Kickboy Face – Fanzine Hemorrhage

At some point I’m going to have achieved the unthinkable, and will have amassed a complete run of Slash magazine, all 29 issues plus the NY Rocker “supplement” from 1981. I don’t have that many goals in life – I mean, I wanna see all the National Parks, and I’d like to see the SF Giants win another World Series with me in the crowd, and maybe my kid’ll have his own kids – so this is by far my dumbest bucket list goal. I’m three away. Bracing myself for the anticlimax.

Slash, Vol. 1, No. 8 is a very recent acquisition – thank you JJ from Germany. It is, of course, phenomenal – a stellar early example of what was almost certainly the best punk fanzine of all time. Central to many folks’ conception of and love for Slash was the ritualistic opening editorial from Claude Bessy, aka Kickboy Face. This one from February 1978 is called “Warning: Crazed Punks Ahead”. It’s dripping with sarcasm and some level of vitriol, but also with love and warmth for the pure, the true, and the open-minded. Even in early 1978, Kickboy was warning the hordes and asking them to please allow punk to evolve and breathe and not reach a dead end – this request coming right with the Pistols just having broken up and The Masque having just closed. About the former, he says: “It does not matter”. Regarding the latter: “It does matter. As soon as we know what has to be done, we will do it”.

There are many interesting, unconfirmed threads in the “Local Shit” column. There’s a warning of a Dils and Avengers combination band getting together to play a gig in San Francisco as Police and Thieves. Did this actually happen? “X’s single is still awaited on Dangerhouse. Main track will probably be “Blue Spark”. (It wasn’t). “Speaking of Dangerhouse…they are already negotiating with Arizona band The Consumers”. (They didn’t).

Of-their-time gems crop up on virtually every page in any given Slash. A key theme in this issue is the encroachment of “power pop”, and a little thrashing of Greg Shaw (Bomp!)’s character for already wishing to sand down the rough edges of punk with lightweight, skinny-tie melodic pop music – though Kickboy nicely defends Shaw’s honor as well. There is a terrific letter to the editors about this power pop threat from “El-Tot Sira”, hopefully someone who went on to paid writing elsewhere. This person could even have been a Slash staffer for all I know. It sounds a little like Falling James. Too early, probably.

I suppose the centerpiece of this thing are the two long bits on the Sex Pistols’ southern US shows in Dallas and Tulsa; Kickboy then gets in a long piece about their San Francisco farewell show, which just about every LA punk you can name traveled up north for. There is some excellent bagging on The Nuns and on The Dictators: “How many times do the creeps have to be told that The Dictators are about as relevant as Blue Oyster Cult? When will they stop reading those press releases and listen to the fucking music?? I’m not even a hardcore punk but I can tell the pseudo leftovers from the desperate kids, and the Dictators…”. Dot dot dot.

One cool curio here is a big full-page ad for the benefit shows being held for the recently-closed Masque at the Elks Lodge on February 24th and 25th. I know what you’re thinking – the shows that ended in a riot, with punks getting clubbed left & right by the pigs! No!! These were successful benefit shows. In 1979, at the same venue, it didn’t go quite as well.

Finally, a few other interesting tidbits – an interview with an LA punk band called The Wildcats, whom I’d never heard of. The Xray Spex interview catches Poly Styrene when she’s young and nervous, a mere 19 years old in December 1977 and sounding every bit of it. There’s a rave review for Skrewdriver’s All Skrewed Up. Kickboy does an entire reggae column called “Dread Greats!” under the nom de plume of Chatty Chatty Mouth, and gets into Tapper Zukie, The Upsetters’ Super Ape, Yabby U and the Prophets and more. Don’t forget, his original foray into publishing was with a reggae fanzine called Angeleno Dread, and what I wouldn’t kill to see a copy of one of those, even a PDF. And he gets in a nice rave for The Avengers and a little LA/SF dig: “Next time The Avengers drop by, let’s kidnap them until they agree to live down here. All this commuting back and forth is a waste of energy. Or maybe we should trade them for something San Francisco might want”. I know – we’ll take the Masque and all the bands that play there – how about that?

Ringing in a new decade with Lee Ving’s “salute to the 80s” on the cover, the first issue of a new year of Slash is absolutely phenomenal. It would, alas, be Slash magazine’s final year. Now I’ve said this before, and said before that I’ve said it before, but this is my all-time favorite fanzine. I put together an entire tribute issue of my own fanzine dedicated to Slash, which you can download here – just so you know where I stand and all. At some point we might talk about each issue in these digital pages.

Let’s start with editor Claude Bessy, aka Kickboy Face. Kickboy was so artful in his bon mots in response to letters to the editor, and often even humble and friendly to Slash’s analog correspondents if he felt they’d made a particularly insightful point about the magazine, the punk scene or a particular band or club. However, sometimes he was less than charitable, and those were the best. See the scan at the bottom of this post.

By this time, Slash was not as solely focused on Los Angeles as it was punk and underground rock writ large – what we now call “post-punk”, you might say. They were not calling it that then, if you can imagine. If someone interesting came to town, they were getting interviewed. This issue brings Joy Division and Psychedelic Furs interviews; I think we can all agree that the latter, on their first album, were quite alright! Slash says “Their music sounds like a fight between The Velvet Underground and The Stooges against Roxy Music and X-Ray Spex”, which may be a bit of hyperbole, I’m afraid, but try listening to “Dumb Waiters” and tell me you don’t dig this era of the band. Slash were also really into the Two-Tone UK ska bands at the time – there’s an interview with Madness here – and I have no beef with that either, not in the least. I nearly sobbed with joy when I saw The Specials do this in 1980 on Saturday Night Live on a rare night my parents let me stay up, so don’t let me hear you talking down to the rude boys and girls.

For a moderately underground publication, the roll call of acts interviewed in this issue alone who are now on t-shirts worn by millions is pretty stupendous. Bob Marley talks with Kickboy. I told you about Madness, Psychedelic Furs and Joy Division already. The Buzzcocks. The Fall. And thankfully, LA stuff too – “Catching up with The Bags”, a band who’d been around for over two big years by that point. There’s an interview with beach punks The Crowd, as “beach punk” was becoming quite the thing.

And oh my, were there some crazy bills the previous month in LA: The Fall / X / The Germs / Suburban Lawns one night; Black Flag / Fear / The Urinals / The Last the next. This issue also includes long reviews of brand-new records out that month: London Calling. Metal Box. 20 Jazz Funk Greats. New Picnic Time. Kickboy does a very admirable job with The Clash record in particular, neither knocking them down too far nor buying into what they were trying to sell by that point – mostly he makes fun of the praise that he knew would be heaped on this 2xLP by folks who couldn’t even whisper the word “punk” eighteen months earlier. He was spot-on. And loads of these fine reviews were by Craig Lee of The Bags, whose stint as a lead writer at Slash didn’t really last all that long, but he did go on to write about music for the LA Times before leaving us too early in 1991.

I mean, every issue of Slash is this good, not merely for the immense envy it provokes in me for those of you who were going to these gigs and buying these records in the immediate moment, but for it being what someone called “a towering giant of literate, eye-popping, on-the-ground Los Angeles punk rock reportage and graphic design.”

This same scribe says,

“These weren’t merely Hollywood party people who were getting drunk and puking on the cops – though they were that! – this was a loosely-assembled collection of exceptionally talented writers, photographers and graphic designers who saw the opportunities this subculture provided them to cleave off entirely from the dominant Los Angeles narratives of the day (sun, cocaine, easy vibes, The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Steve Garvey, tennis, Hollywood filmmaking) and create something dark & exciting, something that truly subverted the proverbial “dominant paradigm”.

So we’ll go with that as a summation for this one, and see what we can come up with next time we bring one of these around the ‘Hemorrhage.

Tag: Kickboy Face

Slash, Vol. 1 No. 8 (February 1978)

Slash, Vol. 3 No. 1 (January/February 1980)