You can see that my 48-year-old copy of this one has what we in the business call a bit of “toning”. Nothing to fret about.

Street Life #2 is another early punk/”street rock” Lisa Fancher fanzine, much like this one, but quite a bit earlier, maybe even a full year earlier. Punk rock’s evolution tracked like dog years at this point, where 1 month was equal to 7 months of new releases, groundbreaking shows, instant haircuts, musical osmosis and general scene chicanery. 1977’s Street Life #2 weighs in with a pretty impressive lineup of contributors, with Bob Morris as the actual editor; Fancher as the assistant editor and chief writer; and Jenny Stern aka the soon-to-be-known-as Jenny Lens as staff photographer. And even a letter to the editor from our hero Eddie Flowers in Alabama right off the bat, too. 

You know, they’re actually calling that new sound of 1976-77 Street Rock in some places, which is marginally better than City Rock, I suppose. Seems to me the key band making waves in Street Life #2, aside from The Ramones, of course, are The Quick. The Quick! Like in the Screamers interview by Fancher with photos by Stern: “They came to LA hoping to make a splash when the entire scene consists of the Quick and….umm….the Quick”. Yet what I most enjoy about this early chat with Tomata and Tommy Gear is how it ends with “Be watching for a Screamers EP coming out on Street Life Records!”. We all know how well that went – about as well as Black Flag’s debut LP on Upsetter. (For the back story on the latter, I’ll just drop an amazing advertisement from No Mag at the bottom of this post; and The Screamers infamously never released a shred of music in their lifetime, always holding out for the better deal that never came). 

For more inexplicable things that actually did happen, Bob’s “Beat of The Street” column talks about Kim Fowley producing a Helen Reddy record. Sally Dricks does a long hero-worshippy review of Bowie’s Low, and teenager Fancher, who also did layout for Street Life #2, throws in a large-font “best yet – LF” just to ensure her voice is also heard on the matter. There’s an entire column talking about the debauchery at a Ramones after-party at the “Screamers house” in Hollywood, and then another column flipping out over The Saints’ I’m Stranded. This is accompanied by a phenomenal Stern photo of The Ramones from that 1977 gig with Blondie at the Whiskey – this one. Someone make me a poster of that thing!

Sex Pistols land on the cover because the talk of the nascent punk world was revolving around the “bad words” they said on England’s Bill Grundy TV show in 1976. Given that these are fanzine people, there’s also a long Greg Shaw interview that allows him to expound upon his theories of musical evolution, the winds of change heralded by punk, the importance of fanzines, Peter Frampton and more. And then the big surprise as I’m going through it is how it all comes to a jarring halt with about 8 pages left to go, and morphs into record collector set sales and auction listings. This is something I might have expected from Goldmine, but not from an urgent fanzine from the streets.