Giant Sand – Fanzine Hemorrhage

I’m old enough to remember when the English weekly music press (NME, Sounds and Melody Maker), in their eternal search for a trend to flog and new things to write about, latched on to the then-au courant independent crop of Americans wearing denim vests and playing jangly Byrdsian pop or vaguely psychedelic sounds, some of whom were better than others. Grasping for a label that might go beyond “Americana”, and that wasn’t the pejorative me and my friends were using (“college rock”), they somehow came up with “The New Sincerity”, which is honestly the single worst name for a musical genre save for when the English later started calling some dank strain of electronic dance music “garage”.

If ever there was a UK fanzine locked into “The New Sincerity” without actually using the term – thankfully – it’d be Bucketfull of Brains circa 1986. And that’s alright with me, more or less, because their remit was wide enough that, while it might surf through mediocrities and forgotten combos who were themselves riding an intense interest from major US labels at the time – this would have been Lone Justice, Del Fuegos and Long Ryders peak season – they also come off as intense record collectors and clubbers who are champing at the bit to champion a few truly great bands like Giant Sand or True West.

I mean, Bucketfull of Brains #18 is easily worth a few pound notes and then some for Nigel Cross’ “Sonoran Desert Spring: The Amazing Giant Sand Story (Howe Gelb interview, part 1)”. It digs deep into the band’s Tucson origins; an ill-fated move to New York City; the birth of the Band of Blacky Ranchette side project; how that first Giant Sandworms 45 was influenced by Talking Heads, and more. Gelb didn’t do a ton of interviews, as we mentioned recently, and so when you see one it’s worth digging into it you happen to dig the band as much as I do. Now I gotta go on eBay and buy #19 so I can read part two.

Editor Jon Storey has a reverential piece on someone I’ve never heard of named Nick Haeffner, who’s treated like a legend/deity for his work with Clive Pig & The Hopeful Chinamen, the Tea Set and The Remayns. He’s compared with Ayers and Barrett and Robyn Hitchcock as a master of cuckoo English songwriter psych. I also need to get on the Haeffner tip! Storey’s also flipping out that the Flamin’ Groovies are playing live and releasing records again for the first time in four years, part of a perpetual rebirth that routinely set more than one fanzine editor’s loins aflame. Fairport Convention has just reformed as well, and there’s much excitement to be had and an indication that they’d been doing so on an annual basis, though I’m pretty sure that only started the year before.

The survey of current Texas bands drops us smack-dab into New Sincerity central, with mini-features on Zeitgeist, Doctor’s Mob, Texas Instruments and the True Believers, among others. Some of that stuff wasn’t half bad! I saw Texas Instruments live and enjoyed them, and I’d have paid at least $3 to have seen Zeitgeist, too. The best part of the piece, for a pigfuck fan like myself, was the lumping in of none other than Scratch Acid in this scene report. Just Keeping Eating has just come out; it was and absolutely remains my favorite thing the band put out, and one of the best back-half-of-the-80s records, bar none. Seeing them live a few months later in San Luis Obispo, CA was a life highlight, which I recounted here.

I’ll admit that back in ‘86 I’d get a little more excited about a fanzine that had a flexidisc tucked into it, and I might pay a small premium in order to acquire it, which left me with a batch of shitty flexis that I couldn’t get rid of a few years later. Such is the collector mentality. How many people do you think found out that Bucketfull of Brains #18 contained a flexi w/ an unreleased Watermelon Men song & an acoustic version of some Peter Case thing and were like, holy shit, drop everything? And the New Sincerity thing – man, that was over before it ever really started, wasn’t it? It was utterly swamped by the Scratch Acids and Pussy Galores of the world, and even quickly within the pages of this fanzine by the Australian next wave represented by the Died Pretty, Scientists, New Christs and so forth. We’ll get to all that another time.

Popwatch fanzine was one hell of a tremendously informative compendium, and as thickly-packed a time capsule of what was going on in the post-Forced Exposure underground in a given year as anything this side of Butt Rag. It was edited by Leslie Gaffney in Somerville, MA and, as we discussed the last time I dissected Popwatch, had probably the single best American pipeline into New Zealand’s tripped-out noise and abstract pop ensembles & artists of the time. Clearly, whatever intersections there were between lo-fi pop, psych and experimental heavy guitar rock informed the Popwatch outlook and who they covered, and those happened to be some intersections that were exceptionally prevalent around the time of 1993’s Popwatch #4.

I mean, this plethora is all too much for even Peter Jefferies to handle. He’s interviewed here, and his The Last Great Challenge in a Dull World has just come out. He’s asked to provide a scene report for NZ, and he says he can only focus on Dunedin. “In the last few days I’ve seen The Puddle, Alastair Galbraith, the 3Ds, King Loser and Snapper play live….there’s so much talent down here, it gets difficult to keep up with”. Barbara Manning, who had her own connections to multiple NZ heavyweights at the time, talks about working at Reckless Records on Haight Street (I used to see her behind the counter all the time, along with filmmaker Jon Moritsugu) and about how “Byron Coley has me and Seymour Glass doing a series of Captain Beefheart songs….each single will have a painting on it”. What the hell happened to all of that? Tying it all together, she also discussed how she wants to do a couple of Peter Jefferies songs on a Siltbreeze 45 (!); oh, and she’ll also be conceiving babies in 1999.

I was truly excited to go through this one again just now and see a Giant Sand and Howe Gelb interview, a mythic rarity one hardly ever came across in the wild back then. This was right as Center of the Universe was coming out, which is a record I dig so much that I’m joyfully listening to it right now. Gaffney does a thing that I once did in my own fanzine. A band once didn’t answer my carefully-prepared questions, so I just printed the questions themselves in my fanzine anyway as a means of conveying to the reading audience why I was interested in the first place (The Fall-Outs, in my case). “Getting Howe to talk when he knows the words are gonna wind up in print somewhere has proven to be a difficult task (which might explain why there aren’t a helluva lot of known Giant Sand interviews)”. She does get him to talk, a little. I was personally so smitten by Giant Sand that year, 1993, that I actually wrote the band a letter in May 1993 offering my meager services to them as their tour manager, having just come off of a 6-week North American tour as roadie/t-shirt seller/money-holder with Claw Hammer. I penned a similar letter to Come, too. I’d never met anyone in either band. Neither wrote me back. It’s a trip to think what my life might’ve become had either or both taken me up on it, and in retrospect I’m quite glad they didn’t.

There are further interrogations with Combustible Edison and Madder Rose – bands I’ve never heard – and with Azalia Snail, a woman given to off-kilter, strange traipsing-through-the-tulips psych and who was pretty special there for a while. She is someone I’ve neglected far too often, and her new one sounds like something worth digging into further for sure. Crystallized Movements garner a big discussion, too – and it’s the only interview with them I’ve ever seen. Wayne and Kate sound like folks I should have known and/or should still get to know while we’re all still alive and totally psyched about killer records. Stewart Moxham from Young Marble Giants gets his say as well. Yeah, I know – it’s all in the same $4 issue.

The reviews squad for Popwatch #4 included Lou Barlow and Bob Fay from Sebadoh and James McNew from Yo La Tengo, along with world-class American Tim Bugbee, and with Leslie Gaffney really taking the reins on most of them. And there are dozens upon dozens upon hundreds of reviews – really, everything moderately interesting that came out that year and even a few things that weren’t. It was kind of a gas to see a review of the A Band Artex/A Lot LP on Siltbreeze, which was a Richard Youngs project and the first of that label’s releases that actually pissed me off. I even loved the Sam Esh record (and I still do). When Popwatch reviewers didn’t like something, they mostly tended to cover up for it by changing the subject rather than slamming the record – or by saying things like “Good, I’m afraid, is all it is”. That’s what counted as a supremely harsh bummer in this fanzine, a nice if unhelpful counter to the preening vitriol that informed so many of the dude-helmed fanzines of the era.