No. 065 - Operation Ivy’s “Knowledge” changed my life

A mixtape, a compilation CD, and a mythical fanmail response — how a teenage Greg Lindquist became a punk for life

Nov 15, 2024

This Song Changed My Life is an independent music publication featuring essays from people all around the world about the songs that mean the most to them. Created by Grace Lilly, supported by readers.

• 6 min read •

Understanding is like water flowing in a stream. Wisdom and knowledge are solid and can block our understanding.
— Thich Nhat Hanh

On the fateful day of April 21, 1994,1 during my freshman year at E.A. Laney High School in Wilmington, North Carolina, an acquaintance named Phillipe Jean created my first compilation tape.2 Controversially titled “A is for anarchy and B is for blowjob,” the tape was dubbed over Metallica's …And Justice for All album. The song list, adorned with the SXE3 insignia, included the underground punk music I would grow to love, such as: Crimpshrine, Jawbreaker, Pansy Division, Propagandhi, Descendents, NOFX, Screeching Weasel, Dead Kennedys, Antischism. I listened to this tape everywhere, but most memorably when mowing my family’s lawn for 50 cents. Yes, one half of a dollar — $1.05 today with inflation. I learned the value of labor: our family’s lot was almost an acre that took a full day with a push mower.

A is for anarchy and B is for blowjob compilation tape, circa 1994

Created later in the same year Green Day launched Dookie into the mainstream on Reprise and before Rancid’s Let’s Go was released that summer,4 this cassette also had two unreleased songs by a band called Operation Ivy. Their discography CD5 was the first punk title my 15 year-old self bought after hearing the mixtape. I can still clearly recall my helicoptering mother in the record store inspecting the lyrics of all 27 tracks6 line-by-line with a magnifying glass and a sheet of blank paper. As the clerk patiently obliged and I squirmed, she made her own commentary on passages in which she identified with singer Jesse Michaels’ precocious lyrics written as a teenager.7 Finally, finding little profanity and much positivity, she approved this $8 disc, purchased with months of lawn mowing.

The age of 15 is formative and one’s development of taste happens rapidly. When I became absorbed in this kind of punk music, its ethos, aesthetic, and culture quickly became part of me for life. I listened to that Operation Ivy disc obsessively and religiously throughout high school, poring over the lyrics, drawing the band photos, making a stencil of the ska guy to spray paint on the grip tape on my fishtail skateboard.

Greg Lindquist’s stenciled fishtail board, circa 1994, Wilmington, NC

The CD opens with the song “Knowledge,” a blistering one minute, forty-two second flash of energy. It is a simple structure: a three barre chord riff, a characteristic Chuck Berry-esque Tim Armstrong solo, and an interlude of inverted chords. Curiously named for its narrator’s apparent lack thereof, “Knowledge” captures the anxious excitement, confusion, and naivety of youth. It reflects the pressures put on a child by their parents to find direction and purpose in life. Michaels’ refrain is a philosophical and modest nod, a self-aware reflection and contradicting confession: “All I know is that I don't know nothing.”8

The line “When you can't get the top off from the bottom of the barrel” is the duct tape9 of all lyrics, speaking to having little means, but being replete with improvisation, ingenuity, and the utility of punk. It also echoes the sentiment of the do-it-yourself (D.I.Y.) counterculture, the mantra of the punk scene which formed the values that have defined who I have become as an artist, professor, and musician. We made community and culture with little more than a glue stick, a pair of scissors, a pen, and access to a photocopier and some vague notions of creative and cultural vision. Ideas were infectious, wondrous, and often dangerous — all we needed was time which is abundant in our youth, and something we struggle to recover and protect in adulthood. I have come to find time is paramount for an artist to make work.

Five weeks ago, I found myself at the new yet improbable Punk Rock Museum in Las Vegas. Like many with whom I’ve discussed, I have serious misgivings about the institutionalization and commercialization of punk. However, experiencing the museum through the narration of Jesse Michaels, who led a tour and with whom I have connected on social media over our working lives as painters, gave me much to reconsider. Jesse was thoughtful, generous, and humble, if not bashful. Relating his encounter with The Clash’s Joe Strummer, his own hero, he understood fandom, patiently answering all questions and regaling us with some epic Operation Ivy stories.

Jesse Michaels standing in front of his youthful image in Operation Ivy while giving a guided tour at the Punk Rock Museum, Las Vegas, October 12, 2024

The museum's most obvious blindspot was its lack of a larger historical and sociopolitical framework for the historical narrative of punk, so I asked Jesse about the relationship between his songwriting and the political climate of the Bay Area in the 1980s. Jesse was precise in explaining his intentions: he was not interested in making ideological statements, but rather social commentary on universal situations, often with abstract or poetic inflections.10 For example, although he might have been influenced by the inequality and social injustices in Berkeley, the song “Big City” could be set anywhere.

“Knowledge” was released May 28, 1989 on the Energy album. I was ten years-old and discovered the band only five years later. Sometime over that summer, I wrote to Operation Ivy at the post office box supplied in the discography. Unexpectedly, I was elated to discover my self-addressed soap-stamped11 envelope returned with a Berkeley cancellation. Inside, I discovered a handwritten note scrawled on a torn half of legal paper:

Hey Greg,
Unfortunately, Op Ivy broke up, but me and Lint [Tim Armstrong] are in a new band called Rancid. Check us out, here are some stickers.
Peace, Matt

Enclosed were a few stickers depicting the Rancid 1993 album cover of a vigilante holding a pistol. My mother confiscated the mail, exclaiming, “Oh no, not that Rancid filth!” When I told my friends the next day at school lunch, they laughed and refused to believe me. I still feel cheated. That letter is every superfan’s dream and belongs in a museum. ◆

About Greg

Greg Lindquist is an artist + writer in Brooklyn whose current wildfire paintings are at The Landing, Los Angeles. He has exhibited at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Weatherspoon Art Museum, and North Carolina Museum of Art, and was a studio participant in the Whitney ISP. Kaia Fischer of Rainer Maria recently recorded his band, CATS, including a shoe gazing cover of Operation Ivy’s “Knowledge."

Instagram @greglindquist

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Conveniently, Phillipe Jean decided to date the mixtape.

Phillipe was the epitome of cool — he had a Green Day Kerplunk tee before they went mainstream, he was in a band, and seemed to have everything figured out.

Straight Edge — that is, a monastic pledge to abstain from alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, and sex.

The summer of 1994 was my “revolution summer.”

According to Epitaph records, it has sold in excess of 500,000 copies worldwide.

All 27 songs clock in at less than an hour!

I am now almost my mother’s age when I first bought the CD and the lyrics still feel as freshly urgent as they did 30 years ago.

The line also recalls an early Hellbender song “Retread” in which Al Burian opines, “The more I learn, the less I know.” Al also is a son of two professors.

Also calls to mind LOOKOUT! labelmate Crimpshrine’s scrappy record “Duct Tape Soup.”

Jesse’s early talent as a songwriter is not lost on anyone who knows that Jesse Michaels’ father was a writer of short stories, novels, and essays, and a Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.

We soaped or glued our stamps so the postmark could be washed off and the stamp reused. The bottom of the barrel, indeed.