Tag: Lazy Cowgirls

Drink & Drive #2

~ Jay Hinman ~ 6 Comments

It never escaped me during my many years spent rubbing elbows in the “garage punk scene” that said scene is often overpopulated with what you might call – for lack of a better word – “dum-dums”. The wallet-on-a-chain dimwits, the rockabilly girls, the cro-magnon alcoholics: they were all in the family at any given 1990s garage punk show for sure. And hey, three cheers for our dum-dums! They’re not torturing themselves like I am with scene contextualization, record collecting and five-dollar adjectives. They’re here to fucking rock, to drink beer, hoot at the bands and yell at poseurs. I spent much time in the trenches with them, and their extroverted enthusiasms helped propel many a 90s show forward from good time to great time. Sometimes these dum-dums even created fanzines back in 1998, such as Drink & Drive #2.

However, late in the 90s I had started backing away a bit. New bands with names like “The Hookers” and the “River City Rapists” were being celebrated, and the general IQ level of my compadres seemed to be rapidly trending downward rather than up. I remember when the fanzine Hit List started coming out. I’d rifle through it on the newsstands, and I really thought it couldn’t get any stupider. (And don’t worry, I’ve got an issue that I’ll be covering in this space in the near future). Jeff Bale from Maximum RocknRoll was deeply involved, which was a real “it figures” moment for me, though that wasn’t exactly the turn I expected him to take once he was done being a left-wing peace creep. 

It is into this dum-dum environment that Drink and Drive #2 proudly steps forth and perhaps even outdoes Hit List. Editor Michael Pedersen has his priorities straight and his controversial opinions eagerly given: “Ah, the sun is shinin’, my zine is almost ready to be printed, life is good. All I need now is a beer and some pussy. Remember, soft rock = soft cock, fuck techno and kill a hippie”. Of course I could cut Pedersen some slack and say well you know, he was from Denmark, English isn’t his first language etc. But that didn’t stop European garage punk fiends Tom Arnaert and Henrik Olausson from putting out high-quality, literate and hilarious garage punk fanzines at the same time – Bazooka and Human Garbage Disposal, respectively, which were better than virtually all American zines of similar ilk. No, Pedersen unfortunately just fell for the Tim Warren/Crypt Records “razzle-dazzle” hook, line and sinker, and simply doesn’t have the mental chops to carve his own path through the idiocy of the current scene.

Grant him this, though: he was a hustler. He nails mail interviews with Larry Hardy of In The Red Records; Pat Todd of the Lazy Cowgirls; and Dana Hatch of the Cheater Slicks. Great, great Americans all, and three of the people most responsible for my 80s-90s garage punk obsessions. He also interviews the Spider Babies from Portland, who, when I saw them at San Francisco’s Purple Onion in the early 90s, were outstanding, with a pissed-off female keyboardist and an absolutely brutal 60s punk vibe. Here, they’ve huffed the doofus vapor that was heavily circulating in 1998, and, when asked to describe their current sound, come up with “It’s like Billy Childish gettin’ raped by The Dwarves while listening to the Mentors, while fantasizing about fuckin’ the guys in Screwdriver”. 

Likewise with The Dirtys – one of the Crypt Records bands of the time that finally pulled me away from the label after its decade and a half of stellar work. The Dirtys don’t like gays, they love porn and beer, they joke incessantly about fisting, lesbians and so forth. They’re exceptionally sensible and cognizant of the changin’ times, these dum-dums, and this forum was purpose-built for them. And somehow Pedersen gets Billy Childish and Thee Headcoats to talk to him, a real “get” in our business. This goes a bit better, and I didn’t leave feeling utterly embarrassed for the participants – but do you perhaps feel as I do now that we might have “oversold” Childish and his bands a bit in the 80s and 90s? It kind of feels like kid music to me now, but that’s probably because I’m not exactly a kid any longer.

I mean, that’s likely why I’m struggling with Drink & Drive #2 in the first place, right? Get a clue, grandpa! Yet it is sort of telling that the whole “I’m-a-rapist”/anti-homosexual/goin’ after pussy thing sort of stumbled hard a year or two later, and very few were doing that dum-dum dance in the 21st century (yes, I know that there are exceptions; I saw the Richmond Sluts, and attended a 2016 Humpers reunion in Long Beach with some of the absolute dumbest people on the planet). This is selling for $2 right now. A Dirtys CD currently only sets you back $4. Maybe we take this issue for the period piece that it is, and interrogate ourselves for how we let ourselves move from the Gories, Supercharger and Cheater Slicks to whatever this all was, seven years later. Can we somehow blame Jon Spencer?

B Side #24

~ Jay Hinman ~ 1 Comment

This Australian fanzine had exceptionally solid distribution in the USA at the time late 1989’s B Side #24 hit my hands, and therefore I’d already been picking them up regularly at Los Angeles’ finer record stores, like it was being published right there in Hollywood. For an Australian of a certain vintage and temperament, B Side was the oracle of all things great, particularly if those things involved high-energy, loud, raw and ugly rocknroll. Simon Lonergan was the editor, at least during the run of issues I own, which travels from issue #19 onward into the early 90s.  

In 1989, when B-Side #24 came out, the cross-pollination between the US underground and Australia’s was at a peak, at least in my lifetime. This was the fertile world of Waterfront, Au Go Go, Dogmeat and Red Eye/Black Eye Records in Australia, rubbing uglies with Sub Pop, Amphetamine Reptile and Touch & Go in the US. It’s all right here on the page. Big names abound. Butch Vig. Rapeman. Laughing Hyenas. Beasts of Bourbon. Kim Salmon. Mudhoney. In fact, Mark and Steve from Mudhoney take part in a trans-Pacific phone call interview for this very issue. They’re asked about influences on their sound, “Saccharine Trust or anything like that?”. Mark says, “Saccharine Trust. Gee, I’ve never heard that one before”, before going on to flatter both his interlocutor and the “lucky country” by praising The Scientists and feedtime. 

This was the peak era of AU’s King Snake Roost and Lubricated Goat, two wild bands who were both snapped up by Sub Pop to sell a couple of hundred records to an uncaring American public. Loved re-reading Mr. Quinn from King Snake Roost’s USA tour diary here. First of all, they arrived for their tour in San Francisco just in time for the 10/17/89 “earthquake to end all earthquakes”, a major fucking event for those of us who endured it. “All I did was pick up a bass in the music shop and the whole damn city started to shake! We’ve been told that Santa Cruz and possibly San Jose are now reduced to rubble so maybe no show on Friday”. 

As it turned out, they were able to make it to Chico – mostly untouched by the quake – on 10/19/89, and then did play Marsugi’s in my then- post-college home of San Jose on 10/20/89. I was there! So that’s what I was doing three days after the earthquake. “Short stroll around the neighborhood – looks deader than Adelaide on Christmas Day. ‘Underground Records’ was the only sign of life, but there’s only burning incense and an old hippy lady inside – guess that doesn’t count as life, huh. Seems as though the ‘quake did a good job on this town”. No Mr. Quinn, that wasn’t the quake, I’m afraid. He also talks about a fistfight that my fellow KFJC-FM disc jockey Les Scurry got into outside the club that night with some doofus DJ from another station…..which I now remember, only barely. There may have been some “tying on” happening this evening. We’d just had a major earthquake, okay??

Back in the pages of B Side #24, we’ve got Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide scene reports, far more interesting and lively than comparable columns in US fanzines – though nothing about Christmas Day in Adelaide. There’s a huge John Murphy autobiography – just like the Ollie Olsen thing in Forced Exposure around this time, both men’s work combined and apart has continued to travel way over my head. There are also interviews with a band called Meat; one with Radio Birdman/New Christs’ Rob Younger; Toys Went Berserk; and Los Angeles’ own Lazy Cowgirls, who were my favorite band in the world this year and during the two previous. See this blank-looking goofball with the Radio Birdman shirt on in the crowd? That’s me, from the pages of this very same B Side #24, taken at LA’s Anti-Club back in 1988. 

When Lonergan interviews Sonic Youth here in tandem with Bruce Griffiths, he gets all three of Thurston, Kim and Lee to do loads upon loads of yakking, which is great. Thurston Moore banters about how popular speed metal is back home, and he actually calls it speed metal. See folks, we did not call it thrash metal back then, no matter what the kids do now. It was speed metal all the way. Also love how Lonergan keeps transcribing mentions of Michael Gira as “Michael Girard”. For a minute I thought he was confusing him with the Killdozer fella, but that’s another name entirely. 

In the lengthy reviews section, there’s much to be explored in the genres of rawk, rock and raw rok. I’ll be honest – I just put a handful of fanzines up on eBay today and was going to put the B Sides in that batch, before I started re-looking at them and was like: what am I thinking? I mean, I’d forgotten about the one with my crowd shot photo, sure; but also, this mag’s great. All I’ll do is piss myself off in five years when I want to re-explore 1989 underground rock from the vantage point of 2029. These things are keepers, and there’s plenty more of them we’ll talk about in due time in this forum.