The East Bay Express has a pretty cool review of the new book Gimme Something Better: The Profound, Progressive, and Occasionally Pointless History of Bay Area Punk from Dead Kennedys to Green Day, which I posted about recently, here.

I haven’t grabbed a copy for myself yet, but Nothing Wrong With Me’s own Amanda has, and she wrote up her impressions in a her always evocative and personal style. She writes: “Gimme Something Better is as crazy, vibrant, and mildly horrifying as the music it is devoted to. It’s a free-for-all in the best possible sense.” Read the whole post on her wonderful blog, here.

In part because news of the book got me thinking about the subject, the history of Green Day and the East Bay punk scene has been a bit of a theme here lately, so here’s a zine that Aaron Cometbus made in 1997 for the tenth anniversary of 924 Gilman St. It gives a sense of how difficult and chaotic but also impressively dedicated the effort has been to keep a completely independent punk rock club going. Bringing together the very disparate personalities that are attracted to punk is a challenge in itself. It’s the story of a labor of love, but not without struggles and mistakes along the way. There’s nothing specifically about Green Day in the zine. Click on the thumbnail for the full size scan.

Continued:
Pages 5 and 6, Pages 7 and 8, Pages 9 and 10, Pages 11 and 12, Pages 13 and 14.

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