Away From The Pulsebeat (Winter 1987)

I know exactly where I was when this issue I’ve scanned and am writing about here first hit my hands in 1987: Aron’s Records in Los Angeles, a store I celebrated years ago in a very self-referential essay called “Let’s Go Record Shopping in 1987 Los Angeles”. And at that time, age 19 for me, a magazine like Away From The Pulsebeat was absolutely and totally in my proverbial wheelhouse, and I happily bought this one and the one that followed it, because I was a college radio dweeb and my favorite bands in the world were the Lazy Cowgirls, Pussy Galore, Scratch Acid, Soul Asylum, Big Black, Death of Samantha and similar other acts who were very much on the Pulsebeat wavelength.

That said, this was a wavelength shared by many folks at the time, and though Away From The Pulsebeat was an ambitious, beautifully laid-out and photo-packed magazine, it truly was a “poor man’s” Forced Exposure, in the sense that it read like a tribute mag, sadly leavened with a bit of gross Your Flesh-style phony nihilism, the sort where a record review ends with something unnecessarily nasty and lame like “Bite it, boy”. There are really two sides to this Hoboken, NJ magazine; the written side, by Art Black, and the rock photography side, by Monica Dee. Dee’s side is phenomenal. She was a tremendous photographer, both posed and onstage, and the magazine liberally uses her originals, especially on a full-color back cover. There’s stuff of hers in here that I’ve never seen elsewhere, like this Pussy Galore shot, for instance. Why doesn’t Monica Dee also have a killer photo book like Marty Perez does?!??

It’s Black who’s the weaker link here. I mean, his enthusiasms are fine, I guess – except the whole thing is enthusiasms. You’ve never seen someone encounter every single indie record of the year and find nearly every one of them a “major fave” (there are 3 reviews in this issue alone that end with those two words). It could be the Tuatara comp or a Dayglo Abortions LP, it’s all amazing. He even likes October Faction! Have you no shame, Art?? So unlike Forced Exposure, in which good taste and discernment were paramount, I could not – and did not – use this issue of Away From The Pulsebeat as any sort of consumer guide. How could I, with that October Faction review? Instead, he’d checkmark/confirm positive biases toward records I already had, like the Baby Astronauts’ All The Pancakes You Can Eat or Expando Brain’s Mother of God…, records that I thought that me & my pals were the only ones who knew about ‘em. 

But listen, being upbeat and excited, even in what turned out to be a pretty “down period” for rocknroll, is probably better than being a Gloomy Gus, isn’t it? OK, so maybe it’s his sub-Peter Davis schtick that bugs me the most, re-reading this as I am 35+ years after having bought it. I don’t really like Black’s pretend (?) “I’m a racist” bit at the front of this issue, which carries on into the record reviews whenever he’s reviewing something by a group with black people in it. The interviews are okay, with the likes of Das Damen, The Nomads, Killdozer and the Celibate Rifles getting a few pages each. These were all very important people in my world in 1987, and as such, buying this issue was a no-brainer then. Yet I think it’s quite telling that I’ve barely thought of it since, and aside from Dee’s photos, think significantly less of it now.