Tag: Don Howland

The Offense Newsletter #44

~ Jay Hinman ~ 1 Comment

I have discussed this Columbus, OH fanzine and its previous iteration The Offense on several different occasions, and it may behoove you to peruse those discussions, presently: they are to be found here, here, here and here. The rule of thumb in this house is that it’s important to get & gather every and all issues of The Offense and its Newsletter, as it has proven itself to me to be one of the greats – entertaining as hell, and completely tapped into the many currents and scene wars of the first-half 1980s American underground. It’s passionate, loose, and yet highly articulate about everything from those 4AD records shimmering in the import bin to the many post-punk forks & branches needling their way through the USA, including hardcore, paisley psych and goth/doom/deathrock/what-have-you. 

The May 11th, 1984 cover’s got Black Flag on it and a small caption, “People can’t stop writing about BLACK FLAG!”. They really couldn’t, could they? In hindsight, I have many thoughts about post-Damaged Black Flag: the plodding, angry, unfunny, metal-tinged, Rollins-era band that extensively toured the world & elsewhere from 1984 to 1986. First – because I remember it well – so much attention was paid to them in 1984 because we are all waiting for them to be great again. Because “the first four years” and Damaged are absolutely monumental, right? But every time some garbage dirge like Loose Nut or The Process of Weeding Out would hit the stacks, everyone would listen to it, forget it quickly, and give them the old “well, there’s always next year” false hope. Meanwhile, the band would scowl and mug on stage and throw fans a few silly punk bones during a gig – a “Six Pack” or a “Nervous Breakdown”, maybe, before proceeding with the plod. 

Secondly, let’s admit their reputation was wholly made during 1979-81. I’ve met maybe 2-3 people in my lifetime who, when they talk about Black Flag, want to first talk about 1984-86. Maybe some heshers or speed metal guys. But not music fans. So no wonder poor music fan Don Howland – yes! Don Howland! – is so conflicted here in his lengthy review of a 4/14/84 Black Flag / Meat Puppets / Nig-Heist show at the Reggae Lounge in NYC. (The “Reggae Lounge”??). Don pretends to really like My War, as many pretended to at the time, but he’s not really sure what to make a show in which he’s “pretty disappointed by 90% of the new stuff”. He misses Chuck Dukowski’s onstage bloviating and general mania, but admits that new bassist Kira Roessler is, in fact, “prettier”. 

But it’s a great marker of the times, this review, and I feel like it proves my point number one above – that when you’ve made a legend for yourself on the basis of some of the most powerful music of all time, anything else you do – even stoned, angry dirges performed in black dolphin shorts – is going to pale by comparison, and totally confuse the fans. Not that there’s anything wrong with confusing the fans, of course – there’s a reason that we all love Flipper so much. Or even this gig’s Meat Puppets, who are, shall we say, not welcomed to the Big Apple whilst playing the country-fried songs from Meat Puppets II. They say it was the Brits who spit at the bands. Not if you believe Howland’s piece here – us Americans were just as adept at the ‘ol “hawk tuah” as any punk from the mother country.

Joe Piecuch also writes about the 4/27/84 bill with the same lineup; he’s less conflicted about Black Flag and sees them as standing proudly apart from the scene, “as unwilling to lead as they are to be led”. That’s one way of putting it, and probably the only feather in Black Flag’s cap during this era: they couldn’t care less what you thought of them. But is that anything to really hang your hat on, when the records are so incredibly lame?

As discussed in previous reviews here of The Offense Newsletter, the letters page served as the bulletin board for the underground scene, or at least some portion of it. Often they were barbs directed at editor Tim Anstaett, who gave as good as he got. There’s lots of discussion about the best of 1983 reader’s poll results, which The Birthday Party apparently walked away with. Now there was a band, ladies and gentlemen! Steve Hesske gets a page of record reviews – they’re pretty funny – and Rob Wylie interviews a band called NonFiction, with whom I am unfamiliar. Bands such as the Icicle Works and of course the Cocteau Twins are bantered about in the letters. Those, as they say, were the days.

The Offense Newsletter #59

~ Jay Hinman ~ 2 Comments

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!

Bazooka! #2

~ Jay Hinman ~ Leave a comment

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.