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Galactic Zoo Dossier #10
I just finished reading Steve Krakow’s – aka Plastic Crimewave – great new memoir-esque book about his music obsessions, his many tour stories and how he bumbled his way from a series of intense avocations (drawing, comics and psychedelic music) into multiple awesome vocations, and into a life well-lived. It’s a story that’s ongoing, thankfully. The book is called A Mind Blown is a Mind Shown, and I came away from it with a big shit-eating grin on my face and another fifteen bands to go check out.
Through it all, Krakow has semi-regularly published one of the fanzines that really ought to be put into a cornerstone of some kind to show the future world what true 20th & 21st century rock and roll freakdom actually was in its most benevolent and welcoming form. Galactic Zoo Dossier is an entity unto itself in so many ways – layout, subject matter, lack of typography, raw enthusiasm – that I will try not repeat myself much from what I wrote about Galactic Zoo Dossier #7 here, which you should take a look at as a brief pre-read if you’re so inclined. (I also tackled Galactic Zoo Dossier #5 here, I just remembered).
Reading Krakow’s book made me wanna crack open an issue of Galactic Zoo Dossier that I hadn’t looked at in a while, so I chose GZD #10, his most recent issue, which I’m afraid came out waaaay back in 2016 – meaning we’ve had 8 years to wait for the next one. (I’ve been told it’s slowly but surely in the works). At this point – and it became clear after reading his book – Krakow had a great paid job as the artist who effectively did the branding and artwork for Gorilla Perfume, a branch of Lush Cosmetics (I think of them as the “bath bomb” people). Pretty obvious when you see work of his like this or this. Anyway, so he’s in London a bunch for work, right? Therefore he’s getting to do things in off-hours like meet and interview Shirley Collins, and Edgar Broughton, and Judie Dyble of Fairport Convention – and so, so many more.
Galactic Zoo Dossier #10 is the “interview issue” for that very reason, and it burrows deeply in the nexus of Krakow mania where damaged guitar gods, astral folk goddesses, greasy bikers, heavy metalloid music and wild psychedelic-tinged comics meet. In fact, after virtually every interview there’s a page or two of scanned late 60s/early 70s Marvel, DC and Gold Key comics with panels of hippies, groovy miniskirt babes, far-out light shows, angry biker scum and more. It’s an absolute content overload, and I mean that in the best sense. There’s a reason why I returned to it with fresh eyes in 2024 and gave it a good twice-over, and why I’ll do so again in another five years, I’m sure.
One of the questions GZD and Krakow’s book helps to raise for me is “where should a bullshit detector begin and end?”. For instance, over my own lifetime I believe I’ve often been too quick to call “bullshit” on certain musics because they didn’t conform to what I’ve told myself is truly underground, inventive or interesting, only to backtrack and “free my mind” somewhere later down the road. The line was often drawn too conservatively, I’d say. Krakow, on the other hand, draws it far more liberally than I might, and is willing to let in nearly everything except the guy who ended up backing up Leo Sayer in the 70s, – I’ve already forgotten who this is – while loving his “early work”. Who sleeps better at night – the overly judgmental guy, or the guy who sees the good in most everyone who’s skirting the boundaries of psychedelia? Well, he’s the musician, and I’m the dilettante who had to quit his only post-college band because he couldn’t understand how to play the most simple of bass lines. Food for thought. If I approached music the way Krakow does I’d literally be drowning in records and minutia, though. It’s already tough enough out there, am I right?
Anyway, each passing year – and now especially after reading his book – I come to realize even more what a treasure Galactic Zoo Dossier has been all this time. May a new issue bless us in 2025.
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Check The Record #2
Over-the-top record collecting mania is so often also accompanied by a sense of shame, of failure, of waste and want and paths not taken. Not with Jen Matson and her Check The Record fanzine, the second issue of which has just come out. She’s in the hardcore record accumulation racket for good, and her fanzine’s a celebration of all the foibles and follies that this passion – shared by many of you, I’ll surmise – entails.
Check The Record #2 leads off with a piece about how her Seattle house may or may not have been in the process of being severely damaged by the weight of her record collection, and how she called in a structural engineer to assess the situation. There’s never really a thought given to purging her collection; it’s more “how do I keep my records, and ensure my top floor doesn’t collapse?”. All this piece did was stress me out about homeownership and the visible ceiling crack on our lower floor, even though at least I know it’s not caused by my embarrassingly small record collection. (However, I will wistfully point out that had I kept every or even most records I’ve purchased since the early 1980s, I’d have one hell of a collection, especially since I had so many of the landmark hardcore punk 45s at one point. Now I have memories and a whole lot of CD-Rs).
There’s what amounts to an advice column on how to care for flexidiscs, along with a piece about the time the Television Personalities had their career to date summarized in Record Collector in 1991. As in Check The Record #1, Matson’s wide-ranging taste eventually zeroes in on an immense love for both Scottish pop and the Flying Nun/New Zealand discography.
The piece that resonated the most with me details the many times she bought the wrong record that was put out by a band with the same name as her desired band. So, buying a single by “The Wipers” instead of Greg Sage’s Wipers, or by a shout-scream band called Camera Obscura instead of the lush Scottish pop Camera Obscura. Since she’s bought probably 20x more records in her lifetime than I have in mine, I don’t have as many stories springing from gotta-have-everything mania. There was the time at age 14 when I went record shopping in Berkeley, as recounted in this thing I wrote here:
…Being a kid, and therefore having limited allowance money to spend, I bought two 45s that first day that I’d been hearing on KFJC: “Antmusic”, by Adam and the Ants (yeah!), and X’s “White Girl”. Such was my musical cognitive dissonance at the time, though I suppose it’s not as far a leap as it might once have seemed. Trouble was, I thought when I bought “White Girl” that I was actually buying a frantic, female-fronted punk rock song I’d heard on the radio once before, which was “100% White Girl” by San Francisco punk band THE VKTMS. Expecting that song, but instead getting Exene’s whiny, nasally voice and the methodical pace of the original “White Girl”, I was thoroughly bummed as I listened to it late that night, after my grandparents had gone to bed, of course. When you only have $6 to spend, and you “waste” $3 of it on one of the best days of your young life, it can be pretty crushing. Of course, now I love X‘s song, and I wish I’d held onto the Slash Records 45. Never did end up buying the Vktms record, either….
These are the stories of our lives, my people. Like sands through the hourglass. Jen Matson gets it. If you want to check out her fanzine, issues #2 and #1 are both available here.
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Who Put The Bomp #9
Because I was four years old when Who Put The Bomp #9 came out in Spring 1972, I have exceedingly little firsthand knowledge of the rocknroll fanzine scene of the time that this was a part of. Clearly, and as I’d imagined, it’s a leading light in a much larger sea of underground, home-produced fanzines being produced by rock maniacs across the US and UK. Editor Greg Shaw gets into it by reviewing many action-packed fanzines of the era like Alan Betrock’s Jamz, which “has a good section on punk rock (Terry Knight & Pack, Shadows of Knight, Vagrants)”, as well as Andy Shernoff’s Teenage Wasteland Gazette. I’ve sadly never seen either, but one day I shall. There’s another one called Bedloe’s Island that you can read about here while also observing my own 90s fanzine being slagged in the process. It’s only now that I’m coming to realize how fertile fanzine-dom was in the early 70s, and that maybe punk didn’t actually need to happen after all.
This one’s far more lo-tech than the Who Put The Bomp issues I previously bantered with you about here and here. Shaw is living in Fairfax, CA, which is still my favorite place in Marin County and located about 35 minutes north of my San Francisco home. He says at the outset “And don’t bother ripping up this magazine – I’ll send you a complete set of photos plus cover for 25¢”. I wonder if the offer still stands? He then has an editorial apologizing for this not being the promised “English invasion issue”. That would come out over a year later. He’s also warning folks that Who Put The Bomp isn’t usually so oldies-oriented as this issue is. They were actually calling late 50s rock “oldies”, even in 1972 – how about that. What do you call the music of 2009, Times New Viking, Grass Widow, Fabulous Diamonds and whatnot?
Gene Vincent has just died, and thereby gets his own piece. Shaw has also just found out about Wanda Jackson, someone whom he believes “may be a name familiar to you only as a country & western singer”. (I just so happen to greatly prefer the Wanda Jackson country years to her often silly rockabilly stuff, although this video is pretty great). The Vincent thing reminds me of this fanzine’s major contribution to furthering record scholarship, which is assembling a painstakingly complete discography with catalog numbers and the works. Rip Lay does the Wanda Jackson piece, and he talks about how smitten he became of her from her record covers and how she thereby supplanted Darlene from the Mickey Mouse Club in his heart.
Mike Saunders does a phony interview with a rockabilly artist he invented from whole cloth called The Famous Alaska King Crab. Couldn’t this guy take a breath and be serious, even for a minute? There are other features on Harmonica Frank and “Elvis in Print” (books about Elvis), Greg Shaw goes deep on reissues, which have started to flood out in 1971/72 – even one with Conway Twitty’s early rocknroll material. He reviews the much-maligned Hot Poop record, who were a bunch of students from my alma mater of UC-Santa Barbara who recorded one record and received an absolute stonewalling as a result.
The excellent and lengthy letters section calls attention to previous pieces in Who Put The Bomp by Lester Bangs and Greil Marcus, and contains letters to the editor penned by Eddie Flowers, Kim Fowley and a dude named Doug Hinman, whom I’ve come to find published a Kinks book thirty years ago. There’s much parsing in these many pages about what real rock & roll is, and little if any complaining about the year 1972 and whether or not it’s dead. There are far too many records to collect and reissues to celebrate for that kind of talk.
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Conflict #35
This is as far back as I can personally go in shedding any informed light on Gerard Cosloy’s Conflict fanzine, an all-time high-water read that I’ve previously tackled in this space in order to share my valued and valuable thoughts for you on issues #36, #37 and #42. I have carressed even earlier editions of this from when he was a Boston-area teen, but not since that stack of Conflicts I borrowed as a teen myself, and that I tore through with extreme prejudice during Spring Break ‘86. At this point, Conflict #35 from March/April 1984, Cosloy’s wildly-swinging snark and bite was beginning to shed its training wheels, and his intent to take both faux and real umbrage and to provoke lesser lights of the scene is very much intact. Names are named and publicly shamed, usually for undue posturing, for sell-out moves, or merely for having inferior musical taste. I loved every moment of it, and I can’t believe I haven’t heard more (or any?) stories of Cosloy getting into the proverbial fisticuffs with DJs, musicians, zine editors and various scene dullards more often.
I mean, it’s all so giddy and dumb that it’s still funny to this day: “…Another one of last issue’s heroes, Brett Milano, has been spotted wearing a bicycle helmet while walking down the street…”, taken from a three-dot gossip column that was embedded in many of the issues called LIES**LIES**LIES**LIES. Milano, Billy Ruane and Mike Gitter. Man, if it weren’t for Conflict and Forced Exposure, I wouldn’t have ever known who these lustily mocked people were, and what their horrific scene crimes might have been. I guess Cosloy had a college radio show at this point, though he’s all too quick to mention to a letter-writer that this is not how he’s getting his records to review.
Speaking of, Billy Bragg is talked of as “England’s answer to the Violent Femmes” – ouch. The Scientists are called “Australia’s next world-beaters”. He digs The Misfits’ Earth A.D., which I also very much enjoy, as well as the March Violets’ “Snake Dance”, also surprisingly excellent. Even at the height of my back-turning on throbbing, danceable post-punk, I do remember Conflict championing the best of this stuff, such as Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, thereby keeping me tenuously connected to the few good strands that carried on into the mid/late 80s. When Cosloy confronts the Jandek Six and Six LP, he’s left to stutter in abject confusion, “Who or what is Jandek? Man or escapee?….In a less tolerant period in history, this man would be hung (or shot, or gassed, or butchered)”. Patrick Amory gets in a bunch of reviews here as well, mostly hardcore, yet he doesn’t like the Deep Wound 45 – WTF? – and concludes his piece with an admonition: “…avoid all New Jersey pop…”.
The 1983 poll results give credence to a deeply-held belief of mine to never poll your readers. The best bands, as voted by the readers of Conflict, happen to be R.E.M, X, The Neats, Suicidal Tendencies and the Violent Femmes. The best Boston bands are The Proletariat, The Neats, Del Fuegos, F.U.s and The Lyres. Worst record of ‘83: Big Country’s “In a Big Country”. Now that definitely tracks. In a similar vein, Cosloy calls The Alarm’s Declaration “the issue’s worst record”. I once saw a different band in Upland CA, probably around 1987 or so, opening for either Soul Asylum or Dinosaur Jr., who were so awful that they’d somehow styled themselves into pretty much an Alarm tribute band – “a shot rings out on the street of Brixton” etc. My jaw hung open for 45 minutes in admiration of their absolute audacity. I forgot their name immediately.
In addition to a film section – something I really don’t remember from my other issues of Conflict – there’s an extensive amount of live show reviews. Gerard Cosloy has undoubtedly attended an absurd amount of live rock music events in his lifetime, even merely judging by the hundreds I’ve seen him review, let alone the ones he didn’t. I’ve never lived in the same city as the guy and I’ve even seen him present at 4-5 different live events across the breadth of the USA. He talks about seeing Chris D. positioned front and center at a Neats show on 1/5/84, which helps explain to me why and how Chris’ Stone By Stone came to cover a Neats song on their I Pass For Human album in 1989.
And after all this, the Violent Femmes themselves are sort of half-heartedly interviewed in the back after a show somewhere, with Cosloy’s heart clearly not in it. I recently got asked by my wife’s friend’s husband to accompany him to a Violent Femmes reunion show, ostensibly because he was vaguely aware that I was a fan of “alternative music” or some such. I did the dishonorable thing in turning it down by telling him through his wife that I thoroughly disliked said band, rather than going with a wash-my-hair or busy-that-night excuse – thereby alienating a truly nice guy who wanted to do me a solid with a free ticket and chance to drink a couple of beers together. Cosloy and his highly formative fanzine brethren of 1983-86 taught me to tell the unvarnished truth, consequences be damned, exceptionally well, and I haven’t forgotten it.
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Bucketfull of Brains #18
I’m old enough to remember when the English weekly music press (NME, Sounds and Melody Maker), in their eternal search for a trend to flog and new things to write about, latched on to the then-au courant independent crop of Americans wearing denim vests and playing jangly Byrdsian pop or vaguely psychedelic sounds, some of whom were better than others. Grasping for a label that might go beyond “Americana”, and that wasn’t the pejorative me and my friends were using (“college rock”), they somehow came up with “The New Sincerity”, which is honestly the single worst name for a musical genre save for when the English later started calling some dank strain of electronic dance music “garage”.
If ever there was a UK fanzine locked into “The New Sincerity” without actually using the term – thankfully – it’d be Bucketfull of Brains circa 1986. And that’s alright with me, more or less, because their remit was wide enough that, while it might surf through mediocrities and forgotten combos who were themselves riding an intense interest from major US labels at the time – this would have been Lone Justice, Del Fuegos and Long Ryders peak season – they also come off as intense record collectors and clubbers who are champing at the bit to champion a few truly great bands like Giant Sand or True West.
I mean, Bucketfull of Brains #18 is easily worth a few pound notes and then some for Nigel Cross’ “Sonoran Desert Spring: The Amazing Giant Sand Story (Howe Gelb interview, part 1)”. It digs deep into the band’s Tucson origins; an ill-fated move to New York City; the birth of the Band of Blacky Ranchette side project; how that first Giant Sandworms 45 was influenced by Talking Heads, and more. Gelb didn’t do a ton of interviews, as we mentioned recently, and so when you see one it’s worth digging into it you happen to dig the band as much as I do. Now I gotta go on eBay and buy #19 so I can read part two.
Editor Jon Storey has a reverential piece on someone I’ve never heard of named Nick Haeffner, who’s treated like a legend/deity for his work with Clive Pig & The Hopeful Chinamen, the Tea Set and The Remayns. He’s compared with Ayers and Barrett and Robyn Hitchcock as a master of cuckoo English songwriter psych. I also need to get on the Haeffner tip! Storey’s also flipping out that the Flamin’ Groovies are playing live and releasing records again for the first time in four years, part of a perpetual rebirth that routinely set more than one fanzine editor’s loins aflame. Fairport Convention has just reformed as well, and there’s much excitement to be had and an indication that they’d been doing so on an annual basis, though I’m pretty sure that only started the year before.
The survey of current Texas bands drops us smack-dab into New Sincerity central, with mini-features on Zeitgeist, Doctor’s Mob, Texas Instruments and the True Believers, among others. Some of that stuff wasn’t half bad! I saw Texas Instruments live and enjoyed them, and I’d have paid at least $3 to have seen Zeitgeist, too. The best part of the piece, for a pigfuck fan like myself, was the lumping in of none other than Scratch Acid in this scene report. Just Keeping Eating has just come out; it was and absolutely remains my favorite thing the band put out, and one of the best back-half-of-the-80s records, bar none. Seeing them live a few months later in San Luis Obispo, CA was a life highlight, which I recounted here.
I’ll admit that back in ‘86 I’d get a little more excited about a fanzine that had a flexidisc tucked into it, and I might pay a small premium in order to acquire it, which left me with a batch of shitty flexis that I couldn’t get rid of a few years later. Such is the collector mentality. How many people do you think found out that Bucketfull of Brains #18 contained a flexi w/ an unreleased Watermelon Men song & an acoustic version of some Peter Case thing and were like, holy shit, drop everything? And the New Sincerity thing – man, that was over before it ever really started, wasn’t it? It was utterly swamped by the Scratch Acids and Pussy Galores of the world, and even quickly within the pages of this fanzine by the Australian next wave represented by the Died Pretty, Scientists, New Christs and so forth. We’ll get to all that another time.
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Lobotomy #6
Recently I’ve come to learn that Pleasant Gehman and Theresa Kereakes, two of the prime movers behind LA’s first-wave punk fanzine Lobotomy, are on a bit of an irregular set-the-record and define-the-terms circuit of college conferences and speaking events devoted to punk rock music. This has generated no shortage of surging interest in their 70s fanzine, and they’ve even got limited-run reprints of the mag happening now if you’re lucky enough to show up. There’s even been some talk of a book-length collection of the full Lobotomy run, which is something that Fanzine Hemorrhage lustily supports.
Anyway, last time we checked in with this fanzine it was April 1978 and we were discussing Lobotomy #5. Now it’s May 1978 and Lobotomy #6 is out, and as you know, a lot can happen in thirty days when you’re on punk time in Los Angeles that year. Pleasant’s opening gossip column – again, prefiguring her “L.A.-De-Da” column I’d read every week in the LA Weekly during the late 80s – catches the scene up with all the latest news, like Johnny Blitz’s stabbing, Charlotte Caffey quitting The Eyes, and the fact that Sable Starr is all growed up and now going to college. Many, many gratuitous droppings are made of the name “Billy Idol” by a woman who was calling herself “Mrs. William Idol” only one issue before.
Pleasant is also wisely ringing the alarm for the heretofore underestimated Germs and their Lexicon Devil/Circle One/No God 45: “for anyone who dismissed the germs as crap—WAKE UP! This is one hot record. They not only play at the speed of light, they do it well….it may burn right through your turntable”. Scarlett Fever pushes all my born-too-late jealousy buttons in her review of a 5/1/78 Dils / Alleycats / Consumers / X show at The Whiskey, with the Consumers from Arizona opening. They’d later turn into 45 Grave, give or take a couple members, and their songs would become their songs. “These guys weren’t no Arizona cowboys, believe me. Fucking great; 1-2-3-bam-bam-bam music, all of ‘em in a shaking frenzy. Hell, they were good. Wish they’d move out here”. Scarlett would get her wish! There are also several reviews of San Francisco’s Avengers, who’ve clearly become a Lobotomy staff favorite in their brief time on the planet.
There’s a Jam interview, about as exciting as the many other incredibly unexciting Jam interviews from the same era. This is offset a bit by a Blondie interview, who were way more fun than the dour Jam. I think this must’ve been the time Pleasant talked about on the Rock Writ podcast where she mentioned Debbie Harry walking into the room and her thinking, “This is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen”. (This understandable comment makes this issue’s cover photo a bit of a hoot). And there’s an ad for a 11-day period at The Whiskey in Hollywood, just a mere eleven days from May 23rd to June 3rd, in which you’d have been able to see Black Randy multiple times (including one show as “Mexican Randy”); the Deadbeats four times; X, The Germs; Fear; The Plugz; The Weirdos; The Skulls; and even The Dickies and Arthur J and the Goldcups. One club! Park me on the Sunset Strip and I’ll see you on June 4th.
Finally, I’ll mention again that Lobotomy was xeroxed only on one side. This is pretty awesome and explainable at some level, despite how “wasteful” it appears to be. I can remember a time when double-sided copiers were not as ubiquitous, and that they were actually expensive to use and a bit of an ordeal when they did appear, with frequent paper jams and sliding paper that caused print and graphics to run off the page. I’m sure they’ve been gabbing about it at those punk scholar forums, but one has to figure there’s at least a 75% chance that’s why this mag only went out single-sided with a corner staple, right?
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The Offense Newsletter #13
The Offense Newsletter was what The Offense quickly evolved into when it became clear that editor Tim Anstaett had hit the point of no return with distributors; and, one might imagine, his own sanity, given the breakneck pace of publishing The Offense had from its perch in Columbus, OH in the early 80s. (You may or may not recall we took a look at this fanzine here and here – that’s probably a good place to start in order to better understand what’s going on with the Newsletter).
Yet the breakneck pace didn’t stop. That Offense #15 I talked about was a March 1982 issue; by the time of this “December 3rd, 1982” Offense Newsletter, Anstaett and his contributors were already on their thirteenth issue of the newsletter. It would go at least into 80-something issues, and they’d vary in size. The Offense Newsletter #13 is a mere 8 pages (7, really – with a blank back cover), with so much crammed into it it’s kinda like I said before – could easily have been sixteen or more without too much art filler.
Anstaett and I actually guested together on a podcast about fanzines recently, which you can listen to here. I should probably know this already as a result, but I surmise that the Newsletter only received minimal if any distribution in non-Columbus stores. There’s no cover price, for instance. It’s also 8 pages – in 1982, that might’ve garnered about 25 cents. I only became aware of it when Tim sent copies to Sound Choice magazine in 1987, where I was a “summer intern”, so I’m guessing that was the main conduit – distributed to other fanzines, given to friends, mailed to contributors, traded for records and so forth. Compile any three or four of these together and you’ve got a real-deal, content-packed fanzine proper.
Better than that, even. The Offense Newsletter #13, with the Three O’Clock on the cover right after they were forced to change their name from The Salvation Army, carries on with what I really admire about the thing – its figurative status as a “meeting point” for highly opinionated letter writers, highly opinionated contributors (Don Howland, no less!), the deep wells of the American sub-underground at a time when hardcore was steamrolling the midwest in particular; and the UK post-punk and its ascendent global equivalents that were particularly near & dear to Anstaett. Just one interview – this one by Blake Gumprecht, who challenges the mostly moronic Bad Brains with sharp questions and thrown elbows, which they mostly try to dodge. I can imagine Gumprecht wasn’t the most captive interviewer they’d come across, as he goes after them for their Rastafarianism and all the idiocy it leeched into their personal stances on women, gays, and apostate Christians, then leavens it with “so when’s the new record coming out?”-type queries.
Aside from this, it’s reviews, letters and a short story about a dream. Steve Hesske’s name is taken in vain by one Dan Rouser of Wichita, KS. The LA paisley underground gets some notice, as well it should have in 1982. Billy Idol is summarily dispatched with for his “hey little sister” song in a review. The first UK82 Punk and Disorderly comp – which was hugely popular and distributed everywhere – gets a write-up. And, given this is effectively a weekly newsletter – at least this week – there’s a show calendar for December 3rd-9th that displays what’s going on in Ohio; in Lawrence KS; and for some reason, at Danceteria in New York – and only those places. The Plasmatics at the Columbus Agora, anyone? -
Record Time #1
There exist, as we’re all aware, many observable subspecies of the record collector. I was one myself at one point, but later lost any earned credibility in this world by evolving in the 2000s to instead be more of a, um, “digital file accumulator” or CD hound instead. It saved me thousands upon thousands of dollars that might otherwise have been spent on records that I’d have loved to own, but that couldn’t have been well-stored in my exceptionally small San Francisco home, a home which also included a wife, kid and dog and all these goddamned fanzines. However, I’ve recognized myself as something of a fraud whilst traveling and conversing in the worlds of the record collector, where I am still sometimes allowed, so I’m therefore on safer ground reading from afar the fanzines that are created by and for them.
Record Time #1, which came out just this year, is unlike any music mag I’ve ever seen. Scott Soriano, a guy we’ve championed on this site (here and here) for being half of the creative team behind Z Gun, has assembled an even larger team for this one, dedicated to and written by the folks who accumulate cheap, bargain-bin LPs and 45s of many genres with obsessive zeal, strange passion and unending curiosity. Adam G. Taub, a contributor here, unintentionally states the magazines’ overriding ethos well: “I have amassed a lot of records that no one wants to listen to, about which some have asked, on more than one occasion, ‘How can you listen to that shit?’”. It’s full of many other contributors you know and love such as Brian Turner, Ryan Wells, Mike Trouchon, Laurent Bigot, Rose Melberg and quite a few others. Record dorks. We love ‘em. You might liken it to sort of a Bull Tongue Review, but only about records.
I have to say, the pièce de résistance has got to be Soriano’s deep dive on any and every tenuous recording link to Plastic Bertrand’s “Ca Plane Pour Moi”: tribute records, soundalikes, covers, ripoffs, cash-ins etc. This is why fanzines exist, and why you’ll only find top-tier research about what most would find utterly meaningless in a mag like this. Soriano also has a great piece on Rooky Ricardo’s Records in San Francisco and its owner Dick Vivian, an incredibly affable guy who knows absolutely everything about every American 60s pop and R&B 45. I was once looking for some girl group stuff there, and he asked me what my favorite girl group single of the era was – ostensibly so he could find me some obscurities from the store’s vast collection. I watched his face drop when I came up with “Breakaway” by Irma Thomas. How pedestrian! Not even a group! This is Dick Vivian you’re talking to!
There’s another stellar article here about Droll Yankees, described herein as “the perfect record label” by author Stan Appleton. The label’s mission was to rescue all things “Yankee” from modernity, such as quaint Eastern language, plus “sea sounds, bird songs, frog croaks and other sounds threatened to be silenced by the modern world”. Seriously, it’s field recordings of deep sea fishermen and farmers, along with a few records of folk songs by Protestants. It’s a great aesthetic and a thoroughly bizarre label which gets its own complete 1960-69 discography here as well. The label, believe it or not, morphed into a bird feeder company.
A column called “Cash or Trade” is penned by Mike Trouchon, and he illuminates a dozen of the 50s and 60s instrumental 7” records he’s collected on the cheap. He helpfully expands the boundaries of “instrumental” – and I agree with him 100% here – by saying “I should mention that songs that are mostly instrumental, meaning they include some chanting, a handful of lyrics, and/or vocalese, still go down in my book as instrumentals”. Amen. There are other pieces on Dutch prog wonders, some sports records, Lee Harvey Oswald-themed records and even more prog by Owen Maerks. Joey Soriano – I believe it’s Scott’s brother? – expounds all about fuckin’ Montrose, giving us the full vinyl history of this band who’d often be the opener at the hard-rock “Day on the Green” concerts at the Oakland Stadium. This is all topped off by a review section called “Bargain Bin Reviews” with everything from the Los Angeles Police Pipe Band to Reddy Teddy to the Kent 3.
And while I don’t really need to comment on it since you can see it right here – how about that cover design? Dennis Worden is the guy’s name. I hope he’s been brought back for future issues, as I know a #2 of Record Time is wrapped up and will be ready to go in the weeks to come.
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Popwatch #4
Popwatch fanzine was one hell of a tremendously informative compendium, and as thickly-packed a time capsule of what was going on in the post-Forced Exposure underground in a given year as anything this side of Butt Rag. It was edited by Leslie Gaffney in Somerville, MA and, as we discussed the last time I dissected Popwatch, had probably the single best American pipeline into New Zealand’s tripped-out noise and abstract pop ensembles & artists of the time. Clearly, whatever intersections there were between lo-fi pop, psych and experimental heavy guitar rock informed the Popwatch outlook and who they covered, and those happened to be some intersections that were exceptionally prevalent around the time of 1993’s Popwatch #4.
I mean, this plethora is all too much for even Peter Jefferies to handle. He’s interviewed here, and his The Last Great Challenge in a Dull World has just come out. He’s asked to provide a scene report for NZ, and he says he can only focus on Dunedin. “In the last few days I’ve seen The Puddle, Alastair Galbraith, the 3Ds, King Loser and Snapper play live….there’s so much talent down here, it gets difficult to keep up with”. Barbara Manning, who had her own connections to multiple NZ heavyweights at the time, talks about working at Reckless Records on Haight Street (I used to see her behind the counter all the time, along with filmmaker Jon Moritsugu) and about how “Byron Coley has me and Seymour Glass doing a series of Captain Beefheart songs….each single will have a painting on it”. What the hell happened to all of that? Tying it all together, she also discussed how she wants to do a couple of Peter Jefferies songs on a Siltbreeze 45 (!); oh, and she’ll also be conceiving babies in 1999.
I was truly excited to go through this one again just now and see a Giant Sand and Howe Gelb interview, a mythic rarity one hardly ever came across in the wild back then. This was right as Center of the Universe was coming out, which is a record I dig so much that I’m joyfully listening to it right now. Gaffney does a thing that I once did in my own fanzine. A band once didn’t answer my carefully-prepared questions, so I just printed the questions themselves in my fanzine anyway as a means of conveying to the reading audience why I was interested in the first place (The Fall-Outs, in my case). “Getting Howe to talk when he knows the words are gonna wind up in print somewhere has proven to be a difficult task (which might explain why there aren’t a helluva lot of known Giant Sand interviews)”. She does get him to talk, a little. I was personally so smitten by Giant Sand that year, 1993, that I actually wrote the band a letter in May 1993 offering my meager services to them as their tour manager, having just come off of a 6-week North American tour as roadie/t-shirt seller/money-holder with Claw Hammer. I penned a similar letter to Come, too. I’d never met anyone in either band. Neither wrote me back. It’s a trip to think what my life might’ve become had either or both taken me up on it, and in retrospect I’m quite glad they didn’t.
There are further interrogations with Combustible Edison and Madder Rose – bands I’ve never heard – and with Azalia Snail, a woman given to off-kilter, strange traipsing-through-the-tulips psych and who was pretty special there for a while. She is someone I’ve neglected far too often, and her new one sounds like something worth digging into further for sure. Crystallized Movements garner a big discussion, too – and it’s the only interview with them I’ve ever seen. Wayne and Kate sound like folks I should have known and/or should still get to know while we’re all still alive and totally psyched about killer records. Stewart Moxham from Young Marble Giants gets his say as well. Yeah, I know – it’s all in the same $4 issue.
The reviews squad for Popwatch #4 included Lou Barlow and Bob Fay from Sebadoh and James McNew from Yo La Tengo, along with world-class American Tim Bugbee, and with Leslie Gaffney really taking the reins on most of them. And there are dozens upon dozens upon hundreds of reviews – really, everything moderately interesting that came out that year and even a few things that weren’t. It was kind of a gas to see a review of the A Band Artex/A Lot LP on Siltbreeze, which was a Richard Youngs project and the first of that label’s releases that actually pissed me off. I even loved the Sam Esh record (and I still do). When Popwatch reviewers didn’t like something, they mostly tended to cover up for it by changing the subject rather than slamming the record – or by saying things like “Good, I’m afraid, is all it is”. That’s what counted as a supremely harsh bummer in this fanzine, a nice if unhelpful counter to the preening vitriol that informed so many of the dude-helmed fanzines of the era.
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Ballroom Blitz #19
Ballroom Blitz was the Detroit version of Los Angeles’ Back Door Man or Seattle’s Chatterbox – pre-punk 70s fanzines high on energy and attitude, and desperate for anything with loud guitars and the correct amount of raw, underdeveloped talent. This fanzine is smaller than those – Ballroom Blitz #19 is only 12 pages – and more or less put together by two guys, Jim Heddle and Mike McDowell. It’s mostly Michigan-centric and delightfully rocknroll-crazed, and at this juncture, March 1977, very much aware that something interesting seems to be underway in music.
The opening editorial has editor Jim Heddle talking about his radio station music survey collecting obsession, and he lists his wants right there on the editorial page. This is followed by a tribute to a Michigan band called The Woolies whom I’ve never heard nor heard of, but right off the bat you get, “The Woolies are without a doubt the longest-lasting punk rock band in the history of rock and roll”. For real? They started in 1965, but at this point, they haven’t released anything since “The Hootchie Cootchie Man is Back” in 1974. “The Woolies have stuck it out, waiting for that big break”. 12 years of punk. I guess some of these bands have subsequently been left waiting much longer, haven’t they? Anyway, here’s what raw feral punkers The Woolies sounded like.
In the Bits & Pieces column by McDowell, there’s also talk of 60s punkers The Cryan Shames, the Ides of March and The Remains – the latter of whom apparently “blew the Beatles off the stage” in Detroit in 1966. Another column by the editor loves the Suicide Commandos, the Flamin’ Groovies and Thundertrain. McDowell’s also got a piece that not a lot of folks were writing in 1977 – “It can be argued that the world of rock and roll has produced 15-20 people that can truly wear the tag of genius. It can also be argued that one of these people is Michael Nesmith”. It’s actually a really good essay, with huge love for the First National Band and for a new Nesmith record that’s just come out that year.
Keeping with the can’t-keep-up excitement of the era, there’s a piece on Cheap Trick that identifies them as being from Boston, despite actually being from Chicago, only a four hour’s drive away. In the reviews, there’s a new one of the Death “Politicians in my Eye” 45, and a thing about a 1971 Dave Clark Five single where they covered “Southern Man”, which I had no idea existed. “Neil Young is the prime example of everything you’ve always hated about the early 70’s, but couldn’t quite put your finger on. His “Southern Man” remains the most banal thirteen minutes of vinyl in history”. Thirteen minutes?!? I suppose if you play it 2.5 times, sure. I really wish people wouldn’t say things like that about Neil.
And finally, an effusive and excited review of a Sonic’s Rendezvous Band show in Ann Arbor 2/22/77, in which “they got the audience so high on their music”. They’re probably one of the fifty or so live bands I wish I’d have been able to see – check this out. And here’s an actual video’ed live performance. Ballroom Blitz is supremely bummed that they’re playing small bars and not large arenas, but as we punkers are prone to say, “careful what you wish for”.
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Fanzine Hemorrhage 