It was called somewhat ludicrously - The Garden Spot, but we mostly called it the Garbage Spot. Nowadays all of Telegraph is a little sleazy, but at that time most of the sleaze stayed concentrated in that one place. Somebody saw Woody there, scrounging food along with the street people, and told us about it. We were kind of embarrassed; we didn't like being associated with the street people, even through our dog. Pretty soon Woody didn't come around much anymore. If you wanted him, you had to go down in frontof the Garbage Spot, and if you didn't have any food to offerhim, he didn't seem that interested in seeing you anyway. When he did come around the house, he had fleas, and smelled bad. Pretty soon people were leaving a bowl of food for him on the back porch and not inviting him in. Woody died while I was out in Michigan. I can't remember how or why. He wasn't very old, but he'd had a hard life. Hippies weren't that big on vaccinations, so it might have been distemper or something like that. Even though he and Woody hadn't been so close that last year, my brother was really broken up about it. He's always loved dogs, but he never got another one, and I don't think he ever will. Some acts are just too hard to follow. Lookout PO Box 12654 Berkeley CA 94712 Send this to: EBP-DA | www.eastbaypunkda.com giant I 0th anniversary issue, came out in the spring of 1995, and just about killed me. It showed in the writing, too. There were a lot of good stories, but the exhaustion I was feeling in my life made it exhausting to write them and, from what I hear, exhausting to read as well. A couple months later I started compiling stories for Lookout #41, but it never happened. Pretty soon I was so busy with Lookout Records, which had grown from its humble beginnings in my bedroom to a multi-million dollar business, that I no longer had time to even think about producing a new issue. By 1997 I was completely burnt on not just the record business, but the whole punk rock music and zine scene. I leftLookout Records and retreatedinto a long period of voluntary oblivion. I stopped going to most shows unless I knew people who were playing, and stopped reading zines except for the obviously obligatory ones like Cometbus. I managed - barely - to produce a bi­ monthly column for Punk Planet, but often wondered what I was doing there: after all, I didn't even consider myself connected to the punk scene anymore. Since then I've spent most of my time in London, which I still consider my main home. I've visited the States pretty often, but usuaUy not for very long. I found Berkeley and San Francisco more painful than pleasant, too full of bad memories and frustrated dreams. Thepunk rock scene that once feltso exciting and fullof promise seemed to have become a bad caricatureof itself. So what am I doing back here, you rightly ask? First off, I'm not "back," at least in the geographical sense. I came to Berkeley for a brief visit that got extended by a month when my fatherwas taken ill. Whilehere I attended the ·... -··.. "Lookout Freakout," a series of concerts that was more like a family reunion, and began to rediscover my appreciation of both the music and people'who had once been such a major part of my life. I got the new Cometbus (#45), which I think may be the best Cometbus ever, and I think that was the main inspiration: as long as I was going to be spending an extra month in Berkeley, why not have something to show forit? So, for the firsttime in ages, I felt enthusiastic about writing and producing a zine. I decided to go back to basics, to do it on a small, more personal scale rather than the massive print runs of the last fewLookout zines. I still intend to -�\•.. resurrectthe old format,including more political coverage, fiction, memoirs, all . that stuffthat Lookout came to be associated with, but for this issue; I'll be· concentrating on music ilndlocal things. I'll be on my way home to London as soon as I finish this, and won't be back in Berkeley till the spring, when I plan to put a new, full-fledged issueof Hello again. Seems like a mighty long time·, maybe because it is. Four Lookout, and resurrect the long-dormant Potatomen (more about that later). If and a half years have gone by since the last Lookout, and I was beginning to you want to write me in the meantime, my Berkeley address will work, but it wonder if there'd ever be another. might take a while. There's always e-mail, too, but I like letters about a hundred For those of you who don't remember, or weren't around, I started this times better. Anyway, here's where to reach me: magazine in 1984 when I was living on a remote mountain top in Northern California. At first it was all about local issues like pot growers, bear attacks, PO Box 12654 Berkeley CA 94712 e-mail: llivermore�aol.com and people wantingto cut down all the trees. Gradually I started writing more about punk rock music, and that somehow I hope you enjoy the issue, and please feel free to let me know what you grew into a band and then a record label which was to consume most of my life think. for the next twelve years. I found less and less time and energy for Lookout Lawrence magazine, which originally came out (almost) every month. The last one, a EBP-DA | www.eastbaypunkda.com Oh, P.S., and this part is important: Despite the similarity in names, this zine is NOT published by polished and my mind is already racing ahead, trying to keep up with a machine Lookout Records and is all my own work. All opinions, capable of digesting every fact I have ever learnedin my life and spitting it back information, and misinformation contained within are also my at me in the time it takes to turn on a light switch. own. Don't get me wrong. I love computers. Much of what I've done in the last 12 years would have been difficult or impossible without them. I'm not about And this is important too: the cover and other original art is by to give up e-mail or desktop publishing or even computer solitaire. But I'm Gabrielle Bell beginning to see that when using such a powerful tool, the power doesn't flow ([email protected]) just one way. I first learned that lesson back in my factory days, when I tried to use a jackhammer that weighed nearly as much as me. One flick of the trigger and I Back To The Old School... went flying in the opposite direction. It was a good, practical demonstration of Newtonian physics, though my foremandidn't see it in quite those terms. I've always tended to sneer at peoplewho think they're somehow being more_ A jackhammer, properly wielded, lets even a 105-pound weakling tear through solid concrete, but that sort of brute force is laughably trivial compared "real" by doing thingsthe hardway. Lifeis hardenough, I figure, that you don't need to look forways to make1t to what any reasonably adept high school kid can do on a modem computer. harder. And, come to thinkof it, we all do things, consciously or not, to screw Being neither adept nor a high school kid, I can't hack into the Pentagon and up and complicate our lives, usually in the name of making them more launch nuclear missiles, but I can do in an afternoon what took Gutenberg and his predecessors centuries to figureout. "interesting," or, at the very least, avoiding boredom. But what I was thinking of in particular was how people rebel agamst What's my point, then? Oh, I don't know. Just that I'm sort of liking this modern technology forwhat seems like no good reason at all. Sure, there are old-fashionedway of writing, and that maybe I'll stick to it even afterI get back home to my computer. It feels, well, more "real," and once again, it seems, I many aspects of modern technology that should be rebelled a�ainst, but someone, say, who insists on using an old-fashionedmanual typewnter when a can't cock a proper sneer without it turning out to have been aimed at myself all cheap computer could type, spell-check and format his work in half the time is along. just being cranky. · . Or so I was inclined to think, but here I am writing the really old-fashioned Idealpolitik way, with a pen and notebook, something I've barely done in what seems like decades. Of course by the time you read this it will probably have been fed Principlesare the last refugeof someone who knows he's lost the argument, through the word processor - my handwriting lacks both the artfulness and or the firstrefuge of the man who knows he hasn't got one. legibility of an Aaron Cometbus - but already I'm realizing that what gets Pablo was laying out his vision for the perfect society: no private property, writtendown heretoday is going to have a distinctly differentcharacter because of course, communal living, complete personal freedom, yuppies and SUVs of the tools I'm using / not using to write it.