Started as a rebellious lark in 1988 by a boho Zelig named Larry Hayes (who took the sobriquet "Livermore" in a nod to a northern California nuclear facility), Berkeley-based Lookout! Records was run as a seat-of-the-pants labor of love and hate until it shuttered completely earlier this year. In addition to grooming Green Day (a 12-year-old Tre Cool played with Livermore in a band called the Lookouts), the label is best known for documenting the scraggly, playfully defiant East Bay pop-punk scene, based around, and in reaction to, the famed 924 Gilman Street club (but mostly enjoyed in countless house parties). The scene emerged as an antidote to the twin funcrushers of '80s punk — hardcore's Reagan-ranting political self-righteousness (most prominently voiced by Maximum Rocknroll, based in San Francisco) and macho, neck-vein-busting bluster (mostly emanating from Southern California and New York). In reaction, Lookout! stuck out its tongue, reminded everybody that the Ramones were better than Black Flag, and popped a beer.
By way of tribute, SPIN asked Frank "Dr. Frank" Portman, leader of the much-mythologized and criminally misunderstood Lookout! band Mr. T Experience, and author of instant-classic 2007 young-adult novel King Dork, to choose the label's most essential songs, with his liner notes. Here are those picks, plus-one-more we insisted upon. CHARLES AARON
7. Green Day "Dry Ice" (from 1,000 Hours EP, 1989)
The 1980s were an awful, awful time for music, so when I first saw a crowd of scruffy youths and their parents and guardians explode into an ecstatic frenzy to songs like this, my reaction was, "Wow, so people still like good music after all." That's still my reaction. F.P.
Full article at SPIN: HERE
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