Frightwig – Fanzine Hemorrhage

I’m pretty sure I know where I got my idea that the San Francisco underground music scene was so mediocre-to-downright-awful around 1985-86. It was from the San Francisco fanzines like BravEar, Wiring Dept and Puncture that championed it. I bought those mags, sure, but I also turned my 18-year-old nose up at them, even at the time. This was my first year of college, and my first year away from the SF Bay Area, and therefore everything that was going on in New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, Boston and even LA was just so much more visceral, exciting and new to me than the SF peace punk/political protest communal hippie-tinged shtick that just bored and at times angered me no end. Especially that year, as punk morphed into speed metal or “cowpunk” or even lamer versions of post-hardcore punk. Steve Albini and my other new heroes that year said San Francisco music was the absolute worst, and I could present very little evidence to counter with.

It was MRR and all my record shopping excursions to peace-punkified Berkeley that probably left me so bereft. That and the explosion of Camper Van Beethoven mania my senior year of high school on college radio and the local music press. As it turned out, I came to eventually enjoy that band’s second record II & III and certainly my issues of Wiring Dept. fanzine down the line. Puncture, not so much, although in reading through Puncture #10 from Fall 1985, it’s still a terrific curio and a strong attempt at making lemonade from lemons. Exhibit A is Mia from Frightwig on the cover here, and several tributes to the band inside. I dug Frightwig; saw them live twice, including once at the world-famous Mabuhay Gardens. In ‘85 they’d have been one of my favorite SF bands; a year later, they actually were.

There’s a piece in here about the goings-on at an Agnostic Front / Fuck-Ups show that was held at the Sound of Music instead of the Mab, because Ness Aquino of the Mab was warned that 200 skinheads were going to show up and cause havoc, as skinheads are wont to do. This was considered an “anti-Maximum Rocknroll” show (hear hear!) because that mag was critical of skinheads, right-leaning politics and so forth, which is understandable, but I’d have liked to have supported an anti-MRR event in any case, just for fun. Shame about the bands.

J. Neo Marvin has a piece in here reviewing four Velvet Underground records – one sometimes forgets just how tough these were to easily find in the bins in the 80s – as well as the new Victor Bokris book on the band, Loaded. This was when a big wave of new Velvets fandom was just starting to crest, with myself included in said wave. In fact, the first songs by the band I ever enjoyed were “Foggy Notion” and “Temptation Inside Your Heart” that very year, because of the recent archival/unreleased LP, although once I heard “I’m Waiting For The Man” and “Sweet Jane” later that year, I was like, hey, I know these songs.

There’s an uneventful Blixa Bargeld interview and a fun pooh-poohing of a Diamanda Galas show at the I-Beam. In the reviews section, there’s loads of love for the Meat Puppets’ new Up on the Sun and for Camper Van Beethoven’s Telephone Free Landslide Victory, of course. Other new favorites included the Butthole Surfers Psychic…Powerless…Another Man’s Sac and locals Glorious Din and their Leading Stolen Horses. The Knitters’ Poor Little Critter on the Road gets compared to “Hee-Haw”, which sounds about right. I honestly don’t think I could bring myself to listen to that record for even a minute in 2024. By the way, if I’m ever sick in bed for an extended period of time, I might just binge-watch a couple seasons of Hee-Haw. I watched so, so, so much television in the 1970s, whatever was on our six channels, that I put in some quality time with this outstanding American television program. If you’ve never seen it, check this out or this one. I’ll take that over The Knitters any goddamn day.

Puncture #10 wraps up with book reviews of the new Less Than Zero as well as a takedown of the punk photo book Loud 3D: “the vast majority of the pictures are performance shots of big-name hardcore bands that would do any photographer from the San Francisco Chronicle proud”… “many of the shots are too dark, out of focus, or lacking sufficient depth. All these factors are important for photography of any kind”. Tell it! Henry Rollins’Two Thirteen Sixty One book is also taken down for having two pieces printed twice in the same book and for its many typos. “Surely Henry Rollins could give us strong street writing if he tried harder”. Try harder, Rollins! I think he had other priorities; around this time is when I saw Rollins write something about his workouts: “When I go into the gym, it’s like I’m going into WAR.” So much to make fun of from 1985, so little time.

Maybe it didn’t really feel like it at the time to me, but Wiring Dept. has reputationally come into its own, nearly forty years after the fact, as an important sub-underground music publication that found joy, innovation and immense left-of-center creativity in post-hardcore San Francisco circa 1984-86. These were supposed to be “the lean years”, but I’ve got a whole Wiring Dept. #4 here that says they weren’t. (I talked about Wiring Dept. #3 here as well).

I know where I was when I bought this in 1985 or early 1986 – it was at Rough Trade Records on 6th Street in San Francisco, and I was up visiting from college on one of my many record-buying excursions to the city while staying with my parents in San Jose. It was likely rung up at the counter by KFJC’s Spliff Skankin (Dennis Bishop), who worked there, and whom I listened to incessantly in high school (and who therefore likely intimidated me at the age of 18 when I bought this – these DJs were absolute gods to me). Given my youth and general punk rock orientation at the time, I probably blanched a little at the pretentious poetry and song lyrics – many by Dylan – in the margins of many pages, and at the inwards circularity of the fanzine, in which much of it seemed primed to elevate its creators and their own endeavors. I’m over it now.

But as examples of what I’m talking about, let’s dissect Wiring Dept. #4 a little. There’s an interview with SF band Trial by Grux of Caroliner and by editor Eric Cope. Then Cope writes about Caroliner. Then William Davenport of Unsound fanzine does an interview with The Flaming Lips after their first LP. Then Cope interviews Davenport. Cope’s own band, Glorious Din, gets a reprint of their interview on KALX radio, and then their album gets a rave review in Cope’s own magazine as well. Who’d have thunk it?

Brandan Kearney of World of Pooh was part of this loose collective as well. He writes a bunch of the record reviews; his band, then a duo, gets raved about; there’s a long review of their tape Dust. and also a review of Brandan Kearney’s magazine Nuf Sed Digest, which I’d never even known about until re-reading this just now. Who’s got a spare copy to trade me for one of my extra CMJ New Music Monthlies? There’s also a review of a World of Pooh tape called Pigmies in a Rose Petal that I’m not 100% sure actually ever existed, and another of a comp tape called UGLY SF III: Bellair McKuen Natures the Preying ANXthouse, supposedly with Lennonburger, Church Police and Caroliner. Google turns up nothing. I need to hear this and I need your help.

There are loads of short interviews, including with four small-ish bands who became much larger in years to come: the aforementioned Flaming Lips; 10,000 Maniacs; Faith. No More and Peter Buck of R.E.M., who were already kind of a big deal on the indie/Americana circuit but nothing like they’d be two/three years later. Yet there are also chats with Controlled Bleeding, Love Tractor, Flat Duo Jets and Stiff Legged Sheep – who were awesome, by the way. Listen here. Corrosion of Conformity, too. Fuckin’ C.O.C., man. I saw them play at the Oxnard Skate Palace, no lie.

Frightwig talk about their upcoming record: “Have you ever seen Russ Meyer, early Russ Meyer films? He did Debbie Does Dallas (sic). He had this film about three go-go dancers who travel around in these sports cars. It’s called Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill. And we’re the three dancers in our sports cars. Faster Frightwig, Kill Kill. It has nothing to do with the music. We just like Russ. We identify with him. We all have big tits. We’re all foxy. I wear hip huggers and dance and we race around in our sports cars and kill men with our bare hands.”

Dave Katz – who for some totally weirdo reason got really mad at me for this 2005 review I wrote of his book! – writes about The Fall’s new 45 Cruiser’s Creek, saying that, “In a way, they sound almost like an 80’s Creedence Clearwater….the main problem with this song about a back woods party is its annoying backing vocals”. Poor Brix, just couldn’t catch a break from the men both lusting after her and wishing she’d go away, sort of a sub-underground version of modern MAGA Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez/Taylor Swift syndrome. And really, maybe the reviews in Wiring Dept. #4 aren’t to be trusted as a matter of course. There’s an uncredited review of the Dead Kennedys’ Frankenchrist, easily one of the worst records I’ve ever heard. This album with “Jock-O-Rama (Invasion Of The Beef Patrol)” and “MTV Get Off The Air” is compared to Iggy Pop and Joy Division, and about which it is said, “Frankenchrist is worth about a million dollars just for the lyrics. What Jello Biafra sings is not mere words put to music, these words come from deep within his heart. He feels with a tortured soul….a record that opens your eyes to injustice and human suffering….do not miss this record”. Hey, I’d leave that review uncredited, too.

All this and a picture of Bob Noxious from The Fuck Ups. It’s therefore little wonder that Wiring Dept. copies are p-r-i-c-e-y when encountered on eBay these days. It’s outstanding source material for documenting whatever it is that was going on musically in 1985, a tale that very much varies with the teller.