I’ve owned this issue of Mike McGonigal’s Chemical Imbalance since the day I bought it in 1986 in an LA record store because it had an included 4-song EP with Sonic Youth on it. It was clear to me in reading through it just now that I really hadn’t flipped its pages since, so honestly, it was a pleasant surprise to see a wonderfully sophomoric yet still well-informed and -intentioned dose of independent, far-left-of-center Americana. If you remember McGonigal as a guy pilloried for my-unremembered and what I’m sure were nonsense “scene crimes” by the likes of Byron Coley and Steve Albini, you’d be forgiven for thinking – as I did – that maybe his early college-era fanzine would have aged none too well. It’s aged just fine.
I mean, I have several of the issues that came after Chemical Imbalance #4 as well, I’m pretty sure. It was never one of my favorites, and I’d be hard-pressed to name a band, musical genre or artist of any sort that this fanzine turned me onto – but it was always easy to find, packed with deep-underground ephemera and tuned to whatever alt-wavelength I found myself frequenting in the late 80s. McGonigal went on to run Yeti and Maggot Brain magazines, both of which suffer(ed) from a seemingly forced, mile-wide/inch-deep eclecticism that render any tastemaking therein to be highly suspect. I suppose that was true of Chemical Imbalance as well – a sort of “look at me, I don’t only like punk rock” narcissism that probably kept me from ever coming back to his mag after my first reading, yet didn’t prevent me from buying at least three more issues. Like I said, maybe time and age has melted my resistance, because I kinda like nearly everything about this one save for the poetry and most of the comics. I always wonder if “fanzine poetry” is meant to be an ironic joke when I come across it anyway.
Seymour Glass, whom we learned recently to our great surprise was a key cog at San Francisco’s BravEar around this time, does a fine interview with that city’s so-deeply-unsung-that-nobody-liked-them Angst. As it turns out, I liked Angst; saw them live; and was a major proponent of their first Happy Squid EP, which you gotta hear if you haven’t. So this interview too was a nice surprise, a great retelling of awful tour stories and corrupt bookers and strange bills put together by SST with Angst and Saint Vitus. There’s a mail interview with Great Plains, another band on a bigger indie label who were probably better than the sub-minus attention they received indicated, and one with Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, “because everyone else interviews Thurston”. Sonic Youth mania was only just barely wheels-up at that point, with Evol having recently come out, and it shows from interviews with other bands here, like when Jeff Pezzati from Naked Raygun interrupts himself to blurt out, “I just saw Sonic Youth, they were amazing!!”.
And with regard to all the comics in Chemical Imbalance #4, well, I’ll tell you about my reverse-evolution with comics. In 1986, when a music fanzine would print comics, I’d get all huffy and uptight about it. Comics were for children, and were uniformly unfunny to boot. I thought “Baboon Dooley” was totally inane (still do). When grown men later started busting a nut over goofus music-adjacent comic artists like Peter Bagge, I stuck my head in the sand and said I. Hate. Comics. I only started thawing with regard to comics, or comix if you will, around the age of 40, and you know, that wasn’t all that long ago. I went back to re-read a bunch of Dan Clowes stuff and fell down that rabbit hole and it introduced me to the whole world of Fantagraphics and Kitchen Sink and bizarre art-dada stuff like Doug Allen’s Steven. I’m totally down with comix now, kids!
I still think the ones in this magazine are mostly imbecilic, but hey, I now thoroughly respect the gumption shown in pulling them together and stand proudly behind their Constitutional right to print ‘em.
Fanzine Hemorrhage 