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  • OP #19 (The “S” issue)

    OP was the offspring of Olympia, WA’s John Foster in 1979, who envisioned documenting an ephemeral organization called “The Lost Music Network” in which record labels, cassette artists, radio stations, fanzines and small clubs might coalesce into a like-minded fraternity of deeply-underground comrades. Over 26 issues, he did much to further the concept, and the glossy-cover Op received some pretty strong nationwide distribution, particularly in its later years, as it traipsed through the alphabet with showcase issues for each letter. It was something I then saw as pretty gimmicky and limiting, but which absolutely aged better with time and an actual look at how they pulled it off.

    Issues of Op are generally able to be found. I never owned any at the time, most likely because their musical remit went well beyond my ability to ingest it as a teenager. I sauntered down to the San Francisco Art Book Fair a few weeks ago and, to my surprise, there were paper ephemera merchants with all sorts of vintage fanzines for sale, including Oregon’s Division Leap. I procured a handful of Op issues from them at a fair price, include Op #19, the “S” issue from 1983.

    Foster and his loose, extensive network of relied-upon contributors were single-minded in their dedicated focus to micro-indie iconoclasts of any genre, from hardcore to 20th century classical to experimental home tapers. It’s an intense collection of information in small-point type, and while I read the issue in detail earlier in the week, it would be wrong to say I was hanging on every word, since there’s not really a defined joint opinion or tastemaking approach outside of “celebrating the unknown” and the misunderstood – regardless, at times, of its ultimate quality.  John Foster’s record reviews in particular attempt to be magnanimous to a fault. I had forgotten 100% about SF Bay Area heshers Eddie and The Tide, the great white local hope of burnouts and stoners at my high school, but even they clearly sent their indie record to Op in hopes of not getting a beating – which they didn’t. 

    That said, Jamie Rake in his Sin 34 review says “Julie must be the worst female vocalist since Debbie of The Flying Lizards”. I don’t really know who that is, but don’t you come at Julie. He also talks about a Wisconsin HC band called The Shemps and asks “when was the last time you heard a pro-sports punk tune? Check out ‘The Pack Will Be Back’”. I definitely need to hear this song. There’s a really great section of fanzine reviews from Foster and Chris Stigliano, the latter of whom also highlights and marvels at a new onslaught of Velvet Underground bootlegs. As far as the interviews go – again, only with artists whose names start with “S”, there’s a perplexingly perfunctory one with Sun Ra, in which he answers multiple questions with variations on “Well I don’t know about that, because I am not human”.

    There’s also a long letters section so different from the ones we see in publications today, with “letters” pulled from emails and Twitter comments. These were letters that then had to be re-typed and transcribed. Shane Williams writes from prison. I had forgotten that one of his longtime tropes had been “You’d be a little bit racist too, if you’d seen what I’ve seen in the joint”. The more late 70s/early 80s fanzines I immerse myself in, the more the letters section often feels like the star of the show. I’m even warming to the Flipside letters section, especially when I can find some teen’s name in there complaining about their scene or their mom or the cops, with the hindsight to know that said teen later went on to be well-known in a band, or put out their own fanzine, or wrote fiction etc. – or was just a letter-writin’ gadfly like Shane Williams or Joe Piecuch. 

    So you may know that Op, once Foster finished up with the letter “Z” issue, had its lofty networking mission carried on afterward by two more fanzines, Sound Choice and Option. The former even invented its own extension of the Lost Music Network: “The Audio Evolution Network”. Both suffered from some of the same shortcomings as their predecessor while each having some winning aspects of their own. We’ll talk about them some other day here on the ‘Hemorrhage.

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  • Bad Vibe #2

    In the spring of 1993 I spent two months traveling North America as the road manager, driver & merch seller for the band Claw Hammer, who were friends of mine from Los Angeles. As someone with zero musical talent – and lord knows I tried to pretend otherwise – I was utterly beside myself that I’d actually be able to go on tour, traveling from city to city, haulin’ in and haulin’ out, just like the underground musicians whose lives I was appropriating by having thrown in my cultural lot with them as a college radio DJ, record buying-obsessive and fanzine publisher. 

    I was so excited by 60 days spent crammed in an Econoline touring the US of A and a little bit of Canada that I quit my job as a customer service rep at Monster Cable, though my sabbatical ended up being short enough that I was able to reclaim my place on the corporate ladder upon returning. The band themselves were on something of an upswing, having recently come off a supporting tour with Mudhoney and with a new record out on the lucre-loaded Epitaph Records, run by Brett from Bad Religion. So I was decidedly a fifth wheel to the 4 band members – the guy who settled up at the end of the night with the club booker; the guy who pulled the van into Des Moines; the guy who taped the t-shirts and CDs to the wall behind the merch table; the guy who had to call Peter Davis at Creature Booking to make sure the show in Baton Rouge or Wichita or Montreal was still on.

    It was all about the Claw Hammer guys and who came to see them – I remember in particular a show in Tulsa with six paying customers, three of whom were members of the Flaming Lips. Occasionally and very rarely, however, there were people I’d meet on the road who actually came to the club with the intention of seeing me. Yeah, some were friends from college, but sometimes (like once or twice) there was actually someone who knew about my music fanzine Superdope and wanted to talk sub-underground musical baseball with me. That’s how I met the Bad Vibe guys.

    It was at the Cabaret Metro in Chicago in May 1993. If I’m not mistaken, “Ween” were the headliner, and a Canadian pop band called Sloan, who had a massive tour bus parked outside, played as well. David Salvia and Jim Sonnenberg from mid-state Illinois had recently put out a garage punk fanzine called Bad Vibe #1, and I had a copy & it’s very likely we’d exchanged “letters” about it – in fact it’s almost certainly how they knew I’d be at this show in their state. 

    Well these two wide-eyed, cornfed Midwesterners saddled up to the merch table and introduced themselves, and we had a fine time talking about the ins & outs of the scene, about the rigors of publishing and distribution and whatnot. Claw Hammer? Pffffft. When they started playing, these guys couldn’t care less and anchored themselves to the table, in the club’s now-empty lobby. I felt so important! It was me – I was the one who was on tour, and these were my two fans! I tried to play all the hits for them: the times I saw Pussy Galore; the time I hung out with Rob Vasquez; that one time the Cheater Slicks stayed at my house, and everything else I could muster. By the end of the night, like Springsteen, Little Steven and “The Big Man”, I’d truly sweated it out and left it all on stage….I mean on the merch table. We then said our goodbyes and never spoke again.

    A few months later Bad Vibe #2 came out, the issue we’re talking about today. Salvia and Sonnenberg one-upped my awful interview (Superdope #5) with Rob Vasquez and The Night Kings with an even worse interview with Vasquez, who cops to being baked 24/7 and really can’t seem to muster enthusiasm for much of anything, including the phone conversation he’s taking part in. They also included a great record with the mag – the Night Kings’ Brainwashed EP. Then they even went and put in posters of the Blues Explosion and Royal Trux. I could never afford color anything, nor could I include a record (not even a flexi) – so I said then to myself and I say now: well done, lads.

    It strikes me re-reading Bad Vibe #2 thirty years later that there were young men who really, really had a thing for The Muffs’ Kim Shattuck; I believe the Bad Vibe team may have counted themselves among them. (Alas, she unfortunately passed away just this past year). Their magazine strikes me now as youthfully dumb, as mine was, while also having a strong handle of the slightly more “popular” side of garage punk – Vasquez very much not included there – and digging into some of the deeper wells at the same time. It’s a fun read, and you can actually still buy a fresh copy here, thirty years on.

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  • Attack #8

    Whenever it was that I found my used, stained issue of Attack #8 in a record store, I know I dragged it to the counter mostly assuming it was a relatively generic, slapdash cut-n-paste April ‘83 hardcore punk fanzine that had caught my fleeting attention for some reason or another. Seattle, maybe. I do dig Seattle. It was only upon bringing it home did I realize I had something pretty fantastic here – a young Jo Smitty was the editor and guy behind it (!). You may know him as a member of Mr. Epp and The Calculations (vocalist on most tracks), or as Jeff Smith, the guy behind Feminist Baseball fanzine in the 90s. And it features multiple contributions from Mark Arm, whom you may know from…..you know who Mark Arm is.

    It was a true treat to get duly reacquainted with this one after so many years away from it while it was sequestered securely away in a garage box. Attack #8 really hammers home what an open-minded fella teenage Jo Smitty was. He’ll talk your ear off about Whitehouse, The Fall, Grandmaster Flash, dozens of hardcore slammeisters and even English punk. ‘83 Smitty loves The Poison Girls and Crass. He and his contributors make the Seattle music scene sound way more exciting and cohesive than popular histories of the pre-grunge era have led me to believe. Wasn’t this supposed to be the city that time forgot, the place few touring bands set foot in because it was “too far” from California or whatever? Not at all the impression given here – these boys are slamming their asses off to Black Flag, DOA, Dead Kennedys and all the Northwest heroes, from Poison Idea to The Fartz – and P.I.L.. Iggy Pop. Savage Republic, TSOL and The Ramones as well. 

    Smitty also reviews a bunch of films; his contributor Talya Christian hates Urgh: A Music War, and singles out The Cramps as being particularly lame, putting them in her “boring to sickening” list (??). This was a particularly fertile moment in American punk rock history – the amazing “Quincy punk” episode had just aired, and it was a whopper. Much-discussed in high school alterna-circles at the time. Smitty understands the stakes here and devotes an entire article to it. Me, I did not see this one in real time when it aired, but I was delighted to have caught the slightly less-heralded CHiPs punk episode on its debut! I’d be willing to fund a Blu-Ray with these two on it, along with some Wally George episodes, maybe.

    Now, Mark Arm, he loves himself some hardcore – totally blown away by Minor Threat, maybe not too impressed with Negative Approach, and he probably loves Flipper most of all. He contributes an excellent savaging of TSOL’s Beneath The Shadows album. In case it hasn’t been clear on this blog to date, I thought, and have always thought, that TSOL were utterly atrocious from day one. I’ll try not to mention them again, but when we talk about early 80s fanzines they always seem to have been around. Rebel Truth from Sacramento are interviewed, and so is Whitehouse! 

    Just a gem of a bedroom fanzine from top to bottom. You can ogle all of the covers of Attack fanzine here if you’d like.

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  • No Mag #13

    It wasn’t quite the case across the entire breadth of independent music, yet all told 1984 was a pretty rotten year for sub-underground rocknroll music in Los Angeles, California – that is, if you’re reading the thirteenth issue of NoMag, the one with Nancy from “Animal Dance” on the cover. Unless you were laser-focused on the SST bands in a way that NoMag decidedly wasn’t – Double Nickels on The Dime, Meat Puppets II and Zen Arcade all came out this year – you’d be forgiven for thinking that the previous world-beating LA music scene had completely and rapidly devolved to godawful cowpunk, retread goth or sell-out pseudo-roots music.

    It’s kind of a bummer to have to see it, but as went the overt trends in LA, so went NoMag – underlining that not all NoMags were created equal. What a letdown. Thumbing through it, it’s clear that editor Bruce Kalberg has become more attracted to the trappings and fringes of alternative culture than to the music that defined it. Everyone is either a goofball cow punk, has a hideous angular new wave haircut or is dressed in highly choreographed “LA sleaze” wear. There’s a group called the Hollywood Hillbillies celebrated here who I am absolutely delighted to have never made the acquaintance of.  

    When I arrived at KCSB in 1985 as a college radio DJ it was these records – the bands interviewed in this issue – that were clogging our library: The D.I.’s; the “no original members” TSOL; Tupelo Chain Sex, The Fiends, Kommunity FK, Detox and so forth. They were usually on labels like Enigma and Restless, quasi-major labels that rose out of hardcore to pump up this sort of clotheshorse rock, or speed metal, or novelty punk. I do somewhat enjoy Tex & The Horseheads – they define the spirit of ‘84 LA for me for better or worse than pretty much anyone else – but SST barely exists here outside of a paid inside front cover ad; no one’s fashionable enough. 

    There’s an interview with the Cambridge Apostles with Alice Bag and two of the Atta brothers from The Middle Class. They sound from their own description of themselves like a dance band, and Alice spends most of the interview herself dancing away from questions about The Bags. A great deal of the activity documented in NoMag #13 feels to me like some real goings through of the motions, the washed-up flotsam of a recently capsized music scene and a lot of musicians desperately searching for the road to cash in. John Doe is interviewed about X and his relationship with his record company, Elektra, and he’s all smiles. You’ll have to read his More Fun In The New World anthology book to see what thirty years of hindsight brought to him – but let’s just say it doesn’t quite jibe with the sunny disposition presented here. 

    That was my favorite of the two Doe books because – well, it’s right there in the sub-heading of the book, “The Unmaking and Legacy of LA Punk”. Everything I’ve just spend three paragraphs moaning about it is confirmed by the folks who participated in it, and the unmaking is happening right here in real time within the pages of NoMag #13.

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  • Dagger #8

    Tim Hinely’s been doing Dagger fanzine in various forms, sizes and guises since the 80s, and I suppose this would have to be the first one of his I ever picked up, back in 1988. The guy has given much back to the music that nursed and nourished him, not just in the form of his longstanding fanzine, but also the anthology book about music clubs Where The Wild Gigs Were, which he edited (an entirely brand-new second volume of which is forthcoming, maybe next year). He also helms a Facebook group devoted to fanzines called Zine Chatter that you can look at if you’re willing to log in to Facebook and surrender yourself to the algorithmic maw.

    Now back in 1988, Tim was a young stallion going to loads of live shows, as active in the scene from his New Jersey locale as I was from my own California locale. More, even. He finds himself trapped at funnypunk shows, seeing Murphy’s Law and loads of other flotsam. Because I read his mag a lot of the 90s and 00s and associate him with that persona, this 1988 version of Hinely shows a little bit more ‘tude than he’d show later, as he later morphed into more of a pure underground pop guy from these HC beginnings. One of the shows he reviews here is that famous Fugazi one where the singer hung himself upside down through a basketball hoop. Another is the Gibson Bros – yes! – during which Tim falls in love with drummer Ellen Hoover and relays that their set was abandoned because Don Howland was too hammered to finish the show. Sounds like the Gibson Bros on their east coast tours for sure – a real alcoholiday by all accounts. 

    All of this action is taking place across New Jersey and greater Philadelphia. Hinely also talks with, as you can see in the cover, The Didjits, Rifle Sport, Bastro and Band of Susans, none of whom I’ve listened to in thirty years – but the interviews are very much fan’s-eye-view, alley-behind-the-club sorts of chats, and therefore quite entertaining. There are an incredible amount of fanzines briefly reviewed as well, showing just what an abundance of ‘em were being published at the time. This was definitely an era where, if Maximum Rocknroll or Flipside reviewed your fanzine, you were certain to receive a plethora of unasked-for xeroxed punk mags from the deepest recesses of the United States; sometimes from prisoners, sometimes from teenagers; always with a “Wanna trade?” note. When I was publishing, yes, sometimes I did wanna trade, but mostly I emphatically did not. I wonder what Tim did. 

    Dagger #8 is itself a pretty cheapo xerox, which renders it all pretty quaint and of the times. Some reviews just don’t quite come off the “printing press” and are just faint letters, and a couple others take a comic run right off the side of the page. I do hope the advertisers in the back weren’t charged a fortune. I’m guessing that Jersey Beat and a speed metal band called Methadrine probably weren’t.

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  • Cheetah #5

    Not really a full-on music magazine, and absolutely not a fanzine, but we’re definitely going to write about it anyway. I first heard about quintessentially quasi-intellectual 60s counterculture magazine Cheetah all of two years ago, when I was deep in the enveloping throes of my late-bloomer Brian Wilson obsession, the one that I wrote about in Dynamite Hemorrhage #10. This fantastic Jules Siegel essay about the runaway train wreck that was the Smile sessions ran in this publication in 1967, and I henceforth learned that it was Ellen Willis who founded and edited Cheetah. I ordered my own copy – and it is the one we shall be discussing presently.

    My research tells me that eight issues in total were published, with the final being the May ‘68 issue, right between the assassinations of MLK and RFK. These cataclysms haven’t even happened yet, yet the back of this February 1968 issue previews next month’s by saying “In the most dire winter of our discontent, the social fabric of America is pulling apart. With maps and diagrams, we’re going to show you just how bad it all is.” I’ll say for the record that I believe that 2020-21 in the United States was even worse, and only by virtue of electoral sanity have we restored the possibility of moving past it. 

    But anyway, continuing with the Brian Wilson theme, actually, the February 1968 issue is like one big tribute to Mr. Van Dyke Parks. There’s a full piece on him by Tom Nolan, and an intro essay at the start of the magazine for this young wonderkind, full of worship but preemptively apologetic about the potential pretentiousness of his lyrics. “Columnated ruins domino”! In general, Cheetah #5 is packed with writing that’s very much trying to be the new thing, the new journalism, and some parts of the charade wear better than others. The narcissism of the counterculture is on full display, for good and for ill.

    There is, for instance, an amazing ad for a different magazine called Avant-Garde right out of hip 60s intellectual central casting, along with other various terrifically dated ads devoted to sexual liberation totems and “smoke grass” buttons and T-shirts. There’s a whole piece about a groovy trip to the San Diego zoo, and another about the killer LA experimental psych band The United States of America. Robert Christgau contributes a piece about hitchhiking. People did that in the 60s, you know.

    Nearly every main article has the exceptionally annoying habit of beginning, going a page or two at most, and then requiring the reader to pick it up again toward the back end of the magazine. Sure, magazines (to the extent they exist) still do that to this day, but not on the momentum-stopping level of Cheetah in 1968. Ellen Willis contributes the best piece in here about Communist rabble-rouser Bettina Aptheker, a woman often held up as a true Hero of The Struggle by the pamphleteering Left when I was attempting to get my political bearings in the 1980s. There’s also something about the “I Ching” which I think may have something to do with tarot cards, and something else about “concrete poetry” which is akin to what we might later have called graphic design. Oh, and a bunch of awful and unfunny New Yorker-like single panel cartoons.

    Do I like Cheetah #5, though? I do! Had I been age 20-whatever in 1968, I’d have fit squarely in their demographic and psychographic profile, and while it’s always great to make fun of hippies, I’ve no doubt that this magazine would’ve probably fit me well had I too grown up in stultifying 50s USA, without college radio, fanzine and punk rock to guide me where it eventually did. Even the brief musical nuggets of Van Dyke Parks and Dorothy Moskowitz and Cheetah’s passel of record reviews would have been enough for me to take out that one-year subscription for $5 – even though said subscription would have unfortunately run aground a mere three issues later.

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  • Rock Mag! #1

    In the early 90s when I was publishing my first fanzine Superdope, there were a few other fellas in my age bracket with concomitant music tastes who were also publishing their homespun fanzines, and with whom I’d regularly communicate. Among them were Marc Masters of Crank, Glen Galloway of Zero Gravity, Eric Friedl of Wipeout! and Tim Ellison of Rock Mag! Tim headed up – and still heads up a revised version of – the San Diego band The Nephews, a band I got to see just once at a tiny club down there called The Neptune, which I later learned was the original Casbah club (SD’s long-running best underground club from the 80s onward). I found their records to be a little uneven at times but they were terrific live, and I particularly remember how great this track was.

    More importantly, I really liked Tim. Contrarian, obtuse, wryly funny, highly educated (music and otherwise) and willing to go waaay out on a limb for the music he liked. Rock Mag! wasn’t for everyone. I remember sending an extra issue of it that Tim let me write a few reviews in to my pal Scott “Deluxe” Drake of The Humpers, thinking he’d love the weird piece Tim wrote on links between The Fall and certain animal noises. He sent me a letter back saying he was totally baffled and frustrated by the whole thing and that he’d never read another fanzine like it. Exactly!

    The first issue of Rock Mag! arrived in 1992, and two-thirds of it is given to theorizing on the nature of rock, how we listen to rock, how we contextualize rock and ultimately defending rock after lambasting it. So sure, it’s an acquired taste I suppose; this issue arrived not long after Rock and The Pop Narcotic by Joe Carducci, a tome that set many typewriters and tongues a-waggin’. It is certainly referenced here, as is Richard Meltzer’s Aesthetics of Rock; neither in flattering terms for the most part. I never really deconstructed the meanings behind the music in this manner and probably never will, as my own brain really doesn’t work that way, but I totally got a gas out of how Tim did it, in his truly passionate, devil-may-care manner.

    He then gives in to writing a big batch of record reviews, because, as he says here, “Rock Mag! (the non-rhetorical magazine of the ‘Rebellation Generation’) is called Rock Mag! because it is a rock mag and rock mags have record reviews in the back of the mag.” Among these record reviews lies praise for The Gories, Hanatarash, Electric Eels, Cheater Slicks, Ruins, The Dwarves (Tim loved the Dwarves, as did I for a time), Dead C, Pavement, Shonen Knife and one of Tim’s other non-R.E.M. favorites, The Fall. On the back cover is a nice big salute to “Paul Fucking McCartney”, and that was Rock Mag! #1. The second issue had what I believe was one of only a couple interviews he ever did, but we’ll get to talking about that one in due time and shall wait, as all good things must. 

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  • NY Rocker – September 1980

    The personal, hand-assembled music fanzine’s always been the place that cultural pontificators like to point to when directing nostalgia seekers to the real pulse of an era, the sociological beat of the streets and the place where a given music’s early adopters were the ones helping to define that music’s formative boundaries and key players. I think there’s much truth to this assertion, or I otherwise wouldn’t be bleating as much as I am here. 

    Yet I think there’s actually far more sociological and on-the-ground ore to mine from the music periodicals of particular musical eras, back when, unlike now, music periodicals were a thing. A single issue of the NY Rocker, say – or of Slash, or Damage, or Take It!, or Sounds, or Rip It Up, or Melody Maker – those newsprint periodicals, packed with columns, reviews, interviews, musings, artwork, listings, ads and photographs – each issue of these provided an incredible bounty of detail and real-time reportage and opinion that actually tops much of what irregularly-produced fanzines did. So I like to read ‘em, myself, just to put myself in the same frame of mind as any other music dork might have been in during 1980, or 1972, or 1967. In the US these local newsprint music papers pretty much died out by the mid-1980s, replaced by the local alt-weeklies that themselves have now died out.

    This preamble is so we can talk about how much I loved reading NY Rocker’s September 1980 issue, OK? It’s the proverbial portal to another world, itemized and particularized extensively and exhaustively from the viewpoints of folks like Andy Schawrtz, Byron Coley, Ira Kaplan, Lisa Fancher, Jeffrey Lee Pierce, Peter Crowley and many others. Some Los Angeles names on there, right? That’s because this is a very heavy “The Best of the West” issue, with three different features on X (who’ve just released Los Angeles and played New York) and a particularly fantastic Lisa Fancher piece trying to make sense of the LA/beach hardcore scene and place it all in context. Like Kickboy Face’s similar piece in Slash around this time, she is an advocate of letting the kids be kids, hating the cops and grooving to the pure adrenaline of nascent hardcore punk. “Though it may have taken three years, these California kids have finally broken away from English apery and come up with something so crazy and incomprehensible it could only be American.”. God bless Lisa, and God bless the USA.

    Oh – and she talks about a show she’s just attended in Redondo Beach at the Fleetwood with a bill of Fear / Bags / The Gears / Circle Jerks / Gun Club / The Urinals. I know, I know. She casually mentions “Slash is filming the proceedings”. Folks, this is the The Decline of Western Civilization show; “Slash” = Penelope Spheeris, the then-Ms. Bob Biggs. I know that some of The Gears footage made it to a Decline DVD; does anyone know if she actually filmed The Urinals and Gun Club as well?

    Aside from the heavy LA focus in this one, there’s a “the scene is totally dead” San Francisco report from Tony Rocco, who was a staff writer for Damage and who was parroting the party line of that magazine in 1980, which we told you about in this post. There’s a (true) report about The Cramps’ Bryan Gregory quitting the band to join his girlfriend in her intense worship of Satan (!), and his new replacement, Julien H (you can see her in this clip, one of the greatest pieces of rocknroll ever committed to film). There are also great bits on The Raincoats, Gang of Four and The Selecter, all interesting, all of their time and all so exciting in the context of everything else also going on around them.

    There was another reason this was such a great year – The Shaggs’ world-destroying Philosophy of the World had just been reissued, and it was blowing minds from Nashua to Great Neck and back again. Byron Coley reports on it all, in the context of a review that unsuccessfully (and tongue-in-cheek) attempts to compare it with some Slits demos that have just come out. I heard it not long after this and got quite the laff out of it, but it wasn’t until about 1983 or so that Shaggs mania would enter my home from the most unlikely of sources.

    The comedian Bob (“Bobcat”) Goldthwait was a local San Francisco comic in 1983, and I was a 15-year-old who listened to the Alex Bennett Morning Show on KQAK (“The Quake”) every weekday morning before school. Every morning Bennett had someone on, a local comedian, who’d later go on to be moderately famous, like Dana Carvey, Kevin Pollak and Mark Pitta. Anyway, Goldthwait was on at least once a week, and he decided to bring The Shaggs to the west coast, both figuratively (by making Bennett play “My Pal Foot-Foot” and “Who Are Parents?” on the air all the time) and “literally”, by pretending to bankroll their big trip to San Francisco, where they’d be greeted on the ground at the airport as heroes who’d come to save rock & roll. 

    Goldthwait used Bennett’s show one morning to pump up the in-studio crowd who’d come to KQAK for every show – as well as the audience listening at home – to get themselves to SFO airport immediately to cheer and hoot for The Shaggs, whose “plane was just about to land”. Goldthwait had a live mic and several dozen amped-up people around him at the airport chanting “We love The Shaggs! We love The Shaggs!” as their plane landed. I was quite entertained listening at home, let me tell ya. I don’t quite remember what happened when the Wiggin sisters didn’t actually get off the plane, but perhaps I had to get to Social Studies 1 and missed it entirely. 

    Anyway, like I’ve said in previous items, I haven’t entirely lived up to my promise to write more unasked-for stream-of-consciousness diversions in these blog posts, so there you go. NY Rocker’s September 1980 issue is a real gem. I have others to review in the weeks to come. (And hey, does anyone have any info on the lone issue of NY Rocker Pix? It has on the cover one Donna Destri, the sister of Blondie’s Jimmy – I just this very week heard her name for the first time when I watched this not-especially-good documentary called Nightclubbing about Max’s Kansas City.)

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  • Luggage #1

    I believe Luggage #1 was the first and only in its run – a Boston-based digest fanzine from the haphazardly-xeroxed school of design, focused on music skirting the boundaries of rock. The editors were Jason Castolene and Mike Zimbouski, and there’s an excited sense of newfound discovery in the fanzine, that they’ve very recently unlocked a hidden portal to the deep underground and are newly bathing within a deep well of improvisational noise, jazz, not-quite-rock and related experimentation. It all comes off as wide-eyed and prone to the disproportionate obsession and over-analysis that can make life in one’s twenties so fun and so frivolous. 

    Trans Am, purportedly a krautrock-inspired band who are interviewed here, put that myth to rest by telling Luggage that they’ve just heard most of it for the first time, with one guy piping up to say he’d just heard Faust today. There’s an interview with clarinetist Don Byron, whom the editors are chastising me for not knowing in 1997; alas, I’ve only heard of him now, 26 years later, reading this old fanzine I’ve recently found. Good, prepared questions from the Luggage team and it gave me a great sense of that late 90s NY/Knitting Factory downtown era that I wish I’d have been able to experience a bit of firsthand. 

    The final of their trio of interviews is with Thurston Moore, and I’m always game to read his explorations of record collecting, navigation of the obscure, and straddling of the major label and micro-indie worlds. The editors flummox him a bit with the sort of rookie questions I unfortunately still ask my subjects in the interviews I do: “What are you listening to these days?”  “What books are you reading?” “What’s Sonic Youth doing next?”. Byron Coley is referred to here and in another part of the magazine as “Byron Cohen”. 

    Moore makes a particularly relevant point in the interview about what’s driving such a strong interest in improvisational and far-underground, out-there music in 1997 – and while he doesn’t quite say it with these words, it’s effectively the turned backs of underground music freaks who once revered major label bands like his own Sonic Youth. The underground, having seen their bands so thoroughly co-opted, are digging deeper into formless tuneage, distant krautrock, harsh noise and even the strange, loose psychedelic folk music starting to coalesce around this time, just to see what might turn up and excite them the way bands did in the 1980s. Here I was in 1997 thinking it was just a buncha scene credential hogs pretending to enjoy Keiji Haino and The Tower Recordings, and it was Moore’s evenhanded take that probably explains it all better. As I’ve mentioned before, it took me quite a few years before I’d personally come back to the late 90s to really dig into all I missed by turning my own back on the sub-sub-underground.

    Therefore, I still don’t know what’s what with some of Luggage #1’s favorites: Analogue, Five Starcle Men, Oval etc. The fanzine closes out with an incongruous show review of Polvo playing in Boston in 1996, “an epiphanic experience” for the unnamed writer. “Polvo” is one of those you-had-to-be-there-I-guess 90s fanzine-rave bands, much like “The Grifters”, from whom I’m still waiting for a first decent song to penetrate my consciousness. Anyone know if Castolene and Zimbouski went on to write elsewhere? (Yes! Just found out that Zimbouski published this collection of short stories…).

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  • Ugly Things #62

    Ugly Things has been around for forty years now. Amazing. How about that? Twenty years ago I got it in my pudding head to write partially-mocking “reviews” on my blog of what were then issues #21 and #23, only a mere third of the way into the magazine’s lifecycle, and I’ve pretty much regretted it ever since, despite more or less “agreeing with myself” on what I had to say about it. The thing is, there’s no world in which it’s a good idea to belittle what Mike Stax and his longtime cast of contributors have achieved with this gargantuan thing: the careers they’ve resurrected, the historical records they’ve either set straight or thoroughly defined in the first place, and the sheer mania and volume of fandom and documentation, which truly has known no bounds.

    Stax magnanimously dropped a comment on my old blog not long after this, sort of reminding me of something unnecessarily snarky and lame I’d said, and my face fell to the floor. Of all the people to mock, why Ugly Things?? I probably own half their issues, and I’m a happy current paying subscriber. I discover new 60s and 70s sounds every time I get one. So here’s what I had to say back then, in 2003 and 2005, across two different posts:

    Ugly Things #21: November 17th, 2003

    NOW A FEW WORDS ON “UGLY THINGS”….Last week I finished this year’s edition of Ugly Things magazine (#21) after spending a couple of weeks with it – well, “finished” is perhaps a bit of an exaggeration. How does one actually finish a massive tome like this, packed with absolutely insane amounts of 60s rock arcana and incidental, meaningless flotsam? I mean, the cover feature on mediocre London-via-Riverside psych band THE MISUNDERSTOOD is 45 pages of tiny type, in which the band’s marginally interesting back story and sub-stories are flogged into painful submission – and it’s only the second of three jumbo cover stories planned on the group. 

    I’d accuse Mike Stax of trying to grab a Pulitzer if that was even plausible. Likewise, the massive reviews section in the back would garner a lot more credibility if it weren’t for the utter lack of subjectively (yes! more subjectivity please!) and unabashed cheerleading for every tinpot reissue of flowery psych/pop turd, Danish beat combo and marginal 60s garage rock outfit. Isn’t at least some of this stuff just absolute shit? – and doesn’t some of it merit, say, a 1-paragraph review as opposed to 7-8 paragraphs of down-to-the-liner-notes scientific dissection? I think Stax does get it at some level – one reviewer makes reference to a dictat from headquarters asking for “less words” in the reviews. I’d say that judging from the boatload of bloated reviews this issue, the memo hit the circular file the second it arrived.

    Hey, don’t get me wrong – I eagerly buy Ugly Things every time a new issue hits the stands, and strongly encourage you to do the same. No magazine covers its scene this deeply – and in recent years that scene has expanded to raw music from the 70s and 80s (witness the “controversial” Crime, Union Carbide Productions and Misfits cover features). There’s always some features that serve the public interest exceptionally well – witness #21’s piece that sorts through the recent mass of ABKCO Rolling Stones reissues. 

    They’ve even stooped to allow famous record collector Johan (“I owe you one”) Kugelberg on the masthead, and at least he does keep things verbally moving along – and covers micro-scenes that no one else does. Why, this issue JK even tackles Danny & The Dressmakers and the legend of Fuck Off Records. And he even prints up a list that he just happened to find in a scrapbook – hey, now where’d that come from??!? – of his favorite records in September 1983 – when he was just a mere teen! Not surprisingly, because he’s always been such a groover, he was way into SPK, Pere Ubu, Television and The Popes – just like all the other kids! I mean, come on. I lay even odds that this list of “favorite 1983 records” was written in, oh, how about 2003?

    Anyway, the new Ugly Things is out! Go forth and prosper.

    Ugly Things #23 – September 27th, 2005

    Someone once said on this site that it was obvious that I didn’t “like” Ugly Things magazine, yet nothing could be further from the truth. I happen to have a strong appreciation for the way the love of music can make intelligent folks go utterly bonkers, and therefore spend precious waking minutes obsessively cataloging and testifying to their faves in the hopes that someone else might catch on. It’s why, despite my better judgment, I still post entries to Agony Shorthand at least 3-5 times per week. I’m right with you, Stax & co. I’ll buy your magazine every time. 

    Where I part company with the Ugly Things crew is in attempting to see the forest for the trees. For every genre of music, including 60s garage and beat, there is a cut-off line, below which the music is so unremarkable or throwaway that it merits not a second’s worth of debate. For Ugly Things, that line is waaaay down there. Not only does Ugly Things refuse to really “debate” anything (bad reviews are barely allowed — you can actually watch reviewers like Mike Fornatale squirm as they attempt to be magnanimous), but they joyfully celebrate every unfilled pothole from the 1960s — like, in this issue, “The Checkmates”, “Charlie Crane”, “The Belfast Gypsies” and “Las Mosquitas”. Those might be some fucking out of control rock monsters, but I highly doubt it, and the approach to their music is strictly biographical name/rank/serial number scribing. Aggressive skimming is unavoidable.

    Still, the sheer repetition of underwhelming 60s rock music paints a picture of a sort, and the Ugly Things team are so incredibly clued-in to their world that you end up getting jazzed about some of it in any case. Not like I need another 60s punk comp, but they’ve got me excited to buy “The Ikon Records Story” 2xCD (Sacramento!!). They also view just about every cool music DVD that hits the shelves and read every single rock book as well, and if that’s your bag, these guys have it nailed better than anyone. This particular Ugly Things issue seems to be lacking a little something, like they’re just waiting to get this Misunderstood saga out of the way before relatively firing on all cylinders again. And I never thought I’d say this, but I actually miss Johan Kugelberg this issue (I guess he was making his electroclash album with Moby). Still, for 9 Paypaled bucks, you’ve got a quality read that’ll last you all Autumn. The worst Ugly Things is better than, say, the best “Maxim Blender”.

    OK, so here we are back in 2023 again. I just finished the Summer 2023 issue, Ugly Things #62, last night. I left more on the table than I was able to cognitively take away from it, which is normal, because if I spent time actually reading the word-for-word entirety of, say, The Petards cover story and every story like it, I’d never again read books, watch films, have friends, etc. Yet that Petards cover story will always be there when I need it, like if I hear one of their songs at a fab hullabaloo or a far-out shindig and I’m like, “Let’s Shazam this fucker – oh, it’s The Petards??!! I gotta go back to Ugly Things #62 and find out what those young Germans were really on about in 1968!”. 

    Another thing Ugly Things does really, really well: you’ll be reading along with a record review, and all of a sudden it’ll be accompanied by an impromptu interview, like this issue’s MX-80 Sound chat. In other words, the cover doesn’t encompass the totality of the contents therein, and that makes for some really great surprises. And Phil Milstein writes for it. God bless Ugly Things and I’m sorry again for my snarky blather of the early aughts.

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