Home

(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).

From where I’m sitting today , trying to recall the environment I was marinating in at 14 years old in 1982, it’s sort of unsettling to see Take It! #5 cover stars The Dead Kennedys, and reckon with just how unimportant they ended up being. I mean, at San Jose’s John Muir Junior High School in 1982, the two bands on every burgeoning punk’s lips were the Dead Kennedys and Black Flag. Black Flag and the Dead Kennedys. Even people who didn’t know who they were knew who they were. They were the big-deal punk bands, the scary punk bands that last year’s jocks and this year’s mohicans wrote in sharpie on their denim jackets and all over their pants & Pee-Chees. And everyone knew about “Holiday in Cambodia”, “California Uber Alles” and “Too Drunk To Fuck”. These were, as they say, the soundtrack to our lives. 

My first real “punk” show, in fact, was The Dead Kennedys, 7 Seconds and Whipping Boy at a sold-out Keystone Palo Alto. So yeah, pretty weird to see them pretty much persona non grata forty years later, a band barely remembered nor revered, yet mocked mercilessly by virtually everyone I know when they’re talked about at all. I blame Biafra – a self-aggrandizing turd who did everything possible to alienate 85% of the people who came in contact with him, then lawsuited his way into musical and historical oblivion. (I do suppose there’s a more charitable interpretation of the man and his career, and I’m open to hearing it). 

Anyway, Take It! #5 puts the Dead Kennedys on the cover – albeit a cartoon drawing of them – and on a flexi with the Angry Samoans and Flipper. Editor Michael Koenig talks about the six-month delay in getting this issue out, so now we’re definitely into 1982, finally. Highlight of the issue is – that’s right – Byron Coley with a big piece on Black Flag. This is right after “Henry Garfield” has joined the band, so there must have been a short period in LA in which he wasn’t called Rollins just yet. It’s a pretty exciting on-the-ground snapshot of a particularly important time in the band’s story – Garfield in; Damaged deemed an “anti-parent” record; LAPD taking over etc. 

Gerard Cosloy, who must’ve been all of 16 years old, contributes a list of his favorite tapes for the year, including NME C-81, Theater of Hate Live and The Future Looks Bright. He then goes on to write a paean to east coast hardcore, specifically fuckin’ SOA and Minor Threat. In fact, this is the first issue of Take It! that deals well with the onslaught of ‘core that was pouring out of all corners of the USA at this time. 

The Boston show reviews are broken out into single show reviews, rather than a column, and this time are by Koenig and Bill Tupper – but Tristam Lozaw thankfully still gets another full page to vent about Boston radio and everything wrong with it. Ira Kaplan does a nice takedown on Robert Christgau – a perennial article, written by many, that was all the rage for many years – and includes this nice quote comparing his obsessive grading compulsiveness with the scattershot gonzoid approach of Lester Bangs: “Not that they’re opposites – I plot Christgau and Bangs on a circle, one at 0° and the other at 360° – people who reach the same point by uniquely different routes.”

Other strong material: David Hild (The Girls) and Steve Stain, writing articles about each other. A short review of an Amos Poe film I’m not familiar with that stars Susan Tyrell from Fat City called Subway Riders – hey, sign me up! I dig Gregg Turner’s column this time, about fanzines and specifically Negative Army, put out by Mike Snider. (For what it’s worth, I could use any of your extra copies of this fanzine if you have them). I personally ran into Snider a few times at Lazy Cowgirls shows in LA later in this decade and we yukked it up together with Shane Williams, the now-deceased rocknroll bank robber of some repute. A story for another time (or, if you prefer, you can read my story about my encounters with Willams right here). 

There’s a sneering and pretty funny article about Nancy Spungen and a 1974 poem that she left behind, reprinted and showcasing her genius (I’ll spare you a second reprint). Peter Holsapple opines on the glory of the Go-Go’s, unaware, most likely, that they’d be the biggest band in the world a month or two from now. Tim Barry tongue-in-cheeks his way through a report on his trip to “Reggae Sunsplash” in Jamaica; Byron Coley writes on Bomp Records’ Battle of the Garages compilation with a prescient eye toward the 60s punk revival; Amy Linden takes on Flipper. And there’s just an incredible singles roundup from Coley, with reviews (among others) of The Cheifs, Panther Burns, Scritti Politti, Cordell Jackson, Glenn Danzig, Social Distortion, Kimberly Rew, The Meat Puppets and Fang. No, really!

This early 80s Los Angeles hardcore fanzine’s been rightly exalted for its place in the times, but revisiting this issue struck me just how flat-out DUMB it all was. I mean, don’t get me wrong – We Got Power #4 was about as down-the-center, pitch-perfect, bandanna-wearing, fists-flying, slam-your-ass-off 1982 LA HC as it got or ever got – yet it’s also incredibly, surprisingly teenage and comes across as super, super stupid. Even dumber than Touch & Go, and Touch & Go was pretty goddamn juvenile. And hey – that makes sense – editor Jordan Schwartz and his We Got Power-contributing pals were high school kids, and god love ‘em for it. 

This magazine proudly stands out from its peers for a couple of reasons. First of all, where We Got Power is concerned, hardcore punk rock is a total nonstop party, as opposed to serious business. The very first page of this issue is a collage of various young LA punks drinking, goofing, laughing and is simply captioned “Fun”. Jordan Schwartz, Dave Markey, Jennifer Schwartz and other WGP contributors strike me as fabled “latch key kids”, growing up in Santa Monica with little-to-no parental supervision, drinking, skating and going apeshit at every Black Flag, Bad Religion, Circle One, Descendents, Youth Brigade et al show they can turn up at – which is pretty much all of them, by the evidence presented herein. Their energy and extreme dedication to the ‘core is infectious and almost cute in its innocence. To contrast the vitality and excitement of 1982 LA punk with, say, what was going on in deadened LA “punk” four years later, when Markey would tour as a member of Painted Willie with a running-on-fumes Black Flag, is to wish time stopped in its tracks and you too could be stagediving to Circle One’s “Destroy Exxon” with Schwartz and his pals. 

We Got Power #4 also xeroxes in color pages along with black & white ones, and while it’s incredibly crudely typeset, it just reads better overall that your standard ‘82 hardcore slop-job. And it’s pretty much hardcore- and hardcore-adjacent bands only, so yeah, they’ll praise Red Cross and The Minutemen (who both played mostly hardcore shows at this point), while keeping away from the heavy, ultra-serious English UK82 punk and “oi” that was polluting so many young ears around this time. A typical record review isn’t going to get you particularly far, and might be about as developed as this review of the compilation Life Is Ugly So Why Not Kill Yourself: “Holy Moly, what a record, if you don’t like something on this record youre fucked up in your head.”

There are dopey interviews with Black Flag, Husker Du, Dead Kennedys, Minor Threat, Bad Religion and Suicidal Tendencies in this issue alone; quite possibly six of the ten most eventually beloved bands of this ilk of all time. Oh – and this is the exact magazine that started the rumor, still unconfirmed, that the Meat Puppets actually played a Phoenix gig in ‘82 in which they covered an entire side of The Decline of Western Civilization soundtrack, including the talking. (“That’s stupid, punk rock – I just think of it as rock and roll” and so on). I so, so want this to be true, and even better, for a tape to turn up. 

Perfect soundtrack for this issue would be Bad Religion’s How Could Hell Be Any Worse and/or the American Youth Report compilation that’d come out later that year. The following year, the We Got Power team would put this 40-song compilation out, one of the first HC records I ever bought and one that I helped form a “tribute band” for (full story here; photograph from our only gig here). And you can of course get this issue and all of their other issues in the deluxe We Got Power book for only twenty bucks here!

---

---

Some of my favorite record-collector nutballs are the 60s punk maniacs who organically coalesced in the 1980s to fanatically scream their allegiance to unheard, raw 1965-66 American teenage garage rockers, and to orgasmically scream their disallegiance to just about everything else. Their ranks were certainly best exemplified by Tim Warren, the Crypt Records impresario who started putting out the mind-blowing Back From The Grave compilation series in 1983, and who then tacitly started releasing the Garage Punk Unknowns records two years later. For what it’s worth, I interviewed Warren about all this in issue #2 of my own magazine, which you can download a PDF of here. Yet he was in no way alone, as an avalanche of illegitimate 60s punk compilations that flowed forth in the 80s very much proved.

For a certain class of these obsessives, it’s as though 1967 came around and music completely, totally, 100% was over. That’s pretty much the tack taken by issue #1 of Brown Paper Sack. It came out in 1997 and far as I can gather was the work of Andrew Brown, a Houston, TX gentleman who wouldn’t put out a 2nd issue of this thing. While 60s punk “scholarship” had advanced quite impressively over the previous fifteen years to that point, Brown is definitely working his angle, which is most definitively Texas and Louisiana-based garage punk music of the 60s. It just so happened that Texas probably gave the world the single best per-capita ratio of screaming 60s punk bands of any of the fifty states, and therefore there’s a ton to mine in this particular angle. Around the time of Brown Paper Sack #1, a German label was putting out reissue CDs of the early 80s Flashback compilation series, now called Texas Flashbacks, and this stuff was finally beginning to be heard by folks beyond 1966 Texas teens, including by me.

I happen to have an all-time favorite 60s punk song, and that favorite is “Born Loser” by Tyler, TX’s Murphy and The Mob. Aside from the kernels of information included in the Back From The Grave Volume Three insert, the only Murphy and The Mob information I know of is Brown Paper Sack’s single-page interview with Terry Murphy, the titular head of the band. Like many of the energized and bewildered teens that made these records, they aimed to make a “British Invasion”-style A-side that might be their hit 45, a la “Psychotic Reaction” or “Dirty Water”, and often would bang out some crude B-side in an hour or two as a throwaway. Those throwaways, of course, are often the stuff of legend, a la The Twilighters’ “Nothing Can Bring Me Down” or Murphy and The Mob’s “Born Loser”, confirmed in the latter instance by this interview.

Brown either feigns or genuinely adopts a pissed, dismissive tone toward anything & everything that stood in the way of these latent garage heroes, including promoters, radio people, and every other form of music, especially pop. It’s honestly what I totally love about these guys. The one true path was defined by The Roamin’ Togas, The Gaunga Dins, The Basement Wall and so on – and fuck everyone else.

Like Ugly Things, Brown ensures that his interviews don’t simply scratch the surface but rather get down into every friggin’ detail imaginable; I mean, while most of the participants in mid-60s punk would have only been in their late forties by the time Brown caught up with them, their availability and recollections were likely deemed to have been extremely elusive, so best to catch everything now and not wait for someone else to fail to do it later. 26 years later, i.e. when I’m writing this, those still alive are now in their mid-70s – so if you ever personally wanted to grill an American 60s garage punk original mover, now would be the time. Brown Paper Sack #1 is absolutely upper-echelon 60s punk scholarship, and I’d love to know if Andrew Brown kept up his mania in print elsewhere anytime after this.

That’s Drunken Fish #1 and only, as far as I’ve ever known. It’s one of the greats, especially if you really like records….and I do. This relatively small and limited magazine included a split 45 by Splintered and The Back Off Cupids, the latter of whom I believe were affiliated with “Rocket From The Crypt”. Yet if I ever had that record, I must have sold it decades ago, and I’ve thereby been left with a fantastic collector/accumulator/navel-gazer-centric sort of fanzine that I delightedly take for a personal spin every ten years or so. Today I’d like to tell you why.

Drunken Fish was published by Darren Mock in 1992. Those of you who were sentient and rooting around the underground in the 1990s know that he quickly turned his passions into a fine label that put out records & CDs by Bardo Pond, Roy Montgomery, Truman’s Water, Doo Rag, Lee Renaldo and all manner of other heavy hitters throughout that decade. That sort of commitment to wide-ranging, off-beat underground quality shines through in his magazine as well. I’ve revisited this issue often primarily because of Dave Stimson’s “Low Tech” piece, focused on seven of the rawest & most crude of total-genius 45s from the previous fifteen years: Mike Rep & The Quotas, O Rex, Screamin’ Mee-Mees, Tav Falco & The Panther Burns, Vertical Slit, Fuckin’ Flyin’ A-Heads and Solger. Solger! Anyone who wrote anything about Solger in 1992 was an instant hero to me. That single cannot be touched. I reserve a special ‘lil piece of my heart for the genre known as “shit-fi”, so this article was and remains solid gold.

I think this is also the magazine that got me to wake up and really pay attention to Lee Hazlewood for the first time. Once I got hooked on the guy I was all-in. Man, Hazlewood records were really tough to find for a while there! The original albums were going for way more than I could afford in the mid-90s, then all of a sudden these LHI Records CDs started showing up in stores late in the decade, and I snapped every one of them up. I thought they were bootlegs at the time. Anyway, Mark Sullivan of Adelphi, MD, who wrote this excellently comprehensive Hazlewood discography piece in Drunken Fish – please stand up and take a bow, right now. 

So you can likely already see the breadth & heft of this issue so far – but wait, there’s more. Mike Trouchon interviews loopy Englishman Simon Wickham-Smith, who’s living in Davis, CA while his girlfriend goes to UC-Davis (!). Johan Kugelberg covers various punk and noise rarities, and as in many of Kugelberg’s blathers, he pointlessly equates “rare” with “masterpiece”. I know that for years I’d chase down mp3s of material he’d raved about – i.e. records that he owned and that you didn’t – only to be forlorn, bereft and a little miffed that I’d spent precious time clicking & dragging when I could have been eating a hot dog or something. And Darren Mock himself pulls together a complete discography of Wales’ Fierce Recordings, who put out a Jesus & Mary Chain 45 that was just sounds from a “riot” at one of their shows (among many, many other things). 

It’s a real barn-burner over the course of its 24 pages. There are Discogs listings for the aforementioned record active as of this writing that actually include the ‘zine, if you’re interested!

My entire collection of Marc Masters’ 1990s Crank fanzine fell victim to “the great lost fanzine box” which we tearily recounted the tale of here. I’ve been slowly righting that wrong over the past few years, and the issue I was most excited to claw back was Crank #2 from Fall 1991, the one we’ll be discussing presently. I (thought I) remembered this one the clearest and had pinned it in my mind as his “San Francisco issue”, given the Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 and Seymour Glass interviews, yet there’s a bunch I was excited & surprised to rediscover after finally holding it in my grubby paws again, thirty-plus years after the fact & nearly 25 years since my copy went astray down the I-5.

My own fuckin’ name, for one – self-centered egomaniac that I am. See, around this time I’d started my own fanzine Superdope, and as a result of our respective complementary endeavors, Marc and I became pre-internet “pen pals”, I suppose you’d call us. Isn’t that nice? Both of us were mining somewhat similar quarries at this time in our fanzines, but Marc really took his music-writing chops from this point and ran far with them. From these humble beginnings, he’s since written the definitive book on no wave; been a key writer for Pitchfork, The Wire, Bandcamp and elsewhere; and now he’s even got a few podcasts going, the most recent of which is The Music Book Podcast, which I highly recommend. Back in ‘91 he called attention in his preamble to my own minor work, and I appreciated seeing and recalling it just now.  

But the dude inadvertently did me a much bigger solid in 2017 that snowballed into one of the coolest experiences of my life. Mind you, we’ve never spoken nor met in person, yet he did a piece late that year in The Wire’s Unofficial Channels column about my current fanzine Dynamite Hemorrhage. This directly led to The Wire’s editor Biba Kopf recommending me to take part in an all-expenses-paid speaking gig at The Tomorrow Festival in Shenzhen, China in 2018, where I got to ramble on about the history of music fanzines to a Chinese audience. Unlike Mark, I’ve never done anything remunerative with music writing, 100% by choice in my case, but this was as close as I’ve come and likely ever will come. An incredible stroke of fortune that I’m eternally grateful for.

Whew, so yeah, how can I be objective about Masters’ 1991 Washington DC-based fanzine, right? Well, I was a partisan for it from day one. A few things struck me on the re-read; first, I’d totally forgotten that there were two other excellent contributors, Heather Lieser and Dave Whelan, and the three of them split up the many reviews. Heather even has an entire page dedicated to her live reviews. She digs The Cannanes, and gets to opine on most of the DIY pop stuff in Crank #2. Dave seems to get about half of the noisier independent rock and some pop stuff, and Marc gets anything & everything out of the weirdo San Francisco scene, including Archipelago Brewing Company (he likes ‘em!), whom I’m proud to say I saw live once, and Caroliner, whom I’m not proud to say I saw more than once.

The Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 interview with Hugh Swarts was a really good one, as he hems and haws about how long he’s hated the name of his own band, and dishes a bit on how lame it was playing with Royal Trux at a 1991 Matador Records showcase at the 6th Street Rendezvous in San Francisco, a show I attended and which I actually thought Royal Trux never even showed up for; either that or I bailed out of the club at 1am rather than wait for them to set up (at that point I’d only heard Twin Infinitives and not the first album!). The mock Seymour Glass “interview” is a frustrating bit of self-aggrandizement disguised as self-sabotage that was both hard to read then and is even harder to comprehend now. Other than that, I like it. 

Today I associate Masters with his deep appreciation for and knowledge of more experimental and difficult music, and you can certainly see the seeds of all that taking root here. Yet, as his podcasts and other fine music writing show, there’s still a rocknroller out-of-controller lurking behind that digital pen. Now if I could just find Crank #1 and #3….do you know anyone who might be able to help?

It wasn’t but two months ago when we talked about a different issue of the Alright! fanzine (#4), put out in Los Angeles by Rich, a.k.a. McKinley Richard of the band Jackknife. Rich, he was in love & lust with the garage punk of the day, both as a practitioner and as a true fan. This small missive from 1992 spans a mere twelve pages but it’s a terrific snapshot of where much of my head was at the time, mainly gawping and gaping at Royal Trux, The Bassholes, ‘68 Comeback, the Cheater Slicks, the Blues Explosion and so on – though I never saw this magazine at the time & I can’t imagine any more than 50-100 of them were ever printed. I just got this copy in the mail from JS, who gifted it to me like a true mensch. We sincerely appreciate his generosity at Fanzine Hemorrhage!

Rich makes his swelling admiration for The Trashwomen’s Danielle known right from the off, and it got me digging through my own physical archives….yeah, I know there’s a picture somewhere….yes, there it is! Before any of us knew her as a musician, she danced go-go style for The Phantom Surfers and (I thought, but I’m probably wrong) The Mummies. It was likely 1991 when she was summoned over to our clan of idiots in order for Nicole Penegor to take this photo of her and myself.

Then a year later, she turned up in a new all-female trio called The Trashwomen, at first playing instrumental surf music only, and then adding tracks with vocals as they improved – and they did improve. I recall that they let Danielle – whom I’d never met before this photo was snapped, nor after – sing one song and one song only, and it was fingernails-on-chalkboard fantastic. She was later in The Brentwoods, and therefore lives forever in our hearts. 

Alright #2 is like watching an unfolding snapshot of the time we all first heard The Chrome Cranks; when the final Gibson Bros album came out, and when “Larry from In The Red” had young America’s ear. Or being able to nod knowingly when Royal Trux tells Rich that Matador gave them an advance for an album, but that they “inadvertently spent all the money”. Oh, snap! Does that all sound pretty inane to you? Yeah, it does to me too from this vantage point 31 years later, but there were some good times, some mighty good times, and Rich was right there on the front lines stirring the drink.

It may not be recorded in the history books, yet no one around this house will ever forget the tragedy of “the great lost fanzine box” in 1999. We had moved from Seattle back to San Francisco that year, and used the “Starving Students” moving company, who were neither students nor starving, but were rather clear ex-cons who at least, to their credit, liked to talk baseball with me. Otherwise they were total clowns, and I realized long after the fact that one of the 3 boxes of fanzines I had been collecting over the years didn’t end up getting delivered to the new rental house in San Francisco. Several of these fanzines were most certainly copies of Steve Erickson’s Cut, along with other gems that I’ve diligently worked to replace over the years (like the entire run of Marc Masters’ Crank), along with many copies of “The Bob” and things like that which I haven’t. 

This particular 11th issue of Cut came along in 1991, and it’s clear that Erickson had been pumping these out pretty aggressively, maybe about 3 per year based upon looking at his back issue contents that are listed on Page 1. He was publishing from Norwich, CT so his center of show-going gravity appeared to be Boston, and that’d make some sense given that he’s got Lou Barlow and Bob Fay along as contributors. Erickson notes in his intro that he’d just been burned to the tune of $60 by Circuit Records and distribution, which I recall being quite a fanzine cause célèbre at the time; it was a cool noise label w/ Monster Magnet and Surgery records as well as big plans for many more, and I guess the main guy there had some substance abuse problems (or something), and was ragged on pretty aggressively in things I’d read from that point onward. 

But hey man, out on the west coast things were mellow and we didn’t know any of these people. Cut in May 1991 very effectively serves as an exceptionally comprehensive inventory of any & all interesting underground rock music coming out at the time, with frequent review-section swerves into hip-hop as well. I was putting out my own first issues of Superdope fanzine this particular year, and this is totally a world I was deeply marinating in: Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, Monster Magnet, Pavement, Unsane, Terminals, Thee Mighty Caesars, Gibson Bros, Skullflower and so forth. Erickson makes a point in several places of being a little frustrated with the state of it all, and he’s clearly moved on from Amphetamine Reptile and Sub Pop bands, as had I. So he and I were compatriots, and the two of us probably would have had some good times shuckin’ and jivin’ in 1991. 

I did notice that in his review of Houston noise/psych/torture band The Pain Teens we get quite the proclamation: “The Pain Teens are one band who I’d unequivocally endorse as rock’n’roll’s future”. Jon Landau, call your office! I’m sorry to report here that the Pain Teens genre takeover was not to be. But how were we to know that then, am I right??

 Erickson was a strong writer who granted himself and his contributors a fairly wide remit, from precious indie pop to grinding noise. He was on the Xpressway train pretty early and gets in a Plagal Grind review and deservedly flips over The Terminals’ “Do The Void” 45. That single absolutely rules, and Erickson called it. He perhaps didn’t have to review every promo he was sent in 1991, but then again neither did I, and I reviewed a whole heapin’ helpin’ of mediocrities and said nothing interesting about them, for there was little to say. I’ll admit that getting a boatload of sub-underground records in the mail every day was a fantastic treat when I was 23 and broke and perhaps increasingly narcissistic (why, you want me to endorse you? Let me see what I can do). Anyway, Cut #11 brought the misty memories flooding back, and I’m glad I at least have this one issue still around. The Starving Students criminals are all currently reading the others.

When I started this site, waaaay back in late December 2022, I promised (or threatened) that the pieces herein might not actually be about the actual fanzine issues themselves, but rather would serve as a “jumping-off point” for me to write something else entirely….maybe a watery-eyed reminiscence, perhaps a funny ‘lil tale, or maybe a rant of some sort, provided I could get myself worked up enough about a dopey music fanzine to do so. So far I’d say I’ve done almost none of that, and my posts have been more name/rank/serial number reviews of each issue in question. I hope that’s okay. This post will be a little different and more in line with what I promised/threatened, though.

Slash, a punk magazine from Los Angeles circa 1977-80, is my all-time favorite fanzine. In 2020 I published an issue of my own fanzine, Dynamite Hemorrhage, 100% devoted to talking about and celebrating Slash magazine. The magazine went out of print within a year, but you can download and read a PDF of it right here. Meanwhile, I’ve been attempting to collect the full run of Slash over the years, and I guess I’m more than halfway there now. My most recent “acquisition” is the one you see here, Volume 2 Number 2 from November 1978. It has Siouxsie and The Banshees on the cover. It’s great. We’re not going to talk about it any longer.

Instead, I’d like to publish a short and previously unpublished 2020 interview I did with Terry Graham, aka Terry “Dad” Bag of The Bags, and later of The Gun Club (and for a time, The Cramps and the Leaving Trains). We talked solely about Slash magazine. 

I’d just read Graham’s book Punk Like Me, a crazed ride through his musical, relational and substance career, and I was in the midst of putting together the Slash issue of Dynamite Hemorrhage. It made sense to interview someone in one of the bands routinely featured in Slash, and I chose Mr. Graham. Alas, there was some sort of Google Docs communication snafu that was almost entirely my fault, and I went to “press” without Graham’s interview about his observations of and experiences with Slash magazine. I swore I’d publish it somewhere at some point, and here it is.

---

DH: What do you remember of the first time you came across an issue of Slash, and what was your reaction to it?

Terry Graham: I was very impressed. The large format and design quality gave a boost to our scene which was lacking in confidence because the punk scenes in New York and London were so well represented by numerous fanzines, magazines and national media attention.

DH: What were some of your personal interactions like with the magazine, as a member of The Bags, the Gun Club or otherwise?

Terry Graham: Slash printed an interview with the Bags with photos taken especially for the interview. That was a validating moment for the Bags. I had only been in the band for a few weeks and it gave us quite a boost.

DH: I’d love to get any anecdotes, stories, thoughts or whatever else you’ve got regarding each of the four Slash founders – one sentence, one paragraph, multiple paragraphs or nothing at all – your choice….

Claude Bessy?

Terry Graham: I didn’t know Claude too well but of course he was everywhere at once. Everyone liked him even though he could be quite irascible and cantankerous. His cynicism was always infused with a wry laugh and obvious sense of humor. His observations in Slash were spot on and added a much needed international perspective to what we were doing on the streets of L.A.

Philomena Winstanley, Steve Samiof, Melanie Nissen? 

Terry Graham: I had very little interaction with Philomena, Steve and Melanie.

DH: Do you have a favorite piece or story (or even a review or graphic element) from the magazine? If so, what was it and why?

Terry Graham: I’m afraid I’ll have to default to the Bags interview because it meant a lot to us and gave us a shot of confidence that we desperately needed.

DH: What impact do you think Slash had on the music scene that it covered, i.e. how was it perceived by the bands, artists and assorted weirdos in its pages – as well as by underground LA in general?

Terry Graham: In some ways it was perceived as a moneyed attempt to crash the scene. At the same time, because it was written primarily by people involved in the scene in some way (mostly musicians) it was also thought of as a genuine attempt to legitimize our efforts to create a viable and unique rock and roll for the time. It had a lot of influence and was looked up to as the publisher of record for the scene. Some may not admit that, but it carried quite a bit of legitimacy.

DH: What impact did it have on you?

Terry Graham: I enjoyed reading it but kept an eye out for signs of the dreaded “sell out.” We were all sensitive to people who might try to capitalize on the scene and so many of us were suspicious of people like Bob Biggs, Steve Samioff, etc., but for no real reason, in fact. Not sure one can capitalize on something that makes no money and barely made a dent in record sales charts or record company decisions. Culturally, I think Slash was a very positive force. Anyone who saw it, and particularly those who weren’t part of the punk scene, would be left with an impression of authority which, in turn, added the same to our scene. All of us together – with Slash and all the other fanzines – changed the world but it took a generation or so for that to happen. 

DH: Any thoughts on Jeffrey Lee Pierce’s contributions to Slash?

Terry Graham: I loved Jeff’s contributions. He was first and foremost a writer so I know he loved his work for Slash. I only wish he could have done a lot more. 

DH: Did Slash suffer from myopia by ignoring certain aspects of what was going on in greater LA circa 1977-80, or did you feel it was pretty representative of what was actually happening in clubs and elsewhere around the city?

Terry Graham: Yes, it genuinely represented our scene because so many of us who were actually creating the music, wrote for Slash. The graphic design and presentation within Slash were also very creative and artistic. It was truly representative of Los Angeles during those years.

DH: Any other thoughts or stories or opinions you’d like to share?

Terry Graham: No, but I sure wish I had kept all my copies. I still have one, with Lee Ving on the cover. That’s right, the one with the Bags interview.