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Wiring Dept. #4
Maybe it didn’t really feel like it at the time to me, but Wiring Dept. has reputationally come into its own, nearly forty years after the fact, as an important sub-underground music publication that found joy, innovation and immense left-of-center creativity in post-hardcore San Francisco circa 1984-86. These were supposed to be “the lean years”, but I’ve got a whole Wiring Dept. #4 here that says they weren’t. (I talked about Wiring Dept. #3 here as well).
I know where I was when I bought this in 1985 or early 1986 – it was at Rough Trade Records on 6th Street in San Francisco, and I was up visiting from college on one of my many record-buying excursions to the city while staying with my parents in San Jose. It was likely rung up at the counter by KFJC’s Spliff Skankin (Dennis Bishop), who worked there, and whom I listened to incessantly in high school (and who therefore likely intimidated me at the age of 18 when I bought this – these DJs were absolute gods to me). Given my youth and general punk rock orientation at the time, I probably blanched a little at the pretentious poetry and song lyrics – many by Dylan – in the margins of many pages, and at the inwards circularity of the fanzine, in which much of it seemed primed to elevate its creators and their own endeavors. I’m over it now.
But as examples of what I’m talking about, let’s dissect Wiring Dept. #4 a little. There’s an interview with SF band Trial by Grux of Caroliner and by editor Eric Cope. Then Cope writes about Caroliner. Then William Davenport of Unsound fanzine does an interview with The Flaming Lips after their first LP. Then Cope interviews Davenport. Cope’s own band, Glorious Din, gets a reprint of their interview on KALX radio, and then their album gets a rave review in Cope’s own magazine as well. Who’d have thunk it?
Brandan Kearney of World of Pooh was part of this loose collective as well. He writes a bunch of the record reviews; his band, then a duo, gets raved about; there’s a long review of their tape Dust. and also a review of Brandan Kearney’s magazine Nuf Sed Digest, which I’d never even known about until re-reading this just now. Who’s got a spare copy to trade me for one of my extra CMJ New Music Monthlies? There’s also a review of a World of Pooh tape called Pigmies in a Rose Petal that I’m not 100% sure actually ever existed, and another of a comp tape called UGLY SF III: Bellair McKuen Natures the Preying ANXthouse, supposedly with Lennonburger, Church Police and Caroliner. Google turns up nothing. I need to hear this and I need your help.
There are loads of short interviews, including with four small-ish bands who became much larger in years to come: the aforementioned Flaming Lips; 10,000 Maniacs; Faith. No More and Peter Buck of R.E.M., who were already kind of a big deal on the indie/Americana circuit but nothing like they’d be two/three years later. Yet there are also chats with Controlled Bleeding, Love Tractor, Flat Duo Jets and Stiff Legged Sheep – who were awesome, by the way. Listen here. Corrosion of Conformity, too. Fuckin’ C.O.C., man. I saw them play at the Oxnard Skate Palace, no lie.
Frightwig talk about their upcoming record: “Have you ever seen Russ Meyer, early Russ Meyer films? He did Debbie Does Dallas (sic). He had this film about three go-go dancers who travel around in these sports cars. It’s called Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill. And we’re the three dancers in our sports cars. Faster Frightwig, Kill Kill. It has nothing to do with the music. We just like Russ. We identify with him. We all have big tits. We’re all foxy. I wear hip huggers and dance and we race around in our sports cars and kill men with our bare hands.”
Dave Katz – who for some totally weirdo reason got really mad at me for this 2005 review I wrote of his book! – writes about The Fall’s new 45 Cruiser’s Creek, saying that, “In a way, they sound almost like an 80’s Creedence Clearwater….the main problem with this song about a back woods party is its annoying backing vocals”. Poor Brix, just couldn’t catch a break from the men both lusting after her and wishing she’d go away, sort of a sub-underground version of modern MAGA Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez/Taylor Swift syndrome. And really, maybe the reviews in Wiring Dept. #4 aren’t to be trusted as a matter of course. There’s an uncredited review of the Dead Kennedys’ Frankenchrist, easily one of the worst records I’ve ever heard. This album with “Jock-O-Rama (Invasion Of The Beef Patrol)” and “MTV Get Off The Air” is compared to Iggy Pop and Joy Division, and about which it is said, “Frankenchrist is worth about a million dollars just for the lyrics. What Jello Biafra sings is not mere words put to music, these words come from deep within his heart. He feels with a tortured soul….a record that opens your eyes to injustice and human suffering….do not miss this record”. Hey, I’d leave that review uncredited, too.
All this and a picture of Bob Noxious from The Fuck Ups. It’s therefore little wonder that Wiring Dept. copies are p-r-i-c-e-y when encountered on eBay these days. It’s outstanding source material for documenting whatever it is that was going on musically in 1985, a tale that very much varies with the teller.
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Bazooka! #1
Earlier on Fanzine Hemorrhage we discussed Belgian Tom Arnaert’s late 90s Bazooka! fanzine and specifically, issue #3. Even thinking of Tom and his fanzine has me pining a bit for the late 90s/early 00s glory days of “CD-R trading”, in which I’d roast up six CDs for you and send ‘em through the mail, and you’d roast up six for me from your collection and fling them my way. I built a hell of a CD “burn collection” in that manner, not just with Arnaert but with several clued-in correspondents all over the world.
I was especially happy to do this with Arnaert and a guy named Luc Onderdonck, both of whom would check stuff out from libraries in Belgium, collections of 78s or punk or world music that never made their way to the USA, then make copies for us both. There was another fella up in Seattle that was a fellow online DJ at Antenna Radio – here’s a Wayback Machine capture of a 2001 show of mine, No Count Dance Party – and I’ve totally blanked on the guy’s name (I think it was “Irv Hunter”?), but he and I, we had ourselves a time with our frantic CD-R trading. To this day, I still make myself CD-Rs of digital files all the time, rather than store everything on a hard drive. I don’t like looking at digital files – I’d still rather cobble together the original artwork, print it out, stuff it into a poly sleeve with the disc and have a fake-but-real CD of my own making,
Anyhow, I recently was able to come into a copy of Arnaert’s very first issue from early ‘96, Bazooka! #1. We see this young man finding his musical and publishing sea legs at this point, and he is indeed a young man; based on some mathematical deducing done from an offhand comment in his interview with The Tinklers that he made about being four years old when they started up in 1978, that would put young Tom at 21 or 22 at this point. In many ways – much like the atrocities I myself was publishing at that age (but far better than mine) – it feels like it, and it even seems that Arnaert didn’t quite have the all-consuming command of the English language that he’d even have just a couple years later, when I first came across Bazooka! #3 and found this guy writing circles around his fanzine contemporaries.
1994-1996 was peak garage punk mania for many garage-crazed individuals around the world, as we’ve documented here, here and here. Accordingly, Arnaert is big on The Oblivians, and gets in a good mail interview w/ Eric Friedl, who magnanimously answers everything like a mensch. He also gets in good with Dennis Callaci of Shrimper Records and the band Refrigerator, a gentleman & a label that were true fanzine/underground “objects of attention” at the time, something I found it hard to latch onto myself. Then there’s an interview with Kevin Munro of the band Mule, a guy who’d been in the Laughing Hyenas for a time. He comes across as a bit of an antagonist and perhaps something of a “dum-dum”.
Oh, and I love Arnaert calling out some doofus from “The Swingin’ Neckbreakers” when they played in Gent, Belgium: “Highly praised by the people from Norton Records and despised by other garage freaks for copying the 60s r&r sound without adding anything substantial to it (or something like that). I could see from the singer’s face that he was some arrogant piece of shit and that they were going to suck real hard. And I was right cuz a bit later, after a series of sneers addressed to the soundman, the singer threw down his bass, jumped off stage and got in a fight with the soundman. Really weak….”. Who needs Pitchfork when you have reviewers who’ll lay it on the line and leave it all on the field like that? Tom Arnaert, it’s time to bring back Bazooka! for a new generation. Get in touch and I’ll hook you up with a printer.
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Big Star #3
Terrific third and final issue in Big Star’s run. You certainly can’t complain about the use of the name in Spring 1978, particularly when I was raised to understand that no one had cared about Big Star, the band, several years earlier, and that their fans at the time could be counted on the fingers of several hands. It wasn’t quite true, yet the fact that punk fanzine empresario Bernard Kugel (Bernie to his friends!) found a way to easily merge them into his mag along with The Ramones and so forth spoke volumes about how they were perceived by at least a subset of the underground.
Now Bernie, he was doing this in Buffalo, NY, and he’s been subsequently called the “godfather of the Buffalo punk scene”. I’ve never seen the other two issues of Big Star, but Big Star #3 is an excellent early ‘78 rocknroll fanzine right out of fanzine central casting. Like, I mean, I’m not really into Talking Heads but I like how Kugel does three seperate interviews with 3 different band members, right after their album’s come out, then loops back around to interview Tina Weymouth again. In some cases, each interview’s no more than a half-dozen questions. Jerry Harrison gets asked about his previous band, the godlike Modern Lovers:
Big Star: Why did the original Lovers break up?
JH: Just personalities.
Big Star: What do you think of Jonathan’s current stuff?
JH: I’m not wild about it. I mean I think it’s sort of interesting but it’s not exciting to me. That’s why I really didn’t want to continue because it was all his personality. If you really like his personality, then that’s great. I don’t think his personality is that great.
Miriam Linna – whom I believe was out of The Cramps at this point but in Nervus Rex – does a column called “The New Sounds of the U.S.A”. She goes wild for The Real Kids, DMZ, The Fleshtones and The Zantees, the latter of whom she praises for “their impeccable taste and truly inspired treatment of rock n roll”. As it turned out, she was weeks away from joining the band herself as their new drummer, if she hadn’t already.
Kugel does a puff piece on local band The Jumpers, whose 45 Kugel’s label Radio City has just so happened to have just released. There are brief fanzine-y chats with Cheap Trick and The Ramones, two bands who’d, unlike The Jumpers, go on to immortal and everlasting glory by being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And there’s a good freewheeler of an interview w/ Metal Mike Saunders. He talks about becoming an accountant; how “Kiss is the best American rock group, hands down”; how “The Ramones’ albums literally make me ill”; his band Vom, which was still coming together with Richard Meltzer and Gregg Turner when this interview takes place in October 1977, after getting launched with the creation of their first song, “Getting High With Steven Stills”. All this and a full-page Twinkeys ad, with one band member holding a “Sacramento” baseball pennant right at the time that said city was my hometown!
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Halana #4
I’d have to say that even if the late 1990s ended up being one of my least-favorite eras for music, I’m still rather struck by just how many well-designed, high-circulation fanzines were being made available at the time that covered the most absolute out music on the planet. People bought ‘em! I’m still not sure if the rock-adjacent improv & experimental underground was actually and truly peaking around this time, or if there were just more folks paying attention to it as a defiant reaction against the mainstream co-optation of the independent rock underground – you know, the whole “Royal Trux and V3 and Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments on major labels” thing. I had the opposite reaction and mostly ran for the hills, both from the mainstream and from the deep-deep underground for a few years. But I still bought their fanzines.
From Muckraker to Bananafish to Opprobrium to Deep Water to this one, Halana #4 – and obviously there were others – there was an entire circuit of editors and an audience who revolved around craft micro-labels like Betley Welcomes Careful Drivers, Swill Radio, Sedimental, Oblique and dozens of others, many of whom released not-even-music music. Halana #4 came out in 1999 and was edited by Chris Rice in Ardmore, PA. His magazine focused primarily on what is somewhat euphemistically called “new music”, which means avant-grade and certainly non-linear music not at all informed by the 4/4 beat, nor from, say, your traditional “rocknroll boogiewoogie”.
The contributing editor was Ian Nagoski, who’d later become a hero of mine with his Canary Records and incredible unearthings of 78rpm records by American immigrants, which he then turned into an expansive series of analog and digital-only releases with all that and more. In a similar, fellow traveler sort of vein, the touchstone piece in Halana #4 is a long travelog by Richard Bishop (Sun City Girls), packed with advice and stories and an enumeration of his approach to jaunting across India, Indonesia, Malaysia etc. Ian Nagoski himself writes about saxophonist Joe Maneri and his son Mat, and like any good curator, he got me to check them out 25 years later, something I didn’t do in 1999 when I very first saw this piece and was sort of openly rejecting the world that Halana was marinating in. Check out Maneri’s Paniots Nine from 1998, totally beautiful klezmer/gypsy Greek jazz from another realm. It’s a long piece, but you come out really wanting to HEAR these guys. I sure did, and have more to learn.
There’s a long section of reviews by Chris Rice that takes up the rear of the fanzine. Nothing “rocks” in the least except Mainliner and Major Stars toward the end, and that’s fine as far as it goes. But there is a big heaping helping of praise for Revenant Records, which also just happened to be MY favorite record label in 1999. The rest of the section is lasered-focused on improvisational abstractions, with even most free jazz being too “straight” for Halana. There is a compilation CD in my copy that’s been there since I bought it. I just know I’m gonna hate it and I really like the mag, so why ruin it, right?
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Lost Mynds #1
The first time I ever heard “sixties garage punk” was while in high school in the early 80s via the reissued Nuggets compilations. Not knowing anything about any of it, my standard was quickly set by The Count Five’s “Psychotic Reaction” and the Standells’ “Dirty Water”. I liked it, but was altogether indifferent to the larger picture. Once I arrived in college in 1985, I’d hear raw snatches of sixties garage punk on the radio that I really found appealing, but it wasn’t until I heard the Back From The Grave comps that year that I went totally apeshit for the form.
At that point, anyone modern with a bowl haircut and 60s psychedelic lettering on their records was fair game for me to (try and) get super excited about, and we had records from all of ‘em at KCSB, the college radio station I fell in with. I had plenty to sample from. Yard Trauma, The Raunch Hands, Pushtwangers, Vipers, Gruesomes, Deja Voodoo, Stomachmouths, Plasticland, The Brood, Chesterfield Kings, Cynics – it was all stuff I tried and failed to like. It really took The Morlocks, the Boys From Nowhere and then The Gories to get me fired up about any modern 80s band attempting to look and sound the part. Everything else sounded tinny and too reverentially retro, especially the stuff on Voxx Records, which suffered from both poor recording quality and mediocre A&R to boot.
This is all a long way of introducing a Montreal fanzine I have from 1986 called Lost Mynds #1 which is fully steeped and marinated in a world I was trying to steep and marinate myself in that year. You can see that the cover is beautiful, and the fanzine itself looks terrific, totally home-assembled and with a great visual, cut-and-paste aesthetic. However, it was really trite and untrustworthy in the main, especially re-reading it now. They’re trying to approximate some absurd version of hipster-speak across all of their articles: “daddy-o”, “cats and kiddies”, “way out”, “fab”, “squaresville” etc. Dear Christ is that shit annoying.
That said, their remit is wide and there’s no question the folks behind this were living and breathing all the nooks & crannies of 60s-inspired punk and psych that were blossoming across the 1980s. Nearly all of the bands I mentioned in my roll call above of the eighties/sixties bands are featured or are interviewed here, with an interview with The Lyres/DMZ’s Jeff Connolly as well. There include scans from other magazines, sixties stuff, and then a few tribute pieces to actual sixties bands like The Yardbirds, Stones, Pretty Things etc. – and, and good on ‘em for this, the Ugly Ducklings – maybe Canada’s finest sixties punk band? You tell me.
When they get to seeing The Cramps live for the first time, on the A Date With Elvis tour, they’re just as sour about it being their Cramps intro as I was when I saw them for the first (and only) time in 1986, having been a fanatic for the band for the previous four years. So I can commiserate there for sure, but all that forced teenybopper talk otherwise leaves me a little cold when considering the totality of the Lost Mynds #1 fanzine.
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I Wanna Be Your Dog #7
My understanding of the 1970s fanzine I Wanna Be Your Dog doesn’t travel particularly far, but here’s where it goes: I believe it started as an Iggy-obsessed French proto-punk fanzine, which then lasted into the punk era, with November 1977’s I Wanna Be Your Dog #7 being the final issue. It was actually an offshoot of the Iggy Pop fan club, no less. This final issue is in English, and they’ve opened a US “office” in Hollywood, ensuring that most of the content here is focused around US-based bands (which, frankly, it was previously, even whilst written in French).
Big-time punk rocker Eddie Money is on the cover. He’s interviewed and sounds absolutely coked to the gills. He keeps talking about Blondie, saying “she’s very beautiful”, and even when corrected by the interviewer, keeps referring to Blondie and “her band”, and rambles on about how bad they are for a backing band. It’s a pretty typical interview of rocker guys getting their first taste of Top 40 fame during the early punk era; they’re wanting to praise it all for being “from the streets”, but they’re also working to backhandedly distance themselves from it at the same time. I’ve seen a half-dozen similar interviews; at this time, ‘77/’78, one of the opening questions of virtually any interviewer in a punk mag was “What do you think about punk?” and/or “Do you see yourself as part of the punk movement??”.
There’s an interview with and some lavish praise thrown at Devo, as well as features on Mink Deville, Deaf School and Cheap Trick, the latter of whom come off as exceptionally affable goofballs. Of course, I’m most excited about I Wanna Be Your Dog #7’s early forays into the Los Angeles punk underground, and there’s a big LA scene spread near the back. It’s said that “the scene revolves around the bands and their performances. Three bands stand out: The Weirdos, Backstage Pass and The Screamers”. Two out of three ain’t bad! About Backstage Pass, they say, “They’re not ‘punks’ but they’re definitely part of the new wave”. Genny Schorr from that band is still active and she put quite a rock career behind her – all documented here.
There’s also a short piece on The Weasels, creators of “Beat Her With a Rake and Make Her Pay For Her Mistake” fame, along with a photo of creepy Kim Fowley with his arm around one of The Runaways. The Dogs from Detroit, now in LA, are interviewed, and they really were just about the perfect band for this fanzine’s Iggy-fied aesthetic. Crime from San Francisco are interviewed by Vale, and they come off as being kind of “silly”, which I like! They left all bogus attitudes at home that day. Phast Phreddie reviews the excellent first Human Switchboard 45 and says “If this kinda record sounds interesting to you, please, keep far away from me”. Finally, The Germs’ first 45 is reviewed by “Al and Pooch” (Flipside!) and they review it as if “Sex Boy”, and not “Forming”, had been the A-side. Strong move!
There appears to be a book about and possibly even collecting the I Wanna Be Your Dog fanzine, written completely in French, available here.
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Escargot #1
I’ve got a friend in the fanzine obsession game who occasionally will magnanimously take care of me by sending along small packages of stuff he’s accumulated that he thinks I might like, and he’s usually spot-on. I recently received an unasked-for copy of San Francisco’s Escargot #1 from Autumn 1995, published by three women, one of whom I personally know quite well: Windy Chien. She used to run Aquarius Records, and she’s since gone on to some very deserved recognition for her fine art knotwork, something that really has to be seen to be believed how cool it all is.
This mag came along at a time and in a year when I very much should’ve appreciated it and known what it was, and yet I’ve never heard of the thing. Devoted to “Music and the Internet” – mostly the then-new information superhighway – it seems to have been put out by something called “Sick & Tired”, which I vaguely recall being another fanzine or a record label or something. I believe the name is meant to be a witty counterpoint to “snail mail”, which is what folks started calling “hand-written mail with a stamp on it” at this point.
You know, I wasn’t really an early Internet guy. We got “e-mail” in at my job at Monster Cable in 1994, and as I’ve written about here, it was a revelation for those of us who sometimes made more time at work for pranking each other than we did, you know, actual work. My mom, of all people, was cavorting on the Internet a good 18 months before I was, farting around in AOL chat rooms and telling me all about it. She once asked me if I knew who someone named “Costes” was, as he was a strange Frenchman she was being weirded-out by online, and whom she deduced was probably running in similar underground circles as I was. I did know – he was a Lisa Suckdog compatriot. I don’t think I got my own e-mail address until late 1996, on “The Microsoft Network” – jhinman@msn.com. I never participated in chat rooms, the “Chug list”, on listservs or anything like that. I think my early web activity was restricted to reading Suck, Salon and Feed every single day, but honestly, until streamable and/or downloadable music became a thing, I mostly refrained from connecting with my fellow music freaks outside of e-mail correspondence until the late 1990s.
Given the current enshitification of the Internet in 2024, the boundless enthusiasm in Escargot #1 for its potential to liberate us all from Kathleen, Jeanne and Windy in 1995 all seems very quaint, and a little sad, I suppose. We humans really fucked it all up, didn’t we? The whole idea here is to help shepherd readers, most of whom were new to online life, into the underground music crevices and ratholes that Kathleen, Jeanne and Windy were so excited about. There are lessons in “netiquette”, “modem musts”; a jargon dictionary; and helpful instructions for how to get going on e-mail, mailing lists and “the newest and most glitzy aspect of the Internet”: the World Wide Web. Then, at the end, they list who’s online that you ought to check out, like a Kiwimusic page, KZSU radio, Sebadoh’s and Stereolab’s respective web pages, and many lists to subscribe to.
When they interview someone, like Pussy Galore/Free Kitten’s Julia Cafritz or Franklin Bruno, the talk is fun and gossipy, primarily revolving around Internet stuff. These early adopters, Cafritz in particular, are already getting a little over it. I wonder how they feel now, after the birth, heyday and slow death of social media? Midway in, there’s a stream of live reviews with zero Internet content (I’m capitalizing that word and hyphenating “e-mail” because that is what we did in the 1990s), including shows I was personally in attendance at, such as the Dirty Three opening for the Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 during “Dirty Three Weekend” in San Francisco, which Windy Chien rightly reports as a long weekend in which everyone in town’s mind was suitably blown by that trio’s live performances. Mine certainly was – knew I’d like it because I’d been such a big Venom P. Stinger fan, but that first trip through from Dirty Three was even better.
I also liked Jeanne McKinney’s description of “the lovely Miss Cindy Dall” during her time playing live with Smog. I certainly was smitten with her from the word go when I saw her play. “If you’ve seen them on either tour you’ll know what I mean by ‘the lovely Miss’…it’s what my friends call a ‘high-maintenance look’. Much of the time not only is Miss Dall tastefully made-up, with tastefully coiffed hair, but also with a theatrical gown. And while her guitar playing seems error-free, it’s pretty simple stuff…and even after the many shows she’s played with Smog, she still seems nervous but self-confident, on the one hand hiding behind her stage persona, on the other not quite sure where the persona ends…This is fascinating stuff for me.” Dall, sadly, died way too young. I really enjoyed her in Bill Callahan’s band, and there’s a great 1995 show available to watch right here if you’re interested.
All fanzines are time capsules in their way, of course, yet Escargot #1 especially marks a moment in time that was unique, refreshing and exciting for those caught up in it all. You can feel the promise of the Internet as a place where oddballs and obsessives are already starting to find each other, an algorithm-free, advertising-free, VC-money-free, bottoms-up collective of misfits who are straddling the world of print fanzines on one hand and an undefined, exploding digital realm on the other. It’s one of the more interesting fanzines I’ve ever come across.
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Vulcher #4
Though we’ve barely met, I’ve been somewhat connected with Eddie Flowers, the founder and editor of Vulcher fanzine, for going on 35 years now. I spent huge portions of the years 1985-89 routinely driving two hours from Santa Barbara to see live shows in Los Angeles, during that grim era when LA music was still mostly ruled by jean jacket cowboys and bullet belt bullshit. My patron saints in those years were the Lazy Cowgirls, and I loved everything and anything in their orbit. That very much included Eddie Flowers’ band Crawlspace, who started life as a high-energy, MC5-adjacent compliment to the Cowgirls – as you can hear on the 1988 Gimme The Keys!! Trigon Records comp that featured Crawlspace, Claw Hammer and many of the other bands I/we then considered part & parcel of the Cowgirls’ hallowed, hard-driving cadre.
I remember “chatting” with Ed and the Lazy Cowgirls’ Keith Telligman in Isla Vista, CA – the student ghetto adjacent to UC-Santa Barbara – during an all-day Trigon Records fest at AnisQ’oyo’ Park while the two of the them were totally tripping their brains out on LSD. A short conversation! Later, Flowers would self-publish a tiny ‘zine in the late 1990s called Slippy Town Times, and he’d routinely send them all my way, and sadly, I lost every one of them in the great fanzine disaster of 1999. The previous year, I’d published the eighth and final issue of my own 90s fanzine called Superdope, and I’ll never forget how Flowers responded to my “Forty-Five 45s That Moved Heaven and Earth” piece with an absolutely frothing electronic mail pointing out ALL the amazing 45s I’d missed in my personal list of the greatest 45s of all time.
Frankly, if I’d never met the guy, I’d still know he was one of the good guys by his general tone, tenor and track record. Now you also might know him as the fella from all-timer 1970s Indiana punk band The Gizmos, and you’d be right about that. But we’re here today to talk about his Vulcher fanzine, and specifically Vulcher #4 from Summer 2018, which I chose randomly from the five issues that were published during the back half of the last decade, up through 2019. It boasts an incredible roll call of contributors and friends, including Byron Coley, Todd Novak, Alexa Pantalone, Eric Friedl, Bruce Cole, Tim Hinely and a couple dozen others. Vulcher was akin during its brief run to a free-form Ugly Things mixed with the haphazard contributions in Bull Tongue Review, with no real concern for whether music covered therein is from the 50s, 60s, 70s or 2018.
Flowers and his crew are excellent at staying current with the spaced-out, free youth making music around the planet. He’s super supportive of young bands he meets along with way such as Rays, who were probably my favorite band around this time. I also like that he does the thing that I tried to always do in my mags, which is throw a random record review into any available spare space, rather than actually try to adjust layout and photos to make it all look professional. Too hard. I truly know the feeling.
Vulture #4 includes some real ringers. There’s a great Richard Lloyd (Television) interview by Kelsey Simpson, a woman who is a major contributor here and in other issues, probably because she’s actually Vulcher’s co-editor. Rich Coffee – once himself a Gizmo with Flowers – interviews Michael Rummens of The Sloths, and later The Hollywood Stars. You know “Makin’ Love” by The Sloths, right? Right?? Jay Dobis writes an open letter to Sean L. Maloney, who wrote the 33⅓ edition on The Modern Lovers (a top ten gem for me). It’s chock full of “wrong!!!” corrections, the sort of totally obsessed navel-gazing esoterica that I live for.
I really dig the Screamin’ Mee-Mees photos and essay by Flowers. Eddie understands their genius as too few others did. There’s also a Flowers thing on strange CD label Eastern Prawn, one of whose bands were Celebrity Handshake, a band who at their best are absolutely fucked rocknroll of the highest caliber, and who fit neatly into the man’s improvisational, ultra-raw, drug-friendly worldview quite well. Finally, and perhaps a little strangely, Chris Sienko contributes a long history of Crawlspace circa 1985-97, including a picture taken from LA’s Anti-Club where I saw them play in their early days. Hey, who cropped me out of the photo?
I can’t find any issues of Vulcher for sale online at the current moment, which is a true shame because, I mean, these just came out five minutes ago in the relative timeline that this website covers. Flowers is still just in his late sixties, so if he’s got the gumption to get another printed endeavor off the ground, there’s still time and I’d be all over it.
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Pissed + Broke #4
I’ve noticed a trend over the course of the past few months with small-press books or collections I’ve purchased on Amazon. The final page will say “Made in the USA, Las Vegas NV” and then provide the date it was printed. In every case, this is the date I ordered it. It happened with a paperback of Charles Willeford’s Pick-Up, which was riddled with spelling errors. It happened with a book by Patrick Cooper about Elaine May’s 1976 film Mikey and Nicky, which I have yet to read. And it happened with this fanzine reprint of Pissed + Broke #4, put out in Bournemouth, England by Jon Lange in Spring 1980.
I get what’s going on here now. This must be Amazon’s print-on-demand offering “Kindle Direct Publishing”, and there’s a lot to recommend it. This could be how the Fanzine Hemorrhage book or my novel I haven’t written eventually sees the light of day, you know what I mean? And at least there’s no spelling errors in Pissed + Broke #4 beyond what young Lange bobbled himself in the original edition. There’s a sort of a modern “wrapper” around this one in which Lange explains his thinking and offers apologies for same, both in an introduction and in an appendix with endnotes. Chris D. did this in his Writing For Slash book as well. There’s not much reason for apologies; much of the endnotes is devoted to dissecting his interview with Adam Ant of the Dirk Wears White Sox-era Adam and the Ants, mostly to pile on Adam, who’d become one of the biggest stars in the UK about a year after this.
He talks to Gene October of Chelsea, another guy I’ve always reckoned to be a blithering idiot and a quote-unquote “bad person” after reading about his behavior toward the Black Flag guys on their UK tour in this Rollins essay. (I’m not sure if this Rollins follow-up tale is actually true, but I hope it is). Lange was also a massive Crass fan, and goes deep on Stations of the Crass. It was just after this time that I started buying my first issues of the UK music papers and Crass were a major topic of conversation, particularly in Sounds. Their confrontational political stance and extreme DIY ethos was highly perplexing and/or fascinating to the powers that be, both institutionally and journalistically. I’d say shame about their music, but I’ll listen to a little Crass every now and again.
Anyway, I’m all for unearthing old fanzines and republishing them via Kindle Direct Publishing or whatever it takes to bring them to the people. Lange has got another issue of his 80s fanzine up there as well if you’re interested.
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Mouth of the Rat #14
Mouth of the Rat was a free South Florida music newspaper, similar in concept at least to the far inferior free BAM or even The Rocket papers of my youth and twenties, except entirely punk-centric, unbeholden to major labels, and far more in line with Slash or NY Rocker. Dave Parsons not only edited and wrote most of the paper, he hand-lettered it, which yeah, it’s been done in a few places, but I’d never seen it as extensively and hand-crampingly executed as it is here until Galactic Zoo Dossier came along. (Lindsay Hutton did do it pretty well himself in Next Big Thing over many years).
I’m especially excited about the May 1980 issue, Mouth of the Rat #14, for one very, very important reason. There’s actual, in-the-moment documentation of Smegma – soon to be Sheer Smegma and then Teddy and The Frat Girls! This all-female group might be the greatest thing to have ever emerged from South Florida, and I’m definitely including navel oranges, Gloria Estefan, the Challenger space shuttle and Kreamy ‘Lectric Santa. Atonal, decadent, primitive, godlike art/punk howl from women who were clearly making it up as they want along, but who, in two brilliant songs, “I Owe It To The Girls” and “Clubnight” – created two of the all-time high-water marks of American – nay, global – culture. Because they’re so ridiculously undocumented anywhere, I’ve snapped photos (below) from Mouth of the Rat #14 so you see how Parsons was perceiving them after their very first show.
That’s really enough, but there’s more. I gathered from reading this issue that The Cichlids meant as much to Floridians at the time as, say, the Ramones did to NY several years earlier. Here’s a scan I found from an earlier Mouth of the Rat. Such was the localization of scenes at the time, where your bands were barely known by anyone outside your city, even when they’d put out 45s, but were influential and life-changing heroes within your own city limits. It was a couple of years later, but we’d talk about hardcore band The Faction the same way in San Jose, CA, and it felt like maybe no one an hour north of us in San Francisco knew who they were.
Being 1980, The Clash and Public Image Ltd. are very much on young Parsons’ mind. Aside from reports of touring around and seeing them live across the eastern US – something you had to do growing up in the southeast corner of the USA – he’s writing about every new record he’s finding or getting sent, which includes all the Posh Boy stuff coming out of LA; The Mo-Dettes; the Pop Group and Young Marble Giants, the latter of which he loves, but he knows that you won’t, punker. Eventually Parsons would move to New York City and start Ratcage records and put out the first couple of Beastie Boys releases. I had this version of their Cooky Puss 12” in high school and am glad to see it’s only selling for triple what I paid for it at the time, as opposed to the 100x I’d expected.
Anyway, Smegma! :
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Fanzine Hemorrhage 
