This website is the creation of Jim Allison, one of the former members of the band formerly known as Fuel, which makes it a somewhat “official” website.

I am in touch with the other members - Aaron Arroyo, Mike Kirsch and Jeff Stofan - and will be picking their brains because I’m sure they remember many more details than I can recall. But this site will nevertheless have my spin on things.

I decided to start working on this site for three main reasons:

1) I want to create a scrapbook for the band. I want a place to put up all the flyers, photos, videos, etc, that just sit in a big brown envelope on a shelf, so that I can share some of these memories with friends and family that weren’t around in the Bay area in the late-eighties.

2) I want to look back at the Gilman St. Warehouse scene that had been my punk rock mecca. In the summer of ‘88, I slaved away in a record company warehouse in Toronto, saving what pennies I didn’t sink into drowning my sorrows in pitchers of beer purchased at Sneeky Dees (the old Bloor St location), so that I could move to Berkeley to check out the scene I was reading about in the pages of Maximum Rock’n'Roll, with bands like Operation Ivy, Isocracy, the Yeastie Girlz and Mr. T Experience playing every weekend. Everyone you met at Gilman Street was in at least one band, publishing a zine, starting new movements. It was the most creative and productive period of my life and I want to see if I can get to the bottom of what made that time and place so special.

3) I want to offer a slight correction to what I believe is often a misunderstanding about our place in punk rock history, which traces our legacy a bit too much based on the bands and style of music that Mike has been well-known for in his work after Fuel. While we played a couple of shows with future Ebullition bands, we had an uncomfortable relationship with Kent McClard. And although we wore our DC-influences proudly on our sleeves, we were first and foremost rooted in the Bay Area. The bands I felt closest to at the time were the bands we were personally friends with - bands like Samiam, Jawbreaker, Cringer and Monsula.

So those are my motives for putting together this site. I hope you might enjoy poking around this self-indulgent nostalgia trip with me…

If you happen to have any material, i.e. photos, flyers or videos, from any of the shows covered on this site, I would greatly appreciate hearing from you and will gladly link to whoever provides me with material.