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Punk on the rocks?
Lookout! lose Green Day
BY LEON NEYFAKH
Related Links

Lookout! Records' official Web site

Ted Leo + Pharmacists' official Web site

Troubled Hubble's official Web site

Mary Timony's official Web site

Green Day's official Web site

Pretty Girls Make Graves' official Web site

The Reputation's official Web site

A month ago, Lookout! Records looked like a label in renaissance. The respected Bay Area indie had just released a new EP by Ted Leo/Pharmacists and a well-received full-length by Troubled Hubble, and former Helium frontwoman Mary Timony was on the road supporting her Lookout! solo album. Even though it hadn’t found another Green Day — the band whom label founder Larry Livermore presciently signed in the late ’80s — the label’s artistic reputation was secure, and it still had the rights to the first couple of Green Day releases, 1991’s 1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours and 1992’s Kerplunk! But on August 1 everything changed: Green Day pulled their back catalogue, and the curtain came up on Lookout!’s rotting infrastructure.

Over the past decade, those first two Green Day albums had been making money, but it seems the band hadn’t seen much of it. By the time Green Day pulled the plug, years of bad decision making had caught up to Lookout!, and the quiet reputation of unreliability the label had accrued among Bay Area bands was an open secret. "It's about money, and also about bad faith," Livermore wrote in a vitriolic message he posted on-line. "It kind of makes me sick to see what's happened to a label I put so much of my heart and soul into."

Livermore left the company in 1995 to Chris Appelgren, who'd started in the Lookout! mailroom when he was 15 and rose to become Livermore’s junior partner. By the time he took over as president, the golden age of underground pop-punk had ended and major labels were taking the bread and butter of Lookout!’s roster. Dr. Frank, leader of the long-time Lookout! punk band the Mr. T Experience, explained it this way via e-mail: "The prominence and commercial success of ‘pop punk’ at the time meant that bands like mine started to demand that Lookout! act more like a ‘real’ record label. . . . If they hadn't taken steps in that direction, they would have lost people, because everyone had more options. That put a kind of pressure on the new version of the company that Larry never had to deal with."

Appelgren appears not to have handled the new pressures very well. Former Lookout! employee Jesse Townley, who also played in the Lookout! bands the Criminals and Blatz, says, "I don’t think it was malicious — it was incompetence." Townley himself had difficulty collecting royalties, even though as the label’s official "royalty advocate," he was responsible for tracking down long-lost band members and keeping track of debts. That position was never filled after he left in 1999. And Townley, tired of waiting for his royalties, took back the Criminals/Blatz master tapes. "Lookout! had the opportunity to become a real mainstay in terms of supporting small local bands. Instead, over the course of a decade, they just pissed it away."

In an open letter published on Lookout!’s Web site, Appelgren acknowledges that he made a lot of mistakes. Green Day’s decision, he says, was a "huge wake-up call." All six of Lookout!’s employees were then laid off, and the label moved to a smaller space. Still, Appelgren is optimistic about the future. "We’re gonna be here," he continues. "It may be smaller, and it may be some time before we start being a really active label again. But we’re gonna be here."

And in fact Lookout! appears to have retained enough good will to re-establish itself. The recently signed bands Pretty Girls Make Graves, the Reputation, and Troubled Hubble should serve the label well as soon as it’s ready to start releasing new material. And it still has plenty of big sellers in its catalogue, including albums by Operation Ivy, the Queers, and the Mr. T Experience — all pioneers of the sound that once defined the East Bay punk scene.

"Despite everything, I still like Lookout!," writes Dr. Frank. "I hope they make it, because whatever happens in the future, I'd like my records to remain in print."


Issue Date: August 19 - 25, 2005
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