Tag: Brandan Kearney

Wiring Dept. #6

~ Jay Hinman ~ 2 Comments

Frankly, I don’t have a ton of chronological information to go on here since the obscurant Wiring Dept didn’t provide dates nor issue numbers, but I’m pretty sure this was their sixth and final issue, and that it came out in late 1987. I’ve talked mostly positively about their 3rd and 4th issues here and here. I have another issue with Thurston Moore on the cover, and we shall discuss that in this space presently; and by “presently”, I mean it as Mark Twain used the term: “after a short time; soon”. 

What kind of has this issue floundering a bit in my estimation – relative to earlier issues – is just how immersed editor Eric Cope has clearly become in radical chic and the de rigeur performative leftism that was endemic to its home base San Francisco at the time. I really think the only reason I became the bleeding heart liberal I am today later in life is due my utter contempt for the MDC/Jello Biafra/MRR force-fed feeding tube leftism of the 80s. Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaraugua, Bobby Sands, Malcolm X, an important conference against racism, Huey Newton, Steve Biko, prison abolition poetry, Native Americans and European colonial penetration, the PLO: it’s all here, baby. It’s here and in the dorm rooms of my UC-Santa Barbara left-leaning brethren at the time, right next to the Che poster, the hacky sack, the gonorrhea antibiotics and the “One Love” and “Buffalo Soldier” records playing softly in the background. 

You think I’m exaggerating? I am not. There are reverent photos of Jonathan Jackson with his guns at the Marin County Civic Center, where he died, and George Jackson, the hero, the Soledad Brother, the liberator of Angela Davis – and then a two-page spread for Huey Newton as well. I mean, yeah, I sort of dug the Black Panther mystique myself at the time (the leather, the guns, the chants, and they fed the little children of Oakland, too!), and no 4-year college journey of intellectual discovery at the time was complete without a little time spent coming to grips with Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice. Mine was completed, shall we say. But even so, I blanched when I read Wiring Dept. #6’s interview with sisters/artists Sue Coe and Mandy Coe, who have a new art book dedicated to Malcolm X and who talk incessantly about police brutality. You know, I always say it was MDC and Biafra who turned me counter-countercultural, but maybe it was this interview?

Anyway, the music content is lessened in this one as a result of having to shoehorn in all this important agitprop. But the music content is quite strong, as it was in previous music-dominant issues. Big Black are interviewed at the very end of their run in 1987. “Why is this your last tour?” “Because we’re breaking up on Sunday”. Santiago Durango was going to law school, but interviewers Humbert de Birck and Brandan Kearney seem to be trying to convince them to stay together, which we now know did not work. Steve Albini says: “When people who don’t understand what kind of music this is ask me, I ask them if they know what rock and roll is. And they usually say, yeah. And then I say, Imagine that, but with a lot of heavy machinery operating at the same time”. Also, the band expresses a deep hatred of the up-and-coming band Jane’s Addiction, who, long before they became famous, became deservingly embedded in my own personal lexicon as one of the absolute worst bands in the history of rock music. I’d say “You know, truly awful, like Jefferson Starship or Jane’s Addiction”. I stand by it!

There’s a negative review of “sellouts” Sonic Youth and their “9/28/87” show at The Fillmore on the Sister tour. This happens to be the exact same date that I saw them play one of the greatest shows I’ve ever seen, in Isla Vista, CA, also labeled as 9/28, and because two locales are a six-hour drive from each other – someone’s lying. David Katz talks to Adrian Sherwood; Sherwood describes what his music sounds like when his group plays live as “live funk dub” – then he says “Don’t use that quote. Don’t say ‘live funk dub’ – sounds horrible!”. Doesn’t he know that when you’re on the record and you say “don’t print that”, it’s absolutely gonna be printed? I’ll bet he knows that now in 2025, perhaps not so much 38 years ago.

Katz also talks to Wire in London, and it’s actually a really comprehensive overview of the band’s journey, leaning much more heavily on recent years, as the band back then were pretty reticent when confronted with their glorious past – you know, the first three albums that everyone wanted to talk about, instead of the recent stuff that they didn’t. There are also other chats with Stickdog, the Beat Nigs – a band so bad Jello Biafra loved them – Barnacle Choir, and Comic Book Opera, the latter of whom sound like something I’d go to see live for sure, if only I could teleport back to the Reagan era. There’s a review of a super-early Brandan Kearney/Barbara Manning-era World of Pooh live show at “Lipps Underground”: “singing like children who don’t want to wake their sleeping parents”. “Foot-shuffling, hunched shoulders, and staring are what pass for stage mannerisms in their rock show”. They ended said Lipps Underground show with a cover of “Gunboats” by Swell Maps. Anyone have the tape???

Most record reviews within Wiring Dept. #6 are by Kearney, in fact, and I’m pretty sure the ones that are not by him – by people like “Rosanguine”, “Curdleby”, “Stallwart Pool Trump” and “R. Pawnships” – are by him. His exceptionally positive review of Three Day Stubble’s Monster makes it pretty clear where he stands: “Remember that one person that was more pathetic than you in 7th grade? The one person you could actually look down on? Well, it’s 1987 now and it turns out that he was miles ahead of you all along.”

Bought at Rhino Records in LA for $2, sticker still on the back, and it has successfully traveled with me through the peaks and valleys of life’s rich pageant ever since.

Wiring Dept. #4

~ Jay Hinman ~ 4 Comments

Maybe it didn’t really feel like it at the time to me, but Wiring Dept. has reputationally come into its own, nearly forty years after the fact, as an important sub-underground music publication that found joy, innovation and immense left-of-center creativity in post-hardcore San Francisco circa 1984-86. These were supposed to be “the lean years”, but I’ve got a whole Wiring Dept. #4 here that says they weren’t. (I talked about Wiring Dept. #3 here as well). 

I know where I was when I bought this in 1985 or early 1986 – it was at Rough Trade Records on 6th Street in San Francisco, and I was up visiting from college on one of my many record-buying excursions to the city while staying with my parents in San Jose. It was likely rung up at the counter by KFJC’s Spliff Skankin (Dennis Bishop), who worked there, and whom I listened to incessantly in high school (and who therefore likely intimidated me at the age of 18 when I bought this – these DJs were absolute gods to me). Given my youth and general punk rock orientation at the time, I probably blanched a little at the pretentious poetry and song lyrics – many by Dylan – in the margins of many pages, and at the inwards circularity of the fanzine, in which much of it seemed primed to elevate its creators and their own endeavors. I’m over it now.

But as examples of what I’m talking about, let’s dissect Wiring Dept. #4 a little. There’s an interview with SF band Trial by Grux of Caroliner and by editor Eric Cope. Then Cope writes about Caroliner. Then William Davenport of Unsound fanzine does an interview with The Flaming Lips after their first LP. Then Cope interviews Davenport. Cope’s own band, Glorious Din, gets a reprint of their interview on KALX radio, and then their album gets a rave review in Cope’s own magazine as well. Who’d have thunk it?

Brandan Kearney of World of Pooh was part of this loose collective as well. He writes a bunch of the record reviews; his band, then a duo, gets raved about; there’s a long review of their tape Dust. and also a review of Brandan Kearney’s magazine Nuf Sed Digest, which I’d never even known about until re-reading this just now. Who’s got a spare copy to trade me for one of my extra CMJ New Music Monthlies? There’s also a review of a World of Pooh tape called Pigmies in a Rose Petal that I’m not 100% sure actually ever existed, and another of a comp tape called UGLY SF III: Bellair McKuen Natures the Preying ANXthouse, supposedly with Lennonburger, Church Police and Caroliner. Google turns up nothing. I need to hear this and I need your help.

There are loads of short interviews, including with four small-ish bands who became much larger in years to come: the aforementioned Flaming Lips; 10,000 Maniacs; Faith. No More and Peter Buck of R.E.M., who were already kind of a big deal on the indie/Americana circuit but nothing like they’d be two/three years later. Yet there are also chats with Controlled Bleeding, Love Tractor, Flat Duo Jets and Stiff Legged Sheep – who were awesome, by the way. Listen here. Corrosion of Conformity, too. Fuckin’ C.O.C., man. I saw them play at the Oxnard Skate Palace, no lie.

Frightwig talk about their upcoming record: “Have you ever seen Russ Meyer, early Russ Meyer films? He did Debbie Does Dallas (sic). He had this film about three go-go dancers who travel around in these sports cars. It’s called Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill. And we’re the three dancers in our sports cars. Faster Frightwig, Kill Kill. It has nothing to do with the music. We just like Russ. We identify with him. We all have big tits. We’re all foxy. I wear hip huggers and dance and we race around in our sports cars and kill men with our bare hands.”

Dave Katz – who for some totally weirdo reason got really mad at me for this 2005 review I wrote of his book! – writes about The Fall’s new 45 Cruiser’s Creek, saying that, “In a way, they sound almost like an 80’s Creedence Clearwater….the main problem with this song about a back woods party is its annoying backing vocals”. Poor Brix, just couldn’t catch a break from the men both lusting after her and wishing she’d go away, sort of a sub-underground version of modern MAGA Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez/Taylor Swift syndrome. And really, maybe the reviews in Wiring Dept. #4 aren’t to be trusted as a matter of course. There’s an uncredited review of the Dead Kennedys’ Frankenchrist, easily one of the worst records I’ve ever heard. This album with “Jock-O-Rama (Invasion Of The Beef Patrol)” and “MTV Get Off The Air”  is compared to Iggy Pop and Joy Division, and about which it is said, “Frankenchrist is worth about a million dollars just for the lyrics. What Jello Biafra sings is not mere words put to music, these words come from deep within his heart. He feels with a tortured soul….a record that opens your eyes to injustice and human suffering….do not miss this record”. Hey, I’d leave that review uncredited, too. 

All this and a picture of Bob Noxious from The Fuck Ups. It’s therefore little wonder that Wiring Dept. copies are p-r-i-c-e-y when encountered on eBay these days. It’s outstanding source material for documenting whatever it is that was going on musically in 1985, a tale that very much varies with the teller.

Nothing Doing #1

~ Jay Hinman ~ 1 Comment

In my 20s I was very magnetically drawn to those who were undeniably smarter, funnier and more interesting than I was. Through the use of common bonding agents such as alcohol and underground music talk (areas in which I could hold my own, if nowhere else), on occasion I found myself holding court with one of these bon vivants, a guy named Brandan Kearney. I’d initially come to admire this gentleman through his band World of Pooh during the years 1989-90; he would come to do time in Caroliner, The Steeple Snakes, Faxed Head, the Heavenly Ten Stems, The Three Doctors Band and the Totem Pole of Losers in the 80s and early 90s, and then others besides. He ran a San Francisco label called Nuf Sed that put much of this out.

A couple methods to get a better handle on this world would be to read Will York’s Who Cares Anyway – Post-Punk San Francisco and the End of the Analog Age book, and/or to read the oral history of World of Pooh that I assembled in Dynamite Hemorrhage #3 fanzine, which you can download a PDF of right here. Aside from the boner where I bumbled and called Kearney WoP’s bassist, I’m proud of how it turned out. As Kearney was immersed in and helping to drive San Francisco’s absurdist early 90s parallel world sub-underground culture, he furthered his contribution with a two-issue run of a small fanzine called Nothing Doing. Nothing Doing #1 came out in Spring 1994, and it wasn’t really a music fanzine at all, because any and all music discussed within it did not exist except in Kearney’s unique and wacked vision, informed as it was by weird religious tracts, thrift store records, conspiracy theories, the Chinese Communist Party and an extreme and ahead-of-its-time notion of anti-comedy.

Its purpose was clearly to subvert, for lack of a better term, the notion of the fanzine. Since music fanzines were ubiquitous and often uniform in 1994, Nothing Doing #1 stood out, shall we say, to the extent that it was seen by anyone. There’s a table of contents with zero connection to the contents herein. The demo tape review section features music by acts like no (fucking) name and Whirling Petals, the latter of whom’s tape Embroidery and Crucifixion is reviewed thusly: “Within two minutes of pressing ‘play’ I felt like I was dying of encephalitis. I mean that in the best possible sense, and with all due credit to Oliver Eustace, the Petals’ morbidly obese lead singer – an utterly deluded fop whose muse seems to be having a little joke at his expense….Certainly no one else is washing hogs like this, at least not while accompanied by a chorus-drenched mandolin, a piccolo and a triangle”.

There’s a further section of reviews of recordings from “The China Record Company”, whose albums include We Steel Workers Have an Iron Will and Poor and Lower-Middle Class Peasants Love Chairman Mao Most. If I ever looked for these in thrift stores, I never found them. A representative proxy for the remainder of Nothing Doing #1 might be the “cartoons” section, which I’ve helpfully scanned for you here. Laugh it up, and I’ll get down to tackling this mag’s second issue here within the next 365 days.