Motorbooty #1

I never dawdled on buying a given issue of Motorbooty the moment their issues hit the stands in the late 80s and well into the 90s, and I don’t believe I was an outlier in that regard. Motorbooty was an exceptionally highly-regarded conduit to a funny, crude and musically-informed worldview centered around all things “Detroit”, mostly for better and only sometimes for worse; as well as to wise-ass college humor and underground comix, many of them penned by co-founder and editor Mark Dancey. What I loved about Motorbooty at the time was its complete disregard for sacred cows; its intensely needling sense of humor, and especially any bit of writing where Mike Rubin put pen to paper. His “When Good Bands Start To Suck” piece in a later issue was a touchstone/lodestar piece of investigative journalism in my late 80s world. There was also, of course, that series of Insane Clown Posse comics that Mark Dancey did that were quite hilarious and deservedly renowned, comics that even attracted some terrific negative attention from that band and their awesome Juggalo Nation.

Motorbooty also loved to make fun of all things hardcore, which, as with Flesh and Bones around the same time, was dead-center in my endorphin-producing wheelhouse in 1987. Mark Dancey says here, “At that time we considered past involvement in the hardcore scene to be a badge of honor (to the snobbish point of being suspicious of peers who had not been into it) but thought that anyone who was still into it to be a hopeless fool”. The only time I was not into Motorbooty was when these white boys leaned too self-consciously hard into all things overtly Detroit and tried to meld black culture into white in a way that sometimes approached minstrelsy – writing about “muthafuckas” and so forth. Barry Henssler, Mark Dancey and Mike Danner’s – all key Motorbooty personnel – Detroit band Big Chief were the “funky” musical representation of this misbegotten and thankfully largely forgotten ethos. 

And, for Motorbooty #1 and for several issues after this until issue #5 (when he was referred to on the masthead as the “Minister of Absentia”), the founder and co-editor was one Danny Plotnick, who happens to be a longtime friend of mine. He’s told me the story of how this magazine evolved away from his stewardship and into the hands of others, but I’m light on the details and, as usual, have forgotten more than I’ve remembered. Suffice to say his heaviest direct involvement was in the earliest issues, but he’d move to San Francisco after this point to become a filmmaker, likely making it a little tough to truly edit a Michigan-based magazine with Michigan-based compatriots. If you haven’t seen his book Super 8: An Illustrated History, you certainly need to. And if you really want a laugh, you can watch me as one of the “stars” of his 1999 Swinger’s Serenade here. I’m the cuckolded husband figure, an absolute acting tour-de-force which really brings the house down no matter which living room or VFW Hall it plays in. 

Anyway, Plotnick contributes a great piece of nonfiction in Motorbooty #1 called “Fat City Death Sled”, about being hassled by some goombahs that he later spun into comic gold in his Super 8 short film Steel Belted Romeos. The majority of the mag is about half underground music fanzine, half underground comix compendium. For the music portion, it starts with an interview with Breaking Circus, who are asked, “How do you feel about grouping bands with the term ‘Pig Fuckers’?”. Turns out they’re cool with it, as long as it’s not in reference to them. There’s also a piece on the fantastic Laughing Hyenas, whose debut EP hadn’t even come out yet. “Moving from the confines of Detroit’s Cass corridor to the too-mellow spaces of college town Ann Arbor has provided a stable base for the band, who drive cabs, make pizzas, sell army surplus and patchouli oil in order to afford a house to practice in”. Reference is made to this WCBN radio performance from 6-22-87, a samizdat tape I had for a long time and used to run off for others repeatedly. See this YouTube upload of it? The photo of the tape’s inner label and song titles? That’s my writing. Just discovered this whilst trying to link to it. Who are you, Uncouth Youth??

There’s a Mike Rubin Wire interview in which clear superfan Rubin seems to be enduring their pomposity more than anything else, as he’s still smarting from how bad their reunion album The Ideal Copy is. Barry Henssler has a Necros tour diary from Summer 1987, about half of which seems wholly made up, though I’m really not sure which half. I met Henssler a few years after this and he was nothing but highly entertaining company, someone whom I wish I’d had more than a single beer with. He talks in this tour piece about going to Tampa and how bored the band is there. “Needless to say, to ward off boredom we’ve already invented a couple of games, the first of which is called ‘I’m-from-out-of-town-and-you-think-I’m-famous-enough-to-do-an-in-store-at-your-record-outlet, therefore-anything-I-want-I-can-have-free-of-charge’. This game is amazing! Who’s gonna call the cops on a band doing an in-store for shoplifting?”. He talks about doing a massive amount of blow on Megadeth’s tour bus in Pittsburgh, and calls Prince his “main man” and “his purple badness” when in Minneapolis. I suppose that’s one way to put it. I remember hoping at the time that this was the fake part.

Unlike later issues of Motorbooty, there are record reviews in this one, and even a mean-spirited fake R.E.M./Michael Stipe tour diary that would not have existed had Forced Exposure also not existed. The mag, already top-drawer at this time, would only get better in the years to come, and would easily benefit from a full retrospective hardcover compendium if only someone would choose to put it out.