Wipeout! #7

Always knew that Eric Friedl’s Wipeout! was one of my hands-down favorite reads of the 90s, yet cracking it again this week only reinforced what a total blast his fanzine was. I know that given Friedl’s subsequent stature as a member of The Oblivians and as the creator and proprietor of Goner Records, these early garage punk & noise-adjacent fanzines from him are quite “in demand”. I had to regrettably trade one away to a European just to get something I really needed from a guy, and now I feel like I’m the one who got totally rooked.

I certainly remembered the sheer amount of wild and tip-top underground music content the guy shoved into each particular issue, but reading Wipeout! #7 from 1993, I’d also forgotten how absurdly chaotic an issue could be. Like Friedl says at several points in this mag: he’s really just into the music, he loves the music, and he doesn’t really care that much about what he’s writing nor what you think about it. So check out this Truman’s Water 45 review for a sense of how it all went down with this as his ethos:

Though we don’t knead no stinking badges Truman’s Water frustrate the 7” fan by making their albums essential to understanding the short 7”ers, giving keys and subject headers to look up in individual research. So these spastics don’t obey, and throw “Sad Sailor Song” into epic areas and pretty without sentimentality or icky Ricardo beat (cha cha), wires are wiry and I hear the phone ring during the whole thing (a good sign!). 

I get the first sentence; the second is about as wacked-out as the Truman’s Water singles themselves, and fairly representative of any given Friedl review, in this issue at least. One of Eric’s recurring loves in these magazines is what was going on in my part of the world in ‘93, San Francisco, which he mistakenly calls “The San Mateo Scene”: Mummies, Supercharger, Spoiled Brats, Phantom Surfers, Trashwomen and so on. He was even more up on it all than I was from his perch in Memphis, and I was seeing one or another of those bands literally every other weekend around that time. Here’s a letter to the editor in this issue, referencing some of Friedl’s mania from Wipeout #6:

Eric,

  Mummies mummies mummies mummies mummies mummies, you’ll be swallowing shitrock hard when you realize it’s gonna sound as shitty in one year as 77 punk does now. I can’t wait.

Cal

Vanishing Rock, CO

Took me another five/ten years to get there with The Mummies, but Supercharger still can’t be touched.

Another big love is Japan – garage punk from Japan; noise; The Boredoms; surf, you name it. If it was raw and Japanese, Friedl was on it. And this one’s got an interview with Jeff Evans from ‘68 Comeback and The Gibson Bros, quite a bit better and more incisive than the one I did in Superdope #6 that same year. Friedl also documents a roadtrip to “Garageshock II” in Bellingham, WA, which you’d probably call a proto-Gonerfest from the early 90s that was pulled together by Dave Crider from Estrus Records. Many of this issue’s heroes performed at that Summer 1993 thing, and it sounds like something maybe I should have traveled up to see myself. I don’t know, I had my garage punk favorites at the time, but anything that strayed into “hot rod” or “monster rock” or novelty shit, I really had trouble with – so yeah, while I’d see The Cheater Slicks or Supercharger or Teengenerate or anything related to Don Howland, Jeff Evans or even Jon Spencer in a hot minute that year, I probably would’ve been moping into my Red Hook and doing my best to avoid the bowlcuts and the romulans and the drunken go-go bar girls at “Garageshock II”.

Finally, this one came out when Eric’s own band The Oblivians were starting to move it into gear, putting out their killer debut 45 Call The Shots that same summer. Man, we were so overflowing with exceptional garage trash that year, weren’t we? I think that was THE year. Within a year or two The Oblivians would be touring in Europe, and Friedl only had two more Wipeout!s to give us before really devoting himself to Goner Records and his band. I’ve hung on to a few of ‘em, and I shall be dissecting them in time as this Fanzine Hemorrhage project proceeds accordingly.