Energy

In 1930, in a Berkeley laboratory, physicist Ernest Lawrence created the first cyclotron, a particle accelerator that smashed atoms and revealed the building blocks of the universe. In the 1940s, the cyclotron played a crucial role in the Manhattan Project. For his efforts, Lawrence was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Nearly sixty years later, four punks converged in Berkeley to unlock something far more potent than nuclear fusion. Operation Ivy—a band named after a 1952 American hydrogen bomb test—did the unthinkable: they fused hardcore and ska. Their lone LP, Energy, is just that: a kinetic jolt of gritty, uptempo punk. Is Op Ivy more deserving of a Nobel than Ernest Lawrence? It’s hard to say. But if the Nobel committee had any sense, Ska-Punk would be a prize category alongside Physics and Peace, and Op Ivy would be standing on a platform in Stockholm with medals around their necks.

On a Sunday night in May of 1989, a throng of sweaty kids packed the 924 Gilman Street Project, a Berkeley punk club in an industrial zone just a few blocks from the San Francisco Bay. The opening band was a trio of East Bay upstarts who had recently changed their name from Sweet Children to Green Day. But the reason the club was at max capacity was to see the headliners, Op Ivy, who were celebrating the release of Energy.

Formed in May of 1987, Op Ivy were like a precocial animal—an elephant or a horse that, at birth, could run with the pack. With frontman Jesse Michaels, Dave Mello on drums, Matt Freeman on bass, and guitarist Tim Armstrong, then known as Lint (a nickname he allegedly gave himself without reason), Op Ivy became the flagship band of the early Gilman scene. That night, the quartet played 20 songs, basically their entire catalog, with the audience spilling onto the stage, singing along, fists pumping in the air.

“It was magic,” said Lawrence Livermore, the cofounder of Lookout!, Op Ivy’s label, in Kiss This, a 1997 book by the critic Gina Arnold. (Livermore’s nom de punk comes from the East Bay nuclear-weapons research lab named after Ernest Lawrence.) “There were millions of kids there, singing all the choruses, and we couldn’t figure out where they’d come from. It was like a punk Woodstock.” Gilman’s capacity at the time was 225, so it was probably a few people shy of “millions.” Over the years I’ve met at least 15 people who’ve claimed they were at that show.

Op Ivy ended their set that night with the anthemic “Unity.” Its rallying cries, Michaels’ plea to “Stop this … war!” and “Unity, as one stand together!” whipped the audience into a state of euphoria. As an unstoppable live band with a phenomenal album under their belt and legions of adoring fans, Op Ivy was poised for the limelight.

It was, famously, the last show they would ever play.

Ok, “Green Day’s first show was as the opener at Op Ivy’s last show” looks good on paper, but it isn’t exactly true. Op Ivy actually played one final time the night after their Gilman Street triumph in the backyard of their friend Eggplant. And show flyers have been unearthed revealing that Green Day played a few gigs under their new name before May of 1989. But, as they say: print the legend.

Nearly three decades on from Op Ivy’s brief run, their demise is still shrouded in a veil of mystery. By some accounts, Michaels pulled the plug on Op Ivy due to “unwanted attention.” By other accounts, it was a mutual decision because the band had run its course. Whatever the reason, one EP, one LP, and a smattering of compilation tracks are all that’s left behind. It’s a small yet towering body of work. In 2009, Jesse Michaels wrote the introduction to Gimme Something Better, an oral history of the Bay Area punk scene by Jack Boulware and Silke Tudor. In it, he writes, “The Rock Writer writing about punk generally has one aim: to arrogate intellectual ownership of something he or she knows absolutely nothing about.” Before deciding if I agreed with Michaels’ claim about rock criticism, I had to double-check the definition of the word “arrogate.”

From the needle drop on Side A, Energy accelerates at the speed of light. Its opening salvo, “Knowledge,” is a punk blast that clocks in at under two minutes. That singalong chorus—“All I know is that I don’t know/All I know is that I don’t know nothing”—hearkens back to Socrates’ precept, “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.” This is known as a “Socratic paradox.” Pretty heady stuff for guys barely out of high school with a friend named Eggplant. (It should be noted that Michaels is the son of Leonard Michaels, who was an English professor at UC Berkeley, a novelist, short-story writer, and a New Yorker contributor.)

“Knowledge” has had an interesting life post-Op Ivy. It’s become somewhat of a punk standard, rubbing elbows with “Anarchy in the UK” and “Blitzkrieg Bop.” Green Day has covered “Knowledge” in concert a whopping 780 times. (By comparison, they’ve played “American Idiot” 705 times and, surprisingly, “Big Yellow Taxi” 18 times.) They’ve definitely played it more times than Op Ivy ever did, and have probably played it to singular stadium crowds that outnumber every Op Ivy live audience combined.

Twelve years ago, I played bass with Ted Leo as the house band in a show at SF Sketchfest (his band, the Pharmacists, must’ve been busy that night). We wanted to cover two songs that embodied the independent, free-thinking spirit of the Bay Area. Ted chose “Knowledge” and the theme song to Full House. As far as I know, “Whatever happened to predictability?” is not a reference to Socrates.

On “Sound System,” Energy’s second track, the album takes a wild turn off the well-trod punk path into brave new territory: unabashed ska. Granted, Op Ivy had ska tracks on their six-song, 1988 debut EP, Hectic, but the speed and pep of their ska-ness was more fine-tuned on Energy.

Armstrong’s previous band, Basic Radio, never released any albums, but demos and live bootlegs reveal a predilection for ska upstrokes and 2 Tone-style grooves. It was Armstrong who acted as a musical director for Op Ivy and schooled them on the tenets of ska. “I had never really played ska,” Mello says in 2021’s In Defense of Ska by Aaron Carnes. “I remember Tim saying, you got to listen to these records: the Specials, Madness, English Beat, and the Selecter.”

Energy pivots from raw punk to buoyant ska on a dime, and occasionally they mash up the two genres like checkerboard Vans in a Vitamix. It’s tempting to make a Venn diagram for Energy songs, with one circle being “punk,” another labeled “ska,” and the overlap being “ska-punk.” One of those wild swings from ska to punk takes place on Side A as the soaring skank of “Unity” gives way to the brutal eyewitness account of a pedestrian getting killed by a drunk driver on "Vulnerability." Buried in the cover art on Energy, which Michaels drew, there’s a yin-yang symbol. He’s tipping his hand. The music pinballs from a joyous dance party to a full-blown existential crisis. This tennis-match whiplash gives the album a complexity uncommon to most hardcore fare.

While Energy is championed as the launchpad of third-wave ska, it’s also easy to detect the influence of hip-hop in Michaels’ lyricism and delivery. He’s able to cram an ungodly amount of syllables into a line, and spits verses at proto-Eminem warp speeds. Like Public Enemy, Michaels uses Op Ivy as a vehicle for reportage, to describe the political climate on the streets of the East Bay. “It’s 1989, stand up and take a look around,” he sings on “Freeze Up.” He paints a picture of an authoritarian hellscape where “static and division is increasing like a storm.” It’s a song that has unfortunately aged well.

In their short existence, Op Ivy played, by some estimates, a staggering 180 shows. With all that stage time logged, Mello and Freeman evolved into an airtight rhythm section on Energy. But it’s the interplay of Michaels’ vocals and lyrics and Armstrong’s vocals and guitar playing that makes Op Ivy endure. There’s a toughness and a sweetness to both of their performances on the album—just listen to their voices bob and weave in the coda of “Bad Town” (a song featuring the album’s only horn). While ska faded from fashion, Op Ivy’s cool factor has never waned. It’s Armstrong and Michaels’ unapologetic earnestness and passion for these songs that keep them timeless.

Op Ivy tried recording Energy at 924 Gilman Street to capture the sound of their live shows, but quickly abandoned that idea. They smartly chose to co-produce the album with Kevin Army at the knobs in a San Francisco studio. Army, who would go on to engineer Green Day’s Insomniac and produce a string of pop-punk classics by the Mr. T Experience, expertly captured the grit of Op Ivy’s punker side, and made their melodic choruses sound huge. The album feels like you’re in the front row at Gilman, about to get sucked into the pit.

The stories of Gilman and Op Ivy are forever intertwined. Founded in 1986, in part by Maximum Rocknroll founder Tim Yohannon, the venue became a clubhouse for the East Bay’s all-ages punk scene. The club is still thriving. When you walk in, you’re greeted by a laundry list of rules spraypainted on a wall: NO ALCOHOL, NO DRUGS, NO VIOLENCE, NO STAGEDIVING, NO DOGS, NO FUCKED-UP BEHAVIOR, NO RACISM, NO MISOGYNY/SEXISM, NO HOMOPHOBIA, NO TRANSPHOBIA. After thirty-nine years, 924 Gilman is still a volunteer-run nonprofit without an owner.

Recently, I dropped into Gilman to watch a show on a random Tuesday night. The bill featured four grindcore bands. The first to take the stage was Piss Baptism, a duo from Sacramento wearing black executioners’ masks. They ripped through lightning-fast sludge, including their recent single, “Blown Out Your Own Hole.” The house was packed with death-metal freaks in head-to-toe black, from ages seven to seventy. Despite the demonic screams and hellfire guitar tones, the vibes couldn’t have been friendlier. A college friend later texted me to say that he had stopped into Gilman last year “simply because one of the bands was called George Crustanza.” It ended up being the best show he’d seen in 2024. Of Gilman, he texted, that place has “still got the juice.”

Unlike CBGB, Gilman will never become a punk-themed bar-and-grill at the Newark Airport. It holds fast to its ideals because bands like Op Ivy laid the foundation. By breaking up upon the release of Energy, and completely side-stepping mainstream attention, Op Ivy set a standard for the Gilman ilk. Obviously, the club emphasizes artistic expression over commerce—from the early days of Crimpshrine, Isocracy, and Sweet Baby, right up to today. Infamously, Jello Biafra got jumped at Gilman in 1994 for being too much of a rock star (an extremely silly notion in hindsight), and Green Day was banned from the club when they signed to Warner Bros. Gilman will forever give the cold shoulder to clout chasers, and will welcome artists like Piss Baptism, George Crustanza, and Op Ivy with open arms.

When I was in junior high, I became a fan of poppier Lookout! bands like the Mr. T Experience and the Hi-Fives (and, yes, Green Day), but was intimidated by Op Ivy. I’d see skaters smoking Marlboro Reds outside the 7-Eleven with Op Ivy patches sewn on their sleeveless denim jackets. I thought their artwork looked menacing, but that fear was unfounded. Like how the Grateful Dead’s skull iconography makes you think they might be a deathcore band, but then you hear them sing about sunshine daydreams, Op Ivy’s music was so uplifting and life-affirming when I finally heard it.

Op Ivy had long since disbanded when I hit high school. Rancid, Armstrong and Freeman’s post-Op Ivy band, became liberty-spiked MTV darlings. Their song “Journey to the End of the East Bay” immortalized the Op Ivy story. “It was just the four of us, yeah man, just the core of us,” Armstrong sings. “Too much attention unavoidably destroyed us.”

Pre-internet rumors swirled about Michaels’ 1990s activities. One kid told me he heard Michaels moved to Tibet to become a monk. Another told me he lived on an island in Puget Sound and was writing the Great American Novel (he did publish a neo-noir mystery novel in 2013). In Gimme Something Better, Michaels clarifies, “I went to Nicaragua. I just wanted to do something really different. I did have a social consciousness, and wanted to see if I could be of service. It turns out I was completely lazy when I was there. Spent most of the time drinking. It didn’t really work out. But I had good intentions. I just had a rough time in my 20s. I’m a lot happier now.”

In the late ’90s, Michaels formed the reggae-tinged band Common Rider, and later Classics of Love. And in 2021, Michaels reunited with Armstrong to form Doom Regulator, a band that has released one trad-ska single to date.

Earlier this year, I was a staff writer on Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney. For 12 weeks, our show aired live on Netflix at 7 p.m. PT. In the afternoon on show days, we’d do a dress rehearsal. Writers would sit in for the celebrity guests, the studio audience was empty, but we had live callers, even though the rehearsal would never air. The topic for our fifth episode was “Getting Fired,” and at the dress rehearsal, Mulaney took a couple phone calls in the first interview segment. One caller identified himself as “Jesse from Los Angeles.” There was an echo on his call. Mulaney debated hanging up but gave him a chance. Jesse told a story about how he worked as a prep cook in his 20s. He was terrible at it, and yet, his boss wouldn’t fire him.

“Jesse, why couldn’t you get fired from that job?” Mulaney asked.

“Because my boss was a fan of my band,” Jesse said.

“What was your band called?” Mulaney said.

“The band was Operation Ivy, the punk band,” Jesse said.

Mulaney’s jaw dropped. “Oh my god, you were in Operation Ivy? That’s fuckin’ sick.”

I was just offstage watching this exchange, dumbstruck. Jesse Michaels called into our dress rehearsal? How did he even get the phone number? It was so unexpected. Michaels was self-effacing and charming while talking to Mulaney, a couple writers, and the show’s announcer, Richard Kind (who, in that episode, was in character as Gene Simmons because he got hit on the head with a Kiss LP). After a few minutes of conversation, Mulaney said, “I gotta hang up on you, Jesse, but Operation Ivy rules.”

After the rehearsal, the writers and producers convened to receive notes from Netflix. One of the suits sent a note that said, “You gotta get the Op Ivy guy to call back for the live show. That was incredible.” Mulaney considered the note for a beat, but waved it off. When spontaneous magic strikes in a dress rehearsal, it can be a fool’s errand to try and recreate that moment on live TV.

Michaels’ phone call to Mulaney’s dress rehearsal gave me a brief but true Op Ivy experience. Like the band, that phone call was only experienced by a handful of people. It was a blink-or-you’ll-miss-it moment that only happened once, and would never be replicated.

Like an atom being split by nuclear fission, Op Ivy was a ball of fire blazing at punk clubs and backyard shows that extinguished before the world could catch on. All that’s left behind is Energy. It’s a remarkable document of a band that had a scene in the palm of its hand. You had to have been there.