Creep #5 from Fall 1980 would come to be the final issue of this now-venerated San Francisco punk fanzine, a publication we’ve previously explored here and here. It doesn’t appear they knew that at the time, but I do sense a bit of “drift” in this one, as it’s a smorgasbord of opinion, rants, “just asking questions” essays, interviews and scene reports. Of course this might describe any punk fanzine of the era, but the only real unifier here in the previously cohesive Creep is the highly unifying presence of Flipper, a band whose self-destructiveness and contempt for the rudiments of “show business” was legendary, and is recognized as such in real time in this issue.
What I sense here is editors Mickey Creep and Mark Creep effectively letting anyone write about and/or contribute just about anything, which, in its totality, helps provide me with what I’d imagine to be the state of the San Francisco underground at the time. There’s a lot of scene navel-gazing here, and I love it. “Western Fraud” is about the corporatization of the Western Front festival and the fact that the 1980s edition allowed in some new wave bands and some venues with legendarily moronic bouncers. Here’s a flyer for the 1979 version, and a tough-to-read 1980 version, featuring shows by “Bill Graham Presents”. Creep, not an overtly or at least over-the-top political ‘zine, except when Jello Biafra is writing for them, seems to be mostly concerned with keeping punks from selling out as well as from eating each other alive.
The editorial magnanimity in allowing one writer to praise Brian Ferry at length and another to do a free-form piece extolling Roky Erickson is a nice surprise. James Koetting in his Ferry piece at least has the good sense to recognize that the jig was up when Flesh and Blood came out. The New Youth collective, which I was just talking about the other day, get a post-mortem that features Caitlin Hines prominently, and is probably the best overview you’ll find on the intra-scene dynamics and backbiting that came from putting on punk shows outside of the established clubs at this time. There’s a long interview with Paul Rat as well that adds yet another layer to the same. (for fun, here’s a 1979 phone call between Rat and Black Randy you might want to spend 9 minutes with).
The Flipper interview is, by turns, hilarious and even a little shocking. The amount of drugs and alcohol these boys put away at the time – well, now that I’m a fifty-something dad, I want to stage an intervention to at least to keep Will Shatter alive a little longer. (“Beautiful Boy”). Shatter has some collage art in here that’s excellent as well. Some deep intelligence, casual racism, complex theory and general chaos comes to the fore in this interview, and clearly there’s a small chunk of San Francisco that’s become totally enraptured with the band during the previous year. And hey, we lost Bruce Loose this year, but Ted Falconi is still with us, folks!
The Dead Kennedys have just come back from their first tour of England, and there’s a great piece about how incredibly bleak things are over there, both in the punk scene – then morphing into oi – and otherwise. Jello is startled by the fact that in the UK, so many of the kids coming to see them want him to sign something, and how even performers like him are treated like untouchable gods – except to spit on during the show, of course. A Crass piece makes similar points about England and of course extols all the ways they’ll likely be making it better. Olga deVolga from Vs. gets to rant about the scene and show off her general anger, and breaks the news that Vs. will be “merging” with Seattle’s The Lewd to form a new band called – The Lewd. There’s a long conceptual piece about Bill Griffith and his Zippy the Pinhead comic, which was quite popular with local weirdos well into the 1990s and still endures to this day. Careful connoisseurs of all the garbage I’ve written might recall the Kurt Cobain/Zippy connection I wrote about here.
There’s even a crossword puzzle with questions like, “Who taught the Cramps their songs?”, “Anarchy in the __”, and “Ted, Will, Bruce and Steve are ____”. (I told you everything comes back to Flipper in this one). We could go on and on picking this one apart, and I’d like to, but let me conclude by giving a huge kudo and shout-out to Creep #5 for being the only contemporaneous fanzine I’ve ever seen that wrote about the Fuckin’ Flyin’ A-Heads while they were still around (though it appears Touch and Go may have as well!). If you know, you know. Not merely a review of the 45, but a brief chat, which talks about their move to San Francisco from Honolulu. This might be why I found my cheap copy of “Swiss Cheese Back” at Record Vault in SF in the late 1980s, a glorious banner day that was subsequently undercut by my poor decision to sell the same single on eBay ten years later.
Fanzine Hemorrhage 