Do The Pop! #1

A cottage industry devoted to American punk rock scholarship emerged in the 1990s, spurred on by both the Killed By Death and Bloodstains obscure 45s collections and by the nascent internet. I proved myself an adept student, and I did my best to pull together whatever revelatory texts I could find. One particularly lost-to-time artifact is this Do The Pop #1 fanzine, published out of Seattle by married couple Lisa Lindstrom and Alan Wright in 1995. I did my homework & tried to find if there’s any real record of this thing online, and I found that at this writing, there is not. This, my friends, is why we pursue and share the navel-gazing passions that we do.

Do The Pop #1 (and only?) is 70+ pages of newsprint, absolutely packed with information both critical and non. Alan and Lisa had once worked together on a 60s/garage fanzine called Cryptic Times before this, and while I’ve heard of it, I don’t have any of ‘em. Their tastes in punk rock music don’t precisely align with mine and maybe veer too far into the “pogo”/leather jacket realm, and of course that’s fine – but it means I can skip slathering profiles of Sham 69 and The Viletones, for instance, and skim through Lisa’s incredibly detailed interview/profile on The Droogs – surely the best and final word on said long-running band if you’re interested. There are also two lengthy pieces on Radio Birdman, a band who in the pre-KBD era were very important to me, but whom I unfortunately find quite pedestrian and boring now. I’m still trying to piece together why I’d been obsessing over them and not The Saints in the 1980s.

This issue’s stock in trade is the partisan profile and discography, with photos cribbed from various flyers and fanzines of the past and assembled beautifully on whatever computers were able to make it look this great in 1995. Aside from the aforementioned, there are also pieces of this ilk on the Alan Milman Sect, Eater, Satan’s Rats, The Hates and What? Records. There’s a fine example of Stooges scholarship here as well, with Alan telling the tale of how his first Stooges record was Metallic K.O., and how that was what turned him into a Stooges fanatic. He then quite helpfully pulls apart all the different primitive Stooges bootlegs coming out around that time (remember these, on “Revenge Records”?), most of which were pretty lame to my ears, but which the fanatic both needs and requires. 

I found my interest once again piqued in particular when I re-read their excellent 4-page overview of late 70s Seattle punk: The Lewd, Ze Whizz Kids, The Enemy and whatnot. I conversed a little bit before with you about this wild scene here, here and here. While there are only a couple of records from that era/town that I think actually stand up, you get this sense of a frantic, desperate need to offend, rebel and shock, making late 70s Seattle sound absurdly stuffy and uptight in a way that SF/LA/NY etc just weren’t. In a non-punk move, the editors have recently discovered Beyond The Valley of the Dolls and can’t not talk about it. I love that film so much I bought the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray. 

The other draw here is a huge Wayne Kramer interview, taking us from the MC5 through his days in jail, playing with Johnny Thunders and now with, uh, some guys from Pennywise. I think people loved this guy so much not merely for his undeniable talents on guitar and image-making, but just for being an enthusiastic, lucid, humble and relatable fella from one of the underground’s most legendary bands. I never shook his hand nor broke bread with him, but folks I know who did couldn’t say enough about the guy. Lisa & Alan’s piece is on par with any post-MC5 thing I’ve ever read and needs to be collected in a book somewhere. Are you the person to do it? Get in touch if you require the scans.