The Offense #15

Last summer I worked myself into a small lather attempting to pick apart 1981’s The Offense #12, which you can peruse right here. I’ve got a few other issues of this thing in my stacks that we ought to talk about, such as March 1982’s The Offense #15. Not only must I beg and struggle for good lighting and total concentration in order to actually read its microscopic print, my head aches all the more for just how ridiculously stacked it is. Really, it’s 51 pages of content that could have easily been 102 pages with different layout decisions, and its breadth is just mind-boggling. 

Hailing from Columbus, Ohio – no one’s real idea of any sort of musical hotbed at the time, yet it was just about to be rightly perceived as such over the following 15-20 years – The Offense was helmed by Tim Anstaett, who staffed it with a group of dispersed individuals, each intensely devoted to underground music and the life surrounding it, as well as to extending their tentacles to contact and convert every like-minded soul. I mean, it’s almost a crusade with these folks, and I remember very well this devout intensity of feeling of both being an outsider and worshiping other outsiders, and to gobbling up every bit of underground music, film, writing and gossip as I could. 

Honestly, The Offense would have been my favorite mag in 1982 had I’d known it existed, because it was over-the-top anglophilic (as I was), while deeply interested in the American underground and what was happening in individual cities, or, as we once called them, “scenes” (as I was). UK chart-toppers live uncomfortably here side by side with the fastest and meanest American hardcore bands, and letter writers range from nascent goth girls to new wave goobers to Barry Henssler of The Necros, raving about his visits to the DC scene. You can see on the cover here that much mirth & merrymaking is being had at combatting the mag’s reputation as “anglophilic”, right up the dawn of the USA-love-it-or-leave-it Reagan era. 

The 1981 readers poll results lean way more post-punk and English, which likely reflects that, at this point, there were no American publications covering that music with any sort of knowledge nor intelligence save for perhaps Trouser Press – and they were really just trying to stay alive at that point by putting Adam Ant or whomever on the cover. I’d buy two-months-old Sounds, NME and Melody Makers if I wanted to read about my faves Bauhaus or the Au Pairs or Simple Minds. At The Offense #15, the big winners are The Psychedelic Furs, Joy Division and Siouxsie and the Banshees – but also, there’s some serious coverage of underground Ohio as well. Human Switchboard are on the cover, and there’s lots of love for Naked Skinnies (who I only know as Mark Eitzel’s first band) and something called Razor Penguins.

The writing staff is populated by heavy hitters such as Ron House, Don Howland, Steve Hesske and the “controversial” Seattlite Joe Piecuch. I think it’s House who writes all his reviews like they’re song lyrics, like this for the Process of Elimination comp (currently selling for $271 on Discogs – I had this record!!): “Necros alternately try to be the scariest and fastest of all and succeed / Violent Apathy win shit production recognition, with most the others close runners-up / what’s wrong with saving your gig money for time in a decent studio with someone behind the board who halfway knows what he’s doing? / guess then it wouldn’t be a team effort /” – and so on. It takes some getting used to, but hey, “why be normal”, right?

There’s really no sense of what someone’ll think about something; records now part of the canon get slammed; commercial mediocrities like U2 and the “Fun Boy Three” are canonized; tiny underground bands can go either way. Hesske loves The Bongos’ “The Bulrushes” – so did/do I. Again, if I’d come across this at John Muir Junior High toward the end of 9th grade I’d have absolutely taken out a subscription and likely been king shit of turd mountain at my school (nah, I’d have absolutely gotten my ass kicked if I brought it to class). 

Anstaett bemoans that only 1000 copies were able to be printed of his mag each issue due to various distribution snafus the past year. I’m just glad one of them landed in my paws eventually, and as it turned out, this was the final issue of The Offense before it relaunched as the smaller The Offense Newsletter later that year.