THIS IS THE house that East Bay punk built, I keep telling myself as I follow Christopher Appelgren through the minicatacomb of offices and storage spaces at Ashby and Adeline in Berkeley. Or rather, this is the building that Lookout! Records bought.

Appelgren, who shakes his stuff as the singer in the Pattern when he doesn't attend to presidential duties at the label, shows me around, proudly pointing out the Lookout! cartoon posters he created with former partner Patrick Hynes and introducing me to a handful of the dozen or so employees and interns in the office. "Is this my beer from last night?" he asks production employee Erica Hynes, picking up the open can on her desk.

"How do you know it wasn't from this morning?" she throws back playfully.

Of course, no one would deny that beer and bagel schmears are just desserts for the crew at Lookout! It's a far cry and 15 years since Lawrence Livermore began the label in his house in the mountains near Humboldt, where, legend has it, he had neither a phone nor conventional electricity. (Livermore and partners David Hayes and Patrick Hynes have since left, and Appelgren and wife Molly Neumann and Cathy Bauer are now in.) Since then Green Day, Rancid, Neurosis, the Hi-Fives, Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, Operation Ivy, and the Donnas, a Lookout!-born and -bred band from their pimply teenage years, have passed through the hands of the label.

All that calls for a toast – of bagels and brewskis – as Lookout! celebrates its sweet-15th birthday with a trio of shows, at Thee Parkside July 25 with Dr. Frank, Great American Music Hall July 26 with the Queers, the Mr. T Experience, the Smugglers, and the Enemies, and July 27 with Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, the Oranges Band, Communique, and the Pattern (which includes Bay Guardian staffer Jason Rosenberg).

Appelgren may not have been there from the very beginning, but he did come on close to the start, in 1989, as a $5-an-hour mail-order clerk and later an ad designer and jack-of-all-trades, after contacting Livermore to get records for his Humboldt radio show. "This was music that was on par with some of the greatest music ever made," he says. "But like a lot of great things, it was existing undiscovered and not being cultivated by large amounts of people, but a small group of people. I heard early and pre-Lookout! bands like Sweet Baby Jesus, and I just thought, this sounds like the early Beatles to me."

Over the years Appelgren has made his peace with naysayers who've rubbed his nose in the contradictions of anarchy and commerce. "People would say, 'You could volunteer and then get another job, and that would be cooler,' " he recalls. "But then I'd be, 'Well, I'm making enough money to pay my $100-a-month rent in my little room at the time, and not having to get a crummy job to support my hobby seems like a significant success.'

"If we can help a band stay on the road, pay their rent, feed their cat, I'm completely happy. That's the goal. The point is, we try to do that without getting anything over on anybody, without ripping off the fan of the band."

To that end the label is putting out not only new artists such as Small Brown Bike, a band so fierce you'd hesitate to call them emo, but also remastered, augmented versions of its Green Day albums, and a DVD of the label's music videos. In the next year, Lookout! expects to release Billie Joe Armstrong and Aaron Cometbus's Pinhead Gunpowder side project as well as a box set of Thrasher magazine's skate rock compilations.

"I'm looking forward to the next 15 years," Appelgren says. "I want Lookout! to have its permanent home. I remember visiting the ruins of Stax in Memphis – it's not there anymore."

We want the movie screens Call it the meeting of juvies from Forest Hills, N.Y. Native Dennis Shyer, otherwise known as Dennis the Menace of The Menace's Attic on KUSF-FM, had only to see his fellow kings of Queens in Ramones: End of the Century at Slamdance last year to know he had to bring the film to S.F. And he will do just that July 17 at the Roxie Cinema.

Let's just say it's a public service, courtesy of the ad guy who spins everything from doo-wop to the Delgados on his soon-to-be-syndicated show.

"I'm a 46-year-old bald guy who's 22 at heart," Shyer says, sitting down to watch a scrap of End of the Century with me last week. I can believe it. He looks like he's ready to jump out of his chair with excitement as I poke the latest cut of the film into the VCR and settle down to watch Johnny, Dee Dee, and Tommy expound on the band that launched a million leather-clad punk pop groups.

First-time filmmakers Michael Gramaglia and Jim Fields do an especially admirable job of establishing the musical and cultural context that spawned the Ramones, and it turns out Queens resident Gramaglia had an insider's track from the start: he worked in the band's longtime accounting office. "That's how I got the real story," he tells me on the phone from N.Y. "They're very protective of their story. They never talk about what really went on – they're kind of like the Mafia. But I was in 'the family.' They called it 'the family.'

"Johnny especially liked idea of doing a film that was very raw and truthful and honest. That was their aesthetic. It's all in there – the betrayals in the band, the whole infighting, stuff they never revealed before."

A.R.E. you experienced? The much hyped booty-clash banditos of A.R.E. Weapons are whooping it up on the final limb of a two-month worldwide tour, on which they have been spreading the minimalist electro-punk gospel of their 2001 single "Street Gang" and their recent self-titled Rough Trade album to small towns in Europe. But talking to the Manhattan trio while they were on the road to Houston, I thought the roughneck futurists, who stop at Bottom of the Hill July 16, could use a few charm lessons.

Then again it could have been me. I had to ask A.R.E. Weapons manager-drum machine button puncher Paul Sevigny about his relationship with geeky, chic kid sister Chloë Sevigny. "I don't know – she's been through hippie times, geeky times, but no, her attention hasn't affected what I do," he says, laughing and eating at the same time. "What am I supposed to do – not do anything for the rest of my life because of her?!"

Excuse me for doing my own button pushing – though the questions that probably made Sevigny want to reach for a real weapon were those about his reported past work as a banker. Guitarist Matt McCauley gives it up once Sevigny tosses him the phone. "Me and Brain [McPeck, vocalist] had been friends for years, and Paul was our weed dealer," he says reasonably. "He was selling to our friends, chilling, and he was obviously a good businessman because he was always selling. So he decided he was going to be our manager, and then when we needed someone to run the drum machine, he said, 'Fuck it. I'll step up.' "

As for McCauley (once rumored to be dating Chloë), he's just about love and finding inspiration for songs like "Fuck You Pay Me" and "Headbanger Face" by just walking down the street, drinking, and checking out babies, both humanoid and canine. "I fucking love puppies," he swears. "Fucking puppies break my heart."

Mixology Mixed Elements plans to set up its swank camp regularly at Bambuddha Lounge, the former Backflip, on one Thursday and one Sunday a month.... We'll miss the toy serenades, animal masks, and Christmas lights. Former Double U member Linda Hagood recently made the move from the Bay Area to New York City.... Over at the Hemlock Tavern, the site of recent Hagood appearances, Jessica of Run for Cover Lovers e-mailed to say the band will play their last show July 18. (Jessica vows to continue performing with bandmate Julie, and they'll unveil their new duo, Pillows, at Edinburgh Castle Pub Aug. 28, sharing a bill with Beyond THC including ex-Run for Cover Lovers drummer Tequila Killingsworth.) That's the evening before Z's is scheduled to blow all parties away at the Hemlock with their "brutal chamber" music, says Z's member Sam. (The ensemble, along with Animal Collective and Orugusu Norrihide, also perform at the Ramp July 20 in a show organized by Bay Guardian contributor George Chen). And if that wasn't enough activity at the tavern, Jolie Holland was signed last week to Anti after performing for label lawyers at the club, a source reports. She returns to the Hemlock in triumph Aug. 13. (Before that, she performs July 19 at Berkeley's Jazz House and July 20 at Thee Parkside.) Sad to say the "Chinese Sinatra" of Chinatown's Forbidden City, Larry Ching, passed away July 5 of a brain aneurysm, shortly after releasing his debut album, Till the End of Time (produced by journalist Ben Fong-Torres), at the extremely ripe age of 82.