Looking to start a punk band, Livermore had trouble finding members, citing the majority of the local musicians being
hippies and "completely uninterested in the music we wanted to make". Eventually, Livermore recruited 14-year-old Kain Hanschke on
bass and 12-year-old Frank Edwin "Tré" Wright III on
drums. Although he had never before played drums, young Tré showed an instant affinity for them, likely because, as Livermore said, "he loved making a lot of noise and getting everyone to look at him." Claiming that the members needed "punk rock names", Livermore gave his fellow musicians new last names. Kain's surname went from Hanschke to "Kong", while Tré went from Wright to "Cool". It has often been claimed that Livermore was the person to dub Cool with "Tré". His family had long before given him the nickname, a play on the word "tres", or "three", because he was the third Frank Edwin in his family. The Lookouts recorded three albums, ''Lookout! It's the Lookouts
, One Planet One People
, and Spy Rock Road
, and two EPs, Mendocino Homeland
and IV.'' :On July 10, 1990, we went into The Art Of Ears studio in San Francisco and recorded nine songs, six of which would ultimately be released [as
IV], and then went over to Oakland to play what would be, though we didn't know it at the time, our last show. I was never that great at lead guitar (or rhythm guitar, for that matter, if we're going to be honest), so I asked a friend named
Billie Joe to play on the recordings. From there, Livermore went on to running his record label, named
Lookout Records;
One Planet One People was the first release in the label's history. Livermore eventually sold Lookout Records to business partner
Chris Appelgren in the mid-1990s. Kong became a
National Park Service park ranger. Cool became the drummer for
Green Day, after they were left in a lurch by their
first drummer. In 2015,
Don Giovanni Records released
Spy Rock Road and Other Stories, a compilation featuring all of the tracks from
Spy Rock Road,
Mendocino Homeland and
IV, a few compilation tracks and one from their demo, ''Lookout! It's the Lookouts''. Besides a couple of compilation appearances, this marked the first time the band's recordings were released on CD. == Members ==