Claw Hammer – Fanzine Hemorrhage

I haven’t really sat down and given Summer 1993’s Osmotic Tongue Pressure #3 any sort of true once-over in the thirty-plus years since I enthusiastically bought it, devoured it and then mostly forgot it. I’d really only remembered & marked it as a real good one, one named after some Richard Meltzer-ism of unknown provenance. Gave it the full re-read last night in order to properly consider it for a true Fanzine Hemorrhage exhumation, and I’ll come out and say that it was a really great one, now ranking in whatever imaginary ledger I’ve got going internally as “one of the top music fanzines of the 1990s”. Allow me to explain why and how!

I once scanned the cover of this for another blog and said it was an early 1990s fanzine from San Diego put out by a guy named Mike Kinney, whom I also knew had shuffled off this mortal coil far too young – only eight or so years after this issue was created. I was half right. There were two editors, with Kinney holding down Southern California and Kevin Cascell as the other half, living and creating this from San Francisco, my hometown then as now. In fact, it’s almost eerie reading all these show reviews how often he and I were rubbing proverbial shoulders without actually knowing each other. It’s not like this is a really big city, just one with a subcultural footprint larger than its actual population.

Anyway, Cascell went to the May 1992 Pavement show and disliked it as vehemently as I did; he and I overlapped at shows ridiculously in this opening section. Sebadoh/Some Velvet Sidewalk at Morty’s (unlike him, I thought Some Velvet Sidewalk were fantastic, yet have barely thought of them since, let alone listened to them); Claw Hammer at the Nightbreak; Antiseen at Brave New World; I think I was even at the MX-80/Slovenly show in Oakland, although I missed Slovenly. I also saw the Helter Skelter: LA Art in the 90s thing w/ Raymond Pettibon, Robert Williams, Mike Kelley and many others at Temporary Contemporary/LACMA that Mike Kinney went to. Life is a drink and you get drunk when you’re young. In fact, when Kinney sees The Cows at the alcohol-free, all-ages Jabberjaw club in LA and, while he’d had a decent time and likes the band, concludes rightly that “it’d have been nice to throw some beer on ‘em”.

Cascell, by the way, would join the band Truman’s Water within a year of the release Osmotic Tongue Pressure #3, and he’d also put together stuff as the No Friends Band, whose unearthed stuff has received a ‘lil deserved airplay on my podcast. He’s also a phenomenal collage artist, one of my favorite offbeat forms of creativity, one I keep saying I’ll explore more of and never do.

I suppose I’m not really explaining yet just why this mag was so fantastic. To start with, these were young men of taste and class. I’ll enumerate further in a bit, but both wrote exceptionally well, each with a healthy combination of highly literate snark and excitable fanzine jive talk, and who just come off as the sort of lads you’d simply want to be talking music with. I’ve no doubt they’d have turned me onto some of the free jazz they were ably comprehending years before I was. For instance, a representative sampling from the reviews section finds the Gibson Bros, Pharoah Sanders, Rudolph Grey, William Hooker Sextet, Royal Trux, The Humpers, Eugene Charbourne and the Dead C – and a consistent bashing of a coterie of Merge Records / power-pop-turd / indie-lite bands. As well they should, my friends, as well they should.

These guys are also both clued-in enough to totally love the feral energy of rock beasts Claw Hammer, and accordingly have an interview with them here. Reviewer Cary Holleran observes their dip in form on Pablum in the reviews section, even though he knows & concedes they rule live and hadn’t lost a step there in the least. This happened to be right at the time I was along on a tour w/ those fellas as their road manager, somewhat discussed here. Kinney really digs Tim Ellison’s Rock Mag, to his immense credit. The interview with Slovenly is also really insightful and wide-ranging, and came at the absolute end of their run, as they wouldn’t be a band for even a few more months after the execution of this discussion.

Finally, showing off the style and taste of these erudite young scholars, there’s a guide to “cyberpunk” books and a set of reminiscences by Byron Coley, some of which are in such miniscule type that I can’t even read them with my reading glasses on. Now there’s a sentence I hadn’t conceived of myself typing in 1993. It kinda kills me that I wasn’t clinking glasses and slapping backs with these two guys when I was in my quote-unquote prime. We’d have had many a fine bro-down together. They made it to an issue #5 in 1996, but I’ve seen neither hide nor hair of the other three in my lifetime thus far. Have you?

In the spring of 1993 I spent two months traveling North America as the road manager, driver & merch seller for the band Claw Hammer, who were friends of mine from Los Angeles. As someone with zero musical talent – and lord knows I tried to pretend otherwise – I was utterly beside myself that I’d actually be able to go on tour, traveling from city to city, haulin’ in and haulin’ out, just like the underground musicians whose lives I was appropriating by having thrown in my cultural lot with them as a college radio DJ, record buying-obsessive and fanzine publisher.

I was so excited by 60 days spent crammed in an Econoline touring the US of A and a little bit of Canada that I quit my job as a customer service rep at Monster Cable, though my sabbatical ended up being short enough that I was able to reclaim my place on the corporate ladder upon returning. The band themselves were on something of an upswing, having recently come off a supporting tour with Mudhoney and with a new record out on the lucre-loaded Epitaph Records, run by Brett from Bad Religion. So I was decidedly a fifth wheel to the 4 band members – the guy who settled up at the end of the night with the club booker; the guy who pulled the van into Des Moines; the guy who taped the t-shirts and CDs to the wall behind the merch table; the guy who had to call Peter Davis at Creature Booking to make sure the show in Baton Rouge or Wichita or Montreal was still on.

It was all about the Claw Hammer guys and who came to see them – I remember in particular a show in Tulsa with six paying customers, three of whom were members of the Flaming Lips. Occasionally and very rarely, however, there were people I’d meet on the road who actually came to the club with the intention of seeing me. Yeah, some were friends from college, but sometimes (like once or twice) there was actually someone who knew about my music fanzine Superdope and wanted to talk sub-underground musical baseball with me. That’s how I met the Bad Vibe guys.

It was at the Cabaret Metro in Chicago in May 1993. If I’m not mistaken, “Ween” were the headliner, and a Canadian pop band called Sloan, who had a massive tour bus parked outside, played as well. David Salvia and Jim Sonnenberg from mid-state Illinois had recently put out a garage punk fanzine called Bad Vibe #1, and I had a copy & it’s very likely we’d exchanged “letters” about it – in fact it’s almost certainly how they knew I’d be at this show in their state.

Well these two wide-eyed, cornfed Midwesterners saddled up to the merch table and introduced themselves, and we had a fine time talking about the ins & outs of the scene, about the rigors of publishing and distribution and whatnot. Claw Hammer? Pffffft. When they started playing, these guys couldn’t care less and anchored themselves to the table, in the club’s now-empty lobby. I felt so important! It was me – I was the one who was on tour, and these were my two fans! I tried to play all the hits for them: the times I saw Pussy Galore; the time I hung out with Rob Vasquez; that one time the Cheater Slicks stayed at my house, and everything else I could muster. By the end of the night, like Springsteen, Little Steven and “The Big Man”, I’d truly sweated it out and left it all on stage….I mean on the merch table. We then said our goodbyes and never spoke again.

A few months later Bad Vibe #2 came out, the issue we’re talking about today. Salvia and Sonnenberg one-upped my awful interview (Superdope #5) with Rob Vasquez and The Night Kings with an even worse interview with Vasquez, who cops to being baked 24/7 and really can’t seem to muster enthusiasm for much of anything, including the phone conversation he’s taking part in. They also included a great record with the mag – the Night Kings’ Brainwashed EP. Then they even went and put in posters of the Blues Explosion and Royal Trux. I could never afford color anything, nor could I include a record (not even a flexi) – so I said then to myself and I say now: well done, lads.

It strikes me re-reading Bad Vibe #2 thirty years later that there were young men who really, really had a thing for The Muffs’ Kim Shattuck; I believe the Bad Vibe team may have counted themselves among them. (Alas, she unfortunately passed away just this past year). Their magazine strikes me now as youthfully dumb, as mine was, while also having a strong handle of the slightly more “popular” side of garage punk – Vasquez very much not included there – and digging into some of the deeper wells at the same time. It’s a fun read, and you can actually still buy a fresh copy here, thirty years on.