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December 13, 2004
  Membership card for 924 Gilman Street in Berkeley, CA. "924 Gilman: The Story So Far" book out now. The heavyweight champion of my past and current obsessions, the one that makes head fakes at the weak-kneed superficial pretenders and does spit-takes at the high-speed revolving door of girl crushes, is probably my heart and ear affair with Gilman Street-East Bay Punk Rock. One listen to Operation Ivy's Hectic EP in 1988 was all it took to put me on a five year virtual tour of Northern California following the exploits of bands from Oakland to El Cerrito to Concord and over the bridge to Benicia before deciding between Santa Rosa and Davis on my way to the paper mills of Arcata and Eureka. It took a meccan pilgrimage to Gilman Street in March '93, the first time I ever set foot in CA, while on spring break during my senior year of college to finally come to terms with it. This is not a romanticization of the era; there was a lot of crap music too and I was an outsider by about 3000 miles, but these are often the little speaker cracks that shape the years bridging teenager and college graduate. So now I am re-visiting it and venturing into music label territory by attempting to re-release punk/indie material from the 80's/early 90's under the TOP Music imprint packaged as free MP3 editions. Much like re-issue labels such as Rhino, we want to preserve music and extend it to an audience who might not have had a chance to hear it the first time around. We are concentrating on demos, basement tapes, and out-of-print cassette-only releases from now defunct or never-been record labels. As it turns out, digitizing old cassette tapes isn't a hard thing to do and the only limitation is the original sound quality but we're not talking about your weird uncle's jazz collection here. I am also pleased to announce that The Man In Sacramento will be heading up our West Coast office and has already made overtures to jump ass-first cannonball style into the shallow end of sappy nostalgia. Our obvious influences and tastes have an admitted bias to what we heard locally (in my case, "Bay Area Punk" also means Chesapeake covering Annapolis-Baltimore-DC) and the stuff on the pre-1994 pages of Maximum Rock'n'Roll but drop us a line if you have old band tapes lying around. Thanks. Sewer Trout - "Coors For Contras" (1.52 MB) Scan from "Is Sewer Trout really the Word of God?" Related: South of Gilman Street - comprehensive streaming radio station of the Gilman scene and beyond with awesome request feature, Sewer Trout - Songs About Drinking [Lookout], "Sleep, What's That?" [Sac], and TOP Music #1 "Lest We Forget" Krucoff.com powered by Removable Hype. Copyright © 2004 La Otra Página, Inc. All nights observed. Feel free to email "info(at)krucoff.com" for questions, comments, hunting tips, and family gossip. |
