Brain Damage #1

We had a post a couple of days ago about the annus horribilis of 1974, so let’s return there again today and talk about a “real” early-years music fanzine, Brain Damage #1, and a great, albeit insular, one at that. This comes courtesy of a xerox my friend JB made for me of it in the early 1990s, as he magnanimously did with the Back Door Man issue we once discussed here. Talk about heavy hitters: the editors are Metal Mike Saunders (much later of Vom and the Angry Samoans) and Gene Sculatti, and the publisher is Mark Shipper (Chris Stigliano went deep on his 1972 fanzine Flash, which put forth multiple issues, here). 

Brain Damage #1 was a one-and-done parody fanzine, “formerly called Who Took The Shelves”. I’m sure it was all quite uproarious for the creators, and if you’ve got something of a historical sense of fanzines like Who Put The Bomp, magazines like Creem, and the general rock critic milieu of the early 1970s, much of the mirth-making taking place here might even make some sense to a contemporary audience. They say “Subscriptions are $56 for 240 issues in the United States and Canada. Overseas rates do not exist and we reserve the right to refuse all requests from Limeys, Polacks, and New Yorkers.” They start with fake letters from Lester Bangs, Robot Hull, John Fogerty and Jon Landau, all very funny to the editors I’m sure, and continue on with a phony Lester Bangs interview and a heavy metal records consumer guide from “Bobby Crisco” aka Robert Christgau. There are some chortles and guffaws to be had, yet no splitting of sides.

Then there’s a first-rate, over-the-top piece about basketball hero Meadowlark Lemon of the Harlem Globetrotters and his (very real) “Shoot-a-Basket” 45, compared extremely favorably with the Stooges, the Shadows of Knight, Love and early Pink Floyd. James Williamson is rumored to be the guitarist on it. I think I’d better check that one out. There’s an extensive “Juke Box Jury” by Reg Shaw, aka Greg Shaw, complete with the same font and layout he was using in his own fanzine. And then, quite unexpectedly, there’s a real guide to Lou Reed’s early pre-Velvets Pickwick 45s by Wayne Davis, not really played for laughs but more some gentle mocking of his work with The Beachnuts and so forth.

Now even in the course of all this tomfoolery there are many uses of the term “punk rock”, once again resting the case that the term was something very much in circulation well before 1976 – at least in rarefied rock-crit circles – and that it was used to describe exactly what you think it was. As of this writing, there’s a copy of Brain Damage #1 for sale on eBay for the low low price of $199.99, but it does contain some photos of the pages if you’d like to take a peek.