Last year I shared the formative and highly boring tale and of the very first fanzine I ever purchased, Ripper #4, procured in late 1982 from Do-Re-Mi records in Los Gatos, CA (though it had come out more than a year earlier). In the nearly forty-two years since, I’ve found my way to a few other issues of San Jose’s Ripper, including Ripper #6, which editor Tim Tonooka has scrawled in the margin that he “took to printer, 12/29/81”. Big year for the scene, and a big year to come.
As I wrote in that earlier piece, San Jose struggled with its relative cultural stature as compared with the cosmopolitan savoir faire of San Francisco, felt acutely by local punks and by high school dorks like myself at the time. Ripper #6 kicks off with a nice talk with local punks Ribsy, – two women, two guys, and a big point of local pride among the tiny handful of punks at my school. They’re quite adept of extracting lemonade from the lemons they’d been handed:
Ripper: What do you like about living in San Jose?
Kat: The fact that you can make a dent.
Sharon: Mostly the fact that there’s very few punks here at all. When people see us it’s really a shock to them, more so than if we’re in San Francisco. There nobody says anything. But in San Jose they say “Oh my god! What is wrong with you?”. People in San Jose don’t even know what punks are. Somebody asked me if I was a nun once because my hair was so short and I was dressed in black. People in San Jose are really uninformed, and that’s what I like, is being able to talk to people and inform them about it.
Matt: The only reason I hang out in San Jose is the band, otherwise I would just as well be hangin’ out in San Francisco.
Sharon: I like San Jose because I feel like a square peg in a round hole, and I always like that feeling. Because everybody in San Jose dresses the same, in clothes from two years ago.
I’ll bet Sharon Nicol from Ribsy grew up to be a very well-adjusted woman with an highly developed sense of self. If you want to get a sense of San Jose culture from around this era and the world I grew up in, here’s the inside front cover of my Gunderson High School yearbook from 1982-83:
A group called N.W.S. (New Wave Sluts) is trying to book shows in San Jose and are having some trouble. The 10/29/81 show at Campbell’s Briner Hall with Black Flag was “shut down by local police”. Fighting a war we can’t win! Ribsy made it onto the bill of every one of the 5 shows they were able to have there. There’s some complaining about local shows in San Francisco as well, with The Sound of Music – great article about it here – getting rep’ed as the place for discerning punks to make their presence known in late ‘81.
I like how Ripper provides the ages of the people whom they talk with, so we get to learn from Wasted Youth (later LA’s Wasted Youth) that everyone in the band is 17 or 18, which happens to be 2-3 years younger than my own son is today. When they talk with T.S.O.L. there’s some discussion about how moronic singer Jack wears horror/goth makeup on stage now. He says, “The only thing that makes me mad is that a lot of times people say I’m like an Ant or something, They go, ‘Oh yeah, you love Adam Ant.” But I was wearing makeup when I was a skinhead three years ago, just to bum people out”. Was there a worse California punk band than T.S.O.L. around this time? China White, maybe?
Cover band The Lewd are also interviewed; they were at their peak here, this year if you ask me. The Seattle-era Lewd were great but the American Wino-era Lewd totally ruled. Fantastic photos of the band, too, like 20 of them! In the Black Flag interview, there’s a reference to a 5/17/81 show they played with The Ghouls, Deanna from Frightwig’s early band. I’ve played them on Dynamite Hemorrhage Radio from a song (“Cheap Hotel”) that Brandan Kearney taped off the radio in 1981 (!) and was kind enough to digitize and send to me. I messaged Deanna about The Ghouls and this demo a couple years ago, and she effectively told me “I don’t have any recordings and barely know anything about it, godspeed to you”. Perhaps someone out there knows where these recordings are buried? The internet turns up exceptionally little.
Ripper #6 also contains a piece heaping well-earned praise upon England’s Au Pairs, who were one of my favorite bands at this time thanks to incessant play on KFJC of their debut Playing with a Different Sex. The huge review section includes a piece looking at six different Girlschool records, about which Tonooka says “Their records are proof that there actually is such a thing as good heavy metal”. Arguable on many fronts. The first Meat Puppets 45, one of my top 20 singles of all time, is delightfully called “one of those terminally great records like the Urinals single” and a “rubber room riot”. Finally, in the reader’s poll results, we find that “46% of the people who answered live in Northern California. Their average age is 19 years old. Our readers’ two most favorite bands are Black Flag and the Circle Jerks”. These pit demons, stage divers and Moral Majority enemies are now averaging out at 61 years of age today. Don’t you love it?
Fanzine Hemorrhage 