The Pope #2

You may know Tim Adams as the fella behind the Ajax Mailorder catalog, which was a pretty crucial conduit for record collection-burnishing in the 1990s. Or maybe you know the guy for his underground label Ajax Records. For me, he was always “Tim from The Pope”, as that’s where I discovered the cut of his jib back in 1987, when I swiped this issue of his fanzine from my “internship” job at Sound Choice mag in Ojai, CA. Tim was probably the first fanzine editor to send me a personal letter in the mail, when I ordered the issue that followed this one. Given my youth – I’d just turned 20 – getting a letter from a highly opinionated fanzine editor, even if it was mostly to make fun of the name of the college town I lived in (Isla Vista, CA), impressed upon me the value of customer service and providing “a little something extra” in transactions such as this. Not that I ever follow his example in my own mailings. I’m too fuckin’ busy. 

The Pope #2 is a digest-sized, fairly packed read with an outstanding cover photo. I’m gathering here that Adams is going to college two hours away from Chicago, in Indiana, but that the address for the mag is in Oakbrook, IL – likely his parents’ house. Badass. He’s already gathered some fan mail from his debut issue. Jane Guskin from Ten Tall Men writes about how Tim needs to buy the Whitefronts LP (yes!) and mockingly compares his fanzine to Gerard Cosloy’s Conflict, a comparison not at all without merit. “I found his whole ‘mag’ utterly enjoyable, especially the cruel ‘slags’ of my ‘fave’ records. Same goes for your zine – you seem to have learned a lot from your idols, down to what could almost be imitation. You just seem a bit less….’worldly’, let’s say”.

Adams also reviews a bunch of current fanzines, taking extra care to repeatedly make sport of Jet Lag fanzine. Was he the guy that once called it “Jet Lack“? I could never call it anything but that after I’d read that. Other fanzine reviews include two that feature Karen Schoemer, whom I know sometimes looks at this site (whoa!), and a review of something I’ve never seen a copy of, Butt Rag #1 from Peter Margasak. Adams says, of the ‘Rag, it’s “..pretty nasty (maybe too nasty?)…I was initially turned off by the pure vitriol of the thing”. In reviewing Bill Callahan’s Disaster #3, he says “Apparently this is a side project of Gerard Cosloy’s, wherein he lets his three-year-old autistic son do the layout”. You get the temper and tone of young male American fanzine nation circa 1987 in spades here, something we’ve discussed in this space before. 

I often get the sense that Tim Adams is “hedging” here a bit, which is fine. He seems to now realize that people in his musical orbit will actually read his fanzine, and unless it’s with regard to a band like “Scruffy The Cat” or something, his punches seem a little bit more pulled than the letters to the editor responding to The Pope #1 might indicate. I’ve never seen that issue, so wouldn’t know, but I at least recall Adams’ fanzine as being highly joke-centric and a little scene insider-y, but maybe that’s in the later issues that I haven’t seen in years but that we’ll talk about here eventually. 

For interviews, there’s one with The Didjits and another with Killdozer, a band I associate with The Pope because it may have been this interview that turned me on to them that year, or perhaps because Tim calls himself “Hamburger_Martyr” on Instagram. There’s also a long talk with Clark Johnson of Squirrel Bait, who’d just broken up. Are you old enough to remember Squirrel Bait mania? There was something I read maybe my senior year of high school in Spin about how “Squirrel Bait will kill you” because they were so “loud”. Clark Johnson, who apparently is 6’7”, is game enough for a fairly long and well-professed interview, and he underscores just how young the band were – no older than myself at the time – when they were getting written up in Spin and whatnot. I’d thankfully forgotten that members of the band went on to a project called “Fancy Pants” at one point. This entire interview can be read here. 

And as with other American underground music fanzines, my own from a few years later very much included, live and record reviews round out the proceedings toward the end. There’s a great live review of Big Black and their final Chicago show, in which Albini lights a big row of firecrackers on the stage right when they come out on stage, just as the band kicks into “Fists of Love”. Great night out. As for record reviews, Adams thinks Soul Asylum’s While You Were Out is a big step down from Made To Be Broken, which I don’t agree with because it’s not true, and he calls it “the worst album cover since the 1970s”, which I do agree with, at least until Murphy’s Law’s Back With a Bong came along two years later. He says “OK, call me a fag, but I like this album” for the Sex Clark Five’s Strum and Drum! (also a fine record). He does a little better when he dubs Scratch Acid’s Berserker a “squalling Tojo of a record”. Tojo! 

Interestingly, I now have two copies of his follow-up The Pope #3 as well. Both have identical contents on the inside, yet one cover highlights that inside there’ll be stuff on They Might Be Giants, Zoogz Rift, Trip Shakespeare and additional bands so obscure that I have no idea how they’d become comedy punchlines, if that’s indeed what was going on here. Bold move if so. I wonder how limited my nutty “joke” cover might be?