Gimme Something Better: The Profound, Progressive, and Occasionally Pointless History of Bay Area Punk From Dead Kennedys to Green Day

GIFT GUIDE 2009

• Picture Book

  To see or not to see

• Grunge, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Bob Seger, The Rolling Stones, and The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

  BY RAOUL HERNANDEZ

• Jad Fair

  BY AUDRA SCHROEDER

• Misery Obscura: The Photography of Eerie Von (1981-2009)

  BY MARC SAVLOV

Rock & Roll Books

• Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone

  BY AUDRA SCHROEDER

• Miss O'Dell: My Hard Days and Long Nights With the Beatles, the Stones, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, and the Women They Loved

  BY MARGARET MOSER

• Blues & Chaos: The Music Writings of Robert Palmer

  BY DOUG FREEMAN

• The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature

  BY GREG BEETS

• Man of Constant Sorrow: My Life and Times

  BY JIM CALIGIURI

• Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

  BY JAY TRACHTENBERG

• The Tao of Wu

  BY CHASE HOFFBERGER

• I Slept With Joey Ramone: A Family Memoir

  BY MARGARET MOSER

• Gimme Something Better: The Profound, Progressive, and Occasionally Pointless History of Bay Area Punk From Dead Kennedys to Green Day

  BY MARC SAVLOV

• We'll Be Here for the Rest of Our Lives: A Swingin' Showbiz Saga

  BY MARGARET MOSER

• Always Been There: Rosanne Cash, the List, and the Spirit of Southern Music

  BY JIM CALIGIURI

• Big Man: Real Life & Tall Tales

  BY AUSTIN POWELL

• Moonwalk, The Michael Jackson Tapes: A Tragic Icon Reveals His Soul in Intimate Conversation, and Michael Jackson 1958-2009: Life of a Legend

  BY MARGARET MOSER

Gimme Something Better: The Profound, Progressive, and Occasionally Pointless History of Bay Area Punk From Dead Kennedys to Green Day

It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. It was punk as fuck. Tackling the gleefully vicious, calculatedly anti-social, and utterly wonderful history of punk rock's most fertile egg chamber outside the UK is a fool's errand akin to picking daisies for Danzig's pet baby unicorn on Easter Sunday. Sayeth Ian MacKaye, "Think again." Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain nailed the whole New Yawk punk rawk squawk with their essential CGBG's flashback-a-thon Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, Marc Spitz and Brendan Mullen recounted Southern California's 15 minutes of Weird(os) in We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A. Punk, and now, against all odds, Jack Boulware and Silke Tudor have gone and one-upped both of those indispensable oral histories with this endlessly fascinating and frankly addictive masterpiece of safety-pin journalism. Of key note here is the Texas/SF cross-country tweakshow that included the likes of DRI, Tales of Terror, girlfriend-killing Fang-frontman Sam "Sammytown" McBride, and the (ever infamous) SF/SoCo skin Marc Dagger. Apart from chords and kick-drums, the good old days were actually pretty bad, it turns out, although Berkeley's 924 Gilman St. ultimately returned the blood from fists to fret boards, where it belonged. Among other notable decedents was scene cop and Maximumrocknroll founder Tim Yohannan, who artfully managed to sick up lymphoma in 1998, thereby allowing him to exit prior to the colossal embarrassment that is Hot Topic. To quote the late Will Shatter: "Isn't life a blast? It's just like living in the past." Hey, man, whatever gets you through the Vats.