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Puncture #10
I’m pretty sure I know where I got my idea that the San Francisco underground music scene was so mediocre-to-downright-awful around 1985-86. It was from the San Francisco fanzines like BravEar, Wiring Dept and Puncture that championed it. I bought those mags, sure, but I also turned my 18-year-old nose up at them, even at the time. This was my first year of college, and my first year away from the SF Bay Area, and therefore everything that was going on in New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, Boston and even LA was just so much more visceral, exciting and new to me than the SF peace punk/political protest communal hippie-tinged shtick that just bored and at times angered me no end. Especially that year, as punk morphed into speed metal or “cowpunk” or even lamer versions of post-hardcore punk. Steve Albini and my other new heroes that year said San Francisco music was the absolute worst, and I could present very little evidence to counter with.
It was MRR and all my record shopping excursions to peace-punkified Berkeley that probably left me so bereft. That and the explosion of Camper Van Beethoven mania my senior year of high school on college radio and the local music press. As it turned out, I came to eventually enjoy that band’s second record II & III and certainly my issues of Wiring Dept. fanzine down the line. Puncture, not so much, although in reading through Puncture #10 from Fall 1985, it’s still a terrific curio and a strong attempt at making lemonade from lemons. Exhibit A is Mia from Frightwig on the cover here, and several tributes to the band inside. I dug Frightwig; saw them live twice, including once at the world-famous Mabuhay Gardens. In ‘85 they’d have been one of my favorite SF bands; a year later, they actually were.
There’s a piece in here about the goings-on at an Agnostic Front / Fuck-Ups show that was held at the Sound of Music instead of the Mab, because Ness Aquino of the Mab was warned that 200 skinheads were going to show up and cause havoc, as skinheads are wont to do. This was considered an “anti-Maximum Rocknroll” show (hear hear!) because that mag was critical of skinheads, right-leaning politics and so forth, which is understandable, but I’d have liked to have supported an anti-MRR event in any case, just for fun. Shame about the bands.
J. Neo Marvin has a piece in here reviewing four Velvet Underground records – one sometimes forgets just how tough these were to easily find in the bins in the 80s – as well as the new Victor Bokris book on the band, Loaded. This was when a big wave of new Velvets fandom was just starting to crest, with myself included in said wave. In fact, the first songs by the band I ever enjoyed were “Foggy Notion” and “Temptation Inside Your Heart” that very year, because of the recent archival/unreleased LP, although once I heard “I’m Waiting For The Man” and “Sweet Jane” later that year, I was like, hey, I know these songs.
There’s an uneventful Blixa Bargeld interview and a fun pooh-poohing of a Diamanda Galas show at the I-Beam. In the reviews section, there’s loads of love for the Meat Puppets’ new Up on the Sun and for Camper Van Beethoven’s Telephone Free Landslide Victory, of course. Other new favorites included the Butthole Surfers Psychic…Powerless…Another Man’s Sac and locals Glorious Din and their Leading Stolen Horses. The Knitters’ Poor Little Critter on the Road gets compared to “Hee-Haw”, which sounds about right. I honestly don’t think I could bring myself to listen to that record for even a minute in 2024. By the way, if I’m ever sick in bed for an extended period of time, I might just binge-watch a couple seasons of Hee-Haw. I watched so, so, so much television in the 1970s, whatever was on our six channels, that I put in some quality time with this outstanding American television program. If you’ve never seen it, check this out or this one. I’ll take that over The Knitters any goddamn day.
Puncture #10 wraps up with book reviews of the new Less Than Zero as well as a takedown of the punk photo book Loud 3D: “the vast majority of the pictures are performance shots of big-name hardcore bands that would do any photographer from the San Francisco Chronicle proud”… “many of the shots are too dark, out of focus, or lacking sufficient depth. All these factors are important for photography of any kind”. Tell it! Henry Rollins’Two Thirteen Sixty One book is also taken down for having two pieces printed twice in the same book and for its many typos. “Surely Henry Rollins could give us strong street writing if he tried harder”. Try harder, Rollins! I think he had other priorities; around this time is when I saw Rollins write something about his workouts: “When I go into the gym, it’s like I’m going into WAR.” So much to make fun of from 1985, so little time.
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Snipehunt #16
Gurgling under the history of fanzines one had to pay for is another entirely separate history of fanzines that one didn’t have to pay for. These were usually ad-supported newsprint music papers, free for pickup at local record stores. I see very little difference between the best of these and actual fanzines, except for perhaps the profit motive, and in some cases, the existence of actual “staff”. Seattle’s The Rocket was one I used to always grab when I saw it. In San Francisco there was the execrable bi-weekly BAM for many years, which I’d usually pick up in spite of its godawful contents due to its occasional coverage of the new wave, “modern music” and other topics of interest. I even remember when longtime alt-paper SF Weekly was called Music Calendar and had listings for anything and everything that was happening. Los Angeles had its own music-only freebies, and at least when I was living nearby, they seemed to be mostly about hair metal.
That was all a big windup for my all-time favorite of the many free music papers: Portland, OR’s late 80s and 1990s treasure Snipehunt. Luckily, we got them in discerning record stores in San Francisco as well, sitting right there on the floor to stuff into your bag as you exited. Snipehunt #16 came out during the summer of 1993, and that would have been the summer that I was personally this close to moving to the Pacific Northwest – no, not Portland, which I had taken to calling “the poor man’s Seattle” just to bum people out, but Seattle itself. I’d get there four years later, only to return happily to San Francisco two years after that.
Part of the NW draw were these free papers that just made it appear that underground music was seeping out of every door and storefront, not just Snipehunt but also Seattle’s free weekly The Stranger, which I liked to read so much at the time that I took out an expensive mail subscription for it to my house in San Francisco. Both papers gave me the impression that everyone was young & weird & totally ready to party in these cities, as I was in all three cases. I’m sure both papers therefore did a lot to stoke my heightened enthusiasm for the region. Snipehunt #16 even contains “scene reports” from Eugene and Bellingham, from Idaho and from Orange County, CA. It was clearly meant to be a “west coast” paper, with Portland positioned as the center of the scene (!) – and honestly, with Los Angeles itself mostly being ignored and at times mocked, if I remember correctly.
I’m happy that the issue of Snipehunt that I still own is the one with the Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 interview by Erika Bury. They were a huge, huge favorite for me at the time. She plays it mostly serious, but also lets them goof and prank and make mirth & merriment when appropriate. Then it’s just a slew of similar interviews – Motorgoat, Smut, something called Anal Solvent; Dog Faced Hermans, Icky Boyfriends, Leather Uppers, Unsane and Trumans Water. 1993! Eagle eyes and folks with strong memory function may recall that Icky Boyfriends/Leather Uppers EP that very year, and that the two bands eventually shared a member in Anthony Bedard, whom the world often knows and quite rightly loves to this day as “Tone EB”.
I can’t recall if this was always the case, but Snipehunt #16 has a huge comics section in the middle. The Stranger used to do this as well. They also have a helpful resource section of clubs, bookers, radio stations and record stores that bands might wanna contact in Portland, Seattle and San Francisco, and they close the whole thing out with an enormous section of reviews of tapes, LPs, CDs, videos, fanzines and books, even one about TinTin. I also don’t remember actually trusting any particular writer at Snipehunt to be the man or woman who’d lead me to my next mindblowing band, and in re-reading these ill-considered capsules, I can see why that was – but their breadth was highly impressive, and again, you get the sense that underground and weird culture was what was making the west coast tick in the early 1990s. I mean that’s how I remember it, but that’s of course where I spent virtually all my non-sleeping, non-working time.
I linked to it up top, but if you want to go deeper into Snipehunt and what it meant to various alternajerks like me during that time, check out this oral history here.
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Crank #4
18 months ago was the first time I gave the once-over to an issue of Marc Masters’ excellent 1990s fanzine Crank, and I suppose I already provided my main introductions to its subtleties there. That one came out in 1991; three years later, we’ve got Marc publishing Crank #4 from Syracuse, NY. Was Masters an Orangeman? So was my mom! Lou Reed, too. Why else would anyone live there, right?
This issue came with a 45, a rather landmark single in my world to be honest, because it was the first time – the very first and quite frankly one of the only times – that a pure, no-doubt-about-it “noise” composition pierced my consciousness in a highly pleasing manner. It was, and remains, Alan Licht’s blistering “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” – the first noise track to really zonk me. Maybe it’s an unlikely one, but there it is. Still sounds great to this day. The flip was by Bruce Russell’s project A Handful of Dust, and it didn’t pack quite the punch.
The interview with Alan Licht is the centerpiece of this issue. Licht, in high school, was listening to Beefheart, free jazz, The Fugs, Minutemen, Stooges etc. – now this is a guy I’d have wanted to have been hanging with, rather than the Night Ranger and Foreigner-loving morons who clogged the halls of Gunderson High in San Jose. I appreciated the part where he and Masters banter about how Licht’s college band Love Child enraptured the fanzine cognoscenti at the time with their early demos, your Byron Coleys and Chris Stiglianos and what have you, and then sort of fell off a cliff critically – at least with that crew – once they put out proper albums. Licht even compares Love Child’s “Church of Satan”, from their first album, to “Bitchen’ Camaro”. Harsh. I remember this too, the Forced Exposure mania for early Love Child because they had a track called “Crocus Says”, as in Crocus Behemoth from Rocket From The Tombs. Licht, man – this guy totally knew what he was doing, didn’t he?
He also says what I was very much fretting about at the time: “Improv has become the thing that jaded punk rock record collectors are into” – except rather than playing actual improvisations as he was, I took this fact personally, almost, and dove deeper into garage punk and “KBD” knuckle-draggers instead, turning my back on the improv/noise underground almost entirely aside from whatever Siltbreeze was putting out. Licht, in 1994, also wanted to write a book on John Cassavetes. Perhaps he still shall.
There’s a shorter interview with Bruce Russell to complement the other side of the included 45, and then a meaty section with 7 different Sun City Girls reviews. And then into the reviews – what a great 1993-1994 roll call: Bassholes, 68 Comeback, Free Kitten, Harry Pussy, Palace Bros, Brainbombs, Blue Humans, Arthur Doyle, Fly Ashtray, Alastair Galbraith and many more. Marc is very excited about most everything reviewed, then as now not a guy ready to serve heads on platters. He even loved the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion as much as I did that year – whoops!
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The Bible #1
I’ll never lose sight of the magnanimity shown by Miranda Fisher to yours truly in 2013 when I was working to get Dynamite Hemorrhage #1 fanzine off the ground, when she and photo editor Jon Chamberlin gave me heeded advice on ad rates, the proper weight of paper and what to look for in a printer. She was publishing Rubberneck fanzine from Texas at that point, at a time when underground music fanzines were kinda scarce. She’d later go on to do one called Casting Couch – color covers and everything for both mags – and played in a number of wild garage punk bands, the most well-known of whom – relatively speaking, folks! – was probably The Zoltars.
So I see a thing about this new music fanzine The Bible #1 online; Dave Brushback was waxing enthusiastically about it most certainly, and hey, being a fan of the fanzine genre, my interest was piqued and an order was placed. Moreover, I’m looking at the cover and wondering if there was maybe a Grady Runyan interview in there somewhere. Yet little did I know it was a Miranda Fisher ‘zine until it arrived in the post, and moreover yet again, that she published it right here in my hometown of San Francisco, California, where she too now lives. Welcome, Miranda. I do hope the Golden Gate has opened its arms to you.
The two best pieces in here do in fact happen to be Miranda’s, and they’re ruminative explorations – one on the nature of music taste and how one comes by it, and another about her obsession with “TikTok” videos in which average doofuses make short videos in order to rate and review everything on Rolling Stone’s top 500 albums list. I’m glad she described these excruciating exercises in dumbassery for me, because not only do I not have access to “TikTok”, there’s just certain stuff I can’t watch any longer, even ironically – like, say, a Presidential debate, or an 80s boobie comedy, or any sort of video by a would-be influencer or talking head on social media.
The Bible #1 is also enriched by Miranda’s reviews of records more or less in the garage/psych/spazz realm, with exceptions like Rosali and Winged Wheel and other things of that ill-defined ilk. Mitch Cardwell – a great American whom I did know lived around these parts, as he always has – writes about David Nance and Mowed Sound in Oakland, a show that literally took place only two months ago. So yes, this is a new fanzine. And among other things, there’s a long talk with Donna Allen from Chronophage, and it’s clear that Miranda and Donna know each other from ‘ol Texas times and have the sort of comfort and familiarity to put forth a pretty “intimate” talk, in the figurative sense. There’s some joshin’ and free-associatin’ and perhaps some secrets spilling out. Maybe partying had helped!
Anyway, I think it’s one of those things where you get in contact with Miranda directly to be allowed to order one, sort of like “ask a punk” shows at someone’s house. The Bible #1 can be obtained by asking nicely at thebiblezine@gmail.com.
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Slash, Vol. 1 No. 8 (February 1978)
At some point I’m going to have achieved the unthinkable, and will have amassed a complete run of Slash magazine, all 29 issues plus the NY Rocker “supplement” from 1981. I don’t have that many goals in life – I mean, I wanna see all the National Parks, and I’d like to see the SF Giants win another World Series with me in the crowd, and maybe my kid’ll have his own kids – so this is by far my dumbest bucket list goal. I’m three away. Bracing myself for the anticlimax.
Slash, Vol. 1, No. 8 is a very recent acquisition – thank you JJ from Germany. It is, of course, phenomenal – a stellar early example of what was almost certainly the best punk fanzine of all time. Central to many folks’ conception of and love for Slash was the ritualistic opening editorial from Claude Bessy, aka Kickboy Face. This one from February 1978 is called “Warning: Crazed Punks Ahead”. It’s dripping with sarcasm and some level of vitriol, but also with love and warmth for the pure, the true, and the open-minded. Even in early 1978, Kickboy was warning the hordes and asking them to please allow punk to evolve and breathe and not reach a dead end – this request coming right with the Pistols just having broken up and The Masque having just closed. About the former, he says: “It does not matter”. Regarding the latter: “It does matter. As soon as we know what has to be done, we will do it”.
There are many interesting, unconfirmed threads in the “Local Shit” column. There’s a warning of a Dils and Avengers combination band getting together to play a gig in San Francisco as Police and Thieves. Did this actually happen? “X’s single is still awaited on Dangerhouse. Main track will probably be “Blue Spark”. (It wasn’t). “Speaking of Dangerhouse…they are already negotiating with Arizona band The Consumers”. (They didn’t).
Of-their-time gems crop up on virtually every page in any given Slash. A key theme in this issue is the encroachment of “power pop”, and a little thrashing of Greg Shaw (Bomp!)’s character for already wishing to sand down the rough edges of punk with lightweight, skinny-tie melodic pop music – though Kickboy nicely defends Shaw’s honor as well. There is a terrific letter to the editors about this power pop threat from “El-Tot Sira”, hopefully someone who went on to paid writing elsewhere. This person could even have been a Slash staffer for all I know. It sounds a little like Falling James. Too early, probably.
I suppose the centerpiece of this thing are the two long bits on the Sex Pistols’ southern US shows in Dallas and Tulsa; Kickboy then gets in a long piece about their San Francisco farewell show, which just about every LA punk you can name traveled up north for. There is some excellent bagging on The Nuns and on The Dictators: “How many times do the creeps have to be told that The Dictators are about as relevant as Blue Oyster Cult? When will they stop reading those press releases and listen to the fucking music?? I’m not even a hardcore punk but I can tell the pseudo leftovers from the desperate kids, and the Dictators…”. Dot dot dot.
One cool curio here is a big full-page ad for the benefit shows being held for the recently-closed Masque at the Elks Lodge on February 24th and 25th. I know what you’re thinking – the shows that ended in a riot, with punks getting clubbed left & right by the pigs! No!! These were successful benefit shows. In 1979, at the same venue, it didn’t go quite as well.
Finally, a few other interesting tidbits – an interview with an LA punk band called The Wildcats, whom I’d never heard of. The Xray Spex interview catches Poly Styrene when she’s young and nervous, a mere 19 years old in December 1977 and sounding every bit of it. There’s a rave review for Skrewdriver’s All Skrewed Up. Kickboy does an entire reggae column called “Dread Greats!” under the nom de plume of Chatty Chatty Mouth, and gets into Tapper Zukie, The Upsetters’ Super Ape, Yabby U and the Prophets and more. Don’t forget, his original foray into publishing was with a reggae fanzine called Angeleno Dread, and what I wouldn’t kill to see a copy of one of those, even a PDF. And he gets in a nice rave for The Avengers and a little LA/SF dig: “Next time The Avengers drop by, let’s kidnap them until they agree to live down here. All this commuting back and forth is a waste of energy. Or maybe we should trade them for something San Francisco might want”. I know – we’ll take the Masque and all the bands that play there – how about that?
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Zip It Up!: The Best of Trouser Press Magazine 1974 – 1984 (book)
(I wrote this for a print magazine that’s not coming out, and borrowed a few sentences from an issue of Trouser Press I talked about here).
I happened to have been a teenaged Trouser Press subscriber in the early 1980s, but given my youth, had never purchased an issue during their 70s heyday as an Anglophilic rock magazine whose subhead was “America’s Only British Rock Magazine”, and who were actually originally known as the Trans-Oceanic Trouser Press. Theirs was a good niche to mine in the 1970s going head-to-head on the stands with Creem, Circus and Rock Scene, yet starting in 1978 with a Todd Rundgren cover, the magazine started backing away from the UK in favor of the domestic. By the time I was subscribing, their forte was whatever crapola English or American “rock of the 80s” band was burning up MTV, with cover features on Duran Duran, the Stray Cats and Adam Ant egregiously pulling them away from whatever earned credit they’d accumulated.
That said it’s hard to be too overly critical of Trouser Press, as this curated collection makes clear. Editor Ira Robbins emerges through the looking glass of 40 years and peppers his article introductions with the same criticisms you and I might level at his magazine. I’ve heard the man give an articulate account of himself in several quarters, and he’s a mensch and a fan above all else. The magazine was still far too indulgent of whatever was “above board” and on the charts, with a particular focus on power pop, pub rock (they loved them some Ducks Deluxe and Brinsley Schwarz), Elvis Costello, The Ramones and The Who. Granted, the “American Underground” column was a longtime staple and highlight; it’s where I learned about LA’s paisley underground in 1982 – and they even wrote about Flipper, GG Allin and all manner of small-press 45s in the same space. The Kate Bush, P.I.L. and Peter Tosh pieces in particular that are fully reprinted here are excellent reads, as is a 1979 Lou Reed interview that helped cement and lock in place his reputation as the biggest asshole on the planet.
It’s maybe a little difficult to get the full sway of the magazine and the tenor of their times, even when contracted and excerpted in this heavy 447-page tome. I’d recommend picking up individual pre-1982 back issues of Trouser Press instead to get a far better sense of how each contextualized any given month of rock music in real time.
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The Story So Far #3
Here’s another issue of this 1980 English fanzine – I talked about Issue #4 here. “Marts” and “Tim” are the editors, and it looks like this is a Summer 1980 thing, which means the short interview with Joy Division and Ian Curtis was done mere weeks before he killed himself in May 1980, and this was printed before they had a chance to acknowledge it. Ironically, Curtis asks here, rhetorically, “Why does everyone say our music is gloomy and doomy?”. Poor fella.
You have to imagine that Tim and Marts were excellent at slapping backs and greasing palms, given the access they were provided to “bigger names” for their small regional fanzine The Story So Far #3. For instance, The Clash have just come back from the US, and London Calling has just come out. I certainly appreciate the band providing this much attention to a small fanzine; however, what came out of their mouths was often just narcissistic BS and it totally soured me on the band from an early age. This happened to be late, late in their run, but man – I remember listening to San Francisco’s commercial “rock of the 80s” new wave station The Quake around 1984 or so, and a drunken Joe Strummer either called in or stumbled into the studio, I can’t remember which. He proceeded to give an over-the-top master class in unbridled self-admiration, conceit and ego, ranting about how he was takin’ The Clash back to their roots, how his music was incredibly important for the kids, and how the new album he was working on – it would be Cut The Crap – was going to be a major, major work. It was highly entertaining, to be fair.
So are these Mick Jones quotes from the Clash interview in The Story So Far #3:
“America is dying for the sort of music we play. Dying for it. Going berserk, right…We’re probably one of the last hopes you’ve got, really”.
Better still: “I personally asked Gary Numan, who must be a quite a simple chap really, to explain what the fuck he’s on about. Because we can stick two roadies in fuckin silly pyramids and make them dance around the stage, and we can get a load of fuckin big lights at the back to make us look better….explain what you’re on about, my man. It’s your time to do it…be plain, the kids can’t understand you. They only buy your records because ours ain’t out, but when they are out, you can go to fuckin hell”.
Mick Jones, ladies and gentlemen. The guy who’d be in Big Audio Dynamite a few years later.
Gary Numan kinda takes it on the chin across the entire issue. There’s an interview with Daniel Miller from Mute Records, who’s just come off being “The Normal” but hasn’t quite hit paydirt by signing Depeche Mode yet. In it. one of the editors hand-scrawls something about how Gary Numan’s Tubeway Army has “ripped off Daniel Miller”. Perhaps. Now these guys love The Cramps; it appears to have been total mania at their recent shows in the UK, and the editors see them as the personification of everything great about America, as do I. As should we all.
Finally, there’s an “unedited” interview with The Mo-Dettes. I’ve read interviews with them before and they were pretty loopy, “taking the piss” sorts of talks. They adored going after other bands in a way that no one does any longer. Here’s a feisty quote from Jane in the band: “Rough Trade’s a bunch of hippies. They’re a load of stupid intellectuals with too many ‘isms’. It’s all these feminists. I’d include The Raincoats in the feminist bag…I think their music stinks”. Apparently there’s a Mo-Dettes flexidisc included in this issue, but mine’s just two blank pieces of orange tape on the inside front cover, sort of like what a gallery wall looks like after an art heist. Not that I’m comparing the two, mind ya.
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Punk Rock Special: Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols (Spring 1978)
Punksploitation gets pretty meta here, for what could be more exploitative than a single-issue magazine about the most exploitative and supposedly shocking band around, right? I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I sometimes find it difficult to read about the Sex Pistols at all. So much of my so-called musical education was formed with them as the dominant example of “punk”, the band that had changed the world and so on. It’s hard to even contextualize those guys now due to over-familiarity. I’m also not all that hopped-up on their music, and never really have been.
However, in the spirit of late 1977 newness, especially in the US, it’s easy to recognize why the Stories, Layouts & Press publishing enterprise would have found it a strong business move to put this out. They even call it a “cash-in special” with no irony. The purpose is to introduce the band to the US public, and they absolutely revel in the salacious and the vile. The band is “besmeared with vomit, dripping with obscenity”, and right from the off there are several tales of how each of the Sex Pistols has gotten his ass royally kicked back in England multiple times.
There are mini-features on each band member. “The most horrible, the most ugly-looking, the one that leads the group is a 20-year-old deviant named Johnny Rotten”. “The Sex Pistols needed a guitar player, see, so they found one, a jerky lookin’ nerd with an asshole of a smile. The kid’s name was Steve Jones”. After that, it’s every page loaded with sneering photos of the band, sometimes with those same photos repeated on subsequent pages. Punksploitation any way you cut it, baby.Inexplicably, there’s also a small scene report from London with live show pictures of Poly Styrene and….Angus Young of AC/DC (hunh?). Hannah Spitzer weighs in with a preposterously dumb “How To Be a Punk” piece to close it all off, which appears to borrow almost completely from the same piece she wrote in Punk Rock #2 I’ve reviewed previously, and which came out right around the time this one did. Page count, Hannah! We have a page count to fill!
This whole magazine’s wonderfully crude and flaunts its capitalistic approach in multiple ways, even comparing England’s no-future problems with America’s so-called robust economy (this in 1978, the high-interest rate doldrum Carter years). If I’d somehow owned this at the time, I’d have hidden it so, so deep into the crevices of my bedroom that even I wouldn’t have been able to find it. I lived in fear of encounters such as the one where my aunt found my cousin’s hidden Hell Comes To Your House comp LP, and told him, “I found your punk rock record, and I literally threw up”. No wonder misbegotten youth totally gobbled up the entire print run of this top-tier punksploitation special.
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A Bunch of Links to The Old Stuff
Here are a ton of otherwise hard-to-uncover links to posts written here in this site’s earliest days waaaay back in 2023. All the other posts are located on the sidebar of the desktop site (but can’t be seen on mobile).
Boo Boo #1
What a Nice Way To Turn Seventeen #6
The Offense #12
Sooprize Package #2
Back Door Man #4
Take It! #2
Conflict #42
It’s So Hard To Tell Who’s Going To Love You The Best #1
New Dezezes #2
New Dezezes #1
Zigzag #95
Talk Talk (Vol. 3 No. 2 – 1981)
Wipeout! #7
Breakfast Without Meat #13
Away From The Pulsebeat (Winter 1987)
Bull Tongue Review #1
Sonic Death #5
Hexarc #1
Throat Culture #2
Teen Looch #8
We Jazz #6
Slush #2
Slash Vol. 3 No. 1 (January/February 1980)
Caught In Flux #6
Chatterbox #4
Flipside #32
Bucketfull of Brains #13
Paranoia #4
Surrender #5
Popwatch #6
Unsound #1
New Wave Rock #3
Forget It! #4
Damp #3
Forced Exposure #9
My Teeth Need Attention #1
Creep #2
Gold Soundz #4
Butt Rag #8
Great God Pan #12
Human Garbage Disposal #4
No Mag #10
BravEar #12
Sounds (November 7th, 1981)
Z Gun #1
Wiring Dept. #3
Flesh and Bones #6
Trouser Press #36
Damage #7
Take It! #5
Bazooka! #3
We Got Power #4
Brown Paper Sack #1
Drunken Fish #1
Fŏrdämning #11
Crank #2
Alright! #2
Cut #11
Slash Vol. 2 No. 2 (November 1978)
Galactic Zoo Dossier #7
Matter #10
Teen Screen – February 1967
Vintage Violence #6
Curiosity in Stout Shoes #1
Tuba Frenzy #4
What Goes On #1
Scram #5
Brain Transplant #1
NY Rocker, September 1982
Alright! #4
Zigzag #102
Crush #3
Grace and Dignity #1
Too Fun Too Huge! #2
Astronauts #4
Mental Children #2
Truly Needy #10
Silent Command #1
Sounds (November 8th, 1980)
Conflict #37
Cimarron Weekend #6.04…
Search & Destroy #6
Making Waves #1
Ripper #4 -
Wipeout! #6
I was a major Wipeout! partisan when this thing was around, and even still, I’m not sure many fanzines have aged as gracefully thirty-plus years on as this one has. Even when Eric Friedl was finding pedantic fault in some 45 or live show, it was the man’s overall and all-encompassing joie de vivre vis-a-vis wild, sub-underground rock n roll music – and Friedl’s ability to transmit it and get you REALLY excited to come aboard – that stands out. This was a guy deeply into culturally mining multiple corners of the musical underground. You can just feel the endorphins rushing as he turns over another rock and immediately pounds his impressions into his TRS-80 or whatever. It’s hard even now to not want to make his 1992 bag your bag today, even if it’s harsh and unlistenable Japanese noise. I’m reading through his reviews just today, and genuinely wondering if I totally missed the boat on Zeni Geva and The Gerogerigegege.
Not that everyone agreed with this assessment at the time! In 1992’s Wipeout #6, Friedl reprints a review from the Denver Independent Observer’s 6/18/92 issue and an article called “New Alternative Music Magazines”: “…and of all the Bangs/Meltzer/Coley-inspired zines, WIPEOUT is by far the worst…Friedl reviews in (an) ‘irreverent’ borrowed style that merely succeed at being irrelevant, insulting and inane…has nothing to say to true followers of British and American alternative music…”. Let me state for the record that for true followers of alternative music, depending upon how defined, this may be true. There’s another letter from a guy in a Columbus, OH band called Shitfits, complaining about not being reviewed in Wipeout: “Skaters are into ska and hardcore too”. Also not untrue. But Friedl wasn’t. Glen Galloway also has a partial letter printed in which he writes about my fanzine: “Superdope reigns and I didn’t mean to imply otherwise”. Wait, what did he imply??
The linchpin piece in this one, I suppose, is the giant overview and complete discography to date of The Mummies, a band that for better or for worse helped define the “budget rock” template and aesthetic for so many bands that followed. It talks about their “final gig” on New Year’s Eve 1991 – this is a band that’s still playing multiple shows per year to this day. I like that Friedl looks askance at the band’s involvement with local San Mateo hair farmers/stoners Three Stoned Men and Wig Torture: “What is it with these ‘just say fuck hippiedom’ kinda guys’ involvement with stoner rock? Could they be closet long-hairs? Or is the San Mateo scene so small that these are the only other bands worth their time?”. I think I’m pretty sure I know the answer.
As sort of a tag-along, there’s a Supercharger overview and interview (best SF Bay Area garage band of the era by a mile, though they were thought of in some quarters as a Mummies “little brother band” at first). Clearly it’s a mail interview, as every time guitarist Darin Rafaelli makes a smart-ass remark, he’s immediately corrected by bassist Greg Lowry, who clearly filled out his portion next. Friedl gives a bunch of ink to an act called the Country Rockers, a Memphis band whose entire trajectory and decline I completely missed. Other sections include a mighty Roky Erickson overview and discography; a thing on Mexican rock and roll, a little bit of a non-judgmental tiptoe into “techno”, and loads of zine reviews.
As I’ve discussed before, Wipeout! was one of a tiny handful of fanzines that gave tons of slavish attention to obscure Japanese weirdness, along with Bananafish and Show-Kai. Wipeout! treats many things from the land of the rising sun as worthy of attention, from blistering and atonal noise to garage rock to pop. He even reviews Pink Lady. I still remember the brief 1980 TV show Pink Lady and Jeff, which you can watch here. My mom was an ESL teacher to Japanese exchange students, who’d come to San Jose and stay in our home. We went through a major “Japan” phase ourselves at 1085 Normington Way, and this unfortunately even included watching each episode of Pink Lady and Jeff when it came on.
And like any fanzine worth its salt, Wipeout! #6 is just larded up with a ton of reviews, except it’s not lard at all, and maybe unlike the following issue, most of them are totally coherent and well-reasoned, if in a “first-draft, fuck it” style. This is where you really feel the full weight of Friedl’s fetching, wide-ranging and entirely self-curated music mania. He loves The Brainbombs’ first two 45s: “these singles completely busted my wig wide open”. He gives critical and deserved hosannas to the Feel Lucky, Punk?!! compilation. He loves the Jesus Lizard; well, we were all young once…! There’s a big Sun City Girls section. You could curate a tremendous 1992 record collection from these picks, and I’m certain that this fanzine helped my own collection along a bit.
Not long after I wrote about Wipeout! #7 here, a terrific podcast interview with Friedl came out on Armen Svadjian’s RockWrit and it’s a great place to understand where the man’s head was at at the time. You’ll learn that Wipeout! actually “started with Issue #4, because I thought no one actually cared about a first issue. If anyone has copies of the extremely rare #1-#3 issues, let me know, because I didn’t write ‘em”.
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