Kim Cooper – Fanzine Hemorrhage

It’s been some time since we’ve taken a look at Kim Cooper’s 1990s-00s Scram; I think it was one of the very first fanzines I wrote about on this site, here and here. I’ve got this trove of them, a near-complete run, and every now and again it seems like a good idea to break one out, and I’m always glad I did – particularly the later issues, as this thing just continued to gather steam until its final transmission, issue #22.

Scram #19 – “Hollywood’s Premiere Journal of Unpopular Culture” – is the Spring 2004 issue, and features a few of the same unearthings I was myself pretty excited about at the time. To wit: Linda Perhacs. Not long after the time I’d discovered how much I loved Vashti Bunyan’s music, I went looking for other lost 60s/70s female folk oddities, and came across Perhacs’ dreamy and strange 1970 Parallelograms. It resonated pretty strongly, and not only with me. It had just been reissued on CD a few years before this issue, and as Cooper notes in the intro, “The reviews were odd. Without any evidence beyond the text itself, the critics made assumptions about Linda, painting her as a dippy hippie sprite who somehow channeled these vast ideas unknowingly”. So Cooper and Ron Garmon had the first sit-down interview ever granted by Perhacs for this issue to fill in the gaps.

I mean, the best revelation by far is that Perhacs is a name we now know only because she, as a post-college dental hygienist, haltingly passed on some of her home recordings to one of her rich patients in Beverly Hills, Leonard Rosenman. Dazzled, he then did everything possible to hustle her into a studio. She just thought of them as “campfire songs”, something she did for fun. Also, her “Hey, Who Really Cares?” ended up being the theme song for the TV cop show Matt Lincoln, because the producers wanted a “delicate song on top of this hard action”, inspired as they were by Robert Altman’s M.A.S.H. theme “Suicide is Painless”. How about that? I’ll let you find the other revelations in your own copy of Scram #19.

I am also thankful for all the younger zine editors who, unlike me, thought to interview the immortal Lee Hazlewood while he still communed with us on this mortal coil. Dan Kapelovitz gets the honor here – a piece he originally wrote for Hustler (!) and which was rejected by the editors. I wish I’d talked to this guy (Hazlewood, not Kapelovitz) when he was around, seriously. What a storyteller – about his run-ins with Frank Sinatra; about sexual attitudes in Europe; about young fans in Sweden who scream so loud they scare his band, and who only want to hear his obscurities, not his hits.

About a month ago I saw the Zombies’ documentary Hung Up On a Dream and I now have a new appreciation for Colin Blunstone and co. that I only slightly had before (I even bought Odessey and Oracle, a record I’d never owned). But yeah, an interview with Blunstone was right in Kim Cooper’s wheelhouse – The Zombies being exactly the sort of band I associate with Scram: a little forgotten; a little underrated; a little fey or twee or different or goofy or strange or orchestral. His chat here is engaging and wide-ranging for sure; he talks more about the “tour” of the Philippines that the Zombies undertook which is perhaps the highlight of the documentary.

The John Trubee interview by one of his childhood summer camp pals is priceless as well. As mentioned before, it’s the interviews, features and weird bits of humor papered throughout Scram that made it stand out, not the record reviews of contemporary crap from labels whose ads helped pay for the print runs (although, frankly, Scram was relatively ad-free, and well over 90% of this issue’s pages don’t have one). The fanzine was its own little insular world of obsessions and excitements, and typifies just how interesting and enduring a well-executed ‘zine can be when one person’s weirdo vision is carefully unfurled and then shoddily typeset.

We return now to Kim Cooper’s Scram, a low-culturally omnivorous magazine whose fifth issue I dissected a bit earlier in the year here. The Los Angeles-based mag had gathered a great deal of steam by this point, 2002, to the point where they’d recently held their own showcase weekend “Scramarama” at the Palace Theater in LA, which I learned in this issue my cousin Doug Miller was the bartender and alcohol-procurer for. Of course he was!

As mentioned last time, Scram had a sensibility that didn’t quite dovetail with my unrelentingly pure underground-music-that-must-be-beyond-reproach stance at the time, so while I always liked it, I really have come to enjoy it now, after the fact, now that I’m not such a pigheaded contrarian. The borders of their schtick were quite loose, but encompassed elements of goofy 60s pop, novelty records, garage punk, pranks, toys, oddballs, analog-era artifacts and underground comix. The writing was fun, upbeat, winking and satiric. Contributors – in this issue alone – ranged from Gene Sculatti to Mike Applestein to Andrew Earles to Brian Doherty, with Kim Cooper lording over the proceedings and setting the tone as “editrix”.

Right out of the gate Scram #15 hits it out of the park with a funny & revealing Dan Clowes interview that’s contemporaneous with the release of the Ghost World film, one of the 2000’s best, discussing everything it took to get it made and released. I was so taken with reading this last night that I’m going to watch the Criterion edition of the film tonight w/ all the extras. There’s a panel review of rock-themed board games, such as a Monkees, a K-Tel and even a Partridge Family game that I actually remember from my youth. And then Sculatti’s piece is actually a 1971 interview he did with songwriter and producer Gary Usher, talking extensively about his interactions with the Byrds, Beach Boys and the early 60s instrumental surf scene.

Remember how excited everyone got about that Langley Schools Music Project release, a mid-70s recording of some Canadian schoolkids arranged through their music program into doing tracks like “Space Oddity” and “In My Room”? Applestein interviews Hans Fenger, the maestro behind it, as well as one of the now-grown-up kids, who gives a fairly reluctant interview about something she’s clearly still a little baffled about. Mike Applestein also milks a piece out of “Five Concerts I Missed”, a terrific concept I wish I’d thought of first: shows you could have gone to, but didn’t, and then regretted. I’d start with SST’s “The Tour” on February 28th, 1985 at the Keystone Palo Alto with The Minutemen, Husker Du, Meat Puppets and Saccharine Trust, which I couldn’t get any of my high school friends to attend with me so I bailed.

I’ve got nearly a complete run of Scram except for issues #8, #9 and #10, which I’m missing and can’t find. Anyone able to help a brother out?