David Ciaffardini – Fanzine Hemorrhage

Before we dig in here, a little history of how Sound Choice fanzine came to be, before I’ll spoil everything with some incredibly self-aggrandizing prattle about my minor role in this particular concern.

So there was OP magazine for the first half of the 80s, published by John Foster out of Olympia, WA. We’ve written about that excellent mag here and here. It then split into two new fanzines. As per Wikipedia: “OPtion, along with Sound Choice, were the dual successors to the earlier music magazine OP, published by John Foster and the Lost Music Network and known for its diverse scope and the role it played in providing publicity to DIY musicians in the midst of the cassette culture. When Foster ended OP after only twenty-six issues, he held a conference, offering the magazine’s resources to parties interested in carrying on; attendant journalist David Ciaffardini went on to start Sound Choice, while Scott Becker, alongside Richie Unterberger, founded Option. Whereas Sound Choice was described as a low-budget and “chaotic” publication in spirit, Option was characterized as a “profit making operation” right at the start, meant to compete with the newly founded Spin.”

Which is precisely why, circa 1987, I had never bought a copy of Option. Never owned one later either, I guess. Sound Choice hadn’t really shown up on my radar, except as something I’d seen in stores, as it was pretty well-distributed. But cassettes, tape art, “audio evolution”? No thanks, amigo. However, one time when I was doing a 2-6am substitute radio show at KCSB-FM in Santa Barbara during my college years, I met the DJs who came on before me, and it was a couple of the fellas from Sound Choice, including editor Ciaffardini, who lived “just down the road” in Ojai.

We got to talking, and wouldn’t you know it, within a couple of months I was hoofing it south on the 101 to Ojai a couple of times a week after college classes, in order to serve as Sound Choice’s one and only “intern”. I’d sort (and abscond with) many promo records; I’d answer correspondence; I’d chase down subscribers for renewals, and completed many other tasks assigned to me upon arrival. One time I even called up Ray Farrell at SST Records to talk about getting their ads submitted, and was nervous as hell – that dude was on the fucking Maximum Rocknroll Radio show!! Soon enough Ciaffardini made me “Managing Editor”, I think in the issue after Sound Choice #8. Then, not even a year later, when I stopped coming regularly, he had me listed as “Vanishing Editor” in the issue that followed that one.

For what it’s worth, Ciaffardini was an incredibly nice guy: a highly driven, self-effacing, pot-smoking, chaotic and supremely independent nice guy with a mellow hippie temperament, who took me under his wing and gave me exposure to something cool that I’d never have experienced otherwise. He had a girlfriend named Eileen, a (to me) “older woman” who might have been at most 35 years old at the time, and whom I was secretly smitten with. When I stopped coming around, it was about the time Dave’s KCSB program ended as well, so I’m not sure that I ever saw him in the flesh again after 1988. Only a couple of years ago did we even make any sort of electronic mail contact.

Sound Choice #8 came out in May/June 1987, and features The Butthole Surfers on the cover, from their show at the Oxnard Skate Palace that year that I’ve previously talked about here. It also includes action photos of fuckin’ Blast! and SNFU from this other Skate Palace show, which I also attended. The magazine is the proverbial “hodgepodge” – a tumultuous cacophony of fonts, font sizes, advertisements, short articles, long manifestos and an ungodly amount of reviews. In addition, there are several incredibly unfunny comics; things on underground radio and “audio drama”, a Culturcide interview, a piece on Master/Slave Relationship (a woman named Debbie Jaffe who dressed scantily and did psycho/sexual performance art); and SST ads everywhere, like 8 pages of them, no lie. Nothing that I’d sold, however – that came later. The magazine’s cacophony is mostly to its credit, and it makes for much to uncover and dissect within the tiny type.

Oh, and there’s a real nice letter from Lisa Fancher of Frontier Records, who’d perhaps been taken to task in an earlier issue for being too major label-adjacent, and perhaps for not paying artists (I’m too lazy to see if I have Sound Choice #7 to look at it): “Would you care to produce someone who hasn’t been paid by me, fuckhead? You suggesting that I bend for anyone, even as a figure of speech, will land you a punch in the mouth next time I have the misfortune of hearing you blather at some function where everyone is dreading running into you”. She then concludes perhaps a little tartly with “Go fuck a dead dog”. Oh dear. Ciaffardini apologizes. He never told me if Fancher ever actually popped him in the mouth at a banquet or social gathering in subsequent months.

There’s also a piece by a guy whom we know about now, but didn’t then – Randy Russell from Kent, OH. He was in the excellent band Moonlove, and here he talks about the magic of tapes and how he first heard the Dream Syndicate. Shane Williams contributes “Growing Up Absurd: Confessions of a Dope Addict Rock Fiend”, and thankfully it’s one of the few coherent pieces he ever put together. And yeah, the reviews section is the most bountiful one I have ever seen this side of Butt Rag, but it generally lacks the authority, tastemaking and writing chops to be anything more than words on a page. Yes, this is very much true of the ones I wrote for this same fanzine at age 19/20 in subsequent issues as well. Don’t look them up – you won’t like them.

In 1987, Damp editor Kevin Kraynick openly worried in the pages of this issue that he’d be lumped in with fanzine editors “who are the kind of guys who always got picked last for kickball games in gym class”. I mean, sure, but if the shoe fits….right? So in meager compensation, there’s some aggro finger-pointing and posturing in places where there oughtn’t be any – “whatta dick”; “you bet your globular ass”; that sort of thing. Certainly, Damp grew up a ton in subsequent issues – including #3 that we discussed here – but was still taking some young man’s cues from Conflict without quite having the chops to approximate its humorous vitriol.

That said, I bought Damp #2 then and I’d have happily owned it now for 37 years had it not been “disappeared” in the Great Starving Students Lost Fanzine Box. Only recently was I able to procure a copy again, perhaps even my own original for all I know. Slight concerns aside, it was an unalloyed pleasure to read cover to cover last night. There is an interview with New England locals Expando Brain, one of my very favorite super-far-underground rock bands of the mid/late 80s. Kraynick also pulls together a well-researched Snakefinger interview that’ll always be my primary source material should I ever need to do any serious Snakefinger research, such as to write a paper. There are also interviews with acts that only a young man might pretend to like – Big Dipper and Zoogz Rift – but then there’s also the only piece I’ve ever seen on The Longshoreman, a long-running San Francisco band featuring Judy and Carol from Pink Section and the Inflatable Boy Clams. Kraynick was clearly looking a bit afield from the alterna front-runners of the day, your Soul Asylums and Big Blacks and whatnot.

Sometimes the vituperation is pretty funny in his reviews, too, as in this fine intro to a Dash Rip Rock review: “Front cover shows the band burning guitars in the fireplace and let’s hope those are the only ones they’ve got”. As it turns out, even Kraynick knows that the miniscule 4-point font for record reviews that he’s using is utterly comic, and christens the whole section “The World’s Tiniest Record Reviews”. This was the era of Squirrel Bait, Butthole Surfers, Dinosaur and Halo of Flies worship, a consensus that emerged in the East Coast fanzines I read all the way across the country in Santa Barbara, and my taste was molded accordingly. For some reason David Ciaffardini is a great target of derision, which I kind of understand if you were comparing his Sound Choice magazine with, say, Forced Exposure, but he was an exceptionally friendly dude whom I knew personally, a true mensch from the word go, and someone whom I recently re-established contact with after 35 years.

The snarky sub-underground fanzines all had to have their “out crowd” for sure, and there was a consensus pile-on against the same targets, the supposed “guys who always got picked last for kickball games in gym class”. Clowns like Tesco Vee and Lydia Lunch got a free pass for some reason, probably for the same reason confident extroverts always have and always do. If you can convincingly act the part, it doesn’t matter how brainless your material actually is; if you cower and show weakness in any social circle, particularly one in which young men are attempting to preen and show off for each other’s benefit, you get bullshit like over-the-top Mike McGonigal hatred and Baboon Dooley. I wasn’t totally immune myself when I started in this racket a few years later.

Then again, maybe we all just wanted to be Byron Coley. He’s interviewed here, the second part of a 2-parter, the first of which I’ve never read because I’ve never seen Damp #1. I remember reading this interview back then, and he praised the Lazy Cowgirls – who were my absolute favorite band – and it was a big, big deal to me, the voice of God anointing my own musical taste as being first-rate. And he also made fun of SWA, who were absolutely my friends’ & my favorite musical whipping post around this time. These “photos” of “Jimmy & Byron” from Forced Exposure definitely generated some chatter at the time as well, as it was hard to know what these guys looked like in an era before The Face Book and before I was able to Ask Jeeves. It took me at least a few years to realize 100% that these weren’t the guys.

Finally, Damp #2 closes up with a guy named Wandz, who has his own page of “Hip Cat Jazz Reviews”. He even writes as if he knows what he’s talking about. A nice icing to a pretty packed fanzine.