Tag: kevin kraynick

Damp #4

~ Jay Hinman ~ 3 Comments

In my previous write-ups of Kevin Kraynick’s Damp #2 and Damp #3, and even though I talked about them in reverse order, I still noted the growth, wisdom and “maturity” from one issue to the next. I mean, maturity in a sense, right? We are talking about early twentysomethings publishing indie rock fanzines from their apartments. Yet by Winter 1989, when Damp #4 came out, Kraynick was a wizened professional. He’s still using that “dos command line” font every now & again, but now it’s being varied with a ‘lil Helvetica and some sort of proto-Arial font that I can’t place. Like I said, totally pro.

This was being assembled and composed from somewhere called So. Willington, CT, and surprisingly gets right to the meat of the matter with an early anti-George Bush essay by Michael “Spike” Anton. The back cover even has a Bush drawing in which one of his eyes has a holy cross in it and the other has a swastika. Brutal, brutal burn. Remember when Bush and, I don’t know, Dan Quayle – were the most evil Republicans you could think of? Wouldn’t you like to have those days back again in 2025? Politics does pop up from time to time in Damp #4, but really more as a hobby than as MRR-style rants, and actually, so does the National Football League (we call it the NFL). I thought fanzine dorks only admitted to liking baseball??

There’s a lot to unwind here, but my re-read of this one for the first time since maybe the early 2000s had me immediately heading straight to the Gibson Bros interview, which took place in 1988, just after the Homestead reissue of their Jay’s-top-50-records-of-all-time debut Big Pine Boogie. I like how guitarist/hero Don Howland tries to downplay that he was ever in Great Plains; Cut editor Steve Erickson’s name is repeatedly taken in vain, and a pledge is made by the band to never, ever play Boston again. Kraynick rather sweetly butters up his Columbus, OH-residing subjects with “Columbus seems like it would be a great town to live in. The bands are certainly top notch coming out of there.” (Much chuckling from DON and JEFF). Don: “On what would you base that kind of an assumption on, Kevin?”. Later Howland says “There’s probably forty people who do cool stuff here and they’re all sick of each other”. 

Another interview is with the rock group “M.O.T.O.“. I’m not sure how it happened, but I went 35+ years without ever once hearing this band – perhaps willfully, based on descriptions I’d read – until I saw them at Gonerfest 2024 in Memphis last year. Well, I saw four or five songs anyway, and then it was time to go find some water or something. Mission accomplished. Mark Lo both gets his own column on cassettes and gets to do the Rhys Chatham interview. I like how it’s not the standard “fanzine Q&A”, like the pedestrian way I’ve always done them, but an actual article by Lo, with quotes and answers from Chatham interspersed as & when they are needed and/or required – the way a journalist does it. 

There was a band in here I’d never heard of – the Bedspring Reptiles – and then I come to find they’re actually the Minneapolis band the Baby Astronauts, whom I was really into in the late 80s. They’ve just changed their name. Kevin drops a Department Store Santas reference (!) within his intro. A debut Bedspring Reptiles LP has been recorded and is being readied for release (note: it wasn’t). Obviously, you can tell from the cover that Harvey Pekar, Fred Frith and Vomit Launch are interviewed as well. Only one of these artists mentions and praises The Whitefronts. 

I guess I can take or leave the mocking porno reviews, which are something Forced Exposure was already doing, but this is nicely offset by a much-needed glossary of Funkadelic slang and its translation (Thumpasaurus People = “foot-stomping hand clap Funkateers”), which I’ve now pinned to the microwave in case the Mothership disgorges the Brides of Funkenstein at my door. The review section, called “Big Ass Rock on Turd Mountain”, is full of ‘88/’89s brightest and its lesser lights. Kraynick provides his biggest props (and a nice little preemptive “scolding” to indie rock fans) for Last Exit. Unfortunately his next-biggest are for Prince, who is perhaps my least favorite mainstream recording artist of all time. And some of this is so dumb it’s great: for Pussy Galore’s Sugarshit Sharp, he says “Well, big fat boogies, if it ain’t another clatter clatter ding dong from the Boopsie Boys”. I suppose that’s one way to put it, isn’t it?

My copy even has a stuffed insert with 20 handwritten, one-sentence, mostly dismissive “late-arriving” record reviews, including the Nirvana and Mudhoney debuts. Damp #5 and #6 are even better than all of this nonsense, and we haven’t even covered those yet. Can you hang with me another two years, folks?

Damp #2

~ Jay Hinman ~ 2 Comments

In 1987, Damp editor Kevin Kraynick openly worried in the pages of this issue that he’d be lumped in with fanzine editors “who are the kind of guys who always got picked last for kickball games in gym class”. I mean, sure, but if the shoe fits….right? So in meager compensation, there’s some aggro finger-pointing and posturing in places where there oughtn’t be any – “whatta dick”; “you bet your globular ass”; that sort of thing. Certainly, Damp grew up a ton in subsequent issues – including #3 that we discussed here – but was still taking some young man’s cues from Conflict without quite having the chops to approximate its humorous vitriol. 

That said, I bought Damp #2 then and I’d have happily owned it now for 37 years had it not been “disappeared” in the Great Starving Students Lost Fanzine Box. Only recently was I able to procure a copy again, perhaps even my own original for all I know. Slight concerns aside, it was an unalloyed pleasure to read cover to cover last night. There is an interview with New England locals Expando Brain, one of my very favorite super-far-underground rock bands of the mid/late 80s. Kraynick also pulls together a well-researched Snakefinger interview that’ll always be my primary source material should I ever need to do any serious Snakefinger research, such as to write a paper. There are also interviews with acts that only a young man might pretend to like – Big Dipper and Zoogz Rift –  but then there’s also the only piece I’ve ever seen on The Longshoreman, a long-running San Francisco band featuring Judy and Carol from Pink Section and the Inflatable Boy Clams. Kraynick was clearly looking a bit afield from the alterna front-runners of the day, your Soul Asylums and Big Blacks and whatnot. 

Sometimes the vituperation is pretty funny in his reviews, too, as in this fine intro to a Dash Rip Rock review: “Front cover shows the band burning guitars in the fireplace and let’s hope those are the only ones they’ve got”. As it turns out, even Kraynick knows that the miniscule 4-point font for record reviews that he’s using is utterly comic, and christens the whole section “The World’s Tiniest Record Reviews”. This was the era of Squirrel Bait, Butthole Surfers, Dinosaur and Halo of Flies worship, a consensus that emerged in the East Coast fanzines I read all the way across the country in Santa Barbara, and my taste was molded accordingly. For some reason David Ciaffardini is a great target of derision, which I kind of understand if you were comparing his Sound Choice magazine with, say, Forced Exposure, but he was an exceptionally friendly dude whom I knew personally, a true mensch from the word go, and someone whom I recently re-established contact with after 35 years. 

The snarky sub-underground fanzines all had to have their “out crowd” for sure, and there was a consensus pile-on against the same targets, the supposed “guys who always got picked last for kickball games in gym class”. Clowns like Tesco Vee and Lydia Lunch got a free pass for some reason, probably for the same reason confident extroverts always have and always do. If you can convincingly act the part, it doesn’t matter how brainless your material actually is; if you cower and show weakness in any social circle, particularly one in which young men are attempting to preen and show off for each other’s benefit, you get bullshit like over-the-top Mike McGonigal hatred and Baboon Dooley. I wasn’t totally immune myself when I started in this racket a few years later.

Then again, maybe we all just wanted to be Byron Coley. He’s interviewed here, the second part of a 2-parter, the first of which I’ve never read because I’ve never seen Damp #1. I remember reading this interview back then, and he praised the Lazy Cowgirls – who were my absolute favorite band – and it was a big, big deal to me, the voice of God anointing my own musical taste as being first-rate. And he also made fun of SWA, who were absolutely my friends’ & my favorite musical whipping post around this time. These “photos” of “Jimmy & Byron” from Forced Exposure definitely generated some chatter at the time as well, as it was hard to know what these guys looked like in an era before The Face Book and before I was able to Ask Jeeves. It took me at least a few years to realize 100% that these weren’t the guys.  

Finally, Damp #2 closes up with a guy named Wandz, who has his own page of “Hip Cat Jazz Reviews”. He even writes as if he knows what he’s talking about. A nice icing to a pretty packed fanzine.

Damp #3

~ Jay Hinman ~ Leave a comment

Part of the reason I started this endeavor up was to set a digital trail for quality, formative magazines like Damp that really possess no internet presence outside of what I myself have put up there, and especially what Tony P wrote during the years he was publishing Fuckin’ Record Reviews. Where I come from this shit matters, and besides, it gives me an opportunity to go back and re-educate myself about music I might not have been ready for when I first encountered it in the pages of, say, Kevin Kraynick’s Damp in the late 80s.

I know we’re not talking about it here, but his Beefheart issue, #5, came out when I, like so many, had heard Trout Mask Replica and said, nope, that’s definitely not for me. Maybe two years later after his mag came out, ‘92 or so, my “stance” had totally changed and I was singing the praises of the Captain wherever I could, and I got to revisit Damp #5 and really whet my palate that much more. I suppose I could do the same with this issue and The Fugs, but I already very much enjoy Tuli Kupferberg and The Fugs, perhaps more in spirit than in action. 

But what I’m getting at is that Kraynick, in 1988, was mixing his general “indie underground” (i.e. this issue’s Scrawl and Nice Strong Arm interviews) with oblique musical worlds that your average college radio 19-year-old (like me) hadn’t quite cottoned to, and placed it all on a beautiful continuum that’s rather obvious in hindsight. Kind of like Patrick Amory’s Too Fun Too Huge! that we talked about here. 

Kraynick wrote well, dug deep and used one of the worst fonts imaginable. I don’t know what you’d call it – “Dos command line”? That’s what it looked like, and it’s what word processors were built with at the time – so all is forgiven. This issue also has a great if rather sad interview with John Trubee, whom some of you may know from his album The Communists Are Coming To Kill Us!; his novelty hit “A Blind Man’s Penis”; his prank phone calls or for one of the all-time great song titles, “Satan Pukes on the High School Cheerleaders”. Trubee, in Damp #3, comes off as a misanthrope, sure, but a very self-hating misanthrope, whose bitterness and disgust at the world is only outweighed by that directed at himself. I’m glad to know, in 2023, that he’s still with us, because he’s given me a few good laffs and chortles over the years.

Meanwhile, there are a few more yuks to be had in Damp #3. Contributor Steve Erickson, whom we last discussed in our review of his Cut #11, gets his first exposure to Alex Chilton via his High Priest album and says, “I suppose someday I’ll pick up a Big Star album…why couldn’t he have covered The Fall’s “Hip Priest” or The Scientists’ “Bad Priest” instead of Carole King and “Volare”?” Oh for sure, I know how BUMMED people were around this time when they’d go see Chilton, and he’d do an earnest, not-kidding-at-all, full-blown version of “Volare”, usually with a shirt open to his navel. So good. For what it’s worth, I didn’t hear Big Star myself until 1993, and, suitably impressed, I told my friend JB about my new discovery and his riposte was, “Dude, that’s so high school”. Ouch.

Off topic again. Kraynick gets in a few zingers himself at the expense of Three Day Stubble, The Descendents, Tim Adams of The Pope fanzine (and later Ajax Mailorder) and not an insignificant amount of others. His contributors – New England/NYC fellow travelers – actually get more play than he does, especially with the features, so Damp #3 is more of a group effort than I’d remembered. The magazine would get even better from here; I have a bunch of them; and we shall be discussing them in this forum at some later date to be determined at whim.