Gimme Something Better (49 page)

Larry Livermore:
I was up in Mendocino County, way up in the mountains. I was living with this girl who played drums, and we were forever trying to find a bass player who was into punk. Nobody trusted us because we had short hair. The neighbors thought we were narcs ’cause they were mostly pot growers.

I started a magazine,
Lookout!
, which was mostly about mountain stuff. The neighbors didn’t like it because they didn’t want the attention. They threatened to burn my house down. So I started writing about music instead. I did a lot of politics and environmental stuff.

Rebecca Gwyn Wilson:
Livermore was a one-man
Maximum RocknRoll. Lookout!
was really funny. He would write about how he grew up in Michigan and how he was really bored and disenchanted.

Larry Livermore:
I found some local kid to play bass, so I started looking for somebody else to play drums. The kid at the nearest house down the road, about a mile away, was crazy and full of energy. He was a showoff and a loudmouth, and I figured he’d be a good drummer. He was 12. That was the Lookouts.

We had a lot of offers to “Shut the fuck up!” from the neighbors. There was no electricity. Everything was either solar panels or generators, so it was very quiet up there. Our first attempt at a show was at a combination store and camping area down on the highway. It was the closest commercial establishment. It didn’t go over very well. One of the old hippies unplugged us in the middle of our set and there was a confrontation about that.

I made up Lookout! Records basically to put out a record by my own band. I was at a temporary room in San Francisco, with David Hayes and Dave MDC, and another guy called Joe. David was doing a tape label, and he did a compilation called
Bay Mud
. He got tracks from about 20 Bay Area bands.

Frank Portman:
Mr. T Experience made our first record, called
Everyone’s Entitled to Their Own Opinion
. It was like 1986. We didn’t have a label, we got a loan from our parents. We went to the cheapest studio in the phone book, which was also how we found out about Kevin Army. Larry said, “Where did you get your record?” I said, “We recorded it with Kevin Army.” So the Lookouts recorded
One Planet One People
, with songs like “Fuck Religion.” That was Lookout! 001.

James Washburn:
Livermore, he’s not from Berkeley, he’s from the hills. If you listen to the Lookouts’ music, it ain’t punk, it’s weirdo stoner noise. He had a really open mind. Tim Yohannan had a very strict edge of what is punk and what isn’t. And Livermore had a very different definition.

Frank Portman:
Maximum RocknRoll
had put out a 7-inch EP that was recorded by Kevin Army. The new sound of the East Bay, so it had all these bands. It was called
Turn It Around
. And it had a picture of this goofy dude Walter on the cover.

Dave Mello:
They asked all the bands to be on it. That was the first time Op Ivy went into the studio to record something.

Billie Joe Armstrong:
That was really great. That was amazing. That just summed everything up. I listened to that over and over and over and over again. It was like my favorite record.

Larry Livermore:
I knew this kid Tim, we’d always talk and hang out. When I went to Gilman, Tim came running up and literally jumped into my arms. He said, “Larry, Larry, I’m in a new band, we’re called Operation Ivy, we’re gonna play.” I saw my first Operation Ivy show and was so amazed. It was complete energy, everybody was singing along and jumping up onstage with them. They’d been together three months.

I said, “I want to make a record with you guys.” I was thinking of putting out one by Isocracy anyway. I knew David was interested in Op Ivy, too. I said, “Why don’t we join forces?” He had Corrupted Morals and Operation Ivy, and I picked Isocracy, and at the last minute we decided to do Crimpshrine, too, ’cause they already had a fully recorded tape.

Those came out in January of ’88. David’s first ad in
Maximum RocknRoll
was, “Nobody buys vinyl records anymore—so we’re putting out four of them.” All 7-inches. Five, six, seven songs, as much as we could squeeze on there. We sold out the whole first pressing of 1,000 each. At that time, that was a lot. Ruth Schwartz called up and said, “We’d like to distribute your records now.” That made a huge difference. She instantly sold out our next pressing. I doubt the company would have survived without Mordam.

Martin Brohm:
I used to live with David Hayes, we lived in this shitty little apartment. It’s where Lookout! Records was run out of. They’d come over and have their big power meetings. There’d be piles of records in his bedroom.

Jason Beebout:
We’d go to Marty’s house just so we could check out all the different colored vinyls, to get the best vinyl. We had to stuff all the records ourselves. It was like splatter designs.

Jesse Michaels:
Back then, no one ever expected to be actually on a record. We were thrilled. I didn’t have anything to compare it to, because I had never met anyone who did a label and I didn’t know anything about records. I just thought it was incredible that someone would actually do it.

Billie Joe Armstrong:
I used to see Larry at different gigs. I was a little taken aback by how much older he was than everybody else. In the scene, when they say “all-ages,” they really mean it. 15 all the way up to 50.

Mendocino Homeland: Larry Livermore

Dave Mello:
He was an older guy, but at the same time he made it feel like we weren’t signing anything. Basically we were all just doing it ourselves. He made the record deal like it was an even-even deal: “Were not gonna be making money off you.” We were all 18, 19, and not really knowing exactly what it entails, what a contract is, and what percentages are. We didn’t really know the whole scope.

Jeff Ott:
Larry had everybody record with Kevin Army out of this place, Dancing Dog—everything came out sounding very trebly. Pete Rypins from Crimpshrine, Matt Freeman from Operation Ivy, Dave Edwardson from Neurosis and Ron Nichols, who ended up being in Christ on Parade, are like four of the greatest bass players ever. And they’re all on this label where the bass is turned way down. And everything’s super trebly. It’s like, how did that happen?

Aaron Cometbus:
There’s nothing like the feeling of putting the needle down on your very first record of your own band. It’s a wonderful, wonderful feeling. But I also remember a different kind of good feeling, which is smashing your own record into a million pieces. I did that with copies of the Crimpshrine
Burning Bridges
EP on the way back from a show in Davis, tossing them out the car window and watching them splinter onto the highway. I was frustrated and sad. And angry, of course. But it wasn’t just that. It felt good to destroy a little of what you’d worked so hard to create.

David Hayes from Lookout! Records did the same thing with copies of Op Ivy’s album when it came out. To sort of christen it, and to express his frustration. That really bummed out the band, though. They were in the car right behind his.

There’s a flipside to the joy of creation, this feeling of futility and loss that comes with it, and it was especially strong at that time because it felt like we were losing our whole scene just at the moment when other people were starting to discover it. That feeling was in the air—that just as we were getting out of the gate, we’d already lost something essential that couldn’t be replaced.

There were more cynical, bitter ways of expressing the same thing. David Hayes would make another 20 Op Ivy records stamped “Number One” whenever he got drunk, just to fuck with the collectors.

Dallas Denery:
To Lawrence’s credit, I think he identified right away what was going on. More than anybody else. Sweet Baby and Op Ivy and Isocracy and Mr. T were a bunch of really good bands that appeared all at once, in one place. And Lawrence understood what that meant.

Jesse Michaels:
One thing that really separated our little scene from a lot of other people is we were really into the old melodic punk sound. The Clash, Stiff Little Fingers, the Buzzcocks, Crime, the Dils, all those old bands. Avengers, the Dangerhouse Records bands, Poshboy bands. And that influenced a lot of the so-called East Bay sound, if there is such a thing. Which is why stuff went back to mid-tempo, as opposed to breakneck hardcore tempo.

Andy Asp:
When you saw what came out of Lookout!, compared to the darker San Francisco punk scene, it was that punk can be fun. It doesn’t have to be so serious.

Christopher Appelgren:
A punk friend at my school had become pen pals with Larry Livermore. He had a place outside of Laytonville. And of course his
Lookout!
magazine was distributed in southern Humboldt. She made me a tape that had the Lookouts’ first album on one side, and on the other, all of the first Lookout! 7-inches—Operation Ivy, Crimpshrine, Corrupted Morals and Isocracy. And maybe the
Turn It Around
compilation, too.

I wrote to Lookout!, “I do this show at a local radio station. Can I get some records for my show?” Larry wrote me back suggesting that, instead, why doesn’t he just come up and be a guest on my show? And he’d bring all the Lookout! records and maybe some new stuff.

Larry became my official co-host pretty quickly after. And we did the show for about three years. He must have been 40 or 41. I was pretty excited because I had the opportunity to meet somebody who was at the center of what was really interesting and important to me.

David Hayes had created the look of the label, done Lookout!’s art and design. And between the two of them, they picked the bands. But I think their partnership had soured pretty early on.

Larry Livermore:
David was dissatisfied, he wanted to quit the label. It had become too much like a job, and there was too much money involved. I think we grossed sales of $20,000 that year.

David had been keeping all the records and the accounts on a couple pages of loose-leaf notebook. I was mostly hype. Meeting with bands, talking to people, getting attention. I was more like the spark plug, and he was the very solid engine.

Christopher Appelgren:
Larry is a little difficult. I know David tried a couple of times to leave the label.

Larry Livermore:
I was very petrified at the idea of him leaving. I was begging him not to. I said, you can stay under almost any terms. Part of the reason was that I couldn’t do the finances, because at this time I was still on disability for crazy people. That was my income.

Jeff Ott:
In the middle ’60s Larry got caught pouring gasoline all over his school to burn it down. And rather than criminally prosecuting him, they put him on SSI.

Larry Livermore:
I have a history of pyromania. It was the same thing that got me out of Vietnam. I had a series of years in the wilderness after that, where I spent a year hiding out from the police ’cause I had been involved in a big drug bust.

That’s how I came to California in the first place. Living in squats, things were getting more and more desperate. By 1971 I was completely broke, and pulling up dandelion greens out of the backyard. I thought, I’ll go down to the welfare office and turn my life over. Ironically the shrink that examined me was a hippie revolutionary, who basically said, “Look, I approve everybody because it’s a way of subverting the system.” The shrink later got arrested for pipe bombs.

I was on that for 20 years. If I had to start filing tax returns and financial reports, it meant I was working. And it was the end of my guaranteed money. Lookout! was making a small profit, but not enough to support the one person, let alone two.

So I told David, you can just be the front man, you just sign all the checks and file the sales tax reports and stuff like that, and you can still have half of whatever we make. And David was like, “No, I can’t do it.”

I was going to do a compilation, he was going to do a compilation. And both of them were going nowhere. But he had all the art. He finally shrugged and said, “Oh, well, let’s just do it together then.” His compilation was going to be called
Floyd
. So it became
The Thing That Ate Floyd
, a double record instead of a single record. It was meant to be a survey of everything that was going on in the Bay Area at that time.

Dale Flattum:
It amazed me that they had the stick-to-itiveness, just the logistics of getting that many bands to get the recording done.

Davey Havok:
The second compilation was
Can of Pork
. For us, that was, “Oh my god, this is the biggest band in the world—they’re on the Lookout! Records compilation!”

Cammie Toloui:
I moved into the
Maximum RocknRoll
house with Tim Yohannan and Lawrence Livermore and David Hayes. We were all there at one time. Lawrence hadn’t figured out what he was going to be when he grew up. He just seemed really old to me ’cause I was 18.