RiYL podcast 007: Larry Livermore

Adeline Records

For a punk rock-obsessed teenager growing up in the East Bay in the 90s, Larry Livermore’s name was inescapable, floating in the ether in those days before Wikipedia existed to retain all the world’s information. I had no idea precisely who he was or what he did in the years when I would take monthly trip to Lookout Records’ University Avenue storefront — just that he was everywhere. In magazines and zines, on record sleeves, bearing a name suspiciously close to the East Bay laboratory that routinely discovered super-heavy elements.
Livermore was connected to disproportionate number of my teenage heroes — Cometbus, Operation Ivy, Green Day — both as the founder of Lookout and the Wavy Gravy mountain man, who enlisted a 12-year-old Tre Cool as the drummer for his pop-punk band of the same name. He was in his late 30s at the time, a veteran of several punk waves, beginning with the MC5 and Stooges, who ruled over his native Detroit.
2013 marks the release of the punk rock Zelig’s long-threatened memoir, Spy Rock Memories. A sucker for limited editions, I pre-ordered the hardcover months ago. Rather than waiting for its arrival, however, I opted to go to the man himself to find out the answer to a question I’ve been asking for nearly 20s years: just who the hell is Larry Livermore?

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