If this collection of blink-and-miss giveaway issues of a small free fanzine from 1979 called 20aMPC didn’t exist, I’d probably never have known of the thing’s original existence in the first place. I love it when folks collect stuff like this for those of us who weren’t there. My understanding from this podcast is that Pleasant Gehman is going to be reprinting her late 70s LA punk fanzine Lobotomy this year, and I’m all over that when it happens – but hey, just in case you find out about it first, can you let me know?
So 20aMPC was a xeroxed/stapled fanzine given away or sold for 5 cents (!) at The Deaf Club in San Francisco between February and May 1979. This collection takes the original five issues, and adds two brief “previously unpublished issues”. It was put together in 2015 by San Francisco’s Punk Rock Sewing Circle, a collection of quote-unquote original punks who were holding quite a few punk anniversary events around that time, some of which I attended. The writer and editor was Jack Fan, a.k.a. Jack Johnson, and he appeared to be a young man swept up into the scene and living large 24/7, pogoing from shows at The Deaf Club to DJing and working at Cafe Flore to touring with The Offs – clearly his close friends – and attending shows across SF, five nights a week at least.
This was his micro-fanzine, and you gotta marvel how tightly he packed these issues with a mere four months of personal punk history, while also illuminating the evolution of punk on the ground, as it was happening. Key players in these issues include the aforementioned Offs; Pink Section; The Situations (I don’t know this band); The Cramps, and a posse of LA bands coming up the coast, like The Bags, The Germs, Middle Class, Zeros and more. Be still my friggin’ heart.
One key takeaway is Fan’s massive disdain for the Mabuhay Gardens club and for Dirk Dirkson. He almost positions the Mab as the “corporate” club, the one that only tourists and the bridge & tunnel crowd go to. Such were the razor-fine lines of punk rock 1979! But jeez, there was such a cornucopia of shows to choose from in San Francisco every weekend, maybe you’d want to draw these lines once a cool clubhouse-type hangout like The Deaf Club opened up. 20aMPC came out so frequently that Fan is able to give schedules of upcoming shows each weekend, and the lineups just make one’s eyes water: X/Bags/Units/Suburbs; Offs/Bags/Alleycats, and Mutants/Avengers/Pink Section just over a 30-hour period alone, Friday and Saturday nights February 23rd-24th, 1979.
Crime are called “notorious capitalists” because they charged $4.50 for a show. The other person to really take it on the chin here is Howie Klein, which absolutely seems to be a recurring theme in these SF punk fanzines. I mean, from the time I started hearing about the guy I was highly suspicious; while it’s hard for me to see Dirk Dirkson as anything but the real deal, Klein struck me as a musical opportunist with questionable taste in music, a junior-level Bill Graham safe enough for the suits but able to dabble in punk-ish power pop and with bands searching for career opportunities, the ones that never knock. Jack Fan sure thought so!
This Punk Doesn’t Need a Fanzine Called 20aMPC collection is still very much available for interested parties right here.
Fanzine Hemorrhage 