To date I’ve tried to share a bit of the tenor and tone of the 1990s garage punk fanzines I collected at the time, and have written several dispositive entries here about Wipe Out!, Alright!, Human Garbage Disposal and Bazooka, respectively. Today we’re going to talk about one I hadn’t been aware of at the time but found a copy of to procure online, Sooprize Package #2 from the UK, a fanzine I was hipped to by someone who rightly thought I might enjoy it. Oh dear, it’s “The Lo-Fidelity Magazine for Losers” – already signaling a deep need to “fit in” with the faux-aggressive, fuck-it-all punk presentation of the time (1994).
You see, there was this whole class of garage-rooted bands and fanzines who basically took their cues directly from Tim Warren’s over-the-top Crypt Records advertisements of the 80s and 90s. Those ads were absolute masterworks of confrontational art and low class, with a presentation and an ethos that truly couldn’t be beat. Everyone laughed their asses off about that at the time. I’ve done you the favor of printing an example here so you can see the germ from which fanzines like Sooprize Package took (virtually all of) their inspiration from.
While I totally loved Crypt, of course, they helped to enable a bit of a dividing line between discerning music-first lovers of the raw, loud & snotty, and the many dullards who got off on exclamation points, “losers”, “rekkids”, “you suck” etc. – and in dressing oneself in sartorial splendor like the man on the cover of this one, Shane White of The Spoiled Brats (a local from my area, San Francisco, who did his own fanzine Pure Filth that probably sat on what I’d personally call the wrong side of the line).
If you’re a believer in the 80/20 rule, well, so am I. 20% of this shtick, both musically and in the scene infrastructure that surrounded it, was a blast and had a winking “intelligence”, for lack of a better term, that understood that the riffs, energy and the mayhem of 60s- and ‘77-inspired rocknroll could be effectively harnessed and even improved upon, mixing in feedback, brute-force noise and dirty blues (Cheater Slicks, Oblivians) or inventing a goofus teen dance party “language” that played upon sitcom tropes and borrowed from the best no-fi bands of the 60s and 70s (Supercharger, Brentwoods). There were plenty of other ways to successfully cut it within that hallowed 20%, and bands like The Night Kings, Gories, Fireworks and others did just that. I even liked a lot of the instrumental surf revival action at the time, and no, I didn’t mind at all that some of the bands dressed funny and synchronized their moves on stage. What’s better than getting three sheets to the wind and self-lobotomizing at a live rock show, am I right?
80% of it was total garbage. It’s where you found the hot rod creeps, the wallet-on-a-chain goofballs, Gearhead, all-white bands with “Los” in their names, grown men wearing monkey masks, “Man or Astroman” and so on. Sooprize Package #2 straddled this line rather deftly, to be honest. Clearly editor James Petter got off on anything “raw ‘n wild” and he did his best to stoke the fires of this whole scene in a very well-put-together digest-sized fanzine that celebrated it all in xeroxed, cut-n-paste glory. It’s also a trans-continental celebration, bringing in English and European bands that I’ve never heard with bands that routinely performed within three miles of my home. The San Francisco tentacles of this scene stretched even further than I knew of at the time, and this 1994 issue is going bananas over the Trashwomen, Spoiled Brats, Phantom Surfers and Rip Offs, and these bands are playing all across Europe and Japan, with their exploits documented herein.
Petter, like I said, is a highly excitable guy, and he basically plasters the Crypt advertisement ethos across the entire issue. His best piece in here by far is a restrained and actually quite illuminative interview with Lux & Ivy from The Cramps at the Regent Hotel in posh Marylebone, London. The band have just released what I’m sure was a totally forgettable record called Flamejob (I’ve never heard it, to be fair, so it may be a psychobilly masterpiece), but listen – they’re Lux & Ivy. They were always a fantastic interview, and they’re even better here. They’ve just signed to Creation Records, because they’re The Cramps and of course they did. Petter does a great job getting them to open up about their passions, their discography and even their thoughts on some of the current bands in the lowbrow garage punk scene who are routinely opening shows for them at this point. Gotta love Erick and Kristy.
So I suppose the whole thing’s a bit of the proverbial mixed bag, but I’d prefer to be magnanimous and acknowledge that it’s impossible to not greatly admire the effort, craft and enthusiasm that went into assembling Sooprize Package #2. I was doing my own fanzines at the time and I certainly could have used a bit more of the lightheartedness and sloppy fun present here. Sure, I vastly prefer the way that Eric at Wipe Out! did it, but mostly because his tastes were more aligned with mine, and he rarely suffered the knuckle-draggers and humored them the way Sooprize Package does. All of this really feels like 100 years ago by now, doesn’t it?
Fanzine Hemorrhage 