Alan Licht – Fanzine Hemorrhage

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.

18 months ago was the first time I gave the once-over to an issue of Marc Masters’ excellent 1990s fanzine Crank, and I suppose I already provided my main introductions to its subtleties there. That one came out in 1991; three years later, we’ve got Marc publishing Crank #4 from Syracuse, NY. Was Masters an Orangeman? So was my mom! Lou Reed, too. Why else would anyone live there, right?

This issue came with a 45, a rather landmark single in my world to be honest, because it was the first time – the very first and quite frankly one of the only times – that a pure, no-doubt-about-it “noise” composition pierced my consciousness in a highly pleasing manner. It was, and remains, Alan Licht’s blistering “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” – the first noise track to really zonk me. Maybe it’s an unlikely one, but there it is. Still sounds great to this day. The flip was by Bruce Russell’s project A Handful of Dust, and it didn’t pack quite the punch.

The interview with Alan Licht is the centerpiece of this issue. Licht, in high school, was listening to Beefheart, free jazz, The Fugs, Minutemen, Stooges etc. – now this is a guy I’d have wanted to have been hanging with, rather than the Night Ranger and Foreigner-loving morons who clogged the halls of Gunderson High in San Jose. I appreciated the part where he and Masters banter about how Licht’s college band Love Child enraptured the fanzine cognoscenti at the time with their early demos, your Byron Coleys and Chris Stiglianos and what have you, and then sort of fell off a cliff critically – at least with that crew – once they put out proper albums. Licht even compares Love Child’s “Church of Satan”, from their first album, to “Bitchen’ Camaro”. Harsh. I remember this too, the Forced Exposure mania for early Love Child because they had a track called “Crocus Says”, as in Crocus Behemoth from Rocket From The Tombs. Licht, man – this guy totally knew what he was doing, didn’t he?

He also says what I was very much fretting about at the time: “Improv has become the thing that jaded punk rock record collectors are into” – except rather than playing actual improvisations as he was, I took this fact personally, almost, and dove deeper into garage punk and “KBD” knuckle-draggers instead, turning my back on the improv/noise underground almost entirely aside from whatever Siltbreeze was putting out. Licht, in 1994, also wanted to write a book on John Cassavetes. Perhaps he still shall.

There’s a shorter interview with Bruce Russell to complement the other side of the included 45, and then a meaty section with 7 different Sun City Girls reviews. And then into the reviews – what a great 1993-1994 roll call: Bassholes, 68 Comeback, Free Kitten, Harry Pussy, Palace Bros, Brainbombs, Blue Humans, Arthur Doyle, Fly Ashtray, Alastair Galbraith and many more. Marc is very excited about most everything reviewed, then as now not a guy ready to serve heads on platters. He even loved the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion as much as I did that year – whoops!