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  • Zigzag #95

    These Zigzags from late 70s UK can be pretty illuminating on the 1979 state of the underground rock fandom and just how fast and furious and sideways new, exciting bands were hitting editor Kris Needs and the team. These folks had completely modified their approach to music once punk hit. It started as a straight rock magazine in 1969 – check out this 1976 Jefferson Starship cover, ugh! – and one year later, just about all of that was whooshed aside in favor of punk, pre-punk like The Stooges, any/all punk offshoots and – being that this was England and the punks loved reggae – some reggae as well.

    By July 1979, when this issue hit the local newsagent, it was clear that the magazine and its readers had started to codify their representative favorites. Zigzag #95 is totally packed with Siouxsie and the Banshees mania. Their reader’s poll has Siouxsie winning “Sexiest person”, “Best Dressed” and “Female Singer”, and the band taking #1 for “Best Single” (“Staircase”, easily one of their worst 45s) and the #2 slot for album (The Scream, their first), best group and best live group – all second to The Clash, I might add. It’s a recurring theme in 1979 fanzines in both the UK and the US, I have found – The Clash lord over all, even though it seems to me as though no one actually really loved Give ‘Em Enough Rope at the time. 

    Zigzag’s just had their tenth anniversary party, actually, and there’s a multi-page spread talking about how great it was. No, they didn’t invite Steve Hillage nor Be-Bop Deluxe nor Dr. Feelgood nor Marc Bolan, though the latter couldn’t make it anyway since he’d died two years earlier. But Siouxsie was there. Wayne County was totally there. The Clash and PiL were there. Were you there? Drop us a line if you were.

    Kris Needs does a “stop the press” review about how blown away he is by Public Image Ltd.’s “Death Disco” single (“frightening, monstrous dancing musik”), in fact. And I can say with a high degree of subjectivity and assurance 44 years later that it was the best thing PiL did and would ever do. The other new UK item the team at Zigzag are totally hopped up about are the Psychedelic Furs. Just as Kickboy Face in the United States and Slash would soon be calling the earliest incarnation of the band a “Velvet Underground / Roxy Music hybrid”, so too are those same influences thrown around by this magazine, along with Syd Barrett and Bolan himself. Well, now who wouldn’t be excited about that in 1979? 

    The thing is, I’ve always kinda liked the early Psychedelic Furs myself. They were a staple of KFJC, my college radio learning module, when I was coming of age in my San Jose, CA bedroom. The big hits on KFJC were “Sister Europe”, “Dumb Waiters” and “Pretty in Pink”, if I recall. This was at least two years before the latter song became the theme to a very popular teen movie, and catapulted the band to minor stardom. So reading these early Slash and Zigzag real-time appraisals of the band made me go back and listen to those first two albums, the self-titled one and Talk Talk Talk, and you know what? I get it. I completely get the excitement, and it sort of rekindled a respect for the band that I’d partially lost, so much so that my most recent Dynamite Hemorrhage Radio podcast plays a trio of songs to try to convince others that the FURS are h-o-t-t stuff. 

    Zigzag #95 shows further good taste and refinement by interviewing The Cramps, and furthering their desire to not be a cult band (Lux: “I consider us a totally commercial band. It’s just a matter of bending people our way.”), along with Switzerland’s Kleenex. Singer Regula Sing has just left the band, and the band are pissed about it. I think this was the catalyst for them turning into LiLiPut, right? Oh, and I think I may have been someone who once furthered something I don’t think is true any longer; Regula Sing did not go on to form The Mo-Dettes under the name Ramona Carlier, even though there are plenty of websites that say she did. I don’t believe the two of them look enough nor sound enough alike, and I’m gonna call bullshit on the whole thing right now, OK? 

    Destroy All Monsters and The Prats interviews, too! Good magazine, real good one, and I’m going to try and keep scooping more of them up where I can.

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  • Talk Talk (Vol. 3 No. 2 – 1981)

    Well this cover really makes you wanna kick out the fuckin’ jamz, doesn’t it? Talk Talk was a frequently-published, late 70s/early 80s “Midwest American Rock and Reggae Magazine” from Lawrence, KS. Lawrence gathered a bit of a counterculture halo effect over the years by being a cool college town plopped in the middle of Kansas, and particularly because William S Burroughs spent some quality time there. I’ve been to Lawrence a couple of times, and frankly, I loved the place. Easily one of the most liveable places in this country, vibrant & safe and with mostly decent weather, as long as you’re cool with being surrounded by college kids and cornfields and with having Kansas City as your nearest metropolis. 

    That’s maybe easier to say now than it was in 1981, a time in which records, news and trends moved much more slowly, particularly from the coasts to the dead-center of Midwest USA. Talk Talk Vol. 3 No. 2 has the feel of a place partially locked out of the cutting edge, such as it was, while being one still dying to take part regardless. You get this vibe sometimes in fanzines outside of NY, LA, SF and Chicago. They know that something’s happening, just that it’s somewhere else, and their ability to successfully separate wheat from chaff is often therefore a bit limited. 

    Like the record reviews in this one: Adam and The Ants and Black Flag are given roughly equivalent milquetoast reviews; in Black Flag’s case, for Damaged, “…Once you listen to their latest release, you might not really want to see them. Granted, this type of music is not for everyone.” That’s typical of the journalistic standards of most of the writing, but I definitely got a laugh out of the fact that the editor, Bill Rich, clearly laid down the law of the use of contractions. There’s nary a “don’t” nor a “can’t” nor a “let’s” anywhere in Talk Talk, but rather, “Let us”, “cannot” and so on. Strunk and White, call your office!

    Yet there’s still a real “college try” going on here to build a scene, and that’s worth admiring. Plenty of local bands are covered, including one I know and like: Get Smart!. I also dig the equivalent coverage given to reggae, even dub, such as Augustus Pablo’s Rockers Meet King Tubbys in a Firehouse, about which Hill says, “These people seem to meet everywhere”. I guess flexis were included with later issues; flexidiscs were huge in 1981, but the one from Abuse here seems to have gone missing in my copy. Thanks to ZNZ for including this as a special bonus in a shipment to me; he has a way of doing that, I’ve noticed, so you might wanna insist on some left-field or middle-of-America bonus next time you place an order there.

  • Wipeout! #7

    Always knew that Eric Friedl’s Wipeout! was one of my hands-down favorite reads of the 90s, yet cracking it again this week only reinforced what a total blast his fanzine was. I know that given Friedl’s subsequent stature as a member of The Oblivians and as the creator and proprietor of Goner Records, these early garage punk & noise-adjacent fanzines from him are quite “in demand”. I had to regrettably trade one away to a European just to get something I really needed from a guy, and now I feel like I’m the one who got totally rooked.

    I certainly remembered the sheer amount of wild and tip-top underground music content the guy shoved into each particular issue, but reading Wipeout! #7 from 1993, I’d also forgotten how absurdly chaotic an issue could be. Like Friedl says at several points in this mag: he’s really just into the music, he loves the music, and he doesn’t really care that much about what he’s writing nor what you think about it. So check out this Truman’s Water 45 review for a sense of how it all went down with this as his ethos:

    Though we don’t knead no stinking badges Truman’s Water frustrate the 7” fan by making their albums essential to understanding the short 7”ers, giving keys and subject headers to look up in individual research. So these spastics don’t obey, and throw “Sad Sailor Song” into epic areas and pretty without sentimentality or icky Ricardo beat (cha cha), wires are wiry and I hear the phone ring during the whole thing (a good sign!). 

    I get the first sentence; the second is about as wacked-out as the Truman’s Water singles themselves, and fairly representative of any given Friedl review, in this issue at least. One of Eric’s recurring loves in these magazines is what was going on in my part of the world in ‘93, San Francisco, which he mistakenly calls “The San Mateo Scene”: Mummies, Supercharger, Spoiled Brats, Phantom Surfers, Trashwomen and so on. He was even more up on it all than I was from his perch in Memphis, and I was seeing one or another of those bands literally every other weekend around that time. Here’s a letter to the editor in this issue, referencing some of Friedl’s mania from Wipeout #6:

    Eric,

      Mummies mummies mummies mummies mummies mummies, you’ll be swallowing shitrock hard when you realize it’s gonna sound as shitty in one year as 77 punk does now. I can’t wait.

    Cal

    Vanishing Rock, CO

    Took me another five/ten years to get there with The Mummies, but Supercharger still can’t be touched.

    Another big love is Japan – garage punk from Japan; noise; The Boredoms; surf, you name it. If it was raw and Japanese, Friedl was on it. And this one’s got an interview with Jeff Evans from ‘68 Comeback and The Gibson Bros, quite a bit better and more incisive than the one I did in Superdope #6 that same year. Friedl also documents a roadtrip to “Garageshock II” in Bellingham, WA, which you’d probably call a proto-Gonerfest from the early 90s that was pulled together by Dave Crider from Estrus Records. Many of this issue’s heroes performed at that Summer 1993 thing, and it sounds like something maybe I should have traveled up to see myself. I don’t know, I had my garage punk favorites at the time, but anything that strayed into “hot rod” or “monster rock” or novelty shit, I really had trouble with – so yeah, while I’d see The Cheater Slicks or Supercharger or Teengenerate or anything related to Don Howland, Jeff Evans or even Jon Spencer in a hot minute that year, I probably would’ve been moping into my Red Hook and doing my best to avoid the bowlcuts and the romulans and the drunken go-go bar girls at “Garageshock II”.

    Finally, this one came out when Eric’s own band The Oblivians were starting to move it into gear, putting out their killer debut 45 Call The Shots that same summer. Man, we were so overflowing with exceptional garage trash that year, weren’t we? I think that was THE year. Within a year or two The Oblivians would be touring in Europe, and Friedl only had two more Wipeout!s to give us before really devoting himself to Goner Records and his band. I’ve hung on to a few of ‘em, and I shall be dissecting them in time as this Fanzine Hemorrhage project proceeds accordingly.

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  • Breakfast Without Meat #13

    Gregg Turkington finally got something approaching his “due” – at least as it regards his pre-Neil Hamburger career of obtuse pranks, sonic terrorism and his left-field retro-cornball aesthetic – in the new Who Cares Anyway – Post-Punk San Francisco and the End of the Analog Age book. I supplied my thoughts on the book itself here. His true introduction to the world, such as it was, came in the pages of his and Lizzy Kate Grey’s 80s/90s fanzine Breakfast Without Meat. Derek Bostrom, of the Meat Puppets, was also a frequent contributor. We’re going to talk about Breakfast Without Meat #13 from 1990 here, as it’s the only issue of the mag that I own.

    I always admired those on the west coast and elsewhere whose favorite “punk” bands circa 1981-82 were Flipper and The Meat Puppets. They zeroed in on something that the rest of us didn’t about the total absurdity of hardcore. My cousin – who loved other, more true hardcore as well – was one of those, and he helped turn me on to a worldview that put these two bands at the top of some imaginary heap where comedy, nihilism, mockery and a total shitstorm of sound all work together beautifully. These were (among) Turkington’s heroes as well, and the book makes it clear that he was partially raised at Will Shatter’s knee, more or less. Shatter’s actually in this one, in a strange UFO graphic, and like I said, Bostrom has his thumbprints all over Breakfast Without Meat #13 as well, including his interviews with Hal Blaine and Tiny Tim!

    The Hal Blaine interview in particular is a gas, while also being quite illuminative about the 60s, session musicians and just how omnipresent Blaine and his Wrecking Crew were on so, so many sixties records. My favorite quote is vis-a-vis Dennis Wilson of The Beach Boys and how Blaine was the studio drummer on their recordings: “A lot of people ask me, didn’t the drummers of the groups hate it? Actually they didn’t, because as I’ve said in the past, when I was making thirty-five dollars for a session with the Beach Boys, Denny would be making thirty-five thousand somewhere. And that gave him time to surf, ride his motorcycle, and play with his boats during the day.”

    So that’s the relatively serious side of Breakfast Without Meat #13. Most of the remainder brings to bear the same sort of bizarro-world approach that characterized Great Phone Calls, Neil Hamburger and the Zip Code Rapists, like this “Top 20 of The Decade” – “for the decade ending Dec. 20, 1902”. Or “Gobo’s Breakfast Record Reviews”, which use a key in which you “match the codes listed after each title with its corresponding comment in the opposite column”, most of which savage the promo releases in question. 

    There’s even a preposterous in-person interview held by Grey and Turkington with “Tender Fury”, a horrible post-TSOL band with Jack Grisham whom I’d 100% forgotten even existed. They are mostly flummoxed by questions like “What book would you give a newborn baby?”, “You live in LA, who really killed Marilyn Monroe?” and “If the most popular person in high school had a locker next to yours, how long would it take you to introduce yourself?”, although, to their credit, they do try to answer everything in earnest. The ensuing conversation, even from a bunch of dullards, ends up being more entertaining than most anyone I’ve ever interviewed with my boring name/rank/serial number questions about their “music” and “influences” and whatnot.

    To my discredit, I passed up quite a few opportunities to buy issues of this when it was around the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 80s, and now I can’t go back to Rough Trade or Reckless or Aquarius Records to buy them. So yeah – if you’d like to make a trade or something, you’re more than welcome to check my fanzine want list, and if so, I’ll gladly share my fanzine have list with ya.

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  • Away From The Pulsebeat (Winter 1987)

    I know exactly where I was when this issue I’ve scanned and am writing about here first hit my hands in 1987: Aron’s Records in Los Angeles, a store I celebrated years ago in a very self-referential essay called “Let’s Go Record Shopping in 1987 Los Angeles”. And at that time, age 19 for me, a magazine like Away From The Pulsebeat was absolutely and totally in my proverbial wheelhouse, and I happily bought this one and the one that followed it, because I was a college radio dweeb and my favorite bands in the world were the Lazy Cowgirls, Pussy Galore, Scratch Acid, Soul Asylum, Big Black, Death of Samantha and similar other acts who were very much on the Pulsebeat wavelength.

    That said, this was a wavelength shared by many folks at the time, and though Away From The Pulsebeat was an ambitious, beautifully laid-out and photo-packed magazine, it truly was a “poor man’s” Forced Exposure, in the sense that it read like a tribute mag, sadly leavened with a bit of gross Your Flesh-style phony nihilism, the sort where a record review ends with something unnecessarily nasty and lame like “Bite it, boy”. There are really two sides to this Hoboken, NJ magazine; the written side, by Art Black, and the rock photography side, by Monica Dee. Dee’s side is phenomenal. She was a tremendous photographer, both posed and onstage, and the magazine liberally uses her originals, especially on a full-color back cover. There’s stuff of hers in here that I’ve never seen elsewhere, like this Pussy Galore shot, for instance. Why doesn’t Monica Dee also have a killer photo book like Marty Perez does?!??

    It’s Black who’s the weaker link here. I mean, his enthusiasms are fine, I guess – except the whole thing is enthusiasms. You’ve never seen someone encounter every single indie record of the year and find nearly every one of them a “major fave” (there are 3 reviews in this issue alone that end with those two words). It could be the Tuatara comp or a Dayglo Abortions LP, it’s all amazing. He even likes October Faction! Have you no shame, Art?? So unlike Forced Exposure, in which good taste and discernment were paramount, I could not – and did not – use this issue of Away From The Pulsebeat as any sort of consumer guide. How could I, with that October Faction review? Instead, he’d checkmark/confirm positive biases toward records I already had, like the Baby Astronauts’ All The Pancakes You Can Eat or Expando Brain’s Mother of God…, records that I thought that me & my pals were the only ones who knew about ‘em. 

    But listen, being upbeat and excited, even in what turned out to be a pretty “down period” for rocknroll, is probably better than being a Gloomy Gus, isn’t it? OK, so maybe it’s his sub-Peter Davis schtick that bugs me the most, re-reading this as I am 35+ years after having bought it. I don’t really like Black’s pretend (?) “I’m a racist” bit at the front of this issue, which carries on into the record reviews whenever he’s reviewing something by a group with black people in it. The interviews are okay, with the likes of Das Damen, The Nomads, Killdozer and the Celibate Rifles getting a few pages each. These were all very important people in my world in 1987, and as such, buying this issue was a no-brainer then. Yet I think it’s quite telling that I’ve barely thought of it since, and aside from Dee’s photos, think significantly less of it now.

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  • Bull Tongue Review #1

    After Forced Exposure wrapped it up in 1993, I had to make do with reading Byron Coley’s music writing work wherever I could track it down, even if that meant having to wade through Jay Babcock’s early 2000s Arthur periodical in order to find his & Thurston Moore’s joint “Bull Tongue” column. Man, that whole Arthur schtick really stuck in my craw at the time, and I vented my spleen here and here about it, though somewhat tongue-in-cheek in the latter instance (this was also when I was probably the most “right wing” I’ve ever been in my life, which then positioned me as a libertarian-leaning moderate Democrat).  

    Coley’s stuff was around if you looked for it – and I certainly did, as he was foremost in helping to shape my eventual musical environment, and was often a real laff to boot. Still is. A few years back, 2014 to be exact, he finally popped up with his own publication, Bull Tongue Review, “A Quarterly Journal of Post-Rock Cultural Pluralism”. They lasted five issues in total, with the conceit being that this magazine would be a significant extension of that Arthur column, the one where he and Moore got to prattle about favorite records, books and other pieces of sub-underground cultural ephemera. Coley even says so in the intro to Bull Tongue #1, at which point the two of them get right into it, reviewing Tim Warren’s latest Back From The Grave comps, Adele Bertei’s Peter Laughner book, a bunch of S-S Records, some wild jazz, and (gasp) even my own Dynamite Hemorrhage fanzine. These guys never really took ownership of their respective parts of each long column, which was kinda fun, though I think the “When I moved to NYC in late 76 at age 18 and was later in a band called The Coachmen” section was probably written by Thurston Moore.

    If their lengthy column was, in fact, the whole fanzine – hey, that’d be a really, really great fanzine! But wait, there’s more. Bull Tongue Review was an invite-only compendium of short pieces by the people from the greater Byron Coley universe: folks from the FE days like Suzy Rust, Steve Albini, Chris D and Tom Givan; and other tentacles extending outward into the underground to ensnare folks like Richard Meltzer, Joe Carducci, Lisa Carver, Gary Panter, Andrea Feldman, Brian Turner, Marc Masters, Donna Lethal and many more. (By the way – Donna Lethal is a tremendous and tremendously wacked-out writer; when I first corresponded with her she was going out with Chris D., and she told me about her indie-press memoir Milk of Amnesia, which was absolutely fantastic. I’ve lost touch with her). And even Coley’s wife Lili Dwight gets a turn, and she contributes a fine piece about those OXO Liquiseal travel mugs. 

    Each contributor gets 250-500 words or so to review something, to tell a story, write a poem or, in rare cases, to contribute some artwork. Most in Bull Tongue #1 review something, usually a record (!), and that’s all to the good – yet some of the other stuff’s even better, like when Alan Bishop relays a tale told to him by Human Hands’ David Wiley about the time he got a phone call in the early 80s to rush down to a friend’s house so he could drive the Sun Ra Arkestra to a Sizzler. Or when Chris D. reviews a bunch of modern neo-noir films. Or when Owen Maercks talks about what it was really like to hear The Ramones’ first album in 1975 for the first time – what a great piece. (It may not beat Steve Albini’s writing on the matter, though – I’ll never forget his description of him and his brother playing the first LP and laughing uproariously at it, yelling “this totally sucks!” at it, calling it the worst record ever, and then…at night…thinking about it incessantly and wondering if it was time for a life change). 

    Ted Lee, who still runs Feeding Tube Records with Coley, contributes the miniature artwork for each section. It’s a little jarring to have a record be reviewed, accompanied by a weird drawing rather than the album cover, but it’s their deal, not mine, and why not anyway, right? They did it this way four more times and I snapped them up as soon as I could. I keep hoping in vain that another Bull Tongue will make a surprise appearance sometime soon. It’s a terrific concept, and it’ll work well as long as some Coley-adjacent crew are the ones contributing.

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  • Sonic Death #5

    I’ve long had a hankering to own a copy of Thurston Moore’s multi-issue 80s fanzine Killer, but I’ve never seen the thing and don’t know anyone who has one (do you?). Sometimes I’ve gotten it confused with a 90s fanzine called Sonic Death, which is maybe a little more easy to come by but still often quite “dear” if you’re looking to trade money for one. I did it anyway. It’s a publication of the Sonic Youth Fan Club – there was, in fact, such a thing (!). And it’s 100% written by Thurston, Lee, Kim and Steve. How about that?

    Sonic Death #5 finds us in 1994. I was sort of following Sonic Youth at that point but I’d mostly tuned out; suffice to say I was not in the fan club. This was not due to any anti-SY stance on my part; I still maintain the September 28th, 1987 show of theirs at Borsodi’s Coffee House in Isla Vista, CA was one of the capital-G Great Nights of My Life. And maybe my second-favorite time I saw them of the 7-8 times I did was a year after this fanzine, a blowout performance on the Washing Machine tour in San Francisco, with The Amps and Bikini Kill opening. Tremendous band, but I was spoiled for choice in those years and when it came down to, say, High Rise, Dadamah and the Cheater Slicks vs. “Kool Thing”, I had my lines drawn when it came to my record-buying dollar, and was highly resistant to just about anything on a major label, including my previous independent favorites who’d grabbed at the brass ring. 

    This issue totally sucked me in with one of my favorite photos ever of the eternally perplexing Royal Trux from 1987; you can see Jennifer’s eyes, for one. There’s another one here. No other Royal Trux content graces Sonic Death #5 – a great fanzine move! Lee Renaldo writes a chatty and excited introduction and catches up the club w/ recent doings on the last day of 1993, talking about recent shows playing with Neil Young, Metallica, The Black Crowes and Faith No More, among many others. “I had to wonder at one point how we’d managed to get our foot in this door!”. Indeed. 

    Here’s what I love about these folks; this dumbfounded wide-eyed marveling gives immediate way to an interview with The Ex, followed by Thurston Moore going bananas with a few dozen reviews of far-underground 45s and LPs spanning from Keiji Haino to The Frumpies to Skinned Teen to The Shadow Ring to Merzbow to the Screamin’ Mee-Mees. The distance from MTV to PSF was really bridged by this band, and this band only. There’s a bunch of banter about the next album, xeroxed fan letters (including those screaming “sell out!”), and something pretty cool – “print-outs” of missives from the online Sonic Life mailing list, all from 1993. I don’t believe I really understood that there was something called an internet and that I could be on it until at least a year later, despite being 25 years old at that point; it was my late-fortysomething Mom who gave me the lowdown on chat rooms and America Online and all that, if you can believe it. I’ve written here about just how amazing it was to get “email” at work, which I and my favorite co-workers immediately used for pranks only. There was a Sonic Life listserv, and I didn’t even know about it.

    Sonic Death #5 is a sloppy and chaotic fanzine through and through, in the very best sense of both words. I’d have to think it introduced quite a few Fan Club members to an aesthetic and a revelatory “mode of seeing” that they’d never cottoned to before. Lucky for all of us, each issue of this fanzine is available to read right here and right now as a PDF, thanks to Sonic Youth themselves. Download them before they go away like that amazing Contextual Dissemination site did!

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  • Hexarc #1

    I’m always gunning for a new high-quality fanzine and it appears that Hexarc, by the looks of Issue #1, is shaping up to be just that. It’s from Delaware – “the first state” – and aside from famous exports Bettina Richards, Joe Biden and Dogfish Head beer, it’s the state I know perhaps the least about. Not for lack of trying, folks; I mean, I’ve been on a train that passed through Wilmington once, and every now and again I start thinking about buying a cheapo home on the Delaware coast, a place I’ve never been, and find myself mapping out Zillow locations and prices.

    But hey, to listen to Hexarc #1, the live music scene in Delaware’s been a bit lacking since the pandemic struck, while record stores and bookstores remain healthy. It’s a big concern for editor Max, who’s enthusiastically flying the flag for a new day in DE. I’m hoping he’ll see it. What I like most about this issue, though, is the great centerpiece interview with Pat Blashill, a longtime punk and indie photographer of much note, and a fella that some band in the 80s (Doctor’s Mob? Offenders? Offbeats?) wrote a song about that I cannot extricate from my head whenever I see his name. Blashill is the guy behind that very recent Texas is The Reason punk photo collection, and he proves to be a bountiful fount of both memory and knowledge about 1980s Texas punk freaks, from The Big Boys to Scratch Acid and with much in between.

    Hexarc #1 also celebrates The Big Boys a bit further beyond that piece, with a short essay, discography and multiple flyer reprints. Funny; they were actually a big favorite of mine late in the 80s; I even had the Fun Fun Fun and Where’s My Towel records, among others, the latter a bootleg that isn’t even listed on Discogs. Thinking I need to figure out where did my love go and give them all a big open-minded listen again.

    The fanzine is in great need of contributors like you, so if you want to get a line on how to write for ‘em (and how to get a copy of Hexarc #1), give Max a jingle over on Instagram at @hex.arc, or email him directly at hexarczine@gmail.com.

  • Throat Culture #2

    I had some vague sense of a “gonzo” rocknroll writer named Lester Bangs when I was growing up and becoming rock-savvy, yet I’d really never read anything by him until the 1987 publication of Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, a collection of his writings in Creem and elsewhere. I was excited to, though – by that time I knew he’d loudly championed both The Stooges and The Velvet Underground when exceptionally few were doing so, and I figured it’d be great to see what real-time early 70s writing about both bands might look like. I totally loved the book, as many did, and the cult of Bangs grew rapidly and much further from that point onward.

    In 1990 this “collectors’ edition” of a New Jersey fanzine called Throat Culture showed up on the racks, and was a no-brainer purchase at the then-normal price of $3.50. Editor Rob O’Connor and his fellow co-editors were pretty smitten with Bangs as well, and as they tell it, Throat Culture #2 was supposed to be a “normal” indie-rock fanzine until the Bangs mania totally took over, and they just decided to go all-Bangs this time around, for what ended up being their 2nd and final issue. 

    I gobbled it up once I bought it, and until last night, I hadn’t read it again. Since then I guess we had the Almost Famous film and Jim DeRogatis’ biography Let It Blurt, which I have read and very much enjoyed. But this Throat Culture mag has proved to be a key link in the Bangs chain! The editors’ mania ensured that they went down a number of Bangs-related rabbit holes, included talking to DeRogatis about his teenage meeting w/ the man (O’Connor’s piece even says “Jim DeRogatis, myself and no doubt less than a handful of others entertain the idea of writing Lester’s biography but that seems like a longshot, Who would care?”). 

    I guess at the time I totally bought into the “Lester Bangs was such a great writer that his pieces are more like literature than rock criticism” thing. I guess I still do today. I remember how eye-wateringly hilarious those Carburetor Dung things on The Godz, The Troggs and his Lou Reed interviews were. I also was a bit saddened, if chagrined, by the fact that this highly self-destructive, probably utterly depressed young-ish man medicated himself by guzzling cough syrup and alcohol by the bucket. There are numerous essays to that point in Throat Culture #2 from the folks that knew him best; childhood friend Roger Anderson; MC5 singer Rob Tyner; Joe Nick Patoski, Richard Reigel, Voidoids guitarist Ivan Julian; Creem co-founder Jaan Uhelszki and more. 

    The real killer, though, the pièce de résistance, is actually two pieces, both with Richard Meltzer involved. The first is Throat Culture’s reprint of his 1984 essay “Lester Bangs Recollected in Tranquility”, written two years after Bangs’ death. The San Diego Reader reprinted it later when the internet came along, so you can read it here, right now. Even better is a piece commissioned just for this fanzine, in which Meltzer and Nick Tosches turn on a tape recorder and start talking about Bangs – their memories, his shortcomings, his frailties, his incredible lust for life and encyclopedic knowledge of rock (and jazz), and much more. Many have been the times that I have found Meltzer to be quite absurd, pedantic, and/or too pleased with himself to consider him readable at all. These two fantastic pieces are not those times.

    It would also be foolish not to note that this magazine prints, for the first time, a “rejected” Bangs piece that the NY Rocker wouldn’t take, written about Sid Vicious’ death. I wonder, knowing what we all know now, just how much attention anyone would have paid to Vicious’ antics. I sometimes find it difficult to read about the Sex Pistols at all. So much of my so-called musical education was formed with them as the dominant example of “punk”, the band that had changed the world and so on – it’s hard to even contextualize those guys now due to over-familiarity. I’m also not all that hopped-up on their music, and never really have been. Anyway, it was a nice score by Throat Culture, and it was later reprinted in the second Bangs collection, Mainlines, Blood Feasts and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader in 2003. Man, I need to read that again too. 

    When I published my own Dynamite Hemorrhage #8 fanzine and made it all about Slash Magazine, I absolutely took my cues from this particular issue of Throat Culture. If they could subvert the dominant fanzine paradigm, so could I! I’m glad to have engorged my brain with the thing again last night. Keep an eye peeled for it if it turns up on resale sites, as it’s definitely a gem worth having.

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  • Teen Looch #8

    Look up “Great American” in the dictionary, and you’ll see a picture of Brian Turner right there in the definition. Try it now! Brian Turner is known to many far and wide as a radio “disc jockey” who spent many years leading music programming at WFMU, and who now hosts The Brian Turner Show through the medium of podcasting. He’s also a frequent writer of liner notes and magazine pieces, most recently in Creem and absolutely on any Fall reissues of note from the last decade. So of course it’s exciting for Fanzine Hemorrhage to embarrass him greatly by calling discrete attention to his early 1990s music fanzine Teen Looch #8.

    Now I haven’t seen any of the other seven issues of the ‘Looch, so all impressions of his fanzine are taken from perusing this one over the years. It came out in 1995 and I’ve had it ever since. Brian and I were clearly corresponding at the time – “letters”, we called them – because I submitted a Best of 1994 list for a collection of such lists in this issue. I wouldn’t come to break physical bread with Turner for another 8-9 more years after that, when he had left this issue’s publishing locale of Hudson, PA and was firmly ensconced in New York City. I actually had a pretty good job doing a big project for ESPN in the early/mid 2000s and was in the Big Apple pretty frequently, so that’s where we finally clinked glasses together and when I got to frantically rifle through his record collection.

    Teen Looch #8 has the same breadth and general eclecticism that has characterized the Brian Turner radio shows over the years; everything’s almost always picked with an eye either to the supremely off-beat (Harvey Sid Fisher, Esquivel, even Alan Licht) or the canonical (Moe Tucker and I suppose Stereolab). He actually interviews Mo! I suppose that was something you could easily do at one time; perhaps one still can. I’m personally partial to his Giant Sand interview, as that’s a band I was totally bananas for at the time and who were accurately characterized as an “acquired taste” by most folks. Turner finds out that he and band frontman & founder Howe Gelb have similar roots in Wilkes-Barre, PA and is therefore able to coax more natural, loose and normal conversation out of Gelb than I think I’ve seen in any other interview elsewhere. Giant Sand had just that year put out what I consider to be their masterpiece, Glum, so I was more than happy to give this interview another read-through to try and telepathically get on Gelb’s sonic wavelength from that time.

    I learned later on down the road that Turner also has a big diving/swimming/aquatics jones, and sure enough, he wasn’t afraid to document and explain it all in a piece included here called “For The Love of Aquatics”. Around this era the only time I’d allow any non-music portion of myself to be shared with the world in my own fanzine, I’d usually be yakking it up about how much I was drinking or maybe just what a rad libertarian I was – so it’s pretty refreshing to see someone of the same age and general elitist musical temperament writing about, “here’s how much I love to go swimming” instead. 

    Now the whole “Gyros!” thing on the cover – I truly have no idea what that’s about. I’ll wait for the eventual Teen Looch “book of books” to come out with Turner’s (or Byron Coley’s) explanatory intro.

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