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  • Flipside #30

    I’ve discussed it before in this forum (here, here and here), but I’ll repeat: I believe my memory to be correct in that no one looked to Flipside while it was around as a place for “rock criticism”, nor as a place to have one’s mind blown and taste defined by the immortal power of its prose. Nay, Flipside in the 1980s was more a clubhouse, bulletin board, connection point and gathering place for teenagers, night owls and newly-minted punk obsessives – a place to get the Southern California-centric ground-level view of it all, straight from Los Angeles & Orange Counties, where everyone’s favorite bands (Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Adolescents, Fear et al) were from. Consequently, it’s those early 80s issues that I still have and cherish, and/or have acquired after the fact.

    In the 90s Flipside served a similar function, even once the bloom had almost completely worn off the SoCal musical rose. Today, as I’ve tried to make clear in previous Flipside unpackings, their issues remain one of the single best collections of archival material we have to make sense of it all, and I enjoy the fanzine far more now than I did then. Because I love LA punk rock of this era more than I do my family, my country and life itself, I still find myself quite enraptured with the slamtastic goings-on in this Flipside #30 from early 1982.

    This magnanimity even extends to an early photo of Rodney Bigenheimer with Unit 3 and Venus and a Shane Williams with letter from prison. But I’m more entertained by this era’s letters from punks complaining about scene violence, poseurs, Serena Dank and “Parents of Punkers” and of course about the outstanding Phil Donahue episode with “mothers of punks”. A guy from Jodie Foster’s Army (from Phoenix) writes in complaining about how messed-up & angry the LA scene has become, and about a fight he nearly got into with some lunkhead when his band played the Cuckoo’s Nest. Editor Al Flipside responds, “We know things are a mess, our scene has been invaded by lots of assholes, most of them big”. Someone named “Kansas City” writes in complaining about San Francisco’s punks, but then blurts out this curveball kicker: “I liked the Sex Pistols and all that other shit too, but that was more than three years ago, anyway, what are the Sex Pistols compared to The Minutemen and The Meat Puppets? Or Tav Falco?”. Kansas City, contact Fanzine Hemorrhage with your real name and coordinates, please!

    There are a ton of random-passing interviews; because Flipside staffers were at all the shows; they’d just corner a band before or afterward and let the tape roll. Sometimes it yielded some quotables; often it did not. The Adolescents are back after a short stint with Pat Smear on guitar (!); an item a page later says Smear is going to tour with Paul Roessler to back up Nina Hagen on a world tour (!!). Can confirm! There’s an interview with local band Godhead, who had a 45 on the Bemisbrain label (who gave us Hell Comes To Your House) that I thought I’d never heard, then I just listened to it here and yeah, I totally know this one – and without a doubt, I have not heard this song since the 1980s. 

    Other early ‘82 groups interviewed included Fear; The Effigies from Chicago, RF7, Anti-Pasti and a brief Greg Hetson/Circle Jerks chat. New Order – yes, the very same – are being extremely difficult; Flipside #30’s interview with them is an interview of them saying they don’t want to be interviewed. They still snapped two smiling band member photos nonetheless (incidentally, I think New Order were fantastic around this era – listen). There’s also Modern Warfare, who get compared to The Germs and don’t mind in the least, and unfortunately TSOL and Crucifix interviews as well, both of which still remain unread 43 years later so that I can eventually apply those five minutes to charity work instead. 

    And look who’s on the cover. Salvation Army, who would change their name next year to The Three O’Clock, talk about an upcoming New Alliance 45 called “Blow Your Mind” that never actually happened, as well as a full-length album that will be called Looking Through The Walking Four O’Clock. This also never happened. On one of my podcasts I back-announced some early Salvation Army material and authoritatively remarked they’d never put out an album, and that this material only ever came out later as Befour Three O’Clock – you know, the one with “She Turns To Flowers”. My pal Nick corrected my dumbassery – there was a Salvation Army album, and the two records were one and the same. Singer Michael Quercio was known as “Rickey Start” at this time, and in this interview. Some real mythmaking going on in early ‘82.

    What else? Scene reports! From Seattle’s” “The group I like and think has a lot of talent is Solger” – oh hell yeah. The Phoenix report talks about how Madison Square Gardens is likely to close because of (imported?) punk violence. The scene reporter – Michael Cornelius – is crossing his fingers it won’t be more of the same at the upcoming Black Flag/Saccharine Trust/Minutemen/Plebs show. Plebs fans were totally nuts! There’s a photo of The Flesh Eaters’ Chris D. standing with two fellas from Social Distortion. There’s just been a Masque Revival Night in February 1982 at the Cathay de Grande with Controllers/Skulls/Bags/Plugz/Arthur J & The Goldcups, put together by Craig Lee, at which attendees were instructed to dress like it was 1977, a mere 5 years earlier. What would you dress like if instructed to dress like 2020? I shudder to think. At said event, The Bags only played “fast stuff” and were purportedly amazing. I would have gone if you’d have told me about it. 

    Well, I just spent a ton of time flipping through my own copy of Flipside #30 taking notes in order to painstakingly capture the mood and the magic for you, only to just now find that you can experience it all yourself thanks to the Internet Archive. Enjoy!

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  • Wiring Dept. #6

    Frankly, I don’t have a ton of chronological information to go on here since the obscurant Wiring Dept didn’t provide dates nor issue numbers, but I’m pretty sure this was their sixth and final issue, and that it came out in late 1987. I’ve talked mostly positively about their 3rd and 4th issues here and here. I have another issue with Thurston Moore on the cover, and we shall discuss that in this space presently; and by “presently”, I mean it as Mark Twain used the term: “after a short time; soon”. 

    What kind of has this issue floundering a bit in my estimation – relative to earlier issues – is just how immersed editor Eric Cope has clearly become in radical chic and the de rigeur performative leftism that was endemic to its home base San Francisco at the time. I really think the only reason I became the bleeding heart liberal I am today later in life is due my utter contempt for the MDC/Jello Biafra/MRR force-fed feeding tube leftism of the 80s. Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaraugua, Bobby Sands, Malcolm X, an important conference against racism, Huey Newton, Steve Biko, prison abolition poetry, Native Americans and European colonial penetration, the PLO: it’s all here, baby. It’s here and in the dorm rooms of my UC-Santa Barbara left-leaning brethren at the time, right next to the Che poster, the hacky sack, the gonorrhea antibiotics and the “One Love” and “Buffalo Soldier” records playing softly in the background. 

    You think I’m exaggerating? I am not. There are reverent photos of Jonathan Jackson with his guns at the Marin County Civic Center, where he died, and George Jackson, the hero, the Soledad Brother, the liberator of Angela Davis – and then a two-page spread for Huey Newton as well. I mean, yeah, I sort of dug the Black Panther mystique myself at the time (the leather, the guns, the chants, and they fed the little children of Oakland, too!), and no 4-year college journey of intellectual discovery at the time was complete without a little time spent coming to grips with Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice. Mine was completed, shall we say. But even so, I blanched when I read Wiring Dept. #6’s interview with sisters/artists Sue Coe and Mandy Coe, who have a new art book dedicated to Malcolm X and who talk incessantly about police brutality. You know, I always say it was MDC and Biafra who turned me counter-countercultural, but maybe it was this interview?

    Anyway, the music content is lessened in this one as a result of having to shoehorn in all this important agitprop. But the music content is quite strong, as it was in previous music-dominant issues. Big Black are interviewed at the very end of their run in 1987. “Why is this your last tour?” “Because we’re breaking up on Sunday”. Santiago Durango was going to law school, but interviewers Humbert de Birck and Brandan Kearney seem to be trying to convince them to stay together, which we now know did not work. Steve Albini says: “When people who don’t understand what kind of music this is ask me, I ask them if they know what rock and roll is. And they usually say, yeah. And then I say, Imagine that, but with a lot of heavy machinery operating at the same time”. Also, the band expresses a deep hatred of the up-and-coming band Jane’s Addiction, who, long before they became famous, became deservingly embedded in my own personal lexicon as one of the absolute worst bands in the history of rock music. I’d say “You know, truly awful, like Jefferson Starship or Jane’s Addiction”. I stand by it!

    There’s a negative review of “sellouts” Sonic Youth and their “9/28/87” show at The Fillmore on the Sister tour. This happens to be the exact same date that I saw them play one of the greatest shows I’ve ever seen, in Isla Vista, CA, also labeled as 9/28, and because two locales are a six-hour drive from each other – someone’s lying. David Katz talks to Adrian Sherwood; Sherwood describes what his music sounds like when his group plays live as “live funk dub” – then he says “Don’t use that quote. Don’t say ‘live funk dub’ – sounds horrible!”. Doesn’t he know that when you’re on the record and you say “don’t print that”, it’s absolutely gonna be printed? I’ll bet he knows that now in 2025, perhaps not so much 38 years ago.

    Katz also talks to Wire in London, and it’s actually a really comprehensive overview of the band’s journey, leaning much more heavily on recent years, as the band back then were pretty reticent when confronted with their glorious past – you know, the first three albums that everyone wanted to talk about, instead of the recent stuff that they didn’t. There are also other chats with Stickdog, the Beat Nigs – a band so bad Jello Biafra loved them – Barnacle Choir, and Comic Book Opera, the latter of whom sound like something I’d go to see live for sure, if only I could teleport back to the Reagan era. There’s a review of a super-early Brandan Kearney/Barbara Manning-era World of Pooh live show at “Lipps Underground”: “singing like children who don’t want to wake their sleeping parents”. “Foot-shuffling, hunched shoulders, and staring are what pass for stage mannerisms in their rock show”. They ended said Lipps Underground show with a cover of “Gunboats” by Swell Maps. Anyone have the tape???

    Most record reviews within Wiring Dept. #6 are by Kearney, in fact, and I’m pretty sure the ones that are not by him – by people like “Rosanguine”, “Curdleby”, “Stallwart Pool Trump” and “R. Pawnships” – are by him. His exceptionally positive review of Three Day Stubble’s Monster makes it pretty clear where he stands: “Remember that one person that was more pathetic than you in 7th grade? The one person you could actually look down on? Well, it’s 1987 now and it turns out that he was miles ahead of you all along.”

    Bought at Rhino Records in LA for $2, sticker still on the back, and it has successfully traveled with me through the peaks and valleys of life’s rich pageant ever since.

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  • Defiant Pose #8

    Defiant Pose #8 from 2014 was a punk fanzine, and it went to great pains to make sure you couldn’t forget it. Each page looks like something out of Sniffin’ Glue or innumerable other 1977-78 punk clarion calls: 100% cut-and-paste, cheap xeroxing and varied fonts. Like the “MacIntosh” had never been invented. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, right? Now me, I’ll tend to steer well clear of fanzines with interviews w/ bands like “Stench” and “Cervix”, neither of whom I’ve ever heard – because, of course, you can in fact judge a book by its cover – but Defiant Pose #8 transcended these transgressions quite impressively due to its core subject matter this time.

    Yes, I bought this UK fanzine in 2014 because it came with a Rema-Rema 45. This was a late 70s UK band who’d only had that Wheel in the Roses EP to their name (the first record on 4AD!), a record that (to my ears) only had one notable track: the outstanding, eponymous, clanging post-punk juggernaut “Rema-Rema”. That track is so, SO special that I took a flyer on this mag + 45, and w–o-w. The included single International Scale/Short Stories was the best thing this band ever did, including all the stuff that came out after this, and you do need to hear it. That said, what I linked there is not quite the version on the 45. 

    Better still, Defiant Pose #8 gets some of the Rema-Rema gang back together for multiple interviews and fond reminiscing about the salad days of yore. Turns out, to no one’s surprise, they struggled to find their place in the proverbial scene, despite having Marco Pirroni from Siouxsie & The Banshees on guitar. Pirroni would shortly thereafter achieve world stardom playing “antmusic” with Adam and the Ants. It’s very possible that this collection of interviews helped to kick-start Rema-Rema fandom into gear again, as it wasn’t too long afterward that a full documentary was made about the band that I haven’t yet seen.

    Michael, the guy that put this one out, is a true punk rock archivist/lifer and it shows in the absurd amount of flyer reprints in this one and in another issue I have (#6) that focused on LA punk. He runs a record label called Inflammable Material that is fuckin’ punk to the core. There are still other issues of Defiant Pose available (here, too) if your interest is piqued. 

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  • Hot Spit #1

    When I was involved in Southern CA college radio in the late 80s, we at KCSB always kept a watchful eye on any other California stations that might be as cool as ours. KXLU in LA – no way. KALX in Berkeley – perhaps. KFJC in Los Altos Hills – absolutely. The one I was especially curious about was KDVS in Davis, just outside of Sacramento. You’d think maybe not with that one, given its location, and yet every time I’d meet a DJ from that station at a show or elsewhere, that person would know far more about underground music than I did. I’m thinking both Sharon McKenzie and Karl Ikola in particular; the former ran Hecuba Records and turned me onto Bill Direen & The Bilders; the latter would go on to run Anopheles Records, and was & is a guy who knew just about everything about everything psychedelic, raw and strange. 

    Ikola didn’t write for Hot Spit #1 in 1989, but Sharon McKenzie did, and so did some other heavyweight names from greater Sacramento that I’m very familiar with: Brian Faulkner (still does a fantastic show on KDVS to this day, and whom I interviewed in my own Radio Dies Screaming #1 last year); Jed Brewer (he’s in mesmerizing psych shamans San Kazakgascar); and wow, Ted Verani, whom I used to work with at two different corporate jobs over 20 years ago. The zine was edited by Bill Smith, and while his opening editorial lacks a fair bit of depth (“That’s kind of the way it is with alternative music. It has always been a little different. Hot Spit brings you that something different”), the overall package is just fine – even with the subtitle for the fanzine being “The sizzle of alternative sounds”, and the cover looking like what might result if you handed off art direction for your fanzine to the one college art major sophomore you happened to know. Alas, Smith died quite young, as I’ve just discovered.

    There’s an Anthony Braxton interview by Damon Cleckler, which takes place in Braxton’s office at Mills College moments after he’s just finished teaching a class there. He really gets him talking! They cover AACM, Stockhausen, Braxton’s writings and, most importantly, whether or not he’ll be getting tenure at Mills and be able to stay on in Oakland. I checked Wikipedia and it’s looking like he didn’t, which is probably why Braxton and I never went out for beers during those years or saw a Thinking Fellers show together.

    Also a good Penelope Houston interview; she’s actually a bit bemused that there’s still a cult of The Avengers out there; she also does a nice call out for Mary O’Neil of the Wannabe Texans, a pal and hero of ours here at FH and a woman who’d later go on to form Virginia Dare. Our man Verani interviews Rudi Protrudi of The Fuzztones. Verani says “A lot of the bands that were playing with you – The Morlocks, Telltale Hearts, the Chesterfield Kings – have all disappeared, and Protrudi humbly responds “They’re all dead and gone. We buried them”. Gross! And it wouldn’t be a good Davis-area mag without a Thin White Rope piece; along with True West and Game Theory, they were the patron saints of greater Sacramento’s alterna-whatever throughout the 80s and into the 90s. McKenzie writes a puff piece on Mudhoney, Brewer tries to wave a flag for Voivod, and many marginal independent releases of ‘89–’90 are given the once-over. Hot Spit #1, folks!

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  • NY Rocker #18

    I’ve recently come into a gaggle of older issues of NY Rocker, and thumbing through them, I’m even happier about my minor acquisitions than I’d thought I’d be. At least on the evidence presented by NY Rocker #18 from April/May 1979, this not-really-a-fanzine tabloid newspaper was even better in its earlier years than it would be a couple years hence. I’ve talked about issues from that later era here, here, here, here and here. And I’ll talk about other ones that sprang from ‘79/’80 in the weeks to come, as I traverse them. This shall take time. For now, let’s see what was happening in the world of underground NY/LA/SF/London during the Carter years.

    First, there’s Howie Klein reporting from San Francisco. Sigh. I can’t throw a stick at a fanzine from this period without encountering the guy. If you’re not a Clash fan, and I’m not, it’s hard to wrestle with hyperbole such as Klein’s blather when he sees their 2/7/79 show in San Francisco: “This was undoubtedly one of the best shows ever seen in the Bay Area…..”. If you don’t know which side of the true punk vs. corporate schmuck divide Klein stood on – or at least which side he was (rightly) perceived to be on – there are these gems from the same piece: “Rock super-promoter Bill Graham – the only major concert promoter in the U.S. to give strong and consistent support to the new wave…” (Bill fucking Graham!!) and dissing the grass-roots punk/all-ages organization called New Youth who got The Clash to play this cheap, for-the-people gig in the first place. “…the band (got) involved with New Youth, a group of mostly idealistic (like starry-eyed at best, and in some cases, simply psycho) young fans who believe in non-profit punk rock gigs. So they got The Clash to commit themselves to doing a benefit for them at a deserted Jewish synagogue between the Peoples’ Temple and the Old Fillmore in the heart of San Francisco’s black ghetto. A cheap ticket price and the opportunity to see the band in an unseated funky venue…caused a dramatic slump in ticket sales in what should have been the band’s biggest and fastest sell-out. As it turned out, The Clash came pretty near to selling out anyway….but not before a lot of rock-biz upset between the Graham Organization, Epic Records and Tapes and the William Morris booking agency”.

    The horror! You can see the sort of scene mechanics that actually stressed Klein out in 1979, and why he ended up being so utterly reviled by music-focused underground aesthetes at the time, unfair as it perhaps may have been, considering one’s perspective and degree of oppositional defiance.

    More irony abounds in a Sandy Pearlman interview – he produced The Clash’s Give ‘Em Enough Rope – “The Clash themselves will do virtually nothing to make it. In other words, they will not accommodate themselves to the rotten, debased, commercial system of exploitation that currently exists. The Clash do not wish to make any compromises”. Totally! On the flipside is a paean by Doug Simmons to truly underground Boston band The Neighborhoods and their singer David Minehan. I didn’t much care for the band, once I finally heard them, but my 9th grade best friend Jon Grant had just moved to San Jose from Massachusetts, and his brother had been close friends with Minehan. I’d hear all about The Neighborhoods from Jon, and seriously, I felt pretty special at age 14 knowing a guy who had a brother who was friends with a guy in an actual performing punk band that I’d never heard.

    Oh, and the Beach Boys stuff in this issue is just fantastic. There’s a Greg McLean interview with Carl and Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, as well as a Harvey Kubernik sidebar about a recent BB book. McLean clearly isn’t a fan of Dennis Wilson: “his frequently crass and unexpected comments often cut Carl off mid-sentence, and he dropped the name of his new girlfriend, Christine McVie, whenever possible”. McLean retaliates and agitates them by only asking questions about Brian Wilson: where is he, tell me more about Brian etc. This does him no favor with the brothers. Dennis says, vis-a-vis the Dr. Eugene Landy thing, “Brian is loved dearly by all of us and us by him, and all that bullshit about him being manipulated is just….not in my experience…”. McLean then goes on to bait them further about Mike Love being an asshole (a certified fact, from what I understand), and then talks about a Beach Boys show at Radio City Music Hall in ‘79: “Between songs, Love babbled aimlessly, killing any sense of pace the show might have established. Mike Love looked old and foolish”. Everyone loves Mike Love, don’t they?

    So this issue is absolutely packed, and I could write reams about each piece – but there are like, 20 pieces: The Shoes; a thing on young Boston and NY radio DJs and stations; Viv Stanshall; The Raincoats; The Only Ones; and a really early piece on The B-52s, circa their Rock Lobster 45, with great photos of a very young band and an interview by editor Andy Schwartz. Even so, NY Rocker would sometimes give space to mainstream music-lovers like Ken Barnes. He writes a thing about how much he loves disco, even in 1979 (the year of Disco Demolition Night), and says, perplexingly, “It seems to me that a lot of people are quite scared about disco, and they’re lashing back with unreasoning venom. An interesting observation by Mark Shipper pertains here – for years during the 70s rock lull, all the right fanzines clamored for the return of fast, exciting beat music kids could dance to. Now it’s here and kids dig it…but because it doesn’t follow the form the clamorers grew up with, they’ve turned on it viciously. Ironic, wouldn’t you say?”. I mean…..that’s one way to look at it?

    Finally, and I feel like I’m skimming here, but there are great reviews of recent “rock concerts” by The Contortions, Nico, The Knack (who are absolutely buried by Don Waller), and The Ramones with their special opening band Lester Bangs’ Birdland. NY Rocker #18 comes to an outstanding close with Jeffery Vogel’s fake “TV Guide” listings that shit mercilessly on every upcoming show and on every NY band – especially the Dead Boys. Now that’s some vitriolic mirth-making that we at Fanzine Hemorrhage can get behind, anytime & anywhere, even from 46 years ago.

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  • Not Fade Away #4

    Not Fade Away #4 showed its face in 1985, only a mere five years after the previous issue, the Not Fade Away #3 that I talked about here. It’s a pure and heartfelt celebration of raw Texas rock & roll sound, with nothing past 1970 talked about; it’s focused squarely on the sixties punk and blasted-out psychedelia that had the Lone Star State marking itself as the pinnacle location for both forms. Doug Hanners was the guy who made the fanzine happen, and he was a first-rate devotee of garage rock, yet was also clearly into documenting Texas’ hillbilly and rockabilly musics this time around as well.

    Right off the bat there’s a Texas Archive Records ad on the inside front cover, promising that a new “Flashback series” is coming – I thought that would have to be the amazing Texas Flashbacks comps, but no, it’s a different set of records entirely. Hanners was involved. There’s a great early discussion about the band The Blue Things, and the feature talks at length about a 60s radio station with immense wattage called KOMA out of Oklahoma City. Its signal was so strong they’d announce live shows each night that were happening from Bismarck, ND to Plainview, TX – in case listeners in those areas needed something to do. I love that stuff. When I was growing up in San Jose, CA, I was able to pick up a Tijuana, Mexico AM station called “The Mighty 690”, with the 60s DJ “The Real Don Steele” still holding down the fort at night. That’s a long way from San Jose, folks, and was totally fascinated with these transmissions from another world. I was also able to pick up KFI from Los Angeles, and I can still sing their jingles, teasers and stingers to this day.

    Not Fade Away #4 took a similar approach to that of Ugly Things in putting forth every known detail about a given short-lived 60s band, and interviewed any living members willing to talk. Rather unlike Ugly Things, however, Hanners and his crew opted for relative descriptive and discussion brevity in most cases. They have a couple of killer ones here for sure – The Sparkles, whom you may know for “No Friend of Mine” and “Hipsville 29 B.C.”, and The Stoics, who did the awesome “Hate”. The latter band also had bodyguards pulled from the Capinch motorcycle gang, and I learned that they ultimately had a falling out because “half the band wanted to go in a Kinks direction, and the other half in a Stones direction”. Let’s call the whole thing off!

    Other interviews are with The Golden Dawn, who bond with Hanners during their interview over their mutual distaste for the first Red Krayola record. There are short pieces on The Remaining Few, The Sherwoods, The Lavender Hour, Sea-Ell Records, and a great longer piece with Weldon Rogers bantering with Hanners about West Texas music in the 1950s: radio stations, record labels, regional music, country, hillbillies, Ernest Tubb and more. After the three pages of reviews of Texas 45s and reissues – again, nothing post-sixties allowed, please! – I gazed upon a cool ad for Austin’s Mediaphile Performing Arts Books & Magazines, a store that could (probably) not exist now. They’re advertising “The Roky Erickson Story – over 200 xeroxed pages of newspaper articles, record reviews, interviews, posters etc. With discography”. Here’s what little I could dig up online about it. I’d buy that for a dollar! Even in 1985, they’re wanting $25 for it.

    This issue concluded the run for Not Fade Away – four outstanding missives in ten years. Truly essential 60s punk scholarship here, and probably the germ that helped so many of us realize Texas’ unsung but outsized contributions to the greater culture during that decade.

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  • Fuz #1

    I first became aware of fuzz-drenched “biker rock”, 60s biker films, and the music of Davie Allan and the Arrows when that Angel Dust comp came out way back in 1988. Pretty goddamn revelatory! The Arrows very quickly became a touchstone band for me, and over the course of the intervening 37 years I tried to pick up any reissues or unearthings of their instrumental madness that I could. I’ve mightily enjoyed much of the crazed post-60s stuff Allan’s done as well, particularly his 1990s resurgence with blistering 45s like Chopper/Open Throttle. Always got a good laff out of his poses in his latter-day photos – tough, mean, unsmiling and still pissed off about the way Mike Curb treated him in the 60s.

    Fuz #1 sort of functions as the best Davie Allan & The Arrows “book” and discography we may ever get, despite coming out back in 1997, even before the Devil’s Rumble 2x compilation finally writed many wrongs and got Allan’s music to the people. Though the Arrows stuff in here is not even novella-length, it’s at least a strong retelling of how Allan and his group became the in-play session men for teen exploitation films from American International Pictures and how they were shepherded through a variety of projects by young Hollywood mogul Mike Curb, later a California lieutenant governor. I’ll never forget when CA governor Jerry Brown was out of the county once, Curb, his elected-but-not-appointed lieutenant, pulled an Alexander Haig “I’m in charge here now” move, and started vetoing bills and making appointments himself, thoroughly pissing off the Democrat establishment and prompting immediate rule changes.

    Anyway, Fuz #1 was the brainchild of one Seth Wimpfheimer, and Seth’s the guy who takes on assembling the Allan piece, which is 2/3rds of the mag. Packed with storytelling, photos, movie posters, asides and old radio station charts – “Blues Theme” was #1 across many west coast stations in late 1967! – his Allan piece only really lacks an interview with the man himself. I will assume it was not for a lack of trying. There’s a great late 60s group shot of Allan, Curb and a gaggle of young-&-beautiful Hollywood singers, actors, musicians and actresses. The dude on the far left is Doug Moody, identified here as an A&R man (which he was). You may know him better as the proprietor of Mystic Records, generally thought by many to be the worst hardcore punk label of all time. 

    Gudrun Müller contributes the other piece to this fanzine, and it’s a celebration of 60s exploitation actress Mimsy Farmer. Müller can’t really “keep it in his pants”, shall we say, yet he puts together an excellent overview of her filmography and the usual sordid Hollywood BS that kept her both working and not working. I know I’ve seen Riot on the Sunset Strip and Devil’s Angels – both of which she was in – but if I’m being honest, it’ll be tough for me to complete her filmography as I really can’t find the brain capacity to devote to exploitation cinema in 2025. There was once a time, but that time is no longer.

    All of Fuz #1 is on thick, glossy pages and it’s a real treat to hold and caress. As one does. My understanding is that Wimpfheimer never made a Fuz #2, but if you know differently, please let us know in the comments.

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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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