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This would have come out just before the time that Jackie Ockene loaned me her big stack of Conflict mags over Spring Break 1986, along with about 10-12 other issues of Gerard Cosloy’s magazine that came out before this one. I didn’t go to South Padre Island or Cabo or Daytona, but rather to my parents’ house in San Jose to replenish my fluids and nutrition and read music mags for a week. Conflict overall is still hands-down one of the best fanzines I’ve ever read, and now that I have a few of them, it’s probably the year that his publication went from really great to really, really great. I’ve told Jackie many times that these and the Matter mags she loaned me that spring were sort of life-changers. One never knows what the inflection points are going to be that push their obsessions into new and better directions, but Spring ‘86 was definitely one of mine.

Unlike some of the other fanzine mirth-makers and court jesters whom we’ve discussed previously, Cosloy’s hijinks and shenanigans were actually quite funny, and yeah, “acerbic” to a fault – yet almost always right on the mark. I probably padded my record collection more with recommendations from Conflict around this time than any magazine save Forced Exposure. The guy’s taste was strong enough to wrap itself around pretty much anything worth paying attention to circa 1986, from whatever fumes of hardcore were still rising (Tar Babies!) to The Fall (“Except for Boxcar Willie, I can’t think of any other artists who’ve delivered with such vigor for so long”) to Big Stick (yeah!). Conflict hadn’t apparently come out in 18 months when this four-pages-with-a-corner-staple hit the street, so that meant he took 1985 off, moved from Boston to New York, and then finally started this thing up again.

Now I was personally a little nonplussed over the Lazy Cowgirls’ debut LP myself when it came out – the Chris D.-produced one that both the band and Chris D. have spent years apologizing for – but man, Cosloy just rips the thing to ribbons (“3rd-rate bar band slop” and so on). Pretty sure he – and anyone else nonplussed – changed his tune when Tapping The Source came out a year later. Love the 7 Seconds review, though. This band were such a deserved whipping boy, easily one of hardcore’s all-time lamest bands, and they’d sink to even lower lows as their career progressed. “If 7 Seconds were really interested in promoting positive interaction they’d be handing out spanish fly ‘stead of bothering us with the worst excuse for punk anywhere”. Spanish Fly!! Do any of you remember Spanish Fly? Did it work? Cosloy also likes Camper Van Beethoven’s Telephone-Free Landslide Victory. So do I. Terrific issue.

I reckoned I’d take this 1999 fanzine on when I saw just how “reminiscent” the cover was to Brian Berger’s 1992 Grace and Dignity issue that we talked about recently. A quote-unquote funny fake table of contents. Are you laughing? I’m totally laughing over here.

I remember getting an earlier issue of Cimarron Weekend in the mail from editors David Dunlap and Andrew Earles in ‘97 or ‘98 when I was living in Seattle. It was a nice surprise, and I’d been impressed & excited that they were as discerning about their garage punk and the more rock-leaning modern indie underground as I personally felt myself to be, and they had a bozo-like charm in basically making fun of everything in said worlds. Unlike Berger’s magazines, there wasn’t much viciousness to it, and clearly these guys, being from the South (Memphis), were having a lot of fun with the “southern friend boogie” bands of the 70s; your Black Oak Arkansas, your Little Feats and whatnot. Much modern stuff would find itself in their pages getting compared with Skynyrd, or the Allmans – and in the era of “Man’s Ruin” Records and some perplexing underground popularity for the newfound genre of stoner rock, it’s little wonder.

And though I’d forgotten about it, I contributed some reviews to the 1998 issue that came out before this one. How about that?

This particular small issue looks like a simple, free stopgap that came out after that one and before Issue #7. It’s pretty much all reviews: records, live and a couple films. I recall at the time that my generalized take on The Cimarron Weekend cut a couple of ways. I appreciated not merely their musical taste but how out on a limb they’d go to try to eviscerate modern indie music without making it too personal nor ugly. Sometimes it really was quite funny. I also felt that they tried waaaay too hard to wring yuks out of places where there weren’t any. One look at this cover and you’ll see what I mean. I recall that National Lampoon was a big influence for them, and clearly, Dunlap and Earles at times were very much going for that vibe: a straight-up humor mag. I just don’t think underground rock music is nor was anywhere near as hilarious as they seemed to think it might be. Better to take the Motorbooty approach and pick fat targets and then totally hit the bullseye, rather than target everything with a “spray & pray” approach.

Then again, I once sent an email to Henry Owings of Chunklet magazine – which took a similar approach – telling him that I’d laughed my ass off about something or another he’d published (I think it was these awesome fake indie rock tattoos they’d mocked up in an issue). He wrote me back and said he was cheered yet incredibly surprised, as he thought that perhaps I didn’t possess much of a sense of humor, and that I gave off the impression in my own fanzine of being rather, um, serious. So there you go!

At some point last year I was contentedly canoodling around at Green Apple Books in San Francisco, a place I find myself in maybe every 2-3 weeks for one reason or another. While I’d recently scored a few punk-infused Rock Scene mags there, Green Apple’s not generally a place to go looking for oddball zines or paper ephemera, but rather a serious used/new bookstore of much deserved renown. So imagine my surprise to stumble upon a near-complete run of San Francisco’s 1977-79 Search & Destroy magazine there, each selling for 15 dollars. Only limited by my available funds at the time, I was still able to procure seven of them, of which this Search & Destroy #6 was one.

One reason why I think Search & Destroy doesn’t get as much retroactive shrift nor generate as much overall slathering excitement as Slash does among us hoi polloi is because the mags themselves were already beautifully and rapidly compiled into those two Re/Search books in the mid-90s – every single word and image from the magazine’s 11-issue run. I bought and consumed them with extreme prejudice right when they came out. At that point, the mystery and scarcity of Search & Destroy and the relatively undocumented nature of the late 70s San Francisco punk underground was dissipated. The books got a great deal of play at the time; publisher V. Vale and his Re/Search imprint were flying high, as far as these things go. No question the magazine, which was just a tremendously well-done marker of the creativity, passion and rage rising from the subcultural sub-underground, has long been considered one of the all-time greats. It took this recent re-look to really confirm it for me again.

What Search & Destroy had even over Slash (to me, the single greatest underground music publication of all time) was its photographers, and their innate ability to capture the danger, wildness and raw power of the San Francisco Bay Area music scene. Ruby Ray, James Stark and Bruce Conner have been lauded in local galleries and their own books over time, but let’s laud them again here, because their photos in this issue alone were just incredible. When some of these later turned up in the early 80s Hardcore California book, they became my roadmap and totemistic items of longing for a scene I’d missed by being about seven years too young to participate. 

And yeah, LA’s late 70s punk & underground bands were better than San Francisco’s. It’s not really even close. But per capita – Los Angeles County had 7.35 million people in 1978, to San Francisco’s 700,000 – well, I think you can make a strong case that SF stands pretty proud on a per-capita basis with our Dils, UXA, Crime, Flipper, Avengers, Chrome, Tuxedomoon and so on! Search & Destroy #6 is not overtly, over-the-top politically frothing the way I’d remembered, and Jello Biafra is thankfully nowhere to be seen. The essay in support of striking coal miners around the world is right-on, and wow, if you contrast the high-octane urban SF punk scene of the 70s with what was going on at the exact same time in Barbara Koppel’s Harlan County USA documentary, it’s pretty jarring. 

The interview with David Thomas of Pere Ubu is particularly great, especially his pumping for Cleveland pals the Electric Eels and Johnny and the Dicks (!). Vale and the S&D team – as well as the city of San Francisco – were all over Throbbing Gristle from early on, and that’s quite clear here, with John Savage interviewing them in London:

S&D: Have you seen THE CLASH?

Genesis P-Orridge: No, I haven’t met them either, but I have doubts. From the design of their clothes – the Rauschenberg look – and from the fact that they’re a lot more sophisticated than they pretend – I think it’s dangerous for the kids.

I’ll never tire of the “great Clash debates” going on in underground publications at the time. And it’ll be a blast to really dig deeper into those other copies I’d procured one of these days, as – man – 27 years have passed since I last looked into these in those Re/Search books.

I suppose it wouldn’t come as much of a surprise to most folks if one were to posit that females, i.e. women, were generally not accorded a representative amount of space nor respect in the music fanzine world as it existed up until our current century. It was a pretty dudely endeavor for too many years there, with some very visible exceptions both in the UK and North America from the punk era forward, eventually leading to an empowered flowering of women-helmed and -defined music fanzines starting in the 1990s.

Making Waves was a four-issue cross-Atlantic collaboration between two women – Camille Lan in Paris and Mary Jane Regalado in Los Angeles. Camille – who truly has outstanding taste in low-fidelity post-punk music – did the Gunilla Mixtapes mp3 mix blog. I also just unearthed this more-recent show she had a hand in. Mary Jane, who later moved to Washington DC, was in a totally loopy LA band called Neonates whom I totally dug at the time – check this digital-only album out.

Their first Making Waves came out in 2011, and it’s sort of a record-corrector and light-shiner on a plethora of women who led bands, labels and scenes in different eras, from 70s punk onward. I made it a point to buy each of ‘em (there were four in total) as they hit the digital stores, especially after this classy first one, which featured an interview with all three Kleenex/LiLiPut members whilst still alive. Better still, it was the first time I’d read an interview with Stef Petticoat (of The Petticoats!), a true UK DIY hero who was barely recognized as such in most quarters until the last ten years or so, or maybe when Times New Viking covered one of her frantic songs (“Allergy”) a few years earlier. 

Alice Bag of The Bags talks about her upcoming book Violence Girl, and there’s a cool cover for it previewed in this mag that ended up not being the actual cover at all. Jeri Cain Rossi from Your Funeral gives the lowdown on the early 80s Denver scene and gets me all excited that she got to play with The Frantix and fuckin’ Bum Kon. “Debsy” from the Dolly Mixture gets a turn – and a whole lot more, not merely just 70s/80s stuff.

I also enjoy that they’re “perfect-bound”, which means that they’re like little novellas, with a spine and everything. The writers don’t fall into the keyboard warrior trap of spending an undue amount of time on jeremiads against the patriarchy – except when we deserve it, of course. The true emphasis is on quality sub-underground music and the women who made or make it.  If any of this is as interesting to you as it is to me, you’ll be happy to know that three of the four issues of Making Waves can still be purchased here. Easily one of the best fanzines of the past twenty years.

(Note: I just came across this post, a week after writing this thing, that has PDFs of all four Making Waves issues).

This is a pretty important one here at Fanzine Hemorrhage HQ: it’s the absolute very first fanzine I ever bought. Ripper was published in my then-hometown of San Jose, CA. I was just beginning the 10th grade in late 1982 and was just turning 15. Jon Grant and I would occasionally take a bus from our South San Jose neighborhood into the wilds of Campbell (where Tower Records was located) or, on this particular day, Los Gatos, to procure whatever alternative cultural totems we might be able to locate. 

It was quite the slog in an auto-dependent city; the bus – “County Transit” was an afterthought for most folks and was therefore scheduled accordingly. I remember on the day that I bought my first fanzine that we had to wait a good hour or so just for our transfer bus, both getting to Los Gatos and on the way back. Once we’d arrived, though, we went to Do Re Mi Records, and this is where I procured Ripper #4, as well as an early issue of Maximum RocknRoll (#3, which you can see pictured here….I recall being a bit confused about why the guy on the cover hated sports; I loved the Giants and the Niners and wasn’t sure if I was supposed to now hate sports as well). I didn’t buy any records, but totally devoured my new magazines on the long bus slog home.

Now this particular Ripper had come out at least a year earlier, but I was just so taken with the fact that there was a local punk magazine that I had to buy it. There may have been a little “danger” involved. Both mags that I bought were immediately stashed away at the bottom of a broken drawer in my bedroom to keep them away from prying parental eyes. It wasn’t so much that I’d get in trouble or anything, I just wanted to steer clear from any uncomfortable questions about my rapidly devolving music taste, while certainly wanting to feel like I could now be somehow part of the larger punk scene that I could absolutely feel and see all around me, especially on trips to San Francisco and Berkeley. 

Tim Tonooka was the editor and publisher, and by all accounts was a great American. I now have most of the other issues from his run, and it’s definitely one of the early 80s’ better punk fanzines for both breadth and especially for its original photos. He championed Black Flag quite heavily – who didn’t? – and also gave quite a boost to the San Jose and Peninsula punk bands, names you might or might not remember like Los Olividados, Social Unrest, Ribzy, The Faction, Executioner, The Drab and so on. I seem to recall that most of those bands got almost no truck with San Francisco/Berkeley punks, and that despite San Jose only being an hour’s drive from SF, it might as well have been a cowtown in the central valley for all the attention any local scene received outside of our own city limits.

Me, I was too young and mostly too chicken to go to those local shows anyway, so I missed some real corkers at VFW halls that would later be recounted in Ripper’s pages. This particular issue didn’t do a ton to turn me onto any new bands; the (California) Undead; Impatient Youth, No Alternative and the Red Rockers were all pretty weak tea, I’d come to find out, but there’s a good, brief X interview, some relaying of what sounded like a pretty tense local show by The Slits, and unfortunately quite a few pages on The Plasmatics, which even a teenage greenhorn like me could see was exceptionally lame.  

By far the most valuable service this issue provided me was this radio guide below, which I became obsessed with and thereupon used as my personal guide to the underground. The Sunday night “Guns on the Roof” show on Santa Clara’s KSCU; the Monday night “White Noise” show on KFJC and especially Tuesday nights with “Maximum Rocknroll” on the barely-received-in-San-Jose KPFA became absolute must-listens, and were hugely beneficial at expanding my world beyond the new wave & post-punk I was otherwise consuming. I never went full-bore hardcore then nor at any other time, but there was just so much incredibly wild and exciting music buzzing all around me, on the radio and in record stores and in the fanzines that I’d eventually start buying with every spare dollar. I was delirious for all of it. It could have been any mag, but this one just happens to be where the whole obsession began. 

Last post we took a gander at a fanzine called Crush from a fella named Brian Berger. If you’ll recall, I had much to praise about it after lodging any reservations. After Crush ceased its 4-issue run, he published a short series of single-issue fanzines (I guess you’d call them) more or less in the vein of Crush, with names like Constant Wonder and Strange Affair and this one, late 1992’s Grace and Dignity #1. 

Maybe I ought to read them all in order, since I haven’t looked at any of them in thirty years, but I can barely grasp what’s going on with this particular thing. Berger appears to be a little drunk on his own relative notoriety and looking to double down. He gets an Iowa City peer to write a paean to how good his writing is – seriously! – and then proceeds to reel off a ludicrous amount of non-sequiturs, in-jokes, literary references without context, and even a little goy-baiting just for fun. Is it a music fanzine? I suppose it is. 

If I’m to understand what’s happening here, Berger is married with a child, and lives in Iowa City, IA. It’s difficult to grasp and not all that interesting to me whether that was true or not. He attended South By Southwest in Austin, and writes up a bunch of show reviews here, ranging from The Mekons to Claw Hammer to Surgery to Beat Happening. Then he writes up a bunch of record reviews, most of which have fake unfunny titles (i.e. Unrest’s Imperial f.f.f.r. becomes Imperial f.a.g.s.) and which savage the respective contents of each. Clearly this was a boy who’s mostly done with indie rock, or who was at least pretending to be. I’ll hold onto this just for completist’s sake, but this might have been the issue where enfant terrible crossed over into straight-up terrible.

I’m certain there are some of you out there who might be able to tell us far more about this magazine’s editor Brian Berger than I can. Because of his relatively “confrontational” reviewing style and some intra-scene romantic dynamics involving him that supposedly went on in the early 1990s, I have a dim memory of Berger briefly being a person of interest among mostly East Coast fanzine-reading alterna-jerks. He published a range of single-issue zines under different names, but the one that seemed to be best-received by his undoubtedly exceptionally limited audience was Crush, the longest-lasting at three big issues, total.

I certainly can see why it was “popular”, and because I hadn’t really read this one through since I bought it in 1990, I was reminded of the Conflict fanzine imitators (Disaster, Crush) that followed in the wake of and concurrently with Gerard Cosloy’s fantastic fanzine, right down to the Courier font. Berger actually pretends to review an issue of Conflict here, saying,

“My biggest influence according to people who wish they knew what the fuck they were talking about. I’ve seen this magazine around but I don’t know what it’s about or who publishes it since I make it a rule not to read titles named after Crass-family bands.”

Even that sort of dismissive, pretend-not-to-know-what-you’re-talking-about thing was a trope straight out of Conflict itself. Well done, Brian! But wait – then he takes on Bill Callahan’s – yes, that Bill Callahan – Disaster fanzine right below that:

“Bill Callahan is one of those guys who has a “thing” for Lisa “Suckdog” Carver. In my mind that’s about as lame as being into John Wayne Gacy’s painting career, having all of last year’s Professional Bowling Association broadcasts in your video library, or wearing a Your Flesh t-shirt.”

Now that’s a bon mot I can appreciate, shoehorning both a Your Flesh and a Lisa Carver rip into a single sentence. Most of Crush #3 is record and live reviews by Berger, with an additional few of each by Alan Licht who, as it just so happens (!), also gets his band Love Child interviewed in here as well. Berger, it seems, was a Iowa college student from New Jersey back home for the summer at Mom & Dad’s while writing this thing, enmeshed in the NYC/NJ, CBGB/Maxwell’s live music social whirl. His reviews are mostly great, totally unafraid of the takedown & with pretty right-on music taste and an innate ability to separate wheat from chaff (the Big Chief reviews are especially tasty). He knows who the Hampton Grease Band are, he digs free jazz and especially loves David Allen Coe. It’s a true 1990 brain-dump from an over-the-top music obsessive who knows how to write, and write really well, at a pretty young age.

The biggest drawback is 21-year-old Brian’s wolfish and slathering questions for Rebecca Odes of Love Child, just straight-up talking about her breasts, suggesting on-stage nudity and so on right from the off. Like yeah – we get it – attractive woman in a rock band – but try a little subtlety, comrade! Hey, we’re all in our fifties now. I wonder if Berger still thinks that the “Ass Ponys” put out the single best record of 1990?

This 1994 LA-based fanzine was well-positioned at the center of beating heart of that “third great wave of punk rock” we were yammering on about in an earlier post. McKinley Richard, aka “Rich” as I somewhat knew him, and Sandra, aka “Super Sandra” for some reason, were a couple who also played together in the band Jackknife and ran the Star Fuck label, while also putting out this magazine. It’s as reverentially 1994 as it gets, complete with a rip-off of the Crypt Records font to pair with Jackknife’s bow–down-before-your-masters rip-off of much of Pussy Galore’s je nais se quoi. (And I totally dig that font, Jackknife and this magazine, so don’t let my gentle ribbin’ convince you otherwise).

‘94 was a great year to be young, drunk and going to garage punk shows, let me tell you. We had the Purple Onion here in San Francisco and a heaping helping of middling-to-great blitzoid garage punk bands in our city the previous few years, from Supercharger to Monoshock to The Brentwoods to the Dwarves to the Trashwomen to the Donnas. Rich and Sandra in LA had their own band and I reckon there was a smattering of other decent ones of their ilk in SoCal, yet the real action was spread across the USA, with the Cheater Slicks, Gories, Night Kings, Fireworks, ‘68 Comeback, Doo Rag, Bassholes and many others who were releasing top-notch 45s circa ‘91-’94, not all of it fast-n-loud but very much descended from the finest in stripped-down 50s, 60s and late 70s rocknroll. You can bathe in the scene and read about it in Eric Davidson’s excellent We Never Learn! book. And while we may sometimes pretend otherwise, everybody loved the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, myself included. I think I’d get ear cancer if I tried to listen to them in 2023.  

So Alright! #4 is living right at the nexus of all of this as it’s happening, with an onslaught of crazed records coming out plus an insane amount of live shows to wig out and lose one’s hearing at. The magazine is snotty, super-dismissive of alterna-rock (Jesus Lizard gets a nice raking over the coals, as does the city of Seattle) and is very much of its scene and of its time. I wasn’t particularly into Bratmobile while they were around (except for how incredibly magnanimous and forgiving they were when me and a few friends berated them w/ shouted Black Flag cover requests when they played SF’s Chameleon…and no, not “Slip It In”, I promise)  but I’ll give Rich & Sandra credit for championing the feral rawness of some of the “riot grrrl” bands, many of whom, like Bratmobile, have aged better with time. They capture the whole sick scene quite well, and you can capture a mighty and informative whiff of 1994’s garage punk ambiance by taking a journey through this one.

I don’t know if it’s “fair” to classify the monthly big-city punk/underground tabloids of the late 70s/early 80s – Slash, Damage, Boston Rock, Take It!, NY Rocker – as fanzines per se, but they certainly served the same purpose, often employed the same tastemakers, and were about as on-the-ground and in-the-clubs as any drooling fanzine impresario such as myself would be ten years later.

I’ve been slowly assembling a small collection of NY Rocker issues over the years. I never bought any when they were around, but I remember seeing them on sale at Rasputin’s Records in Berkeley when I was 14, probably right around the time this September 1982 issue came out. They’re more wide-ranging in both taste and remit than Slash was, and by the time the issues get to 1981 and 1982, there’s a great deal of positive coverage of “the new wave”, i.e. synthesizer-driven bands from England, coexisting quite uncomfortably right next to articles on strange American underground bands by Byron Coley and plenty of US hardcore 45 reviews. By this issue, it’s quite clear that if an act in question had “funny hair”, they were fit to be covered in the New York Rocker.

But oh, the on-the-spot treasures to be found here! There are photos of personal favorites of mine like Red Cross, Salvation Army and The Flesh Eaters that I’d never seen before. Byron Coley’s piece on Vox Pop and 45 Grave is tremendous (and hilarious) and goes a long way to explaining the mysteries of the former while helping re-illuminate the positives of the latter. Oliver Lake, who is the early 70s helped lead wild free jazz quintet The Black Artists Group, is by 1982 doing some sort of funky dance music called Jump Up, and he’s interviewed in this issue about it & his career to date. There are X and Richard Hell interviews; the former has just jumped to a major label and are touchy about it, and the latter has just released Destiny Street, and there’s much obfuscating and hemming & hawing about his drug usage and its effect on his ability to keep a band together. 

I reckon my two favorite things in here are two particular live reviews. One’s a Salvation Army/The Last/Bangs review by Coley. No one’s coined the term “paisley underground” yet, thankfully, but I’m especially pleased to see Coley so incredibly smitten by The Bangs – soon to be the Bangles. I wish I’d seen them around this time; I totally love their first single and EP and their all-encompassing adoration of The Byrds, Monkees and Mamas/Papas. 

The review that really takes the proverbial cake, however, is Don Howland’s relaying of the 1982 Loretta Lynn/Ernest Tubb concert at Veterans Memorial Auditorium in Columbus, OH. For those of you who know Howland from the work he’d later go on to do as a musician (Gibson Bros, Bassholes), he was also one of the finest and most subversively funny music writers ever to put pen to paper. Maybe he still is! To wit, some snippets from the show review:

“…Now Loretta attracts fans of all ages, from 3 to 103, and 10pm is bedtime for a good percentage of them, so glazed eyeballs were the order of the evening. And it looked like bedtime was a long time ago for show-opener Ernest Tubb. …He looked like a cross between a man who died a year ago and a man who died ten years ago.”

“…It was Ernest who introduced Loretta to the Opry stage a couple decades ago when she was still a timid little housewife. Woooo! ‘Little’ is still the word! What a shrimp! Those were my thoughts as the Coal Miner’s Daughter idled on stage after a brief intermission, belting out “If You’re Looking at Me, You’re Looking at Country”. I had imagined this idol of mine to stand about six-foot-six…..the whole sensation was a lot like the first time I saw Iggy up close – really.”

“…But the (song) I remember best was an homage to her Indian heritage (1/16th or 1/4th or something)” ‘Red, white and blue / Wa-oo, wa-oo, wa-oo / And proud of it too,’ set over some thumping tom riffage.”

Yeah. Get familiar with Don Howland as a writer if you’re able. I’ll take you through some other NY Rockers in this space at some point in the not-too-distant future.