Doug Hanners – Fanzine Hemorrhage

Not Fade Away #4 showed its face in 1985, only a mere five years after the previous issue, the Not Fade Away #3 that I talked about here. It’s a pure and heartfelt celebration of raw Texas rock & roll sound, with nothing past 1970 talked about; it’s focused squarely on the sixties punk and blasted-out psychedelia that had the Lone Star State marking itself as the pinnacle location for both forms. Doug Hanners was the guy who made the fanzine happen, and he was a first-rate devotee of garage rock, yet was also clearly into documenting Texas’ hillbilly and rockabilly musics this time around as well.

Right off the bat there’s a Texas Archive Records ad on the inside front cover, promising that a new “Flashback series” is coming – I thought that would have to be the amazing Texas Flashbacks comps, but no, it’s a different set of records entirely. Hanners was involved. There’s a great early discussion about the band The Blue Things, and the feature talks at length about a 60s radio station with immense wattage called KOMA out of Oklahoma City. Its signal was so strong they’d announce live shows each night that were happening from Bismarck, ND to Plainview, TX – in case listeners in those areas needed something to do. I love that stuff. When I was growing up in San Jose, CA, I was able to pick up a Tijuana, Mexico AM station called “The Mighty 690”, with the 60s DJ “The Real Don Steele” still holding down the fort at night. That’s a long way from San Jose, folks, and was totally fascinated with these transmissions from another world. I was also able to pick up KFI from Los Angeles, and I can still sing their jingles, teasers and stingers to this day.

Not Fade Away #4 took a similar approach to that of Ugly Things in putting forth every known detail about a given short-lived 60s band, and interviewed any living members willing to talk. Rather unlike Ugly Things, however, Hanners and his crew opted for relative descriptive and discussion brevity in most cases. They have a couple of killer ones here for sure – The Sparkles, whom you may know for “No Friend of Mine” and “Hipsville 29 B.C.”, and The Stoics, who did the awesome “Hate”. The latter band also had bodyguards pulled from the Capinch motorcycle gang, and I learned that they ultimately had a falling out because “half the band wanted to go in a Kinks direction, and the other half in a Stones direction”. Let’s call the whole thing off!

Other interviews are with The Golden Dawn, who bond with Hanners during their interview over their mutual distaste for the first Red Krayola record. There are short pieces on The Remaining Few, The Sherwoods, The Lavender Hour, Sea-Ell Records, and a great longer piece with Weldon Rogers bantering with Hanners about West Texas music in the 1950s: radio stations, record labels, regional music, country, hillbillies, Ernest Tubb and more. After the three pages of reviews of Texas 45s and reissues – again, nothing post-sixties allowed, please! – I gazed upon a cool ad for Austin’s Mediaphile Performing Arts Books & Magazines, a store that could (probably) not exist now. They’re advertising “The Roky Erickson Story – over 200 xeroxed pages of newspaper articles, record reviews, interviews, posters etc. With discography”. Here’s what little I could dig up online about it. I’d buy that for a dollar! Even in 1985, they’re wanting $25 for it.

This issue concluded the run for Not Fade Away – four outstanding missives in ten years. Truly essential 60s punk scholarship here, and probably the germ that helped so many of us realize Texas’ unsung but outsized contributions to the greater culture during that decade.

Despite never having truly been a true record collector – much more of a record accumulator – I hold obsessed, deeply committed collectors in high regard, and rarely tire of their stories of the hunt & the big score. Aside from the guys who almost single-handedly resurrected pre-WWII blues by going door-to-door in the deep South to look for 78s in the late 50s/early 60s, my favorite collectors are the 60s punk fiends, the guys who cobbled together a cohesive and distinctly American narrative for what was clearly going on in thousands of garages and basements across the USA in 1965-1967. That’s the world that 1980’s Not Fade Away #3 traffics in, and their scope is further refined to the great state of Texas, almost certainly the American locus of the most insanely wild and highest-quality 60s garage punk during those years.

Now think back, if you’re old enough to do so, to what 60s punk scholarship was like in 1980. Sure, Nuggets had long been out, the first few Pebbles comps were around and Greg Shaw’s Who Put The Bomp! was writing about this stuff at times. Most of what we’d come to know about the great underground 60s punk 45s would come later, though, first through a series of 60s punk bootlegs like What A Way To Die, Garage Punk Unknowns and Scum of the Earth, and then of course via Back From The Grave, the greatest compilation series of all time. I’d have to imagine that editor Doug Hanners was doing his own original research, digging up telephone numbers from white pages & writing letters to studios listed on 45s released fourteen years previous – and he actually started the mag in 1975.

The biggest features are all listed on the cover here – Mouse and The Traps get the top billing and the longest piece. I was most smitten with the side-by-side photos of these Texas rogues from 1966 (basic cool roughneck hippie kids) and 1967 (far-out psychedelic shaman with love beads and paisley shirts). There’s a great short piece on The Reasons Why, who’d cut this absolute screamer called “Don’t Be That Way” in 1966. They dispel any myths one might have had about well-behaved teenagers at dance clubs and fraternal lodges, in particular the Beyersville SPJST: “All these kids from the little towns would pack the place. Being out in the country we’d get a lot of cowboy redneck types and sometimes things would get pretty wild. We’d be up on stage playin’ and the dance floor would be packed, then all of a sudden this whirlpool would start in the middle of the floor. It wouldn’t be just a few guys from Taylor fightin’ a few guys from Rockdale, it’d be everybody from Taylor fightin’ everybody from Rockdale….one time this cowboy picked up this hippy and threw him through the plate glass window in front.” Texas punk!

Was also psyched, if you will, to see the small piece on The Stereo Shoestring. Have you ever heard their psychedelic face-melter “On The Road South”?? Please do so, right here! Maybe ten years ago I re-read this particular issue and started cataloging the things in the review section I’d never heard, particularly in the short “Tex-Mex” section of 45s. I then went onto the illicit file-sharing site Soulseek and found said Tex-Mex 45s, and they were a true blast. Texas is a big state and all, but I think per-capita it really musically punched well above its weight for many, many years. Not Fade Away #3 is a superb fan’s-eye furthering of what made this particular state’s iconoclasts and cultural rebels stand out, and documents everything I love about the crazed collector mentality.