B Side fanzine – Fanzine Hemorrhage

I started buying Sydney, Australia’s B Side around 1987, and it was an authoritative sherpa for me through the wilds & weeds of that era’s Australian underground. Independent US record stores were getting a lot of this stuff in stock at the time, so it wasn’t all that tough for me to find Scientists records, or any- & everything on the Aberrant, Citadel, Au Go Go, Waterfront, Greasy Pop, Red Eye and Black Eye labels, money permitting of course, of which I had little. Today I’m pretty ready to assert that the underground writ large, myself included, still hasn’t quite come to terms with how fertile this period was across Australia, particularly around the years 1984-86. This is where my recently-procured copy of B Side #11 lands, right in the middle of 1985.

For context, I just listened online to two records enthusiastically discussed here – Salamander Jim’s low-end, rumbling, psych noise-damaged “Black Star”, and The Moffs’ guitar-drenched paisley-psych 45 “Another Day in the Sun”. They’re great! It’s far more likely I just haven’t paid attention to any revivals of this stuff, since there are a ton of comps out there like this one. Anyway, Simon Lonergan and his crack team at B-Side were doing all the documentation in real time. I liken this fanzine to the UK’s Bucketful of Brains, but built instead around lowdown & dirty Australian bands with big hair and bad attitudes, as well as the more punk-oriented and as opposed to jangle-driven psych. It was the tenor of the times, as they say.

If you’re like me, your eye was perhaps caught by B-Side #11’s promise of “Byron Coley on the State of the U.S.A.”. Coley’s “The State of American Noise Part 1” starts with an opening salvo positing that stupid Americans are ignoring the likes of the greatness he’s about to wax poetically about, which we probably were. This comes down to 4 key bands: Dredd Foole & The Din, Raunch Hands, Butthole Surfers and the Leaving Trains. The Trains’ debut LP Well Down Blue Highway “represents the culmination o’ years spent drunkenly tryin’ t’ find the Northwest Passage between The Damned and Creedence Clearwater Revival”. After describing them and the adjacent band To Damascus, he says “Now ya know more about these jerks than 99.99% of the American people. How’s it feel?”. Byron Coley sticking the landing, as usual. This is also the article in which Coley first wrote that Jello Biafra turned his nose up at the Butthole Surfers when he first saw them and said they were “too weird” – a statement that really stuck in Biafra’s craw for years afterward. Fun!

Tex Perkins (who was in Salamander Jim along with Kim Salmon) has a good interview here – he was better known as “Greg” at the time – which includes ruminations on his jealousy of the more popular Beasts of Bourbon; trouble with the cops; and the fact that he’s now about to start playing with Pat Bag and Kid Congo in Fur Bible. They haven’t even started the band yet, nor even told him what kind of music they’re going to be doing – he just wants to make sure it doesn’t sound anything like the Gun Club nor the Beasts of Bourbon. Well, maybe a little.

There are also a slew of interviews with the likes of the Celibate Rifles, who just had that first LP and a 45 out at this point. A year later they’d have records that were easily procured at Aron’s and Zed in LA, and which became pretty beloved by me & my Radio Birdman-loving pals. (I don’t have them anymore and haven’t heard the band in decades). Other chats are with The Shindiggers, Decline of the Reptiles, 21 Faces, Harem Scarem, and American Eugene Chadbourne, who’s just come to town and won a handful of converts down under.

The excitement of the age is real, and you can feel it in the big Melbourne “scene report” by David Laing and Trevor Block. They’re shooting the proverbial shit back and forth about bands like “Behind The Magnolia Curtain” and Murphy’s Hardware, who supposedly play live in matching Hawaiian shirts. Who wouldn’t be excited, am I right? And as a result of reading this blog post, you now know more about these jerks from 1985 than 99.99% of the Australian people. How’s it feel?

This Australian fanzine had exceptionally solid distribution in the USA at the time late 1989’s B Side #24 hit my hands, and therefore I’d already been picking them up regularly at Los Angeles’ finer record stores, like it was being published right there in Hollywood. For an Australian of a certain vintage and temperament, B Side was the oracle of all things great, particularly if those things involved high-energy, loud, raw and ugly rocknroll. Simon Lonergan was the editor, at least during the run of issues I own, which travels from issue #19 onward into the early 90s.

In 1989, when B-Side #24 came out, the cross-pollination between the US underground and Australia’s was at a peak, at least in my lifetime. This was the fertile world of Waterfront, Au Go Go, Dogmeat and Red Eye/Black Eye Records in Australia, rubbing uglies with Sub Pop, Amphetamine Reptile and Touch & Go in the US. It’s all right here on the page. Big names abound. Butch Vig. Rapeman. Laughing Hyenas. Beasts of Bourbon. Kim Salmon. Mudhoney. In fact, Mark and Steve from Mudhoney take part in a trans-Pacific phone call interview for this very issue. They’re asked about influences on their sound, “Saccharine Trust or anything like that?”. Mark says, “Saccharine Trust. Gee, I’ve never heard that one before”, before going on to flatter both his interlocutor and the “lucky country” by praising The Scientists and feedtime.

This was the peak era of AU’s King Snake Roost and Lubricated Goat, two wild bands who were both snapped up by Sub Pop to sell a couple of hundred records to an uncaring American public. Loved re-reading Mr. Quinn from King Snake Roost’s USA tour diary here. First of all, they arrived for their tour in San Francisco just in time for the 10/17/89 “earthquake to end all earthquakes”, a major fucking event for those of us who endured it. “All I did was pick up a bass in the music shop and the whole damn city started to shake! We’ve been told that Santa Cruz and possibly San Jose are now reduced to rubble so maybe no show on Friday”.

As it turned out, they were able to make it to Chico – mostly untouched by the quake – on 10/19/89, and then did play Marsugi’s in my then- post-college home of San Jose on 10/20/89. I was there! So that’s what I was doing three days after the earthquake. “Short stroll around the neighborhood – looks deader than Adelaide on Christmas Day. ‘Underground Records’ was the only sign of life, but there’s only burning incense and an old hippy lady inside – guess that doesn’t count as life, huh. Seems as though the ‘quake did a good job on this town”. No Mr. Quinn, that wasn’t the quake, I’m afraid. He also talks about a fistfight that my fellow KFJC-FM disc jockey Les Scurry got into outside the club that night with some doofus DJ from another station…..which I now remember, only barely. There may have been some “tying on” happening this evening. We’d just had a major earthquake, okay??

Back in the pages of B Side #24, we’ve got Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide scene reports, far more interesting and lively than comparable columns in US fanzines – though nothing about Christmas Day in Adelaide. There’s a huge John Murphy autobiography – just like the Ollie Olsen thing in Forced Exposure around this time, both men’s work combined and apart has continued to travel way over my head. There are also interviews with a band called Meat; one with Radio Birdman/New Christs’ Rob Younger; Toys Went Berserk; and Los Angeles’ own Lazy Cowgirls, who were my favorite band in the world this year and during the two previous. See this blank-looking goofball with the Radio Birdman shirt on in the crowd? That’s me, from the pages of this very same B Side #24, taken at LA’s Anti-Club back in 1988.

When Lonergan interviews Sonic Youth here in tandem with Bruce Griffiths, he gets all three of Thurston, Kim and Lee to do loads upon loads of yakking, which is great. Thurston Moore banters about how popular speed metal is back home, and he actually calls it speed metal. See folks, we did not call it thrash metal back then, no matter what the kids do now. It was speed metal all the way. Also love how Lonergan keeps transcribing mentions of Michael Gira as “Michael Girard”. For a minute I thought he was confusing him with the Killdozer fella, but that’s another name entirely.

In the lengthy reviews section, there’s much to be explored in the genres of rawk, rock and raw rok. I’ll be honest – I just put a handful of fanzines up on eBay today and was going to put the B Sides in that batch, before I started re-looking at them and was like: what am I thinking? I mean, I’d forgotten about the one with my crowd shot photo, sure; but also, this mag’s great. All I’ll do is piss myself off in five years when I want to re-explore 1989 underground rock from the vantage point of 2029. These things are keepers, and there’s plenty more of them we’ll talk about in due time in this forum.