Jack Boulware might be tired. He's in the middle of Litquake, the annual eight-day San Francisco literary festival he co-founded, which would be enough to stress out any rational person. But he also has his own book to promote, freshly printed, still smelly, and his collaborator Silke Tudor is in town for a brief return to her old stomping grounds, so perhaps he can be forgiven for asking if we needed anything else while he was in "full media-slut spew mode."

He and Tudor, a former S.F. Weekly associate of Boulware's who has given up rock criticism to help the poor, living in a soup kitchen in Lower East Side in Manhattan, are sitting in a booth in the back room of Lost Weekend Video on Valencia Street, where the pair conducted a number of the 300 interviews for their book, just around the corner from Boulware's humble quarters, which, Tudor insists, would not be suitable for an interview - even with punk rock musicians.

Boulware and Tudor have produced "Gimme Something Better: The Profound, Progressive and Occasionally Pointless History of Bay Area Punk, From Dead Kennedys to Green Day," published this month by Penguin Books, a sweeping oral history likely to remain the definitive tome on the topic.

The San Francisco punk scene, the authors say, not only eventually produced the most popular punk rock band in history with Green Day, but also remains one of the longest-running and still thriving punk scenes on the planet.

"There are a lot of punk books out there," says Boulware, "and we've read most of 'em. They tend to gloss over San Francisco."

Originally, they thought the book would focus on the landmark untitled Berkeley punk commune/nightclub known by its address, Gilman Street. "Gilman is hard to get your mind around unless you talk about what was going on before," Tudor says. "The tendrils just kept creeping further and further back and the next thing you knew, we were further and further back."

"And talking to people about the Tubes," Boulware says.

The book begins at the earliest incarnations of the punk movement in North Beach that developed around the Mabuhay Gardens nightclub, and follows the scene through to the 1998 death from cancer of Tim Yohannan, cigarette-huffing disc jockey and fanzine editor of "Maximum RocknRoll." "He's the most prominent character in the book," Boulware says.

Yohannon, whose rabid, amateurish newspaper spread the punk gospel to the far corners of the world in those long-ago, pre-Internet days, would personally encourage bands he liked to move to the Bay Area.

According to Boulware and Tudor, the San Francisco punks brought some cultural ribaldry to the party that bands from other places didn't. "Because of the environment, the political content is practically a given," Tudor says. "That's been true of all the eras. Also the element of goofiness has been more exaggerated, the pointless aspect - kitschy, fantastic costumes - intelligent goofiness."

"Very art-for-art's-sake people" says Boulware, "who aren't interested in making a dime."

San Francisco, of course, was also home of homocore, punk rock by gay and lesbian bands, such as Pansy Division or Tribe 8.

Tudor also says that women played a more important role in San Francisco punk than elsewhere. "Punk is a very male-oriented scene," she says, "and women were always outnumbered by men, but the women were a very formidable force."

Tudor is a native San Franciscan who started attending punk rock shows in the early '80s at the Farm, which she described as "the most violent nightclub in the '80s." Boulware, who grew up in Montana, remembers seeing the Sex Pistols on the "Today" show. Both were well-known music writers for spunky alternative newspaper S.F. Weekly.

The two are also completely conversant with the polemics of punk.

"It's not up to us to decide what's punk or not," Tudor says. "It's up to whoever is doing it. The most important thing with the book is we want to leave the impression that punk is still going on. Two-thirds of the way through the book with Green Day, it would be easy to stop there with what is arguably the most famous punk band ever.

"It's still underground and people are doing all sorts of things with a complete lack of interest fame or money," she says.

"And with complete disrespect for the ones who are famous," Boulware says.

It took years for Tudor and Boulware to conduct the 300 interviews for this assiduous chronicle of the city's long-suffering punk scene, not as famous or degenerately glamorous as New York, Los Angeles or London. Much of their advance was spent on transcripts, and they say the book would never have been finished if it weren't for more than two dozen volunteer typists who responded to pleas over the Internet.

Even if the book comes to a sentimental ending, with Yohannon passing the torch of his "Maximum RocknRoll," Tudor says punk lives. "The ideas that punk embodies will always be important," she says. "People believe in it because it empowers them to do whatever the hell they want."