I’ve long had a hankering to own a copy of Thurston Moore’s multi-issue 80s fanzine Killer, but I’ve never seen the thing and don’t know anyone who has one (do you?). Sometimes I’ve gotten it confused with a 90s fanzine called Sonic Death, which is maybe a little more easy to come by but still often quite “dear” if you’re looking to trade money for one. I did it anyway. It’s a publication of the Sonic Youth Fan Club – there was, in fact, such a thing (!). And it’s 100% written by Thurston, Lee, Kim and Steve. How about that?
Sonic Death #5 finds us in 1994. I was sort of following Sonic Youth at that point but I’d mostly tuned out; suffice to say I was not in the fan club. This was not due to any anti-SY stance on my part; I still maintain the September 28th, 1987 show of theirs at Borsodi’s Coffee House in Isla Vista, CA was one of the capital-G Great Nights of My Life. And maybe my second-favorite time I saw them of the 7-8 times I did was a year after this fanzine, a blowout performance on the Washing Machine tour in San Francisco, with The Amps and Bikini Kill opening. Tremendous band, but I was spoiled for choice in those years and when it came down to, say, High Rise, Dadamah and the Cheater Slicks vs. “Kool Thing”, I had my lines drawn when it came to my record-buying dollar, and was highly resistant to just about anything on a major label, including my previous independent favorites who’d grabbed at the brass ring.
This issue totally sucked me in with one of my favorite photos ever of the eternally perplexing Royal Trux from 1987; you can see Jennifer’s eyes, for one. There’s another one here. No other Royal Trux content graces Sonic Death #5 – a great fanzine move! Lee Renaldo writes a chatty and excited introduction and catches up the club w/ recent doings on the last day of 1993, talking about recent shows playing with Neil Young, Metallica, The Black Crowes and Faith No More, among many others. “I had to wonder at one point how we’d managed to get our foot in this door!”. Indeed.
Here’s what I love about these folks; this dumbfounded wide-eyed marveling gives immediate way to an interview with The Ex, followed by Thurston Moore going bananas with a few dozen reviews of far-underground 45s and LPs spanning from Keiji Haino to The Frumpies to Skinned Teen to The Shadow Ring to Merzbow to the Screamin’ Mee-Mees. The distance from MTV to PSF was really bridged by this band, and this band only. There’s a bunch of banter about the next album, xeroxed fan letters (including those screaming “sell out!”), and something pretty cool – “print-outs” of missives from the online Sonic Life mailing list, all from 1993. I don’t believe I really understood that there was something called an internet and that I could be on it until at least a year later, despite being 25 years old at that point; it was my late-fortysomething Mom who gave me the lowdown on chat rooms and America Online and all that, if you can believe it. I’ve written here about just how amazing it was to get “email” at work, which I and my favorite co-workers immediately used for pranks only. There was a Sonic Life listserv, and I didn’t even know about it.
Sonic Death #5 is a sloppy and chaotic fanzine through and through, in the very best sense of both words. I’d have to think it introduced quite a few Fan Club members to an aesthetic and a revelatory “mode of seeing” that they’d never cottoned to before. Lucky for all of us, each issue of this fanzine is available to read right here and right now as a PDF, thanks to Sonic Youth themselves. Download them before they go away like that amazing Contextual Dissemination site did!
Fanzine Hemorrhage 
