4. The Lookout Offices Were Built On Top of an Ancient Native Burial Ground
Much like the bad guy land developer from the movie “Poltergeist,” Livermore neglected to move the bodies buried in their ancestral cemetery grounds when he built the label’s extravagant office park. The offices, which featured multiple helipads, a full three-ring-circus and a large neon sign reading “We Do Not Respect Your Ancestors” constantly beaming above the loose soil littered with screaming bones, was apparently an affront to the vengeful spirits that had been previously laid to rest there. The justifiably pissed ancestral ghosts caused havoc among Lookout’s employees and artists and severely damaged its operation, often encouraging the shittier bands on the label to continuously put out more records than the good bands to suck up as many resources as possible – it is suggested that this is how Citizen Fish was able to become so prolific. The whole “built the office over angry skeletons” thing finally came to a head when Livermore attempted to sublet part of the offices to Geffen. The spirits, who were ardently against any association with major labels, rose up in a grand, final haunting that saw the entirety of the label’s offices, as well as much of its circus infrastructure, completely destroyed in a burst of pure ecto-comeuppance. The spirits were released from their vindictive purgatory and the subsequent ambient recording of the destruction of the Lookout offices and the resultant chaos surrounding that night was rated a 9.4 by Pitchfork, which hailed it as “the resurrection of the origins of the punk rock spirit.”