I’ve never made much of an effort to connect with any “perzines”, if you will: personal fanzines, which are much more about the teller than the tale. It may be why I didn’t know about Liz Clayton’s and Summer 1996’s Wind-Up Butter Cow (“The All-Ohio Issue”) until TP wrote about it in my own Dynamite Hemorrhage #1 fanzine back in 2013. I almost certainly would have pegged it as a wacky perzine and kept walking had I seen it at Tower Records, which I’ve subsequently learned would have been a mistake. Here’s what TP had to say about it:
WIND-UP
“Not so much a record review ‘zine as the personal diary of coffee and soup aficionado Liz Clayton, Wind Up actually offered very little in the way of fuckin’ record reviews. In contrast, Liz spent the 90’s interviewing bands, submitting questionnaires, sharing recipes and highlighting the happenings in her life and the lives of her friends from Michigan to Chicago to Ohio and beyond. So what, right? Were there not hundreds of young Americans doing the same thing at the time? Maybe, but Liz wrote within the frame of a music head in love with her times and did so with classy aplomb. She changed the title of the zine with each issue, publishing five or six distinct epistles between 1991 and 1997: Wind-Up Toy, Wind-Up Frozen Entrée, Wind-Up Toaster Pastry, Wind-Up Industrial Burnoff, Wind-Up Butter Cow…
Like her Editor-In-Chief colleagues around music zine nation, Liz also nurtured a syndicate of like-minded writers, many of whom were musicians. Her crowning zine achievement was the 1996 issue Wind-Up Butter Cow: The All Ohio Issue, which, as can be deduced, exclusively cheered Ohio bands and culture: Gaunt, Moviola, My Dad Is Dead, Scrawl, TJSA, Bela Koe-Krompecher (“sum him up in seven words or less!”), as well as Ron House trashing the 4AD editor fanny who wrote The Offense Newsletter. Liz’s book Nice Coffee Time was published by tinyperson press in 2013.”
Here’s what I’ll add. First, Ron House’s piece in Wind-Up Butter Cow doesn’t trash Tim Anstaett’s The Offense at all; in fact, it’s a full-stop tribute to the fanzine, with its idiosyncrasies and out-of-step-with-the-herd tendencies both noted and praised. Also, Tom Lax of Siltbreeze Records – an Ohioan himself – gets several pages to give a second listen to some of his 70s/80s Ohio “art-punk” 45s to see if they’re any good or not, and rounds ‘em up for the fanzine. Most don’t seem to make “the grade”. And while the standard questionnaire conceit at the heart of this fanzine ultimately gets a wee bit tiresome when applied to more than a half-dozen bands, their answers to questions like “What would you say Ohio is shaped like?” and “What is your favorite place in Ohio?” do generate some pretty interesting, and dare I say educational answers.
I mean, I’ve been to Columbus and Cincinnati once each on work trips, and three times to Cleveland – once with Claw Hammer on a 1993 tour; once for the 1996 Case Western dental school graduation to see my now-brother-in-law matriculate; and once again for Content Marketing World in 2013. I can’t therefore say with any confidence that I’ve got a unique read on the state of Ohio. But it’s a little bit more robust now that I’ve read Wind-Up Butter Cow. I mean, I could now go to Licking County and potentially find a few things to do, and/or follow Mike Rep’s advice and check out Serpent Mound or some civil war burial sites.
Oh, and a couple other things: Jeff Curtis tells the story (as a comic) of coming to college and immersing himself of the Kent, OH underground scene in the early 80s and playing in bands without once mentioning Moonlove, his phenomenal mid-80s band whose May Never Happen got reissued a couple years back. Finally, and completely refuting any notion that this might be a perzine and not really music-related, Clayton writes some truly funny live show reviews that have absolutely zero to do with Ohio, and Wind-Up is all the better for it. I wouldn’t mind one bit taking a look at the other issues that she did both before and after this thing.
Fanzine Hemorrhage 