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  • Damp #2

    In 1987, Damp editor Kevin Kraynick openly worried in the pages of this issue that he’d be lumped in with fanzine editors “who are the kind of guys who always got picked last for kickball games in gym class”. I mean, sure, but if the shoe fits….right? So in meager compensation, there’s some aggro finger-pointing and posturing in places where there oughtn’t be any – “whatta dick”; “you bet your globular ass”; that sort of thing. Certainly, Damp grew up a ton in subsequent issues – including #3 that we discussed here – but was still taking some young man’s cues from Conflict without quite having the chops to approximate its humorous vitriol. 

    That said, I bought Damp #2 then and I’d have happily owned it now for 37 years had it not been “disappeared” in the Great Starving Students Lost Fanzine Box. Only recently was I able to procure a copy again, perhaps even my own original for all I know. Slight concerns aside, it was an unalloyed pleasure to read cover to cover last night. There is an interview with New England locals Expando Brain, one of my very favorite super-far-underground rock bands of the mid/late 80s. Kraynick also pulls together a well-researched Snakefinger interview that’ll always be my primary source material should I ever need to do any serious Snakefinger research, such as to write a paper. There are also interviews with acts that only a young man might pretend to like – Big Dipper and Zoogz Rift –  but then there’s also the only piece I’ve ever seen on The Longshoreman, a long-running San Francisco band featuring Judy and Carol from Pink Section and the Inflatable Boy Clams. Kraynick was clearly looking a bit afield from the alterna front-runners of the day, your Soul Asylums and Big Blacks and whatnot. 

    Sometimes the vituperation is pretty funny in his reviews, too, as in this fine intro to a Dash Rip Rock review: “Front cover shows the band burning guitars in the fireplace and let’s hope those are the only ones they’ve got”. As it turns out, even Kraynick knows that the miniscule 4-point font for record reviews that he’s using is utterly comic, and christens the whole section “The World’s Tiniest Record Reviews”. This was the era of Squirrel Bait, Butthole Surfers, Dinosaur and Halo of Flies worship, a consensus that emerged in the East Coast fanzines I read all the way across the country in Santa Barbara, and my taste was molded accordingly. For some reason David Ciaffardini is a great target of derision, which I kind of understand if you were comparing his Sound Choice magazine with, say, Forced Exposure, but he was an exceptionally friendly dude whom I knew personally, a true mensch from the word go, and someone whom I recently re-established contact with after 35 years. 

    The snarky sub-underground fanzines all had to have their “out crowd” for sure, and there was a consensus pile-on against the same targets, the supposed “guys who always got picked last for kickball games in gym class”. Clowns like Tesco Vee and Lydia Lunch got a free pass for some reason, probably for the same reason confident extroverts always have and always do. If you can convincingly act the part, it doesn’t matter how brainless your material actually is; if you cower and show weakness in any social circle, particularly one in which young men are attempting to preen and show off for each other’s benefit, you get bullshit like over-the-top Mike McGonigal hatred and Baboon Dooley. I wasn’t totally immune myself when I started in this racket a few years later.

    Then again, maybe we all just wanted to be Byron Coley. He’s interviewed here, the second part of a 2-parter, the first of which I’ve never read because I’ve never seen Damp #1. I remember reading this interview back then, and he praised the Lazy Cowgirls – who were my absolute favorite band – and it was a big, big deal to me, the voice of God anointing my own musical taste as being first-rate. And he also made fun of SWA, who were absolutely my friends’ & my favorite musical whipping post around this time. These “photos” of “Jimmy & Byron” from Forced Exposure definitely generated some chatter at the time as well, as it was hard to know what these guys looked like in an era before The Face Book and before I was able to Ask Jeeves. It took me at least a few years to realize 100% that these weren’t the guys.  

    Finally, Damp #2 closes up with a guy named Wandz, who has his own page of “Hip Cat Jazz Reviews”. He even writes as if he knows what he’s talking about. A nice icing to a pretty packed fanzine.

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  • The Offense #15

    Last summer I worked myself into a small lather attempting to pick apart 1981’s The Offense #12, which you can peruse right here. I’ve got a few other issues of this thing in my stacks that we ought to talk about, such as March 1982’s The Offense #15. Not only must I beg and struggle for good lighting and total concentration in order to actually read its microscopic print, my head aches all the more for just how ridiculously stacked it is. Really, it’s 51 pages of content that could have easily been 102 pages with different layout decisions, and its breadth is just mind-boggling. 

    Hailing from Columbus, Ohio – no one’s real idea of any sort of musical hotbed at the time, yet it was just about to be rightly perceived as such over the following 15-20 years – The Offense was helmed by Tim Anstaett, who staffed it with a group of dispersed individuals, each intensely devoted to underground music and the life surrounding it, as well as to extending their tentacles to contact and convert every like-minded soul. I mean, it’s almost a crusade with these folks, and I remember very well this devout intensity of feeling of both being an outsider and worshiping other outsiders, and to gobbling up every bit of underground music, film, writing and gossip as I could. 

    Honestly, The Offense would have been my favorite mag in 1982 had I’d known it existed, because it was over-the-top anglophilic (as I was), while deeply interested in the American underground and what was happening in individual cities, or, as we once called them, “scenes” (as I was). UK chart-toppers live uncomfortably here side by side with the fastest and meanest American hardcore bands, and letter writers range from nascent goth girls to new wave goobers to Barry Henssler of The Necros, raving about his visits to the DC scene. You can see on the cover here that much mirth & merrymaking is being had at combatting the mag’s reputation as “anglophilic”, right up the dawn of the USA-love-it-or-leave-it Reagan era. 

    The 1981 readers poll results lean way more post-punk and English, which likely reflects that, at this point, there were no American publications covering that music with any sort of knowledge nor intelligence save for perhaps Trouser Press – and they were really just trying to stay alive at that point by putting Adam Ant or whomever on the cover. I’d buy two-months-old Sounds, NME and Melody Makers if I wanted to read about my faves Bauhaus or the Au Pairs or Simple Minds. At The Offense #15, the big winners are The Psychedelic Furs, Joy Division and Siouxsie and the Banshees – but also, there’s some serious coverage of underground Ohio as well. Human Switchboard are on the cover, and there’s lots of love for Naked Skinnies (who I only know as Mark Eitzel’s first band) and something called Razor Penguins.

    The writing staff is populated by heavy hitters such as Ron House, Don Howland, Steve Hesske and the “controversial” Seattlite Joe Piecuch. I think it’s House who writes all his reviews like they’re song lyrics, like this for the Process of Elimination comp (currently selling for $271 on Discogs – I had this record!!): “Necros alternately try to be the scariest and fastest of all and succeed / Violent Apathy win shit production recognition, with most the others close runners-up / what’s wrong with saving your gig money for time in a decent studio with someone behind the board who halfway knows what he’s doing? / guess then it wouldn’t be a team effort /” – and so on. It takes some getting used to, but hey, “why be normal”, right?

    There’s really no sense of what someone’ll think about something; records now part of the canon get slammed; commercial mediocrities like U2 and the “Fun Boy Three” are canonized; tiny underground bands can go either way. Hesske loves The Bongos’ “The Bulrushes” – so did/do I. Again, if I’d come across this at John Muir Junior High toward the end of 9th grade I’d have absolutely taken out a subscription and likely been king shit of turd mountain at my school (nah, I’d have absolutely gotten my ass kicked if I brought it to class). 

    Anstaett bemoans that only 1000 copies were able to be printed of his mag each issue due to various distribution snafus the past year. I’m just glad one of them landed in my paws eventually, and as it turned out, this was the final issue of The Offense before it relaunched as the smaller The Offense Newsletter later that year.

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  • Outasite #1

    For me, the name “Greg Prevost” had mostly meant one, or rather two, things of consequence: the amazing, blown-out 1978 Distorted Levels single, and its belated and even more over-the-top Mean Red Spiders follow-up, which wouldn’t come out until 1990. Truly one of the all-timers for catastrophically ridiculous gargle-mouth vocals, unnecessary male screaming, violent lyrics, and blitzoid, sped-up Stoogified guitar worship. That’s my Greg Prevost. Turns out he was in some other bands as well and did a ‘lil fanzine called Outasite, an early 80s issue of which just crossed my transom. 

    Now I know this is from the early 1980s because Greg mentions his favorite band are The Zantees, but his opening editorial and highly-believable copyright symbol tries to mark Outasite #1 as being a fanzine from “1966”. The advertisements and clip-art from various teen mags are lined up accordingly, but his heart’s not really into the joke. A thing pops up about The Nazz; records are reviewed that came out in 1967; The Byrds and Chocolate Watchband (who he really interviewed!) talk about post-’66 stuff and so forth. I didn’t intend to hold him to the conceit as I read it.

    I will hold him accountable for entertainment and educational value, however, and on that front Outasite #1 is a bit mixed. It might be that his taste in “outasite 60s psychedelic” stuff runs a bit more pedestrian than I’d have hoped. I mean, even in 1981 or whenever this was truly out there, page-filling photo features on The Rolling Stones, Yardbirds and Paul Revere & The Raiders really didn’t add much to any conversation that was happening or to any furthering of wild, underground 60s garage punk. It’s only those interviews, especially the one with Groop Ltd. – that really have any heft, and even those are little more than name/rank/serial number Q&As. There’s too much teeny bopper diddling, and not enough of the raw meat I so desperately crave.

    Some of the reviews near the back get at the true fanzine qualities that might take this one into a higher strata. Prevost is a record collector, see, and his passion for 45s he’s found on record excursions is immense, clear and fetching. Love the devotion to uncovering every 60s jot & titter by any band connected with Rochester NY, his hometown, but he’s also a huge fan of the mind-melters from 1965-68 Texas, including Knights Bridge’s “Make Me Some Love” – a major favorite here at the ‘Hemorrhage. Somehow in the course of clicking around the internet I learned that this is the same Outasite mag that eventually put out this and this, too. Those definitely might be worth a flip-through some sweet day.

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  • Flesh and Bones #7

    A year ago I wrote up a thing about a very important fanzine to me, Middlesex, New Jersey’s Flesh and Bones #6. When Spring 1988 rolled around and Flesh & Bones #7 rolled around with it, I made zero haste and bought this one immediately upon sight, almost certainly at Rhino or Aron’s in Los Angeles. I was, at this point, a junior in college and very much immersed in record collecting and ultra-loud “longhaired punk” bands from both Seattle and the east coast, very much including this issue’s Green River, White Zombie and Das Damen. But honestly, the music coverage in Flesh and Bones, such as it was, was absolutely secondary to the mag’s presentation ethos, which revolved around comedically cutting, pasting and manipulating 50s, 60s and 70s advertisements and comics; loads of drug and hippie humor; eye-popping modern comix art; wild, hair-swinging photos of modern abrasive heshers, and a super goofy, it’s-fun-but-who-gives-a-shit approach to rock & roll in general. 

    I believe I enjoyed this particular issue even more than I did #6, though it wasn’t quite as revelatory. Even now I get a big laff out of it. Published by Jeff/“Jeffo”, a gentleman whom I’ve tried to digitally engage with in our current era to no avail, Flesh & Bones #7 has even more erstwhile hair farmers than its predecessor, including truly awful shirtless photos of Saint Vitus, who were unfortunately interviewed as well. The mag starts with a phony underground rock gossip column with blatantly untrue “items” about the likes of Ed Gein’s Car, Sloth, Phantom Tollbooth, Redd Kross and Live Skull – so not only those captivated by that strange 1986-89 interregnum when male hair went totally bananas and a handful of bands half-pretended that Jim Dandy and Black Oak Arkansas were something to aspire to. 

    Along those lines, there is a fantastic “guide to being a real man” photo essay called “Manly Phrases and Gestures” by a greasy rocker named Davoid, from a (apparently real) band called Wassermann Love Puddle. He shows off his scar, his cop belt, his boots, how to answer the door with a baseball bat, and best of all, his melancholy down times, sitting at the bar alone, “Thinking about ‘Nam”. Oh yeah – ‘Nam. Charlie. Don’t get me started, comrade. There’s also a “Wild Women of Rock” article with loads of photos in which we get to meet and celebrate, among others, Elyse from Raging Slab, Jennifer from Royal Trux, Sean from White Zombie and yes, Yanna from Big Stick! 

    Das Damen are allowed to say their piece in an abbreviated 1986-87 tour diary that’s well worth paying attention to. Bob Bert tells his life story, taking us up to the present days in Pussy Galore, who were one of my 2-3 favorite bands on the planet at this time and who, in my eyes, aged the best of just about anyone from the so-called pigfuck years. Typical of Flesh & Bones #7 is in-jokey pieces that fill spaces in between features like “Twenty Ways To Ruin The Scene”. Those of you as old as i am will remember when “the scene” was sacrosanct, and any efforts to disunite or trample upon it were highly frowned upon. Is it funny? I don’t know, is it? When you’re 20 years old it sure is.

    Peppered around all of this stuff are strange comics, tongue-firmly-in-cheek record reviews and so, so many great band photos – in the back section of live reviews alone are some of the best shots I’ve ever seen of The Flaming Lips, BALL, Divine Horseman, No Trend and Death of Samantha – with every photo uncredited! It’s as good as Monica Dee’s stuff but I have no idea who took these gems. And in 1988, you could buy this meaty, 80-page Flesh & Bones #7 for a cover price of $2. Today it goes for a little more than that.

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  • NY Rocker #38 (April 1981)

    In April 1981 I’m sure it felt like a pretty big deal that NY Rocker had weathered the storms of punk and post-punk and come out on the other side of five years of publishing. They’d have a few more to go, though the end was quite a bit more ignominious than anything happening there from 1976 through 1982. So this issue, celebrating said 5-year anniversary, is a pretty nice one to have around, particularly because it’s not all onanistic back-patting but rather a normal monthly NY Rocker issue, tarted up with a little deserved looking back. 

    On that front, there’s a cool piece called “Whatever Happened to the Class of ‘76?”, focused on the Manhattan/CBGB/Max’s whoosh that gave the mag and underground music much of its initial jolt. Tom Verlaine, in 1981, is said to be “a study in career suicide”. The Ramones’ lack of commercial breakthrough is thoroughly bemoaned, though some hope is held out for their new 45 “She’s a Sensation” (it didn’t chart, not even close). Suicide are “finally on the verge of the commercial success they so richly deserve” (I don’t remember said success). There’s definitely some bellyaching that Patti Smith is now in Detroit being a mom and raising a family, likely written by “a young person” who perhaps hadn’t yet considered having children now or ever.

    They also track down “The De-Classe of ‘76” as well: those who disappeared. This includes acting editor for NY Rocker issues #2, 3 and 4 Craig Gholson, who says he got out early in the game because he “became disinterested in the music. I wanted to write about Television. I didn’t want to have to write about the Dead Boys”. Amen and godspeed, Craig. The “early days” reminiscing continues with a piece of Kristian Hoffman memories, a great Roberta Bayley photo spread of all the key ‘76-’77 NYC players and best of all, a reprint of Lester Bangs’ Peter Laughner obit from the September 1977 issue. It’s a phenomenal piece, readable here and also in one of the Bangs books, and it’s highly ironic for its depictions of Bangs trying to reason with Laughner to not drink and drug himself to death. and not letting him up into his apartment because Laughner was becoming “bad news”. I say highly ironic because I read the Bangs bio and, well, black kettle/black pot and all that. 

    As far as the 1981 stuff in here, well, there’s news of a Plasmatics indecency arrest in Milwaukee, and The Specials being fined in London for “encouraging fighting” at their gigs, which was highly preposterous. The Plasmatics were indecent, though, on every level. I remember both of these incidents, but man, growing up in the suburbs as I did among the rubes, any time my musically unsophisticated peers wanted to reference whatever was happening in punk and “the new wave”, it was often The Plasmatics that they reached for. The 6 o’clock news had probably done something on them blowing up a school bus, or Wendy’s nipple tape, or this arrest. The hoi polloi, the great unwashed – they usually knew about Devo (total fags), the Plasmatics (that chick’s a dyke) and the Dead Kennedys (probably gay).

    Now – on the proverbial flipside, NY Rocker #38 features a cool visit to the Brooklyn abode of Miriam Linna and Billy Miller of The Zantees to admire their record collection, jukebox and retro dishware. Bill Landis of Sleazoid Express weighs in with a fantastic primer essay, “From Tack to Gore: The Exploitation Film in America”, so good it makes me want to order that book I just hyperlinked to. In the reviews section, reviewer David Blither tries to grapple with the landmark ½ Japanese½ Gentlemen/Not Beasts triple LP box set, and far from finding it wanting, walks away from the experience with the zeal of the convert. Love that thing. And Howard Wuelfling gets a ton of great shit to review: a pile of Cleveland 45s like Pressler-Morgan, X_X, The Styrenes and Cleveland Confidential, plus the debut Bad Brains, a Wipers single and even the Lesa (Aldridge) 45. What would you say if I told you 1981 was one of the top three years in rock music history? NY Rocker #38 is another in a long line & litany of verifiable and documented proof points, so I shall provide no quarter on my stance.

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  • Savage Damage Digest #3

    Part of the reason I hold onto so many of these goddamn fanzines is because I just know I’m gonna need ‘em someday. Case in point is this Larry Wallis piece in 2013’s Savage Damage Digest #3. I recently embarked upon a UK late 60s/early 70s hippie/hard rock scuzz mini-bender –  Deviants, Pink Fairies, Groundhogs, all that – and man, was I glad to be able to dimly remember the Wallis piece in this one that I’d mostly skimmed over 11 years ago. You see, despite my longtime Talmudic “study” of the rocknroll form, I’m still constantly attending a school of my own making, expanding my horizons and whatnot, and/or revisiting stuff I’d passed on the first time because I wasn’t quite ready. Like The Byrds we talked about last time. 

    What am I gonna do for succor and encouragement, buy the nonexistent Pink Fairies book on Amazon? No, I’m going to head to the stacks and read editor Corey Linstrum’s long, ultra-nitpicking (in the best possible sense) overview of Pink Fairies guitarist Wallis’ entire musical career. Now I know. At least for the 45 minutes in which I retain the information I’ve just read, I can have a fuckin’ blowout conversation about Wallis with you or anybody. That’s why I “invest” in fanzines as I do, because it’s that important.

    When I got this issue of Savage Damage Digest #3 in 2013, I was just grateful that a real print fanzine was still publishing. Seemed to be a grim period, besides my own, stalwarts like Ugly Things and a few others. I was drawn in my Linstrum’s massive Avengers/Greg Ingraham interview, which is bedecked with many well–placed photos and flyers, including many I’ve never seen before. Did I ever tell you guys that the first punk song I ever loved was the “The American In Me”? I was barely out of elementary school, heard it on the left of the dial, and it was world-changing. Today I sort of see them as a decidedly second-tier early-wave US punk band so my interest in their 70s shenanigans is perhaps lower than my interest in, say, first-hand recollections of The Electric Eels, which thankfully Linstrum has in a later issue. But yeah, the Ingraham interview is the sort of deep-dig dork-out that I very much admire, and should I ever need to gather source material for a big Avengers listening sesh and eventual discussion with you over a beer, I’ll absolutely know where to go. 

    One final thing I admire about Linstrum is that he clearly just heads where the spirit moves him. Like he’s got an entire fanzine out about the history of underground music in San Francisco’s East Bay, which I bought when it came out and’ll get to on this site at some point. He fills a page with a rocknroll crossword puzzle, with print so small I abandoned it both now and in 2013 when I first came across it – back when I could see everything just fine. Only moderate bum note is a perfunctory and sort of unprepared interview with Jeff McDonald of Redd Kross; time was an interview with the wacky McDonald brothers was a key reason to buy a fanzine, yet at this point Redd Kross were just awful and there was little use pretending otherwise. But there’s no accounting for taste, as they say!

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  • Zigzag #28

    My travels into and around the “classic rock” pantheon over my life have been halted, stuttering, filled with skepticism and, ultimately, redeemed with revelation and joy. Every few years there’s a popular band that you & everyone else has loved for years that finally fully clicks in for me; in 2023, that band was The Byrds. Several years ago, it was the Pet Sounds/Smile-era Beach Boys, which I wrote extensively about in my most recent Dynamite Hemorrhage #10 fanzine. To understand why it’s taken a fifty-something man with enormous lifelong exposure to these bands so long at times to finally grasp their genius, I’ll give a sense of my starting point.

    In the late 1970s and early 1980s, as my tastes were being formed in the direction of punk and “the new wave”, it was classic rock and heavy rock that I 100%, fully and totally set myself in defiant, youthful opposition to. At age 13/14/15, the bands that my doofus junior high and high school peers loved, all of whom were routinely pouring out of boomboxes on KOME and KSJO, were the full antithesis of everything I thought myself to be. If it was popular, heavy, and on the FM dial, I hated it. If heshers and especially hippies liked it, I hated it. If it was unpopular, unknown, strange, bent, angular and possibly from England, I was interested. 

    So naturally this sort of stance precluded and eliminated a great deal of music in my life. The first crack in the armor for me in the late 80s was The Rolling Stones, especially once I heard Beggar’s Banquet and Exile on Main Street. Then it was a major Neil Young overdose in the early 90s, which continues to this day. The gates would continue to open, and have continued to open, for years. We let in the Beatles, AC/DC and of course The Kinks over time. Recently The Byrds, whom I’ve always sorta liked but never owned any records from, came waltzing in.

    I recently got this February 1973 Zigzag #28 because I wanted to dig more into the cover feature on them. Zigzag, which I’ve written about before here and here, was edited by Pete Frame in the UK and was one of the premier fanzines of its time, even in the cold, lean years of 1972-73. “It’s produced for our friends rather than as a commercial enterprise”: this is how Frame defends to a letter-writer not wanting to “cover” Uriah Heep, Black Sabbath and Nazareth. That, and the greasy hair and foul body odor of the aforementioned. Frame’s just come back from the US where he’s hung out with a young Alan Betrock and unfortunately gone out there in the first place to see Genesis; Zig Zag in this era was quite hung up on prog, with a big Kevin Ayers interview and a killer hand-drawn “family tree” of Soft Machine, Gong and so on. I can’t predict where I’d have been in February 1973 myself at that age, and while I’d like to have said Beefheart/Stooges/Velvets were my guiding lights, I’m pretty sure Bowie would have been even more important. Which is fine.

    The Byrds stuff is killer. It’s an overview of their existence from April 1965 through March 1966, including interviews with Chris Hillman and Roger McGuinn and a timeline walk through a pivotal year in the band’s life. As mentioned, for years I pretty much skimmed or ignored all the writing I’d see about this band because aside from their hits, I hadn’t heard that one song that opened the doors for me until I finally ingested “Have Your Seen Her Face”. Then Sweethearts of the Rodeo was it for me, then all the folky stuff and so on. Biggest fan etc. Zigzag #28 also has a similar retrospective piece on Love, and tells us that in 1973, “Arthur Lee is currently fronting an all-new, all-Black Love”. Click the link, it’s a good story.

    In the Jimmy Page interview, at a time when Led Zeppelin were playing enormo-domes all across America and tossing TVs into swimming pools, Page talks about Takoma Records and his love for Fairport Convention and NRBQ (!). There is also an interview with Stealers Wheel – ouch. Those guys are famous for the awful 70s MOR “Stuck in the Middle With You”, which was later famously used to soundtrack the slice-the-ear-off-the-cop scene in Reservoir Dogs. And sorta apropos of nothing, there’s a long interview with author J.P. Donleavy, whose book The Ginger Man my pal CM says is one of the all-time greats, and something that I must read. Should I?

    There’s more in here, but some of you might especially be interested in the big Kim Fowley interview and timeline. Now me, I recently tried to reread the long-ago omnibus compendium from the early 2000s about him in Ugly Things, and I have to say I found it tough sledding. It’s not merely the beyond-credible rape accusations that have come up since that, it’s honestly that the guy was just so tedious to listen to talk about himself. His rap gets old very quickly, and Fowley’s production right-place-right-time “legend” is one of mediocrity and overhype across the board. Writer Mac Garry says “I haven’t heard the newly recorded Fowley solo album, but none of the others have ever been released here. Should you stumble across an import copy, do yourself a favour and leave it in the rack…they are all, quite frankly, abominable horsemanure”. Hey Mac, if you’re still with us 51 years later, I’d like to play you a song called “Motorboat”. Aside from that, sure. It may take yet another 51 years for me to finally come around to that particular brand of “classic rock”.

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  • Only Death is Fatal #1

    After years of being something of an afterthought and/or the provenance of “girls just sing better” dorks like me for a couple patriarchal decades, the exhumation of “female-fronted punk” truly took a quantum leap in the 2010s. I became acquainted with Erin Eyesore, née Erin Fleming, who lived in San Francisco as I did and hosted the great Ribbon Around a Bomb show that was only classically rad 70s/80s femme-punk. She had me onto the program at the Radio Valencia studios once and let me “spin” some of my best mp3s. It was fun to email her links to the Reference of Female-Fronted Punk Rock bootlegs every now and again with a quick “Hey u ever hear this?” and get an eye-roll emoji back. She was still doing the show recently at her and my joint alma mater KCSB-FM Santa Barbara, too – shows linked here. 

    Erika Elizabeth, too – superstar DJ, musician, risograph designer and writer – she did a killer piece in 2014’s Dynamite Hemorrhage #2 fanzine on female-fronted punk obscurities that helped further the disentombment of so much of this music. Right before that, I happily picked up a copy of 2013’s Only Death is Fatal #1, published out of Montreal by a woman known to me only as Megon, and it’s this deep dive into ultra-obscurity we’ll be talking about today. Unless I’ve got it wrong, Megon only published this one print fanzine before going the full digital on her “blogspot” blog, which ran out of steam in 2017 yet not before making a full accounting of hundreds of female-fronted punk and post-punk corners. 

    She was the type of editor to hear a weird UK DIY song on a comp track by a band with a ridiculous name like Cool To Snog and say, “Hey! I need to interview the folks from Cool To Snog!”. Someone needed to, and we’re all the better for it. That’s really the unstated mission statement of Only Death is Fatal #1 – to turn over the previously unturned rocks. She tracks down the two sisters from the only band in here besides Bona Dish whom I’d heard of – the Anemic Boyfriends, from Alaska (!) – and gives what I’m sure is the most full airing of their history to them they’d ever been proffered. Turns out the ‘Boyfriends moved to San Francisco, and then away from it, not once but twice! 

    Because these bands were barely talked to by fanzines in their day and almost all moved on (as people do) to raise families, work jobs and so forth, you get a sense that even the band members struggle to remember what actually happened in 1980 and why. Megon will ask the sort of naval-gazer of a question I’d ask, something learned through deep online & offline scouring and tape insert reading, only to get an answer like, “Ah, you’ve really got me there. I don’t know how that came about”. But she did a phenomenal job sourcing original photographs & flyers, and going deep on the questions – she actually knocked it out of the park with Bona Dish, who I myself interviewed in 2013 as well, and got a cool photo that the band didn’t send to me (sorry, Megon gets it mate). 

    And then, after all of this flurry of female-fronted punk documentation from Erin, Erika and Megon, Jen B. Larson put out the book Hit Girls: Women of Punk in the USA, 1975-1983 just over a year ago. I suggest you give it a gander if you’re so inclined. Sin 34 and the Inflatable Boy Clams get their own chapters, so you’re likely to want to get involved.

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  • Twisted #1

    Seattle, Washington ended up being pretty well-represented at the mid/late 70s dawn of punk rock by not one but two stellar publications, both of which I’ve written about before – Chatterbox and Twisted. I vowed when I typed up some words about the latter that I’d do what it takes to procure the two copies I didn’t have of the latter, and somehow I was able to do just that. All it takes is a willing and friendly seller and a highly obsessive buyer willing to forgo some of life’s pleasures in order to buy some dopey fanzine from 1977.

    Except Twisted #1’s not dopey – I mean, not really. Hitting the hot, hot streets of the jet city in July 1977, there’s excitement in the air and Seattle is all of a sudden on the fucking punk rock/alterna-music circuit, with Iggy Pop and Blondie not merely having just come to town to play together, but to party it up with our editors and with all sorts of new, nascent, barely formed punk bands as well. Their whole 4-day Northwest visit is documented blow-by-blow here, like the big deal that it most assuredly was for the participants. This was when Iggy had Bowie playing keyboards for him (!), and there’s a photo of him just sitting off to the side of the stage, nonchalantly doing his thing and trying not to be noticed. “With Iggy on stage it would be hard for anyone, even him, to be noticed.”

    Each day, Iggy goes off to parties and jam sessions with the editors – he does not bring Bowie with him, though there’s a message left at the hotel for editor “Robert Roberts”: “David Bowie called – looking for Iggy”. Turned out Bowie was looking for the party but couldn’t find it. I think he got lost at the shpritzer honker splasher. He missed Iggy jamming with “Blondie’s band”; he missed Iggy hanging out with Seattle band The Feelings and commandeering their instruments; and he missed a trip to Herfy’s, the beloved Sacramento hamburger chain of my youth. 

    Somehow there’s a party as well in Ballard, and I’m going to guess new Seattle punk band The Knobs had something to do with it, as they are profiled in Twisted #1. This is the band that The Lewd grew out of, with lead singer J. “Satz” Beret. Hell yes. Weren’t we just talking about The Lewd? It says here that “…The Knobs never played an official show, because as SATZ says…”We had no songs.” However, The Knobs did play one intimate “performance” at a Fremont rehearsal space called The Funhole. This A-list evening was written up in a Seattle punk fanzine Twisted.” I know from having lived there that Ballard and Fremont are almost the same neighborhood, lightly separated as they are by “Phinney Ridge”. Going to guess this was the show. Anyone in the Fanzine Hemorrhage reading audience get loaded that night at The Funhole?

    Other things are happening too, folks. Tomata and The Screamers have recently moved to LA but have kept their ties with the Twisted editors, which means there are a ton of a photos and a wild-eyed write-up of the band’s otherworldly synth-blast, including a snap from the legendary Slash magazine party where both entities became known to the LA underground. Tomata himself writes up a frothingly happy piece about The Damned’s visit to LA and all the partying they did together. I mean, this is all formative stuff. Any & all documents about 1977 punk in Los Angeles contains these events, and here we are on the ground with the people who either made it happen or were witnessing it. 

    In the record reviews, some nameless reviewer thinks The Saints’ I’m Stranded album is pretty awful, yet digs the new ones from The Tubes and U.F.O. Cool. And there’s a Danny Fields interview. Did you know that Fields was the editor of teenybopper mag 16 back then? Somehow this fact had eluded me. Twisted #1’s a short one, 25 pages, but for 60 cents and a chance to have your mind blown & musical taste rearranged, there’s some truly excellent value for money going on.

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  • What Goes On #3

    As I’m sure you’re aware, there’s been a rich history of single-artist music fanzines catering to “the obsessives” for many decades now. Backbreaking work has been done by certified Dylanologists, for instance, then deployed with extreme prejudice in numerous Dylan fanzines over the years – and whenever I get the gumption to search for music fanzines on eBay, I’ll get dozens upon dozens of listings for fanzines about Kiss, Tori Amos, Kate Bush, David Bowie, Pink Floyd, Stone Roses, Bruce Springsteen, The Smiths and obviously many more. Never the Velvet Underground, unfortunately; that is, unless a copy of What Goes On turns up online, which isn’t particularly often. 

    I scanned What Goes On #1’s cover and printed a bit of my interview with Velvet Underground Appreciation Society founder & What Goes On editor Phil Milstein here. Those first two late 70s issues are fantastic, but this fanzine really started to flower in 1982 with the publication of What Goes On #3, which, well – on one hand it’s a straight-up, obsessive fan magazine devoted to what might be the greatest rock band of all time, yet on the other, it’s a supreme piss-take on the idea of fan magazines. Milstein, as I’d later come to understand, encompasses multitudes – a wiseacre archivist of the obscure and the outsider; a serio-comic writer whom it’s sometimes impossible to know when he’s being honest or inscrutable; and, at times, a musician in his own right. That’s in addition to his lifelong servitude to and furthering of the cult of the Velvet Underground, a passion which I have nothing but the highest admiration for. 

    That admiration was extended once I dug into What Goes On #3. While fully devoted to explaining & expanding the genius of the Velvet Underground, It absolutely doesn’t take itself very seriously, and it’s all the better for it. Milstein, 25 years old at the time, prefigures one of my favorite SNL sketches of all time – the one at the Star Trek convention – with a moderately ridiculous Velvets quiz, with questions like “When Nico first met Andy Warhol, she was carrying a demo acetate in her purse. What was the song on the demo, and who wrote it?”. Funny enough, I can answer a big chunk of these questions, but that’s with the benefit of 42 additional years of Velvets scholarship having been brought to life since 1982. 

    This isn’t a navel-gazer of a fanzine, though. There are interviews in this issue alone with Andy Warhol, Tony Conrad, Henry Flynt, Terry Riley and Byron Coley’s outtakes of his NY Rocker John Cale interview from 1980. Dana Hatch – who’d later go on to glory as the drummer and throat-scraping vocalist in the Cheater Slicks – and who was really just a ‘lil nipper at this point – does a detailed overview of VU live records and gets his letter to & drawings for Lou Reed published as well. A big unpublished Lester Bangs piece on Nico is published here (!), and Tim Yohannan – yes! Tim Y! – has a piece about his own homemade, DIY Velvet Underground album covers. 

    What Goes On #3 treats solo recordings from Nico, Cale, Reed etc with the same sort of reverence and respect as it does VU stuff, but is certainly willing to carve it up as necessary, as it somewhat does for Reed’s newest LP The Blue Mask. A writer named Richard Mortifolglio contributes an excellent piece on White Light/White Heat – no jokin’ here, just a dissection of the record I’ve sometimes called my absolute favorite piece of vinyl. Perhaps the most entertaining section is “Ken’s Corner”, featuring a nursing home resident out of the pages of David Greenberger’s Duplex Planet magazine:

    The mag’s nooks & crevices are filled in with bootleg reviews and every jot and titter from Velvets world, including mentions of the band in other mags, such as Lou Reed himself mentioning the VUAS and What Goes On in some Dutch mag, and how he likes to read it on the toilet. That’s actually pretty charitable from Reed, all things considered. I’ll be more charitable than that and state that this is an absolute treasure, and something well worth reprinting in book form along with the other issues. I do hope that someone takes up the call.

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