In my lifetime there have been no hometowners like Cleveland hometowners – which is to say that underground fanzine guys from Cleveland have traditionally covered their oft-maligned city and its punching-way-above-their-weight bands with the fervor and boosterism of highly-compensated Chamber of Commerce execs. “That’s okay with me”. Cleveland was a rock town for decades with a per-capita scene batting average high above the norm, I’m talking from ‘75 onward into the 1990s, even into June 1991 perhaps, which is when the digest-sized Ragnarok #6 came out.
Make that “Steve Wainstead’s Ragnarok”, as it says on the cover, in a feat of awesome doofus branding that just makes me laugh. Wainstead is indeed a hometowner, and outside of some visiting touring bands, Ragnorok #6 is C-Town all the way. If I didn’t know a little bit about Puff Tube and the Soul Vandals and whatnot – probably from Seven – Scat Records Quarterly and the 1990s version of CLE – I’d have no idea what he’s talking about. And again, that’s fine. His aesthetic is type, cut, paste, repeat – with vintage illustrations and graphics helping to tart up the overall environment. Any punk- or noise-adjacent show in Cleveland from the preceding month that he and his crew attended gets reviewed, with one megawatt event in particular (Puff Tube/Soul Vandals on 5/9/91, where were you??) getting six different reviews, including one from Cleveland royalty, Charlotte Pressler!
Steel Pole Bath Tub are the out-of-towners treated with respect. They were from my town, San Francisco, and around this time I was pretty well fed up with them, as they seemed to be the opening band for every other mid-sized show I went to that year. If it wasn’t them, it was The Melvins. At least one larger show I attended it was Steel Pole Bath Tub and The Melvins opening. I cared for neither, and I was always the guy who believes it when they’d say “Doors 7 / Show 8”, and then I’d show up at 9pm and walk in as Steel Pole Bath Tub were starting their first song. However, in their Ragnarok #6 interview, all three gentlemen are intelligent, funny and quite road-weary, with a good sense of their place in the whole cosmic joke. Now I feel just awful having tried to dodge them all those years. Boner Records 4-ever.
There’s another interview, this time with locals The Vivians, whom I’d never heard. Check out the entire campus at Case Western having a motherfucking rocknroll riot during one of their sets here. The Pressler stuff near the end is cool to read, though it spins out into the pointy-headed academic meandering that I’m sure made some sense to her at the time. In all, good local fanzine and you’d have bought one for three quarters yourself after a big night of excess at Peabody’s Down Under.
You know and I know that Rock Scene wasn’t a fanzine, and that it probably has no place on this blog. Yet they were so well-situated at the nexus of the pre-punk void, before 1976 and all it represented, that it’s one of the absolute best places to get a handle on how tastes, fashions, criticism and fandom itself were evolving in the mid-1970s. I mean here we are in March 1976. There’s no mention of the Sex Pistols, who’d played 13 gigs to that point, but everyone here will hear them in about in a few weeks and go bananas – the shot in the arm editors Richardand Lisa Robinson were looking for in their post-Dolls landscape, despite all that’s already going on right in their hometown of New York City. Rock Scene would embrace punk in a big way, without leaving the remnants of glitter, glam and hard rock behind, at least in what I think was their 1976-78 heyday.
Rock Scene was very much a NYC mag. They called themselves “The alternative to the alternatives!”. While that may be going a bit far in the era of Back Door Man, Who Put The Bomp, Chatterbox and countless others that I don’t own and wish I did, I actually enjoy it even more than Creem and certainly more than Circus. This is despite not having a ton of written content and much “criticism”, as it were. This March 1976 issue is a big drunken party on the streets and in the clubs, full of photos and photo essays with only a modicum of commentary to support it all. I figure as long as they were paying photographers like Bob Gruen, Leee Childers and Raymond le Fourchette well for their snaps – because they’re fantastic – it’s actually pretty fun to read an inversion of the text-over-visuals form that’s pretty standard in any fanzine or magazine dabbling in underground rock.
Besides, it is a fanzine when the editors are given so much leeway to cover whatever the hell they want, and then insert themselves into the visual narrative as often as possible. Richard and LIsa Robinson take an exceptionally onanistic approach to their duties by printing as many photos of themselves with rock stars, record execs and scenesters as they can fit. There are 5 with Lenny Kaye and either one or both of them in this issue alone. Because it’s early 1976, there is a bunch on the CBGB scene, with Heartbreakers and Television pics I’ve absolutely never seen. Cyrinda Foxe gets herself into many a photo, as well she should, and Lance Loud is out and about as well.
There are other photo spreads on Cherry Vanilla, Roxy Music, The Marbles, Patti Smith Group (with Ivan Kral giving Shaun Cassidy and Leif Garrett a run for their money in the set-teenage-girls’-hearts-aflame dept.), Elton John, David Bowie and Jim Dandy (!). There’s an early photo spread of Blondie’s Debbie Harry with a totally different, almost Midwest Christian wife look that I kinda like. (She doesn’t have a real name in this magazine – she’s “Blondie”). There’s also a “new bands” section trying to drum up excitement for Killer Kane, a Raspberries spinoff called Windfall and a bunch of hairy New Jersey bands. There’s even a Sable Starr (LA groupie) action shot to give the west coast a little love.
There is some actual writing, though! I appreciated an entire column about comics – Marvel, DC and comix – treating it all very seriously and simpatico with rock and roll. There’s some BS about Kiss at a high school – I can’t read anything about Kiss – but there’s also a great letter to the editor from one “Peggy O’Neil” about how great Kiss are. Could it really be this Peggy O’Neil?? Donald Lyons writes about the film scene in 1976 and finds it “lousy”, this the year of Taxi Driver, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Mikey and Nicky, Network and Marathon Man, which was hot on the heels of an even better 1975. Don’t get me started.
In 1987, Damp editor Kevin Kraynick openly worried in the pages of this issue that he’d be lumped in with fanzine editors “who are the kind of guys who always got picked last for kickball games in gym class”. I mean, sure, but if the shoe fits….right? So in meager compensation, there’s some aggro finger-pointing and posturing in places where there oughtn’t be any – “whatta dick”; “you bet your globular ass”; that sort of thing. Certainly, Damp grew up a ton in subsequent issues – including #3 that we discussed here – but was still taking some young man’s cues from Conflict without quite having the chops to approximate its humorous vitriol.
That said, I bought Damp #2 then and I’d have happily owned it now for 37 years had it not been “disappeared” in the Great Starving Students Lost Fanzine Box. Only recently was I able to procure a copy again, perhaps even my own original for all I know. Slight concerns aside, it was an unalloyed pleasure to read cover to cover last night. There is an interview with New England locals Expando Brain, one of my very favorite super-far-underground rock bands of the mid/late 80s. Kraynick also pulls together a well-researched Snakefinger interview that’ll always be my primary source material should I ever need to do any serious Snakefinger research, such as to write a paper. There are also interviews with acts that only a young man might pretend to like – Big Dipper and Zoogz Rift – but then there’s also the only piece I’ve ever seen on The Longshoreman, a long-running San Francisco band featuring Judy and Carol from Pink Section and the Inflatable Boy Clams. Kraynick was clearly looking a bit afield from the alterna front-runners of the day, your Soul Asylums and Big Blacks and whatnot.
Sometimes the vituperation is pretty funny in his reviews, too, as in this fine intro to a Dash Rip Rock review: “Front cover shows the band burning guitars in the fireplace and let’s hope those are the only ones they’ve got”. As it turns out, even Kraynick knows that the miniscule 4-point font for record reviews that he’s using is utterly comic, and christens the whole section “The World’s Tiniest Record Reviews”. This was the era of Squirrel Bait, Butthole Surfers, Dinosaur and Halo of Flies worship, a consensus that emerged in the East Coast fanzines I read all the way across the country in Santa Barbara, and my taste was molded accordingly. For some reason David Ciaffardini is a great target of derision, which I kind of understand if you were comparing his Sound Choice magazine with, say, Forced Exposure, but he was an exceptionally friendly dude whom I knew personally, a true mensch from the word go, and someone whom I recently re-established contact with after 35 years.
The snarky sub-underground fanzines all had to have their “out crowd” for sure, and there was a consensus pile-on against the same targets, the supposed “guys who always got picked last for kickball games in gym class”. Clowns like Tesco Vee and Lydia Lunch got a free pass for some reason, probably for the same reason confident extroverts always have and always do. If you can convincingly act the part, it doesn’t matter how brainless your material actually is; if you cower and show weakness in any social circle, particularly one in which young men are attempting to preen and show off for each other’s benefit, you get bullshit like over-the-top Mike McGonigal hatred and Baboon Dooley. I wasn’t totally immune myself when I started in this racket a few years later.
Then again, maybe we all just wanted to be Byron Coley. He’s interviewed here, the second part of a 2-parter, the first of which I’ve never read because I’ve never seen Damp #1. I remember reading this interview back then, and he praised the Lazy Cowgirls – who were my absolute favorite band – and it was a big, big deal to me, the voice of God anointing my own musical taste as being first-rate. And he also made fun of SWA, who were absolutely my friends’ & my favorite musical whipping post around this time. These “photos” of “Jimmy & Byron” from Forced Exposure definitely generated some chatter at the time as well, as it was hard to know what these guys looked like in an era before The Face Book and before I was able to Ask Jeeves. It took me at least a few years to realize 100% that these weren’t the guys.
Finally, Damp #2 closes up with a guy named Wandz, who has his own page of “Hip Cat Jazz Reviews”. He even writes as if he knows what he’s talking about. A nice icing to a pretty packed fanzine.
Last summer I worked myself into a small lather attempting to pick apart 1981’s The Offense #12, which you can peruse right here. I’ve got a few other issues of this thing in my stacks that we ought to talk about, such as March 1982’s The Offense #15. Not only must I beg and struggle for good lighting and total concentration in order to actually read its microscopic print, my head aches all the more for just how ridiculously stacked it is. Really, it’s 51 pages of content that could have easily been 102 pages with different layout decisions, and its breadth is just mind-boggling.
Hailing from Columbus, Ohio – no one’s real idea of any sort of musical hotbed at the time, yet it was just about to be rightly perceived as such over the following 15-20 years – The Offense was helmed by Tim Anstaett, who staffed it with a group of dispersed individuals, each intensely devoted to underground music and the life surrounding it, as well as to extending their tentacles to contact and convert every like-minded soul. I mean, it’s almost a crusade with these folks, and I remember very well this devout intensity of feeling of both being an outsider and worshiping other outsiders, and to gobbling up every bit of underground music, film, writing and gossip as I could.
Honestly, The Offense would have been my favorite mag in 1982 had I’d known it existed, because it was over-the-top anglophilic (as I was), while deeply interested in the American underground and what was happening in individual cities, or, as we once called them, “scenes” (as I was). UK chart-toppers live uncomfortably here side by side with the fastest and meanest American hardcore bands, and letter writers range from nascent goth girls to new wave goobers to Barry Henssler of The Necros, raving about his visits to the DC scene. You can see on the cover here that much mirth & merrymaking is being had at combatting the mag’s reputation as “anglophilic”, right up the dawn of the USA-love-it-or-leave-it Reagan era.
The 1981 readers poll results lean way more post-punk and English, which likely reflects that, at this point, there were no American publications covering that music with any sort of knowledge nor intelligence save for perhaps Trouser Press – and they were really just trying to stay alive at that point by putting Adam Ant or whomever on the cover. I’d buy two-months-old Sounds, NME and Melody Makers if I wanted to read about my faves Bauhaus or the Au Pairs or Simple Minds. At The Offense #15, the big winners are The Psychedelic Furs, Joy Division and Siouxsie and the Banshees – but also, there’s some serious coverage of underground Ohio as well. Human Switchboard are on the cover, and there’s lots of love for Naked Skinnies (who I only know as Mark Eitzel’s first band) and something called Razor Penguins.
The writing staff is populated by heavy hitters such as Ron House, Don Howland, Steve Hesske and the “controversial” Seattlite Joe Piecuch. I think it’s House who writes all his reviews like they’re song lyrics, like this for the Process of Elimination comp (currently selling for $271 on Discogs – I had this record!!): “Necros alternately try to be the scariest and fastest of all and succeed / Violent Apathy win shit production recognition, with most the others close runners-up / what’s wrong with saving your gig money for time in a decent studio with someone behind the board who halfway knows what he’s doing? / guess then it wouldn’t be a team effort /” – and so on. It takes some getting used to, but hey, “why be normal”, right?
There’s really no sense of what someone’ll think about something; records now part of the canon get slammed; commercial mediocrities like U2 and the “Fun Boy Three” are canonized; tiny underground bands can go either way. Hesske loves The Bongos’ “The Bulrushes” – so did/do I. Again, if I’d come across this at John Muir Junior High toward the end of 9th grade I’d have absolutely taken out a subscription and likely been king shit of turd mountain at my school (nah, I’d have absolutely gotten my ass kicked if I brought it to class).
Anstaett bemoans that only 1000 copies were able to be printed of his mag each issue due to various distribution snafus the past year. I’m just glad one of them landed in my paws eventually, and as it turned out, this was the final issue of The Offense before it relaunched as the smaller The Offense Newsletter later that year.
For me, the name “Greg Prevost” had mostly meant one, or rather two, things of consequence: the amazing, blown-out 1978 Distorted Levels single, and its belated and even more over-the-top Mean Red Spiders follow-up, which wouldn’t come out until 1990. Truly one of the all-timers for catastrophically ridiculous gargle-mouth vocals, unnecessary male screaming, violent lyrics, and blitzoid, sped-up Stoogified guitar worship. That’s my Greg Prevost. Turns out he was in some other bands as well and did a ‘lil fanzine called Outasite, an early 80s issue of which just crossed my transom.
Now I know this is from the early 1980s because Greg mentions his favorite band are The Zantees, but his opening editorial and highly-believable copyright symbol tries to mark Outasite #1 as being a fanzine from “1966”. The advertisements and clip-art from various teen mags are lined up accordingly, but his heart’s not really into the joke. A thing pops up about The Nazz; records are reviewed that came out in 1967; The Byrds and Chocolate Watchband (who he really interviewed!) talk about post-’66 stuff and so forth. I didn’t intend to hold him to the conceit as I read it.
I will hold him accountable for entertainment and educational value, however, and on that front Outasite #1 is a bit mixed. It might be that his taste in “outasite 60s psychedelic” stuff runs a bit more pedestrian than I’d have hoped. I mean, even in 1981 or whenever this was truly out there, page-filling photo features on The Rolling Stones, Yardbirds and Paul Revere & The Raiders really didn’t add much to any conversation that was happening or to any furthering of wild, underground 60s garage punk. It’s only those interviews, especially the one with Groop Ltd. – that really have any heft, and even those are little more than name/rank/serial number Q&As. There’s too much teeny bopper diddling, and not enough of the raw meat I so desperately crave.
Some of the reviews near the back get at the true fanzine qualities that might take this one into a higher strata. Prevost is a record collector, see, and his passion for 45s he’s found on record excursions is immense, clear and fetching. Love the devotion to uncovering every 60s jot & titter by any band connected with Rochester NY, his hometown, but he’s also a huge fan of the mind-melters from 1965-68 Texas, including Knights Bridge’s “Make Me Some Love” – a major favorite here at the ‘Hemorrhage. Somehow in the course of clicking around the internet I learned that this is the same Outasite mag that eventually put out this and this, too. Those definitely might be worth a flip-through some sweet day.
A year ago I wrote up a thing about a very important fanzine to me, Middlesex, New Jersey’s Flesh and Bones #6. When Spring 1988 rolled around and Flesh & Bones #7 rolled around with it, I made zero haste and bought this one immediately upon sight, almost certainly at Rhino or Aron’s in Los Angeles. I was, at this point, a junior in college and very much immersed in record collecting and ultra-loud “longhaired punk” bands from both Seattle and the east coast, very much including this issue’s Green River,White Zombie and Das Damen. But honestly, the music coverage in Flesh and Bones, such as it was, was absolutely secondary to the mag’s presentation ethos, which revolved around comedically cutting, pasting and manipulating 50s, 60s and 70s advertisements and comics; loads of drug and hippie humor; eye-popping modern comix art; wild, hair-swinging photos of modern abrasive heshers, and a super goofy, it’s-fun-but-who-gives-a-shit approach to rock & roll in general.
I believe I enjoyed this particular issue even more than I did #6, though it wasn’t quite as revelatory. Even now I get a big laff out of it. Published by Jeff/“Jeffo”, a gentleman whom I’ve tried to digitally engage with in our current era to no avail, Flesh & Bones #7 has even more erstwhile hair farmers than its predecessor, including truly awful shirtless photos of Saint Vitus, who were unfortunately interviewed as well. The mag starts with a phony underground rock gossip column with blatantly untrue “items” about the likes of Ed Gein’s Car, Sloth, Phantom Tollbooth, Redd Kross and Live Skull – so not only those captivated by that strange 1986-89 interregnum when male hair went totally bananas and a handful of bands half-pretended that Jim Dandy and Black Oak Arkansas were something to aspire to.
Along those lines, there is a fantastic “guide to being a real man” photo essay called “Manly Phrases and Gestures” by a greasy rocker named Davoid, from a (apparently real) band called Wassermann Love Puddle. He shows off his scar, his cop belt, his boots, how to answer the door with a baseball bat, and best of all, his melancholy down times, sitting at the bar alone, “Thinking about ‘Nam”. Oh yeah – ‘Nam. Charlie. Don’t get me started, comrade. There’s also a “Wild Women of Rock” article with loads of photos in which we get to meet and celebrate, among others, Elyse from Raging Slab, Jennifer from Royal Trux, Sean from White Zombie and yes, Yanna from Big Stick!
Das Damen are allowed to say their piece in an abbreviated 1986-87 tour diary that’s well worth paying attention to. Bob Bert tells his life story, taking us up to the present days in Pussy Galore, who were one of my 2-3 favorite bands on the planet at this time and who, in my eyes, aged the best of just about anyone from the so-called pigfuck years. Typical of Flesh & Bones #7 is in-jokey pieces that fill spaces in between features like “Twenty Ways To Ruin The Scene”. Those of you as old as i am will remember when “the scene” was sacrosanct, and any efforts to disunite or trample upon it were highly frowned upon. Is it funny? I don’t know, is it? When you’re 20 years old it sure is.
Peppered around all of this stuff are strange comics, tongue-firmly-in-cheek record reviews and so, so many great band photos – in the back section of live reviews alone are some of the best shots I’ve ever seen of The Flaming Lips, BALL, Divine Horseman, No Trend and Death of Samantha – with every photo uncredited! It’s as good as Monica Dee’s stuff but I have no idea who took these gems. And in 1988, you could buy this meaty, 80-page Flesh & Bones #7 for a cover price of $2. Today it goes for a little more than that.
In April 1981 I’m sure it felt like a pretty big deal that NY Rocker had weathered the storms of punk and post-punk and come out on the other side of five years of publishing. They’d have a few more to go, though the end was quite a bit more ignominious than anything happening there from 1976 through 1982. So this issue, celebrating said 5-year anniversary, is a pretty nice one to have around, particularly because it’s not all onanistic back-patting but rather a normal monthly NY Rocker issue, tarted up with a little deserved looking back.
On that front, there’s a cool piece called “Whatever Happened to the Class of ‘76?”, focused on the Manhattan/CBGB/Max’s whoosh that gave the mag and underground music much of its initial jolt. Tom Verlaine, in 1981, is said to be “a study in career suicide”. The Ramones’ lack of commercial breakthrough is thoroughly bemoaned, though some hope is held out for their new 45 “She’s a Sensation” (it didn’t chart, not even close). Suicide are “finally on the verge of the commercial success they so richly deserve” (I don’t remember said success). There’s definitely some bellyaching that Patti Smith is now in Detroit being a mom and raising a family, likely written by “a young person” who perhaps hadn’t yet considered having children now or ever.
They also track down “The De-Classe of ‘76” as well: those who disappeared. This includes acting editor for NY Rocker issues #2, 3 and 4 Craig Gholson, who says he got out early in the game because he “became disinterested in the music. I wanted to write about Television. I didn’t want to have to write about the Dead Boys”. Amen and godspeed, Craig. The “early days” reminiscing continues with a piece of Kristian Hoffman memories, a great Roberta Bayley photo spread of all the key ‘76-’77 NYC players and best of all, a reprint of Lester Bangs’ Peter Laughner obit from the September 1977 issue. It’s a phenomenal piece, readable here and also in one of the Bangs books, and it’s highly ironic for its depictions of Bangs trying to reason with Laughner to not drink and drug himself to death. and not letting him up into his apartment because Laughner was becoming “bad news”. I say highly ironic because I read the Bangs bio and, well, black kettle/black pot and all that.
As far as the 1981 stuff in here, well, there’s news of a Plasmatics indecency arrest in Milwaukee, and The Specials being fined in London for “encouraging fighting” at their gigs, which was highly preposterous. The Plasmatics were indecent, though, on every level. I remember both of these incidents, but man, growing up in the suburbs as I did among the rubes, any time my musically unsophisticated peers wanted to reference whatever was happening in punk and “the new wave”, it was often The Plasmatics that they reached for. The 6 o’clock news had probably done something on them blowing up a school bus, or Wendy’s nipple tape, or this arrest. The hoi polloi, the great unwashed – they usually knew about Devo (total fags), the Plasmatics (that chick’s a dyke) and the Dead Kennedys (probably gay).
Now – on the proverbial flipside, NY Rocker #38 features a cool visit to the Brooklyn abode of Miriam Linna and Billy Miller of The Zantees to admire their record collection, jukebox and retro dishware. Bill Landis of Sleazoid Express weighs in with a fantastic primer essay, “From Tack to Gore: The Exploitation Film in America”, so good it makes me want to order that book I just hyperlinked to. In the reviews section, reviewer David Blither tries to grapple with the landmark ½ Japanese½ Gentlemen/Not Beasts triple LP box set, and far from finding it wanting, walks away from the experience with the zeal of the convert. Love that thing. And Howard Wuelfling gets a ton of great shit to review: a pile of Cleveland 45s like Pressler-Morgan, X_X, The Styrenes and Cleveland Confidential, plus the debut Bad Brains, a Wipers single and even the Lesa (Aldridge) 45. What would you say if I told you 1981 was one of the top three years in rock music history? NY Rocker #38 is another in a long line & litany of verifiable and documented proof points, so I shall provide no quarter on my stance.
Part of the reason I hold onto so many of these goddamn fanzines is because I just know I’m gonna need ‘em someday. Case in point is this Larry Wallis piece in 2013’sSavage Damage Digest #3. I recently embarked upon a UK late 60s/early 70s hippie/hard rock scuzz mini-bender – Deviants, Pink Fairies, Groundhogs, all that – and man, was I glad to be able to dimly remember the Wallis piece in this one that I’d mostly skimmed over 11 years ago. You see, despite my longtime Talmudic “study” of the rocknroll form, I’m still constantly attending a school of my own making, expanding my horizons and whatnot, and/or revisiting stuff I’d passed on the first time because I wasn’t quite ready. Like The Byrds we talked about last time.
What am I gonna do for succor and encouragement, buy the nonexistent Pink Fairies book on Amazon? No, I’m going to head to the stacks and read editor Corey Linstrum’s long, ultra-nitpicking (in the best possible sense) overview of Pink Fairies guitarist Wallis’ entire musical career. Now I know. At least for the 45 minutes in which I retain the information I’ve just read, I can have a fuckin’ blowout conversation about Wallis with you or anybody. That’s why I “invest” in fanzines as I do, because it’s that important.
When I got this issue of Savage Damage Digest #3 in 2013, I was just grateful that a real print fanzine was still publishing. Seemed to be a grim period, besides my own, stalwarts like Ugly Things and a few others. I was drawn in my Linstrum’s massive Avengers/Greg Ingraham interview, which is bedecked with many well–placed photos and flyers, including many I’ve never seen before. Did I ever tell you guys that the first punk song I ever loved was the “The American In Me”? I was barely out of elementary school, heard it on the left of the dial, and it was world-changing. Today I sort of see them as a decidedly second-tier early-wave US punk band so my interest in their 70s shenanigans is perhaps lower than my interest in, say, first-hand recollections of The Electric Eels, which thankfully Linstrum has in a later issue. But yeah, the Ingraham interview is the sort of deep-dig dork-out that I very much admire, and should I ever need to gather source material for a big Avengers listening sesh and eventual discussion with you over a beer, I’ll absolutely know where to go.
One final thing I admire about Linstrum is that he clearly just heads where the spirit moves him. Like he’s got an entire fanzine out about the history of underground music in San Francisco’s East Bay, which I bought when it came out and’ll get to on this site at some point. He fills a page with a rocknroll crossword puzzle, with print so small I abandoned it both now and in 2013 when I first came across it – back when I could see everything just fine. Only moderate bum note is a perfunctory and sort of unprepared interview with Jeff McDonald of Redd Kross; time was an interview with the wacky McDonald brothers was a key reason to buy a fanzine, yet at this point Redd Kross were just awful and there was little use pretending otherwise. But there’s no accounting for taste, as they say!
My travels into and around the “classic rock” pantheon over my life have been halted, stuttering, filled with skepticism and, ultimately, redeemed with revelation and joy. Every few years there’s a popular band that you & everyone else has loved for years that finally fully clicks in for me; in 2023, that band was The Byrds. Several years ago, it was the Pet Sounds/Smile-era Beach Boys, which I wrote extensively about in my most recent Dynamite Hemorrhage #10 fanzine. To understand why it’s taken a fifty-something man with enormous lifelong exposure to these bands so long at times to finally grasp their genius, I’ll give a sense of my starting point.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, as my tastes were being formed in the direction of punk and “the new wave”, it was classic rock and heavy rock that I 100%, fully and totally set myself in defiant, youthful opposition to. At age 13/14/15, the bands that my doofus junior high and high school peers loved, all of whom were routinely pouring out of boomboxes on KOME and KSJO, were the full antithesis of everything I thought myself to be. If it was popular, heavy, and on the FM dial, I hated it. If heshers and especially hippies liked it, I hated it. If it was unpopular, unknown, strange, bent, angular and possibly from England, I was interested.
So naturally this sort of stance precluded and eliminated a great deal of music in my life. The first crack in the armor for me in the late 80s was The Rolling Stones, especially once I heard Beggar’s Banquet and Exile on Main Street. Then it was a major Neil Young overdose in the early 90s, which continues to this day. The gates would continue to open, and have continued to open, for years. We let in the Beatles, AC/DC and of course The Kinks over time. Recently The Byrds, whom I’ve always sorta liked but never owned any records from, came waltzing in.
I recently got this February 1973 Zigzag #28 because I wanted to dig more into the cover feature on them. Zigzag, which I’ve written about before here and here, was edited by Pete Frame in the UK and was one of the premier fanzines of its time, even in the cold, lean years of 1972-73. “It’s produced for our friends rather than as a commercial enterprise”: this is how Frame defends to a letter-writer not wanting to “cover” Uriah Heep, Black Sabbath and Nazareth. That, and the greasy hair and foul body odor of the aforementioned. Frame’s just come back from the US where he’s hung out with a young Alan Betrock and unfortunately gone out there in the first place to see Genesis; Zig Zag in this era was quite hung up on prog, with a big Kevin Ayers interview and a killer hand-drawn “family tree” of Soft Machine, Gong and so on. I can’t predict where I’d have been in February 1973 myself at that age, and while I’d like to have said Beefheart/Stooges/Velvets were my guiding lights, I’m pretty sure Bowie would have been even more important. Which is fine.
The Byrds stuff is killer. It’s an overview of their existence from April 1965 through March 1966, including interviews with Chris Hillman and Roger McGuinn and a timeline walk through a pivotal year in the band’s life. As mentioned, for years I pretty much skimmed or ignored all the writing I’d see about this band because aside from their hits, I hadn’t heard that one song that opened the doors for me until I finally ingested “Have Your Seen Her Face”. Then Sweethearts of the Rodeo was it for me, then all the folky stuff and so on. Biggest fan etc. Zigzag #28 also has a similar retrospective piece on Love, and tells us that in 1973, “Arthur Lee is currently fronting an all-new, all-Black Love”. Click the link, it’s a good story.
In the Jimmy Page interview, at a time when Led Zeppelin were playing enormo-domes all across America and tossing TVs into swimming pools, Page talks about Takoma Records and his love for Fairport Convention and NRBQ (!). There is also an interview with Stealers Wheel – ouch. Those guys are famous for the awful 70s MOR “Stuck in the Middle With You”, which was later famously used to soundtrack the slice-the-ear-off-the-cop scene in Reservoir Dogs. And sorta apropos of nothing, there’s a long interview with author J.P. Donleavy, whose book The Ginger Manmy pal CM says is one of the all-time greats, and something that I must read. Should I?
There’s more in here, but some of you might especially be interested in the big Kim Fowley interview and timeline. Now me, I recently tried to reread the long-ago omnibus compendium from the early 2000s about him in Ugly Things, and I have to say I found it tough sledding. It’s not merely the beyond-credible rape accusations that have come up since that, it’s honestly that the guy was just so tedious to listen to talk about himself. His rap gets old very quickly, and Fowley’s production right-place-right-time “legend” is one of mediocrity and overhype across the board. Writer Mac Garry says “I haven’t heard the newly recorded Fowley solo album, but none of the others have ever been released here. Should you stumble across an import copy, do yourself a favour and leave it in the rack…they are all, quite frankly, abominable horsemanure”. Hey Mac, if you’re still with us 51 years later, I’d like to play you a song called “Motorboat”. Aside from that, sure. It may take yet another 51 years for me to finally come around to that particular brand of “classic rock”.
After years of being something of an afterthought and/or the provenance of “girls just sing better” dorks like me for a couple patriarchal decades, the exhumation of “female-fronted punk” truly took a quantum leap in the 2010s. I became acquainted with Erin Eyesore, née Erin Fleming, who lived in San Francisco as I did and hosted the great Ribbon Around a Bomb show that was only classically rad 70s/80s femme-punk. She had me onto the program at the Radio Valencia studios once and let me “spin” some of my best mp3s. It was fun to email her links to the Reference of Female-Fronted Punk Rock bootlegs every now and again with a quick “Hey u ever hear this?” and get an eye-roll emoji back. She was still doing the show recently at her and my joint alma mater KCSB-FM Santa Barbara, too – shows linked here.
Erika Elizabeth, too – superstar DJ, musician, risograph designer and writer – she did a killer piece in 2014’s Dynamite Hemorrhage #2 fanzine on female-fronted punk obscurities that helped further the disentombment of so much of this music. Right before that, I happily picked up a copy of 2013’s Only Death is Fatal #1, published out of Montreal by a woman known to me only as Megon, and it’s this deep dive into ultra-obscurity we’ll be talking about today. Unless I’ve got it wrong, Megon only published this one print fanzine before going the full digital on her “blogspot” blog, which ran out of steam in 2017 yet not before making a full accounting of hundreds of female-fronted punk and post-punk corners.
She was the type of editor to hear a weird UK DIY song on a comp track by a band with a ridiculous name like Cool To Snog and say, “Hey! I need to interview the folks from Cool To Snog!”. Someone needed to, and we’re all the better for it. That’s really the unstated mission statement of Only Death is Fatal #1 – to turn over the previously unturned rocks. She tracks down the two sisters from the only band in here besides Bona Dish whom I’d heard of – the Anemic Boyfriends, from Alaska (!) – and gives what I’m sure is the most full airing of their history to them they’d ever been proffered. Turns out the ‘Boyfriends moved to San Francisco, and then away from it, not once but twice!
Because these bands were barely talked to by fanzines in their day and almost all moved on (as people do) to raise families, work jobs and so forth, you get a sense that even the band members struggle to remember what actually happened in 1980 and why. Megon will ask the sort of naval-gazer of a question I’d ask, something learned through deep online & offline scouring and tape insert reading, only to get an answer like, “Ah, you’ve really got me there. I don’t know how that came about”. But she did a phenomenal job sourcing original photographs & flyers, and going deep on the questions – she actually knocked it out of the park with Bona Dish, who I myself interviewed in 2013 as well, and got a cool photo that the band didn’t send to me (sorry, Megon gets it mate).
And then, after all of this flurry of female-fronted punk documentation from Erin, Erika and Megon, Jen B. Larson put out the book Hit Girls: Women of Punk in the USA, 1975-1983 just over a year ago. I suggest you give it a gander if you’re so inclined. Sin 34 and the Inflatable Boy Clams get their own chapters, so you’re likely to want to get involved.
Seattle, Washington ended up being pretty well-represented at the mid/late 70s dawn of punk rock by not one but two stellar publications, both of which I’ve written about before – Chatterbox and Twisted. I vowed when I typed up some words about the latter that I’d do what it takes to procure the two copies I didn’t have of the latter, and somehow I was able to do just that. All it takes is a willing and friendly seller and a highly obsessive buyer willing to forgo some of life’s pleasures in order to buy some dopey fanzine from 1977.
Except Twisted #1’s not dopey – I mean, not really. Hitting the hot, hot streets of the jet city in July 1977, there’s excitement in the air and Seattle is all of a sudden on the fucking punk rock/alterna-music circuit, with Iggy Pop and Blondie not merely having just come to town to play together, but to party it up with our editors and with all sorts of new, nascent, barely formed punk bands as well. Their whole 4-day Northwest visit is documented blow-by-blow here, like the big deal that it most assuredly was for the participants. This was when Iggy had Bowie playing keyboards for him (!), and there’s a photo of him just sitting off to the side of the stage, nonchalantly doing his thing and trying not to be noticed. “With Iggy on stage it would be hard for anyone, even him, to be noticed.”
Each day, Iggy goes off to parties and jam sessions with the editors – he does not bring Bowie with him, though there’s a message left at the hotel for editor “Robert Roberts”: “David Bowie called – looking for Iggy”. Turned out Bowie was looking for the party but couldn’t find it. I think he got lost at the shpritzer honker splasher. He missed Iggy jamming with “Blondie’s band”; he missed Iggy hanging out with Seattle band The Feelings and commandeering their instruments; and he missed a trip to Herfy’s, the beloved Sacramento hamburger chain of my youth.
Somehow there’s a party as well in Ballard, and I’m going to guess new Seattle punk band The Knobs had something to do with it, as they are profiled in Twisted #1. This is the band that The Lewd grew out of, with lead singer J. “Satz” Beret. Hell yes. Weren’t we just talking about The Lewd? It says here that “…The Knobs never played an official show, because as SATZ says…”We had no songs.” However, The Knobs did play one intimate “performance” at a Fremont rehearsal space called The Funhole. This A-list evening was written up in a Seattle punk fanzine Twisted.” I know from having lived there that Ballard and Fremont are almost the same neighborhood, lightly separated as they are by “Phinney Ridge”. Going to guess this was the show. Anyone in the Fanzine Hemorrhage reading audience get loaded that night at The Funhole?
Other things are happening too, folks. Tomata and The Screamers have recently moved to LA but have kept their ties with the Twisted editors, which means there are a ton of a photos and a wild-eyed write-up of the band’s otherworldly synth-blast, including a snap from the legendary Slash magazine party where both entities became known to the LA underground. Tomata himself writes up a frothingly happy piece about The Damned’s visit to LA and all the partying they did together. I mean, this is all formative stuff. Any & all documents about 1977 punk in Los Angeles contains these events, and here we are on the ground with the people who either made it happen or were witnessing it.
In the record reviews, some nameless reviewer thinks The Saints’ I’m Stranded album is pretty awful, yet digs the new ones from The Tubes and U.F.O. Cool. And there’s a Danny Fields interview. Did you know that Fields was the editor of teenybopper mag 16 back then? Somehow this fact had eluded me. Twisted #1’s a short one, 25 pages, but for 60 cents and a chance to have your mind blown & musical taste rearranged, there’s some truly excellent value for money going on.
As I’m sure you’re aware, there’s been a rich history of single-artist music fanzines catering to “the obsessives” for many decades now. Backbreaking work has been done by certified Dylanologists, for instance, then deployed with extreme prejudice in numerous Dylan fanzines over the years – and whenever I get the gumption to search for music fanzines on eBay, I’ll get dozens upon dozens of listings for fanzines about Kiss, Tori Amos, Kate Bush, David Bowie, Pink Floyd, Stone Roses, Bruce Springsteen, The Smiths and obviously many more. Never the Velvet Underground, unfortunately; that is, unless a copy of What Goes On turns up online, which isn’t particularly often.
I scanned What Goes On #1’s cover and printed a bit of my interview with Velvet Underground Appreciation Society founder & What Goes On editor Phil Milsteinhere. Those first two late 70s issues are fantastic, but this fanzine really started to flower in 1982 with the publication of What Goes On #3, which, well – on one hand it’s a straight-up, obsessive fan magazine devoted to what might be the greatest rock band of all time, yet on the other, it’s a supreme piss-take on the idea of fan magazines. Milstein, as I’d later come to understand, encompasses multitudes – a wiseacre archivist of the obscure and the outsider; a serio-comic writer whom it’s sometimes impossible to know when he’s being honest or inscrutable; and, at times, a musician in his own right. That’s in addition to his lifelong servitude to and furthering of the cult of the Velvet Underground, a passion which I have nothing but the highest admiration for.
That admiration was extended once I dug into What Goes On #3. While fully devoted to explaining & expanding the genius of the Velvet Underground, It absolutely doesn’t take itself very seriously, and it’s all the better for it. Milstein, 25 years old at the time, prefigures one of my favorite SNL sketches of all time – the one at the Star Trek convention – with a moderately ridiculous Velvets quiz, with questions like “When Nico first met Andy Warhol, she was carrying a demo acetate in her purse. What was the song on the demo, and who wrote it?”. Funny enough, I can answer a big chunk of these questions, but that’s with the benefit of 42 additional years of Velvets scholarship having been brought to life since 1982.
This isn’t a navel-gazer of a fanzine, though. There are interviews in this issue alone with Andy Warhol, Tony Conrad, Henry Flynt, Terry Riley and Byron Coley’s outtakes of his NY Rocker John Cale interview from 1980. Dana Hatch – who’d later go on to glory as the drummer and throat-scraping vocalist in the Cheater Slicks – and who was really just a ‘lil nipper at this point – does a detailed overview of VU live records and gets his letter to & drawings for Lou Reed published as well. A big unpublished Lester Bangs piece on Nico is published here (!), and Tim Yohannan – yes! Tim Y! – has a piece about his own homemade, DIY Velvet Underground album covers.
What Goes On #3 treats solo recordings from Nico, Cale, Reed etc with the same sort of reverence and respect as it does VU stuff, but is certainly willing to carve it up as necessary, as it somewhat does for Reed’s newest LP The Blue Mask. A writer named Richard Mortifolglio contributes an excellent piece on White Light/White Heat – no jokin’ here, just a dissection of the record I’ve sometimes called my absolute favorite piece of vinyl. Perhaps the most entertaining section is “Ken’s Corner”, featuring a nursing home resident out of the pages of David Greenberger’s Duplex Planet magazine:
The mag’s nooks & crevices are filled in with bootleg reviews and every jot and titter from Velvets world, including mentions of the band in other mags, such as Lou Reed himself mentioning the VUAS and What Goes On in some Dutch mag, and how he likes to read it on the toilet. That’s actually pretty charitable from Reed, all things considered. I’ll be more charitable than that and state that this is an absolute treasure, and something well worth reprinting in book form along with the other issues. I do hope that someone takes up the call.
I believe it’ll serve the world and the ultimate digital historical record in some meager way if I take a crack on this site at each of the three Z Gun fanzines that came out toward the end of the 2000s. I talked about Z Gun #1 a year ago here. In Spring 2008, Scott Soriano and Ryan Wells sprung a second issue upon us, one they manifested as Z Gun #2. Like its predecessor, it was probably the best print fanzine that came out in its year, and I suspect I’d be hard-pressed to find examples to the contrary.
For instance, it contains one of my favorite interviews in any fanzine, ever – one with Australian duo Fabulous Diamonds. Not only was their dubbed-out experimental delay some of the absolute finest music of the day, the band were a male/female non-couple who seemed to cultivate this bizarre, right-out-in-the-open sexual tension that made them hate each other. In this too-brief interview by contributor DX, they talk about how they love to yank people’s chains about the sex they’re having with each other; how Jarrod wanted their record cover to be them actually 69’ing, and Nisa giving him tons of crap about how “if it came to the crunch I think he wouldn’t do it”, and Jarrod riposting that he wouldn’t be able to perform if it was with Nisa. Just a total gem of a chat, almost entirely about how much they loathe or fake-loathe each other, with nothing at all about their music.
There are Sightings and Ceramic Hobs interviews as well, with none of the interviews here having any photos of the bands whatsoever, a clearly deliberate anti-fanzine choice that I’ll have to ask one of these San Franciscans about one of these days if we ever find ourselves on the same cable car. Monty Buckles interviews Mike Doscocil of Drunks With Guns, and quite memorably says their band’s guitar “sounds the way burning plastic smells”. Bravo! This was never more apparent than on “Wonderful Subdivision”, one of the late 20th century’s most towering and majestic works of art. Doskocil admits that seeing Flipper in Kansas City at the local VFW in ‘83 or ‘84 had a major impact on his band, as you’d have expected it might have.
Rich Kroneiss, bless him, does an overview and survey of Amphetamine Reptile Records, which honestly, in 2008 was probably a label we were all a little too long in the tooth to pretend had any lasting power beyond its ability to fry the severely underdeveloped synapses of 19-year-old male faux misanthropes and colored-vinyl fiends. Hard for me to even get excited about Halo of Flies any more, much as I’d like to. Cosmic Psychos, sure. I’d have to really think beyond that, but nothing’s coming to me, and I saw just about all of them live at one point or another (King Snake Roost were a total blast).
2008, wow. A ton of underground records were still coming out on 45 and LP. In Z Gun #2, was the era of Eat Skull, Billy Bao, Black Lips, Eddy Current Suppression Ring, Hospitals, Mayyors, Pissed Jeans, Sic Alps and Slicing Grandpa. As I rather belatedly came to sort of realize putting out my own fanzines, reviewing everything that comes into the office helps no one – not the readers that have to wade through a plethora “it’s alright, I guess” reviews; not the bands whose work is given the cursory once-over and the tepid, “highly qualified” endorsement; and neither does it serve the writers, who spend some of life’s finite time padding the fanzine with mediocrity when it could have been perhaps better spent giving another 5 pages each to the Fabulous Diamonds to fight with each other, or to more stories from Mike Doscocil. This was the Art for Spastics era for me, a radio program I used to listen to religiously online made by DJ Rick of KDVS. His aesthetic fit neatly in line with that of the Z Gun editors, and even with my griping about too many reviews, when you get to the end of them you come to realize/remember that 2008 was actually a pretty healthy time for the scene.
We could use more Soriano and Wells in print right about now, couldn’t we? But hark! Scott Soriano has a new fanzine, Record Time, about to drop any day now. Pre-orders here!
I’ve come to terms with Flipside in its early 80s guise not as a taste-building nerve center, nor as a place where one might gather intelligent discourse on the state of the scene, yet rather as a sociological excavation of punk rock as it was actually lived. Every time I saw/see something like The Vandals or Suicidal Tendencies on a Flipside cover I mentally classified/classify it as a taste-optional children’s magazine, but that’s not totally fair. You can get more on-the-ground sociological punk research in any given Flipside letters section alone than anywhere else of its time, and if that’s your thing, then issues like late 1982’s Flipside #36 are worth their weight in gold.
In this one, Susanna Hoffs writes on a postcard with the breaking news of how The Bangs were forced to change their name. Someone else writes to defend the honor of Al from SS Decontrol, who’d apparently come under some scene criticism of late; Sothira from Crucifix writes to complain about a racist cartoon of him in a previous issue; and all manner of punk cretins write in from godforsaken Southern California towns like Norco, Glendora and El Toro, the latter of which is now called Lake Forest. We’re in the peak hardcore era, but Flipside was relatively magnanimous in their coverage breadth, extending it even to an Allen Ginsberg mail interview by “roving reporter Helen”.
There’s a whole page interviewing The Misfits about the fallout from Doyle recently clocking a kid on the head with his guitar in San Francisco. Needless to say they’re both defensive and dismissive. The editors talk to Rebel Truth from Sacramento; to 100 Flowers; to Bill Bartell from White Flag (who has a Dave Markey movie coming out about him); and to MDC from San Francisco, who for once don’t strike me as complete nincompoops. I will grant that band the quote-unquote power of some of their blitzoid hardcore on their first album, but they really turned me off at age 15 when I’d hear them on MRR radio, trying to out-Left Wing their hosts to the point of absurdity. There’s also a big interview with The Necros, with lots of discussion about English spike-haired punk; anarchy and its deeper meaning; bands that sing about Reagan etc. All the teenage punk hits of ‘82, brought to you by the deep thinkers at Flipside.
Want to know what else was going on with folks trying to “catch a wave” on the sub-underground in 1982? There’s an ad for Chris Ashford’s What? Records for a new Davie Allen and the Arrows 45, “Stoked on Surf”. “You may remember David’s 1967 twangy fuzz-tone hit ‘Blues Theme’ from that outrageous biker movie ‘The Wild Angels’. Now he’s off bikes and onto boards!”. Well that didn’t last long. I actually read an entire interview last night with a band that was unknown to me, The Romans, who had ex-Monitor, Human Hands and Deadbeats folks, and who loved the Symbionese Liberation Army and the paisley underground. My kind of people. Had to go listen to some online. I’ve heard worse! In fact, I totally dug it and ordered a cheapo used copy of their You Only Live Onceoff of Discogs. Who was it that said Flipside weren’t tastemakers? Me?!?
It’s apparent that if you’re looking to truly piece together the rough corners of Los Angeles music history during the glory years of 1977-83 that Flipside, given its breadth and dogged documentation, would have to be a primary resource. The amount of content in any given issue is staggering, honestly, and as I talked about before, one thing I actually admired and even sort of envied about Al, Hud, Gerber and the crew was how they really were out there and in clubs, veteran’s halls and parties – every night of the week, anywhere there was a show.
For better or worse, they set the historical record in ways that others never could or did. For that alone, I’ll keep reading and unpacking these with pleasure, because 15-year-old “Slammy” from Buena Park in the letters section gets to capture the essence of being young and dumbstruck by the power of the ‘core for eternity, in a way that some nostalgia-ridden 50-something meathead like myself simply can’t. Copy of this on the Internet Archive here!
I remember Sporadic Droolings fanzine mostly because it served as a repository for much of Shane Williams’ writing before he wrote for Flipside. When I came to “know” Williams – a story which I wrote about in detail here – he reminded me frequently about his time served at this fanzine. The man was, indeed, “a talker”. I almost didn’t write about Sporadic Droolings #5 because, in flipping through it, I came to editor Dave Burokas’ intro to an article of his that starts out, “If there is a person who is extremely dedicated to punk rock, it is certainly Donny the Punk”. Yet for better or worse, we plow onward.
Sporadic Droolings #5 came out in 1986. Burokas was based in Kearney, NJ, and was a devotee of tiny type and of cramming a ton of information into small spaces. He apologizes for not answering all his letters because “he’s going to college full-time”, and good for him. I was doing the same in the year of our lord 1986. You have to wade through some mire to find the good stuff here, such as a “save the punk scene” editorial written at a sub-kindergarten level by one Bill McLaughlin, but in general, there’s good materials to be found.
Shane Williams, in prison at this time, interviews shitty punk band 76% Uncertain and then redeems himself by interviewing Laura and Stacey from Austin’s Rabid Cat Records, who helped bring the world Scratch Acid, a band who that year were in the process of becoming one of my favorite things on the planet. He then writes a ham-handed but not altogether wrong editorial inveighing against political correctness of the MRR variety. I get the sense that Shane, having let’s say some time on his hands, was allowed by Burokas to just do his thing and send letters full of questions to various bands; they’d then take the answers back, type up an interview, and shove it into Sporadic Droolings. Shane also does this for Philadelphia’s Ruin and for Orange County, CA’s Pontiac Brothers.
Regarding the latter, it’s unfortunately a lot more Shane than actual answers from the band. Guitarist Ward Dotson is asked about his time in the Gun Club, and says, ‘I have been out of the band for over three years, and I’m doing my best to try and forget about the whole mess”. I have a real soft spot for these guys, the Pontiac Brothers, not just because my pal Jon W was in the band for a bit, but for their devotion to tiny clubs and bars in Orange County and for actually being the rare sort of bar rock band that I can envision seeing three sheets to the wind in a cramped bar and totally loving it. Here, here’s why. Alas, I missed them and never was allowed the experience.
Burokas catches Gerard Cosloy as Homestead Records has really hit its stride, with Sonic Youth having just announced they’re leaving for SST but with the label otherwise hitting big with Big Black, Squirrel Bait, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds and so forth. Apparently, as was his wont, Cosloy had “tangled” with Sporadic Droolings and/or Burokas in the pages of his Conflict fanzine recently, and this interview was meant to be an amends-maker. In the intro, Burokas says, “He started out with two strikes, Gerard did. First, he was late for the interview. Second and worst of all, he had a Mets duffle bag with him. But he managed to escape the strikeout”. The interview actually fills in quite a few gaps in my personal understanding of Cosloy’s rise through, and eventual all-seeing lordship over, the US rock music underground.
Kudos as well to Burokas for his Honeymoon Killers interview – no one was writing about this NYC band at the time, and they sound like inspired & deranged people you’d want to hang out with. There’s a piece on the Celibate Rifles and much excitement about Birdman-inspired Aussie garage punk that was well-distributed at the time, and that was about to start clogging up my personal record collection with Psychotic Turnbuckles, Seminal Rats, Eastern Dark and Hard-Ons vinyl. In the live reviews section, I had to laugh at the entry on Dinosaur and Squirrel Bait at Maxwell’s in Hoboken NY on 1/9/86. Squirrel Bait were TOO LOUD for Dave, and I’m thinking, oh man if that was hurting his eardwums, what’s he going to think about….and then he predictably complains that Dinosaur were “even louder!!”. I heard all this stuff about how punishingly loud Dinosaur were for a good 18 months before I finally saw them, and when they finally came to the west coast, not only did my ears survive but they were perhaps the biggest live-music disappointment in my young life up to that point. Pussy Galore, on the other hand – oh dear. I’m still saying “whaaaat?” to my wife on their account.
I just couldn’t read the Donny the Punk interview, I just couldn’t. But there’s a nice full-page ad for the Ed Gein’s Car LP on the back cover. I’ll keep Sporadic Droolings #5 around for sure.
Last year I shared the formative and highly boring tale and of the very first fanzine I ever purchased, Ripper #4, procured in late 1982 from Do-Re-Mi records in Los Gatos, CA (though it had come out more than a year earlier). In the nearly forty-two years since, I’ve found my way to a few other issues of San Jose’s Ripper, including Ripper #6, which editor Tim Tonooka has scrawled in the margin that he “took to printer, 12/29/81”. Big year for the scene, and a big year to come.
As I wrote in that earlier piece, San Jose struggled with its relative cultural stature as compared with the cosmopolitan savoir faire of San Francisco, felt acutely by local punks and by high school dorks like myself at the time. Ripper #6 kicks off with a nice talk with local punks Ribsy, – two women, two guys, and a big point of local pride among the tiny handful of punks at my school. They’re quite adept of extracting lemonade from the lemons they’d been handed:
Ripper: What do you like about living in San Jose? Kat: The fact that you can make a dent. Sharon: Mostly the fact that there’s very few punks here at all. When people see us it’s really a shock to them, more so than if we’re in San Francisco. There nobody says anything. But in San Jose they say “Oh my god! What is wrong with you?”. People in San Jose don’t even know what punks are. Somebody asked me if I was a nun once because my hair was so short and I was dressed in black. People in San Jose are really uninformed, and that’s what I like, is being able to talk to people and inform them about it. Matt: The only reason I hang out in San Jose is the band, otherwise I would just as well be hangin’ out in San Francisco. Sharon: I like San Jose because I feel like a square peg in a round hole, and I always like that feeling. Because everybody in San Jose dresses the same, in clothes from two years ago.
I’ll bet Sharon Nicol from Ribsy grew up to be a very well-adjusted woman with an highly developed sense of self. If you want to get a sense of San Jose culture from around this era and the world I grew up in, here’s the inside front cover of my Gunderson High School yearbook from 1982-83:
A group called N.W.S. (New Wave Sluts) is trying to book shows in San Jose and are having some trouble. The 10/29/81 show at Campbell’s Briner Hall with Black Flag was “shut down by local police”. Fighting a war we can’t win! Ribsy made it onto the bill of every one of the 5 shows they were able to have there. There’s some complaining about local shows in San Francisco as well, with The Sound of Music – great article about it here – getting rep’ed as the place for discerning punks to make their presence known in late ‘81.
I like how Ripper provides the ages of the people whom they talk with, so we get to learn from Wasted Youth (later LA’s Wasted Youth) that everyone in the band is 17 or 18, which happens to be 2-3 years younger than my own son is today. When they talk with T.S.O.L. there’s some discussion about how moronic singer Jack wears horror/goth makeup on stage now. He says, “The only thing that makes me mad is that a lot of times people say I’m like an Ant or something, They go, ‘Oh yeah, you love Adam Ant.” But I was wearing makeup when I was a skinhead three years ago, just to bum people out”. Was there a worse California punk band than T.S.O.L. around this time? China White, maybe?
Cover band The Lewd are also interviewed; they were at their peak here, this year if you ask me. The Seattle-era Lewd were great but the American Wino-era Lewd totally ruled. Fantastic photos of the band, too, like 20 of them! In the Black Flag interview, there’s a reference to a 5/17/81 show they played with The Ghouls, Deanna from Frightwig’s early band. I’ve played them on Dynamite Hemorrhage Radio from a song (“Cheap Hotel”) that Brandan Kearney taped off the radio in 1981 (!) and was kind enough to digitize and send to me. I messaged Deanna about The Ghouls and this demo a couple years ago, and she effectively told me “I don’t have any recordings and barely know anything about it, godspeed to you”. Perhaps someone out there knows where these recordings are buried? The internet turns up exceptionally little.
Ripper #6 also contains a piece heaping well-earned praise upon England’s Au Pairs, who were one of my favorite bands at this time thanks to incessant play on KFJC of their debut Playing with a Different Sex. The huge review section includes a piece looking at six different Girlschool records, about which Tonooka says “Their records are proof that there actually is such a thing as good heavy metal”. Arguable on many fronts. The first Meat Puppets 45, one of my top 20 singles of all time, is delightfully called “one of those terminally great records like the Urinals single” and a “rubber room riot”. Finally, in the reader’s poll results, we find that “46% of the people who answered live in Northern California. Their average age is 19 years old. Our readers’ two most favorite bands are Black Flag and the Circle Jerks”. These pit demons, stage divers and Moral Majority enemies are now averaging out at 61 years of age today. Don’t you love it?
In 1989 my pal Bob, whom I was visiting and staying with in Seattle, took me for the first time to the house of his friend “Jimmy The Bud Man” across the water in West Seattle, so that we might drink some adult beverages and partake communally in what is often euphemistically called “the good times”. This was before I’d come to know Jimmy The Bud Man as Jimmy Stapleton, and before the world would come to know him as the proprietor of Bag of Hammers records, a label that put out some pretty exceptional garage punk 45s across the breadth of the 1990s.
Jimmy was a pin-on-the-chest, wave-the-flag, head-held-high record collector. I even saw him, later, introduce himself to someone at a party as, “Hi, my name’s Jimmy, and I collect records”. To that end, partying at his house was, for me, also a great night of plowing through his vinyl and through his stacks of fanzines. He was one of those guys who’d rip the needle off a record thirty seconds in to immediately play you something else, or jog to the back of the house to pull out some weird print gem from his fanzine collection. One he really wanted me to check out was Siltbreeze, a small digest-sized mag from Philadelphia festooned with an array of absurd 1970s pornographic pictures. I was first intrigued just by the sheer ridiculousness of the thing – super-dumb and ultra-cheap xeroxed porn photos bracketing various record reviews and short features – but then, as I started reading it, I got the sense that the folks behind it knew a ton about the deep crevices of the underground, self-created, pressing-of-200 rock music world that I was personally fascinated with then, as now.
Within a year I’d come to understand that Siltbreeze was primarily driven by Tom Lax out of Philadelphia, and he and I would become correspondents or telephone pals or whatever it was we did before electronic mail. This fanzine would quickly turn into a world-champion record label, about which I will assume you know a bit about – and if not, here’s a great primer. Let it be established: fantastic record label, one of the golden greats etc. etc. Yet Siltbreeze was a fanzine first, and I’m going to assume its outré design choices and decidedly politically incorrect general orientation is why more folks don’t know about it…..and yeah, its exceptionally limited print run is likely another reason.
The final issue was Siltbreeze #8, the one we’re looking at today. At this point, which I believe was early 1991, Lax & co. were off and running putting out Dead C, Gibson Bros and Monkey 101 records, among others. But even if he’d never done that, his fanzine’d still be one of the best I’ve ever come across. Once I got my hands on a bushel of his back issues, I came to realize that not only did this fella know about every wacko sub-underground record coming out on every continent, he wrote about them with panache and style, in truly comedic and reference-packed paragraphs that made you want to drop four dollars and an SASE in the mail for whatever 45 he happened to be hyping.
I mean, the guy’s brain makes connections that others don’t, can’t or won’t. I remember when I sent him the Monoshock 45 I put out back in 1994, and he told me, “they sound like the bastard sons of Kriminella Gittarer”. Told the guys in the band that, and they were like, “Ha ha, sure, OK. Kriminella Gittarer. We totally love them”. But they fucking did sound like that. In Siltbreeze #8, Lax – if it is Lax writing here (everything’s uncredited) – he’s fired up about Liimanarina (who were great!), Chris Heazlewood, Dustdevils, Vermonster, Terminals, Rancid Vat, Cheater Slicks and much more besides. There’s a “Silt Picks” top records list near the back that lists a few current favorites; when he listed “Television – Live Portland ‘78 LP” among them, I just knew, given the credibility the man had already built in previous pages, that was a bootleg I’d have to go out and find, and eventually I did. And lo, it was excellent.
Siltbreeze #8 rounds out the reviews and the general transgression with an Alcoholics Unanimous tour diary. Wow, anyone else remember Brilliancy Prize Records,Thee Whiskey Rebel, the Drinking is Great 45…? That’s a whole Portland, OR sub-subculture someone oughta do a feature film on. Right after they make the Jimmy The Bud Man movie and after Feral House compiles all the Siltbreeze mags into book form.
On the cover of this 40-page newsprint gem, the Slash magazine that hit the record stores of greater Los Angeles in August 1979, we have muscle-flexing LA punk “Jimbo”, setting the tone for a wave of eventual hardcore dolts like Circle One’s John Macias to follow. I’m probably a bit of a heretic here, but the nonsensical Gary Panter drawings in Slash have always gone over my head, or more likely, missed me as a member of the target psychographic profile. People seemed to love ‘em, and I suspect it was because a cartoonist/artist was actually spending time drawing punk rockers, in a punk rock magazine, and drawing them well. So bravo, Mr. Panter!
Inside we’ve got a masthead, a table of contents with photos + a “Reader’s Chart”, which looks to me to have been lightly goosed by the editors, given the presence of multiple reggae discs (Tapper Zukie?!?) and oddball critical faves like The Misfits’ Cough Cool/She 45. A year’s-long domestic subscription is hawked for $10. Different times.
The next two pages – LOCAL EXCREMENT – were standard for most of the magazine’s entire tenure, this time a nice castor-oil potty-mouth cleanup from the typical “Local Shit”. This virtiol- packed section is one that I presume was typically penned by editor Claude Bessy, given that it alternates gossipy scene reportage, unbridled enthusiasm for new bands and a heavy dose of fuck-you, aimed at targets both easy (cops) and potentially bridge-burning (club owners, certain local bands etc.). This time Kickboy quite rightly sets his sneering sights on a local free magazine called Gosh! and a recent piece called “A Conservative Looks at a Punk Rock Party”, in which the author purportedly slandered Nervous Gender’s Phranc, an out Lesbian, as well as on The Whiskey, a Sunset Blvd. club, for essentially banning punk bands “without a recording contract”, which meant most of the good ones.
Also going on in LA during the summer of 1979: Tomata du Plenty’s birthday party; the imminent release of the Germs’ as yet untitled album – you know it as (GI); the lovely Trudie Arguelles and her birthday party; a new gay club called The One Way that plays punk instead of disco; and a peaceful makeup between The Dils and Slash magazine, necessitated by some earlier poor reviews and/or snipes directed at the former by the latter.
We have an all-caps editorial – Kickboy again – that makes light of the fact that his typical editorial rant had been missing from the last few issues, and that he’d thus been hearing that Slash therefore was probably going soft, selling out etc. This August 1979 editorial eventually winds its way to the point, which is that the halcyon days of 1977 are long gone; that punk rock has evolved; and that “Punk was never more than an Attitude and a Stand. At the time, and often now, this was and is and is best expressed in the 1 2 3 4 I Hate Your Guts format. But there are other ways to get the lovely message across.”
Bessy/Kickboy enumerate a few of his favorites: The Fall. Alternative TV. The Pop Group. He’s excited and very much keeping the faith, which is one of the things I love about this guy and his writing at the time: “…it’s still all there. Growing. Spreading. Infecting.” In retrospect, it certainly was.
Next, we have the letters section. Always a hoot. The topic du jour this month relates directly to the editorial on the pages before it: Slash’s championing of slower, stranger, less raw music, much of it coming from the UK. Magazine; The Fall; Pere Ubu etc. Some of the hoi polloi are displeased. Kickboy, in his responses, keeps a hammer inside a velvet glove, nicely chirping mild and respectful dissent for some, and spewing venomous mockery at others.
On to this month’s interviews. Penetration, from England. Pauline Murray’s band. There were quite a few Slash interviews in which it was effectively impossible to discern actually who conducted it, and this was one of them. It’s just “Slash” asking the questions. I believe that probably means Bessy and Philomena Winstanley, the latter of whom took the photo of Penetration that accompanies the article. There’s also an interview with film director Paul Schrader (Blue Collar, Hardcore, American Gigolo), and this time we know who’s asking the questions: Chris D., Judith Bell and Clarissa Ainley. They’re actually pretty interested in why he’s deigning to talk to Slash, a punk magazine, and he’s clearly into punk rock in the same voyeuristic manner that his movies explore: “I like the anger, the heat…the feeling you used to have in CBGB’s that you could be stabbed and no one would know for fifteen or twenty minutes because it would so packed with people that you couldn’t fall down…”.
The other three interviews this time are with the aforementioned Nervous Gender; with X and with Nico. Nervous Gender, BPeople, Monitor and Human Hands were all arty, unusual and synth- driven bands just breaking onto the Los Angeles underground music scene that year, and often played together. Slash championed them in a major way. X, of course, were the proverbial belles of the ball in LA and with the Slash staff in general; the Slash label that grew out of the magazine would go on to release their second single and first two albums. These two interviews are conversational, respectful and interesting enough.
It’s that Nico interview that really makes this issue, though. The intro alone is phenomenal, capturing a time in her career as she was coming back & playing again in the late 70s, despite being caught in the grip of a 15-year addiction to heroin. Not precisely sure who wrote this intro which reviews her two shows at the Whiskey and sets up the visit of the interviewing crew at Tim Hardin’s house in LA, but here are some bits from it:
“Nico’ s second set was a burned-out shambles. You want your cult idol, well suffer her cult performances as she does a routine reminiscent of Judy Garland meeting Lenny Bruce in the last days….One girl shouting ‘We love you, Nico, we love you’ until Nico turns to the mike and says, ‘Do you really think that makes me feel any better?’.…when no one offers her a drink she throws a glass across the stage and says, ‘Isn’t there any dope in this damn place?’…
Next day’s interview took place at Tim Hardin’s house. Mr. Hardin, shit faced and stumbling around, hurt himself about four times while we were there. It was one of those dark sixties types hippie houses with art deco in the bathroom and a pot of beans on the stove. Nico had just been crying – former manager Paul Morrissey had taken her money so she wouldn’t spend it on foolish indulgences. She did seem too old for a babysitter, though. She is bothered by the people who have come to interview her – too many: One C. Bag, one Philomena, One Greg ‘New York Rocker’ Turner, One publicist Tim Hogan….”
To translate: that’s Craig Lee from the Bags; Slash founding editor Philomena Winstanley; Gregg Turner of Vom and the Angry Samoans; and, uh, publicist Tim Hogan. The rest of the interview proceeds as you think it might after this set-up. Nico, having delivered a strange, drugged soliloquy to Sid Vicious during her shows the night before, has this exchange with her interlocutors:
Slash: Do you like the Sex Pistols? Nico: Yes……of course. Slash: What was your favorite song? Nico: Oh – I don’t know. I couldn’t tell you. Because I don’t buy those records. I only listen to classical music.
There’s a three-page “Los Angeles Band Update” spread that seeks to update the reader about the prime movers on the local scene, circa summer ‘79. It’s a gas, because so many of these bands are being documented in single-paragraph form during either their early nascence or when they’ve already evolved into the legendary acts they’d eventually gain their due for. I’m reprinting the Germs piece here. This is whom Slash saw fit to document that summer:
The Alleycats / Arthur J and the Goldcups / The Bags / The B People / Black Randy and the Metrosquad / Backstage Pass / Black Flag / The Brainiacs / The Controllers / The Deadbeats / The Dickies / The Dils / The Eyes / The Extremes / Eddie and the Subtitles / Fear / The Flesheaters / The Flyboys / F-Word / The Germs / The Go-Gos / The Gears / Holly and the Italians / Human Hands / The Mau Mau’s / Middle Class / Nervous Gender / The Plugz / Rhino 39 / The Rotters / The Skulls / The Satintones / The Screamers / The Simpletones / U.X.A. / Wall of Voodoo / The Weirdos / X / The Zeros
That was what a week out in the clubs of underground Los Angeles would bring to you on any given day of the week that summer. Unreal. The blurbs are accompanied by fantastic Melanie Nissen photos of many of the bands, most of them never seen since except in these pages, this month. Oh, and there’s a two-full-pages center spread “family tree” with numerous drawings called “2 Years of Punk in LA” that does one of those hand-drawn family tree lineage things that Trouser Press was popularizing around the same time, but instead of being about Humble Pie or Traffic or whatever, it’s about virtually every punk band from LA the past two years, including many new-to-me combos like The Strict IDs, The Brothelcreepers, LA Shakers and The Whores – in addition to the Germs / Bags / Black Randy and the Metrosquad and all our other faves. I’d love to reprint it here, but you wouldn’t be able to read it.
After the interviews and features, Slash would most often feature live reviews from the previous months, and they do the same here. They’re often lengthy, packed with detail, and never withholding of opinion. As per the previous section – whoa. What a month! Chris D., writing as V/D, reviews early Black Flag (Keith Morris version) at the Bla Bla Cafe on 6/11/79: “They rival only the Germs in their potential for snowballing a room full of sedate people into a mangled tumult of chaos”. There are two reviews of a Screamers six-night stand at The Whiskey that make it sounds like the absolute death knell of the band, a Weimar cabaret-style performance with a female backing vocalist and violins. One unnamed reviewer wants to vomit; Kickboy says not so fast. The Screamers would be broken up within six months. The other reviewed shows range from X to Nervous Gender to the Plugz to Ray Campi and His Rockabilly Rebels. Teleport me back and I’ll go to every last one of ‘em.
Record reviews always came next, first a section of 45s, then one for albums. What was new in August of 1979? Everything from Augustus Pablo’s East of the River Nile to Devo’s Duty Now For The Future to Kleenex’s You/U 45 to The Jam’s Strange Town single (about which Kickboy writes, “This should have been reviewed ages ago. Nobody came forth with their little paragraph. What could be the reason behind such indifference. I wonder.”) The breadth of the reviews was wide enough to accommodate the aforementioned; a bunch of reggae singles; some new wave or power pop items from all over the country (most of which are dumped upon); and a ritual deboning of The Clash, a fairly standard and often wide target for Slash during their time publishing.
Finally, there’s a full page travelogue devoted to a worshipful trip to Jamaica taken by one Ranking Jeffrey Lea, otherwise known as Jeffery Lee Pierce, who would form the band that would eventually morph into the Gun Club mere months after this was written. Pierce, Bessy and Chris D. were huge reggae fiends and integrated their passion into the pages of Slash as effortlessly as they did other underground musics, recognizing in real time that this time – 1977-79 – was an exceptionally fertile period for reggae, dub and roots music, as the passage of time would soon prove.
Then a Jimbo cartoon, and that was Slash Vol. 2 No. 7, over and out. It’s certainly not enough for me to merely tell you about how interesting or well laid-out or of-the-moment it all is, yet I know of no other publication that captured the zeitgeist of a given month, any month, in musical history better than this one. Slash had the intimacy of a fanzine – written in the first person with the intention to cajole, harangue, celebrate and champion – combined with the ritual deadline-date urgency of a much more streamlined and professional operation. It arrived each month as promised, with a chronicling of the month just passed, a handful of new enemies made and heroes to pedestalize, and a wide-eyed, optimistic look at sub-underground musical horizons – and a possible revolution in musical tastes that might lay just ahead.
Finding a copy of Forced Exposure#10 in 1986 at Rockpile Records in Goleta, CA was one of those proverbial “trigger events” that dramatically sped my progress down a path of sub- underground music obsession. It would not be hyperbole to note that this particular fanzine was where I truly learned just how extensive, inventive and widespread the American & global independent music scene(s) were, while also getting some of my first critical filtering techniques that helped me better separate the truly excellent from the merely good-enough.
During the 1980s, I read every Forced Exposure magazine that came out with such a slavish devotion that it practically helped build the record collection that I have to this day. What I loved, and even today still love about it, was that it was the most accurate “consumer’s guide” I’d ever read, in the sense that if Jimmy Johnson and especially if Byron Coley said it was good, it almost always was. That to me has always subsequently been the litmus test for a good fanzine. “Can I trust your taste?” (please, let’s leave my own questionable taste out of this).
I’ve always admired those who might be trustworthy gatekeepers, and there’s no doubt this magazine helped me want to attempt to pretend to be one myself. I also thought, at age 18, the way Jimmy & Byron snottily but cleverly dismissed annoying halfwits like Jello Biafra was unlike anything I’d ever seen from the underground press to that time, and those guys helped at the time to provide me with a far more wizened (and newly subjective) perspective about music than anyone else, ever. In a nutshell, if you “came of age” in the 1980s and have the sort of general music taste that might lead you to peruse, say, my own Dynamite Hemorrhage, calling Forced Exposure your “favorite” magazine of that era is nearly self-evident. It was virtually everybody’s favorite at the time.
Forced Exposure #6 is where the levee broke for this magazine. For the first time, bands not on the breakneck hardcore touring circuit nor even remotely connected to hardcore were being spotlighted, praised, and interviewed in a somewhat juvenile (understandably so, given editor Jimmy Johnson’s age) yet incredibly informed way. Bands such as the Dream Syndicate, the Birthday Party and even Venom (!). I may be 100% wrong on this, so correct me if so, but I’m pretty sure this is the first time Byron Coley bared his pen in Forced Exposure‘s pages, after being a resident scribe at the New York Rocker and the excellent Take It! fanzine. He interviews Los Angeles’ weird fake-Christian punk band RF7 and scribes a few reviews, in the apostrophe-laden and made-up word style (spuzz, spoo, zug) that was hilarious, exciting & yes, a bit annoying at times.
Most of Johnson’s stuff sticks to the ‘core or the nearly-‘core, but he also dips a toe into some raving reviews of goth heavyweights of the time like the March Violets and Southern Death Cult (much like Touch & Go used to go ape over the Virgin Prunes). Another Boston teen, Gerard Cosloy, was a fanzine up-n-comer himself at the time, and he submits the Dream Syndicate interview, and it’s a good one, very “in the moment” when that moment was just after their incredible debut LP The Days of Wine and Roses.
Like any fanzine from this time, it’s a blast to look back & see the brand-new punk & post-punk records that people would gladly trade a kidney for in 2024 going for $3-$6 in advertisements. An additional treat is how out-of-step Forced Exposure was with the Maximum RocknRoll hardcore punk orthodoxy of the time, which was over-the- top “politically correct” before any of us had ever heard the term. Exhibit A is an interview in #6 with the Nig Heist, easily the most un-PC band of the day (GG Allin and the F.U.’s notwithstanding), and Exhibit B is a screed against the “Rock Against Reagan” collective, something championed by lefty punk bands MDC and the Dead Kennedys, making the case that the whole thing was a charade designed to buy a particular hippie named Dana Beale some more dope. Coming from the west coast, the first time I saw a punk rag that dared to question the Orwellian judgment of MRR was phenomenally refreshing (Flipside, the other popular west coast punk mag, was almost completely and totally apolitical).
The Forced Exposure of 1983, which is when #6 came out, would prove to be worlds apart from the musical universe of Forced Exposure #18 ten years after. But we’ll get there. I wrote about FE #9 and FE #15 as well, if you want to hit those links.
I think when I was introduced to the notion of “New Zealand’s punk rock history” not long before this – probably when I first heard AK-79 in 1993, when it was reissued on CD – I was like, “Wait, New Zealand had a punk rock history?”. Well indeed it did; I should have known better; and in the early 2000s, a fanzine called Mysterex sprung up to document it all. See, I’ve always been chagrined by the Flying Nun-centric notion that the bands The Enemy and then Toy Love “started punk in New Zealand”, something that you’ll read from time to time, and which is lustily contradicted here and here. Mysterex #2 from 2002, the only issue I have, was devoted to not only setting the record straight, but setting the record, period, for a scene completely eclipsed by the country’s even greater musical heights reached in the post-punk era.
Andrew Schmidt was the editor, and he’s explained the whole tale behind why he started the mag and its timeline here. Not surprisingly, this one surely moved the most units of any of his issues, coming as it did with a 23-track CD compilation of NZ punk called Move To Riot which I don’t seem to have around any longer. I remember reading Mysterex #2 on a beach on Cape Cod when we were visiting my brother in law that year, so if any of my P-Town or Sandwich crew found this CD 22 years ago, you know where to find me.
For me the big draw was and remains the feature on Shoes This High, helmed by Brent Heyward and creators of one of the great global post-punk 45s of all time. The long piece is full of Heyward reminiscences on the Wellington scene, and as accompanied by a timeline that explains the epochal events in said city, like David Bowie playing there in December 1978, and even “overseas records” by Pere Ubu, Captain Beefheart, Lou Reed and The Clash showing up in Wellington shops the same month. The article has got to be the pièce de résistance of Shoes This High scholarship, and I hope it finds its way to digital at some point, for the kids.
Speaking of The Clash, there’s an oral history of their visit to New Zealand in 1982, including quotes from members of The Clash taken from elsewhere. Much of the rest of the magazine is spent delving deep into bands that Schmidt and his contributors saw as missing links and important bands in the development of the two island’s punk scenes: The Androidss; The Newmatics, and a little bit of the Suburban Reptiles. Them I know! Mark Brooks is interviewed extensively about the Christchurch scene, and that’s followed by an interview with an early group, Desperate Measures. Mysterex fanzine has got a yen for the forgotten and the misplaced, and that’s right in my proverbial wheelhouse when I’m, you know, reading a fanzine on a beach somewhere.
Oh, and then there’s a list at the end that goes right for my obsessive/cataloging/list-making jugular: “Thirteen Great Uncomped Kiwi Post-Punk Classics, 1980-83”, which for some reason includes a track from the amazing **** (Four Stars) compilation. Would you say that was “uncomped”? I’d say that’s really stretching the definition. Really well-put together fanzine with a righteous mission and execution.
The pre-punk era of LA captured by Back Door Man and here in Radio Free Hollywood #1 is endlessly fascinating for those of us who love to marinate in the whos, whys and wherefores of the sparks that had to ignite to make that particular music scene as combustible as it became starting in 1977. But the argument here, in early 1977, is that the sparks have already ignited. There had recently been a “ground zero” event on August 24th, 1976 with The Pop!, The Dogs and The Motels playing a show in Hollywood, billed as an antidote to the fern bars, disco and cover bands plaguing greater Los Angeles.
While it’s hard for me to imagine that these particular bands could be a catalyst of any kind, you take what you can get sometimes, don’t you? The opening editorial sets its mission as wanting to capitalize on what’s been growing out of that one live show. You’ve got people who write for Back Door Man taking part in this as well, including Phast Phreddie Patterson and Gregg Turner. To them, what’s happening is something they’re calling “street rock”, so accordingly there’s a big column looking at what’s going on called “Out in the Streets”.
“At present, there are over a dozen good bands playing steadily on the Hollywood circuit, among them Quiet Riot, The Pop!, The Berlin Brats, The Dogs, The Motels, The Quick, The Boyz, Shock, Van Halen, Sway, Wolfgang and Zolar-X”. There’s even a letter to the editor talking about what a shredder of a guitarist Eddie Van Halen is. Street rock!! But as punk encroaches, Phast Phreddie, at least, is ready. He talks about some exciting new 45s and loves “(I’m Stranded)” by The Saints and the third Pere Ubu single. And I guess The Motels had a song at this point called “Whatever Happened to the Modern Lovers?”. This gives credence to just how barren and bereft rocknroll must have felt to so many who’d lived through the Sunset Strip-60s, and/or who marinated in The Stooges, MC5, Velvet Underground and even Can and Hawkwind. I’d certainly list 1976 as one of my bottom-five years to have been young and searching for hot raw sounds in the United States of America.
But you can always pretend, right? That’s how you get a piece like “The Pop – Rock n Roll Monsters” by Gregg Turner. I guess I can sort of see if you’re into this sorta street rock/headbanger/AOR/vest-rock bullshit, a la Van Halen and Quiet Riot and The Pop!, you might see the arrival of bands like The Germs and The Weirdos and The Screamers in a few months as something of a threat – which could be why Turner and Vom were sending it up somewhat, only to reverse course and in a can’t-beat-’em-join-’em move, start the Angry Samoans in 1978.
Radio Free Hollywood #1 is basically one large sheet of newsprint folded up. I find it quite entertaining in its way, and I’m glad to have it around.
I haven’t really sat down and given Summer 1993’s Osmotic Tongue Pressure #3 any sort of true once-over in the thirty-plus years since I enthusiastically bought it, devoured it and then mostly forgot it. I’d really only remembered & marked it as a real good one, one named after some Richard Meltzer-ism of unknown provenance. Gave it the full re-read last night in order to properly consider it for a true Fanzine Hemorrhage exhumation, and I’ll come out and say that it was a really great one, now ranking in whatever imaginary ledger I’ve got going internally as “one of the top music fanzines of the 1990s”. Allow me to explain why and how!
I once scanned the cover of this for another blog and said it was an early 1990s fanzine from San Diego put out by a guy named Mike Kinney, whom I also knew had shuffled off this mortal coil far too young – only eight or so years after this issue was created. I was half right. There were two editors, with Kinney holding down Southern California and Kevin Cascell as the other half, living and creating this from San Francisco, my hometown then as now. In fact, it’s almost eerie reading all these show reviews how often he and I were rubbing proverbial shoulders without actually knowing each other. It’s not like this is a really big city, just one with a subcultural footprint larger than its actual population.
Anyway, Cascell went to the May 1992 Pavement show and disliked it as vehemently as I did; he and I overlapped at shows ridiculously in this opening section. Sebadoh/Some Velvet Sidewalk at Morty’s (unlike him, I thought Some Velvet Sidewalk were fantastic, yet have barely thought of them since, let alone listened to them); Claw Hammer at the Nightbreak; Antiseen at Brave New World; I think I was even at the MX-80/Slovenly show in Oakland, although I missed Slovenly. I also saw the Helter Skelter: LA Art in the 90s thing w/ Raymond Pettibon, Robert Williams, Mike Kelley and many others at Temporary Contemporary/LACMA that Mike Kinney went to. Life is a drink and you get drunk when you’re young. In fact, when Kinney sees The Cows at the alcohol-free, all-ages Jabberjaw club in LA and, while he’d had a decent time and likes the band, concludes rightly that “it’d have been nice to throw some beer on ‘em”.
Cascell, by the way, would join the band Truman’s Water within a year of the release Osmotic Tongue Pressure #3, and he’d also put together stuff as the No Friends Band, whose unearthed stuff has received a ‘lil deserved airplay on my podcast. He’s also a phenomenal collage artist, one of my favorite offbeat forms of creativity, one I keep saying I’ll explore more of and never do.
I suppose I’m not really explaining yet just why this mag was so fantastic. To start with, these were young men of taste and class. I’ll enumerate further in a bit, but both wrote exceptionally well, each with a healthy combination of highly literate snark and excitable fanzine jive talk, and who just come off as the sort of lads you’d simply want to be talking music with. I’ve no doubt they’d have turned me onto some of the free jazz they were ably comprehending years before I was. For instance, the a representative sampling from the reviews section finds the Gibson Bros, Pharoah Sanders, Rudolph Grey, William Hooker Sextet, Royal Trux, The Humpers, Eugene Charbourne and the Dead C – and a consistent bashing of a coterie of Merge Records / power-pop-turd / indie-lite bands. As well they should, my friends, as well they should.
These guys are also both clued-in enough to totally love the feral energy of rock beasts Claw Hammer, and accordingly have an interview with them here. Reviewer Cary Holleran observes their dip in form on Pablum in the reviews section, even though he knows & concedes they rule live and hadn’t lost a step there in the least. This happened to be right at the time I was along on a tour w/ those fellas as their road manager, somewhat discussed here. Kinney really digs Tim Ellison’s Rock Mag, to his immense credit. The interview with Slovenly is also really insightful and wide-ranging, and came at the absolute end of their run, as they wouldn’t be a band for even a few more months after the execution of this discussion.
Finally, showing off the style and taste of these erudite young scholars, there’s a guide to “cyberpunk” books and a set of reminiscences by Byron Coley, some of which are in such miniscule type that I can’t even read them with my reading glasses on. Now there’s a sentence I hadn’t conceived of myself typing in 1993. It kinda kills me that I wasn’t clinking glasses and slapping backs with these two guys when I was in my quote-unquote prime. We’d have had many a fine bro-down together. They made it to an issue #5 in 1996, but I’ve seen neither hide nor hair of the other three in my lifetime thus far. Have you?
Maybe it didn’t really feel like it at the time to me, but Wiring Dept. has reputationally come into its own, nearly forty years after the fact, as an important sub-underground music publication that found joy, innovation and immense left-of-center creativity in post-hardcore San Francisco circa 1984-86. These were supposed to be “the lean years”, but I’ve got a whole Wiring Dept. #4 here that says they weren’t. (I talked about Wiring Dept. #3 here as well).
I know where I was when I bought this in 1985 or early 1986 – it was at Rough Trade Records on 6th Street in San Francisco, and I was up visiting from college on one of my many record-buying excursions to the city while staying with my parents in San Jose. It was likely rung up at the counter by KFJC’s Spliff Skankin (Dennis Bishop), who worked there, and whom I listened to incessantly in high school (and who therefore likely intimidated me at the age of 18 when I bought this – these DJs were absolute gods to me). Given my youth and general punk rock orientation at the time, I probably blanched a little at the pretentious poetry and song lyrics – many by Dylan – in the margins of many pages, and at the inwards circularity of the fanzine, in which much of it seemed primed to elevate its creators and their own endeavors. I’m over it now.
But as examples of what I’m talking about, let’s dissect Wiring Dept. #4 a little. There’s an interview with SF band Trial by Grux of Caroliner and by editor Eric Cope. Then Cope writes about Caroliner. Then William Davenport of Unsound fanzine does an interview with The Flaming Lips after their first LP. Then Cope interviews Davenport. Cope’s own band, Glorious Din, gets a reprint of their interview on KALX radio, and then their album gets a rave review in Cope’s own magazine as well. Who’d have thunk it?
Brandan Kearney of World of Pooh was part of this loose collective as well. He writes a bunch of the record reviews; his band, then a duo, gets raved about; there’s a long review of their tape Dust. and also a review of Brandan Kearney’s magazine Nuf Sed Digest, which I’d never even known about until re-reading this just now. Who’s got a spare copy to trade me for one of my extra CMJ New Music Monthlies? There’s also a review of a World of Pooh tape called Pigmies in a Rose Petal that I’m not 100% sure actually ever existed, and another of a comp tape called UGLY SF III: Bellair McKuen Natures the Preying ANXthouse, supposedly with Lennonburger, Church Police and Caroliner. Google turns up nothing. I need to hear this and I need your help.
There are loads of short interviews, including with four small-ish bands who became much larger in years to come: the aforementioned Flaming Lips; 10,000 Maniacs; Faith. No More and Peter Buck of R.E.M., who were already kind of a big deal on the indie/Americana circuit but nothing like they’d be two/three years later. Yet there are also chats with Controlled Bleeding, Love Tractor, Flat Duo Jets and Stiff Legged Sheep – who were awesome, by the way. Listen here. Corrosion of Conformity, too. Fuckin’ C.O.C., man. I saw them play at the Oxnard Skate Palace, no lie.
Frightwig talk about their upcoming record: “Have you ever seen Russ Meyer, early Russ Meyer films? He did Debbie Does Dallas (sic). He had this film about three go-go dancers who travel around in these sports cars. It’s called Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill. And we’re the three dancers in our sports cars. Faster Frightwig, Kill Kill. It has nothing to do with the music. We just like Russ. We identify with him. We all have big tits. We’re all foxy. I wear hip huggers and dance and we race around in our sports cars and kill men with our bare hands.”
Dave Katz – who for some totally weirdo reason got really mad at me for this 2005 review I wrote of his book! – writes about The Fall’s new 45 Cruiser’s Creek, saying that, “In a way, they sound almost like an 80’s Creedence Clearwater….the main problem with this song about a back woods party is its annoying backing vocals”. Poor Brix, just couldn’t catch a break from the men both lusting after her and wishing she’d go away, sort of a sub-underground version of modern MAGA Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez/Taylor Swift syndrome. And really, maybe the reviews in Wiring Dept. #4 aren’t to be trusted as a matter of course. There’s an uncredited review of the Dead Kennedys’ Frankenchrist, easily one of the worst records I’ve ever heard. This album with “Jock-O-Rama (Invasion Of The Beef Patrol)” and “MTV Get Off The Air” is compared to Iggy Pop and Joy Division, and about which it is said, “Frankenchrist is worth about a million dollars just for the lyrics. What Jello Biafra sings is not mere words put to music, these words come from deep within his heart. He feels with a tortured soul….a record that opens your eyes to injustice and human suffering….do not miss this record”. Hey, I’d leave that review uncredited, too.
All this and a picture of Bob Noxious from The Fuck Ups. It’s therefore little wonder that Wiring Dept. copies are p-r-i-c-e-y when encountered on eBay these days. It’s outstanding source material for documenting whatever it is that was going on musically in 1985, a tale that very much varies with the teller.
Earlier on Fanzine Hemorrhage we discussed Belgian Tom Arnaert’s late 90s Bazooka fanzine and specifically, issue #3. Even thinking of Tom and his fanzine has me pining a bit for the late 90s/early 00s glory days of “CD-R trading”, in which I’d roast up six CDs for you and send ‘em through the mail, and you’d roast up six for me from your collection and fling them my way. I built a hell of a CD “burn collection” in that manner, not just with Arnaert but with several clued-in correspondents all over the world.
I was especially happy to do this with Arnaert and a guy named Luc Onderdonck, both of whom would check stuff out from libraries in Belgium, collections of 78s or punk or world music that never made their way to the USA, then make copies for us both. There was another fella up in Seattle that was a fellow online DJ at Antenna Radio – here’s a Wayback Machine capture of a 2001 show of mine, No Count Dance Party – and I’ve totally blanked on the guy’s name (I think it was “Irv Hunter”?), but he and I, we had ourselves a time with our frantic CD-R trading. To this day, I still make myself CD-Rs of digital files all the time, rather than store everything on a hard drive. I don’t like looking at digital files – I’d still rather cobble together the original artwork, print it out, stuff it into a poly sleeve with the disc and have a fake-but-real CD of my own making,
Anyhow, I recently was able to come into a copy of Arnaert’s very first issue from early ‘96, Bazooka #1. We see this young man finding his musical and publishing sea legs at this point, and he is indeed a young man; based on some mathematical deducing done from an offhand comment in his interview with The Tinklers that he made about being four years old when they started up in 1978, that would put young Tom at 21 or 22 at this point. In many ways – much like the atrocities I myself was publishing at that age (but far better than mine) – it feels like it, and it even seems that Arnaert didn’t quite have the all-consuming command of the English language that he’d even have just a couple years later, when I first came across Bazooka #3 and found this guy writing circles around his fanzine contemporaries.
1994-1996 was peak garage punk mania for many garage-crazed individuals around the world, as we’ve documented here, here and here. Accordingly, Arnaert is big on The Oblivians, and gets in a good mail interview w/ Eric Friedl, who magnanimously answers everything like a mensch. He also gets in good with Dennis Callaci of Shrimper Records and the band Refrigerator, a gentleman & a label that were true fanzine/underground “objects of attention” at the time, something I found it hard to latch onto myself. Then there’s an interview with Kevin Munro of the band Mule, a guy who’d been in the Laughing Hyenas for a time. He comes across as a bit of an antagonist and perhaps something of a “dum-dum”.
Oh, and I love Arnaert calling out some doofus from “The Swingin’ Neckbreakers” when they played in Gent, Belgium: “Highly praised by the people from Norton Records and despised by other garage freaks for copying the 60s r&r sound without adding anything substantial to it (or something like that). I could see from the singer’s face that he was some arrogant piece of shit and that they were going to suck real hard. And I was right cuz a bit later, after a series of sneers addressed to the soundman, the singer threw down his bass, jumped off stage and got in a fight with the soundman. Really weak….”. Who needs Pitchfork when you have reviewers who’ll lay it on the line and leave it all on the field like that? Tom Arnaert, it’s time to bring back Bazooka for a new generation. Get in touch and I’ll hook you up with a printer.
Terrific third and final issue in Big Star’s run. You certainly can’t complain about the use of the name in Spring 1978, particularly when I was raised to understand that no one had cared about Big Star, the band, several years earlier, and that their fans at the time could be counted on the fingers of several hands. It wasn’t quite true, yet the fact that punk fanzine empresario Bernard Kugel (Bernie to his friends!) found a way to easily merge them into his mag along with The Ramones and so forth spoke volumes about how they were perceived by at least a subset of the underground.
Now Bernie, he was doing this in Buffalo, NY, and he’s been subsequently called the “godfather of the Buffalo punk scene”. I’ve never seen the other two issues of Big Star, but Big Star #3 is an excellent early ‘78 rocknroll fanzine right out of fanzine central casting. Like, I mean, I’m not really into Talking Heads but I like how Kugel does three seperate interviews with 3 different band members, right after their album’s come out, then loops back around to interview Tina Weymouth again. In some cases, each interview’s no more than a half-dozen questions. Jerry Harrison gets asked about his previous band, the godlike Modern Lovers:
Big Star: Why did the original Lovers break up?
JH: Just personalities.
Big Star:What do you think of Jonathan’s current stuff?
JH: I’m not wild about it. I mean I think it’s sort of interesting but it’s not exciting to me. That’s why I really didn’t want to continue because it was all his personality. If you really like his personality, then that’s great. I don’t think his personality is that great.
Miriam Linna – whom I believe was out of The Cramps at this point but in Nervus Rex – does a column called “The New Sounds of the U.S.A”. She goes wild for The Real Kids, DMZ, The Fleshtones and The Zantees, the latter of whom she praises for “their impeccable taste and truly inspired treatment of rock n roll”. As it turned out, she was weeks away from joining the band herself as their new drummer, if she hadn’t already.
Kugel does a puff piece on local band The Jumpers, whose 45 Kugel’s label Radio City has just so happened to have just released. There are brief fanzine-y chats with Cheap Trick and The Ramones, two bands who’d, unlike The Jumpers, go on to immortal and everlasting glory by being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And there’s a good freewheeler of an interview w/ Metal Mike Saunders. He talks about becoming an accountant; how “Kiss is the best American rock group, hands down”; how “The Ramones’ albums literally make me ill”; his band Vom, which was still coming together with Richard Meltzer and Gregg Turner when this interview takes place in October 1977, after getting launched with the creation of their first song, “Getting High With Steven Stills”. All this and a full-page Twinkeys ad, with one band member holding a “Sacramento” baseball pennant right at the time that said city was my hometown!
I’d have to say that even if the late 1990s ended up being one of my least-favorite eras for music, I’m still rather struck by just how many well-designed, high-circulation fanzines were being made available at the time that covered the most absolute out music on the planet. People bought ‘em! I’m still not sure if the rock-adjacent improv & experimental underground was actually and truly peaking around this time, or if there were just more folks paying attention to it as a defiant reaction against the mainstream co-optation of the independent rock underground – you know, the whole “Royal Trux and V3 and Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments on major labels” thing. I had the opposite reaction and mostly ran for the hills, both from the mainstream and from the deep-deep underground for a few years. But I still bought their fanzines.
From Muckraker to Bananafish to Opprobrium to Deep Water to this one, Halana #4 – and obviously there were others – there was an entire circuit of editors and an audience who revolved around craft micro-labels like Betley Welcomes Careful Drivers, Swill Radio, Sedimental, Oblique and dozens of others, many of whom released not-even-music music. Halana #4 came out in 1999 and was edited by Chris Rice in Ardmore, PA. His magazine focused primarily on what is somewhat euphemistically called “new music”, which means avant-grade and certainly non-linear music not at all informed by the 4/4 beat, nor from, say, your traditional “rocknroll boogiewoogie”.
The contributing editor was Ian Nagoski, who’d later become a hero of mine with his Canary Records and incredible unearthings of 78rpm records by American immigrants, which he then turned into an expansive series of analog and digital-only releases with all that and more. In a similar, fellow traveler sort of vein, the touchstone piece in Halana #4 is a long travelog by Richard Bishop (Sun City Girls), packed with advice and stories and an enumeration of his approach to jaunting across India, Indonesia, Malaysia etc. Ian Nagoski himself writes about saxophonist Joe Maneri and his son Mat, and like any good curator, he got me to check them out 25 years later, something I didn’t do in 1999 when I very first saw this piece and was sort of openly rejecting the world that Halana was marinating in. Check out Maneri’s Paniots Nine from 1998, totally beautiful klezmer/gypsy Greek jazz from another realm. It’s a long piece, but you come out really wanting to HEAR these guys. I sure did, and have more to learn.
There’s a long section of reviews by Chris Rice that takes up the rear of the fanzine. Nothing “rocks” in the least except Mainliner and Major Stars toward the end, and that’s fine as far as it goes. But there is a big heaping helping of praise for Revenant Records, which also just happened to be MY favorite record label in 1999. The rest of the section is lasered-focused on improvisational abstractions, with even most free jazz being too “straight” for Halana. There is a compilation CD in my copy that’s been there since I bought it. I just know I’m gonna hate it and I really like the mag, so why ruin it, right?
The first time I ever heard “sixties garage punk” was while in high school in the early 80s via the reissued Nuggets compilations. Not knowing anything about any of it, my standard was quickly set by The Count Five’s “Psychotic Reaction” and the Standells’ “Dirty Water”. I liked it, but was altogether indifferent to the larger picture. Once I arrived in college in 1985, I’d hear raw snatches of sixties garage punk on the radio that I really found appealing, but it wasn’t until I heard the Back From The Grave comps that year that I went totally apeshit for the form.
At that point, anyone modern with a bowl haircut and 60s psychedelic lettering on their records was fair game for me to (try and) get super excited about, and we had records from all of ‘em at KCSB, the college radio station I fell in with. I had plenty to sample from. Yard Trauma, The Raunch Hands, Pushtwangers, Vipers, Gruesomes, Deja Voodoo, Stomachmouths, Plasticland, The Brood, Chesterfield Kings, Cynics – it was all stuff I tried and failed to like. It really took The Morlocks, the Boys From Nowhere and then The Gories to get me fired up about any modern 80s band attempting to look and sound the part. Everything else sounded tinny and too reverentially retro, especially the stuff on Voxx Records, which suffered from both poor recording quality and mediocre A&R to boot.
This is all a long way of introducing a Montreal fanzine I have from 1986 called Lost Mynds #1 which is fully steeped and marinated in a world I was trying to steep and marinate myself in that year. You can see that the cover is beautiful, and the fanzine itself looks terrific, totally home-assembled and with a great visual, cut-and-paste aesthetic. However, it was really trite and untrustworthy in the main, especially re-reading it now. They’re trying to approximate some absurd version of hipster-speak across all of their articles: “daddy-o”, “cats and kiddies”, “way out”, “fab”, “squaresville” etc. Dear Christ is that shit annoying.
That said, their remit is wide and there’s no question the folks behind this were living and breathing all the nooks & crannies of 60s-inspired punk and psych that were blossoming across the 1980s. Nearly all of the bands I mentioned in my roll call above of the eighties/sixties bands are featured or are interviewed here, with an interview with The Lyres/DMZ’s Jeff Connolly as well. There include scans from other magazines, sixties stuff, and then a few tribute pieces to actual sixties bands like The Yardbirds, Stones, Pretty Things etc. – and, and good on ‘em for this, the Ugly Ducklings – maybe Canada’s finest sixties punk band? You tell me.
When they get to seeing The Cramps live for the first time, on the A Date With Elvis tour, they’re just as sour about it being their Cramps intro as I was when I saw them for the first (and only) time in 1986, having been a fanatic for the band for the previous four years. So I can commiserate there for sure, but all that forced teenybopper talk otherwise leaves me a little cold when considering the totality of the Lost Mynds #1 fanzine.
My understanding of the 1970s fanzine I Wanna Be Your Dog doesn’t travel particularly far, but here’s where it goes: I believe it started as an Iggy-obsessed French proto-punk fanzine, which then lasted into the punk era, with November 1977’s I Wanna Be Your Dog #7 being the final issue. It was actually an offshoot of the Iggy Pop fan club, no less. This final issue is in English, and they’ve opened a US “office” in Hollywood, ensuring that most of the content here is focused around US-based bands (which, frankly, it was previously, even whilst written in French).
Big-time punk rocker Eddie Money is on the cover. He’s interviewed and sounds absolutely coked to the gills. He keeps talking about Blondie, saying “she’s very beautiful”, and even when corrected by the interviewer, keeps referring to Blondie and “her band”, and rambles on about how bad they are for a backing band. It’s a pretty typical interview of rocker guys getting their first taste of Top 40 fame during the early punk era; they’re wanting to praise it all for being “from the streets”, but they’re also working to backhandedly distance themselves from it at the same time. I’ve seen a half-dozen similar interviews; at this time, ‘77/’78, one of the opening questions of virtually any interviewer in a punk mag was “What do you think about punk?” and/or “Do you see yourself as part of the punk movement??”.
There’s an interview with and some lavish praise thrown at Devo, as well as features on Mink Deville, Deaf School and Cheap Trick, the latter of whom come off as exceptionally affable goofballs. Of course, I’m most excited about I Wanna Be Your Dog #7’s early forays into the Los Angeles punk underground, and there’s a big LA scene spread near the back. It’s said that “the scene revolves around the bands and their performances. Three bands stand out: The Weirdos, Backstage Pass and The Screamers”. Two out of three ain’t bad! About Backstage Pass, they say, “They’re not ‘punks’ but they’re definitely part of the new wave”. Genny Schorr from that band is still active and she put quite a rock career behind her – all documented here.
There’s also a short piece on The Weasels, creators of “Beat Her With a Rake and Make Her Pay For Her Mistake” fame, along with a photo of creepy Kim Fowley with his arm around one of The Runaways. The Dogs from Detroit, now in LA, are interviewed, and they really were just about the perfect band for this fanzine’s Iggy-fied aesthetic. Crime from San Francisco are interviewed by Vale, and they come off as being kind of “silly”, which I like! They left all bogus attitudes at home that day. Phast Phreddie reviews the excellent first Human Switchboard 45 and says “If this kinda record sounds interesting to you, please, keep far away from me”. Finally, The Germs’ first 45 is reviewed by “Al and Pooch” (Flipside!) and they review it as if “Sex Boy”, and not “Forming”, had been the A-side. Strong move!
There appears to be a book about and possibly even collecting the I Wanna Be Your Dog fanzine, written completely in French, available here.
I’ve got a friend in the fanzine obsession game who occasionally will magnanimously take care of me by sending along small packages of stuff he’s accumulated that he thinks I might like, and he’s usually spot-on. I recently received an unasked-for copy of San Francisco’s Escargot #1 from Autumn 1995, published by three women, one of whom I personally know quite well: Windy Chien. She used to run Aquarius Records, and she’s since gone on to some very deserved recognition for her fine art knotwork, something that really has to be seen to be believed how cool it all is.
This mag came along at a time and in a year when I very much should’ve appreciated it and known what it was, and yet I’ve never heard of the thing. Devoted to “Music and the Internet” – mostly the then-new information superhighway – it seems to have been put out by something called “Sick & Tired”, which I vaguely recall being another fanzine or a record label or something. I believe the name is meant to be a witty counterpoint to “snail mail”, which is what folks started calling “hand-written mail with a stamp on it” at this point.
You know, I wasn’t really an early Internet guy. We got “e-mail” in at my job at Monster Cable in 1994, and as I’ve written about here, it was a revelation for those of us who sometimes made more time at work for pranking each other than we did, you know, actual work. My mom, of all people, was cavorting on the Internet a good 18 months before I was, farting around in AOL chat rooms and telling me all about it. She once asked me if I knew who someone named “Costes” was, as he was a strange Frenchman she was being weirded-out by online, and whom she deduced was probably running in similar underground circles as I was. I did know – he was a Lisa Suckdog compatriot. I don’t think I got my own e-mail address until late 1996, on “The Microsoft Network” – jhinman@msn.com. I never participated in chat rooms, the “Chug list”, on listservs or anything like that. I think my early web activity was restricted to reading Suck, Salon and Feed every single day, but honestly, until streamable and/or downloadable music became a thing, I mostly refrained from connecting with my fellow music freaks outside of e-mail correspondence until the late 1990s.
Given the current enshitification of the Internet in 2024, the boundless enthusiasm from Kathleen, Jeanne and Windy in Escargot #1 for its potential to liberate us all in 1995 all seems very quaint, and a little sad, I suppose. We humans really fucked it all up, didn’t we? The whole idea here is to help shepherd readers, most of whom were new to online life, into the underground music crevices and ratholes that Kathleen, Jeanne and Windy were so excited about. There are lessons in “netiquette”, “modem musts”; a jargon dictionary; and helpful instructions for how to get going on e-mail, mailing lists and “the newest and most glitzy aspect of the Internet”: the World Wide Web. Then, at the end, they list who’s online that you ought to check out, like a Kiwimusic page, KZSU radio, Sebadoh’s and Stereolab’s respective web pages, and many lists to subscribe to.
When they interview someone, like Pussy Galore/Free Kitten’s Julia Cafritz or Franklin Bruno, the talk is fun and gossipy, primarily revolving around Internet stuff. These early adopters, Cafritz in particular, are already getting a little over it. I wonder how they feel now, after the birth, heyday and slow death of social media? Midway in, there’s a stream of live reviews with zero Internet content (I’m capitalizing that word and hyphenating “e-mail” because that is what we did in the 1990s), including shows I was personally in attendance at, such as the Dirty Three opening for the Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 during “Dirty Three Weekend” in San Francisco, which Windy Chien rightly reports as a long weekend in which everyone in town’s mind was suitably blown by that trio’s live performances. Mine certainly was – knew I’d like it because I’d been such a big Venom P. Stinger fan, but that first trip through from Dirty Three was even better.
I also liked Jeanne McKinney’s description of “the lovely Miss Cindy Dall” during her time playing live with Smog. I certainly was smitten with her from the word go when I saw her play. “If you’ve seen them on either tour you’ll know what I mean by ‘the lovely Miss’…it’s what my friends call a ‘high-maintenance look’. Much of the time not only is Miss Dall tastefully made-up, with tastefully coiffed hair, but also with a theatrical gown. And while her guitar playing seems error-free, it’s pretty simple stuff…and even after the many shows she’s played with Smog, she still seems nervous but self-confident, on the one hand hiding behind her stage persona, on the other not quite sure where the persona ends…This is fascinating stuff for me.” Dall, sadly, died way too young. I really enjoyed her in Bill Callahan’s band, and there’s a great 1995 show available to watch right here if you’re interested.
All fanzines are time capsules in their way, of course, yet Escargot #1 especially marks a moment in time that was unique, refreshing and exciting for those caught up in it all. You can feel the promise of the Internet as a place where oddballs and obsessives are already starting to find each other, an algorithm-free, advertising-free, VC-money-free, bottoms-up collective of misfits who are straddling the world of print fanzines on one hand and an undefined, exploding digital realm on the other. It’s one of the more interesting fanzines I’ve ever come across.
Though we’ve barely met, I’ve been somewhat connected with Eddie Flowers, the founder and editor of Vulcher fanzine, for going on 35 years now. I spent huge portions of the years 1985-89 routinely driving two hours from Santa Barbara to see live shows in Los Angeles, during that grim era when LA music was still mostly ruled by jean jacket cowboys and bullet belt bullshit. My patron saints in those years were the Lazy Cowgirls, and I loved everything and anything in their orbit. That very much included Eddie Flowers’ band Crawlspace, who started life as a high-energy, MC5-adjacent compliment to the Cowgirls – as you can hear on the 1988 Gimme The Keys!! Trigon Records comp that featured Crawlspace, Claw Hammer and many of the other bands I/we then considered part & parcel of the Cowgirls’ hallowed, hard-driving cadre.
I remember “chatting” with Ed and the Lazy Cowgirls’ Keith Telligman in Isla Vista, CA – the student ghetto adjacent to UC-Santa Barbara – during an all-day Trigon Records fest at AnisQ’oyo’ Park while the two of the them were totally tripping their brains out on LSD. A short conversation! Later, Flowers would self-publish a tiny ‘zine in the late 1990s called Slippy Town Times, and he’d routinely send them all my way, and sadly, I lost every one of them in the great fanzine disaster of 1999. The previous year, I’d published the eighth and final issue of my own 90s fanzine called Superdope, and I’ll never forget how Flowers responded to my “Forty-Five 45s That Moved Heaven and Earth” piece with an absolutely frothing electronic mail pointing out ALL the amazing 45s I’d missed in my personal list of the greatest 45s of all time.
Frankly, if I’d never met the guy, I’d still know he was one of the good guys by his general tone, tenor and track record. Now you also might know him as the fella from all-timer 1970s Indiana punk band The Gizmos, and you’d be right about that. But we’re here today to talk about his Vulcher fanzine, and specifically Vulcher #4 from Summer 2018, which I chose randomly from the five issues that were published during the back half of the last decade, up through 2019. It boasts an incredible roll call of contributors and friends, including Byron Coley, Todd Novak, Alexa Pantalone, Eric Friedl, Bruce Cole, Tim Hinely and a couple dozen others. Vulcher was akin during its brief run to a free-form Ugly Things mixed with the haphazard contributions in Bull Tongue Review, with no real concern for whether music covered therein is from the 50s, 60s, 70s or 2018.
Flowers and his crew are excellent at staying current with the spaced-out, free youth making music around the planet. He’s super supportive of young bands he meets along with way such as Rays, who were probably my favorite band around this time. I also like that he does the thing that I tried to always do in my mags, which is throw a random record review into any available spare space, rather than actually try to adjust layout and photos to make it all look professional. Too hard. I truly know the feeling.
Vulture #4 includes some real ringers. There’s a great Richard Lloyd (Television) interview by Kelsey Simpson, a woman who is a major contributor here and in other issues, probably because she’s actually Vulcher’s co-editor. Rich Coffee – once himself a Gizmo with Flowers – interviews Michael Rummens of The Sloths, and later The Hollywood Stars. You know “Makin’ Love” by The Sloths, right? Right?? Jay Dobis writes an open letter to Sean L. Maloney, who wrote the 33⅓ edition on The Modern Lovers (a top ten gem for me). It’s chock full of “wrong!!!” corrections, the sort of totally obsessed navel-gazing esoterica that I live for.
I really dig the Screamin’ Mee-Mees photos and essay by Flowers. Eddie understands their genius as too few others did. There’s also a Flowers thing on strange CD label Eastern Prawn, one of whose bands were Celebrity Handshake, a band who at their best are absolutely fucked rocknroll of the highest caliber, and who fit neatly into the man’s improvisational, ultra-raw, drug-friendly worldview quite well. Finally, and perhaps a little strangely, Chris Sienko contributes a long history of Crawlspace circa 1985-97, including a picture taken from LA’s Anti-Club where I saw them play in their early days. Hey, who cropped me out of the photo?
I can’t find any issues of Vulcher for sale online at the current moment, which is a true shame because, I mean, these just came out five minutes ago in the relative timeline that this website covers. Flowers is still just in his late sixties, so if he’s got the gumption to get another printed endeavor off the ground, there’s still time and I’d be all over it.
I’ve noticed a trend over the course of the past few months with small-press books or collections I’ve purchased on Amazon. The final page will say “Made in the USA, Las Vegas NV” and then provide the date it was printed. In every case, this is the date I ordered it. It happened with a paperback of Charles Willeford’s Pick-Up, which was riddled with spelling errors. It happened with a book by Patrick Cooper about Elaine May’s 1976 film Mikey and Nicky, which I have yet to read. And it happened with this fanzine reprint of Pissed + Broke #4, put out in Bournemouth, England by Jon Lange in Spring 1980.
I get what’s going on here now. This must be Amazon’s print-on-demand offering “Kindle Direct Publishing”, and there’s a lot to recommend it. This could be how the Fanzine Hemorrhage book or my novel I haven’t written eventually sees the light of day, you know what I mean? And at least there’s no spelling errors in Pissed + Broke #4 beyond what young Lange bobbled himself in the original edition. There’s a sort of a modern “wrapper” around this one in which Lange explains his thinking and offers apologies for same, both in an introduction and in an appendix with endnotes. Chris D. did this in his Writing For Slash book as well. There’s not much reason for apologies; much of the endnotes is devoted to dissecting his interview with Adam Ant of the Dirk Wears White Sox-era Adam and the Ants, mostly to pile on Adam, who’d become one of the biggest stars in the UK about a year after this.
He talks to Gene October of Chelsea, another guy I’ve always reckoned to be a blithering idiot and a quote-unquote “bad person” after reading about his behavior toward the Black Flag guys on their UK tour in this Rollins essay. (I’m not sure if this Rollins follow-up tale is actually true, but I hope it is). Lange was also a massive Crass fan, and goes deep on Stations of the Crass. It was just after this time that I started buying my first issues of the UK music papers and Crass were a major topic of conversation, particularly in Sounds. Their confrontational political stance and extreme DIY ethos was highly perplexing and/or fascinating to the powers that be, both institutionally and journalistically. I’d say shame about their music, but I’ll listen to a little Crass every now and again.
Anyway, I’m all for unearthing old fanzines and republishing them via Kindle Direct Publishing or whatever it takes to bring them to the people. Lange has got another issue of his 80s fanzine up there as well if you’re interested.
Mouth of the Rat was a free South Florida music newspaper, similar in concept at least to the far inferior free BAM or even The Rocket papers of my youth and twenties, except entirely punk-centric, unbeholden to major labels, and far more in line with Slash or NY Rocker. Dave Parsons not only edited and wrote most of the paper, he hand-lettered it, which yeah, it’s been done in a few places, but I’d never seen it as extensively and hand-crampingly executed as it is here until Galactic Zoo Dossier came along. (Lindsay Hutton did do it pretty well himself in Next Big Thing over many years).
I’m especially excited about the May 1980 issue, Mouth of the Rat #14, for one very, very important reason. There’s actual, in-the-moment documentation of Smegma – soon to be Sheer Smegma and then Teddy and The Frat Girls! This all-female group might be the greatest thing to have ever emerged from South Florida, and I’m definitely including navel oranges, Gloria Estefan, the Challenger space shuttle and Kreamy ‘Lectric Santa. Atonal, decadent, primitive, godlike art/punk howl from women who were clearly making it up as they want along, but who, in two brilliant songs, “I Owe It To The Girls” and “Clubnight” – created two of the all-time high-water marks of American – nay, global – culture. Because they’re so ridiculously undocumented anywhere, I’ve snapped photos (below) from Mouth of the Rat #14 so you see how Parsons was perceiving them after their very first show.
That’s really enough, but there’s more. I gathered from reading this issue that The Cichlids meant as much to Floridians at the time as, say, the Ramones did to NY several years earlier. Here’s a scan I found from an earlier Mouth of the Rat. Such was the localization of scenes at the time, where your bands were barely known by anyone outside your city, even when they’d put out 45s, but were influential and life-changing heroes within your own city limits. It was a couple of years later, but we’d talk about hardcore band The Faction the same way in San Jose, CA, and it felt like maybe no one an hour north of us in San Francisco knew who they were.
Being 1980, The Clash and Public Image Ltd. are very much on young Parsons’ mind. Aside from reports of touring around and seeing them live across the eastern US – something you had to do growing up in the southeast corner of the USA – he’s writing about every new record he’s finding or getting sent, which includes all the Posh Boy stuff coming out of LA; The Mo-Dettes; the Pop Group and Young Marble Giants, the latter of which he loves, but he knows that you won’t, punker. Eventually Parsons would move to New York City and start Ratcage records and put out the first couple of Beastie Boys releases. I had this version of their Cooky Puss 12” in high school and am glad to see it’s only selling for triple what I paid for it at the time, as opposed to the 100x I’d expected.
I have a couple issues of Bob Bert’s late 90s/early 2000s BB Gun in the files and on balance I’m glad to have them around, though its “underground sleaze” horndog aesthetic was pretty off-putting even in its day. At its worst, it was sort of a lower east-side NYC parallel to the “lad’s mags” of the era, what with its lascivious droolings over various alterna-females and the constant written bloviations of Lydia Lunch. Thankfully, BB Gun #5 from 2001 is rarely at its worst, and can be much more generously read as a “glossy entertainment yearly”, albeit one drawn from fringe sub-scenes across music, film and literature, with many if not most participants plucked from Bob Bert’s most obvious orbits (i.e. Sonic Youth, Pussy Galore and Lydia Lunch, all of whom he drummed for).
BB Gun #5’s really one of those “all in the family” affairs. Bert interviews Kim Gordon and Ikue Mori; there are Richard Kern photos and many references to the man; Nick Zedd gets to say his piece (which is unreadable); Thurston Moore helps out with a Yoshimi interview. That sort of family. Actually, and this harkens back to the Sho-Kai #1 fanzine I wrote about here, here’s Bert’s description of encountering Yoshimi’s band for the first time:
“When Pussy Galore played in Osaka, Japan in 1988, the opening act was the Boredoms. In all my years of witnessing every kind of rock-noise attacks, I was never so blown away, as I watched this raucous, barrage of kamikaze sounds snap the air in two. There were two drummers, one who (at least three times per number) would stand up on his stool and fall face first into the set and continue playing, wildly and ferociously; thunder-driven. Behind the other kit was one of the most remarkable drummers I ever heard. I had a translator-friend next to me, who taught me how to say, ‘Yoshimi, will you marry me?’. I yelled it after every song!”
Cute!! I wish The Boredoms had performed that falling-into-the-drums trick when I saw them. Richard Hell isinterviewed by Bert, and Hell is already defensive at the fannish questions being asked at the start of the interview: “So how exhaustive is this gonna be?”. Well, it ends up being really exhaustive and extremely interesting, so journalistically I’m glad Bert stuck to his guns. Bert also gets a big piece in on Nancy Sinatra, who was in a sort of comeback phase around that time, if you’ll recall, as well as an interview with cover star Cynthia Plaster Caster, who’s just come off of casting the engorged member of longtime Fanzine Hemorrhage hero “Danny Doll Rod”.
Evelyn McDonnell, who used to be the lead rock writer at my local free alt-paper SF Weekly during the years when I read those things cover-to-cover, has a good interview with Ari Up of The Slits in BB Gun #5. Ms. Up has lived a life, shall we say. Lunch is awarded with the literature beat, and she interviews Jerry Stahl, the sort of barely-readable “transgressive” writer you’d expect her to admire. She also talks to Hubert Selby Jr., who apparently “stomped a new asshole in the face of literature”. One of the other main editors here is Jack Sargeant, and he talks to both Mary Woronov (!) and to Bleddyn Butcher, a photographer whom I always get mixed up with the woman in My Bloody Valentine.
There’s plenty of other things to mention in what’s nearly a 100-page tome. There’s an utterly insufferable “Beatles/Stones Dialectic in Music” by Ian Svenonius, a piece that makes Nick Zedd’s look like Percy Blythe Shelley. Bert’s really into a fetching underground actress named Misty Mundae, who acts in some guy named William Hellfire’s low budget exploitation films, and it all reminds me of the Film Threat era which has passed us by. And while I can’t fault Bert for falling for the JT LeRoy swindle, it’s still pretty funny to read “if he keeps it up into his twenties he could be the next Burroughs or Shelby Jr.”. We could’ve only hoped!
I was so charmed by my purchase of punksploitation mag Punk Rock #2 earlier in the year (wrote about it here) that I found it highly important to track down the first issue from December 1977 as well. And you know what? This one surprisingly doesn’t have quite the over-the-top “-sploitation” quotient of its descendant, reading instead like a frothy, punk-centric issue of Rock Scene from around the same time.
There are loads of photos and 66 pages of features, mostly centered on NY but really with a transatlantic ear to the ground. Sex Pistols, Blondie, Stranglers, Devo, Dead Boys, Iggy Pop, Deaf School (“a pick to click”) and Television interviews, photo spreads, treatises or all three. But where the rubber meets the proverbial road for me in this one is in the really well-done piece on DMZ, whom you kinda forget sometimes were blowing minds across Boston starting in 1976. What a fantastic band those first two years. Marie Cosentino’s feature is an interview with JJ Rassler of the band, and Robert Post’s photos show what a wild, unhinged powerhouse they must have been on a Friday night at The Rat. There’s also a “Hot Pix from The Rat” section, as it turns out, with crazed Post-taken pictures of new wavers The Cars, Nervous Eaters, Third Rail, Willie “Loco” Alexander and total heshers Thundertrain!
Rassler, in the DMZ interview, wants to dodge virtually all of the questions about punk and whether they’re a part of it, a stance that’s almost uniform across the interviews with Tom Verlaine, Patti Smith and others. Everyone’s excited that something new is happening, and everyone insists that they alone stand somewhat removed from it all. We’re so early in the game at this point that punk rock vs. new wave questions haven’t cropped up yet. Iggy Pop so successfully dodges these sorts of questions that his interview is almost like a piece of dada, a weird back-and-forth with interviewer Hannah G. Spitzer, who’s clearly making her questions up on the spot and is having loads of fun trying to bait Iggy to say something controversial.
Donna Santisi gets a full “punk rock from L.A.” photo spread in the back, and she was a hell of a photographer. Terrific snap of Chip Kinman wearing a hammer & sickle shirt that’s captioned “This is the lead guitarist from Dil”. There are Screamers, Shock, Weirdos, The Pop and Backstage Pass pics as well. Inject it in my veins.
I’m all-in on the punksploitation mags like this and New Wave Rock. Stay with us as I attempt to find the final Punk Rock #3 at a price I can afford, when we shall thenceforth discuss it in these quarters.
Sense of Purpose #2 came out in 1984 and was pulled together by a guy named Dave Sprague in New York City. I was just trying to figure out how I knew the name Dave Sprague from the 90s. Perhaps we were correspondents? We might’ve been. I didn’t save all my scented letters in a shoebox. I then remembered that he used to write for Your Flesh, and moreover, that I even used to readYour Flesh. But this fella honed his chops in his own self-defined corner of the underground music universe, with Sense of Purpose truly ignoring huge portions of what music fanzines were going on about at the time in favor of a curated garage, psych and rooted Americana angle, minus the jangle and the college rock endemic to fanzines like The Bob or Jet Lag.
In fact Sprague puts his critical ducks in a row right off the bat, with an opening editorial about how awful Psychic TV were live. Leaving aside the question of why he was in attendance, this essay expands into a treatise against the sort of then-fashionable juvenilia that tried to make hay out of surgical training films; that turned anything sexual into something potentially violent and ugly; that made fun of crippled children and so forth. The Meatmen, for instance, or some of the grade-z material that Forced Exposure somehow thought worthy of publication.
There’s a section of letters to the editor (including one from Mr. Ott from White Boy!) that has one correspondent taking him to severe task for liking the Green on Red LP on Slash in his first issue. Gravity Talks? Decent record! Clearly the LA so-called paisley underground was big in Sprague’s mind at the time; he’s got a tape of the Dream Syndicate’s forthcoming second album The Medicine Show and he’s truly flipping out over it. I share – and shared at the time – many folks’ reservations with the thing, but nearly forty years of perspective still have me pretty bullish on the record, despite the enveloping spectre of major-label, let’s-get-big-on-alterna-radio gloss on that and so many other second albums from 1984-1985.
We talked about Living Eye fanzine just a few days ago; Sprague is also keeping tabs on the NYC 60s scene and a bunch of bands I really just couldn’t cotton to: The Fuzztones, The Cheepskates, Mod Fun, The Vipers, Outta Place etc. Then, after listing and dissecting these heavyweights, there’s another short column on brand-new garage bands: Alter Boys, Raunch Hands, Tryfles, Swampgoblins,and House Pets. There is some bountiful and deserved enthusiasm in the reviews section for the new Australian sixties feedback/sleaze heroes the Lime Spiders, whom I discovered on San Jose’s KSJS radio that same year. When I hauled my nervous 17-year-old self to college in Santa Barbara the following year, and wanted to impress my older cousin who was DJ-ing a Cramps/fuzz/punk-laden show on KCSB, I called in to request that band’s “Slave Girl”, which he hadn’t yet heard. It was a 1985 “life highlight” when he breathlessly came on the air right after the song and said, “Jay you are HOT!”. I desperately wanted and needed that sort of cred in my life at the time, and music obsession would be my path forward.
Another thing I really enjoy about Sense of Purpose #2 is its intense focus on the Cleveland underground of the present and recent past. There’s big love for Cleveland’s Easter Monkeys from Christopher Stigliano, and he also provides the full Andrew Klimek story (X__X and others). His Cleveland enthusiasms duly infected Sprague, who then contributed a piece on Red Dark Sweet, probably the only one I’ve ever seen anywhere….? This was a NY-by-way-of-Cleveland duo of Charlotte Pressler and Andrew Klimek; they call themselves “free rock”, and you absolutely need to listen to their “Oh! Carol” here if you haven’t heard it.
There are interviews with Salem 66 and the Trypes as well, the latter of which includes a history lesson on The Feelies and common member Glenn Mercer. Finally, in what is always an entertaining and confounding chat with Jonathan Richman, we find in 1984 that Jonathan is clearly going through an intense environmentalist phase. “Farming is important, especially on a small scale like the gardens in the East Village. I also don’t like flush toilets. I avoid them whenever I can”. Definitely this was a fanzine a cut well above the median read at the time, as well as a fascinating look at how good music taste can concentrate into some really interesting Venn diagrams at different points in history.
I always felt kinda sorry for the city of San Diego during the 1980s. Despite the fact that over 1.7 million people resided in the San Diego metro area in 1980, and despite the area itself being an earthly paradise, the city’s underground music scene was duller than dishwater. Not even 90 minutes north lay Orange County and just over two hours away was Hollywood, and yet with LA and OC concurrently thriving with one of the greatest underground rock scenes of all time, the best San Diego could come up with was, what – Battalion of Saints? And in the-mid 80s, The Morlocks and Crawdaddys?
When I’d talk to music-obsessed folks from SD at the time, they’d tell me about their shitty music clubs and how biker gangs would regularly fight at X shows, as well as how their weekends were usually spent in cars driving to LA for shows by necessity. It was gratifying when the 90s rolled around and the city truly got “a scene of one’s own” and dozens of strange and oddly complementary local underground bands. Those who participated in it – such as my now-wife – say that it was truly a blast. But before that, to me it was the land of shitty hardcore and the embarrassingly juvenile (if highly complex and time-consuming) “macabre” art of “Mad Marc Rude”. So I concentrated my San Diego vibes on the fish tacos and the sunshine instead.
Mad Marc was otherwise known as Mark Hoffman, and his bizarre, nonsensical editorial in May 1980’s Away From The Numbers #1 illustrates the vapidity of adolescence and the scene he and his peers were trying to will into life. To their credit, while what’s going on in LA colors so much of what’s covered here, they’re trying very hard to make a figuratively clean cut at the border of Orange and San Diego counties, and editor Pete Verbrugge comes off admirably for trying. “The object of Away From The Numbers is to shed light on San Diego’s new wave scene by bringing to attention events, people and places that we feel haven’t received adequate coverage.” Like The Jam playing in LA? Sure! “There are obstacles, of course, like the SDPD”. Fuckin’ cops. They hate us, we hate them, right?
I do like the coverage of local thrift shops by “Jolie” – man, one thing I do remember about early 90s visits to San Diego was stuff like that: stopped-in-time thrift stores and old movie theaters and bookstores that looked like no one had walked in since 1974. Verbrugge’s “show of the month” took place on March 29th, 1980 and was a bill of The Alleycats, the Go-Gos and a local group called Mature Adults. Mature was perhaps the antithesis of our editor’s physical reaction to the Go-Gos: “It took the Gogos all of three minutes to win the crowd over, about the same time it took me to come all down my pants”. Whew; I know I’ve seen some really outtasite shows in my life but thankfully that hasn’t happened yet.
The Cramps are due to come play the North Park LIons Club in May, and I do hope that they made it, because Away From The Numbers #1, specifically reviewer Russ Toppman, is buzzing about the band, as well as should have been. Songs The Lord Taught Us has just come out and he’s floored, as I would eventually be when I’d hear it a couple of years later. I also like the back-page advertisement for a two-location local record store called Arcade Music Company, where all records and tapes are $2.49 (can you imagine?) and that there’s a “New Wave section coming in May”. A new wave section! Man, I used to love the new wave sections at my local mainstream chain record stores. At Record Factory in San Jose it was called “Modern Music”, and I’d go in there and ogle the same 17 or so unsold records every time, until I finally discovered Tower Records in Campbell, which had everything, and even domestic underground records were filed away as “Imports”. Away From The Numbers #1 is a strong time capsule of that era, and it’s a fanzine that’s highly fetching in a historical and sociological sense, while perhaps not quite as an informed curation of sub-underground SoCal circa 1980.
As much as I’ve been a fan of 60s punk and archival garage raunch for so long, I’d have to admit that my “fanzine game” in these areas has been pretty weak overall over the years. Sure, we’ve talked about Brown Paper Sack, Not Fade Away, Ugly Things and Who Put The Bomp! in these pages before, but I kinda feel like this whole group of obsessive/compulsive 60s garage punk maniacs emerged at once in the early 1980s, and I have to feel like they left some other good small-batch fanzines behind them. Right? Well Ken Aronds from New Jersey did, and the lone copy I’ve ever seen of his is the sole one that own, Living Eye #4 from 1982.
And look, I’m not talking about NY goofballs who ogled the Fuzztones or the Fleshtones or whomever. I mean those rubbing elbows with Tim Warren or Mike Mariconda, and who were sincerely crate-digging for 40-cent gems at Venus Records and Midnight Records, not dressing up like dipshits. Aronds and his pals seem to have been the former type. Doing this in 1982 is pretty ahead of the curve for sure, but Aronds casts a jealous set of loins toward Los Angeles, who “have the best neo-60s scene”, which was almost certainly true. “The scene here in the big city is followed almost entirely by guys, which is kind of depressing”. Amen, brother. If I could have been rubbing shoulders with Susanna Hoffs around this time, I’d have been all-in myself. “How come there aren’t any girls on hand trying to look like Marianne Faithfull or Edie Segewick or Raquel Welch or Nancy Sinatra???”. How come indeed, New York???
Living Eye #4 takes the various micro-genres that make up what I guess we’ll call “underground oldies” and provide them with their own review columns. For instance, there’s a surf 45s review column and a rockabilly reviews column by one Tina Valentine, then a girl groups column – all 60s stuff. Aronds has his own column of 60s punk and psych records, then there’s another by Dave Baldwin with more of them, mostly total obscurities. Again, I’m not getting the sense that these were high-spending collectors in the Tim Warren sense, but rather accumulators of anything raw, high-energy and fun that they could afford. The column authors stitch together whatever information’s on a no-PS record’s label with whatever arcana they already know about that scene (“Is this from San Jose? I think this is from San Jose. Did they go to school with the Count Five?” etc).
Aronds lands what I’m sure for him was quite a coup, an essay by Greg Shaw, “Why Collect Old Records?”. It’s a paean to the 1960s and a justification for burying oneself into spending money on records from it. There’s a rockabilly revival underway again (this every-three-years cycle seems to have completely died in the 21st century), so Wanda Jackson gets a reverent feature. Aronds also provides a feature on Ann-Margret, yet with a mere single photo of Ann tucked in the back. Clearly the man wasn’t yet able to shamelessly pilfer from the internet the way I do.
Right there in New York City keeping the flag flying in 1982 were cover stars The Zantees, with Miriam Linna and Billy Miller. Kicks, their fanzine which I’ll cover in these parts shortly, is talked about in the past tense. Maybe my favorite underground-fanzine thing about Living Eye #4 is how loads of pieces will start on one page and continue on another, including my favorite no-count fanzine move, in which a piece starts on Page 26 and is then “continued on pg. 23”, earlier in the magazine a few pages back. It’s a truly fumble-fingered, backed-into-a-corner layout choice that even I haven’t erred into yet, and I’m terrible at this stuff. I’d love to see the other Living Eyes, if anyone out there perhaps knows where I might see them…?
In my 20s I was very magnetically drawn to those who were undeniably smarter, funnier and more interesting than I was. Through the use of common bonding agents such as alcohol and underground music talk (areas in which I could hold my own, if nowhere else), on occasion I found myself holding court with one of these bon vivants, a guy named Brandan Kearney. I’d initially come to admire this gentleman through his band World of Pooh during the years 1989-90; he would come to do time in Caroliner, The Steeple Snakes, Faxed Head, the Heavenly Ten Stems, The Three Doctors Band and the Totem Pole of Losers in the 80s and early 90s, and then others besides. He ran a San Francisco label called Nuf Sed that put much of this out.
A couple methods to get a better handle on this world would be to read Will York’s Who Cares Anyway – Post-Punk San Francisco and the End of the Analog Age book, and/or to read the oral history of World of Pooh that I assembled in Dynamite Hemorrhage #3 fanzine, which you can download a PDF of right here. Aside from the boner where I bumbled and called Kearney WoP’s bassist, I’m proud of how it turned out. As Kearney was immersed in and helping to drive San Francisco’s absurdist early 90s parallel world sub-underground culture, he furthered his contribution with a two-issue run of a small fanzine called Nothing Doing. Nothing Doing #1 came out in Spring 1994, and it wasn’t really a music fanzine at all, because any and all music discussed within it did not exist except in Kearney’s unique and wacked vision, informed as it was by weird religious tracts, thrift store records, conspiracy theories, the Chinese Communist Party and an extreme and ahead-of-its-time notion of anti-comedy.
Its purpose was clearly to subvert, for lack of a better term, the notion of the fanzine. Since music fanzines were ubiquitous and often uniform in 1994, Nothing Doing #1 stood out, shall we say, to the extent that it was seen by anyone. There’s a table of contents with zero connection to the contents herein. The demo tape review section features music by acts like no (fucking) name and Whirling Petals, the latter of whom’s tape Embroidery and Crucifixion is reviewed thusly: “Within two minutes of pressing ‘play’ I felt like I was dying of encephalitis. I mean that in the best possible sense, and with all due credit to Oliver Eustace, the Petals’ morbidly obese lead singer – an utterly deluded fop whose muse seems to be having a little joke at his expense….Certainly no one else is washing hogs like this, at least not while accompanied by a chorus-drenched mandolin, a piccolo and a triangle”.
There’s a further section of reviews of recordings from “The China Record Company”, whose albums include We Steel Workers Have an Iron Will and Poor and Lower-Middle Class Peasants Love Chairman Mao Most. If I ever looked for these in thrift stores, I never found them. A representative proxy for the remainder of Nothing Doing #1 might be the “cartoons” section, which I’ve helpfully scanned for you here. Laugh it up, and I’ll get down to tackling this mag’s second issue here within the next 365 days.
This March 1978 issue of Seattle’s Twisted is almost certainly one of the twenty titles I’d bravely save from a fire, were I to only save twenty. The three issues of Twisted ran from June 1977 until this one, and someday, inshallah, I’ll find a way to procure the other two. While it has neither the writing chops of Slash nor the NY Rocker at this time, Twisted #3 is omnivorously devoted to uncovering the excitement of global punk wherever it leads them, no matter how far underground it takes them, and no matter how many miles they need to drive to, say, San Francisco for the Sex Pistols/Avengers/Nuns show to get the story.
There are over a dozen contributors, both writers and photographers. It starts off with a revelatory bang by a writer taken by friends while in NY to an early Cramps show at CBGB – mind totally blown. This is followed by a little local coverage of The Mentors, I’m afraid to say, who are called “the disembowelment of rock ‘n roll”. Early songs like “Secretary Hump” were already nice and worked out even here in early ‘78, and we’re blessed with lyrics for this and other fine songs like “Macho Package” and “Can’t Get It Up”. The disgusting picture of El Duce is thankfully followed up with one of lovely Jennifer from The Nuns, along with an interview w/ Richie Dietrick from her band, a total NYC born-and-bred, attitude-drenched goombah who was already an out gay man by this time. Pretty bold move in ‘78, and I’ve gone my whole punk-lovin’ life not knowing that.
As the eyes of the world zeroed in on punk rock, Twisted #3 was getting nervous. There’s a punk vs. “New Wave” semantics essay, and in the mag’s gossip column it is reported that “MISCARRIAGE in Boston reports that the city is being inflicted with a strange illness, ‘new wave virus’, which all the punks have….”. Meanwhile, there’s much love for The Avengers and Penelope, who’d recently moved from Seattle to SF to go to art school and then formed her band there. “Record contract rumors are flying like crazy – Sire being the head of the list”. Is this sorta like when Penelope was scouted to replace Grace Slick in Jefferson Starship?
I wasn’t particularly into the mean article about Nico and her show at the Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco. The photograph you see here was from that December 8th, 1977 performance, and it’s one of my all-time favorite rock photos. And jeez, the ads in this thing. There are ads for Screamers and Dils tours which will bring them to the Northwest, and there’s a great one for Slash magazine itself. Twisted #3 are very excited about the debut Black Randy and the Metrosquad 45 “Trouble at the Cup”, and give the man a two-page celebratory spread just to rejoice about it.
As we discussed a bit when I reviewed Chatterbox #4, the local Seattle punk scene really got roaring quite a bit earlier than I’d previously comprehended. I mean this was Seattle – now a metropolis, but then with less than 500,000 people (and post-Boeing, falling) and in the corner of nowhere. Or so I thought. There’s a centerfold-esque photo of the early Lewd; an interview with The Snots and some Midwest transplants called The Invaders whom I’ve never heard of. In addition to a Portland scene report (with three other bands I’ve never heard of). Lydia Lunch of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks gets to be nihilistic; there some blather about The Clash; and a Generation X interview, a band that for me proved the maxim that any punk residing in the upper 20% of physical good looks will always gain disproportionate attention irrespective of talent. Until they don’t.
What a strange, creative and insularly self-driven fanzine Unsound was. We talked about issue #1 of this one here earlier in the year; I’m now going to attempt to render several paragraphs about Unsound #4, published in San Francisco during the first half of 1984. Little thought was given to economizing the page count in this issue, so you get a really crazed (but readable) mess of font types and sizes, short pieces about nothing whatsoever, longer pieces about not much in particular; and then more-or-less standard record reviews and interviews, mostly centering around a nexus of industrial, experimental, avant-garde and just generally oppositional musicians, musical offshoots, writers and artists.
This is how Zoogz Rift and his “Amazing Shitheads” come to bring his “odd, abrasive” free-form dada music to the Unsound party, just by being as oppositional as the First Amendment and the outer limits of taste might allow, all the while complaining (tongue planted firmly in cheek, I’d imagine) that he’s “being boycotted by the music industry”. Sonic Youth, fresh off their first visit to Europe and the release of Confusion Is Sex also have an interview here, 100% Thurston Moore representing, and right in that window where those of us hearing the band for the first time thought of them as something vaguely (if mildly) dangerous and transgressive. Remember, this is a time where “this music” wasn’t really even on college radio and the records themselves were often poorly distributed. All details were transmitted via fanzines.
I’d see blurry B&W photos of wild people like Michael Gira, Sonic Youth with guitars locked and hair long, even the relatively more popular Einstürzende Neubauten etc. and it was all pretty nuts and a little too much for a suburban high schooler. However, much more daring high schoolers like Jo Smitty and Mark Arm were living it in their suburban Seattle band Mr. Epp, referred to here in a bizarre post-mortem piece (“A self explanation”) entirely written by the band themselves. Four years later I’d see boogie-rockers Sonic Youth and Arm’s Mudhoney sharing a stage at San Francisco’s Fillmore. I’m going to bet Unsound editor William Davenport stayed home.
Then again, who really knows? It’s sort of funny combing through the record reviews of this one, which mixes up stuff like The Haters and deep-underground, edition-of-5 noise tapes with whatever records awful hardcore labels like Mystic Records were sending Unsound. Davenport, Brad Laner and other writers treat it all quite magnanimously, to my surprise – even the Gay Cowboys in Bondage tape!
I’ve also just come off reading Marc Masters’ outstanding overview of cassette tape history and lore, High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape (get it!). My favorite chapter is on the 80s tape underground that was helped to flourish – all things being relative, of course – by fanzines like Op and by college radio programs helmed by freaks who’d play whatever tapes showed up at the station, no matter how homespun. This is a world that Unsound also helped to steward and cultivate, and there’s also a great piece about “Art Radio” in which people call up particular shows on the left of the dial in order to share their “audio art” with the limited audience brave enough to tune in. I barely recorded my own doofus 1980s college radio shows, and it kills me that so much amazing and daring cultural weirdness on the airwaves was barely heard once, and will unquestionably never be heard again.
Finally, there’s what looks to be a mail interview with a 26-year-old Adrian Sherwood of On-U Sound, and he’s hilariously defensive and dismissive of many things surrounding “reggae” and the mainstream. It’s a hoot. Unsound #4 itself is too, mostly for all the right reasons.
Part of what I remember the best about doing a fanzine in the early 1990s was how rapidly it put me in contact with all sorts of weirdos running labels, in bands and doing their own fanzines. It was a bit of a whirlwind for an introvert. I took advertisements in Superdope, the mag I was doing from 1991-98, in order to help fund the thing. That helped me “meet” folks like David Hopkins from Public Bath Records, a Madison, WI-based label that was carving out a totally niche play as a US-based imprint that only put out deeply underground music from Japan, and from nowhere else. The Japan Bashing series of comp 45s in particular was quite enjoyable, though that whole Japanese underground, though ubiquitous in the sorts of fanzines I was inhaling in 1990-92, ended up being quite ephemeral in the broader sense of having staying power in hearts and minds lasting beyond that brief era.
Show-Kai #1 from 1991 was Hopkins’ solo, one-and-done fanzine, with a Public Bath stamp on the cover and a written approach wholly dedicated to exposing the deepest crevices of Japanese outsider noise, no wave, punk and psychedelic rock. Clearly, Hopkins was a guy who had just come off living in Japan and who’d drunk deeply from underground well whilst there, making friends with Eye Yamatsuka and many other musical misfits along the way. As celebrated as these Japanese freaks were around this time, I personally found it hard to get truly excited about many of them, including The Boredoms. It was only when I heard the first Tokyo Flashback, reviewed here, and especially when Larry Hardy told me about and then played meHigh Rise II a year later, that I latched on to any of it, and even then just the PSF stuff and maybe Ruins a little bit, whom I once saw in San Francisco at a club called “Morty’s”.
In fact, until reading this I’d forgotten I’d seen the all-female Sekiri (“Dysentery”) in SF around this time, and I couldn’t have cared less about Shonen Knife, the 5-6-7-8s and what have you. But lord, this fanzine brings back to memory so, so many bands from the late 80s and early 90s, from KK Null to UFO or Die to Omoide Hatoba to Masonna to the legendary Hanatarashi, featuring the aforementioned Eye Yamatsuka. Eye was in a greatmany bands around this time. The Japanese underground was truly a microculture with some absolutely rabid adherents around the world, and reading Show-Kai #1 you get the sense that we barely scratched the surface getting this music to the people then, and that it has nearly vanished from the historical record now – at least in Western media.
Hopkins reviews a new Boredoms tape called Boretronix 3 that’s just come out: “I guess your chances of ever hearing this are pretty slim, and that’s really too bad. This is one of those cassette things that Eye releases whenever they need a little pocket money. He makes a hundred, walks around to about five record stores and goes home with the cash. Side one is clearly not The Boredoms. It sounds like Eye screwing around with Boredoms tapes and other found/sampled stuff”. Hopkins clearly didn’t anticipate the internet, and the fact that you can now listen to this on your cellular telephone right here.
Show-Kai #1 has a highly admirable who-gives-a-fuck layout style, decorated as it is in the margins with xeroxed Japanese baseball cards, kanji script and photos of toys. Like the Damp #3 fanzine from roughly the same era, the primitive font used here is the one I like to generously call “DOS command line”. Eye Yamatsuka contributes a bonkers nonsense comic where you’re supposed to arrange the panels to make sense to you. Yet you’d never accuse Show-Kai #1 of being bereft of content, no sir – there’s a History of no wave in the Kansai region of Japan, where Osaka is located, from 1984-89. Aunt Sally and Ultrabide are the names I know from this time; you may be more familiar with the many other players mentioned. There are also interviews with modern acts: Chu from Dub Squad, Omiya Ichi from Daihakase, Yamamoto Seiichi from UFO or Die, and with the bands Goonzees, The Folk Tales, and Soap-jo Henshi. All your favorites!
This is rounded out nicely with a July 1990 Boredoms interview, in which they insult each other, talk about their legendary show opening for Pussy Galore in Osaka (which I’ve seen referenced elsewhere, maybe in the new Thurston Moore book?), and in which there are multiple pictures of them all bowling together.
And, as I just found out, you can secure a digital download of Show-Kai #1 here, as long as you have￥100 in your Paypal account. That’s somewhere between fifty cents and $273 in real ‘Merican money, I’m not entirely sure.
I’ve griped before – and have seen others griping – about how the back half of the 1990s (specifically 1996-99) was a musical low period marked by a dearth of exciting, ground-breaking new music, rocknroll or otherwise. Low periods are nothing uncommon, obviously; there would be no high periods without them. It’s certainly all in the eye of the beholder, naturally. I was in grad school during these times, and my record collecting necessarily fell off a cliff due to lack of funds and time. I got married; I moved to Seattle and back; and yeah, I was still listening to music like a fiend, but found myself shuffling into a comfortable if limiting corner of my own making: either garage punk, solo guitar (my John Fahey discovery & appreciation totally soared during this time) or old pre-WWII blues and country, of which there was much to discover. This corner was almost entirely analog in nature.
So just as Jeremy Rotsztain was publishing Frequency #1 in Summer 1997 and having the time of his life with new electronics-driven space rock and the whole Kranky/Drag City Chicago funhouse that was surging during these years, I was busy ignoring most of it. He might tell you the late 90s were the glory years. Honestly, I really only overlapped with Rotsztain and the Ontario-based Frequency crew at the time on Stereolab and Roy Montgomery, two acts I hold close to my bosom to this day. But Jessamine, Trans Am, Rachel’s, Silver Jews? Barely knew ‘em; and when easy streaming later allowed me to plumb their catalogs, I found this world wasn’t particularly to my liking in any case. Such are the vagaries of taste.
Picked up a used copy of Frequency #1 at a local record store recently and used it to try and sway me into their Moog-centric world. Best piece in here is an interview with Simeon from Silver Apples. I’d forgotten about how they’d “reformed” during this time; the Silver Apples Discogs shows many releases during these years. It’s all coming back to me; the kids were going nuts about their crazy 1960s oscillator sounds right as the internet and message boards were getting started, yet I’d only heard that 60s stuff (Silver Apples and Contact) and was still a few years away from appreciating even that. Can anyone give an honest endorsement of any of that 90s stuff? If so, which one(s)? I’ll investigate accordingly.
Rotsztain was a fanzine editor who’d meticulously done his homework before each interview and came in pre-loaded with discographical and tour questions that he may or may not have already known the answers to. His talk with Jim O’Rourke is a good one as well, and O’Rourke previews a new album he’s working on – Bad Timing – a fantastic record. So it’s not all bleeps and blurbs over at Frequency! Rotsztain became an artist of some renown; you can see his work on his own website here. Meanwhile, I can’t get a read on whether his Frequency fanzine ever published again but this one here is a nice capsule to pull out when I’m ready to try and reevaluate the late 90s yet again.
It is not difficult in our current times for a San Franciscan to happen upon V. Vale, late 1970s editor of Search and Destroy fanzine, sitting in front of City Lights bookstore or at an art event of some kind, selling intact and original back issues of Search and Destroy at around $25-$30 a pop. I was fortunate to come by my copies in a different manner, and certainly not by being one of the original 100 Bay Area punks in 1977. This is when Search and Destroy #3 was published, presumably in the back half of the year, given the killer New Year’s Eve Crime/Weirdos show advertised herein.
Let’s start with the mystery of the cover of this one. I’m still not sure who this is! For years I reckoned it was someone from The Damned, but nah, none of those guys looked like this. Who is this dude? What a photo. Wait, is it Stiv Bators? Someone tell us. Search and Destroy #3 is as up-to-the-minute on the whys and wherefores of punk rock music as anything contemporaneous you’ll read anywhere; you’d think from the tone taken that it had been around and thriving for several years by this point. No one’s jaded, but neither is anyone blithering around like a weeks-old convert, pie-eyed about the Sex Pistols or what have you. The scene is raw, hot and exploding, and the coverage reflects it. Search and Destroy always defined “punk” with a pretty wide remit, so even in ‘77 The Residents are included. There’s even a super-brief Don Van Vliet interview.
The first piece is an interview with Black Randy, who does everything in his power to ensure that he’ll alienate everyone around him, telling many matter-of-fact stories from his times in jail and as a male hustler. The real deal, this guy was. Debbie Harry, long before Blondie has come near anything approaching popularity, is asked if she’s had any offers to be in movies and says, “No, only Amos Poe”. Sorry, Amos. Cliff Roman from The Weirdos attempts to turn Northern California on to In-N-Out Burger – we didn’t have them back then up here; in fact, when I went to college in Southern California eight years after this, I couldn’t get SoCal folks to keep their yaps shut about In-N-Out and Tommy’s. Perhaps the best of the interviews is with Mark Perry of Alternative TV and Sniffin Glue fanzine, already years-old before his time and with a perspective so far ahead of his gobbing, safety-pin bedecked contemporaries.
Oh, there’s a Devo interview as well. I just saw Devo’s 50-year anniversary show in San Francisco a couple weeks ago. They’re in their seventies now, and they were great. Devo in 1977 loves Germany, the country, because “they avoided the hippie 60s” and because “German cinema is the only thing happening in film, practically” – hyperbole in 1977, coming off an absolutely incredible 8-year run for American film. You often can’t see it when it’s happening right in front of you, can you? Search and Destroy #3 has a Crime centerfold (!) and reprints a bunch of lyrics by brand-new bands like X, as well as The Germs’ “Forming”. These feel like space-fillers, but I’m also wondering how anyone was able to interpret and transcribe anything Darby was muttering.
Finally, I’ll leave you with some snippets from The Dils, who got to collectively author the Los Angeles “Street Report”. They’d moved down there from San Francisco as a band at one point; I’m not positive on the timeline but I’m guessing their stay down south wasn’t taking so well:
“A big thing in LA is people telling each other to FUCK OFF, & getting involved in little, petty street skirmishes – imitating English punks they’ve seen on TV. Like the strangle-dance – it’s stupid!”
“LA likes bands gaudy and silly on the surface – we get slagged off because we have a political outlook, for being Too Serious. We get shit like “Communist Chairman Mao” and “Dils Suck” written on our cars.”
“Audiences here are totally infatuated with the Johnny Rotten star trip. They don’t realize that when he first took a suit and ripped it apart, then fastened it together with safety pins, he was SAYING SOMETHING – not that “safety pins are cute” – the clothes like the music are supposed to be a threat.”
“The BAGS are a joke band – they wear bags over their heads, nipples and kotexes all over their bodies. VENUS & THE RAZORBLADES are garbage – Kim Fowley puppetoons.”
As I said last time in my typically hackneyed and cliched manner, there’s really never been a fanzine quite like Galactic Zoo Dossier before or since. First, editor Steve Krakow has put forth his own singular, personal vision for what defines true rocknroll. That’s not unique to Krakow, of course, but for him It’s “psychedelic” in every guise and form, overlapping with all things trippy and raw. This can be psych-pop, folk, or hippie rock, or it can be grunting, Stoogely groin emanations. It’s that he illustrates and hand-draws his entire mag that just boggles the mind, and I’m using present tense here as I write about Winter 2001’s Galactic Zoo Dossier #5, because my understanding is that a new issue is currently in the works after a long layoff.
This issue is dedicated to Skip Spence, and why not? There’s not really a Spence thread running through it, except for a very agreeable piece (as in, I agree with it) by Scott Wilkinson called “The Myth of the San Francisco Sound”. He convincingly posits that there was very little continuity between the many celebrated and underground late 60s bands in my hometown, and therefore trying to make a big hullabaloo connecting the Dead, Fifty Foot Hose, Moby Grape, It’s a Beautiful Day and what have you is just silly. It was just a happening music scene with loads of tripped-out kids; otherwise just as absurd as talking about the “Los Angeles Sound” of the late 70s.
Plenty of things to really love in this one. Dieter Moebius and Michael Rother give the story on Harmonia, a record I now love but didn’t hear until a year or two ago (!), as well as other krauty things. There’s also a nice bit about horrific rock stars like Kenny Loggins or Rick Springfield that had their own “psychedelic” periods, which I take to mean a song or two that were vaguely hippie-ish (Galactic Zoo Dossier is unfortunately quite liberal with terms like “kickass” to the point of straining credulity). And staying on the kraut theme, there’s a jukebox jury where Krakow plays records for Michael Karoli and Damo Suzuki from Can. Karoli claims to have never heard Syd Barrett “knowingly” until that day. Come again now??
While Galactic Zoo Dossier #5 came out in 2001, it clearly was in the works for some time, as you might expect given its craft. There’s a scene report from the April 1998 Terrastock II in San Francisco that I missed by a few days, Kendra Smith, Alastair Galbraith, Mudhoney and even Major Stars’ most recent show in SF before the one I saw in 2019, which I’m currently claiming to have been one of the twenty greatest live shows I’ve ever seen. Krakow also writes about some Incredible Chicago shows he’s witnessed with Major Stars themselves, as well as Japan’s High Rise and Mainliner on the same night (yeah, I know they shared members). There are also small pieces on Chants R&B, Idle Race and Kaleidoscope, who are said to have been every bit as great as The Beatles, and I say that’s totally okay if someone wants to think that.
So much more, too. “German heavy rock” by Kit Moore; a surface-scraping interview with Dick Taylor of Pretty Things; a talk with dumb-dumb dopesmokers Electric Wizard, and a set of removable “Damaged Guitar Gods” trading cards. These encompass a wide range of freaks and string-benders, from Jandek to Davie Allan to Eddie Hazel to James Williamson to Pip Proud. Krakow seemingly knows everything and everybody, and now he’s 22 years older and wiser than that. Totally gearing up for that next issue if and when it arrives.
We’re back here at Fanzine Hemorrhage after a several-month break. That break was what enabled us to complete a film-focused fanzine called Film Hemorrhage #1, which has just come out and is available here. Now on with the program.
Music fanzine culture in the early 80s UK was more robust and fertile than anywhere else on the planet, I think it’s fair to say. The Story So Far #4 is highly representative of an excitable and ear-to-the-ground subculture of music freaks there, just allowing an onslaught of underground music to wash over them in 1980 and trying to document as much as possible before it drifts away. This in turn engenders new brain-jolting discoveries from the 1960s and 1970s, a particular new obsession of this fanzine, which has tribute pieces on The Raspberries and The Trashmen.
The editors were “Tim” and “Marts”, and according to the masthead, Nikki Sudden is a contributor in here somewhere. “This issue is full of yanks, which is unintentional but just turned out that way”, says one of them. If only they knew just how problematic that would sometimes feel for certain anglophilic American publications who went the other way. Key among the yanks in The Story So Far #4 are cover stars The Cramps, who really took hold of England during the early 80s and who were actually introduced to me back by English publications that I was buying in the USA (as well as by college radio). Even in 1980 we’ve got an ad in here for Lindsay Hutton’s Cramps fan club, as well as a Cramps interview and original photos from recent gigs. Lux is highly complementary of The Barracudas, a band highly visible in UK fanzines at the time but who don’t seem to me to be particularly well-remembered now.
I’m a little baffled by the letter to the editor from Vermilion Sands, a woman who became one of my retroactive 70s punk rock crushes once I saw her photo in Hardcore California a couple years after this. She’s at this point a former San Francisco punk and Search and Destroy contributor now based in England, making what sounds like some abysmal biker rock. It sounds as though she’s encouraging bands to sell out and join a major label, but she could just as well be arguing the exact opposite in her clipped, elliptical, punk rock-inspired typing. I’m really unsure, but it merited a full page in The Story So Far #4. In other news, Joan Jett has just released her first solo record and talks a bunch about the LA glitter and Rodney’s English Disco scene; Tim gives a full-page rave to the new Mo-Dettes album, and Marts tries to do the same for some new Generation X piece of vinyl, clearly his favorite bands two years ago but you can just tell the guy’s heart isn’t in it any longer.
I wonder what became of Tim and Marts seven years later. Were they nodding off at Spacemen 3 gigs? Were they pigfuckers deeply into Big Black, Killdozer and the Butthole Surfers? Did they go through an intense “jangle” interlude? Fellas, write us here at Fanzine Hemorrhage as we’d love to get to understand the cut of your 1980s jib!
I was decidedly not an indiepop kid in the late 1980s, so I’ve come to my only issue of the Charming fanzine well after its publication date. But I do know that fanzines were an essential part of the UK pop underground and that within them many a battle was fought, many a crush was nursed and many an obsessed vinyl collector was born. Years later – and I mean years later – I finally caught up to 80s English and Scottish acts like Tallulah Gosh, Fat Tulips, Pooh Sticks and so on, but I didn’t give that stuff much of a sniff back in my knuckle-dragging youth.
Charming #2 from 1988’s pretty much everything you’d want it to be, though, if that is or was a world that mattered to you. Fully cut-and-paste, with loads of wacky photos, double entendres, scene gossip, drawings and excitedly hurried reviews of bands both new and old. The editor was “Stephen Charming” (he also refers to himself as “Stephen Sexbomb Charming”, as one does), and he published out of a really small coastal town in the east of England called Dovercourt. Wikipedia says “Dovercourt is a seaside town and former civil parish, now in the parish of Harwich, in the Tendring district, in the county of Essex, England.” So now you know.
The enthusiasm and vulgarity of The Pooh Sticks is on full display here in their interview, as the (male) members of the group discuss what they’d like to do to and withClare Grogan. My Bloody Valentine are a new band, one already gathering a major reputation for “driving audience members out of the emergency exits” for their ear-bleeding set closer “You Made Me Realise” (spelling, MBV!!). I first heard them on Loveless and still enjoy that one in fits and starts, but they’d already started to become a touchstone band for many in the late 80s. Charming #2 has definitely lost whatever goodwill and admiration they had for The Smiths by this point – I can’t believe we’re talking about The Smiths for the second post in a row, or in any posts at all – and there’s a to-do made in multiple places about them selling out, cleaning up, whatever. All very nasty, too – Stephen Charming wasn’t a guy who suffered his fools gladly and while he may have enjoyed twee sounds he’s far from a shrinking violet in print, which makes for a fun read.
That’s when you can actually read the thing – jeez, am I starting to sound my age or what? 4- to 6-point fonts, man – I want to enjoy them, but I do really struggle with some of the fanzines of yesteryear, such as this one, made for US fighter pilots with 20/20 vision holding a magnifying glass. Oh, there’s a few other things, though – remember when we talked about Drunken Fish #1 fanzine and their big run-through of the Fierce Recordings label? Charming #2 does this too, in less discographical form. And the big overview in here of UK band The Primitives – I wouldn’t hear them until the 2010s, having closed my ears off nearly entirely to such music, but if you’ve ever heard a better feedback-drenched indiepop song than “Really Stupid” – listen to it right here – well, I want you to tell me about it and we’ll do a nude fistfight on hot coals over which one’s really better.
The 1984 Conflict fanzine we talked about last time makes explicit reference within its pages at just how badNY Rocker was by that year, and folks, it’s that exact era that this particular issue – NY Rocker #57 from May 1984 – resides in. And whew, it is indeed pretty bad. It’s not the voice of the NYC underground any longer, but rather an Anglophilic pseudo-music industry paper, reminding me just how rotten things were just north of the deep underground that year.
What they’re covering is mostly garbage. The execrable Girlschool, The Smiths, Eddy Grant, another feature on X (the previous two issues I wrote about had X on the cover both times, just not their sell-out “year of change” X of 1984-85); Chrissie Hynde and all manner of commercial mediocrities across the board (Robert Cray??!), in every corner of the magazine.
Patrick Albino writes in to vent about British provocateur and known Stalinist Julie Burchill having recently made her way to NY Rocker’s pages. Burchill was a bit more complex than that, politically, and eventually traveled from one pole halfway to the next, growing up enough to write this piece a couple of years ago. Editor Iman Lababedi takes the bait full-on and sounds about as much of a peace creep doofus as any Ruth Schwartz or Tim Yohannan response in that era’s MRR: “During an age that finds America’s right-wing lunacy reaching new dimensions of danger, you’re complaining about our printing a brilliant communist columnist. I know what side you’re on and it isn’t mine”.
Burchill’s column here is fantastic, actually, a wild review of various drugs and the current state of UK drug-taking. She’s said elsewhere that she had “put enough toot up my admittedly sizeable snout to stun the entire Colombian armed forces”. There’s a ton of UK/US cross-pollination going on in this issue, very reflective of the “Rock of the 80s” times when synth-pop and MTV were the centerpiece of mainstream rock writers attempting to shy away from Madonna, Springsteen, Prince, Michael Jackson etc. So it makes NY Rocker #57 feel far less of a fanzine than the previous issues I’ve discussed (here and here), and more like the new wave dreck Trouser Press was dishing out at this time, usually with worse writing. It reads at times like a non-benevolent corporate parent has taken over, yet that doesn’t appear to be the case, which is a bummer because it might explain why they took such a dive down the dumper.
Still, like Trouser Press in this era, there are moments. There’s a NY Underbelly column by Tim Sommer – he was in Even Worse! – featuring one of those rare Sonic Youth shots with Kim Gordon in glasses, along with small features on Swans, Ut and Sonic Youth. While the reviews are mostly of commercial records, the review section ends on a high note with a highly positive review of New Orleans’ Shitdogs (!). Three years later I’d see the Lazy Cowgirls play that band’s “Reborn” every single show, and have the singer of the Cowgirls relay to me personally the theretofore-unknown glory of The Shitdogs.
Thing is, for $1.95 I’d have bought this every month had it been made available to me, reservations aside. I was a junior in high school at this point – and a Smiths fan – and I would have welcomed it into my home, while recognizing even then that it was fairly weak across the board. It’s a very different music publication than the one that had Byron Coley and Don Howland writing for it a couple of years earlier. What I learned is that the magazine had “folded” in 1982, and that this and only one other issue had been part of a brief – and totally unsuccessful – revival of NY Rocker. It ended up being the final issue, and I think that was most certainly for the best.
I’ve discussed Conflict #37 and Conflict #42 on this site previously; the former was (obviously) the issue of Gerard Cosloy’s fanzine that followed the one we’re discussing today, yet it took 18 months after Conflict #36 to actually see publication, by which point Cosloy had taken the entire year of 1985 off from publishing a fanzine, and had moved from Boston to New York City. So this one, Conflict #36 from August/September 1984 was the last of the Boston issues, and was definitely included in that whopping batch of Conflicts and Matters that Jackie Ockene let me borrow over spring break 1986, and which I count as a “germinal” event in my overall musical appreciation development, such that it was.
Conflict #36 begins with something truly incongruous and unusual: what appears to be a heartfelt apology to folks like Mike Gitter and Billy Ruane and Al Quint whom he’d spent much mirth and merrimaking mocking in previous issues, the ones Jackie let me borrow. Mostly these folks were Boston-area publishers who wrote about punk & hardcore, and wrote about it poorly, as I gathered. Whatever happened in issue #35, I don’t know, but there are multiple letters printed in this one calling Cosloy out for being an asshole/jerk/too critical etc. It either had finally hit home, or this young man was being incredibly facetious in his apology; in any case, I have most issues of Conflict after this one, and sensitive and magnanimous they are most certainly not. So it didn’t hold for long – not even past page one in this one, to be honest.
What’s different about this issue from the ones that followed, aside from centering on Boston scene jibber-jabber and mock controversies rather than NYC, is its general girth. There are an obscene amount of reviews in here, everything under the 1984 sun that lived at the underground crossroads of hardcore, goth, college rock and nascent pigfuck. That could be X or R.E.M, Siouxsie and the Banshees or New Order, or Fang and the Sluglords and Flipper and Gang Green. Or Circle X or Sonic Youth or Live Skull. Interesting times, my friends.
Patrick Amory, whom we last visited in these pages when we talked about his Too Fun Too Huge #2 fanzine, gets his own jumbo section to wax about records and live shows he’s seen around Boston. He puts out a contrasting (to Gerard’s) view of live 1984 Meat Puppets, calling them “heavy metal” and not worthy of the insane underground hype then-circulating around the Meat Puppets II record (one of my all-timers, for what it’s worth). Frankly, once I’d see them live for the first time two years later, that’s what they were – a shitty 70s rock band. Since I missed their berzerk, blitzoid hardcore days, I kinda feel like I missed their live genius entirely, because after I saw them in 1986, they were even worse!
Now Amory also reviews SSD’s How We Rock, which he rightly calls the worst album title of all time, yet he still thinks the whole thing is “powerful”, “supertight” and “awesome”. I wonder if he still listens to it. (Cosloy also reviews it, also digs it). I would have loved to see SS Decontrol live in 1981-82, but I personally believe “Springa” was hands-down one of the five worst vocalists in hardcore punk history. I really, really hope Al Barile, Choke and the Boston Crew don’t read this. Speaking of Boston ‘core, Forced Exposure’s Jimmy Johnson is a kid that has his say in Conflict #36, and gets a big section of reviews that mirror the interests of his own mag at the time – also HC, but also bizarro UK goth and noise. Cosloy’s excited about a ton of stuff in this one, with special lionizations of the latest records from Saccharine Trust and Big Black.
That’s it – no interviews, just dozens upon dozens of short reviews, laced liberally with scene reports, gossip and invective. That’s precisely what I needed when I read this in 1986, and Conflict from that point forward became one of the only two 100% totally essential fanzines for me in the late 80s, right alongside Forced Exposure.
First time I ever came across the name “Tony Rettman” was through a relatively strange pathway, back when I was doing my Agony Shorthand blog around 2004. Before there was really any social media of note, if you wanted to “troll” someone, you did so in the comments of someone’s blog. My blog was usually exempt, but at one point it got continually and habitually trolled by someone named Don Rettman – nothing too over-the-top, just some nastiness about whatever music I was writing about, mixed with some light-touch character assassination. All in good fun. In seeking to figure out who this guy was, I was told by a few east coasters in the know that Don Rettman was a longtime & well-known underground record collector, and a guy who had a younger brother named Tony, whom I came to find out actually looked at my blog on occasion and who I got in touch with via electronic mail.
Tony Rettman eventually cleared up the smoke somewhat; his brother wasn’t the rogue commenter, nor was it he, and it was someone anonymous out to besmirch us all in one way or another. All of those comments vanished when the comment-hosting provider I was using went belly-up. I then came to find that Tony Rettman was a main player on the Blastitude website, a really great digital fanzine of the era – not really a blog – which I eventually came to read daily. I soon found that Rettman was not only exceptionally versed in the minutiae of hardcore punk, he’d very much “lived through it”, and his subsequent books like this one and this one and this one have since crowned him as perhaps the preeminent historian of the genre. I remember one bit of correspondence between us back then in which he was jealous that I’d seen the band “Doggy Style” live. Now that is some truly omnivorous and forgiving ‘core commitment.
I came to track down some issues of his five-issue fanzine, The Two Hundred Pound Underground, which was later shortened to 200lbu. We’ll be talking about #1 today. It came out in 1996, and was co-edited by Nick Forte in New Brunswick NJ. The true pièce de résistance in this one is the extensive interview with Brian McMahon of the Electric Eels, going deep and going long on Cleveland in the 1970s at a time when many folks were waking up to just how incredible the sub-underground music scene had been there twenty years previous. McMahon is asked about Charlotte Pressler saying in From The Velvets To The Voidoids that he’d lived something of a double life, split between his Catholic upbringing and his involvement with the Eels, to which McMahon responds, “Charlotte is misguided…sounds like creative writing….Charlotte was insane at that time. She was abusing drugs too much. She was probably right in the middle of a nervous breakdown at the time. I mean look what Peter (Laughner) did to get away from her!”
There’s also a full page about something called the “God Says Fuck The Reunion” tour, in which bands in every town get to pretend to be The Electric Eels, in support of whatever bands the ex-Eels members are playing in at the time. I’ve never heard if this fiasco actually happened in 1996-97. Did it? Beyond that, there are a couple of pieces of fiction by V-3’s Jim Shepard, and a tiny, effectively unreadable print piece by Dwayne Zarakov about a tour by New Zealand’s Space Dust in the US. Can’t even read it to tell you much about what it says, but apparently my old pal Doug Pearson of Oakland, California is featured in it.
I’m always up for reading anything and everything by and about Eddie Flowers, whose Vulcher and Slippy Town Times fanzines I’ll eventually get to writing about sometime here. He talks a great deal about how his band Crawlspace came to be in Los Angeles, and how and why they morphed rather suddenly from the ramalama MC5-ish rock band I saw live in the late 80s to the sprawling, druggy, improvisation freak-noise act they’d become in the 90s. Todd Homer of Mooseheart Faith also gives a nice spin through how and why he broke from his bandmates in the Angry Samoans to do something similar, and just how uncaring and unkind the vacuous masses LA could be to bands like his and Flowers’ around this time (not that I liked them any more than said masses did!).
Rettman and the 200lbu crew at this point are really setting out to explore the outer limits, and do so in a large set of record reviews that, again, due to tiny blurred type are effectively impossible to read: Kevin Ayers, Brother JT, Climax Golden Twins, the Hampton Grease Band reissue, the LAFMS box set and so forth. As befitting The Two Hundred Pound Underground #1’s tenor and tone, it closes with a rapturous endorsement of the Siltbreeze 1996 live extravaganza with The Shadow Ring, Charalambides and Harry Pussy. Kids were going bananas for that stuff in ‘96. Aside from the readability concerns, it’s a highly effective and well-crafted snapshot of refined and expansive music taste, with the chops to communicate about it deftly and effectively. And zero Santana live record reviews to speak of.
If this collection of blink-and-miss giveaway issues of a small free fanzine from 1979 called 20aMPC didn’t exist, I’d probably never have known of the thing’s original existence in the first place. I love it when folks collect stuff like this for those of us who weren’t there. My understanding from this podcast is that Pleasant Gehman is going to be reprinting her late 70s LA punk fanzine Lobotomy this year, and I’m all over that when it happens – but hey, just in case you find out about it first, can you let me know?
So 20aMPC was a xeroxed/stapled fanzine given away or sold for 5 cents (!) at The Deaf Club in San Francisco between February and May 1979. This collection takes the original five issues, and adds two brief “previously unpublished issues”. It was put together in 2015 by San Francisco’s Punk Rock Sewing Circle, a collection of quote-unquote original punks who were holding quite a few punk anniversary events around that time, some of which I attended. The writer and editor was Jack Fan, a.k.a. Jack Johnson, and he appeared to be a young man swept up into the scene and living large 24/7, pogoing from shows at The Deaf Club to DJing and working at Cafe Flore to touring with The Offs – clearly his close friends – and attending shows across SF, five nights a week at least.
This was his micro-fanzine, and you gotta marvel how tightly he packed these issues with a mere four months of personal punk history, while also illuminating the evolution of punk on the ground, as it was happening. Key players in these issues include the aforementioned Offs; Pink Section; The Situations (I don’t know this band); The Cramps, and a posse of LA bands coming up the coast, like The Bags, The Germs, Middle Class, Zeros and more. Be still my friggin’ heart.
One key takeaway is Fan’s massive disdain for the Mabuhay Gardens club and for Dirk Dirkson. He almost positions the Mab as the “corporate” club, the one that only tourists and the bridge & tunnel crowd go to. Such were the razor-fine lines of punk rock 1979! But jeez, there was such a cornucopia of shows to choose from in San Francisco every weekend, maybe you’d want to draw these lines once a cool clubhouse-type hangout like The Deaf Club opened up. 20aMPC came out so frequently that Fan is able to give schedules of upcoming shows each weekend, and the lineups just make one’s eyes water: X/Bags/Units/Suburbs; Offs/Bags/Alleycats, and Mutants/Avengers/Pink Section just over a 30-hour period alone, Friday and Saturday nights February 23rd-24th, 1979.
Crime are called “notorious capitalists” because they charged $4.50 for a show. The other person to really take it on the chin here is Howie Klein, which absolutely seems to be a recurring theme in these SF punk fanzines. I mean, from the time I started hearing about the guy I was highly suspicious; while it’s hard for me to see Dirk Dirkson as anything but the real deal, Klein struck me as a musical opportunist with questionable taste in music, a junior-level Bill Graham safe enough for the suits but able to dabble in punk-ish power pop and with bands searching for career opportunities, the ones that never knock. Jack Fan sure thought so!
This Punk Doesn’t Need a Fanzine Called 20aMPC collection is still very much available for interested parties right here.
When the next great compendium of “cult bands” is written, please save a giant section of the book for the Sun City Girls if you’re the one who’s writing it. The sub-underground impact of this Seattle-via-Phoenix-via-the globe trio from about the mid-1990s onward was immense, and they did much to sully the loins of fans of improvisational ragas, world esoterica, barely-structured chaos, absurdist comedy and generalized audience baiting. They were a world unto themselves, and fanzines like 2008’s Bixobal #3 and quite a few others like it took no small amount of their cues from the expansive world they defined, and from rejecting the rest of the world said band were so clearly defined against.
That’s a hyper-simplification of this fanzine, no question – yet the first thing I see on its inside from cover is an ad for Bixobal’s in-house record label Ri Be Xibalba’s Charlie Gocher tribute album, and on the back, tour dates for Alan and Rick Bishop’s “The Brothers Unconnected” tour. Incidentally, I’m told that I accompanied some friends to the 5/21/2008 show from this tour at Slim’s in San Francisco. It’s one of the very few nights I spent absolutely hammered over the past two decades; in fact, it’s probably the last time that’s happened. Suffice to say I don’t really remember the show but I’m sure it was an outtacontroller.
Bixobal #3, edited by Eric Lanzilotta in Seattle, I believe, is a point-perfect representation of the insular world defined and wrought by the Sun City Girls, taken into a written direction and done quite well. Rob Millis writes about 78rpm records; he’d soon put out the terrific Victrola Favorites package of some of his favorites. Allan MacInnis nails an extensive interview with Peter Stampfel of the Holy Modal Rounders, definitely a gem worth reading. There’s an interview with German 70s something-or-other Gerd Kraus, and then a mess of reviews, including a few at the end by Patrick Marley of Muckraker.
If I’m being honest, so much of this No Neck Blues Band, formless drone, anti-music music drives me totally bonkers, and it becomes difficult for me at times to understand the line in between “I like this because it’s digging deeper and taking me someplace new” and “I like this because you won’t, and it’s obscure and insular.” I know that’s not an especially notable nor new criticism, now nor ever. I have no such problem with most free jazz and with challenging world musics I’m encountering for the first time, yet I’ve always shuddered a bit when formerly indie rock white guys disappear up their collective anus into music played by others like them that’s premised on & defined by its difficulty and obscurity. Then I wonder if the problem’s me. It probably is me.
Bixobal #3 reviews a few of the newer Sublime Frequencies releases and guess what – they love ‘em. I love that if this world I’m describing is one you cotton to, then you’re in luck – you can still buy this thing for a big $2.50 at the Fusetron music emporium. Load up your cart and tell them Fanzine Hemorrhage sent ya!
We return now to Kim Cooper’s Scram, a low-culturally omnivorous magazine whose fifth issue I dissected a bit earlier in the year here. The Los Angeles-based mag had gathered a great deal of steam by this point, 2002, to the point where they’d recently held their own showcase weekend “Scramarama” at the Palace Theater in LA, which I learned in this issue my cousin Doug Miller was the bartender and alcohol-procurer for. Of course he was!
As mentioned last time, Scram had a sensibility that didn’t quite dovetail with my unrelentingly pure underground-music-that-must-be-beyond-reproach stance at the time, so while I always liked it, I really have come to enjoy it now, after the fact, now that I’m not such a pigheaded contrarian. The borders of their schtick were quite loose, but encompassed elements of goofy 60s pop, novelty records, garage punk, pranks, toys, oddballs, analog-era artifacts and underground comix. The writing was fun, upbeat, winking and satiric. Contributors – in this issue alone – ranged from Gene Sculatti to Mike Applestein to Andrew Earles to Brian Doherty, with Kim Cooper lording over the proceedings and setting the tone as “editrix”.
Right out of the gate Scram #15 hits it out of the park with a funny & revealing Dan Clowes interview that’s contemporaneous with the release of the Ghost World film, one of the 2000’s best, discussing everything it took to get it made and released. I was so taken with reading this last night that I’m going to watch the Criterion edition of the film tonight w/ all the extras. There’s a panel review of rock-themed board games, such as a Monkees, a K-Tel and even a Partridge Family game that I actually remember from my youth. And then Sculatti’s piece is actually a 1971 interview he did with songwriter and producer Gary Usher, talking extensively about his interactions with the Byrds, Beach Boys and the early 60s instrumental surf scene.
Remember how excited everyone got about that Langley Schools Music Project release, a mid-70s recording of some Canadian schoolkids arranged through their music program into doing tracks like “Space Oddity” and “In My Room”? Applestein interviews Hans Fenger, the maestro behind it, as well as one of the now-grown-up kids, who gives a fairly reluctant interview about something she’s clearly still a little baffled about. Mike Applestein also milks a piece out of “Five Concerts I Missed”, a terrific concept I wish I’d thought of first: shows you could have gone to, but didn’t, and then regretted. I’d start with SST’s “The Tour” on February 28th, 1985 at the Keystone Palo Alto with The Minutemen, Husker Du, Meat Puppets and Saccharine Trust, which I couldn’t get any of my high school friends to attend with me so I bailed.
I’ve got nearly a complete run of Scram except for issues #8, #9 and #10, which I’m missing and can’t find. Anyone able to help a brother out?
Earlier this year I bought a near-complete run of San Francisco’s top-drawer late 70s/early 80s punk fanzine Creep from the ZNZ store – who still have three of the five issues for sale as of this writing. I excitedly wrote up Creep #2in these pages here, so I’ll spare you another introduction to the mag and let you go read that first if you’re interested, allowing us to get right to the heart of 1980 west coast punk rock USA in the here and now.
Creep #4 lives at an interesting intersection of several strands of California punk “journalism”, such as it was. There are half-hearted attempts at intellectually unpacking various scene controversies and kerfuffles of the time, such as a piece on Noh Mercy’s acerbic and still spine-rattling “Caucasian Guilt”, or a total mess of a P.I.L. show that almost didn’t happen – something akin to a piece you’d find in Damage around this time. There’s truly stupid punk-sneer writing by birdbrains such as one might find in Flipside. And given this magazine’s tenuous connection with Maximum Rocknroll, which wouldn’t publish its first issue for another two years, you can see a little bit of a political slant sashaying its way into these pages – but not too much to make Creep #4 intolerable.
I actually have to give much credit for the breadth of the interviews here. There’s one with Alex Chilton by Ray Farrell, not at all something I’d expect here – and Alex is great, totally calm and cool as Farrell takes him to task for Like Flies on Sherbert (shame on you, Ray!). There’s a brief one with Steve Tupper of Subterranean Records, which was just getting off the ground. He tells it like it is: “415 (an S.F. label) appears to be primarily interested in very commercial or very well known bands. That means exclusion of everybody else. We’re much more interested in experimental kinds of things – the kind of music being made by hordes of kids just picking up guitars and synthesizers and making music. Everything we do has this hard, grey feel to it. That’s the way the world is. Let’s face it – a lot of this stuff just isn’t hit material.”. Subterranean were the label who first released Flipper, and they were covered at length in the excellent book Who Cares Anyway? – Post-Punk San Francisco and the End of the Analog Age.
On the other hand, the interview with The Vktms doesn’t do them any favors – with all due respect to Nyna, she definitely comes across as a major league dum-dum in this interview. And I’ve done some bellyaching about Gregg Turner, Mike Saunders and the Angry Samoans before but never have I seen their misanthropy and queer-baiting at such a jacked-up level as it is in their interview here, in which they go off on all the high crimes & misdemeanors of the LA punk scene, a scene that was known to blackball the Samoans for just such behavior. I mean, these weren’t 15-year-olds from Canoga Park writing into Flipside, these were guys in their early thirties play-acting as punks and – in Saunders’ case – saying Iggy, Iggy, Iggy whenever handed the opportunity. Of course, I laughed at “Get Off The Air” and I still love large chunks of Back From Samoa and I always will, but Saunders and Turner are (or were, in 1980) detestable human beings. Watch their brief interview in this 1980 LA punk “expose” called What’s Up America and you’ll see what I mean. And Gregg Turner’s recent book was an abomination that I couldn’t get even a third of the way through. Do I make myself clear?
This was the year of collective disillusionment with The Clash, and the piece by “Austin Tatious” (great punk name I’d somehow never heard before, but still not as classy as my friend Christina’s DJ moniker Geannie Lotrimin) expresses great disappointment in their San Francisco show. The whole Lee Dorsey (“Working in a Coal Mine”) “bored cocktail lounge a la Holiday Inn backup band” opening act bit was pretty funny; I suppose this was the time that they were bringing incongruous opening acts on the road with them, which, hey, hats off for trying I guess. The Specials are also on the road in America – “Horace’s impression of U.S. AM radio: ‘Great if you like ‘Hold The Line” or ‘Life in the Fast Lane’’. He swears he heard each at least 80 times across the country with only sporadic listening.” Oh yes, 1980 commercial radio in the United States was just awful if you were there, and I was there.
Creep #4 is a content-rich goldmine for you punk historians, probably one step up from Ripper and very much in the same vein, from size to breadth to paper type to regions covered. Now let’s see a Silicon Valley Bank-like run on the few copies remaining in the ZNZ store.
Despite never having truly been a true record collector – much more of a record accumulator – I hold obsessed, deeply committed collectors in high regard, and rarely tire of their stories of the hunt & the big score. Aside from the guys who almost single-handedly resurrected pre-WWII blues by going door-to-door in the deep South to look for 78s in the late 50s/early 60s, my favorite collectors are the 60s punk fiends, the guys who cobbled together a cohesive and distinctly American narrative for what was clearly going on in thousands of garages and basements across the USA in 1965-1967. That’s the world that 1980’s Not Fade Away #3 traffics in, and their scope is further refined to the great state of Texas, almost certainly the American locus of the most insanely wild and highest-quality 60s garage punk during those years.
Now think back, if you’re old enough to do so, to what 60s punk scholarship was like in 1980. Sure, Nuggets had long been out, the first few Pebbles comps were around and Greg Shaw’s Who Put The Bomp! was writing about this stuff at times. Most of what we’d come to know about the great underground 60s punk 45s would come later, though, first through a series of 60s punk bootlegs like What A Way To Die, Garage Punk Unknowns and Scum of the Earth, and then of course via Back From The Grave, the greatest compilation series of all time. I’d have to imagine that editor Doug Hanners was doing his own original research, digging up telephone numbers from white pages & writing letters to studios listed on 45s released fourteen years previous – and he actually started the mag in 1975.
The biggest features are all listed on the cover here – Mouse and The Traps get the top billing and the longest piece. I was most smitten with the side-by-side photos of these Texas rogues from 1966 (basic cool roughneck hippie kids) and 1967 (far-out psychedelic shaman with love beads and paisley shirts). There’s a great short piece on The Reasons Why, who’d cut this absolute screamer called “Don’t Be That Way” in 1966. They dispel any myths one might have had about well-behaved teenagers at dance clubs and fraternal lodges, in particular the Beyersville SPJST: “All these kids from the little towns would pack the place. Being out in the country we’d get a lot of cowboy redneck types and sometimes things would get pretty wild. We’d be up on stage playin’ and the dance floor would be packed, then all of a sudden this whirlpool would start in the middle of the floor. It wouldn’t be just a few guys from Taylor fightin’ a few guys from Rockdale, it’d be everybody from Taylor fightin’ everybody from Rockdale….one time this cowboy picked up this hippy and threw him through the plate glass window in front.” Texas punk!
Was also psyched, if you will, to see the small piece on The Stereo Shoestring. Have you ever heard their psychedelic face-melter “On The Road South”?? Please do so, right here! Maybe ten years ago I re-read this particular issue and started cataloging the things in the review section I’d never heard, particularly in the short “Tex-Mex” section of 45s. I then went onto the illicit file-sharing site Soulseek and found said Tex-Mex 45s, and they were a true blast. Texas is a big state and all, but I think per-capita it really musically punched well above its weight for many, many years. Not Fade Away #3 is a superb fan’s-eye furthering of what made this particular state’s iconoclasts and cultural rebels stand out, and documents everything I love about the crazed collector mentality.
I’ve owned this issue of Mike McGonigal’s Chemical Imbalance since the day I bought it in 1986 in an LA record store because it had an included 4-song EP with Sonic Youth on it. It was clear to me in reading through it just now that I really hadn’t flipped its pages since, so honestly, it was a pleasant surprise to see a wonderfully sophomoric yet still well-informed and -intentioned dose of independent, far-left-of-center Americana. If you remember McGonigal as a guy pilloried for my-unremembered and what I’m sure were nonsense “scene crimes” by the likes of Byron Coley and Steve Albini, you’d be forgiven for thinking – as I did – that maybe his early college-era fanzine would have aged none too well. It’s aged just fine.
I mean, I have several of the issues that came after Chemical Imbalance #4 as well, I’m pretty sure. It was never one of my favorites, and I’d be hard-pressed to name a band, musical genre or artist of any sort that this fanzine turned me onto – but it was always easy to find, packed with deep-underground ephemera and tuned to whatever alt-wavelength I found myself frequenting in the late 80s. McGonigal went on to run Yeti and Maggot Brain magazines, both of which suffer(ed) from a seemingly forced, mile-wide/inch-deep eclecticism that render any tastemaking therein to be highly suspect. I suppose that was true of Chemical Imbalance as well – a sort of “look at me, I don’t only like punk rock” narcissism that probably kept me from ever coming back to his mag after my first reading, yet didn’t prevent me from buying at least three more issues. Like I said, maybe time and age has melted my resistance, because I kinda like nearly everything about this one save for the poetry and most of the comics. I always wonder if “fanzine poetry” is meant to be an ironic joke when I come across it anyway.
Seymour Glass, whom we learned recently to our great surprise was a key cog at San Francisco’s BravEar around this time, does a fine interview with that city’s so-deeply-unsung-that-nobody-liked-them Angst. As it turns out, I liked Angst; saw them live; and was a major proponent of their first Happy Squid EP, which you gotta hear if you haven’t. So this interview too was a nice surprise, a great retelling of awful tour stories and corrupt bookers and strange bills put together by SST with Angst and Saint Vitus. There’s a mail interview with Great Plains, another band on a bigger indie label who were probably better than the sub-minus attention they received indicated, and one with Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, “because everyone else interviews Thurston”. Sonic Youth mania was only just barely wheels-up at that point, with Evol having recently come out, and it shows from interviews with other bands here, like when Jeff Pezzati from Naked Raygun interrupts himself to blurt out, “I just saw Sonic Youth, they were amazing!!”.
And with regard to all the comics in Chemical Imbalance #4, well, I’ll tell you about my reverse-evolution with comics. In 1986, when a music fanzine would print comics, I’d get all huffy and uptight about it. Comics were for children, and were uniformly unfunny to boot. I thought “Baboon Dooley” was totally inane (still do). When grown men later started busting a nut over goofus music-adjacent comic artists like Peter Bagge, I stuck my head in the sand and said I. Hate. Comics. I only started thawing with regard to comics, or comix if you will, around the age of 40, and you know, that wasn’t all that long ago. I went back to re-read a bunch of Dan Clowes stuff and fell down that rabbit hole and it introduced me to the whole world of Fantagraphics and Kitchen Sink and bizarre art-dada stuff like Doug Allen’s Steven. I’m totally down with comix now, kids!
I still think the ones in this magazine are mostly imbecilic, but hey, I now thoroughly respect the gumption shown in pulling them together and stand proudly behind their Constitutional right to print ‘em.
I’ve sort of dipped in and out of Phil McMullen and Nick Saloman’s Ptolemaic Terrascope world over many years, but I’ve come to see their efforts at creating a psychedelic music oracle and broadsheet as a highly successful one, no more so than this mid-career effort from November 1997, Ptolemaic Terrascope #24. I guess the way I sorta contextualize the magazine is as an underground but widely-distributed fanzine treading somewhere at a midpoint between Bucketfull of Brains and the later Galactic Zoo Dossier; more intelligent than either and slightly more geared toward a collector mentality.
Ptolemaic Terrascope often included vinyl and CDs, and this one, which has a 4-song vinyl comp EP, excitedly announces that future issues will include compact discs. Fuck yeah! It also announces the 1998 Terrastock 2 festival taking place in San Francisco, the city which has been my hometown for 34 years except for the mere two years I was away in grad school in Seattle, which, alas, coincided with this festival. I came home to SF for spring break and this has just happened and all the cool heads were abuzz about it; you are welcome to gaze at the lineup I’d just missed by a day or two.
The biggest draw in this issue is a Karl Precoda interview, a rarity if there ever was one. He won’t talk about The Dream Syndicate, but this discussion was held right as that excellent firstLast Days of May CD was coming out, and I really love that thing and its follow-up and don’t get why they still seem to be almost completely unheard. It’s terrific to see a reluctant Precoda eventually settle graciously into his interview and talk technique, dub music, his guitars and more. There’s also a Guided By Voices interview. Robert Pollard has just turned 40 and defensively expounds a bit on his advancing age, saying “I still think I’ve got a few years left”. I’ll say he did.
Other features are on The Electric Prunes; The Misunderstood, later subjects of an exhaustive Ugly Things exhumation; a Ghost side project called Cosmic Invention; and a cool piece on Pelt (Mike Gangloff, Jack Rose and Patrick Best) – an excellent overview of a band I missed at the time, confusing them with the UK’s Felt whom I didn’t like. In the reviews section, we’ve got some absurdly tiny type that even twentysomethings might complain about – not that any of those were reading Ptolemaic Terrascope #24, right? – and it meshes reviews of stuff like Santana – Live at the Fillmore with a passel of freak-rock albums on the New World of Sound label such as Plague Lounge, a teenage pre-Comets on Fire band whom I once saw open for Monoshock.
That reviews section is a good encapsulation of the sort of musical melange this ostensible psych fanzine was trying to pull together: heavy rock, freakbeat, far-out pop, strange noise, garage rock, and anything with even a twinge of drug use, real or imagined. Advertisers are all over the map, from the most minimalist of noise labels to the most maximalist (if super-underground) of loud rocknroll/punk labels. Seems that issues of this magazine aren’t too tough to procure online if one is so inclined, but me, I’ve just got this and one other and could probably find room somewhere for another few.
Incredible: a true, no-doubt-about-it, cash-in-on-the-trend punk rock exploitation magazine. I was intrigued enough by the looks of this one to order it from Ryan Richardson’s Ryebread Rodeo fanzine emporium, and despite the falling-apart cover and the general contents therein, I’m glad I did. To the best of my knowledge, only three issues of this made it out there; this is the first one and this is the third and final. (Just poking around the internet I also came up with this 1978 issue of another punksploitation mag, Punk Rock Stars. “Kiss: Did They Start It All?” I’ve often wondered!).
I really can’t be certain how serious the birdbrain writers at Punk Rock #2 were taking themselves or their punk magazine assignment from corporate parent Stories, Layouts & Press Inc. Most of the writing affects a silly, “dangerous” sort of phony aura that sounds like broke, young bespeckled journalists who’ve just come off of covering The Allman Brothers and Kansas for other mags, and who’ve maybe just been forced to read the 1977 Time magazine article on punk and taken their cues accordingly. Or they’re sort of hanging on to their former, more comfortable rocknroll worlds, as in Gloria Robinson’s opening gossip column, which starts off with items on Blondie, the Sex Pistols, The Runaways and Lou Reed before drifting wistfully to unironically talk instead about The Beach Boys, Elton John, Greg & Cher Allman and the Grateful Dead.
Photos of The Dead Boys permeate this thing. If there was one group who went all-in on throwing themselves in front of cameras and beclowning themselves as wild “punks”, it was them. It’s fun to see some of the features trying to decide what’s punk and what isn’t. This was the era, if you’ll recall, that Mink DeVille routinely showed up in punk features (including here), mostly because the band played often at CBGBs and Willy DeVille had an angular haircut and punkish mien. Punk Rock #2 has features on The Dictators (one of the few well-written pieces, this one by Michael P. Liben) and a wild-looking group of Detroit hair farmers with the MC5’s Dennis Thompson in the band called Sirius Trixon and the Motor City Bad Boys.
Darcy Diamond travels to Los Angeles to go The Jam’s press conference, and to briefly write about and misspell the name of The Weirdos (here called “The Wierdos”; you’ll also see a great deal of confusion within Punk Rock #2 about there vs. their vs. they’re). “My punk friends in The Germs and The Bags implored me to catch The Weirdos set.”. And really, the less said about the “How to be a Punk” guide in the middle of this thing, the better. I get the sense from a doofus editorial up front that Punk Rock magazine was ginning itself up for an on-the-ground media war with John Holmstrom’s equally awful Punk magazine, which clearly never took place once the former checked out in April 1978.
Robert Griffin was the fella behind the early 90s fanzine-with-a-record-from-a-band-from-Cleveland Seven. He also ran and still runs Scat Records, who, among their many other accomplishments, were the label who basically hipped the world at large to Guided By Voices, a band that only folks like Tom Lax knew about before the 1993 Propeller/Vampire on TitusCD hit the street, courtesy of Scat. And then the world fell in love, as you’ll remember.
Griffin also put out the phenomenal 3×10” release Those Were Different Times in 1997, which gave the world some incredible til-then-unreleased 1970s Electric Eels and Mirrors gems. He was in the band Prisonshake, and when I started communicating with him around the time Seven – Scat Records Quarterly #2 came out in 1990, I was blown away that I was actually in analog communication with a guy from the aggro mid-80s post-punk band Spike In Vain, whom I vainly held to my bosom as one of the secret treasures that only I knew about. I wrote about them in Superdope #2 the next year thanks to some info that he – and only he – was capable of providing me.
And funny enough, Griffin plays something of a role in one of own my major life events. I took my now-wife of 25 years, Rebecca, on our first-ever date to see Guided By Voices at the I-Beam in San Francisco on July 2nd, 1994. I was a big fancy man, “on the list” with a “plus one”, thanks to Griffin, and of course that helped cement the date with this target of my affection. Who wouldn’t be totally impressed with a “potential boyfriend who gets on lists with a plus one”? – only to find at the door that “Nope, there’s no Jay Hinman on the list, sorry, nope, go away freeloader”. Thankfully I was able to rustle up $16 for a couple of ducats and she somehow stayed with me regardless. She’s upstairs right now. Griffin didn’t know what happened, and hey – it’s all cool in 2023.
Seven #2 from 1990 was about 7” singles only, as were the other issues. I applauded and still applaud the concept. I’ve had my own deep forays into singles-only collecting, and even in recent years I’ve bought a bunch of 45s on Discogs and in stores to build back all the great records in my favorite format that I’d sold over the years, then thought better of it and promptly sold those records yet again. #2 comes with a Starvation Army single I’ve never listened to, as well as other wacky inserts like photographs, cheapo toys (a plastic snake, a skeleton hand and a black balloon), and other assorted real inserts, including a Scat Records catalog.
The idea to do a different sort of fanzine with packaging as the linchpin was another strong marketing play from a guy who was and probably still is interested in doing things differently from the indie herd, even if it meant spending more. The thing is even numbered, and mine is #343/1000. Serious record dork alert. The fanzine itself is OK. There are many reviews of small indie pop records, loads of Cleveland things and a focus on the Sub Pop and Amphetamine Reptile records that were pouring forth like Old Faithful around that time. 1990 – a weird year for the underground. I see it as a transitional year from the shitty late 80s into a much more fruitful underground (New Zealand, garage punk, Siltbreeze etc.) from 1991-94.
I remember being moderately frustrated by the Cleveland-centricity of this fanzine at the time, primarily because I didn’t really like the bands. Griffin’s own band Prisonshake were good but so much of the local stuff that Seven flogged just didn’t have any real heft once I’d get down to buying it at Epicenter or Aquarius or wherever. Fair enough, though – I’d write disproportionately about my San Francisco Bay Area favorites in my own fanzine, and many of those bands proved to be utterly baffling outside of the 415 area code. I hadn’t looked at my copies of Seven in many years and now I’ve got two others in front of me, so I reckon we’ll take a look at those in these pages when the time is right.
I started this site at the end of 2022 and have kept it exceptionally prolific over the subsequent 9 months. A pal told me he thought I’d totally lose stream after 10-15 posts, but I guess the evidence points to 3 pithy and prosaic posts a week having been the norm almost ever since it started. Given the amount of printed music fanzines I’ve built up over the years and the very, very important things I need to say about them in this forum, I’ve found it quite cathartic to just post whatever the hell hits my fingertips as I’m typing after a run-through of these fanzines, many of which I’ve stored in boxes and not looked at for up to 35 years.
Anyway, I’m going to take a short break this week and come roaring back shortly. In the meantime, I wanted to provide a few tips that might make reading the “blog” – and it’s most certainly a 2005-era blog – more enjoyable.
Subscribe to this thing and get an email every time I post. Since so many of you kids spend all your time on your cellular telephones, you may not know that there’s a desktop version of Fanzine Hemorrhage that’s way better than the telephone version. If you come to the site on a computer, you’ll see right there in the upper right-hand corner that you can drop your email address in and subscribe – then you’ll get every post emailed to you the moment it’s out there. Wouldn’t that be amazing??!?
There are tons of links to other posts on the sidebar. There’s a veritable cornucopia of fanzine blatherings on the right-hand sidebar; again, it’s not something you can see on your smartphone browser. Nearly every post is there, although now there are so many that I’ll post hyperlinks at the bottom of this post to some of the older ones that aren’t there any longer.
Read Fanzine Hemorrhage in landscape view on your phone, not portrait. Hey, I didn’t make the rules for how it all looks on the internet, but I noticed that the cover scans looks all goofy and compressed when your read the mobile version length-wise (portrait view), and look great when you hold your phone width-wise (landscape view). And since this site is so incredibly forward-looking and graphics-rich, you’re going to want that full sensory experience for sure.
Meanwhile, my “trademark of quality” is that I will only yak about fanzines I personally own in physical form, which certainly precludes me from talking about the ones I don’t own, but I’ve also drawn the line at PDFs of incredible music fanzines that I’ve downloaded over the years (for now). Speaking of – if you downloaded a bunch of the punk fanzines that the Contextual Dissemination site had up before that site vanished, please let me know. I was an imbecile and somehow assumed they’d be there forever, just like everything on the internet. We can trade PDFs or something!
Finally, here are some of the earliest posts on Fanzine Hemorrhage from “the early days”, meaning December 2022 and January 2023:
Coming only mere months in May 1980 before the desultory Damage #7 issue that we discussed here, the bloom is most certainly not yet off of the punk rock rose in Damage #6. In fact, this issue’s one of this San Francisco tabloid’s very finest, easily in league with Slash and NY Rocker issues that were being published concurrently. Sure, it’s all filtered through a San Francisco sensibility, and despite being a proud taxpaying, child-rearing resident of said city for 34 years now, I still gag on so much of the “punk politics” and arty pretensions of SF during the 70s and especially the 80s – hell, even now – which are often just a real hectoring bummer in the midst of such a plethora of so much countercultural flowering.
But not in Damage #6, really! I mean, there was a police bust at Target Video downstairs from Damage HQ during a party for Japanese group The Plastics, and editor Brad Lapin is none too pleased in his editorial. Damage then gives it full coverage in a big article and even a comic. I swear man, I hate cops to the max. There’s also a brief supplement for NART magazine, all political art and very San Francisco. Caitlin Hines, who wrote better at age 19 or 20 than I ever have at any age, savages promoter and record label impresario Howie Klein for something he said about her in issue #5. I have this issue, but am too lazy to go read it now. Hines says, “I have always been most fair in my dealings with him, never once alluding to his age, girth, infamous past exploits in Nepal, balding dome or rather unsightly general appearance”. She was fantastic. I interviewed her ex-partner Peter Urban about her in Dynamite Hemorrhage #8 if you wanna read it.
Jane Cantillon interviews and writes about John Cale (I think it’s actually Jane Hamsher, who was a contributing editor at Damage). “When I told Cale I was writing this for Damage, he said defensively, ‘I’m not new wave!’”. There’s also a tongue-in-cheek short interview with the “pretty” and “pert and perky pop fave” Lydia Lunch, who’s just released Queen of Siam. Even then people were making deliberate fun of her horribly over-the-top persona! Speaking of similar circles, there’s an overview of performance art in San Francisco. I guess Karen Finley plied her trade for a while in SF? I did not know that. And we also have an introduction to “local electronic music”: Non, Factrix, Minimal Man and The Scientists. This was the wild sound of young San Francisco in 1980, along with Flipper, who get a rave review for their contribution to the SF Underground comp.
I was also pretty impressed with the San Francisco scene report. It talks about artpunk quartet The Bob, whom they call “…the best thing out of Oakland since ‘You are now leaving Oakland’ signs”. The LA scene report right next to that says that Patricia Morrison has left The Bags(true) and that the band has renamed themselves Plan 9(wow, if true!). And then a chunk of reviews, most of which are by rockin’ Jeff Bale, very soon to be a star player in the Maximum RocknRoll world.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the interview with The Mutants, whose Sue Mutant, one of their three singers, graces the cover. They’re not a band I’ve ever really cottoned to much, and most folks who were there will tell ya to steer clear of the records – live is where they were at. A couple of months ago The Roxie Theater here in San Francisco had a night of Napa State Mental Hospital rock & roll, by which I mean they played the entire June 1978 performance of The Cramps there; along with The Mutants’ entire heretofore-unseen performance, and then Jason Willis’ and Mike Plante’s excellent short documentary on the day. I swear the audience felt like it was comprised of San Francisco’s first 200 punks, all the Mab and Deaf Club denizens of the day, and they dutifully hooted and hollered whenever their friends turned up on camera. Then a couple of Mutants came out and did a little Q&A before V. Vale came up on stage and hijacked the proceedings and we left to go get a beer. Good times.
Due to the beneficence of Chris Seventeen, the 1980s editor and publisher of the UK’s What a Nice Way To Turn Seventeen fanzine, I’m now in the possession of several additional copies that span beyond my original issue #6 that I talked about here. Many of these came with records included, including 1984’s What a Nice Way To Turn Seventeen #2, which has a 4-track EP that included musicians with whom I’m familiar, like Nikki Sudden and The Jazz Butcher, as well as those with whom I am not, like The Rag Dolls and The Sad-Go-Round. In any case my copy doesn’t have a record, and I’m going to be okay with that.
Now let’s get the big concern out of the way first. People, usually people even older than myself as if that’s possible, have at times expressed their concern about the font size of my own Dynamite Hemorrhage fanzine, yet my 9-point font is practically the top row of the eye chart when compared with this one. Epic Soundtracks – yes, that Epic Soundtracks, not the other one you went to high school with – writes a piece about discovering Brian Wilson that I’m dying to read, but it’s literally written in one or two point font, so small that it blurs on the page and is nearly an undifferentiated series of dots and inkblots. In the light on a nice day, it’s possible to find some coherence to it, but in evening light you can totally forget about it.
Andrew Bean contributes a piece on Captain Beefheart that I can somewhat read, though a magnifying glass helps – one of those plastic ones with a flat bottom that you can glide across a page that grandpas like me who complain about fanzine font sizes like to use. It posits that “When Trout Mask Replica appeared, cloaked in a sleeve which depicted a guy in a silly hat and a fish mask waving from the front, and on the back, a bunch of weird-looking guys who looked like refugees from the Alpha Centauri Home For The Criminally Insane creeping around in bushes, wearing dresses and waving table lamps around, the record-buying public were not impressed.” Why the hell not??
You want to know about the other things that make the 16-page What a Nice Way to Turn Seventeen #2 fanzine such a gem? I’ll tell you. There’s a record-fiends-only guide to collecting the Texas 60s punk label Eva Records by Chris Seventeen, as well as a celebration of Creation Records, a brand new label at this point (!). David J from Bauhaus rants with extreme passion about the John Cale show he saw in London in January 1983. And there’s an annotated Johnny Thunders discography. I certainly missed many of the greats, but I did see this fanzine’s cover star Thunders play live on January 7th, 1987 at a pool hall called The Golden Eagle in Santa Barbara, CA – the aural evidence of said performance is right here. I know I was mostly there because The Lazy Cowgirls opened, but still. Johnny Thunders, right?
What a Nice Way to Turn Seventeen #2 actually reminds me of another fantastic fanzine that came out with a 7” single as part of the package – Drunken Fish #1. Both were “wrap-arounds” with the record inside and both take an omnivorous collector freak’s eye toward their scenes of choice. In this case, it’s the current UK underground, American offbeat rock geniuses and scarf rock through the ages. I’d love to see a book of this stuff someday if they’d agree to pump up the font size 5x at a minimum.
Last time we talked about Jen Matson over here it was to call attention to some early 90s writing she did in Writer’s Block #7. She also helmed her own indiepop fanzine in the 90s called Nonstop Diatribe, and through it all to the present day doing a radio show/podcast, she’s quite clearly someone with the record collecting disease. Check The Record #1 is an analog celebration of the analog sickness, done up in such a bright, breezy manner that you’d be forgiven for thinking that collecting records had somehow been very healthy and to be encouraged all along.
I actually suspected this whole thing was going to be Scottish records only, an ode to “Edwyn” and “The Shoppies” and whatnot, but it’s a more generalist whirl around her collection and how it came to be. Like the price stickers piece is totally great: photographic evidence of non-removable price stickers on various records she’s bought, along with the story of acquiring that record and the trade-off involved when she came to realize that peeling the thing would cause more damage than it was worth. Let me say it right now, for all of us: I’ve been there.
The Scottish piece is great too, total thrill-of-the-hunt stuff, maybe not as mind-boggling as that Fŏrdämning piece “The Dirty Year”, but I was right there with Matson as she relays being taken to the “special basement” at Edinburgh’s Avalanche Records to have her pick of whatever treasures she wanted. I still have dreams like that, and I don’t even collect records anymore. There’s also a humility-first advice column about putting information into the crowdsourced Discogs, and about the creeps who sometimes populate the site and try to one-up these free laborers.
Her partially facetious (I think) ode to the CD long box is really the ultimate glass-half-full paean to something that I remember being hated from the first day they appeared. In the late 80s I asked my parents for Coltrane’s A Love Supreme LP for Christmas, and I got it, except that my father somehow thought that the CD long box version of it was a 12” record. Dad…!!! I recently spent an hour at his house helping him set up his “cellular phone” (totally baffled), his laptop (he couldn’t get past the login screen) and even showing him how to find the Xfinity On-Demand channel so he could pick movies to watch. He’d told me and my sister that “Comcast changed the channel on me” and we totally shared a good laugh, thinking he’d sat on the remote or something and knocked his cable service offline. Turned out Comcast actually had changed the channel, and after showing Dad how to use the buttons on the remote to browse the guide, he was fully back in the business of entertaining himself.
Anyway, after my Coltrane long box fiasco – I brought it back to Rainbow Records in San Jose to exchange it for the LP, and they didn’t have the LP – I wouldn’t actually buy my first CD for another three years, until 1992. And I’m soooo proud of what it was: Monster Magnet’s abysmal Spine of God, sold back to a used store before the week was up. I’d forgotten all about long boxes until Matson’s piece, so there you go – she just spurred me to tell a couple of uninteresting stories in the service of talking about her new fanzine. See what yarns you can spin about your own record experiences by grabbing Check The Record #1 here.
I guess 23 years on, we’re probably well past the point where we might routinely encounter a thick, glossy-cover, free improvisation / experimental / noise mag with a CD inside of it at Tower Records, aren’t we? Muckraker #9 came out in Summer 2000 and was a pretty fetching and decently-distributed publication pulled together with some regularity throughout the 90s by Patrick Marley – always on the deep edge of obscurity, while always approachable enough to bring in purportedly open-minded experimental skeptics such as myself.
I mean, Muckraker #9 is literally packed with so many deep and likely semi-listenable obscurities I really can’t grasp a ton of it; it’s music I haven’t heard and perhaps never will hear, and that’s probably okay. Much of the reviewed tapes and CD-Rs and lathe-cut singles are not findable even today, though you never know what’ll turn up at Fusetron that might have been sitting there for 23 years. Muckraker often skirts the boundaries of what TQ fanzine once called “the no fans underground” – music so formless and vague that it’s often comfortable assuming that it’s being directed toward a listening audience of zero. Still, I’m excited to see so many great, fanzine-funding ads for labels with deep weirdo catalogs that I missed or barely comprehended at the time – labels like Squealer, Little Army, High Knee, Chocolate Monk, Freedom From, Polyamory, Menlo Park, Povertech Industries and many, many more.
The biggest draw for me here has always been the interview with Nick Schultz of Majora Records by Gretchen Gonzales. It was such a phenomenal and wide-ranging talk with one of our nation’s leading and most cantankerous lights that I reprinted it inDynamite Hemorrhage #5, then interviewed Nick myself as an addendum to it. Majora was an exceptionally special 1990s label, and one that we risk forgetting to our undying shame. This is followed by a piece with Nick and Alan Bishop of the Sun City Girls bantering about Eddy Detroit, telling stories about this longtime Phoenix-area musical enigma, mostly because Marley and the Muckraker team couldn’t actually pin down Eddy Detroit himself for a talk.
Some hallowed forerunners of the no-fans underground are interviewed as well, both Derek Bailey and then Eddie Prevost of AMM. Prevost is the exact opposite of pompous and obtuse; he tells stories of early AMM shows in 1966 where promoters wouldn’t pay them for their completed sets because they were “only tuning up”. There’s another interview with Ceramic Hobs, a group I’m most familiar with due to the forthrightness of the principles about their mental illness, institutionalizations and so forth. Simon Morris of the band calls the music he makes about his psychosis “the last frontier”. It might be, but does it burn down the house? Does it totally kick out the fucking jams? You’ll have to tell us.
I always liked that Patrick Marley went on to thrive in a true journalism career – like, he’s a major stringer for The Washington Postthese days. He and the Muckraker team proved to me back then both here and in previous issues that you can make anything musical (or non-musical) interesting enough if you ask the right questions, write intelligently, respect your audience and do the hard work of explaining the validity and context of the music you’re talking about.
We had a post a couple of days ago about the annus horribilis of 1974, so let’s return there again today and talk about a “real” early-years music fanzine, Brain Damage #1, and a great, albeit insular, one at that. This comes courtesy of a xerox my friend JB made for me of it in the early 1990s, as he magnanimously did with the Back Door Man issue we once discussed here. Talk about heavy hitters: the editors are Metal Mike Saunders (much later of Vom and the Angry Samoans) and Gene Sculatti, and the publisher is Mark Shipper(Chris Stigliano went deep on his 1972 fanzine Flash, which put forth multiple issues, here).
Brain Damage #1 was a one-and-done parody fanzine, “formerly called Who Took The Shelves”. I’m sure it was all quite uproarious for the creators, and if you’ve got something of a historical sense of fanzines like Who Put The Bomp, magazines like Creem, and the general rock critic milieu of the early 1970s, much of the mirth-making taking place here might even make some sense to a contemporary audience. They say “Subscriptions are $56 for 240 issues in the United States and Canada. Overseas rates do not exist and we reserve the right to refuse all requests from Limeys, Polacks, and New Yorkers.” They start with fake letters from Lester Bangs, Robot Hull, John Fogerty and Jon Landau, all very funny to the editors I’m sure, and continue on with a phony Lester Bangs interview and a heavy metal records consumer guide from “Bobby Crisco” aka Robert Christgau. There are some chortles and guffaws to be had, yet no splitting of sides.
Then there’s a first-rate, over-the-top piece about basketball hero Meadowlark Lemon of the Harlem Globetrotters and his (very real) “Shoot-a-Basket” 45, compared extremely favorably with the Stooges, the Shadows of Knight, Love and early Pink Floyd. James Williamson is rumored to be the guitarist on it. I think I’d better check that one out. There’s an extensive “Juke Box Jury” by Reg Shaw, aka Greg Shaw, complete with the same font and layout he was using in his own fanzine. And then, quite unexpectedly, there’s a real guide to Lou Reed’s early pre-Velvets Pickwick 45s by Wayne Davis, not really played for laughs but more some gentle mocking of his work with The Beachnuts and so forth.
Now even in the course of all this tomfoolery there are many uses of the term “punk rock”, once again resting the case that the term was something very much in circulation well before 1976 – at least in rarefied rock-crit circles – and that it was used to describe exactly what you think it was. As of this writing, there’s a copy of Brain Damage #1 for sale on eBay for the low low price of $199.99, but it does contain some photos of the pages if you’d like to take a peek.
Joe Tunis, a.k.a. “CarbonJoe”, is already back in action with a second digest-sized issue of My Teeth Need Attention as we hoped and prayed for back when we reviewed his first one earlier this year. Not only has his game been upped this time around with an absolutely lovely hue of orange/red for the cover – I believe this may have been the same shade as the “Fire Engine Red” crayon in my 64-color childhood Crayola box – but he’s got a terrific interview with another one of the 21st century’s best music fanzine creators, Matthias Andersson of Fŏrdämning.
Because Fŏrdämning wasn’t exactly easy to come by when it was around in the United States of America, or outside of Sweden at all, you may better know Andersson for his i Dischi Del Barone, Discreet Music, Fŏrdämning Archiv and Förlag För Fri Musik labels, all of which are still active. He’s also a member of numerous experimental musical acts on said labels, the most “famous” of whom are Enhet För Fri Musik, who are very, very famous and who routinely sell out hockey rinks in their native Sweden. This interview conducted by Tunis is the most complete overview I’ve seen of how this incessant curator and furtherer of the underground came to be the man he is today. If I can be said to have modern heroes, Andersson is probably one of mine and it’s always great to hear from someone who got into rad punk and underground sounds from Bones Brigade skate videos, especially when they lived in a 400-person village in Southern Sweden.
My Teeth Need Attention #2 has a similarly deep philosophical investigation with New Zealand musician and label owner Anthony Milton, who relates that he nearly recently died from a brain hemorrhage, wracking me with guilt over the callousness of this blog’s name. Liam Grant, one of the finest solo guitarists on the planet right now and who has a new LP on Carbon Records as it turns out, contributes a few pages of tour photos. Then there’s a record-collector-adjacent piece of fiction and another about a bewildering encounter with a male prostitute; another tour diary from Joe just like last issue; and it closes off with a gaggle of reviews, a few of which have led me by the hand into “exciting new dimensions in music” like this wild 1970s Pygmy Unit private-press jazz thing.
I get it – we’re really stretching the concept of “fanzine” here, as this is a full-fledged rock magazine from 1974, something found on what we once called the newsstand. Perhaps at the grocery store magazine rack. If it’s any consolation, I won’t be tackling any Creem, Circus or Hit Parader here – but the Canadian publication Beetle gives me an excuse to talk about Roxy Music, and I’m always happy to converse about Roxy Music.
Maybe we ought to get a handle on Beetle first, though. While you can find plenty of back issues for sale on eBay, I’m not really coming up with much about it on the broader world wide web, so we’ll have to go with what we have here, the only issue owned by Fanzine Hemorrhage. It’s October 1974 – widely and quite rightly considered one of the proverbial low points in rock n roll history. There are features on Chuck Mangione, a young and not-yet-famous Billy Joel and Brownsville Station (“Smokin’ in the Boy’s Room” – one of the first rock songs I ever heard). There are excited reviews of The Bee Gees, Earth Wind & Fire and Chicago, whose singer is pictured wearing a Black Hawks jersey. Original six, baby!
Yet there is quality music worth paying attention to, and at least someone at Beetle knows about it. Apparently the New York Dolls took a beating in the most recent issue, and the letters section roundly takes them to task for it. They review Too Much Too Soon and call it “truly fine raunch”, which I guess in hindsight seems a little off, because that record was some serious “sophomore slump” if there ever was such a thing, right? While the staff at Beetle gripe in several places about the Canadian content laws that mean that their radio stations are clogged with Canadian rock garbage, they are homers to some extent: “Mahogany Rush, a heavy Hendrixian trio from Montreal, are soon to be one of the better known Canadian bands in the U.S. So how come they’re unheard of in Canada?”
This reminds me of the time I was reading the morning newspaper when I was on a work trip in Toronto, the day after the academy awards. There were two screaming headlines on the front page – one about the winner of that year’s Best Picture, and an even larger one in which there was a big story about Canadian Sarah Polleynot winning “Best Adapted Screenplay”. I can understand it, though. I’ve always been part of the all-encompassing American monoculture that swallows everything, and it was nice to maybe see things from the perspective of someone from Flin Flon or Moose Jaw.
Speaking of film, there’s a laudatory long review of Peter Bogdonovich’s Daisy Miller, which is something that was “quite rare” in those days. But what excites me the most here is the big piece on Roxy Music, including a strange interview with Bryan Ferry that’s threaded in. When I was still obsessively listening to Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 in the mid/late 1970s, I heard a show he did, more like a half-day special, in which he played a ton of the previous hits of the 1970s. I had just become acquainted with “Love is the Drug” around that time, and loved it, but had never heard anything else from Roxy – and Casey Kasem, of all people, busted out “The Thrill of It All” on this program. Life changer.
I immediately bought Roxy Music’s Greatest Hits, this 1977 American album you see here that never really got repressed in the US or UK afterward – this was probably 1980. I played that thing to death, and honestly even now I think it’s a perfect record. Culling the best of Roxy Music into one LP, and actually choosing the best is no easy feat, even if it doesn’t contain “Remake/Remodel” or “In Every Dream Home a Heartache”. But it also doesn’t have any of that Flesh and Blood or Avalon crap, and I was really glad when I heard that stuff that I’d started here.
I was also kind of blown away when Casey played “The Thrill of It All” on an American Top 40 special. My impression at the time was that no one cared about Roxy Music in the USA at all, and that they had been more or less an underground band (granted, I was 12 years old at the time so I didn’t know anything about anything). Beetle, and obviously plenty of other extant rock music writing I’ve subsequently seen, showed that this was not really the case; there was a strong contingent of Roxy fans in the US; they were played on both AM hit radio and FM rock radio; and people did go to their shows here (and in Canada). They were just more beloved in their native England, unlike Mahogany Rush in their native Canada, I guess.
(Originally written as part of a Forced Exposure fanzine overview in Dynamite Hemorrhage #7):
When Byron Coleywas interviewed by Jason Gross online in 2010, he told a pretty funny story about how Diamanda Galas came to be on the cover of this Summer 1989 issue:
The (interview) we were dreading the most was the Diamanda Galas one. The problem with doing a print magazine is that sometimes, records come out and it’s like… you really don’t have enough time to deal with (them), but you want to deal with it ’cause it’s on a label like Mute. So a Diamanda Galas record came in right when the issue was due and I think Jimmie reviewed it. His whole review was something like… she was supposedly going out with Blixa (Bargeld) right then, so Jimmie wrote something like “Blixa’s dick must be as big as everybody says it is because she’s really fucking screaming on this one.” (laughs) And she kind of hit the roof because at that time, a lot of people were reading the magazine and a review like that… People would just really laugh. The label put across the word that she was furious about it. And I absolutely understand. So we said “OK, we’ll interview her. We’ll put her on the cover of the next issue.” It seemed like a good idea anyway.
But getting ready to go down for that interview… We interviewed her at a restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen. We were just like “Oh my God, she’s going to fucking castrate us.” So we went in and her rep was really vicious and we had done tons of research, so we went in prepared to be disembowel. And we apologized and explained the situation, but she was really hostile. But then as it went along and she hummed a Coltrane tune and Jimmie knew what it was (it was something theme from Meditations) and she was like “Oh!” And the questions we had were obviously well-researched – we asked her about a lot of stuff that people hadn’t really talked to her about. So it ended up being OK but that was a rough one.
She actually comes off in the interview like a pretentious, self-involved and utterly pompous ass, but whatever. I saw her finally in the mid-1990s, and it will always be one of the most memorable shows of my lifetime.
The letters section starts off with a nice bit of what we’d now recognize as “trolling” from an ex- professional baseball pitcher named Lowell Palmer, who shares the advice of “the original punk Vince Lombardi” to “do sports, not drugs”. Byron naturally takes the bait and yammers about how real adults take drugs, or, in his words, “gobble a sheet of L or bang a little smack”. Just how old were these FE guys by 1989? I’m afraid you don’t wanna know. It certainly wasn’t 19 or 20.
This issue has some fantastic material otherwise. Seymour Glass did an exceptionally comprehensive & entertaining interview with the Sun City Girls, which was followed by a single- page paean to Claw Hammer – who were fast becoming my favorite band at the time – by Eddie Flowers; “LA hasn’t been home to a ROCK combo this musically exciting and aesthetically gone since, uh, the early, Kendra-era Dream Syndicate”. Ditto that, Crawlin’ Ed.
More terrific photos of leading lights like Death of Samantha and Hanatarash and Howe Gelb litter the excellent record reviews section, and the return of the C/U Meter sees three singles get a “C/U ENTIRE PRESSING”: Vertigo’s first one (agree 100%), plus Lithium X-Mas and White Stains (both of which I’ve found online, like, just now – and both are terrific & weird psych records). Huge books section, loads of video reviews, and a new mostly noir/crime review section called “Chris D.’s Video Library” – which was a healthy step forward from the previous issue’s father/son porn reviews.
History was made with this April 1982 issue of Flipside, at least in my world. My older, clued-in cousin had it and let me peruse it frequently, mostly to laugh at The Misfits interview and to ogle Tracy Lea from Red Cross, my ultimate punk rock girl crush for many years. It struck a major chord for me because this one came out right at the tip-top of “peak LA hardcore” – peak US hardcore, pretty much – and it reads accordingly, in all of its stupidity, squalor, excitement and chaotic splendor. In fact, its tiny type truly packs in an entire universe of slam-your-ass-off punk rock mania, written for teens by people who weren’t teens, yet who wrote as intelligently as any dim-bulb high school simpleton from Canoga Park or Hawthorne or La Mirada might.
Lest you think I come here to bury Flipside #31, let it be said that I do not! I tried to capture my general feeling about the fanzine when I wrote about the issue that’d come out right after this one here. This one’s even better, for many reasons, mostly for how on-the-ground it all is, documenting the scene at eye level and in the words of its jackbooted and bandanna’ed participants. A nicely representative letter from Mark Evans gets us started:
Hey Flipside: I’m from the SF area and I’m 14 years old and I go to all the shows I can in S.F. We have some good shows up here like just a while ago Fear played with Circle One and some other bands from around here like Fuck Up’s, Lewd Crucifix and Domino Theory. Up here our Vex is the Elite Club, we have shows about every two weeks it’s totally cool. I want to say another thing: you probably have heard about the Mabuhay Gardens where they have shows every night, it sucks all they have is new wave shows, it sucks total big dick!!! — Mark Evans PS: Print this so I can show my mommy
On the opposite page is another fine missive about the scene from one “Falling” James Moreland of the Leaving Trains; I’ve done you the favor of scanning it in its entirety at the end of this post. Boy did I have some interesting run-ins with that guy over the years. There was the time in the late 80s when I tried bantering with him at a show at the Coconut Teazer (!) in LA, and he was aggressively licking his lips and jittering. I was like, oh, so that’s what speed does to you. A few years later I watched him get kicked out of Al’s Bar in LA at his own show, then later eavesdropped on him having an intense argument with Taquila Mockingbird in the parking lot. Soon enough he’d show up all around LA in dresses, yammering incessantly, and my understanding is gender fluidity has been a part of who he is ever since. There’s a “Dead or Alive?” page up for him here. I’m very glad he’s still with us: an American original.
So – the Misfits article. Now I do enjoy The Misfits myself, at least the pre-Walk Among Us 45s. But I don’t need to tell you what a horrible human being Glenn Danzig was. I don’t know about now. My cousin and I – who were huge Flesh Eaters fans – used to get a real kick out of this part of the interview:
Flipside: And you and Chris D. mixed the album. Weren’t you supposed to play with Chris D.’s band the Flesheaters?
Glenn: Yeah, but they’re scared of us.
Flipside: Why’s that?
Glenn: I don’t know…maybe because we’re all (make a mean scary face gesture) and they’re all homos, ya know?!! I don’t care what they like, I hate them. God this is homo city around here!!
Jerry: We try to avoid going down that street (Santa Monica Blvd. near Starwood).
Glenn: You go to the supermarket or to use the phone and it’s so yeecch (makes kissing sound), “Fuck you, leave me alone for 5 seconds!!” In N.Y. it’s not like that. Everybody is into their own trip. No one bugs you, if you’re a homo, fine, you are a homo and go where homo’s go. But here it’s so fucked up, everybody’s pushing on you. You have a lot more homos here than in New York!!
Flipside: Well, right here is where they all concentrate…
Glenn: And Frisco is fucking homo land!! Yeah we wanted to eat at McDonald’s and the Flesheaters wanted to go into homo-ville, we just said, “fuck you, you give us the money, we’re getting out of here!!”.
You sometimes forget from the vantage point of 2023 just how rabidly anti-gay the youth of America were forty years ago. I was in high school then, and I remember. The letters section of Flipside #31 is just “fag”, “homo”, “that’s gay”, “I hate that queer”, etc., ad nauseam. HR, in the interview with the Bad Brains, responds to the question “How’d it go in SF?” with, “Well, it’s ok, but too many faggots.” Back to The Misfits – their interview here took place after their infamous San Francisco show at the Elite Club, during which “Doyle” totally brained some kid in the crowd with his guitar. (The incident is very well-described here). That show is reviewed in this issue, and ends a little shakily, “We figured someone might have been murdered but I haven’t read anything about it in the paper.”
So aside from all that, there’s a nice interview with Pagan Icons-era Saccharine Trust, who are already tiring of punk and moving on to what they’d become one album later; Tracy Lea and the always reliably hilarious Red Cross; Jodie Foster’s Army reveal the origins of the song title “Beach Blanket Bongout”, quite seriously among the top five song titles of all time as voted by Fanzine Hemorrhage; and a plethora of tiny-type scene reports mostly written by morons, which are yet Illuminative of a pretty special and unique time in the American underground. It’s an insanely-packed issue that all criticisms aside was highly worth the dollar my cousin spent on it in the HC Spring of 1982.
We’re now traveling backward in time through multiple fanzines that were helmed and penned by Mike Applestein. We talked about his current Silent Command fanzine here; we then conversed about his late 90s fanzine Caught In Fluxhere. We’re now discussing Writer’s Block #7, which came out in the Spring of 1991 and was published from Spotswood, New Jersey along with his girlfriend Alex Kogan and an all-female cast of contributing editors, including Jen Matson. You can see from the scan that my copy was marked up 5x from its original price, having recently procured it as I did from Division Leap books & ephemera.
The Writer’s Block crew are primarily rooted in underground pop music of many flavors and colors, the more lo-fi and personal the better. There’s room for the broader, noisier underground as well, and Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 and Killdozer make lauded appearances, but in general, acts like Heavenly and Unrest and The Clean rule the roost, as well as New Zealand and the Flying Nun universe. There’s an interview with the unfortunately-named Olympia, WA duo Courtney Love – I always felt sorry for them on that count – as well as with Sue Garner, who was in the Shams and Fish & Roses, and who’d later go on to be in the highly underrated (including by me, at the time) Run On. The passion and deep knowledge that went into their interview subjects and the questions asked of them is readily apparent, and no question Writer’s Block belongs in the international pop underground museum someone’ll eventually erect.
Barbara Manning writes a letter from San Francisco, and Applestein reviews her 2/23/91 show at the Knitting Factory in NYC, her first show in town since World of Pooh blew through a year previous as they were breaking up. Man, that year – 1991 – I must have seen Barbara Manning play a dozen or more shows in the San Francisco Bay Area alone. I was besotted with World of Pooh while they were around, and was bereft now that they were gone. Manning’s solo shows and early shows with “Barbara Manning and the Tablespoons” were a fantastic salve. Her work in the first half of the 90s stands up proudly vs. anyone’s. Great to see another magazine enthusiastically making said case in real time.
Pavement get one of their first local shows reviewed – the 8/12/90 show at Maxwell’s – and it’s clear from Alex Kogan’s review that they were barely more coherent then than they were the time I saw them at their big San Francisco coming-out party a few months before that. I can’t find anything online to confirm exactly when the band first played in SF, but it was a big deal for several of us based on their two 45s and the Perfect Sound Forever record, and….they were horrific! Like walk-out-long-before-the-end-of-the-set horrific. Kogan blames intoxication and a who-cares attitude. The 1990s, folks. That’s how we rolled. I never saw Pavement on a stage again.
(By the way – there is reliable evidence online that suggests that Pavement might not have actually played their first San Francisco show until 1992. This would not be the first time that my misshapen memory has arranged events to fit a narrative I’d like to convey; in this case, my attendance at a 1990 show by Pavement before anyone else saw them play. Not that I care about Pavement, you know, but I do prefer being accurate to muddled and braggy. Anyone know?)
My copy of Writer’s Block #7 has stamps and a mailing label slapped on the back, and it’s addressed to Steve Connell from Puncture fanzine. I wonder how Mike Applestein feels about Connell having turned his back like this on his 1991 sweat, toil and labor.
Remember when the Terminal Boredom guys did a print zine? Aside from three collections of internet reprints, I had thought that Termbo #1 in 2013 was the only one they did, but even as I’m writing this, I just found out that there was another three years later that I never saw. Then they were done. Now their message board’s totally kaput as well. I can’t say I really did anything over there, maybe a post or two, but a lot of their online action was concurrent with a lot of my online action, and I had much respect for the community of frothing, opinionated-as-hell garage punk misanthropes they built, as well as for the gentlemen who built it, primarily Rich Kroneiss and a few other hearty, regular contributors.
If you had to try and pinpoint their aesthetic, this fanzine’s cover provides many clues. A messed-up looking “beach wrestler”; a muscular heavy metal arm with a knife; and a band called “White Load”. (Forget the “poetry”; you certainly will once you read it). Today’s Total Punk record label is an almost perfect manifestation of the world that Terminal Boredom helped to incubate and further along. Termbo #1 states its mission pretty clearly from the off: “…a collection of articles and interviews, most of which were written for this print edition in particular and some older material that never made it to the Termbo site for whatever reason.”
Of those articles, there is one that stands out very clearly for me. Russ Murphy digs deep into the Black Flag debacle that had gone on that year, the one where Greg Ginn brought Ron Reyes back into the fold for a “Black Flag” record and tour, pretty much just to spite the shenanigans Keith Morris was pulling with his own bands Off! and Flag. I’m not totally sure of the chronology of all this stuff, because I really tried my hardest to not pay attention to any of it, but when this record cover came out it was truly a “drop everything” moment. Murphy illuminates the contours of the controversy and attempts a journey into Ginn’s head to understand what possessed him to do any of this, and as a card-carrying Black Flag freak, tries really hard to enjoy the record (“Careful listening shows that there is more going on here than a casual listen will reveal”). He comes to the conclusion that in order to actually listen to and get something out of this record, the listener will really have to “put some effort” into it. I can imagine – but no thanks! Great piece.
Also enjoyed the film reviews by Jordy Shearer, which range from “Cabin Boy” to “Frances Ha” to Antonioni’s “The Passenger” and back again to “Phantasm”. There’s also a long piece about exploitation films – I think it’s by Kroneiss, but it’s uncredited – and the hallowed video stores and VHS tapes of his misspent youth. There’s an interview with the aforementioned White Load and a photo in which one of the guys has a fuckin’ sword. Totally killer. And another with the FNU Ronnies, who were a pretty wild experimental punk band I think I may need to listen to again.
If you want to know where all the “message board punks” went after the death of Terminal Boredom – or if you do know – this thread’s where you need to head next after subscribing to future Fanzine Hemorrhage posts in the upper right-hand corner of our desktop site.
The late 1990s were the heyday of “brothers going their own way” when it came to underground, rock-adjacent music – as least as it was covered by fanzines at the time. I’ve already yammered about how averse to free jazz, abstract folk and experimental noise I was at the time in my previous discussions of Tuba Frenzy #4, Astronauts #4 and Gold Soundz #4, so I won’t belabor the unimportant point here, nor the unimportant point that I’ve come whimpering back to it all in the subsequent decades. Just be glad I don’t have any issues of De/Create or Opprobrium. Those were the ones that really pissed me off back then.
This brings us to Deep Water #5 from Winter 1998, which emanates from the same genus as those others. You see a fanzine published from Iowa City, Iowa and there’s a pretty good chance that someone’s going to college. In fact the mailing address is on “College Street”. There are three editors, and I’m a bit suspicious of their listed names: “Kevin Moist”, “Bill Reader” and “Chris Curley” – though I suppose if Reader and Curley were going for something wacky they’d have done a little better than that.
The fanzine begins inauspiciously. There’s a long article from a pal of theirs, an American in Poland, haranguing the music fanzine reader (who after all, just wants to ROCK) about Poland’s inelegant post-Communist transition to democracy and hyper-capitalism in the 1990s. It smells like a ploy by the writer to get published in the only place he might be able to – his friends’ budget music fanzine. He probably bugged the crap out of them to shoehorn this dreary drone in there. That said, there are recipes in the magazine – like recipes you cook, for food – so maybe Deep Water was attempting an omnivorous approach to culture as they themselves defined it.
There’s nowhere to go but up from there – and thankfully they go way up! Kevin Moist’s intro to his Brother J.T. interview is exceptionally well-written. Now I know he was a college boy. Just a well-done interview through and through – like one of the better wide-ranging fanzine discussions with a smart person you’ll ever read; if you’ve ever read a good Dan Melchior interview, it’s the same vibe – and now I’m feeling like I need to go back and listen to more Brother J.T. records. I mostly started and ended in the 80s with “she’s just fourteen and I don’t care!”. The same thing happened to me when I read the long piece on Cordelia’s Dad – another erudite exploration that makes me wonder how I missed this band. Good music writing’ll do that, and is all too rare. And how did I forgot all about Grimble Grumble until today??
Honestly, maybe I’m most taken with the Times New Roman font, always the font of choice for my own mags. I know I ask for details sometimes on these obscure mags and it’s been very rare that anyone’s been willing and able to provide it, but: does anyone know anything more about Deep Water and the fellas that put it out? (I found this, so that’s a good start). You leave a comment about it if you do, and fifty years from now some middle-aged dude that hasn’t been born yet will totally thank you.
Who Put The Bomp was an ur-fanzine, one of the earlier and absolute best examples of a rocknroll fanatic following his obsessions and documenting every jot and titter from his heroes. Greg Shaw is deservedly lauded for parting from the mainstream in his writing when it was warranted; for going deep into topics that no one else would touch (like this issue’s instrumental surf records coverage) and for bringing on a king’s table of rock writers over the years to write for the mag – including Lester Bangs, Richard Meltzer, Dave Marsh, Greil Marcus and “Metal” Mike Saunders.
I’ve had all six of the late 70s punk-infused issues, from when it was just called Bomp! magazine, for quite some time. I’m only now coming around to trying to cobble together issues of the pre-1976 Who Put The Bomp! fanzine, of which there are 15 issues. The first one of those I got was the “British Invasion Issue”, #10-11, and it’s so massive and meaty and full of tiny type that I’ve barely cracked the code on the thing. All-in, it’s longer than most books about music you’re likely to read. All the issues before that one are too scarce and expensive for Fanzine Hemorrhage’s pocketbook, but if there’s a will there’s a way, and there’s totally a will.
So I’m concentrating on those issues between that British Invasion one and and the punk-era stuff, and recently found a lovely copy of Who Put The Bomp! #14 from Fall 1975, the one with these hodads on the cover. Like I said, the key to the issue is the instrumental surf music discography and backstory. It’s an incredible resource even now, 48 years later. I’m sure there’s probably some small-press record collector book that’d tell me a bunch of the same info I can get here, but there might not be. I happen to love this stuff and it grows on me even more as I age into the typical age bracket of the “1961 surf instrumental 45 record collector”. After glomming onto this thing I’ve been spending a bunch of time with the Surf-Age Nuggets: Trash & Twang Instrumentals box set, as well as with my Lost Legends of Surf Guitar comps. OK, grandpa!
I learned all about Tony Hilder, who produced Fresno’s Revels (who did “Church Key”) and was a prime mover in the early 60s California Central Valley instrumental surf scene, which I was surprised as you were to find out was a thing. Hilder then put out a series of “right-wing records” about the John Birch society and Barry Goldwater, which I’m sure are total fucking godhead. Alas, the piece says “The defeat of Barry Goldwater and the demise of surf music marked the end of Tony Hilder’s active involvement in the music industry. He is now employed as a salesman of freeze-dried food products in Southern California, writing reactionary declarations in his spare time”.
Other highlights: a complete discography and story about Dutch rock (The Outsiders, Q65, Shocking Blue etc.) and another oddly compelling discography of Beatles novelties and parodies – none of it by the Beatles, but stuff like The Twiliters’ “My Beatle Haircut”. I mean, the folks that put this stuff together, need I say, did not have the internet, or Goldmine, or anything similar. Just their own crate-digging and obsessive compiling, at a time when a used, non-picture sleeve 45 in a record store could be picked up for a nickel, dime or quarter.
And Roky Erickson is back! He’s just been released from a Texas state psychiatric hospital after being inside for five years – and he’s got a new band, Roky Erickson & Bleib Alien. He’s come to Los Angeles to play his brand-new songs, “Two-Headed Dog”, “Starry Eyes”, “Don’t Slander Me” and “Don’t Shake Me Lucifer”. Can you believe it? Greg Turner is on the scene, and gets Erickson to do a fairly coherent interview. This is then followed up with a full International Artists discography, because of course it is.
The new wave is almost here. Shaw notes in his end-of-issue column that “Big news around Hollywood is The Runaways, a group of 3 high school girls (14, 16, 18) who play like The Sweet and sing great teenage anthems, most of them written by Kerry Krome, a 13-year-old girl prodigy. They also do The Troggs’ classic “Come Now”. Remember, you read it here first.” In 1975, that was probably the case. She was actually Kari Krome, real name Carrie Mitchell, and boy does she now have a sordid and likely indisputable story to tell.
Who Put The Bomp #14 is one of those fanzines you wanna hold onto for dear life, not merely because of its centrality to a certain all-encompassing rock & roll mindset in ‘75, but as a resource to be frequently mined. I probably gave Shaw short shrift in my twenties for being what his contributors Greg Turner and Mike Saunders would call “a power pop turd”, but hey, I’ve even come around a little on some 70s power pop. Let me see if I can find a few of those other issues and I promise to meet ya here to talk about them.
OP was the offspring of Olympia, WA’s John Foster in 1979, who envisioned documenting an ephemeral organization called “The Lost Music Network” in which record labels, cassette artists, radio stations, fanzines and small clubs might coalesce into a like-minded fraternity of deeply-underground comrades. Over 26 issues, he did much to further the concept, and the glossy-cover Op received some pretty strong nationwide distribution, particularly in its later years, as it traipsed through the alphabet with showcase issues for each letter. It was something I then saw as pretty gimmicky and limiting, but which absolutely aged better with time and an actual look at how they pulled it off.
Issues of Op are generally able to be found. I never owned any at the time, most likely because their musical remit went well beyond my ability to ingest it as a teenager. I sauntered down to the San Francisco Art Book Fair a few weeks ago and, to my surprise, there were paper ephemera merchants with all sorts of vintage fanzines for sale, including Oregon’s Division Leap. I procured a handful of Op issues from them at a fair price, include Op #19, the “S” issue from 1983.
Foster and his loose, extensive network of relied-upon contributors were single-minded in their dedicated focus to micro-indie iconoclasts of any genre, from hardcore to 20th century classical to experimental home tapers. It’s an intense collection of information in small-point type, and while I read the issue in detail earlier in the week, it would be wrong to say I was hanging on every word, since there’s not really a defined joint opinion or tastemaking approach outside of “celebrating the unknown” and the misunderstood – regardless, at times, of its ultimate quality. John Foster’s record reviews in particular attempt to be magnanimous to a fault. I had forgotten 100% about SF Bay Area heshers Eddie and The Tide, the great white local hope of burnouts and stoners at my high school, but even they clearly sent their indie record to Op in hopes of not getting a beating – which they didn’t.
That said, Jamie Rake in his Sin 34 review says “Julie must be the worst female vocalist since Debbie of The Flying Lizards”. I don’t really know who that is, but don’t you come at Julie. He also talks about a Wisconsin HC band called The Shemps and asks “when was the last time you heard a pro-sports punk tune? Check out ‘The Pack Will Be Back’”. I definitely need to hear this song. There’s a really great section of fanzine reviews from Foster and Chris Stigliano, the latter of whom also highlights and marvels at a new onslaught of Velvet Underground bootlegs. As far as the interviews go – again, only with artists whose names start with “S”, there’s a perplexingly perfunctory one with Sun Ra, in which he answers multiple questions with variations on “Well I don’t know about that, because I am not human”.
There’s also a long letters section so different from the ones we see in publications today, with “letters” pulled from emails and Twitter comments. These were letters that then had to be re-typed and transcribed. Shane Williams writes from prison. I had forgotten that one of his longtime tropes had been “You’d be a little bit racist too, if you’d seen what I’ve seen in the joint”. The more late 70s/early 80s fanzines I immerse myself in, the more the letters section often feels like the star of the show. I’m even warming to the Flipside letters section, especially when I can find some teen’s name in there complaining about their scene or their mom or the cops, with the hindsight to know that said teen later went on to be well-known in a band, or put out their own fanzine, or wrote fiction etc. – or was just a letter-writin’ gadfly like Shane Williams or Joe Piecuch.
So you may know that Op, once Foster finished up with the letter “Z” issue, had its lofty networking mission carried on afterward by two more fanzines, Sound Choice and Option. The former even invented its own extension of the Lost Music Network: “The Audio Evolution Network”. Both suffered from some of the same shortcomings as their predecessor while each having some winning aspects of their own. We’ll talk about them some other day here on the ‘Hemorrhage.
In the spring of 1993 I spent two months traveling North America as the road manager, driver & merch seller for the band Claw Hammer, who were friends of mine from Los Angeles. As someone with zero musical talent – and lord knows I tried to pretend otherwise – I was utterly beside myself that I’d actually be able to go on tour, traveling from city to city, haulin’ in and haulin’ out, just like the underground musicians whose lives I was appropriating by having thrown in my cultural lot with them as a college radio DJ, record buying-obsessive and fanzine publisher.
I was so excited by 60 days spent crammed in an Econoline touring the US of A and a little bit of Canada that I quit my job as a customer service rep at Monster Cable, though my sabbatical ended up being short enough that I was able to reclaim my place on the corporate ladder upon returning. The band themselves were on something of an upswing, having recently come off a supporting tour with Mudhoney and with a new record out on the lucre-loaded Epitaph Records, run by Brett from Bad Religion. So I was decidedly a fifth wheel to the 4 band members – the guy who settled up at the end of the night with the club booker; the guy who pulled the van into Des Moines; the guy who taped the t-shirts and CDs to the wall behind the merch table; the guy who had to call Peter Davis at Creature Booking to make sure the show in Baton Rouge or Wichita or Montreal was still on.
It was all about the Claw Hammer guys and who came to see them – I remember in particular a show in Tulsa with six paying customers, three of whom were members of the Flaming Lips. Occasionally and very rarely, however, there were people I’d meet on the road who actually came to the club with the intention of seeing me. Yeah, some were friends from college, but sometimes (like once or twice) there was actually someone who knew about my music fanzine Superdope and wanted to talk sub-underground musical baseball with me. That’s how I met the Bad Vibe guys.
It was at the Cabaret Metro in Chicago in May 1993. If I’m not mistaken, “Ween” were the headliner, and a Canadian pop band called Sloan, who had a massive tour bus parked outside, played as well. David Salvia and Jim Sonnenberg from mid-state Illinois had recently put out a garage punk fanzine called Bad Vibe #1, and I had a copy & it’s very likely we’d exchanged “letters” about it – in fact it’s almost certainly how they knew I’d be at this show in their state.
Well these two wide-eyed, cornfed Midwesterners saddled up to the merch table and introduced themselves, and we had a fine time talking about the ins & outs of the scene, about the rigors of publishing and distribution and whatnot. Claw Hammer? Pffffft. When they started playing, these guys couldn’t care less and anchored themselves to the table, in the club’s now-empty lobby. I felt so important! It was me – I was the one who was on tour, and these were my two fans! I tried to play all the hits for them: the times I saw Pussy Galore; the time I hung out with Rob Vasquez; that one time the Cheater Slicks stayed at my house, and everything else I could muster. By the end of the night, like Springsteen, Little Steven and “The Big Man”, I’d truly sweated it out and left it all on stage….I mean on the merch table. We then said our goodbyes and never spoke again.
A few months later Bad Vibe #2 came out, the issue we’re talking about today. Salvia and Sonnenberg one-upped my awful interview (Superdope #5) with Rob Vasquez and The Night Kings with an even worse interview with Vasquez, who cops to being baked 24/7 and really can’t seem to muster enthusiasm for much of anything, including the phone conversation he’s taking part in. They also included a great record with the mag – the Night Kings’ Brainwashed EP. Then they even went and put in posters of the Blues Explosion and Royal Trux. I could never afford color anything, nor could I include a record (not even a flexi) – so I said then to myself and I say now: well done, lads.
It strikes me re-reading Bad Vibe #2 thirty years later that there were young men who really, really had a thing for The Muffs’ Kim Shattuck; I believe the Bad Vibe team may have counted themselves among them. (Alas, she unfortunately passed away just this past year). Their magazine strikes me now as youthfully dumb, as mine was, while also having a strong handle of the slightly more “popular” side of garage punk – Vasquez very much not included there – and digging into some of the deeper wells at the same time. It’s a fun read, and you can actually still buy a fresh copy here, thirty years on.
Whenever it was that I found my used, stained issue of Attack #8 in a record store, I know I dragged it to the counter mostly assuming it was a relatively generic, slapdash cut-n-paste April ‘83 hardcore punk fanzine that had caught my fleeting attention for some reason or another. Seattle, maybe. I do dig Seattle. It was only upon bringing it home did I realize I had something pretty fantastic here – a young Jo Smitty was the editor and guy behind it (!). You may know him as a member of Mr. Epp and The Calculations (vocalist on most tracks), or as Jeff Smith, the guy behind Feminist Baseball fanzine in the 90s. And it features multiple contributions from Mark Arm, whom you may know from…..you know who Mark Arm is.
It was a true treat to get duly reacquainted with this one after so many years away from it while it was sequestered securely away in a garage box. Attack #8 really hammers home what an open-minded fella teenage Jo Smitty was. He’ll talk your ear off about Whitehouse, The Fall, Grandmaster Flash, dozens of hardcore slammeisters and even English punk. ‘83 Smitty loves The Poison Girls and Crass. He and his contributors make the Seattle music scene sound way more exciting and cohesive than popular histories of the pre-grunge era have led me to believe. Wasn’t this supposed to be the city that time forgot, the place few touring bands set foot in because it was “too far” from California or whatever? Not at all the impression given here – these boys are slamming their asses off to Black Flag, DOA, Dead Kennedys and all the Northwest heroes, from Poison Idea to The Fartz – andP.I.L.. Iggy Pop. Savage Republic, TSOL and The Ramones as well.
Smitty also reviews a bunch of films; his contributor Talya Christian hates Urgh: A Music War, and singles out The Cramps as being particularly lame, putting them in her “boring to sickening” list (??). This was a particularly fertile moment in American punk rock history – the amazing “Quincy punk” episode had just aired, and it was a whopper. Much-discussed in high school alterna-circles at the time. Smitty understands the stakes here and devotes an entire article to it. Me, I did not see this one in real time when it aired, but I was delighted to have caught the slightly less-heralded CHiPs punk episode on its debut! I’d be willing to fund a Blu-Ray with these two on it, along with some Wally George episodes, maybe.
Now, Mark Arm, he loves himself some hardcore – totally blown away by Minor Threat, maybe not too impressed with Negative Approach, and he probably loves Flipper most of all. He contributes an excellent savaging of TSOL’s Beneath The Shadows album. In case it hasn’t been clear on this blog to date, I thought, and have always thought, that TSOL were utterly atrocious from day one. I’ll try not to mention them again, but when we talk about early 80s fanzines they always seem to have been around. Rebel Truth from Sacramento are interviewed, and so is Whitehouse!
Just a gem of a bedroom fanzine from top to bottom. You can ogle all of the covers of Attack fanzine here if you’d like.
Fanzine Hemorrhage 
