Gimme Something Better Get it now!

While the book is ambitious in its scope, I can't help but be disappointed comparing this oral history to Please Kill Me (the New York version that pioneered punk oral histories) and We Got the Neutron Bomb (the equally fascinating L.A. version). The authors spend precious little time exploring the early scene, skipping over a number of important formative bands and spending way too much time on the splinter scene after 1981-82 or so and into the 90s (though of course Flipper gets well-deserved attention). That stuff just isn't as interesting as the roots of the scene, so deeply explored in the above books. Dead Kennedys of course get a lot of coverage, but we need to know much more about important well-known bands like Crime, Nuns, Dils, and Avengers (a short chapter each, if that, is not enough), and some lesser known but vital early bands that are barely mentioned, if at all, such as Maggots, VKTMS, Sudden Fun, Lewd, Breakouts, Nubs, Sleepers, Vs., etc. Also there is very little about the connection between punk and politics during the early days: the emergence of women in rock in a city with a thriving feminist movement, the connection between punk and gay politics in San Franciso (how can the book possibly not go into more detail about this when we're talking about the heyday of Harvey Milk and gay liberation!?), etc. To be honest, I read about 1/4 of the book, and attempted to read further, but just didn't care about many of the hardcore and alterna-rock bands that get much more attention than those who invented the scene.Get more detail about Gimme Something Better.