Photo: Daniel Chekalov on Unsplash
There was a tiny bar on Bigelow Boulevard with a Warhol-style banana on the sign where, for about 20 years, some of the loudest bands in America played a few feet from the crowd.
From disco to hardcore
The Electric Banana sat at 3887 Bigelow Boulevard in North Oakland, run by Johnny and Judy Zarra, known to everybody as Johnny and Judy Banana. The place started as a go-go bar and then a disco in the 1970s. When disco collapsed, the Zarras needed something new.
As Johnny told The Pitt News, disco dropped dead like someone turned the lights off, so they went rock and roll. The first punk shows landed around 1979, and by 1980 the Banana was the city's punk and new wave headquarters, later opening up to hardcore and metal.
The Bermuda Triangle
The Banana was one of three Oakland clubs that fed the city's music scene, along with the Decade, which Dom DiSilvio opened in 1973, and Graffiti on Baum Boulevard. Locals called the trio Oakland's Bermuda Triangle.
They didn't get along. The Decade booked blues and bar-rock acts like Joe Grushecky and the Iron City Houserockers. The Banana booked the bands the Decade wouldn't touch. Grushecky put it simply to The Pitt News: the Decade was the antithesis of the Electric Banana.
Who played that tiny room
The list is genuinely absurd for a bar that size: Black Flag, Sonic Youth, Husker Du, the Minutemen, the Circle Jerks, the Dead Milkmen, the Butthole Surfers, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and the Goo Goo Dolls before anyone knew them. Pittsburgh bands practically lived there, including Carsickness, the Cynics, and Half Life.
They Might Be Giants put the club in their 2006 song "Pittsburgh," singing about still having dreams about a place called the Electric Banana. Not many neighborhood bars get that.
The end, and what's there now
By the late 1990s the crowds had thinned. Bigger rooms like Metropol and Club Laga had newer setups and better sound, the neighborhood had grown less tolerant of late-night noise, and the scene moved on. The club stopped booking music around 1999 and 2000.
The Zarras turned the building into an Italian restaurant, Zarra's. Same address, very different night out.
Were you at the Banana? Tell us the show. We'll believe almost anything about that room.