Record Time tracks, measures and elucidates upon the long tail of analog musical history in a manner unlike no fanzine before it. It’s not here to champion the “winners”, although some of what it champions are indeed winners. It exists to cover anything that you’d likely find in a thrift store, a shitty record store or at a garage sale, and that you’d likely be able to buy for the price of 1 or 2 Venti no-whip lattes. I gave a bit of detail on its modus operandi in a bit I wrote on Record Time #1, and now we shall briefly explore the latest issue, Record Time #3, because it could very well be the best of a fantastic trio.
Editor Scott Soriano has an omnivorous and over-active brain, clearly, and this has powered a record fetish that knows few bounds. He’s turned me onto so much treasure and trash over the years. His Crud Crud blog in the 2000s was the digital embodiment of what Record Time is attempting to accomplish, and I loved that thing so much that I made myself four outstanding mix CD-Rs from the mp3s I’d hoovered up from him back then. When he wants to go deep, he absolutely goes deep, as in the Plastic Bertrand-inspired records piece in #1, the Sex Pistols novelty & backlash records thing in #2, and this issue’s absolutely absurd and breathtakingly complete overview on mainstream artists who decided to dip a toe into “punk” in the late 70s/early 80s.
Like how could I forget Alice Cooper’s Flush The Fashion LP from 1980, produced by Roy Thomas Baker (!) and with a “punk party platter” of song titles like “Clones”, “Model Citizen”, “Nuclear Infected” and “Pain” (no, sorry, not this Pain). Or that The Tubes had a whiny song called “I Was a Punk Before You Were a Punk” that insecurely recites all the ways in which their mid-70s zany costumes and trash debauchery schtick helped bring San Francisco punk rock to life in 1976-77? And Soriano briefly relays the tale of Van Halen turning into Scottish punk band “The Enemas” for one night in 1977, a story you can read more about here. This is why we spend $15 on the mostly ad-free Record Time magazine, folks.
There are well over a dozen deeply-researched and well-written pieces in here by a plethora of contributors, so I’ll restrain myself to conveying a couple big highlights. “…The worst thing that happened in 1973 was a TV special and accompanying album which only those outside of a handful of die-hard diva fans and enthusiasts of shitty records know about: Barbra Streisand…and Other Musical Instruments”. Soriano then proceeds to describe this atrocity in painstaking detail, a record and TV special that seems to have almost totally disappeared from the Streisand legend. You must read it, and then you must watch as much of the special as you can handle. Those were different times.
Chris Selvig’s piece on and record-by-record dissection of Colorado 80s-90s improv-skronk destroyers Blowhole was quite welcome, and he even brings the band back together to rehash the good times over a microphone. Somehow I’d never known the story of boyfriend-murderer and 60s easy listening fox Claudine Longet, but “Johnny Sunshine” relays it all here, and in true Record Time fashion, also feels the need to assiduously evaluate the relative merits and demerits of each of her 99-cent LPs, currently sitting in bulk at a Community Thrift near you.
And look, I’m even in this one, briefly. Soriano sent out an entreaty last year to a few folks he knew, asking them to pick one 80s SST record from the 1986-88 glut that they like, but not the popular ones, so no one was permitted to slop out another paean to Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr or Bad Brains. I picked Das Damen’s Jupiter Eye, and I stand by it. $4.71 on Discogs. There’s a real cast of heavy hitters picking theirs here as well, including Gerard Cosloy, Tom Carter, Brian Faulkner, Bill Chen, Mike Trouchon, Ryan Wells, Karl Ikola, Chris Selvig and other top-drawer stars of the scene. Some picked the album I should have picked, but naturally no one picked Swa. Of course not.
“They” tell me that Record Time #3 is finding its audience more limited than it should be, which would be a goddamn crime. There’s really nothing else like it on the planet. Jarvis Cocker even writes for it. I don’t really know who that is, mind you, but he writes for it, and perhaps that’s all the inspiration you’ll need after my yammering to go seek this one out.
Fanzine Hemorrhage 