Rock Mag! #1

In the early 90s when I was publishing my first fanzine Superdope, there were a few other fellas in my age bracket with concomitant music tastes who were also publishing their homespun fanzines, and with whom I’d regularly communicate. Among them were Marc Masters of Crank, Glen Galloway of Zero Gravity, Eric Friedl of Wipeout! and Tim Ellison of Rock Mag! Tim headed up – and still heads up a revised version of – the San Diego band The Nephews, a band I got to see just once at a tiny club down there called The Neptune, which I later learned was the original Casbah club (SD’s long-running best underground club from the 80s onward). I found their records to be a little uneven at times but they were terrific live, and I particularly remember how great this track was.

More importantly, I really liked Tim. Contrarian, obtuse, wryly funny, highly educated (music and otherwise) and willing to go waaay out on a limb for the music he liked. Rock Mag! wasn’t for everyone. I remember sending an extra issue of it that Tim let me write a few reviews in to my pal Scott “Deluxe” Drake of The Humpers, thinking he’d love the weird piece Tim wrote on links between The Fall and certain animal noises. He sent me a letter back saying he was totally baffled and frustrated by the whole thing and that he’d never read another fanzine like it. Exactly!

The first issue of Rock Mag! arrived in 1992, and two-thirds of it is given to theorizing on the nature of rock, how we listen to rock, how we contextualize rock and ultimately defending rock after lambasting it. So sure, it’s an acquired taste I suppose; this issue arrived not long after Rock and The Pop Narcotic by Joe Carducci, a tome that set many typewriters and tongues a-waggin’. It is certainly referenced here, as is Richard Meltzer’s Aesthetics of Rock; neither in flattering terms for the most part. I never really deconstructed the meanings behind the music in this manner and probably never will, as my own brain really doesn’t work that way, but I totally got a gas out of how Tim did it, in his truly passionate, devil-may-care manner.

He then gives in to writing a big batch of record reviews, because, as he says here, “Rock Mag! (the non-rhetorical magazine of the ‘Rebellation Generation’) is called Rock Mag! because it is a rock mag and rock mags have record reviews in the back of the mag.” Among these record reviews lies praise for The Gories, Hanatarash, Electric Eels, Cheater Slicks, Ruins, The Dwarves (Tim loved the Dwarves, as did I for a time), Dead C, Pavement, Shonen Knife and one of Tim’s other non-R.E.M. favorites, The Fall. On the back cover is a nice big salute to “Paul Fucking McCartney”, and that was Rock Mag! #1. The second issue had what I believe was one of only a couple interviews he ever did, but we’ll get to talking about that one in due time and shall wait, as all good things must.