The Blasting Room: FoCo’s Punk Rock Heart Beats For 25 Years

The Blasting Room didn’t start with a Big Bang, as you might expect, but a drunken nap. The engineer for one of the Descendents’ mid-80s records fell asleep at the recording console. As he snored, Bill Stevenson, the band’s drummer, rolled the engineer’s chair out of the way to work the dials himself. 25 years later, the studio he built with Jason Livermore has become a punk rock recording institution, producing pop and folk records too. But the heart of the original Blasting Room still beats like a punchy snare, a place where young bands make their punk rock dreams come true.