Smallflowers Press #1

One-and-done New England fanzine put out by a guy who chose near-anonymity by merely calling himself “Kris”. I’m sure there’s no question that if you were at all part of the Brattleboro/Amherst early 2000s freak scene that funneled its way into wider consciousness via Byron Coley & Thurston Moore’s Arthur column, you surely knew who Kris was. He seems to have been exceptionally well-acquainted with the whats and wherefores of just about everyone and everything surrounding the players in that professed New Weird Underground, a movement that had something of a moment around the time of Smallflowers Press #1’s publication in 2004. I found this hippie encroachment to be a little threatening at the time and I kept a wary and highly suspicious eye upon it, yet it fizzled and fragmented as these things tend to do.

Kris and his small team did something I’ve never seen in a fanzine before: Smallflowers Press #1 consists of three long interviews, period, each supplemented by a ton of photos. Here’s what Coley/Moore had to say about it in one of their columns:

“If you ever wondered about the minutiae of the New England Underground, you could do much worse than to get the debut issue of SMALLFLOWERS PRESS. This is a solo newsprint mag that contains incredibly detailed interviews with Dredd Foole, Chris Corsano, and all the countless members of Sunburned Hand of the Man. It’s a massive 76-page read, and probably a tough slog if you’re not somewhat besotted by this stuff, but if you are, well, sheesh, this one’s for you.”

I suppose it could be a tough slog, yet the interviews have such obvious camaraderie and are so stepped in music arcana that I find them fairly easy sledding in most parts. The massive Dredd Foole (Dan Ireton) interview in particular hones in for a big chunk on the late 70s/early 80s Boston underground, and the man’s deep involvement with Mission of Burma and its players. The comparatively small-ish Chris Corsano interview is cool because Corsano – one of the all-time most ferocious drummers I’ve ever seen – was really just a young pup at this point, already quite accomplished and playing with numerous free jazz and freeform giants.

The true whopper here is the enormous Sunburned Hand of the Man interview, which takes up nearly 50 pages in total. You want the early story on this magickal, mystical free rock collective, you’ll find it here.  The band talks about their June 10th, 2003 show in San Francisco with Comets on Fire that I captured my magnanimous impressions of here the following day. I guess I kinda liked ‘em! I was trying so hard back then to incorporate the hippie and free-folk interlopers into my hidebound worldview and taste parameters. Every so often, it’d work – like I became a huge Josephine Foster fan around this time. You read the interview with “Sunburned” here, and it’s not hard to admire their rural, back-to-the-land, communal approach to living and making music. 

I don’t know, something about the post-9/11 cultural landscape and the void left in underground music after the massive wave of the 1990s left a lot of interesting, obscure musical tentacles, micro-labels and homespun fanzines like Smallflowers Press floating about, each doing their thing in as radically independent a manner as could be imagined. When I search for ways to make fun of it, as is my wont, I don’t get as far as I’d like, leading me to believe that given the right set of circumstances and chemical fortification, I too might have been one of the barefoot dancing heshers on stage with them at any given show. I also think that someone could pull together from tapes a compilation documenting the best of the New England “free music” scene documented here that’d probably knock our socks off. Kris, you still out there?