Tag: Jen Matson

Check The Record #2

~ Jay Hinman ~ Leave a comment

Over-the-top record collecting mania is so often also accompanied by a sense of shame, of failure, of waste and want and paths not taken. Not with Jen Matson and her Check The Record fanzine, the second issue of which has just come out. She’s in the hardcore record accumulation racket for good, and her fanzine’s a celebration of all the foibles and follies that this passion – shared by many of you, I’ll surmise – entails.

Check The Record #2 leads off with a piece about how her Seattle house may or may not have been in the process of being severely damaged by the weight of her record collection, and how she called in a structural engineer to assess the situation. There’s never really a thought given to purging her collection; it’s more “how do I keep my records, and ensure my top floor doesn’t collapse?”. All this piece did was stress me out about homeownership and the visible ceiling crack on our lower floor, even though at least I know it’s not caused by my embarrassingly small record collection. (However, I will wistfully point out that had I kept every or even most records I’ve purchased since the early 1980s, I’d have one hell of a collection, especially since I had so many of the landmark hardcore punk 45s at one point. Now I have memories and a whole lot of CD-Rs). 

There’s what amounts to an advice column on how to care for flexidiscs, along with a piece about the time the Television Personalities had their career to date summarized in Record Collector in 1991. As in Check The Record #1, Matson’s wide-ranging taste eventually zeroes in on an immense love for both Scottish pop and the Flying Nun/New Zealand discography. 

The piece that resonated the most with me details the many times she bought the wrong record that was put out by a band with the same name as her desired band. So, buying a single by “The Wipers” instead of Greg Sage’s Wipers, or by a shout-scream band called Camera Obscura instead of the lush Scottish pop Camera Obscura. Since she’s bought probably 20x more records in her lifetime than I have in mine, I don’t have as many stories springing from gotta-have-everything mania. There was the time at age 14 when I went record shopping in Berkeley, as recounted in this thing I wrote here:

…Being a kid, and therefore having limited allowance money to spend, I bought two 45s that first day that I’d been hearing on KFJC: “Antmusic”, by Adam and the Ants (yeah!), and X’s “White Girl”. Such was my musical cognitive dissonance at the time, though I suppose it’s not as far a leap as it might once have seemed. Trouble was, I thought when I bought “White Girl” that I was actually buying a frantic, female-fronted punk rock song I’d heard on the radio once before, which was “100% White Girl” by San Francisco punk band THE VKTMS. Expecting that song, but instead getting Exene’s whiny, nasally voice and the methodical pace of the original “White Girl”, I was thoroughly bummed as I listened to it late that night, after my grandparents had gone to bed, of course. When you only have $6 to spend, and you “waste” $3 of it on one of the best days of your young life, it can be pretty crushing. Of course, now I love X‘s song, and I wish I’d held onto the Slash Records 45. Never did end up buying the Vktms record, either….

These are the stories of our lives, my people. Like sands through the hourglass. Jen Matson gets it. If you want to check out her fanzine, issues #2 and #1 are both available here.

Check The Record #1

~ Jay Hinman ~ 1 Comment

Last time we talked about Jen Matson over here it was to call attention to some early 90s writing she did in Writer’s Block #7. She also helmed her own indiepop fanzine in the 90s called Nonstop Diatribe, and through it all to the present day doing a radio show/podcast, she’s quite clearly someone with the record collecting disease. Check The Record #1 is an analog celebration of the analog sickness, done up in such a bright, breezy manner that you’d be forgiven for thinking that collecting records had somehow been very healthy and to be encouraged all along.

I actually suspected this whole thing was going to be Scottish records only, an ode to “Edwyn” and “The Shoppies” and whatnot, but it’s a more generalist whirl around her collection and how it came to be. Like the price stickers piece is totally great: photographic evidence of non-removable price stickers on various records she’s bought, along with the story of acquiring that record and the trade-off involved when she came to realize that peeling the thing would cause more damage than it was worth. Let me say it right now, for all of us: I’ve been there. 

The Scottish piece is great too, total thrill-of-the-hunt stuff, maybe not as mind-boggling as that Fŏrdämning piece “The Dirty Year”, but I was right there with Matson as she relays being taken to the “special basement” at Edinburgh’s Avalanche Records to have her pick of whatever treasures she wanted. I still have dreams like that, and I don’t even collect records anymore. There’s also a humility-first advice column about putting information into the crowdsourced Discogs, and about the creeps who sometimes populate the site and try to one-up these free laborers. 

Her partially facetious (I think) ode to the CD long box is really the ultimate glass-half-full paean to something that I remember being hated from the first day they appeared. In the late 80s I asked my parents for Coltrane’s A Love Supreme LP for Christmas, and I got it, except that my father somehow thought that the CD long box version of it was a 12” record. Dad…!!! I recently spent an hour at his house helping him set up his “cellular phone” (totally baffled), his laptop (he couldn’t get past the login screen) and even showing him how to find the Xfinity On-Demand channel so he could pick movies to watch. He’d told me and my sister that “Comcast changed the channel on me” and we totally shared a good laugh, thinking he’d sat on the remote or something and knocked his cable service offline. Turned out Comcast actually had changed the channel, and after showing Dad how to use the buttons on the remote to browse the guide, he was fully back in the business of entertaining himself.

Anyway, after my Coltrane long box fiasco – I brought it back to Rainbow Records in San Jose to exchange it for the LP, and they didn’t have the LP – I wouldn’t actually buy my first CD for another three years, until 1992. And I’m soooo proud of what it was: Monster Magnet’s abysmal Spine of God, sold back to a used store before the week was up. I’d forgotten all about long boxes until Matson’s piece, so there you go – she just spurred me to tell a couple of uninteresting stories in the service of talking about her new fanzine. See what yarns you can spin about your own record experiences by grabbing Check The Record #1 here.

Writer’s Block #7

~ Jay Hinman ~ 1 Comment

We’re now traveling backward in time through multiple fanzines that were helmed and penned by Mike Applestein. We talked about his current Silent Command fanzine here; we then conversed about his late 90s fanzine Caught In Flux here. We’re now discussing Writer’s Block #7, which came out in the Spring of 1991 and was published from Spotswood, New Jersey along with his girlfriend Alex Kogan and an all-female cast of contributing editors, including Jen Matson. You can see from the scan that my copy was marked up 5x from its original price, having recently procured it as I did from Division Leap books & ephemera.

The Writer’s Block crew are primarily rooted in underground pop music of many flavors and colors, the more lo-fi and personal the better. There’s room for the broader, noisier underground as well, and Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 and Killdozer make lauded appearances, but in general, acts like Heavenly and Unrest and The Clean rule the roost, as well as New Zealand and the Flying Nun universe. There’s an interview with the unfortunately-named Olympia, WA duo Courtney Love – I always felt sorry for them on that count – as well as with Sue Garner, who was in the Shams and Fish & Roses, and who’d later go on to be in the highly underrated (including by me, at the time) Run On. The passion and deep knowledge that went into their interview subjects and the questions asked of them is readily apparent, and no question Writer’s Block belongs in the international pop underground museum someone’ll eventually erect. 

Barbara Manning writes a letter from San Francisco, and Applestein reviews her 2/23/91 show at the Knitting Factory in NYC, her first show in town since World of Pooh blew through a year previous as they were breaking up. Man, that year – 1991 – I must have seen Barbara Manning play a dozen or more shows in the San Francisco Bay Area alone. I was besotted with World of Pooh while they were around, and was bereft now that they were gone. Manning’s solo shows and early shows with “Barbara Manning and the Tablespoons” were a fantastic salve. Her work in the first half of the 90s stands up proudly vs. anyone’s. Great to see another magazine enthusiastically making said case in real time. 

Pavement get one of their first local shows reviewed – the 8/12/90 show at Maxwell’s – and it’s clear from Alex Kogan’s review that they were barely more coherent then than they were the time I saw them at their big San Francisco coming-out party a few months before that. I can’t find anything online to confirm exactly when the band first played in SF, but it was a big deal for several of us based on their two 45s and the Perfect Sound Forever record, and….they were horrific! Like walk-out-long-before-the-end-of-the-set horrific. Kogan blames intoxication and a who-cares attitude. The 1990s, folks. That’s how we rolled. I never saw Pavement on a stage again.

(By the way – there is reliable evidence online that suggests that Pavement might not have actually played their first San Francisco show until 1992. This would not be the first time that my misshapen memory has arranged events to fit a narrative I’d like to convey; in this case, my attendance at a 1990 show by Pavement before anyone else saw them play. Not that I care about Pavement, you know, but I do prefer being accurate to muddled and braggy. Anyone know?)

My copy of Writer’s Block #7 has stamps and a mailing label slapped on the back, and it’s addressed to Steve Connell from Puncture fanzine. I wonder how Mike Applestein feels about Connell having turned his back like this on his 1991 sweat, toil and labor.