Lookout Records Downsizes

Sorry Chris. This has got to hurt.

I thought Teddy Leo was carrying that label right now.

Lookout was getting awesome. Going the Epitaph route and growing with their fans.

this sentence is just hanging there..

But this whole thing stinks of greed.

yet.

cool...they nice dudes. i'm sure it'll bee fun (what band r u in btw?)

if you are contractually owed money for work you've done and didn't receive it, what exactly would you do? would you tell your accountant, "eh let 'em keep it, i don't need it"? ridiculousness. just because the guy has more money than the combined net worth of all ILM posters doesn't mean a business entity shouldn't be accountable for their obligations.

maybe green day should have taken equity in lookout and brought in new management in lieu of royalties due. they obviously were holding up the entire business anyway.

I don't see why this is ridiculous. It would be a gesture of generosity towards the people who originally invested in you and gave you your biggest break.

I know which side I'd take.

don't forget ANDY!!!

I met all of Green Day, Chris Applegren and wife(?) Molly (and Larry Livermore for that matter), and they are all swell swell folks. I'm hoping things mend between them all (though Larry is not involved in this issue, of course.) I could be wrong, but if Green Day were "greedy fucking bastards", they could have pulled a Buttholes-suing-Touch&Go type thing, but this doesn't look like it... in fact, I'm guessing the band were nice enough to let it go far enough until they said "well, you know, it's kinda been a while." Again, I could be wrong. But I give the benefit of the doubt to any band that, at the height of their popularity, bring along Pansy Division as their opening band for stadium tours.

Anyway, I hope everyone's happier after all of this.

"Lawrence Livermore started Lookout records with his welfare money"

"In the spring of 1990, the Berkeley punk club 924 Gilman Street hosted a record- release party for four young bands signed to a tiny, seat-of-the-pants record label called Lookout.

Lookout's two principal staff members at the time, founder Lawrence Livermore, then 43, and Christopher Appelgren, then 17, set up shop in the corner of the club, selling singles and albums by the bands -- Neurosis, Samiam, the Mr. T Experience and a trio of teenage brats calling themselves Green Day."

Semi-random Googled info - do Green Day owe Appelgren anything? Or was it Livermore?)

"I don't know too many details, but I do know the problem has been going on for a long time, and that Green Day has been more than patient.

If anyone should be griping, it should be me: I basically gave those Green Day records to the current Lookout owners, and they basically threw them away.""

Another way to think about it is that Green Day were essentially employing 6 people who were doing nothing for them. If you want to talk about generosity, the band could theoretically set up some kind of charity and hire six people to do something better than release bad punk records.

LOOKOUT put them out of work - by cheating their main breadwinner!

Anyway.

Livermore started Lookout Records as a partnership with David Hayes then who left to start Very Small Records (who put out the first Jawbreaker 7", "69 newport" 7" by Op Ivy alongside records from Schlong -two of the Op Ivy guys -, Econochrist, Sewer Trout, Plaid Retina etc) a few years later. If i remember right Hayes then changed the label name to Too Many Records a few years after that.

It was after Hayes left that Applegren joined. If i remember right Hayes actually owned the Lookout name and even designed it's logo but said he wanted nothing more to do with the label, walked away and left everything to Livermore, hence him not getting any of the later Green Day and Op Ivy money.

Also, i don't think Livermore was "squeezed out". From what i remember from his MRR column he said after the label started making real money on the early Green Day releases he was able to take his share of the money and finally go travalling, thus he left the label in Applegren's hands but still got his slice of the Green day back catalog pie. He moved to London for a while.

Weirdly, the journalist responsible emailed me for info after reading what I'd written in this thread.

Finished: http://www.punknews.org/article/45835

Not entirely surprising, but really kind of sad that as of right now there isn't a way to get the label's back catalog.

http://thebaybridged.com/2017/01/03/lookouting-celebration-lookout-records-runs-next-weekend-924-gilman/

I may be in attendance at this

~25 years ago, I saw Tilt and they opened with this song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NPGtmGjcV8

Catchy stuff.

what a weird scene this was - old punks and their kids + young obsessives. I enjoyed the set I went to see anyway (Brents TV)

spent most of Squirtgun's set trying to figure out why it is pop punk is so deeply unappealing to me on every level

that's p hilarious that a 19-year-old organised this. every original musician on the lineup must be easily twice his age, prob closer to 3x in some cases

yeah the juxtaposition was ... odd (and not lost on various participants)

or certain participants anyway