Lookout! Records

He grew up in Northern California and started playing drums at an unusually young age.

One of his early musical connections was Larry Livermore, founder of Lookout Records, who recruited him to play in a band called The Lookouts.

Trey was barely a teenager.

Most kids that age were worried about homework, bicycles, and whether their parents would let them stay out past nine.

When John Kiffmeyer left Green Day to attend college, Trey joined the band in 1990, and the classic lineup was complete.

Billie Joe Armstrong on guitar and vocals, Mike Dirt on bass, Trey Cool on drums, three guys, one enormous sound rock.

Green Day's first full-length album, 39 Smooth, arrived in April 1990 on Lookout Records.

Now, if your introduction to Green Day was American Idiot, listening to 39 Smooth might feel like discovering home movies of somebody before they became famous.

The band, which eventually became a trio, lasted from 1991 to 1994 before breaking up on stage, actually.

And eventually after that, Molly started working for a punk label in the Bay Area called Lookout Records, thus starting her pivot to become the behind-the-scenes executive helping other acts like hers reach audiences.

There is so much more to say about Molly and her amazing experiences in the music industry, but I will let her tell you, so please welcome to the show Molly Neuman.

Molly Neuman, welcome to On the Record.

... label owners? Like, tell me about that.

Yeah, sure.

I mean, what, what ended up happening was, yeah, I started my band, I graduated college, and then started working in 1994 at, uh, Lookout Records, which had been the label that released, uh, the first two Green Day albums, and '94 was when Dookie came out.

So it was a really...

... which is-

Lookout Records, you mean?

Yes.

Yeah.

Although Fires Within Fires is only a couple of minutes longer at 40 minutes.

It was released in February 1990 on Lookout Records.

And Lookout are also known for fostering bands like Green Day, Rancid and Operation Ivy.

All from the same area, playing a similar sort of thing and obviously took quite different paths.

Green Day came out of the Bay Area punk scene in the late '80s.

After getting signed to local indie punk label Lookout Records, the band went through a name change.

They were originally called Sweet Children, and there was another band with a similar name, and to avoid confusion, they changed to Green Day, a name that eventually they grew out of because it w- referred to hanging around getting high, but it's too late now.

They've committed to it.

So it's a place where kids could go be loud and annoying and... and hopefully have a lot of fun.

The band's early releases were with the independent record label Lookout Records, including their first album, 39 Slash Smooth, 1990.

For most of the band's career, they have been a power trio, with Cool, who replaced John Kiffmeyer in 1990.

Before the recording of the band's second studio album, Kerplunk.

Operation Ivy and Sound System.

That comes from the one and only full length record, Energy, that Operation Ivy released on Lookout Records in 1989.

And they came out just two months before I arrived in Berkeley, California.

Before Operation Ivy, you heard Screeching Weasel and Dingbat.

That comes from the record from the year before, 1988, called Boogada Boogada Boogada.

And yeah, that would have been what they were touring on or playing on when I saw them in Chicago at the Peace Fest in the summer of 1988.

That record and the band, Screeching Weasel, later joined Lookout Records.

But that was a few years in the future.