Hey, I wanted to let Fanzine Hemorrhage readers know that I’m by no means stopping what I’m doing here, but I also have a Substack that I recently created called Collected Ephemera. These work best by subscription, and you’ll get an email of each new post in your inbox as soon as I hit submit.
Collected Ephemera follows the same pathways this site does. It’s a deep dive into the paper, magazines and marginal collectables I’ve accumulated over the years, especially 60s & 70s political rabble-rousing, underground music, smut, hippy/biker stuff, postcards and much else. They are all sitting in plastic storage containers and, well, each of them has a story. I’m aiming to be one of the people who might tell that story.
Meanwhile, I’ve got a stack of interesting fanzines to write about on this site, but if you’re potentially interested in this other thing, you can subscribe to it right here.
One thing you come to realize when you’ve, ahem, been doin’ this sort of fanzine exploring for as long as I have is the incredible abundance of print that was just everywhere in the 70s, 80s and 90s. I mean, I remember it well, so it’s not like I’m just piecing it together now, but back then record stores, head shops and independent stores of many colors would carry magazines & fanzines galore, and then piles of FREE newsprint tabloid things sat on the floors as well. In a few places, they still do.
What was maybe different about that time was the quality level of some of these ad-supported freebies. They had full editorial staff, and they paid reviewers and graphic designers and circulation managers and others to do their thing. I’m not just talking about your general alt-weeklies, but tabloids like San Francisco’s Psyclone (“the magazine money can’t buy”) that were 100% music-focused. You’d get them on the floor of now-legendary record stores like Rather Ripped and Aquarius. I’ve already garbled a bit about these things in my preamble to a piece on Snipehunt, so you can continue your studies there if you’d like.
Contrary to this thing, which says there were only three issues of Psyclone, and which therefore gins up some scarcity by selling those three for a whopping $1800, I can tell you right here and right now that there were more than three, and that a few of them pre-date punk. There’s one selling for $30 at San Francisco’s Amoeba Music right now from 1976, and while it has a Mary Monday article, the rest of it’s decidedly of the fern bar/long hair/sexy sex/doofus rock era epitomized to me by the godawful Tubes.
This June 1977 issue isn’t all that far off, either. Sure, you’ve got hot new band The Nuns on the cover and a half-page ad for Crime’s new 45 (!!), but what’s sorta impressive about this one is just how trapped the editorial stuff is between “the new sound” and the old stuff they still want to write about. Like there’s a big spread on Genesis, for instance, and a lot of bemoaning of their new singer “Phil” and how awesome Peter Gabriel was. There’s also a piece on some long-haired bozos called Hero, as well as dissections in the reviews section of dreck from Utopia, Bad Company and Pink Floyd (as well as of some punk-ish stuff and “imports” from England).
The masthead has some names I definitely know well from my California punk history studies, though: editor Jerry Paulson (the first guy to put on shows at The Mabuhay Gardens); Howie Klein; Steve Seid; Michael Snyder; Cosmo Topper; Jonathan Postal; James Stark and Jenny Stern (aka Jenny Lens). But they’re all trying to figure it out. A guy named Robert Conttrell thinks that UK punk is in no way an offshoot of US punk like The Ramones, and says, regarding England, “the strongest provincial scene is in Manchester, led by The Clash”. Another guy named Walter Lenci is able to grab John Cale for about five minutes for an interview before he goes on stage, and Cale spends almost the entire time preemptively trying to get Lenci to not talk about the Velvet Underground or about how he was recently backing up solo Lou Reed: “Now this is important. This is number one….Now’s what’s important….This band is really, really good….Now it’s time to do it myself….It’s time to do it in America. I now have the opportunity to create and establish my own territory. This is it. Now I have a good band, good management….This is my time”. Somebody bring this man a spoon, there’s a snowstorm coming on!
One of the things I enjoyed most about the book about Dirk Dirksen and the Mab (Shut Up You Animals!! The Pope is Dead. A Remembrance of Dirk Dirksen: The History of the Mabuhay Gardens) was the complete show-by-show listing of every single band that played there on every single date. Worth the price of admission by itself. Well, it’s funny in the early years, ‘76-’77, to see just who turned up, and this June 1977 Psyclone has a great ad in the back for what’s coming this month there. It’s really early in the scene, remember, but June will feature shows by The Nuns, The Dogs, Berlin Brats and Freestone (yes! “Bummer Bitch” Freestone!). Roky Erickson playing with The Pop, too. And then all those strange lost-to-time non-punk Bay Area bands that had serious but small followings at the time: Leila and the Snakes; Magister Ludi; Novak; and the Hoo Doo Rhythm Devils. I’ll do this thing when I see a show calendar like this and retrospectively plot out my month for the shows I’d have gone to, knowing what I know now. It’s a little more crazed for LA clubs circa 1978-82 – I’d truly be out 27 nights out of 30 – but once the Mab really got rolling late in 1977, it would not have been difficult at all to spend a good ten/fifteen nights a month there, as many did.
Hey, if you were one of ‘em, and you have some tales about Psyclone to tell, please do so in the comments, okay?
I started this site at the end of 2022 and have kept it exceptionally prolific over the subsequent 9 months. A pal told me he thought I’d totally lose stream after 10-15 posts, but I guess the evidence points to 3 pithy and prosaic posts a week having been the norm almost ever since it started. Given the amount of printed music fanzines I’ve built up over the years and the very, very important things I need to say about them in this forum, I’ve found it quite cathartic to just post whatever the hell hits my fingertips as I’m typing after a run-through of these fanzines, many of which I’ve stored in boxes and not looked at for up to 35 years.
Anyway, I’m going to take a short break this week and come roaring back shortly. In the meantime, I wanted to provide a few tips that might make reading the “blog” – and it’s most certainly a 2005-era blog – more enjoyable.
Subscribe to this thing and get an email every time I post. Since so many of you kids spend all your time on your cellular telephones, you may not know that there’s a desktop version of Fanzine Hemorrhage that’s way better than the telephone version. If you come to the site on a computer, you’ll see right there in the upper right-hand corner that you can drop your email address in and subscribe – then you’ll get every post emailed to you the moment it’s out there. Wouldn’t that be amazing??!?
There are tons of links to other posts on the sidebar. There’s a veritable cornucopia of fanzine blatherings on the right-hand sidebar; again, it’s not something you can see on your smartphone browser. Nearly every post is there, although now there are so many that I’ll post hyperlinks at the bottom of this post to some of the older ones that aren’t there any longer.
Read Fanzine Hemorrhage in landscape view on your phone, not portrait. Hey, I didn’t make the rules for how it all looks on the internet, but I noticed that the cover scans looks all goofy and compressed when your read the mobile version length-wise (portrait view), and look great when you hold your phone width-wise (landscape view). And since this site is so incredibly forward-looking and graphics-rich, you’re going to want that full sensory experience for sure.
Meanwhile, my “trademark of quality” is that I will only yak about fanzines I personally own in physical form, which certainly precludes me from talking about the ones I don’t own, but I’ve also drawn the line at PDFs of incredible music fanzines that I’ve downloaded over the years (for now). Speaking of – if you downloaded a bunch of the punk fanzines that the Contextual Dissemination site had up before that site vanished, please let me know. I was an imbecile and somehow assumed they’d be there forever, just like everything on the internet. We can trade PDFs or something!
Finally, here are some of the earliest posts on Fanzine Hemorrhage from “the early days”, meaning December 2022 and January 2023:
I’d truly fashioned myself as about as much of a ‘77-’83 Los Angeles punk/underground collector, snob and scholar as one who wasn’t there might possibly be, but somehow I’d not been told the news that Masque founder & proprietor and Scottish punk gadfly Brendan Mullen had his own outstanding early 80s fanzine, Slush (!). If it weren’t for the online fanzine store ZNZ I still wouldn’t know about it, yet when I spied Slush #2 sitting on their digital racks and got a gander at what it was all about – Mullen’s semi-ridiculous Slash magazine “parody”-cum-scandal sheet-cum-straight-up, punk-reverent fanzine, well, I did what anyone as weirdly obsessed as I am about this era might do. I pounced.
And it’s even better than I expected, this Slush #2. I thought it might be short on content and long on snark, but it’s actually long on both. Better still, it’s good enough to be respectively deemed a worthy LA extension of the godlike Slash, and nearly as informative, opinionated and certainly as on-the-ground and in the center of the maelstrom as Slash was. I mean, Mullen’s the guy that gave the first-wave LA punks their playhouse. He didn’t slink away after it was shut down; in fact, he was a drummer in multiple bands himself: Geza X and The Mommymen; Arthur J and The Gold Cups and Hal Negro and the Satin Tones. He even famously – and it’s referenced here – served as Black Flag’s singer for a gig or two between Ron Reyes and Dez Cadena, though I’d have to check the record on that again to confirm that it was more of an in-joke than a tryout.
On the cover is a high school photo of Eddie Joseph, later of Eddie & The Subtitles and someone lionized here as an all-around great guy. Inside we have a promise that the magazine “can only come out every two months (realistically) instead of monthly as had originally been hoped”. The magazine, I’m afraid to say, never came out again, but not before promising a third issue that would feature The Urinals, Vox Pop, East LA “punk in the barrio”, “The Screamers movie”, Russel Mael, Don Bolles and much more. If I’m wrong, like I was ignorant of this fanzine’s entire existence, and this did come out, can someone please let me know?
There’s a big essay up front called “Is There, Isn’t There Punk Rock Violence?????”. I was absolutely prepared for an anti-LA Times piece (it is that) and lots of “I swear, I hate cops, to the max” equivocating, but no – Mullen pulls a surprise rabbit out of his punk rock hat and basically says, yeah, it’s pretty out of control right now, and he sets his target straight at Huntington Beach, or the “Aitch Bees” as he calls them. It’s actually a fairly responsible essay, written by an adult, a man who’s very much excited for punk’s continued evolution but who sees the seeds of its eventual destruction already germinating.
But Mullen celebrates Orange County two pages later with a very excited piece called “Orange County….California Screamin’…The Fourth Wave”; Mike Patton, truly of the OC (and also of The Middle Class), gets in his long own Fullerton/Anaheim scene report, with mini-features on pretty much every band that calls themselves a punk band and who maybe played a gig in a garage.
The Bags have broken up. There’s another nail in the first wave, and Mullen provides the obituary. Craig Lee of said band – weren’t we just talking about him? – provides the world’s first look at brand-new band Castration Squad with his ex-bandmate Alice, and (sigh) Tracy Lea, referred to here as “Little Tracy”. Lee also provides another intro to The Gun Club, “a brand new band who’ve maybe played only six or seven gigs and as yet have not established any audience”. Germs have broken up, too – Darby’s working on establishing The Darby Crash Band, and would, alas, be dead within 3 months. AND we get to see who that new Black Flag singer is who’s not Mullen!
So yeah, it’s all very exciting and another glimpse into something I’d have given my proverbial eye teeth to have taken part in. Maybe I could’ve saved Slush when Mullen put out that call for contributors….maybe I could’ve saved Brendan….maybe I could’ve saved the scene itself….
One of the things I’ve always admired about some of the early Washington HarDCore crew was that it was The Cramps, not The Pistols nor The Stooges nor even the Velvets, whom they professed initially set them on their respective paths of mayhem & audio destruction. They were pretty much a, if not the, major touchstone band for me as well.
Even as an early-teenage new waver, hearing “Garbageman” and “Goo Goo Muck” and especially “Human Fly” on college radio directly drew me into The Cramps’ orbit, from which I’ve never looked back. I’d then see photos of them – I’m thinking especially of the particular one you can see at the bottom of this post, from a UK “1982 Rock Yearbook” that I owned back then (and picked up for nostalgia’s sake on eBay very recently) – and just salivate over how cool they must be, and how badly I needed to see them play live.
I saw Urgh! A Music War and this jaw-dropping Cramps performance right when it hit home video (or perhaps I saw it on USA Network’s Night Flight), and I practically wept with joy. Soon thereafter, my first purchased bootlegs were Cramps bootlegs, because I already had all the legit vinyl of theirs that I could afford. People would relay these incredible stories from their live shows, with anecdotes such as the one in which Lux supposedly took a gross sneaker that someone had thrown on stage, poured half his bottle of wine into it, then guzzled the wine directly from the shoe. All this tomfoolery with sexy gum-smacker Poison Ivy laying down ferocious yet simplistic fuzztone rockabilly riffs and Nick Knox beautifully taking rock drumming back to its jungle roots.
Alas, by the time I finally got to see them live, it was my freshman year of college; A Date With Elvis had just come out, and the band played the corporate “One Step Beyond” club in Santa Clara, CA. Hey, I had fun – it was The Cramps! – but it was instantly clear I’d missed the band’s high-water mark by a good five years already. Here’s a thing I wrote about The Cramps 18 years ago, still somehow online.
That brings us to that aforementioned high-water mark; the period around the 1979 Alex Chilton “Ohio Demos” (later the All Tore Up bootleg) and right afterward, when the (inferior but still great) Songs The Lord Taught Us came out. That’s approximately when the UK magazine Zigzag deigned to interview and put The Cramps on their cover, in June 1980. It even features a killer “center-spread” of Cramps photos that I’m sure I’d have ripped out and pinned to the wall if I’d owned this issue in the early 80s. The Brits loved The Cramps; I believe the entire weirdo “psychobilly” scene of the early 80s pretty much grew directly from their barnstorming across the UK.
I’m sure we’ll talk about Zigzag more next time I pull one of their issues from my collection, but suffice to say this issue (#102), all things considered, is a corker. It’s got Chris Desjardins (yeah, Chris D.!) introducing his Los Angeles compatriots X to the entire UK in a lengthy article. There’s a lucid and funny interview with The Fall, with much love and emotion for their Dragnet LP from the magazine’s staff. #102 also includes Mikey Dread, Jah Wobble and respect & raves for current dub and reggae. Somehow there’s even a straight-up sit-down interview with Pete Townsend.
One final aside: the more I immerse myself in punk fanzines of the ‘78-’80 period, the more hovering and omnipresent the ludicrous spectre of The Clash seems to be. People just loved to debate the merits and demerits of The Clash back then. In this Zigzag, the Rude Boy film has apparently just come out, and much consternation about it is made in various parts of the magazine, from the letters section to snide remarks about it being snuck into various articles and reviews. This love/hate Clash stuff crops up in US fanzines as well at the time, but it being spread all over a London-based mag such as Zigzag shows me the inner war UK critics of the time must have been at with themselves regarding a local band that promised them so much and delivered so little. They ought’ve spent all that energy & debate picking apart the glories of The Cramps instead!
Fanzine Hemorrhage 