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On the cover of this 40-page newsprint gem, the Slash magazine that hit the record stores of greater Los Angeles in August 1979, we have muscle-flexing LA punk “Jimbo”, setting the tone for a wave of eventual hardcore dolts like Circle One’s John Macias to follow. I’m probably a bit of a heretic here, but the nonsensical Gary Panter drawings in Slash have always gone over my head, or more likely, missed me as a member of the target psychographic profile. People seemed to love ‘em, and I suspect it was because a cartoonist/artist was actually spending time drawing punk rockers, in a punk rock magazine, and drawing them well. So bravo, Mr. Panter!

Inside we’ve got a masthead, a table of contents with photos + a “Reader’s Chart”, which looks to me to have been lightly goosed by the editors, given the presence of multiple reggae discs (Tapper Zukie?!?) and oddball critical faves like The Misfits’ Cough Cool/She 45. A year’s-long domestic subscription is hawked for $10. Different times.

The next two pages – LOCAL EXCREMENT – were standard for most of the magazine’s entire tenure, this time a nice castor-oil potty-mouth cleanup from the typical “Local Shit”. This virtiol- packed section is one that I presume was typically penned by editor Claude Bessy, given that it alternates gossipy scene reportage, unbridled enthusiasm for new bands and a heavy dose of fuck-you, aimed at targets both easy (cops) and potentially bridge-burning (club owners, certain local bands etc.). This time Kickboy quite rightly sets his sneering sights on a local free magazine called Gosh! and a recent piece called “A Conservative Looks at a Punk Rock Party”, in which the author purportedly slandered Nervous Gender’s Phranc, an out Lesbian, as well as on The Whiskey, a Sunset Blvd. club, for essentially banning punk bands “without a recording contract”, which meant most of the good ones.

Also going on in LA during the summer of 1979: Tomata du Plenty’s birthday party; the imminent release of the Germs’ as yet untitled album – you know it as (GI); the lovely Trudie Arguelles and her birthday party; a new gay club called The One Way that plays punk instead of disco; and a peaceful makeup between The Dils and Slash magazine, necessitated by some earlier poor reviews and/or snipes directed at the former by the latter.

We have an all-caps editorial – Kickboy again – that makes light of the fact that his typical editorial rant had been missing from the last few issues, and that he’d thus been hearing that Slash therefore was probably going soft, selling out etc. This August 1979 editorial eventually winds its way to the point, which is that the halcyon days of 1977 are long gone; that punk rock has evolved; and that “Punk was never more than an Attitude and a Stand. At the time, and often now, this was and is and is best expressed in the 1 2 3 4 I Hate Your Guts format. But there are other ways to get the lovely message across.” 

Bessy/Kickboy enumerate a few of his favorites: The Fall. Alternative TV. The Pop Group. He’s excited and very much keeping the faith, which is one of the things I love about this guy and his writing at the time: “…it’s still all there. Growing. Spreading. Infecting.” In retrospect, it certainly was.

Next, we have the letters section. Always a hoot. The topic du jour this month relates directly to the editorial on the pages before it: Slash’s championing of slower, stranger, less raw music, much of it coming from the UK. Magazine; The Fall; Pere Ubu etc. Some of the hoi polloi are displeased. Kickboy, in his responses, keeps a hammer inside a velvet glove, nicely chirping mild and respectful dissent for some, and spewing venomous mockery at others.

On to this month’s interviews. Penetration, from England. Pauline Murray’s band. There were quite a few Slash interviews in which it was effectively impossible to discern actually who conducted it, and this was one of them. It’s just “Slash” asking the questions. I believe that probably means Bessy and Philomena Winstanley, the latter of whom took the photo of Penetration that accompanies the article. There’s also an interview with film director Paul Schrader (Blue Collar, Hardcore, American Gigolo), and this time we know who’s asking the questions: Chris D., Judith Bell and Clarissa Ainley. They’re actually pretty interested in why he’s deigning to talk to Slash, a punk magazine, and he’s clearly into punk rock in the same voyeuristic manner that his movies explore: “I like the anger, the heat…the feeling you used to have in CBGB’s that you could be stabbed and no one would know for fifteen or twenty minutes because it would so packed with people that you couldn’t fall down…”.

The other three interviews this time are with the aforementioned Nervous Gender; with X and with Nico. Nervous Gender, BPeople, Monitor and Human Hands were all arty, unusual and synth- driven bands just breaking onto the Los Angeles underground music scene that year, and often played together. Slash championed them in a major way. X, of course, were the proverbial belles of the ball in LA and with the Slash staff in general; the Slash label that grew out of the magazine would go on to release their second single and first two albums. These two interviews are conversational, respectful and interesting enough.

It’s that Nico interview that really makes this issue, though. The intro alone is phenomenal, capturing a time in her career as she was coming back & playing again in the late 70s, despite being caught in the grip of a 15-year addiction to heroin. Not precisely sure who wrote this intro which reviews her two shows at the Whiskey and sets up the visit of the interviewing crew at Tim Hardin’s house in LA, but here are some bits from it:

“Nico’ s second set was a burned-out shambles. You want your cult idol, well suffer her cult performances as she does a routine reminiscent of Judy Garland meeting Lenny Bruce in the last days….One girl shouting ‘We love you, Nico, we love you’ until Nico turns to the mike and says, ‘Do you really think that makes me feel any better?’.…when no one offers her a drink she throws a glass across the stage and says, ‘Isn’t there any dope in this damn place?’…

Next day’s interview took place at Tim Hardin’s house. Mr. Hardin, shit faced and stumbling around, hurt himself about four times while we were there. It was one of those dark sixties types hippie houses with art deco in the bathroom and a pot of beans on the stove. Nico had just been crying – former manager Paul Morrissey had taken her money so she wouldn’t spend it on foolish indulgences. She did seem too old for a babysitter, though. She is bothered by the people who have come to interview her – too many: One C. Bag, one Philomena, One Greg ‘New York Rocker’ Turner, One publicist Tim Hogan….”

To translate: that’s Craig Lee from the Bags; Slash founding editor Philomena Winstanley; Gregg Turner of Vom and the Angry Samoans; and, uh, publicist Tim Hogan. The rest of the interview proceeds as you think it might after this set-up. Nico, having delivered a strange, drugged soliloquy to Sid Vicious during her shows the night before, has this exchange with her interlocutors:

Slash: Do you like the Sex Pistols?
Nico: Yes……of course.
Slash: What was your favorite song?
Nico: Oh – I don’t know. I couldn’t tell you. Because I don’t buy those records. I only listen to classical music.

There’s a three-page “Los Angeles Band Update” spread that seeks to update the reader about the prime movers on the local scene, circa summer ‘79. It’s a gas, because so many of these bands are being documented in single-paragraph form during either their early nascence or when they’ve already evolved into the legendary acts they’d eventually gain their due for. I’m reprinting the Germs piece here. This is whom Slash saw fit to document that summer:

The Alleycats / Arthur J and the Goldcups / The Bags / The B People / Black Randy and the Metrosquad / Backstage Pass / Black Flag / The Brainiacs / The Controllers / The Deadbeats / The Dickies / The Dils / The Eyes / The Extremes / Eddie and the Subtitles / Fear / The Flesheaters / The Flyboys / F-Word / The Germs / The Go-Gos / The Gears / Holly and the Italians / Human Hands / The Mau Mau’s / Middle Class / Nervous Gender / The Plugz / Rhino 39 / The Rotters / The Skulls / The Satintones / The Screamers / The Simpletones / U.X.A. / Wall of Voodoo / The Weirdos / X / The Zeros 

That was what a week out in the clubs of underground Los Angeles would bring to you on any given day of the week that summer. Unreal. The blurbs are accompanied by fantastic Melanie Nissen photos of many of the bands, most of them never seen since except in these pages, this month. Oh, and there’s a two-full-pages center spread “family tree” with numerous drawings called “2 Years of Punk in LA” that does one of those hand-drawn family tree lineage things that Trouser Press was popularizing around the same time, but instead of being about Humble Pie or Traffic or whatever, it’s about virtually every punk band from LA the past two years, including many new-to-me combos like The Strict IDs, The Brothelcreepers, LA Shakers and The Whores – in addition to the Germs / Bags / Black Randy and the Metrosquad and all our other faves. I’d love to reprint it here, but you wouldn’t be able to read it.

After the interviews and features, Slash would most often feature live reviews from the previous months, and they do the same here. They’re often lengthy, packed with detail, and never withholding of opinion. As per the previous section – whoa. What a month! Chris D., writing as V/D, reviews early Black Flag (Keith Morris version) at the Bla Bla Cafe on 6/11/79: “They rival only the Germs in their potential for snowballing a room full of sedate people into a mangled tumult of chaos”. There are two reviews of a Screamers six-night stand at The Whiskey that make it sounds like the absolute death knell of the band, a Weimar cabaret-style performance with a female backing vocalist and violins. One unnamed reviewer wants to vomit; Kickboy says not so fast. The Screamers would be broken up within six months. The other reviewed shows range from X to Nervous Gender to the Plugz to Ray Campi and His Rockabilly Rebels. Teleport me back and I’ll go to every last one of ‘em.

Record reviews always came next, first a section of 45s, then one for albums. What was new in August of 1979? Everything from Augustus Pablo’s East of the River Nile to Devo’s Duty Now For The Future to Kleenex’s You/U 45 to The Jam’s Strange Town single (about which Kickboy writes, “This should have been reviewed ages ago. Nobody came forth with their little paragraph. What could be the reason behind such indifference. I wonder.”) The breadth of the reviews was wide enough to accommodate the aforementioned; a bunch of reggae singles; some new wave or power pop items from all over the country (most of which are dumped upon); and a ritual deboning of The Clash, a fairly standard and often wide target for Slash during their time publishing.

Finally, there’s a full page travelogue devoted to a worshipful trip to Jamaica taken by one Ranking Jeffrey Lea, otherwise known as Jeffery Lee Pierce, who would form the band that would eventually morph into the Gun Club mere months after this was written. Pierce, Bessy and Chris D. were huge reggae fiends and integrated their passion into the pages of Slash as effortlessly as they did other underground musics, recognizing in real time that this time – 1977-79 – was an exceptionally fertile period for reggae, dub and roots music, as the passage of time would soon prove. 

Then a Jimbo cartoon, and that was Slash Vol. 2 No. 7, over and out. It’s certainly not enough for me to merely tell you about how interesting or well laid-out or of-the-moment it all is, yet I know of no other publication that captured the zeitgeist of a given month, any month, in musical history better than this one. Slash had the intimacy of a fanzine – written in the first person with the intention to cajole, harangue, celebrate and champion – combined with the ritual deadline-date urgency of a much more streamlined and professional operation. It arrived each month as promised, with a chronicling of the month just passed, a handful of new enemies made and heroes to pedestalize, and a wide-eyed, optimistic look at sub-underground musical horizons – and a possible revolution in musical tastes that might lay just ahead.