ChinMusic! #1

I remember my actual glee when I discovered this issue at Cody’s Books in Berkeley, CA in 1997. Baseball and punk rock, two of my lifetime passions, together in one fanzine. This was in the glory days of “the magazine”, no doubt about it. Cody’s had a magazine section that went on forever; just the underground music stuff alone was packed with your ChinMusic!s and your Pure Filths and your Superdopes. Man, when I was in grad school in Seattle during 1997-99, there was an even better magazine emporium on University Avenue that I’d while my time away in between classes. The place was unreal; every possible publication angle about every sub-genre was covered and available for purchase. My favorite was a golfing magazine targeted at hipsters/dorks, attempting to make golf attractive to the same sort of folks who enjoyed tiki bars and vintage 50s fashion. (No matter how hard I search Google for variations of “90s golf magazine for hipster doofus morons”, I can’t find this title). Or the computing magazine that put pornstar Christy Canyon and her internet-worker sister on the cover. 

So why not a ChinMusic!, right? The Venn diagram of rocknrollers and baseball fiends overlaps far more than one might have thought – in fact, that’s the magazine’s entire stated reason for being, as explained in ChinMusic! #1’s opening editorial. It’s funny how often in this magazine – I also have other issues – that I’d come across one of their interviews with a big-league ballplayer and get totally excited that he was a punker, only to find that, like the great Trevor Hoffman in this issue, they’re really just music guys. In the way that we are “all” music guys and gals. “I got a little Van Halen, I got a little Alanis Morisette, Metallica’s in my glove compartment, I got a little Country music, I think you’ve got to be able to listen to everything”, says Hoffman. Everything, Trevor? So where are your Siltbreeze CDs and It’s War Boys mixtapes, then?

I know I was initially pretty excited, when I spied this mag, at the notion that Tim Yohannan, my bête noire, would be talking baseball inside. Humorless, pedantic Tim Yo talking about hating the Yankees and how to break in a new glove? Sign me up. And for what it’s worth, I personally interacted with Yohannan several times before his untimely death in 1998, and he was neither pedantic nor humorless at all; kind of a fun dude, to be honest! I was just scarred from all the teenage hours spent listening to his between-music struggle sessions on MRR Radio in the 80s, and feeling like he and Jeff Bale, Jello Biafra, Ruth Schwartz and “the gang” would have been the most insufferable people imaginable to spend five minutes with. But Tim Yo loathed the Yankees and he loved the NY/SF Giants – just like me. Does it bum you out like it does me that he passed away from cancer at the unripened age of 52, younger than I am now? If you’re my age, didn’t you see him as an “old guy” when he was around? It’s just a cosmic joke, isn’t it. All of it. 

Kevin Chanel was the editor and prime idea man here, and he’d recently arrived in San Francisco from San Diego, hence some of the Padres-centricity here. There are two pieces in ChinMusic! #1 that really stand out for me: first, Chanel’s baseball water cooler blather session with none other than Royal Trux’s Neil Hagerty. No music, just ball. It’s outstanding. It reminds me of the sorts of multi-beer baseball nerdouts I’ve absolutely loved to engage in over the years with co-workers, family members and really anyone at all, blue collar to white, with sports being the great leveler and all that. Hagerty really knows his stuff, and it’s just a gas to read him talking about his beloved Orioles and whether Keith Hernandez will get into the Hall of Fame, rather than astral nonsense, drugs, and Brownsville Station. 

Pete Simonelli contributes a piece about the mid-1970s Cincinnati Reds, specifically those 1975-76 “Big Red Machine” teams that were incredibly formative for me, Simonelli, Tim Hinely, the Zisk guys, Gerard Cosloy and probably several million others who were deservedly awed by them. Any chance I get to read about Cesar Geronimo, I’m going to take it. Darby Romeo interviews her dad about baseball; he probably wasn’t 52 yet either – and there’s a variety of music coverage that, like that of Great God Pan, is to my eyes very much secondary to the main event, which is baseball and its intersection with punk rock, even when it’s tenuous, tangential and maybe not even there, but we’re pretending that it is. Hey, the dude from Scared Straight, one of Mystic Records’ lesser lights, played in the pros – that really happened.

Funny enough, Chanel, whom I’ve never met, ended up marrying and procreating with Sunny Anderson (Girlyhead publisher, a delightful woman whom I have met many times, yet not for over thirty years). The two of them literally live down the street from me. It has been reported to me over the course of the past ten years that they have seen me running and/or walking the dog, and that their daughter knows who my son is (I mean of course she does, he’s Jay Hinman’s kid). And yet we’ve never once talked about Randy Jones or Broderick Perkins or Juan Eichelberger. When the time comes, well-armed with 50+ years of baseball ephemera and deep study through excellent secondary sources such as ChinMusic! #1, I will be ready.