Skid #5

I only came to possess a copy of 1982’s Skid #5 because its editor, one Jon Hope, kindly sent me one over ten years ago. We’d been conversing about this & that & what have you, fanzines and rock and roll music and all of that jazz, and in the course of him sending me some of his old copies of Matter – which I’m still totally psyched beyond belief he did – I also got Skid #5, published out of his hometown of Oconomowoc, WI. I kid you not. It’s a real place. Over 18,000 people happily live there to this day.

It’s funny, the deeper I head into fanzines from 1981-1982 the more I realize that not everyone was balkanizing themselves into hardcore vs. not hardcore. Out in California, where I’m from, I really can’t remember a reputable fanzine that successfully straddled blazing ‘core, English post-punk and mainstreamish FM alterna-rock, treating it all as part of the great cosmic whirl and with equal levels of respect. It was, like, Ripper and Maximum Rocknroll and Flipside and Paranoia – among many, many others – on the pure HC side, and then a few gothy, mod or nu-wave fanzines on the other side, never the twain shall meet. Out there in the “real America”, there was The Offense and Op and Skid making sure they did, in fact, meet. Hope’s favorite songs, listed in his intro, proclaim his current favorite songs to be from acts such as Felt, The Replacements, Die Kreuzen, Gang of Four, Flipper, The Embarrassment and Secret Hate (!).

And something I’ve never seen before: Skid #5 includes a post-it note to hold its contents in place, I thought it was just mine, but there are instructions right there in the intro. Deliberate – and very bold – D.I.Y. move. Being from Wisconsin, Hope and his crew cover some of the time period’s serious Wisconsin heavyweights – Ama-Dots, Oil Tasters and No, “a Green Bay hardcore band”. Kansas’ The Embarrassment have just come to Milwaukee after opening for P.I.L. in Chicago, and got 8 people in the crowd as their audience as their reward. “They report they haven’t given up on Milwaukee”. They appear here to be Hope’s favorite band, as he claims to be all out of superlatives to describe them.

Then you get into the astoundingly innumerable reviews – was he getting promos or was he just an incredible record collector? – and it’s really just the crème de la crème of modern hardcore punk. He flips for Flipper and the This is Boston Not L.A. comp (“except for the noticeable lack of SS Decontrol, this is really impressive”). Hell, I’ll say! I still think the blitzoid Gang Green stuff on that record is jaw-droppingly, eye-wateringly great, up there with Void, Negative Approach and The Fix in my personal hardcore pantheon, and just one notch below the first Die Kreuzen LP (speaking of Wisconsin, as we were). Hope is a little tepid on the Flesheaters’ Forever Came Today, before moving on to review the plethora of material that’s just come out that quarter, with Punk and Disorderly and Bullshit Detector II right in there with Joe Jackson, SPK and Y Pants. Raise your hand if you were 14 years old around this time and Punk and Disorderly was among your first five punk album purchases.

Then, in the area that’s not well-held by the post-it note, there’s an English Beat interview, and it all wraps up with a “Church of the Subgenius” pamphlet for reasons unknown. If you have to ask, you’ll never know. It’s probably better that way.