Galactic Zoo Dossier – Fanzine Hemorrhage

I just finished reading Steve Krakow’s – aka Plastic Crimewave – great new memoir-esque book about his music obsessions, his many tour stories and how he bumbled his way from a series of intense avocations (drawing, comics and psychedelic music) into multiple awesome vocations, and into a life well-lived. It’s a story that’s ongoing, thankfully. The book is called A Mind Blown is a Mind Shown, and I came away from it with a big shit-eating grin on my face and another fifteen bands to go check out.

Through it all, Krakow has semi-regularly published one of the fanzines that really ought to be put into a cornerstone of some kind to show the future world what true 20th & 21st century rock and roll freakdom actually was in its most benevolent and welcoming form. Galactic Zoo Dossier is an entity unto itself in so many ways – layout, subject matter, lack of typography, raw enthusiasm – that I will try not repeat myself much from what I wrote about Galactic Zoo Dossier #7 here, which you should take a look at as a brief pre-read if you’re so inclined. (I also tackled Galactic Zoo Dossier #5 here, I just remembered).

Reading Krakow’s book made me wanna crack open an issue of Galactic Zoo Dossier that I hadn’t looked at in a while, so I chose GZD #10, his most recent issue, which I’m afraid came out waaaay back in 2016 – meaning we’ve had 8 years to wait for the next one. (I’ve been told it’s slowly but surely in the works). At this point – and it became clear after reading his book – Krakow had a great paid job as the artist who effectively did the branding and artwork for Gorilla Perfume, a branch of Lush Cosmetics (I think of them as the “bath bomb” people). Pretty obvious when you see work of his like this or this. Anyway, so he’s in London a bunch for work, right? Therefore he’s getting to do things in off-hours like meet and interview Shirley Collins, and Edgar Broughton, and Judie Dyble of Fairport Convention – and so, so many more.

Galactic Zoo Dossier #10 is the “interview issue” for that very reason, and it burrows deeply in the nexus of Krakow mania where damaged guitar gods, astral folk goddesses, greasy bikers, heavy metalloid music and wild psychedelic-tinged comics meet. In fact, after virtually every interview there’s a page or two of scanned late 60s/early 70s Marvel, DC and Gold Key comics with panels of hippies, groovy miniskirt babes, far-out light shows, angry biker scum and more. It’s an absolute content overload, and I mean that in the best sense. There’s a reason why I returned to it with fresh eyes in 2024 and gave it a good twice-over, and why I’ll do so again in another five years, I’m sure.

One of the questions GZD and Krakow’s book helps to raise for me is “where should a bullshit detector begin and end?”. For instance, over my own lifetime I believe I’ve often been too quick to call “bullshit” on certain musics because they didn’t conform to what I’ve told myself is truly underground, inventive or interesting, only to backtrack and “free my mind” somewhere later down the road. The line was often drawn too conservatively, I’d say. Krakow, on the other hand, draws it far more liberally than I might, and is willing to let in nearly everything except the guy who ended up backing up Leo Sayer in the 70s, – I’ve already forgotten who this is – while loving his “early work”. Who sleeps better at night – the overly judgmental guy, or the guy who sees the good in most everyone who’s skirting the boundaries of psychedelia? Well, he’s the musician, and I’m the dilettante who had to quit his only post-college band because he couldn’t understand how to play the most simple of bass lines. Food for thought. If I approached music the way Krakow does I’d literally be drowning in records and minutia, though. It’s already tough enough out there, am I right?

Anyway, each passing year – and now especially after reading his book – I come to realize even more what a treasure Galactic Zoo Dossier has been all this time. May a new issue bless us in 2025.

As I said last time in my typically hackneyed and cliched manner, there’s really never been a fanzine quite like Galactic Zoo Dossier before or since. First, editor Steve Krakow has put forth his own singular, personal vision for what defines true rocknroll. That’s not unique to Krakow, of course, but for him It’s “psychedelic” in every guise and form, overlapping with all things trippy and raw. This can be psych-pop, folk, or hippie rock, or it can be grunting, Stoogely groin emanations. It’s that he illustrates and hand-draws his entire mag that just boggles the mind, and I’m using present tense here as I write about Winter 2001’s Galactic Zoo Dossier #5, because my understanding is that a new issue is currently in the works after a long layoff.

This issue is dedicated to Skip Spence, and why not? There’s not really a Spence thread running through it, except for a very agreeable piece (as in, I agree with it) by Scott Wilkinson called “The Myth of the San Francisco Sound”. He convincingly posits that there was very little continuity between the many celebrated and underground late 60s bands in my hometown, and therefore trying to make a big hullabaloo connecting the Dead, Fifty Foot Hose, Moby Grape, It’s a Beautiful Day and what have you is just silly. It was just a happening music scene with loads of tripped-out kids; otherwise just as absurd as talking about the “Los Angeles Sound” of the late 70s.

Plenty of things to really love in this one. Dieter Moebius and Michael Rother give the story on Harmonia, a record I now love but didn’t hear until a year or two ago (!), as well as other krauty things. There’s also a nice bit about horrific rock stars like Kenny Loggins or Rick Springfield that had their own “psychedelic” periods, which I take to mean a song or two that were vaguely hippie-ish (Galactic Zoo Dossier is unfortunately quite liberal with terms like “kickass” to the point of straining credulity). And staying on the kraut theme, there’s a jukebox jury where Krakow plays records for Michael Karoli and Damo Suzuki from Can. Karoli claims to have never heard Syd Barrett “knowingly” until that day. Come again now??

While Galactic Zoo Dossier #5 came out in 2001, it clearly was in the works for some time, as you might expect given its craft. There’s a scene report from the April 1998 Terrastock II in San Francisco that I missed by a few days, Kendra Smith, Alastair Galbraith, Mudhoney and even Major Stars’ most recent show in SF before the one I saw in 2019, which I’m currently claiming to have been one of the twenty greatest live shows I’ve ever seen. Krakow also writes about some Incredible Chicago shows he’s witnessed with Major Stars themselves, as well as Japan’s High Rise and Mainliner on the same night (yeah, I know they shared members). There are also small pieces on Chants R&B, Idle Race and Kaleidoscope, who are said to have been every bit as great as The Beatles, and I say that’s totally okay if someone wants to think that.

So much more, too. “German heavy rock” by Kit Moore; a surface-scraping interview with Dick Taylor of Pretty Things; a talk with dumb-dumb dopesmokers Electric Wizard, and a set of removable “Damaged Guitar Gods” trading cards. These encompass a wide range of freaks and string-benders, from Jandek to Davie Allan to Eddie Hazel to James Williamson to Pip Proud. Krakow seemingly knows everything and everybody, and now he’s 22 years older and wiser than that. Totally gearing up for that next issue if and when it arrives.