Back in the days of my misspent youth I saw so many shows I can’t even calculate how many bands and performances I’ve seen in my lifetime. There are a few club performances that really stick out in my memory, such as the time The Frank Moore Experience played at 924 Gilman in Berkeley, many years ago.

I can’t remember what year it happened, (It might have been 1987,) but it was during the time when I was a Gilman regular. I went there quite often, sometimes just wandering by without knowing what was going on or even who was playing that evening.

This * might * be the night
I am talking about. Yes, from 1987.
(I’m old!)

The night The Frank Moore Experience played seemed like a typical Gilman night, at least first. I watched the first couple of bands which were pretty good basic punk bands. Between bands, while the last band was breaking down their equipment down and the next band was setting up, people would go outside the club to chat and smoke cigarettes and just get some fresh air, and I was out there with the bulk of the Gilman crowd. There were a lot of people there that night and the club was basically full, so intermittent fresh air was a valuable commodity that evening

Just as The Frank Moore Experience was getting ready to start, almost everyone had gone back into the club to watch their set. The only people still outside were myself and two friends of mine. We had gotten caught up in an interesting conversation and were lagging behind.

Our conversation was interrupted, however, when everyone, and I mean everyone in the club came pouring out of the exits. They were all wincing and swearing and rubbing their eyes and sticking out their tongues with twisted faces.

Myself and my friends were completely befuddled. “What’s going on? What’s happening?” All our fellow clubgoers could say was “Ew! Ick! Don’t go in there! It’s disgusting!”

We asked for clarification. “Why? What’s going on in there?” They provided no details. They just kept ewing and icking and admonishing us not to go inside. Since no one was going to tell me why it was so disgusting I decided to see for myself what was revolting a lot of seasoned punk rockers.

Frank Moore was a performance artist born with cerebral palsy. He was confined to a wheelchair and could not move very well or really speak. Yet he was the leader of his act and also the singer. That evening he was half naked, convulsing as much as he could in his wheelchair, and slurring into a microphone as a few musicians bashed out a primitive tune.

Thee Frank Moore

But that was not what was putting everyone off. Several dancers dressed in skimpy outfits such as faux bikinis and loincloths had covered the stage with clear plastic wrap and had spread a bunch of pig guts and entrails all over the stage and were rolling around in it. That was the truly disgusting part of it.

I winced and said to myself “Ew! Ick!” and went back outside to join every single other club patron. Basically Frank Moore managed to empty out an entire club of any clubgoers, yet we could still hear the music and Moore’s slurring. They kept playing as if nothing was amiss.

There was quite a mass of punks crowding the front of the club as all of us patiently waited for The Franke Moore Experience to finish their pig guts set. About five minutes after I came outside everyone suddenly started rushing back inside the club, as fast as they could cram themselves through the front door!

I was very confused. Once the initial lemming rush to get back inside had subsided I went back in to see what was going on.

The dancers, the ones who had been rolling around in pig guts, had started taking their clothes off.

Basically everyone who had initially been completely revolted by the bloody carnage before decided to pile back into the club as fast as they could because wanted to see live nude dancers. That there were pieces of pig liver stuck to parts of their bodies seemed to be inconsequential. There were naughty bits to see!

Whatever anyone thinks of Frank Moore and his merry guts covered Experiencers, it is quite a remarkable thing to completely empty a club full of hardcore punks who have seen just about everything, and then a few minutes later completely refill the club with the very same punks.

In all my years of going to clubs and seeing all kinds of bands, that is the only time I have ever seen a band do anything like that.