forget it fanzine – Fanzine Hemorrhage

Considering its robust content, Spring 1982’s Forget It! #7 is somewhat hamstrung and cast in relative undeserved obscurity due to its terrible cover this time around. They really weren’t all this bad. Forget It! was one of the two great San Jose, CA punk rock fanzines of the early 80s along with Ripper. It was edited by “Howard Etc.” and featured contributions from unsearchable nom de plumes like Billy Fallout, Barb Ituate and Lisa House. You don’t see issues of this very often, and I do believe I’d like to build a complete run somehow, aside from the two that I happen to own.

So many of these early American punk fanzines totally aped each others’ best ideas, to the point where dozens of them sprang from the same template, almost certainly laid down by Slash and Lobotomy a few years previous. Case in point was the opening 3-dot “gossip” column that so many of them had. ”Belinda of the Go-Go’s and Bill Bateman of The Blasters are to be married in the near future (they weren’t; more here)…Dirk Dirksen isn’t running the Mabuhay anymore. He and Ness, the owner, got into an argument over the booking of hardcore bands. Ness didn’t want them anymore and Dirk did…According to D. Boon of The Minutemen, Social Distortion and Wasted Youth are demanding $800 for a show, and all the producers are laughing at them…”. And much more of this highly entertaining ilk.

We get three editorials bemoaning the May 17th, 1981 show that was broken up by the cops. It was “San Jose’s first punk rock riot” at H.O.L.M.E.S. Hall with Black Flag, The Lewd, Los Olvidados, The Ghouls, Happy Death and Onslaught. We discussed this show a bit here as well. Let me tell you, as one who grew up there, not much of note happened within the city limits of San Jose around this time, so to join Los Angeles and San Francisco in the big leagues of punk riots was absolutely enough to merit this blessed event’s placement on the cover of Forget It! #7, terrible artwork aside. Speaking of Los Olvidados, there’s a picture of them and a bunch of associated praise, including “This band deserves to replace Crucifix on a great many bills!”. Amen to that.

Some terrific short interviews as well. In the Gun Club interview, they talk about bands they typically open for. Ward Dotson on X: “They bring in the worst crowd. They’re too college…They want to hear White Girl and Los Angeles and go home. They don’t want anything to do with opening acts”. This is preceded and followed by lots of drunk talk about Marc Bolan, who was obviously one of Jeffery Lee Pierce’s obsessions around this time. Code of Honor wants California to secede and form its own country, much like the State of Jefferson bozos do today. The Blasters talk about opening for Queen in San Diego and playing for a bunch of US Marines, and that Brian May “said he liked them”. Bill Bateman says being in The Flesh Eaters “was the most fun I’ve had in my whole life”. Good thing he got to do it again and again.

Then, after a full-page tribute to The Minutemen, there’s a rapid-fire interview with Lemmy from Motorhead – a real “get”, as we say in the business, in which he talks about adjusting to playing small clubs in the US when they’re not on the road opening for Ozzy, and of course about being booted out of Hawkwind. No Alternative have seemingly become an imbecilic rockabilly band called the Swingin’ Possums, who have a confederate flag in their logo and appear to be some serious, serious poseurs. The Gears, in their interview, are panting horndogs for Dianne Chai from the Alleycats and for Jane Weidlin from the Go-Gos, whom they’re still calling “Jane Drano” even though she’s now in one of the biggest bands in the world, and whom they imagine a collective group motel room romp with. Equity, dignity and respect was still quite some years away. There’s a Cramps interview – no question given how many fanzine interviews they did, the band was exceptionally giving with their time and would talk to just about anyone – and 2 pages are left mistakenly blank, so we’ll unfortunately never know what treasures were supposed to be printed upon them.

In the “Try this 7 Inch Swill” review section, it’s clear that 1981-1982 was bursting at the seams with genius and/or at least moderately interesting records: Descendents, Minutemen, Society Dog, Salvation Army, Black Flag, Wilma, Flipper, ½ Japanese, Minor Threat, The Insults, Altered Images (!) and tons more. LP section also has an honor roll of great records, yet with perhaps not the most insightful analyses (For the Gun Club’s Fire of Love: “This is the LP for you if you’re tired of punk rock and new wave”; DOA’s Hardcore ‘81: “It’s a great record if ya like good records; if ya don’t, then, like, ya can fuck off, eh?”). Forget It! at this point most closely resembled a more readable and slightly more considered Flipside, and hey, if you know where I might be able to find additional issues of it or even take a gander at some PDFs, please get in touch.

I spent age 10 to age nearly-18 as a resident of San Jose, California during the years 1978-1985, before leaving with extreme prejudice for college and never coming back (except to visit my beloved folks, of course). While it would be extreme hyperbole to call this city of 500,000 people when we moved there a “cowtown”, culturally the place was truly a backwater until the 1990s or so, forever in San Francisco’s and even Oakland’s shadow, even to this day – despite having the 10th largest population in the United States, well ahead of Austin, Seattle and Washington DC. When I was growing up there, it was a metal town, a burnout town, a stoner town. You can read my reminiscences here if you’d like.

When punk rock hit, there were thankfully folks like Tim Tanooka and Verna Wilson in town to document its impact both across the suburban diaspora of the South Bay in South Bay Ripper – later Ripper – the first true fanzine I ever bought. But let’s not also pass by the chance to honor Howard Etc.and Billy Fallout from Forget It! – the other first-class San Jose punk fanzine, and one that existed in the pre-hardcore era. Forget It! #4 came out in November 1980 and straddles one world in which The Plugz, the Go-Gos and Mo-dettes are bands on the up-and-up and playing shows in San Jose and on the peninsula, and another in which Black Flag is opening for Stiff Little Fingers in San Francisco, and blowing everyone out of the water, changing lives, melting faces etc.

This is one of my favorite eras to read about in music, especially in US and UK fanzines that were not from the big cities. “Punk” and “new wave” have not divided and conquered yet in these places, and battle lines between them haven’t really been drawn in San Jose, a place where one Forget It! writer can express swelling admiration for Black Flag, the B-52s and XTC, as well as profess true love for “Margot of The Go-Gos”, with a center-spread of candids of her to boot. A place where contributing writers have names like Barb Ituate and Lisa House. Later – nine years later, to be exact – I’d get a radio show on landmark South Bay college radio station KFJC, and I’d join DJs there with names like Jim Shorts, Hell’n Hairspray and Mark Darms. I decided to go in the other direction, and made sure my crazy DJ name was “Jay”.

Favorite thing in Forget It! #4 is The Plugz interview, which goes on and on and was transcribed exactly as it happened. Some fanzines clearly reckoned that editing was something corporate media did. I sometimes forget that Tito Larriva and The Plugz carried on as long as they did; when this interview was done, their first LP Electrify Me was out, and Tito had come off his stint as a member of The Flesh Eaters the year before. He talks a bit about Chris Desjardins before taking the opportunity to mock his histrionic, yowling vocals on the song “Brain Time”, a Larriva-penned track that the Flesh Eaters also did, albeit never on vinyl. Bad, Tito, bad!

There’s also an advertisement for a long-gone San Jose store called The Dedicated Record Collector, the very store in which I procured my Mo-dettes “White Mice” 45 and The Story So Far LP when I was in high school. Did they once belong to Billy Fallout or Howard Etc. in previous years? We’ll never know!