When I wrote up Coolest Retard #15 earlier this year and promoted my logghorea about it on “Instagram”, it turned out to be the single most popular thing I’d ever posted. That Mark E. Smith cover somehow slipped its way into the algorithm, and all of a sudden I’m right up there with the Kardashians or Britney Spears or whatever it is that’s popular with you kids today. And let me state that I was so smitten with this collectable Chicago fanzine from 1981 that I went right out and collected another one, Coolest Retard #13 from April/May ‘81.
Like The Offense, being published “down the road” in Columbus, Coolest Retard’s a have-cake-and eat-it compendium of pretty much everything interesting going in rock music in 1981, with few meaningful compartmentalizing lines drawn between English post-punk, American hardcore and all things indie/underground. I mean this cover shot of Bauhaus – I thought it was actually Jeff Pezzati of Naked Raygun at first, a band also featured here and another dude with abnormally high cheekbones. There’s a good mixing of Chicago scene stuff with what’s happening elsewhere; for the in-town stuff, there are the Naked Raygun and Strike Under interviews, plus an entire page praising the Da single. Have you heard this one? Are you a new waver? You should hear it.
And if you can’t get what you want in Chicago, there’s Milwaukee sitting right there on its haunches 90 minutes to the north. Coolest Retard #13 has a full list of Milwaukee bands and short sentences about each: Ama-Dots, Haskels, Oil Tasters and many others. No Die Kreuzen, you ask? No! They were “The Stellas” at this point, about which it is said “Young Rockford, IL transplants on their way to L.A. – good punk while it lasted.”. What the hell happened with that aborted move to LA? Strangely, they almost moved to San Francisco, too – as I recounted here. See, we learn these important things when we re-read punk rock fanzines.
There’s a good Bauhaus interview; I’ll broker no argument about their merits, as they were one of my favorite bands on the planet not long after this, and their many “imports” helped make my high school experience a record-obsessed one. There’s talk with them here about how the English weeklies don’t like them and some speculation about why, which comes mainly down to “they don’t understand”. I also like that there’s a comprehensive “alternative radio guide”, which is effectively any show in Chicagoland worth listening to. This was also big in Ripper, and invaluable at a time when fanzines, record stores and radio shows were the sole trifecta for finding out about what weirdos and musical miscreants were creating outside of your backyard.
All this praise notwithstanding, let’s not mistake Coolest Retard for, say, Forced Exposure or Matter or even The Offense in terms of its ability to mint hundreds of discerning tastemakers and send them out into the world. There’s a highly effusive review of the execrable Prince in which one of his pieces of R&B schlock is described as sounding “like Quincy Jones producing Electric Warrior”. The Stray Cats: “they are so bloody good”. So it’s probably best to maybe skip these parts, or to remember, as I do, when anyone who looked and acted differently was an ally; when anyone who didn’t “conform to the norm” was a potential friend. And a year or two later, when “Rock of the 80s” was ascendent and MTV was everywhere, there was hopefully a sharpening and resetting of tastes. It took me even longer than that – and I still worship Bauhaus and the Banshees.
Fanzine Hemorrhage 
“There’s a highly effusive review of the execrable Prince in which one of his pieces of R&B schlock is described as sounding “like Quincy Jones producing Electric Warrior”. The Stray Cats: “they are so bloody good”. So it’s probably best to maybe skip these parts, or to remember, as I do, when anyone who looked and acted differently was an ally; when anyone who didn’t “conform to the norm” was a potential friend. And a year or two later, when “Rock of the 80s” was ascendent and MTV was everywhere, there was hopefully a sharpening and resetting of tastes.” That’s how I remember it; I’d listen to the “New Wave” show here, and you’d hear the Stray Cats, The Fall, and Black Flag in the same set. Hey, it wasn’t Journey, so give it a spin.
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