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  • New York Rocker #4 (September 1976)

    I’d recently vowed in these pages to cobble together a ‘lil NY Rocker collection, and I’ve been making good on this important promise (to myself). Yet I’d never, ever seen any ones with this typeface, one of the first four mythical issues, in the wild – that is, until I came upon New York Rocker #4 and struck up a bargain with its seller at the 2025 San Francisco Art Book Fair. This 1975-76 era is one of my favorites for rock music writing due to its anticipatory excitement, with much undefined underground exploration in the air and on the fuckin’ streets, with absurd decadence and drug bottoming-out the norm. Nowhere was this more the case, of course, than in New York City. 

    I don’t really know a whole lot about cover star Cherry Vanilla, except that she was central to the first moment I ever become acquainted with “punk rock”, her famous “Lick Me” photo having been part of Time magazine’s July 11th, 1977 punk rock article that absolutely blew my mind and maybe scared me a little bit at the age of 9. Her interview here is sober, reflective and humble, and it’s a far cry from the she-devil harlot I’m sure imagined her to be when I saw that photo. Still not quite sure what she did in the grand social whirl of the time, though this bio is a start. This is followed by a Duncan Hannah photo sesh with Andy Warhol and Talking Heads at The Factory on May 26th, 1976, and then a terrific article & photos of John Cale at the Ocean Club in July ‘76, with one Lou Reed backing him up, and a hopped-up Patti Smith jumping on stage, unasked, multiple times to get involved.

    Hilly Kristal, CBGB proprietor, pens an article about his own Live at CBGB Vol.1 comp, with special praise for The Shirts, Tuff Darts and Mink De Ville. Me, I’m just glad that there was a band called The Shirts at one point in history. They look like total street rockers with matching white jumpsuit/pant combos – outstanding. There’s an exceptionally catty gossip column called “Pressed Lips” by Janis Cafasso, whom I understand may have been Johnny Thunders’ girlfriend at one point in time and features in various Dolls lore I found online. I wonder if she ever did illegal drugs? Her column is a gem – honestly, this sort of real-time lens into at-the-moment scene machinations is a far better history lesson than anyone’s dimly-remembered memoir. Here are a few of her insights from the Bicentennial summer:

    • “Where have all the groupies gone? Not much time from shaking go-go these days I guess. Money first, sex second. Tsk-tsk, calling Sable…”
    • “By the way, Richard Hell, the king of crinkle (somebody please find him an iron) has gotten a new group and now for some serious attempts at sound??? God loves all the bewildered beatniks!”
    • “Two nights in a row the Mael brothers, as in Ron and Russell, could be seen ogling little Tina of Talking Heads…”
    • “Can we please put Bobby Blane, the new Dolls organist in a straightjacket and nail his shoes to the stage so he doesn’t have to offend the audience with his mincing and peacock strutting. Best quote of the evening in reference to Bobby Blane was from Wayne County who said ‘I just loooove the Dolls new lead singer’. And that about sizes it up. Two Mick Jaggers in the same group is a bit much!!”. 

    Great stuff, am I right? Just for some context, the David Johansson-led final-wave of the NY Dolls were running on fumes at this point; Johnny Thunders’ Heartbreakers were reemerging in a big way; and Richard Hell’s “new band” talked about here, post-Television, would of course be Richard Hell & The Voidoids. 

    But wait, there’s more. Victor Bokris has a short story called Coffee Shop; he’d go on to write biographies of several of the folks we’ve already mentioned here. Milk & Cookies get very defensive: “We just don’t want to be known as a wimpy, trite pop band”; “We’re not the Bay City Rollers”; “There’s some meat to our songs”. You be the judge! By far the most interesting piece to me, after the gossip column, naturally, is the deep dive by Craig Gholson with Richard Lloyd of Television. He talks about some early Television songs he sang, like “What I Heard” (great!!!) and an “X-rated” one called “Hot Dog”. He talks about the break he took from the band “to straighten out some personal problems” (i.e. drug addiction). He speculates what might be on their upcoming debut album; “Kingdom Come” is discarded for being too long and “Double Exposure” for being too old. Titles, too, have been rejected: See No Evil and Repeatinginging (whew on that last one). 

    And more! Sneakers from North Carolina (Chris Stamey, Mitch Easter etc) get what I imagine was probably their first interview; The Runaways get a dopey one as well; there’s a great posed photo of The Heartbreakers, we get a wacky check-in with The Ramones, already olde-timers by this point but still with only that first LP out; and New York Rocker #4 closes up incongruously with Lance Loud’s paean to Robin Williamson of The Incredible String Band, mounting a comeback or whatever you’d want to call it with his “Merry Band” in New York City that month. What a time to be alive, the quote-unquote old struggling to stay relevant and the new struggling to be born, and everyone still under 35 years of age.

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  • Revolutionary Wanker #1

    I hadn’t known this free 1981 San Francisco xerox zine existed until alerted to it by the good folk at San Francisco’s Groove Merchant, who seems to get his hands on just about anything and everything interesting these days. What’s more, now that I’ve procured my own copy of Revolutionary Wanker #1, I come to find that it’s a “Creep Production”, backed by the one and only “Mickey Creep” of Creep. How about that?? The editors listed on the so-called masthead are Naomi Batya and Robin Lande, about whom I can turn up very little on the internet, unless this is the same Naomi Batya who wrote a Hebrew folk tune at age 14 and grew up in Mendocino County, just north of SF? The dates for a San Francisco punk rock rebellion line up well!

    This arrives at just the right epoch to document the uncomfortable gelling of hardcore punk and SF’s strange post-punk underground, the latter epitomized by Toiling Midgets and Flipper, and celebrated with relish in the Who Cares Anyway book. The Wounds, who played the 1981 Eastern Front fest in Berkeley’s Aquatic Park – the place that became my daily skip-work-early running route during the five years I worked in nearby Emeryville – with the aforementioned, are interviewed here. So are 7 Seconds. They were from Reno, and were basically children at this point, with no vinyl out yet and more shows in SF than in their hometown. They’d soon put out the Skins, Brains & Guts EP, with all-timers like “Racism Sucks” and “I Hate Sports”. Neither interview is particularly illuminating, and it stands to reason that the amount of intellectual effort expended toward Revolutionary Wanker #1 was measured by the monetary reward expected from it, which was quite little, given its price of $0.00.

    To wit, “Joan Moan” writes a piece about poseurs, and how they’re “destroying the ‘scene’ from inside-out”. This essay is thankfully leavened by a nice unexplained “Flipper Rules Fools” piece of graffiti next to it. Naomi Batya – who, given this evidence, couldn’t have been the one to write that Hebrew folk tune, provides a poem called “Most People”, that ends with this stanza:

    Most people I meet have fucking no brain
    No wonder they consider me fucking insane
    Believing what they’re taught that it’s wrong to use their head
    Most people I meet they might as well be dead.

    Holy shit! Drop the fucking mic, Naomi. The address listed for this one, presumably where Naomi wrote these words, is 41 29th Street in the Mission District, about two miles from where I’m sitting right now. I know this house. Here’s what it looks like today. This debut issue ends with an interview with “two anarchists in the Haight”, who’ve asked to remain anonymous. I guess there was a group at one point who called themselves Mindless Thugs who embarked upon a terror campaign against Haight Street merchants, in response to being called “mindless thugs” in the first place by local media. Or something like that. I really can’t understand the coded insider language of 1981 anarchists, to be fair. And I really don’t get the connection to Creep magazine at all for this thing.

    So, do I now need to own the other three issues of Revolutionary Wanker that came out after this? Is Ronald Reagan going to start World War III??? Of course I do. This is subcultural gold.

    (BREAKING: multiple sets of all four issues of Revolutionary Wanker are for sale right here, directly from the source)

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  • Hairy Hi-Fi #3

    Sometimes I get a little downhearted when I come to realize how much of the written, printed word of the 20th century will never be re-collected nor again adored by anyone beyond fanzine and magazine aficionados, or those willing to regularly pop open PDFs and read on a computer/iPad. I’m both of those things, but I know I’m part of a relatively tiny audience. I ache not merely for this major leakage of primal music journalism, but for all the “new journalism” of the 60s and 70s you won’t be reading; the film writing mostly lost to time; even the uncollected short fiction you’d find in literary journals, weekly magazines and mass-circulation monthlies. 

    If there was a market for it, I’d want to lead the charge to get all of it into new print editions, a series of my own, paid for by a major publisher. We’ll have to settle for the very few curators who actually do this, like Dian Hanson does for absurd men’s pin-up/girlie magazines of the 50s-70s. I myself have a small collection of these and they’re often a phenomenal window into male libido, male fear of women, and – at times – swashbuckling fiction or advocacy that’s often quite readable, if dated in the extreme. You can learn a great deal from issues of Rogue, Sir!, Dude, Adam, Stag, Man, Spree and Hi-Life, let me tell you.

    If I did something for music fanzines, I might put in the Moe Tucker interview from Hairy Hi-Fi #3, published in 1990 by John Bagnall in Durham, England. It’s exactly why I still want to read, and re-read, my old fanzines, and transmit my half-baked transmittals about them to you. This interview captures Moe as she’s come out of motherhood-driven seclusion and is now playing with Jad Fair and members of Half Japanese, touring the UK and coming to a reckoning with her Velvets past. To me, it’s an essential piece of Velvets ephemera. She’s still tight with Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison, and talks a bunch about coming across Velvets bootleg tapes and LPs at swap meets in the UK on this tour. She’s a little stupefied: “There’s one called Sweet Sister Ray that’s like four ‘Sister Ray’s!”. Interlocutor Marc Baines has to coach her to demand the tapes; she does, nicely, and gets a full armload to bring home.

    What’s funny about this piece in particular is just how much more Baines knows about her legacy and post-breakup Velvets ephemera than she does, so it’s a real treat to get her reaction. “They did??!?”. “He DOES??!?”. It makes me love her all the more. Hairy Hi-Fi #3, which to me reads like a psych-tinged cross between Galactic Zoo Dossier (mostly handwritten as well!) and late 80s Flesh and Bones (lots of comics and cut-out 60s hippies ads), adds in a great piece about Romulan Records – remember those? Following in the then-current tradition of excavatory bootleg labels with names like Strip and Link, they were best known for the Girls in the Garage comps, but released a slew of other wild vinyl comps of lost 60s stuff. This piece catches the label early in their run, and reviews everything that had come out to that point that Marc Baines could grab. It’s a true piece of fandom and obsession that I salute with gusto. 

    Elsewhere, there’s another fantastic interview present – this one with Eugene Chadbourne, a great talker and storyteller. This one needs to go in an anthology as well. The editors have severe mania for all things Shimmy-Disc and B.A.L.L., and follow the latter around England as they play various gigs, then learn after they leave that they’ve broken up, with members of the band joining Dinosaur Jr. (?). I remember this too, but can’t call up the particulars at all. Seems to me Dinosaur Jr. carried on just fine and mostly the same for years afterward. There are also interviews with Laughing Soup Dish and Walkingseeds, about whom I remember a bit more, but whom I haughtily dismissed for the most part. We had Pussy Galore and the Lazy Cowgirls and Mudhoney and the Laughing Hyenas and World of Pooh and The Dwarves active and raring at the time, and that’s precisely where my head was.

    Hairy Hi-Fi #3 doesn’t really rise to the occasion reviews-wise, since most everything is “great”, and we all know that’s not true. It’s those interviews that makes this a superlative read and a highly welcome piece of reference material I’ll hang onto for at least another decade or two, before I unleash the entire fanzine archive onto eBay or magnanimously give them to Penelope Houston’s punk room at the San Francisco Public Library.

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  • Puncture #9

    When all the dust clears, when all the debates are finished, when all the fists stop flying – what will you say was the best San Francisco music fanzine of the second half of the 1980s? I feel like the contenders were probably BravEar, Wiring Dept and Puncture, right? Unless I’m forgetting someone. These three fanzines were the most adventurous in terms of traversing the wider underground and going deep where necessary, and yet all three suffered a bit for their overtly sleeve-wearing left wing politics, and for pandering a bit too heavily to quote-unquote college rock at times. But listen, I did myself at the time, no question. That’s why I still own copies of all these mags that I bought during 1984-87. I think it’s probably a pretty easy call at the end of the day: Wiring Dept, then BravEar, then Puncture. 

    Said the guy who’s here to talk about Puncture #9 from Spring 1985! We’re not talking about Forced Exposure or Conflict levels of quality, taste and information here – those east coast zines really set the standard during this period in my unforgiving eyes. I mostly like Puncture, though, and I believe the value-for-cost quotient you’ll get from this book of their first six issues is pretty high, at a mere $14.95 a pop. Patty Stirling was really the main driver behind this one, and of all of the fanzine’s first, I don’t know, 10 or 11 issues? Then it really did become a true alterna/indie/Lollapalooza abomination that I don’t think she had anything to do with. (Although looking at these covers, any fanzine with a “Remembering Flipper” article couldn’t have been too hideous). 

    In the rado update that kicks the thing off, it talks about how Ray Farrell is leaving the Bay Area and KPFA to go work at SST in LA. Weren’t we just talking about that guy? The interview with Test Dept is quite standoffish and a little pretentious, and yet I actually come away admiring these UK proto-industrial performance art freaks and maybe wanting to see if I might like them 40 years later. Sure, it’s fine. It brings KFJC’s Mark Darms and his Industrial Report radio show from those years screaming back to life for me, which is great. The thing in here on the Violent Femmes isn’t too annoying, either – you have to remember, that second album of theirs, the one where frontman Gordan Gano “found Jesus”, was not received well by the frat boys who partied their asses off to “Blister in the Sun” and “Add It Up”, but there’s some love for it here, along with Gano’s religious side project The Mercy Seat, which I guess I never heard, because I absolutely loathed the Violent Femmes. 

    Aaaaaaaah and there’s a review of Husker Du / Minutemen / Meat Puppets (no Saccharine Trust or Swa??) from The Stone in San Francisco, 3/1/1985. This was SST’s celebrated “The Tour”, and a show that took place here and at the Keystone Palo Alto the night before. It was my senior year of high school, and my friends weren’t really cottoning to the American underground the way I was, so I didn’t go despite really wanting to. San Jose State’s station KSJS was playing Double Nickels on the Dime and New Day Rising incessantly; Palo Alto was a mere 30 minute drive from my home in San Jose, and my parents were definitely in the “we don’t care what you do” phase of my youth. But go to a show by myself, at age 17? Absolutely not, out of sheer embarrassment and introversion. So I ended up never seeing The Minutemen, Husker Du nor Saccharine Trust. It is no consolation whatsoever that I did, in fact, see SWA live on stage several years later.

    There are great pics of Sonic Youth from a 1/14/85 show at The I-Beam, and kudos to Patty Stirling for finding a way to compare them to both Hex Enduction Hour-era Fall and The Stooges. She also contributes a fantastically ludicrous meathead drawing of an ultra-buffed Henry Rollins to her Black Flag reviews. Other reviews abound of the Cocteau Twins, Billy Bragg, Aztec Camera, Rank and File, Einstruzende Neubauten, This Mortal Coil and all that SST stuff – this was 1984/85 to me at the time, and from my vantage point of Gunderson High School in San Jose and especially from my bedroom’s clock radio, it was “magic hour”. I couldn’t have been more excited about music, and I had so much still to learn. (I still do). I would renounce virtually all of it in the year to come, once I got to college, except for those SST bands and my newly-discovered Homestead and Touch & Go heroes, and all that blitzing hardcore I’d been too chicken and/or broke to actively buy circa 1982-83. Now I can go back and very much enjoy the Cocteau Twins and This Mortal Coil, as well as a few others whom I never strayed from, such as Siouxsie and the Banshees – still a Fanzine Hemorrhage favorite to this day. Listen!

    I guess Puncture ended up capturing the time better than I thought. I mean, here’s this issue’s back cover, pictured. Flipper! I suspect this is where I stole a thing I did in my own Dynamite Hemorrhage fanzines of putting a band photo of someone not even talked about in the issue on the back cover, then letting readers guess who it is. Let’s go Wiring Dept/Puncture/BravEar, then. What say you? What high-quality Bay Area fanzines am I missing from this time?

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  • Twist & Shout #2

    When punk first hit North American consciousness in 1977, I get the picture that unless you were living in New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco, or perhaps Seattle and Cleveland, the records you were coming across in stores and were hearing on late-nite “new wave” radio programs were almost entirely English in nature. This 1977 Montreal fanzine, Twist & Shout #2, certainly aspires to be Anglocentric in the extreme; or, whether it aspires to be or not, it most certainly is. Canada is part of the queen’s commonwealth, of course, but just based on the features and records reviewed here, it feels a lot like a Canadian version of Trouser Press, who were proud Anglophiles, and/or one informed very much by Britain’s own Zigzag. 

    Nothing wrong with that, of course! If you were desperate for raw and wild rocknroll and all you could find were Cortinas and Boys and Johnny Moped records, of course you’d be going for it. In fact, Twist & Shout is one of many “searching for real rock and roll” fanzines from the 1974-77 time period, written by young men and sometimes women, desperate for raw guitar and who were starting to blend newly-arrived punk into whatever was considered frenzied, urgent and/or “street level” beforehand. Although, I must say Twist & Shout really stretches the concept, as we’ll discover.

    Like a few of these ‘76-‘77 mags, such as Chatterbox and Radio Free Hollywood, there’s a continued allegiance to “hard rock” writ large even as punk is crashing upon their shores, and more power to them for it. The first interview is with Sean Tyla from Ducks Deluxe and Tyla Gang, the latter of whom were a boogie/proto-punk hybrid of sorts and fit in nicely with this mag’s aesthetic. I suppose so do Ultravox, a brand-new UK band on Island. John Foxx is interviewed. That rollicking ‘77 version of the band, as many well know, bears virtually no relation to the Ultravox many new wavers came to know and love only 3 years later. 

    Pat Travers – the “Boom Boom Out Goes The Lights” guy??!? – does get some ink due to being Canadian, and for being a fine boogie lickmeister besides. And I love the interview with Terry Wilson Slesser, a class-A prima donna from the UK band Crawler, formerly known as Back Street Crawler. I’ve never heard of them. “Then we went to Kansas to open for Roxy Music. With our rock and blues approach we literally blew Roxy off-stage”. He then talks about guys in his band named “Sniffy” (wonder how many snowstorms that guy had to instigate to get that nickname!) and “Rabbit”. After the death of Crawler guitarist Paul Kossoff, it appears that Atlantic Records were trying to get them a new guitarist, and Mick Taylor from the Rolling Stones was suggested by the label. “I said Mick Taylor ain’t going to join Back Street Crawler. He joined the Stones after Brian Jones’ death; can you imagine him joining us after the death of Paul Kossoff? I did call him up and we got together and got pissed drunk, but there was no way he was going to join”. He then talks about how they might be going out on tour to support Kansas, one of the no-doubt worst bands of all time (and absolutely legendary hair farmers – please click the link), and how awesome that would be. So no, I really didn’t need to hear Crawler. But I listened anyway, and if you want to, you can too.

    There are, in fact, a fair amount of interviews with Englishmen in Twist & Shout #2. We’ve got chats with Eddie and The Hot Rods, The Vibrators, Judas Priest (!!), Heavy Metal Kids (they’re extremely concerned about whether or not they’ll be able to “make it in the States” – spoiler: they didn’t); plus Mr. Big, David Essex and Goddo. Punk explosion! There’s also a minimal discography of all the known (to the editors) 1977 punk 45s so far – or, really, as they put it: “Various artists considered new wave or punk”. This includes Ultravox, The Stranglers and of course everything on Stiff and Raw Records (the latter of which was one of the great UK punk labels for sure). There’s absolute slavish worship of the newly released Never Mind The Bollocks (“album of the decade”, “people will worship this the way they worshipped The Beatles in 1964” etc), as well as reviews of Brownsville Station, Meatloaf, Ian Dury, Motorhead, Boomtown Rats and even that Raw Records Creation “Making Time” 45, something that I proudly used to own and somehow don’t any longer.

    Finally, we get a mention of the only true Canadian punk in the issue: The Viletones’ debut Screamin’ Fist 45, reviewed by John Kearney: “This is Toronto’s answer to punk. They are The Viletones. Isn’t that name just right for a punk band and aren’t those titles fab. Just listen to the names of the guys in the band: Dog, Chris Hate, Freddy Pompeii, Motor X. It’s all there: the group name, the titles, the guys’ names in the band, the great picture sleeve, even the music, it’s pure punk. The only problem with it all is that it’s bloody awful. It shows that the best packaging etc. can’t replace talent”. This is about as withering, spiteful and worked up as a Canadian can get, I reckon. Aren’t they just the nicest folks?

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  • Sound Choice #8

    Before we dig in here, a little history of how Sound Choice fanzine came to be, before I’ll spoil everything with some incredibly self-aggrandizing prattle about my minor role in this particular concern.

    So there was OP magazine for the first half of the 80s, published by John Foster out of Olympia, WA. We’ve written about that excellent mag here and here. It then split into two new fanzines. As per Wikipedia: “OPtion, along with Sound Choice, were the dual successors to the earlier music magazine OP, published by John Foster and the Lost Music Network and known for its diverse scope and the role it played in providing publicity to DIY musicians in the midst of the cassette culture. When Foster ended OP after only twenty-six issues, he held a conference, offering the magazine’s resources to parties interested in carrying on; attendant journalist David Ciaffardini went on to start Sound Choice, while Scott Becker, alongside Richie Unterberger, founded Option. Whereas Sound Choice was described as a low-budget and “chaotic” publication in spirit, Option was characterized as a “profit making operation” right at the start, meant to compete with the newly founded Spin.”

    Which is precisely why, circa 1987, I had never bought a copy of Option. Never owned one later either, I guess. Sound Choice hadn’t really shown up on my radar, except as something I’d seen in stores, as it was pretty well-distributed. But cassettes, tape art, “audio evolution”? No thanks, amigo. However, one time when I was doing a 2-6am substitute radio show at KCSB-FM in Santa Barbara during my college years, I met the DJs who came on before me, and it was a couple of the fellas from Sound Choice, including editor Ciaffardini,  who lived “just down the road” in Ojai. 

    We got to talking, and wouldn’t you know it, within a couple of months I was hoofing it south on the 101 to Ojai a couple of times a week after college classes, in order to serve as Sound Choice’s one and only “intern”. I’d sort (and abscond with) many promo records; I’d answer correspondence; I’d chase down subscribers for renewals, and completed many other tasks assigned to me upon arrival. One time I even called up Ray Farrell at SST Records to talk about getting their ads submitted, and was nervous as hell – that dude was on the fucking Maximum Rocknroll Radio show!! Soon enough Ciaffardini made me “Managing Editor”, I think in the issue after Sound Choice #8. Then, not even a year later, when I stopped coming regularly, he had me listed as “Vanishing Editor” in the issue that followed that one. 

    For what it’s worth, Ciaffardini was an incredibly nice guy: a highly driven, self-effacing, pot-smoking, chaotic and supremely independent nice guy with a mellow hippie temperament, who took me under his wing and gave me exposure to something cool that I’d never have experienced otherwise. He had a girlfriend named Eileen, a (to me) “older woman” who might have been at most 35 years old at the time, and whom I was secretly smitten with. When I stopped coming around, it was about the time Dave’s KCSB program ended as well, so I’m not sure that I ever saw him in the flesh again after 1988. Only a couple of years ago did we even make any sort of electronic mail contact.

    Sound Choice #8 came out in May/June 1987, and features The Butthole Surfers on the cover, from their show at the Oxnard Skate Palace that year that I’ve previously talked about here. It also includes action photos of fuckin’ Blast! and SNFU from this other Skate Palace show, which I also attended. The magazine is the proverbial “hodgepodge” – a tumultuous cacophony of fonts, font sizes, advertisements, short articles, long manifestos and an ungodly amount of reviews. In addition, there are several incredibly unfunny comics; things on underground radio and “audio drama”, a Culturcide interview, a piece on Master/Slave Relationship (a woman named Debbie Jaffe who dressed scantily and did psycho/sexual performance art); and SST ads everywhere, like 8 pages of them, no lie. Nothing that I’d sold, however – that came later. The magazine’s cacophony is mostly to its credit, and it makes for much to uncover and dissect within the tiny type.

    Oh, and there’s a real nice letter from Lisa Fancher of Frontier Records, who’d perhaps been taken to task in an earlier issue for being too major label-adjacent, and perhaps for not paying artists (I’m too lazy to see if I have Sound Choice #7 to look at it): “Would you care to produce someone who hasn’t been paid by me, fuckhead? You suggesting that I bend for anyone, even as a figure of speech, will land you a punch in the mouth next time I have the misfortune of hearing you blather at some function where everyone is dreading running into you”. She then concludes perhaps a little tartly with “Go fuck a dead dog”. Oh dear. Ciaffardini apologizes. He never told me if Fancher ever actually popped him in the mouth at a banquet or social gathering in subsequent months.

    There’s also a piece by a guy whom we know about now, but didn’t then – Randy Russell from Kent, OH. He was in the excellent band Moonlove, and here he talks about the magic of tapes and how he first heard the Dream Syndicate. Shane Williams contributes “Growing Up Absurd: Confessions of a Dope Addict Rock Fiend”, and thankfully it’s one of the few coherent pieces he ever put together. And yeah, the reviews section is the most bountiful one I have ever seen this side of Butt Rag, but it generally lacks the authority, tastemaking and writing chops to be anything more than words on a page. Yes, this is very much true of the ones I wrote for this same fanzine at age 19/20 in subsequent issues as well. Don’t look them up – you won’t like them.

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  • Summer Salt #3

    A period of lengthy inactivity on this site by me should not generally be held as any indication of any lack of enthusiasm for continuing to write here, but rather a reflection of the need to satiate other interests. And, if I’m being really honest, to unfortunately grieve the too-early passing of my wife, best friend and 31-year love of my life, Rebecca, this past April. Cancer. It’s bullshit. She was the best. 

    Yeah, I’ve written several posts here since she left us – I guess the most recent four? – and that, in its own way, is cathartic for me. As weird as that might seem. There’s no right way to grieve, they tell me, and I’ve found myself processing it all in every way imaginable, a process that likely has no real end until my own. At the same time, I feel it’s pretty disingenuous to pretend like everything in my life’s totally cool and returned to normal in weeks, so I’m just blurting out the main reason why my “posting schedule” is perhaps a bit more uneven than it’s been in the past. Since this site is just as much my chance to selfishly insert myself into the narrative of these fanzines as it is a celebration of the fanzines themselves, well – I suppose it’d be strange to not mention it. There shall be feasts and there shall be famines, but I strongly believe that Fanzine Hemorrhage will continue to be a thing for the foreseeable future. Isn’t that wonderful for us all??

    So anyway. Here’s a pretty early UK fanzine that found its way to my hands – Summer Salt #3 from 1978, published right after “The Damned and the Pistols have broken up”. Well, one had anyway. Summer Salt serves as a smartly-intentioned and -executed UK punk fandom bridge to what was happening in 1975-77, as well, when (I presume) editor Pete Maggs was coming of the proverbial age. Hence there are interviews with Dr. Feelgood, the Doctors of Madness and a celebration of Ducks Deluxe – all heroes to certain British Isles punks who otherwise suffered through parts of the 70s. (Jim Kerr of my own teenage early-80s heroes Simple Minds – and punk band Johnny & The Self-Abusers – used to rave about Doctors of Madness in interview after interview). 

    Maggs actually announces in his opening editorial that he’s backing out and turning over the reins of the fanzine to Dave Case; I know that Case did make a fourth issue, and it’s currently selling for $150 here (!). Maggs and his staff kick off Summer Salt #3 with the Ducks Deluxe celebration, acknowledging the help of Zigzag magazine’s incredible archives in their own retelling. It’s followed by a short thing on Manchester’s The Drones, who are made to sound feral, raw and crazed. On this evidence, they were nothing of the sort. 

    There are great live reviews of some pretty legendary shows here, the Sex Pistols and Damned notwithstanding. How about January 13th, 1978 in Huddersfield with The Prefects / The Doll / The Fall / Sham 69? About The Fall, Mick Hinchcliffe says, “…no emotion and a deadpan lead vocalist, but effective all the same. Much heckling comes their way however, to which the vocalist replies with laconic weirdness ‘We’re so sincerely sorry for playing for you’, and then they finish with ‘Industrial Estate’, which is very good. A future for this lot in my estimations”. 

    Or how about The Saints playing with Generation X on December 4th, 1977? The Saints!! I’m sure you know they’re touring now with Mark Arm on vocals, no lie. After praising them, reviewer Maria Fabrizi says, “And now, for your enjoyment, the most over-rated band of ‘77, Generation X. The set was mediocre, the sound was mediocre, the band seemed drugged….there was a sickening lack of real atmosphere, and I am not going to one of their gigs again unless they rid themselves of their ‘Superstars’ image and feel”. There’s another celebration of the band Penetration – who, honestly, I can’t remember if I’ve ever even heard them before, though I do know “Pauline Murray and the Invisible Girls” – this song was a big hit on KFJC in the early 80s – and then a bitchy/touchy set of fanzine overviews of contemporary (competitive) UK punk zines. 

    And these Summer Salt #3 punks are clearly informed and excited by their scene’s precedents. There’s a review of the Velvet Underground bootleg Evil Mothers; a dissection of the debut Pere Ubu LP; and even some John Lennon blather. They also pile on just how lame The Dead Boys are; as I’ve mentioned before, this is music to my eyes. Very, very solid piece of work, this fanzine. If I can pull together a few hundred disposable dollars maybe we’ll have a talk about the other three in this space someday.

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  • Thrillseeker #1

    At one point in September 1982’s Thrillseeker #1, Barry Henssler of The Necros bemoans the lack of fanzines tied to the DC punk scene. I’m guessing the folks who were living their “salad days” at this time in our (my) nation’s capital don’t quite remember it that way, and indeed, there’s an entire book set to come out about DC’s punk fanzines. Thrillseeker will get some play, I am sure. It’s an excellent and incredibly comprehensive piece of on-the-ground work, edited by a guy named Tony Lombardi and with a plethora of contributors. I scanned the many names and recognized Tom Lyle from Government Issue, and Jeff Krulik – Mr. Heavy Metal Parking Lot to you. 

    Thrillseeker #1 absolutely looks the part and walks the walk of a hardcore punk zine, but due to Lombardi’s wide-ranging, omnivorously music-hungry tastes, there’s quite a bit more than meets the proverbial eye. The long review section at the back, for instance, tackles everything from Mofungo to The Raincoats to Mission of Burma to the Flesheaters to the Dazz Band and Rick Springfield. The short review of the (excellent) debut single from The Bangs (you perhaps know them as The Bangles) says, “What a disappointment. I thought these gals were supposed to play 60s influenced trash rock, but this is just cutesy wimpy pop. Even Tru Fax & the Insaniacs rock out more than this trio”. You don’t even have to know that reference to know it’s a total harsh burn. But Lombardi, who writes at least two-thirds of the reviews here, also cops to loving Fleetwood Mac and the new Springfield record. And Void and Flipper. 

    We’ve established previously on this blog that the opening “news/gossip” section was a de rigeur part of many 70s/80s US punk fanzines. What I always love are the “items” that end up never coming true, such as “Black Flag will be in a movie called Cool Patrol”. What the hell? Who can tell us what that was all about? There’s more gossip and news about go-go bands (DC’s indigenous funk gift to the world); the fact that ½ Japanese’s “epic” ½ Gentlemen Not Beasts is about to be issued on cassette; and “The Gun Club have undergone personnel changes. The band now includes two women. Jeffrey Lee Pierce still drinks too much!”

    The live show reviews include a dispatch from a Fear / Necros / Scream / Double O and Void show at the Lincoln Memorial July 3rd, 1982. God bless America!! Void, in another review, are described in awe and quite aptly: “Their music is pure noise, as tortuous as the best Black Flag and Flipper. It was like they were tuning up the whole time they were on stage”. Oh to have seen that. Void bassist Chris Stover now lives in and is a realtor in San Francisco, my home. We had some good hangs a couple decades ago; went to each other’s kids’ birthday parties and what have you. Either Lombardi or Tom Lyle (both are “TL” here) reviews a go-go show with Trouble Funk, Air Raid Band and a no-showing Soul Sonic Force. I recall how excited I was when I learned that all-white hardcore bands and all-black go-go bands in DC played shows together. Never happened in enlightened San Francisco, but perhaps that was because we didn’t have go-go bands. 

    In the Black Flag interview, Henry Rollins has just joined the band, and he actually talks about wanting to cut a comedy record with his old pal Ian Mackaye. Is that where this thing started? I’ve seen that ferociously bad idea referenced in other fanzines for years. Greg Hetson from the Circle Jerks says their next record will be a “six song 12”EP” – another one of those bit of information that bore no eventual fruit. There are also interviews with Fear, The Necros, X, DOA, Sonic Youth (!!) and The Flesheaters. This is that same tour that Byron Coley documented in tour diary form in Take It #6, one of my favorite single issues of any fanzine ever. Here he’s a clowning interview-interrupter, and on the evidence herein, clearly the band and Coley get along well. Chris D’s favorite new stuff includes the Meat Puppets’ debut album on SST, along with “Dream Syndicate, Salvation Army, Red Cross and the Gun Club”. 1982, a great year to be alive in Los Angeles, California.

    Government Issue recount their trip to California, starting with their interview with Tim Yohanan on the MRR radio show, “All Tim Y wanted to talk about was ‘straight edge’, and we were burnt out from the sleepless ride out to the west coast, so it was kind of lame, but fun!”. They then go on to talk about their first gig at the On Broadway in San Francisco, which was just upstairs from the Mabuhay Gardens, and, (for a time) was also booked by Dirk Dirkson. “The crowd in SF is weird, really image-conscious Oi-clones. Lots of dressing up for the big night out but not much action….Dirk made our show all worthwhile by giving us $40 at the end of the night! Shredding!” No lie: that’s the equivalent of $132.56 today.

    There’s a long interview with Jello Biafra that’s actually really good. He’s humble enough, for a change, that it almost makes me respect the guy. I did enjoy his personal taste in offbeat music, but his stage performance and unbridled ego in virtually every setting was so off-putting to me in the 80s that it’ll take another forty years of personal growth and maturity for me to move him to the positive side of whatever imaginary ledger I’m keeping. Void also show up again in an extensive, exceptionally dumb interview from a radio show they stumbled onto, with wacky call-in guests; it was maybe one of those things “not fit for transcription”, particularly in the pre- voice-to-text world.

    I know Thrillseeker made it to both a second and a third issue, but I’ve never seen them in the wild. The notion of DC being fanzine-bereft, however, is severely undercut by its existence, to say nothing of other gems we’ve talked about previously here like Truly Needy and Vintage Violence.

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  • Research & DocumentFanzine #2

    This is a high-concept fanzine from our current times undertaken by one Coco Brigitte. She selects one obscure, underground, punk-adjacent pre-internet band, and then goes to town in compiling the ultimate print-only, perfect-bound historical record of said band: articles, interviews, fanzine reprints and photos galore. She did this in Research & DocumentFanzine #1 for Japan’s Non Band, a band I’m ashamed to say I’m not even familiar with, and now she’s done it for San Francisco’s The Trashwomen, a band I’m quite familiar with, for Research & DocumentFanzine #2.

    I’d never fob myself off as one of the overexcited hordes who went nuts for The Trashwomen when they emerged around 1991, but I certainly saw multiple early shows of theirs. I’d been effectively going to every Mummies show in the SF Bay Area for the previous 24 months, and a few Phantom Surfers things as well, and this new all-female garage band was a part of a crop of raw, talent-optional bands that emerged quickly from that scene. I knew guitarist Elka Zolot because she’d been in 8-Ball Scratch; I didn’t care for them much, but they’d ably opened a few shows I’d gone to. Her easiness on the eyes was certainly commented upon by more than one young cad of my acquaintance during those years, but it was her utterly ripping and highly distorted surf guitar chops that kept both girls and boys rapt and standing at attention. 

    Danielle Pimm had been the go-go dancer for The Phantom Surfers (or The Mummies? or both); now here she was playing bass for the first time, and (be still my heart) sometimes singing too. (Some called it caterwauling; I called it “learning to sing”). Tina Lucchesi worked in a local record store, was at pretty much every garage punk show I saw, and was always great to talk to. Here she was playing drums! Three stars were born. The Trashwomen converted skeptics quickly, and jeez, by the last time I saw them a couple years later they were really, really good. What had started as almost 100% instrumental was now primarily vocal-driven surf/garage/party rock, really reverbed-out, bashing and and distorted. And the freaks who were part of that scene – man – all the screaming you hear on their live record, or other live records from this scene? That’s what these crazy garage punk kids did: just screamed and screamed and sloshed their beer all over each other. Sometimes, I was one of them.

    Coco, the editor of Research & DocumentFanzine #2, saw some stuff I’d written online about early 90s fanzines that spotlighted the band, like this, and asked if I could supply some scans. As most punks know, I’m always willing to lend a hand to help unite the scene. So I even get a ‘lil thank-you in this thing – how about that? But let me tell you, folks – this is an exceptionally well put-together book/fanzine, perfect bound and on heavy paper, full color and laid out in a great combination of absolute professionalism and total fanzine who-gives-a-fuck-ism. There’s even a totally black page with nothing on it – “uh oh, we don’t have enough material for a multiple of 4; but we’re close enough – let’s just make a blank page”. (And honestly, besides a few typos, the rest is first-rate graphics and layout and, um, content creation). 

    So you get the wild sights, sound and smells of San Francisco’s clubs circa 1992-94 here, along with dozens of color and B&W photos from their Japan and European tours, as well as ephemera from other jaunts. You’ll come to know as much about The Trashwomen as there probably is to know beyond the memories of the band members themselves – and those are in here too, including a new interview with Tina. (it seems her new band might actually be called TINA! – I really hope so). Honestly, you don’t even really have to dig the band all that much to be highly enthusiastic about this fanzine; it’s certainly making me want to get her first issue and sign up for the ones to come, the bands being researched & documented being of little consequence. (Wait, how about Sally Skull??)

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  • Bored Out #2

    Ryan Leach is a gentleman whom you may be familiar with from his excellent label Spacecase Records; from the many interviews he’s published online with people whom I actually want to read about; and for being a super plugged-in guy with particular interests in 70s Memphis, 70s-80s Los Angeles and the current contours of the sub-underground. Our kind of fella, in other words. His recent interview with Eric Friedl on the Goner podcast might have been a bit of a downer, shall we say, regarding the fragile state of independent record production and distribution, but it was highly engaging nonetheless, and I came away even more impressed with Leach and his tenacity in the face of disinterest from the great unwashed hordes. 

    So I suppose that this second issue of his Bored Out fanzine from right now in 2025 is meant to be the sequel to his book of interviews, which presumably is now meant to be thought of as Bored Out #1 (right?). And like that one, most if not all of the material here started out online, where publishing is free, and is now available in print in a numbered edition of 100 (mine’s 22/100), which obviously has a sunk cost to be recouped. I’m here to tell you that you’ll be glad to have helped in these efforts. 

    The real standouts, comprising well over half of the issue, are the interviews with In The Red Records’ Larry Hardy and with Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise and Fall of SST Records author Jim Ruland. Leach is an excellent asker of questions and knows his shit. He’ll insert his thoughts & views into the narrative when it makes sense, and god love him for his willingness to transcribe a two-hour interview. One reason I probably default to email interviews for my own fanzine is a regrettable lack of internal fortitude for the long, slow pain of transcription. Looking at his banter with Larry and Jim, it reminds me how much better a live chat is and why those interviews I’ve done in this manner are so, so much more interesting & readable than taking the lazy man’s pathetic path. 

    Larry Hardy, whom I’ve known personally for years, has a fantastic history of run-ins, releases and stories from all manner of interesting musicians, from Tav Falco to The Gories to the Cheater Slicks and beyond. Leach gets the most out of him, even given Hardy’s admirable lack of ego. Same with Ruland – man, I was a little suspicious of his SST book given that it was by “the guy who wrote the Bad Religion bio”, but I loved it; absolutely told the story as it needed to be told, with the best part being “the fall” of SST in the 90s/00s by far (Jambang, anyone?). Again, Leach, who knows a ton about SST and the world surrounding it, asks excellent questions, just shooting the shit with a fellow music freak. I have made a note to learn from his methods.

    The remainder of Bored Out #2 is reviews of films and records, some of which you might have already seen on the man’s Tumblr – I know you’re all still on Tumblr, of course. East German films; Hardware; The Axemen; Robert Rental – you know. Power hitters. Get your copy here, and ignore the incorrect copy below the image; that’s Bored Out #1 that’s being deservedly touted.

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