New Wave #1

This, for lack of a better term, is a “my cup runneth over” fanzine from 1977. It’s somewhat amazing to even be allowed to look at it. I was not aware of the existence of New Wave #1 until I found a way of procuring a copy on eBay – nor was I aware of the absurdly great bounty within it, save for a drunkenly-written Lester Bangs piece about punk that ended up being sadly uneventful once I actually read it. 

I’m 99% sure that this is the only issue of this San Francisco-based newspaper-style fanzine ever created, and I’m just as assured that a 1-issue run was not at all what the editors had intended when they excitedly put this together in August 1977. (For instance, in the back there’s a plea for subscribers. $9.50 for 12 issues, plus your choice of either The Ramones’ Leave Home or Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers). Who were these editors? Proving that he was in fact ultimately useful for something, the main editor was Howie Klein; the associate editor was Steve Seid, about whom more later.

Excited is definitely the word. We’re into punk pretty early here: the long-awaited and much-prophesized rocknroll revolution is finally here, which doesn’t stop many of the big-name rock writers assembled from sneering about punk anyway, Bangs included. As it should be. Where do I start? How about with some of the bigger names: Billy Altman writes about Mink Deville, and Richard Meltzer gets his own column on jazz: “Bebop on Your Mama”. It’s really funny, actually, and full of his patented discombobulated snark. He even saw Dizzy Gillespie play live that year. Patti Smith pens a mostly unreadable poetry slam-type thing on Robert Bresson that I’d probably have sent back to her for rewrite (“come on, Patti, I know you can do better”). 

Loads of excitement and hot gossip in the San Francisco, LA, NY and UK scene reports. LA’s is by Gregg Turner, he’d go on to do an almost identical column in Take It! in the 1980s. An “Amy G” is mentioned in the SF column; she’s a “former punk of the month” who has just moved to Memphis. Would this – be still my heart – be Amy Gassner, who’d join The Klitz in Memphis?? Gotta be, right? If you’ve never heard her 1979 rendition of “Brown Sugar”, which was recorded “under the influence of hog tranquilizers” and absolutely sounds like it, you’ll need to do so right now. And if you have a copy of that record and need to part with it, please get in touch.

Maybe my single favorite page in New Wave #1 is the one compiling some instant-reaction crowd interview snippets after Crime’s June 18th, 1977 show at the Mabuhay Gardens; this includes quotes from Jean Caffeine from New Dezezes, Britley Black (sic), who’d later join the band; Don Vinyl and Michael Snyder, the latter of whom was an SF rock critic I think at the Chronicle, back when daily newspapers actually had multiple in-house rock critics. Also in various spots throughout this magazine is talk about how Jennifer Moscone, the Mayor’s kid, is going to punk shows at the Mabuhay. Sheriff Michael Hennessey was into punk, too, and he used to regularly show up at the Mab. 

There are too many other features for me to go deep into: Cheap Trick, The Dils, Avengers, Nuns pieces; the only one on Ozzie from Sacramento I’ve ever seen; a Mary Monday (!) article plus a centerfold; The Negatives, a Richard Hell interview and more. There’s a country music overview by Ed Ward that tries to tie modern country outlaws like Johnny Paycheck to punk, rather unsuccessfully. And the capper, the thing that just makes this a chef’s-kiss A+ fanzine in my book, is the Steve Seid film column, “Enter The Avant Garde Surfers”. It calls out genius films like Payday and The King of Marvin Gardens and Three Women, among others, and is essentially a paean to how utterly amazing 70s American filmmaking was up to that point. Seid realizes he’s living in a golden age, and is essentially admonishing readers that they ought to realize it as well. Alas, “Star Wars”, a popular children’s film that helped to quickly bury major-studio risk-taking, was released more or less as this magazine was being written. Seid was not to know, but one of his cultural worlds was ending just as another was excitedly being born.