Gimme Something Better (50 page)

Between Friends: Lookout! Records profit motive chart

Jesse Luscious:
David Hayes was starting his new label, Very Small Records, and had just split off from Lookout! So that was kind of bitter and weird. Very Small Records was kind of a self-defeating thing. He would do really short runs or he would just do bands that he loved, that were tough for people to get a handle on, like Schlong or Elmer. He doesn’t really care about selling records.

Christopher Appelgren:
At this point Lookout! was Larry, myself, and Patrick Hynes, who Larry had met at KALX. Larry had started going back to school at Berkeley in late 1990, and had rented a room in a house. That actually was our Lookout! office for a number of years. He would fold up his futon and then we would do layout on the floor. Pat and I had this joke about a lot of pubic hairs getting in the layouts. There was no vacuum cleaner. There really were a lot of Larry’s pubic hairs in the art. I know that’s bad.

On the weekends, Pat and I would load up our skateboards with boxes of 7-inches, and go sell records. You’d stack them up on the front and you could stand on it like it was a little scooter. Our distributor was in San Francisco, so we’d take our skateboards, load up all the stuff and take BART with these big boxes. It was really bad through the turnstile, and going down the escalator. I remember thinking, I hope this is all for something. Especially since I’d flunked out of school.

Larry Livermore:
After David had finally quit for good, I had to go to the Social Security and tell them I’m making money. I had to take this giant leap of faith that Lookout! was gonna start supporting me.

Andy Asp:
Lawrence Livermore was a musician, and he was in a way the East Bay’s Kim Fowley or Andrew Loog Oldham. “This eccentric older man is taking interest in my son’s music!” Parents must have been like, “What the hell?” A lot of the early punk guys were music-centric older unmarried men. I didn’t realize that 50-year-olds were going to punk shows. I remember meeting some of them on tour. Some guy would invite you to stay at his house, let’s say in the Northeast. I’m sure there were different motivations.

Larry Livermore:
Op Ivy and Green Day, the CDs were issued the same day, in spring of ’91. We were kinda slow on doing CDs. A lot of punk labels were. It was a revelation when we finally did. Because our sales quadrupled overnight. That was probably the main thing that enabled me to get off welfare.

Mike LaVella:
Lookout! was doing great. They had the Op Ivy record, they had the two Green Day records, which were selling. They were gold and platinum respectively, which is a lot. Imagine selling 500,000, a million of those three records. They had a lot of money coming in. They had some 60-40 split with the bands, where the bands got 60. I’ve never heard of that in my life. Lookout! actually gave more money to their artists than anybody else. And then they restructured it to 50-50, which is the standard.

Christopher Appelgren:
Green Day had always been our bestselling band, and then suddenly, instead of a couple thousand CDs or albums at a time, we started ordering tens of thousands. We started selling a lot of records. A lot of everything else, too. There was a real wave of interest in all the bands on the label.

Davey Havok:
Lookout! was very tastemaking within that scene, for the time. They were tastemakers. We wanted to be on Lookout! for sure, but they didn’t care about AFI at all.

Christopher Appelgren:
There was a crazy period of time, we were getting checks that were a million dollars a month. Writing checks to Green Day that were a million dollars. We always paid all of our bills in advance. But in order to be able to meet this need, we actually had to get terms from the manufacturer and the printer, because it was more money than we had.

Larry Livermore:
It was growing very rapidly. We were selling probably 30, 40,000 Green Day records a year. And suddenly we were selling several hundred thousand a year. Once
Dookie
came out, we sold at least half a million of each of their records in a couple years. The first year Op Ivy came out, we sold 2,000 the whole year. And in ’95 we were selling 2,000 a week. Of a band that had been broken up for six years.

I tried to rent an apartment down the street, ’cause it was getting too crazy, the phone ringing constantly. I said, “I run this company.” They said, “Where’s your office?” I pointed up the street, “That house, that room upstairs.” The landlord called me back the next day and said, “No, I’m afraid we can’t rent to you ’cause it sounds too implausible, you running a multi-million-dollar business out of that old slumhouse.” So I got a suite of offices on University Avenue, and had about a dozen employees. Some of them I barely knew. It was a quick transition. Not a wholly comfortable one.

Some of the bands were saying, “You gotta spend a lot more money to promote us.” I was like, “Look, why tamper with success? We’ve made this company grow very well.” And they said, “Yeah, but you gotta get with the times.” There was a lot of tension within the company as well.

It was getting a bit nerve-wracking. At Gilman you’d get chased around with people trying to give you demos. I started getting lax in my responsibilities. I’d also let the two guys who worked for me have half the company in profit shares, ’cause I couldn’t pay them much in the early years. So they now had 49 percent of the company.

Christopher Appelgren:
We had to make Lookout! into a business. Before, there was no paperwork. The company was just him doing business as Lookout! Records. In 1995, in the midst of all this stuff, we had a business lawyer help set an LLC in California.

Bill Michalski:
I got this reputation, I guess, as the punk rock book-keeper. When I left AK Press I went to work at Lookout! Records for a couple years. They were just coming off the crest of when Green Day really hit it big. When I was working there, I think we were getting from Mordam probably in the neighborhood of like $250,000 a month. The bulk of that was Green Day and Op Ivy sales. There was 20 employees. And then, in the two years that I worked there, they just squandered it all to hell. That’s basically why I had to leave. I was sick of telling people that we’re not gonna pay you, or the check’s in the mail or whatever kinda bullshit I had to feed them. I couldn’t watch them flush the business down the toilet anymore.

I think their main downfall was that they lost track of where they came from. They basically abandoned being an advocate of the East Bay sound and scene. They really wanted to be Warner Brothers or EMI or something like that, instead of taking full advantage of being Lookout! They just didn’t realize what a great thing they had.

Larry Livermore:
I would appreciate making that kind of money today. So it’s kinda hard to put yourself in that place of saying, “Oh, this is so wearisome, I’ve gotta get away from it all.” But it was constant stress. A lot of people who had been friends were now either business associates or adversaries. I was getting really depressed. I was drinking a lot. I was near suicidal. It couldn’t be helped. They don’t ask you when they drive up the Brinks truck and dump out all the money. It just comes.

Deciding which bands to sign, and what approach to take, and how to promote them. That was the stuff I had always excelled at. And I was letting other people try their pet theories on it. I didn’t like what they were doing, I didn’t like the image it was giving the company.

You could say, look how democratic I am, look how willing I am to give everyone else a chance. Looking at it in a not so bright light, it’s lazy, cowardly, not being able to stand up for what I was sure was the right way to do things. Not wanting to get people mad at me. It was costing horrendous amounts of money.

Christopher Appelgren:
We started sending out more promos, booking more ads. We sent out CDs and posters when bands went on tour. Larry became less involved. He was traveling more. He had promised and threatened and warned that he wasn’t into being a businessman.

Larry Livermore:
I had 51 percent, so I could say, this is how it’s gonna be. But because of my personality and my philosophy, it was difficult to do that. So when people would argue in favor of doing things a different way, like taking out an ad in
Spin
, or doing a video, more often than not I would say, “Yeah, I think it’s a bad idea, but go ahead, try it. We can afford it. We’ve got plenty of extra money.”

Christopher Appelgren:
We had a dispute with Screeching Weasel, one of the first bands outside of the East Bay that we had signed. They disputed how we were calculating royalties. Weird faxes and letters. Larry filed suit against the band, to have a judge decide if we were upholding the contract.

Lookout! had this clause in our agreement about always treating each other with friendship and trust. And I felt like Larry was not doing that. He was not exhibiting friendship and trust. He was assuming that Ben Weasel was out for his own interests.

Larry Livermore:
Two of us were on one side, Chris was on the other side. We couldn’t reach agreement.

Christopher Appelgren:
The conflict escalated, it was in
Maximum RocknRoll
. It was embarrassing, it was like a big part of local gossip, local shit-talking. It got to the point where I thought, well, maybe I’ll quit. And then Larry escalated his plan he’d always promised, or threatened, that he was going to retire. He took Pat with him.

Larry Livermore:
I’d been brooding about it. Part of my bitterness was that I was spending all of my time helping other people with their art, and I had no time left for mine. I was having virtually no fun. I went home, and somewhere during the night, I had one of those moments—“I know, Chris could take over.” I withdrew my capital from the company. One of my other partners left at the same time, so it was left with Chris. I went around and saw the major bands, and explained to them what was going on.

Christopher Appelgren:
I get a little bit angry because I don’t know if I was Larry, 45 or 46 years old, if I would have felt it was the most responsible thing to leave a multi-million-dollar business in the hands of a 23-year-old high school graduate.

Larry was moderately involved for a time, but phased out pretty quickly because I made some pretty radical decisions that went against what he would have advised. Patrick became an employee, and worked for me. And gave up his vote.

At its peak in ’96, we opened a record store. We had 18 people between the store and label. The store never made any money. It’s hard to have a record store in the face of Amoeba and Rasputin’s, all these great stores in Berkeley. It was more of our little clubhouse to have in-stores, and have cool artifacts. But it was a very expensive one.

Bill Michalski:
After I left, I was still friends with a lot of people that worked there. One of the things that I heard they were trying to do was to have Lookout! bands on airline in-flight entertainment. Like, you put in your fuckin’ headphones in the airplane and you’re gonna hear the Oranges Band or Gaza Strippers or some shitty band that they were promoting at the time. How crazy is that?

Another thing that was a real big mistake—they tried to get in on the Warped Tour too late. If they had done it when they had all the money and when the Warped Tour was first starting, it would have been cool. But when they finally decided to do something, I think it was ’98.

Money was really tight at Lookout! All these other record labels like Epitaph had these free giveaways, goody bags and all this cool shit. Lookout! had a bunch of plastic bags printed up with Lookout! on it, maybe stick in an old Samiam cassette that they had laying around somewhere. So they were giving out basically empty bags. They looked like complete cheapskates. It was really pathetic. And it cost a ton of money.

Christopher Appelgren:
It happened on my watch. I just really didn’t know. We were also dealing with a more and more sophisticated underground and independent music industry, that was more competitive. It was harder. Green Day was proud of spending $900 to record their record. Then I was dealing with bands that wanted $50,000 to make records. That’s a real different mentality. Lookout! ended our relationship with Green Day, because there was a long period of not paying royalties.

Larry Livermore:
They stopped getting paid. You can’t blame them. The bands weren’t getting their checks regularly, and they were also complaining that Lookout! was signing all these bands they didn’t like. They felt like the money that should be going to them was going to promote these new bands.

The Lookout! people would always say, oh, everything’s alright, don’t worry. I was on the other side of the ocean. So I didn’t really know for a few years how bad things were getting. It’s pretty much all gone now.

Christopher Appelgren:
We basically renegotiated a settlement with Green Day, where now they are stakeholders in the business, in lieu of money that we owed them. We’ve gone out with our hat in our hands and admit some of our shortcomings, try to work things out. In some cases, it was successful. In other cases, it was too late.