Starting with my acquisition of the bootleg Dangerhouse 45s collection Me Want Breakfast! in 1986, my musical life was totally upended by the serial unearthing of ear-shredding punk rock singles from 1977-84. Suffice to say that in 1986 and 1987, very little was being written about the ultra long-tail of American punk singles from less than a decade earlier, so it was hard to know about it all unless you were there and actively buying 45s at the time, and I mostly hadn’t been. (Though, when 1980’s “Job” by The Nubs finally got comped, I finally got to play a godhead song for folks that I’d only been able to fumblingly describe using the highly limiting oral tradition).  

The comps started coming in dribs and drabs at first. I bought Where Birdmen Flew and Year of the Rats, and they were absolute staples of my then-radio show, my social relationships with other punk fiends and collectors, and my life in general. Sort of hard to transmit now, when everything’s available at any time to anyone, but these two comps are where I first heard Crime, The Urinals, the Psycho Surgeons, the Australian X and so many more. I mean many “older” Americans who were now in their late 20s had heard Crime and the Urinals by this time, of course, but those records were going for, like, $15! Who had that kind of money? Then it was the first four Killed By Death comps in 1988 and 1989 – holy shit. Chain Gang, The Eat, The Mad, The Queers. Mindblowing. The gates came off after that, and bootleg punk compilations flew out from all corners of the globe, documenting every jot and titter from Belgrade to Bergen. 

(As an aside, when I stopped writing Fanzine Hemorrhage for a short while earlier this year, it was because I’d felt that I’d been getting far too redundant. I’ve realized that the two paragraphs I just wrote basically tell the same story I’ve already relayed in my review of Brain Transplant #1 fanzine. Just to keep things honest and on the level).

By the late 90s, it was tough to keep up, and really – in my case, anyway – no need to, because most of the Killed By Deaths and Bloodstains comps at that point showed increasing diminishing returns, to the point where many of them had absolutely no good songs at all. But how would one know or not know if they were missing something? Into this breach stepped Mark Murmann, known to many as “Icki”, and Maximum RocknRoll presents CompHELLation, put out toward the end of 1998. He’s a real renaissance man, Murmann – outstanding photographer, Mother Jones photo editor and even the frontman of a cool punk band I saw over a decade ago. He also collected punk rock compilation records, religiously, and created the then-best record of all that had come out at the time, indexed first by title, and then by every individual band. If you’d ever wondered which comps the Meaty Buys turned up on, well, before Discogs, this was definitely where you’d get your answer. While MaximumRocknRoll clearly funded and distributed the mag, if you wanted to order a copy, it says inside to get it from “Icki”, not from MRR. So they clearly allowed him the space for this excellent vanity project.

Leafing through it now, I’m remembering vague scene mutterings about the people who put these out. I mean, virtually everyone knows that Johan Kugelberg was wholly or partly responsible for the first four KBDs. Did he fund them? I don’t know. Probably. Byron Coley had at least something to do with Bloodstains Across California if not other early gems in that series. Tom Lax did the Killed By Death #1 DIY thing that turned me onto some UK stuff I’d absolutely never heard before. 

I was never especially deep in with the real collectors at the time, as I never had the cash to buy the originals once KBD mania took hold, yet I was at least somewhat adjacent to them, merely by flogging their illicit product in my own Superdope fanzine in the 90s. I bought an Electric Eels Cyclotron/Agitated 45 at a record show in the late 80s for $12 and felt like a pretty big-time record turd there for a couple months. And for those that still know, even now, some of the best stuff still can be bought for not too much money. My pal Jon just bought a Rude Kids “Raggare is a Bunch of Motherfuckers” 45 this year, and he’s a schoolteacher. Priorities!

My copy of this, as you can see from the scan, has coffee stains (or something) all over the front and back. I thought maybe I was the butterfingers who ruined this zine three decades ago, but now, seeing Murmann’s own listing for it on his page with similar coffee stains, I know it was all part of the plan, at least for some of the issues. If only my copy was part of some limited numbered series for dipshits, I could crow about it here!