Back From The Grave #1

What do you call those low-run, xerox-y looking, print publications that Boo-Hooray puts out, often about obscure and collectible underground music? Fanzines? No? Well then will you at least humor me this time? I only have a couple of Boo-Hooray items, the few that correspond precisely with my interests, of which one of them is something I’d have opened a vein for if I hadn’t otherwise been able to procure it. It’s a one-off, 66-copies-printed (allegedly) fanzine all about the Back From The Grave 60s garage punk compilation series. This Tim Warren-curated album collection, as I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, is an all-time peak cultural totem that makes Americans like me just a little more patriotic every time we listen, and it’s a series that did more for the cause of “garage punk” writ large than anything save for Lenny Kaye’s Nuggets and those mid-60s teenage punkers themselves. And each volume was 100x better than the best volume of Nuggets, great as those are.

This Back From The Grave “fanzine” – well, I only latched onto a copy because Boo-Hooray proprietor Johan Kugelberg traded me one, mostly because I’d just published my own interview with Tim Warren about the then recently-resurrected Back From The Grave series in my Dynamite Hemorrhage #2 fanzine. Read it here if you’d like. The reason I did so wasn’t merely because I wanted to pay tribute to the most raw, savage and deeply underground 60s punk 45s – though of course there was that – but because Warren himself was, and I’m sure still is, a wildly enigmatic, funny and highly opinionated and obsessive vinyl hound. He’s a guy whom I’d somehow built up enough personal goodwill with over the years that he said he’d talk to me, and he doesn’t seem to talk to that many folks. I’ll never forget while I was waiting to call him at the anointed hour we were supposed to speak, he was already frantically typing unedited answers to my questions in the Google Doc I’d sent him. I’m sitting there watching the document explode in real time, so I had to call him in Germany 15 minutes early just to get him to stop. The interview is transcribed just as it happened – some written, most spoken. 

Also met the dude once in San Francisco in the mid-1990s when he was nice & hammered, sunglasses on in a club at 11pm, trucker hat pulled low over his forehead. We had a real nice chat. Everything about this LP series and how it came to be – and of course the music it documents – is immensely fascinating to me. I’m also writing right now with the fatal elitist prick assumption that you reading this right now “get” everything I’m saying, and totally already know all about Back From The Grave and the music on it. Odds are you actually might not, and that’s completely understandable. Check out this, this, this and this for some of my all-time favorites.

This Back From The Grave mag has an unnecessary but very cool “glow in the dark” substance slathered on the lettering for “Back” and “Grave” that you see here. Tested it last night (for the first time, after owning this for ten years) and it worked! Its contents are even better. Effectively, it’s a well-curated collection of every bit of BFTG ephemera that Kugelberg could find: interviews, advertisements, alternate album covers that weren’t released, even the hand-written interview that Tim Warren did with members of The Keggs as he was putting Back From The Grave Volume One out. 

The main entry, I guess, is Sylvain Collette’s illustrated discography of the different BFTG volumes and editions. You get a teaser about a wildly rare bootleg double LP called Garage Kings that came out with the first two BFTG editions, something I certainly never knew about. There’s a fantastic interview with Mort Todd, the guy who created the covers for the first seven editions of the series, all of which are worth staring at and parsing for twenty minutes at a time. They offer much to learn about Warren’s worldview. There are several Tim Warren interviews, a Mike Stax essay, a Johan Kugelberg essay, and quite a bit more. Johan says, and I believe him, that Warren is the one who told him “Oh, you should do a 70s punk Back From The Grave”. Kugelberg took the advice, and those ended up being the first 4 volumes of the Killed By Death compilations. Life-changers.

So I know it’s a drag reading about something that only 66 copies were made of. Bums me out with collectable records all the time. I have good news for you, though, something that I didn’t know until I started Googlin’ while writing this post. As of this writing someone’s selling one on eBay for $300; better still, someone scanned the whole thing and it’s available for free on the Internet Archive to look at right now, if that’s something you’d be interested in doing. Then you can see what all this malarkey and balderdash is all about.