Today is that special holiday Record Store Day, where indie record stores across America offer you, our customers, treats that only proper indie record stores can offer! 

In addition to special Record Store Day-only sales, we here at Amoeba San Francisco will be offering a free goodie bag stuffed with swag while supplies last with purchase!  Also available tomorrow, artists such as Death Cab for Cutie, REM, Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks,  Black Keys, and Vampire Weekend have created super rad vinyl-only releases to celebrate the occasion, and you can pick 'em up here!

Here in San Francisco we will have Jello Biafra manning the Information Counter from 4-5pm!  You can come by and ask him about Alternative Tentacles releases, or what his favorite country album is!  We will also have DJ sets by DJ Smash, V. Vale, and Aaron Axelson of  LIVE 105.  Check out this page on our website for more SF info.  For information about what will be happening at the Berkeley store, you can check out this page right here.  And for the happenings in the Hollywood store, click here.

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Man!  I miss the eighties. I miss the 1980's mainly for the music and the vibe surrounding it. Yes in-fuckin-deed!

Perhaps even  more than the hip-hop of that decade (which I love to death) I miss the American  punk rock of the 1980's even more.

I miss 80's US punk because the music was still fresh and vibrant and hard(core).  It was when punk itself was still an ideal that hadn't been fully exploited yet: IE not some fuckin pre-packaged commodity hawked as a fashion accessory at the Hot Topic outlet down at the local strip mall USA. 

Back then punk zines from MRR all the way down to every small but passionately put together two-page Xeroxed, circulation of ten, zine had balls.  And near everything related to punk, from zines to album covers to concert fliers and of course the music/lyrics themselves,  had a strong scent of political  activism. And  the one thing that seemed to cement  everything together?  The president at the time: Ronald Reagan. 

If you forgot who Reagan was, let me refresh your memory. He  was a former governor of California who made some bad decisions but still became president of the USA.  Reagan was (like  George W. Bush) a Republican and (also like Bush) someone that folks liked to mock and imitate and disdain.  He liked jellybeans. He asked "where's the beef?" and (like Bush) was a puppet of corrupt big business powers behind the scenes. 

And at that time it seemed every punk rock group had a song or album or show flier about Reagan.  I thought of this when I went crate-digging in my punk section this morning and dug up my copy of the great Alternative Tentacles compilation "Let Them Eat Jellybeans" and also an album by the great former band Reagan Youth - just two examples of punk releases fueled by their contempt towards the then president of the USA.