Tag: bazooka fanzine

Bazooka! #2

~ Jay Hinman ~ Leave a comment

In earlier days on this site, I wrote about Bazooka! #3 from 1997 and later Bazooka! #1 from early 1996. The latter post helped me to reconnect after many years with its editor Tom Arnaert, the Belgian with whom I traded CD-Rs and ‘zines in the late 90s and early 00s. He was kind enough to send me Bazooka! #2, a crucial missing link in my very important fanzine collection. Last night I read it cover to cover and I believe I’ll tell you about it now.

Even from the cover scanned here you can see that Tom had an absurdist streak and a strong eye for goofy graphics, and there’s a ton of this cut-n-paste aesthetic running through the issue – some of which is well thought-out, and some which raises more questions than answers. The “Bonus 45rpm single” advertised on cover is a fine example of the latter. It doesn’t exist. 

Bazooka! was a garage punk fanzine that arrived in that 1994-96 timeframe when a wave of  highly satisfying raw/loud/snotty music was ascendent, as well as a new crop of fanzines that covered it. These included Human Garbage Disposal, Sooprize Package, Alright! and of course Wipeout!. It’s clear that news of the early 1996 “Rip Off Rumble” weekend at The Kilowatt in San Francisco has made it over to Belgium, and it’s practically talked about here as the key touchstone rock event of the 90s, Lollapalooza be damned. I suppose for a certain flavor of young man, it was – and I happened to have been one of those young doofuses in attendance. The bands talked about here in connection with said event – The Problematics and De Stipjes – were the bands we walked out on to go get beers elsewhere. Yes, there were also those we didn’t leave, The Brides and The Oblivians included. I feel like maybe The Motards played this thing as well. Can we get someone in fact-checking to review that, please?

I truly enjoyed the Don Howland interview here. At this point he was two albums in as the leader of The Bassholes, and had recently replaced Rich Lillash as his drummer with “Bim”. Howland is an all-time favorite musician, writer and human of mine. My talks with him on the phone in 1993 for my Superdope fanzine (which yielded this), and later in person in 1995 were highly entertaining and edifying. I proudly got him to go see the 1995 film The Wife at The Roxie in San Francisco when he was in town, and he loved it, and now I want you to go see it as well, because you’ll love it too. My understanding is that there was to be a potential Gibson Bros reunion at Gonerfest in Memphis earlier this year, 2024; all parties were on board except Howland, who wanted nothing to do with it – and he’s a pretty important party in that regard. This interview perhaps gives you a good sense of why.

As an aside, when The Bassholes came to SF in 1995, I believe he and Bim stayed at my house, and I heard later, like YEARS later, Lamont Thomas aka Bim aka Obnox was calling to me from the stage at an Obnox show, “does anyone know if Superdope is here, is Jay Hinman here?”. I wasn’t, but I’m super psyched beyond belief that I was remembered as such a fine host! Money quote from Howland in Bazooka! #2: “The first live show I ever saw was the Ike and Tina Turner Review at the Ohio State Fair in ‘68 or so; from that point on white women were second best”.

Bazooka! #2 has a bunch of tape reviews (!); a treatise on something European and unknown to me called Dode’s Ka-Den, and a crazy interview with Austin’s 1-4-5s. You know, you really have to hand it to Texas for its central place in multiple garage punk waves over the years. I mean, the state clearly and dramatically over-indexed, quality- and volume-wise, in the 1960s, and the 70s punk scenes in all three major cities was laudable as well. The 1990s saw a ton of wild bands beyond the 1-4-5s; my favorites included the aforementioned Motards; The Inhalants, Fireworks, Junior Varsity and Sugar Shack, and there were countless others I’m forgetting. Tom’s reviews of all this stuff are frothingly opinionated; it doesn’t take him long to decide that some three-chord basher is utter genius or “shit”. He’s also in the midst of broadening his proverbial scope here, as this issue introduces some dub and cuban mambo reviews along with all the drunken blues and blitzin’ blindin’ punk rock music you can stomach.  

Stay close and we’ll get to issues #4 and #5 at some point, which you’ll surely want to read for how invariably it triggers my highly self-indulgent, candy-colored, rose-tinted nostalgia for dumb rocknroll memories from the distant past.

Bazooka! #1

~ Jay Hinman ~ 1 Comment

Earlier on Fanzine Hemorrhage we discussed Belgian Tom Arnaert’s late 90s Bazooka! fanzine and specifically, issue #3. Even thinking of Tom and his fanzine has me pining a bit for the late 90s/early 00s glory days of “CD-R trading”, in which I’d roast up six CDs for you and send ‘em through the mail, and you’d roast up six for me from your collection and fling them my way. I built a hell of a CD “burn collection” in that manner, not just with Arnaert but with several clued-in correspondents all over the world. 

I was especially happy to do this with Arnaert and a guy named Luc Onderdonck, both of whom would check stuff out from libraries in Belgium, collections of 78s or punk or world music that never made their way to the USA, then make copies for us both. There was another fella up in Seattle that was a fellow online DJ at Antenna Radio – here’s a Wayback Machine capture of a 2001 show of mine, No Count Dance Party – and I’ve totally blanked on the guy’s name (I think it was “Irv Hunter”?), but he and I, we had ourselves a time with our frantic CD-R trading. To this day, I still make myself CD-Rs of digital files all the time, rather than store everything on a hard drive. I don’t like looking at digital files – I’d still rather cobble together the original artwork, print it out, stuff it into a poly sleeve with the disc and have a fake-but-real CD of my own making, 

Anyhow, I recently was able to come into a copy of Arnaert’s very first issue from early ‘96, Bazooka! #1. We see this young man finding his musical and publishing sea legs at this point, and he is indeed a young man; based on some mathematical deducing done from an offhand comment in his interview with The Tinklers that he made about being four years old when they started up in 1978, that would put young Tom at 21 or 22 at this point. In many ways – much like the atrocities I myself was publishing at that age (but far better than mine) – it feels like it, and it even seems that Arnaert didn’t quite have the all-consuming command of the English language that he’d even have just a couple years later, when I first came across Bazooka! #3 and found this guy writing circles around his fanzine contemporaries.

1994-1996 was peak garage punk mania for many garage-crazed individuals around the world, as we’ve documented here, here and here. Accordingly, Arnaert is big on The Oblivians, and gets in a good mail interview w/ Eric Friedl, who magnanimously answers everything like a mensch. He also gets in good with Dennis Callaci of Shrimper Records and the band Refrigerator, a gentleman & a label that were true fanzine/underground “objects of attention” at the time, something I found it hard to latch onto myself. Then there’s an interview with Kevin Munro of the band Mule, a guy who’d been in the Laughing Hyenas for a time. He comes across as a bit of an antagonist and perhaps something of a “dum-dum”.

Oh, and I love Arnaert calling out some doofus from “The Swingin’ Neckbreakers” when they played in Gent, Belgium: “Highly praised by the people from Norton Records and despised by other garage freaks for copying the 60s r&r sound without adding anything substantial to it (or something like that). I could see from the singer’s face that he was some arrogant piece of shit and that they were going to suck real hard. And I was right cuz a bit later, after a series of sneers addressed to the soundman, the singer threw down his bass, jumped off stage and got in a fight with the soundman. Really weak….”. Who needs Pitchfork when you have reviewers who’ll lay it on the line and leave it all on the field like that? Tom Arnaert, it’s time to bring back Bazooka! for a new generation. Get in touch and I’ll hook you up with a printer.

Bazooka! #3

~ Jay Hinman ~ 1 Comment

There’s something a little culturally demoralizing for Americans when we come across Europeans who can write, communicate and think better in our native tongue than we can. Folks like Matthias at Fŏrdämning, Henrik at Human Garbage Disposal and Tom Arnaert at Bazooka! are my jealously-looked-upon models in that regard. I mean, I personally took three years of high school Spanish, baby! I even know well enough to stay away from lengua and tripa burritos, so why can’t I craft an erudite, funny, Spanish-only music fanzine?

Well look, maybe erudite isn’t exactly the right word for Arnaert’s 1997 third issue of Bazooka!, but it was absolutely one of my favorite sources for garage punk & expansive roots/world music rock-turning in the late 90s. Arnaert and I traded “CD-Rs” in those days, and the guy sent me some of my favorite collections of obscure global 78s, down-home Americana and blues comps back in those frantic years when everything was coming out on CDs only, and I got the notion that I’d better sell all of my vinyl, and fast, because vinyl records were soon to be dead as a doornail. Clearly, we were trading fanzines as well; I put out my final issue of Superdope in 1998 and I reckon that was my coin of the realm which enabled me to procure this issue of Bazooka! and the two that followed it. 

From his perch in Ieper, Belgium, Arnaert surveyed all he saw in the worlds of low-class, lo-fi garage punk and other sundry forms. A great comparison fanzine both in content and layout for this magazine would be Eric Friedl’s Wipeout! – note the exclamation point. Both took as their starting point loud & raw rocknroll music both present and past, and as they dug deeper, they extended their remit to include loads of “black” music, i.e. the bedrock upon which all of their current passions rested. Arnaert in particular goes deep into fife & drum music on this one; you may recall this was the time of Othar Turner mania, powered by cultural appropriators Birdman Records’ Everybody Hollerin’ Goat CD.

 Bazooka #3 also surveys 1977-78 Belgian punk – why wouldn’t he? – while also interviewing New Orleans’ trash/rockabilly overlord King Louie (Royal Pendletons, Persuaders, King Louie & The Harahan Crack Combo) and penning a Mick Collins survey to boot. The mag is just bursting with reviews of both records and current fanzines, laid out haphazardly wherever space exists (this happens to be a great cheat for those of us who’ve created fanzines but don’t know a thing about true graphic design). In 1997, this is whom you’d find darting about the pages of Bazooka! as well as in the record collections of its fellow travelers: Bassholes, Thee Headcoatees, the Demolition Doll Rods, Billy Childish, Chrome Cranks, T-Model Ford, Splash Four and Junior Kimbrough. If that sounds like your kettle of tea, let me assure you that it probably is. I experienced those last three years of the 1990s as fairly grim ones, musically, and I know there are others who agree with that verdict – so it was great to have Arnaert’s Bazooka! out there to help illuminate the silver linings.