Nothing Doing #1

In my 20s I was very magnetically drawn to those who were undeniably smarter, funnier and more interesting than I was. Through the use of common bonding agents such as alcohol and underground music talk (areas in which I could hold my own, if nowhere else), on occasion I found myself holding court with one of these bon vivants, a guy named Brandan Kearney. I’d initially come to admire this gentleman through his band World of Pooh during the years 1989-90; he would come to do time in Caroliner, The Steeple Snakes, Faxed Head, the Heavenly Ten Stems, The Three Doctors Band and the Totem Pole of Losers in the 80s and early 90s, and then others besides. He ran a San Francisco label called Nuf Sed that put much of this out.

A couple methods to get a better handle on this world would be to read Will York’s Who Cares Anyway – Post-Punk San Francisco and the End of the Analog Age book, and/or to read the oral history of World of Pooh that I assembled in Dynamite Hemorrhage #3 fanzine, which you can download a PDF of right here. Aside from the boner where I bumbled and called Kearney WoP’s bassist, I’m proud of how it turned out. As Kearney was immersed in and helping to drive San Francisco’s absurdist early 90s parallel world sub-underground culture, he furthered his contribution with a two-issue run of a small fanzine called Nothing Doing. Nothing Doing #1 came out in Spring 1994, and it wasn’t really a music fanzine at all, because any and all music discussed within it did not exist except in Kearney’s unique and wacked vision, informed as it was by weird religious tracts, thrift store records, conspiracy theories, the Chinese Communist Party and an extreme and ahead-of-its-time notion of anti-comedy.

Its purpose was clearly to subvert, for lack of a better term, the notion of the fanzine. Since music fanzines were ubiquitous and often uniform in 1994, Nothing Doing #1 stood out, shall we say, to the extent that it was seen by anyone. There’s a table of contents with zero connection to the contents herein. The demo tape review section features music by acts like no (fucking) name and Whirling Petals, the latter of whom’s tape Embroidery and Crucifixion is reviewed thusly: “Within two minutes of pressing ‘play’ I felt like I was dying of encephalitis. I mean that in the best possible sense, and with all due credit to Oliver Eustace, the Petals’ morbidly obese lead singer – an utterly deluded fop whose muse seems to be having a little joke at his expense….Certainly no one else is washing hogs like this, at least not while accompanied by a chorus-drenched mandolin, a piccolo and a triangle”.

There’s a further section of reviews of recordings from “The China Record Company”, whose albums include We Steel Workers Have an Iron Will and Poor and Lower-Middle Class Peasants Love Chairman Mao Most. If I ever looked for these in thrift stores, I never found them. A representative proxy for the remainder of Nothing Doing #1 might be the “cartoons” section, which I’ve helpfully scanned for you here. Laugh it up, and I’ll get down to tackling this mag’s second issue here within the next 365 days.