Hairy Hi-Fi #3

Sometimes I get a little downhearted when I come to realize how much of the written, printed word of the 20th century will never be re-collected nor again adored by anyone beyond fanzine and magazine aficionados, or those willing to regularly pop open PDFs and read on a computer/iPad. I’m both of those things, but I know I’m part of a relatively tiny audience. I ache not merely for this major leakage of primal music journalism, but for all the “new journalism” of the 60s and 70s you won’t be reading; the film writing mostly lost to time; even the uncollected short fiction you’d find in literary journals, weekly magazines and mass-circulation monthlies. 

If there was a market for it, I’d want to lead the charge to get all of it into new print editions, a series of my own, paid for by a major publisher. We’ll have to settle for the very few curators who actually do this, like Dian Hanson does for absurd men’s pin-up/girlie magazines of the 50s-70s. I myself have a small collection of these and they’re often a phenomenal window into male libido, male fear of women, and – at times – swashbuckling fiction or advocacy that’s often quite readable, if dated in the extreme. You can learn a great deal from issues of Rogue, Sir!, Dude, Adam, Stag, Man, Spree and Hi-Life, let me tell you.

If I did something for music fanzines, I might put in the Moe Tucker interview from Hairy Hi-Fi #3, published in 1990 by John Bagnall in Durham, England. It’s exactly why I still want to read, and re-read, my old fanzines, and transmit my half-baked transmittals about them to you. This interview captures Moe as she’s come out of motherhood-driven seclusion and is now playing with Jad Fair and members of Half Japanese, touring the UK and coming to a reckoning with her Velvets past. To me, it’s an essential piece of Velvets ephemera. She’s still tight with Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison, and talks a bunch about coming across Velvets bootleg tapes and LPs at swap meets in the UK on this tour. She’s a little stupefied: “There’s one called Sweet Sister Ray that’s like four ‘Sister Ray’s!”. Interlocutor Marc Baines has to coach her to demand the tapes; she does, nicely, and gets a full armload to bring home.

What’s funny about this piece in particular is just how much more Baines knows about her legacy and post-breakup Velvets ephemera than she does, so it’s a real treat to get her reaction. “They did??!?”. “He DOES??!?”. It makes me love her all the more. Hairy Hi-Fi #3, which to me reads like a psych-tinged cross between Galactic Zoo Dossier (mostly handwritten as well!) and late 80s Flesh and Bones (lots of comics and cut-out 60s hippies ads), adds in a great piece about Romulan Records – remember those? Following in the then-current tradition of excavatory bootleg labels with names like Strip and Link, they were best known for the Girls in the Garage comps, but released a slew of other wild vinyl comps of lost 60s stuff. This piece catches the label early in their run, and reviews everything that had come out to that point that Marc Baines could grab. It’s a true piece of fandom and obsession that I salute with gusto. 

Elsewhere, there’s another fantastic interview present – this one with Eugene Chadbourne, a great talker and storyteller. This one needs to go in an anthology as well. The editors have severe mania for all things Shimmy-Disc and B.A.L.L., and follow the latter around England as they play various gigs, then learn after they leave that they’ve broken up, with members of the band joining Dinosaur Jr. (?). I remember this too, but can’t call up the particulars at all. Seems to me Dinosaur Jr. carried on just fine and mostly the same for years afterward. There are also interviews with Laughing Soup Dish and Walkingseeds, about whom I remember a bit more, but whom I haughtily dismissed for the most part. We had Pussy Galore and the Lazy Cowgirls and Mudhoney and the Laughing Hyenas and World of Pooh and The Dwarves active and raring at the time, and that’s precisely where my head was.

Hairy Hi-Fi #3 doesn’t really rise to the occasion reviews-wise, since most everything is “great”, and we all know that’s not true. It’s those interviews that makes this a superlative read and a highly welcome piece of reference material I’ll hang onto for at least another decade or two, before I unleash the entire fanzine archive onto eBay or magnanimously give them to Penelope Houston’s punk room at the San Francisco Public Library.