Bazooka #1

Earlier on Fanzine Hemorrhage we discussed Belgian Tom Arnaert’s late 90s Bazooka fanzine and specifically, issue #3. Even thinking of Tom and his fanzine has me pining a bit for the late 90s/early 00s glory days of “CD-R trading”, in which I’d roast up six CDs for you and send ‘em through the mail, and you’d roast up six for me from your collection and fling them my way. I built a hell of a CD “burn collection” in that manner, not just with Arnaert but with several clued-in correspondents all over the world. 

I was especially happy to do this with Arnaert and a guy named Luc Onderdonck, both of whom would check stuff out from libraries in Belgium, collections of 78s or punk or world music that never made their way to the USA, then make copies for us both. There was another fella up in Seattle that was a fellow online DJ at Antenna Radio – here’s a Wayback Machine capture of a 2001 show of mine, No Count Dance Party – and I’ve totally blanked on the guy’s name (I think it was “Irv Hunter”?), but he and I, we had ourselves a time with our frantic CD-R trading. To this day, I still make myself CD-Rs of digital files all the time, rather than store everything on a hard drive. I don’t like looking at digital files – I’d still rather cobble together the original artwork, print it out, stuff it into a poly sleeve with the disc and have a fake-but-real CD of my own making, 

Anyhow, I recently was able to come into a copy of Arnaert’s very first issue from early ‘96, Bazooka #1. We see this young man finding his musical and publishing sea legs at this point, and he is indeed a young man; based on some mathematical deducing done from an offhand comment in his interview with The Tinklers that he made about being four years old when they started up in 1978, that would put young Tom at 21 or 22 at this point. In many ways – much like the atrocities I myself was publishing at that age (but far better than mine) – it feels like it, and it even seems that Arnaert didn’t quite have the all-consuming command of the English language that he’d even have just a couple years later, when I first came across Bazooka #3 and found this guy writing circles around his fanzine contemporaries.

1994-1996 was peak garage punk mania for many garage-crazed individuals around the world, as we’ve documented here, here and here. Accordingly, Arnaert is big on The Oblivians, and gets in a good mail interview w/ Eric Friedl, who magnanimously answers everything like a mensch. He also gets in good with Dennis Callaci of Shrimper Records and the band Refrigerator, a gentleman & a label that were true fanzine/underground “objects of attention” at the time, something I found it hard to latch onto myself. Then there’s an interview with Kevin Munro of the band Mule, a guy who’d been in the Laughing Hyenas for a time. He comes across as a bit of an antagonist and perhaps something of a “dum-dum”.

Oh, and I love Arnaert calling out some doofus from “The Swingin’ Neckbreakers” when they played in Gent, Belgium: “Highly praised by the people from Norton Records and despised by other garage freaks for copying the 60s r&r sound without adding anything substantial to it (or something like that). I could see from the singer’s face that he was some arrogant piece of shit and that they were going to suck real hard. And I was right cuz a bit later, after a series of sneers addressed to the soundman, the singer threw down his bass, jumped off stage and got in a fight with the soundman. Really weak….”. Who needs Pitchfork when you have reviewers who’ll lay it on the line and leave it all on the field like that? Tom Arnaert, it’s time to bring back Bazooka for a new generation. Get in touch and I’ll hook you up with a printer.