Bull Tongue Review #1

After Forced Exposure wrapped it up in 1993, I had to make do with reading Byron Coley’s music writing work wherever I could track it down, even if that meant having to wade through Jay Babcock’s early 2000s Arthur periodical in order to find his & Thurston Moore’s joint “Bull Tongue” column. Man, that whole Arthur schtick really stuck in my craw at the time, and I vented my spleen here and here about it, though somewhat tongue-in-cheek in the latter instance (this was also when I was probably the most “right wing” I’ve ever been in my life, which then positioned me as a libertarian-leaning moderate Democrat).  

Coley’s stuff was around if you looked for it – and I certainly did, as he was foremost in helping to shape my eventual musical environment, and was often a real laff to boot. Still is. A few years back, 2014 to be exact, he finally popped up with his own publication, Bull Tongue Review, “A Quarterly Journal of Post-Rock Cultural Pluralism”. They lasted five issues in total, with the conceit being that this magazine would be a significant extension of that Arthur column, the one where he and Moore got to prattle about favorite records, books and other pieces of sub-underground cultural ephemera. Coley even says so in the intro to Bull Tongue #1, at which point the two of them get right into it, reviewing Tim Warren’s latest Back From The Grave comps, Adele Bertei’s Peter Laughner book, a bunch of S-S Records, some wild jazz, and (gasp) even my own Dynamite Hemorrhage fanzine. These guys never really took ownership of their respective parts of each long column, which was kinda fun, though I think the “When I moved to NYC in late 76 at age 18 and was later in a band called The Coachmen” section was probably written by Thurston Moore.

If their lengthy column was, in fact, the whole fanzine – hey, that’d be a really, really great fanzine! But wait, there’s more. Bull Tongue Review was an invite-only compendium of short pieces by the people from the greater Byron Coley universe: folks from the FE days like Suzy Rust, Steve Albini, Chris D and Tom Givan; and other tentacles extending outward into the underground to ensnare folks like Richard Meltzer, Joe Carducci, Lisa Carver, Gary Panter, Andrea Feldman, Brian Turner, Marc Masters, Donna Lethal and many more. (By the way – Donna Lethal is a tremendous and tremendously wacked-out writer; when I first corresponded with her she was going out with Chris D., and she told me about her indie-press memoir Milk of Amnesia, which was absolutely fantastic. I’ve lost touch with her). And even Coley’s wife Lili Dwight gets a turn, and she contributes a fine piece about those OXO Liquiseal travel mugs. 

Each contributor gets 250-500 words or so to review something, to tell a story, write a poem or, in rare cases, to contribute some artwork. Most in Bull Tongue #1 review something, usually a record (!), and that’s all to the good – yet some of the other stuff’s even better, like when Alan Bishop relays a tale told to him by Human Hands’ David Wiley about the time he got a phone call in the early 80s to rush down to a friend’s house so he could drive the Sun Ra Arkestra to a Sizzler. Or when Chris D. reviews a bunch of modern neo-noir films. Or when Owen Maercks talks about what it was really like to hear The Ramones’ first album in 1975 for the first time – what a great piece. (It may not beat Steve Albini’s writing on the matter, though – I’ll never forget his description of him and his brother playing the first LP and laughing uproariously at it, yelling “this totally sucks!” at it, calling it the worst record ever, and then…at night…thinking about it incessantly and wondering if it was time for a life change). 

Ted Lee, who still runs Feeding Tube Records with Coley, contributes the miniature artwork for each section. It’s a little jarring to have a record be reviewed, accompanied by a weird drawing rather than the album cover, but it’s their deal, not mine, and why not anyway, right? They did it this way four more times and I snapped them up as soon as I could. I keep hoping in vain that another Bull Tongue will make a surprise appearance sometime soon. It’s a terrific concept, and it’ll work well as long as some Coley-adjacent crew are the ones contributing.