Caitlin Hines – Fanzine Hemorrhage

One of the great tabloid fanzines of all time, Damage published thirteen issues in San Francisco from 1979 to 1981. I’ve had the pleasure of talking with you in this forum about it before: Damage #6 and Damage #7. Now let’s take a peek at the very first issue, Damage #1 from June 1979, even if it does have Jello Biafra on the cover. Trust me, my copy wasn’t “complimentary”, as you can see stamped along the top here, but it leads me to believe that my copy belonging to a previous owner once was.

There seems to be a real coalescence of smart and driven people around the San Francisco underground music scene in 1979, not merely a bunch of dimwit punks. They’ve all been given a place to congregate in the pages of Damage #1. There’s billboard artist “DA”, provided with this sobriquet as a cover for his real name, due to his public vandalism of billboards and corporate buildings. This includes putting up a series of large posters that say, “Rich..? Boring…? Then you soon may be dead unless you contribute to the new wave revolution. Send money today = be spared tomorrow”. An address at 626 Post Street is helpfully provided. He also created confrontational machine-based visual art and displayed it in public spaces, like a gas station, making me think he might very well be Mark Pauline, or someone within his orbit. Though I doubt Mark Pauline would have given much thought to fomenting a “new wave revolution”.

Another great interview is with Robert Hanrahan, manager of The Offs and Dead Kennedys, and a guy who put on shows at San Francisco’s legendary Deaf Club. (Robert is now Daphne Hanrahan). The club is struggling with fire regulations, police presence, and with quality-of-life cleanup issues on Valencia Street. Mayor Dianne Feinstein is referred to as “the Queen of Hearts”, in reference to a legendary mocking magazine cover that I unfortunately can’t find reference to on the internet. She was reviled by the punks. Hanrahan complains about people trying to piggyback on the club’s notoriety and/or get in for free: “We’ve had people come to the club and flash New West press passes, and we say, okay that’ll be three dollars. And they’re shocked – ‘but we can write about you, we can give you all kinds of publicity’….one night Black Randy came to the door and announced, ‘Black Randy, party of twelve’. I said ‘Black Randy, party of none, it’s three bucks apiece’. He was flipped. We let him in, and a half hour later two guys were carrying him out because he had passed out in the bathroom”.

Now if you’ve done even the tiniest bit of cursory reading about the late 70s San Francisco punk scene, you surely know who Dirk Dirksen is. The interview with him here is fantastic. The interviewer comes at him repeatedly and rather lamely with every Mabuhay Gardens controversy du jour – ticket prices ($4.50 on weekends instead of $3!); whether he’s enriching himself from the Mabuhay (he is not); “a lot of people resent the way you act on stage”, and so on. The final question is “Someone asked me to ask you if it’s true you hate punks”. Dirkson replies, “I only love myself. I don’t know any punks, but those pseudo-punks that come to the Mabuhay, I certainly like them”. Read an entire book about him here.

Damage #1 also talks to bands, I assure you. There’s a rare one with The Urge, an all-female band that included Jean Caffeine, who did New Dezezes fanzine (which I wrote about here and here) a year or two before this band, and who, along with her bandmates, went to Washington High in the Richmond (two members are still there at the time of this interview). There’s a talk with No Sisters, a band of brothers, all of whom wear nerd glasses. There are strange utterings from Coum Transmissions, i.e. the Throbbing Gristle folks, a collective very popular with a certain San Francisco archetype of the era, as you may well know. Craig and Alice from The Bags do a perfunctory Q&A, and MX-80 Sound, who’ve just moved to SF from Bloomington, IN, get their own small grilling here.

Just to give the proper context, may I please continue? There’s an interview with Nervous Gender, a photo essay of “A Day at Home with Sally Mutant”, and a piece on filmmaker George Kuchar. Jello Biafra gets a column to spout his nonsense; John and Exene from X give a short interview, decorated with some phenomenal band action shots. The women from Noh Mercy talk about the blowback to “Caucasian Guilt”, and about some of their difficult live shows, such as the one in LA at Madame Wong’s where the highly touchy madame took exception to them wearing kimonos on stage, and for being women in the first place, then banned them from ever playing there again. There’s an LA gossip column from someone named “Jane’s Plane” and an SF gossip column by Ginger Coyote, who put out the fairly weak fanzine Punk Globe and was later in the execrable White Trash Debutantes.

Yeah, all of that….and even more. I really dug the interview with the folks behind New Youth Productions, who put on a legendary grassroots Clash/Zeros/Negative Trend show on 2/8/79 and ruffled a ton of industry feathers in the process. There’s much more about Caitlin Hines from New Youth in my own Dynamite Hemorrhage #8, which you can read here. So as I said at the outset here, tons of energy, spit and vinegar in San Francisco at the time, and you really couldn’t capture it a whole lot better than Damage #1 did.

Coming only mere months in May 1980 before the desultory Damage #7 issue that we discussed here, the bloom is most certainly not yet off of the punk rock rose in Damage #6. In fact, this issue’s one of this San Francisco tabloid’s very finest, easily in league with Slash and NY Rocker issues that were being published concurrently. Sure, it’s all filtered through a San Francisco sensibility, and despite being a proud taxpaying, child-rearing resident of said city for 34 years now, I still gag on so much of the “punk politics” and arty pretensions of SF during the 70s and especially the 80s – hell, even now – which are often just a real hectoring bummer in the midst of such a plethora of so much countercultural flowering.

But not in Damage #6, really! I mean, there was a police bust at Target Video downstairs from Damage HQ during a party for Japanese group The Plastics, and editor Brad Lapin is none too pleased in his editorial. Damage then gives it full coverage in a big article and even a comic. I swear man, I hate cops to the max. There’s also a brief supplement for NART magazine, all political art and very San Francisco. Caitlin Hines, who wrote better at age 19 or 20 than I ever have at any age, savages promoter and record label impresario Howie Klein for something he said about her in issue #5. I have this issue, but am too lazy to go read it now. Hines says, “I have always been most fair in my dealings with him, never once alluding to his age, girth, infamous past exploits in Nepal, balding dome or rather unsightly general appearance”. She was fantastic. I interviewed her ex-partner Peter Urban about her in Dynamite Hemorrhage #8 if you wanna read it.

Jane Cantillon interviews and writes about John Cale (I think it’s actually Jane Hamsher, who was a contributing editor at Damage). “When I told Cale I was writing this for Damage, he said defensively, ‘I’m not new wave!’”. There’s also a tongue-in-cheek short interview with the “pretty” and “pert and perky pop fave” Lydia Lunch, who’s just released Queen of Siam. Even then people were making deliberate fun of her horribly over-the-top persona! Speaking of similar circles, there’s an overview of performance art in San Francisco. I guess Karen Finley plied her trade for a while in SF? I did not know that. And we also have an introduction to “local electronic music”: Non, Factrix, Minimal Man and The Scientists. This was the wild sound of young San Francisco in 1980, along with Flipper, who get a rave review for their contribution to the SF Underground comp.

I was also pretty impressed with the San Francisco scene report. It talks about artpunk quartet The Bob, whom they call “…the best thing out of Oakland since ‘You are now leaving Oakland’ signs”. The LA scene report right next to that says that Patricia Morrison has left The Bags (true) and that the band has renamed themselves Plan 9 (wow, if true!). And then a chunk of reviews, most of which are by rockin’ Jeff Bale, very soon to be a star player in the Maximum RocknRoll world.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the interview with The Mutants, whose Sue Mutant, one of their three singers, graces the cover. They’re not a band I’ve ever really cottoned to much, and most folks who were there will tell ya to steer clear of the records – live is where they were at. A couple of months ago The Roxie Theater here in San Francisco had a night of Napa State Mental Hospital rock & roll, by which I mean they played the entire June 1978 performance of The Cramps there; along with The Mutants’ entire heretofore-unseen performance, and then Jason Willis’ and Mike Plante’s excellent short documentary on the day. I swear the audience felt like it was comprised of San Francisco’s first 200 punks, all the Mab and Deaf Club denizens of the day, and they dutifully hooted and hollered whenever their friends turned up on camera. Then a couple of Mutants came out and did a little Q&A before V. Vale came up on stage and hijacked the proceedings and we left to go get a beer. Good times.