I just finished thumbing through Gimmie Something Better: A History of San Francisco Bay Area Punk Rock (Penguin).  The following things were thought up in my head:

• What’s interesting about this book,  it isn’ t about New York or LA, it’s about this weird scene that produced one band who sold more records than just about all the important bands from either of those places (Green Day), and gave us some of the most enduring artwork (Winston Smith,Flipper logo, Cometbus copy machine art) of the punk/underground scene.

• Between this book, and the book on LA punk, We Got The Neutron Bomb, somebody has to go ahead and write the definitive book on The Screamers.

• I really want to listen to Green Day after reading this book.

• Blake Schwarzenbach is totally absent from the conversation, even the ones about his band, Jawbreaker.  This bums me out a bit.

• Jesse Michaels doesn’t mention his father Leonard by name.  Bummed.

• I can read just about anything Aaron Cometbus says or writes:

“A bunch of us in Berkley were professors’ kids.  Professors’ kids who never went to college ourselves.  A few of the professors were pretty high profile.  Not mine, though.  He taught economics at the crappy state school”