At the time this came out in 1998 I was of two minds about these guys, David Dunlap and Giles Palermo (aka Andrew Earles) and their The Cimarron Weekend. I felt perhaps they were getting a little too high on their own supply, going a bit too “gonzo”; writing whilst drunk; over-revering the 70s rock critic aesthetic (Bangs/Meltzer/Saunders et al) and so forth. But they truly did make me laff repeatedly, and I was highly pleased by their off-the-charts snark and snidely dismissive takes on modern indie rock. I busted out The Cimarron Weekend #6 this past week and have come to find that it’s aged far, far better than I’d imagined, and I’m now ready to put it in an upper-tier 1990s fanzine pantheon that exists only in my head.
I mean, no complaints at all about the cover, am I right? None whatsoever. Earles and Dunlap break out of the gates with individual gonzo-style introductions – oh boy, hang on, it’s gonna be a wild, wild ride with these naughty, drunken rapscallions! But then, right after that, we’ve got a Chris Selvig Top 10 which includes The Boredoms, Dock Boggs and the Jared Diamond book. Selvig! A couple years later he’d become a personal friend, which he remains very much to this day, but I didn’t know the guy from the proverbial Adam at the time. Alan Licht then does a “10 worst”, including the same Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas film that Selvig liked, as well as “virtually every Matador release (especially Liz Phair)”.
There are piqued and odd letters to the editor from Jim Shepard, Brad Kohler and Tim Ellison. Apparently Andrew Earles had previously gone to town not only on Ellison’s Rock Mag but on Richard Meltzer’s Aesthetics of Rock, and Ellison’s bravely fighting back on both of their behalves. Jim Shepard, alas, would expire by his own hand within months of writing these letters, one of which happily details how much cocaine John Cale was doing backstage when Shepard opened for him, and how frustrated Shepard was by The Offense’s turn toward 4AD records.
Earles then dives deep into film reviews, mostly from the 1970s and 1980s. Fat City, one of my top five films of all time, is “a rewarding jaunt if you have the patience”. He likes Who’ll Stop The Rain more, and that’s fine, except the drug delivery is in Berkeley, not San Francisco. Dog Day Afternoon is “probably my favorite movie in motion picture history”. It’s up there for me as well. I’d mostly forgotten about 1996’s Trees Lounge with Steve Buscemi, which I saw in the theaters when it came out, but after re-reading this review I’ll absolutely need to give it another run-through. Another fantastic one of Buscemi’s from around this time is Living in Oblivion if you haven’t seen it.
Then Earles goes into a series of mostly stream-of-consciousness, feelings-be-damned record and fanzine reviews. These are far meaner than I’d remembered. I truly enjoyed the evisceration of Nick Cain’s Opprobrium #5. I wouldn’t mind sneaking a look at Cain’s De/Create and Opprobrium fanzines again nearly 25-30 years later to see if I still feel the same way Earles did about it, but I sold the ones I owned long before the turn of the century, as I too felt like Cain maybe ought to have started his musical journeys with The Stooges instead of, say, Matthew Shipp. I’ve scanned his review below, since I won’t be writing my own, similar review unless I come into inexpensive contact with an issue again. I’ll add the Cat Power review to the bottom as well; anyone who saw her live around this period knows exactly what’s going on here.
His Dirtbombs review is good, too: “I normally don’t come within 15 feet of records called ‘Horndog Fest”, or songs called ‘Vixens in Space’, ‘Granny’s Little Chicken’ or ‘Shake!! Shivaree”, but I believe this to be a half-deliberate attempt to lure stupid people into hearing an album that’s actually driving off into the ditch for a change”. This means he thinks all the Gearhead dumbassery is actually subterfuge for what was really a top-drawer record (it wasn’t, but whatever). Then – wait a minute WTF?? – there’s a reviews page by ME. OK, I’m just funnin’ ya, I remember doing this. It was originally from an email-only version of Superdope I’d sent around to folks I knew after my final issue in 1998: I covered The Chiefs, The Bassholes, Jenks “Tex” Carmen and The Dirtbombs, the latter of which I most certainly did not like, a negative review for which I was eventually taken to task in person by Mick Collins a year later. Then Chris Selvig, my pal, has a bunch more reviews!
Off to the side of all these reviews are some fantastic shaded columns packed with negativity. Earles does a rundown of British music publications like The Wire, NME, Mojo, Q and Uncut. Dunlap does “Scottish reviews”: Belle & Sebastian, Arab Strap, Mogwai. You can only imagine. As any American would, he sneaks in a haggis joke. Then, in a series of pieces I wasn’t that interested in at the time but that read a lot better now, there’s a bunch of tribute blather about National Lampoon, a magazine which had been highly formative for these rogues. This includes Chris Selvig waxing poetically on PJ O’Rourke: “Reading P.J. O’Rourke has long been one of my guilty pleasures. My parents are staunch Democrats, so I felt a bit mischievous when I brought Republican Party Reptile into the house years ago.” It was somewhat the opposite for me, raised by semi-staunch Republicans, and how satisfied I was when I told my dad, who was footing the entire bill for my undergraduate degree, about my “Black Radicals” class at UCSB. “Dad, let’s talk about what ‘by any means necessary’ means to you”.
The Cimarron Weekend #6 is now something of a landmark mag for me after the intense visitation I just had with it. Information about it and their other issues is pretty scarce online – I guess I get the top Google results for this – yet with a little bit of fortitude and sleuthing, I’m certain you can scare one up somewhere, maybe!
Fanzine Hemorrhage 