LimeWire Music Blog

I’ve got a trash-strewn, vomit-smeared corner of my heart dedicated to that particular brand of sentimental sensationalism known as the rock book.  While academics all over the world scramble to hang haphazard theory all over the world of pop culture, rock books are a simpler affair compared to their highfalutin cousins.  They’ve got bold covers that promise sex, violence and insecurity, and the best of them, despite their generally exploitative nature, deliver high opera.  I’m talking Please Kill Me and Cash; mythic shit.  Anyway, while us music writers have mined London and New York for every minor subplot in their stories, the time is ripe for some new ethnography.  What of all the great, weird, incestuous, self-referential music scenes American cities have birthed?  While the principle players are still kicking, we need to seal for posterity every belch and debauch, every demolished guitar and broken dream. Our children will thank us.

Jack Boulware and Silke Tudor have done their part.  This month sees the release of their new book, Gimme Something Better: The Profound, Progressive, and Occasionally Pointless History of Bay Area Punk from Dead Kennedys to Green Day.  For those of us for whom the Cometbus omnibus just simply was not enough, this is required reading.  Originally envisioned as a history of San Francisco’s legendary Gilman Street venue, this book attempts a thorough history of a scene that gave us bands as diverse as Fifteen, Pansy Division, NOFX and AFI.  And don’t get me started on MDC.  According to an interview in the San Francisco Chronicle, the book will also focus significantly on the life and times of Maximum Rock and Roll editor and general man-about-town Tim Yohannan. And in true Bay Area DIY style, Gimme Something Better was made possible by a gaggle of volunteer typists, raised via Internet to transcribe the 30 odd interviews the authors had conducted.  Close your eyes.  You can almost smell the BART.