Psyclone (June 1977)

One thing you come to realize when you’ve, ahem, been doin’ this sort of fanzine exploring for as long as I have is the incredible abundance of print that was just everywhere in the 70s, 80s and 90s. I mean, I remember it well, so it’s not like I’m just piecing it together now, but back then record stores, head shops and independent stores of many colors would carry magazines & fanzines galore, and then piles of FREE newsprint tabloid things sat on the floors as well. In a few places, they still do. 

What was maybe different about that time was the quality level of some of these ad-supported freebies. They had full editorial staff, and they paid reviewers and graphic designers and circulation managers and others to do their thing. I’m not just talking about your general alt-weeklies, but tabloids like San Francisco’s Psyclone (“the magazine money can’t buy”) that were 100% music-focused. You’d get them on the floor of now-legendary record stores like Rather Ripped and Aquarius. I’ve already garbled a bit about these things in my preamble to a piece on Snipehunt, so you can continue your studies there if you’d like.

Contrary to this thing, which says there were only three issues of Psyclone, and which therefore gins up some scarcity by selling those three for a whopping $1800, I can tell you right here and right now that there were more than three, and that a few of them pre-date punk. There’s one selling for $30 at San Francisco’s Amoeba Music right now from 1976, and while it has a Mary Monday article, the rest of it’s decidedly of the fern bar/long hair/sexy sex/doofus rock era epitomized to me by the godawful Tubes. 

This June 1977 issue isn’t all that far off, either. Sure, you’ve got hot new band The Nuns on the cover and a half-page ad for Crime’s new 45 (!!), but what’s sorta impressive about this one is just how trapped the editorial stuff is between “the new sound” and the old stuff they still want to write about. Like there’s a big spread on Genesis, for instance, and a lot of bemoaning of their new singer “Phil” and how awesome Peter Gabriel was. There’s also a piece on some long-haired bozos called Hero, as well as dissections in the reviews section of dreck from Utopia, Bad Company and Pink Floyd (as well as of some punk-ish stuff and “imports” from England).

The masthead has some names I definitely know well from my California punk history studies, though: editor Jerry Paulson (the first guy to put on shows at The Mabuhay Gardens); Howie Klein; Steve Seid; Michael Snyder; Cosmo Topper; Jonathan Postal; James Stark and Jenny Stern (aka Jenny Lens). But they’re all trying to figure it out. A guy named Robert Conttrell thinks that UK punk is in no way an offshoot of US punk like The Ramones, and says, regarding England, “the strongest provincial scene is in Manchester, led by The Clash”. Another guy named Walter Lenci is able to grab John Cale for about five minutes for an interview before he goes on stage, and Cale spends almost the entire time preemptively trying to get Lenci to not talk about the Velvet Underground or about how he was recently backing up solo Lou Reed: “Now this is important. This is number one….Now’s what’s important….This band is really, really good….Now it’s time to do it myself….It’s time to do it in America. I now have the opportunity to create and establish my own territory. This is it. Now I have a good band, good management….This is my time”. Somebody bring this man a spoon, there’s a snowstorm coming on!

One of the things I enjoyed most about the book about Dirk Dirksen and the Mab (Shut Up You Animals!! The Pope is Dead. A Remembrance of Dirk Dirksen: The History of the Mabuhay Gardens) was the complete show-by-show listing of every single band that played there on every single date. Worth the price of admission by itself. Well, it’s funny in the early years, ‘76-’77, to see just who turned up, and this June 1977 Psyclone has a great ad in the back for what’s coming this month there. It’s really early in the scene, remember, but June will feature shows by The Nuns, The Dogs, Berlin Brats and Freestone (yes! “Bummer Bitch” Freestone!). Roky Erickson playing with The Pop, too. And then all those strange lost-to-time non-punk Bay Area bands that had serious but small followings at the time: Leila and the Snakes; Magister Ludi; Novak; and the Hoo Doo Rhythm Devils. I’ll do this thing when I see a show calendar like this and retrospectively plot out my month for the shows I’d have gone to, knowing what I know now. It’s a little more crazed for LA clubs circa 1978-82 – I’d truly be out 27 nights out of 30 – but once the Mab really got rolling late in 1977, it would not have been difficult at all to spend a good ten/fifteen nights a month there, as many did.

Hey, if you were one of ‘em, and you have some tales about Psyclone to tell, please do so in the comments, okay?