A heavy cloud of cigarette smoke fills the interior of the small room. Graffiti covers every inch of the walls. Everybody piles in and faces the stage, standing on their toes to see over all of the spiked hair and fists to get a good look at the band. The crowd feeds off of the energy from the band and uses the music to vent their aggression. Pumping their fists in the air and stomping around, it’s all good clean fun in this underground punk venue.

Without knowing where the venue is, it’s easy to walk right past it without ever knowing what goes on inside. The shows are usually in the most downtrodden neighborhoods in cities with bad reputations, like Richmond and Oakland where the police have a lot more to worry about than a bunch of punks playing some music. Through the doors is a whole other world that outsiders are not familiar with. Walk in, pay the cover charge and do whatever you want: drink, smoke, puke, whatever. Music is always playing.

When the band takes the stage the stereo goes down and everybody directs his or her attention to the front. People choose where they stand wisely, moving up to the front or middle to get more of the action, but you’re guaranteed some impact no matter where you stand, even if it’s up against the wall. When the music starts, so does the crowd. Everyone in the pit moves in a counterclockwise circle, some running across the stage and diving onto people. This goes on until the end of the set and starts again when the next band starts.

The bands that make up the scene have different sounds but the main focus of the music is ’80s hardcore. Most of the bands that play these shows have a set of original songs and most are about a minute in length or shorter. A show will usually have four to five bands on the bill. A whole set usually doesn’t go any longer then thirty minutes. The bands try to wrap it up before a bar’s last call and everything finishes around 12:30 a.m. so people can catch the last BART train home.

People from all over the Bay Area come to these places to see bands and play music. Skinheads (not Nazis), straight edge kids, longhairs, street punks and crusties all attend the shows. Historically, there has been friction between the genres of punks, but here they all have love for the same music and get along well with each other.

The scene is very male-dominated, but there are girls that hang out too. Dharma Mooney, seventeen-year-old lead singer of Duck and Cover, is not afraid to jump in with the boys. She had her nose broken at the first show she ever went to. Now, she is one of the only women that leads a band in the Bay Area punk scene. “I’m not being put on a pedestal. I’m just singing to my peers. It’s nothing different from what it was before I was in a band,” says Mooney.

Every band has something to stand for. Some stand for drinking beer and getting high, while the straight edge kids take pride in staying sober, and some even abstain from caffeine and casual sex. There are many straight edge kids that come to shows, but just recently formed bands playing all straight edge music—like Skull Stomp and Negative Choice—consist of young kids from the East Bay that draw X’s on their hands to show their allegiance the lifestyle. They take the same idealism as 80’s hardcore bands like Minor Threat and SS Decontrol and then put their own twist on it.

It may seem like a free-for-all compared to other clubs, but there are still rules of conduct that are strictly enforced. The band K-Bar wrote a song called “Not Welcome” that pretty much laid out the rules with lyrics like, “My life is this scene/You fuck with it and you fuck with me/My friends are my family/You fuck with them you fuck with me.”

Most of the fights seem to start in the pit. Everyone dances and has fun, but every one in awhile someone pops into the pit with the idea that it is the place to beat up people without consequence. “You don’t try to hit anyone one; if you see someone fall then you pick them up,” says nineteen-year-old Michael Kiddy, who has been attending these shows for several years. It may seem violent, but there are people there to help others if they fall.

Racism and sexism is also not tolerated. At 924 Gilman, a Nazi came to a show with swastika tattoos and was quickly removed. The whole crowd from the show chased him down the block and he had to hide in a construction zone until the police came and escorted him away.

Violence aside, this is a very positive and strong group of people. They are making music, putting on shows and recording demo tapes without help from anyone else. There is a strong brotherhood between them that is impossible to break.

The next time someone with a leather jacket, shaved head or Mohawk passes by, just remember that they are a part of something bigger.