Operation Ivy

And now for an enlargened account: a punk rock band that included

Lint (Tim) - guitar, vocals  
Jesse - vocals  
Matt McCall - bass, vocals  
Dave Mello - drums, vocals  
Paul Bae plays sax  

They are most remembered for their amazing energy and crowd empathy: they wrote what they believed in, and sang with enthuisasm. They were punk to the bone. Unfortunately, they felt they had to break up when things became to corporate (very unpunk) and too much money was involved (many of those involved were socialist) The albums:
The records: (yeah, i said records. Yeah those are those weird thing your parents used.)

Lint: The King of Ska
Turn It Around
hectic
energy 

Operation Ivy was the first-ever series of hydrogen bomb tests, carried out by Joint Task Force 132 at Enewetak Atoll in the Pacific Proving Grounds. The tests were coordinated by the Atomic Energy Commission and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The first bomb dropped in this operation was "Mike", a 10.4 megaton blast roughly 750 times as powerful as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Mike vaporized the entire test island.

The second Operation Ivy test was the "King" shot, a pure fission device using Oralloy (pure U235) air-dropped on November 19, 1952. King was a 500 kiloton shot, which left a one mile wide crater and blanketed dozens of neighboring islands with radioactive fallout, thanks to the winds (not that dropping an immense nuclear device had anything to do with it...).
----
Thanks to Grzcyrgba for the correction on the Ivy King test.

To expand on VAXGeek's comment, Operation Ivy's Lint (Tim Armstrong) and Matt (real name Matt Freeman) now form the nucleus of the very much alive punk band Rancid. They reminisce about their OpIV days with the tune "Journey to the End of the East Bay" on their 1995 album And Out Come the Wolves. OpIV's glory days ran from about 1987 to 1989.

On a personal note, I did not encounter OpIV's music until something like 1996. Suffice it to say that I consider my life prior to listening to their music to have been much darker and emptier than it could have been had I been a little more with it in my youth.

Here are some Operation Ivy lyrics. Man, I love this band. BTW, I did not node all these songs. Psk, neil and StopTheViolins did several before I got the idea. I just assembled this listing and plugged the holes.

Album: Energy (1989)

• Knowledge
• Sound System
• Jaded
• Take Warning
• The Crowd
• Bombshell
• Unity
• Vulnerability
• Gonna Find You
• Bad Town
• Smiling
• Caution
• Freeze Up
• Artificial Life
• Room Without a Window
• Big City
• Missionary
• Junkie's Running Dry
• Here We Go Again
• Hoboken
• Yelling in my Ear
• Sleep Long
• Healthy Body
• Officer
• I Got No

Album: Plea For Peace (1992)

• Uncertain
• Troublebound
• Someday
• Plea For Peace

Here's a few more tidbits concerning what former members of Operation Ivy have been up to since their glory days at Gilman.

Immediately following the demise of the much loved ska-core quartet, Vocalist Jesse Michaels went on to form punk outfit Big Rig . They recorded one EP, called it Expansive Heart, and then promptly broke-up. Afterwards, Michaels took a sort hiatus from music, and for 6 years worked quietly as a graphic designer for Lookout Records, creating a plethora of Album Artwork for many of the Label's bands, including Filth and Green Day. During that time, Michaels wrote over 300 songs, but found himself unable to start a band and put them onto wax, which he claims was due mostly to a long, arduous struggle with depression and alcoholism. Finally, in 1999, he managed to get himself together, and subsequently founded the Punk-Reggae group Common Rider, which continues as a working band to this day. That year, the band released Last Wave Rockers, a musically compelling blend of Reggae, Ska, Jazz and Punk, which was for the most part well received by critics, but somewhat lost upon fans of Micheal's earlier work in Op Ivy, from which the music of Common Rider was a far departure. In 2001, Common rider released a follow-up EP to Last Wave Rockers, entitled Thief in a sleeping town, which contained music that was much more similar to (though not at all derivative of) that of Operation Ivy.

Drummer Dave Mello played in Downfall with Tim Armstrong, Matt Freeman and older brother Pat Mello during and after his tenure in Operation Ivy. The band recorded a full length for Lookout Records in 1990, which, for various reasons, still is yet to be released. Afterwards, he and Pat formed Ska-Punk trio Schlong, who put out a few very odd, obscure releases during the mid 90s. Most notable among these an album in which they covered all the songs from the West Side Story musical. I've heard that Mello now owns and operates a bar somewhere in Berkeley, but I'm not sure whether that's true or not.