As I’m sure you’re aware, there’s been a rich history of single-artist music fanzines catering to “the obsessives” for many decades now. Backbreaking work has been done by certified Dylanologists, for instance, then deployed with extreme prejudice in numerous Dylan fanzines over the years – and whenever I get the gumption to search for music fanzines on eBay, I’ll get dozens upon dozens of listings for fanzines about Kiss, Tori Amos, Kate Bush, David Bowie, Pink Floyd, Stone Roses, Bruce Springsteen, The Smiths and obviously many more. Never the Velvet Underground, unfortunately; that is, unless a copy of What Goes On turns up online, which isn’t particularly often.
I scanned What Goes On #1’s cover and printed a bit of my interview with Velvet Underground Appreciation Society founder & What Goes On editor Phil Milstein here. Those first two late 70s issues are fantastic, but this fanzine really started to flower in 1982 with the publication of What Goes On #3, which, well – on one hand it’s a straight-up, obsessive fan magazine devoted to what might be the greatest rock band of all time, yet on the other, it’s a supreme piss-take on the idea of fan magazines. Milstein, as I’d later come to understand, encompasses multitudes – a wiseacre archivist of the obscure and the outsider; a serio-comic writer whom it’s sometimes impossible to know when he’s being honest or inscrutable; and, at times, a musician in his own right. That’s in addition to his lifelong servitude to and furthering of the cult of the Velvet Underground, a passion which I have nothing but the highest admiration for.
That admiration was extended once I dug into What Goes On #3. While fully devoted to explaining & expanding the genius of the Velvet Underground, It absolutely doesn’t take itself very seriously, and it’s all the better for it. Milstein, 25 years old at the time, prefigures one of my favorite SNL sketches of all time – the one at the Star Trek convention – with a moderately ridiculous Velvets quiz, with questions like “When Nico first met Andy Warhol, she was carrying a demo acetate in her purse. What was the song on the demo, and who wrote it?”. Funny enough, I can answer a big chunk of these questions, but that’s with the benefit of 42 additional years of Velvets scholarship having been brought to life since 1982.
This isn’t a navel-gazer of a fanzine, though. There are interviews in this issue alone with Andy Warhol, Tony Conrad, Henry Flynt, Terry Riley and Byron Coley’s outtakes of his NY Rocker John Cale interview from 1980. Dana Hatch – who’d later go on to glory as the drummer and throat-scraping vocalist in the Cheater Slicks – and who was really just a ‘lil nipper at this point – does a detailed overview of VU live records and gets his letter to & drawings for Lou Reed published as well. A big unpublished Lester Bangs piece on Nico is published here (!), and Tim Yohannan – yes! Tim Y! – has a piece about his own homemade, DIY Velvet Underground album covers.
What Goes On #3 treats solo recordings from Nico, Cale, Reed etc with the same sort of reverence and respect as it does VU stuff, but is certainly willing to carve it up as necessary, as it somewhat does for Reed’s newest LP The Blue Mask. A writer named Richard Mortifolglio contributes an excellent piece on White Light/White Heat – no jokin’ here, just a dissection of the record I’ve sometimes called my absolute favorite piece of vinyl. Perhaps the most entertaining section is “Ken’s Corner”, featuring a nursing home resident out of the pages of David Greenberger’s Duplex Planet magazine:
The mag’s nooks & crevices are filled in with bootleg reviews and every jot and titter from Velvets world, including mentions of the band in other mags, such as Lou Reed himself mentioning the VUAS and What Goes On in some Dutch mag, and how he likes to read it on the toilet. That’s actually pretty charitable from Reed, all things considered. I’ll be more charitable than that and state that this is an absolute treasure, and something well worth reprinting in book form along with the other issues. I do hope that someone takes up the call.
Fanzine Hemorrhage 