It’s now hard for me to fathom just how aggressively I turned my back on many of my fellow late 1990s fanzine brethren and sistren. While my personal underground rocknroll palate was fairly omnivorous during the first half of the decade, I developed a severe reaction to what by 1996 felt like a lemming-like rush by the broader fanzine community toward noise, free jazz, drone, electronics and so forth – toward anything that wasn’t rock. 

At the time, I mostly blamed Bananafish. I mean, everyone was reading the thing, myself included. It was well-distributed and editor and chief writer Seymour Glass perhaps inadvertently cultivated quite a curated aura and persona, one that championed (often tongue-in-cheek) the most outré of non-rock music as being central to a finely-honed taste and sensibility. Sun City Girls and Merzbow yes; anything with a hint of swing or swagger, no way. Because he and I skirted around some of the same local bands the previous few years – Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, World of Pooh and so on, all of whom were his personal friends and mere acquaintances of mine, at best – I’m sure I suffered from a bit of jealousy at times for that and for the fact that he wrote exceptionally well & had a real way of making me feel like a wild, weird party of creative freaks was going on in his corner of San Francisco and not in mine. (In hindsight, the freaks I partied with at the time were just fine). 

Also in hindsight, I can see now that it’s not quite clear where the creators of underground rock fanzines should have been paying their attention in the lean years of 1996-2000. I personally was more interested in garage heathens such as The Cheater Slicks and spent time digging almost exclusively into 60s punk at the time, and granted, I hadn’t really evolved much beyond a punk-before-all mindset. I was also a ‘lil busy getting married and going to grad school during this time as well. So I’d look at fanzines flogging Fushitsusha, or Flying Saucer Attack, or Tortoise, or Olivia Tremor Control, or William Hooker, or Labradford, or Tono-Bungay, or Loren Mazzacane Connors, or Cecil Taylor and so on, and just completely disassociated myself. I missed out not only on some fantastic music but some top-drawer fanzines writing about it as a result. I only really started heading back into this era within the past ten years, trying to pick up fanzines like Tuba Frenzy that covered it where I can.

In fact I only bought this 1998 issue online this past week, inspired by seeing a different issue of the magazine referenced by Dave Lang on his The Devil’s Lexicon Instagram. The editor of Tuba Frenzy was Tim Ross, and he published this out of Chapel Hill, NC along with a stable of contributors. Far from being a pompous, uninformed, trendy dive into more-difficult music, Tuba Frenzy #4, the magazine’s final issue, was as well-written and informed a mag as I’ve seen from this era, and it was a real disservice to myself that I passed it up back then, something I even recall doing.

There’s a terrific overview and oral history of NYC’s late 70s/early 80s 99 Records (ESG, Glenn Branca, Liquid Liquid, Bush Tetras etc.), as well as truly comprehensive interviews with Oval (one of the Thrill Jockey bands I totally ignored), jazz saxophonist Sam Rivers, the aforementioned Tono-Bungay, Ian Williams from Don Caballero and a ton more. Truly deep musical ephemera and intense explanation for heads, record collectors and fellow deviants. 

If you believe this website, you can still buy this issue for $4.00 directly from Tim himself. I’d love to find copies of the other three, once I truly sit down & read this one cover to cover to make up for lost time, and maybe discover a hot new weirdo band from 25 years ago.

I had an ongoing correspondence in the early 1990s with a woman named Christina Madonia, who worked at the Sound Exchange record store in Austin, TX and somehow counted herself a fan of the early issues of my own fanzine Superdope. We infrequently wrote “letters”, a form of written communication that some of you may remember, in which we compared notes on various bands, our respective music scenes, the turgid miasma of existence and so forth.

Let it be said that fanzine correspondence from a woman – particularly one near my age, which was at the time 23-24 – was always most welcome, given its extreme rarity. She definitely conveyed a sense of a goofy and creative early 90s Austin that’s subsequently been codified in memory and lionized by many, though it was clear to me then that Christina, who was maybe 22-23 at this point, wasn’t a late-night rager nor an extreme extrovert making the scene but rather an introspective, poetic and graspingly creative old soul, looking for the right outlet to share her vision.

She helped lead the publication of the Sound Exchange’s Bloat in-store fanzine and even reviewed Superdope within it. I’d been trying to uncrack the mysteries of Austin with her via our letters and I remember her telling me she was moving to Houston to work at the Sound Exchange there, which sounded kinda baffling to me at the time, given the asymmetry between the two cities in my mind vis-a-vis the underground rocknroll scene and my personal priorities as such. 

(Note: I will interject, two days after writing this post, that what I’ve just recounted appears to have been mostly made-up on my part. Christina has corrected the record; while she did live in Austin, it wasn’t until later in the 90s. She lived in Houston and worked at the record store there the whole time. There was no move to nor from either city during the time we corresponded. This message has been brought to you by whatever deep hole that exists in my memory banks, which we’ll call the “Embellishment Hole” from here on.)

It was here that she published the sole issue of her fanzine Curiosity in Stout Shoes in 1993. It was very much in keeping with the earthy, ethereal, poetic and dissonant nature of what would very soon become her music, as she would soon marry one Tom Carter in Houston and become the Christina Carter whom we know and love from the band Charalambides and later solo recording fame. Apparently – I have been told this by Christina personally – I had something to do with connecting her and Mr. Carter with Tom Lax at Siltbreeze Records, who then put out their first album Union. I’ll go ahead and own that as a feather in my proverbial cap, as I love that record and its follow up Market Square.

Her fanzine was both music-related and music-tangential, a personal fanzine of stories, comics, diary entries and dream depictions along with interviews with Smog/Bill Callahan and Linda Smith. Tom Carter is involved in illustration and pops up frequently in the stories themselves. In 1992 I spent some quality time in Houston with Christina, Tom and their bandmate Jason Bill while I was visiting to work the booth at the “Ace Hardware Convention” for my employer Monster Cable. They were phenomenal hosts, and it was just one of those memorable young-person nights where everything came together. They dazzled me with the culinary delights of Houston’s rich Indian food culture (who knew in California?), took me to drink beers on the lawn in front of KTRU radio at Rice University, and played me records back at their place, which I seem to recall was on or very near a river (?). They made me a tape, as one then did, of some killer Houston psych/noise bands – Dry Nod, Rusted Shut, The Mike Gunn. I left thinking “these are some of the finest people I’ve ever had the privilege of hanging out with”. 

In early ‘93 – come to think of it, only a month after this fanzine was published – I came to Houston again as the road manager for the band Claw Hammer, and Tom & Christina came out to Emo’s and hung out with all of us outside while we very purposefully escaped inside headliner The Reverend Horton Heat. I took this photo of Christina with my handheld Instamatic camera here at that show – and alas, thereafter lost contact with her within a year or so, and we wouldn’t reconnect for another 22 years. When I pulled out this Curiosity in Stout Shoes again recently, I noticed that I had been thanked for encouragement for this very singular and interesting one-off fanzine. Hey, I didn’t do nothin’!