Home

  • Trendy Rag #9

    This 1986 cut/paste/copy mini-zine is my sole issue of Trendy Rag, published just outside of Boston by a fella named Jim Hildreth. Jim appears caught between a love of hardcore and a need to make fun of it; between a love of nascent guitar noise/pigfuck and a need to sneer at the fanzines helping to shepherd it (Forced Exposure, Conflict, Chemical Imbalance); and between a desire to put out an opinionated fanzine and to shut the hell up – as alluded to in his intro.

    I’m not sure how much further Hildreth went with this fanzine – are you? Nothing online – well, nothing except for this and this I guess – which I suppose is why I do this site in the first place. He kinda kicks the thing off with a recognition of the “limp” Boston scene of the late 1986 moment – “most all-ages shows revolve around metal-drunk band GANG GREEN or STRAWDOGS that XXX keeps presenting”. Ah ha, the all-ages modifier is our clue that Hildreth is a young man – well, that and the fact he’s still listening to 7 Seconds in 1986, or ever listened to them at all. There’s a mail interview with Big Stick that’s pretty much a both-ways goof, in which the duo each claim to be in their 70s and profess their love for many of the same metalcore bands Hildreth was bemoaning one page earlier.

    Jarboe of The Swans also more or less dodges many of her interview questions, but I think it’s the first time I’ve read an interview with her (never a fan of her solo music nor of The Swans, there are only so many years in a life) and I like that she’s in keeping with whatever obtuse and abstracted persona I’d imagined for her. Steve Epstein and Jeremy Spencer guest-reprint their December 1985 radio interview with The Minutemen, conducted two weeks before D. Boon’s death. Hildreth mentions in his intro how much he hated Project: Mersh when it came out and therefore skipped the band when they came through town; this unfortunately mistaken opinion was one held by many at the time, and I’ve never understood it. Excellent record!

    I was most excited to see a super-early Pussy Galore interview – maybe my favorite band of the late 80s. And it’s not with Spencer, it’s with Cristina (Martinez), and she’s not even in the band any longer: “I’ve been kicked out of the band and they’re trying to get a new guitar player this girl Rebecca Corbett who used to be in Missing Foundation”. She talks about how she’s about to start playing with the Honeymoon Killers; about how the phenomenal Pussy Gold 5000 record ended up on Buy Our Records (“they offered us money”); about her work as a phone sex operator (she encourages the interviewers to get out their Visas and Master Cards), and about how a super-secret surprise tape’s about to come out, and how we’re all going to love it but she can’t tell us what it is (it was Exile on Main Street). Mostly she’s just brash, young and annoying, which is entirely keeping with her 80s persona as well. 

    Most of Trendy Rag #9 is handwritten, including the entire “Recordings” review section. This is where I can see Hildreth bouncing around from late-hardcore mediocrities to stuff like Rat At Rat R and Ciccone Youth and a Slits live bootleg he’s just picked up. Best quote: “The Slits were an amazingly beautiful band and The Cocteau Twins just totally ripped them and many other Rough Trade bands like The Raincoats off”. Oh yeah??

    , , , , ,

  • Rock Mag #6

    As I relayed last time we discussed Tim Ellison’s Rock Mag, there really wasn’t a music fanzine quite like it before, and there definitely hasn’t been since. I mean, I’ve subsequently come to have read much of the strange, erudite and serious rock writing of the 60s and 70s, but even that stuff in Crawdaddy or Beetle or Cheetah doesn’t really have the potent mix of over-the-top earnestness and below-the-surface humor of Rock Mag, and of course, none of those mags were tied so utterly to the outlook and informed worldview of one single rock-obsessed man. 

    Rock Mag #6 doesn’t call out its time of publication, but I believe just by the records covered that it’s probably late 1996 or early 1997. It starts off with a bang: “Having gotten so far away from what Rock originally (and for the better) meant, this is probably the worst ever period for Rock”. “If I were running a major label I could enquire about signing many artists: VON LMO, maybe Silver Apples and The Godz if they were up for it, The Fall, The Red Krayola, The Dead C, Ghost, Ruins, High Rise, Fushitsusha, Cheater Slicks, The Dirt Bombs and The Inhalants, Run On, Satisfact, Los Cincos, maybe old-timers like Blue Oyster Cult and Voivod….That’d be a good start for a Rock label”. Oh, and Ellison has a section called CDs vs. Records: The Final Word: “Records are better!”. 

    A highlight in this issue, as in other issues of Rock Mag, is a letter from Alan Licht. His mind clearly works a lot like Tim Ellison’s does, and carves all sorts of grooves into every manner of musical minutia. Ellison, of course, has a long response to Licht’s long letter, with digressions into Can, Stevie Nicks lyrics, The Seeds, The White Album and so on. I’d listen to a box set of these guys’ phone calls from around this time period, but that’s me. There are also other letters from two great Americans, Scott Derr and Doug Pearson. 

    Unlike the typical interview/essay/record review fanzines, my own included, it was always something of a crap-shoot what you’d get in any given issue of this one. Rock Mag #6 has an unexplained reprint of some out-of-context Richard Meltzer paragraphs; a berzerk hand-written word explosion on George Harrison, and – get this – a page-by-page annotated takedown on Simon Reynolds’ The Sex Revolts. I never read that, but it’s fun to see what was totally discombobulating Tim at the time. This is the sort of piece I alluded to above; on one level, it reads as much ado about nothing at all, and you’re like, what the hell is this guy so worked-up about. On another level, it’s a sort of anti-comedy and quite entertaining in its fake-but-not-really outrage. On a third level, it is valid and exceptionally pointed criticism – old-school criticism, the kind they used to write, when there were true critics employed at newspapers and national magazines. 

    And look, I know just over a week ago I discussed another fanzine that had a small section of my own “record reviews” – let me assure you, that one and this one were the only times that ever happened. Rock Mag #6 has a “Superdope supplement” with eleven reviews that I wrote and only published here. Reading back on them now, there are some good ones on Alex Chilton and The Dwarves and The Urinals, and some incredibly stupid ones on the Blues Explosion and the Ear Piercing Punk comp reissue. Tim, of course, gets the real review page count. He reviews the Un 45 on Siltbreeze – a great mind-boggler – and everything else from Masonna to The Fall to the Shadow Ring to Nautical Almanac to the newest R.E.M. major label CD; then a few backwards looks, including to The Three O’Clock’s Arrive Without Traveling (“one of the great Rock albums of the 80s”). Footnotes galore. 

    After the main section of reviews, there’s another long column with a ton more records that were sent to Tim. Anyone who did a music fanzine then remembers just how many independent labels were in existence back then, in an era when physical media actually sold copies. Downloadable files barely existed. So greenhorns like me & Tim, we’d have glorious mail days nearly every day, even if the majority of stuff we received was going to end up at a used record store by the end of the week. I remember the two months I was away on the Claw Hammer tour in 1993, coming home to three overflowing buckets full of packages that I got to tear open like the happiest overindulged rich kid on Christmas morning. I wish I were joking, but I can remember my endorphins basically exploding out of my head that afternoon.

    On the inside back cover, he’s still picking apart that Sex Revolts book. Jeez, maybe now I wanna read this thing, just to zoom to the pages Tim hated and compare the contents with the affront Tim’s taking. It can’t be that bad, can it? A poindexterish rock book about the centrality of gender that one might likely read in a cultural studies course at an elite American university? Sign me the fuck up.

    , , ,

  • Twisted #2

    Twisted was Seattle’s finest and foremost contribution to on-the-ground ‘77-’78 punk rock documentation, and it’d probably be one of the fanzine high-water marks for any musical era, really. Their full arc was a short three-issue run, and I’ve already aired my views about Twisted #1 and Twisted #3 at the respective links. Here we are in late 1977 completing the run with the middle-issue Twisted #2. 

    This issue reads not so much as a Seattle mag, but as a Northwest regional fanzine, with road trips to Vancouver, Portland record store ads etc. The Pacific Northwest, then as now, really has just those three large metro areas, and forty years ago they felt – I’m sure quite rightly – that they totally were off the map for the rest of North America in terms of touring bands and coverage. Make your own scene! The ad sales department at Twisted has clearly been taking some three-hour trips in both directions from Seattle, as we’ve got Vancouver and Portland record stores and newsmagazines well-represented, along with a few major label ads for hot new bands The Tubes and The Boomtown Rats.

    A nice surprise in the early pages is “A Punk’s Guide to Stereo”, an audiophile approach to playing punk records at the requisite level of fidelity. Do true audiophile maniacs still exist now? I used to converse with some of these lunatics daily in my first job out of college at Monster Cable, which you can read about here (seriously, I think it’s my favorite piece of writing I’ve ever been involved with). I suspect they’re mostly a dying breed, with an average age of 75+ now, but whoa, what a fanatically insular subculture when it was around. Brian Tristan, Lobotomy contributor and a man who’d eventually become Kid Congo Powers, contributes a bird’s eye view of what it has been like to be the president of the Ramones LA fan club for the past year now; this is accompanied by a fantastic photo of Joey Ramone record shopping with Tomata du Plenty. And then this is followed by a stuttering and strange first-person 4-day diary of the Ramones’ visit to Vancouver.

    Still keeping it north of the border, we then get a 3-band Vancouver overview, with things on The Skulls (featuring singer Joey Shithead – “undoubtedly the focal point of the band”), Dee Dee and The Dishrags (they’d come to be known as just The Dishrags) and The Furies. There’s a piece on The Mumps and a thing on The Jam in LA at The Whiskey, with loads of photos. The Lewd get their first photo shoot – they look super, super, super punk – and this is followed by what I am certain was their first feature, as they seem to have been in existence as a band for mere weeks. Clearly they were Seattle’s great white hope of ‘77. And this Screamers fan club ad, reprinted below – wow.

    I’m maybe getting a little tired of saying it, but it wouldn’t be an early punk fanzine without a dumb three-dot or multi-dot gossip column. Of course Twisted #2 has one. “Screamers have ousted their keyboardist David (Brown). He is now a residing partner in the newly formed Dangerhouse Records”. The Knobs have broken up, and turned into The Lewd and The Snots. “The Damned have lost their drummer. Early reports said that Rat Scabies had been fired for ripping up a hotel lobby in Paris. Fired for being a punk?”. “Iggy has a new hair cut. It’s very short on top and looks almost ROTTEN-like. Don’t call him a punk though, the press agent at RCA says he’ll hit ya”. “In San Francisco there’s a new fanzine out – “NEW DESEASES” (sic). It’s as close to an English fanzine as your gonna find in this country”. Gorilla Rose, a semi-legendary name from around this time for his antics adjacent to The Screamers and his huge influence on the aforementioned Brian Tristan, gets his own gossip column that follows this, “The Rose Report”, mostly focused on LA happenings. 

    Layout’s great, brain-rattled enthusiasm is great, writing is good enough, and suffice to say that Twisted’s one of the all-time keepers, and only 60 cents an issue back in the proverbial day.

    , , , ,

  • Bazooka! #2

    In earlier days on this site, I wrote about Bazooka! #3 from 1997 and later Bazooka! #1 from early 1996. The latter post helped me to reconnect after many years with its editor Tom Arnaert, the Belgian with whom I traded CD-Rs and ‘zines in the late 90s and early 00s. He was kind enough to send me Bazooka! #2, a crucial missing link in my very important fanzine collection. Last night I read it cover to cover and I believe I’ll tell you about it now.

    Even from the cover scanned here you can see that Tom had an absurdist streak and a strong eye for goofy graphics, and there’s a ton of this cut-n-paste aesthetic running through the issue – some of which is well thought-out, and some which raises more questions than answers. The “Bonus 45rpm single” advertised on cover is a fine example of the latter. It doesn’t exist. 

    Bazooka! was a garage punk fanzine that arrived in that 1994-96 timeframe when a wave of  highly satisfying raw/loud/snotty music was ascendent, as well as a new crop of fanzines that covered it. These included Human Garbage Disposal, Sooprize Package, Alright! and of course Wipeout!. It’s clear that news of the early 1996 “Rip Off Rumble” weekend at The Kilowatt in San Francisco has made it over to Belgium, and it’s practically talked about here as the key touchstone rock event of the 90s, Lollapalooza be damned. I suppose for a certain flavor of young man, it was – and I happened to have been one of those young doofuses in attendance. The bands talked about here in connection with said event – The Problematics and De Stipjes – were the bands we walked out on to go get beers elsewhere. Yes, there were also those we didn’t leave, The Brides and The Oblivians included. I feel like maybe The Motards played this thing as well. Can we get someone in fact-checking to review that, please?

    I truly enjoyed the Don Howland interview here. At this point he was two albums in as the leader of The Bassholes, and had recently replaced Rich Lillash as his drummer with “Bim”. Howland is an all-time favorite musician, writer and human of mine. My talks with him on the phone in 1993 for my Superdope fanzine (which yielded this), and later in person in 1995 were highly entertaining and edifying. I proudly got him to go see the 1995 film The Wife at The Roxie in San Francisco when he was in town, and he loved it, and now I want you to go see it as well, because you’ll love it too. My understanding is that there was to be a potential Gibson Bros reunion at Gonerfest in Memphis earlier this year, 2024; all parties were on board except Howland, who wanted nothing to do with it – and he’s a pretty important party in that regard. This interview perhaps gives you a good sense of why.

    As an aside, when The Bassholes came to SF in 1995, I believe he and Bim stayed at my house, and I heard later, like YEARS later, Lamont Thomas aka Bim aka Obnox was calling to me from the stage at an Obnox show, “does anyone know if Superdope is here, is Jay Hinman here?”. I wasn’t, but I’m super psyched beyond belief that I was remembered as such a fine host! Money quote from Howland in Bazooka! #2: “The first live show I ever saw was the Ike and Tina Turner Review at the Ohio State Fair in ‘68 or so; from that point on white women were second best”.

    Bazooka! #2 has a bunch of tape reviews (!); a treatise on something European and unknown to me called Dode’s Ka-Den, and a crazy interview with Austin’s 1-4-5s. You know, you really have to hand it to Texas for its central place in multiple garage punk waves over the years. I mean, the state clearly and dramatically over-indexed, quality- and volume-wise, in the 1960s, and the 70s punk scenes in all three major cities was laudable as well. The 1990s saw a ton of wild bands beyond the 1-4-5s; my favorites included the aforementioned Motards; The Inhalants, Fireworks, Junior Varsity and Sugar Shack, and there were countless others I’m forgetting. Tom’s reviews of all this stuff are frothingly opinionated; it doesn’t take him long to decide that some three-chord basher is utter genius or “shit”. He’s also in the midst of broadening his proverbial scope here, as this issue introduces some dub and cuban mambo reviews along with all the drunken blues and blitzin’ blindin’ punk rock music you can stomach.  

    Stay close and we’ll get to issues #4 and #5 at some point, which you’ll surely want to read for how invariably it triggers my highly self-indulgent, candy-colored, rose-tinted nostalgia for dumb rocknroll memories from the distant past.

    , , , ,

  • Great God Pan #9

    Great God Pan was not, during its finest years, a music fanzine. It had started as one, more or less, but by the time they really got rolling in the mid/late-1990s, it had morphed into the “The Journal of Californiana”, funded by ads from indie record labels who probably still thought they were promoting their wares in a music publication, and not one devoted to unpacking California and western lore in an exploratory, often tongue-in-cheek manner. Sure, Great God Pan still had record reviews at the end of each issue, but this had never been the draw, and, later, may have been a sop to keep that ad revenue flowing in.

    The fanzine, if it can be called that, is among my highest-order “keepers”, especially the ones that ran from about #9-14. These were full of outstanding writing and a sense that GGP had almost fully evolved into an erudite and still down-to-earth essay journal from its garage-rock fanzine roots. The final one was basically a book about editor Mark Sundeen’s travels in the Utah/Nevada desert. During the pandemic, I read every one of the ones that I owned cover to cover, which resulted in this short piece in my own Dynamite Hemorrhage #9 fanzine.

    Great God Pan #9 sees them in full evolutionary mode. The record reviews are there, as is Part One of a piece with various contemporaneous fanzine recollections of The Misfits’ early 80s visits to Southern California, along with one from Chris O’Connor talking about buying Horror Business and the Government Issue Legless Bull records at Zed in 1980. These, once again, prove just what a horrible, egotistical, misanthropic little braggart Glenn Danzig was back then. Raymond Pettibon, forever associated, mostly against his will, with punk rock music, gets a great interview feature as well in this issue, with the questions asked and associated essay written by Tom Watson, formerly of the band Slovenly. 

    There’s a multi-page section at the front of Great God Pan #9 that’s full of wacky modern tales from California, almost like a “police blotter” of items from local newspapers anytime from the 1880s to the 1920s, written in a droll, I-can’t-believe-these-fucking-people tongue. This is of a piece with Sarah Taylor’s well-written “Soiled Doves: Prostitution & The Gold Rush” bit of important historical fodder, which even has photos of some San Francisco “parlor girls” of the 1850s. Excerpt:

    “In May of 1850, the Alta California, a San Francisco newspaper, announced with approval the arrival of ‘fifty or sixty’ young women. ‘The bay was dotted by flotillas of young men, on the announcement of this extraordinary importation’, the paper reported. Earlier that year, two hundred girls had sailed into the bay on a ship from Sydney, Australia. Another city newspaper, The Transcript, described the eager San Franciscans rowing out into the bay to greet the women. What were they doing? ‘Trying to engage housekeepers’, the paper said, with more than a hint of irony”. 

    Of special note to me is the “Our Lady of the Angels: Southern California in Print” piece. This might be where I discovered the novels of John Fante, every one of which I’ve devoured in the subsequent years (although I also remember Jon Behar buying me one – Ask the Dust, still my favorite, so good I’ve read it twice, something I almost never do with books). This piece and my engendered Fante mania also set me onto obsessions with the Bunker Hill neighborhood; the Angel’s Flight funicular; LA-set film noir of the 40s/50s; Dan Fante, John’s son; James M. Cain and virtually anything else related to the dark LA underworld of the times. These were the sort of jumping-off articles that made Great God Pan so valuable. These guys (and their contributors) weren’t just dilettantes, either – they did their own primary research; they camped in out-of-the-way locales to gather the best story, and they seemed very content to push it all onto the page without any real thought to any remuneration beyond what it might take to publish another issue. If any 90s magazine is ripe for a book-length compendium, it’s this one.

    , , , , ,

  • Cimarron Weekend #6

    At the time this came out in 1998 I was of two minds about these guys, David Dunlap and Giles Palermo (aka Andrew Earles) and their The Cimarron Weekend. I felt perhaps they were getting a little too high on their own supply, going a bit too “gonzo”; writing whilst drunk; over-revering the 70s rock critic aesthetic (Bangs/Meltzer/Saunders et al) and so forth. But they truly did make me laff repeatedly, and I was highly pleased by their off-the-charts snark and snidely dismissive takes on modern indie rock. I busted out The Cimarron Weekend #6 this past week and have come to find that it’s aged far, far better than I’d imagined, and I’m now ready to put it in an upper-tier 1990s fanzine pantheon that exists only in my head.

    I mean, no complaints at all about the cover, am I right? None whatsoever. Earles and Dunlap break out of the gates with individual gonzo-style introductions – oh boy, hang on, it’s gonna be a wild, wild ride with these naughty, drunken rapscallions! But then, right after that, we’ve got a Chris Selvig Top 10 which includes The Boredoms, Dock Boggs and the Jared Diamond book. Selvig! A couple years later he’d become a personal friend, which he remains very much to this day, but I didn’t know the guy from the proverbial Adam at the time. Alan Licht then does a “10 worst”, including the same Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas film that Selvig liked, as well as “virtually every Matador release (especially Liz Phair)”. 

    There are piqued and odd letters to the editor from Jim Shepard, Brad Kohler and Tim Ellison. Apparently Andrew Earles had previously gone to town not only on Ellison’s Rock Mag but on Richard Meltzer’s Aesthetics of Rock, and Ellison’s bravely fighting back on both of their behalves. Jim Shepard, alas, would expire by his own hand within months of writing these letters, one of which happily details how much cocaine John Cale was doing backstage when Shepard opened for him, and how frustrated Shepard was by The Offense’s turn toward 4AD records.

    Earles then dives deep into film reviews, mostly from the 1970s and 1980s. Fat City, one of my top five films of all time, is “a rewarding jaunt if you have the patience”. He likes Who’ll Stop The Rain more, and that’s fine, except the drug delivery is in Berkeley, not San Francisco. Dog Day Afternoon is “probably my favorite movie in motion picture history”. It’s up there for me as well. I’d mostly forgotten about 1996’s Trees Lounge with Steve Buscemi, which I saw in the theaters when it came out, but after re-reading this review I’ll absolutely need to give it another run-through. Another fantastic one of Buscemi’s from around this time is Living in Oblivion if you haven’t seen it.

    Then Earles goes into a series of mostly stream-of-consciousness, feelings-be-damned record and fanzine reviews. These are far meaner than I’d remembered. I truly enjoyed the evisceration of Nick Cain’s Opprobrium #5. I wouldn’t mind sneaking a look at Cain’s De/Create and Opprobrium fanzines again nearly 25-30 years later to see if I still feel the same way Earles did about it, but I sold the ones I owned long before the turn of the century, as I too felt like Cain maybe ought to have started his musical journeys with The Stooges instead of, say, Matthew Shipp. I’ve scanned his review below, since I won’t be writing my own, similar review unless I come into inexpensive contact with an issue again. I’ll add the Cat Power review to the bottom as well; anyone who saw her live around this period knows exactly what’s going on here.

    His Dirtbombs review is good, too: “I normally don’t come within 15 feet of records called ‘Horndog Fest”, or songs called ‘Vixens in Space’, ‘Granny’s Little Chicken’ or ‘Shake!! Shivaree”, but I believe this to be a half-deliberate attempt to lure stupid people into hearing an album that’s actually driving off into the ditch for a change”. This means he thinks all the Gearhead dumbassery is actually subterfuge for what was really a top-drawer record (it wasn’t, but whatever). Then – wait a minute WTF?? – there’s a reviews page by ME. OK, I’m just funnin’ ya, I remember doing this. It was originally from an email-only version of Superdope I’d sent around to folks I knew after my final issue in 1998: I covered The Chiefs, The Bassholes, Jenks “Tex” Carmen and The Dirtbombs, the latter of which I most certainly did not like, a negative review for which I was eventually taken to task in person by Mick Collins a year later. Then Chris Selvig, my pal, has a bunch more reviews!

    Off to the side of all these reviews are some fantastic shaded columns packed with negativity. Earles does a rundown of British music publications like The Wire, NME, Mojo, Q and Uncut. Dunlap does “Scottish reviews”: Belle & Sebastian, Arab Strap, Mogwai. You can only imagine. As any American would, he sneaks in a haggis joke. Then, in a series of pieces I wasn’t that interested in at the time but that read a lot better now, there’s a bunch of tribute blather about National Lampoon, a magazine which had been highly formative for these rogues. This includes Chris Selvig waxing poetically on PJ O’Rourke: “Reading P.J. O’Rourke has long been one of my guilty pleasures. My parents are staunch Democrats, so I felt a bit mischievous when I brought Republican Party Reptile into the house years ago.” It was somewhat the opposite for me, raised by semi-staunch Republicans, and how satisfied I was when I told my dad, who was footing the entire bill for my undergraduate degree, about my “Black Radicals” class at UCSB. “Dad, let’s talk about what ‘by any means necessary’ means to you”.

    The Cimarron Weekend #6 is now something of a landmark mag for me after the intense visitation I just had with it. Information about it and their other issues is pretty scarce online – I guess I get the top Google results for this – yet with a little bit of fortitude and sleuthing, I’m certain you can scare one up somewhere, maybe!

    , , , , , ,

  • Matter #12

    For those of us who were living there, maybe we didn’t know it at the time, but the year 1985 would eventually prove to be one of the leanest annums in underground music history. “Americana/new sincerity” garbage was ascendent. Post-punk had splintered into dozens of mostly boring strands. Hardcore was an absolute joke of pseudo-metal postering, brain-dead funnypunk and political nincompoopery. It’s arguable that 1984 or 1986 was worse, but I don’t think so. This 1985 zeitgeist is where Matter #12 has landed. (despite what the cover misprint says, this was their twelfth issue; I’ll talk about the real Matter #11 another day).

    You’ve got a fella from The DBs on the cover. Do any of you have revered bands that you’ve read about and have known about for 40+ years, but who, to the best of your knowledge, you’ve never actually heard? The DBs are this band for me. Why would I start now, right? For years I was rather smugly proud that The Feelies were this band for me, but then I went and heard them around 2010 or so, and totally ruined everything. 

    Matter #12 had a grade-A letters page, and invariably, as we’ve written about when discussing other issues of the magazine here and here, there’s always someone complaining about staff writer Steve Albini. Nick Mink of Lawrence, KS writes that Albini is “a pompous, ignorant, pretend-intellectual, contemptible pile of stinking horseshit”. Hard to believe today, but people actually took their dopey indie rock pretty seriously, and it was considered very au courant to pick sides and head into pitched battle against those whose musical taste didn’t flatter yours. This issue also has a wordy complaint from Derek Bostrom of The Meat Puppets about a letter penned against them in a previous issue, ending with “people who don’t like the Meat Puppets can fuck off as far as we’re concerned”. See, even smart people like Bostrom were young and dumb once, so don’t feel too embarrassed about what you said in your twenties. 

    Matter also did the three-dot gossip column thing so popular in the punk fanzines before it; the best piece of blather in this one concerns Billy Bragg playing a tape of Albini’s Big Black for his tour-mates Echo and the Bunnymen, “who were very impressed. When told he’d won the Bunnyfolk’s favor, however, Black’s Steve Albini was not”. There are three new up-n-comers profiled on the following pages: Dumptruck, Live Skull and White Animals, the latter of whom (a college-bar cover band that apparently did reggae versions of pop songs) sound like the worst thing about the 80s/90s not called The Freaky Executives or Skankin’ Pickle. 

    The magazine, previously a Chicago fanzine, is now based in Hoboken, NJ and as such has pieces from locals like Jim DeRogatis and Jim Testa, the latter of whom does a (relatively) early piece on the Butthole Surfers. So far so good after a Minimal Man interview, but then a terrible Rolling Stone-level puff piece on “General Public”? And then two pieces about the awful Del Fuegos and how they can’t wait to sell out and make money? And then one about the other terrible band I used to always confuse them with, the Del-Lords? 1985, folks.

    If I was a Robyn Hitchcock fan I’m sure his interview here (I assume with editor Liz Phillip) would have excited me somewhat, as it’s really well-done and wide-ranging, but it’s hard to muster even a modicum of excitement for the tepidly limp “garage” bands waxed about after this: The Fuzztones, The Prime Movers and The Mad Violets. I first heard “sixties-inspired punk” that year vis-a-vis these bands and their peers The Vipers,the Lyres, the Chesterfield Kings and so forth, and it’s little wonder it took me another couple of years to care about anything 60s-ish at all, I was so turned off. After the usual “group reviews” thing the mag did where each writer gets a few sentences and assigns a letter grade, Steve Albini’s “Tired of Ugly Fat?” column closes up with the postulation that “we are plum ready for some new blood and some new noise….in gross terms there is still strong music being made, but by fewer and fewer bands and in ever-more-limited contexts”. That is 1985 to me, distilled to its essence. Like other fanzines I’ve written about here, Matter #12’s is great source material if you want to get an excellent sense of what this semi-barren ‘84-’86 interregnum was like.

    , , ,

  • What A Nice Way To Turn Seventeen #1

    Something kinda funny I’ve noticed over many years of fanzine gazing is just how poorly the covers of some of the British ones have held up over the years. I’m talking only about the ink, and how badly it fades on some mags. Am I wrong, or is this a UK and European-only problem? I had and perhaps still have this theory that it had something to do with the printing presses/machines being used in the UK in the late 70s and early 80s. Was there an ink of some kind that caused covers like the one on What A Nice Way To Turn Seventeen #1 to fade as it has here? 

    I asked Chris Seventeen, the gentleman responsible for this in 1983, and whose fanzine we’ve talked about here and here before. He said via email, “I must be honest and say I don’t have an answer. I’ll admit everything was done on a budget and there were printers that “specialised” in low cost printing. I certainly wasn’t considering at the time how long it might last – never thought it would be “something” 40 years from then if I’m honest. The only thought I can throw up is I did go for a coloured font – maybe black and white would have stood the test of time a little better?”

    Well there goes that theory – that Thatcher-era Britain was using some obscure copier that was set to self-destruct covers of anti-establishment, underground fanzines somewhere down the road. If anyone knows what’s what, please let me know. I used modern computer technology to make this one look a little more clear than my copy actually does in real life. 

    Anyway, here’s the first issue of What A Nice Way To Turn Seventeen, published in Warwickshire. Chris had previously published a fanzine called Stringent Measures, but decided that he wanted one that was a bit more “fun”, and I suppose that it is. I’m not going to make any more “scarf rock” jokes like I did last time, but let me just state for the record that scarf rocker Dave Kusworth’s band The Rag Dolls get a big write-up, as does scarf rocker supreme Johnny Thunders. Then again, so does Alex Chilton and I never saw that guy wear any sort of neckerchief. I’m always excited to read people grappling with Chilton back when there was still something of an aura of mystery around the guy, and this piece in particular picks apart Big Star’s 3rd aka Sister Lovers and tries to ensure that readers know just how special it is. Me, I certainly do like that record, but Radio City is a top ten all-timer for me, and I’d rather talk about that, if you ever wanna talk about it. Let me know.

    Chris is supremely bummed that The Undertones have just broken up, ostensibly because they gave themselves a four-year-plan or something like that to have hits, and it just didn’t happen. I get it. I too enjoy the Undertones greatly, and it’s not even “Teenage Kicks” that’s my favorite. It’s “Wednesday Week”. A perfect pop song. I’ve probably listened to it 2,000 or more times in my life. I had this album with the exceptionally classy cover in high school, and it was that song that I needle-dropped over and over again. 

    What A Nice Way To Turn Seventeen #1 also has features on Tempest and Nation III; big interviews with The Waterboys and The Jazz Butcher; and a short interview with a new band called The Pastels (!). For good measure, there’s a discography and a couple of pages of praise for The Ramones. I’ll often sum these things up with my own sort of lazy shorthand claiming that it’s a true fanzine, like yeah, this guy was really a true FAN and that comes out in the ZINE etc. etc. So it is. That’s what makes them so fun to read, right? It’s the homespun ones that reek of bedrooms and late nights and phonographs running in the background that I enjoy the most, all the more if the writing chops are up to snuff, as Chris’s were. After this one, he started including records along with some issues of What A Nice Way To Turn Seventeen, and that tradition carried on to the final issue. Some can even still be found here.

    , , , ,

  • Freak Out, USA #2

    Oh man – when I saw this at a local record store recently, I snapped it up with the enthusiasm and ardor of a starving bear perched at the side of the salmon stream. Just as we’ve deservedly celebrated the punksploitation magazines of the late 1970s – here, here, here and here – let’s now begin delving into any & all late 60s psychsploitation magazines we’re able to find, starting right here and right now with Freak Out, USA #2 from February 1968. I’ll find #1 in due time and give it the once-over, and that’s a promise.

    Remember that before there were nationally-distributed newsstand magazines about rock music like Creem, Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy, much of rock & roll “journalism” was encased in these colorful, boy-crazy teen magazines, which, as Eddie Flowers, who bought them with Alabama-bred relish and  desperation, said in his recent podcast interview, “were pretty much for girls”. Accordingly, even this hippie cash-in from Warren Magazines is full of “great wallet pix of groovy guys” – including a totally doofy picture of teen heartthrob Van Morrison that I’m guessing was unanimously left intact by every teen girl who saw it. Freak Out, USA #2 was the second and final issue of a very short series that apparently didn’t perform at the newsstand. This bums me out, yet it’s also quite indicative of the liberal elites-vs.-silent majority morality play that led to Nixon being elected later that same year. (Cue Pauline Kael: “I can’t believe Nixon won – I don’t know a single person who voted for him!”). 

    It’s possible there was some record company payola dumped into this thing, necessitating who got covered. In addition to the popular Young Rascals – “what they look for in a girl” – there are pieces celebrating The Blades of Grass, one of “the hottest and most personable groups ‘round”, who had one song chart at #87 and weren’t heard from again, as well as Harpers Bizarre, Jay & The Techniques and Every Mother’s Son. The latter go on and on about their exponentially absurd theories of what “love” means and why it’s so important. Remember, we were at peak LSD this year, and for thousands of young people it wasn’t just for concerts in the park, but perhaps also for interviews at Warren Headquarters at 22 East 42nd Street.

    The Beatles – well, the Beatles were sort of a big band, and there perhaps wasn’t any payola involved there. The unnamed writer totally overdoes the recent death of Brian Epstein with purple prose and innumerable errors of syntax. “Suddenly, tragedy struck….the effect on The Beatles was devastating. Their once charmed lives could no longer be considered that. Death had reached out and touched very close indeed”. 

    While there’s a bit of I-love-boys blather in most of the pieces, the non-handsome bands like Spanky & Our Gang just get goofy write-ups with silly photos, but no talk of cars and girls and theories of love. I guess The Fugs and Frank Zappa are in the issue before this one, and it’s a similar story there – and god bless the internet, baby, because you can read that whole issue right here. Then there’s “The exciting new flower-rock group NGC 4594. They’re well into the bead bag and can hold their own from the Haight-Ashbury to Tompkins Park”. Are you holding?

    What makes this psychsploitation mag perhaps even more embarrassing than the punksploitation cash-ins is the grasping, desperate attempts to approximate the language of the times. The “Freaky Things” column is so representative of this mag I’ll just scan it at the bottom of this post so you can see it in all its glory. The Country Joe and The Fish piece is just a word jumble of hippie/psych nonsense (“Purple is the time for you”, “Shreds of red balloons that got caught in the tree-tops fly like little tattered flags”, “Sometimes, in April, you can smell the green” etc.), completely and totally out of line with the band’s plodding blues-rock. But I did enjoy a few things that traveled beyond my natural snark and condescension. The Doors piece is one of the few actual readable pieces, along with the thing on the Bee Gees, “Britain’s most promising new group”, which includes a whole bunch of quotes from Robert Stigwood, the band’s manager. I totally associate that guy with the disco era and all the pain it caused us, yet it turns out he was around way before that.

    There’s an ad asking you to spend $2 to subscribe to the next six issues of Freak Out, USA – issues that were never written. I’ve hidden this punchline for you until now, so you’d read my hot take on this thing, but yes, thanks to the wonders of the internet, you can read the whole of #2 here as well.

    , , , ,

  • The Broken Face #10

    Were you aware that Mats Gustafsson, the celebrated discaholic and longtime free sax player & collaborator, published a rock-adjacent fanzine called The Broken Face from his Trosa, Sweden home in the late 90s/early 00s? Well good, if you weren’t – because it’s not true. The Broken Face was put together by a different Mats Gustafsson, I’ve been informed since my first draft of this post. How embarrassing, and what are the chances.

    You’d almost certainly need to have been marinating in the outsider/experimental and limited-pressing rock underworld of the time, and connected enough in that milieu to have found your way to a copy. We’re talking about the free-folk, noise, psych and abstract-laden scenes bubbling up around Terrastock events and micro-labels like Fonal, Camera Obscura, Spirit of Orr, Audible Hiss and Betley Welcomes Careful Drivers. I’ve talked about ‘zines from this era that trod similar ground like Astronauts, Deep Water, Gold Soundz and Luggage before, but we’re just getting to The Broken Face now. 

    A few years after this early 2001 issue that insular but incredibly diverse & burgeoning world would really get its international sea legs and some form of journalistic reckoning, but The Broken Face was deeply embedded with it all quite earlier than that. Far as I can gather, there was a co-editor named Lee Jackson from Texas; both he and Gustafsson do their top record lists for the year 2000, and both have Alastair Galbraith’s Cry sitting at the big #1. The mag all kicks off with a long and very revealing interview with Glenn Jones of Cul De Sac, who’s exceptionally articulate and concise in answering what appears to be emailed questions. Most things here are email interviews, almost certainly. No problem – it’s mostly what I myself do to this day to prevent superfluous human interaction. This is followed by an early talk with Matt Valentine of Tower Recordings. “Tower Recordings are a band that didn’t win me over instantly”, says Mats – whew, you can say that again (and again). 

    Gustafsson’s uncovered some stones here that only true diggers and obscurists rave about, or so I assume. There’s an interview with a German husband and wife “mystical psychedelic forest folk” called Fit & Limo, going strong since the early 80s, and who sound like a band very much off the grid & off the world’s radar and liking it that way. They claim to be influenced primarily by Popol Vuh and the Incredible String Band. I think I probably need to hear them. There’s another interview with Jon DeRosa – also a new discovery. See what you learn when you spend quality time with old fanzines instead of with your friends and family?

    The Broken Face team files a Terrastock Four report from Seattle in 2000, which took place a year after I moved away from said city. I’d missed the one in San Francisco before that as well…because I was living in Seattle. This one featured Doug Yule, Moe Tucker, Major Stars, Ghost, Charalambides, Wellwater Conspiracy, Six Organs of Admittance, Bardo Pond and a “supergroup in wigs” w/ Damon & Naomi + Wayne & Kate from Major Stars called Children of the Rainbow. You know, I’d have probably checked it out, but when I left Seattle my favorite band there was The Kent 3 by a mile, so it’s probable my head was elsewhere, drowning in craft beer & garage punk, and not in weed & magick. I didn’t even hear Major Stars’ music for at least another ten years (!). 

    More than half the mag is reviews – and long ones at that. It’s clear both here and in some of the aforementioned mags that Hall of Fame were getting some deserved notice – I need to listen to that Siltbreeze thing again, as I truly cottoned onto this band in a way that never clicked for me with Tower Recordings. It turns out there was a Pip Proud studio album that came out in 2000 – who the fuck knew? Everything reviewed is apparently chosen for congruence with the reviewers’ tastes; I’ve yet to uncover any invective slung at a record more hostile than “this might not be my favorite from them, but…”. Now I’ve got to research how many more underground record collectors named Mats Gustafsson there are in Sweden and how frequently they’re confused for each other by greenhorns like me.

    , , ,