Conflict #42

In recent weeks I’ve, uh, “opened up” about just what my precise musical obsessions were during the years 1986-89, and unsurprisingly – and I’m not ashamed of most of ‘em – they were a lot like those of many others. If it was on Touch & Go, Homestead, Amphetamine Reptile or SST, it got my attention. If it was abrasive, rocking and loud, it got my attention. My “favorite contempo band” during this era ranged from the Lazy Cowgirls to Mudhoney, I think, with pit stops for Big Black, Naked Raygun, Scratch Acid, Soul Asylum, Urge Overkill and the Laughing Hyenas along the way. There was some deeper digging going on for sure, and I spent far more time with music from the first half of the 80s than the second half I was living in. Yet as we came out of the 1980s, I think my very “favorite current band” on 1/1/90 was Death of Samantha. My “all-time favorite bands” were The Flesh Eaters, The Velvet Underground and The Fall. I still had much to discover, and aside from the Gibson Bros, The Clean, World of Pooh & a few pop bands, I was very decidedly a hard/loud/noise-centered impressionable young twentysomething as the decade closed.

After all that, and with 33+ years of hindsight, the band I listen to the most now from those days is – that’s right, you totally nailed it: Pussy Galore. I was into them from the very first time I spied Laurel Waco’s Groovy Hate Fuck EP and convinced her to let me borrow it, strategically hiding the back cover with its large-lettered PUSSY-JEW-CUNT-DIE-MEAT-KILL-ASSHOLE with my arm as I shepherded it back to my Isla Vista, CA dorm room. I soon found the Feel Good About Your Body 7”EP at Zed Records in Long Beach, and then the real topper was that 1986 Pussy Gold 5000 EP, where they instantly became one of the tip-top bands of the era, and the one I revere the most now. 

I saw them on 10/27/88 at Raji’s in Los Angeles, a show so ear-splittingly loud that I scooted to the very back of the room, where Eugene, the then-cook at Raji’s and the bald hero who kicks off The Decline of Western Civilization (“That’s stupid, punk rock, I don’t know, I just think of it as rocknroll”), was peeking out of his kitchen cubbyhole at the chaos up on stage. I drove home to Isla Vista fearing permanent ear damage, and could barely hear my friends talking in the car. Those were, as they say, “good times”. 

This issue of Gerard Cosloy’s Conflict, #42, was probably where I first heard the members of Pussy Galore “speak”. It took me probably until this interview to understand that it was their underlying snotty 60s garage punk riffs & attitude, caked in a total wall of noise, that was what endeared me to them the most. When I found out down the road that folks like Tim Warren and Larry Hardy were just as smitten as I was with the band, well, it all made sense. And look, I’ve taken this long to even really get to talking about this issue of the fanzine – I told you when I started this that Fanzine Hemorrhage would be a stream-of-consciousness, mostly unedited voyage into the unknown, and this time I’m keeping my promise.

So let’s talk about Conflict #42. This is about as seminally representative of Cosloy’s mid/late-80s stance and vibe as any of his issues were. Around this time, names like “Jim Testa”, “Mike Gitter”, “Donny the Punk” and “Jack Rabid” were only known to me as mocked men in the pages of Conflict, and though my knowledge of their crimes was therefore heavily one-sided, I ate it all up nonetheless and got a ton of laffs out of Cosloy’s sarcastic eviscerations. (We’d later get copies of Gitter’s XXX fanzine on the west coast and that certainly helped to reinforce things). It didn’t hurt that Cosloy’s sense of humor fell in many of the same bizarro places mine did at the time. This issue has much talk about an “oi revival”, so much so that it is broached to a bewildered Pussy Galore and comes up in at least ten different reviews. He asks the band, “If both The Exploited and The Partisans were drowning and you could only save one of them, which would you save?”, which is followed by “(dead silence)”. (I will state for the record, however, that The Exploited’s “Dead Cities” and The Partisans’ “Police Story” are the two finest songs of the oi/UK82 era). 

Cosloy was running Homestead Records at this point, or at least selecting which bands to sign, and 1985/86 saw his releases of leading scene indicators from Sonic Youth, Dinosaur, Big Black, Volcano Suns, Death of Samantha, Green River and many others. So the guy came with some cred, shall we say, all the more enhanced by an ability to pick gems from the underground to spotlight in Conflict that I’d then go out and buy, or at least play on my college radio show. My re-read of Conflict #42 surprised me as to just how many English (non-oi) bands he was digging into, from Eyeless in Gaza to The Wedding Present to The Weather Prophets to The Mighty Lemon Drops, about the latter of whom he says, “If this band ever comes to NYC, they will surely feel the wrath of skin violence, razors in the night, et al.”

I’ll also give the man some props for where he lived and published in 1986: 62 Avenue C #3 in Manhattan. I visited New York in 1991 during the crack epidemic and, as a soft San Franciscan, felt a little tense walking anywhere east of Avenue A – so kudos for some real urban living. I’ll leave you with Cosloy’s round-up of current top fanzines of the day to help you parse out the then-cut of his jib.