Documentary ‘Turn It Around’ Revisits East Bay Punk’s Fractured Legacy

“Turn It Around – The Story of East Bay Punk” assembles oral histories from a Northern California community where anarcho-punk ideals collided with everyday life. Sean Reveron, who moved from Los Angeles at 14 and attended Berkeley High, offers one of the film’s most bruising testimonies. Drawn north by zines like Maximum Rocknroll, he soon navigated a scene that claimed inclusivity but tolerated organized racist violence. On his first walk down Haight Street, a child compelled by skinheads spat on him and forced a racial slur. Reveron’s response was to call into Tim Yohannan’s radio show to challenge Mark Dagger, the leader of the S.F. Skins, during a live interview — a confrontation transcribed in MRR’s October 1984 issue.

The fallout was immediate: threats to bomb the Anarchist Bookstore and a hunt for the Black punk who had spoken out. Reveron started attending shows disguised as an African exchange student to avoid attack. The documentary includes his recollection not as isolated drama but as part of a broader argument that punk’s radical ethics were tested by internal hatred. By giving space to such accounts, “Turn It Around” frames East Bay punk as a culture constantly negotiating its own contradictions, where peace punk and street violence existed side by side, and where racism was neither abstract nor extreme — simply present.