Great God Pan was not, during its finest years, a music fanzine. It had started as one, more or less, but by the time they really got rolling in the mid/late-1990s, it had morphed into the “The Journal of Californiana”, funded by ads from indie record labels who probably still thought they were promoting their wares in a music publication, and not one devoted to unpacking California and western lore in an exploratory, often tongue-in-cheek manner. Sure, Great God Pan still had record reviews at the end of each issue, but this had never been the draw, and, later, may have been a sop to keep that ad revenue flowing in.

The fanzine, if it can be called that, is among my highest-order “keepers”, especially the ones that ran from about #9-14. These were full of outstanding writing and a sense that GGP had almost fully evolved into an erudite and still down-to-earth essay journal from its garage-rock fanzine roots. The final one was basically a book about editor Mark Sundeen’s travels in the Utah/Nevada desert. During the pandemic, I read every one of the ones that I owned cover to cover, which resulted in this short piece in my own Dynamite Hemorrhage #9 fanzine.

Great God Pan #9 sees them in full evolutionary mode. The record reviews are there, as is Part One of a piece with various contemporaneous fanzine recollections of The Misfits’ early 80s visits to Southern California, along with one from Chris O’Connor talking about buying Horror Business and the Government Issue Legless Bull records at Zed in 1980. These, once again, prove just what a horrible, egotistical, misanthropic little braggart Glenn Danzig was back then. Raymond Pettibon, forever associated, mostly against his will, with punk rock music, gets a great interview feature as well in this issue, with the questions asked and associated essay written by Tom Watson, formerly of the band Slovenly. 

There’s a multi-page section at the front of Great God Pan #9 that’s full of wacky modern tales from California, almost like a “police blotter” of items from local newspapers anytime from the 1880s to the 1920s, written in a droll, I-can’t-believe-these-fucking-people tongue. This is of a piece with Sarah Taylor’s well-written “Soiled Doves: Prostitution & The Gold Rush” bit of important historical fodder, which even has photos of some San Francisco “parlor girls” of the 1850s. Excerpt:

“In May of 1850, the Alta California, a San Francisco newspaper, announced with approval the arrival of ‘fifty or sixty’ young women. ‘The bay was dotted by flotillas of young men, on the announcement of this extraordinary importation’, the paper reported. Earlier that year, two hundred girls had sailed into the bay on a ship from Sydney, Australia. Another city newspaper, The Transcript, described the eager San Franciscans rowing out into the bay to greet the women. What were they doing? ‘Trying to engage housekeepers’, the paper said, with more than a hint of irony”. 

Of special note to me is the “Our Lady of the Angels: Southern California in Print” piece. This might be where I discovered the novels of John Fante, every one of which I’ve devoured in the subsequent years (although I also remember Jon Behar buying me one – Ask the Dust, still my favorite, so good I’ve read it twice, something I almost never do with books). This piece and my engendered Fante mania also set me onto obsessions with the Bunker Hill neighborhood; the Angel’s Flight funicular; LA-set film noir of the 40s/50s; Dan Fante, John’s son; James M. Cain and virtually anything else related to the dark LA underworld of the times. These were the sort of jumping-off articles that made Great God Pan so valuable. These guys (and their contributors) weren’t just dilettantes, either – they did their own primary research; they camped in out-of-the-way locales to gather the best story, and they seemed very content to push it all onto the page without any real thought to any remuneration beyond what it might take to publish another issue. If any 90s magazine is ripe for a book-length compendium, it’s this one.