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(Originally written for Dynamite Hemorrhage fanzine #9). 

In the 1990s a California-based music fanzine called Great God Pan started an issue-by-issue transition from being ostensibly about independent rock music to being entirely “The Journal of Californiana”. It was a fanzine that looked like and was put together like a fanzine – and which took advertisements from the indie labels of the day – and yet was pretty much wholly about California and Pacific West lore, tall tales, explorations, and California- themed artwork by the time they wrapped it up in 2000. Editors Mark Sundeen and Eric Bluhm were car campers, western history nerds and lovers of the offbeat, deranged and strange. It occurred to me often while reading it that music was truly becoming a bill-paying afterthought for them with each passing issue, and I was very much okay with that at the time.

I caught the magazine about halfway through their transition, in the mid-1990s, and likely bought and devoured them all because I was both a Californian just starting to take edifying personal road trips across every freeway in the state, and because I was an underground rocknroll fiend who’d scarf up every decent fanzine on the rack. Yet it was only in 2020 that I decided to again crack open my stack of Great God Pans to see how they held up a couple of decades later. You may recall that you yourself had many evenings spent at home during the year of our lord 2020.

Many wonders revealed themselves again, and some for the very first time. In two issues of the magazine, Great God Pan #12 and #13, there lived three pieces each by a writer named Michael Fessier Jr. These pieces had originally been published in the Los Angeles Times’ Sunday magazine, West, during 1970 and 1971, as part of a 10-part exploration of the soul of an exceptionally impenetrable city called “L.A.: In Search of the City”. I got busy reading them, somewhat chagrined that unless my memory had totally failed me, I was doing so for the first time. I couldn’t believe how outstanding this guy’s prose was, nor how in-depth his travels to the far corners of this big, wide, unending city had taken him.

As he explained in the introduction to the as-then only partially underway series on February 22nd, 1970, “The author was not too sure of what he would do or who he would talk to, except that he would try very hard to avoid actors, hippies, noisy advocates of the Silent Majority and Timothy Leary. Certainly somebody else was out there.” He then explained to Great God Pan 28 years later that his actual target in doing the series was the Times itself: “the Times and my accumulated sense that outside movies, the Times, novels, and all the rest of it – there was this other L.A., totally unnoticed.”

This has also struck me about Los Angeles time and again. One turn off of a freeway, and you’re drifting through Pico Rivera, or Sylmar, or Altadena, or Montebello, or Lawndale. All of it Los Angeles, just as much as Wilshire Blvd. or Hollywood & Vine or Fairfax & Melrose. I’ve found myself in places like this for one reason or another, their own self- contained worlds off the 710 or 405 or 110, and just been like, “Wow….people live here.”. My pal Jerry used to take me around Los Angeles and Orange counties in the 1990s, and I was the gawking tourist who wanted to know about any & all regional differences between Buena Park and Santa Ana, between El Segundo and Hawthorne, between Orange and Anaheim.

Fessier’s writing about pockets of the city were absolutely revelatory to me, and I read and then re-read all six of the ten pieces that Great God Pan had been able to reprint. He doggedly interviewed hyper-local “characters” in each region he visited like a gumshoe detective, not to unravel a case but instead to make one: that this place, this Cudahy or Rustic Canyon or a skid row downtown street, this place is a place that matters to the people who live and work there.

The San Dimas piece in particular should have won a Pulitzer, such is the pathos and humor of the story. It’s the story of a 28-year-old man named Fred Blitstein who’s carpetbagged into the Inland Empire town to make a name for himself in civic improvement, with an eye toward transforming the decaying Bonita Avenue into an open- air “Early California” living museum. No one can quite figure out what “Early California” actually means, and can only point to older pictures of Bonita Avenue looking just as it does today by way of example. This disappoints Blitstein greatly, who desperately wants to do something exciting and memorable for San Dimas:

Blitstein was out showing me around in his trim, tangerine-colored Opel GT. “Southern California,” he was explaining, “is the land of the two-time loser. A pretty plastic facade. You push through it and there is nothing there.”

He had come to study in Southern California thinking it would be the nearest thing to his beloved Florida. The place of his imagination was the movie-poster one, all beach and sun and pretty girls. He was badly disappointed, and now believes that Southern California out-tinsels Florida five to one. He went to a conference of urban affairs people at the Hilton where the question of “What is Southern California?” was asked. Nobody had any answers. “Southern California is an abstraction,” said Blitstein. “You can’t tell what it is, even where it is.”

“Southern California is God’s test of man,” he said, whipping his car around corners so quickly I was feeling a little carsick.

Depending on how you look upon this time in Southern California, it’s either a far more innocent era than our own, or a part of post-Manson reckoning that was already ripping the city apart. The Manhattan Beach piece, about swingin’ mustachioed bachelors trying to party and get down with stewardesses, seems to split the difference. To me, 1970 seems, you know, like a long time ago, half a century even – and yet elements of Fessier Jr.’s Los Angeles are still instantly recognizable to this day.

The ten pieces in West were – by title and titular region:
●  “Growing Up in Cudahy” (Cudahy)
●  “In With The In  Crowd” (Manhattan Beach)
●  “Coming To The Canyon” (Rustic Canyon)
●  “The Pied Piper of San Dimas” (San Dimas)
●  “Portraits and People” (The Huntington Library in Pasadena)
●  “The Living End” (Downtown LA)
●  “The Gates of Rolling Hills” (Rolling Hills)
●  Title unknown – San Fernando Valley 1
●  Title unknown – San Fernando Valley 2
●  Title unknown – San Fernando Valley 3

“Title unknown” because I haven’t read them, nor found even references to them online, and not for lack of trying. Suitably impressed by what I did read (to say the least), I tracked down Great God Pan co- editor Mark Sundeen, whom I also learned subsequently went on to quite a writing and book-publishing career of his own. I let him know that my research uncovered that Fessier had passed away in Santa Barbara in 2014, at the age of 75, and I even had floated the idea of actually publishing these pieces in a book of my own, money permitting. Here’s what he told me:

Yeah, Fessier, wow. What a guy. I don’t think I knew he died. He was such a great writer, one of those Californians like John Fante or Leonard Gardner who had so much talent, such a unique West Coast way of seeing the world, but just didn’t figure out how to break through to a wide audience. I blame the fact that the publishing world sits on the East Coast but there were surely other factors. The way I remember meeting him is that he wrote a glowing review of Great God Pan in the LA Weekly, and we got in touch with him and he mentioned this piece he’d written decades earlier about Manhattan Beach, where we lived, and so of course we wanted to read it, and were blown away by it, and asked it we could reprint the series. I think we meant to keep publishing more, but we soon “retired.”

I personally would pitch in a few bucks to publish a book of his essays about LA from the early 70s. I think he really captured it better than say, Didion, because he really dove into the uncool places far from Hollywood. When I met him I was in grad school at USC and just discovering the New Journalists of the 70s like Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe and Didion and I thought/think he was as good as them.

I think he sent us old xeroxes of either his typed drafts or the West pages, and I typed them into the computer manually!

What’s exceptionally frustrating in this always-connected, everything documented era we live in is just how tough it can be to dig up printed materials from the past – and even to find people, say, Fessier Jr.’s two sons – who haven’t really left much of an internet presence, except for the fact that they appear to be alive and about my age. I didn’t know what I was going to ask them when I did find them, to be fair, but it was probably permission to compile all ten of these pieces into a book on my not-quite- launched vanity private press. Maybe I’d call it “L.A.: In Search of the City”! I suppose that costs money, and anyway, I can’t track these guys down, and that’s probably just as well. It’s the Los Angeles Times that likely owns the rights to the ten pieces, and I’m not ready to slug it out with Otis Chandler just yet.

Until that time comes, I merely wanted to illuminate the fact that this amazing trove of urban spelunking and writing exists, as Great God Pan also did, even if I’m not actually reprinting it so you can compare notes with me and all your Dynamite Hemorrhage– reading chums. I’d do what I can to grab copies of Great God Pan #12 and #13 if you’re at all interested in checking this stuff out, and hey, if you figure out how to work the microfiche machine, maybe we can take this Fessier Jr. project a step further together. 

(Postscript: not only did I make contact in 2022 with one of Fessier Jr.’s sons, who basically told me godspeed and thank you, more or less, I was bestowed with a treasure trove of Fessier Jr. scans from SL, who did know how to work the machines at his local library. I got to read the three San Fernando Valley pieces, but also a ton more of Fessier Jr.’s work in New West, the LA Weekly and other journalistic venues. Fantastic stuff, and makes me even hungrier to finance and publish that book.)

A terrifically robust fanzine subculture sprouted up around the great third wave of garage punk wave in the 1990s; you know, the one defined by bands like the Cheater Slicks, Supercharger and The Gories and by labels like In The Red, Crypt and Goner. Or, perhaps I should qualify and say that crew helped defined the first half of the nineties; there was also this additional berzerk blitzkrieg of loud-fast-raw garage punk in the decade’s second half that one might instead associate with an avalanche of Japanese bands; Rip Off Records, and some of the better material on labels like Estrus and Sympathy. 

The Europeans – they got in good during this latter stage, and were regularly importing American and Japanese bands over to tour, and were cranking out some of their own fine imitations & even a few moderately original variations. Everyone knows that if you’re a podunk North American band drawing 15 people a night in your own backyard, but you have Euro distribution and a small set of fans across the pond, you’ll be treated like pampered dukes & duchesses in places like Utrecht, Ghent, Madrid and Munich. 

It was also the Europeans who were producing the best garage punk fanzines of this era (aside from Eric Friedl’s Wipeout!, which we’ll come onto one of these days soon; Todd Killings’ Horizontal Action also made the grade) – well, at least I think so. Two Europeans, anyway. We already discussed Tom Arnaert’s Bazooka on this site. The other total ringer was Swede Henrik Olausson’s Human Garbage Disposal. I only have two issues, #4 and #5, and they’re small-batch, small-page-count, small-print expositions on the crude, feral and exciting world of garage-based punk sounds, 1960s-present. Not small-brained!

Olausson, like Arnaert, had a command of the English language that far outweighed that of most of my own countrymen, and unlike Arnaert, he was pretty fucking snotty and dismissive. Red lines were set and not crossed; the whole “turbo-charged” big rock sound of slobs like The Hellacopters and Turbonegro was verboten in this mag, except to mock mercilessly. No, Olausson had phenomenal taste, and even re-reading 1997’s Human Garbage Disposal #4 again last night, I was discovering stuff I missed back then, like a Spanish band with the dumb name Pretty Fuck Luck whom I then “googled” and found some ripping, underwater lo-fi garbage clang from. See, in ‘97 or ‘98 when I first had this magazine, you couldn’t just leap from print to digital to hear what you were reading about; even Napster and all that started later, and it took me a good four years to even try those services because I was petrified that I’d be served with a $20,000 cease-and-desist for downloading a Wire bootleg or something.

Human Garbage Disposal #4 is 12 pages of record, live and fanzine reviews, divided into “modern music” (with a great 1979 new wave font), 60s punk reissues and 70s punk/KBD stuff. There’s an explainer on Kinky Friedman (of Kinky Friedman and his Texas Jewboys), following up on something from the previous issue that I don’t own. So no – Olausson wasn’t necessarily bound by a commitment to rock at all costs. He praises the debut Demolition Doll Rods LP after saying “Their previous singles left a little more to desire”, one of which I actually helped put out (!). He and I actually part company there; I couldn’t find much to like about that band after their first single, and it all seems pretty stupid now, wouldn’t you agree? He does a great job eviscerating aspects of the Amphetamine Reptile label while laying it on thick for killer records by The Bassholes, Supercharger, the Murder Punk comps, the Urinals and then some. 

I don’t suppose that any of you out there know how I might get in touch with Henrik Olausson of Landskrona, Sweden, would you?

There’s really nothing that’s ever been like Los Angeles’ illustrious No Mag, before or since. Sired into this world by Bruce Kalberg, the magazine lived in defiant, outright violation of whatever common standards of “decency” were during its 1978-85 run, a run which happened to overlap beautifully with the flowering of the great Los Angeles punk rock underground. Some issues of No Magazine or No Mag may index heavier on music than this one – the local scene, if you will – but #10 is a great entrée into Kalberg’s crazed world of art, sex, blood, photography, violence, excretory functions, glamor and punk rock. I’d buy every single copy of this fantastic magazine’s fourteen-issue run if I could afford to – they’re quite “dear” and hard to find! – but thankfully they’re easily read online, thanks to the titanic efforts of Ryan Richardson and his Circulation Zero site. I’ve got three of them, and No Mag #10 is the one we’ll take a peek at.

You may have seen an episode or two of Peter Ivers’ early 80s late-night LA TV show New Wave Theater, right? No Mag was of that absurd, demented world, just with crisper execution and far better taste in music. This issue really does lean heavy on juxtaposing modern out-there art and photography with hammering home just how open-mindedly “free” Kalberg and his pals are about all things sexual, even going so far as to aggressively and obnoxiously try and get Kat Arthur of Legal Weapon to admit she’s gay. The cover you see here previews a couple of vixens whose “sex poetry”, I suppose you’d call it, is inside – one of the two women is a 22-year-old Suzanne Gardner, who’d later go to play guitar and sing for L7. I’m going to assume on the evidence presented herein she’d had a bit of a rough life up to that point.

Musically, we get interviews with Savage Republic; Michelle from Twisted Roots; Saccharine Trust; Voodoo Church; 3 of the 4 guys from Social Distortion (total boneheads) and Kat from Legal Weapon. There are no “serious” record reviews nor hot band alerts – but other issues do have these; this one has some long extrapolations on photographers and artists who are unknown to me, all told in Kalberg’s surreal style and paranoid prose. At times I get the sense that he is really tempting the censors as much as possible; this was the Reagan era and the backlash was fierce. Kalberg, like any grown adult who waddled & wallowed in excrement and filth and sexuality, comes off less as a truth-telling rebel forty years down the road, and more of a provocateur whose antics reflected a nihilism that seems pretty stunted & juvenile, rather than bold and powerful. I wonder if that’s how he felt about it all when he hit his fifties. 

That said, the best piece in here is The Mentors reviewing and grading all of the 1982-83’s newest, hottest punk rock and local new wave records from the likes of X, Black Flag, Circle Jerks, the Go-Gos, TSOL and so on. Everything gets either an “F” or an “F-Minus-Minus”, except for Fear, who get a D. The photo shoot accompanying their reviews shows the members of the Mentors either setting fire to, taking a dump on, knifing or otherwise defiling every one of the records in question. A real class act from a classy magazine!

If you’d like to get a sense of how Bruce Kalberg’s life ultimately turned out, you could do worse than to take a gander at this 2009 piece from the LA Weekly; slightly more forgiving is this obituary from 2011. Me, I’ll be happily wallowing in the No Mag mire as long as I live, especially if I can ever find those 11 issues of it I don’t own. 

At more or less the same time that Wiring Dept. was publishing the 1985 issue we recently combed through, another San Francisco Bay Area fanzine, BravEar #12, was making a similar pass at underground eclecticism, though far more “indie/college” than “sub-underground/fringe”. You could read the same magazines, covering the same general scene within the same four-month period, and come away from BravEar feeling that maybe the overall jig was up, and from Wiring Dept. that perhaps it was just getting started. 

This early 1986 issue probably gave me the impression I’ve long carried with me that the greater San Francisco music scene of this time was pretty beat. The Cat Heads. Yo. Angst. Faith No More. Vomit Launch. Short Dogs Grow. The final fumes of the Dead Kennedys. – and so on. All contradicted by last week’s romp through Wiring Dept. #3.

BravEar ensured that their remit traveled further than the local, Northern California scene, however, which is why this issue has an interview with a touring Cocteau Twins, after their one & only San Francisco show in 1985 – a show I happened to attend as a high schooler driving up from San Jose (!) – as well as talks with The Meat Puppets and the UK’s Poison Girls. Such was the de rigeur dreariness of an 80s San Francisco fanzine, however, that the whole magazine basically kicks off with a brain-erasing discussion centered around preventing nuclear war. Please. There’s also a column that briefly and weakly attempts to take down the then-Boston fanzine Forced Exposure, which at this point was my absolute favorite fanzine on the planet, so between the “peace creeps” peddling their peace BS and the editors choosing to hang their hats on an anti-FE platform, well – I knew with certitude in 1986 which such of the divide I’d be standing on.

But listen, that hasn’t kept me from hanging on to this issue since the day I bought it, probably at Rough Trade on 6th Street, back in 1986. It’s all done at a pretty high level of quality, such as it is, and the recently-passed D. Boon was placed on the cover, a “quality move” as they say. Here’s the real revelation, after coming back to this issue for a re-read just now after many, many years spent away from it: this issue is, in many ways, a Seymour Glass project. Yes! Seymour Glass, Charles Nielson, Earl Kuck, the future editor of Bananafish, the proprietor of Stomach Ache and Butte County Free Music Society labels, performer in Idiot (The) and The Glands of External Secretion. That guy. 

No, this isn’t his magazine, but he contributes the most copy in BravEar #12 by a country mile, and many of the folks surrounding him in this Berkeley publication are other Chico, CA stalwarts, including half of the aforementioned Vomit Launch and managing editor Rory Lions. Greg Freeman, later of Pell Mell, SF Seals, Virginia Dare and production credit on a ton of terrific records, is also a heavy hitter in this issue. Because Glass’s tastes and persona were so preposterously impenetrable later on, when he was writing Bananafish and championing the most horrific noise or whacked-out experimentalisms, I settled on the idea that this guy arrived to his outre tastes fully-formed – as if that were even possible, right? Nah, here he’s reviewing the Dead Kennedys and Beefeater and pop bands like 54-40 and he likes it all. An indie rocker, as go we all. I saw the guy at a “Gas Huffer” show once in the mid-90s and was like, “Did he show up on the wrong night?”. (Frankly, I’m not sure what I was doing there myself). 

BravEar soldiered through three more issues after this and while I bought them all when I saw them, and probably even learned a thing or two, the overriding feeling even then after reading one was annoyance. You can look at all the covers here, and that’s probably good enough.

Last time we talked about Sounds in this forum, we picked through an issue from exactly one year before this one, and admitted that no, this long-running weekly UK music tabloid was not a fanzine, but that it often read like one nonetheless. Sounds’ breadth was impressive and its tart & acidic writing quite entertaining as well, even if they sometimes read like a strange jumble of oi/UK82 punk, horrific mainstream acts, synth-pop, “The New Wave of British Heavy Metal”, gothy post-punk and homegrown reggae. 

A few brief things to say about this November 7th, 1981 issue. First of all, Clare Grogan was cute as a button. I don’t think you could pay me to listen to Altered Images again, but when I was 14 – i.e. when the cloying “Happy Birthday” was the #2 song in England, i.e. when this issue of Sounds came out and landed her band on the cover – well, I had a lot more patience for her baby voice and their bouncy, synthesized sounds.I stumbled upon an early 2000s TV documentary on Altered Images on YouTube and she was still bursting with charm and charisma, someone just made for pop music. John Peel sure thought so, and was the band’s #1 patron, the guy who basically took them from nowheresville, Scotland to where they’re residing at the time of this issue. Clare has much to say in the band’s interview about how she “just loves that man!”. 

Second, there is not a single journalistic byline anywhere in this issue. None. There’s no clue whatsoever which pundit wrote a 45 review, who did an interview, who savaged a Prince or Olivia Newton-John album, nothing. Why? All material was just by “Sounds”? It wasn’t always this way, for sure – I mean, I knew who Gary Bushell was in Sounds because he was the wound-up “oi” guy. British music journalists at this time often loved to put themselves at the center of any story. Perhaps it was because of this note found on Page 42, “Sounds apologies (sic) for the reduced size of this current edition and the omission of some regular features. These problems are due to industrial action by journalists.” Ah, the Thatcher era! I’ll bet that’s it. 

Well, really I bought this issue online a few years ago not because of Clare nor Depeche Mode nor Rod Stewart, but because there’s a full feature story on Chris D. and The Flesh Eaters – right before A Minute To Pray, a Second To Die has even come out. The Flesh Eaters really didn’t seem to translate overseas during their time, and until the reissues came out in the 21st century I had yet to met a European who really knew the band’s work – so really incongruous to see them here. The Flesh Eaters are actually called a “local celebrity supergroup barely known outside of LA county”. My guess: Slash Records wanted to get X and The Blasters heard in the UK. Part of some “deal”, perhaps brokered by Chris himself, was to get Sounds to feature The Flesh Eaters in a story. Who knows? The album still didn’t come out in England, but Chris tells the full saga of his band up through 1981, including the Tooth and Nail compilation, Upsetter Records, playing with Joe from The Eyes in his band and then some. If you can read it, I’ve got photos of it below here.

This is what we call an “all-timer”. No, not in the way that a Slash, a Forced Exposure, a Conflict or a No Mag might be, but an all-timer in the sense that if I were forced to hold on to only 25 of the fanzines in my collection, Flesh and Bones #6 just might make the cut; it made that much of a mark on me when I bought it in 1987. Its sensibilities were just goofy and mocking enough, and its tastes in modern sounds so aligned with mine at the time (Pussy Galore, Scratch Acid, Dinosaur et al), that I read, photocopied and shared wisdom from this issue as frequently and as far & wide as I could. Of course, its Tiger Beat/16 Magazine cover homage was well executed and really hit the spot for me at Age 19.

Editor “Jeffo” was coming out of hardcore, and as someone whose attention had been turned toward the long-haired punk and caustic underground noise of 1987, he mocked hardcore punk relentlessly, with frequent jokes about the Boston Crew, “Revolution Summer”, the Cro-Mags and Jodie Foster’s Army. He covered and reveled in “grunge” before it was grunge, while taking the best potshots at ’81-’82 HC and at heavy metal wasteoids I’ve ever seen. A lot of his live reviews were actually just made-up fantasies of getting in fistfights at gigs with people like Thurston Moore or Glen Danzig; stage-diving to mellow acts like Salem 66; and heckling multiple bands “with a Big Stick wig on” (remember Big Stick?). 

The graphics were all hilarious cut, pasted & jumbled items from other magazines, many of them from the hippie 1960s, as well as a few homegrown comics (mostly Jeffo’s) that were usually quite OK. An example of a typical graphics might have a lowbrow dildo advertisement placed on the left (“The Erecto”, “The Giant Bone”), with a strategically whited-out musical equipment ad saying “We’ll make that ___ of yours as big as Tommy Dorsey’s!” on the right.

Flesh and Bones also had a few staff photographers who took excellent band shots, usually of the modern acts with the longest, filthiest hair and the most thrift store-adjacent clothes (Raging Slab seemed to be a favorite, a band I don’t think I’ve heard anyone talk about since 1987). This was not a mag I really read as a consumer’s guide; it was one I celebrated because it was laugh-out-loud funny, and contrary to some quarters, I like to laff! The Redd Kross interview in Flesh and Bones #6 is right up there with my all-time favorite band interviews, ever, and the Dinosaur (Jr.) interview (beautifully hijacked by Thurston Moore, who also loves making fun of hardcore) is outstanding as well, considering how dour those guys typically were.

Jeffo also swelled with New Jersey pride, probably somewhat tongue-in-cheek, yet proud to represent the Garden State nonetheless. 1987-88 was an unusual time in the American underground, particularly when you look at the photos. Hair was long, metal wasn’t verboten and abrasiveness was a band’s ticket to ride, particularly if they wanted coverage in Flesh and Bones. I’ve searched in vain for copies of Flesh and Bones #1-#5 for years to no avail, getting only so far as photos here and here.

Damage was an upper-pantheon San Francisco punk tabloid that ran from 1979 through 1981. I have a few issues from their 13-issue run, and I’m always game to add more, especially after hearing the terrific interview Rock Writ podcast did with editor Brad Lapin recently, which you can listen to here. It wouldn’t be a stretch in the least to call it San Francisco’s “answer” to Los Angeles’ Slash and New York’s NY Rocker; other newsprint/tabloid gems from this general era include LA’s No Mag and Boston’s Take It! and Boston Rock. We’ll get to frolicking in all of this stuff in time, promise.

I’m always sort of bedeviled and a little bothered when I read some of these San Francisco-focused magazines, even Search & Destroy at times, as I continually find the focus on social politics boring, the art-school aesthetic pompous and pretentious, and many of the local musical mediocrities to be dull as dishwater. Damage #7 exemplifies much of this, exceptionally more so than other issues which I’ve enjoyed far more than this one. I don’t know, maybe catching “the scene” as the calendar was rolling over from mid-1980 to late 1980 is catching it all in a bad stretch, but there’s a sense here in #7 that it’s all a bit globally played out, and baby, you and I know that wasn’t the case.

Maybe it’s just San Francisco itself. Crime have just released their awful third single, “Gangster Funk / Maserati”, and the key members of the band have changed their names to “Frankie Valentino” and “Johnny St. John”. Some of the “new wave” artwork in the magazine follows suit, looking like Nagel paintings and reeking of cocaine. There’s a piece in here about “Trends: Pop Music”, which spotlights some of the Bay Area’s weakest nu-wavers and skinny-tie power poppers (No Sisters, Rubinoos) as pretty much the hottest thing going. And honestly, when you spend three big pages covering the Public Image Ltd. press conference, things are looking grim. 

So Damage #7 does what I’d have done to mitigate, and sends Amy Linden to interview The Cramps, who’ve just released Songs The Lord Taught Us, and puts Bruce Conner on a plane to Tokyo to cover the scene there. Anything but the moribund local scene depicted here. The Flipper interview, which is terrible, is very much to the contrary – but you wouldn’t have known it by the meandering discussion of punk’s past and present & absolutely no context for who this incredible band were and what sort of music they were playing. 

The magazine’s overall quality control just seems off this time. Later-period garbage records by Stiff Little Fingers and The Members get total raves, and someone thought it would be a good idea to interview The Dead Boys in 1980, after all of the band save Stiv Bators & Jimmy Zero had quit. You don’t get this sort of malarky from Slash in 1980, and even though there’s a great Peter Urban review picking apart X’s Los Angeles whilst enumerating his disappointments, I’d have probably found myself having a hard time trusting Damage as a tastemaker. Then again, I was 12 years old and would have been too scared to spend my dollar on this anyway.