For those of us who were living there, maybe we didn’t know it at the time, but the year 1985 would eventually prove to be one of the leanest annums in underground music history. “Americana/new sincerity” garbage was ascendent. Post-punk had splintered into dozens of mostly boring strands. Hardcore was an absolute joke of pseudo-metal postering, brain-dead funnypunk and political nincompoopery. It’s arguable that 1984 or 1986 was worse, but I don’t think so. This 1985 zeitgeist is where Matter #12 has landed. (despite what the cover misprint says, this was their twelfth issue; I’ll talk about the real Matter #11 another day).
You’ve got a fella from The DBs on the cover. Do any of you have revered bands that you’ve read about and have known about for 40+ years, but who, to the best of your knowledge, you’ve never actually heard? The DBs are this band for me. Why would I start now, right? For years I was rather smugly proud that The Feelies were this band for me, but then I went and heard them around 2010 or so, and totally ruined everything.
Matter #12 had a grade-A letters page, and invariably, as we’ve written about when discussing other issues of the magazine here and here, there’s always someone complaining about staff writer Steve Albini. Nick Mink of Lawrence, KS writes that Albini is “a pompous, ignorant, pretend-intellectual, contemptible pile of stinking horseshit”. Hard to believe today, but people actually took their dopey indie rock pretty seriously, and it was considered very au courant to pick sides and head into pitched battle against those whose musical taste didn’t flatter yours. This issue also has a wordy complaint from Derek Bostrom of The Meat Puppets about a letter penned against them in a previous issue, ending with “people who don’t like the Meat Puppets can fuck off as far as we’re concerned”. See, even smart people like Bostrom were young and dumb once, so don’t feel too embarrassed about what you said in your twenties.
Matter also did the three-dot gossip column thing so popular in the punk fanzines before it; the best piece of blather in this one concerns Billy Bragg playing a tape of Albini’s Big Black for his tour-mates Echo and the Bunnymen, “who were very impressed. When told he’d won the Bunnyfolk’s favor, however, Black’s Steve Albini was not”. There are three new up-n-comers profiled on the following pages: Dumptruck, Live Skull and White Animals, the latter of whom (a college-bar cover band that apparently did reggae versions of pop songs) sound like the worst thing about the 80s/90s not called The Freaky Executives or Skankin’ Pickle.
The magazine, previously a Chicago fanzine, is now based in Hoboken, NJ and as such has pieces from locals like Jim DeRogatis and Jim Testa, the latter of whom does a (relatively) early piece on the Butthole Surfers. So far so good after a Minimal Man interview, but then a terrible Rolling Stone-level puff piece on “General Public”? And then two pieces about the awful Del Fuegos and how they can’t wait to sell out and make money? And then one about the other terrible band I used to always confuse them with, the Del-Lords? 1985, folks.
If I was a Robyn Hitchcock fan I’m sure his interview here (I assume with editor Liz Phillip) would have excited me somewhat, as it’s really well-done and wide-ranging, but it’s hard to muster even a modicum of excitement for the tepidly limp “garage” bands waxed about after this: The Fuzztones, The Prime Movers and The Mad Violets. I first heard “sixties-inspired punk” that year vis-a-vis these bands and their peers The Vipers,the Lyres, the Chesterfield Kings and so forth, and it’s little wonder it took me another couple of years to care about anything 60s-ish at all, I was so turned off. After the usual “group reviews” thing the mag did where each writer gets a few sentences and assigns a letter grade, Steve Albini’s “Tired of Ugly Fat?” column closes up with the postulation that “we are plum ready for some new blood and some new noise….in gross terms there is still strong music being made, but by fewer and fewer bands and in ever-more-limited contexts”. That is 1985 to me, distilled to its essence. Like other fanzines I’ve written about here, Matter #12’s is great source material if you want to get an excellent sense of what this semi-barren ‘84-’86 interregnum was like.
Fanzine Hemorrhage 
“the year 1985 would eventually prove to be one of the leanest annums in underground music history. “Americana/new sincerity” garbage was ascendent. Post-punk had splintered into dozens of mostly boring strands.” I partially blame too many Midwestern farm kids who grew up hearing nothing but Top 40 and Polka hitting college that year and hearing college radio for the first time: they were too easily impressed (Chuck Klosterman is the patron saint of those guys). I was graduating high school that year so it was a real drag. That year I saw the White Animals clear out a club after the Butthole Surfers played, so you made me think of them for the first time in almost 40 years.
” it’s hard to muster even a modicum of excitement for the tepidly limp “garage” bands waxed about after this: The Fuzztones, The Prime Movers and The Mad Violets. I first heard “sixties-inspired punk” that year vis-a-vis these bands and their peers The Vipers,the Lyres, the Chesterfield Kings and so forth, and it’s little wonder it took me another couple of years to care about anything 60s-ish at all, I was so turned off.” They may have been the Insane Clown Posse of 80s garage, but I played the hell out of the Fuzztones live album that year; I wrote a review of it for a friend’s zine that would make me wince now (who knows? You might find it). I still like the Lyres but DMZ were better; Jeff Conolly is a real “don’t meet your heroes” guy though. I tried to start a garage band myself that year, but the guitarist was hitting on an under-aged friend of the drummer and that ended that.
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