Bedloe’s Island – Fanzine Hemorrhage

In the midst of some of my past yammerings on this site, I’d mentioned my regrettable unfamiliarity with many of the rock fanzines of the pre-punk 1970s, aside from Who Put The Bomp and a small sampling of others. This really has to do with their scarcity and their unaffordability – I mean, yes, I’d love to have ‘em – but also with how I grew up and learned about rocknroll in the late 70s and 1980s. It was an article of faith during my “learning era” that 1970-76 were nearly worthless years, a complete wasteland of bloat and stupidity, with oceans of prog, teenybop bands, hard-rock excess and CSN&Y eventually driving kids to invent punk rock at the mid-point of the decade. It wasn’t true, but it served to cement my nearly lifelong disinterest in whatever fanzines might have been active during those years – because, after all, what would they cover?

A kind American recently stepped in and provided me with some source texts from this period to help guide me toward the light. One of these was Bedloe’s Island #2 from Fall 1971, edited by New Jersey’s own Jesse Farlowe, who also contributes the majority of the text. Due to an upcoming address change to Goddard College in Plainfield, VT, I’m left to assume that Farlowe was a young man, a late-term high schooler even. If it indeed shows in some of the writing, I say who the fuck cares. His mania for digging as deep as he was physically and aurally able to do in 1971 is highly admirable, and his breadth of enthusiasms run wide, from The Mothers of Invention to Pink Floyd to both the white- & black-skinned purveyors of blues.

And in the great fanzine tradition, it’s not like he and his contributors aren’t above calling a spade a spade. Farlowe’s not a fan of Hawkwind’s debut (“long boring instrumentals with electronic noises attempting to fill the holes in the music which only succeed in making it worse”), nor of Karen Dalton’s In My Own Time (“True, her voice is original – sorta like Melanie trying to sound like Janis Joplin – but it is also one of the most irritating sounds I’ve ever heard. Each time she begins to sing I get a shiver down my spine”). It goes the other way, too. Contributor Tom Ayers completely busts two nuts over – wait for it…… – Poco, live in concert (“their shitkickin’ country brand of rock makes ya smile no matter how down things may be getting for you…This is just about the most infectious music I’ve ever heard – and they’re good musicians, too. Poco is perhaps the most dynamic band around today”). I was going to chime in and say “and they hadn’t even released “Amie” yet!”, but that was Pure Prairie League, another godhead proto-punk monster band.

Bedloe’s Island #2 is a hoot to dig through because it’s (obviously) written on a manual typewriter and there’s a bit of a coded apology at the start for the price having to be raised to 25 cents from whatever comparably affordable price it was before. The era when information was scarce and painstakingly manual cobbling had to be done is all too apparent in Farlowe’s John Mayall discography, which attempts to list every record by not just Mayall, but those who played with him, such as Eric Clapton and Peter Green. So you therefore get a Fleetwood Mac discography up to 1971. I remember being a kid when Rumors was the biggest record on the planet, and seeing all these other strange-looking Fleetwood Mac records in the bins and wondering why no one ever talked about those. Farlowe did!

Still, he’s feeling the winds of change and the cold, end-of-an-era current that started at Altamont is now starting to bum his trip a little, too. He’s got an editorial about some monkey business going on with the crowd at an Emerson, Lake and Palmer show (!) and connects it to a recent stabbing at a Who concert in Forest Hills (!!). “Rowdiness is quite prevalent at concerts….once an avid concert goer I can no longer take ‘the scene’ and limit my concerts to a select few….hopefully it will all blow over…”). Whew, I am glad that Farlowe did not get to experience Long Beach’s Fender’s Ballroom in the 1980s. It did not blow over. The first time I went there in 1985 I was told that the previous week’s show had been a “bloodbath”, which effectively had me standing at the back near an exit for most of the evening, as skins, punx and miscreants of all stripes slammed their asses off, fists first. Good times. Give me ELP’s rowdy-ass crowd any day.

Because I was four years old when Who Put The Bomp #9 came out in Spring 1972, I have exceedingly little firsthand knowledge of the rocknroll fanzine scene of the time that this was a part of. Clearly, and as I’d imagined, it’s a leading light in a much larger sea of underground, home-produced fanzines being produced by rock maniacs across the US and UK. Editor Greg Shaw gets into it by reviewing many action-packed fanzines of the era like Alan Betrock’s Jamz, which “has a good section on punk rock (Terry Knight & Pack, Shadows of Knight, Vagrants)”, as well as Andy Shernoff’s Teenage Wasteland Gazette. I’ve sadly never seen either, but one day I shall. There’s another one called Bedloe’s Island that you can read about here while also observing my own 90s fanzine being slagged in the process. It’s only now that I’m coming to realize how fertile fanzine-dom was in the early 70s, and that maybe punk didn’t actually need to happen after all.

This one’s far more lo-tech than the Who Put The Bomp issues I previously bantered with you about here and here. Shaw is living in Fairfax, CA, which is still my favorite place in Marin County and located about 35 minutes north of my San Francisco home. He says at the outset “And don’t bother ripping up this magazine – I’ll send you a complete set of photos plus cover for 25¢”. I wonder if the offer still stands? He then has an editorial apologizing for this not being the promised “English invasion issue”. That would come out over a year later. He’s also warning folks that Who Put The Bomp isn’t usually so oldies-oriented as this issue is. They were actually calling late 50s rock “oldies”, even in 1972 – how about that. What do you call the music of 2009, Times New Viking, Grass Widow, Fabulous Diamonds and whatnot?

Gene Vincent has just died, and thereby gets his own piece. Shaw has also just found out about Wanda Jackson, someone whom he believes “may be a name familiar to you only as a country & western singer”. (I just so happen to greatly prefer the Wanda Jackson country years to her often silly rockabilly stuff, although this video is pretty great). The Vincent thing reminds me of this fanzine’s major contribution to furthering record scholarship, which is assembling a painstakingly complete discography with catalog numbers and the works. Rip Lay does the Wanda Jackson piece, and he talks about how smitten he became of her from her record covers and how she thereby supplanted Darlene from the Mickey Mouse Club in his heart.

Mike Saunders does a phony interview with a rockabilly artist he invented from whole cloth called The Famous Alaska King Crab. Couldn’t this guy take a breath and be serious, even for a minute? There are other features on Harmonica Frank and “Elvis in Print” (books about Elvis), Greg Shaw goes deep on reissues, which have started to flood out in 1971/72 – even one with Conway Twitty’s early rocknroll material. He reviews the much-maligned Hot Poop record, who were a bunch of students from my alma mater of UC-Santa Barbara who recorded one record and received an absolute stonewalling as a result.

The excellent and lengthy letters section calls attention to previous pieces in Who Put The Bomp by Lester Bangs and Greil Marcus, and contains letters to the editor penned by Eddie Flowers, Kim Fowley and a dude named Doug Hinman, whom I’ve come to find published a Kinks book thirty years ago. There’s much parsing in these many pages about what real rock & roll is, and little if any complaining about the year 1972 and whether or not it’s dead. There are far too many records to collect and reissues to celebrate for that kind of talk.