With a razor-sharp memory and conversational writing style, L.A. punk pioneer Alice Bag recounts her musical obsession.

Akashic Press expands, redesigns, and re-releases Mark Anderson and Mark Jenkins’s invaluable DIY learning tool, Dance of Days. Even better, it’s just as energizing as the first read. What were YOU up to at age 16?

Scott Adams finds this compelling history of Merge Records, the underdog label that beat the odds and succeeded, to be insanely readable.

Albert Mudrian’s Hall of Fame lineup of heavy metal Decibel masterpieces is the stuff of teenage delinquent dreams.

Greg Prato’s new oral history of Seattle music (or “grunge” to you and me, bucko) strikes the right balance between bratty humor and pathos, thinks Matthew Moyer. And was the bassist from Guns N’ Roses really in the Fastbacks? Read on,,,

Apocalyptic sci-fi, Busby Berkeley, and the proto-punk of the Screamers collide head-on in this reissue of Rene Daalder’s lo-fi, hilarious, and terribly sad musical. Is that a twelve-year old Beck making a cameo?

…but James Mann offers a review of two books on the subject that should be: Steven Blush’s American Hardcore: A Tribal History and Mark Spitz and Brendan Mullen’s We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A. Punk.