We last checked in with John Foster’s Op magazine a couple of years after this one, 14 issues down the line, when they’d found their feet a bit more. Here, back in early 1981, Op #5 is fully newsprint, folded up into a couple of messy sections like a free alt-weekly. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t make the reading experience moderately frustrating, and I’d be lying further if I said some of the layout choices weren’t totally, totally eighties, with acres of white space and new wavy doodles running across them.
At this junction, Op #5 had both breadth and depth but maybe not as much heft as it’d come to feature. It hewed to its vision as a central connecting point for the North American sub-underground, which crossed paths mostly through the mail and via the airwaves at this point in 1981: fanzines, cassettes, records and local radio shows, all of which Op is there to document with addresses and call numbers and perfunctory reviews. You’ll see something like Yazoo Records’ Heroes of the Blues trading cards reviews next to some avant-noise tapes next to new punk records like the Flesh Eaters’ No Questions Asked (Foster doesn’t like it). A young Calvin Johnson, who’d soon go on to start K Records and Beat Happening, doesn’t like the Circle Jerks’ Group Sex, either.
It’s not the place I’d have gone to build my record collection based on the sterling taste and deep knowledge of its writers. Their zeal to link freaks with freaks is messianic and all-encompassing, and in many ways a nice backward look at the hippie papers of the 60s and 70s that attempted to do the same thing. The shortcoming, at least at this stage of the fanzine, is that while I walk away impressed with all the buzzing and DIY activity across the US and Canada – and elsewhere – in 1981, it’s tough to get a read on what’s actually exciting out there. The excitement, it would seem, is that there’s a world beyond major labels, and that that’s enough.
Op published 26 issues, each focused on a letter of the alphabet. This one is “E”, so there are somewhat half-assed features on Bill Evans, Gil Evans and Roky Erickson, among others. Interspersed in the “E” section are a bunch more record reviews that have nothing to do with that letter. One gets the sense that for many of the labels who sent Op their releases, these might be the only reviews those records and cassettes ever got. I know this was a seminal mag for many folks, but I surmise based on the evidence presented that it really kicked in around the back half of the alphabet and not quite yet in Spring 1981.
Incidentally, my copy was sent to Creep magazine, based on the mailing label on the back, so I’m holding the very copy once caressed and fondled by “Mickey Creep”.
Fanzine Hemorrhage 