Hypertension #7

~ Jay Hinman ~ 1 Comment

Hard one to stomach, this Hypertension #7, but that’s probably not being altogether fair, and we believe in fairness and accuracy in reporting here at FH. Editor Paul Lukas, is, like me, now an “old guy”, but at one point in his journey he was not – he was a young twentysomething marinating in whatever “biting”/”cutting” fanzine template it was that Gerard Cosloy had laid down with Conflict, but he was, alas, not doing it particularly well – yet doing it with an unearned bravado that, who knows, I might have really enjoyed at the time. That said, I was a total ding-dong dumbbell in 1988.

Now, if you know the name Paul Lukas, it’s because he took his underground publishing fetish and love for the offbeat and kind of turned it into a vocation of sorts. I mean, he’s minor-league famous for a column called Uni Watch, for sports uniform obsessives, that I’d never heard about until about ten minutes ago. I remember his Beer Frame, and I remember Inconspicuous Consumption. These were non-music fanzines – or “zines”, as some call them. You know, the sort of people who create “zines” and sell them at tables at “‘zinefests” and so on. I remember seeing John Marr from Murder Can be Fun at one of those things and he looked so abject and miserable, I think it might be why he stopped publishing completely (incidentally, this was the only “zinefest” I’ve ever walked into and then out of). 

And look, there’s nothing wrong with any of that. If I met Paul Lukas, lord knows he and I would probably have much to talk about beyond sciatica and the AARP newsletter: a fella who likes beer, music, baseball and a good laff is probably a great fucking American. So let’s just judge Hypertension #7 by itself, then, seen through an all-consuming lens of hindsight, regret and modern snark. Lukas was publishing this in Brooklyn in 1988. Let’s start by saying I’m really hoping he’s Jewish, because his ability to thread in too-many jokes about the Jews in this thing could, and should, only be pulled off by a Member of the Tribe. 

He opens with an editorial about the “cleverness brigade” and how he stands righteously opposed to them, without fully saying whom they are, except for they like Shimmy-Disc Records, Half Japanese and they might publish Flesh & Bones fanzine. As I said, the whole tone of this is exceptionally Cosloy-esque, especially the opening 3-dot gossip and opinion thing. I saw this style parroted/ripped off in Bill Callahan’s Disaster too, but this one is far more annoying in its jovial dissing by virtue of not being very funny, i.e. “the Nu Muzak Semen-ar”; “I saw Boys From Nowhere and you didn’t” and the slagging of various bands. This is done without the sort of established tastemaking that might have had me buying, selling & attending/not attending based on his flippant reviews. Perhaps if I’d read Hypertension #1-6 I might appreciate the full cut of his jib, and feel otherwise. 

There’s lots of “cringe” insider shorthand, too – the Celibate Rifles are “the Rifles”, the Band of Susans are the “Band of Susie-Q’s”, Sonic Youth is for some reason “Chronic Youth” or “Scenic Youth”, and Buster Poindexter is “B. Poindexter”. I don’t know who first started writing like this but it thankfully was a short-lived trend that seems to have been left to die in the 1980s. There are ongoing Cheap Trick jokes; lots of complaining about lyrics and people who don’t dissect lyrics the way he does; and some praise for Patti Smith on the basis of, OMG I can’t even type this: “Patti Smith always understood that rock & roll is sex”. There, whew, I did it. How you guys doing out there?

Now, once we’ve gotten through all of that, well, there are two halfway decent interviews with Ohio rocknrollers the Boys From Nowhere and Sister Ray, both of whom who featured prominently in my record collection at the time. There are well-written and positive reviews of Drunks With Guns and Nice Strong Arm – ditto. And then leading into “the man he would soon become”, there are many ironic product reviews and baseball references, the former of which are uninteresting to me and the latter of which feel totally Cosloy, but I also grant that many of us roundly enjoy America’s pastime. Some even successfully melded the sport with underground punk rock music in a manner that didn’t annoy me. 

But I can’t say, now that I’ve read so many of their fanzines, that I actually miss the days when every late 80s NY/Boston/Jersey smart kid who loved Dinosaur and Big Dipper published a fanzine, and brutally aped his idols in the course of doing so. If I’d been doing the same during those years, I know my product would have been absolutely insufferable. What I came out with 4-5 years later was bad enough. I’m glad the dude found his calling down the line, and in so many ways, Hypertension #7 is quite rewarding as a repository for the tenor of its times, much like Teen Screen or Cheetah were for theirs.

Punk Magazine #2

~ Jay Hinman ~ 3 Comments

I did not buy Punk Magazine #2 in 1973 because I was, as it turns out, five years old. Rather, I came to it as an idiot “fanzine collector” quite recently. So recent in fact that it first crossed the threshold of my house in 2026. First, let’s establish that this had nothing to do with the Legs McNeil/John Holmstrom Punk magazine of a few years later, which I’d call among the most overrated fanzines of all time if I’d thought it was much “rated” in the first place. Easily. Nearly unreadable. No, this Punk was sired and stewarded by Billy Altman out of Buffalo, NY during the “rock desert” year of ‘73, which probably wasn’t all as bad a year as folks once made it out to be.

Anyway, it’s kind of a treat and a real collection of early rock-write all-stars, from Lester Bangs to Richard Meltzer to Mike Saunders to Scott Fischer to Joe Fernbacher to Altman himself. They’ve all just recently come back from the debauched “National Rock Writers Convention” in Memphis, and its existence is tossed around occasionally here without many details shared. On one hand, these fellas seem to be writing solely for each other to garner laffs, and are having a hell of a fun time doing so. This makes it quite fun to read. I’d have absolutely loved most of this in my twenties, which is when I first read Meltzer, Nick Tosches and Lester Bangs and thought their rock-adjacent fuck-you writing was just the coolest. 

Thirty years on and much of it has the distinct whiff of its times – which in so many ways are far superior to our times, sure, but again, it’s also a bit of a “revenge of the dorks” circle jerk that maybe you need to be 22-25 years of age and just figuring it all out to be truly blown away by. And it’s a good thing Congress didn’t get a hold of this one at the time, as it’s a little obscene, perhaps. But quite funny, if you’re willing to be entertained!

Punk Magazine #2 is a rock broadsheet, more or less, but most of the writers prefer to wander off the reservation, and are rarely “telling the truth” in their actual rock writing, either, which is few and far between in any case. For instance, there are 3 pieces about baseball, just as many as there are about music – including one by Terry Bromberg about my San Francisco Giants. These baseball pieces all seem written by the same person, even though they’re not. These guys each have an erudite, nyuk-nyuk sensibility that’s about wringing as much hilarity as possible out of a sport that’s ostensibly not all that funny. Wilber Wood is a fatty, Tito Fuentes dresses like a pimp and the ladies love him. Smokey Burgess is so unhealthy he can only pinch-hit, and so on. 

This was the state of one strain of humor in 1973 – a little gonzo, a little offensive, and very over the top. Philip Roth, bless him, wrote my two least favorite of his 31 books in this style and during this general timeframe – The Great American Novel (about baseball!) and Our Gang (about Nixon). Smart wiseasses were ascendant in part of the culture for a very, very short interregnum. 

As for fabrication in the rock writing portions, Altman’s Vanilla Fudge piece purports to be a love letter to the band and is anything but. Mike Saunders lies his way through a piece on Blue Cheer, the outlines of which are still true, and there’s also a true (I think) discography at the end. Nice “Gump Worsley” reference in the piece, too – hockey fans thank you. Fernbacher’s thing on Wild Man Fischer is probably the best of this trio of “rock” articles, and, given the subject matter, doesn’t need to resort to prevarication in order to entertain. 

Lester Bangs’ piece about why “alcohol is just the best” is among his weakest things of his I’ve ever read, despite how hard he seems to be trying to be an outta control wildman on the typewriter. And – it’s almost gauche to say this – it was probably written whilst under the influence of his selfsame topic! There’s also a whole piece by Meltzer on the many times he traveled across the USA to get laid in 1972, with each session rendered graphically and in detail. It certainly brings to mind a piece by him I once loved and have not forgotten entitled “I Never Ate Rebecca Rosen”.  

The zine is riddled with typos, and it’s probably all part of the Punk ethos that those are not corrected nor whited out, even when they were noticed. I’m good with that. It bums me out a bit that this feels both like such a time capsule and a lost era, and that I’m not frothing about it the way I would have had I read it first in, say, 1991. And jeez, the two copies of this online are selling for $1,200 and $1,500 respectively, so how did I come to get mine on eBay for less than 1/20th of that? (Was that the most inane collector douchebag humblebrag you’ve ever read? You’re welcome!)

The Offense Newsletter #44

~ Jay Hinman ~ 1 Comment

I have discussed this Columbus, OH fanzine and its previous iteration The Offense on several different occasions, and it may behoove you to peruse those discussions, presently: they are to be found here, here, here and here. The rule of thumb in this house is that it’s important to get & gather every and all issues of The Offense and its Newsletter, as it has proven itself to me to be one of the greats – entertaining as hell, and completely tapped into the many currents and scene wars of the first-half 1980s American underground. It’s passionate, loose, and yet highly articulate about everything from those 4AD records shimmering in the import bin to the many post-punk forks & branches needling their way through the USA, including hardcore, paisley psych and goth/doom/deathrock/what-have-you. 

The May 11th, 1984 cover’s got Black Flag on it and a small caption, “People can’t stop writing about BLACK FLAG!”. They really couldn’t, could they? In hindsight, I have many thoughts about post-Damaged Black Flag: the plodding, angry, unfunny, metal-tinged, Rollins-era band that extensively toured the world & elsewhere from 1984 to 1986. First – because I remember it well – so much attention was paid to them in 1984 because we are all waiting for them to be great again. Because “the first four years” and Damaged are absolutely monumental, right? But every time some garbage dirge like Loose Nut or The Process of Weeding Out would hit the stacks, everyone would listen to it, forget it quickly, and give them the old “well, there’s always next year” false hope. Meanwhile, the band would scowl and mug on stage and throw fans a few silly punk bones during a gig – a “Six Pack” or a “Nervous Breakdown”, maybe, before proceeding with the plod. 

Secondly, let’s admit their reputation was wholly made during 1979-81. I’ve met maybe 2-3 people in my lifetime who, when they talk about Black Flag, want to first talk about 1984-86. Maybe some heshers or speed metal guys. But not music fans. So no wonder poor music fan Don Howland – yes! Don Howland! – is so conflicted here in his lengthy review of a 4/14/84 Black Flag / Meat Puppets / Nig-Heist show at the Reggae Lounge in NYC. (The “Reggae Lounge”??). Don pretends to really like My War, as many pretended to at the time, but he’s not really sure what to make a show in which he’s “pretty disappointed by 90% of the new stuff”. He misses Chuck Dukowski’s onstage bloviating and general mania, but admits that new bassist Kira Roessler is, in fact, “prettier”. 

But it’s a great marker of the times, this review, and I feel like it proves my point number one above – that when you’ve made a legend for yourself on the basis of some of the most powerful music of all time, anything else you do – even stoned, angry dirges performed in black dolphin shorts – is going to pale by comparison, and totally confuse the fans. Not that there’s anything wrong with confusing the fans, of course – there’s a reason that we all love Flipper so much. Or even this gig’s Meat Puppets, who are, shall we say, not welcomed to the Big Apple whilst playing the country-fried songs from Meat Puppets II. They say it was the Brits who spit at the bands. Not if you believe Howland’s piece here – us Americans were just as adept at the ‘ol “hawk tuah” as any punk from the mother country.

Joe Piecuch also writes about the 4/27/84 bill with the same lineup; he’s less conflicted about Black Flag and sees them as standing proudly apart from the scene, “as unwilling to lead as they are to be led”. That’s one way of putting it, and probably the only feather in Black Flag’s cap during this era: they couldn’t care less what you thought of them. But is that anything to really hang your hat on, when the records are so incredibly lame?

As discussed in previous reviews here of The Offense Newsletter, the letters page served as the bulletin board for the underground scene, or at least some portion of it. Often they were barbs directed at editor Tim Anstaett, who gave as good as he got. There’s lots of discussion about the best of 1983 reader’s poll results, which The Birthday Party apparently walked away with. Now there was a band, ladies and gentlemen! Steve Hesske gets a page of record reviews – they’re pretty funny – and Rob Wylie interviews a band called NonFiction, with whom I am unfamiliar. Bands such as the Icicle Works and of course the Cocteau Twins are bantered about in the letters. Those, as they say, were the days.

Check The Record #3

~ Jay Hinman ~ 1 Comment

The daily thoughts, dreams and the peculiarities of the record collector can be all-enveloping. You find yourself too frequently contemplating your next big score, perhaps only minutes after completing your last one. Pressing quandaries such as record storage, what to do about price stickers, and whether or not to buy a different country’s pressing of a record you already own are thoughts that easily crowd out those more healthily devoted to family, friends and personal health & hygiene. It’s far too tempting to fall into it, and I’ve done so many times over my extended life; I may perhaps even be in a cycle of this sort right now. Even when I’m not in a collecting cycle, I still have these fantastic dopamine-drenched recurring dreams that involve flipping through vinyl, the sorts of trips to Berkeley and Los Angeles that made me the man I am today. 

Sometimes the only means of extracting oneself from it all is to aggressively start the selling process – firing up the eBay account and ordering big packs of mailing boxes from Bags Unlimited. This too I have frequently done, with much current regret, over the years.

Perhaps there’s a better way, one that allows you to keep all the records and do so guilt-free. Jen Matson, the publisher of Check The Record #3, is one who leans in – way in – into the mania. When I read her impenitent fanzines about record collecting (I talked about the other two here and here), I take them as apologia for my own off-and-on obsessions. Her approach to her own methods & madness in, say, accumulating every single overseas Go-Betweens pressing is straightforward, workmanlike and totally no-nonsense. She writes with a sense of fun & whimsy about it all, totally one-upping my own combination of guilt, shame and financial worry. I think I was perhaps too scarred by this documentary about lonely and near-suicidal record collectors, afraid of hitting my sixties in a similar state of mind. 

Matson charts a different path, one in which you can – and DO – fly to Melbourne, Australia, ostensibly for a minor music festival, but really to visit every single record store in the metropolitan region. This is a standout piece in Check The Record #3, marked on multiple occasions by the pain of going out of your way to a store only to find that it’s a lame alterna-jerk shop with no used records and overflowing with awful overpriced “Record Store Day” backstock. You can feel her sense of trepidation and triumph when she spots a copy of the Go-Betweens’ Send Me a Lullabye on the wall at Round and Round Records (a store formerly owned by friend of the blog Dave Lang):

“Did I already own a copy of this vinyl? Did I already own copies of all of the Go-Betweens’ albums on vinyl? Yes and yes. But since I am a wee bit of a completist when it comes to this band, I was always a bit sad that my copy was the UK reissue on Rough Trade, not the original Australian pressing on Missing Link Records, with a gatefold sleeve and a different, truncated track listing. In my 35+ years of record shopping, I’d never spotted it in the wild”. 

I don’t think you’ll be at all surprised to learn that she bought it, and “left the store in grand spirits”. I get it, and I forgive this behavior: a different track listing and a gatefold sleeve? Forget gassing up the car next week, we can walk instead. Later, she buys a “condition upgrade” copy of a record she already has, and cries about seeing The Gordons’ Flying Nun debut – a phenomenal record that I once owned –  for $172, despite it having a stained and scribbled-upon cover. This she does not purchase. 

The other two main pieces in Check The Record #3 explore the roots of her collecting predilections, unsurprisingly passed on from her dad, who himself amassed a great and totally unnecessary collection of operation & maintenance manuals for World Word II-era airplanes – and a funny, somewhat droll exploration by Calvin Johnson on how to deal with price stickers on records. Me, I’m so goddamn impatient that I go straight to tearing them off, and therefore have multiple pockmarked LP covers as a result. There are better ways, as you’ll learn should you choose to get your own copy of this thing right here.

Some of the lesser-seen posts

~ Jay Hinman ~ Leave a comment

As a man’s thoughts turn to summer – to baseball, to barbeque and to baseness of all kinds – it becomes clear that writing about music fanzines of recent decades has become, shall we say, a lesser priority. But fear not – this doesn’t mean we’re throwing in the towel (again). It simply means it’s a good time to re-up a bunch of older posts from the days when we were actually doing this 3 times a week, for some reason. Here they are.

Boo Boo #1
What a Nice Way To Turn Seventeen #6
The Offense #12
Sooprize Package #2
Back Door Man #4
Take It! #2
Conflict #42
It’s So Hard To Tell Who’s Going To Love You The Best #1
New Dezezes #2
New Dezezes #1
Zigzag #95
Talk Talk (Vol. 3 No. 2 – 1981)
Wipeout! #7
Breakfast Without Meat #13
Away From The Pulsebeat (Winter 1987)
Bull Tongue Review #1
Sonic Death #5
Hexarc #1
Throat Culture #2
Teen Looch #8
We Jazz #6
Slush #2
Slash Vol. 3 No. 1 (January/February 1980)
Caught In Flux #6
Chatterbox #4
Flipside #32
Bucketfull of Brains #13
Paranoia #4
Surrender #5
Popwatch #6
Unsound #1
New Wave Rock #3
Forget It! #4
Damp #3
Forced Exposure #9
My Teeth Need Attention #1
Creep #2
Gold Soundz #4
Butt Rag #8
Great God Pan #12
Human Garbage Disposal #4
No Mag #10
BravEar #12
Sounds (November 7th, 1981)
Z Gun #1
Wiring Dept. #3
Flesh and Bones #6
Trouser Press #36
Damage #7
Take It! #5
Bazooka! #3
We Got Power #4
Brown Paper Sack #1
Drunken Fish #1
Fŏrdämning #11
Crank #2
Alright! #2
Cut #11
Slash Vol. 2 No. 2 (November 1978)
Galactic Zoo Dossier #7
Matter #10
Teen Screen – February 1967
Vintage Violence #6
Curiosity in Stout Shoes #1
Tuba Frenzy #4
What Goes On #1
Scram #5
Brain Transplant #1
NY Rocker, September 1982
Alright! #4
Zigzag #102
Crush #3
Grace and Dignity #1
Too Fun Too Huge! #2
Astronauts #4
Mental Children #2
Truly Needy #10
Silent Command #1
Sounds (November 8th, 1980)
Conflict #37
Cimarron Weekend #6.04…
Search & Destroy #6
Making Waves #1
Ripper #4

Drink & Drive #2

~ Jay Hinman ~ 6 Comments

It never escaped me during my many years spent rubbing elbows in the “garage punk scene” that said scene is often overpopulated with what you might call – for lack of a better word – “dum-dums”. The wallet-on-a-chain dimwits, the rockabilly girls, the cro-magnon alcoholics: they were all in the family at any given 1990s garage punk show for sure. And hey, three cheers for our dum-dums! They’re not torturing themselves like I am with scene contextualization, record collecting and five-dollar adjectives. They’re here to fucking rock, to drink beer, hoot at the bands and yell at poseurs. I spent much time in the trenches with them, and their extroverted enthusiasms helped propel many a 90s show forward from good time to great time. Sometimes these dum-dums even created fanzines back in 1998, such as Drink & Drive #2.

However, late in the 90s I had started backing away a bit. New bands with names like “The Hookers” and the “River City Rapists” were being celebrated, and the general IQ level of my compadres seemed to be rapidly trending downward rather than up. I remember when the fanzine Hit List started coming out. I’d rifle through it on the newsstands, and I really thought it couldn’t get any stupider. (And don’t worry, I’ve got an issue that I’ll be covering in this space in the near future). Jeff Bale from Maximum RocknRoll was deeply involved, which was a real “it figures” moment for me, though that wasn’t exactly the turn I expected him to take once he was done being a left-wing peace creep. 

It is into this dum-dum environment that Drink and Drive #2 proudly steps forth and perhaps even outdoes Hit List. Editor Michael Pedersen has his priorities straight and his controversial opinions eagerly given: “Ah, the sun is shinin’, my zine is almost ready to be printed, life is good. All I need now is a beer and some pussy. Remember, soft rock = soft cock, fuck techno and kill a hippie”. Of course I could cut Pedersen some slack and say well you know, he was from Denmark, English isn’t his first language etc. But that didn’t stop European garage punk fiends Tom Arnaert and Henrik Olausson from putting out high-quality, literate and hilarious garage punk fanzines at the same time – Bazooka and Human Garbage Disposal, respectively, which were better than virtually all American zines of similar ilk. No, Pedersen unfortunately just fell for the Tim Warren/Crypt Records “razzle-dazzle” hook, line and sinker, and simply doesn’t have the mental chops to carve his own path through the idiocy of the current scene.

Grant him this, though: he was a hustler. He nails mail interviews with Larry Hardy of In The Red Records; Pat Todd of the Lazy Cowgirls; and Dana Hatch of the Cheater Slicks. Great, great Americans all, and three of the people most responsible for my 80s-90s garage punk obsessions. He also interviews the Spider Babies from Portland, who, when I saw them at San Francisco’s Purple Onion in the early 90s, were outstanding, with a pissed-off female keyboardist and an absolutely brutal 60s punk vibe. Here, they’ve huffed the doofus vapor that was heavily circulating in 1998, and, when asked to describe their current sound, come up with “It’s like Billy Childish gettin’ raped by The Dwarves while listening to the Mentors, while fantasizing about fuckin’ the guys in Screwdriver”. 

Likewise with The Dirtys – one of the Crypt Records bands of the time that finally pulled me away from the label after its decade and a half of stellar work. The Dirtys don’t like gays, they love porn and beer, they joke incessantly about fisting, lesbians and so forth. They’re exceptionally sensible and cognizant of the changin’ times, these dum-dums, and this forum was purpose-built for them. And somehow Pedersen gets Billy Childish and Thee Headcoats to talk to him, a real “get” in our business. This goes a bit better, and I didn’t leave feeling utterly embarrassed for the participants – but do you perhaps feel as I do now that we might have “oversold” Childish and his bands a bit in the 80s and 90s? It kind of feels like kid music to me now, but that’s probably because I’m not exactly a kid any longer.

I mean, that’s likely why I’m struggling with Drink & Drive #2 in the first place, right? Get a clue, grandpa! Yet it is sort of telling that the whole “I’m-a-rapist”/anti-homosexual/goin’ after pussy thing sort of stumbled hard a year or two later, and very few were doing that dum-dum dance in the 21st century (yes, I know that there are exceptions; I saw the Richmond Sluts, and attended a 2016 Humpers reunion in Long Beach with some of the absolute dumbest people on the planet). This is selling for $2 right now. A Dirtys CD currently only sets you back $4. Maybe we take this issue for the period piece that it is, and interrogate ourselves for how we let ourselves move from the Gories, Supercharger and Cheater Slicks to whatever this all was, seven years later. Can we somehow blame Jon Spencer?

Travellin’ Fist #1

~ Jay Hinman ~ 2 Comments

I’ve never come to know how the dense 1988 Chicago one-and-done fanzine Travellin’ Fist came to be free upon its publication. My working theory is that, given its lack of advertisements and its esoteric, wordy and (at the time) somewhat outré content, charging for it might have been a tough proposition to begin with, so it became a “let’s give it to friends” proposition. Lord knows I had to search hell’s half acre to get my own copy thirty-eight years later, after seeing references to it over the years. 

Travellin’ Fist #1 was birthed and sired by both Dan Koretzky, who’d very soon come to found Drag City Records with Dan Osborne, and Rian Murphy, who’d himself also come to be highly involved in the label. I knew that there would be some “Beach Boys content” in this one, and indeed, there is. That would not have been much of a draw for me in 1988, lemme tell ya, but as I wrote about in my own fanzine and have also published here, that changed in a big way later – and not all that long ago, either. But I didn’t know precisely where it’d take me until I spent some quality time with it this week, and now I think I have a much better idea about it all.

It starts with Chris Stigliano producing one of his patented and rather self-referential rants about his inability to be published in publications with statures bigger than, say, Travellin’ Fist, as well as his struggles getting his fanzine Phfudd! effectively distributed. At the same time, “Don’t Get Into Rock Writing!” hits out – in a highly flailing but satisfyingly rabid manner – at many highly worthy late 80s targets that range from Chuck Eddy to BravEar to Creem to Ben Fong-Torres to the folks running the Village Voice music section at the time. No question that becoming a “rock writer” was always both a poor career and life choice. I never for even a moment considered it, despite once making a fat $60 for three record reviews at the San Francisco Bay Guardian in 1993. I therefore second and third Stig’s celebration of publishing a money-losing and yet life-affirming fanzine in its stead. 

This is followed by a long piece by Rian Murphy about Game Theory, postulating on why they’re not more revered. I mean, among a certain set of folks, some of whom I knew well, they certainly were, but I do take the point. The author says “Maybe it has to do with the soft aura of light ringed around the early 70s, which is often where Scott Miller, the brain child behind the name, is coming from”. Yes, I am sure that’s true. To me, Game Theory were Big Star minus the great songwriting, + the addition of some strange, abstract chord & tonal changes. Big Star sold terribly enough without strange, abstract chord & tonal changes. Also, in 1988 the quasi-effeminate vocals were not in keeping with the pigfuck times, or at least with what au courant fanzines of the era were frothing on and on about. 

This same piece then morphs into an excellent dissection of Grace Slick and the Jefferson Airplane, and it’s none too complementary, choosing to elevate the few things that were great about said band, and calling onto the carpet the many things that weren’t (“Marty Balin squealing like a pig – anything but soothing”). This is a band about whom I’d actually welcome a locked room debate over, and/or a nude fistfight over hot coals. I’m not totally sure which side I’d be taking. 

The first Beach Boys piece is also by Rian Murphy, the one person who probably gets about 75% of the page count in Travellin’ Fist #1. Why not? This piece has a bit of why use one word for something when you can use two?, stoned sort of Beat generation patter going, but it’s a warts-and-all exegesis about all & sundry aspects of the band, by way of discussing recent books about them. This is followed by a second piece by Murphy about the band’s Sunflower, which is interesting enough that I think maybe it’s time for me to listen to the record for the first time. 

But what else is in here, you ask? Lots. An incongruous God Bullies interview, a personal diary masquerading as a Chicago scene report, a John Hughes movie overview, a sex/drugs/poor writing-filled “West Coast Scene Report” by Phil Jenks that’s such an awful Forced Exposure parody that I’m thinking it probably was a parody; an Astral Weeks article; and even some Raymond Pettibon cartoons. There’s a defence of Chemical Imbalance fanzine, albeit with a rewritten Camper Van Beethoven review from said fanzine, now done “better and more accurately” by Murphy.

Murphy again pops off on California bands in another piece, and how they’re so awful and yet how so many of them are so great (??). Again, it’s a complete stream of consciousness thing almost certainly written with a big bag of weed by his side. I don’t fully condone then-illegal marijuana cigarettes, but given the guy’s extreme music knowledge and mania, him letting his freak flag fly in order to “paint pictures with words” is quite entertaining when held against the usual low fanzine standard, and he held my attention in ways that I’m not used to it being held when skimming & scanning a fanzine. This California love/hate session eventually and predictably becomes a long discussion of, that’s right…..The Beach Boys. 

The closest music fanzines I’ve ever seen to Travellin’ Fist #1 – literate, exploratory, musically omnivorous, a little tough to follow at times – were Brian Doherty’s Surrender, which I talked about here, and Tim Ellison’s Rock Mag, discussed here. Perhaps the Brian Berger fanzines. You can even perhaps intuit, in hindsight, the direct line from this fuzzy, different-plane way of thinking and writing to the musical output of the Drag City label, which continues to this day. 

Sniffy Linings #2

~ Jay Hinman ~ Leave a comment

I don’t have a social media presence any longer – wait, have I said that before? Look at me everyone, wow, look at me, I’m not on social, so incredibly brave, wow – and therefore this site is my quote-unquote “public face”. Thus, it’s where I shall inform you about some things:

*** After five months of slumber, my Agony Shorthand music podcast – once called Dynamite Hemorrhage Radio, then Radio Dies Screaming – has a new episode out. You can go listen to it if you like music.

*** I have a Fanzine Hemorrhage column in Record Time #4 fanzine. It’s now out, and I’ve seen it. Ignore how the layout cuts off some of the text and punctuation – you didn’t need to understand my sentences anyway, right? The mag’s great. Order it here. 

Now, on with our programme.

I was probably in a condescending, holier-than-thou, nattering-nabob-of-negativity headspace when I read Sniffy Linings #1 last year. I mentally filed it as “yeah, it’s okay”. And yet something obviously brought me back, and it wasn’t an interview with Itchy and The Nits. No, I’ve always dug what Rich at the Total Punk label’s been about; his label is class, and he just seems like a great fella. We got to bantering the lone time I met the dude about Teddy & The Frat Girls, as one does. He puts together the new Sniffy Linings print fanzine from his Portland, OR home with a set of bigtime punk rocker contributors – folks like the other punk rock Rich (Kroneiss, who did Terminal Boredom); Mitch Cardwell; Miranda Fisher, who does The Bible; Joe Chamandy and others. Even Gerard Cosloy – yeah, that one – lends a hand. 

So last night I dove into Sniffy Linings #2 and I went full “cover to cover” on the thing. I walked away inspired, refreshed and with a far better outlook on the scene than I had two hours previous. To wit: the chitty-chat with Matthew from Black Time & Midnight Mines by his fellow Englishman Chris Taylor is highly enjoyable, despite my only being marginally acquainted with the man’s work. It’s fun to see just how obsessed this guy was with Crime, the band, from an ocean away, and get to hear his stories of meeting up with Johnny Strike and Hank Rank in California years later. I remember being pretty fucking stoked myself when I found myself in person with them a couple times. 

Better still is Miranda Fisher’s “I did it for the article” trip to a Roseville, CA sports bar to see Greg Ginn’s new Black Flag, the one with the female singer. Loved reading about the crowd in their Papa Roach and Tool shirts getting bummed every time the band played anything post-Damaged; loved the story of the show being listed as an 11am show, rather than the 7pm it actually was; actually, I love everything about both Fisher as a comedic writer and about a brain-friend Ginn playing live gigs as “Black Flag” with three kids. 

Three of the guys from The Lavender Flu are interviewed as well, and man, I feel like I’m the only person in whatever cohort I’m in to not get the love for this band at all. Everything they say here makes me think that they’d be phenomenal – despite the fact that I nearly walked out of the room when I saw guitarist Chris Gunn’s Hunches long ago, but that was mainly due to the singer making a Stiv Bators-esque ass of himself on the floor of the club. You keep writing the songs and I’ll keep trying, Lavender Flu, okay? 

So many other things to consider here. There’s a now-recuring “I Don’t Get It” column where the writer gets to gratuitously bash a band of his or her choice, which is a blast. I tried my hand at this sort of tomfoolery on a blog over two decades ago – Waylon Jennings, The Dictators, The Pop Group and so on. So fun, and as you might imagine, I received my very best “fan mail” about this series of articles. (Note: I’ve subsequently changed my tune on The Pop Group). Anyway, in Sniffy Linings #1 the takedown was on Redd Kross, and it was great. This time it’s Randall Cummings carving apart Guided By Voices, and while I don’t quite agree, I love that he’s only heard Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes – their two best records – and feels that’s already more than enough. “Maybe it’s not fair to write off an artist with 400 plus albums because you’ve partially listened to two of them, but how bloody does your nose have to get before you decide to stop punching yourself in the face?”. 

I’ll leave it there to let you “do the needful” and get your own copy here.

Wind-Up Industrial Burnoff #4

~ Jay Hinman ~ Leave a comment

First, a big thanks to Tim G, who is the patriotic American who sent me Wind-Up Industrial Burnoff #4. To be more precise, this is Wind-Up #4 – the longer tag-on title was sort of their thing, as with the other one in this series I wrote about two years ago, Wind-Up Butter Cow (which was #5, and the final issue in this series). And “their” = “her”, as in Liz Clayton, the fanzine’s editor and omnipresent interviewer, live show reviewer, city reviewer, editorial writer and so forth. No, this one’s definitely not a “perzine” as I sort of hinted at with #5 – this is a 1995 music fanzine that leans 90s indie underground and then kind of spins off from there.

First, let’s just say it: so, so many ads. This is not all bad. Despite ads taking up 40-50% of the real estate here, Clayton clearly had the micro-indie “loss leader” labor-of-love record label in mind, and I was marginally happy to be reacquainted with New World of Sound, Walt, Brinkman, Roof Bolt, IMD, Anyway, Union Pole, Tube Alloy, Dark Beloved Cloud, Cher Doll and Car in Car Disco Product. I bought or was mailed nearly every 45 under the sun during those years, and so many of the ones from New Zealand artists in particular are the big fish that got away when I decided around 1999 that vinyl was dead and I’d better clear it all out, right now. Many are advertised here. And funding a fanzine doesn’t come cheap, I get it. I did the same thing, until I crapped out and decided to go low-tech and ad-free.

I’ve also got this perverse pride, which I’ve written about before, on never having heard certain bands or musicians, despite them being important to people I might be adjacent to. Sometimes I just don’t want to, you know? Ignorance being bliss and so forth. Silkworm are one of those bands. I don’t know ‘em. They’re interviewed here, and it’d probably be interesting if you knew ‘em! Six Finger Satellite and The Renderers I know, same with Dick Dale – him, that guy, he’s one I totally know. He comes off as a great, cranky S.O.B. in his chat with Rob Warmowski. Warmowski tries and fails to bait him several times into acknowledging the existence of punk rock, with questions about Agent Orange and JFA. How awesome would it have been to get Dick Dale sharing his take on the Blatant Localism 45 and “Beach Blanket Bong-Out”?

There’s a somewhat striking set of short Q&As with various scene denizens about their parents: what they inherited from them, what they find maddening about them and the like. The supposition might have been that we’re punks, and we got to this point probably through something our parents did or didn’t do for or to us. Happily, like me, most folks like their parents just fine, and see their strengths and foibles as clearly as anyone else does. My dad was just telling me two days ago about how much he enjoyed going to see Claw Hammer live in 1993 with me – a show at which he was quietly called an “old man” by a friend of mine who didn’t know it was my father, and despite his then being nine years younger than I am right now.

Better still – and better than the music stuff – are Liz Clayton’s “City Reviews” from various road trips that year. Clayton strikes me as someone I’d have enjoyed breaking bread with in 1995; this was around the time that I was also pretty fascinated with the US of A, which I’d only just started seeing, and especially with “local scenes”, music and otherwise. While we absolutely decried the “homogenization of America” at the time, the Wal-Martization of the country and all that, it now seems like she was traveling a set of quaint isolated villages with names like “Memphis” and “Albuquerque” with their own quirky local customs, compared with the true monoculture of 2026. She also wins my admiration with her simple yet pointed review of Phoenix, Arizona: “Phoenix sucks!”. Aside from Stinkweeds, it still does.

All the Wind-Ups are in that RILM Archive of Popular Music Magazines, which I guess you need to register for and maybe pay a little, I suppose, and you can then read a whole mess of fanzines on your computing device, including some of my misbegotten 1990s fumbles. Liz Clayton’s contributions to the cause are all right here.

Fŏrdämning #13

~ Jay Hinman ~ Leave a comment

It would be fair to say that I was personally quite heavily under the sway of this fanzine during the years 2015-2019 or thereabouts. While I’d been tentatively marinating in strange, low-fidelity, experimental and murky noise musics a bit for some years, I credit Matthias Andersson’s Fŏrdämning for helping give me the language with which to rank & order it, along with a host of intensely underground bands and artists to check out. My record collection and my podcast at the time absolutely were the better for it. I can’t say he’s for certain the exact person to turn me onto Stefan Christensen, Neutral, Sarah Mary Chadwick, Blue Chemise, Drunk Elk, Enhet För Fri Musik and others, but I’m pretty sure he’s the fella. 

My relationship with difficult, rock-adjacent music can sometimes be fraught, as I still set a higher bar than some of my peers might for repeat listenability, and I can get pretty easily triggered by the circle-jerking of the collector/fanzine underground over records & tapes of questionable merit. I once did all sorts of online scouring for mp3s of the New Zealand lathe-cut 45s Andersson raves about issue to issue, as well as the back catalog of the Metronymic label, written about here in Fŏrdämning #13. I found most of what I was looking for, but I also found a ton of formless, pretentiously unconstructed noodling given a smudgy, low-underground sheen through anti-production. But was it shit I’d actually listen to again? Come on. 

As I wrote about a few years ago, the Swedish Andersson was creating Fŏrdämning in his second language, English, like a goddamn native-tongue speaker, while also navigating the distribution challenges and high shipping costs that I’m sure were more acute in his Gothenburg than in my San Francisco. Yet the breadth of this small thing is pretty phenomenal, and he’s on top of every exciting micro-artist creating strange & enveloping DIY music in this year of 2017. Cover star Stefan Christensen, for instance. He’s a gifted shape-shifter who came out of conventional loud garage rock music (Estrogen Highs), discovered New Zealand’s fertile back catalog, and himself began crafting these exquisitely noisy and flummoxing records that I truly can’t get enough of. He’s a big favorite in this household, and I thank Fŏrdämning for being such an enthusiastic champion of his that I couldn’t help but getting on the bus with them. 

Fŏrdämning #13 also explores the great Australian DIY label Albert’s Basement, run by Michael Zulicki. It’s a short interview, but it cuts a little meat off the bone as to why this oddball pop label is worlds different from the rest. Andersson says in this issue’s intro that people have been “complaining” that he’s straying too far from coverage of pure, unadulterated noise, so he tosses them a bone here with Eric Nystrand’s overview of the Gothenburg Blood Cult label’s tapes. I mean, even here there are descriptions that totally propel me out of my chair toward the computer for further investigative research: the Vårtgård tape from 2007, described as “a huge heaving and patiently swelling mass of moist rot….feels like slowly being force fed dung while sewer rats flop their hungry tongues in your ears”. Do I dare?? It’s been nineteen years now; is it sometimes better to let these things stay buried?

You may or may not know that Matthias Andersson was also concurrently running the I Dischi Del Barone record label at this time, which pretty much acted as the aural representation of this fanzine: limited-run, bewildering music from some of earth’s best and most obscure artists. That morphed into Discreet Music, very active to this day. He turned these passions into a career of sorts, and you can see it all germinating in Fŏrdämning, should you be fortunate enough to stumble upon a copy or two.

Terminal! #19

~ Jay Hinman ~ Leave a comment

Hey, a couple of things before we get started this time:

— I have a Fanzine Hemorrhage column in the new Record Time #4 fanzine. It looks like this’ll be a regular thing in one of the best print things on the planet right now, so I’m delighted to be a part of it. Order yours here. I was asked to review a couple of “power pop” fanzines. Hilarity ensues!

— I’ve also got a couple of pieces in the nearly-out Where The Wild Gigs Were, Volume 2 book put together by Tim Hinely and Eric Eggleston. Their first book was a real joy to read, and it sold out very quickly, so if this is interesting to you I’d recommend making the buy sooner rather than later. I talk about two long-gone clubs: Los Angeles’ Raji’s, and San Francisco’s 6th Street Rendezvous. Other, better writers talk about other clubs as well!

I got June 1985’s Terminal! #19, my first and only issue of this Philadelphia tabloid, as part of a batch of fanzines proffered to me for the price of “please take these off my hands”. Now I know that, like New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Seattle, Portland and South Florida, Philly had its own large-format underground thing as well. Maybe I’d barely heard of it because, um, ….it’s not that good…..but at any rate, I think there are a few things to discuss here about it anyway.

Terminal! #19 is an “all things to all people” sort of paper with equal access to all points in the underground and lower-tier mainstream. You can be a good band, and you can also very much be a bad band, and you’ll get relatively uncritical coverage here. You can be a 1972 radio interview with Captain Beefheart transcribed for the first time, or you can be a “street rock” band called The Limits, who’ve ascended the scale of Philadelphia rock royalty to the point where they’re now opening for The Hooters. You can be Lemmy from Motorhead, shooting the shit about the band he just fired, or you can be American composer Robert Ashley, complaining about San Francisco’s provincial music scene. You can be Mykel Board or you can be “Shredder”, and still be allowed to write for this paper.

You can be other things, too. My introduction to cover star Laurie Anderson came from an issue of Sounds I read back in 1982, in which UK readers had just voted her “O Superman” the worst song of 1981. Say what you will about that song, but this woman ended up marrying and then staying with Lou Reed, so clearly had the patience, fortitude and self-negation of Mother Teresa and then some. She gets the centerspread in Terminal #19, and honestly I tried to pay attention while I was reading it, and yet next thing I knew it was 6am and my alarm was going off for work.

Because this is 1985, and Philadelphia’s an hour-ish from New York City, there’s a “New York Downtown” report that hits nicely. It reports on Mofungo, Rhys Chatham, Arto Lindsay, John Zorn and others; elsewhere in the mag Rat At Rat R are namedropped more than once. I loved those guys. See, hindsight shows us that there’s always a good time to be alive and listening to music, even 1985. You just need to be in New York is all. 

Back when I was a college radio DJ in the late 80s, the Philadelphia “horror punk” band The Serial Killers were placed on my show to do a live set. I’d never heard the band before. I got to yakking with singer and prime mover “Paul Bearer” and we got along pretty well; he liked alcoholic beverages, and as a matter of fact, so did I. I was really impressed with his deep, deep Philly accent – so deep in fact, that I often couldn’t understand what he was saying. We traded some live tapes after that, and even talked on the phone a time or two. He once told me “We got a new drama”. I was like, “A new drama? Come again now?”. “A new DRAMA”. “Um – okay. What’s that mean?”. “A DRAMA – someone who plays DRAMS!”. At KCSB he also stepped out to the drinking fountain to get some “wooder”. Fantastic. Far more fascinating than Terminal #19 for sure! 

New York Rocker #2

~ Jay Hinman ~ Leave a comment

Over many years of being an idiot fanzine collector, I’ve thankfully amassed a fairly substantial stash of New York Rockers, so many now that I’d have to really cut out some life management time (exercising, eating, bathing etc)  in order to find the hours to write about each one here. But I totally want to – they’re really fun to dissect and write about. I’ve been able to do so here, here, here, here, here, here and here so far. This particular one is one of the earliest issues I’ve procured, because March 1976’s New York Rocker #2 is, in fact, one of the very earliest issues. 

If a more note-perfect representation of the New York rock underground at its absolute most exciting stage exists, I certainly have never seen it. Everything was coalescing at this time: Amos Poe’s Blank Generation film; Talking Heads, Television, Blondie, Ramones, Heartbreakers, Richard Hell & The Voidoids and every known CBGB band of that very early era. They’re all recording demos, partying with each other, gathering at Max’s and CBGB, and basically laying the groundwork for it all. The photographers – Leee Black Childers, Roberta Bayley, Guillemette Barbet – are assembling and documenting. The writers of this fanzine are getting their very first bylines. 

Speaking of Amos Poe, at this point in history the now-seminal Black Generation doc capturing all of this on film that he did with Ivan Kral is still coming together – but hey, did you guys know about a 1974-75 film those two did together called Night Lunch?? With Television, Roxy Music, NY Dolls, Ramones, Patti Smith etc? Dude, neither did I. It’s all a nice reminder of the scene segue happening at this moment, March ‘76, where glam is definitely passé and the Dolls themselves come in for a little bit of ridicule for still sort of being a “thing”. There’s a great piece in here about the three phases of the NY Dolls, celebrating the first two and then pooping on this current, post-red leather phase, where it’s only David Johansen and Sylvain Sylvain play-acting as the Dolls, and are mostly playing in Japan. 

The action, of course, is at CBGB and with unsigned bands, and that’s all New York Rocker #2 wants to talk about. This is a 100% “local scene” magazine at this point; there’s not even any Bowie or Roxy Music or Stones gossip. No one has a record out save for the Patti Smith Group – even the Ramones’ debut was still a month away, but there are cool photos of them in the studio recording it. Things seem to be so closely knit that the Blondie and Talking Heads articles are actually first-person pieces by Gary Valentine and David Byrne, respectively. The Byrne piece is a pretty funny one by an idealistic but still less-than-formed young man, musing about his place in culture; whether he’ll be able to make a career of this; his lack of dance moves, and how he really digs “Love To Love You Baby” “except for the groans”. Weren’t the groans kind of the whole point?

Max’s – whose physical location I went to and worshipped at in person just this past January – is having an “Easter Rock Festival” over a long weekend in April with Heartbreakers, Wayne County, Ramones, Talking Heads, Blondie, Mink DeVille, Marbles and…..Pere Ubu! (among many others). Artwork for the full-page ad is by Duncan Hannah, whose autobiography I just purchased but haven’t read yet. There’s a piece called “Clothes Nose: Sniffing Out NY Rock Dress Sense” that rates every band in the scene on their clothing game on a 1-10 scale, with explanations. Television score a 7, but only for “Tom Verlaine’s cheekbones” and “Tom Verlaine’s eyes”. The Fast get a low 3/10 and a rejoinder “What Sparks wore in 1974, Fast wear in 1976”. Mink DeVille ekes out a 5/10 but then gets hammered with “Name does not fit appearance. Mink is sort of a convict Springsteen/Presley/Lofgren, and looks okay if you can’t see Springsteen/Presley/Lofgren”. Presley would die on the toilet less than eighteen months later. Admittedly, Nils Lofgren looked pretty cool in 1975, though I’d probably huck apples at him if he was tooling around town in those clothes and holding his glass like that today. 

And Fredda Lynn’s column “Excuse Me, Are You In It For The $$$?” might be the best thing in here. She’s at CBGB on a Thursday night, and proceeds to ask every attendee in a band or who has published photographs the titular question. Chris Frantz of Talking Heads and later Tom Tom Club is in it to win it, as they say: “I’ve always wanted to accumulate some money…it would be nice to have a big bundle”. Jerry Nolan, true New Yorker, says (and you have to imagine the accent and the attitude here), “Let’s put it like this – I’ve been in this business for seventeen years, and I haven’t made a dime yet. That should answer your question”. Ian Hunter (Mott The Hoople) is a big “NO. All I can say is no”. Whom to believe? 

It’s all stellar source material for an inflection point that even the folks putting together New York Rocker #2 seem to recognize as such, and are furiously documenting it all with the necessary excitement and droll coolness required.

Sunbeam Tiger #1

~ Jay Hinman ~ Leave a comment

You folks remember Mike Faloon, right? We fluffed the hell out of that guy when we reviewed his Sonic Viewfinder #1 fanzine last year, and here he is in 2026 with another fine team-up zine called Sunbeam Tiger #1. The “team-up” is with Todd Taylor, a fella from Razorcake, and each gentleman gets two at-bats to see if they can move the runners. I think they move them really well, two big bags at least.

Faloon gets the music coverage, with “coverage” being the operative word. As with Sonic Viewfinder, he takes a literary fiction approach to his subjects, blending multiple tangentially related stories and musings together into a greater whole. It’s an approach I actually like a lot if (and only if) the person behind it’s got the chops to do so. I certainly don’t. Faloon does. His piece on a heretofore unknown-to-me modern act called Black Ends weaves in and out of bits about the band; about his daughter forgetting the keys to her college storage unit; and about the career arc of The Moody Blues. It all works, and one comes to think that maybe said band’s Psychotic Spew is something one maybe ought to take a peep at. 

Taylor – also an excellent writer with his own somewhat unorthodox in-and-out style – puts weak pampered elitist pricks like me to shame with his paean to “Repair” – i.e. fixing broken things yourself. For this guy, it’s not a lifestyle, it’s a life – so much so that he spends large parts of his week at a DIY bike repair collective in Los Angeles, helping to get angelenos off & riding in what might be the most bike-unfriendly city in America. I remember when we bought our home many years ago, my boss told me “You’re either going to get really good at fixing things, or really good at writing checks”. I got really good at writing checks. All Taylor’s article does – besides thoroughly entertain me – is send a big crashing guilt wave across my bow. I mean I’ve fixed the toilet a few times and I’m surprisingly good at gardening my tiny plot(s), but Taylor’s on another competence planet entirely. His closing short piece on the Sunbeam Tiger automobile is connected to the larger one, and provides this fanzine with its name. 

Faloon’s other piece is on Patrick Shiroishi, who’s created some pretty crazed exploratory musics with a variety of collaborators over the past x number of years. I’m particularly fond of this one. Again, Faloon weaves in some baseball, Japanese WWII internment, and a fanzine-making project he does with the elementary school kids he teaches – which resulted in the kids actually making The Patrick Shiroishi Zine. Two thought occur naturally: one, why wasn’t Mike Faloon my elementary school teacher instead of Mrs. Sullivan, and two, can we get a copy of the Shiorishi fanzine for discussion here at Fanzine Hemorrhage?

Get your own copy of Sunbeam Tiger #1 for a hefty $2 here.

Bedloe’s Island #2

~ Jay Hinman ~ 1 Comment

In the midst of some of my past yammerings on this site, I’d mentioned my regrettable unfamiliarity with many of the rock fanzines of the pre-punk 1970s, aside from Who Put The Bomp and a small sampling of others. This really has to do with their scarcity and their unaffordability – I mean, yes, I’d love to have ‘em – but also with how I grew up and learned about rocknroll in the late 70s and 1980s. It was an article of faith during my “learning era” that 1970-76 were nearly worthless years, a complete wasteland of bloat and stupidity, with oceans of prog, teenybop bands, hard-rock excess and CSN&Y eventually driving kids to invent punk rock at the mid-point of the decade. It wasn’t true, but it served to cement my nearly lifelong disinterest in whatever fanzines might have been active during those years – because, after all, what would they cover?

A kind American recently stepped in and provided me with some source texts from this period to help guide me toward the light. One of these was Bedloe’s Island #2 from Fall 1971, edited by New Jersey’s own Jesse Farlowe, who also contributes the majority of the text. Due to an upcoming address change to Goddard College in Plainfield, VT, I’m left to assume that Farlowe was a young man, a late-term high schooler even. If it indeed shows in some of the writing, I say who the fuck cares. His mania for digging as deep as he was physically and aurally able to do in 1971 is highly admirable, and his breadth of enthusiasms run wide, from The Mothers of Invention to Pink Floyd to both the white- & black-skinned purveyors of blues. 

And in the great fanzine tradition, it’s not like he and his contributors aren’t above calling a spade a spade. Farlowe’s not a fan of Hawkwind’s debut (“long boring instrumentals with electronic noises attempting to fill the holes in the music which only succeed in making it worse”), nor of Karen Dalton’s In My Own Time (“True, her voice is original – sorta like Melanie trying to sound like Janis Joplin – but it is also one of the most irritating sounds I’ve ever heard. Each time she begins to sing I get a shiver down my spine”). It goes the other way, too. Contributor Tom Ayers completely busts two nuts over – wait for it…… – Poco, live in concert (“their shitkickin’ country brand of rock makes ya smile no matter how down things may be getting for you…This is just about the most infectious music I’ve ever heard – and they’re good musicians, too. Poco is perhaps the most dynamic band around today”). I was going to chime in and say “and they hadn’t even released “Amie” yet!”, but that was Pure Prairie League, another godhead proto-punk monster band.

Bedloe’s Island #2 is a hoot to dig through because it’s (obviously) written on a manual typewriter and there’s a bit of a coded apology at the start for the price having to be raised to 25 cents from whatever comparably affordable price it was before. The era when information was scarce and painstakingly manual cobbling had to be done is all too apparent in Farlowe’s John Mayall discography, which attempts to list every record by not just Mayall, but those who played with him, such as Eric Clapton and Peter Green. So you therefore get a Fleetwood Mac discography up to 1971. I remember being a kid when Rumors was the biggest record on the planet, and seeing all these other strange-looking Fleetwood Mac records in the bins and wondering why no one ever talked about those. Farlowe did!

Still, he’s feeling the winds of change and the cold, end-of-an-era current that started at Altamont is now starting to bum his trip a little, too. He’s got an editorial about some monkey business going on with the crowd at an Emerson, Lake and Palmer show (!) and connects it to a recent stabbing at a Who concert in Forest Hills (!!). “Rowdiness is quite prevalent at concerts….once an avid concert goer I can no longer take ‘the scene’ and limit my concerts  to a select few….hopefully it will all blow over…”). Whew, I am glad that Farlowe did not get to experience Long Beach’s Fender’s Ballroom in the 1980s. It did not blow over. The first time I went there in 1985 I was told that the previous week’s show had been a “bloodbath”, which effectively had me standing at the back near an exit for most of the evening, as skins, punx and miscreants of all stripes slammed their asses off, fists first. Good times. Give me ELP’s rowdy-ass crowd any day. 

Poison Penn’s #2

~ Jay Hinman ~ Leave a comment

It’s just now dawning on me that the Boston-based Debbi Shane who put out this “collector’s edition” fanzine in 1986 has got to be the Debbie Shane who moved to San Francisco and was in the band Dumbhead a few years later….right? She wouldn’t remember me from the proverbial Adam, but I saw her band a time or two, and one time in the early 90s she and I worked cheek by jowl at “Rough Trade Records inventory day”, for which I was remunerated with free records that they were distributing. I sold these some years later, including original Flying Nun records by The Clean. I wonder if those are worth anything?

Poison Penn’s #2 apparently takes its name from the recently betrothed Madonna and Sean Penn, who, stoked by Sonic Youth, somehow became a cause celebre in the deep underground that year. It was this sort of in-joke that seemed to teeter between irony and sheep-like conformity, and something I did everything I possibly could to ignore at the time. Having not seen the first issue of this fanzine, it seems from letters to the editor to have overdone the Madonna angle even more than this one, and I’d likely find that a little hard to bear. This one keeps it in check, aside from ladling on too many questions about her/him to interview subjects like Peach of Immortality and Mike Watt, who try their best to wriggle away. 

There’s much to recommend here, however! Shane, who admits to not even having hit drinking age yet as of this date, is an attack-you-with-a-tape-recorder-after-the-gig type of interviewer, and I like that approach. She’s also, this year, very fond of “the cinema of transgression”, as evidenced by R. Kern on the cover; a printed manifesto from Nick Zedd about all the people who’ve fucked him over; and an interview with Marty Nation, who famously dangled his participle in the film Fingered and did some unthinkable things to Lydia Lunch with a gun. At the same time, she’s also enamored with Big Dipper, an indie-rock quartet of dorks who had a few albums on Homestead and whom she’s moony over in multiple reviews and asides. 

The mail interview with Tom Smith of Peach of Immortality is in that same highly unreadable fractured-punctuation style that he’d recently done in some Forced Exposure thing. He talks about his label’s upcoming Laughing Hyenas and Drunks With Guns records, which did not, in fact, actually happen. Shane then disses the band in her live review, happy that they’re from DC and therefore “will be leaving in the morning”. Then there’s a club-bomb interview with Bob Forrest of LA’s Thelonious Monster (!?!), who were just awful, in which Forrest – whom people said was a real fun guy! – admits to having just done a bunch of coke in the bathroom. The things an intrepid, spontaneous reporter with a tape recorder can obtain can be pretty magical. 

Mike Watt claims that the aforementioned Madonna wrote “La Isla Bonita” about his hometown, San Pedro, CA – which, if you’ve experienced the sheer natural beauty of that town, you’d understand is 100% true immediately. Shane goes to see Saccharine Trust at TT’s in Boston on 10/30/86; at said show, “Jack Brewer pulled his arm outta his socket mid-set. He ran back stage, dove chest first onto a table, and dangled his arm back into place”. That had to be absolutely awesome to see, right up there with Jeff Connolly of The Lyres beating up a bandmate mid-song, or the guy from Lubricated Goat having a narcolepsy attack on stage. 

She ends with a live review containing a fanciful tale very much in the spirit of phony live reviews that fanzines like Conflict and Flesh and Bones were writing at the time. In this one, the members of Sonic Youth, at the 11/22/86 Irving Plaza NYC show, see Shane taping said show; drop their instruments, and dive off the stage to pummel her, after which she’s hospitalized, where she’s now suffering from amnesia and attempting to write these words. Heeey, now that I think about it, maybe that Jack Brewer story was bogus too. Damn. Great fanzine! Does anyone have any other issues?

BravEar #3

~ Jay Hinman ~ 1 Comment

After the seminal purchase of my first two punk fanzines in 1982, recounted here, the purchase of any and all underground music-related fanzines became a habit, shall we say. The tack-on of one or more fanzines to my Tower Records or Universal Records or Streetlight Records bag for another buck or two, if I had it, became something of a everyday move. It’s why I’m still blabbering about those exact physical copies here. I also was working the counter and/or the drink machine at San Jose’s Wienerschnitzel twenty hours a week at $3.35 an hour, so I absolutely had the extra cash for whatever the fuck I wanted. 

BravEar became a regular early buy. It wasn’t really because I loved this particular fanzine all that much, but because it was a visceral connection to San Francisco, a near-mythical, club-packed, punker-filled city located one long hour to my north. I wanted to be there so goddamn much. I’d read about shows at the Sound of Music, the I-Beam, the Mabuhay and elsewhere and curse my birth year and inability to drive. So I’d buy BravEar and Puncture and live it all vicariously instead. 

However, and I’m just going to say it – when BravEar sucked, it really sucked, and in 1982, issue #3, it really sucked. I got this issue after the fact – just this year, as it happens. I’d never even cradled it in my hands. These are actual adults reviewing records and live shows from ABC, the Stray Cats, Bananarama and Oingo Boingo as though they’re worth dissecting, people who’ve got a foot in the true underground but instead have already bought into the corporate story of funny-haircutted dandies playing disco being the next link in the new wave. They’re also doing a lot of half-baked shitting on 1982 bands like first-EP Dream Syndicate. I mean, 1982 was an absolutely fantastic year for underground music, maybe the last truly great one in a six-year run, and you’re writing about the majesty of Thomas Dolby? (“I enjoin you to have a listen, preferably while reading the words”).

No wonder nearly everyone’s hiding behind some godawful pseudonym here (“Ohr Well”, “Dogtowne”, “Velvet Thistle”). BravEar did get a lot better in later years, despite some remonstrance here and here from me on issues #10 and #12 respectively. And hey, they give some space to Bill Christman to write about, yes, San Jose’s own hardcore punks Los Olividados! SJ pride all the way. Now I get confused sometimes about the fellas who did the hardcore punk rock shows on KFJC back then, but the one that blew my mind every Monday night was Bob Gibson’s “White Noise”. I listened every week, despite being a little intimidated by ‘81-’82 hardcore. He played Los Olividados for sure. I think he’s a distinct person who’s neither Alex Morgan (“Vinyl Rites”) nor Bill Christman, but maybe Morgan and Christman were the same person? Does anyone know what I’m even talking about? No?? OK. let’s move on.

 I’m bummed this issue was so flaccid more out of the sense of them missing an opportunity and blowing it. It’s just music of course, and a fanzine, and both are kinda dumb – but you people don’t pay me for milquetoast takes, right? Lorry Fleming, who was managing editor for this issue, would later go on to write a great fanzine column in the otherwise avoidable BAM. Perhaps she was, like, 18 years old here? And that’s why she greenlit the poetry, the politics and the Wilhelm Reich piece? I mean, you should see the crap that I personally allowed in the KCSB Livewire in 1988, and I was editing at age twenty. So I’m going to stop dumping on BravEar #3 out of immense respect for the process, if not the results.

Freakout, USA #1

~ Jay Hinman ~ 2 Comments

They say if you can remember the 1960s you were never really there, but in my case the point is moot – I was never really there. Yet I’ve cottoned onto the absolute mania of the time, this strange period in which supposed “humor” was wrung from jabbering a mile a minute, from non-sequiter jokes and asides, and from this very 1960s sort of wacky patter I associate with TV shows like Laugh-In and The Monkees and with magazines like the short-lived Freakout, USA. I’m not sure it has dated all that well, but then again, it’s getting close to sixty years now. I’d imagine the humor of the 1900s felt a little dated when this thing was being published as well.

Readers may recall that I reviewed the second and final Freakout, USA #2 here. I also made you a promise that I’d find you (and me, of course) a physical copy of Freakout, USA #1, and here we are. That second issue was probably more bloated with “psychedelia” and over-the-top far-outisms than this one, but even here it’s clear from the cover that it’s not 1966 any longer, and the female target audience likes it freaky, wild and kooky. (For the record, it’s Fall 1967).

This time period coincides with absolute USA Monkee-mania. Accordingly, there are Monkees-only stand-alone pieces from Page 8 to 23 here, with loads of Davey-thinks-this, Peter-likes-this-kind-of-girl, Mickey-wants-that and so on. 15 straining pages of The Monkees, and loads of hot pix. Again, it’s not just who’s cutest, though – there’s talk of LSD, politics and other weighty topics for the times for clued-in teenage women and men. This is followed by three articles on whom I believe were considered the second cutest band of that year, Paul Revere and The Raiders. The girls loved “Fang”, the bass player. Fang!!

I really can’t think of The Mamas and The Papas any longer without immediately calling up the lyric, “And no one’s getting fat except Mama Cass”. Poor Ellen Naomi Cohen. What a raw deal this young woman got, all her earnings notwithstanding. The piece in Freakout, USA #1 is ostensibly about how rich the M’s & P’s are now, and what they’re doing with their “California Dreamin’” money. “They have called Cass the Fat Angel, which she doesn’t seem to mind, for she weighs over 200 pounds and pulls no punches about it”. You think maybe that’s because it’s all anyone could talk about with her? Jesus Christ, I know I wasn’t there, but someone else must have been overweight in the 1960s, right? If you were there, please let me know if it was just “Mama” Cass and no one else.

But really, and I hinted about this before when I yammered about Freakout, USA #2, this issue juxtaposes all the pretty boys and angel-throated girls with two other hot & hairy up comers – The Fugs and The Mothers of Invention! What do you think of these spicy hunks, young ladies? “The Fugs are not everyone’s cup of tea. They leave some folks cold. They are loud, vulgar, and dirty-looking….And they’ve become enormously popular”. Well, I’m not so sure about that last part. What’s great is that Freakout, USA #2 is so committed to the bit that they even are helping to flog Fugs sweatshirts and Fugs buttons. Ed Sanders even looks kinda handsome in his! Different times.

This issue is rounded out with some peppery prattle about Twiggy and an abysmally unreadable article about the Jefferson Airplane, which bums me out because besides The Fugs, they’re my favorite band here. Was no one writing about The Left Banke around this time??? I can’t say for sure if I’d been a 14-year-old American girl in 1967 that I’d have been completely immune to the charms of The Monkees, but I’d like to think my favorite band would have actually been the Left Banke instead. Or The Magic Band.

Reasons For Living #1

~ Jay Hinman ~ Leave a comment

This is a 1985 fanzine that presages some obsessions that college-aged editor Jim DeRogatis would later be somewhat known for; namely, his Lester Bangs fixation – which would result in him ultimately writing the Bangs biography, Let It Blurt – and his Wire fandom, which would somewhat ridiculously garner him & his friends a slot opening for the band on Wire’s entire 1987 US tour, doing Pink Flag from start to finish as “The Ex-Lion Tamers” so that Wire wouldn’t have to play any of it. I still think that’s preposterously awesome, and I wrote about it in one of my own fanzines. 

Reasons For Living #1 was something of a “dummy magazine” and final project that had its roots in an NYU journalism class DeRogatis was taking that year. He’s got a stated goal of bringing back shameless gushing and enthusiasm, as opposed to deep snark and hatred of mediocrity. Well, which would you rather read? Yeah, me too, but this one’s got plenty of “spunk” and “vim” to go around, and a little “vigor” to boot. He wrote it from home in Jersey City, and called upon contributors to give some of their quote-unquote reasons for living. This results in stand-alone pieces on the Rolling Stones, Tom Petty, The Creation, R.E.M., XTC, power pop and Robert Wyatt. Naturally, your tolerance and enthusiasm will vary depending on your patience with said acts or musical movements. But of deep snark and hatred of mediocrity, there is not a whit.

Wire receive the full DeRogatis treatment, pre-comeback. A couple of years later, there’d be some deep snark and hatred of mediocrity pointed their way for sure, but at this point, with the 3 golden records being the sum total of their true discography, the track record was exceptionally solid. The editor also gets in his licks with coverage of The Velvet Underground during that hallowed VU-has-just-come-out period. I remember it well, as it was my introduction to the band, “Foggy Notion” and “Temptation Inside Your Heart” in particular – the latter of which bugged the shit out of me. He also spends a little time on Dumptruck and a New Jersey underground band round-up, including mid-80s east coast fanzine punching bag “Gut Bank”. 

The star diamond in this one is Lester Bangs interview excerpts from a talk teenage DeRogatis had with him just over 2 weeks before his death in 1982. Excellent stuff. Take a look at this particular bit of Lester-on-Lester; it is kind of a drag and highly ironic, given that he’d be dead sixteen days later:

The back-half contributors get a little more free reign than the front-half gushers. Art Black, later or perhaps concurrently the editor of Away From The Pulsebeat, writes about his girl getting knocked unconscious at a show and about how that means punk is probably dying. Laff all you want, folks: Art Black was a fucking nostradamus on this one. Howard Wuelfing is given space to opine on ten things he enjoys, from sex to beer to Big Star. I love the 1985 “good beer” list he provides: “Stegmaiers, Straub’s, Ballantine Ale, Rheingold, John Courage (draught), McSorley’s Ale (draught) and Tuborg Gold (draught only!)”. Dude, I know things were grim in 1985 for beer – I was still a full four years away from my first “Sierra Nevada Pale Ale” – but right there in DC you had the Brickskeller, “the first restaurant of its kind to offer customers a beer list with thousands of beers from around the world.” I went to the Brickskeller not long after I’d hit legal drinking age, and my jaw nearly cracked the wooden floor. Let’s just say that Tuborg Gold “on draught” was far less than second best on that night.

CompHELLation #1

~ Jay Hinman ~ 2 Comments

Starting with my acquisition of the bootleg Dangerhouse 45s collection Me Want Breakfast! in 1986, my musical life was totally upended by the serial unearthing of ear-shredding punk rock singles from 1977-84. Suffice to say that in 1986 and 1987, very little was being written about the ultra long-tail of American punk singles from less than a decade earlier, so it was hard to know about it all unless you were there and actively buying 45s at the time, and I mostly hadn’t been. (Though, when 1980’s “Job” by The Nubs finally got comped, I finally got to play a godhead song for folks that I’d only been able to fumblingly describe using the highly limiting oral tradition).  

The comps started coming in dribs and drabs at first. I bought Where Birdmen Flew and Year of the Rats, and they were absolute staples of my then-radio show, my social relationships with other punk fiends and collectors, and my life in general. Sort of hard to transmit now, when everything’s available at any time to anyone, but these two comps are where I first heard Crime, The Urinals, the Psycho Surgeons, the Australian X and so many more. I mean many “older” Americans who were now in their late 20s had heard Crime and the Urinals by this time, of course, but those records were going for, like, $15! Who had that kind of money? Then it was the first four Killed By Death comps in 1988 and 1989 – holy shit. Chain Gang, The Eat, The Mad, The Queers. Mindblowing. The gates came off after that, and bootleg punk compilations flew out from all corners of the globe, documenting every jot and titter from Belgrade to Bergen. 

(As an aside, when I stopped writing Fanzine Hemorrhage for a short while earlier this year, it was because I’d felt that I’d been getting far too redundant. I’ve realized that the two paragraphs I just wrote basically tell the same story I’ve already relayed in my review of Brain Transplant #1 fanzine. Just to keep things honest and on the level).

By the late 90s, it was tough to keep up, and really – in my case, anyway – no need to, because most of the Killed By Deaths and Bloodstains comps at that point showed increasing diminishing returns, to the point where many of them had absolutely no good songs at all. But how would one know or not know if they were missing something? Into this breach stepped Mark Murmann, known to many as “Icki”, and Maximum RocknRoll presents CompHELLation, put out toward the end of 1998. He’s a real renaissance man, Murmann – outstanding photographer, Mother Jones photo editor and even the frontman of a cool punk band I saw over a decade ago. He also collected punk rock compilation records, religiously, and created the then-best record of all that had come out at the time, indexed first by title, and then by every individual band. If you’d ever wondered which comps the Meaty Buys turned up on, well, before Discogs, this was definitely where you’d get your answer. While MaximumRocknRoll clearly funded and distributed the mag, if you wanted to order a copy, it says inside to get it from “Icki”, not from MRR. So they clearly allowed him the space for this excellent vanity project.

Leafing through it now, I’m remembering vague scene mutterings about the people who put these out. I mean, virtually everyone knows that Johan Kugelberg was wholly or partly responsible for the first four KBDs. Did he fund them? I don’t know. Probably. Byron Coley had at least something to do with Bloodstains Across California if not other early gems in that series. Tom Lax did the Killed By Death #1 DIY thing that turned me onto some UK stuff I’d absolutely never heard before. 

I was never especially deep in with the real collectors at the time, as I never had the cash to buy the originals once KBD mania took hold, yet I was at least somewhat adjacent to them, merely by flogging their illicit product in my own Superdope fanzine in the 90s. I bought an Electric Eels Cyclotron/Agitated 45 at a record show in the late 80s for $12 and felt like a pretty big-time record turd there for a couple months. And for those that still know, even now, some of the best stuff still can be bought for not too much money. My pal Jon just bought a Rude Kids “Raggare is a Bunch of Motherfuckers” 45 this year, and he’s a schoolteacher. Priorities!

My copy of this, as you can see from the scan, has coffee stains (or something) all over the front and back. I thought maybe I was the butterfingers who ruined this zine three decades ago, but now, seeing Murmann’s own listing for it on his page with similar coffee stains, I know it was all part of the plan, at least for some of the issues. If only my copy was part of some limited numbered series for dipshits, I could crow about it here!

Ink Disease #13

~ Jay Hinman ~ Leave a comment

Not gonna lie, as they say, but I thought Ink Disease was pretty weak when it was around in the late 80s, and only cover stories like this one, or the one with The Weirdos, caused me to pick it up at the time. They covered the shitty stuff rather shittily, like a sub-sub-Flipside if memory serves, and yet something must have caused me to hold on to a couple of them all this time. The fanzine was well distributed, and easy to find across LA and elsewhere, and had all the usual ads from important record labels like Taang!, Boner and Fartblossom Enterprises. If you can believe it, I really haven’t looked at an issue of this since that time. Perhaps it might make sense to pry Ink Disease #13 out of cold storage, and see if it’s aged as well as that Châteauneuf-du-Pape I laid down 35 years ago? 

For starters, I’m very impressed with the opening ad for Ink Disease back issues that’s a photo of each of them laid out on top of Jan Paul Beahm’s (Darby Crash’s) actual grave. Big points for concept and execution. I’m less impressed with their Ramones at Cal State Northridge review, not necessarily because I care one way or the other, but because 20-year-old me was at this one. It has a typically deep Ink Disease summary that encapsulates both the show and the mag’s writing chops: “If you have yet to see the greatest rock band of the past 10 years, then you ain’t worth the shit you have for brains”. This show will always be remembered for me and my friends driving around and around looking for a place to stay in central Los Angeles in the wee hours of that night, as we had the big free “SST Festival” in Irwindale to go to the next afternoon. We finally came upon a motel in a bad area near USC that charged $6 an hour and $30 a night, and, not knowing what the deal was with a motel that charged by the hour, I was excited to take it so we could get some sleep. We did not. Actual bedposts crashed against our walls. I tried to sleep on the floor, since there were four of us, and chicken wire poked up into my face from the carpet. And the SST festival was cancelled as well, so we didn’t get to see all the great SST bands of 1987 like Tom Troccoli’s Dog and Painted Willie. 

I’ll give Ink Disease #13 credit for their willingness to let bands jabber on and on in interviews though, and then print the whole thing full-hog and without edits. I mean, your mileage may vary on this. Honor Role at least keep it succinct, but do talk about the Oxnard Skate Palace show they’d just played, another one I was honored to be in attendance for. There’s an exceptionally long interview with Angst, a funny one with a continuing theme that I’ve seen across repeated interviews with these guys (and with Slovenly) of being broke, hungry, and not having very many fans. No turning off the tape recorder here, no sir. Another interview is with Tommy Stinson of The Replacements – now, what a handsome young man! The highlight is him trying to live down a KROQ interview he and the band did in which the entire theme of the interview was “we are gay”. That must have been a riot, right? At one point, his PR flack comes in to make him wrap it up and says “Tiger Beat are in the hall”. I’m not sure whether that’s true or what, but I’m willing to believe it probably was.

The reviews are predictably inane, coming especially as they were during this dreadful era of bands like Fearless Iranians From Hell, Lemonheads, 7 Seconds, Zoogz Rift and Mighty Sphincter – whose awful record, I might add, I saw selling for $40+ in Nashville recently. No matter, it all gets discussed here, lest the promo train pull away from the station. There’s a dilly of a Divine Horsemen review: “Julie C. can lullaby to me all night long. She sounds like the sultry, white-trash, country-girl I never knew. Chris D. would do me a big favor if he kept his voice out of my earshot”. By the way, you simply must see the cover of the new Chris D. album if you haven’t yet. It is super classy and a real crowd pleaser. 

Speaking of classy, there’s a jarring interview with a classical, um, “act”, called the De Falla Trio that I have to assume were somebody’s neighbors or something. It’s followed by an actually quite good interview with To Damascus; the whole band and not just Sylvia Juncosa. Sylvia goes off about why she left SWA to keep To Damascus going again. Having been around at the time, let me say that this second iteration of the band didn’t last long at all, but I did get to see them once – and lo, they were good. Tyran from the band gets in a nice story about his dad’s visit to Spahn Ranch and telling a glazed-out Charles Manson to cut his weeds. Sylvia talks about how her mom was really disappointed with the lyrics on the first Leaving Trains LP (that she was on) and gave her a talking-to about them, and about how she doesn’t want said mom coming to any of her shows “because then she’d find out I have all these tattoos”. This is helpful in case you were wondering what turned all those 80s kids into punks and freaks.

The mag closes with the reason I bought it in ‘87 in the first place, an interview with Big Black in San Francisco during their final weeks of being a band. Albini says, among other things, “You looking for a band that blows? Try The Mission”. Wow, I hadn’t read that line in nearly forty years, no kidding. I used to rattle off this exact quote to some of my death rock/smoke machine rock compadres at UC-Santa Barbara back when I first bought this issue. Oh yeah, and this part, when the band is asked about playing in San Francisco:

SANTIAGO: We never really wanted to play in California.
STEVE: Yeah, California seemed like this really strange, sick little pit of snakes that we didn’t want to get involved in. All these horrible, horrible bands….we just didn’t want to be associated with them, didn’t want to come near them.
ID: Which are the most horrible?
STEVE: I really couldn’t tell you if the Mystic bands are worse or the SST bands are worse…I couldn’t tell you.
ID: Yeah, but Sonic Youth are on SST.
STEVE: That was a big mistake on their part, I think. Them and Slovenly…BIG mistake…and Dinosaur. Big mistake. You’re traveling with some really bad company, fellows.

I recall both getting my dander up at all the hate for my home state and internalizing it to such a degree that I probably started pontificating similar words myself at the time, like a moron. I was extremely malleable and pliable at this stage in my young life, and if opinionated talking heads named Coley, Cosloy or Albini said something demonstrative, I’d often find it difficult to counter and easy to pass off as an opinion of my own. I mean, he’s making fun of Mystic Records here – that was one of my favorite pastimes even then. If you haven’t read Steve Albini’s interviews with Dan Epstein about baseball from 2017, they’re among my favorite things that I’ve read recently – Part 1 and Part 2 are here.

All told, I suppose there’s plenty of entertainment in Ink Disease #13 to potentially justify my continued clutching of it – or at least the eight paragraphs I just spent writing about it here.

No Exit #1

~ Jay Hinman ~ 5 Comments

I guess it’s likely more than clear that I’ve got a small handful of fanzine “micro-genres” that I collect, and therefore that I disproportionately write about here. Anything marginally well-done from San Francisco circa 1977-87 will usually make the grade, for instance. Case in point would be New Dezezes, Damage, Creep, Search & Destroy, Wiring Dept, Unsound, Bravear, New Wave, Revolutionary Wanker, Puncture, Breakfast Without Meat and others besides that I’ve prattled on about, surely. There are even some I’d yet to cover, like No Exit #1, edited by a 1977 SF scenester named Tony Steel, a man whose name had yet to pass my eardrums nor penetrate my eyes in any other form. And I’ve been studying up for a while, let me tell you. So here it is!

The ‘77 excitement here is real. I’m talking ALL-CAPS real, as a single lowercase letter is nowhere to be found within No Exit #1. James Stark – one of the punk photography all-timers – handles the visuals, and fashion is helmed by a woman going by the outstanding blank generation moniker of Jane Who (Jane’s big fashion contribution is a single page of photo booth shots of pretty people preening in sunglasses – the page is called appropriately called “Fashion”). And right out of the gate, we’ve got some attitude being thrown. “Thanks to the only bands in SF, all four and no one else”. Having lived in San Francisco myself for 37 years now, I can appreciate the sentiment. During some of our leaner years, four might even be a bit too optimistic. Luckily for the No Exit triad, Crime and The Nuns and whomever the other two were would be joined by at least another half-dozen true ringers within months.

And also: “No Exit is a publication dealing with exclusively new wave music, people and fashion. There are a lot of fanzines but only a few deal just in new wave items, so get it while you can”. (Note the beautiful lack of the lame “oxford comma” in that one – back from when even new wave ding-dongs knew how to write and punctuate correctly). The opening gossip is all pretty standard fare, but I like the bit about “Bill Graham of Fillmore West fame has finally given in! No it’s not Kiss and The Runaways but a semi-normal show July 30th, The Ramones, the Dictators (blagh!) & The Nuns (local kids make good) – well I give it an 8 out of 10”. And there is some real honest excitement over NBC’s coverage of “Punk Rock in Britain” on the 11:30pm Weekend Show – something that, if you were so inclined, you absolutely would have stayed up for & gathered all your n’er-do-well punk friends around the tube for. Such was the nearly unquenchable thirst for punk in its earliest days.

Their interviews are as brief as brief gets. A guy from this period named Novak – he produced the second Crime 45 – gets a page. Each member of Crime themselves, in fact, receives a page. Johnny Strike disavows any connections whatsoever with punk or new wave; he’s in a rocknroll band, end of story. Frankie Fix talks about the very first song he ever wrote, in 1976 – the year before – called “Razors”. Anyone out there have the demo to send me? Perhaps he was still going by Marc D’Agostino at that point. There is also a picture of him signing autographs, as well. Crime fucking mania in mid-’77! Neither Ron The Ripper nor Brittley Black say anything particularly distinguishing, but I guess overall I’m mostly bummed that Ricky Tractor wasn’t called back for a Q&A here. 

There are reviews – love for the excellent Users 45 and new Step Forward singles from Chelsea and The Cortinas – and then that’s it: No Exit #1 over and out, an ephemeral one-and-done fanzine from the frenzied mess of mid-1977. They were publishing from 49 Germania Street, a lovely little one-block street in the lower Haight. At the time the area wouldn’t have been so lovely; nearby housing projects were get-yourself-robbed zones and the blocks surrounding Germania didn’t quite manifest the gentrified charm you’ll now see fifty (what??) years later, to say the least. Such was life as a shoestring punk in ‘77. Tony Steel, if you’re out there, please get in touch with the ‘Hemorrhage!

Take It! #6

~ Jay Hinman ~ 4 Comments

Finally, we wrap up the Fanzine Hemorrhage project, which has been running constantly & with a couple hundred reviews written since 2022, with what’s likely my favorite issue of any fanzine, ever. It’s Take It #6 from 1982. But first, a couple of things:

  • I put out my own fanzines in the 2010s and 2020s under the names Dynamite Hemorrhage and Radio Dies Screaming. The ten issues of the former are now sold out, but I have plenty of issue #1 of the latter, from late 2024. Take a look, and feel free to order Radio Dies Screaming #1 here. 
  • For years, I’ve taken photos of old American signs – mostly motels and faded glories of the 1950s and 1960s. I mean, it’s not at all professional or anything – they’re phone photos – but I’ve got an, um, ongoing “portfolio” here if you’re interested. I’m not on social media, so this is kind of the only way I’ll likely get anyone to ever take a peek.
  • I’ve got an eBay page set up to unload some extraneous fanzines, and other printed matter that I’m now done with. I’d love for you to take a look and bookmark the site if you ever like to buy old music fanzines and/or collected ephemera from the past. It will be updated frequently. Check it out. 

Now, let’s talk about Take It #6.

This is the lone issue of Take It! that I can say I was “contemporaneous” with; I distinctly remember it being available for purchase at the Record Factory on Blossom Hill Road in San Jose, CA, but I also remember not buying it, given my non-familiarity with the bands on the flexidisc – oh, just The Flesheaters, Meat Puppets and Tex and the Horseheads, each at the height of their respective powers. “The greatest flexidisc of all time”, some have called it (actually that was me that called it that). Anyway, I’d get my copy a few years later while I was in college, and I’ve savored it like a fine chianti with fava beans for years. As long as we’re making lists, it’s one of the single best issues of a fanzine that I’ve ever encountered as well. 

I’ve probably read it more times than anything save my Forced Exposures, but until today it had been a while. Opening it now to tell you about it, I’ve found that Michael Koenig writes in the intro that he patterned the cover of this magazine to be much like that of Slash, given that Chris D. of the Flesh Eaters (who wrote for Slash) is the cover star. Ironically, this issue of Take It! has shrunk to a normal 8.5”x11” size after having been the jumbo tabloid size of Slash for every issue before this final one. 

But wait – let’s talk about that flexidisc first. Tex and The Horseheads with Jeffrey Lee Piece do a blitzkrieg version of “Got Love If You Want It”. While this is not the first band I might go to for the full “roots/punk” experience, I kinda think they’re a bit underrated, and they capture a side of LA that I got to see myself in late bloom five years later: the jean-jacketed, longhaired, alcoholic, wasted sleazoid faux cowboy punk that haunted Hollywood Blvd. and clubs like Raji’s. The Meat Puppets, at the height of their powers, contribute “Teenager(s)”, which I’ve written about elsewhere as having the best opening two seconds of perhaps any song, ever, before turning into a shitstorm of nonsense, and then into a laid-back hippie/doper desert mind-expander. (Check Dynamite Hemorrhage #5 if you want to read more about it). And a live Flesh Eaters track (!), “River of Fever”, was recorded on the 1982 tour that Byron Coley writes about in this issue, about which more later.

The mag starts off with a great “three dot” gossipy column by one Julie Farman – who’d go on much later to detail a sexual harassment incident with the Red Hot Chili Peppers she was the victim of – called “Blabbermouth Lockjaw”. She gives some great copy about T.S.O.L. trying to beat up Minor Threat’s Brian Baker in a bathroom; a near-death accident in Boston when Snakefinger’s “Snakemobile” flipped over; a never-was 80-page Byron Coley fanzine called Flunk that’s “about to come out”; and – ooh, ouch, “Fear replaces Derf Scratch with something/one called THE FLEA”.

Michael Koenig gives his own Boston live action scene report and makes me wish I’d seen Talia Zedek in Dangerous Birds; David & Jad Fair in Sit: Boy Girl, Boy Girl, and Chris D. in the Flesh Eaters (well, I did see that, but not until 1990). Chris D., in fact, gets his own column in here – was this his first published writing since Slash went under? Someone’ll have to tell me. One of the true standout columns this time is a new one from Don Howland, whom you perhaps know from his later work with the Gibson Bros and the Bassholes. Here he dissects the musical sins of Australia, and counts down a “Low 11” of insipid pop acts that I still quote from to this day. 

The piece that always really did it for me in this one is Byron Coley’s tour diary of his time roadie-ing for The Flesh Eaters on their first national tour – “Flesh Eaters ‘82: Masterpieces Hexed from the Dunes of Jive Broken Roads” (sounds like Chris D. might have titled that one). For years, and perhaps even now, I’ve claimed the 1978-83 Flesh Eaters as “my favorite band” – and also for years, this was the most up-close-and-personal I’d ever gotten with them, all filtered through Coley’s mania for the American underground and his warped sense of humor. The part about them playing live in Madison with Die Kreuzen always made me pretty jealous; in fact this whole tour they’re mostly playing with hardcore bands, forcing the band to play faster just to keep the pits flying. You can actually hear it on “River of Fever” on the flexi, which turns into a breakneck pace midway through, quite unlike the version on A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die.

Other highlights – Gregg Turner turns in an excellent LA scene report, complete with absurd reprinted lyrics from a local metal band called Slave-State whom I’m very sad to report did not appear to ever get any vinyl released.  Eric Lindgren writes a piece about “The 10 Most Twisted Tracks From The Sixties”, including The Lollipop Shoppe, Legendary Stardust Cowboy, MC5 and Swamp Rats. Byron Coley writes an insane amount of record reviews, plus a column on beatniks. Richard Meltzer and Mick Farren have their turns as well. And….that’s it. That was the end of Take It!. No pleas for financial help, no indication that another issue wasn’t around the corner, nothing. The magazine gathered steam and rapidly got stronger and when it died with the publication of this issue, it was easily the best fanzine in the USA. 

Even today – in 2026 – every single issue is available directly from Michael Koenig himself right here. Fair warning: it’ll cost you, especially #6, which, at $250, is 10x the price of each of the others. I’d wait for your Hanukkah or Christmas money to accumulate, and maybe write Koenig a nice email and see if he’ll sell them all to you for <$300. Tell him Jay at Fanzine Hemorrhage sent you. And thanks for reading!

Pussyfoot #1

~ Jay Hinman ~ 3 Comments

There was this period in 1987 or so that you’d probably call “peak SST”, when said label was pumping out multiple records each month by a host of mediocrities – from Lawndale to B’last to Swa to Zoogz Rift and so on. This is when I first started seeing shows at the Anti-Club in Los Angeles, and if an out-of-town or bigger local SST band was headlining, there’d be a whole host of these lesser lights on the bill as well. It’s how I got to see Swa. And B’last! And later, Always August, Sylvia Juncosa, DC3 and Painted Willie. 

Record Time recently did a huge feature on this era and on the garbage clogging the label at the time, a “say something nice about one of these records” feature that I got to put in one review for (Das Damen). But Pussyfoot #1 from ‘87 is right in the heart of it, spending much quality time at these Anti-Club four-band SST specials, and they very unironically chose (of all bands from which to choose) to interview Swa themselves. The interview – with Chuck Dukowski, Merrill Ward and Sylvia Juncosa – is as utterly lamebrained and cringe-inducing as the band themselves were. Merrill Ward: “SWA is the revelation, it’s revealing, it’s the opening. SWARA is the revealment and the actual face of the god in heavens….the Sex Doctor is the healer, the wounded healer & through his pain he’s able to heal & liberate the true spirits of sensuality that exists from the body & souls of man”. 

Listen folks, you haven’t lived until you’ve been forced to suffer through Swa in 1988 at the Anti-Club, only to find that there’s a tiny blessed patio outside that you can escape to, only to then have Merrill Ward come outside with his long mic cord to tunelessly moan in your face while his band plays bombastic thud-core back inside. Only being on the receiving end of a stoned Greg Ginn hippie hair-shake in my face while fruitlessly trying to ignore his band Gone rivaled it at the time.

Pussyfoot #1 from La Habra, though, is fully on board in this “ish”. They also bring us a chat with a La Mirada punk band called The Misled, featuring this gem:

PF: What do you think of punk bands changing styles to Heavy metal-glam rock (i.e. Channel 3, Overkill, etc.)?
Chris from The Misled: They turn into fags while they do it.

Much of the fanzine is taken up with placeholders for next issue’s classified ads, next issue’s letters to the editor, subscriptions, ad rates and lots of big planning. There were others, however! The editor was a guy named Blaze James. Blaze James, Blaze James….I know this name. Oh, he was later in the band TVTV$ in the 90s, right. All I remember from the one time I saw them live was that a guy in the band had these awesome Coca-Cola branded pants, and that I was totally hammered and heckling them, which is something I’d only do if I was hammered.

Speaking of hammered, the last interview we’ll jest & jape about here is with a 1987 NY Dolls-esque band from the LA area called Sludge, whom I never heard of nor from at the time. And man, are they right in step with their era – long hair, a guy flipping off the camera, lots of talk about Budweiser and weed, jokes about eventual cirrhosis of the liver. Verbal Abuse, anyone? At least Flesh & Bones interviewed, you know, the good bands from this scene and epoch.

It’s (Your Name) Magazine #1

~ Jay Hinman ~ 1 Comment

It may be something of a trifle, but the debut issue of Seattle’s It’s (Your Name) Magazine from ‘round about 1980 is a brief counterpoint to the popular conception of pre-grunge Seattle being solely slathered in speed metal and hardcore punk. You’d probably have to call this a no wave fanzine, if you’d call it anything at all – certainly its elliptical, cut-and-paste weirdness echoes both no wave-era NYC fanzines and some of the post-punk zines coming out of the UK at the time. Neither hardcore nor metal exists or rates in this world; its heroes are DNA, the Bush Tetras, Pink Section, Young Marble Giants, Joy Division and similar subjects.

A small co-ed team of editors and colleagues are behind this first and likely only issue, and supply the drawings, the word collages, and the strange pasted type that allows for words to hyphenate and fall off the page in all the wrong places. Kind of no wave, am I right? The DNA piece, “DNA stayed at my home”, is exactly that: a droll recounting of what they all talked about, who slept in which room, where they collectively went out to eat, and exciting information about Ikue Mori doing her laundry. DNA in Seattle in 1980 – it doesn’t really calculate for me, and yet the included loose-leaf entertainment guide promises upcoming shows in town by the Mo-Dettes, Delta 5, Cabaret Voltaire and Ultravox. You’d think we were in bleedin’ Sheffield.

The sole interview is with New York’ s Bush Tetras, who, along with the Au Pairs and Delta 5 were among my earliest favorite bands, once I discovered the left of the dial and college radio vis-a-vis KFJC. Clearly the bass-heavy, female-fronted post-punk sound scratched some primordial teenage itch I didn’t know I had, and I love all three bands to this day. The band are delighted to answer out-of-the-norm questions such as “What are the most irritating things people do?”, “Life without electricity?” and “Why don’t you live in Seattle?”. It turns out that one of the most irritating things that people do to Pat Place, Cynthia Sley and Laura Kennedy is confront them in the streets for being weirdos, calling them “Adams Family” or “Munsters” and asking them confused questions about their hair and clothes. It’s just like all of their fans who most likely were being called “Devo” around this time – hell, evenI got called Devo in junior high and high school for my tastes or lack thereof, and I looked and dressed like a Young Republican.  

And really, besides some tongue-in-cheek quizzes, a blank page, and a plea for advertisers, that’s about it for It’s (Your Name) Magazine #1. Of course it whets my appetite & piques my interest to want to know more about the editorial team here – Ray, Bev, Ken, Lembi, Charles, Janet and Thom – so if any Seattlites or those of you who might be deeply knowledgeable about the Seattle post-punk scene of 46 goddamn years ago have any skinny about it all, can you please just let Fanzine Hemorrhage’s dozen-plus readers know in the comments? 

Super Rock (June 1978)

~ Jay Hinman ~ 2 Comments

Let’s end our 2025 postings with something that’s not even a fanzine and didn’t come from the underground, just to bum you out. I bought Super Rock’s June 1978 issue online this year for a couple of reasons: first, because of my immense enjoyment of their second issue, the punksploitation one, which I wrote about here – and secondly, because the editor was one Myron Fass. Fass was a serial churner of exploitation magazines and comics of all types, a total “schlockmeister” who could really turn a buck on newsstand magazines on UFOs, monsters, mobsters, JFK, Elvis, and, apparently, 1970s rock-n-rollers. He was written about lovingly in one of the Bad Mags books, which I also got turned onto this year. 

Whatever punk they’d been writing about a few months before this was almost completely shitcanned by June ‘78, even with the continued presence of Hannah Spitzer on the masthead, seen inside sporting an awesome sneer and a Sex Pistols shirt. Hannah, please write to the ‘Hemorrhage. Let’s converse! Spitzer actually gets the opening gossip column, but was likely forced at gunpoint to write about Meatloaf, ELO, Ted Nugent and Rod Stewart. She looks much more like someone in the crowd at a Teenage Jesus & The Jerks show, and writes accordingly with much vim and vigor.

As with Rock Scene – one of the all-time greats – Super Rock is just overloaded with original, mostly non-publicity photos, a result of its staffers being out and about in New York City and elsewhere. It also has – ugh – color centerfold photos of Stewart, Andy Gibb, the Bee Gees & Peter Frampton, and David Bowie, who’s praised in an article for returning to his senses after Young Americans with his latest records Low and Heroes. “David has dropped the dressup, cut the shit and emerged almost naked with honest and individual energy”. That’s one way to put it.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a true “groupie” column before, but the one from “Dirty Darla” called “Ball Me Out” is quite a treat. She’s upset that the Pistols have just played in Atlanta “…without giving Darla a call. I was counting on a cream/dream date with them – that’s right, all of them….except Steve Jones, maybe – who one of my bisexual male friends who prefers men thinks is a real humpy macho stud punk – whew! Anyhow, I just saw ‘em on the network news!! Hot flashes!”. Poor Darla. I’m sure she did better with some of the more hairy cro-magnons that are interviewed and raved about across the pages of this thing: Starz, J. Geils Band, Billy Squire, Edgar Winter, Player and Tom Petty. 

There are cool photos of the Patti Smith Group in the studio recording Easter, with a special drop-in from an extremely young-looking Bruce Springsteen. This is followed up with an interview, with, um, Olivia Newton-John. Wait a minute – here’s some “punk”! There’s a piece on Iggy Pop, marveling that he’s still alive in 1978. There’s a puff piece on a group called Flame with a female singer who are said to be “Red-hot and Ready To Rock!!”. Now that this has forced me to listen to them online, they may quite literally be one of the worst things I’ve ever heard. Give me Rapid Fire any day.

You want excruciating – have you ever tried to watch that Sgt. Pepper film remake starring the Bee Gees and Frampton? I was 10 when that came out to much hype, and it was just absolutely panned. My sister and I tried to watch it on TV the next year, but I don’t think we made it all the way through – and she was in love with Robin Gibb. Apparently it recouped its costs, though. The promotional budget must have been through the roof, as even here in Super Rock it’s the subject of several articles and photo spreads. Myron Fass was no dummy.

It all makes for some fun reading, I suppose, and it’s why I’ll likely keep buying cheapo copies of Super Rock and Rock Scene should I come across them – maybe even the one with Supertramp on the cover. You’ll just have to let me know if it’s still okay to write about them here. See you in 2026!

Making Waves #4

~ Jay Hinman ~ Leave a comment

A few words before we start: I’ve got a revived music podcast you might potentially be interested in called Agony Shorthand, with all episodes captured here. I also did “the done thing” and made a list of my favorite books I read in 2025, with lots of extraneous commentary, which you can take a look at here. On with today’s program!

Haven’t given Making Waves #4 the once-over since blazing through it when it came out in 2016, but I did write a bit about their 2011 debut issue nearly three years ago, perhaps providing something of an introduction to the cut of their femme-slanted jib here. This one, #4, ended up being their final issue, and the point is made is the intro that they’d prefer to focus this one a bit more on current bands as opposed to the mostly-archival stance of the previous three. So that’s what they did!

The World, Rose Mercie and Moss Lime – all bands I liked, all with different features here: an interview, a tour diary and a playlist, respectively. Moss Lime, Freelove Fenner and Brave Radar were fantastic female-fronted abstract pop groups from Montreal last decade, and all deserve to not be forgotten; in fact, they deserve far better than that, and I kinda wish I’d pumped them up a little more when they were still around.

Cover star Su Tissue falls into the “attention comes so much easier when you’re exceptionally attractive” slot that Billy Idol and other beautiful mediocrities did, though I happen to totally love Su’s completely absurd “Manson girl meets Little House on the Prairie” persona, and the fact that she ditched it all at exactly the point when she was ready to be done with it. Also, watch this 90-second video of her Suburban Lawns playing “Unable” in 1979 – wow. Apparently there are middle-aged men who’ve spent way too much time on the internet fruitlessly attempting to track her down, her mystery and magnetism being catnip. For what it’s worth, I am not one of those middle-aged men. Katie Alice Greer wasn’t either, but she chips in here anyway with “The Eternal Mystery of Su Tissue”, and despite using the words “cultural pedagogy” in the piece, pulls off a nice tribute to the Garbo-like woman who even today just wants to be left alone. 

Making Waves #4 doesn’t shrink from the post-punk women they’d sorta hung their chapeaus upon in previous issues. Vivian Goldman, for one, gets a MW interview grilling, and we’re all the better for it. Vi Subversa, the woman who fronted Poison Girls and who garnered much attention for being a fortysomething mom whilst doing so, also gets a tribute piece. There are other things on creative women from multiple disciplines whom I don’t know anything about, and, incongruously, a playlist of 70s power pop by dudes to check out. 

I know I told you three years ago that 3 of the 4 issues of Making Waves were still available to purchase here, and somehow, for reasons beyond the grasp of sanity and explanation, they still are. 

Creep #5

~ Jay Hinman ~ 1 Comment

Creep #5 from Fall 1980 would come to be the final issue of this now-venerated San Francisco punk fanzine, a publication we’ve previously explored here and here. It doesn’t appear they knew that at the time, but I do sense a bit of “drift” in this one, as it’s a smorgasbord of opinion, rants, “just asking questions” essays, interviews and scene reports. Of course this might describe any punk fanzine of the era, but the only real unifier here in the previously cohesive Creep is the highly unifying presence of Flipper, a band whose self-destructiveness and contempt for the rudiments of “show business” was legendary, and is recognized as such in real time in this issue. 

What I sense here is editors Mickey Creep and Mark Creep effectively letting anyone write about and/or contribute just about anything, which, in its totality, helps provide me with what I’d imagine to be the state of the San Francisco underground at the time. There’s a lot of scene navel-gazing here, and I love it. “Western Fraud” is about the corporatization of the Western Front festival and the fact that the 1980s edition allowed in some new wave bands and some venues with legendarily moronic bouncers. Here’s a flyer for the 1979 version, and a tough-to-read 1980 version, featuring shows by “Bill Graham Presents”. Creep, not an overtly or at least over-the-top political ‘zine, except when Jello Biafra is writing for them, seems to be mostly concerned with keeping punks from selling out as well as from eating each other alive. 

The editorial magnanimity in allowing one writer to praise Brian Ferry at length and another to do a free-form piece extolling Roky Erickson is a nice surprise. James Koetting in his Ferry piece at least has the good sense to recognize that the jig was up when Flesh and Blood came out. The New Youth collective, which I was just talking about the other day, get a post-mortem that features Caitlin Hines prominently, and is probably the best overview you’ll find on the intra-scene dynamics and backbiting that came from putting on punk shows outside of the established clubs at this time. There’s a long interview with Paul Rat as well that adds yet another layer to the same. (for fun, here’s a 1979 phone call between Rat and Black Randy you might want to spend 9 minutes with). 

The Flipper interview is, by turns, hilarious and even a little shocking. The amount of drugs and alcohol these boys put away at the time – well, now that I’m a fifty-something dad, I want to stage an intervention to at least to keep Will Shatter alive a little longer. (“Beautiful Boy”). Shatter has some collage art in here that’s excellent as well. Some deep intelligence, casual racism, complex theory and general chaos comes to the fore in this interview, and clearly there’s a small chunk of San Francisco that’s become totally enraptured with the band during the previous year. And hey, we lost Bruce Loose this year, but Ted Falconi is still with us, folks!

The Dead Kennedys have just come back from their first tour of England, and there’s a great piece about how incredibly bleak things are over there, both in the punk scene – then morphing into oi – and otherwise. Jello is startled by the fact that in the UK, so many of the kids coming to see them want him to sign something, and how even performers like him are treated like untouchable gods – except to spit on during the show, of course.  A Crass piece makes similar points about England and of course extols all the ways they’ll likely be making it better. Olga deVolga from Vs. gets to rant about the scene and show off her general anger, and breaks the news that Vs. will be “merging” with Seattle’s The Lewd to form a new band called – The Lewd. There’s a long conceptual piece about Bill Griffith and his Zippy the Pinhead comic, which was quite popular with local weirdos well into the 1990s and still endures to this day. Careful connoisseurs of all the garbage I’ve written might recall the Kurt Cobain/Zippy connection I wrote about here. 

There’s even a crossword puzzle with questions like, “Who taught the Cramps their songs?”, “Anarchy in the __”, and “Ted, Will, Bruce and Steve are ____”. (I told you everything comes back to Flipper in this one). We could go on and on picking this one apart, and I’d like to, but let me conclude by giving a huge kudo and shout-out to Creep #5 for being the only contemporaneous fanzine I’ve ever seen that wrote about the Fuckin’ Flyin’ A-Heads while they were still around (though it appears Touch and Go may have as well!). If you know, you know. Not merely a review of the 45, but a brief chat, which talks about their move to San Francisco from Honolulu. This might be why I found my cheap copy of “Swiss Cheese Back” at Record Vault in SF in the late 1980s, a glorious banner day that was subsequently undercut by my poor decision to sell the same single on eBay ten years later.

Scram #19

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It’s been some time since we’ve taken a look at Kim Cooper’s 1990s-00s Scram; I think it was one of the very first fanzines I wrote about on this site, here and here. I’ve got this trove of them, a near-complete run, and every now and again it seems like a good idea to break one out, and I’m always glad I did – particularly the later issues, as this thing just continued to gather steam until its final transmission, issue #22.

Scram #19 – “Hollywood’s Premiere Journal of Unpopular Culture” – is the Spring 2004 issue, and features a few of the same unearthings I was myself pretty excited about at the time. To wit: Linda Perhacs. Not long after the time I’d discovered how much I loved Vashti Bunyan’s music, I went looking for other lost 60s/70s female folk oddities, and came across Perhacs’ dreamy and strange 1970 Parallelograms. It resonated pretty strongly, and not only with me. It had just been reissued on CD a few years before this issue, and as Cooper notes in the intro, “The reviews were odd. Without any evidence beyond the text itself, the critics made assumptions about Linda, painting her as a dippy hippie sprite who somehow channeled these vast ideas unknowingly”. So Cooper and Ron Garmon had the first sit-down interview ever granted by Perhacs for this issue to fill in the gaps.

I mean, the best revelation by far is that Perhacs is a name we now know only because she, as a post-college dental hygienist, haltingly passed on some of her home recordings to one of her rich patients in Beverly Hills, Leonard Rosenman. Dazzled, he then did everything possible to hustle her into a studio. She just thought of them as “campfire songs”, something she did for fun. Also, her “Hey, Who Really Cares?” ended up being the theme song for the TV cop show Matt Lincoln, because the producers wanted a “delicate song on top of this hard action”, inspired as they were by Robert Altman’s M.A.S.H. theme “Suicide is Painless”. How about that? I’ll let you find the other revelations in your own copy of Scram #19. 

I am also thankful for all the younger zine editors who, unlike me, thought to interview the immortal Lee Hazlewood while he still communed with us on this mortal coil. Dan Kapelovitz gets the honor here – a piece he originally wrote for Hustler (!) and which was rejected by the editors. I wish I’d talked to this guy (Hazlewood, not Kapelovitz) when he was around, seriously. What a storyteller – about his run-ins with Frank Sinatra; about sexual attitudes in Europe; about young fans in Sweden who scream so loud they scare his band, and who only want to hear his obscurities, not his hits.

About a month ago I saw the Zombies’ documentary Hung Up On a Dream and I now have a new appreciation for Colin Blunstone and co. that I only slightly had before (I even bought Odessey and Oracle, a record I’d never owned). But yeah, an interview with Blunstone was right in Kim Cooper’s wheelhouse – The Zombies being exactly the sort of band I associate with Scram: a little forgotten; a little underrated; a little fey or twee or different or goofy or strange or orchestral. His chat here is engaging and wide-ranging for sure; he talks more about the “tour” of the Philippines that the Zombies undertook which is perhaps the highlight of the documentary. 

The John Trubee interview by one of his childhood summer camp pals is priceless as well. As mentioned before, it’s the interviews, features and weird bits of humor papered throughout Scram that made it stand out, not the record reviews of contemporary crap from labels whose ads helped pay for the print runs (although, frankly, Scram was relatively ad-free, and well over 90% of this issue’s pages don’t have one). The fanzine was its own little insular world of obsessions and excitements, and typifies just how interesting and enduring a well-executed ‘zine can be when one person’s weirdo vision is carefully unfurled and then shoddily typeset.

No Mag #5

~ Jay Hinman ~ 2 Comments

Hard to say for certain exactly when No Mag #5 hit the streets, but given the ad for the Circle Jerks’ brand-new Group Sex and a Vinyl Fetish ad touting “the last Slash”, I’m going with late 1980. Much like a never-satisfied, highly creative novelist, No Mag truly jumbled its format from issue to issue, in search of some higher, elusive truth. Always arty, fashion-forward, transgressive and exceptionally strange, my various copies are at times extremely music-interview and scene-gossip heavy, yet other times they’ll overwhelmingly default to collage art, sexual photography and disorientation. This is (mostly) one of the latter. We talked about different issues here and here.

You know the jarring, conceptualist, highly nonsensical Los Angeles late-night TV programme New Wave Theater from exactly this time? No Mag was its spiritual brethren, and though I lack proof, I’ve gotta think editor Bruce Kalberg and New Wave Theater’s Peter Ivers spent some quality methamphetamine time together. And this issue, No Mag #5 – it’s the first issue of this I ever saw, some years after it came out, probably in 1987 or so at my cousin’s Isla Vista, CA apartment. I’ve certainly never been able to forget the opening fake “interviews” with No Mag readers, all of whom are represented by pictures of the hideously deformed, or of people with various facial skin lesions and tongue abnormalities. 

No Mag #5 does have a Bryan Gregory interview; he’s moved to LA after quitting or being kicked out of The Cramps, and hey, he likes it here. He hasn’t seen a band in a year; soon he’d go on to start the very forgettable and very forgotten Beast. There’s also a long bit of puffery and myth-making about Geza X, none of which is true. Apparently this issue came with a flexi of his, but my copy doesn’t have it and, as Elliot Gould’s Philip Marlowe might say, “it’s okay with me”. 

As mentioned, this issue in particular jumbles together sleek ads of new wave fashion plates; strange collage-art mash-ups; poetry (of a sort), a thing about war and survivalism from Search and Destroy’s Vale and Andrea; comics; more freakish faces; and a ton of Frank Gargani photographs. Some of these are absolute gems: 11-year-old Stevie Metz of Mad Society; lovely Shannon from Castration Squad; this one of Crystal from the Speed Queens; Belinda Carlisle of the Go-Go’s, pre-fame; and a cool-looking group of dudes called The Adaptors, about whom I know nothing and who may have been from San Francisco. 

Of course, you really don’t need me to tell you about it, since you can download every issue of No Mag right here, thanks to the legendary benevolence of Ryan Richardson.

B Side #11

~ Jay Hinman ~ 2 Comments

I started buying Sydney, Australia’s B Side around 1987, and it was an authoritative sherpa for me through the wilds & weeds of that era’s Australian underground. Independent US record stores were getting a lot of this stuff in stock at the time, so it wasn’t all that tough for me to find Scientists records, or any- & everything on the Aberrant, Citadel, Au Go Go, Waterfront, Greasy Pop, Red Eye and Black Eye labels, money permitting of course, of which I had little. Today I’m pretty ready to assert that the underground writ large, myself included, still hasn’t quite come to terms with how fertile this period was across Australia, particularly around the years 1984-86. This is where my recently-procured copy of B Side #11 lands, right in the middle of 1985. 

 For context, I just listened online to two records enthusiastically discussed here – Salamander Jim’s low-end, rumbling, psych noise-damaged “Black Star”, and The Moffs’ guitar-drenched paisley-psych 45 “Another Day in the Sun”. They’re great! It’s far more likely I just haven’t paid attention to any revivals of this stuff, since there are a ton of comps out there like this one. Anyway, Simon Lonergan and his crack team at B-Side were doing all the documentation in real time. I liken this fanzine to the UK’s Bucketful of Brains, but built instead around lowdown & dirty Australian bands with big hair and bad attitudes, as well as the more punk-oriented and as opposed to jangle-driven psych. It was the tenor of the times, as they say.

  If you’re like me, your eye was perhaps caught by B-Side #11’s promise of “Byron Coley on the State of the U.S.A.”. Coley’s “The State of American Noise Part 1” starts with an opening salvo positing that stupid Americans are ignoring the likes of the greatness he’s about to wax poetically about, which we probably were. This comes down to 4 key bands: Dredd Foole & The Din, Raunch Hands, Butthole Surfers and the Leaving Trains. The Trains’ debut LP Well Down Blue Highway “represents the culmination o’ years spent drunkenly tryin’ t’ find the Northwest Passage between The Damned and Creedence Clearwater Revival”. After describing them and the adjacent band To Damascus, he says “Now ya know more about these jerks than 99.99% of the American people. How’s it feel?”. Byron Coley sticking the landing, as usual. This is also the article in which Coley first wrote that Jello Biafra turned his nose up at the Butthole Surfers when he first saw them and said they were “too weird” – a statement that really stuck in Biafra’s craw for years afterward. Fun!

Tex Perkins (who was in Salamander Jim along with Kim Salmon) has a good interview here – he was better known as “Greg” at the time – which includes ruminations on his jealousy of the more popular Beasts of Bourbon; trouble with the cops; and the fact that he’s now about to start playing with Pat Bag and Kid Congo in Fur Bible. They haven’t even started the band yet, nor even told him what kind of music they’re going to be doing – he just wants to make sure it doesn’t sound anything like the Gun Club nor the Beasts of Bourbon. Well, maybe a little. 

There are also a slew of interviews with the likes of the Celibate Rifles, who just had that first LP and a 45 out at this point. A year later they’d have records that were easily procured at Aron’s and Zed in LA, and which became pretty beloved by me & my Radio Birdman-loving pals. (I don’t have them anymore and haven’t heard the band in decades). Other chats are with The Shindiggers, Decline of the Reptiles, 21 Faces, Harem Scarem, and American Eugene Chadbourne, who’s just come to town and won a handful of converts down under. 

The excitement of the age is real, and you can feel it in the big Melbourne “scene report” by David Laing and Trevor Block. They’re shooting the proverbial shit back and forth about bands like “Behind The Magnolia Curtain” and Murphy’s Hardware, who supposedly play live in matching Hawaiian shirts. Who wouldn’t be excited, am I right? And as a result of reading this blog post, you now know more about these jerks from 1985 than 99.99% of the Australian people. How’s it feel?

Revolutionary Wanker #2

~ Jay Hinman ~ 1 Comment

Typically I keep to a couple of core rules here at Fanzine Hemorrhage, the primary one being that every zine discussed here is one that I myself presently own. That means “no PDFs”, though I admit that we’d be able to have some excellent (one-way) fanzine conversations if I bent my rules for access into my “PDF collection”. It also usually means no copies or xeroxes of fanzines. I have bent this rule twice already, however, for Brain Damage #1 and Back Door Man #4. So let’s bend it again for October 1981’s Revolutionary Wanker #2 from San Francisco, a crisp xerox sent directly to me by editor Naomi Batya, who was a hell of a “good sport” after all my shucking and jiving on this site when I discussed my original copy of her Revolutionary Wanker #1.

There’s an opening triumphant disclaimer that the zine is now publishing independently of Creep, and that this is likely for the better. Joan Moan contrasts the negativity of punk with the positive vibrations emanating from the Rastafari world, informed by her trip to Jamaica. She certainly wasn’t the only one disillusioned with mean-spirited punk rockers who go on to big-up on Jah. Alter “Ego” Cronkite – these names, jesus – seems to have taken his own trip around the country to see what various punk scenes are like in LA, DC, NY and even Rochester, and they each came up severely lacking compared with Shangri-La San Francisco. “If you still want to be a punk, stay in San Francisco”. Anyone else think LA and DC were starving for good punk bands in late 1981? 

Tony Kinman from Rank & File is interviewed and naturally gives voice to what it’s like being in a country band, vs. being in The Dils as he’d been two years agone. The band’s approach in 1981 is to play country music within the punk club circuit, and rightly see themselves as the only ones doing as such. Good interview. I’d always assumed those guys were really prickly, but not with the kind young women at Revolutionary Wanker they weren’t. And his favorite SF band is Flipper, as I’d hope mine would have been at the time.

Z’ev does come off initially as exceptionally prickly in his chat with “Will Ling” and “Tobe Lead”, but settles down a bit and eventually takes some major swipes at his electronic & proto-industrial music brethren. You kinda learn to love the guy by the end – isn’t that nice? Each time there’s an interview, it’s then followed by adornments of many stripes – song lyrics, clip art, short musings and the occasional advertisement. In fact there’s an ad I’d never seen for the Market Street Cinema, which I only know as a legendary porn palace, showing off a killer Au Pairs / ESG / B-Team show that’s coming to town on October 2nd. There’s also a praise-drenched review of a new club called Club Generic in the Tenderloin at 236 Leavenworth that sounds like a truly wild space during an exceptionally creative time. These are the sort of events they’d have: here, here and here. 

There’s also an intro to filmmaker Marc Huestis, who was then just getting rolling. So yeah – not exactly a generic table of contents, and already a big leap from the issue that had come out just a few months before this one. I’ve got xeroxes of the others, and you can mark your calendars as I’ll be diving into those sometime within the next several years, count on it!

New Wave Rock #1

~ Jay Hinman ~ 4 Comments

Well, whew, I think I’ve finally completed one of the most breathlessly exciting and highly laudable chases of my life: the quest to own all of the glossy punksploitation magazines that were put out in 1977-78 under a head-spinning spell of confusion, bafflement, excitement and money-grubbing opportunity. My late wife Rebecca would be so proud. I did it for you, honey. New Wave Rock #1 was my sacred chalice to find, and find it I did. (The others I’ve discussed are here, here, here, here, here and here). But then I had to read it, this issue with new wave rockers Kiss on the cover. But I did that too, and now I’m here to talk with you about what I uncovered. 

As it turns out, this September 1978 debut is less sploit-ta-tive than even the two issues that followed it (here and here). It’s actually quite good. Diana Clapton’s opening editorial states that she received funding and wide editorial latitude for it from publishers Harry Matetsky and Jack Borgen, but then they saw her table of proposed contents and blanched at all the no-names (Clash, The Jam, Dictators) therein. “(Harry) then asked the fourteen-year-olds in his Long Island neighborhood, which is light years away from the Bowery, who their very favorite rock group is – and that’s why we have the cover we do, friends”. She then proceeded to label Kiss’ portion in the table of contents “Kiss: what do they mean? Why are they here?”. 

As usual, much of the fun to be had is in the opening gossip pages, which here are broken into distinct London, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco scene reports. There’s some loud post-Sex Pistols break-up speculation, including some that posits that Johnny Rotten and Poly Styrene are singing aging rock & roll standards together on a grand piano, and are now a “joyful couple”. There are salacious details on the Bryan Ferry/Jeri Hall split and how she’s cavorting in the clubs with Mick Jagger, leaving Ferry sad and alone in his new upper Fifth Avenue flat, which he’d moved into with Hall all the way across the Atlantic. There’s also a firsthand report on Lou Reed’s six-show, sold-out run at The Bottom Line, featuring “his transsexual lover Rachel” opening. Rachel, who “is a terrible singer”, apparently hung real tough and dealt with much audience abuse in “tight black leather, stiletto heels, a sultry smirk and a rose looped over his or her belt”. Meanwhile, Brian Eno “and the agonizingly gorgeous Julie Christie are having a fat laugh over rumors of their red-hot love affair, as they have been in each other’s company precisely twice”. 

The LA gossip column by someone purportedly named Eunice O’Reilly is even spicier. After some Germs love, there’s a list of LA’s five “bad bands”: Backstage Pass (I just finished reading Genny Schorr’s All Roads Lead To Punk like, last weekend), The Nerves, The Deadbeats, Runaways (ok, sure) and The Weirdos, “LA’s most unexciting band since Seals & Crofts….claim to not be ex-hippies in disguise, but ace Warner Brothers secretary Coral sez: ‘I went to high school with them. They had long hair and wore love beads’. Case closed”. I also enjoy “O’Reilly”’s take on power pop: “It ain’t new wave but it ain’t ‘zactly old wave either, something y’gotta just live with and LA’s got it up the gitgo”. I suspect this column was written by either Gregg Turner or Metal Mike Saunders, probably Turner, as it contains a multi-paragraph ending about “saving the best for last”, Vom. Their own band. Amazingly, there’s then a two-page spread and feature on Vom later in the mag.

Now, I’ve dissected enough pieces on Blondie, The Jam, The Ramones and the like in other Fanzine Hemorrhage write-ups to really want to spend much time with with the ones in New Wave Rock #1, but I did a double-take skimming the Blondie piece in which Clem says “…we made a movie with John Cassavetes and this guy Sam Shaw. It’s a youth-oriented movie called Blondie, and I don’t know what they’re going to do with it”. Say what now? John Cassavetes? It’s true! (More here from Waitakere Walks). I also learned about the incredibly underwhelming response The Jam received opening for, um, Blue Oyster Cult in Bridgeport, CT, and Paul Weller’s goading of the crowd with, “I know, it’s hard to understand when you’re being confronted with the future of rock and roll right in front of you”. 

One other bonus of this issue is the loads of color photographs documenting both onstage antics and candid backstage snaps, most of which I haven’t seen before. And other tidbits and anecdotes and whatnot: John Cale expounding upon punk and how much or how little was actually being learned from The Velvet Underground (he loves Sham 69, though!); The Clash claiming “people think we’re a con, but we’re not”; and a multi-page overview of Television’s year post-Marquee Moon, pre-Adventure. I’ve been listening a ton of late to the Live Portland 1978 bootleg from around exactly this time, and I think it’s quite possible it’s the single greatest documentation of Television’s majesty in any one single place.

 It’s likely that publishers Matetsky and Borgen didn’t like what they saw when they crunched the newsstand numbers for New Wave Rock #1 and asked to dial up the stupidity levers a bit for the two issues that followed – who knows. I just know that if this had been called something else, and didn’t have Kiss on the cover, it’d be as good as this, this or this from right around the same time, and perhaps remembered just as fondly and not as some joke object for dorks like me. 

The Bob #26

~ Jay Hinman ~ Leave a comment

Around 1985-87, the tabloid fanzine The Bob was pretty ubiquitous on the Tower Records magazine racks and at the indie record stores I used to frequent in California. While their all-encompassing approach to “college rock” certainly covered bands I cared about – i.e. The Bob #26’s bits on The Minutemen and D. Boon’s passing and Pat Thomas’ short overview of Opal – I only bought it every now and again, given the lack of any real cultivated, inspirational, BS-detecting “taste” that I might glom onto. The temperament appeared to have been: indie music is great, listen to all of it, but maybe not if it’s too aggressive or too challenging. Fair enough?

That’s at least what I’ve gathered again in 2025 revisiting this March-April 1986 issue. The Fleshtones, Scruffy The Cat and even The Bangles’ Different Light are taken seriously, as are the longest and most obscure stretches of the jangly American underground tail. As long as someone sent in some vinyl to be reviewed – especially if it’s Engima Records or in any way R.E.M.– or paisley underground-affiliated – it’s gonna get in here. Most of the time it’s going to have one of those reviews that hems & haws and picks at it a bit, then weirdly concludes, “you need to hear this” or “you need to buy this”. As someone who emphatically relied upon fanzines to tell me what was truly worth buying at the time, this was not an approach that built credibility, nor gave me any level of confidence in The Bob’s discernment. 

I always associated The Bob with Fred Mills. His byline was everywhere in virtually every issue, doing many of the interviews and writing a huge chunk of the reviews. Fred was sort of the saving grace, in my opinion. While he was (at times) the foremost purveyor of the review style I’ve just decried, he also was an inveterate music fiend who clearly “collected records” (as did I at this time, age 18), and was absurdly, slavishly devoted to bands, live gigs and uncovering undiscovered gems. In 1993 when I was the “roadie” for the band Claw Hammer, Fred somehow proactively found me on the show floor at Hotel Congress in Tucson, AZ (we’d never met nor corresponded), and we proceeded to banter about all manner of musical ephemera, helping to solidify the positive-leaning sentiments I’d accumulated to date. We’ve not communicated since.

It’s really Mills, Pat Thomas and a parade of lesser lights in The Bob #26. Mills gets the Green on Red deep dive, and upon re-reading it now, I reckon I learned a bit more about where this band’s head was at during that first wave of indie/Americana bands jumping unsuccessfully to major labels. (The best writing about that disappointing blip in time, I think, is in the second of the two John Doe/Tom DeSavia LA punk books). Thomas rightly praises the 28th Day record and seems to imply they were from Los Angeles – they were not. Mills has an entire column on Australian bands; there was a ton of curiosity around this time about The Scientists, Triffids, Decline of the Reptiles and others, whose records were just barely making it to the USA. I’m pretty sure my own Aussie mania of the time was at least piqued by Mills’ columns – so perhaps there was some residual tastemaking going on despite me saying in self-aggrandizing hindsight that there wasn’t.

There are various write-ups of similar 60s psych/garage revival groups like The Mod Fun, Chesterfield Kings, Plan 9, Plasticland et al. I was just at Amoeba Music in San Francisco on Friday; some dude had sold crateloads of this stuff on vinyl – your Miracle Workers, Yard Traumas and what have you, including the aforementioned Aussie stuff – to the store a few months back. While it was fun to look at when it came in, I noticed this week that most of it was now “priced to move” in the reduced/clearance portion of the used LPs. Even at $5.99 a pop, I couldn’t find anything worth slotting into the collection. Not even the Psychotic Turnbuckles, but I at least held that in my hands for five minutes.

1984-1986 remains a puzzling time for me in the broader tale of what underground rock music was during the decade, but a fanzine like The Bob, for better or for worse, goes a long way toward illuminating the quote-unquote lived experience among certain sectors at the time. A glut of vinyl, an aesthetic distaste for punk and what it wrought, a surging “psych” and lite-garage sensibility, and an attempt to guiltlessly straddle the underground and overground. That’s what I remember from The Bob and similar publications like Jet Lag, which is probably why I ultimately found my late-teenage salvation in Forced Exposure, Conflict and Flesh and Bones instead.

Damage #1

~ Jay Hinman ~ 7 Comments

One of the great tabloid fanzines of all time, Damage published thirteen issues in San Francisco from 1979 to 1981. I’ve had the pleasure of talking with you in this forum about it before: Damage #6 and Damage #7. Now let’s take a peek at the very first issue, Damage #1 from June 1979, even if it does have Jello Biafra on the cover. Trust me, my copy wasn’t “complimentary”, as you can see stamped along the top here, but it leads me to believe that my copy belonging to a previous owner once was. 

There seems to be a real coalescence of smart and driven people around the San Francisco underground music scene in 1979, not merely a bunch of dimwit punks. They’ve all been given a place to congregate in the pages of Damage #1. There’s billboard artist “DA”, provided with this sobriquet as a cover for his real name, due to his public vandalism of billboards and corporate buildings. This includes putting up a series of large posters that say, “Rich..? Boring…? Then you soon may be dead unless you contribute to the new wave revolution. Send money today = be spared tomorrow”. An address at 626 Post Street is helpfully provided. He also created confrontational machine-based visual art and displayed it in public spaces, like a gas station, making me think he might very well be Mark Pauline, or someone within his orbit. Though I doubt Mark Pauline would have given much thought to fomenting a “new wave revolution”. 

Another great interview is with Robert Hanrahan, manager of The Offs and Dead Kennedys, and a guy who put on shows at San Francisco’s legendary Deaf Club. (Robert is now Daphne Hanrahan). The club is struggling with fire regulations, police presence, and with quality-of-life cleanup issues on Valencia Street. Mayor Dianne Feinstein is referred to as “the Queen of Hearts”, in reference to a legendary mocking magazine cover that I unfortunately can’t find reference to on the internet. She was reviled by the punks. Hanrahan complains about people trying to piggyback on the club’s notoriety and/or get in for free: “We’ve had people come to the club and flash New West press passes, and we say, okay that’ll be three dollars. And they’re shocked – ‘but we can write about you, we can give you all kinds of publicity’….one night Black Randy came to the door and announced, ‘Black Randy, party of twelve’. I said ‘Black Randy, party of none, it’s three bucks apiece’. He was flipped. We let him in, and a half hour later two guys were carrying him out because he had passed out in the bathroom”. 

Now if you’ve done even the tiniest bit of cursory reading about the late 70s San Francisco punk scene, you surely know who Dirk Dirksen is. The interview with him here is fantastic. The interviewer comes at him repeatedly and rather lamely with every Mabuhay Gardens controversy du jour – ticket prices ($4.50 on weekends instead of $3!); whether he’s enriching himself from the Mabuhay (he is not); “a lot of people resent the way you act on stage”, and so on. The final question is “Someone asked me to ask you if it’s true you hate punks”. Dirkson replies, “I only love myself. I don’t know any punks, but those pseudo-punks that come to the Mabuhay, I certainly like them”. Read an entire book about him here. 

Damage #1 also talks to bands, I assure you. There’s a rare one with The Urge, an all-female band that included Jean Caffeine, who did New Dezezes fanzine (which I wrote about here and here) a year or two before this band, and who, along with her bandmates, went to Washington High in the Richmond (two members are still there at the time of this interview). There’s a talk with No Sisters, a band of brothers, all of whom wear nerd glasses. There are strange utterings from Coum Transmissions, i.e. the Throbbing Gristle folks, a collective very popular with a certain San Francisco archetype of the era, as you may well know. Craig and Alice from The Bags do a perfunctory Q&A, and MX-80 Sound, who’ve just moved to SF from Bloomington, IN, get their own small grilling here.

Just to give the proper context, may I please continue? There’s an interview with Nervous Gender, a photo essay of “A Day at Home with Sally Mutant”, and a piece on filmmaker George Kuchar. Jello Biafra gets a column to spout his nonsense; John and Exene from X give a short interview, decorated with some phenomenal band action shots. The women from Noh Mercy talk about the blowback to “Caucasian Guilt”, and about some of their difficult live shows, such as the one in LA at Madame Wong’s where the highly touchy madame took exception to them wearing kimonos on stage, and for being women in the first place, then banned them from ever playing there again. There’s an LA gossip column from someone named “Jane’s Plane” and an SF gossip column by Ginger Coyote, who put out the fairly weak fanzine Punk Globe and was later in the execrable White Trash Debutantes. 

Yeah, all of that….and even more. I really dug the interview with the folks behind New Youth Productions, who put on a legendary grassroots Clash/Zeros/Negative Trend show on 2/8/79 and ruffled a ton of industry feathers in the process. There’s much more about Caitlin Hines from New Youth in my own Dynamite Hemorrhage #8, which you can read here. So as I said at the outset here, tons of energy, spit and vinegar in San Francisco at the time, and you really couldn’t capture it a whole lot better than Damage #1 did.

Crawdaddy! #16

~ Jay Hinman ~ Leave a comment

I’ve only got a couple 60s issues of the original Crawdaddy! – “The Magazine of Rock” – and I’m quite aware that it wasn’t a true self-published fanzine, as weren’t the magazines Rock Scene, Teen Screen, Trouser Press, Cheetah, Beetle, Sounds and a few others I’ve bantered about here. It’s a great window into the “rock as culture” movement of the late 60s, in which rock music was dissected as intellectual fodder, the whole “but-what-does-it-all-mean” ethos that was part & parcel of the era’s zeitgeist. It’s still a point of chagrin in my house just how picked-over Bob Dylan’s lyrics were at the time, but I know Bobby Z has his fans, and who am I to say they were wrong to do so.

Paul Williams was the editor of the original version of the magazine, which started up in 1966. His run at the helm ended in late 1968, not long after this issue, Crawdaddy! #16 from June 1968, but the thing continued throughout the 70s, albeit without much cultural cache that I can discern. Williams would later re-launch the magazine in the early 1990s as almost a fanzine again from his then-San Diego home. He provided a writing hub to so many folks who’d go on to be fairly well-known, such as Richard Meltzer and this issue’s Sandy Pearlman and Peter Guralnick. (Wikipedia says that Gilda Radner and Dan Aykroyd wrote for it in the 70s!). 

Crawdaddy! #16 finds itself parked pretty well in front of a lot of what I’d like to think I’d be excited about during the hot hot summer of 1968. The United States of America get the cover and an excellent write-up by David Flooke, focused quite a bit on how they might use their synthesizers to build on “the second coming of the new music era, which was heralded by Sergeant Pepper along with Pet Sounds”. People actually liked Sergeant Pepper back then, folks – no, I’m serious! But I love this piece because it’s so excited about “this group that is shaping art into rock”, and also mainly because I really, really dig the LP that Flooke is so excited about, so I’m excited to feel his real-time excitement. 

There’s much excitement as well about a Doors live show by Kris Weintraub, who is already rhapsodizing about the godlike power of “Jim”, on a first-name basis. Williams writes about Smokey Robinson & The Miracles and The Beau Brummels, the latter being one of San Francisco’s finest and a big favorite of Mimi Hinman (my mother), though I did not know they were still hoofing it in 1968. David Anderle and Williams then get into a long recorded discussion about Brian Wilson. The article is simply called “Brian”, and it’s part three of their deep exploration into every conceivable aspect of Wilsoniana. Williams sees 1967’s Wild Honey as “some sort of breakthrough”, and they go way into it, with diversions into Dylan, the Doors, Elvis and even Rembrandt and Modigliani. Your patience may vary. 

Another piece contrasts The Kinks’ Something Else with The Who’s The Who Sell Out and yes, I’ll say my patience for over-explanation does waver a bit on this one. Tim Ellison – whom I know at least somewhat revered Crawdaddy! – brought back this style of labored writing in the 1990s in his excellent fanzine Rock Mag!, but I also felt Tim, educated as well as he was by comparatively lowbrow punk fanzines, leavened his prose with some real tongue-in-cheek weirdness that might have gotten his submissions summarily rejected by Williams in the 60s, who knows.

But look, the real gem here is a real-time inspection by Pearlman of White Light/White Heat by, that’s right, the Velvet Underground. He zeroes in on many things, only some of which I can really understand, but his biggest excitement is reserved for Maureen Tucker’s Bo Diddley-groove, and the band’s unswerving dedication to repetition. He loves “Sister Ray”. And in 1968, to love “Sister Ray” was to be ahead of the curve, shall we say. White Light/White Heat peaked at 199 on Billboard’s album chart, which only went to 200. He can’t really tell if their repetition means “they’re playing badly or not”, but doesn’t care. I don’t either. It’s probably my favorite album of all time.

 Marc Silber ends Crawdaddy! #16 with a piece on Autosalvage’s debut album, which would ultimately be their only. I’d never heard of them, but I like what I’m hearing right now. Of course, I also happen to be on a Moby Grape/Love/Kinks sort of bender right now, so all of this is in my proverbial wheelhouse at the present moment. I’m sure I’ll go back to disparaging the hippies any day now.

Bite Down #1

~ Jay Hinman ~ Leave a comment

Over the course of Fanzine Hemorrhage’s reign of error, I’ve had the distinct pleasure of dissecting several 80s and 90s fanzines by one Brian Berger: Crush #3, Grace and Dignity #1 and Constant Wonder #1. Last time I even sirened a call that I sent across the internet for Berger to get in touch for a real old-school “Fanzine Hemorrhage grilling”, but our bait was left bobbing on the water. The common themes of any given Berger fanzine were a very learned abrasiveness; a high intellectual quotient that didn’t show itself off too much; complete & total independent music immersion; and a bit of horndoggery that did little to advance the seriousness of his cause. Thanks to one BH, I now have Fall 1988’s Bite Down #1, which I believe may be the very first of all the Brian Berger fanzines.

At this point, he’s a student at the University of Michigan, and therefore publishing Bite Down from Ann Arbor. Of course, Ann Arbor, especially its clubs, TOTALLY SUCKS. I love how college students from big cities, such as my own beloved progeny vis-a-vis Tucson, Arizona, often have the perspective of living and cavorting in exactly two places in their lives, and therefore if the second falls short of the first for, say, nightlife, the whole place just SUCKS. Berger places his zine’s opening editorial and statement of purpose on the inside back cover, the last place you’d think to look, and professes his love for rock and roll while also sheepishly admitting he’s a mere 19 years old. Well jeez, I was 20 myself at this exact time, and his obsessive interests very much mirrored mine: what various mythic fanzine types were up to (especially Forced Exposure and Conflict); Sonic Youth; the Gibson Bros; and the releases that were pouring out monthly by the dozens on Touch & Go, Homestead and SST. 

Most/all of the reviews I wrote for Sound Choice at the same age are just as guileless and uninformed as Berger’s, so any mirth-making here is refractory and probably aimed at myself, okay? But it’s funny! The Mekons’ 7-7-88 show at Maxwell’s was “the best show I’ve ever seen”. It may well have been! I say the same thing about the 9-28-87 Sonic Youth show at Borsodi’s Coffeehouse in Isla Vista, CA, which took place when I myself was 19.  “While a goodly amount of praise has been heaped upon the combo known as B.A.L.L., IT AIN’T BEEN ENOUGH!”. Really? B.A.L.L.? Richard Meltzer’s L.A. is the Capital of Kansas: an all-caps “MASTERPIECE”. (Maybe I should read that one). 

He cares even more about Shimmy-Disc records, a label whose program I struggled to get with at the time, but Berger is full-bore. B.A.L.L.’s new one is their “second straight masterpiece”; King Missile are “hilarious”; and even that Carney Hild Kramer record is a “masterwork” (there are nineteen copies of this LP currently selling at $3.48 on Discogs, not to conjoin art and capitalism, nor try to make any statements about price as a cue for quality). He also swipes the Forced Exposure “C/U meter” for his own 45 reviews, which was shorthand for “Could/Use x amount of copies”. So with a C/U of 1, you’d keep your lone copy; C/U of 500 meant, in theory, you needed to go find 500 copies. Tad, who is called “the friggin’ messiah” for his Daisy/Ritual Device single, gets a “C/U Entire Pressing”. Fuck, so that’s why I can’t find the goddamn Tad single – Berger got them all.

Only one more bit of funnin’, and then I’m done. (For the record, I enjoyed reading Bite Down #1 cover to cover today). His interview with Thurston Moore of, yes, Sonic Youth, is really good, mostly because Moore was and is always game to talk shop with a fellow record/music obsessive. It makes me laugh because the questions are so the sorts of questions I would ask bands not just in the 80s, when I’d meet them in person, but even through the 90s, as if they didn’t have anything else to talk about. “How’s the tour?”. “So you guys are playing with Laughing Hyenas”. “What’s the deal with this one record I collected from you” etc. Questions that were just as one-dimensional as I was at that age. I also learned that Thurston Moore’s tour diary in Forced Exposure was enlivened by some somewhat mean-spirited edits by Jimmy Johnson, which, I guess if it happened to me, I’d never submit anything to anyone ever again.

I do think Berger made a quantum-sized developmental leap from Bite Down #1 to Constant Wonder #1 in four years, and some of those rougher edges were never sanded down – mostly to the good in his case. They certainly made for more readable and more memorable fanzines, and I reckon the guy’s still a person of interest from this era, even if I’m the only one still interested.

Alley Oop #5

~ Jay Hinman ~ 1 Comment

I’d wanted a copy of New Zealand’s Alley Oop for years, and so hats off and a big thank you to Brendan, who made it happen. Aside from Garage, which I’ll likely never see an original copy of, it was the NZ mag I’d most seen quotes pulled from and reviews swiped from, and upon the evidence presented here in 1988’s Alley Oop #5, there was ample reason for doing so. 

While no formal editor is presented on any masthead here, at least judging by the amount of content contributed, it looks like Paul McKessar helmed the fanzine or at least was very deeply involved. He apparently got #me-too’ed a few years ago. Right away there’s a very NZ-centric gossip page, with some excited early Xpressway news. Heads-up is provided about the Dead C’s forthcoming The Sun Stabbed EP, and there’s some celebration of the fact that “sales of the Xpressway Pile=Up compilation have already exceeded some expectations”. Remember, if it sells 100 copies in New Zealand, that’s like 4 million in the United States. They also talk about an upcoming Xpressway tape of 1983 recordings by Christchurch’s The World, which didn’t actually happen until Unwucht put the stuff out in 2013.

This gossip column also hipped me to a Bill Direen & The Bilders comp from 1988 called Divina Comedia that I’m only just learning was a thing now. Then comes a trio of interviews; first up is the Jean Paul Sarte Experience. This is undertaken by Ian Henderson, brother of George, and the guy behind Fishrider Records, a terrific small label who has put out several records by Emily Fairlight, one of my favorite artists the past ten years. You’ll definitely want to check her raspy-voiced gothic Americana out, and move on to this one once you’d bought that. Snapper are talked with by McKessar, and Stones by Chris Heazlewood, an artist of deserved renown in his own right. 

The reviews are fairly minimal in number, but of course the kiwis have outstanding taste. I was dazzled to see the rave for Tripod Jimmie by Bruce Russell (Xpressway/The Dead C); he loves the excellent and highly underrated A Warning To All Strangers, which he rightly says is going to be very hard to find. I barely saw it here, where I live in California, and they were from San Francisco. There’s some Pixies love from McKessar, and some slightly overwrought praise for Public Enemy too. Have I ever written about the time Public Enemy was playing UC-Santa Barbara when I was in college, around this very time, and “Flava Flav” was spotted in the middle of the afternoon, walking down Hollister Avenue in the neighboring town of Goleta wearing his big stupid clock around his neck? 

McKessar talks about local live shows you’d have killed to see from Sneaky Feelings, The Puddle, Verlaines, Steven and Plagal Grind (!!). There’s a deep dive into The Clean’s Oddities 2 tape, something I actually once owned (along with an original Xpressway Pile=Up) and sold, because I totally hate cassettes. And perhaps best of all is K B Tannock’s obituary for Nico, who’d just passed away at age 49. It’s exceptionally informative, focusing mostly on her final ten years, and a little harrowing, as it contains a description of his (her?) interview with Nico in 1985. Our heroine is ravaged by heroin, as well as suffering from an inability to communicate, to hear in one ear, and to go five minutes without complaining about how badly she needed smack. We’ve written some about Nico’s interview foibles before on this site (here and here), but she really was something special and strange. (I still have yet to read this book about her, but I own it and will get to it one day).

In all, Alley Oop #5’s about as front-and-center a seat as you’d imagine getting to take at the Flying Nun & Xpressway tables as these labels were at or close to their heights. May they all eventually be lovingly collected somewhere as Garage was.

Anorexic Teenage Sex Gods #7

~ Jay Hinman ~ Leave a comment

A real nice fella named Brian wrote to us here at Fanzine Hemorrhage not long ago and said he was doing some summer cleaning, and would we like a copy of Damage fanzine that he had laying around. We sure would! Lo and behold in the mail, Brian’s kindly-proffered package included no Damage, but rather a gratis copy of Anorexic Teenage Sex Gods #7 from 1991. I hadn’t been familiar with this Cambridge, MA fanzine, but it turns out that on their editorial masthead, they stated that they were, in fact, “The Last Rock N Roll Zine”. How about that?

Editor Gag Warlock and his co-editor “Frank” were very much of the drunk-n-loose glam/slam/rocknroll persuasion, the sorts of folks who worship Johnny Thunders and like it LOUD, sloppy and stupid. I knew these people well – I mean, not Gag and Frank, but this alcoholic jean-jacket & bandanas trash-glam-punk crew. I wrote a thing in the Where The Wild Gigs Were book some years back all about The Chatterbox, a San Francisco club for whom this lifestyle was their entire brand. And I supported it! I had so much fun with my fake ID at The Chatterbox, a melting pot of speed metal heshers, gender norm-challenging NY Dolls freaks, and loads of drunk women who yelled too much. 

What do you know, Johnny Thunders has just passed away as issue #7 is getting pulled together, so there’s lots to talk about. The first piece is coverage of a Memorial/Benefit show on June 19th, 1991 just two months after his death. Then a an actual memorial/tribute from one of the Anorexic Teenage Sex Gods writers to St. Johnny, with a dissected top ten of the man’s greatest moments. Some deep cuts, too – “Short Lives” is #1 – I guess it’s a song that took the lead on this 45. You and I might have picked something else, I suppose, but let’s remember that it wasn’t our fanzine.

This is followed by two more Thunders tributes, one by “DJ Philly Phil” and the other by Kris Guidio. And then all this sadness makes way for some anger. Gag Warlock is pissed about “ultra-glam-fag-metal” types here in 1991 who are dressing up in leggings and who have followed in the wake of the success of Guns & Roses. Wait, were we still complaining about this in 1991? Come on. To me, that world was so Los Angeles 1987, yet for Gag, he’s upset how after G&R, “every doctor’s kid in the country became a street glam cowboy with a bottle of bleach and a rose tattoo, fade-to-bottle of JD and a full sleeve-job (a la Nikki Sixx). Leopard skin pillbox hats, cowboy ballads a la Roy Rogers or Bon Jovi or something; tight plastic Lip Service trousers and a totally whole lot of hairspray”. You know, I only follow about half of what he’s saying there, but I kinda feel like that Sunset Blvd ‘87-’88 look was mostly buried by then. But things can really, really stick in your craw sometimes, can’t they?

When they move on to reviews, they’re very much of a piece with each other: Jeff Dahl Group (lots of Dahl in this thing), Celebrity Skin (some excellent Don Bolles dirt about what an ass he was when he stayed at the writer’s house), Cadillac Tramps, and even some early 3-song EP by Pearl Jam that the writer not unsurprisingly sees as a Green River outgrowth, rather than the Monsters of Rock they’d become later that year (“Album will be out when you read this so buy it”). They also love The Gargoyles, who were unquestionably one of the Bottom Five worst bands I ever saw in my life. I said so in an early issue of my Superdope fanzine around this same time and lemme tell ya, the band didn’t like it!

Really, if you have the look, these guys at Anorexic Teenage Sex Gods are more than forgiving. There is, to wit, love for scarfcore from Nikki Sudden as well as for leather, cigarette and fog machine rock from Sisters of Mercy. But there’s a line that just can’t be crossed, perhaps that same line that got Gag Warlock so worked up about all the Guns & Roses follow-ons, so this issue has a couple of nice vitriolic takedowns of bands I’ve never heard of called The Glamour Punks and the Stars From Mars. Have to admit those are great band names, considering. Yet for all this discernment, our editors are not above calling someone a “Jewboy”. Even in 1991 we didn’t say that, folks. Toward the end there’s a Touch Me Hooker interview and some Alice Cooper hype, but at that point I decided to pull out my Torah scrolls and put on a Marissa Nadler record to quietly recover from all the glam/slam/trash-rocknroll-in-your-fuckin-face action going down here.

Raw Power #5

~ Jay Hinman ~ 4 Comments

It’s been a little quiet around the Fanzine Hemorrhage blog for a few weeks, I’d reckon. This probably has something to do with me trying to modulate my reaction to just how badly I hate the internet in late 2025. I wrote a short essay about it called Opting Out Of The Rot Economy that you’re welcome to read, and perhaps take inspiration from. But there’s nothing in there that necessitates throwing the baby out with the bathwater and quit publishing entirely. This is the baby; social media is the bathwater, and that I’ve thrown out – so these posts won’t be promoted anywhere. They’ll just show up in your inbox if you’re subscribed – which you can do on the desktop version of this site rather easily if you haven’t already. If you’re not, they won’t, and someone will have to tell you about them, perhaps by calling you up on your telephone or by knocking on your door to spread the news.

The guys who put out Raw Power #5 in Spring 1978 effectively had just those means for getting the word out, aside from dropping them into LA-area stores and getting blurbs in other folks’ fanzines. These was effective methods in 1978, given the growing number of underground American fanzines taking off in the punk era and the fact that record stores were literally everywhere, and the cooler ones even carried fanzines. But if you’re putting Ted Nugent – the fucking Nuge – on your cover, you’re not really aiming to have Kickboy Face of Slash’s endorsement, or perhaps it’s even still too early to care. After all, these guys say that Raw Power is “For REAL ROCK ‘n’ ROLLERS ONLY”. If it’s loud and has guitars, it’s fair game.

The editor was a young man named “Quick Draw”. His real handle was Scott Stephens. He’s excited about “the new bands” in his opening editorial, but a little upset as well: “The only qualm I have at this time is the way the kids are branching off into little clicks. A lot of new wavers are down on bands like The Stones and The Beatles. It’s becoming very fashionable to hate the 60s”. I’ll say! “It’ll be funny to me in 10 years when I hear the new generation putting down the 70’s. And believe me, it’s gonna happen. Things that are cool now won’t be cool in 1985”. I don’t know about that. I like the use of “clicks” instead of “cliques”, which I say is forgivable, because it’s one of those words you’d hear spoken way more than you’d see written back then. But I don’t remember much ragging on punk or the new wave or power pop in 1985 – despite my belief that that was kind of a lean year for rock music, it was a year when punks were turning metal en masse, and everyone still hated the same things about the 70s that most of us hate to this day (though I’ll admit the recent reverence for prog did take me by surprise). 

Of course, I love quoting ancient editorials both here and elsewhere. There’s another by “Mike Livewire” stating “This year has certainly been one of the best for rock and roll that I can remember. Sterile FM ‘rock” and discoshit suffered some setbacks at the hands of the Rockers in 1977”. He even R.I.P.’s Peter Laughner later in the column! 

Al Flipside writes in from Whittier and has a little tete-a-tete with Quick Draw about the modern relevance of Iggy Pop. There’s a nice Mott The Hoople history, a quick interview with Debby from Blondie – whom the editor addresses as “Blondie” on the phone and asks her (of course) about being a “sex symbol”, the term we used back then for someone of well-above-average attractiveness. I’m not sure the last time I heard it used, but it’s been a while. There’s an interview with Tommy Shaw from Styx – what? Howard Aronin has a pretty bleak comedy column reviewing phony records by real bands, through I almost cracked a faint smile at the idea of Kissongs by Kiss, a la Yessongs. 

I did crack a true faint smile at this rant from Kim Fowley at the start of his interview with Raw Power #5: “I am the king of punk rock. I am the Adolf Hitler of stink rock. I am the rock n’ roll dog man. I don’t care what Slash magazine, I don’t care what Greg Shaw, I don’t care what Rock Intellectuals say. Fuck you all. Why? Because I am teenage. I am cobra. I am garganchua. I am an asshole, but I can say that and you can’t. The only reason I’m in business is because of the money I make and the dirty girls I meet, and eventually the amount of power I will have”. He hates The Dils, but thinks “The Weirdos and Screamers are interesting because they want to be interesting”. Wait, all you have to do is want it? Why didn’t someone tell me all these years?

I tried to get excited about the Ted Nugent interview, in which Ted tries really hard to be an unhinged wild man, but at the end of the day, he wasn’t one-tenth as much fun of a pompous narcissistic asshole as David Lee Roth was in his interviews, and Ted’s music was far worse as well. There’s a brief feature on AC/DC (“AC/DC: Austrailia’s Amazing Punks”, spelled as I typed it) and an interview with Angus Young. The reviews section is, like I said, all about white guys who play loud guitars, no matter the genre: Rush and Sammy Hagar and The Ramones and Metallic K.O. and New York Dolls reissues and Nazareth and Ultravox and The Babys. In their Weirdos Destroy All Music review, they say “I wish the Weirdos would record some of their other songs, especially “I Dig Your Hole – I’m The Mole’”. What now? Who knows this song?? Not me. I’d like to hear your bootleg of it. 

Finally, there’s a brief column tracking the improvement of The Germs – “they’re not the world’s worst band anymore….but they still aren’t great”. And hey, here’s something I didn’t know before today: there’s an incredible archive of Raw Power issues online, as well as all sorts of information about an upcoming book project; a forthcoming seventh issue; backstories on the contributors and much much more. Go get lost in it, right now!

Sonic Viewfinder #1

~ Jay Hinman ~ 2 Comments

Mike Faloon’s been orbiting my subcultural radar for a couple dozen years now; first, it was for the outstanding baseball fanzine Zisk, which he’s co-edited with Mike Fournier since the Miguel Tejada era. That still thankfully comes out with some regularity, and there’s a summer 2025 issue out now. They put out a book with some of their best material called Fan Interference some time ago, and if you’re a baseball dork like me, you’re probably going to want to read it.

Over the years I’d read between the lines and had gathered in various parts of their zine that both Faloon and Fournier were also very much “music guys”, but Faloon threw me with a great left-turn of a book in 2018 called The Other Night at Quinn’s: New Adventures in The Sonic Underground. It’s about moving during that time to a new small-ish town in New York’s Hudson River Valley with his family and discovering a local club in Beacon, NY called Quinn’s, home to improv and free jazz and regulars like Joe McPhee – whom Faloon has also recently co-written an oral history memoir for/with. 

The Other Night at Quinn’s was sort of revelatory for me, as it came at a time when I was trying (and succeeding) to go three or four steps deeper into free jazz than I’d gone before. Faloon’s real-time reporting of his many nights at the club, picking apart his own discovery process, and musings about what he’s hearing all matched much of my own way of hearing this stuff. Plus, it gave me a laundry list of players to check out, which I did.

He takes that same careful, probing, asking-questions approach for this just-out first issue of a new underground rock fanzine called Sonic Viewfinder #1. For instance, he goes to see the double-bill of Famous Mammals and The Spatulas at Tubby’s near his home, only knowing anything of either band from fanzines he’s read. Whereas my approach to writing about such a show would be to pack 12-15 pithy sentences into two paragraphs, larded with praise and maybe a laugh line or two, Faloon instead stretches out his impressions, interspersing them with wandering-mind tangents, such as callbacks to other records or books or barely-related topics, before oh-yeah-right returning to the bands in a “review”. (For the record, he loves both, as do I – I saw the former play live myself just two weeks ago). 

That’s pretty much what you can expect in the digest-sized, 28-page Sonic Viewfinder #1. The other two explorations are of musicians Damon Locks and Wendy Eisenberg, both more in keeping with the sorts of intrepid adventurers he wrote about with gusto in that Quinn’s book. The Eisenberg piece has me wondering why I’ve never gotten the Lasik surgery she did; perhaps I too could turn the experience of having done so into a double album. Faloon’s technique is a rare one in our content-addled, attention span-wrecking age. It’s one of consideration, questioning and humility – all worthy approaches, particularly when applied with care to hard-to-find music that deserves patience, reckoning and deep listening. Get a copy here for $3 if you want to see it for yourself.

Collected Ephemera – A New Thing To Look At

~ Jay Hinman ~ 1 Comment

Hey, I wanted to let Fanzine Hemorrhage readers know that I’m by no means stopping what I’m doing here, but I also have a Substack that I recently created called Collected Ephemera. These work best by subscription, and you’ll get an email of each new post in your inbox as soon as I hit submit.

Collected Ephemera follows the same pathways this site does. It’s a deep dive into the paper, magazines and marginal collectables I’ve accumulated over the years, especially 60s & 70s political rabble-rousing, underground music, smut, hippy/biker stuff, postcards and much else. They are all sitting in plastic storage containers and, well, each of them has a story. I’m aiming to be one of the people who might tell that story.

Meanwhile, I’ve got a stack of interesting fanzines to write about on this site, but if you’re potentially interested in this other thing, you can subscribe to it right here.

Destroy LA #5

~ Jay Hinman ~ 6 Comments

I’ve always wanted to own a different issue of this thing that has Circle One’s John Macias on the cover, because that guy was my hero. “Let’s Get Rid of Society”: an all-timer, am I right? “Destroy Exxon” is even better. Alas, I’ve only been able to procure this issue of Destroy LA #5, published in 1983 in Van Nuys, CA. 

It’s a wild hardcore punk fanzine that is somewhat undercut by a cover tagline that you see here of “Alternative Beat”. This is explained. Apparently the FBI was after them for their Destroy LA name (say what? Fuckin’ Reagan!) and so they’ll be changing it. But thankfully “…Alternative Beat seems to represent us better”. This dichotomy plays out throughout this issue, as we shall discover. However, I have found no instances of any subsequent fanzine that existed under that name. Perhaps this is for the best?

Alan Brown, Lyn Carvelli and Dan Mazewski were both the editors and entire staff for this one. Not only did they crank it out with a press run of 10,000, they put out an LP compilation of many of the bands featured herein called The Sound of Hollywood. I remember this one, one of the many utterly terrible hardcore comps that came out on Mystic, but man what a cover! It’s selling for $58 and up on Discogs now, likely because of two acoustic Bad Religion tracks.

Yes, about that. This issue catches Bad Religion right as they’re gearing up for the release of their prog rock album with the outer space cover, Into The Unknown, an absolutely legendary record that was so poorly-received the band immediately stuck their tails between their legs, veered right back into punk, and called its follow up Back To The Known.  In this interview, they are clearly already prepared for how hated they’ll be when Into The Unknown comes out. 

Brett Gurewitz: “L.A. is gonna disown us….even if one person buys it we will still have our life together….all I know is if no one does like it and if it bombs we’re still not gonna be dead…”. Greg Graffin: “If we continue playing ‘punk’ because we’re guaranteed to sell 20,000 records, we’d be selling out”. (unneeded note: Bad Religion subsequently released several albums that have sold over 500,000 copies; earned multiple Gold and Platinum album awards, and won a Grammy). Graffin also uses an expression I really haven’t heard since I was in high school in the early 80s when he says “Our first record sold up the butt”. This is a phrase which inexplicably means “a lot”. We should bring that expression back, I’m thinking.

Much of Destroy LA #5 has ultra-tiny type and some sloppy printing that makes it a tough read at times, but I was able to make it through the opening interview with Red Scare and found that this goth punk band had a female singer, which I didn’t know. Bobbi Brat unfortunately died of cancer a mere five years after this interview. There are also interviews with Shattered Faith; F-Beat, some rockabilly thing; and what’s billed as a “newer music” band, Still Life. This band features a guy, Paul Lesperance, who was the blonde singer fella with the bangs in ‘77-’78 Masque punks Shock – yeah – “This Generation’s on Vacation”, baby! His new band really, really wants a record company behind them, to “get a deal”. Alas, it seems that their only appearance on any sort of record at all was, um, Destroy LA/Mystic Records’ aforementioned The Sound of Hollywood compilation. 

Destroy LA #5‘s record reviews are brief, to the point, and I’m afraid are none too helpful. Regarding The Dream Syndicate’s The Days of Wine and Roses, the entire review is “A real promising band with a real good and fun stage show also”. This is followed by a page of MTV video reviews, including much of the new wave/synth pop stuff that I assume would likely have made up the bulk of any future Alternative Beat fanzine. 

Finally, I’ll let you go with some tidbits from the interview with Watty of The Exploited. He has several important opinions worth noting: “Philadelphia was shit, it’s all Crass fans or wankers”; “Black Flag played with us in Britain, they were pure wankers”; “I hate (Jello) Biafra, he is a wanker”; “Chron Gen are wankers, they’re shit”; “Chelsea? Gene October is a faggot, a wanker, a poof”. He also won’t even let the interviewer start asking questions until he takes off his Crass buttons. Worth finding this one for this single page alone.

Street Life #2

~ Jay Hinman ~ 1 Comment

You can see that my 48-year-old copy of this one has what we in the business call a bit of “toning”. Nothing to fret about.

Street Life #2 is another early punk/”street rock” Lisa Fancher fanzine, much like this one, but quite a bit earlier, maybe even a full year earlier. Punk rock’s evolution tracked like dog years at this point, where 1 month was equal to 7 months of new releases, groundbreaking shows, instant haircuts, musical osmosis and general scene chicanery. 1977’s Street Life #2 weighs in with a pretty impressive lineup of contributors, with Bob Morris as the actual editor; Fancher as the assistant editor and chief writer; and Jenny Stern aka the soon-to-be-known-as Jenny Lens as staff photographer. And even a letter to the editor from our hero Eddie Flowers in Alabama right off the bat, too. 

You know, they’re actually calling that new sound of 1976-77 Street Rock in some places, which is marginally better than City Rock, I suppose. Seems to me the key band making waves in Street Life #2, aside from The Ramones, of course, are The Quick. The Quick! Like in the Screamers interview by Fancher with photos by Stern: “They came to LA hoping to make a splash when the entire scene consists of the Quick and….umm….the Quick”. Yet what I most enjoy about this early chat with Tomata and Tommy Gear is how it ends with “Be watching for a Screamers EP coming out on Street Life Records!”. We all know how well that went – about as well as Black Flag’s debut LP on Upsetter. (For the back story on the latter, I’ll just drop an amazing advertisement from No Mag at the bottom of this post; and The Screamers infamously never released a shred of music in their lifetime, always holding out for the better deal that never came). 

For more inexplicable things that actually did happen, Bob’s “Beat of The Street” column talks about Kim Fowley producing a Helen Reddy record. Sally Dricks does a long hero-worshippy review of Bowie’s Low, and teenager Fancher, who also did layout for Street Life #2, throws in a large-font “best yet – LF” just to ensure her voice is also heard on the matter. There’s an entire column talking about the debauchery at a Ramones after-party at the “Screamers house” in Hollywood, and then another column flipping out over The Saints’ I’m Stranded. This is accompanied by a phenomenal Stern photo of The Ramones from that 1977 gig with Blondie at the Whiskey – this one. Someone make me a poster of that thing!

Sex Pistols land on the cover because the talk of the nascent punk world was revolving around the “bad words” they said on England’s Bill Grundy TV show in 1976. Given that these are fanzine people, there’s also a long Greg Shaw interview that allows him to expound upon his theories of musical evolution, the winds of change heralded by punk, the importance of fanzines, Peter Frampton and more. And then the big surprise as I’m going through it is how it all comes to a jarring halt with about 8 pages left to go, and morphs into record collector set sales and auction listings. This is something I might have expected from Goldmine, but not from an urgent fanzine from the streets.

Record Time #3

~ Jay Hinman ~ 1 Comment

Record Time tracks, measures and elucidates upon the long tail of analog musical history in a manner unlike no fanzine before it. It’s not here to champion the “winners”, although some of what it champions are indeed winners. It exists to cover anything that you’d likely find in a thrift store, a shitty record store or at a garage sale, and that you’d likely be able to buy for the price of 1 or 2 Venti no-whip lattes. I gave a bit of detail on its modus operandi in a bit I wrote on Record Time #1, and now we shall briefly explore the latest issue, Record Time #3, because it could very well be the best of a fantastic trio.

Editor Scott Soriano has an omnivorous and over-active brain, clearly, and this has powered a record fetish that knows few bounds. He’s turned me onto so much treasure and trash over the years. His Crud Crud blog in the 2000s was the digital embodiment of what Record Time is attempting to accomplish, and I loved that thing so much that I made myself four outstanding mix CD-Rs from the mp3s I’d hoovered up from him back then. When he wants to go deep, he absolutely goes deep, as in the Plastic Bertrand-inspired records piece in #1, the Sex Pistols novelty & backlash records thing in #2, and this issue’s absolutely absurd and breathtakingly complete overview on mainstream artists who decided to dip a toe into “punk” in the late 70s/early 80s.

Like how could I forget Alice Cooper’s Flush The Fashion LP from 1980, produced by Roy Thomas Baker (!) and with a “punk party platter” of song titles like “Clones”, “Model Citizen”, “Nuclear Infected” and “Pain” (no, sorry, not this Pain). Or that The Tubes had a whiny song called “I Was a Punk Before You Were a Punk” that insecurely recites all the ways in which their mid-70s zany costumes and trash debauchery schtick helped bring San Francisco punk rock to life in 1976-77? And Soriano briefly relays the tale of Van Halen turning into Scottish punk band “The Enemas” for one night in 1977, a story you can read more about here. This is why we spend $15 on the mostly ad-free Record Time magazine, folks.

There are well over a dozen deeply-researched and well-written pieces in here by a plethora of contributors, so I’ll restrain myself to conveying a couple big highlights. “…The worst thing that happened in 1973 was a TV special and accompanying album which only those outside of a handful of die-hard diva fans and enthusiasts of shitty records know about: Barbra Streisand…and Other Musical Instruments”. Soriano then proceeds to describe this atrocity in painstaking detail, a record and TV special that seems to have almost totally disappeared from the Streisand legend. You must read it, and then you must watch as much of the special as you can handle. Those were different times.

Chris Selvig’s piece on and record-by-record dissection of Colorado 80s-90s improv-skronk destroyers Blowhole was quite welcome, and he even brings the band back together to rehash the good times over a microphone. Somehow I’d never known the story of boyfriend-murderer and 60s easy listening fox Claudine Longet, but “Johnny Sunshine” relays it all here, and in true Record Time fashion, also feels the need to assiduously evaluate the relative merits and demerits of each of her 99-cent LPs, currently sitting in bulk at a Community Thrift near you. 

And look, I’m even in this one, briefly. Soriano sent out an entreaty last year to a few folks he knew, asking them to pick one 80s SST record from the 1986-88 glut that they like, but not the popular ones, so no one was permitted to slop out another paean to Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr or Bad Brains. I picked Das Damen’s Jupiter Eye, and I stand by it. $4.71 on Discogs. There’s a real cast of heavy hitters picking theirs here as well, including Gerard Cosloy, Tom Carter, Brian Faulkner, Bill Chen, Mike Trouchon, Ryan Wells, Karl Ikola, Chris Selvig and other top-drawer stars of the scene. Some picked the album I should have picked, but naturally no one picked Swa. Of course not.

“They” tell me that Record Time #3 is finding its audience more limited than it should be, which would be a goddamn crime. There’s really nothing else like it on the planet. Jarvis Cocker even writes for it. I don’t really know who that is, mind you, but he writes for it, and perhaps that’s all the inspiration you’ll need after my yammering to go seek this one out.

ChinMusic! #1

~ Jay Hinman ~ 4 Comments

I remember my actual glee when I discovered this issue at Cody’s Books in Berkeley, CA in 1997. Baseball and punk rock, two of my lifetime passions, together in one fanzine. This was in the glory days of “the magazine”, no doubt about it. Cody’s had a magazine section that went on forever; just the underground music stuff alone was packed with your ChinMusic!s and your Pure Filths and your Superdopes. Man, when I was in grad school in Seattle during 1997-99, there was an even better magazine emporium on University Avenue that I’d while my time away in between classes. The place was unreal; every possible publication angle about every sub-genre was covered and available for purchase. My favorite was a golfing magazine targeted at hipsters/dorks, attempting to make golf attractive to the same sort of folks who enjoyed tiki bars and vintage 50s fashion. (No matter how hard I search Google for variations of “90s golf magazine for hipster doofus morons”, I can’t find this title). Or the computing magazine that put pornstar Christy Canyon and her internet-worker sister on the cover. 

So why not a ChinMusic!, right? The Venn diagram of rocknrollers and baseball fiends overlaps far more than one might have thought – in fact, that’s the magazine’s entire stated reason for being, as explained in ChinMusic! #1’s opening editorial. It’s funny how often in this magazine – I also have other issues – that I’d come across one of their interviews with a big-league ballplayer and get totally excited that he was a punker, only to find that, like the great Trevor Hoffman in this issue, they’re really just music guys. In the way that we are “all” music guys and gals. “I got a little Van Halen, I got a little Alanis Morisette, Metallica’s in my glove compartment, I got a little Country music, I think you’ve got to be able to listen to everything”, says Hoffman. Everything, Trevor? So where are your Siltbreeze CDs and It’s War Boys mixtapes, then?

I know I was initially pretty excited, when I spied this mag, at the notion that Tim Yohannan, my bête noire, would be talking baseball inside. Humorless, pedantic Tim Yo talking about hating the Yankees and how to break in a new glove? Sign me up. And for what it’s worth, I personally interacted with Yohannan several times before his untimely death in 1998, and he was neither pedantic nor humorless at all; kind of a fun dude, to be honest! I was just scarred from all the teenage hours spent listening to his between-music struggle sessions on MRR Radio in the 80s, and feeling like he and Jeff Bale, Jello Biafra, Ruth Schwartz and “the gang” would have been the most insufferable people imaginable to spend five minutes with. But Tim Yo loathed the Yankees and he loved the NY/SF Giants – just like me. Does it bum you out like it does me that he passed away from cancer at the unripened age of 52, younger than I am now? If you’re my age, didn’t you see him as an “old guy” when he was around? It’s just a cosmic joke, isn’t it. All of it. 

Kevin Chanel was the editor and prime idea man here, and he’d recently arrived in San Francisco from San Diego, hence some of the Padres-centricity here. There are two pieces in ChinMusic! #1 that really stand out for me: first, Chanel’s baseball water cooler blather session with none other than Royal Trux’s Neil Hagerty. No music, just ball. It’s outstanding. It reminds me of the sorts of multi-beer baseball nerdouts I’ve absolutely loved to engage in over the years with co-workers, family members and really anyone at all, blue collar to white, with sports being the great leveler and all that. Hagerty really knows his stuff, and it’s just a gas to read him talking about his beloved Orioles and whether Keith Hernandez will get into the Hall of Fame, rather than astral nonsense, drugs, and Brownsville Station. 

Pete Simonelli contributes a piece about the mid-1970s Cincinnati Reds, specifically those 1975-76 “Big Red Machine” teams that were incredibly formative for me, Simonelli, Tim Hinely, the Zisk guys, Gerard Cosloy and probably several million others who were deservedly awed by them. Any chance I get to read about Cesar Geronimo, I’m going to take it. Darby Romeo interviews her dad about baseball; he probably wasn’t 52 yet either – and there’s a variety of music coverage that, like that of Great God Pan, is to my eyes very much secondary to the main event, which is baseball and its intersection with punk rock, even when it’s tenuous, tangential and maybe not even there, but we’re pretending that it is. Hey, the dude from Scared Straight, one of Mystic Records’ lesser lights, played in the pros – that really happened.

Funny enough, Chanel, whom I’ve never met, ended up marrying and procreating with Sunny Anderson (Girlyhead publisher, a delightful woman whom I have met many times, yet not for over thirty years). The two of them literally live down the street from me. It has been reported to me over the course of the past ten years that they have seen me running and/or walking the dog, and that their daughter knows who my son is (I mean of course she does, he’s Jay Hinman’s kid). And yet we’ve never once talked about Randy Jones or Broderick Perkins or Juan Eichelberger. When the time comes, well-armed with 50+ years of baseball ephemera and deep study through excellent secondary sources such as ChinMusic! #1, I will be ready.

New York Rocker #4 (September 1976)

~ Jay Hinman ~ 4 Comments

I’d recently vowed in these pages to cobble together a ‘lil NY Rocker collection, and I’ve been making good on this important promise (to myself). Yet I’d never, ever seen any ones with this typeface, one of the first four mythical issues, in the wild – that is, until I came upon New York Rocker #4 and struck up a bargain with its seller at the 2025 San Francisco Art Book Fair. This 1975-76 era is one of my favorites for rock music writing due to its anticipatory excitement, with much undefined underground exploration in the air and on the fuckin’ streets, with absurd decadence and drug bottoming-out the norm. Nowhere was this more the case, of course, than in New York City. 

I don’t really know a whole lot about cover star Cherry Vanilla, except that she was central to the first moment I ever become acquainted with “punk rock”, her famous “Lick Me” photo having been part of Time magazine’s July 11th, 1977 punk rock article that absolutely blew my mind and maybe scared me a little bit at the age of 9. Her interview here is sober, reflective and humble, and it’s a far cry from the she-devil harlot I’m sure imagined her to be when I saw that photo. Still not quite sure what she did in the grand social whirl of the time, though this bio is a start. This is followed by a Duncan Hannah photo sesh with Andy Warhol and Talking Heads at The Factory on May 26th, 1976, and then a terrific article & photos of John Cale at the Ocean Club in July ‘76, with one Lou Reed backing him up, and a hopped-up Patti Smith jumping on stage, unasked, multiple times to get involved.

Hilly Kristal, CBGB proprietor, pens an article about his own Live at CBGB Vol.1 comp, with special praise for The Shirts, Tuff Darts and Mink De Ville. Me, I’m just glad that there was a band called The Shirts at one point in history. They look like total street rockers with matching white jumpsuit/pant combos – outstanding. There’s an exceptionally catty gossip column called “Pressed Lips” by Janis Cafasso, whom I understand may have been Johnny Thunders’ girlfriend at one point in time and features in various Dolls lore I found online. I wonder if she ever did illegal drugs? Her column is a gem – honestly, this sort of real-time lens into at-the-moment scene machinations is a far better history lesson than anyone’s dimly-remembered memoir. Here are a few of her insights from the Bicentennial summer:

  • “Where have all the groupies gone? Not much time from shaking go-go these days I guess. Money first, sex second. Tsk-tsk, calling Sable…”
  • “By the way, Richard Hell, the king of crinkle (somebody please find him an iron) has gotten a new group and now for some serious attempts at sound??? God loves all the bewildered beatniks!”
  • “Two nights in a row the Mael brothers, as in Ron and Russell, could be seen ogling little Tina of Talking Heads…”
  • “Can we please put Bobby Blane, the new Dolls organist in a straightjacket and nail his shoes to the stage so he doesn’t have to offend the audience with his mincing and peacock strutting. Best quote of the evening in reference to Bobby Blane was from Wayne County who said ‘I just loooove the Dolls new lead singer’. And that about sizes it up. Two Mick Jaggers in the same group is a bit much!!”. 

Great stuff, am I right? Just for some context, the David Johansson-led final-wave of the NY Dolls were running on fumes at this point; Johnny Thunders’ Heartbreakers were reemerging in a big way; and Richard Hell’s “new band” talked about here, post-Television, would of course be Richard Hell & The Voidoids. 

But wait, there’s more. Victor Bokris has a short story called Coffee Shop; he’d go on to write biographies of several of the folks we’ve already mentioned here. Milk & Cookies get very defensive: “We just don’t want to be known as a wimpy, trite pop band”; “We’re not the Bay City Rollers”; “There’s some meat to our songs”. You be the judge! By far the most interesting piece to me, after the gossip column, naturally, is the deep dive by Craig Gholson with Richard Lloyd of Television. He talks about some early Television songs he sang, like “What I Heard” (great!!!) and an “X-rated” one called “Hot Dog”. He talks about the break he took from the band “to straighten out some personal problems” (i.e. drug addiction). He speculates what might be on their upcoming debut album; “Kingdom Come” is discarded for being too long and “Double Exposure” for being too old. Titles, too, have been rejected: See No Evil and Repeatinginging (whew on that last one). 

And more! Sneakers from North Carolina (Chris Stamey, Mitch Easter etc) get what I imagine was probably their first interview; The Runaways get a dopey one as well; there’s a great posed photo of The Heartbreakers, we get a wacky check-in with The Ramones, already olde-timers by this point but still with only that first LP out; and New York Rocker #4 closes up incongruously with Lance Loud’s paean to Robin Williamson of The Incredible String Band, mounting a comeback or whatever you’d want to call it with his “Merry Band” in New York City that month. What a time to be alive, the quote-unquote old struggling to stay relevant and the new struggling to be born, and everyone still under 35 years of age.

Revolutionary Wanker #1

~ Jay Hinman ~ 2 Comments

I hadn’t known this free 1981 San Francisco xerox zine existed until alerted to it by the good folk at San Francisco’s Groove Merchant, who seems to get his hands on just about anything and everything interesting these days. What’s more, now that I’ve procured my own copy of Revolutionary Wanker #1, I come to find that it’s a “Creep Production”, backed by the one and only “Mickey Creep” of Creep. How about that?? The editors listed on the so-called masthead are Naomi Batya and Robin Lande, about whom I can turn up very little on the internet, unless this is the same Naomi Batya who wrote a Hebrew folk tune at age 14 and grew up in Mendocino County, just north of SF? The dates for a San Francisco punk rock rebellion line up well!

This arrives at just the right epoch to document the uncomfortable gelling of hardcore punk and SF’s strange post-punk underground, the latter epitomized by Toiling Midgets and Flipper, and celebrated with relish in the Who Cares Anyway book. The Wounds, who played the 1981 Eastern Front fest in Berkeley’s Aquatic Park – the place that became my daily skip-work-early running route during the five years I worked in nearby Emeryville – with the aforementioned, are interviewed here. So are 7 Seconds. They were from Reno, and were basically children at this point, with no vinyl out yet and more shows in SF than in their hometown. They’d soon put out the Skins, Brains & Guts EP, with all-timers like “Racism Sucks” and “I Hate Sports”. Neither interview is particularly illuminating, and it stands to reason that the amount of intellectual effort expended toward Revolutionary Wanker #1 was measured by the monetary reward expected from it, which was quite little, given its price of $0.00.

To wit, “Joan Moan” writes a piece about poseurs, and how they’re “destroying the ‘scene’ from inside-out”. This essay is thankfully leavened by a nice unexplained “Flipper Rules Fools” piece of graffiti next to it. Naomi Batya – who, given this evidence, couldn’t have been the one to write that Hebrew folk tune, provides a poem called “Most People”, that ends with this stanza:

Most people I meet have fucking no brain
No wonder they consider me fucking insane
Believing what they’re taught that it’s wrong to use their head
Most people I meet they might as well be dead.

Holy shit! Drop the fucking mic, Naomi. The address listed for this one, presumably where Naomi wrote these words, is 41 29th Street in the Mission District, about two miles from where I’m sitting right now. I know this house. Here’s what it looks like today. This debut issue ends with an interview with “two anarchists in the Haight”, who’ve asked to remain anonymous. I guess there was a group at one point who called themselves Mindless Thugs who embarked upon a terror campaign against Haight Street merchants, in response to being called “mindless thugs” in the first place by local media. Or something like that. I really can’t understand the coded insider language of 1981 anarchists, to be fair. And I really don’t get the connection to Creep magazine at all for this thing.

So, do I now need to own the other three issues of Revolutionary Wanker that came out after this? Is Ronald Reagan going to start World War III??? Of course I do. This is subcultural gold.

(BREAKING: multiple sets of all four issues of Revolutionary Wanker are for sale right here, directly from the source)

Hairy Hi-Fi #3

~ Jay Hinman ~ 1 Comment

Sometimes I get a little downhearted when I come to realize how much of the written, printed word of the 20th century will never be re-collected nor again adored by anyone beyond fanzine and magazine aficionados, or those willing to regularly pop open PDFs and read on a computer/iPad. I’m both of those things, but I know I’m part of a relatively tiny audience. I ache not merely for this major leakage of primal music journalism, but for all the “new journalism” of the 60s and 70s you won’t be reading; the film writing mostly lost to time; even the uncollected short fiction you’d find in literary journals, weekly magazines and mass-circulation monthlies. 

If there was a market for it, I’d want to lead the charge to get all of it into new print editions, a series of my own, paid for by a major publisher. We’ll have to settle for the very few curators who actually do this, like Dian Hanson does for absurd men’s pin-up/girlie magazines of the 50s-70s. I myself have a small collection of these and they’re often a phenomenal window into male libido, male fear of women, and – at times – swashbuckling fiction or advocacy that’s often quite readable, if dated in the extreme. You can learn a great deal from issues of Rogue, Sir!, Dude, Adam, Stag, Man, Spree and Hi-Life, let me tell you.

If I did something for music fanzines, I might put in the Moe Tucker interview from Hairy Hi-Fi #3, published in 1990 by John Bagnall in Durham, England. It’s exactly why I still want to read, and re-read, my old fanzines, and transmit my half-baked transmittals about them to you. This interview captures Moe as she’s come out of motherhood-driven seclusion and is now playing with Jad Fair and members of Half Japanese, touring the UK and coming to a reckoning with her Velvets past. To me, it’s an essential piece of Velvets ephemera. She’s still tight with Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison, and talks a bunch about coming across Velvets bootleg tapes and LPs at swap meets in the UK on this tour. She’s a little stupefied: “There’s one called Sweet Sister Ray that’s like four ‘Sister Ray’s!”. Interlocutor Marc Baines has to coach her to demand the tapes; she does, nicely, and gets a full armload to bring home.

What’s funny about this piece in particular is just how much more Baines knows about her legacy and post-breakup Velvets ephemera than she does, so it’s a real treat to get her reaction. “They did??!?”. “He DOES??!?”. It makes me love her all the more. Hairy Hi-Fi #3, which to me reads like a psych-tinged cross between Galactic Zoo Dossier (mostly handwritten as well!) and late 80s Flesh and Bones (lots of comics and cut-out 60s hippies ads), adds in a great piece about Romulan Records – remember those? Following in the then-current tradition of excavatory bootleg labels with names like Strip and Link, they were best known for the Girls in the Garage comps, but released a slew of other wild vinyl comps of lost 60s stuff. This piece catches the label early in their run, and reviews everything that had come out to that point that Marc Baines could grab. It’s a true piece of fandom and obsession that I salute with gusto. 

Elsewhere, there’s another fantastic interview present – this one with Eugene Chadbourne, a great talker and storyteller. This one needs to go in an anthology as well. The editors have severe mania for all things Shimmy-Disc and B.A.L.L., and follow the latter around England as they play various gigs, then learn after they leave that they’ve broken up, with members of the band joining Dinosaur Jr. (?). I remember this too, but can’t call up the particulars at all. Seems to me Dinosaur Jr. carried on just fine and mostly the same for years afterward. There are also interviews with Laughing Soup Dish and Walkingseeds, about whom I remember a bit more, but whom I haughtily dismissed for the most part. We had Pussy Galore and the Lazy Cowgirls and Mudhoney and the Laughing Hyenas and World of Pooh and The Dwarves active and raring at the time, and that’s precisely where my head was.

Hairy Hi-Fi #3 doesn’t really rise to the occasion reviews-wise, since most everything is “great”, and we all know that’s not true. It’s those interviews that makes this a superlative read and a highly welcome piece of reference material I’ll hang onto for at least another decade or two, before I unleash the entire fanzine archive onto eBay or magnanimously give them to Penelope Houston’s punk room at the San Francisco Public Library.

Puncture #9

~ Jay Hinman ~ 3 Comments

When all the dust clears, when all the debates are finished, when all the fists stop flying – what will you say was the best San Francisco music fanzine of the second half of the 1980s? I feel like the contenders were probably BravEar, Wiring Dept and Puncture, right? Unless I’m forgetting someone. These three fanzines were the most adventurous in terms of traversing the wider underground and going deep where necessary, and yet all three suffered a bit for their overtly sleeve-wearing left wing politics, and for pandering a bit too heavily to quote-unquote college rock at times. But listen, I did myself at the time, no question. That’s why I still own copies of all these mags that I bought during 1984-87. I think it’s probably a pretty easy call at the end of the day: Wiring Dept, then BravEar, then Puncture. 

Said the guy who’s here to talk about Puncture #9 from Spring 1985! We’re not talking about Forced Exposure or Conflict levels of quality, taste and information here – those east coast zines really set the standard during this period in my unforgiving eyes. I mostly like Puncture, though, and I believe the value-for-cost quotient you’ll get from this book of their first six issues is pretty high, at a mere $14.95 a pop. Patty Stirling was really the main driver behind this one, and of all of the fanzine’s first, I don’t know, 10 or 11 issues? Then it really did become a true alterna/indie/Lollapalooza abomination that I don’t think she had anything to do with. (Although looking at these covers, any fanzine with a “Remembering Flipper” article couldn’t have been too hideous). 

In the rado update that kicks the thing off, it talks about how Ray Farrell is leaving the Bay Area and KPFA to go work at SST in LA. Weren’t we just talking about that guy? The interview with Test Dept is quite standoffish and a little pretentious, and yet I actually come away admiring these UK proto-industrial performance art freaks and maybe wanting to see if I might like them 40 years later. Sure, it’s fine. It brings KFJC’s Mark Darms and his Industrial Report radio show from those years screaming back to life for me, which is great. The thing in here on the Violent Femmes isn’t too annoying, either – you have to remember, that second album of theirs, the one where frontman Gordan Gano “found Jesus”, was not received well by the frat boys who partied their asses off to “Blister in the Sun” and “Add It Up”, but there’s some love for it here, along with Gano’s religious side project The Mercy Seat, which I guess I never heard, because I absolutely loathed the Violent Femmes. 

Aaaaaaaah and there’s a review of Husker Du / Minutemen / Meat Puppets (no Saccharine Trust or Swa??) from The Stone in San Francisco, 3/1/1985. This was SST’s celebrated “The Tour”, and a show that took place here and at the Keystone Palo Alto the night before. It was my senior year of high school, and my friends weren’t really cottoning to the American underground the way I was, so I didn’t go despite really wanting to. San Jose State’s station KSJS was playing Double Nickels on the Dime and New Day Rising incessantly; Palo Alto was a mere 30 minute drive from my home in San Jose, and my parents were definitely in the “we don’t care what you do” phase of my youth. But go to a show by myself, at age 17? Absolutely not, out of sheer embarrassment and introversion. So I ended up never seeing The Minutemen, Husker Du nor Saccharine Trust. It is no consolation whatsoever that I did, in fact, see SWA live on stage several years later.

There are great pics of Sonic Youth from a 1/14/85 show at The I-Beam, and kudos to Patty Stirling for finding a way to compare them to both Hex Enduction Hour-era Fall and The Stooges. She also contributes a fantastically ludicrous meathead drawing of an ultra-buffed Henry Rollins to her Black Flag reviews. Other reviews abound of the Cocteau Twins, Billy Bragg, Aztec Camera, Rank and File, Einstruzende Neubauten, This Mortal Coil and all that SST stuff – this was 1984/85 to me at the time, and from my vantage point of Gunderson High School in San Jose and especially from my bedroom’s clock radio, it was “magic hour”. I couldn’t have been more excited about music, and I had so much still to learn. (I still do). I would renounce virtually all of it in the year to come, once I got to college, except for those SST bands and my newly-discovered Homestead and Touch & Go heroes, and all that blitzing hardcore I’d been too chicken and/or broke to actively buy circa 1982-83. Now I can go back and very much enjoy the Cocteau Twins and This Mortal Coil, as well as a few others whom I never strayed from, such as Siouxsie and the Banshees – still a Fanzine Hemorrhage favorite to this day. Listen!

I guess Puncture ended up capturing the time better than I thought. I mean, here’s this issue’s back cover, pictured. Flipper! I suspect this is where I stole a thing I did in my own Dynamite Hemorrhage fanzines of putting a band photo of someone not even talked about in the issue on the back cover, then letting readers guess who it is. Let’s go Wiring Dept/Puncture/BravEar, then. What say you? What high-quality Bay Area fanzines am I missing from this time?

Twist & Shout #2

~ Jay Hinman ~ 1 Comment

When punk first hit North American consciousness in 1977, I get the picture that unless you were living in New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco, or perhaps Seattle and Cleveland, the records you were coming across in stores and were hearing on late-nite “new wave” radio programs were almost entirely English in nature. This 1977 Montreal fanzine, Twist & Shout #2, certainly aspires to be Anglocentric in the extreme; or, whether it aspires to be or not, it most certainly is. Canada is part of the queen’s commonwealth, of course, but just based on the features and records reviewed here, it feels a lot like a Canadian version of Trouser Press, who were proud Anglophiles, and/or one informed very much by Britain’s own Zigzag. 

Nothing wrong with that, of course! If you were desperate for raw and wild rocknroll and all you could find were Cortinas and Boys and Johnny Moped records, of course you’d be going for it. In fact, Twist & Shout is one of many “searching for real rock and roll” fanzines from the 1974-77 time period, written by young men and sometimes women, desperate for raw guitar and who were starting to blend newly-arrived punk into whatever was considered frenzied, urgent and/or “street level” beforehand. Although, I must say Twist & Shout really stretches the concept, as we’ll discover.

Like a few of these ‘76-‘77 mags, such as Chatterbox and Radio Free Hollywood, there’s a continued allegiance to “hard rock” writ large even as punk is crashing upon their shores, and more power to them for it. The first interview is with Sean Tyla from Ducks Deluxe and Tyla Gang, the latter of whom were a boogie/proto-punk hybrid of sorts and fit in nicely with this mag’s aesthetic. I suppose so do Ultravox, a brand-new UK band on Island. John Foxx is interviewed. That rollicking ‘77 version of the band, as many well know, bears virtually no relation to the Ultravox many new wavers came to know and love only 3 years later. 

Pat Travers – the “Boom Boom Out Goes The Lights” guy??!? – does get some ink due to being Canadian, and for being a fine boogie lickmeister besides. And I love the interview with Terry Wilson Slesser, a class-A prima donna from the UK band Crawler, formerly known as Back Street Crawler. I’ve never heard of them. “Then we went to Kansas to open for Roxy Music. With our rock and blues approach we literally blew Roxy off-stage”. He then talks about guys in his band named “Sniffy” (wonder how many snowstorms that guy had to instigate to get that nickname!) and “Rabbit”. After the death of Crawler guitarist Paul Kossoff, it appears that Atlantic Records were trying to get them a new guitarist, and Mick Taylor from the Rolling Stones was suggested by the label. “I said Mick Taylor ain’t going to join Back Street Crawler. He joined the Stones after Brian Jones’ death; can you imagine him joining us after the death of Paul Kossoff? I did call him up and we got together and got pissed drunk, but there was no way he was going to join”. He then talks about how they might be going out on tour to support Kansas, one of the no-doubt worst bands of all time (and absolutely legendary hair farmers – please click the link), and how awesome that would be. So no, I really didn’t need to hear Crawler. But I listened anyway, and if you want to, you can too.

There are, in fact, a fair amount of interviews with Englishmen in Twist & Shout #2. We’ve got chats with Eddie and The Hot Rods, The Vibrators, Judas Priest (!!), Heavy Metal Kids (they’re extremely concerned about whether or not they’ll be able to “make it in the States” – spoiler: they didn’t); plus Mr. Big, David Essex and Goddo. Punk explosion! There’s also a minimal discography of all the known (to the editors) 1977 punk 45s so far – or, really, as they put it: “Various artists considered new wave or punk”. This includes Ultravox, The Stranglers and of course everything on Stiff and Raw Records (the latter of which was one of the great UK punk labels for sure). There’s absolute slavish worship of the newly released Never Mind The Bollocks (“album of the decade”, “people will worship this the way they worshipped The Beatles in 1964” etc), as well as reviews of Brownsville Station, Meatloaf, Ian Dury, Motorhead, Boomtown Rats and even that Raw Records Creation “Making Time” 45, something that I proudly used to own and somehow don’t any longer.

Finally, we get a mention of the only true Canadian punk in the issue: The Viletones’ debut Screamin’ Fist 45, reviewed by John Kearney: “This is Toronto’s answer to punk. They are The Viletones. Isn’t that name just right for a punk band and aren’t those titles fab. Just listen to the names of the guys in the band: Dog, Chris Hate, Freddy Pompeii, Motor X. It’s all there: the group name, the titles, the guys’ names in the band, the great picture sleeve, even the music, it’s pure punk. The only problem with it all is that it’s bloody awful. It shows that the best packaging etc. can’t replace talent”. This is about as withering, spiteful and worked up as a Canadian can get, I reckon. Aren’t they just the nicest folks?

Sound Choice #8

~ Jay Hinman ~ 7 Comments

Before we dig in here, a little history of how Sound Choice fanzine came to be, before I’ll spoil everything with some incredibly self-aggrandizing prattle about my minor role in this particular concern.

So there was OP magazine for the first half of the 80s, published by John Foster out of Olympia, WA. We’ve written about that excellent mag here and here. It then split into two new fanzines. As per Wikipedia: “OPtion, along with Sound Choice, were the dual successors to the earlier music magazine OP, published by John Foster and the Lost Music Network and known for its diverse scope and the role it played in providing publicity to DIY musicians in the midst of the cassette culture. When Foster ended OP after only twenty-six issues, he held a conference, offering the magazine’s resources to parties interested in carrying on; attendant journalist David Ciaffardini went on to start Sound Choice, while Scott Becker, alongside Richie Unterberger, founded Option. Whereas Sound Choice was described as a low-budget and “chaotic” publication in spirit, Option was characterized as a “profit making operation” right at the start, meant to compete with the newly founded Spin.”

Which is precisely why, circa 1987, I had never bought a copy of Option. Never owned one later either, I guess. Sound Choice hadn’t really shown up on my radar, except as something I’d seen in stores, as it was pretty well-distributed. But cassettes, tape art, “audio evolution”? No thanks, amigo. However, one time when I was doing a 2-6am substitute radio show at KCSB-FM in Santa Barbara during my college years, I met the DJs who came on before me, and it was a couple of the fellas from Sound Choice, including editor Ciaffardini,  who lived “just down the road” in Ojai. 

We got to talking, and wouldn’t you know it, within a couple of months I was hoofing it south on the 101 to Ojai a couple of times a week after college classes, in order to serve as Sound Choice’s one and only “intern”. I’d sort (and abscond with) many promo records; I’d answer correspondence; I’d chase down subscribers for renewals, and completed many other tasks assigned to me upon arrival. One time I even called up Ray Farrell at SST Records to talk about getting their ads submitted, and was nervous as hell – that dude was on the fucking Maximum Rocknroll Radio show!! Soon enough Ciaffardini made me “Managing Editor”, I think in the issue after Sound Choice #8. Then, not even a year later, when I stopped coming regularly, he had me listed as “Vanishing Editor” in the issue that followed that one. 

For what it’s worth, Ciaffardini was an incredibly nice guy: a highly driven, self-effacing, pot-smoking, chaotic and supremely independent nice guy with a mellow hippie temperament, who took me under his wing and gave me exposure to something cool that I’d never have experienced otherwise. He had a girlfriend named Eileen, a (to me) “older woman” who might have been at most 35 years old at the time, and whom I was secretly smitten with. When I stopped coming around, it was about the time Dave’s KCSB program ended as well, so I’m not sure that I ever saw him in the flesh again after 1988. Only a couple of years ago did we even make any sort of electronic mail contact.

Sound Choice #8 came out in May/June 1987, and features The Butthole Surfers on the cover, from their show at the Oxnard Skate Palace that year that I’ve previously talked about here. It also includes action photos of fuckin’ Blast! and SNFU from this other Skate Palace show, which I also attended. The magazine is the proverbial “hodgepodge” – a tumultuous cacophony of fonts, font sizes, advertisements, short articles, long manifestos and an ungodly amount of reviews. In addition, there are several incredibly unfunny comics; things on underground radio and “audio drama”, a Culturcide interview, a piece on Master/Slave Relationship (a woman named Debbie Jaffe who dressed scantily and did psycho/sexual performance art); and SST ads everywhere, like 8 pages of them, no lie. Nothing that I’d sold, however – that came later. The magazine’s cacophony is mostly to its credit, and it makes for much to uncover and dissect within the tiny type.

Oh, and there’s a real nice letter from Lisa Fancher of Frontier Records, who’d perhaps been taken to task in an earlier issue for being too major label-adjacent, and perhaps for not paying artists (I’m too lazy to see if I have Sound Choice #7 to look at it): “Would you care to produce someone who hasn’t been paid by me, fuckhead? You suggesting that I bend for anyone, even as a figure of speech, will land you a punch in the mouth next time I have the misfortune of hearing you blather at some function where everyone is dreading running into you”. She then concludes perhaps a little tartly with “Go fuck a dead dog”. Oh dear. Ciaffardini apologizes. He never told me if Fancher ever actually popped him in the mouth at a banquet or social gathering in subsequent months.

There’s also a piece by a guy whom we know about now, but didn’t then – Randy Russell from Kent, OH. He was in the excellent band Moonlove, and here he talks about the magic of tapes and how he first heard the Dream Syndicate. Shane Williams contributes “Growing Up Absurd: Confessions of a Dope Addict Rock Fiend”, and thankfully it’s one of the few coherent pieces he ever put together. And yeah, the reviews section is the most bountiful one I have ever seen this side of Butt Rag, but it generally lacks the authority, tastemaking and writing chops to be anything more than words on a page. Yes, this is very much true of the ones I wrote for this same fanzine at age 19/20 in subsequent issues as well. Don’t look them up – you won’t like them.

Summer Salt #3

~ Jay Hinman ~ 7 Comments

A period of lengthy inactivity on this site by me should not generally be held as any indication of any lack of enthusiasm for continuing to write here, but rather a reflection of the need to satiate other interests. And, if I’m being really honest, to unfortunately grieve the too-early passing of my wife, best friend and 31-year love of my life, Rebecca, this past April. Cancer. It’s bullshit. She was the best. 

Yeah, I’ve written several posts here since she left us – I guess the most recent four? – and that, in its own way, is cathartic for me. As weird as that might seem. There’s no right way to grieve, they tell me, and I’ve found myself processing it all in every way imaginable, a process that likely has no real end until my own. At the same time, I feel it’s pretty disingenuous to pretend like everything in my life’s totally cool and returned to normal in weeks, so I’m just blurting out the main reason why my “posting schedule” is perhaps a bit more uneven than it’s been in the past. Since this site is just as much my chance to selfishly insert myself into the narrative of these fanzines as it is a celebration of the fanzines themselves, well – I suppose it’d be strange to not mention it. There shall be feasts and there shall be famines, but I strongly believe that Fanzine Hemorrhage will continue to be a thing for the foreseeable future. Isn’t that wonderful for us all??

So anyway. Here’s a pretty early UK fanzine that found its way to my hands – Summer Salt #3 from 1978, published right after “The Damned and the Pistols have broken up”. Well, one had anyway. Summer Salt serves as a smartly-intentioned and -executed UK punk fandom bridge to what was happening in 1975-77, as well, when (I presume) editor Pete Maggs was coming of the proverbial age. Hence there are interviews with Dr. Feelgood, the Doctors of Madness and a celebration of Ducks Deluxe – all heroes to certain British Isles punks who otherwise suffered through parts of the 70s. (Jim Kerr of my own teenage early-80s heroes Simple Minds – and punk band Johnny & The Self-Abusers – used to rave about Doctors of Madness in interview after interview). 

Maggs actually announces in his opening editorial that he’s backing out and turning over the reins of the fanzine to Dave Case; I know that Case did make a fourth issue, and it’s currently selling for $150 here (!). Maggs and his staff kick off Summer Salt #3 with the Ducks Deluxe celebration, acknowledging the help of Zigzag magazine’s incredible archives in their own retelling. It’s followed by a short thing on Manchester’s The Drones, who are made to sound feral, raw and crazed. On this evidence, they were nothing of the sort. 

There are great live reviews of some pretty legendary shows here, the Sex Pistols and Damned notwithstanding. How about January 13th, 1978 in Huddersfield with The Prefects / The Doll / The Fall / Sham 69? About The Fall, Mick Hinchcliffe says, “…no emotion and a deadpan lead vocalist, but effective all the same. Much heckling comes their way however, to which the vocalist replies with laconic weirdness ‘We’re so sincerely sorry for playing for you’, and then they finish with ‘Industrial Estate’, which is very good. A future for this lot in my estimations”. 

Or how about The Saints playing with Generation X on December 4th, 1977? The Saints!! I’m sure you know they’re touring now with Mark Arm on vocals, no lie. After praising them, reviewer Maria Fabrizi says, “And now, for your enjoyment, the most over-rated band of ‘77, Generation X. The set was mediocre, the sound was mediocre, the band seemed drugged….there was a sickening lack of real atmosphere, and I am not going to one of their gigs again unless they rid themselves of their ‘Superstars’ image and feel”. There’s another celebration of the band Penetration – who, honestly, I can’t remember if I’ve ever even heard them before, though I do know “Pauline Murray and the Invisible Girls” – this song was a big hit on KFJC in the early 80s – and then a bitchy/touchy set of fanzine overviews of contemporary (competitive) UK punk zines. 

And these Summer Salt #3 punks are clearly informed and excited by their scene’s precedents. There’s a review of the Velvet Underground bootleg Evil Mothers; a dissection of the debut Pere Ubu LP; and even some John Lennon blather. They also pile on just how lame The Dead Boys are; as I’ve mentioned before, this is music to my eyes. Very, very solid piece of work, this fanzine. If I can pull together a few hundred disposable dollars maybe we’ll have a talk about the other three in this space someday.

Thrillseeker #1

~ Jay Hinman ~ Leave a comment

At one point in September 1982’s Thrillseeker #1, Barry Henssler of The Necros bemoans the lack of fanzines tied to the DC punk scene. I’m guessing the folks who were living their “salad days” at this time in our (my) nation’s capital don’t quite remember it that way, and indeed, there’s an entire book set to come out about DC’s punk fanzines. Thrillseeker will get some play, I am sure. It’s an excellent and incredibly comprehensive piece of on-the-ground work, edited by a guy named Tony Lombardi and with a plethora of contributors. I scanned the many names and recognized Tom Lyle from Government Issue, and Jeff Krulik – Mr. Heavy Metal Parking Lot to you. 

Thrillseeker #1 absolutely looks the part and walks the walk of a hardcore punk zine, but due to Lombardi’s wide-ranging, omnivorously music-hungry tastes, there’s quite a bit more than meets the proverbial eye. The long review section at the back, for instance, tackles everything from Mofungo to The Raincoats to Mission of Burma to the Flesheaters to the Dazz Band and Rick Springfield. The short review of the (excellent) debut single from The Bangs (you perhaps know them as The Bangles) says, “What a disappointment. I thought these gals were supposed to play 60s influenced trash rock, but this is just cutesy wimpy pop. Even Tru Fax & the Insaniacs rock out more than this trio”. You don’t even have to know that reference to know it’s a total harsh burn. But Lombardi, who writes at least two-thirds of the reviews here, also cops to loving Fleetwood Mac and the new Springfield record. And Void and Flipper. 

We’ve established previously on this blog that the opening “news/gossip” section was a de rigeur part of many 70s/80s US punk fanzines. What I always love are the “items” that end up never coming true, such as “Black Flag will be in a movie called Cool Patrol”. What the hell? Who can tell us what that was all about? There’s more gossip and news about go-go bands (DC’s indigenous funk gift to the world); the fact that ½ Japanese’s “epic” ½ Gentlemen Not Beasts is about to be issued on cassette; and “The Gun Club have undergone personnel changes. The band now includes two women. Jeffrey Lee Pierce still drinks too much!”

The live show reviews include a dispatch from a Fear / Necros / Scream / Double O and Void show at the Lincoln Memorial July 3rd, 1982. God bless America!! Void, in another review, are described in awe and quite aptly: “Their music is pure noise, as tortuous as the best Black Flag and Flipper. It was like they were tuning up the whole time they were on stage”. Oh to have seen that. Void bassist Chris Stover now lives in and is a realtor in San Francisco, my home. We had some good hangs a couple decades ago; went to each other’s kids’ birthday parties and what have you. Either Lombardi or Tom Lyle (both are “TL” here) reviews a go-go show with Trouble Funk, Air Raid Band and a no-showing Soul Sonic Force. I recall how excited I was when I learned that all-white hardcore bands and all-black go-go bands in DC played shows together. Never happened in enlightened San Francisco, but perhaps that was because we didn’t have go-go bands. 

In the Black Flag interview, Henry Rollins has just joined the band, and he actually talks about wanting to cut a comedy record with his old pal Ian Mackaye. Is that where this thing started? I’ve seen that ferociously bad idea referenced in other fanzines for years. Greg Hetson from the Circle Jerks says their next record will be a “six song 12”EP” – another one of those bit of information that bore no eventual fruit. There are also interviews with Fear, The Necros, X, DOA, Sonic Youth (!!) and The Flesheaters. This is that same tour that Byron Coley documented in tour diary form in Take It #6, one of my favorite single issues of any fanzine ever. Here he’s a clowning interview-interrupter, and on the evidence herein, clearly the band and Coley get along well. Chris D’s favorite new stuff includes the Meat Puppets’ debut album on SST, along with “Dream Syndicate, Salvation Army, Red Cross and the Gun Club”. 1982, a great year to be alive in Los Angeles, California.

Government Issue recount their trip to California, starting with their interview with Tim Yohanan on the MRR radio show, “All Tim Y wanted to talk about was ‘straight edge’, and we were burnt out from the sleepless ride out to the west coast, so it was kind of lame, but fun!”. They then go on to talk about their first gig at the On Broadway in San Francisco, which was just upstairs from the Mabuhay Gardens, and, (for a time) was also booked by Dirk Dirkson. “The crowd in SF is weird, really image-conscious Oi-clones. Lots of dressing up for the big night out but not much action….Dirk made our show all worthwhile by giving us $40 at the end of the night! Shredding!” No lie: that’s the equivalent of $132.56 today.

There’s a long interview with Jello Biafra that’s actually really good. He’s humble enough, for a change, that it almost makes me respect the guy. I did enjoy his personal taste in offbeat music, but his stage performance and unbridled ego in virtually every setting was so off-putting to me in the 80s that it’ll take another forty years of personal growth and maturity for me to move him to the positive side of whatever imaginary ledger I’m keeping. Void also show up again in an extensive, exceptionally dumb interview from a radio show they stumbled onto, with wacky call-in guests; it was maybe one of those things “not fit for transcription”, particularly in the pre- voice-to-text world.

I know Thrillseeker made it to both a second and a third issue, but I’ve never seen them in the wild. The notion of DC being fanzine-bereft, however, is severely undercut by its existence, to say nothing of other gems we’ve talked about previously here like Truly Needy and Vintage Violence.

Research & DocumentFanzine #2

~ Jay Hinman ~ Leave a comment

This is a high-concept fanzine from our current times undertaken by one Coco Brigitte. She selects one obscure, underground, punk-adjacent pre-internet band, and then goes to town in compiling the ultimate print-only, perfect-bound historical record of said band: articles, interviews, fanzine reprints and photos galore. She did this in Research & DocumentFanzine #1 for Japan’s Non Band, a band I’m ashamed to say I’m not even familiar with, and now she’s done it for San Francisco’s The Trashwomen, a band I’m quite familiar with, for Research & DocumentFanzine #2.

I’d never fob myself off as one of the overexcited hordes who went nuts for The Trashwomen when they emerged around 1991, but I certainly saw multiple early shows of theirs. I’d been effectively going to every Mummies show in the SF Bay Area for the previous 24 months, and a few Phantom Surfers things as well, and this new all-female garage band was a part of a crop of raw, talent-optional bands that emerged quickly from that scene. I knew guitarist Elka Zolot because she’d been in 8-Ball Scratch; I didn’t care for them much, but they’d ably opened a few shows I’d gone to. Her easiness on the eyes was certainly commented upon by more than one young cad of my acquaintance during those years, but it was her utterly ripping and highly distorted surf guitar chops that kept both girls and boys rapt and standing at attention. 

Danielle Pimm had been the go-go dancer for The Phantom Surfers (or The Mummies? or both); now here she was playing bass for the first time, and (be still my heart) sometimes singing too. (Some called it caterwauling; I called it “learning to sing”). Tina Lucchesi worked in a local record store, was at pretty much every garage punk show I saw, and was always great to talk to. Here she was playing drums! Three stars were born. The Trashwomen converted skeptics quickly, and jeez, by the last time I saw them a couple years later they were really, really good. What had started as almost 100% instrumental was now primarily vocal-driven surf/garage/party rock, really reverbed-out, bashing and and distorted. And the freaks who were part of that scene – man – all the screaming you hear on their live record, or other live records from this scene? That’s what these crazy garage punk kids did: just screamed and screamed and sloshed their beer all over each other. Sometimes, I was one of them.

Coco, the editor of Research & DocumentFanzine #2, saw some stuff I’d written online about early 90s fanzines that spotlighted the band, like this, and asked if I could supply some scans. As most punks know, I’m always willing to lend a hand to help unite the scene. So I even get a ‘lil thank-you in this thing – how about that? But let me tell you, folks – this is an exceptionally well put-together book/fanzine, perfect bound and on heavy paper, full color and laid out in a great combination of absolute professionalism and total fanzine who-gives-a-fuck-ism. There’s even a totally black page with nothing on it – “uh oh, we don’t have enough material for a multiple of 4; but we’re close enough – let’s just make a blank page”. (And honestly, besides a few typos, the rest is first-rate graphics and layout and, um, content creation). 

So you get the wild sights, sound and smells of San Francisco’s clubs circa 1992-94 here, along with dozens of color and B&W photos from their Japan and European tours, as well as ephemera from other jaunts. You’ll come to know as much about The Trashwomen as there probably is to know beyond the memories of the band members themselves – and those are in here too, including a new interview with Tina. (it seems her new band might actually be called TINA! – I really hope so). Honestly, you don’t even really have to dig the band all that much to be highly enthusiastic about this fanzine; it’s certainly making me want to get her first issue and sign up for the ones to come, the bands being researched & documented being of little consequence. (Wait, how about Sally Skull??)

Bored Out #2

~ Jay Hinman ~ Leave a comment

Ryan Leach is a gentleman whom you may be familiar with from his excellent label Spacecase Records; from the many interviews he’s published online with people whom I actually want to read about; and for being a super plugged-in guy with particular interests in 70s Memphis, 70s-80s Los Angeles and the current contours of the sub-underground. Our kind of fella, in other words. His recent interview with Eric Friedl on the Goner podcast might have been a bit of a downer, shall we say, regarding the fragile state of independent record production and distribution, but it was highly engaging nonetheless, and I came away even more impressed with Leach and his tenacity in the face of disinterest from the great unwashed hordes. 

So I suppose that this second issue of his Bored Out fanzine from right now in 2025 is meant to be the sequel to his book of interviews, which presumably is now meant to be thought of as Bored Out #1 (right?). And like that one, most if not all of the material here started out online, where publishing is free, and is now available in print in a numbered edition of 100 (mine’s 22/100), which obviously has a sunk cost to be recouped. I’m here to tell you that you’ll be glad to have helped in these efforts. 

The real standouts, comprising well over half of the issue, are the interviews with In The Red Records’ Larry Hardy and with Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise and Fall of SST Records author Jim Ruland. Leach is an excellent asker of questions and knows his shit. He’ll insert his thoughts & views into the narrative when it makes sense, and god love him for his willingness to transcribe a two-hour interview. One reason I probably default to email interviews for my own fanzine is a regrettable lack of internal fortitude for the long, slow pain of transcription. Looking at his banter with Larry and Jim, it reminds me how much better a live chat is and why those interviews I’ve done in this manner are so, so much more interesting & readable than taking the lazy man’s pathetic path. 

Larry Hardy, whom I’ve known personally for years, has a fantastic history of run-ins, releases and stories from all manner of interesting musicians, from Tav Falco to The Gories to the Cheater Slicks and beyond. Leach gets the most out of him, even given Hardy’s admirable lack of ego. Same with Ruland – man, I was a little suspicious of his SST book given that it was by “the guy who wrote the Bad Religion bio”, but I loved it; absolutely told the story as it needed to be told, with the best part being “the fall” of SST in the 90s/00s by far (Jambang, anyone?). Again, Leach, who knows a ton about SST and the world surrounding it, asks excellent questions, just shooting the shit with a fellow music freak. I have made a note to learn from his methods.

The remainder of Bored Out #2 is reviews of films and records, some of which you might have already seen on the man’s Tumblr – I know you’re all still on Tumblr, of course. East German films; Hardware; The Axemen; Robert Rental – you know. Power hitters. Get your copy here, and ignore the incorrect copy below the image; that’s Bored Out #1 that’s being deservedly touted.

Super Rock #2

~ Jay Hinman ~ 5 Comments

Well, we had to get to Super Rock #2 at some point, right? Once I discovered the small plethora of punksploitation mags that came out in ‘77’-78, I made it a life goal to make sure I owned every one of them. Even Super Rock #2. (the others I’ve discussed are here, here, here, here and here). I will also have a New Wave Rock #1 report coming soon – I think those had been the final two punksploitation items I’d been lacking, a situation which has recently been successfully addressed. 

To call the cover of Super Rock #2 “problematic” is severely understating the case, given that it’s a preview of a (pretend) gang-rape pictorial in which the Dead Boys are the perpetrators. The editors, Jeff Goodman and Christine Chestis, are falling all over themselves in the opening editorials congratulating photographer Glenn Brown on his fine work here documenting the depravity. Sure, his photos of the Dead Boys playing live are pretty outstanding, but that band was about nothing but the posing and the mastering of the “look”. “Modern Day Periodicals” of New York, NY (a name reminiscent of a mafia money laundering holding company) have a bit to answer for here, but….I suppose it was different times folks, different times. Just keep telling yourself that.

Right up front we’ve got two different gossip columns mixing up punks, rockers and Blondie (Deborah Harry, apparently, refuses to party and likes to sleep instead). They’re trying so hard for breadth that they overlap in their highly uninteresting stories about Iggy & Bowie, the Stones, the Ramones and Linda Ronstadt. But here I am thinking on my first read of Super Rock #2 that this is still mostly going to be a punk rock magazine, only to immediately stumble upon a Q&A with Natalie Cole, Nat King’s daughter, followed by a piece on Abba and then one on Fleetwood Mac. The incongruity between the cover and its contents is highly jarring. 

So on that note, maybe my favorite piece here regards Lynyrd Skynyrd: all the fights they get into, their glutton-for-punishment groupies, and their generally high levels of pure stupidity. Some real crackers, these boys, and I mean that in the nicest way. I recently heard “What’s Your Name” playing somewhere and totally loved it, after loathing it as a child when it’d come onto my AM dial. The article talks about their newest upcoming song, “That Smell”. Whew, it sure does. Alas, this piece was published mere months before the band’s dissolution in the face of some pretty unspeakable tragedy.

The Ramones interview conclusively proves Dee Dee was no, um, rocket scientist either, but you didn’t need me to tell you that. Hannah Spitzer, who does the Ramones piece and whom we’ve highlighted previously, gets all the true punk-ish stuff in this issue: Iggy, Ramones, Dead Boys and the Television pieces (she loves Marquee Moon and calls it “real rock…with bone-tingling tightness” – I agree!). Bit of a reach here, but does anyone know anything about Ms. Spitzer beyond her fine work in the punksploitation mags? Maybe she’s still with us? Hannah, get in touch with the ‘Hemorrhage, we need to talk…..!

Love the full-color poster stuff in the middle of the magazine, starting with one of Keith Moon – also soon to taste tragedy – and Joe Cocker together, wearing goofy hats. Guaranteed to be left in the magazine intact! There’s also a hideous Grace Slick poster as well, same story. These went on no one’s walls, ever. Can’t say the same for the Bay City Rollers piece & photos, but you look at them now and hey, they were really funny-looking fellas, weren’t they? I’m just old enough to remember Roller-mania, epitomized by the repeat on-the-hour play of “Saturday Night” on KROY Sacramento when I was a child, and their ubiquity in every female-targeted pre-teen mag. Sha Na Na are here too, pimping for their soon-to-launch TV show, which I also watched at age 10. Look folks, we only had six channels in the 1970s. You’ll perhaps want to watch an episode yourself, right now. 

So no, it’s not really a punk issue except when Hannah Spitzer’s around, for the most part. There are other things here on Willy and Toots DeVille; Talking Heads, in which the bass player is referred to as “Martina Weymouth”, the first time I’ve ever heard that anywhere; John Cale, Foreigner, Flame, Split Enz (who sport some exceptionally ridiculous haircuts), Derringer, Starz, Piper (helmed by Billy Squire); Harry Chapin, Kraftwerk, and Nite City, a Ray Manzarak outfit whom I’m utterly delighted to have never heard. Topping it off are some great Ebet Roberts photos of NY underground nightlife denizens. As with Rock Scene, there’s way more to an issue of “Super Rock” than you might have bargained for, and as with Rock Scene, after a flirtation with punk, they mercilessly tossed it fully and totally aside.

Damp #4

~ Jay Hinman ~ 3 Comments

In my previous write-ups of Kevin Kraynick’s Damp #2 and Damp #3, and even though I talked about them in reverse order, I still noted the growth, wisdom and “maturity” from one issue to the next. I mean, maturity in a sense, right? We are talking about early twentysomethings publishing indie rock fanzines from their apartments. Yet by Winter 1989, when Damp #4 came out, Kraynick was a wizened professional. He’s still using that “dos command line” font every now & again, but now it’s being varied with a ‘lil Helvetica and some sort of proto-Arial font that I can’t place. Like I said, totally pro.

This was being assembled and composed from somewhere called So. Willington, CT, and surprisingly gets right to the meat of the matter with an early anti-George Bush essay by Michael “Spike” Anton. The back cover even has a Bush drawing in which one of his eyes has a holy cross in it and the other has a swastika. Brutal, brutal burn. Remember when Bush and, I don’t know, Dan Quayle – were the most evil Republicans you could think of? Wouldn’t you like to have those days back again in 2025? Politics does pop up from time to time in Damp #4, but really more as a hobby than as MRR-style rants, and actually, so does the National Football League (we call it the NFL). I thought fanzine dorks only admitted to liking baseball??

There’s a lot to unwind here, but my re-read of this one for the first time since maybe the early 2000s had me immediately heading straight to the Gibson Bros interview, which took place in 1988, just after the Homestead reissue of their Jay’s-top-50-records-of-all-time debut Big Pine Boogie. I like how guitarist/hero Don Howland tries to downplay that he was ever in Great Plains; Cut editor Steve Erickson’s name is repeatedly taken in vain, and a pledge is made by the band to never, ever play Boston again. Kraynick rather sweetly butters up his Columbus, OH-residing subjects with “Columbus seems like it would be a great town to live in. The bands are certainly top notch coming out of there.” (Much chuckling from DON and JEFF). Don: “On what would you base that kind of an assumption on, Kevin?”. Later Howland says “There’s probably forty people who do cool stuff here and they’re all sick of each other”. 

Another interview is with the rock group “M.O.T.O.“. I’m not sure how it happened, but I went 35+ years without ever once hearing this band – perhaps willfully, based on descriptions I’d read – until I saw them at Gonerfest 2024 in Memphis last year. Well, I saw four or five songs anyway, and then it was time to go find some water or something. Mission accomplished. Mark Lo both gets his own column on cassettes and gets to do the Rhys Chatham interview. I like how it’s not the standard “fanzine Q&A”, like the pedestrian way I’ve always done them, but an actual article by Lo, with quotes and answers from Chatham interspersed as & when they are needed and/or required – the way a journalist does it. 

There was a band in here I’d never heard of – the Bedspring Reptiles – and then I come to find they’re actually the Minneapolis band the Baby Astronauts, whom I was really into in the late 80s. They’ve just changed their name. Kevin drops a Department Store Santas reference (!) within his intro. A debut Bedspring Reptiles LP has been recorded and is being readied for release (note: it wasn’t). Obviously, you can tell from the cover that Harvey Pekar, Fred Frith and Vomit Launch are interviewed as well. Only one of these artists mentions and praises The Whitefronts. 

I guess I can take or leave the mocking porno reviews, which are something Forced Exposure was already doing, but this is nicely offset by a much-needed glossary of Funkadelic slang and its translation (Thumpasaurus People = “foot-stomping hand clap Funkateers”), which I’ve now pinned to the microwave in case the Mothership disgorges the Brides of Funkenstein at my door. The review section, called “Big Ass Rock on Turd Mountain”, is full of ‘88/’89s brightest and its lesser lights. Kraynick provides his biggest props (and a nice little preemptive “scolding” to indie rock fans) for Last Exit. Unfortunately his next-biggest are for Prince, who is perhaps my least favorite mainstream recording artist of all time. And some of this is so dumb it’s great: for Pussy Galore’s Sugarshit Sharp, he says “Well, big fat boogies, if it ain’t another clatter clatter ding dong from the Boopsie Boys”. I suppose that’s one way to put it, isn’t it?

My copy even has a stuffed insert with 20 handwritten, one-sentence, mostly dismissive “late-arriving” record reviews, including the Nirvana and Mudhoney debuts. Damp #5 and #6 are even better than all of this nonsense, and we haven’t even covered those yet. Can you hang with me another two years, folks?

Flipside #30

~ Jay Hinman ~ 4 Comments

I’ve discussed it before in this forum (here, here and here), but I’ll repeat: I believe my memory to be correct in that no one looked to Flipside while it was around as a place for “rock criticism”, nor as a place to have one’s mind blown and taste defined by the immortal power of its prose. Nay, Flipside in the 1980s was more a clubhouse, bulletin board, connection point and gathering place for teenagers, night owls and newly-minted punk obsessives – a place to get the Southern California-centric ground-level view of it all, straight from Los Angeles & Orange Counties, where everyone’s favorite bands (Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Adolescents, Fear et al) were from. Consequently, it’s those early 80s issues that I still have and cherish, and/or have acquired after the fact.

In the 90s Flipside served a similar function, even once the bloom had almost completely worn off the SoCal musical rose. Today, as I’ve tried to make clear in previous Flipside unpackings, their issues remain one of the single best collections of archival material we have to make sense of it all, and I enjoy the fanzine far more now than I did then. Because I love LA punk rock of this era more than I do my family, my country and life itself, I still find myself quite enraptured with the slamtastic goings-on in this Flipside #30 from early 1982.

This magnanimity even extends to an early photo of Rodney Bigenheimer with Unit 3 and Venus and a Shane Williams with letter from prison. But I’m more entertained by this era’s letters from punks complaining about scene violence, poseurs, Serena Dank and “Parents of Punkers” and of course about the outstanding Phil Donahue episode with “mothers of punks”. A guy from Jodie Foster’s Army (from Phoenix) writes in complaining about how messed-up & angry the LA scene has become, and about a fight he nearly got into with some lunkhead when his band played the Cuckoo’s Nest. Editor Al Flipside responds, “We know things are a mess, our scene has been invaded by lots of assholes, most of them big”. Someone named “Kansas City” writes in complaining about San Francisco’s punks, but then blurts out this curveball kicker: “I liked the Sex Pistols and all that other shit too, but that was more than three years ago, anyway, what are the Sex Pistols compared to The Minutemen and The Meat Puppets? Or Tav Falco?”. Kansas City, contact Fanzine Hemorrhage with your real name and coordinates, please!

There are a ton of random-passing interviews; because Flipside staffers were at all the shows; they’d just corner a band before or afterward and let the tape roll. Sometimes it yielded some quotables; often it did not. The Adolescents are back after a short stint with Pat Smear on guitar (!); an item a page later says Smear is going to tour with Paul Roessler to back up Nina Hagen on a world tour (!!). Can confirm! There’s an interview with local band Godhead, who had a 45 on the Bemisbrain label (who gave us Hell Comes To Your House) that I thought I’d never heard, then I just listened to it here and yeah, I totally know this one – and without a doubt, I have not heard this song since the 1980s. 

Other early ‘82 groups interviewed included Fear; The Effigies from Chicago, RF7, Anti-Pasti and a brief Greg Hetson/Circle Jerks chat. New Order – yes, the very same – are being extremely difficult; Flipside #30’s interview with them is an interview of them saying they don’t want to be interviewed. They still snapped two smiling band member photos nonetheless (incidentally, I think New Order were fantastic around this era – listen). There’s also Modern Warfare, who get compared to The Germs and don’t mind in the least, and unfortunately TSOL and Crucifix interviews as well, both of which still remain unread 43 years later so that I can eventually apply those five minutes to charity work instead. 

And look who’s on the cover. Salvation Army, who would change their name next year to The Three O’Clock, talk about an upcoming New Alliance 45 called “Blow Your Mind” that never actually happened, as well as a full-length album that will be called Looking Through The Walking Four O’Clock. This also never happened. On one of my podcasts I back-announced some early Salvation Army material and authoritatively remarked they’d never put out an album, and that this material only ever came out later as Befour Three O’Clock – you know, the one with “She Turns To Flowers”. My pal Nick corrected my dumbassery – there was a Salvation Army album, and the two records were one and the same. Singer Michael Quercio was known as “Rickey Start” at this time, and in this interview. Some real mythmaking going on in early ‘82.

What else? Scene reports! From Seattle’s” “The group I like and think has a lot of talent is Solger” – oh hell yeah. The Phoenix report talks about how Madison Square Gardens is likely to close because of (imported?) punk violence. The scene reporter – Michael Cornelius – is crossing his fingers it won’t be more of the same at the upcoming Black Flag/Saccharine Trust/Minutemen/Plebs show. Plebs fans were totally nuts! There’s a photo of The Flesh Eaters’ Chris D. standing with two fellas from Social Distortion. There’s just been a Masque Revival Night in February 1982 at the Cathay de Grande with Controllers/Skulls/Bags/Plugz/Arthur J & The Goldcups, put together by Craig Lee, at which attendees were instructed to dress like it was 1977, a mere 5 years earlier. What would you dress like if instructed to dress like 2020? I shudder to think. At said event, The Bags only played “fast stuff” and were purportedly amazing. I would have gone if you’d have told me about it. 

Well, I just spent a ton of time flipping through my own copy of Flipside #30 taking notes in order to painstakingly capture the mood and the magic for you, only to just now find that you can experience it all yourself thanks to the Internet Archive. Enjoy!

Wiring Dept. #6

~ Jay Hinman ~ 3 Comments

Frankly, I don’t have a ton of chronological information to go on here since the obscurant Wiring Dept didn’t provide dates nor issue numbers, but I’m pretty sure this was their sixth and final issue, and that it came out in late 1987. I’ve talked mostly positively about their 3rd and 4th issues here and here. I have another issue with Thurston Moore on the cover, and we shall discuss that in this space presently; and by “presently”, I mean it as Mark Twain used the term: “after a short time; soon”. 

What kind of has this issue floundering a bit in my estimation – relative to earlier issues – is just how immersed editor Eric Cope has clearly become in radical chic and the de rigeur performative leftism that was endemic to its home base San Francisco at the time. I really think the only reason I became the bleeding heart liberal I am today later in life is due my utter contempt for the MDC/Jello Biafra/MRR force-fed feeding tube leftism of the 80s. Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaraugua, Bobby Sands, Malcolm X, an important conference against racism, Huey Newton, Steve Biko, prison abolition poetry, Native Americans and European colonial penetration, the PLO: it’s all here, baby. It’s here and in the dorm rooms of my UC-Santa Barbara left-leaning brethren at the time, right next to the Che poster, the hacky sack, the gonorrhea antibiotics and the “One Love” and “Buffalo Soldier” records playing softly in the background. 

You think I’m exaggerating? I am not. There are reverent photos of Jonathan Jackson with his guns at the Marin County Civic Center, where he died, and George Jackson, the hero, the Soledad Brother, the liberator of Angela Davis – and then a two-page spread for Huey Newton as well. I mean, yeah, I sort of dug the Black Panther mystique myself at the time (the leather, the guns, the chants, and they fed the little children of Oakland, too!), and no 4-year college journey of intellectual discovery at the time was complete without a little time spent coming to grips with Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice. Mine was completed, shall we say. But even so, I blanched when I read Wiring Dept. #6’s interview with sisters/artists Sue Coe and Mandy Coe, who have a new art book dedicated to Malcolm X and who talk incessantly about police brutality. You know, I always say it was MDC and Biafra who turned me counter-countercultural, but maybe it was this interview?

Anyway, the music content is lessened in this one as a result of having to shoehorn in all this important agitprop. But the music content is quite strong, as it was in previous music-dominant issues. Big Black are interviewed at the very end of their run in 1987. “Why is this your last tour?” “Because we’re breaking up on Sunday”. Santiago Durango was going to law school, but interviewers Humbert de Birck and Brandan Kearney seem to be trying to convince them to stay together, which we now know did not work. Steve Albini says: “When people who don’t understand what kind of music this is ask me, I ask them if they know what rock and roll is. And they usually say, yeah. And then I say, Imagine that, but with a lot of heavy machinery operating at the same time”. Also, the band expresses a deep hatred of the up-and-coming band Jane’s Addiction, who, long before they became famous, became deservingly embedded in my own personal lexicon as one of the absolute worst bands in the history of rock music. I’d say “You know, truly awful, like Jefferson Starship or Jane’s Addiction”. I stand by it!

There’s a negative review of “sellouts” Sonic Youth and their “9/28/87” show at The Fillmore on the Sister tour. This happens to be the exact same date that I saw them play one of the greatest shows I’ve ever seen, in Isla Vista, CA, also labeled as 9/28, and because two locales are a six-hour drive from each other – someone’s lying. David Katz talks to Adrian Sherwood; Sherwood describes what his music sounds like when his group plays live as “live funk dub” – then he says “Don’t use that quote. Don’t say ‘live funk dub’ – sounds horrible!”. Doesn’t he know that when you’re on the record and you say “don’t print that”, it’s absolutely gonna be printed? I’ll bet he knows that now in 2025, perhaps not so much 38 years ago.

Katz also talks to Wire in London, and it’s actually a really comprehensive overview of the band’s journey, leaning much more heavily on recent years, as the band back then were pretty reticent when confronted with their glorious past – you know, the first three albums that everyone wanted to talk about, instead of the recent stuff that they didn’t. There are also other chats with Stickdog, the Beat Nigs – a band so bad Jello Biafra loved them – Barnacle Choir, and Comic Book Opera, the latter of whom sound like something I’d go to see live for sure, if only I could teleport back to the Reagan era. There’s a review of a super-early Brandan Kearney/Barbara Manning-era World of Pooh live show at “Lipps Underground”: “singing like children who don’t want to wake their sleeping parents”. “Foot-shuffling, hunched shoulders, and staring are what pass for stage mannerisms in their rock show”. They ended said Lipps Underground show with a cover of “Gunboats” by Swell Maps. Anyone have the tape???

Most record reviews within Wiring Dept. #6 are by Kearney, in fact, and I’m pretty sure the ones that are not by him – by people like “Rosanguine”, “Curdleby”, “Stallwart Pool Trump” and “R. Pawnships” – are by him. His exceptionally positive review of Three Day Stubble’s Monster makes it pretty clear where he stands: “Remember that one person that was more pathetic than you in 7th grade? The one person you could actually look down on? Well, it’s 1987 now and it turns out that he was miles ahead of you all along.”

Bought at Rhino Records in LA for $2, sticker still on the back, and it has successfully traveled with me through the peaks and valleys of life’s rich pageant ever since.

Defiant Pose #8

~ Jay Hinman ~ 2 Comments

Defiant Pose #8 from 2014 was a punk fanzine, and it went to great pains to make sure you couldn’t forget it. Each page looks like something out of Sniffin’ Glue or innumerable other 1977-78 punk clarion calls: 100% cut-and-paste, cheap xeroxing and varied fonts. Like the “MacIntosh” had never been invented. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, right? Now me, I’ll tend to steer well clear of fanzines with interviews w/ bands like “Stench” and “Cervix”, neither of whom I’ve ever heard – because, of course, you can in fact judge a book by its cover – but Defiant Pose #8 transcended these transgressions quite impressively due to its core subject matter this time.

Yes, I bought this UK fanzine in 2014 because it came with a Rema-Rema 45. This was a late 70s UK band who’d only had that Wheel in the Roses EP to their name (the first record on 4AD!), a record that (to my ears) only had one notable track: the outstanding, eponymous, clanging post-punk juggernaut “Rema-Rema”. That track is so, SO special that I took a flyer on this mag + 45, and w–o-w. The included single International Scale/Short Stories was the best thing this band ever did, including all the stuff that came out after this, and you do need to hear it. That said, what I linked there is not quite the version on the 45. 

Better still, Defiant Pose #8 gets some of the Rema-Rema gang back together for multiple interviews and fond reminiscing about the salad days of yore. Turns out, to no one’s surprise, they struggled to find their place in the proverbial scene, despite having Marco Pirroni from Siouxsie & The Banshees on guitar. Pirroni would shortly thereafter achieve world stardom playing “antmusic” with Adam and the Ants. It’s very possible that this collection of interviews helped to kick-start Rema-Rema fandom into gear again, as it wasn’t too long afterward that a full documentary was made about the band that I haven’t yet seen.

Michael, the guy that put this one out, is a true punk rock archivist/lifer and it shows in the absurd amount of flyer reprints in this one and in another issue I have (#6) that focused on LA punk. He runs a record label called Inflammable Material that is fuckin’ punk to the core. There are still other issues of Defiant Pose available (here, too) if your interest is piqued. 

Hot Spit #1

~ Jay Hinman ~ 3 Comments

When I was involved in Southern CA college radio in the late 80s, we at KCSB always kept a watchful eye on any other California stations that might be as cool as ours. KXLU in LA – no way. KALX in Berkeley – perhaps. KFJC in Los Altos Hills – absolutely. The one I was especially curious about was KDVS in Davis, just outside of Sacramento. You’d think maybe not with that one, given its location, and yet every time I’d meet a DJ from that station at a show or elsewhere, that person would know far more about underground music than I did. I’m thinking both Sharon McKenzie and Karl Ikola in particular; the former ran Hecuba Records and turned me onto Bill Direen & The Bilders; the latter would go on to run Anopheles Records, and was & is a guy who knew just about everything about everything psychedelic, raw and strange. 

Ikola didn’t write for Hot Spit #1 in 1989, but Sharon McKenzie did, and so did some other heavyweight names from greater Sacramento that I’m very familiar with: Brian Faulkner (still does a fantastic show on KDVS to this day, and whom I interviewed in my own Radio Dies Screaming #1 last year); Jed Brewer (he’s in mesmerizing psych shamans San Kazakgascar); and wow, Ted Verani, whom I used to work with at two different corporate jobs over 20 years ago. The zine was edited by Bill Smith, and while his opening editorial lacks a fair bit of depth (“That’s kind of the way it is with alternative music. It has always been a little different. Hot Spit brings you that something different”), the overall package is just fine – even with the subtitle for the fanzine being “The sizzle of alternative sounds”, and the cover looking like what might result if you handed off art direction for your fanzine to the one college art major sophomore you happened to know. Alas, Smith died quite young, as I’ve just discovered.

There’s an Anthony Braxton interview by Damon Cleckler, which takes place in Braxton’s office at Mills College moments after he’s just finished teaching a class there. He really gets him talking! They cover AACM, Stockhausen, Braxton’s writings and, most importantly, whether or not he’ll be getting tenure at Mills and be able to stay on in Oakland. I checked Wikipedia and it’s looking like he didn’t, which is probably why Braxton and I never went out for beers during those years or saw a Thinking Fellers show together.

Also a good Penelope Houston interview; she’s actually a bit bemused that there’s still a cult of The Avengers out there; she also does a nice call out for Mary O’Neil of the Wannabe Texans, a pal and hero of ours here at FH and a woman who’d later go on to form Virginia Dare. Our man Verani interviews Rudi Protrudi of The Fuzztones. Verani says “A lot of the bands that were playing with you – The Morlocks, Telltale Hearts, the Chesterfield Kings – have all disappeared, and Protrudi humbly responds “They’re all dead and gone. We buried them”. Gross! And it wouldn’t be a good Davis-area mag without a Thin White Rope piece; along with True West and Game Theory, they were the patron saints of greater Sacramento’s alterna-whatever throughout the 80s and into the 90s. McKenzie writes a puff piece on Mudhoney, Brewer tries to wave a flag for Voivod, and many marginal independent releases of ‘89–’90 are given the once-over. Hot Spit #1, folks!

NY Rocker #18

~ Jay Hinman ~ 5 Comments

I’ve recently come into a gaggle of older issues of NY Rocker, and thumbing through them, I’m even happier about my minor acquisitions than I’d thought I’d be. At least on the evidence presented by NY Rocker #18 from April/May 1979, this not-really-a-fanzine tabloid newspaper was even better in its earlier years than it would be a couple years hence. I’ve talked about issues from that later era here, here, here, here and here. And I’ll talk about other ones that sprang from ‘79/’80 in the weeks to come, as I traverse them. This shall take time. For now, let’s see what was happening in the world of underground NY/LA/SF/London during the Carter years.

First, there’s Howie Klein reporting from San Francisco. Sigh. I can’t throw a stick at a fanzine from this period without encountering the guy. If you’re not a Clash fan, and I’m not, it’s hard to wrestle with hyperbole such as Klein’s blather when he sees their 2/7/79 show in San Francisco: “This was undoubtedly one of the best shows ever seen in the Bay Area…..”. If you don’t know which side of the true punk vs. corporate schmuck divide Klein stood on – or at least which side he was (rightly) perceived to be on – there are these gems from the same piece: “Rock super-promoter Bill Graham – the only major concert promoter in the U.S. to give strong and consistent support to the new wave…” (Bill fucking Graham!!) and dissing the grass-roots punk/all-ages organization called New Youth who got The Clash to play this cheap, for-the-people gig in the first place. “…the band (got) involved with New Youth, a group of mostly idealistic (like starry-eyed at best, and in some cases, simply psycho) young fans who believe in non-profit punk rock gigs. So they got The Clash to commit themselves to doing a benefit for them at a deserted Jewish synagogue between the Peoples’ Temple and the Old Fillmore in the heart of San Francisco’s black ghetto. A cheap ticket price and the opportunity to see the band in an unseated funky venue…caused a dramatic slump in ticket sales in what should have been the band’s biggest and fastest sell-out. As it turned out, The Clash came pretty near to selling out anyway….but not before a lot of rock-biz upset between the Graham Organization, Epic Records and Tapes and the William Morris booking agency”.

The horror! You can see the sort of scene mechanics that actually stressed Klein out in 1979, and why he ended up being so utterly reviled by music-focused underground aesthetes at the time, unfair as it perhaps may have been, considering one’s perspective and degree of oppositional defiance.

More irony abounds in a Sandy Pearlman interview – he produced The Clash’s Give ‘Em Enough Rope – “The Clash themselves will do virtually nothing to make it. In other words, they will not accommodate themselves to the rotten, debased, commercial system of exploitation that currently exists. The Clash do not wish to make any compromises”. Totally! On the flipside is a paean by Doug Simmons to truly underground Boston band The Neighborhoods and their singer David Minehan. I didn’t much care for the band, once I finally heard them, but my 9th grade best friend Jon Grant had just moved to San Jose from Massachusetts, and his brother had been close friends with Minehan. I’d hear all about The Neighborhoods from Jon, and seriously, I felt pretty special at age 14 knowing a guy who had a brother who was friends with a guy in an actual performing punk band that I’d never heard.

Oh, and the Beach Boys stuff in this issue is just fantastic. There’s a Greg McLean interview with Carl and Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, as well as a Harvey Kubernik sidebar about a recent BB book. McLean clearly isn’t a fan of Dennis Wilson: “his frequently crass and unexpected comments often cut Carl off mid-sentence, and he dropped the name of his new girlfriend, Christine McVie, whenever possible”. McLean retaliates and agitates them by only asking questions about Brian Wilson: where is he, tell me more about Brian etc. This does him no favor with the brothers. Dennis says, vis-a-vis the Dr. Eugene Landy thing, “Brian is loved dearly by all of us and us by him, and all that bullshit about him being manipulated is just….not in my experience…”. McLean then goes on to bait them further about Mike Love being an asshole (a certified fact, from what I understand), and then talks about a Beach Boys show at Radio City Music Hall in ‘79: “Between songs, Love babbled aimlessly, killing any sense of pace the show might have established. Mike Love looked old and foolish”. Everyone loves Mike Love, don’t they?

So this issue is absolutely packed, and I could write reams about each piece – but there are like, 20 pieces: The Shoes; a thing on young Boston and NY radio DJs and stations; Viv Stanshall; The Raincoats; The Only Ones; and a really early piece on The B-52s, circa their Rock Lobster 45, with great photos of a very young band and an interview by editor Andy Schwartz. Even so, NY Rocker would sometimes give space to mainstream music-lovers like Ken Barnes. He writes a thing about how much he loves disco, even in 1979 (the year of Disco Demolition Night), and says, perplexingly, “It seems to me that a lot of people are quite scared about disco, and they’re lashing back with unreasoning venom. An interesting observation by Mark Shipper pertains here – for years during the 70s rock lull, all the right fanzines clamored for the return of fast, exciting beat music kids could dance to. Now it’s here and kids dig it…but because it doesn’t follow the form the clamorers grew up with, they’ve turned on it viciously. Ironic, wouldn’t you say?”. I mean…..that’s one way to look at it?

Finally, and I feel like I’m skimming here, but there are great reviews of recent “rock concerts” by The Contortions, Nico, The Knack (who are absolutely buried by Don Waller), and The Ramones with their special opening band Lester Bangs’ Birdland. NY Rocker #18 comes to an outstanding close with Jeffery Vogel’s fake “TV Guide” listings that shit mercilessly on every upcoming show and on every NY band – especially the Dead Boys. Now that’s some vitriolic mirth-making that we at Fanzine Hemorrhage can get behind, anytime & anywhere, even from 46 years ago.

Not Fade Away #4

~ Jay Hinman ~ Leave a comment

Not Fade Away #4 showed its face in 1985, only a mere five years after the previous issue, the Not Fade Away #3 that I talked about here. It’s a pure and heartfelt celebration of raw Texas rock & roll sound, with nothing past 1970 talked about; it’s focused squarely on the sixties punk and blasted-out psychedelia that had the Lone Star State marking itself as the pinnacle location for both forms. Doug Hanners was the guy who made the fanzine happen, and he was a first-rate devotee of garage rock, yet was also clearly into documenting Texas’ hillbilly and rockabilly musics this time around as well.

Right off the bat there’s a Texas Archive Records ad on the inside front cover, promising that a new “Flashback series” is coming – I thought that would have to be the amazing Texas Flashbacks comps, but no, it’s a different set of records entirely. Hanners was involved. There’s a great early discussion about the band The Blue Things, and the feature talks at length about a 60s radio station with immense wattage called KOMA out of Oklahoma City. Its signal was so strong they’d announce live shows each night that were happening from Bismarck, ND to Plainview, TX – in case listeners in those areas needed something to do. I love that stuff. When I was growing up in San Jose, CA, I was able to pick up a Tijuana, Mexico AM station called “The Mighty 690”, with the 60s DJ “The Real Don Steele” still holding down the fort at night. That’s a long way from San Jose, folks, and was totally fascinated with these transmissions from another world. I was also able to pick up KFI from Los Angeles, and I can still sing their jingles, teasers and stingers to this day.

Not Fade Away #4 took a similar approach to that of Ugly Things in putting forth every known detail about a given short-lived 60s band, and interviewed any living members willing to talk. Rather unlike Ugly Things, however, Hanners and his crew opted for relative descriptive and discussion brevity in most cases. They have a couple of killer ones here for sure – The Sparkles, whom you may know for “No Friend of Mine” and “Hipsville 29 B.C.”, and The Stoics, who did the awesome “Hate”. The latter band also had bodyguards pulled from the Capinch motorcycle gang, and I learned that they ultimately had a falling out because “half the band wanted to go in a Kinks direction, and the other half in a Stones direction”. Let’s call the whole thing off!

Other interviews are with The Golden Dawn, who bond with Hanners during their interview over their mutual distaste for the first Red Krayola record. There are short pieces on The Remaining Few, The Sherwoods, The Lavender Hour, Sea-Ell Records, and a great longer piece with Weldon Rogers bantering with Hanners about West Texas music in the 1950s: radio stations, record labels, regional music, country, hillbillies, Ernest Tubb and more. After the three pages of reviews of Texas 45s and reissues – again, nothing post-sixties allowed, please! – I gazed upon a cool ad for Austin’s Mediaphile Performing Arts Books & Magazines, a store that could (probably) not exist now. They’re advertising “The Roky Erickson Story – over 200 xeroxed pages of newspaper articles, record reviews, interviews, posters etc. With discography”. Here’s what little I could dig up online about it. I’d buy that for a dollar! Even in 1985, they’re wanting $25 for it.

This issue concluded the run for Not Fade Away – four outstanding missives in ten years. Truly essential 60s punk scholarship here, and probably the germ that helped so many of us realize Texas’ unsung but outsized contributions to the greater culture during that decade.

Fuz #1

~ Jay Hinman ~ 3 Comments

I first became aware of fuzz-drenched “biker rock”, 60s biker films, and the music of Davie Allan and the Arrows when that Angel Dust comp came out way back in 1988. Pretty goddamn revelatory! The Arrows very quickly became a touchstone band for me, and over the course of the intervening 37 years I tried to pick up any reissues or unearthings of their instrumental madness that I could. I’ve mightily enjoyed much of the crazed post-60s stuff Allan’s done as well, particularly his 1990s resurgence with blistering 45s like Chopper/Open Throttle. Always got a good laff out of his poses in his latter-day photos – tough, mean, unsmiling and still pissed off about the way Mike Curb treated him in the 60s.

Fuz #1 sort of functions as the best Davie Allan & The Arrows “book” and discography we may ever get, despite coming out back in 1997, even before the Devil’s Rumble 2x compilation finally writed many wrongs and got Allan’s music to the people. Though the Arrows stuff in here is not even novella-length, it’s at least a strong retelling of how Allan and his group became the in-play session men for teen exploitation films from American International Pictures and how they were shepherded through a variety of projects by young Hollywood mogul Mike Curb, later a California lieutenant governor. I’ll never forget when CA governor Jerry Brown was out of the county once, Curb, his elected-but-not-appointed lieutenant, pulled an Alexander Haig “I’m in charge here now” move, and started vetoing bills and making appointments himself, thoroughly pissing off the Democrat establishment and prompting immediate rule changes.

Anyway, Fuz #1 was the brainchild of one Seth Wimpfheimer, and Seth’s the guy who takes on assembling the Allan piece, which is 2/3rds of the mag. Packed with storytelling, photos, movie posters, asides and old radio station charts – “Blues Theme” was #1 across many west coast stations in late 1967! – his Allan piece only really lacks an interview with the man himself. I will assume it was not for a lack of trying. There’s a great late 60s group shot of Allan, Curb and a gaggle of young-&-beautiful Hollywood singers, actors, musicians and actresses. The dude on the far left is Doug Moody, identified here as an A&R man (which he was). You may know him better as the proprietor of Mystic Records, generally thought by many to be the worst hardcore punk label of all time. 

Gudrun Müller contributes the other piece to this fanzine, and it’s a celebration of 60s exploitation actress Mimsy Farmer. Müller can’t really “keep it in his pants”, shall we say, yet he puts together an excellent overview of her filmography and the usual sordid Hollywood BS that kept her both working and not working. I know I’ve seen Riot on the Sunset Strip and Devil’s Angels – both of which she was in – but if I’m being honest, it’ll be tough for me to complete her filmography as I really can’t find the brain capacity to devote to exploitation cinema in 2025. There was once a time, but that time is no longer.

All of Fuz #1 is on thick, glossy pages and it’s a real treat to hold and caress. As one does. My understanding is that Wimpfheimer never made a Fuz #2, but if you know differently, please let us know in the comments.

Psyclone (June 1977)

~ Jay Hinman ~ 3 Comments

One thing you come to realize when you’ve, ahem, been doin’ this sort of fanzine exploring for as long as I have is the incredible abundance of print that was just everywhere in the 70s, 80s and 90s. I mean, I remember it well, so it’s not like I’m just piecing it together now, but back then record stores, head shops and independent stores of many colors would carry magazines & fanzines galore, and then piles of FREE newsprint tabloid things sat on the floors as well. In a few places, they still do. 

What was maybe different about that time was the quality level of some of these ad-supported freebies. They had full editorial staff, and they paid reviewers and graphic designers and circulation managers and others to do their thing. I’m not just talking about your general alt-weeklies, but tabloids like San Francisco’s Psyclone (“the magazine money can’t buy”) that were 100% music-focused. You’d get them on the floor of now-legendary record stores like Rather Ripped and Aquarius. I’ve already garbled a bit about these things in my preamble to a piece on Snipehunt, so you can continue your studies there if you’d like.

Contrary to this thing, which says there were only three issues of Psyclone, and which therefore gins up some scarcity by selling those three for a whopping $1800, I can tell you right here and right now that there were more than three, and that a few of them pre-date punk. There’s one selling for $30 at San Francisco’s Amoeba Music right now from 1976, and while it has a Mary Monday article, the rest of it’s decidedly of the fern bar/long hair/sexy sex/doofus rock era epitomized to me by the godawful Tubes. 

This June 1977 issue isn’t all that far off, either. Sure, you’ve got hot new band The Nuns on the cover and a half-page ad for Crime’s new 45 (!!), but what’s sorta impressive about this one is just how trapped the editorial stuff is between “the new sound” and the old stuff they still want to write about. Like there’s a big spread on Genesis, for instance, and a lot of bemoaning of their new singer “Phil” and how awesome Peter Gabriel was. There’s also a piece on some long-haired bozos called Hero, as well as dissections in the reviews section of dreck from Utopia, Bad Company and Pink Floyd (as well as of some punk-ish stuff and “imports” from England).

The masthead has some names I definitely know well from my California punk history studies, though: editor Jerry Paulson (the first guy to put on shows at The Mabuhay Gardens); Howie Klein; Steve Seid; Michael Snyder; Cosmo Topper; Jonathan Postal; James Stark and Jenny Stern (aka Jenny Lens). But they’re all trying to figure it out. A guy named Robert Conttrell thinks that UK punk is in no way an offshoot of US punk like The Ramones, and says, regarding England, “the strongest provincial scene is in Manchester, led by The Clash”. Another guy named Walter Lenci is able to grab John Cale for about five minutes for an interview before he goes on stage, and Cale spends almost the entire time preemptively trying to get Lenci to not talk about the Velvet Underground or about how he was recently backing up solo Lou Reed: “Now this is important. This is number one….Now’s what’s important….This band is really, really good….Now it’s time to do it myself….It’s time to do it in America. I now have the opportunity to create and establish my own territory. This is it. Now I have a good band, good management….This is my time”. Somebody bring this man a spoon, there’s a snowstorm coming on!

One of the things I enjoyed most about the book about Dirk Dirksen and the Mab (Shut Up You Animals!! The Pope is Dead. A Remembrance of Dirk Dirksen: The History of the Mabuhay Gardens) was the complete show-by-show listing of every single band that played there on every single date. Worth the price of admission by itself. Well, it’s funny in the early years, ‘76-’77, to see just who turned up, and this June 1977 Psyclone has a great ad in the back for what’s coming this month there. It’s really early in the scene, remember, but June will feature shows by The Nuns, The Dogs, Berlin Brats and Freestone (yes! “Bummer Bitch” Freestone!). Roky Erickson playing with The Pop, too. And then all those strange lost-to-time non-punk Bay Area bands that had serious but small followings at the time: Leila and the Snakes; Magister Ludi; Novak; and the Hoo Doo Rhythm Devils. I’ll do this thing when I see a show calendar like this and retrospectively plot out my month for the shows I’d have gone to, knowing what I know now. It’s a little more crazed for LA clubs circa 1978-82 – I’d truly be out 27 nights out of 30 – but once the Mab really got rolling late in 1977, it would not have been difficult at all to spend a good ten/fifteen nights a month there, as many did.

Hey, if you were one of ‘em, and you have some tales about Psyclone to tell, please do so in the comments, okay?

Do The Pop! #1

~ Jay Hinman ~ 1 Comment

A cottage industry devoted to American punk rock scholarship emerged in the 1990s, spurred on by both the Killed By Death and Bloodstains obscure 45s collections and by the nascent internet. I proved myself an adept student, and I did my best to pull together whatever revelatory texts I could find. One particularly lost-to-time artifact is this Do The Pop #1 fanzine, published out of Seattle by married couple Lisa Lindstrom and Alan Wright in 1995. I did my homework & tried to find if there’s any real record of this thing online, and I found that at this writing, there is not. This, my friends, is why we pursue and share the navel-gazing passions that we do.

Do The Pop #1 (and only?) is 70+ pages of newsprint, absolutely packed with information both critical and non. Alan and Lisa had once worked together on a 60s/garage fanzine called Cryptic Times before this, and while I’ve heard of it, I don’t have any of ‘em. Their tastes in punk rock music don’t precisely align with mine and maybe veer too far into the “pogo”/leather jacket realm, and of course that’s fine – but it means I can skip slathering profiles of Sham 69 and The Viletones, for instance, and skim through Lisa’s incredibly detailed interview/profile on The Droogs – surely the best and final word on said long-running band if you’re interested. There are also two lengthy pieces on Radio Birdman, a band who in the pre-KBD era were very important to me, but whom I unfortunately find quite pedestrian and boring now. I’m still trying to piece together why I’d been obsessing over them and not The Saints in the 1980s.

This issue’s stock in trade is the partisan profile and discography, with photos cribbed from various flyers and fanzines of the past and assembled beautifully on whatever computers were able to make it look this great in 1995. Aside from the aforementioned, there are also pieces of this ilk on the Alan Milman Sect, Eater, Satan’s Rats, The Hates and What? Records. There’s a fine example of Stooges scholarship here as well, with Alan telling the tale of how his first Stooges record was Metallic K.O., and how that was what turned him into a Stooges fanatic. He then quite helpfully pulls apart all the different primitive Stooges bootlegs coming out around that time (remember these, on “Revenge Records”?), most of which were pretty lame to my ears, but which the fanatic both needs and requires. 

I found my interest once again piqued in particular when I re-read their excellent 4-page overview of late 70s Seattle punk: The Lewd, Ze Whizz Kids, The Enemy and whatnot. I conversed a little bit before with you about this wild scene here, here and here. While there are only a couple of records from that era/town that I think actually stand up, you get this sense of a frantic, desperate need to offend, rebel and shock, making late 70s Seattle sound absurdly stuffy and uptight in a way that SF/LA/NY etc just weren’t. In a non-punk move, the editors have recently discovered Beyond The Valley of the Dolls and can’t not talk about it. I love that film so much I bought the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray. 

The other draw here is a huge Wayne Kramer interview, taking us from the MC5 through his days in jail, playing with Johnny Thunders and now with, uh, some guys from Pennywise. I think people loved this guy so much not merely for his undeniable talents on guitar and image-making, but just for being an enthusiastic, lucid, humble and relatable fella from one of the underground’s most legendary bands. I never shook his hand nor broke bread with him, but folks I know who did couldn’t say enough about the guy. Lisa & Alan’s piece is on par with any post-MC5 thing I’ve ever read and needs to be collected in a book somewhere. Are you the person to do it? Get in touch if you require the scans.

Truly Needy #6

~ Jay Hinman ~ 1 Comment

I can’t say with 100% assurance that this early 1983 issue was the actual sixth installment of DC’s mostly excellent Truly Needy fanzine, because they’d do that annoying “Volume 2 Number 2” thing that was stolen from traditional magazines at the time (Slash did it too). Yet my research seems to indicate that there was in fact a Volume 1, Number 4 issue, but not a Number 5. This would then make this one Truly Needy #6 by all rights, and by the time of the next issue, Truly Needy #7, they were finally doing their numbering the proper fanzine way. 

Truly Needy, if you’re never seen the thing, was a true heavy hitter during its time. It was totally stuffed with deep underground documentation and dribblings, all from a Washington DC base that was seeing the culmination of years of slogging scene-building – captured beautifully in the excellent Punk The Capital documentary. As when reading its peers Matter or The Offense, you could get a strange sort of jarring high from reading about the many tendrils of punk and oddball culture still exploding across the country in ‘83, and even now I’m retroactively jealous of the experiences of living through a time I myself lived through. (Which is how many folks still feel about the mid/late-1960s today). So let’s maybe take a look at what was going on then.

There’s a great early letter here from “Ayu the Braless”, talking about his visit to San Francisco: “Either SF has been sending a fake image to the East Coast or it’s become another 80’s fatality from what I saw. For 3 weeks I searched for industrial death music and only found one group, the German Shepherds, who used noise. And they were very weak and monotonous compared to earlier groups like Factrix and T.G. The performance art I saw was pure excrement….Haight-Ashbury looks like Georgetown…the punk I saw was rock & roll slow, except for the Meat Puppets, and they got pelted with bottles and drinks for having long hair”. But it’s not all bad in San Francisco for Ayu: “The gay scene is great. With the male/female ratio in the street being 9 to 1 there were lots of handsome penii walking around….the bathhouses and sex clubs (only gay ones) are numerous and filled with toys and games…if you care about your penis more than art you can have a great time”. Sure. This is actually quite sad to read considering how that entire scene was unknowingly being hollowed from within at exactly that moment.

The Fall have come to DC, and there’s an initially confrontational interview with Mark E Smith that Truly Needy editor Barbara Rice eventually wrangles under control. When asked about American bands he likes, he pops off with “Fear, Flipper and Panther Burns”, and pines for how awesome it would be if Fear could come out and play Scotland and the north of England. Then Smith says “I always thought that West Coast American punk was the best anywhere”. I mean, he’s right of course – but I didn’t expect it from Mark E Smith (!). Maybe it was this show that did it?

Truly Needy #6 carries multiple threads through its 50-some-odd pages that are both local and global in nature. For local stuff, there’s an “Ask Barney” column about scene etiquette with what appears to be fake letters, along with interviews with DC bands Marginal Man, Egoslavia and The French Are From Hell, only the former of whom I’m familiar with. For global stuff, there’s a long Crass interview that I simply can’t bring myself to read, and that stops in the middle to be “continued next issue”. The Birthday Party are now living in London again after having left Berlin, so this would be “peak heroin season” for the band if I’ve got my dates correct. There’s a quick chat with Rowland Howard and he’s affable and informative. 

Each slice of subculture has its place here – there are columns on TV, comics and a huge fanzine roundup. There’s a Tapes column featuring gems from No Trend, Your Food, Razor Penguins and The Fartz, along with everything the ROIR label had ever put out to that point. My assumption is it all arrived in a big tumbling batch, and given that the Truly Needy ethos seemed to be to review every fucking thing that hit the office, they all get a place here.

In the live reviews section, Rice reviews the 2/25/83 Minor Threat / Government Issue show at Wilson Center, and has the epiphany that the rest of the country was pretty much having about DC around that time: “Finally, this show is ample proof that we don’t need an out-of-town act headlining the bill. For once we have some of the best music in the world”. And I love the review of a 3/12/83 show of Boat Of… at DC Space; they’re a band I’ve only heard about, a Tom Smith (To Live and Shave in LA, Peach of Democracy) project. “(They’ve) been playing to confused and unhappy audiences for the past year across the state of Georgia…At the DC Space show, Boat Of… founding and central member Tom Smith handled most of the chores himself, accompanying his tapes with turntable and vocals…One fellow kept walking up to the stage and saying things like ‘This isn’t music’ and ‘You’re not doing anything’….The show ended with Tom crooning over a wonderfully mutilated version of ‘Colour My World’.”

In the huge reviews section, there’s a multitude of hardcore & goth & imports, mostly dealt with by Rice. But wait, who’s this? Why, it’s Byron Coley getting space to opine on The Chesterfield Kings, The Monkees, The Box Tops and Kansas’ The Mortal Micronotz, whom he totally loves. Great to see him adding a touch of class here. Now me, I could give a shit about the ‘Kings, but I can understand his enthusiasm for championing “six-oh” sounds in that hardcore-drenched era, which he even refers to as a stance worth taking, in the guise of both musics being tough, raw and worthy. Fair enough! Much to ponder in this one and certainly one of America’s finer fanzines during that year.

The Offense Newsletter #59

~ Jay Hinman ~ 2 Comments

We’re getting to the point in this Fanzine Hemorrhage endeavor where certain publications are coming around two, three, sometimes four times now. Which makes it easy for me to spare you the backstories of some of them, like The Offense / The Offense Newsletter – you can just check out previous explanatory posts on that one in particular here, here and here, if that’s something you’d be interested in doing. This allows me to skip the set-up for The Offense Newsletter #59, which wasn’t just from 1985, and wasn’t just from July 1985, but was from July 19th, 1985. 

Cocteau Fever is almost here! In only two months the Cocteau Twins will play one of five dates they’d play on their first-ever US tour in Columbus, OH – totally shafting Chicago – and it was all thanks to Tim Anstaett and his 4AD-besotted, typewriter-cranked Offense Newsletter. Your Fanzine Hemorrhage editor saw one of those five shows, which took place the week before I left home and moved to Santa Barbara for college. There’s not really a ton about it in here – just some acknowledgement that it’s for real and it’s happening. There are also some ‘85 Columbus show listings for the weeks ahead that are super 1985: Black Flag, The Chameleons, Sonic Youth/Die Kreuzen, New Order/A Certain Ratio, Gang Green, Meat Puppets, 7 Seconds. 

As with other issues I’ve read, the letters section sorta rules the roost and in fact takes up six of the twelve overall pages in this one. To read The Offense Newsletter, it seems, was to enter into conversant dialog with The Offense Newsletter. It offered a chance for readers around the country and indeed the world to pop off with scene reports (Gerard Cosloy does so from Boston); to slag and/or praise Tim for his tastes; to broker offense with others who’d written previous letters for their tastes; to complain about Husker Du; to clarify whether or not Tim hates your fanzine (Barbara Rice of Truly Needy); and even, in the case of Great Plains’ Mark Wyatt, to pen an unsolicited, show-by-show mini-tour diary. You’ll get more true pulse on the actual contours of Underground America here than you probably will anywhere else.

Of course I’m probably most drawn in by what comprises another 1/3rd of the pages here – an interview with Craig Scanlon and Simon Rogers from The Fall, accompanied by some spectacular live photographs of the band (and I’ve fallen in love with 1985 Brix Smith all over again, just like I did that year). They’d been touring on The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall, and were just gearing up to release their last truly fantastic record, This Nation’s Saving Grace. Scalon tells Tim aka TKA that Room To Live was “the worst LP we’ve ever released”, and I suppose a case can be made – but can you imagine being super-ashamed of a record that contains “Solicitor in Studio”, “Marquis Cha Cha” and the title track? Not me. Embarrassment of riches up until 1985.

Finally, there’s a small live review section at the end. Don Howland at that point was sometimes writing as “Chet Howland”, and he took on the 6/4/85 Black Flag / DC3 / Twisted Roots show in Lafayette, Louisiana. It’s another gem from Howland, one of my all-timers for music writing. He takes ‘Flag bassist Kira Roessler to task for morphing her look to fit in with the skeezy horndogs she’s playing with, and bemoans the fact that he’s really there to hear them play the ‘79-’81 stuff: “…But when they did an oldie like ‘Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie’ I was just reminded how much this band used to matter to me. But that’s just ole Chet…poor ole Chet. Poor poor poor Chet”. It wasn’t just ole Chet – it was almost every punker who showed up at a Black Flag show from 1983-86 and got a shirtless man in dolphin shorts grinding & sweating all over them to turgid, plodding dirge-metal, and a band totally stoned out of their gourds. Then they’d do “Six Pack” or something, and the crowd would go apeshit. Run the tapes!

Year Zero #1

~ Jay Hinman ~ 3 Comments

Tom Lax from Siltbreeze Records has been selling off a bunch of fanzines and records online, and I figured I ought to get in on some of the action. I’d never heard of nor seen the Australian Year Zero #1 from 1993, but the Tom of Finland cover caught my eye. When “Tom’s” art wasn’t being used in the explicitly gay/leather/roughneck context it was intended for, it was at times being appropriated by straight fellas in the underground rock environment. I’m not the sort of guy who wantonly ascribes homoeroticism to straight men, such as football players or fanzine editors, so I won’t try to unpack it except for to say that these muscled, at times violent drawings were likely the only homoerotic images subconsciously deemed allowable in the snarky, ironic early 90s fanzine world – precisely because they push so brutally against a fairied, sissified gay male stereotype, and because they totally knock the non-gay viewer off balance for a second or two. Call your semiotics and gender studies professors for a deeper read.

The editors of this Melbourne-based journal of class and taste (“Buy me, butt stain!” on the cover) are named “Dave Boofhead”, “The Wiz” and “Jan the Man”, which makes it a little tough to get a read on ‘em as people. Could one of these folks have been Melbourne’s Dave Lang, who’d later put together a record label and a blog called Lexicon Devil? There was evidence that pointed both for and against it, so I decided to do some digging into his blog to see if I could come up with evidence for the affirmative, and sure enough! “….Early that year, I dropped off copies of the first issue of Year Zero to ML. To be honest, I wrote a lot of it when I was drunk and I didn’t expect anyone to buy it, let alone read it, but was surprised when I went back a week later to see that the half-a-dozen copies I’d left the previous week had apparently all sold….”.

This makes sense. The editors’ collective understanding of underground rock music appears to all-consuming and obsessive, if somewhat nascent and overly informed by Maximum RocknRoll and Flipside, two (of course) well-distributed fanzines that I know were highly formative for Dave. When I later started reading Dave’s excellent online writings, maybe ten years after this, he’d totally ditched the buy-me-butt-stain and GG Allin-celebrating shtick you sometimes see here for a more sober consideration of decades’ worth of jazzy skronk, psych, offbeat punk and so forth. Here, he and his team are still a little more impressed by Peter Bagge comics and scene gossip than I’m sure they’d care to remember, but as I always say with regard to these things, given my own early-20s missteps  – never apologize for having been young and dumb. 

The marquee item here is a great talk with Ron House of the Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments, who brings Mike Rep along for the ride. “Dave Boofhead” is able to draw them out quite a bit & get both to explore Columbus and Ohio writ large as places to make music; drinking; the current scene & market for their strange musics, and more. Two eminently interesting and opinionated gentlemen for sure, and they still have much to teach us to this day. An Australian group called Peril are interviewed, along with a GG Allin prison chat. It’s all coming back to me now: GG was supposed to get out of prison and immediately go on tour and kill himself on stage, perhaps taking some of the audience with him. It didn’t quite go to plan. 

Dave and Jan and The Wiz each get the own “scene report” columns, sort of, a very MRR-like move where they get to piss & moan about various scene indignities. There are also many record reviews and they’re all fun, tossed-off sort of blatherings, clearly written at a time when these guys were just intensely & totally devoted to rooting out the wildest, weirdest music they could find (Skullflower, Styrenes, Brainbombs, Merzbow, Zeni Geva, Dead C, Electric Eels) – then sometimes making mirth with it and shredding it to pieces, as Dave does with Boyd Rice and Non.

Oh, and while I hadn’t been aware of Year Zero in 1993, they were aware of me and my own early-20s then-fanzine Superdope. They even swipe an image directly from it! I did get orders from Australia every now & again, and I got a kick out of hearing how my fanzine was received by these gentlemen 32 years ago: “An excellent Northern Californian zine that is both totally analy-retentive and cliqueish, but yet also a damn good read….I swear, all this bunch seem to do all day is piddle around all day worshipping the goddamn hell out of the Thinking Fellers Union, Dead C, The Ex, Sun City Girls and just about any New Zealand, Finnish or Japanese band you care to mention….they don’t get too smart-arsey about the whole thing (unlike ourselves here at YZ)…My only complaints concern the slightly ‘garage’ bias of the zine (that genre, with a few exceptions, bores the shit out of me) and the totally over-the-top Thinking Fellers Union worshipping sessions that seem to accompany just about every issue…They also say that the last issue was ‘the last issue’, but they seem to say that every issue”. Wow. 100% guilty as charged.

Flesh and Bones #8

~ Jay Hinman ~ 2 Comments

Since I only possess three issues of late 80s Flesh and Bones, and because I already covered Flesh and Bones #6 here and Flesh and Bones #7 here, I don’t reckon it’ll be worth me going into too many background details in order to tackle their ultimate issue, Flesh and Bones #8, the classy cover from which you see here. Instead, perhaps we should ask: how was it that so many hardcore punk fiends from 1982-84 became longhaired, heavy metal-adjacent grunge & hesh rock fiends just a couple years later? This very much includes myself, minus the long hair and the taste for metal. 

At the end of the day, it’s because it’s the place where dumb, primal, post-teenage testosterone was finding the most logical home to roost circa 1987-89. If not Green River and Mudhoney, then certainly the more abrasive Touch & Go stable that for me was best defined by the Laughing Hyenas, Killdozer and Big Black. All of the aforementioned were total godz to me then, and thus, Flesh and Bones was one of the music fanzines I was most excited to buy when I’d see it at Rhino or Aron’s in Los Angeles. The touring/booking networks and the nationwide club circuit plowed up by hardcore was still very much in existence, and labels like Touch & Go, Homestead, SST and Sub Pop had more money in their pockets than ever before (Sub Pop, of course, was really just getting off the ground at this time).

Flesh and Bones #8 editor Jeffo, as I’ve discussed, had an innate knack for grafting together his main obsessions into a unified universe of his own making. These would be idiotic 1970s hard rock, comics/comix, 60s hippie/freak/teen stuff and the 1980s hardcore punk he was weaned on – and then spit it out into a wild, page-count-heavy fanzine packed with any modern bands traveling on this same wavelength. Redd Kross around this era would be a great “comp”. White Zombie when they were starting up. And of course Raging Slab. 

This one from January 1989 was his final issue. There’s a lot of tomfoolery afoot. The first interview is with Sloth, a longhaired glammy/riff-heavy punk band whom I liked and whom I saw live at The Chatterbox in San Francisco not long after this. Going with the “if it has long hair, looks like it might smell bad, and plays loud rock music – it’s in!” vibe, there’s next a thing about a group of festival hippies called Magic Mushroom, and pictures of them at the Glastonbury Festival (Summer Solstice 1971), really for no reason at all.  

In the extensive “Nothing But 8-Tracks” record review section, it’s most of the current typical current noise/grunge/punk, but then Jeffo will sneak in a review of some food or beverage, such as his one on Mickey’s Malt Liquor, otherwise known far and wide as “Mickey’s Big Mouth” due to the wide opening of each jug-sized bottle. Apparently it was pretty rare on the East Coast. “The more vulgar of brew-consumers will tell you that the main draw behind Mickey’s is that after you drain its contents you can use the bottle to hold your own golden ale”. Well, that may be true, but honestly, in the late 80s, when craft beer and microbreweries were barely in existence, Mickey’s was also just “upscale” enough for those of us not wanting to plod through yet another Stroh’s or Meister Brau. The beer still exists!

As a non-tangential aside, I had a bit of a Southern California “police story” around this time, a couple years before. My friends and I took my 1980 Ford Mustang to the Oxnard Skate Palace in beautiful Oxnard, California to see The Butthole Surfers, Dag Nasty, Aggression and Uniform Choice. We packed my car with Mickey’s Big Mouth, and upon arrival, thereby commenced to drink (and drink heavily) in the parking lot of the Skate Palace, like morons. Since I’ve learned that this show was on April 4th, 1987, this meant that I was 19 years old. It wasn’t three minutes before cop flashlights were shining into the car, and we were all made to sheepishly get out and show our IDs. “How’d you all like to go to JAIL tonight?”, we were asked. Upon studying my ID – I was probably the youngest – I was told “You – you shouldn’t be drinking at all”. Absolutely not sir, a big mistake on my part. I think I was most worried about missing the show, to be honest, but all we really got for our idiocy was that we had to slowly pour out about 12 Mickey’s in front of the cops before we’d even gotten a buzz on. We understood we were fighting a war that we couldn’t win, you might say. And we still had a lot to learn about State Violence/State Control. 

But back to Flesh and Bones #8, right? While it wasn’t really a magazine I looked at to figure out which new bands to listen to, the whole was far greater than the sum of its parts. There’s are interviews with and/or things on Gwar, The Lunachicks, Dave Brock from Hawkwind, the Tater Totz, Reverb Motherfuckers, Soundgarden, The Hickoids (with jokes about Molly Hatchet), Gary Panter and a film column by Howie Pyro, reviewing “mondo” films like Shanty Tramp and Mantis in Lace. Laurie Es is a big contributor. There’s a piece of fiction called “Hurricane” by “Chris T”, which I believe was meant to be a Forced Exposure parody.

Those are all just seat-fillers for the three best parts. First, the interview with JD King, comix artist and once-bandmate of Thurston Moore’s in The Coachmen. King reads from Thurston’s letters that he’d written to him from around that time – 1977-78 – show reviews in which Moore says things like “Talking Heads are my main influence in life”, or, regarding The Cramps, “Everybody hates this band. They’ll never record. The worst band ever to be on stage. I dig them. I know they can’t play”. Second, the outstanding piece by Dr. Buzz called “Snarfin’ at the End of Aisle Eight – A Guide to Household Inhalants”, which talks about the relative merits of inhaling Lemon Pledge vs. Aqua Net vs. Easy-Off Oven Cleaner. Who knew so much joy was to be had just below our kitchen sink in the 1980s.

Finally, the live reviews in Flesh and Bones were always the best, almost completely made up as they were with totally imaginary hijinks and shenanigans. I’ve particularly been enamored with this one from a 1988 Firehose, Volcano Suns, Screaming Trees and Dos show at Irving Plaza in NYC for years: “By now, Irving Plaza is supposed to be leveled to make way for a parking deck, so who knows how many straight-edge ghosts are wandering the ruins, ready to spook any vino-breathing bum that happens to wander into their concrete haunt, Back in the old days, this place was host to many a cola fest featuring real fighting bands like Minor Threat and SS Decontrol. Far cry from the fistless poop making the round today….So anyway, I walked up the stairs to the main room not expecting trouble (I’m not the kind of guy that looks for fights) when suddenly, this skinhead wearing a ‘Doc Marten’ sweatshirt stepped out of the shadows and growled ‘You the dude who does Flesh+Bones?’ ‘Ye-eah’, I managed to stammer. ‘Well this is for Springa!’, he replied, and smacked me in the face with a magic-marker x-ed fist. The force of the punch sent me tumbling down the stairs again. Luckily, I was wearing my shlep-rock parka with the big furry hood, so it helped cushion my fall. By the time I made it up the stairs again, the guy was gone (sissy!) and DOS were playing their last song. This tall guy in a Big Stick wig kept heckling Kira, shouting ‘Show us your underwear!’ and ‘Kira’s got the 10½!’”….and it goes on from there with multiple lies that I’m sure turned an entirely mediocre show into one much more exciting.

Flesh and Bones was one of the greats, and I strongly encourage you to grab any you find on eBay that might lie within your self-appointed price range. Do it for Springa.

Back Of A Car #1

~ Jay Hinman ~ 2 Comments

I came in pretty late on Big Star. Naturally I never heard them in the 1970s, but I also didn’t hear them in the 80s, either, when I would have or should have been primed to do so. My guess is, given my obsessions during my college years (Lazy Cowgirls, Pussy Galore, Scratch Acid, Laughing Hyenas and what have you), they wouldn’t have taken anyway. It wasn’t until a six-week van trip across North America in 1993 when one of my traveling companions repeatedly blasted a homemade tape of Radio City did I even hear the band, and by then I was ready. All-in. I anointed it one of the ten greatest albums of all time, which is something I’ll still stand behind without question. I’ve written about this before, but when I told a good friend about my new favorite band Big Star, he let the air out of my tires with a withering “dude, that’s so high school”. Not my fucking high school.

Anyway, I get the mythos around the band, fully. The aborted/botched/unheard third album; the record company disasters that kept the first two albums from being revered until much later; the louche Memphis party scene captured in Stranded in Canton; Alex Chilton’s difficult personality – all that. Love it. Makes a ton of sense why a fanzine like Back of Car #1 might come out in 1994, right as the band had started doing those “reunion” shows with two original members and two fellas from The Posies. The interest was there; the stories were mostly untold; and like the Velvet Underground, Big Star were a band who readily inspired something well beyond simple devotion. 

Judith Beeman of Vancouver BC was the woman behind this, and she ended up doing four of them. This is the only one I have. She talks up the nascent “internet” and electronic mail in her introduction, already finding that it has been a highly effective means of sourcing contributors and connecting with them at shows and otherwise. She provides a layperson’s intro to Big Star up front, setting the stage that this thing would be far less of a fan club type of fanzine than one merely centered around Big Star, with outflowing concentric circles into Chiltoniana, similar-sounding bands (DBs, Chris Stamey, Posies), and into Judith’s own comics obsession, which had nothing to do with Big Star in the slightest.

This is further reinforced with the very first piece in the mag, Wilson Smith’s review of the 6/5/94 Big Star quote-unquote reunion show at the Fillmore in San Francisco. I didn’t go – I had an uppity personal policy against attending any reunion shows, one that I kept in place until Mission of Burma came to the same venue eight years later. Anyway, Smith – in what I thought was a fan club magazine when I bought it – didn’t really like it all that much, and says so (!). Bravo. Apparently some secret Springsteen cover band with “Adam Durwitz” of “Counting Crows” opened, which absolutely helps to validate my decision, even though it meant I never saw Alex Chilton in the flesh while he walked amongst us. 

After that, it’s a grab bag of the aforementioned. Ken Stringfellow of The Posies and the reanimated Big Star shares his tour diary from this reunion thing. Lyrics from songs are reprinted; old reviews are dusted off and reprinted; there’s even an article on This Mortal Coil, who did “Holocaust” and “Kanga Roo” on their album that I had as a store-bought cassette in high school, It’ll End in Tears. That would have to have been the first time I ever heard any Alex Chilton compositions, just not performed by him. Judith Beeman breaks apart the Alex Chilton tribute album, which came along at a time when tribute albums were actively poisoning used bins in stores across the globe. And then, after that, it’s not really a Big Star fanzine any longer – it’s those concentric circles and a bunch of comics. 

Oh, and I learned something, too. All these years I thought “Motel Blues” was a Chilton song. Turns out it was by Loudon Wainwright III, and it took Back of a Car #1 for me to finally discover this important fact.

Good read! You can check out all four of the issues Beeman and her team of pop-loving psychotics put together right here.

South Bay Ripper #2

~ Jay Hinman ~ 4 Comments

If there’s a better illustration of the metaphorical distance between the major, “in-touch” US underground music power centers (NY, LA, SF) and the proverbial cowtowns that surrounded them in 1980 than South Bay Ripper #2, I’m not sure where I’d find it. This San Jose fanzine – later to evolve into a true giant in its field, Ripper – really hits a nerve for me. I was in 7th grade in San Jose in 1980, and the sort of grasping, desperate drive to hear anything that was different, weird or challenging was all-consuming for me that year, but I barely knew where to find it.

These kids were older than I was for sure – 19-20 as opposed to, um, 12 – so they had IDs and freedom and perhaps the ability & wherewithal to get rides up to San Francisco for shows. But what South Bay Ripper #2 underscores here is both how utterly out of touch my then-city of 500,000 people was with the attitudes and tastes of San Francisco, a mere hour to the north, and how even a local AOR radio station playing The Pretenders or “Train in Vain” by The Clash was a big deal. I mean, in 7th grade I was personally obsessed with both The Pretenders and B-52s, both of whom penetrated my consciousness before college radio had, and I’d scour free papers like BAM for any glimpses of “the new wave”. There would be advertisements for strange-looking local bands like No Sisters, The Spies and The Jars – none of whom I’d ever heard – and I remember telling a kid at school, when he asked me what my favorite bands were, “Oh, No Sisters, The Spies, The Jars – you know”. 

Tim Tonooka, Violent Vamp and the rest of the South Bay Ripper crew weren’t all that far ahead of me in 1980, save for the fact that they’d actually seen all the limp power-pop and “energy rock” bands like SVT and Mr. Clean and the Nu-Models that fell under the all-encompassing moniker of “new wave” that year. (Let’s again note for the record that this fanzine changed radically and for the better in 1981). They too are grasping at whatever shreds of underground culture they can find – and it’s really, really hard to find in San Jose! One of the few blessings of our current era is that a kid in Hattiesburg, Mississippi or McGillicuddy, Iowa can tell you as much about the Electric Eels and Can and Teenage Jesus & The Jerks – and their modern equivalents – just as readily as a kid in Manhattan or LA can. In San Jose in 1980, it seems that word of The Clash, The Pretenders and Rockpile might have penetrated the city limits, but what was being written about in Slash, Damage, NY Rocker and so forth had barely made a dent. 

Maybe a few reasons for that, which this fanzine helps to shed light on. KFJC, which would soon go on to be one of the finest underground college radio stations of all time (and which would change my life a year or so after this), had only recently had control wrested from a mainstream-focused programming manager in 1979, and they had been dipping their toes into “the new wave” pretty gingerly. Two of the writers for this one, Kevin Animal and Diana Campa, were DJs I used to listen to regularly on that station. I’ll never forget my jaw hitting the floor when Diana played “Sex Beat” by the Gun Club, the first time I ever heard the band. South Bay Ripper #2 bemoans the lack of venues to play at – even some dopey “local wavoids” called Two Words aren’t allowed to play the annual “Tapestry in Talent” festival, a thing my mom used to go to every year to buy ceramic owls and potholders. 

Local commercial rock radio, like hard-rock KSJO, was trying out programs like Kerry Loewen’s “Modern Humans” on Sunday nights from 11pm-1am. Loewen is interviewed here, and he sounds like a proto-industry shill, the sort of person Howie Klein was always rightly or wrongly accused of being. Loewen says he’s not allowed to say the words “punk” or “new wave” on the air. “I like to call the music on the show Modern Music. That’s the term I coined and people may like or hate it”…..”I played 5 songs in an hour that were New Wave and they included like Madness, Iggy Pop, the Romantics and Bram Tchaikovsky; obviously semi-punk”.

Yet Kerry Loewen was a guru to the South Bay Ripper staff. And why not? I remember how in San Jose everything cool felt just out of reach for us. I’d see the badass skull logo for San Francisco’s KUSF and I wanted desperately to listen to the station. I’d read about bands from England playing on Berkeley’s KALX, and try and tune every radio in the house in an almost entirely futile attempt to try and pick it up. This fanzine doesn’t just tout Loewen; there’s also an interview with Peter Bloom, a young man who’d recently booked a 13-gig string of new wave shows at San Jose State’s Spartan Pub. They reminisce about bands like The Instamoids, Jo Allen & The Shapes and The Kingbees from LA who played during the legendary run. Jo Allen does a brief interview, and he is asked to describe his music. “It’s basic 80’s rock. I wouldn’t call it New Wave cuz that doesn’t mean anything anymore. I wish people would stop the confusion with New Wave so it would get another image other than spitting and safety pins”. 1980 is 1977 in San Jose, California, but thankfully hardcore will totally wipe the slate clean a year later.

Rock Scene (January 1975)

~ Jay Hinman ~ 1 Comment

We’ve already established in a previous post here that Rock Scene was by no means a fanzine of the sort we’re typically going on about here. A more rigid editor might require us to strike any discussion of it from the site. But since I’m the editor, here we are: Rock Scene Volume 3, Number 1 from January 1975, with Roxy Music on the cover, no less. Big in Cleveland.

The magazine’s editor Richard Robinson – who looks a tad like Gary Numan in his photo – says in his intro thing that, vis-a-vis rock and roll at the dawn of 1975, “There’s a lot happening, but it’s just repeats, no matter how good it is. You’ll find hints of what’s new in Rock Scene; unfortunately it’s just hints. The truth is that it’s up to you to get these new rock scenes underway”. How frustrating, right? I can totally feel the malaise in the three-dot gossip column about Yes, Focus, Burton Cummings and Chicago – although “Our spies report that they’ve seen Lou Reed sporting white hair” and that “overseas fans will soon have a chance to hear the King Biscuit Flower Hour as overseas syndication is in the works”. I totally remember this show, and hadn’t thought of it in a great while. It was a late-night FM rock staple with live concerts from American AOR/FM staples. The people took what they could get in the late 70s.

And yet – I don’t think they actually had it all that bad, really. I have gathered a few issues of Rock Scene in my time – which was decidedly not its time – and have found it to be both information- and visual-packed. Candid photos, usually from parties, were among its specialties. Some of these are quite baffling: there’s a picture of Sha-Na-Na’s Bowzer with Keith Moon; a photo of a roller derby competition with the caption “Roller Derby: something new on the rock scene”; and a photograph of a sculpture of Black Oak Arkansas’ Jim Dandy riding a horse naked whilst holding a tambourine. Apparently the band tried to get the British Museum to take the sculpture, and were rejected. Weird.

After a Suzi Quatro interview, there’s a goofy photo spread called “Suzi Q. Judges a Dance Contest”, with this nauseating accompanying text: “The big day finally came when Suzi Quatro and Co. arrived in Hollywood! Waiting breathlessly for her at the airport with his lookalike hairdo, Suzi Q. t-shirt and posters for her to autograph was none other than Rodney Bingenheimer! (sic). After many welcoming kisses, roses, and more than a few tears of joy – Rodney whisked Miss Teenage Daydream off to his disco on the Sunset Strip – to judge a dance contest (cute?) and meet some Hollywood, er, scenemakers”. Get off the air, Rodney!!

The “Ask Doc Rock” column has a question about 8-track bootleg tapes (wow), and another question about how to see the skull on the cover of the Velvet Underground’s White Light White Heat. This is followed by a “Roxy Run-Down” with a piece on each band member, and Lance Loud’s column “Tid Bits from the Diamond Doggiebag”, about Bowie, Bryan Ferry and David Johanson and Jimmy Page all partying at Club 82 – but not together – along with various gossip on Van Dyke Parks, Jobriath and Sparks. 

Other photo spreads are of David Johanson and Cyrinda Foxe at home, in a typical ultra-tiny NYC apartment for two; and some great snaps of McKenzie Phillips partying her ass off with Mick Jagger. There’s lots of Bowie; rock stars’ cars; “Eno Cruises the Big Apple”; and photos from the nascent stirrings of the New York rock underground. I love the really early photo of Patti Smith playing live (her debut 45 Hey Joe/Piss Factory has just dropped), along with photos of the Harlots of 42nd Street and Teenage Lust. I mean, I can go on and on here to continue painting the picture: there’s a “Dear Wayne (County)” advice column; an insufferable Kim Fowley column in which he pretends to interview himself; a piece on Brownsville Station by Lenny Kaye; and Rock Scene’s London report from Linda Merinoff, with some super syrupy gossip about Nico being exceptionally difficult and surly and badmouthing everyone she plays with except Brian Eno.

These mags are usually no more than $15 a pop online if you’re discriminating in who you buy from, and worth every cent for the innumerable reasons mentioned herewith.

New Wave #1

~ Jay Hinman ~ 5 Comments

This, for lack of a better term, is a “my cup runneth over” fanzine from 1977. It’s somewhat amazing to even be allowed to look at it. I was not aware of the existence of New Wave #1 until I found a way of procuring a copy on eBay – nor was I aware of the absurdly great bounty within it, save for a drunkenly-written Lester Bangs piece about punk that ended up being sadly uneventful once I actually read it. 

I’m 99% sure that this is the only issue of this San Francisco-based newspaper-style fanzine ever created, and I’m just as assured that a 1-issue run was not at all what the editors had intended when they excitedly put this together in August 1977. (For instance, in the back there’s a plea for subscribers. $9.50 for 12 issues, plus your choice of either The Ramones’ Leave Home or Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers). Who were these editors? Proving that he was in fact ultimately useful for something, the main editor was Howie Klein; the associate editor was Steve Seid, about whom more later.

Excited is definitely the word. We’re into punk pretty early here: the long-awaited and much-prophesized rocknroll revolution is finally here, which doesn’t stop many of the big-name rock writers assembled from sneering about punk anyway, Bangs included. As it should be. Where do I start? How about with some of the bigger names: Billy Altman writes about Mink Deville, and Richard Meltzer gets his own column on jazz: “Bebop on Your Mama”. It’s really funny, actually, and full of his patented discombobulated snark. He even saw Dizzy Gillespie play live that year. Patti Smith pens a mostly unreadable poetry slam-type thing on Robert Bresson that I’d probably have sent back to her for rewrite (“come on, Patti, I know you can do better”). 

Loads of excitement and hot gossip in the San Francisco, LA, NY and UK scene reports. LA’s is by Gregg Turner, he’d go on to do an almost identical column in Take It! in the 1980s. An “Amy G” is mentioned in the SF column; she’s a “former punk of the month” who has just moved to Memphis. Would this – be still my heart – be Amy Gassner, who’d join The Klitz in Memphis?? Gotta be, right? If you’ve never heard her 1979 rendition of “Brown Sugar”, which was recorded “under the influence of hog tranquilizers” and absolutely sounds like it, you’ll need to do so right now. And if you have a copy of that record and need to part with it, please get in touch.

Maybe my single favorite page in New Wave #1 is the one compiling some instant-reaction crowd interview snippets after Crime’s June 18th, 1977 show at the Mabuhay Gardens; this includes quotes from Jean Caffeine from New Dezezes, Britley Black (sic), who’d later join the band; Don Vinyl and Michael Snyder, the latter of whom was an SF rock critic I think at the Chronicle, back when daily newspapers actually had multiple in-house rock critics. Also in various spots throughout this magazine is talk about how Jennifer Moscone, the Mayor’s kid, is going to punk shows at the Mabuhay. Sheriff Michael Hennessey was into punk, too, and he used to regularly show up at the Mab. 

There are too many other features for me to go deep into: Cheap Trick, The Dils, Avengers, Nuns pieces; the only one on Ozzie from Sacramento I’ve ever seen; a Mary Monday (!) article plus a centerfold; The Negatives, a Richard Hell interview and more. There’s a country music overview by Ed Ward that tries to tie modern country outlaws like Johnny Paycheck to punk, rather unsuccessfully. And the capper, the thing that just makes this a chef’s-kiss A+ fanzine in my book, is the Steve Seid film column, “Enter The Avant Garde Surfers”. It calls out genius films like Payday and The King of Marvin Gardens and Three Women, among others, and is essentially a paean to how utterly amazing 70s American filmmaking was up to that point. Seid realizes he’s living in a golden age, and is essentially admonishing readers that they ought to realize it as well. Alas, “Star Wars”, a popular children’s film that helped to quickly bury major-studio risk-taking, was released more or less as this magazine was being written. Seid was not to know, but one of his cultural worlds was ending just as another was excitedly being born.

Trendy Rag #9

~ Jay Hinman ~ Leave a comment

This 1986 cut/paste/copy mini-zine is my sole issue of Trendy Rag, published just outside of Boston by a fella named Jim Hildreth. Jim appears caught between a love of hardcore and a need to make fun of it; between a love of nascent guitar noise/pigfuck and a need to sneer at the fanzines helping to shepherd it (Forced Exposure, Conflict, Chemical Imbalance); and between a desire to put out an opinionated fanzine and to shut the hell up – as alluded to in his intro.

I’m not sure how much further Hildreth went with this fanzine – are you? Nothing online – well, nothing except for this and this I guess – which I suppose is why I do this site in the first place. He kinda kicks the thing off with a recognition of the “limp” Boston scene of the late 1986 moment – “most all-ages shows revolve around metal-drunk band GANG GREEN or STRAWDOGS that XXX keeps presenting”. Ah ha, the all-ages modifier is our clue that Hildreth is a young man – well, that and the fact he’s still listening to 7 Seconds in 1986, or ever listened to them at all. There’s a mail interview with Big Stick that’s pretty much a both-ways goof, in which the duo each claim to be in their 70s and profess their love for many of the same metalcore bands Hildreth was bemoaning one page earlier.

Jarboe of The Swans also more or less dodges many of her interview questions, but I think it’s the first time I’ve read an interview with her (never a fan of her solo music nor of The Swans, there are only so many years in a life) and I like that she’s in keeping with whatever obtuse and abstracted persona I’d imagined for her. Steve Epstein and Jeremy Spencer guest-reprint their December 1985 radio interview with The Minutemen, conducted two weeks before D. Boon’s death. Hildreth mentions in his intro how much he hated Project: Mersh when it came out and therefore skipped the band when they came through town; this unfortunately mistaken opinion was one held by many at the time, and I’ve never understood it. Excellent record!

I was most excited to see a super-early Pussy Galore interview – maybe my favorite band of the late 80s. And it’s not with Spencer, it’s with Cristina (Martinez), and she’s not even in the band any longer: “I’ve been kicked out of the band and they’re trying to get a new guitar player this girl Rebecca Corbett who used to be in Missing Foundation”. She talks about how she’s about to start playing with the Honeymoon Killers; about how the phenomenal Pussy Gold 5000 record ended up on Buy Our Records (“they offered us money”); about her work as a phone sex operator (she encourages the interviewers to get out their Visas and Master Cards), and about how a super-secret surprise tape’s about to come out, and how we’re all going to love it but she can’t tell us what it is (it was Exile on Main Street). Mostly she’s just brash, young and annoying, which is entirely keeping with her 80s persona as well. 

Most of Trendy Rag #9 is handwritten, including the entire “Recordings” review section. This is where I can see Hildreth bouncing around from late-hardcore mediocrities to stuff like Rat At Rat R and Ciccone Youth and a Slits live bootleg he’s just picked up. Best quote: “The Slits were an amazingly beautiful band and The Cocteau Twins just totally ripped them and many other Rough Trade bands like The Raincoats off”. Oh yeah??