04/25/2026
A fun piece of Sideshow history popped up during today’s morning scroll…
posted about ‘The List’ , the indispensable Bay Area concert calendar (in paper form ‘back in the day, and still today on the web). Anyway, they posted a copy of the a list which included an evening which became part of Sideshow legend.
We played to a sparse crowd on Friday, July 24 1992. At the end of the night, the folks at Gilman apologized profusely. There wasn’t enough money to pay bands anything that night. But then, a punk holding a garbage bag stepped up and said, “but we dumpster dived these bagels!”, and handed them to us.
We thanked them. We were totally broke. We gnawed on those bagels for a few days until they became teeth shatteringly hard, and ditched them in the Tower Records on Sunset where we were selling a box of CDs donated to us by the Dirt magazine gents.
When we returned to Gilman exactly one year later, our fortunes changed. We shared the bill with Rancid. The show was sold out. I remember Tim Armstrong was rightfully giddy about selling out Gilman for the first time. I was hoping to have left with an extra $20, but was grateful to have played to anyone at all.
