Terrific third and final issue in Big Star’s run. You certainly can’t complain about the use of the name in Spring 1978, particularly when I was raised to understand that no one had cared about Big Star, the band, several years earlier, and that their fans at the time could be counted on the fingers of several hands. It wasn’t quite true, yet the fact that punk fanzine empresario Bernard Kugel (Bernie to his friends!) found a way to easily merge them into his mag along with The Ramones and so forth spoke volumes about how they were perceived by at least a subset of the underground. 

Now Bernie, he was doing this in Buffalo, NY, and he’s been subsequently called the “godfather of the Buffalo punk scene”. I’ve never seen the other two issues of Big Star, but Big Star #3 is an excellent early ‘78 rocknroll fanzine right out of fanzine central casting. Like, I mean, I’m not really into Talking Heads but I like how Kugel does three seperate interviews with 3 different band members, right after their album’s come out, then loops back around to interview Tina Weymouth again. In some cases, each interview’s no more than a half-dozen questions. Jerry Harrison gets asked about his previous band, the godlike Modern Lovers:

Big Star: Why did the original Lovers break up?

JH: Just personalities.

Big Star: What do you think of Jonathan’s current stuff?

JH: I’m not wild about it. I mean I think it’s sort of interesting but it’s not exciting to me. That’s why I really didn’t want to continue because it was all his personality. If you really like his personality, then that’s great. I don’t think his personality is that great.

Miriam Linna – whom I believe was out of The Cramps at this point but in Nervus Rex – does a column called “The New Sounds of the U.S.A”. She goes wild for The Real Kids, DMZ, The Fleshtones and The Zantees, the latter of whom she praises for “their impeccable taste and truly inspired treatment of rock n roll”. As it turned out, she was weeks away from joining the band herself as their new drummer, if she hadn’t already. 

Kugel does a puff piece on local band The Jumpers, whose 45 Kugel’s label Radio City has just so happened to have just released. There are brief fanzine-y chats with Cheap Trick and The Ramones, two bands who’d, unlike The Jumpers, go on to immortal and everlasting glory by being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And there’s a good freewheeler of an interview w/ Metal Mike Saunders. He talks about becoming an accountant; how “Kiss is the best American rock group, hands down”; how “The Ramones’ albums literally make me ill”; his band Vom, which was still coming together with Richard Meltzer and Gregg Turner when this interview takes place in October 1977, after getting launched with the creation of their first song, “Getting High With Steven Stills”. All this and a full-page Twinkeys ad, with one band member holding a “Sacramento” baseball pennant right at the time that said city was my hometown!