Captain Beefheart – Fanzine Hemorrhage

Hey, a couple of things before we get started this time:

— I have a Fanzine Hemorrhage column in the new Record Time #4 fanzine. It looks like this’ll be a regular thing in one of the best print things on the planet right now, so I’m delighted to be a part of it. Order yours here. I was asked to review a couple of “power pop” fanzines. Hilarity ensues!

— I’ve also got a couple of pieces in the nearly-out Where The Wild Gigs Were, Volume 2 book put together by Tim Hinely and Eric Eggleston. Their first book was a real joy to read, and it sold out very quickly, so if this is interesting to you I’d recommend making the buy sooner rather than later. I talk about two long-gone clubs: Los Angeles’ Raji’s, and San Francisco’s 6th Street Rendezvous. Other, better writers talk about other clubs as well!

I got June 1985’s Terminal! #19, my first and only issue of this Philadelphia tabloid, as part of a batch of fanzines proffered to me for the price of “please take these off my hands”. Now I know that, like New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Seattle, Portland and South Florida, Philly had its own large-format underground thing as well. Maybe I’d barely heard of it because, um, ….it’s not that good…..but at any rate, I think there are a few things to discuss here about it anyway.

Terminal! #19 is an “all things to all people” sort of paper with equal access to all points in the underground and lower-tier mainstream. You can be a good band, and you can also very much be a bad band, and you’ll get relatively uncritical coverage here. You can be a 1972 radio interview with Captain Beefheart transcribed for the first time, or you can be a “street rock” band called The Limits, who’ve ascended the scale of Philadelphia rock royalty to the point where they’re now opening for The Hooters. You can be Lemmy from Motorhead, shooting the shit about the band he just fired, or you can be American composer Robert Ashley, complaining about San Francisco’s provincial music scene. You can be Mykel Board or you can be “Shredder”, and still be allowed to write for this paper.

You can be other things, too. My introduction to cover star Laurie Anderson came from an issue of Sounds I read back in 1982, in which UK readers had just voted her “O Superman” the worst song of 1981. Say what you will about that song, but this woman ended up marrying and then staying with Lou Reed, so clearly had the patience, fortitude and self-negation of Mother Teresa and then some. She gets the centerspread in Terminal #19, and honestly I tried to pay attention while I was reading it, and yet next thing I knew it was 6am and my alarm was going off for work.

Because this is 1985, and Philadelphia’s an hour-ish from New York City, there’s a “New York Downtown” report that hits nicely. It reports on Mofungo, Rhys Chatham, Arto Lindsay, John Zorn and others; elsewhere in the mag Rat At Rat R are namedropped more than once. I loved those guys. See, hindsight shows us that there’s always a good time to be alive and listening to music, even 1985. You just need to be in New York is all.

Back when I was a college radio DJ in the late 80s, the Philadelphia “horror punk” band The Serial Killers were placed on my show to do a live set. I’d never heard the band before. I got to yakking with singer and prime mover “Paul Bearer” and we got along pretty well; he liked alcoholic beverages, and as a matter of fact, so did I. I was really impressed with his deep, deep Philly accent – so deep in fact, that I often couldn’t understand what he was saying. We traded some live tapes after that, and even talked on the phone a time or two. He once told me “We got a new drama”. I was like, “A new drama? Come again now?”. “A new DRAMA”. “Um – okay. What’s that mean?”. “A DRAMA – someone who plays DRAMS!”. At KCSB he also stepped out to the drinking fountain to get some “wooder”. Fantastic. Far more fascinating than Terminal #19 for sure!

Due to the beneficence of Chris Seventeen, the 1980s editor and publisher of the UK’s What a Nice Way To Turn Seventeen fanzine, I’m now in the possession of several additional copies that span beyond my original issue #6 that I talked about here. Many of these came with records included, including 1984’s What a Nice Way To Turn Seventeen #2, which has a 4-track EP that included musicians with whom I’m familiar, like Nikki Sudden and The Jazz Butcher, as well as those with whom I am not, like The Rag Dolls and The Sad-Go-Round. In any case my copy doesn’t have a record, and I’m going to be okay with that.

Now let’s get the big concern out of the way first. People, usually people even older than myself as if that’s possible, have at times expressed their concern about the font size of my own Dynamite Hemorrhage fanzine, yet my 9-point font is practically the top row of the eye chart when compared with this one. Epic Soundtracks – yes, that Epic Soundtracks, not the other one you went to high school with – writes a piece about discovering Brian Wilson that I’m dying to read, but it’s literally written in one or two point font, so small that it blurs on the page and is nearly an undifferentiated series of dots and inkblots. In the light on a nice day, it’s possible to find some coherence to it, but in evening light you can totally forget about it.

Andrew Bean contributes a piece on Captain Beefheart that I can somewhat read, though a magnifying glass helps – one of those plastic ones with a flat bottom that you can glide across a page that grandpas like me who complain about fanzine font sizes like to use. It posits that “When Trout Mask Replica appeared, cloaked in a sleeve which depicted a guy in a silly hat and a fish mask waving from the front, and on the back, a bunch of weird-looking guys who looked like refugees from the Alpha Centauri Home For The Criminally Insane creeping around in bushes, wearing dresses and waving table lamps around, the record-buying public were not impressed.” Why the hell not??

You want to know about the other things that make the 16-page What a Nice Way to Turn Seventeen #2 fanzine such a gem? I’ll tell you. There’s a record-fiends-only guide to collecting the Texas 60s punk label Eva Records by Chris Seventeen, as well as a celebration of Creation Records, a brand new label at this point (!). David J from Bauhaus rants with extreme passion about the John Cale show he saw in London in January 1983. And there’s an annotated Johnny Thunders discography. I certainly missed many of the greats, but I did see this fanzine’s cover star Thunders play live on January 7th, 1987 at a pool hall called The Golden Eagle in Santa Barbara, CA – the aural evidence of said performance is right here. I know I was mostly there because The Lazy Cowgirls opened, but still. Johnny Thunders, right?

What a Nice Way to Turn Seventeen #2 actually reminds me of another fantastic fanzine that came out with a 7” single as part of the package – Drunken Fish #1. Both were “wrap-arounds” with the record inside and both take an omnivorous collector freak’s eye toward their scenes of choice. In this case, it’s the current UK underground, American offbeat rock geniuses and scarf rock through the ages. I’d love to see a book of this stuff someday if they’d agree to pump up the font size 5x at a minimum.