It never escaped me during my many years spent rubbing elbows in the “garage punk scene” that said scene is often overpopulated with what you might call – for lack of a better word – “dum-dums”. The wallet-on-a-chain dimwits, the rockabilly girls, the cro-magnon alcoholics: they were all in the family at any given 1990s garage punk show for sure. And hey, three cheers for our dum-dums! They’re not torturing themselves like I am with scene contextualization, record collecting and five-dollar adjectives. They’re here to fucking rock, to drink beer, hoot at the bands and yell at poseurs. I spent much time in the trenches with them, and their extroverted enthusiasms helped propel many a 90s show forward from good time to great time. Sometimes these dum-dums even created fanzines back in 1998, such as Drink & Drive #2.

However, late in the 90s I had started backing away a bit. New bands with names like “The Hookers” and the “River City Rapists” were being celebrated, and the general IQ level of my compadres seemed to be rapidly trending downward rather than up. I remember when the fanzine Hit List started coming out. I’d rifle through it on the newsstands, and I really thought it couldn’t get any stupider. (And don’t worry, I’ve got an issue that I’ll be covering in this space in the near future). Jeff Bale from Maximum RocknRoll was deeply involved, which was a real “it figures” moment for me, though that wasn’t exactly the turn I expected him to take once he was done being a left-wing peace creep. 

It is into this dum-dum environment that Drink and Drive #2 proudly steps forth and perhaps even outdoes Hit List. Editor Michael Pedersen has his priorities straight and his controversial opinions eagerly given: “Ah, the sun is shinin’, my zine is almost ready to be printed, life is good. All I need now is a beer and some pussy. Remember, soft rock = soft cock, fuck techno and kill a hippie”. Of course I could cut Pedersen some slack and say well you know, he was from Denmark, English isn’t his first language etc. But that didn’t stop European garage punk fiends Tom Arnaert and Henrik Olausson from putting out high-quality, literate and hilarious garage punk fanzines at the same time – Bazooka and Human Garbage Disposal, respectively, which were better than virtually all American zines of similar ilk. No, Pedersen unfortunately just fell for the Tim Warren/Crypt Records “razzle-dazzle” hook, line and sinker, and simply doesn’t have the mental chops to carve his own path through the idiocy of the current scene.

Grant him this, though: he was a hustler. He nails mail interviews with Larry Hardy of In The Red Records; Pat Todd of the Lazy Cowgirls; and Dana Hatch of the Cheater Slicks. Great, great Americans all, and three of the people most responsible for my 80s-90s garage punk obsessions. He also interviews the Spider Babies from Portland, who, when I saw them at San Francisco’s Purple Onion in the early 90s, were outstanding, with a pissed-off female keyboardist and an absolutely brutal 60s punk vibe. Here, they’ve huffed the doofus vapor that was heavily circulating in 1998, and, when asked to describe their current sound, come up with “It’s like Billy Childish gettin’ raped by The Dwarves while listening to the Mentors, while fantasizing about fuckin’ the guys in Screwdriver”. 

Likewise with The Dirtys – one of the Crypt Records bands of the time that finally pulled me away from the label after its decade and a half of stellar work. The Dirtys don’t like gays, they love porn and beer, they joke incessantly about fisting, lesbians and so forth. They’re exceptionally sensible and cognizant of the changin’ times, these dum-dums, and this forum was purpose-built for them. And somehow Pedersen gets Billy Childish and Thee Headcoats to talk to him, a real “get” in our business. This goes a bit better, and I didn’t leave feeling utterly embarrassed for the participants – but do you perhaps feel as I do now that we might have “oversold” Childish and his bands a bit in the 80s and 90s? It kind of feels like kid music to me now, but that’s probably because I’m not exactly a kid any longer.

I mean, that’s likely why I’m struggling with Drink & Drive #2 in the first place, right? Get a clue, grandpa! Yet it is sort of telling that the whole “I’m-a-rapist”/anti-homosexual/goin’ after pussy thing sort of stumbled hard a year or two later, and very few were doing that dum-dum dance in the 21st century (yes, I know that there are exceptions; I saw the Richmond Sluts, and attended a 2016 Humpers reunion in Long Beach with some of the absolute dumbest people on the planet). This is selling for $2 right now. A Dirtys CD currently only sets you back $4. Maybe we take this issue for the period piece that it is, and interrogate ourselves for how we let ourselves move from the Gories, Supercharger and Cheater Slicks to whatever this all was, seven years later. Can we somehow blame Jon Spencer?