Epic Soundtracks – Fanzine Hemorrhage

Due to the beneficence of Chris Seventeen, the 1980s editor and publisher of the UK’s What a Nice Way To Turn Seventeen fanzine, I’m now in the possession of several additional copies that span beyond my original issue #6 that I talked about here. Many of these came with records included, including 1984’s What a Nice Way To Turn Seventeen #2, which has a 4-track EP that included musicians with whom I’m familiar, like Nikki Sudden and The Jazz Butcher, as well as those with whom I am not, like The Rag Dolls and The Sad-Go-Round. In any case my copy doesn’t have a record, and I’m going to be okay with that.

Now let’s get the big concern out of the way first. People, usually people even older than myself as if that’s possible, have at times expressed their concern about the font size of my own Dynamite Hemorrhage fanzine, yet my 9-point font is practically the top row of the eye chart when compared with this one. Epic Soundtracks – yes, that Epic Soundtracks, not the other one you went to high school with – writes a piece about discovering Brian Wilson that I’m dying to read, but it’s literally written in one or two point font, so small that it blurs on the page and is nearly an undifferentiated series of dots and inkblots. In the light on a nice day, it’s possible to find some coherence to it, but in evening light you can totally forget about it.

Andrew Bean contributes a piece on Captain Beefheart that I can somewhat read, though a magnifying glass helps – one of those plastic ones with a flat bottom that you can glide across a page that grandpas like me who complain about fanzine font sizes like to use. It posits that “When Trout Mask Replica appeared, cloaked in a sleeve which depicted a guy in a silly hat and a fish mask waving from the front, and on the back, a bunch of weird-looking guys who looked like refugees from the Alpha Centauri Home For The Criminally Insane creeping around in bushes, wearing dresses and waving table lamps around, the record-buying public were not impressed.” Why the hell not??

You want to know about the other things that make the 16-page What a Nice Way to Turn Seventeen #2 fanzine such a gem? I’ll tell you. There’s a record-fiends-only guide to collecting the Texas 60s punk label Eva Records by Chris Seventeen, as well as a celebration of Creation Records, a brand new label at this point (!). David J from Bauhaus rants with extreme passion about the John Cale show he saw in London in January 1983. And there’s an annotated Johnny Thunders discography. I certainly missed many of the greats, but I did see this fanzine’s cover star Thunders play live on January 7th, 1987 at a pool hall called The Golden Eagle in Santa Barbara, CA – the aural evidence of said performance is right here. I know I was mostly there because The Lazy Cowgirls opened, but still. Johnny Thunders, right?

What a Nice Way to Turn Seventeen #2 actually reminds me of another fantastic fanzine that came out with a 7” single as part of the package – Drunken Fish #1. Both were “wrap-arounds” with the record inside and both take an omnivorous collector freak’s eye toward their scenes of choice. In this case, it’s the current UK underground, American offbeat rock geniuses and scarf rock through the ages. I’d love to see a book of this stuff someday if they’d agree to pump up the font size 5x at a minimum.

I owe my possession of this one thanks to a pro tip from Todd Novak of Hozac Records, who reminded me that any fanzine that came with a record likely means that the record is probably for sale on Discogs…..and that some of them explicitly come bundled with the original fanzine. He explicitly called out the UK’s mid-80s What A Nice Way To Turn Seventeen fanzine as one I might want to do a little reconnaissance on. So I did, and I’m a better man for having done so.

In fact, I had to buy a full 12” compilation LP just to get the July 1986 What A Nice Way To Turn Seventeen #6; it’s got some decent stuff from The Prefects, The Doublehappys and Sneaky Feelings, among others. It’s the fanzine that’s the draw, though, with a real emphasis on old-school fanzine here. Editor Chris Seventeen and his “staff” are intensely passionate music lovers, with an aesthetic that very loosely hovers around the holy quartile of Johnny Thunders, Nikki Sudden, Marc Bolan and Keith Richards – scarf rock, if you will. There’s also a bit of mining of some of similar underground jangle covered by Bucketful of Brains at this time, along with some great 1960s worship, which, you know, had only been less than twenty years before this. Epic Soundtracks and Nikki Sudden of The Swell Maps are staffers, in fact – not merely one-off contributors, but regular members of the ‘Seventeen crew.

So what you get is a highly welcome old-school reverence for discographies and details, the sort that mattered to collectors and accumulators of records in the era before any of this was online – before there was an online. There’s a page-long Alex Chilton discography with every record, comp track and bootleg from his Box Tops days to the present; this follows a terrific in-person Q&A with Alex that was conducted by Epic Soundtracks himself. It’s an essential interview with a guy who was often irascible and tough to reach, and he opens up in a very conversational, candid manner about what he does and doesn’t like about his career, confirming the drugged, tossed-off circumstances that led to Sister Lovers and how Jim Dickinson had a pre-assembled, unannounced band all ready to record Like Flies on Sherbert when Alex walked into the studio, and Chilton was like, “OK, let’s just go with it, then!”.

Having recently read Matthew Goody’s Needles and Plastic as I have, I now know the tortured path by which Flying Nun Records’ music was introduced to the UK in the mid-80s – and here we have a feature on said label, with the spotlight tuned on The Chills, Flying Nun’s most popular band overseas by a mile. There’s also a reconsideration of the music of The Monkees (the editors have just seen “Head”), a piece that I feel I’ve read in a couple of different guises over the years, as those of us who grew up howling at the TV show realize that the music was actually pretty great as well.

You want a discography of The Swell Maps? Well I suppose it helps having Epic Soundtracks and Nikki Sudden on staff, but there’s an exceptionally detailed and annotated one here, full of minutia for the true fan. At this point, 1986, we’d only seen just over half of the Swell Maps material that’d eventually see the light of day. There’s a piece on the “Louie Louie” mania that swept the world in the early 1980s, including a spotlight on the day (August 19th, 1983) that my local college radio station, KFJC, would devote the day to playing over 300 unique versions of the song. I remember it well, and turning the station on and off at various points throughout the day – yep, still playing “Louie Louie”; nope, not back to regular programming yet….

The sort of breadth and depth I’ve just tried to illuminate that permeates What A Nice Way to Turn Seventeen #6 – to say nothing of the writing and assembly, which is first-rate in a not-trying-too-hard “fanzine” sorta manner – is what now brings this issue (cue chorus of angels) into my personal fanzine pantheon. I’ll be doing my damndest to find the others in the months to come, even if it means buying some in-the-way record to have to get it.