Creep #4

Earlier this year I bought a near-complete run of San Francisco’s top-drawer late 70s/early 80s punk fanzine Creep from the ZNZ store – who still have three of the five issues for sale as of this writing. I excitedly wrote up Creep #2 in these pages here, so I’ll spare you another introduction to the mag and let you go read that first if you’re interested, allowing us to get right to the heart of 1980 west coast punk rock USA in the here and now.

Creep #4 lives at an interesting intersection of several strands of California punk “journalism”, such as it was. There are half-hearted attempts at intellectually unpacking various scene controversies and kerfuffles of the time, such as a piece on Noh Mercy’s acerbic and still spine-rattling “Caucasian Guilt”, or a total mess of a P.I.L. show that almost didn’t happen – something akin to a piece you’d find in Damage around this time. There’s truly stupid punk-sneer writing by birdbrains such as one might find in Flipside. And given this magazine’s tenuous connection with Maximum Rocknroll, which wouldn’t publish its first issue for another two years, you can see a little bit of a political slant sashaying its way into these pages – but not too much to make Creep #4 intolerable.

I actually have to give much credit for the breadth of the interviews here. There’s one with Alex Chilton by Ray Farrell, not at all something I’d expect here – and Alex is great, totally calm and cool as Farrell takes him to task for Like Flies on Sherbert (shame on you, Ray!). There’s a brief one with Steve Tupper of Subterranean Records, which was just getting off the ground. He tells it like it is: “415 (an S.F. label) appears to be primarily interested in very commercial or very well known bands. That means exclusion of everybody else. We’re much more interested in experimental kinds of things – the kind of music being made by hordes of kids just picking up guitars and synthesizers and making music. Everything we do has this hard, grey feel to it. That’s the way the world is. Let’s face it – a lot of this stuff just isn’t hit material.”. Subterranean were the label who first released Flipper, and they were covered at length in the excellent book Who Cares Anyway? – Post-Punk San Francisco and the End of the Analog Age.

On the other hand, the interview with The Vktms doesn’t do them any favors – with all due respect to Nyna, she definitely comes across as a major league dum-dum in this interview. And I’ve done some bellyaching about Gregg Turner, Mike Saunders and the Angry Samoans before but never have I seen their misanthropy and queer-baiting at such a jacked-up level as it is in their interview here, in which they go off on all the high crimes & misdemeanors of the LA punk scene, a scene that was known to blackball the Samoans for just such behavior. I mean, these weren’t 15-year-olds from Canoga Park writing into Flipside, these were guys in their early thirties play-acting as punks and – in Saunders’ case – saying Iggy, Iggy, Iggy whenever handed the opportunity. Of course, I laughed at “Get Off The Air” and I still love large chunks of Back From Samoa and I always will, but Saunders and Turner are (or were, in 1980) detestable human beings. Watch their brief interview in this 1980 LA punk “expose” called What’s Up America and you’ll see what I mean. And Gregg Turner’s recent book was an abomination that I couldn’t get even a third of the way through. Do I make myself clear?

This was the year of collective disillusionment with The Clash, and the piece by “Austin Tatious” (great punk name I’d somehow never heard before, but still not as classy as my friend Christina’s DJ moniker Geannie Lotrimin) expresses great disappointment in their San Francisco show. The whole Lee Dorsey (“Working in a Coal Mine”) “bored cocktail lounge a la Holiday Inn backup band” opening act bit was pretty funny; I suppose this was the time that they were bringing incongruous opening acts on the road with them, which, hey, hats off for trying I guess. The Specials are also on the road in America – “Horace’s impression of U.S. AM radio: ‘Great if you like ‘Hold The Line” or ‘Life in the Fast Lane’’. He swears he heard each at least 80 times across the country with only sporadic listening.” Oh yes, 1980 commercial radio in the United States was just awful if you were there, and I was there.

Creep #4 is a content-rich goldmine for you punk historians, probably one step up from Ripper and very much in the same vein, from size to breadth to paper type to regions covered. Now let’s see a Silicon Valley Bank-like run on the few copies remaining in the ZNZ store.