Punkhouse Oakland, the Podcast

Elizabeth Whitney
  • 5.0 (40)
  • Society & Culture
  • Updated Bimonthly

This podcast is an outgrowth of the instagram I started during the pandemic, sharing photos of the many people I'd lived with in my 20 years in a punkhouse. I invited everyone to share their photos, one tag led to another, and before I knew it there were 6,000 followers and a huge backlog of photos to share. This podcast is a series of conversations with people in, and adjacent to, the punk scene in the Bay Area in the 80s and 90s. We explore the stories behind those photos, and dive deeper into who we were, how we found each other, and what it means in our current lives. Photo by Forest Love

  1. Oct 2

    Noah Landis

    Noah Landis is an Oakland native who had a craving for the anti-normal youth cultures. He found Punk Rock at 12 or 13 years old. With a mohawk and skateboard heentered Berkeley High School in 1983 (class of 87), where he met people who would become life-long friends, fellow students who would themselves become important contributors to the East Bay Punk Scene such as David Edwardson (Neurosis), Jesse Michaels (Op Ivy), Jake Sayles (Filth), and Jeff Ott (Crimpshrine). He started playing guitar, taking lessons from Bill Collins (Special Forces)when he was 14. He spent his youth wearing that guitar, hanging out with 20-something year olds like Kate Knox, Orlando Xavier, and DMR, befriending some gnarly first-wave Berkeley punk rockers who took him into their close-knit scene like a little brother. All the while he was absorbing any and all music that was creative, dark, heavy and emotionally expressive. When he was 15 he started Christ on Parade and soon became a solid member of the expanding Bay Area punk community. Noah started his punk rock journey young enough to go to shows at the Mab, the On Broadway, the Farm and Ruthie's Inn and he would play all of those clubs in the late 1980s.Along the way he learned how to record bands, joined his best friends' band Neurosis in 1993 as the keyboardist who created the abrasive samples and beautiful trippy textures, recorded 12 albums over the next 30-odd years. Now, at 57 years old having never left that path, he has half a dozen bands in his past and four bands that are currently active, (Neurosis, Steel Pole Bath Tub, Tension Span and Cassette Profit). He works as an audio producer, lives in Berkeley and remains a good friend to many in the punk community. He has seen a lot.

    Noah Landis

  2. Sep 25

    TINA LUCCHESI

    TINA LUCCHESI IS A BAY AREA NATIVE... BORN AND BRED !!!! GREW UP IN MARIN COUNTY... CORTE MADERA CALIF ... MOVED TO SAN FRANCISCO AT 17 YEARS OLD ABOUT 1986/87 WHEN THE BAY WAS STILL GOLDEN... BEEN LIVING IN PORTLAND, OREGON FOR TH E LAST 10 YEARS... TINA IS A ROCK AND ROLLER, HAIRDRESSER, AND JUNK COLLECTOR/SELLER FOR EONS... PAST CO-OWNER/ OWNER OF DOWN AT LULU’S IN OAKLAND... FROM 2006-2017... CAT MOM & LOVER TO THREE BOY KITTIES FRANKIE... MR LITTLES AND NACHO... LOVES THE BAY AREA SOOOOOOO MUCH FUTURE PLANS FOR SENIOR YEARS IN RUSSIAN RIVER AND TO WRITE A MEMOIR AND PHOTO BOOK REAL SOON ....

    TINA LUCCHESI

  3. Sep 18

    Seth Bogart

    Seth Bogart is an artist & musician living in Los Angeles, CA. He works in painting, video, sculpture and performance. He has exhibited work and performed at LACMA, Participant INC, Artist Curated Projects, One Archives, MoCA Geffen Contemporary, 356 S Mission, Fierman Gallery and Soccer Club Club

    Seth Bogart

  4. Sep 11

    Daniel Sea

    Daniel Sea (he/him) is an actor, musician and artist.  Sea came of age as an artist as part of the queer punk, art and activist scenes of the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1990s. Sea played in the Bay Area punk bands The Gr’Ups and Cypher in the Snow, and later Thorns of Life. As an actor, Sea works in film, theater, and TV. He played the first recurring transmasculine role on television, appearing from 2006 - 2009 as Max in the L Word. In 2022 he revised his role as Max for the L Word: Generation Q.  As an artist, Sea works with interdisciplinary memoir, engaging in processes such as research based performance, writing, music drawing, video and photography. His work transverses from the queer vanguard to the mainstream, intervening on pop culture, infecting the mainstream with a political, magical queer and trans agenda. Photo by Chloe Sherman

    Daniel Sea

  5. Sep 4

    Sam Chiera

    Sam Chiera, aka Spoony Sam, aka Randonee, misspent his youth going to shows and working weird and crappy jobs in Oakland and Berkeley California. In 2003 he moved to New York City where he continued to work in weird places - for a while he swam in a fish tank for money - until he got a law degree and began representing low income tenants' associations in Brooklyn. He has lived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan for over 20 years. If you're reading this, you might be his friend - in which case he says hi.

    Sam Chiera

  6. Aug 28

    Norris Mottley

    Norris says: I was born and raised in Detroit and made my journey to California in 1992. I had been working on a play in New York City but due to some creative differences between me and the other folks involved I moved in another direction. That move brought me to the Bay Area, which was a previous stomping ground of mine. The plan at the time for me was to finish writing the play I had been working on and make my way back to NYC. As fate would have it, I was running out of money so I needed to work. One afternoon while sitting in a cafe sipping coffee. I saw an ad for SD&A in the Bay Guardian and called Doug who hired me the next day. In many ways I was well suited for the work, given my background in theatre. At the time I climbed aboard the SD&A fundraising train, the calling staff was older and tamer than the folks who made SD&A a proverbial cauldron of fundraising creativity and pyrotechnics. What happened next is difficult to explain or even understand, akin to catching lightning in a bottle. Just like many things that burn bright in this world. It all ended abruptly and with little to no warning whatsoever.

    Norris Mottley

  7. Aug 21

    Wendy-O Matik

    Wendy-O Matik is a poet, writer, activist, and the author of Love Like Rage and Redefining Our Relationships. Back in the 90s, she could be found doing spoken word in the Bay Area punk scene and touring with various bands in the US, Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand. Today, she lives in Santa Rosa, CA, where she has coauthored eleven mindfulness meditation books, blogs on social justice topics, and still dabbles in poetry from time to time.

    Wendy-O Matik

  8. Aug 7

    Robert Eggplant

    Eggplant says Wow. What a rare chance to be involved with this cool project of these testimonies of our East Bay punk houses. So good to have this space that highlights examples of how people can make different living arrangements than what agents of society have proscribed. This is badly needed in 2026. i feel that the forces that drive many people into punk, or into dangerous living and self harm are a malevolent threat. We are expending enormous energy and precious time in opposition and very little on making a beautiful future. Issues that made me want to rebel; war, sexism, homophobia, malevolent gender roles, racism, plastic alien mainstream culture, environmental destruction, bullshitting politicians, teachers and media heads, homelessness, mental health surges, police abuse and wealth inequality are as pernicious now as when i ran to my first shows in 1986.i am not a graduate of a prestigious university, i am not an author of a best selling anything, i am not married, i don't have any kids or cute domesticated animals. i don't have a smart phone, a gun, driver's license nor a car. i do bicycle around town. i do have a bunch of records, demo tapes, fliers and underground papers because i value the things we make while dreaming out loud. i find a lot of things in free boxes and utilize them. i relish having a few quiet hours reading deeply in library stacks then getting the rowdy hours of seeing live music amongst a free & freaky people. I eat mainly a diet of Food Not Bombs and even get hungry at 3pm when it is served at People's Park. Lately i've begin to value the night sky as the moon wanes.

    Robert Eggplant
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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
40 Ratings

About

This podcast is an outgrowth of the instagram I started during the pandemic, sharing photos of the many people I'd lived with in my 20 years in a punkhouse. I invited everyone to share their photos, one tag led to another, and before I knew it there were 6,000 followers and a huge backlog of photos to share. This podcast is a series of conversations with people in, and adjacent to, the punk scene in the Bay Area in the 80s and 90s. We explore the stories behind those photos, and dive deeper into who we were, how we found each other, and what it means in our current lives. Photo by Forest Love

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