Larry Livermore - Biography

Biography

In 1977 Hayes began to attend punk rock shows in the San Francisco bay area. He soon adopted the "punk rock name" "Larry Livermore," an allusion to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a nuclear research and development facility in Livermore, California, run by the University of California.

He founded Lookout magazine, based in Laytonville, California, and continued to publish it until 1995. In 1985 he formed the Lookouts, a punk-rock band whose 12-year-old drummer, Tre Cool, later went on to play for Green Day. The Lookouts recorded two LPs, One Planet One People and Spy Rock Road, and two EPs, Mendocino Homeland and IV, between 1985 and 1990, with Livermore playing guitar and singing.

In 1987, with his friend David Hayes (no relation), he cofounded Lookout! Records, which has released records by Operation Ivy, Green Day, Screeching Weasel, The Queers, and scores of other artists. Many of the bands on Lookout were associated with 924 Gilman Street, a nonprofit, volunteer-run punk-rock club based in Berkeley, California. David Hayes left the label at the end of 1989 to establish a label of his own, Very Small Records. Larry Livermore continued as president and principal owner of Lookout! Records until he retired in 1997.

In 1992, Livermore and Patrick Hynes formed the Potatomen, a pop band that has released two albums, Now and Iceland, two EPs, On the Avenue and All My Yesterdays, and a split EP, The Beautiful and Damned/The Day I Said Goodbye, with the Canadian band cub.

From 1987 until 1994, Livermore was a columnist for Maximum Rocknroll magazine, and from 1994 to 2007 wrote a monthly column for Punk Planet magazine. Livermore had a scene report column on Berkeley's punk zine Absolutely Zippo. He was also a contributor to the seminal queercore zine Homocore. In 2008, quarterly periodical Verbicide magazine began publishing his column, titled "Beneath the BQE." Livermore's first column for Verbicide appears in issue 23.