Flipside magazine – Fanzine Hemorrhage

History was made with this April 1982 issue of Flipside, at least in my world. My older, clued-in cousin had it and let me peruse it frequently, mostly to laugh at The Misfits interview and to ogle Tracy Lea from Red Cross, my ultimate punk rock girl crush for many years. It struck a major chord for me because this one came out right at the tip-top of “peak LA hardcore” – peak US hardcore, pretty much – and it reads accordingly, in all of its stupidity, squalor, excitement and chaotic splendor. In fact, its tiny type truly packs in an entire universe of slam-your-ass-off punk rock mania, written for teens by people who weren’t teens, yet who wrote as intelligently as any dim-bulb high school simpleton from Canoga Park or Hawthorne or La Mirada might.

Lest you think I come here to bury Flipside #31, let it be said that I do not! I tried to capture my general feeling about the fanzine when I wrote about the issue that’d come out right after this one here. This one’s even better, for many reasons, mostly for how on-the-ground it all is, documenting the scene at eye level and in the words of its jackbooted and bandanna’ed participants. A nicely representative letter from Mark Evans gets us started:

Hey Flipside: I’m from the SF area and I’m 14 years old and I go to all the shows I can in S.F. We have some good shows up here like just a while ago Fear played with Circle One and some other bands from around here like Fuck Up’s, Lewd Crucifix and Domino Theory. Up here our Vex is the Elite Club, we have shows about every two weeks it’s totally cool. I want to say another thing: you probably have heard about the Mabuhay Gardens where they have shows every night, it sucks all they have is new wave shows, it sucks total big dick!!! — Mark Evans PS: Print this so I can show my mommy

On the opposite page is another fine missive about the scene from one “Falling” James Moreland of the Leaving Trains; I’ve done you the favor of scanning it in its entirety at the end of this post. Boy did I have some interesting run-ins with that guy over the years. There was the time in the late 80s when I tried bantering with him at a show at the Coconut Teazer (!) in LA, and he was aggressively licking his lips and jittering. I was like, oh, so that’s what speed does to you. A few years later I watched him get kicked out of Al’s Bar in LA at his own show, then later eavesdropped on him having an intense argument with Taquila Mockingbird in the parking lot. Soon enough he’d show up all around LA in dresses, yammering incessantly, and my understanding is gender fluidity has been a part of who he is ever since. There’s a “Dead or Alive?” page up for him here. I’m very glad he’s still with us: an American original.

So – the Misfits article. Now I do enjoy The Misfits myself, at least the pre-Walk Among Us 45s. But I don’t need to tell you what a horrible human being Glenn Danzig was. I don’t know about now. My cousin and I – who were huge Flesh Eaters fans – used to get a real kick out of this part of the interview:

Flipside: And you and Chris D. mixed the album. Weren’t you supposed to play with Chris D.’s band the Flesheaters?

Glenn: Yeah, but they’re scared of us.

Flipside: Why’s that?

Glenn: I don’t know…maybe because we’re all (make a mean scary face gesture) and they’re all homos, ya know?!! I don’t care what they like, I hate them. God this is homo city around here!!

Jerry: We try to avoid going down that street (Santa Monica Blvd. near Starwood).

Glenn: You go to the supermarket or to use the phone and it’s so yeecch (makes kissing sound), “Fuck you, leave me alone for 5 seconds!!” In N.Y. it’s not like that. Everybody is into their own trip. No one bugs you, if you’re a homo, fine, you are a homo and go where homo’s go. But here it’s so fucked up, everybody’s pushing on you. You have a lot more homos here than in New York!!

Flipside: Well, right here is where they all concentrate…

Glenn: And Frisco is fucking homo land!! Yeah we wanted to eat at McDonald’s and the Flesheaters wanted to go into homo-ville, we just said, “fuck you, you give us the money, we’re getting out of here!!”.

You sometimes forget from the vantage point of 2023 just how rabidly anti-gay the youth of America were forty years ago. I was in high school then, and I remember. The letters section of Flipside #31 is just “fag”, “homo”, “that’s gay”, “I hate that queer”, etc., ad nauseam. HR, in the interview with the Bad Brains, responds to the question “How’d it go in SF?” with, “Well, it’s ok, but too many faggots.” Back to The Misfits – their interview here took place after their infamous San Francisco show at the Elite Club, during which “Doyle” totally brained some kid in the crowd with his guitar. (The incident is very well-described here). That show is reviewed in this issue, and ends a little shakily, “We figured someone might have been murdered but I haven’t read anything about it in the paper.”

So aside from all that, there’s a nice interview with Pagan Icons-era Saccharine Trust, who are already tiring of punk and moving on to what they’d become one album later; Tracy Lea and the always reliably hilarious Red Cross; Jodie Foster’s Army reveal the origins of the song title “Beach Blanket Bongout”, quite seriously among the top five song titles of all time as voted by Fanzine Hemorrhage; and a plethora of tiny-type scene reports mostly written by morons, which are yet Illuminative of a pretty special and unique time in the American underground. It’s an insanely-packed issue that all criticisms aside was highly worth the dollar my cousin spent on it in the HC Spring of 1982.

It’s possible that overly judgmental folks like me have given Flipside the proverbial “short shrift” over the years. I didn’t even buy a copy until well into college, 1986 or so, mostly because they gave such energetic and frothing coverage to any & every punk rock lame-o band, differentiating not in the least and really just there to innocuously champion all of it. No one cared much about their prose, because (as I saw it) no one there could effectively convince you with any sort of engendered credibility to buy a record or see a particular band anyway.

Yet when I read an issue like Flipside #32 from 1982 cover to cover, all it makes me do is wish I was there side-by-side with Al & Hud and the whole Flipside gang at every single show from South Orange County to the North San Fernando Valley, watching hardcore punk explode and share stages with creeping death rock bands (45 Grave, Christian Death), that next LA wave of over the-top art/performance acts (Johanna Went, Vox Pop) and those few rarified bands that were just miles ahead of everyone else (Minutemen, Dream Syndicate, 100 Flowers, Flesh Eaters).

This was the thrill of reading a Flipside, well into the 1990s. These people really lived it. I’d always marvel at their live reviews. A typical Friday night would have Flipside correspondents jumping from show to show all over the greater LA area, trying to document every last jot & titter coming from the clubs. I got to sort of brush shoulders a few times with editor Al Flipside and a guy named Bob Cantu in the early 90s, and it was all very real: they would start the evening seeing a band in Hollywood, say, then hustle down to Long Beach for another show and then make their way to a 2am wind-down party afterward, drinking and reveling all the way, then file their broken and disjointed dispatches in the next Flipside (“we missed so-and-so but I heard they were good; then the cops came”). I thought I was personally going pretty hard in my 20s, but these folks had me licked – and Al was in his thirties, having started Flipside in 1977. (To say nothing of scene correspondent and “rock and roll bank robber” Shane Williams – I’ve documented my direct encounters with him here).

It was the same in 1982. You read this thing and you still can’t believe LA had so many amazing shows you’d have gone to yourself in June ‘82 alone. You too would be humping it to Canoga Park and Hollywood and Costa Mesa and San Pedro all month long. It’s quite the time capsule, this one. There is such a buzz of punk rock activity that there are “Southern California H.C.” scene reports from Northwest O.C., Palos Verdes, Riverside and “More O.C.” respectively, while the rest of the magazine reports many wild shows that took place in Los Angeles proper.

There’s a priceless letter to the editor from teenager Mark Arm from Seattle, WA, exhorting punks to “think for themselves”; decrying the use of drugs in the scene, and relaying the fact that he had to talk his mom out of joining “Parents of Punkers” after punk rock music and fashions were featured on the Phil Donahue show. “She sees a counselor instead.”

Name an active LA-area punk-adjacent band in 1982 and they’re in here somewhere, as you can see from the cover, but there’s also a Flesh Eaters interview; a Twisted Roots family tree; an interview with the hideous Jeff Dahl about his awful new band Powertrip (“Fuck it all. The only thing I’m into is speed, beer, rock & roll and young girls.”); Eddie and the Subtitles; The Big Boys; and lots of love in the live reviews for the totally-zonkers Meat Puppets (they played with The Cramps in San Pedro this summer; where were you?) and brand-new band the Dream Syndicate, who are said to “sound blatantly like the Velvet Underground, yet are so unselfconscious about it that their plagiarism can’t be held against them.”

About 18 months later, in my estimation, it all started to go sideways in LA, music-wise. By 1984 the city and its nether regions still held more good bands per capita then most anywhere else, but it was a fast fade through the rest of the 80s. Of course my years of living in Southern California happened to be 1985-1989, and so I’d look at Flipside at record stores, then compare it to the vitality, breadth and craft of a Forced Exposure or Conflict and find it all quite “lacking”. Thus my attitude about it over the years, save for my awe and immense admiration for the crazed show-going of their staffers. This issue’s making me a little more generous in my retroactive estimation for the thing.