Operation Ivy News

Strung Out turned 20 this year, which means these L.A. punks started the same year Batman ruled the box office, Operation Ivy released its first full-length and Buckethead presumably still worked at KFC.

There's a basic format for the various funny, frank, drug-filled oral histories of punk rock that have come out in the past ten years.

Gimme Something Better has it all: dead dogs, statutory rape, skinhead fights, the origins of the term "emo," promoters accidentally taking acid in jail, M-80s, soup lines, people falling through skylights, people getting torched with flamethrowers, teenagers on meth squatting in empty beer vats, exhumed bodies, laundromats, Ford Pintos, murderers ...

To view a full slideshow of pictures from the show, click here . Better Than: A show by any other pop-punk outfit playing today.

PHOTO COURTESY OF JESSE MICHAELS East Bay punk fixture Jesse Michaels, former lead singer of Operation Ivy, brings new band to Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco tonight.

Besides being most identified as the poster boys for the mid-'90s ska explosion, the members of smart-alecky outfit Reel Big Fish are somewhat infamous for their goofy covers of '80s hits.

"We ain't got no boss!" Tim Armstrong is positively giddy. His band, Rancid, has just returned with its first new album in six years, the back-to-punk-basics "Let the Dominoes Fall" . And the group just launched a co-headlining tour with upstarts Rise Against - an interesting move, considering that Rancid has headlined its own tours for the last ...

Pinning down the subculture known as "alternative," "underground" or "do-it-yourself" is a tricky thing: By any of these names, it's something that resists simple definitions even as it begs to be explained.

Throughout history, only a few Punk Rock bands have been main-stays in the scene through anthems and back-patches. Yes, many tend to stay with the old UK bands that they claim to have started the movement to begin with, but in all reality, it is the modern bands that are keeping the anarchy alive.

IT COMES AS no surprise, but Rancid guitarist-vocalist Lars Frederiksen has extended his love of punk rock to his child.

Punk rarely rewards longevity. Many influential bands' entire careers - Operation Ivy, Minor Threat, and Rites of Spring, for example - can be condensed to one disc.

To add to the hype around its ambitious prog-rock near-masterpiece "Crack the Skye," Mastodon has set out on a monthlong tour of smaller venues.