I believe Luggage #1 was the first and only in its run – a Boston-based digest fanzine from the haphazardly-xeroxed school of design, focused on music skirting the boundaries of rock. The editors were Jason Castolene and Mike Zimbouski, and there’s an excited sense of newfound discovery in the fanzine, that they’ve very recently unlocked a hidden portal to the deep underground and are newly bathing within a deep well of improvisational noise, jazz, not-quite-rock and related experimentation. It all comes off as wide-eyed and prone to the disproportionate obsession and over-analysis that can make life in one’s twenties so fun and so frivolous.
Trans Am, purportedly a krautrock-inspired band who are interviewed here, put that myth to rest by telling Luggage that they’ve just heard most of it for the first time, with one guy piping up to say he’d just heard Faust today. There’s an interview with clarinetist Don Byron, whom the editors are chastising me for not knowing in 1997; alas, I’ve only heard of him now, 26 years later, reading this old fanzine I’ve recently found. Good, prepared questions from the Luggage team and it gave me a great sense of that late 90s NY/Knitting Factory downtown era that I wish I’d have been able to experience a bit of firsthand.
The final of their trio of interviews is with Thurston Moore, and I’m always game to read his explorations of record collecting, navigation of the obscure, and straddling of the major label and micro-indie worlds. The editors flummox him a bit with the sort of rookie questions I unfortunately still ask my subjects in the interviews I do: “What are you listening to these days?” “What books are you reading?” “What’s Sonic Youth doing next?”. Byron Coley is referred to here and in another part of the magazine as “Byron Cohen”.
Moore makes a particularly relevant point in the interview about what’s driving such a strong interest in improvisational and far-underground, out-there music in 1997 – and while he doesn’t quite say it with these words, it’s effectively the turned backs of underground music freaks who once revered major label bands like his own Sonic Youth. The underground, having seen their bands so thoroughly co-opted, are digging deeper into formless tuneage, distant krautrock, harsh noise and even the strange, loose psychedelic folk music starting to coalesce around this time, just to see what might turn up and excite them the way bands did in the 1980s. Here I was in 1997 thinking it was just a buncha scene credential hogs pretending to enjoy Keiji Haino and The Tower Recordings, and it was Moore’s evenhanded take that probably explains it all better. As I’ve mentioned before, it took me quite a few years before I’d personally come back to the late 90s to really dig into all I missed by turning my own back on the sub-sub-underground.
Therefore, I still don’t know what’s what with some of Luggage #1’s favorites: Analogue, Five Starcle Men, Oval etc. The fanzine closes out with an incongruous show review of Polvo playing in Boston in 1996, “an epiphanic experience” for the unnamed writer. “Polvo” is one of those you-had-to-be-there-I-guess 90s fanzine-rave bands, much like “The Grifters”, from whom I’m still waiting for a first decent song to penetrate my consciousness. Anyone know if Castolene and Zimbouski went on to write elsewhere? (Yes! Just found out that Zimbouski published this collection of short stories…).
Fanzine Hemorrhage 