Tag: Gerard Cosloy

Conflict #35

~ Jay Hinman ~ 2 Comments

This is as far back as I can personally go in shedding any informed light on Gerard Cosloy’s Conflict fanzine, an all-time high-water read that I’ve previously tackled in this space in order to share my valued and valuable thoughts for you on issues #36, #37 and #42. I have carressed even earlier editions of this from when he was a Boston-area teen, but not since that stack of Conflicts I borrowed as a teen myself, and that I tore through with extreme prejudice during Spring Break ‘86. At this point, Conflict #35 from March/April 1984, Cosloy’s wildly-swinging snark and bite was beginning to shed its training wheels, and his intent to take both faux and real umbrage and to provoke lesser lights of the scene is very much intact. Names are named and publicly shamed, usually for undue posturing, for sell-out moves, or merely for having inferior musical taste. I loved every moment of it, and I can’t believe I haven’t heard more (or any?) stories of Cosloy getting into the proverbial fisticuffs with DJs, musicians, zine editors and various scene dullards more often.

I mean, it’s all so giddy and dumb that it’s still funny to this day: “…Another one of last issue’s heroes, Brett Milano, has been spotted wearing a bicycle helmet while walking down the street…”, taken from a three-dot gossip column that was embedded in many of the issues called LIES**LIES**LIES**LIES. Milano, Billy Ruane and Mike Gitter. Man, if it weren’t for Conflict and Forced Exposure, I wouldn’t have ever known who these lustily mocked people were, and what their horrific scene crimes might have been. I guess Cosloy had a college radio show at this point, though he’s all too quick to mention to a letter-writer that this is not how he’s getting his records to review.

Speaking of, Billy Bragg is talked of as “England’s answer to the Violent Femmes” – ouch. The Scientists are called “Australia’s next world-beaters”. He digs The Misfits’ Earth A.D., which I also very much enjoy, as well as the March Violets’ “Snake Dance”, also surprisingly excellent. Even at the height of my back-turning on throbbing, danceable post-punk, I do remember Conflict championing the best of this stuff, such as Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, thereby keeping me tenuously connected to the few good strands that carried on into the mid/late 80s. When Cosloy confronts the Jandek Six and Six LP, he’s left to stutter in abject confusion, “Who or what is Jandek? Man or escapee?….In a less tolerant period in history, this man would be hung (or shot, or gassed, or butchered)”. Patrick Amory gets in a bunch of reviews here as well, mostly hardcore, yet he doesn’t like the Deep Wound 45 – WTF? – and concludes his piece with an admonition: “…avoid all New Jersey pop…”. 

The 1983 poll results give credence to a deeply-held belief of mine to never poll your readers. The best bands, as voted by the readers of Conflict, happen to be R.E.M, X, The Neats, Suicidal Tendencies and the Violent Femmes. The best Boston bands are The Proletariat, The Neats, Del Fuegos, F.U.s and The Lyres. Worst record of ‘83: Big Country’s “In a Big Country”. Now that definitely tracks. In a similar vein, Cosloy calls The Alarm’s Declaration “the issue’s worst record”. I once saw a different band in Upland CA, probably around 1987 or so, opening for either Soul Asylum or Dinosaur Jr., who were so awful that they’d somehow styled themselves into pretty much an Alarm tribute band – “a shot rings out on the street of Brixton” etc. My jaw hung open for 45 minutes in admiration of their absolute audacity. I forgot their name immediately. 

In addition to a film section – something I really don’t remember from my other issues of Conflict – there’s an extensive amount of live show reviews. Gerard Cosloy has undoubtedly attended an absurd amount of live rock music events in his lifetime, even merely judging by the hundreds I’ve seen him review, let alone the ones he didn’t. I’ve never lived in the same city as the guy and I’ve even seen him present at 4-5 different live events across the breadth of the USA. He talks about seeing Chris D. positioned front and center at a Neats show on 1/5/84, which helps explain to me why and how Chris’ Stone By Stone came to cover a Neats song on their I Pass For Human album in 1989. 

And after all this, the Violent Femmes themselves are sort of half-heartedly interviewed in the back after a show somewhere, with Cosloy’s heart clearly not in it. I recently got asked by my wife’s friend’s husband to accompany him to a Violent Femmes reunion show, ostensibly because he was vaguely aware that I was a fan of “alternative music” or some such. I did the dishonorable thing in turning it down by telling him through his wife that I thoroughly disliked said band, rather than going with a wash-my-hair or busy-that-night excuse – thereby alienating a truly nice guy who wanted to do me a solid with a free ticket and chance to drink a couple of beers together. Cosloy and his highly formative fanzine brethren of 1983-86 taught me to tell the unvarnished truth, consequences be damned, exceptionally well, and I haven’t forgotten it. 

Sporadic Droolings #5

~ Jay Hinman ~ Leave a comment

I remember Sporadic Droolings fanzine mostly because it served as a repository for much of Shane Williams’ writing before he wrote for Flipside. When I came to “know” Williams – a story which I wrote about in detail here – he reminded me frequently about his time served at this fanzine. The man was, indeed, “a talker”. I almost didn’t write about Sporadic Droolings #5 because, in flipping through it, I came to editor Dave Burokas’ intro to an article of his that starts out, “If there is a person who is extremely dedicated to punk rock, it is certainly Donny the Punk”. Yet for better or worse, we plow onward.

Sporadic Droolings #5 came out in 1986. Burokas was based in Kearney, NJ, and was a devotee of tiny type and of cramming a ton of information into small spaces. He apologizes for not answering all his letters because “he’s going to college full-time”, and good for him. I was doing the same in the year of our lord 1986. You have to wade through some mire to find the good stuff here, such as a “save the punk scene” editorial written at a sub-kindergarten level by one Bill McLaughlin, but in general, there’s good materials to be found. 

Shane Williams, in prison at this time, interviews shitty punk band 76% Uncertain and then redeems himself by interviewing Laura and Stacey from Austin’s Rabid Cat Records, who helped bring the world Scratch Acid, a band who that year were in the process of becoming one of my favorite things on the planet. He then writes a ham-handed but not altogether wrong editorial inveighing against political correctness of the MRR variety. I get the sense that Shane, having let’s say some time on his hands, was allowed by Burokas to just do his thing and send letters full of questions to various bands; they’d then take the answers back, type up an interview, and shove it into Sporadic Droolings. Shane also does this for Philadelphia’s Ruin and for Orange County, CA’s Pontiac Brothers. 

Regarding the latter, it’s unfortunately a lot more Shane than actual answers from the band. Guitarist Ward Dotson is asked about his time in the Gun Club, and says, ‘I have been out of the band for over three years, and I’m doing my best to try and forget about the whole mess”. I have a real soft spot for these guys, the Pontiac Brothers, not just because my pal Jon W was in the band for a bit, but for their devotion to tiny clubs and bars in Orange County and for actually being the rare sort of bar rock band that I can envision seeing three sheets to the wind in a cramped bar and totally loving it. Here, here’s why. Alas, I missed them and never was allowed the experience.

Burokas catches Gerard Cosloy as Homestead Records has really hit its stride, with Sonic Youth having just announced they’re leaving for SST but with the label otherwise hitting big with Big Black, Squirrel Bait, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds and so forth. Apparently, as was his wont, Cosloy had “tangled” with Sporadic Droolings and/or Burokas in the pages of his Conflict fanzine recently, and this interview was meant to be an amends-maker. In the intro, Burokas says, “He started out with two strikes, Gerard did. First, he was late for the interview. Second and worst of all, he had a Mets duffle bag with him. But he managed to escape the strikeout”. The interview actually fills in quite a few gaps in my personal understanding of Cosloy’s rise through, and eventual all-seeing lordship over, the US rock music underground.

Kudos as well to Burokas for his Honeymoon Killers interview – no one was writing about this NYC band at the time, and they sound like inspired & deranged people you’d want to hang out with. There’s a piece on the Celibate Rifles and much excitement about Birdman-inspired Aussie garage punk that was well-distributed at the time, and that was about to start clogging up my personal record collection with Psychotic Turnbuckles, Seminal Rats, Eastern Dark and Hard-Ons vinyl. In the live reviews section, I had to laugh at the entry on Dinosaur and Squirrel Bait at Maxwell’s in Hoboken NY on 1/9/86. Squirrel Bait were TOO LOUD for Dave, and I’m thinking, oh man if that was hurting his eardwums, what’s he going to think about….and then he predictably complains that Dinosaur were “even louder!!”. I heard all this stuff about how punishingly loud Dinosaur were for a good 18 months before I finally saw them, and when they finally came to the west coast, not only did my ears survive but they were perhaps the biggest live-music disappointment in my young life up to that point. Pussy Galore, on the other hand – oh dear. I’m still saying “whaaaat?” to my wife on their account. 

I just couldn’t read the Donny the Punk interview, I just couldn’t. But there’s a nice full-page ad for the Ed Gein’s Car LP on the back cover. I’ll keep Sporadic Droolings #5 around for sure.

Conflict #36

~ Jay Hinman ~ 4 Comments

I’ve discussed Conflict #37 and Conflict #42 on this site previously; the former was (obviously) the issue of Gerard Cosloy’s fanzine that followed the one we’re discussing today, yet it took 18 months after Conflict #36 to actually see publication, by which point Cosloy had taken the entire year of 1985 off from publishing a fanzine, and had moved from Boston to New York City. So this one, Conflict #36 from August/September 1984 was the last of the Boston issues, and was definitely included in that whopping batch of Conflicts and Matters that Jackie Ockene let me borrow over spring break 1986, and which I count as a “germinal” event in my overall musical appreciation development, such that it was. 

Conflict #36 begins with something truly incongruous and unusual: what appears to be a heartfelt apology to folks like Mike Gitter and Billy Ruane and Al Quint whom he’d spent much mirth and merrimaking mocking in previous issues, the ones Jackie let me borrow. Mostly these folks were Boston-area publishers who wrote about punk & hardcore, and wrote about it poorly, as I gathered. Whatever happened in issue #35, I don’t know, but there are multiple letters printed in this one calling Cosloy out for being an asshole/jerk/too critical etc. It either had finally hit home, or this young man was being incredibly facetious in his apology; in any case, I have most issues of Conflict after this one, and sensitive and magnanimous they are most certainly not. So it didn’t hold for long – not even past page one in this one, to be honest.

What’s different about this issue from the ones that followed, aside from centering on Boston scene jibber-jabber and mock controversies rather than NYC, is its general girth. There are an obscene amount of reviews in here, everything under the 1984 sun that lived at the underground crossroads of hardcore, goth, college rock and nascent pigfuck. That could be X or R.E.M, Siouxsie and the Banshees or New Order, or Fang and the Sluglords and Flipper and Gang Green. Or Circle X or Sonic Youth or Live Skull. Interesting times, my friends. 

Patrick Amory, whom we last visited in these pages when we talked about his Too Fun Too Huge #2 fanzine, gets his own jumbo section to wax about records and live shows he’s seen around Boston. He puts out a contrasting (to Gerard’s) view of live 1984 Meat Puppets, calling them “heavy metal” and not worthy of the insane underground hype then-circulating around the Meat Puppets II record (one of my all-timers, for what it’s worth). Frankly, once I’d see them live for the first time two years later, that’s what they were – a shitty 70s rock band. Since I missed their berzerk, blitzoid hardcore days, I kinda feel like I missed their live genius entirely, because after I saw them in 1986, they were even worse!

Now Amory also reviews SSD’s How We Rock, which he rightly calls the worst album title of all time, yet he still thinks the whole thing is “powerful”, “supertight” and “awesome”. I wonder if he still listens to it. (Cosloy also reviews it, also digs it). I would have loved to see SS Decontrol live in 1981-82, but I personally believe “Springa” was hands-down one of the five worst vocalists in hardcore punk history. I really, really hope Al Barile, Choke and the Boston Crew don’t read this. Speaking of Boston ‘core, Forced Exposure’s Jimmy Johnson is a kid that has his say in Conflict #36, and gets a big section of reviews that mirror the interests of his own mag at the time – also HC, but also bizarro UK goth and noise. Cosloy’s excited about a ton of stuff in this one, with special lionizations of the latest records from Saccharine Trust and Big Black.

That’s it – no interviews, just dozens upon dozens of short reviews, laced liberally with scene reports, gossip and invective. That’s precisely what I needed when I read this in 1986, and Conflict from that point forward became one of the only two 100% totally essential fanzines for me in the late 80s, right alongside Forced Exposure.

Conflict #42

~ Jay Hinman ~ 2 Comments

In recent weeks I’ve, uh, “opened up” about just what my precise musical obsessions were during the years 1986-89, and unsurprisingly – and I’m not ashamed of most of ‘em – they were a lot like those of many others. If it was on Touch & Go, Homestead, Amphetamine Reptile or SST, it got my attention. If it was abrasive, rocking and loud, it got my attention. My “favorite contempo band” during this era ranged from the Lazy Cowgirls to Mudhoney, I think, with pit stops for Big Black, Naked Raygun, Scratch Acid, Soul Asylum, Urge Overkill and the Laughing Hyenas along the way. There was some deeper digging going on for sure, and I spent far more time with music from the first half of the 80s than the second half I was living in. Yet as we came out of the 1980s, I think my very “favorite current band” on 1/1/90 was Death of Samantha. My “all-time favorite bands” were The Flesh Eaters, The Velvet Underground and The Fall. I still had much to discover, and aside from the Gibson Bros, The Clean, World of Pooh & a few pop bands, I was very decidedly a hard/loud/noise-centered impressionable young twentysomething as the decade closed.

After all that, and with 33+ years of hindsight, the band I listen to the most now from those days is – that’s right, you totally nailed it: Pussy Galore. I was into them from the very first time I spied Laurel Waco’s Groovy Hate Fuck EP and convinced her to let me borrow it, strategically hiding the back cover with its large-lettered PUSSY-JEW-CUNT-DIE-MEAT-KILL-ASSHOLE with my arm as I shepherded it back to my Isla Vista, CA dorm room. I soon found the Feel Good About Your Body 7”EP at Zed Records in Long Beach, and then the real topper was that 1986 Pussy Gold 5000 EP, where they instantly became one of the tip-top bands of the era, and the one I revere the most now. 

I saw them on 10/27/88 at Raji’s in Los Angeles, a show so ear-splittingly loud that I scooted to the very back of the room, where Eugene, the then-cook at Raji’s and the bald hero who kicks off The Decline of Western Civilization (“That’s stupid, punk rock, I don’t know, I just think of it as rocknroll”), was peeking out of his kitchen cubbyhole at the chaos up on stage. I drove home to Isla Vista fearing permanent ear damage, and could barely hear my friends talking in the car. Those were, as they say, “good times”. 

This issue of Gerard Cosloy’s Conflict, #42, was probably where I first heard the members of Pussy Galore “speak”. It took me probably until this interview to understand that it was their underlying snotty 60s garage punk riffs & attitude, caked in a total wall of noise, that was what endeared me to them the most. When I found out down the road that folks like Tim Warren and Larry Hardy were just as smitten as I was with the band, well, it all made sense. And look, I’ve taken this long to even really get to talking about this issue of the fanzine – I told you when I started this that Fanzine Hemorrhage would be a stream-of-consciousness, mostly unedited voyage into the unknown, and this time I’m keeping my promise.

So let’s talk about Conflict #42. This is about as seminally representative of Cosloy’s mid/late-80s stance and vibe as any of his issues were. Around this time, names like “Jim Testa”, “Mike Gitter”, “Donny the Punk” and “Jack Rabid” were only known to me as mocked men in the pages of Conflict, and though my knowledge of their crimes was therefore heavily one-sided, I ate it all up nonetheless and got a ton of laffs out of Cosloy’s sarcastic eviscerations. (We’d later get copies of Gitter’s XXX fanzine on the west coast and that certainly helped to reinforce things). It didn’t hurt that Cosloy’s sense of humor fell in many of the same bizarro places mine did at the time. This issue has much talk about an “oi revival”, so much so that it is broached to a bewildered Pussy Galore and comes up in at least ten different reviews. He asks the band, “If both The Exploited and The Partisans were drowning and you could only save one of them, which would you save?”, which is followed by “(dead silence)”. (I will state for the record, however, that The Exploited’s “Dead Cities” and The Partisans’ “Police Story” are the two finest songs of the oi/UK82 era). 

Cosloy was running Homestead Records at this point, or at least selecting which bands to sign, and 1985/86 saw his releases of leading scene indicators from Sonic Youth, Dinosaur, Big Black, Volcano Suns, Death of Samantha, Green River and many others. So the guy came with some cred, shall we say, all the more enhanced by an ability to pick gems from the underground to spotlight in Conflict that I’d then go out and buy, or at least play on my college radio show. My re-read of Conflict #42 surprised me as to just how many English (non-oi) bands he was digging into, from Eyeless in Gaza to The Wedding Present to The Weather Prophets to The Mighty Lemon Drops, about the latter of whom he says, “If this band ever comes to NYC, they will surely feel the wrath of skin violence, razors in the night, et al.”

I’ll also give the man some props for where he lived and published in 1986: 62 Avenue C #3 in Manhattan. I visited New York in 1991 during the crack epidemic and, as a soft San Franciscan, felt a little tense walking anywhere east of Avenue A – so kudos for some real urban living. I’ll leave you with Cosloy’s round-up of current top fanzines of the day to help you parse out the then-cut of his jib.