Green on Red – Fanzine Hemorrhage

Around 1985-87, the tabloid fanzine The Bob was pretty ubiquitous on the Tower Records magazine racks and at the indie record stores I used to frequent in California. While their all-encompassing approach to “college rock” certainly covered bands I cared about – i.e. The Bob #26’s bits on The Minutemen and D. Boon’s passing and Pat Thomas’ short overview of Opal – I only bought it every now and again, given the lack of any real cultivated, inspirational, BS-detecting “taste” that I might glom onto. The temperament appeared to have been: indie music is great, listen to all of it, but maybe not if it’s too aggressive or too challenging. Fair enough?

That’s at least what I’ve gathered again in 2025 revisiting this March-April 1986 issue. The Fleshtones, Scruffy The Cat and even The Bangles’ Different Light are taken seriously, as are the longest and most obscure stretches of the jangly American underground tail. As long as someone sent in some vinyl to be reviewed – especially if it’s Engima Records or in any way R.E.M.– or paisley underground-affiliated – it’s gonna get in here. Most of the time it’s going to have one of those reviews that hems & haws and picks at it a bit, then weirdly concludes, “you need to hear this” or “you need to buy this”. As someone who emphatically relied upon fanzines to tell me what was truly worth buying at the time, this was not an approach that built credibility, nor gave me any level of confidence in The Bob’s discernment.

I always associated The Bob with Fred Mills. His byline was everywhere in virtually every issue, doing many of the interviews and writing a huge chunk of the reviews. Fred was sort of the saving grace, in my opinion. While he was (at times) the foremost purveyor of the review style I’ve just decried, he also was an inveterate music fiend who clearly “collected records” (as did I at this time, age 18), and was absurdly, slavishly devoted to bands, live gigs and uncovering undiscovered gems. In 1993 when I was the “roadie” for the band Claw Hammer, Fred somehow proactively found me on the show floor at Hotel Congress in Tucson, AZ (we’d never met nor corresponded), and we proceeded to banter about all manner of musical ephemera, helping to solidify the positive-leaning sentiments I’d accumulated to date. We’ve not communicated since.

It’s really Mills, Pat Thomas and a parade of lesser lights in The Bob #26. Mills gets the Green on Red deep dive, and upon re-reading it now, I reckon I learned a bit more about where this band’s head was at during that first wave of indie/Americana bands jumping unsuccessfully to major labels. (The best writing about that disappointing blip in time, I think, is in the second of the two John Doe/Tom DeSavia LA punk books). Thomas rightly praises the 28th Day record and seems to imply they were from Los Angeles – they were not. Mills has an entire column on Australian bands; there was a ton of curiosity around this time about The Scientists, Triffids, Decline of the Reptiles and others, whose records were just barely making it to the USA. I’m pretty sure my own Aussie mania of the time was at least piqued by Mills’ columns – so perhaps there was some residual tastemaking going on despite me saying in self-aggrandizing hindsight that there wasn’t.

There are various write-ups of similar 60s psych/garage revival groups like The Mod Fun, Chesterfield Kings, Plan 9, Plasticland et al. I was just at Amoeba Music in San Francisco on Friday; some dude had sold crateloads of this stuff on vinyl – your Miracle Workers, Yard Traumas and what have you, including the aforementioned Aussie stuff – to the store a few months back. While it was fun to look at when it came in, I noticed this week that most of it was now “priced to move” in the reduced/clearance portion of the used LPs. Even at $5.99 a pop, I couldn’t find anything worth slotting into the collection. Not even the Psychotic Turnbuckles, but I at least held that in my hands for five minutes.

1984-1986 remains a puzzling time for me in the broader tale of what underground rock music was during the decade, but a fanzine like The Bob, for better or for worse, goes a long way toward illuminating the quote-unquote lived experience among certain sectors at the time. A glut of vinyl, an aesthetic distaste for punk and what it wrought, a surging “psych” and lite-garage sensibility, and an attempt to guiltlessly straddle the underground and overground. That’s what I remember from The Bob and similar publications like Jet Lag, which is probably why I ultimately found my late-teenage salvation in Forced Exposure, Conflict and Flesh and Bones instead.

Dave Sprague was the editor, publisher and for the most part, lone writer for Sense of Purpose #1. He published it from his apartment in New York City in December 1983, and I admire how dogmatically locked-in he was on only the defined contours of the rock music underground he cared about, rather than taking the larger view. I’m reasonably certain that Sprague may have been unaware of and/or unable to access much of it – you have to remember, a lot of fanzine folk got themselves deeply clued-in about far-flung independent music in one of two ways: by being involved in college radio, where new records were everywhere, or by receiving loads of free promos from all corners of the globe after publishing a first issue. This being the first issue of Sense of Purpose and therefore not yet reliant on a promo gravy train, I see Sprague trending a bit toward what was on alternative radio and in middlebrow-ish publications like Trouser Press at the time.

This includes a bunch of what we then called “imports” from the UK, records available almost completely in sections labeled as such at record stores – Alien Sex Fiend, The Cure, The Smiths and whatnot. He’s also big into LA’s Americana and quote-unquote paisley underground bands, as we shall discuss, and as relayed when we talked about his second issue of Sense of Purpose here. Sprague’s pedantic opening editorial bemoans the synth-pop, dress-up “Rock of the 80s”, finding too-easy targets in the Stray Cats and Billy Idol and positioning his fanzine as standing “against” them. I might have written something similar in 1983, so all is well. I do like and puzzle a bit how this is immediately juxtaposed with a paean to the Sisters of Mercy, whom I also kind of enjoyed myself during the days I rabidly trolled the imports section; I was also really big on Red Lorry Yellow Lorry and Xmal Deutschland my senior year of high school.

He gets a big talk in with the Dream Syndicate, who’ve recently lost Kendra Smith on bass but still retain Karl Precoda on guitar. The Medicine Show wasn’t out yet, but Steve Wynn is already warning people about how desperately he wants to be popular. He says the band’s way more influenced by Bryan Adams than by Lou Reed at this point, and claims “one band we all think is inspirational/amazing/great on every level is Steely Dan”. Regarding Kendra’s departure earlier that year, Wynn says “When Kendra left, it changed the band a lot – essentially we broke up and reformed, and now a lot of the old stuff sounds dated to me”. Fair enough, I suppose. I wouldn’t see Dream Syndicate live until 1986, with Paul Cutler on guitar, but they played the Days of Wine and Roses material beautifully. I just couldn’t stand Wynn, and everything he said on the mic was pompous, annoying and self-mythologizing. I can see in this interview that this is just where he was at for a few years; he thankfully mellowed with age, as one does.

The talk with Green on Red is good as well, albeit with much ado made about Dan Stuart’s legendary alcohol intake. There’s a Cleveland fixation in this issue and in its follow-up that makes me wonder if that’s maybe where Sprague was from originally. He touts a Cle band called The Wombats, and a fellow writer named Larry Smiley delves deeply into Brian Sands. Why not Evie Sands? Bobby Sands? Cleveland, that’s why. And speaking of Cleveland, Sprague drags up something I feel like I once knew, but then completely forgot – that post-Kid Congo Cramps guitarist “Ike Knox” was actually Mike Metoff from The Pagans! Sprague also goes unnecessarily overboard on The Cramps’ new Smell of Female EP, as many of us did at the time, because it was the first new Cramps vinyl in a long while, and despite it being live and mediocre, was felt to be much-needed. I’m sure I haven’t listened to it in over thirty years.