Johnny Thunders – Fanzine Hemorrhage

A real nice fella named Brian wrote to us here at Fanzine Hemorrhage not long ago and said he was doing some summer cleaning, and would we like a copy of Damage fanzine that he had laying around. We sure would! Lo and behold in the mail, Brian’s kindly-proffered package included no Damage, but rather a gratis copy of Anorexic Teenage Sex Gods #7 from 1991. I hadn’t been familiar with this Cambridge, MA fanzine, but it turns out that on their editorial masthead, they stated that they were, in fact, “The Last Rock N Roll Zine”. How about that?

Editor Gag Warlock and his co-editor “Frank” were very much of the drunk-n-loose glam/slam/rocknroll persuasion, the sorts of folks who worship Johnny Thunders and like it LOUD, sloppy and stupid. I knew these people well – I mean, not Gag and Frank, but this alcoholic jean-jacket & bandanas trash-glam-punk crew. I wrote a thing in the Where The Wild Gigs Were book some years back all about The Chatterbox, a San Francisco club for whom this lifestyle was their entire brand. And I supported it! I had so much fun with my fake ID at The Chatterbox, a melting pot of speed metal heshers, gender norm-challenging NY Dolls freaks, and loads of drunk women who yelled too much.

What do you know, Johnny Thunders has just passed away as issue #7 is getting pulled together, so there’s lots to talk about. The first piece is coverage of a Memorial/Benefit show on June 19th, 1991 just two months after his death. Then a an actual memorial/tribute from one of the Anorexic Teenage Sex Gods writers to St. Johnny, with a dissected top ten of the man’s greatest moments. Some deep cuts, too – “Short Lives” is #1 – I guess it’s a song that took the lead on this 45. You and I might have picked something else, I suppose, but let’s remember that it wasn’t our fanzine.

This is followed by two more Thunders tributes, one by “DJ Philly Phil” and the other by Kris Guidio. And then all this sadness makes way for some anger. Gag Warlock is pissed about “ultra-glam-fag-metal” types here in 1991 who are dressing up in leggings and who have followed in the wake of the success of Guns & Roses. Wait, were we still complaining about this in 1991? Come on. To me, that world was so Los Angeles 1987, yet for Gag, he’s upset how after G&R, “every doctor’s kid in the country became a street glam cowboy with a bottle of bleach and a rose tattoo, fade-to-bottle of JD and a full sleeve-job (a la Nikki Sixx). Leopard skin pillbox hats, cowboy ballads a la Roy Rogers or Bon Jovi or something; tight plastic Lip Service trousers and a totally whole lot of hairspray”. You know, I only follow about half of what he’s saying there, but I kinda feel like that Sunset Blvd ‘87-’88 look was mostly buried by then. But things can really, really stick in your craw sometimes, can’t they?

When they move on to reviews, they’re very much of a piece with each other: Jeff Dahl Group (lots of Dahl in this thing), Celebrity Skin (some excellent Don Bolles dirt about what an ass he was when he stayed at the writer’s house), Cadillac Tramps, and even some early 3-song EP by Pearl Jam that the writer not unsurprisingly sees as a Green River outgrowth, rather than the Monsters of Rock they’d become later that year (“Album will be out when you read this so buy it”). They also love The Gargoyles, who were unquestionably one of the Bottom Five worst bands I ever saw in my life. I said so in an early issue of my Superdope fanzine around this same time and lemme tell ya, the band didn’t like it!

Really, if you have the look, these guys at Anorexic Teenage Sex Gods are more than forgiving. There is, to wit, love for scarfcore from Nikki Sudden as well as for leather, cigarette and fog machine rock from Sisters of Mercy. But there’s a line that just can’t be crossed, perhaps that same line that got Gag Warlock so worked up about all the Guns & Roses follow-ons, so this issue has a couple of nice vitriolic takedowns of bands I’ve never heard of called The Glamour Punks and the Stars From Mars. Have to admit those are great band names, considering. Yet for all this discernment, our editors are not above calling someone a “Jewboy”. Even in 1991 we didn’t say that, folks. Toward the end there’s a Touch Me Hooker interview and some Alice Cooper hype, but at that point I decided to pull out my Torah scrolls and put on a Marissa Nadler record to quietly recover from all the glam/slam/trash-rocknroll-in-your-fuckin-face action going down here.

Due to the beneficence of Chris Seventeen, the 1980s editor and publisher of the UK’s What a Nice Way To Turn Seventeen fanzine, I’m now in the possession of several additional copies that span beyond my original issue #6 that I talked about here. Many of these came with records included, including 1984’s What a Nice Way To Turn Seventeen #2, which has a 4-track EP that included musicians with whom I’m familiar, like Nikki Sudden and The Jazz Butcher, as well as those with whom I am not, like The Rag Dolls and The Sad-Go-Round. In any case my copy doesn’t have a record, and I’m going to be okay with that.

Now let’s get the big concern out of the way first. People, usually people even older than myself as if that’s possible, have at times expressed their concern about the font size of my own Dynamite Hemorrhage fanzine, yet my 9-point font is practically the top row of the eye chart when compared with this one. Epic Soundtracks – yes, that Epic Soundtracks, not the other one you went to high school with – writes a piece about discovering Brian Wilson that I’m dying to read, but it’s literally written in one or two point font, so small that it blurs on the page and is nearly an undifferentiated series of dots and inkblots. In the light on a nice day, it’s possible to find some coherence to it, but in evening light you can totally forget about it.

Andrew Bean contributes a piece on Captain Beefheart that I can somewhat read, though a magnifying glass helps – one of those plastic ones with a flat bottom that you can glide across a page that grandpas like me who complain about fanzine font sizes like to use. It posits that “When Trout Mask Replica appeared, cloaked in a sleeve which depicted a guy in a silly hat and a fish mask waving from the front, and on the back, a bunch of weird-looking guys who looked like refugees from the Alpha Centauri Home For The Criminally Insane creeping around in bushes, wearing dresses and waving table lamps around, the record-buying public were not impressed.” Why the hell not??

You want to know about the other things that make the 16-page What a Nice Way to Turn Seventeen #2 fanzine such a gem? I’ll tell you. There’s a record-fiends-only guide to collecting the Texas 60s punk label Eva Records by Chris Seventeen, as well as a celebration of Creation Records, a brand new label at this point (!). David J from Bauhaus rants with extreme passion about the John Cale show he saw in London in January 1983. And there’s an annotated Johnny Thunders discography. I certainly missed many of the greats, but I did see this fanzine’s cover star Thunders play live on January 7th, 1987 at a pool hall called The Golden Eagle in Santa Barbara, CA – the aural evidence of said performance is right here. I know I was mostly there because The Lazy Cowgirls opened, but still. Johnny Thunders, right?

What a Nice Way to Turn Seventeen #2 actually reminds me of another fantastic fanzine that came out with a 7” single as part of the package – Drunken Fish #1. Both were “wrap-arounds” with the record inside and both take an omnivorous collector freak’s eye toward their scenes of choice. In this case, it’s the current UK underground, American offbeat rock geniuses and scarf rock through the ages. I’d love to see a book of this stuff someday if they’d agree to pump up the font size 5x at a minimum.