Forced Exposure #15

(Originally written as part of a Forced Exposure fanzine overview in Dynamite Hemorrhage #7):

When Byron Coley was interviewed by Jason Gross online in 2010, he told a pretty funny story about how Diamanda Galas came to be on the cover of this Summer 1989 issue:

The (interview) we were dreading the most was the Diamanda Galas one. The problem with doing a print magazine is that sometimes, records come out and it’s like… you really don’t have enough time to deal with (them), but you want to deal with it ’cause it’s on a label like Mute. So a Diamanda Galas record came in right when the issue was due and I think Jimmie reviewed it. His whole review was something like… she was supposedly going out with Blixa (Bargeld) right then, so Jimmie wrote something like “Blixa’s dick must be as big as everybody says it is because she’s really fucking screaming on this one.” (laughs) And she kind of hit the roof because at that time, a lot of people were reading the magazine and a review like that… People would just really laugh. The label put across the word that she was furious about it. And I absolutely understand. So we said “OK, we’ll interview her. We’ll put her on the cover of the next issue.” It seemed like a good idea anyway.

But getting ready to go down for that interview… We interviewed her at a restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen. We were just like “Oh my God, she’s going to fucking castrate us.” So we went in and her rep was really vicious and we had done tons of research, so we went in prepared to be disembowel. And we apologized and explained the situation, but she was really hostile. But then as it went along and she hummed a Coltrane tune and Jimmie knew what it was (it was something theme from Meditations) and she was like “Oh!” And the questions we had were obviously well-researched – we asked her about a lot of stuff that people hadn’t really talked to her about. So it ended up being OK but that was a rough one.

She actually comes off in the interview like a pretentious, self-involved and utterly pompous ass, but whatever. I saw her finally in the mid-1990s, and it will always be one of the most memorable shows of my lifetime.

The letters section starts off with a nice bit of what we’d now recognize as “trolling” from an ex- professional baseball pitcher named Lowell Palmer, who shares the advice of “the original punk Vince Lombardi” to “do sports, not drugs”. Byron naturally takes the bait and yammers about how real adults take drugs, or, in his words, “gobble a sheet of L or bang a little smack”. Just how old were these FE guys by 1989? I’m afraid you don’t wanna know. It certainly wasn’t 19 or 20.

This issue has some fantastic material otherwise. Seymour Glass did an exceptionally comprehensive & entertaining interview with the Sun City Girls, which was followed by a single- page paean to Claw Hammer – who were fast becoming my favorite band at the time – by Eddie Flowers; “LA hasn’t been home to a ROCK combo this musically exciting and aesthetically gone since, uh, the early, Kendra-era Dream Syndicate”. Ditto that, Crawlin’ Ed.

More terrific photos of leading lights like Death of Samantha and Hanatarash and Howe Gelb litter the excellent record reviews section, and the return of the C/U Meter sees three singles get a “C/U ENTIRE PRESSING”: Vertigo’s first one (agree 100%), plus Lithium X-Mas and White Stains (both of which I’ve found online, like, just now – and both are terrific & weird psych records). Huge books section, loads of video reviews, and a new mostly noir/crime review section called “Chris D.’s Video Library” – which was a healthy step forward from the previous issue’s father/son porn reviews.