BILLBOARD -- If you want to know how much Fat Wreck Chords has grown during its first 25 years, just look at its office space. “Fat Mike” Burkett had been frontman for punk band NOFX for two years when he and his former wife Erin Kelly-Burkett started the label in the kitchen of their one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco’s Mission District. Today, the label, which releases music from 30 acts, is run out of a 7,000-square-foot facility in an office park south of the Mission. The bustling atmosphere can be as frenetic as the punk rock in which Fat Wreck Chords specializes.
Kelly-Burkett, 46, calls the company “sort of an accident, something we started as a hobby and side project, mostly because we wanted to put out NOFX records.”
The couple were both still attending San Francisco State University; Fat Mike studying Social Science and Human Sexuality, Kelly-Burkett majoring in Creative Writing and working in public relations.