Damp #4

In my previous write-ups of Kevin Kraynick’s Damp #2 and Damp #3, and even though I talked about them in reverse order, I still noted the growth, wisdom and “maturity” from one issue to the next. I mean, maturity in a sense, right? We are talking about early twentysomethings publishing indie rock fanzines from their apartments. Yet by Winter 1989, when Damp #4 came out, Kraynick was a wizened professional. He’s still using that “dos command line” font every now & again, but now it’s being varied with a ‘lil Helvetica and some sort of proto-Arial font that I can’t place. Like I said, totally pro.

This was being assembled and composed from somewhere called So. Willington, CT, and surprisingly gets right to the meat of the matter with an early anti-George Bush essay by Michael “Spike” Anton. The back cover even has a Bush drawing in which one of his eyes has a holy cross in it and the other has a swastika. Brutal, brutal burn. Remember when Bush and, I don’t know, Dan Quayle – were the most evil Republicans you could think of? Wouldn’t you like to have those days back again in 2025? Politics does pop up from time to time in Damp #4, but really more as a hobby than as MRR-style rants, and actually, so does the National Football League (we call it the NFL). I thought fanzine dorks only admitted to liking baseball??

There’s a lot to unwind here, but my re-read of this one for the first time since maybe the early 2000s had me immediately heading straight to the Gibson Bros interview, which took place in 1988, just after the Homestead reissue of their Jay’s-top-50-records-of-all-time debut Big Pine Boogie. I like how guitarist/hero Don Howland tries to downplay that he was ever in Great Plains; Cut editor Steve Erickson’s name is repeatedly taken in vain, and a pledge is made by the band to never, ever play Boston again. Kraynick rather sweetly butters up his Columbus, OH-residing subjects with “Columbus seems like it would be a great town to live in. The bands are certainly top notch coming out of there.” (Much chuckling from DON and JEFF). Don: “On what would you base that kind of an assumption on, Kevin?”. Later Howland says “There’s probably forty people who do cool stuff here and they’re all sick of each other”. 

Another interview is with the rock group “M.O.T.O.“. I’m not sure how it happened, but I went 35+ years without ever once hearing this band – perhaps willfully, based on descriptions I’d read – until I saw them at Gonerfest 2024 in Memphis last year. Well, I saw four or five songs anyway, and then it was time to go find some water or something. Mission accomplished. Mark Lo both gets his own column on cassettes and gets to do the Rhys Chatham interview. I like how it’s not the standard “fanzine Q&A”, like the pedestrian way I’ve always done them, but an actual article by Lo, with quotes and answers from Chatham interspersed as & when they are needed and/or required – the way a journalist does it. 

There was a band in here I’d never heard of – the Bedspring Reptiles – and then I come to find they’re actually the Minneapolis band the Baby Astronauts, whom I was really into in the late 80s. They’ve just changed their name. Kevin drops a Department Store Santas reference (!) within his intro. A debut Bedspring Reptiles LP has been recorded and is being readied for release (note: it wasn’t). Obviously, you can tell from the cover that Harvey Pekar, Fred Frith and Vomit Launch are interviewed as well. Only one of these artists mentions and praises The Whitefronts. 

I guess I can take or leave the mocking porno reviews, which are something Forced Exposure was already doing, but this is nicely offset by a much-needed glossary of Funkadelic slang and its translation (Thumpasaurus People = “foot-stomping hand clap Funkateers”), which I’ve now pinned to the microwave in case the Mothership disgorges the Brides of Funkenstein at my door. The review section, called “Big Ass Rock on Turd Mountain”, is full of ‘88/’89s brightest and its lesser lights. Kraynick provides his biggest props (and a nice little preemptive “scolding” to indie rock fans) for Last Exit. Unfortunately his next-biggest are for Prince, who is perhaps my least favorite mainstream recording artist of all time. And some of this is so dumb it’s great: for Pussy Galore’s Sugarshit Sharp, he says “Well, big fat boogies, if it ain’t another clatter clatter ding dong from the Boopsie Boys”. I suppose that’s one way to put it, isn’t it?

My copy even has a stuffed insert with 20 handwritten, one-sentence, mostly dismissive “late-arriving” record reviews, including the Nirvana and Mudhoney debuts. Damp #5 and #6 are even better than all of this nonsense, and we haven’t even covered those yet. Can you hang with me another two years, folks?