How to Ru(i)n a Record Label

Larry Livermore is best known for his role in helping to launch the careers of bands such as Operation Ivy, Green Day, and Screeching Weasel. In his latest book, How To Ru(i)n A Record Label: The Story of Lookout Records, Larry tells the story of the rise—and ultimate fall—of Lookout Records.

Read an excerpt of the first chapter right here!

Chapter 1: If You Build it They Will Come

In 1985 I was living up on Spy Rock, an off-the-grid hippie wilderness about as close to the middle of nowhere as you could get and still be anywhere. I was publishing a magazine called Lookout, and singing and playing guitar for a band called the Lookouts. We’d just recorded our first demo tape, and this guy named David Hayes wrote to order a copy.

A month or two after I sent it to him, he wrote back to say he was putting together a cassette compilation of Northern California bands, and invited the Lookouts to be part of it. I don’t remember him actually saying he liked our band, but we were part of the scene he was documenting, so a couple of our songs wound up on his Bay Mud tape. We continued exchanging letters, and a tentative friendship sprang up.

I’m not positive when David and I met in person, but I think it might have been when the Lookouts played at Own’s Pizza in South Berkeley, on May 29, 1986. It was the first time our band had made it down to the big city, or, for that matter, anywhere out of Mendocino County.

Where we lived, punk rock shows were all but nonexistent. The only way there was likely to be one was if we put it on ourselves. But it wasn’t easy finding places to play in San Francisco or the East Bay, either. Venue after venue would get trashed by unruly crowds or shut down by the police.

New Method, an anarchist and peace punk warehouse in Emeryville, where I’d been hoping the Lookouts might land their first Bay Area gig, had recently suffered both fates. So now shows happened in random places—pizzerias on the brink of going out of business, for example—whose owners knew nothing about the mayhem they might be letting themselves in for.

But for some reason that night in 1986 was different. Not a hint of trouble, and big smiles all around.

The lineup—No Means No, Victim’s Family, the Mr. T Experience, Complete Disorder, and the Lookouts—was a mixed bag, bands you might not expect to see on the same bill. But somehow it all flowed together beautifully.

Victor Hayden, a vaguely mysterious, almost Devo-esque character who I’d met at New Method, had helped organize the Own’s Pizza show. As a bunch of us milled around the front door afterward, not quite ready to go home, I heard him say, “We need to find someplace we can do this all the time.”

I wasn’t the only one, but I’d like to think I was one of the first to say, “Yeah, let’s do it!” None of us realized it just then, but that was the beginning of the Gilman Street Project.

Victor’s idea might have never progressed beyond wishful thinking if it weren’t for Kamala Parks, barely a year or two out of Berkeley High, but already adept at making things happen on the East Bay punk scene. A few days later, Victor told me Kamala had found a vacant warehouse in West Berkeley.

“It’s perfect,” he said. “Now we just need to convince Tim.”

“Tim” was Tim Yohannan, Maximum Rocknroll’s irascible but mostly benign dictator-for-life. MRR had started as a radio show in the 1970s and began publishing a monthly magazine in 1982. Through sheer persistence and punctuality—until then nobody had heard of a zine that came out unfailingly on schedule—it had grown into one of the most powerful punk rock institutions on the planet.

Despite its low cover price and dirt-cheap advertising rates, MRR raked in an astonishing amount of cash. But surplus income didn’t end up in Tim’s pockets or the magazine’s own coffers; instead, he recycled it into musical and political causes he thought were worthwhile. Victor and Kamala set out to persuade him that converting the West Berkeley warehouse into a punk rock club fit that bill.

“We’ll need about $10,000 to get it up and running,” Victor thought. It wound up being more like $40,000. Tim was dubious at first—for starters, he thought the club should be in San Francisco, not the East Bay—but once he decided to get involved, MRR began footing the bills and money was no longer an issue.

Next came the physical work of actually building the club. I wielded a jackhammer for the first time since my Zug Island days, and nearly electrocuted myself trying to install some wiring. Meanwhile, a revolving cast of punks, misfits, and weirdos tried to come up with rules and principles for how Gilman Street should be run.

It could—and possibly would—have devolved into nothing but collective chaos if Tim had not been at the helm. Everyone was allowed his or her say, no matter how bizarre or off-the-wall, as long as they wound up agreeing to do things Tim’s way. Sometimes we had to vote and re-vote half a dozen times to come up with that result, but we always did.

His semi-authoritarian tactics earned him the nickname of “Chairman Tim,” and some of his more vocal critics even accused him of being a Stalinist. Tim’s cheerful reply: “It’s true! I have a poster of The Stalin hanging on my bedroom wall.”

He was referring to the Japanese hardcore band, not the Soviet strongman, but Tim was a collectivist at heart. He believed in democracy when it produced the desired result, but naked totalitarianism was fine too, if that was what got the job done.

Not all of Tim’s ideas proved realistic. Scornful of “rock star egos,” he hoped to break down the traditional hierarchy separating performers from audiences by making bands who played Gilman help out with unglamorous jobs like cleanup and security. That lasted about as long as you’d imagine.

Another experiment that survived only a month or two was a ban on advertising. The theory was that people wouldn’t know who was playing on any given date, but that they’d show up to be part of the club rather than to be passively entertained. A few too many chilly midwinter nights in a mostly empty warehouse put an end to that plan. David Hayes became Gilman’s de facto calendar maker, and also produced many of its most memorable flyers.

David developed a unique, disarming style, employing comic techniques without ever becoming cartoonish. This might have been a talent he’d had all along, but it came to life and blossomed at Gilman.

That was how it worked for many bands, too. When Gilman opened on Dec. 31, 1986, the Bay Area punk scene was far from dead, but it wasn’t exactly thriving. Bands came through town on tour, of course, playing commercial venues like Ruthie’s Inn or the On Broadway, and there were a few local bands “big” enough to open for them. Beyond that, you were mostly looking at disaffected teenagers who’d count it a success if they packed in enough friends and classmates to fill somebody’s garage or basement.

Gilman got off to a slow start; on its first night, the room was never much more than half full. But in the weeks and months that followed, it began to feel like that catch phrase from Field of Dreams: if you build it, they will come.

The East Bay scene had been small and insular; go to enough shows and you’d soon know everyone, at least by sight. But once Gilman opened, kids nobody had ever seen began showing up. And by kids I mean kids, mostly high school-aged, but some as young as 12 or 14. Word had obviously gotten out: here was a place where you wouldn’t be laughed at or turned away for being uncool, where being strange or unusual was considered a character asset, where you could where your weirdness as a badge of honor.

It also didn’t take long to figure out that almost anyone could get a gig at Gilman. You didn’t need special connections, you didn’t even need to be good. As long as you looked like you were having fun and didn’t take yourself too seriously, people would give you a chance. Not surprisingly, newly formed bands were soon coming out of the woodwork.

Some old school bands didn’t fare so well. The Naked Lady Wrestlers, who’d been around since the beginning of the 80s, were greeted with catcalls and boos despite being among the most gifted musicians—from a technical standpoint, anyway—to play Gilman in those early days.

Granted, they invited most of that abuse by bragging about how great they were, taunting the audience, and insulting the newer, younger bands. Supposedly it was all a joke, but they seemed genuinely distressed at being shown up by kids who were still learning to play their instruments.

The band that really worked the Naked Lady Wrestlers’ nerves was Isocracy, four high schoolers from the far-flung East Bay suburb of El Sobrante (Spanish for “the leftover”). I’d met Isocracy a few months before Gilman opened, when their drummer and chief mouthpiece, John Kiffmeyer (aka Al Sobrante), plaintively asked me, “How do bands get to play shows?”

I wondered about that myself, I told him, but since the Lookouts had a gig at San Francisco’s Club Foot that week, I offered Isocracy the first ten minutes of our slot. I wasn’t even sure they’d show up, but just before we were due to go on, I spotted them carrying their equipment up Third Street. They’d made the hour and a half trip from El Sobrante via bus, BART, and, for the last few blocks, on foot.

Jason Beebout, their lead singer, had such a bad case of stage fright that he more or less hid out behind our bass amp. All four members of the band looked like they’d rather be at the dentist getting their teeth drilled, but it only took a matter of months for the once-timid teenagers to transform themselves into masters of the Gilman universe.

It might sound like I’m exaggerating, but no one who was there during the first months of 1987 could deny that Isocracy were the club’s first superstars. Their music might still have been in a development stage, but they made up for it with a show that was nothing short of spectacular. Or, as some preferred to call it, trash-tacular.

Trash was the essence of the Isocracy experience. There was the verbal kind, delivering in the braying foghorn tones of Al Sobrante and the free-association ramblings of Jason, who’d come so far out of his shell it was hard to believe he’d ever had one.

But the band became even better known for the massive amounts of physical junk—basically anything cheap or free, from silly string and police tape to reams of office paper and bags of flour—that they dumped on the audience, who promptly threw it right back at them.

It was a tough act to follow. The Naked Lady Wrestlers were one of the few bands foolish enough to try, but they failed abjectly. If they hadn’t been so loud and arrogant about putting down “those no-talent kids,” you almost could have felt sorry for them.

Isocracy milked the abuse for all it was worth, until the Naked Lady Wrestlers unwisely challenged them to a battle of the bands. It was set up like a wrestling match, and refereed by rubberfaced loudmouth and MRR record reviewer Walter Glaser.

The bands took turns playing songs, after which the audience would vote on who had won that “round.” Isocracy scored a unanimous victory. It was all in good fun, of course, but it also represented a changing of the guard. This was not your dad’s punk rock anymore, not even your brother’s. Gilman belonged to a new generation.

I was still spending the majority of the time up on Spy Rock, which had been my home for most of the 80s, but I hated missing any of the Gilman action. Getting there, though, meant a three and a half hour trip each way, and, if I was too tired to drive back after the show, sleeping in the camper shell on the back of my pickup.

I was complaining about this to Dave MDC (“Millions of Dead Cops,” “Multi-Death Corporations,” etc.), who told me he was about to get evicted from his apartment in San Francisco unless he could find three new roommates right away.

David Hayes wanted to move out of his parents’ house in the suburbs, and our mutual friend Joe Britz, a disgruntled fanzine editor from Brooklyn, was eager to relocate to the Bay Area. A week later the three of us took up residence at what would become known as the Rathouse.

Why the “Rathouse”? There was David’s pet rat, not to mention the appearance of the place, which ranged from “comfortably lived in” to “Whoa, did Isocracy just play here?” Lastly, it was a play on the German word Rathaus, which means “city hall.”

I still spent several days a week at Spy Rock, but my Rathouse base made it possible to get more wholeheartedly involved at Gilman. David, Joe, and I launched a house zine, Tales (sometimes Tails) From The Rathouse, and whiled away many a night with rambling discussions about where this whole punk rock thing may be going.

That could have been when the idea of starting a record label first came up. It was mostly just idle speculation; there weren’t enough bands—or fans—for it to make sense. Once you got beyond Isocracy, and maybe Nasal Sex and Rabid Lassie, who was there, really?

Well, there was my band, the Lookouts, but I was already, much too hastily in David’s opinion, putting out our own LP. “You should have done a 7” first,” he kept saying. Too late, I realized he was right.

One People One Planet came out in April of 1987, bearing the imprint of something called “Lookout Records.” No such company existed; I’d just slapped the name on there to make it look more “official.” The album didn’t sell anywhere near enough copies to break even, and that, I assumed, was the beginning and end of my life in the music industry.

In June of that year, I sublet my room at the Rathouse and took off to Europe for a couple of months. While I was away, Maximum Rocknroll asked David to put together a double 7” compilation to showcase some of the Gilman bands and raise money for the club.

He wrote me a letter telling me about it, and mentioned a band called Operation Ivy, who he said were becoming “the new stars of Gilman Street.”

“Bigger than Isocracy?” I wrote back.

“Way bigger,” came the answer.

That was as much as I’d heard about Operation Ivy until I got back to Gilman in mid-August. I’d barely walked in the door when a kid I knew only as Tim—“that floppy boy” I always called him—ran across the room and jumped up into my arms. He weighed about as much as a bag of feathers.

“Yo Larry, I’m in a band!”

Tim’s previous band, Basic Radio, had broken up just before Gilman opened. Judging from the way he was always tearing around the dance floor and hugging everyone in sight, you’d think he was the happiest kid alive, but I knew he’d been desperate to start playing music again.

“That’s awesome, Tim!” I said.

“Yeah, I don’t go by Tim anymore. People call me Lint now.”

“Lint?”

“Yeah, you know, like the stuff in the bottom of your pocket. Larry, you gotta check us out. We’re playing today. Are you gonna stick around and watch?”

“Sure, of course. What’s your band called?”

“Operation Ivy.”

I stood at the back of the room, not expecting much. After all, they’d barely been together three months.

By the time they went into the first chorus, I was up front singing along to words I’d never heard before. It was one of those moments I’d experienced only a handful of times in my life, when music moved beyond the level of entertainment or inspiration, and opened a door to dimensions previously undreamed of.

Afterward, as I leaned against a wall catching my breath, Lint walked up and asked if I’d liked his band. I still marvel at how I opened to mouth to say, “That was really good,” only to have a completely different set of words come tumbling out:

“Do you guys want to make a record?”

I have no idea why I said it. All I knew was that there needed to be an Operation Ivy record, and somehow I was going to make it happen.

A day or two later David Hayes sidled up to me and said, “Now that you’ve promised Operation Ivy you’re going to put out their record, maybe you should try listening to their demo tape.”

I hadn’t even known they had a demo. When I put on the cassette David gave me, my heart sunk. It was good, all right, but not that good. It sounded like what it was: a decent first effort from an almost brand new band. It bore little resemblance to the transcendent spectacle I’d witnessed at Gilman.

Me and my big mouth, I thought. But I’d given Op Ivy my word, and I wasn’t going to take it back. Besides, not wanting Isocracy to feel left out, I’d asked them to do a record, too.

The whole thing would have turned into a giant fiasco if David hadn’t come to the rescue. I was good at big talk and crazy ideas, but he knew how to make things actually happen.

He’d been wanting to put out a 7” for Corrupted Morals, so I suggested we join forces and do all three bands together. He agreed. Hearing that Crimpshine had recorded enough songs for an EP, I decided what the heck, let’s make it four, and just like that, we were in the record business.

Be sure to pick up a copy of How To Ru(i)n A Record Label: The Story of Lookout Records to read the rest!