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  • Boo Boo #1

    Terrific 1994 glorification of various countercultures here by Brett Sokol in Boo Boo #1, complete with a weed-smokin’ radical on the cover and a glorious pastiche of 60s-90s anti-mainstream vibes. Royal Trux were perhaps the perfect “bridge” band of this ilk from one generation to the next, and I loved Sokol’s opening disclaimer before his interview with them: “Royal Trux take the attitude toward interviewers that most people have towards their landlord: why would you want to give them more than you had to?”. Turns out that they’re actually quite game to answer his questions; I’ve noticed through the years that if you really wanted to get Neil Hagerty talking, start asking him about Zappa, or Jefferson Airplane, or Creedence. Sokol figures this out pretty early on in the interview and it just flows from there.

    Boo Boo #1 is exceptionally Cleveland-heavy, which is where the fanzine emanated from. So there’s a cool interview with Scott Pickering, talking about Ragged Bags, Spike in Vain and more, along with tangential scans and reprints, such as a recent Anastasia Pantsios review of the Cleveland portions of Clinton Heylin’s From The Velvets to the Voidoids book (oh man was I excited when that book hit the shelves in 1993). Also a deep dive into the discography and aesthetic of Fuzzhead, a project/band I’ve only really recently connected with, thirty years later, and am still trying to figure out. Then there’s just out-of-context advertisements for stuff like Terminal Records, clipped from another fanzine fourteen years earlier – although I know when I first saw  this in 1994 I was ready to spring for that Cleveland Confidential 45 at $3 before realizing what Sokol was up to.

    About 50% of the way in, it’s almost like Sokol ran out of steam, or perhaps he did what he really wanted to do anyway, which is to bask in the glories of the freak underground of 15-25 years prior. The mag re-xeroxes hippie-fied excerpts from the “Bring The War Home” early late 60s/70s would-be revolution, with reprints of pieces from Ramparts; Fugs ads; a ton of Zappa ads and reviews; Weather Underground articles; CLE magazine scene reports and more. You just need to roll with it, and once you do it’s actually pretty great to see the “big picture” as it existed in Sokol’s brain at the time. It’s a winning concept and it’s kept my Boo Boo #1 tucked safely in a poly sleeve and in a sealed box for safekeeping for nearly the last thirty years. 

    Sokol later went on to write for the NY Times and elsewhere, and now runs a Miami publishing house called Letter16 Press primarily focused on photography; I gladly bought their Charles Hashim book a year or two ago, and it’s really something. If I’m not mistaken, he was also behind White Heap Records, who put out a Vile Cherubs CD and then called it a day, just as this fanzine did after this single issue. 

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  • What A Nice Way To Turn Seventeen #6

    I owe my possession of this one thanks to a pro tip from Todd Novak of Hozac Records, who reminded me that any fanzine that came with a record likely means that the record is probably for sale on Discogs…..and that some of them explicitly come bundled with the original fanzine. He explicitly called out the UK’s mid-80s What A Nice Way To Turn Seventeen fanzine as one I might want to do a little reconnaissance on. So I did, and I’m a better man for having done so.

    In fact, I had to buy a full 12” compilation LP just to get the July 1986 What A Nice Way To Turn Seventeen #6; it’s got some decent stuff from The Prefects, The Doublehappys and Sneaky Feelings, among others. It’s the fanzine that’s the draw, though, with a real emphasis on old-school fanzine here. Editor Chris Seventeen and his “staff” are intensely passionate music lovers, with an aesthetic that very loosely hovers around the holy quartile of Johnny Thunders, Nikki Sudden, Marc Bolan and Keith Richards – scarf rock, if you will. There’s also a bit of mining of some of similar underground jangle covered by Bucketful of Brains at this time, along with some great 1960s worship, which, you know, had only been less than twenty years before this. Epic Soundtracks and Nikki Sudden of The Swell Maps are staffers, in fact – not merely one-off contributors, but regular members of the ‘Seventeen crew. 

    So what you get is a highly welcome old-school reverence for discographies and details, the sort that mattered to collectors and accumulators of records in the era before any of this was online – before there was an online. There’s a page-long Alex Chilton discography with every record, comp track and bootleg from his Box Tops days to the present; this follows a terrific in-person Q&A with Alex that was conducted by Epic Soundtracks himself. It’s an essential interview with a guy who was often irascible and tough to reach, and he opens up in a very conversational, candid manner about what he does and doesn’t like about his career, confirming the drugged, tossed-off circumstances that led to Sister Lovers and how Jim Dickinson had a pre-assembled, unannounced band all ready to record Like Flies on Sherbert when Alex walked into the studio, and Chilton was like, “OK, let’s just go with it, then!”. 

    Having recently read Matthew Goody’s Needles and Plastic as I have, I now know the tortured path by which Flying Nun Records’ music was introduced to the UK in the mid-80s – and here we have a feature on said label, with the spotlight tuned on The Chills, Flying Nun’s most popular band overseas by a mile. There’s also a reconsideration of the music of The Monkees (the editors have just seen “Head”), a piece that I feel I’ve read in a couple of different guises over the years, as those of us who grew up howling at the TV show realize that the music was actually pretty great as well. 

    You want a discography of The Swell Maps? Well I suppose it helps having Epic Soundtracks and Nikki Sudden on staff, but there’s an exceptionally detailed and annotated one here, full of minutia for the true fan. At this point, 1986, we’d only seen just over half of the Swell Maps material that’d eventually see the light of day. There’s a piece on the “Louie Louie” mania that swept the world in the early 1980s, including a spotlight on the day (August 19th, 1983) that my local college radio station, KFJC, would devote the day to playing over 300 unique versions of the song. I remember it well, and turning the station on and off at various points throughout the day – yep, still playing “Louie Louie”; nope, not back to regular programming yet….

    The sort of breadth and depth I’ve just tried to illuminate that permeates What A Nice Way to Turn Seventeen #6 – to say nothing of the writing and assembly, which is first-rate in a not-trying-too-hard “fanzine” sorta manner – is what now brings this issue (cue chorus of angels) into my personal fanzine pantheon. I’ll be doing my damndest to find the others in the months to come, even if it means buying some in-the-way record to have to get it.

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  • The Offense #12

    In 1987 and 1988 I accepted an offer from a fellow college radio DJ at KCSB-FM in Santa Barbara and “interned” at his fanzine/magazine, Sound Choice in Ojai, CA. At some point I’ll explore an issue of this, and we can talk a little more deeply about all this entailed and what came of it during my twentieth year on the planet. For now, I can state that one of my many jobs there was opening the mail, and then asking editor Dave Ciaffardini if I might take some of the hundreds of promo records and fanzines he’d receive each week home with me, which he always said yes to.

    The Offense Newsletter from Columbus, OH was one that arrived in Ojai with regularity. Because this was a time of fanzine abundance, and particularly of fanzines that covered the raw punk, noise and, uh, “pigfuck” that I craved, I was flummoxed enough by The Offense Newsletter that I never took any of them home with me. Editor Tim Anstaett was really, really, really into 4AD Records and had an intense anglophilia and some tolerance for what by then I thought of as “new wave garbage” that, even though he and his contributors also deftly wrote about all the things I loved, I found too discordantly strange and therefore untrustworthy. 

    Of course, now that I’m all growed up, I applaud the breadth of his tastes and passions, even if some of the chosen material in 1981’s The Offense #12 is to my ears laughably trendy or pedestrian, such as interviews with U2 or the Comsat Angels, or time spent reviewing Heaven 17 and the Human League records, right next to Cracks in the Sidewalk, Minor Threat and Dow Jones & The Industrials. (The fanzine changed from a larger fanzine to a smaller newsletter format at some point, hence the minor name change). I do like the part where the guy from the Comsat Angels says he spends most of his time listening to Pere Ubu and Chrome, and wonders why his band plays the considerably less challenging music that it does.

    Want to know just how intense the 4AD worship was over here? Not only are there letters to the editor mocking Anstaett for it already in 1981, but a few years later he’d be the catalyst for the Cocteau Twins playing one of their five US tour shows in Columbus, which thankfully resulted in one of my favorite pieces of local TV news coverage ever (please watch it). Fun fact – Fanzine Hemorrhage’s editor, a San Jose, CA Gunderson High School student and part-time new waver, attended one of the other five shows in 1985, in the considerably more logical tour city of San Francisco.

    The Offense #12 – actually dated as having come out precisely on November 12th, 1981 – is an even more rewarding time capsule than I’d imagined it might be. First, it’s clear that Anstaett is getting some really strong distribution on this thing, with copies all over the UK and thus loads of underground promos and letters to the editor from there and from all across the United States. He prints a ton of letters, some of which take him to task, some of which praise him to the heavens, a couple of which are flirting sexual entreaties from women that he flat-out takes the bait on. There’s a letter from a guy in Seattle named Joe Piecuch – anyone remember how ubiquitous this guy’s letters were across various publications across the 1980s? Go check your Forced Exposures. There’s also a long, snotty one from NY Rocker editor Andy Schwartz and even one from a young Randy Russell in Kent, OH, a guy whom I interviewed last year in my own Dynamite Hemorrhage #10 about his later musical endeavors in Moonlove.  

    Also – remember that it’s Columbus, Ohio that we’re talking about here. Who knew that Don Howland and Ron House were big contributors to this one? Not I! Howland’s music writing is some of my favorite music writing ever, and here we’re fortunate to get his first thoughts on The Gun Club’s debut album Fire of Love, which has just come out: “‘Fire of Love’ hits turntables across America with all the impact of a severed penis hitting a crowded sidewalk after falling SOME ONE THOUSAND feet from the roof of a skyscraper. It’s that good.” Howland also praises that Scritti Politti 45 “The Sweetest Girl” (the A-side only, which he gives an A+ to the b-sides’ “F-”) – it’s a really great song, I totally agree; major KFJC college radio hit when I was a teen – while copping to a lot of the confusion and dismay on display here that so many post-punk bands are so blatantly chasing “Rock of the 80s” cash. Anstaett, too – he eviscerates records by Adam and the Ants, Human League and other UK bands that were soon to become big US alterna-radio staples.

    The aforementioned Joe Piecuch isn’t merely a letter-writer, he’s also a contributor, and he’s clearly going through some major Throbbing Gristle mania in late 1981, reviewing and lauding everything and anything he can get his hands on. Anstaett reviews some recent fanzines and gets a bit frosty when Tim Tanooka at Ripper calls The Offense “80 pages of really stupid drivel published by a very pretentious Anglophile who doesn’t like hardcore punk.”. I mean it’s 42 years too late, but I’ll state for the record that this magazine neither reads as pretentious, nor does it slight nor demean hardcore punk – quite the contrary. I plowed through this issue last night and it made me think that maybe I need some other issues. Thankfully, there’s The Offense Book of Books from 2019, which compiles the first 18 issues across two mega-volumes – for real! More here, and good luck tracking this one down if you’re so inclined.

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  • Sooprize Package #2

    To date I’ve tried to share a bit of the tenor and tone of the 1990s garage punk fanzines I collected at the time, and have written several dispositive entries here about Wipe Out!, Alright!, Human Garbage Disposal and Bazooka, respectively. Today we’re going to talk about one I hadn’t been aware of at the time but found a copy of to procure online, Sooprize Package #2 from the UK, a fanzine I was hipped to by someone who rightly thought I might enjoy it. Oh dear, it’s “The Lo-Fidelity Magazine for Losers” – already signaling a deep need to “fit in” with the faux-aggressive, fuck-it-all punk presentation of the time (1994).

    You see, there was this whole class of garage-rooted bands and fanzines who basically took their cues directly from Tim Warren’s over-the-top Crypt Records advertisements of the 80s and 90s. Those ads were absolute masterworks of confrontational art and low class, with a presentation and an ethos that truly couldn’t be beat. Everyone laughed their asses off about that at the time. I’ve done you the favor of printing an example here so you can see the germ from which fanzines like Sooprize Package took (virtually all of) their inspiration from. 

    While I totally loved Crypt, of course, they helped to enable a bit of a dividing line between discerning music-first lovers of the raw, loud & snotty, and the many dullards who got off on exclamation points, “losers”, “rekkids”, “you suck” etc. – and in dressing oneself in sartorial splendor like the man on the cover of this one, Shane White of The Spoiled Brats (a local from my area, San Francisco, who did his own fanzine Pure Filth that probably sat on what I’d personally call the wrong side of the line). 

    If you’re a believer in the 80/20 rule, well, so am I. 20% of this shtick, both musically and in the scene infrastructure that surrounded it, was a blast and had a winking “intelligence”, for lack of a better term, that understood that the riffs, energy and the mayhem of 60s- and ‘77-inspired rocknroll could be effectively harnessed and even improved upon, mixing in feedback, brute-force noise and dirty blues (Cheater Slicks, Oblivians) or inventing a goofus teen dance party “language” that played upon sitcom tropes and borrowed from the best no-fi bands of the 60s and 70s (Supercharger, Brentwoods). There were plenty of other ways to successfully cut it within that hallowed 20%, and bands like The Night Kings, Gories, Fireworks and others did just that. I even liked a lot of the instrumental surf revival action at the time, and no, I didn’t mind at all that some of the bands dressed funny and synchronized their moves on stage. What’s better than getting three sheets to the wind and self-lobotomizing at a live rock show, am I right?

    80% of it was total garbage. It’s where you found the hot rod creeps, the wallet-on-a-chain goofballs, Gearhead, all-white bands with “Los” in their names, grown men wearing monkey masks, “Man or Astroman” and so on. Sooprize Package #2 straddled this line rather deftly, to be honest. Clearly editor James Petter got off on anything “raw ‘n wild” and he did his best to stoke the fires of this whole scene in a very well-put-together digest-sized fanzine that celebrated it all in xeroxed, cut-n-paste glory. It’s also a trans-continental celebration, bringing in English and European bands that I’ve never heard with bands that routinely performed within three miles of my home. The San Francisco tentacles of this scene stretched even further than I knew of at the time, and this 1994 issue is going bananas over the Trashwomen, Spoiled Brats, Phantom Surfers and Rip Offs, and these bands are playing all across Europe and Japan, with their exploits documented herein.

    Petter, like I said, is a highly excitable guy, and he basically plasters the Crypt advertisement ethos across the entire issue. His best piece in here by far is a restrained and actually quite illuminative interview with Lux & Ivy from The Cramps at the Regent Hotel in posh Marylebone, London. The band have just released what I’m sure was a totally forgettable record called Flamejob (I’ve never heard it, to be fair, so it may be a psychobilly masterpiece), but listen – they’re Lux & Ivy. They were always a fantastic interview, and they’re even better here. They’ve just signed to Creation Records, because they’re The Cramps and of course they did. Petter does a great job getting them to open up about their passions, their discography and even their thoughts on some of the current bands in the lowbrow garage punk scene who are routinely opening shows for them at this point. Gotta love Erick and Kristy. 

    So I suppose the whole thing’s a bit of the proverbial mixed bag, but I’d prefer to be magnanimous and acknowledge that it’s impossible to not greatly admire the effort, craft and enthusiasm that went into assembling Sooprize Package #2. I was doing my own fanzines at the time and I certainly could have used a bit more of the lightheartedness and sloppy fun present here. Sure, I vastly prefer the way that Eric at Wipe Out! did it, but mostly because his tastes were more aligned with mine, and he rarely suffered the knuckle-draggers and humored them the way Sooprize Package does. All of this really feels like 100 years ago by now, doesn’t it?

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  • Back Door Man #4

    If you’re as ludicrous a person as I am, it can be tempting to mentally place oneself in a particular year “at age” and wonder how you might have responded at the time to rocknroll’s past, present and potential future. If I put myself in 1974, I’d probably want to respond a lot like Phast Phreddie Patterson and the Back Door Man crew did at the time. I’d want to be blathering to everyone who listened about The Stooges, Velvets and Roxy Music; I’d have a reverence for rockabilly and 60s garage rock; I’d know what “punk” was three years before 1977 told me what it was; and I’d be searching, grasping for anything that hinted at the musical future I wanted to will into existence. (If I’m really stretching the imaginary point, I’d be putting out a fanzine praising Les Razilles Denudes, current krautrock, crate-digging 60s punk 45s, Simply Saucer and whatnot).

    To date, every fanzine I’ve talked about here has been something that I physically own an original copy of. Not Back Door Man #4. In the early 1990s my good friend JB was spending quality time at his local San Diego Kinko’s making ersatz photocopies of his classic fanzines for certain friends, of whom I was luckily one. I got a package once with multiple Back Door Mans, a Brain Damage and a gaggle of the Patti Smith fanzine Another Dimension, all stapled and assembled beautifully. Given that they were from the mid-70s, I could almost pretend that they were the real deal, in their original form. This Back Door Man came from that batch, and yet it’s “worth” plenty to me.

    I hadn’t really looked at it in a long time, this “only 40¢” fanzine from Torrance, CA. They really were a crew of “hardcore rock’n’rollers” at BDM; they included within their ranks Patterson; co-editor DD Faye (whom I confused for years with her equally lovely sister Danielle, who was in The Zippers and Venus & The Razorblades), Don Waller and Thom Gardner. At this point, 1974, considered by many far & wide to be a true low point in rock music, they are grasping at anything rebellious and wild they can get their hands on that might hint at the abandon and rawness they need. Blue Oyster Cult, Aerosmith, Ron Ashton & Dennis Thompson’s new band New Order; Mott The Hoople, Nico, Patti Smith and John Cale – even the execrable Tubes get a big write-up by Lisa Fancher, who’d later go on to run Frontier Records. It’s what you did in 1974, and it makes me think that the search for musical redemption in the bins and on the radio was actually a far more fun and ultimately rewarding environment for rocknroll fandom than, say, 2023 is. There just weren’t many clubs in which to go see local bands, nor many local bands who weren’t playing covers in fern bars.

    When there were, Back Door Man #4 is all over it. Phast Phreddie does a proto-scene report called “South Bay Rock’n’Roll” talking over local live shows with the reformed Blue Cheer, along with Shatterminx, Heavy Transport, Atomic Kid and The Ratz! The Imperial Dogs, who formed that year and featured Back Door Man’s Don Waller on vocals, are also duly raved about, as well they should be. There’s also a great piece about how flummoxed they all are by Lou Reed’s new Metal Machine Music but how they appreciate its rawness and its place in th culture as a big fuck-you nonetheless. 

    The staff also writes in various places about having to rely on AM radio (KHJ) to get their musical kicks, again grasping, grasping…..they’re really excited about The Sweet’s “Ballroom Blitz”, which they should be because that song rules (we also discussed it previously on this blog here). I’m assuming that FM rock Radio was already pumping that heavy-lidded dopesmoker AOR sound around that time that I remember from my precocious Sacramento childhood: Jethro Tull, Yes, Led Zeppelin and whatnot, and these guys and gals were instead looking for the proverbial teenage kicks. 

    Anyway, there’s much, much more to be told in the Back Door Man saga here – but mostly elsewhere. I leave you with an interview that Scram fanzine did with Don Waller about the magazine; here’s a great RockWrit podcast interview with Phast Phreddie himself. Enjoy.

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  • Take It! #2

    (This piece is taken from a written overview I did on Take It! fanzine (1981-82) in the most recent Dynamite Hemorrhage fanzine #10. You’re more than welcome to check out the full piece in the magazine if you’re so inclined).

    This one doesn’t helpfully provide a date of publishing, yet judging from the extensive talk of the late 1980 deaths of both John Lennon and Darby Crash, I’d attempt to date this one around Spring ‘81. Therefore it follows on the heels of its predecessor quite faithfully. Aside from the US/UK music split, there is some film talk; a piece on a pornographic cake company and another on an artist named Jonathan Borofsky – he’d later go on to make the “Hammering Man” sculpture you now see in front of the Seattle Art Museum. There’s a non-rock photo section curated by Phil-n-Phlash, whom I know far better for his photos of Boston hardcore a year or two later, including the Boston Not LA cover, and whose photos continue in future issues. And there’s a Boston punk rock fashion show review. 

    But since you’re here for the music, let me tell you a bit about what Take It! was on about in early 1981. Well, there’s some gratuitous Fleshtones bashing, something that was de rigueur in fanzines at the time, but better still, the Byron Coley column and record reviews are among the best things I’ve read by the guy – the sort of johnny-on-the-spot reportage that I want to see collected in that Byron Coley compendium that no one’s put up the cash to assemble (yet).

    Now at this time he did somehow believe that the debut Angry Samoans 12” EP was better than either of Black Flag’s Nervous Breakdown or Jealous Again. OK then! I’ve been wrong before myself. He also investigates and then champions the Pebbles compilations that were just then starting to trickle out (guy was an early-and-often champion of 60s punk for sure). He says that Suburban Lawns’ “Janitor”…”has many lapses in generally acceptable diction and that’s okay too”. His column ends up comparing songs between Michael Hurley – whom I truly believe no one was talking about in 1981 – and Bound & Gagged.

    Phil Milstein does a terrific piece on NRBQ; he was just as engaging a writer then as he is now. There’s an on-the-nose semi-takedown of Jim Carroll and his “Jim Carroll Band”. We also get a Buzzcocks interview and an unreadable piece of slash fiction about Bob Dylan, John Lydon and God. Finally, in Gregg Turner’s LA column, he scathingly pontificates about the recent death of Darby Crash, something he seems pretty happy about – proving himself to be the petty, self-involved creep I’ve long taken him to be. This jousting is then coupled with some praise for The Mentors, of all things, whilst simultaneously casting aspersions on the physical appearance of Mentors band members such as guitarist Sickie Wifebeater (“amazing gtrst tho”). Ah, to be young and exceptionally good-looking in Hollywood like Gregg Turner from the Angry Samoans!

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  • Conflict #42

    In recent weeks I’ve, uh, “opened up” about just what my precise musical obsessions were during the years 1986-89, and unsurprisingly – and I’m not ashamed of most of ‘em – they were a lot like those of many others. If it was on Touch & Go, Homestead, Amphetamine Reptile or SST, it got my attention. If it was abrasive, rocking and loud, it got my attention. My “favorite contempo band” during this era ranged from the Lazy Cowgirls to Mudhoney, I think, with pit stops for Big Black, Naked Raygun, Scratch Acid, Soul Asylum, Urge Overkill and the Laughing Hyenas along the way. There was some deeper digging going on for sure, and I spent far more time with music from the first half of the 80s than the second half I was living in. Yet as we came out of the 1980s, I think my very “favorite current band” on 1/1/90 was Death of Samantha. My “all-time favorite bands” were The Flesh Eaters, The Velvet Underground and The Fall. I still had much to discover, and aside from the Gibson Bros, The Clean, World of Pooh & a few pop bands, I was very decidedly a hard/loud/noise-centered impressionable young twentysomething as the decade closed.

    After all that, and with 33+ years of hindsight, the band I listen to the most now from those days is – that’s right, you totally nailed it: Pussy Galore. I was into them from the very first time I spied Laurel Waco’s Groovy Hate Fuck EP and convinced her to let me borrow it, strategically hiding the back cover with its large-lettered PUSSY-JEW-CUNT-DIE-MEAT-KILL-ASSHOLE with my arm as I shepherded it back to my Isla Vista, CA dorm room. I soon found the Feel Good About Your Body 7”EP at Zed Records in Long Beach, and then the real topper was that 1986 Pussy Gold 5000 EP, where they instantly became one of the tip-top bands of the era, and the one I revere the most now. 

    I saw them on 10/27/88 at Raji’s in Los Angeles, a show so ear-splittingly loud that I scooted to the very back of the room, where Eugene, the then-cook at Raji’s and the bald hero who kicks off The Decline of Western Civilization (“That’s stupid, punk rock, I don’t know, I just think of it as rocknroll”), was peeking out of his kitchen cubbyhole at the chaos up on stage. I drove home to Isla Vista fearing permanent ear damage, and could barely hear my friends talking in the car. Those were, as they say, “good times”. 

    This issue of Gerard Cosloy’s Conflict, #42, was probably where I first heard the members of Pussy Galore “speak”. It took me probably until this interview to understand that it was their underlying snotty 60s garage punk riffs & attitude, caked in a total wall of noise, that was what endeared me to them the most. When I found out down the road that folks like Tim Warren and Larry Hardy were just as smitten as I was with the band, well, it all made sense. And look, I’ve taken this long to even really get to talking about this issue of the fanzine – I told you when I started this that Fanzine Hemorrhage would be a stream-of-consciousness, mostly unedited voyage into the unknown, and this time I’m keeping my promise.

    So let’s talk about Conflict #42. This is about as seminally representative of Cosloy’s mid/late-80s stance and vibe as any of his issues were. Around this time, names like “Jim Testa”, “Mike Gitter”, “Donny the Punk” and “Jack Rabid” were only known to me as mocked men in the pages of Conflict, and though my knowledge of their crimes was therefore heavily one-sided, I ate it all up nonetheless and got a ton of laffs out of Cosloy’s sarcastic eviscerations. (We’d later get copies of Gitter’s XXX fanzine on the west coast and that certainly helped to reinforce things). It didn’t hurt that Cosloy’s sense of humor fell in many of the same bizarro places mine did at the time. This issue has much talk about an “oi revival”, so much so that it is broached to a bewildered Pussy Galore and comes up in at least ten different reviews. He asks the band, “If both The Exploited and The Partisans were drowning and you could only save one of them, which would you save?”, which is followed by “(dead silence)”. (I will state for the record, however, that The Exploited’s “Dead Cities” and The Partisans’ “Police Story” are the two finest songs of the oi/UK82 era). 

    Cosloy was running Homestead Records at this point, or at least selecting which bands to sign, and 1985/86 saw his releases of leading scene indicators from Sonic Youth, Dinosaur, Big Black, Volcano Suns, Death of Samantha, Green River and many others. So the guy came with some cred, shall we say, all the more enhanced by an ability to pick gems from the underground to spotlight in Conflict that I’d then go out and buy, or at least play on my college radio show. My re-read of Conflict #42 surprised me as to just how many English (non-oi) bands he was digging into, from Eyeless in Gaza to The Wedding Present to The Weather Prophets to The Mighty Lemon Drops, about the latter of whom he says, “If this band ever comes to NYC, they will surely feel the wrath of skin violence, razors in the night, et al.”

    I’ll also give the man some props for where he lived and published in 1986: 62 Avenue C #3 in Manhattan. I visited New York in 1991 during the crack epidemic and, as a soft San Franciscan, felt a little tense walking anywhere east of Avenue A – so kudos for some real urban living. I’ll leave you with Cosloy’s round-up of current top fanzines of the day to help you parse out the then-cut of his jib.

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  • It’s So Hard To Tell Who’s Going to Love You The Best #1

    Do you remember your reaction the first time you heard Karen Dalton? Honestly, now. I remember mine – it was probably in the early 2000s. I was doing the blog Agony Shorthand, and there was another music blog/site/”online magazine” called Blastitude who’d cover all sorts of strange noise and post-hardcore craziness, yet who also had an incongruous soft spot for the female singer-songwriters and girl groups of the 60s (as I very much did). I’m not sure if it was Larry Dolman or Tony Rettman, but one of those dudes was seriously championing Karen Dalton and her 60s/70s recordings, so I went and checked her out as one does on the internet, and was like – ugh. Couldn’t get past her voice, which was a strange, froggy thing that almost sounded like someone trying to emote & intonate through a cleft palate. 

    But friends, this is why we show grit and persevere when we encounter barriers. It didn’t take long for me to see just how beautiful, pained and otherworldly her folk music was, and to really embrace her flawed voice – if it is even flawed – the way we embrace Neil Young and Bryan Ferry for their own vocal foibles. Then when Karen Dalton’s archival 1966 tapes came out and I heard ‘em – well wow, that really did it for me. She entered my pantheon of farsighted, tragic geniuses immediately, and I cursed myself for ever having doubted her, even if she almost totally performed songs that were not written by herself. Who cares? Karen Dalton, especially in the 60s, was phenomenal, and I’m delighted that so much of her music from that period has flowed out to the people in recent years.

    It was into this vortex of unbridled enthusiasm that a one-off, small-batch fanzine called It’s So Hard To Tell Who’s Going To Love You The Best came into my life. It was put out in the UK by an outfit (or person) called Cherry Styles, who also put out a Patti Smith fanzine and one called The Chapess, and who seem to have gone mostly dark and missing from the internet. I think it was maybe 2015 or so that this came out on Cherry’s own Synchronise Witches Press? I believe that Cherry Styles and her enthusiasms were very much borne of and furthered by the “Tumblr era”, an era which now seems to have passed. 

    Anyway! It’s So Hard To Tell Who’s Going To Love You The Best is a “Karen Dalton fanzine”. It was accompanied by a cassette tape of murky, blown-out, proto-folk recordings by Bridget Hayden, one of our favorite discombobulating modern musicians here at FH HQ. That’s probably how I heard about it in the first place, though her music’s connection to Dalton’s is tenuous at best. The fanzine is a collection of tribute articles, poems, pieces of art and even a Bean Bread recipe (!), all in tribute to St. Karen. It’s a cool, personal, homespun, underground fanzine all the way. If you heart Karen Dalton, you’ll heart this fanzine.

    You know what’s even better? The Karen Dalton documentary In My Own Time that was one of the very first films I saw in a theater after getting myself vaxxed & done. I’m not exaggerating when I saw that it’s one of my favorite music docs ever, right up there with The Decline of Western Civilization, Gimme Shelter, Be Here To Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt and Dig!. See it! Then buy that 1966 LP, and then offer me up your No Mag collection in exchange for It’s So Hard To Tell Who’s Going To Love You The Best #1 and we’ll talk!

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  • New Dezezes #2

    I’ve noticed in looking back at early punk fanzines that many of the youngsters writing for them had clearly been weaned on their daily paper’s gossip column, and therefore took this time-honored scandal-sheet form into their first writings. Quite a few fanzines loved to go with these “items” about who was dating whom; who was breaking up; who got drunk at a party; who got burned by a label and so on. Even the “scene reports” that clogged up MaximumRocknRoll eventually took some of this form.It’s even more fun, in 1977’s New Dezezes #2 (we talked about #1 here two days ago), to see just how either off-base and wrong, or prescient and predictive, so many of these “items” actually were. To wit:

    “Rat Scabies left THE DAMNED because of a rumoured suicide attempt and the band has decided to break up!”

    “The new CRIME drummer is McDonald’s employee HANK RANK – who has never played drums before”

    “David Braun, keyboard player for The Screamers, has been sacked and is now starting his on (sic) record label – DANGER HOUSE (sic)”

    “The Cramps drummer Miriam left & the band has since disbanded”

    “Penelope Houston got a chunk of her arm bitten off at a trendy DEVO party”

    “A new punk club called THE MASQUE has opened up in L.A.”

    Great stuff in ‘77! Jean Caffeine’s New Dezezes #2 has a color cover this time around as well as double the amount of staples (top left and top right!), but still insisted on printing on one side of paper only for about two-thirds of the pages, somehow switching gears every now & again and going big on “both sides”. Sometimes the pages are in landscape mode, others in portrait, and often hand-written or banged out on a clunky typewriter, as one did in those days.

    Given that Peter Urban was one of the prime movers on this magazine, and that he managed The Dils, it’s only right and natural that The Dils get a big feature in this one. The Dils were also a fantastic all-timer of a punk band, and their new 45 I Hate The Rich has just hit the stores. Yet the Paul Weller (The Jam) interview seems to take the tone & tenor of this thing down a bit. The Jam clearly toured the US earlier than I’d thought, and listen, The Jam were also one of my favorite bands in high school – more the “Going Underground” and “Down in the Tube Station at Midnight” Jam, not the snotty, punk-ish sounding 1977 Jam. I still like that stuff, but I always thought Weller was a boob and a terrible interview, just a huge chip on his shoulder at all times and someone who was really, really bad at being the “common man” he so very much wanted to be. Springsteen is better at that act for sure!

    Greg and Jimmy from The Avengers each get their own interviews in this one, and there are some cool photos of a new band called The Liars, who never recorded, but how about this – there’s terrific footage of them from 1978 right here on YouTube! (And while you’re at it, how about CRIME sounding like the Velvet Underground playing “Sweet Sister Ray”?). You know, the crowd from these days loved to whistle on about “the spirit of ‘77” long after those days were over, but all you need to do is watch those videos and the sheer joy of the crowds having a total ball – and then read a mag like New Dezezes #2 documenting it all in real time – and you’ll cut them some slack, when you’re not whining in your own head about missing it all because you were nine years old, like I always tend to do. 

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  • New Dezezes #1

    This is a now-legendary early San Francisco punk fanzine from 1977 (!) that I found somewhere about fifteen years ago, maybe at a record store or a yard sale or a church jumble, I honestly can’t remember. I’m delighted to have it, as it’s early, man – very, very early. The editor was Jean Caffeine, with heavy contributions from Peter Urban. Urban managed The Dils at this time, and is someone I connected with relatively recently when I did Dynamite Hemorrhage #8 and interviewed him about his ex-partner Caitlin Hines. Very magnanimous and helpful, and I appreciated his perspective greatly. The guy’s still very willing to talk about the scene, the old days and whatnot, as evidenced by this very recent clip. 

    New Dezezes #1 is stapled in the upper left corner and only printed on one side, like a pack of flyers assembled, collated and hurriedly stapled together. As DIY as it comes, as rushed as the torrent of music that was washing over these impressionable and young SF rebels. There’s loads of excitement over the fact that on commercial TV – the only kind we got back then, actually – “…the NBC Weekend show had a segment on punk rock and it was great. It showed the Sex Pistols live and in the studio….the punk club audiences were shown trashing the clubs and each other. (Lots of SF people must have been watching because the Mabuhay has suddenly gotten a lot more frantic)…..Unfortunately, actually seeing a glimpse of the English scene only whetted my appetite for more. FUCK the U.S.A.! I WANNA GO TO ENGLAND”.

    My understanding is that Caffeine stuck around San Francisco a bit longer and then moved to New York and became a member of Pulsallama, and then to Texas and became a “cow-punk”. Urban was around far longer and may actually still be in SF; he certainly gets back here (which is the city in which I live) often enough to participate in various punk rock anniversary hoo-hahs/nostalgia trips (all of which I love, of course). This is their earliest work, and it chooses its targets to celebrate wisely. There’s a form-fill interview with two members of Crime; a big rave-up by Peter Urban on The Screamers; and a good interview with a rambunctious Richie Detrick of The Nuns, where I learned that he was “Crazy Richie”, an early member of The Ramones, kicked out because he had a nervous breakdown (!). He also answers a very important question, “Do you think there are any new wave bands here?” (meaning San Francisco). His retort: “There are only 3. 1) NUNS 2) CRIME 3) AVENGERS. I don’t consider Mary Monday new wave. I don’t consider her nothin’. All these bands just hopped on a band wagon. You go to Mabuhay and there’s all these shit bands.”.

    This is also likely the earliest venue for the punk photos of James Stark, who’s now celebrated widely and wisely for same. (You can get his book here). And there’s a piece on Bobby Death of the band Skidmarx; Mr. Death never recorded with either this band nor his own Bobby Death Band, so this is kind of a rare treat of a guy who turns up sometimes in photos and old fanzines but who’s sort of a missing link between all the bands like Crime and The Nuns who did record. 

    Hey, one thing I’d recommend if you’re interested in the 1977+ San Francisco scene is this book about Mabuhay Gardens booker and fabled MC Dirk Dirkson called Shut Up You Animals!!! The Pope is Dead. A Remembrance of Dirk Dirksen: A History of the Mabuhay Gardens. The book itself is super sloppy and a bit half-baked (I think the copy editor may have been Will Shatter on a five-day heroin bender), but there’s a show-by-show overview of every show at the Mab from the first day they started booking punk to the very last day they had bands in the late 80s. It’s great! You can sit there and pick out a month, I don’t know, let’s say August 1978, and fantasize how just that month you could’ve seen Crime, The Bags, The Dils, The Flesh Eaters, The Weirdos, Negative Trend, Avengers, The Germs and so on. I mean, that’s the sort of thing I like to do, anyway. I guess if you’re Jean Caffeine and Peter Urban, you use it as a tally of where you likely were on any given night that month. We’ll talk about Issue #2 of this fanzine next time.

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