Despite never having truly been a true record collector – much more of a record accumulator – I hold obsessed, deeply committed collectors in high regard, and rarely tire of their stories of the hunt & the big score. Aside from the guys who almost single-handedly resurrected pre-WWII blues by going door-to-door in the deep South to look for 78s in the late 50s/early 60s, my favorite collectors are the 60s punk fiends, the guys who cobbled together a cohesive and distinctly American narrative for what was clearly going on in thousands of garages and basements across the USA in 1965-1967. That’s the world that 1980’s Not Fade Away #3 traffics in, and their scope is further refined to the great state of Texas, almost certainly the American locus of the most insanely wild and highest-quality 60s garage punk during those years.
Now think back, if you’re old enough to do so, to what 60s punk scholarship was like in 1980. Sure, Nuggets had long been out, the first few Pebbles comps were around and Greg Shaw’s Who Put The Bomp! was writing about this stuff at times. Most of what we’d come to know about the great underground 60s punk 45s would come later, though, first through a series of 60s punk bootlegs like What A Way To Die, Garage Punk Unknowns and Scum of the Earth, and then of course via Back From The Grave, the greatest compilation series of all time. I’d have to imagine that editor Doug Hanners was doing his own original research, digging up telephone numbers from white pages & writing letters to studios listed on 45s released fourteen years previous – and he actually started the mag in 1975.
The biggest features are all listed on the cover here – Mouse and The Traps get the top billing and the longest piece. I was most smitten with the side-by-side photos of these Texas rogues from 1966 (basic cool roughneck hippie kids) and 1967 (far-out psychedelic shaman with love beads and paisley shirts). There’s a great short piece on The Reasons Why, who’d cut this absolute screamer called “Don’t Be That Way” in 1966. They dispel any myths one might have had about well-behaved teenagers at dance clubs and fraternal lodges, in particular the Beyersville SPJST: “All these kids from the little towns would pack the place. Being out in the country we’d get a lot of cowboy redneck types and sometimes things would get pretty wild. We’d be up on stage playin’ and the dance floor would be packed, then all of a sudden this whirlpool would start in the middle of the floor. It wouldn’t be just a few guys from Taylor fightin’ a few guys from Rockdale, it’d be everybody from Taylor fightin’ everybody from Rockdale….one time this cowboy picked up this hippy and threw him through the plate glass window in front.” Texas punk!
Was also psyched, if you will, to see the small piece on The Stereo Shoestring. Have you ever heard their psychedelic face-melter “On The Road South”?? Please do so, right here! Maybe ten years ago I re-read this particular issue and started cataloging the things in the review section I’d never heard, particularly in the short “Tex-Mex” section of 45s. I then went onto the illicit file-sharing site Soulseek and found said Tex-Mex 45s, and they were a true blast. Texas is a big state and all, but I think per-capita it really musically punched well above its weight for many, many years. Not Fade Away #3 is a superb fan’s-eye furthering of what made this particular state’s iconoclasts and cultural rebels stand out, and documents everything I love about the crazed collector mentality.
Fanzine Hemorrhage 