Tag: creep fanzine

Creep #5

~ Jay Hinman ~ Leave a comment

Creep #5 from Fall 1980 would come to be the final issue of this now-venerated San Francisco punk fanzine, a publication we’ve previously explored here and here. It doesn’t appear they knew that at the time, but I do sense a bit of “drift” in this one, as it’s a smorgasbord of opinion, rants, “just asking questions” essays, interviews and scene reports. Of course this might describe any punk fanzine of the era, but the only real unifier here in the previously cohesive Creep is the highly unifying presence of Flipper, a band whose self-destructiveness and contempt for the rudiments of “show business” was legendary, and is recognized as such in real time in this issue. 

What I sense here is editors Mickey Creep and Mark Creep effectively letting anyone write about and/or contribute just about anything, which, in its totality, helps provide me with what I’d imagine to be the state of the San Francisco underground at the time. There’s a lot of scene navel-gazing here, and I love it. “Western Fraud” is about the corporatization of the Western Front festival and the fact that the 1980s edition allowed in some new wave bands and some venues with legendarily moronic bouncers. Here’s a flyer for the 1979 version, and a tough-to-read 1980 version, featuring shows by “Bill Graham Presents”. Creep, not an overtly or at least over-the-top political ‘zine, except when Jello Biafra is writing for them, seems to be mostly concerned with keeping punks from selling out as well as from eating each other alive. 

The editorial magnanimity in allowing one writer to praise Brian Ferry at length and another to do a free-form piece extolling Roky Erickson is a nice surprise. James Koetting in his Ferry piece at least has the good sense to recognize that the jig was up when Flesh and Blood came out. The New Youth collective, which I was just talking about the other day, get a post-mortem that features Caitlin Hines prominently, and is probably the best overview you’ll find on the intra-scene dynamics and backbiting that came from putting on punk shows outside of the established clubs at this time. There’s a long interview with Paul Rat as well that adds yet another layer to the same. (for fun, here’s a 1979 phone call between Rat and Black Randy you might want to spend 9 minutes with). 

The Flipper interview is, by turns, hilarious and even a little shocking. The amount of drugs and alcohol these boys put away at the time – well, now that I’m a fifty-something dad, I want to stage an intervention to at least to keep Will Shatter alive a little longer. (“Beautiful Boy”). Shatter has some collage art in here that’s excellent as well. Some deep intelligence, casual racism, complex theory and general chaos comes to the fore in this interview, and clearly there’s a small chunk of San Francisco that’s become totally enraptured with the band during the previous year. And hey, we lost Bruce Loose this year, but Ted Falconi is still with us, folks!

The Dead Kennedys have just come back from their first tour of England, and there’s a great piece about how incredibly bleak things are over there, both in the punk scene – then morphing into oi – and otherwise. Jello is startled by the fact that in the UK, so many of the kids coming to see them want him to sign something, and how even performers like him are treated like untouchable gods – except to spit on during the show, of course.  A Crass piece makes similar points about England and of course extols all the ways they’ll likely be making it better. Olga deVolga from Vs. gets to rant about the scene and show off her general anger, and breaks the news that Vs. will be “merging” with Seattle’s The Lewd to form a new band called – The Lewd. There’s a long conceptual piece about Bill Griffith and his Zippy the Pinhead comic, which was quite popular with local weirdos well into the 1990s and still endures to this day. Careful connoisseurs of all the garbage I’ve written might recall the Kurt Cobain/Zippy connection I wrote about here. 

There’s even a crossword puzzle with questions like, “Who taught the Cramps their songs?”, “Anarchy in the __”, and “Ted, Will, Bruce and Steve are ____”. (I told you everything comes back to Flipper in this one). We could go on and on picking this one apart, and I’d like to, but let me conclude by giving a huge kudo and shout-out to Creep #5 for being the only contemporaneous fanzine I’ve ever seen that wrote about the Fuckin’ Flyin’ A-Heads while they were still around (though it appears Touch and Go may have as well!). If you know, you know. Not merely a review of the 45, but a brief chat, which talks about their move to San Francisco from Honolulu. This might be why I found my cheap copy of “Swiss Cheese Back” at Record Vault in SF in the late 1980s, a glorious banner day that was subsequently undercut by my poor decision to sell the same single on eBay ten years later.

Creep #4

~ Jay Hinman ~ 3 Comments

Earlier this year I bought a near-complete run of San Francisco’s top-drawer late 70s/early 80s punk fanzine Creep from the ZNZ store – who still have three of the five issues for sale as of this writing. I excitedly wrote up Creep #2 in these pages here, so I’ll spare you another introduction to the mag and let you go read that first if you’re interested, allowing us to get right to the heart of 1980 west coast punk rock USA in the here and now.

Creep #4 lives at an interesting intersection of several strands of California punk “journalism”, such as it was. There are half-hearted attempts at intellectually unpacking various scene controversies and kerfuffles of the time, such as a piece on Noh Mercy’s acerbic and still spine-rattling “Caucasian Guilt”, or a total mess of a P.I.L. show that almost didn’t happen – something akin to a piece you’d find in Damage around this time. There’s truly stupid punk-sneer writing by birdbrains such as one might find in Flipside. And given this magazine’s tenuous connection with Maximum Rocknroll, which wouldn’t publish its first issue for another two years, you can see a little bit of a political slant sashaying its way into these pages – but not too much to make Creep #4 intolerable.

I actually have to give much credit for the breadth of the interviews here. There’s one with Alex Chilton by Ray Farrell, not at all something I’d expect here – and Alex is great, totally calm and cool as Farrell takes him to task for Like Flies on Sherbert (shame on you, Ray!). There’s a brief one with Steve Tupper of Subterranean Records, which was just getting off the ground. He tells it like it is: “415 (an S.F. label) appears to be primarily interested in very commercial or very well known bands. That means exclusion of everybody else. We’re much more interested in experimental kinds of things – the kind of music being made by hordes of kids just picking up guitars and synthesizers and making music. Everything we do has this hard, grey feel to it. That’s the way the world is. Let’s face it – a lot of this stuff just isn’t hit material.”. Subterranean were the label who first released Flipper, and they were covered at length in the excellent book Who Cares Anyway? – Post-Punk San Francisco and the End of the Analog Age.

On the other hand, the interview with The Vktms doesn’t do them any favors – with all due respect to Nyna, she definitely comes across as a major league dum-dum in this interview. And I’ve done some bellyaching about Gregg Turner, Mike Saunders and the Angry Samoans before but never have I seen their misanthropy and queer-baiting at such a jacked-up level as it is in their interview here, in which they go off on all the high crimes & misdemeanors of the LA punk scene, a scene that was known to blackball the Samoans for just such behavior. I mean, these weren’t 15-year-olds from Canoga Park writing into Flipside, these were guys in their early thirties play-acting as punks and – in Saunders’ case – saying Iggy, Iggy, Iggy whenever handed the opportunity. Of course, I laughed at “Get Off The Air” and I still love large chunks of Back From Samoa and I always will, but Saunders and Turner are (or were, in 1980) detestable human beings. Watch their brief interview in this 1980 LA punk “expose” called What’s Up America and you’ll see what I mean. And Gregg Turner’s recent book was an abomination that I couldn’t get even a third of the way through. Do I make myself clear?

This was the year of collective disillusionment with The Clash, and the piece by “Austin Tatious” (great punk name I’d somehow never heard before, but still not as classy as my friend Christina’s DJ moniker Geannie Lotrimin) expresses great disappointment in their San Francisco show. The whole Lee Dorsey (“Working in a Coal Mine”) “bored cocktail lounge a la Holiday Inn backup band” opening act bit was pretty funny; I suppose this was the time that they were bringing incongruous opening acts on the road with them, which, hey, hats off for trying I guess. The Specials are also on the road in America – “Horace’s impression of U.S. AM radio: ‘Great if you like ‘Hold The Line” or ‘Life in the Fast Lane’’. He swears he heard each at least 80 times across the country with only sporadic listening.” Oh yes, 1980 commercial radio in the United States was just awful if you were there, and I was there.

Creep #4 is a content-rich goldmine for you punk historians, probably one step up from Ripper and very much in the same vein, from size to breadth to paper type to regions covered. Now let’s see a Silicon Valley Bank-like run on the few copies remaining in the ZNZ store. 

Creep #2

~ Jay Hinman ~ 5 Comments

Fantastic 1979 second issue from one of San Francisco’s more revered punk fanzines, Creep, which I’d long known was helmed & stewarded by one “Mickey Creep” (in actuality, Dean Sampson, sometimes known as Mickey Sampson). Sampson and his band of contributors capture the frenzied zeitgeist of 1979 punk and of San Francisco writ large better than nearly any other publication I’ve read, and unlike the jaded first-wave scenesters who were already crying punk-is-dead around this time, Creep #2 is very much about helping to document and further its vitality or rebirth, however it is you want to cut it. 

I really learned some things, too! First, all these years I thought the Maximum RocknRoll Radio show, which I used to listen to religiously on KPFA on Tuesday nights, started in 1980 or even 1981. It was started in 1977, folks – and was originally a combination of the new “punk rock sound” that was sprouting up and 50s rockabilly & oldies (!). There was even a dude named Al “Professor Pop” Ennis on the show who ran the 1950s portion; he was long gone by the time I started listening – a time of Jeff Bale, Ruth Schwartz, Tim Yohannan (of course), Ray Farrell and sometimes Jello Biafra (blah). Ennis can barely be found & connected with this show online at all, but hey, that’s why I accumulate these old fanzines, to get the real fuckin’ story.

I also learned via an advertisement about Portals to Music, a new wave record store at Stonestown Mall, now home of Target, Whole Foods and multiple Asian-themed restaurants and boba places – and a place two miles from my home that I find myself in weekly. Absolutely incongruous and baffling. Another world entirely. One final new thing I learned was that the worst bit of music writing I’d ever read had been hiding all along right here in Creep #2! One Thomas Sinclair, with his Freshman English classes surely barely in hand, writes about MX-80 Sound:

“As perchance this brisk July eve in the Bay Area, I was to experience a delightful musical and aesthetic encounter. As unpretentious and undistinguished as the visual accoutrement of the band may have been, the sound of MX-80 Sound was brilliantly polished and pulsated as rhythmically as could be expected for their indigenous brand of semi-eclecticism would allow…” – and it only gets worse from there. It’s truly mind-bending, and I’m glad to know where to find the worst piece of music writing of all time should I ever need it!

Creep #2 takes us on a tour of the state of it all, circa 1979. Jello Biafra is running for mayor. Punk violence is threatening to close down The Deaf Club, because some drunken knucklehead decided to take a chain to three parked cars outside of the club after a show. The Canadians have just come to town, and locals are hopped-up about D.O.A. and the Pointed Sticks. (D.O.A. were always hugely popular in the SF Bay Area; when I first started hearing punk for the first time, my perspective was that the biggest bands in the entire North American scene were the Dead Kennedys, Black Flag and D.O.A. pretty much in that order). And there’s a terrific interview with Craig Lee from LA’s Bags. Lee wasn’t just a shredding punk guitarist; he was always one of the good guys, and a man who shuffled off this mortal coil far too early.

I think my favorite thing in Creep #2, though, is the respectful and just-enough-noose-to-hang-himself interview with Joel Selvin, who was then, and for a long time afterward, the chief rock music writer at the San Francisco Chronicle. I grew up reading Selvin, because I read the newspaper every day, and just like the old man that I am, I still do. It was definitely de rigeur for punks to hate the mainstream rock critic; Selvin got a ton of vitriol over the years; his counterpart Robert Hilburn at the LA Times got just as much if not more. I’ll say right now that I recently read Selvin’s book about early 1960s Los Angeles pop music, Hollywood Eden, and while no masterpiece, it’s quite entertaining and very effective at calling up an ephemeral time and special place in music’s history, with his Beach Boys “Good Vibrations” chapter at the end being especially well-put-together. 

But here, in Creep #2 – wow. This photo they ran is really the epitome of the late 70s, coked-out, record-industry sleazeball; I don’t think Selvin was really that guy, but I can only imagine what the sneering punks reading Creep in ‘79, the ones who had to suffer through his weekly writings about Journey, the Doobie Brothers, Elvin Bishop and Maria Muldaur, had to say about it. Selvin himself gets off some pretty self-damaging zingers; to wit:

“Over the past few years the quality music in the local clubs has plummeted. In 1975, the Longbranch – unbelievable. It was everything a nightclub should be….I haven’t seen a show at the Mabuhay that I thought was good. I’ve checked these places out. They’re just not happening the way a club should be happening.”

“One time the Eagles were really good. It was the time that they opened for the Doobie Brothers that they were spectacular.”

“However important or significant The Clash may be, it’s “Sultans of Swing” that’s gonna be remembered from 1979….I have no doubt the American public wants the Knack and not the Clash. And certainly the sales figures reflect that.”

I guess on that last point he’s not wrong; I mean, I disliked The Clash as much as he did. And I suppose it is “Sultans of Swing” that I hear inside of Safeway or Chipolte, not “Guns on the Roof”. But oh for those days at The Longbranch, watching Sammy Hagar, Earthquake, Eddie Money and Commander Cody! 

One final note, a thing that got a lot of hearts racing here in San Francisco: Penelope Houston of The Avengers works at the San Francisco Public Library, and she helped establish a “punk rock collection” there of zines, flyers, videos and other ephemera that I’ve had the good fortune to go check out, albeit only once, and albeit only in brief because her snotty co-worker was bogarting so much of the material on a day she wasn’t working. Here’s a 90-minute panel discussion the library put on with the folks who put out Search and Destroy, Ripper and Creep – including our boy Mickey! You can learn more about the library here.