Al Flipside – Fanzine Hemorrhage

I’ve come to terms with Flipside in its early 80s guise not as a taste-building nerve center, nor as a place where one might gather intelligent discourse on the state of the scene, yet rather as a sociological excavation of punk rock as it was actually lived. Every time I saw/see something like The Vandals or Suicidal Tendencies on a Flipside cover I mentally classified/classify it as a taste-optional children’s magazine, but that’s not totally fair. You can get more on-the-ground sociological punk research in any given Flipside letters section alone than anywhere else of its time, and if that’s your thing, then issues like late 1982’s Flipside #36 are worth their weight in gold.

In this one, Susanna Hoffs writes on a postcard with the breaking news of how The Bangs were forced to change their name. Someone else writes to defend the honor of Al from SS Decontrol, who’d apparently come under some scene criticism of late; Sothira from Crucifix writes to complain about a racist cartoon of him in a previous issue; and all manner of punk cretins write in from godforsaken Southern California towns like Norco, Glendora and El Toro, the latter of which is now called Lake Forest. We’re in the peak hardcore era, but Flipside was relatively magnanimous in their coverage breadth, extending it even to an Allen Ginsberg mail interview by “roving reporter Helen”.

There’s a whole page interviewing The Misfits about the fallout from Doyle recently clocking a kid on the head with his guitar in San Francisco. Needless to say they’re both defensive and dismissive. The editors talk to Rebel Truth from Sacramento; to 100 Flowers; to Bill Bartell from White Flag (who has a Dave Markey movie coming out about him); and to MDC from San Francisco, who for once don’t strike me as complete nincompoops. I will grant that band the quote-unquote power of some of their blitzoid hardcore on their first album, but they really turned me off at age 15 when I’d hear them on MRR radio, trying to out-Left Wing their hosts to the point of absurdity. There’s also a big interview with The Necros, with lots of discussion about English spike-haired punk; anarchy and its deeper meaning; bands that sing about Reagan etc. All the teenage punk hits of ‘82, brought to you by the deep thinkers at Flipside.

Want to know what else was going on with folks trying to “catch a wave” on the sub-underground in 1982? There’s an ad for Chris Ashford’s What? Records for a new Davie Allen and the Arrows 45, “Stoked on Surf”. “You may remember David’s 1967 twangy fuzz-tone hit ‘Blues Theme’ from that outrageous biker movie ‘The Wild Angels’. Now he’s off bikes and onto boards!”. Well that didn’t last long. I actually read an entire interview last night with a band that was unknown to me, The Romans, who had ex-Monitor, Human Hands and Deadbeats folks, and who loved the Symbionese Liberation Army and the paisley underground. My kind of people. Had to go listen to some online. I’ve heard worse! In fact, I totally dug it and ordered a cheapo used copy of their You Only Live Once off of Discogs. Who was it that said Flipside weren’t tastemakers? Me?!?

It’s apparent that if you’re looking to truly piece together the rough corners of Los Angeles music history during the glory years of 1977-83 that Flipside, given its breadth and dogged documentation, would have to be a primary resource. The amount of content in any given issue is staggering, honestly, and as I talked about before, one thing I actually admired and even sort of envied about Al, Hud, Gerber and the crew was how they really were out there and in clubs, veteran’s halls and parties – every night of the week, anywhere there was a show.

For better or worse, they set the historical record in ways that others never could or did. For that alone, I’ll keep reading and unpacking these with pleasure, because 15-year-old “Slammy” from Buena Park in the letters section gets to capture the essence of being young and dumbstruck by the power of the ‘core for eternity, in a way that some nostalgia-ridden 50-something meathead like myself simply can’t. Copy of this on the Internet Archive here!

It’s possible that overly judgmental folks like me have given Flipside the proverbial “short shrift” over the years. I didn’t even buy a copy until well into college, 1986 or so, mostly because they gave such energetic and frothing coverage to any & every punk rock lame-o band, differentiating not in the least and really just there to innocuously champion all of it. No one cared much about their prose, because (as I saw it) no one there could effectively convince you with any sort of engendered credibility to buy a record or see a particular band anyway.

Yet when I read an issue like Flipside #32 from 1982 cover to cover, all it makes me do is wish I was there side-by-side with Al & Hud and the whole Flipside gang at every single show from South Orange County to the North San Fernando Valley, watching hardcore punk explode and share stages with creeping death rock bands (45 Grave, Christian Death), that next LA wave of over the-top art/performance acts (Johanna Went, Vox Pop) and those few rarified bands that were just miles ahead of everyone else (Minutemen, Dream Syndicate, 100 Flowers, Flesh Eaters).

This was the thrill of reading a Flipside, well into the 1990s. These people really lived it. I’d always marvel at their live reviews. A typical Friday night would have Flipside correspondents jumping from show to show all over the greater LA area, trying to document every last jot & titter coming from the clubs. I got to sort of brush shoulders a few times with editor Al Flipside and a guy named Bob Cantu in the early 90s, and it was all very real: they would start the evening seeing a band in Hollywood, say, then hustle down to Long Beach for another show and then make their way to a 2am wind-down party afterward, drinking and reveling all the way, then file their broken and disjointed dispatches in the next Flipside (“we missed so-and-so but I heard they were good; then the cops came”). I thought I was personally going pretty hard in my 20s, but these folks had me licked – and Al was in his thirties, having started Flipside in 1977. (To say nothing of scene correspondent and “rock and roll bank robber” Shane Williams – I’ve documented my direct encounters with him here).

It was the same in 1982. You read this thing and you still can’t believe LA had so many amazing shows you’d have gone to yourself in June ‘82 alone. You too would be humping it to Canoga Park and Hollywood and Costa Mesa and San Pedro all month long. It’s quite the time capsule, this one. There is such a buzz of punk rock activity that there are “Southern California H.C.” scene reports from Northwest O.C., Palos Verdes, Riverside and “More O.C.” respectively, while the rest of the magazine reports many wild shows that took place in Los Angeles proper.

There’s a priceless letter to the editor from teenager Mark Arm from Seattle, WA, exhorting punks to “think for themselves”; decrying the use of drugs in the scene, and relaying the fact that he had to talk his mom out of joining “Parents of Punkers” after punk rock music and fashions were featured on the Phil Donahue show. “She sees a counselor instead.”

Name an active LA-area punk-adjacent band in 1982 and they’re in here somewhere, as you can see from the cover, but there’s also a Flesh Eaters interview; a Twisted Roots family tree; an interview with the hideous Jeff Dahl about his awful new band Powertrip (“Fuck it all. The only thing I’m into is speed, beer, rock & roll and young girls.”); Eddie and the Subtitles; The Big Boys; and lots of love in the live reviews for the totally-zonkers Meat Puppets (they played with The Cramps in San Pedro this summer; where were you?) and brand-new band the Dream Syndicate, who are said to “sound blatantly like the Velvet Underground, yet are so unselfconscious about it that their plagiarism can’t be held against them.”

About 18 months later, in my estimation, it all started to go sideways in LA, music-wise. By 1984 the city and its nether regions still held more good bands per capita then most anywhere else, but it was a fast fade through the rest of the 80s. Of course my years of living in Southern California happened to be 1985-1989, and so I’d look at Flipside at record stores, then compare it to the vitality, breadth and craft of a Forced Exposure or Conflict and find it all quite “lacking”. Thus my attitude about it over the years, save for my awe and immense admiration for the crazed show-going of their staffers. This issue’s making me a little more generous in my retroactive estimation for the thing.