Zigzag #28

My travels into and around the “classic rock” pantheon over my life have been halted, stuttering, filled with skepticism and, ultimately, redeemed with revelation and joy. Every few years there’s a popular band that you & everyone else has loved for years that finally fully clicks in for me; in 2023, that band was The Byrds. Several years ago, it was the Pet Sounds/Smile-era Beach Boys, which I wrote extensively about in my most recent Dynamite Hemorrhage #10 fanzine. To understand why it’s taken a fifty-something man with enormous lifelong exposure to these bands so long at times to finally grasp their genius, I’ll give a sense of my starting point.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, as my tastes were being formed in the direction of punk and “the new wave”, it was classic rock and heavy rock that I 100%, fully and totally set myself in defiant, youthful opposition to. At age 13/14/15, the bands that my doofus junior high and high school peers loved, all of whom were routinely pouring out of boomboxes on KOME and KSJO, were the full antithesis of everything I thought myself to be. If it was popular, heavy, and on the FM dial, I hated it. If heshers and especially hippies liked it, I hated it. If it was unpopular, unknown, strange, bent, angular and possibly from England, I was interested. 

So naturally this sort of stance precluded and eliminated a great deal of music in my life. The first crack in the armor for me in the late 80s was The Rolling Stones, especially once I heard Beggar’s Banquet and Exile on Main Street. Then it was a major Neil Young overdose in the early 90s, which continues to this day. The gates would continue to open, and have continued to open, for years. We let in the Beatles, AC/DC and of course The Kinks over time. Recently The Byrds, whom I’ve always sorta liked but never owned any records from, came waltzing in.

I recently got this February 1973 Zigzag #28 because I wanted to dig more into the cover feature on them. Zigzag, which I’ve written about before here and here, was edited by Pete Frame in the UK and was one of the premier fanzines of its time, even in the cold, lean years of 1972-73. “It’s produced for our friends rather than as a commercial enterprise”: this is how Frame defends to a letter-writer not wanting to “cover” Uriah Heep, Black Sabbath and Nazareth. That, and the greasy hair and foul body odor of the aforementioned. Frame’s just come back from the US where he’s hung out with a young Alan Betrock and unfortunately gone out there in the first place to see Genesis; Zig Zag in this era was quite hung up on prog, with a big Kevin Ayers interview and a killer hand-drawn “family tree” of Soft Machine, Gong and so on. I can’t predict where I’d have been in February 1973 myself at that age, and while I’d like to have said Beefheart/Stooges/Velvets were my guiding lights, I’m pretty sure Bowie would have been even more important. Which is fine.

The Byrds stuff is killer. It’s an overview of their existence from April 1965 through March 1966, including interviews with Chris Hillman and Roger McGuinn and a timeline walk through a pivotal year in the band’s life. As mentioned, for years I pretty much skimmed or ignored all the writing I’d see about this band because aside from their hits, I hadn’t heard that one song that opened the doors for me until I finally ingested “Have Your Seen Her Face”. Then Sweethearts of the Rodeo was it for me, then all the folky stuff and so on. Biggest fan etc. Zigzag #28 also has a similar retrospective piece on Love, and tells us that in 1973, “Arthur Lee is currently fronting an all-new, all-Black Love”. Click the link, it’s a good story.

In the Jimmy Page interview, at a time when Led Zeppelin were playing enormo-domes all across America and tossing TVs into swimming pools, Page talks about Takoma Records and his love for Fairport Convention and NRBQ (!). There is also an interview with Stealers Wheel – ouch. Those guys are famous for the awful 70s MOR “Stuck in the Middle With You”, which was later famously used to soundtrack the slice-the-ear-off-the-cop scene in Reservoir Dogs. And sorta apropos of nothing, there’s a long interview with author J.P. Donleavy, whose book The Ginger Man my pal CM says is one of the all-time greats, and something that I must read. Should I?

There’s more in here, but some of you might especially be interested in the big Kim Fowley interview and timeline. Now me, I recently tried to reread the long-ago omnibus compendium from the early 2000s about him in Ugly Things, and I have to say I found it tough sledding. It’s not merely the beyond-credible rape accusations that have come up since that, it’s honestly that the guy was just so tedious to listen to talk about himself. His rap gets old very quickly, and Fowley’s production right-place-right-time “legend” is one of mediocrity and overhype across the board. Writer Mac Garry says “I haven’t heard the newly recorded Fowley solo album, but none of the others have ever been released here. Should you stumble across an import copy, do yourself a favour and leave it in the rack…they are all, quite frankly, abominable horsemanure”. Hey Mac, if you’re still with us 51 years later, I’d like to play you a song called “Motorboat”. Aside from that, sure. It may take yet another 51 years for me to finally come around to that particular brand of “classic rock”.