In the spring of 1987, Brian Jay threw a concert in Sproul Plaza. The 2.6-acre expanse of concrete and brick is the grand southern gateway for the University of California, Berkeley campus. Sproul sits near the northern end of Telegram Avenue, the main artery of Berkeley's storied counterculture community. When Berkeley was the epicenter of sevеral overlapping anti-establishment movеments in the 1960s, Sproul became the public square for hippie idealism. On December 2, 1964, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement gathered 5,000 people in the plaza to protest the school's archaic limitations of student expression. Before Joan Baez performed, 21-year-old UC Berkeley junior Mario Savlo implored his fellow demonstrators to "put your bodies upon the gears" of the university machinery should the institution continue to suppress their voices. Brian Jay was not Mario Savlo. Jay didn't go to UC Berkeley; he attended El Cerrito High School, about four miles north of Sproul Plaza. Jay didn't have a lofty cause that might draw Berkeley's activism community for a show. He did, however, have a band, albeit one that had barely taken its clumsy first steps. Jay hadn't played music before he became the vocalist for The Vagrants. Before he set his sights on Sproul Plaza, Jay's group performed just once, but because The Vagrants made their public debut at his high school, Jay didn't count it a real show. Still, he had more experience singing in a band than organizing a concert, never mind one at such an illustrious and unconventional place like Sproul. But Jay had a power to call upon that ensured pesky things like "logistics" and "bureaucratic paperwork" wouldn't prevent him from trying. He had punk. "The Berkeley show is a really weird thing," Jay recalled. "Me and my friend Eric Bailey were like, 'Let's get a bunch of bands together.' It was really self-promotion to start, and then it ballooned into, like, 'Let's get all these people, let's make it huge.'" Jay asked venerable scene documentarian Aaron Cometbus if the gritty East Bay band he drummed in, Crimpshrine, would play. He said yes, but Crimpshrine didn't show up to Sproul on April 11, 1987. The June 1987 issue of Maximumrocknroll included an East Bay scene report with Cometbus' mea culpa; already skeptical of the show, he blew it off to work. "And boy did I fuck up," Cometbus wrote. "Not only did we miss out on playing the show, I didn't even get to see it, and then everyone kept coming up to me for a few days afterwards and telling how great and how fun it was." Cometbus declared Jay's show to be "probably the East Bay event of the year." East Bay punk had a lot going for it in 1987. A community-run all-ages venue soft opened in a northwest Berkeley warehouse on New Year's Eve 1986, and although the first few months at the Gilman Street Project were relatively quiet, it soon became the nexus of the region's youth-oriented punk community. Over the next seven years, the East Bay scene transformed into one of the most important creative hubs in postwar U.S. history; every kid who scammed a copy shop to Xerox zines about go-nowhere bands and radical politics knew that, regardless of what zip code they lived in. When Green Day broke out with their major label debut, 1994's Dookie, the rest of the world realized it too. The Vagrants were one of the cells in the East Bay incubation chamber, though they're rarely included in the history books. The 2017 documentary Turn It Around: The Story of East Bay Punk only had room for a few photos of The Vagrants in its 158-minute run-time, though drummer Dave "E.C." Henwood popped in as a talking head, though whenever he appeared onscreen, it was to talk about anything other than The Vagrants. Keven Prested's detailed book of the area's most crucial label, Punk USA: The Roots of Green Day & The Rise & Fall of Lookout! Records skims over The Vagrants even though the group contributed to the fledging imprint during its fertile early years. To be fair, the scene produced a phonebook of great bands who explored uncharted territory in punk. The Vagrants etched their version on the outer edges of this ecosystem, whose denizens didn't seem to know what to make of them. That proved especially true when they reached their final form under the name Pot Valiant. Brian Jay, Dave Henwood, guitarist Nick Ganchell, and bassist Craig Miller formed a unit that always remained a little out of step with the rest of the misfits who congregated at Gilman. They strayed from the utopian optimism of ska-punk pioneers Operation Ivy, they didn't exhibit a need for speed like proto-powerviolence unit Stikky, they lacked the apocalyptic misanthropy coursing through hardcore experimentalists Neurosis, and they did not foreground sweet melodies like all the pop-punk bands to emerge in Green Day's wake. As The Vagrants morphed into Pot Valiant, they saturated their melodies with reverb and beefed out their sound with a metal heaviness, all while Jay's increasingly cryptic lyrics turned inward. The El Cerrito foursome were aloof in an East Bay community that reveled in communal acts of goofiness. As the East Bay scene flourished in the early 1990s, a handful of acts catering in post-hardcore catharsis helped make sense of Pot Valiant's aesthetic. But while Fuel and Monsula imported the sound and spirit of D.C.'s Revolution Summer and laid the foundation for emo in the Bay Area, Pot Valiant drew from a well no one else seemed to be able to access: Their incandescent lone LP, 1994's Transaudio, conjures an out-of-body sanctity through Ganchell's whirring guitars and Jay's murmured moans, Transaudio didn't remember much else that had been praised or slagged off as emo at the time, which may have also gone a long way in showing the infant genre its potential
