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  • Psyclone (June 1977)

    One thing you come to realize when you’ve, ahem, been doin’ this sort of fanzine exploring for as long as I have is the incredible abundance of print that was just everywhere in the 70s, 80s and 90s. I mean, I remember it well, so it’s not like I’m just piecing it together now, but back then record stores, head shops and independent stores of many colors would carry magazines & fanzines galore, and then piles of FREE newsprint tabloid things sat on the floors as well. In a few places, they still do. 

    What was maybe different about that time was the quality level of some of these ad-supported freebies. They had full editorial staff, and they paid reviewers and graphic designers and circulation managers and others to do their thing. I’m not just talking about your general alt-weeklies, but tabloids like San Francisco’s Psyclone (“the magazine money can’t buy”) that were 100% music-focused. You’d get them on the floor of now-legendary record stores like Rather Ripped and Aquarius. I’ve already garbled a bit about these things in my preamble to a piece on Snipehunt, so you can continue your studies there if you’d like.

    Contrary to this thing, which says there were only three issues of Psyclone, and which therefore gins up some scarcity by selling those three for a whopping $1800, I can tell you right here and right now that there were more than three, and that a few of them pre-date punk. There’s one selling for $30 at San Francisco’s Amoeba Music right now from 1976, and while it has a Mary Monday article, the rest of it’s decidedly of the fern bar/long hair/sexy sex/doofus rock era epitomized to me by the godawful Tubes. 

    This June 1977 issue isn’t all that far off, either. Sure, you’ve got hot new band The Nuns on the cover and a half-page ad for Crime’s new 45 (!!), but what’s sorta impressive about this one is just how trapped the editorial stuff is between “the new sound” and the old stuff they still want to write about. Like there’s a big spread on Genesis, for instance, and a lot of bemoaning of their new singer “Phil” and how awesome Peter Gabriel was. There’s also a piece on some long-haired bozos called Hero, as well as dissections in the reviews section of dreck from Utopia, Bad Company and Pink Floyd (as well as of some punk-ish stuff and “imports” from England).

    The masthead has some names I definitely know well from my California punk history studies, though: editor Jerry Paulson (the first guy to put on shows at The Mabuhay Gardens); Howie Klein; Steve Seid; Michael Snyder; Cosmo Topper; Jonathan Postal; James Stark and Jenny Stern (aka Jenny Lens). But they’re all trying to figure it out. A guy named Robert Conttrell thinks that UK punk is in no way an offshoot of US punk like The Ramones, and says, regarding England, “the strongest provincial scene is in Manchester, led by The Clash”. Another guy named Walter Lenci is able to grab John Cale for about five minutes for an interview before he goes on stage, and Cale spends almost the entire time preemptively trying to get Lenci to not talk about the Velvet Underground or about how he was recently backing up solo Lou Reed: “Now this is important. This is number one….Now’s what’s important….This band is really, really good….Now it’s time to do it myself….It’s time to do it in America. I now have the opportunity to create and establish my own territory. This is it. Now I have a good band, good management….This is my time”. Somebody bring this man a spoon, there’s a snowstorm coming on!

    One of the things I enjoyed most about the book about Dirk Dirksen and the Mab (Shut Up You Animals!! The Pope is Dead. A Remembrance of Dirk Dirksen: The History of the Mabuhay Gardens) was the complete show-by-show listing of every single band that played there on every single date. Worth the price of admission by itself. Well, it’s funny in the early years, ‘76-’77, to see just who turned up, and this June 1977 Psyclone has a great ad in the back for what’s coming this month there. It’s really early in the scene, remember, but June will feature shows by The Nuns, The Dogs, Berlin Brats and Freestone (yes! “Bummer Bitch” Freestone!). Roky Erickson playing with The Pop, too. And then all those strange lost-to-time non-punk Bay Area bands that had serious but small followings at the time: Leila and the Snakes; Magister Ludi; Novak; and the Hoo Doo Rhythm Devils. I’ll do this thing when I see a show calendar like this and retrospectively plot out my month for the shows I’d have gone to, knowing what I know now. It’s a little more crazed for LA clubs circa 1978-82 – I’d truly be out 27 nights out of 30 – but once the Mab really got rolling late in 1977, it would not have been difficult at all to spend a good ten/fifteen nights a month there, as many did.

    Hey, if you were one of ‘em, and you have some tales about Psyclone to tell, please do so in the comments, okay?

  • Do The Pop! #1

    A cottage industry devoted to American punk rock scholarship emerged in the 1990s, spurred on by both the Killed By Death and Bloodstains obscure 45s collections and by the nascent internet. I proved myself an adept student, and I did my best to pull together whatever revelatory texts I could find. One particularly lost-to-time artifact is this Do The Pop #1 fanzine, published out of Seattle by married couple Lisa Lindstrom and Alan Wright in 1995. I did my homework & tried to find if there’s any real record of this thing online, and I found that at this writing, there is not. This, my friends, is why we pursue and share the navel-gazing passions that we do.

    Do The Pop #1 (and only?) is 70+ pages of newsprint, absolutely packed with information both critical and non. Alan and Lisa had once worked together on a 60s/garage fanzine called Cryptic Times before this, and while I’ve heard of it, I don’t have any of ‘em. Their tastes in punk rock music don’t precisely align with mine and maybe veer too far into the “pogo”/leather jacket realm, and of course that’s fine – but it means I can skip slathering profiles of Sham 69 and The Viletones, for instance, and skim through Lisa’s incredibly detailed interview/profile on The Droogs – surely the best and final word on said long-running band if you’re interested. There are also two lengthy pieces on Radio Birdman, a band who in the pre-KBD era were very important to me, but whom I unfortunately find quite pedestrian and boring now. I’m still trying to piece together why I’d been obsessing over them and not The Saints in the 1980s.

    This issue’s stock in trade is the partisan profile and discography, with photos cribbed from various flyers and fanzines of the past and assembled beautifully on whatever computers were able to make it look this great in 1995. Aside from the aforementioned, there are also pieces of this ilk on the Alan Milman Sect, Eater, Satan’s Rats, The Hates and What? Records. There’s a fine example of Stooges scholarship here as well, with Alan telling the tale of how his first Stooges record was Metallic K.O., and how that was what turned him into a Stooges fanatic. He then quite helpfully pulls apart all the different primitive Stooges bootlegs coming out around that time (remember these, on “Revenge Records”?), most of which were pretty lame to my ears, but which the fanatic both needs and requires. 

    I found my interest once again piqued in particular when I re-read their excellent 4-page overview of late 70s Seattle punk: The Lewd, Ze Whizz Kids, The Enemy and whatnot. I conversed a little bit before with you about this wild scene here, here and here. While there are only a couple of records from that era/town that I think actually stand up, you get this sense of a frantic, desperate need to offend, rebel and shock, making late 70s Seattle sound absurdly stuffy and uptight in a way that SF/LA/NY etc just weren’t. In a non-punk move, the editors have recently discovered Beyond The Valley of the Dolls and can’t not talk about it. I love that film so much I bought the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray. 

    The other draw here is a huge Wayne Kramer interview, taking us from the MC5 through his days in jail, playing with Johnny Thunders and now with, uh, some guys from Pennywise. I think people loved this guy so much not merely for his undeniable talents on guitar and image-making, but just for being an enthusiastic, lucid, humble and relatable fella from one of the underground’s most legendary bands. I never shook his hand nor broke bread with him, but folks I know who did couldn’t say enough about the guy. Lisa & Alan’s piece is on par with any post-MC5 thing I’ve ever read and needs to be collected in a book somewhere. Are you the person to do it? Get in touch if you require the scans.

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  • Truly Needy #6

    I can’t say with 100% assurance that this early 1983 issue was the actual sixth installment of DC’s mostly excellent Truly Needy fanzine, because they’d do that annoying “Volume 2 Number 2” thing that was stolen from traditional magazines at the time (Slash did it too). Yet my research seems to indicate that there was in fact a Volume 1, Number 4 issue, but not a Number 5. This would then make this one Truly Needy #6 by all rights, and by the time of the next issue, Truly Needy #7, they were finally doing their numbering the proper fanzine way. 

    Truly Needy, if you’re never seen the thing, was a true heavy hitter during its time. It was totally stuffed with deep underground documentation and dribblings, all from a Washington DC base that was seeing the culmination of years of slogging scene-building – captured beautifully in the excellent Punk The Capital documentary. As when reading its peers Matter or The Offense, you could get a strange sort of jarring high from reading about the many tendrils of punk and oddball culture still exploding across the country in ‘83, and even now I’m retroactively jealous of the experiences of living through a time I myself lived through. (Which is how many folks still feel about the mid/late-1960s today). So let’s maybe take a look at what was going on then.

    There’s a great early letter here from “Ayu the Braless”, talking about his visit to San Francisco: “Either SF has been sending a fake image to the East Coast or it’s become another 80’s fatality from what I saw. For 3 weeks I searched for industrial death music and only found one group, the German Shepherds, who used noise. And they were very weak and monotonous compared to earlier groups like Factrix and T.G. The performance art I saw was pure excrement….Haight-Ashbury looks like Georgetown…the punk I saw was rock & roll slow, except for the Meat Puppets, and they got pelted with bottles and drinks for having long hair”. But it’s not all bad in San Francisco for Ayu: “The gay scene is great. With the male/female ratio in the street being 9 to 1 there were lots of handsome penii walking around….the bathhouses and sex clubs (only gay ones) are numerous and filled with toys and games…if you care about your penis more than art you can have a great time”. Sure. This is actually quite sad to read considering how that entire scene was unknowingly being hollowed from within at exactly that moment.

    The Fall have come to DC, and there’s an initially confrontational interview with Mark E Smith that Truly Needy editor Barbara Rice eventually wrangles under control. When asked about American bands he likes, he pops off with “Fear, Flipper and Panther Burns”, and pines for how awesome it would be if Fear could come out and play Scotland and the north of England. Then Smith says “I always thought that West Coast American punk was the best anywhere”. I mean, he’s right of course – but I didn’t expect it from Mark E Smith (!). Maybe it was this show that did it?

    Truly Needy #6 carries multiple threads through its 50-some-odd pages that are both local and global in nature. For local stuff, there’s an “Ask Barney” column about scene etiquette with what appears to be fake letters, along with interviews with DC bands Marginal Man, Egoslavia and The French Are From Hell, only the former of whom I’m familiar with. For global stuff, there’s a long Crass interview that I simply can’t bring myself to read, and that stops in the middle to be “continued next issue”. The Birthday Party are now living in London again after having left Berlin, so this would be “peak heroin season” for the band if I’ve got my dates correct. There’s a quick chat with Rowland Howard and he’s affable and informative. 

    Each slice of subculture has its place here – there are columns on TV, comics and a huge fanzine roundup. There’s a Tapes column featuring gems from No Trend, Your Food, Razor Penguins and The Fartz, along with everything the ROIR label had ever put out to that point. My assumption is it all arrived in a big tumbling batch, and given that the Truly Needy ethos seemed to be to review every fucking thing that hit the office, they all get a place here.

    In the live reviews section, Rice reviews the 2/25/83 Minor Threat / Government Issue show at Wilson Center, and has the epiphany that the rest of the country was pretty much having about DC around that time: “Finally, this show is ample proof that we don’t need an out-of-town act headlining the bill. For once we have some of the best music in the world”. And I love the review of a 3/12/83 show of Boat Of… at DC Space; they’re a band I’ve only heard about, a Tom Smith (To Live and Shave in LA, Peach of Democracy) project. “(They’ve) been playing to confused and unhappy audiences for the past year across the state of Georgia…At the DC Space show, Boat Of… founding and central member Tom Smith handled most of the chores himself, accompanying his tapes with turntable and vocals…One fellow kept walking up to the stage and saying things like ‘This isn’t music’ and ‘You’re not doing anything’….The show ended with Tom crooning over a wonderfully mutilated version of ‘Colour My World’.”

    In the huge reviews section, there’s a multitude of hardcore & goth & imports, mostly dealt with by Rice. But wait, who’s this? Why, it’s Byron Coley getting space to opine on The Chesterfield Kings, The Monkees, The Box Tops and Kansas’ The Mortal Micronotz, whom he totally loves. Great to see him adding a touch of class here. Now me, I could give a shit about the ‘Kings, but I can understand his enthusiasm for championing “six-oh” sounds in that hardcore-drenched era, which he even refers to as a stance worth taking, in the guise of both musics being tough, raw and worthy. Fair enough! Much to ponder in this one and certainly one of America’s finer fanzines during that year.

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  • The Offense Newsletter #59

    We’re getting to the point in this Fanzine Hemorrhage endeavor where certain publications are coming around two, three, sometimes four times now. Which makes it easy for me to spare you the backstories of some of them, like The Offense / The Offense Newsletter – you can just check out previous explanatory posts on that one in particular here, here and here, if that’s something you’d be interested in doing. This allows me to skip the set-up for The Offense Newsletter #59, which wasn’t just from 1985, and wasn’t just from July 1985, but was from July 19th, 1985. 

    Cocteau Fever is almost here! In only two months the Cocteau Twins will play one of five dates they’d play on their first-ever US tour in Columbus, OH – totally shafting Chicago – and it was all thanks to Tim Anstaett and his 4AD-besotted, typewriter-cranked Offense Newsletter. Your Fanzine Hemorrhage editor saw one of those five shows, which took place the week before I left home and moved to Santa Barbara for college. There’s not really a ton about it in here – just some acknowledgement that it’s for real and it’s happening. There are also some ‘85 Columbus show listings for the weeks ahead that are super 1985: Black Flag, The Chameleons, Sonic Youth/Die Kreuzen, New Order/A Certain Ratio, Gang Green, Meat Puppets, 7 Seconds. 

    As with other issues I’ve read, the letters section sorta rules the roost and in fact takes up six of the twelve overall pages in this one. To read The Offense Newsletter, it seems, was to enter into conversant dialog with The Offense Newsletter. It offered a chance for readers around the country and indeed the world to pop off with scene reports (Gerard Cosloy does so from Boston); to slag and/or praise Tim for his tastes; to broker offense with others who’d written previous letters for their tastes; to complain about Husker Du; to clarify whether or not Tim hates your fanzine (Barbara Rice of Truly Needy); and even, in the case of Great Plains’ Mark Wyatt, to pen an unsolicited, show-by-show mini-tour diary. You’ll get more true pulse on the actual contours of Underground America here than you probably will anywhere else.

    Of course I’m probably most drawn in by what comprises another 1/3rd of the pages here – an interview with Craig Scanlon and Simon Rogers from The Fall, accompanied by some spectacular live photographs of the band (and I’ve fallen in love with 1985 Brix Smith all over again, just like I did that year). They’d been touring on The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall, and were just gearing up to release their last truly fantastic record, This Nation’s Saving Grace. Scalon tells Tim aka TKA that Room To Live was “the worst LP we’ve ever released”, and I suppose a case can be made – but can you imagine being super-ashamed of a record that contains “Solicitor in Studio”, “Marquis Cha Cha” and the title track? Not me. Embarrassment of riches up until 1985.

    Finally, there’s a small live review section at the end. Don Howland at that point was sometimes writing as “Chet Howland”, and he took on the 6/4/85 Black Flag / DC3 / Twisted Roots show in Lafayette, Louisiana. It’s another gem from Howland, one of my all-timers for music writing. He takes ‘Flag bassist Kira Roessler to task for morphing her look to fit in with the skeezy horndogs she’s playing with, and bemoans the fact that he’s really there to hear them play the ‘79-’81 stuff: “…But when they did an oldie like ‘Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie’ I was just reminded how much this band used to matter to me. But that’s just ole Chet…poor ole Chet. Poor poor poor Chet”. It wasn’t just ole Chet – it was almost every punker who showed up at a Black Flag show from 1983-86 and got a shirtless man in dolphin shorts grinding & sweating all over them to turgid, plodding dirge-metal, and a band totally stoned out of their gourds. Then they’d do “Six Pack” or something, and the crowd would go apeshit. Run the tapes!

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  • Year Zero #1

    Tom Lax from Siltbreeze Records has been selling off a bunch of fanzines and records online, and I figured I ought to get in on some of the action. I’d never heard of nor seen the Australian Year Zero #1 from 1993, but the Tom of Finland cover caught my eye. When “Tom’s” art wasn’t being used in the explicitly gay/leather/roughneck context it was intended for, it was at times being appropriated by straight fellas in the underground rock environment. I’m not the sort of guy who wantonly ascribes homoeroticism to straight men, such as football players or fanzine editors, so I won’t try to unpack it except for to say that these muscled, at times violent drawings were likely the only homoerotic images subconsciously deemed allowable in the snarky, ironic early 90s fanzine world – precisely because they push so brutally against a fairied, sissified gay male stereotype, and because they totally knock the non-gay viewer off balance for a second or two. Call your semiotics and gender studies professors for a deeper read.

    The editors of this Melbourne-based journal of class and taste (“Buy me, butt stain!” on the cover) are named “Dave Boofhead”, “The Wiz” and “Jan the Man”, which makes it a little tough to get a read on ‘em as people. Could one of these folks have been Melbourne’s Dave Lang, who’d later put together a record label and a blog called Lexicon Devil? There was evidence that pointed both for and against it, so I decided to do some digging into his blog to see if I could come up with evidence for the affirmative, and sure enough! “….Early that year, I dropped off copies of the first issue of Year Zero to ML. To be honest, I wrote a lot of it when I was drunk and I didn’t expect anyone to buy it, let alone read it, but was surprised when I went back a week later to see that the half-a-dozen copies I’d left the previous week had apparently all sold….”.

    This makes sense. The editors’ collective understanding of underground rock music appears to all-consuming and obsessive, if somewhat nascent and overly informed by Maximum RocknRoll and Flipside, two (of course) well-distributed fanzines that I know were highly formative for Dave. When I later started reading Dave’s excellent online writings, maybe ten years after this, he’d totally ditched the buy-me-butt-stain and GG Allin-celebrating shtick you sometimes see here for a more sober consideration of decades’ worth of jazzy skronk, psych, offbeat punk and so forth. Here, he and his team are still a little more impressed by Peter Bagge comics and scene gossip than I’m sure they’d care to remember, but as I always say with regard to these things, given my own early-20s missteps  – never apologize for having been young and dumb. 

    The marquee item here is a great talk with Ron House of the Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments, who brings Mike Rep along for the ride. “Dave Boofhead” is able to draw them out quite a bit & get both to explore Columbus and Ohio writ large as places to make music; drinking; the current scene & market for their strange musics, and more. Two eminently interesting and opinionated gentlemen for sure, and they still have much to teach us to this day. An Australian group called Peril are interviewed, along with a GG Allin prison chat. It’s all coming back to me now: GG was supposed to get out of prison and immediately go on tour and kill himself on stage, perhaps taking some of the audience with him. It didn’t quite go to plan. 

    Dave and Jan and The Wiz each get the own “scene report” columns, sort of, a very MRR-like move where they get to piss & moan about various scene indignities. There are also many record reviews and they’re all fun, tossed-off sort of blatherings, clearly written at a time when these guys were just intensely & totally devoted to rooting out the wildest, weirdest music they could find (Skullflower, Styrenes, Brainbombs, Merzbow, Zeni Geva, Dead C, Electric Eels) – then sometimes making mirth with it and shredding it to pieces, as Dave does with Boyd Rice and Non.

    Oh, and while I hadn’t been aware of Year Zero in 1993, they were aware of me and my own early-20s then-fanzine Superdope. They even swipe an image directly from it! I did get orders from Australia every now & again, and I got a kick out of hearing how my fanzine was received by these gentlemen 32 years ago: “An excellent Northern Californian zine that is both totally analy-retentive and cliqueish, but yet also a damn good read….I swear, all this bunch seem to do all day is piddle around all day worshipping the goddamn hell out of the Thinking Fellers Union, Dead C, The Ex, Sun City Girls and just about any New Zealand, Finnish or Japanese band you care to mention….they don’t get too smart-arsey about the whole thing (unlike ourselves here at YZ)…My only complaints concern the slightly ‘garage’ bias of the zine (that genre, with a few exceptions, bores the shit out of me) and the totally over-the-top Thinking Fellers Union worshipping sessions that seem to accompany just about every issue…They also say that the last issue was ‘the last issue’, but they seem to say that every issue”. Wow. 100% guilty as charged.

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  • Flesh and Bones #8

    Since I only possess three issues of late 80s Flesh and Bones, and because I already covered Flesh and Bones #6 here and Flesh and Bones #7 here, I don’t reckon it’ll be worth me going into too many background details in order to tackle their ultimate issue, Flesh and Bones #8, the classy cover from which you see here. Instead, perhaps we should ask: how was it that so many hardcore punk fiends from 1982-84 became longhaired, heavy metal-adjacent grunge & hesh rock fiends just a couple years later? This very much includes myself, minus the long hair and the taste for metal. 

    At the end of the day, it’s because it’s the place where dumb, primal, post-teenage testosterone was finding the most logical home to roost circa 1987-89. If not Green River and Mudhoney, then certainly the more abrasive Touch & Go stable that for me was best defined by the Laughing Hyenas, Killdozer and Big Black. All of the aforementioned were total godz to me then, and thus, Flesh and Bones was one of the music fanzines I was most excited to buy when I’d see it at Rhino or Aron’s in Los Angeles. The touring/booking networks and the nationwide club circuit plowed up by hardcore was still very much in existence, and labels like Touch & Go, Homestead, SST and Sub Pop had more money in their pockets than ever before (Sub Pop, of course, was really just getting off the ground at this time).

    Flesh and Bones #8 editor Jeffo, as I’ve discussed, had an innate knack for grafting together his main obsessions into a unified universe of his own making. These would be idiotic 1970s hard rock, comics/comix, 60s hippie/freak/teen stuff and the 1980s hardcore punk he was weaned on – and then spit it out into a wild, page-count-heavy fanzine packed with any modern bands traveling on this same wavelength. Redd Kross around this era would be a great “comp”. White Zombie when they were starting up. And of course Raging Slab. 

    This one from January 1989 was his final issue. There’s a lot of tomfoolery afoot. The first interview is with Sloth, a longhaired glammy/riff-heavy punk band whom I liked and whom I saw live at The Chatterbox in San Francisco not long after this. Going with the “if it has long hair, looks like it might smell bad, and plays loud rock music – it’s in!” vibe, there’s next a thing about a group of festival hippies called Magic Mushroom, and pictures of them at the Glastonbury Festival (Summer Solstice 1971), really for no reason at all.  

    In the extensive “Nothing But 8-Tracks” record review section, it’s most of the current typical current noise/grunge/punk, but then Jeffo will sneak in a review of some food or beverage, such as his one on Mickey’s Malt Liquor, otherwise known far and wide as “Mickey’s Big Mouth” due to the wide opening of each jug-sized bottle. Apparently it was pretty rare on the East Coast. “The more vulgar of brew-consumers will tell you that the main draw behind Mickey’s is that after you drain its contents you can use the bottle to hold your own golden ale”. Well, that may be true, but honestly, in the late 80s, when craft beer and microbreweries were barely in existence, Mickey’s was also just “upscale” enough for those of us not wanting to plod through yet another Stroh’s or Meister Brau. The beer still exists!

    As a non-tangential aside, I had a bit of a Southern California “police story” around this time, a couple years before. My friends and I took my 1980 Ford Mustang to the Oxnard Skate Palace in beautiful Oxnard, California to see The Butthole Surfers, Dag Nasty, Aggression and Uniform Choice. We packed my car with Mickey’s Big Mouth, and upon arrival, thereby commenced to drink (and drink heavily) in the parking lot of the Skate Palace, like morons. Since I’ve learned that this show was on April 4th, 1987, this meant that I was 19 years old. It wasn’t three minutes before cop flashlights were shining into the car, and we were all made to sheepishly get out and show our IDs. “How’d you all like to go to JAIL tonight?”, we were asked. Upon studying my ID – I was probably the youngest – I was told “You – you shouldn’t be drinking at all”. Absolutely not sir, a big mistake on my part. I think I was most worried about missing the show, to be honest, but all we really got for our idiocy was that we had to slowly pour out about 12 Mickey’s in front of the cops before we’d even gotten a buzz on. We understood we were fighting a war that we couldn’t win, you might say. And we still had a lot to learn about State Violence/State Control. 

    But back to Flesh and Bones #8, right? While it wasn’t really a magazine I looked at to figure out which new bands to listen to, the whole was far greater than the sum of its parts. There’s are interviews with and/or things on Gwar, The Lunachicks, Dave Brock from Hawkwind, the Tater Totz, Reverb Motherfuckers, Soundgarden, The Hickoids (with jokes about Molly Hatchet), Gary Panter and a film column by Howie Pyro, reviewing “mondo” films like Shanty Tramp and Mantis in Lace. Laurie Es is a big contributor. There’s a piece of fiction called “Hurricane” by “Chris T”, which I believe was meant to be a Forced Exposure parody.

    Those are all just seat-fillers for the three best parts. First, the interview with JD King, comix artist and once-bandmate of Thurston Moore’s in The Coachmen. King reads from Thurston’s letters that he’d written to him from around that time – 1977-78 – show reviews in which Moore says things like “Talking Heads are my main influence in life”, or, regarding The Cramps, “Everybody hates this band. They’ll never record. The worst band ever to be on stage. I dig them. I know they can’t play”. Second, the outstanding piece by Dr. Buzz called “Snarfin’ at the End of Aisle Eight – A Guide to Household Inhalants”, which talks about the relative merits of inhaling Lemon Pledge vs. Aqua Net vs. Easy-Off Oven Cleaner. Who knew so much joy was to be had just below our kitchen sink in the 1980s.

    Finally, the live reviews in Flesh and Bones were always the best, almost completely made up as they were with totally imaginary hijinks and shenanigans. I’ve particularly been enamored with this one from a 1988 Firehose, Volcano Suns, Screaming Trees and Dos show at Irving Plaza in NYC for years: “By now, Irving Plaza is supposed to be leveled to make way for a parking deck, so who knows how many straight-edge ghosts are wandering the ruins, ready to spook any vino-breathing bum that happens to wander into their concrete haunt, Back in the old days, this place was host to many a cola fest featuring real fighting bands like Minor Threat and SS Decontrol. Far cry from the fistless poop making the round today….So anyway, I walked up the stairs to the main room not expecting trouble (I’m not the kind of guy that looks for fights) when suddenly, this skinhead wearing a ‘Doc Marten’ sweatshirt stepped out of the shadows and growled ‘You the dude who does Flesh+Bones?’ ‘Ye-eah’, I managed to stammer. ‘Well this is for Springa!’, he replied, and smacked me in the face with a magic-marker x-ed fist. The force of the punch sent me tumbling down the stairs again. Luckily, I was wearing my shlep-rock parka with the big furry hood, so it helped cushion my fall. By the time I made it up the stairs again, the guy was gone (sissy!) and DOS were playing their last song. This tall guy in a Big Stick wig kept heckling Kira, shouting ‘Show us your underwear!’ and ‘Kira’s got the 10½!’”….and it goes on from there with multiple lies that I’m sure turned an entirely mediocre show into one much more exciting.

    Flesh and Bones was one of the greats, and I strongly encourage you to grab any you find on eBay that might lie within your self-appointed price range. Do it for Springa.

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  • Back Of A Car #1

    I came in pretty late on Big Star. Naturally I never heard them in the 1970s, but I also didn’t hear them in the 80s, either, when I would have or should have been primed to do so. My guess is, given my obsessions during my college years (Lazy Cowgirls, Pussy Galore, Scratch Acid, Laughing Hyenas and what have you), they wouldn’t have taken anyway. It wasn’t until a six-week van trip across North America in 1993 when one of my traveling companions repeatedly blasted a homemade tape of Radio City did I even hear the band, and by then I was ready. All-in. I anointed it one of the ten greatest albums of all time, which is something I’ll still stand behind without question. I’ve written about this before, but when I told a good friend about my new favorite band Big Star, he let the air out of my tires with a withering “dude, that’s so high school”. Not my fucking high school.

    Anyway, I get the mythos around the band, fully. The aborted/botched/unheard third album; the record company disasters that kept the first two albums from being revered until much later; the louche Memphis party scene captured in Stranded in Canton; Alex Chilton’s difficult personality – all that. Love it. Makes a ton of sense why a fanzine like Back of Car #1 might come out in 1994, right as the band had started doing those “reunion” shows with two original members and two fellas from The Posies. The interest was there; the stories were mostly untold; and like the Velvet Underground, Big Star were a band who readily inspired something well beyond simple devotion. 

    Judith Beeman of Vancouver BC was the woman behind this, and she ended up doing four of them. This is the only one I have. She talks up the nascent “internet” and electronic mail in her introduction, already finding that it has been a highly effective means of sourcing contributors and connecting with them at shows and otherwise. She provides a layperson’s intro to Big Star up front, setting the stage that this thing would be far less of a fan club type of fanzine than one merely centered around Big Star, with outflowing concentric circles into Chiltoniana, similar-sounding bands (DBs, Chris Stamey, Posies), and into Judith’s own comics obsession, which had nothing to do with Big Star in the slightest.

    This is further reinforced with the very first piece in the mag, Wilson Smith’s review of the 6/5/94 Big Star quote-unquote reunion show at the Fillmore in San Francisco. I didn’t go – I had an uppity personal policy against attending any reunion shows, one that I kept in place until Mission of Burma came to the same venue eight years later. Anyway, Smith – in what I thought was a fan club magazine when I bought it – didn’t really like it all that much, and says so (!). Bravo. Apparently some secret Springsteen cover band with “Adam Durwitz” of “Counting Crows” opened, which absolutely helps to validate my decision, even though it meant I never saw Alex Chilton in the flesh while he walked amongst us. 

    After that, it’s a grab bag of the aforementioned. Ken Stringfellow of The Posies and the reanimated Big Star shares his tour diary from this reunion thing. Lyrics from songs are reprinted; old reviews are dusted off and reprinted; there’s even an article on This Mortal Coil, who did “Holocaust” and “Kanga Roo” on their album that I had as a store-bought cassette in high school, It’ll End in Tears. That would have to have been the first time I ever heard any Alex Chilton compositions, just not performed by him. Judith Beeman breaks apart the Alex Chilton tribute album, which came along at a time when tribute albums were actively poisoning used bins in stores across the globe. And then, after that, it’s not really a Big Star fanzine any longer – it’s those concentric circles and a bunch of comics. 

    Oh, and I learned something, too. All these years I thought “Motel Blues” was a Chilton song. Turns out it was by Loudon Wainwright III, and it took Back of a Car #1 for me to finally discover this important fact.

    Good read! You can check out all four of the issues Beeman and her team of pop-loving psychotics put together right here.

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  • South Bay Ripper #2

    If there’s a better illustration of the metaphorical distance between the major, “in-touch” US underground music power centers (NY, LA, SF) and the proverbial cowtowns that surrounded them in 1980 than South Bay Ripper #2, I’m not sure where I’d find it. This San Jose fanzine – later to evolve into a true giant in its field, Ripper – really hits a nerve for me. I was in 7th grade in San Jose in 1980, and the sort of grasping, desperate drive to hear anything that was different, weird or challenging was all-consuming for me that year, but I barely knew where to find it.

    These kids were older than I was for sure – 19-20 as opposed to, um, 12 – so they had IDs and freedom and perhaps the ability & wherewithal to get rides up to San Francisco for shows. But what South Bay Ripper #2 underscores here is both how utterly out of touch my then-city of 500,000 people was with the attitudes and tastes of San Francisco, a mere hour to the north, and how even a local AOR radio station playing The Pretenders or “Train in Vain” by The Clash was a big deal. I mean, in 7th grade I was personally obsessed with both The Pretenders and B-52s, both of whom penetrated my consciousness before college radio had, and I’d scour free papers like BAM for any glimpses of “the new wave”. There would be advertisements for strange-looking local bands like No Sisters, The Spies and The Jars – none of whom I’d ever heard – and I remember telling a kid at school, when he asked me what my favorite bands were, “Oh, No Sisters, The Spies, The Jars – you know”. 

    Tim Tonooka, Violent Vamp and the rest of the South Bay Ripper crew weren’t all that far ahead of me in 1980, save for the fact that they’d actually seen all the limp power-pop and “energy rock” bands like SVT and Mr. Clean and the Nu-Models that fell under the all-encompassing moniker of “new wave” that year. (Let’s again note for the record that this fanzine changed radically and for the better in 1981). They too are grasping at whatever shreds of underground culture they can find – and it’s really, really hard to find in San Jose! One of the few blessings of our current era is that a kid in Hattiesburg, Mississippi or McGillicuddy, Iowa can tell you as much about the Electric Eels and Can and Teenage Jesus & The Jerks – and their modern equivalents – just as readily as a kid in Manhattan or LA can. In San Jose in 1980, it seems that word of The Clash, The Pretenders and Rockpile might have penetrated the city limits, but what was being written about in Slash, Damage, NY Rocker and so forth had barely made a dent. 

    Maybe a few reasons for that, which this fanzine helps to shed light on. KFJC, which would soon go on to be one of the finest underground college radio stations of all time (and which would change my life a year or so after this), had only recently had control wrested from a mainstream-focused programming manager in 1979, and they had been dipping their toes into “the new wave” pretty gingerly. Two of the writers for this one, Kevin Animal and Diana Campa, were DJs I used to listen to regularly on that station. I’ll never forget my jaw hitting the floor when Diana played “Sex Beat” by the Gun Club, the first time I ever heard the band. South Bay Ripper #2 bemoans the lack of venues to play at – even some dopey “local wavoids” called Two Words aren’t allowed to play the annual “Tapestry in Talent” festival, a thing my mom used to go to every year to buy ceramic owls and potholders. 

    Local commercial rock radio, like hard-rock KSJO, was trying out programs like Kerry Loewen’s “Modern Humans” on Sunday nights from 11pm-1am. Loewen is interviewed here, and he sounds like a proto-industry shill, the sort of person Howie Klein was always rightly or wrongly accused of being. Loewen says he’s not allowed to say the words “punk” or “new wave” on the air. “I like to call the music on the show Modern Music. That’s the term I coined and people may like or hate it”…..”I played 5 songs in an hour that were New Wave and they included like Madness, Iggy Pop, the Romantics and Bram Tchaikovsky; obviously semi-punk”.

    Yet Kerry Loewen was a guru to the South Bay Ripper staff. And why not? I remember how in San Jose everything cool felt just out of reach for us. I’d see the badass skull logo for San Francisco’s KUSF and I wanted desperately to listen to the station. I’d read about bands from England playing on Berkeley’s KALX, and try and tune every radio in the house in an almost entirely futile attempt to try and pick it up. This fanzine doesn’t just tout Loewen; there’s also an interview with Peter Bloom, a young man who’d recently booked a 13-gig string of new wave shows at San Jose State’s Spartan Pub. They reminisce about bands like The Instamoids, Jo Allen & The Shapes and The Kingbees from LA who played during the legendary run. Jo Allen does a brief interview, and he is asked to describe his music. “It’s basic 80’s rock. I wouldn’t call it New Wave cuz that doesn’t mean anything anymore. I wish people would stop the confusion with New Wave so it would get another image other than spitting and safety pins”. 1980 is 1977 in San Jose, California, but thankfully hardcore will totally wipe the slate clean a year later.

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  • Rock Scene (January 1975)

    We’ve already established in a previous post here that Rock Scene was by no means a fanzine of the sort we’re typically going on about here. A more rigid editor might require us to strike any discussion of it from the site. But since I’m the editor, here we are: Rock Scene Volume 3, Number 1 from January 1975, with Roxy Music on the cover, no less. Big in Cleveland.

    The magazine’s editor Richard Robinson – who looks a tad like Gary Numan in his photo – says in his intro thing that, vis-a-vis rock and roll at the dawn of 1975, “There’s a lot happening, but it’s just repeats, no matter how good it is. You’ll find hints of what’s new in Rock Scene; unfortunately it’s just hints. The truth is that it’s up to you to get these new rock scenes underway”. How frustrating, right? I can totally feel the malaise in the three-dot gossip column about Yes, Focus, Burton Cummings and Chicago – although “Our spies report that they’ve seen Lou Reed sporting white hair” and that “overseas fans will soon have a chance to hear the King Biscuit Flower Hour as overseas syndication is in the works”. I totally remember this show, and hadn’t thought of it in a great while. It was a late-night FM rock staple with live concerts from American AOR/FM staples. The people took what they could get in the late 70s.

    And yet – I don’t think they actually had it all that bad, really. I have gathered a few issues of Rock Scene in my time – which was decidedly not its time – and have found it to be both information- and visual-packed. Candid photos, usually from parties, were among its specialties. Some of these are quite baffling: there’s a picture of Sha-Na-Na’s Bowzer with Keith Moon; a photo of a roller derby competition with the caption “Roller Derby: something new on the rock scene”; and a photograph of a sculpture of Black Oak Arkansas’ Jim Dandy riding a horse naked whilst holding a tambourine. Apparently the band tried to get the British Museum to take the sculpture, and were rejected. Weird.

    After a Suzi Quatro interview, there’s a goofy photo spread called “Suzi Q. Judges a Dance Contest”, with this nauseating accompanying text: “The big day finally came when Suzi Quatro and Co. arrived in Hollywood! Waiting breathlessly for her at the airport with his lookalike hairdo, Suzi Q. t-shirt and posters for her to autograph was none other than Rodney Bingenheimer! (sic). After many welcoming kisses, roses, and more than a few tears of joy – Rodney whisked Miss Teenage Daydream off to his disco on the Sunset Strip – to judge a dance contest (cute?) and meet some Hollywood, er, scenemakers”. Get off the air, Rodney!!

    The “Ask Doc Rock” column has a question about 8-track bootleg tapes (wow), and another question about how to see the skull on the cover of the Velvet Underground’s White Light White Heat. This is followed by a “Roxy Run-Down” with a piece on each band member, and Lance Loud’s column “Tid Bits from the Diamond Doggiebag”, about Bowie, Bryan Ferry and David Johanson and Jimmy Page all partying at Club 82 – but not together – along with various gossip on Van Dyke Parks, Jobriath and Sparks. 

    Other photo spreads are of David Johanson and Cyrinda Foxe at home, in a typical ultra-tiny NYC apartment for two; and some great snaps of McKenzie Phillips partying her ass off with Mick Jagger. There’s lots of Bowie; rock stars’ cars; “Eno Cruises the Big Apple”; and photos from the nascent stirrings of the New York rock underground. I love the really early photo of Patti Smith playing live (her debut 45 Hey Joe/Piss Factory has just dropped), along with photos of the Harlots of 42nd Street and Teenage Lust. I mean, I can go on and on here to continue painting the picture: there’s a “Dear Wayne (County)” advice column; an insufferable Kim Fowley column in which he pretends to interview himself; a piece on Brownsville Station by Lenny Kaye; and Rock Scene’s London report from Linda Merinoff, with some super syrupy gossip about Nico being exceptionally difficult and surly and badmouthing everyone she plays with except Brian Eno.

    These mags are usually no more than $15 a pop online if you’re discriminating in who you buy from, and worth every cent for the innumerable reasons mentioned herewith.

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  • New Wave #1

    This, for lack of a better term, is a “my cup runneth over” fanzine from 1977. It’s somewhat amazing to even be allowed to look at it. I was not aware of the existence of New Wave #1 until I found a way of procuring a copy on eBay – nor was I aware of the absurdly great bounty within it, save for a drunkenly-written Lester Bangs piece about punk that ended up being sadly uneventful once I actually read it. 

    I’m 99% sure that this is the only issue of this San Francisco-based newspaper-style fanzine ever created, and I’m just as assured that a 1-issue run was not at all what the editors had intended when they excitedly put this together in August 1977. (For instance, in the back there’s a plea for subscribers. $9.50 for 12 issues, plus your choice of either The Ramones’ Leave Home or Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers). Who were these editors? Proving that he was in fact ultimately useful for something, the main editor was Howie Klein; the associate editor was Steve Seid, about whom more later.

    Excited is definitely the word. We’re into punk pretty early here: the long-awaited and much-prophesized rocknroll revolution is finally here, which doesn’t stop many of the big-name rock writers assembled from sneering about punk anyway, Bangs included. As it should be. Where do I start? How about with some of the bigger names: Billy Altman writes about Mink Deville, and Richard Meltzer gets his own column on jazz: “Bebop on Your Mama”. It’s really funny, actually, and full of his patented discombobulated snark. He even saw Dizzy Gillespie play live that year. Patti Smith pens a mostly unreadable poetry slam-type thing on Robert Bresson that I’d probably have sent back to her for rewrite (“come on, Patti, I know you can do better”). 

    Loads of excitement and hot gossip in the San Francisco, LA, NY and UK scene reports. LA’s is by Gregg Turner, he’d go on to do an almost identical column in Take It! in the 1980s. An “Amy G” is mentioned in the SF column; she’s a “former punk of the month” who has just moved to Memphis. Would this – be still my heart – be Amy Gassner, who’d join The Klitz in Memphis?? Gotta be, right? If you’ve never heard her 1979 rendition of “Brown Sugar”, which was recorded “under the influence of hog tranquilizers” and absolutely sounds like it, you’ll need to do so right now. And if you have a copy of that record and need to part with it, please get in touch.

    Maybe my single favorite page in New Wave #1 is the one compiling some instant-reaction crowd interview snippets after Crime’s June 18th, 1977 show at the Mabuhay Gardens; this includes quotes from Jean Caffeine from New Dezezes, Britley Black (sic), who’d later join the band; Don Vinyl and Michael Snyder, the latter of whom was an SF rock critic I think at the Chronicle, back when daily newspapers actually had multiple in-house rock critics. Also in various spots throughout this magazine is talk about how Jennifer Moscone, the Mayor’s kid, is going to punk shows at the Mabuhay. Sheriff Michael Hennessey was into punk, too, and he used to regularly show up at the Mab. 

    There are too many other features for me to go deep into: Cheap Trick, The Dils, Avengers, Nuns pieces; the only one on Ozzie from Sacramento I’ve ever seen; a Mary Monday (!) article plus a centerfold; The Negatives, a Richard Hell interview and more. There’s a country music overview by Ed Ward that tries to tie modern country outlaws like Johnny Paycheck to punk, rather unsuccessfully. And the capper, the thing that just makes this a chef’s-kiss A+ fanzine in my book, is the Steve Seid film column, “Enter The Avant Garde Surfers”. It calls out genius films like Payday and The King of Marvin Gardens and Three Women, among others, and is essentially a paean to how utterly amazing 70s American filmmaking was up to that point. Seid realizes he’s living in a golden age, and is essentially admonishing readers that they ought to realize it as well. Alas, “Star Wars”, a popular children’s film that helped to quickly bury major-studio risk-taking, was released more or less as this magazine was being written. Seid was not to know, but one of his cultural worlds was ending just as another was excitedly being born.

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