Do you hear the dice rolling, the cards shuffling, and the slot machines chiming their contrapuntal cacophony? No? Well, we don’t either. That’s because, although we are back in and coming live to you from Las Vegas, Nevada on this episode, we’re hearing the din of punk scholarship amplified by sound examples–be it hardcore, pop-punk, or grindcore–that are contoured by theoretical frameworks. We met in this electrified desert to discuss, debate, and develop new ways of understanding issues pertinent to our Punk Scholars Network US 4th Annual Conference theme: ‘For The Record: Punk Histories and Archival Practices,’ which are especially significant as punk, increasingly institutionalized, celebrates its 50th anniversary of being a means of collective empowerment and collaboration between people, spaces, places, and things.
And, we heard the resonant buzz of this (over)driven subcultural community as we gathered in the Punk Rock Museum with speakers dispensing distortion as tour guides and conference-goers walked their ways around co-constitutive beginnings: where lived experiences meet objects anew in the moments we have been fortunate to share. And bringing this all together–reflections on temporality, perspective, resonance and sending forth, collaboration and contemplation, and the recognition of one’s impact in shaping the world of punk (and beyond) by promoting one’s once ‘secondary’ scene as a musician, a recorder label co-founder, a writer (zines, books), and current archival collaborator– is our esteemed guest: Larry Livermore.
This episode began after Larry’s presentation with Stefano Morello on ‘Co-archiving East Bay Punk’ allowing co-hosts Jessica Schwartz and Ellen Bernhard to take turns asking Larry questions that extended this discussion, exploring labels as archives, memoir as historical intervention, and what it means to be and self-reflect on being part of the record rather than just in it. And, for the record, this episode also probes those things, moments, and intensities that cannot, perhaps, be archived but are just as important.
Guest Bio.
Larry Livermore is a writer, editor, musician, and co-founder of Lookout Records, the Bay Area label that documented the East Bay punk scene and put out records for artists such as Operation Ivy, Green Day, Spitboy, and more. He edited the zine Lookout, launched in 1984 from a solar-powered cabin in Mendocino County and, by 1995, distributed internationally. He was an early organizer and volunteer at 924 Gilman, where he played dozens of shows with the Lookouts and the Potatomen. He also wrote columns for Maximumrocknroll (1987-94) and Punk Planet (1994-2007), and contributed to underground publications ranging from Homocore to the Anderson Valley Advertiser. Livermore is the author of Spy Rock Memories (2013) and How to Ru(i)n a Record Label: The Story of Lookout Records (2015).
Links