Don Howland – Fanzine Hemorrhage

We’re getting to the point in this Fanzine Hemorrhage endeavor where certain publications are coming around two, three, sometimes four times now. Which makes it easy for me to spare you the backstories of some of them, like The Offense / The Offense Newsletter – you can just check out previous explanatory posts on that one in particular here, here and here, if that’s something you’d be interested in doing. This allows me to skip the set-up for The Offense Newsletter #59, which wasn’t just from 1985, and wasn’t just from July 1985, but was from July 19th, 1985.

Cocteau Fever is almost here! In only two months the Cocteau Twins will play one of five dates they’d play on their first-ever US tour in Columbus, OH – totally shafting Chicago – and it was all thanks to Tim Anstaett and his 4AD-besotted, typewriter-cranked Offense Newsletter. Your Fanzine Hemorrhage editor saw one of those five shows, which took place the week before I left home and moved to Santa Barbara for college. There’s not really a ton about it in here – just some acknowledgement that it’s for real and it’s happening. There are also some ‘85 Columbus show listings for the weeks ahead that are super 1985: Black Flag, The Chameleons, Sonic Youth/Die Kreuzen, New Order/A Certain Ratio, Gang Green, Meat Puppets, 7 Seconds.

As with other issues I’ve read, the letters section sorta rules the roost and in fact takes up six of the twelve overall pages in this one. To read The Offense Newsletter, it seems, was to enter into conversant dialog with The Offense Newsletter. It offered a chance for readers around the country and indeed the world to pop off with scene reports (Gerard Cosloy does so from Boston); to slag and/or praise Tim for his tastes; to broker offense with others who’d written previous letters for their tastes; to complain about Husker Du; to clarify whether or not Tim hates your fanzine (Barbara Rice of Truly Needy); and even, in the case of Great Plains’ Mark Wyatt, to pen an unsolicited, show-by-show mini-tour diary. You’ll get more true pulse on the actual contours of Underground America here than you probably will anywhere else.

Of course I’m probably most drawn in by what comprises another 1/3rd of the pages here – an interview with Craig Scanlon and Simon Rogers from The Fall, accompanied by some spectacular live photographs of the band (and I’ve fallen in love with 1985 Brix Smith all over again, just like I did that year). They’d been touring on The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall, and were just gearing up to release their last truly fantastic record, This Nation’s Saving Grace. Scalon tells Tim aka TKA that Room To Live was “the worst LP we’ve ever released”, and I suppose a case can be made – but can you imagine being super-ashamed of a record that contains “Solicitor in Studio”, “Marquis Cha Cha” and the title track? Not me. Embarrassment of riches up until 1985.

Finally, there’s a small live review section at the end. Don Howland at that point was sometimes writing as “Chet Howland”, and he took on the 6/4/85 Black Flag / DC3 / Twisted Roots show in Lafayette, Louisiana. It’s another gem from Howland, one of my all-timers for music writing. He takes ‘Flag bassist Kira Roessler to task for morphing her look to fit in with the skeezy horndogs she’s playing with, and bemoans the fact that he’s really there to hear them play the ‘79-’81 stuff: “…But when they did an oldie like ‘Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie’ I was just reminded how much this band used to matter to me. But that’s just ole Chet…poor ole Chet. Poor poor poor Chet”. It wasn’t just ole Chet – it was almost every punker who showed up at a Black Flag show from 1983-86 and got a shirtless man in dolphin shorts grinding & sweating all over them to turgid, plodding dirge-metal, and a band totally stoned out of their gourds. Then they’d do “Six Pack” or something, and the crowd would go apeshit. Run the tapes!

In earlier days on this site, I wrote about Bazooka! #3 from 1997 and later Bazooka! #1 from early 1996. The latter post helped me to reconnect after many years with its editor Tom Arnaert, the Belgian with whom I traded CD-Rs and ‘zines in the late 90s and early 00s. He was kind enough to send me Bazooka! #2, a crucial missing link in my very important fanzine collection. Last night I read it cover to cover and I believe I’ll tell you about it now.

Even from the cover scanned here you can see that Tom had an absurdist streak and a strong eye for goofy graphics, and there’s a ton of this cut-n-paste aesthetic running through the issue – some of which is well thought-out, and some which raises more questions than answers. The “Bonus 45rpm single” advertised on cover is a fine example of the latter. It doesn’t exist.

Bazooka! was a garage punk fanzine that arrived in that 1994-96 timeframe when a wave of highly satisfying raw/loud/snotty music was ascendent, as well as a new crop of fanzines that covered it. These included Human Garbage Disposal, Sooprize Package, Alright! and of course Wipeout!. It’s clear that news of the early 1996 “Rip Off Rumble” weekend at The Kilowatt in San Francisco has made it over to Belgium, and it’s practically talked about here as the key touchstone rock event of the 90s, Lollapalooza be damned. I suppose for a certain flavor of young man, it was – and I happened to have been one of those young doofuses in attendance. The bands talked about here in connection with said event – The Problematics and De Stipjes – were the bands we walked out on to go get beers elsewhere. Yes, there were also those we didn’t leave, The Brides and The Oblivians included. I feel like maybe The Motards played this thing as well. Can we get someone in fact-checking to review that, please?

I truly enjoyed the Don Howland interview here. At this point he was two albums in as the leader of The Bassholes, and had recently replaced Rich Lillash as his drummer with “Bim”. Howland is an all-time favorite musician, writer and human of mine. My talks with him on the phone in 1993 for my Superdope fanzine (which yielded this), and later in person in 1995 were highly entertaining and edifying. I proudly got him to go see the 1995 film The Wife at The Roxie in San Francisco when he was in town, and he loved it, and now I want you to go see it as well, because you’ll love it too. My understanding is that there was to be a potential Gibson Bros reunion at Gonerfest in Memphis earlier this year, 2024; all parties were on board except Howland, who wanted nothing to do with it – and he’s a pretty important party in that regard. This interview perhaps gives you a good sense of why.

As an aside, when The Bassholes came to SF in 1995, I believe he and Bim stayed at my house, and I heard later, like YEARS later, Lamont Thomas aka Bim aka Obnox was calling to me from the stage at an Obnox show, “does anyone know if Superdope is here, is Jay Hinman here?”. I wasn’t, but I’m super psyched beyond belief that I was remembered as such a fine host! Money quote from Howland in Bazooka! #2: “The first live show I ever saw was the Ike and Tina Turner Review at the Ohio State Fair in ‘68 or so; from that point on white women were second best”.

Bazooka! #2 has a bunch of tape reviews (!); a treatise on something European and unknown to me called Dode’s Ka-Den, and a crazy interview with Austin’s 1-4-5s. You know, you really have to hand it to Texas for its central place in multiple garage punk waves over the years. I mean, the state clearly and dramatically over-indexed, quality- and volume-wise, in the 1960s, and the 70s punk scenes in all three major cities was laudable as well. The 1990s saw a ton of wild bands beyond the 1-4-5s; my favorites included the aforementioned Motards; The Inhalants, Fireworks, Junior Varsity and Sugar Shack, and there were countless others I’m forgetting. Tom’s reviews of all this stuff are frothingly opinionated; it doesn’t take him long to decide that some three-chord basher is utter genius or “shit”. He’s also in the midst of broadening his proverbial scope here, as this issue introduces some dub and cuban mambo reviews along with all the drunken blues and blitzin’ blindin’ punk rock music you can stomach.

Stay close and we’ll get to issues #4 and #5 at some point, which you’ll surely want to read for how invariably it triggers my highly self-indulgent, candy-colored, rose-tinted nostalgia for dumb rocknroll memories from the distant past.