les scurry – Fanzine Hemorrhage

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.

We were all seriously spoiled for choice when it came to underground fanzines in the early/mid 1990s, and didn’t even know it. Some, like Popwatch and even my own Superdope, weren’t even all that underground, and could be easily found in nationwide Tower Records stores and had print runs in the thousands (mine only actually hit those numbers once). Yet there was only so much that I could or would read back then, to say nothing of my limited-means income that only allowed just so much superfluous fanzine spending.

I actually passed on all of the Popwatch mags I saw then, with merely one exception – then only later wondered why I hadn’t accumulated them in the 90s. It may be that I incorrectly saw it more as a corporate-leaning magazine rather than as a fanzine per se; such were the very important distinctions that dictated the terms of my pocketbook.

What became retrospectively clear was just how strong a line Leslie Gaffney’s Popwatch had built to the incredibly fruitful New Zealand music scene of the time. Popwatch #6 arrived in 1994 when there was just one amazing NZ 45 after another coming out on US labels like Majora, Siltbreeze, New World of Sound, Ajax and Roof Bolt. Alastair Galbraith and Bill Direen each came and played shows in the US – I saw ‘em! – and this issue interviews both gentlemen. Galbraith actually contributed the glossy cover collage art you see here. I particularly like Bill Meyer’s “Who Is Bill Direen?” piece – honestly didn’t read this until after I’d interviewed Direen myself for Dynamite Hemorrhage #2, twenty years later, thinking that I’d finally cornered the US market.

There’s a whole passel of top-tier contributors to Popwatch #6, including our old pal Brian Turner, then the publisher of Teen Looch fanzine (and don’t worry, Brian, if you’re reading this – we’ll be getting to the ‘Looch one of these days). Turner contributes a piece on Japanese noise; Tim Bugbee interviews Jim Shepard; Gaffney herself interviews Crawling With Tarts. Corporate magazine my ass.

It was a laff to see reviews by Les Scurry, a guy I used to DJ with on KFJC circa 1989-90 when he was the music director over there. The dude was a serious curmudgeon and seen-it-all nihilist before his time, and it comes out in his many dismissive reviews in this issue. He did the same thing when he’d stand in front of the entire KFJC stuff at our mandatory weekly meeting on Wednesdays and go through that week’s new releases that’d been mailed to the station – “this is garbage”, “this one’s a big pile of dumper”, “you can forget playing this on the air” and so on.

The reviews section is really the only blot on the Popwatch record, as aside from Scurry, it’s relentlessly positive to a fault, and it attempts to review absolutely everything, as was the wont of many fanzines that styled themselves as comprehensive guides did at the time. I’ve written about these tendencies before; there were and remain irreconcilable pet peeves.

I also magnanimously recognize that not everyone reads these things the same way that I do; I’m always looking for guidance as to what’s the next set of records to buy, while others might be looking for some larger context on the state of underground music in 1994, be it San Diego pop-punk, twee midwestern jangle or UK industrial noise. But it’s tough for me to really contextualize anything when reading a review of some indie-pop doofus that concludes, “This is what music should be”. Oh yeah?

Or these choice sentences: from an Alastair Galbraith review: “Dedicated to Pip Proud, an English singer that no one’s ever heard of…” (three issues later this Australian singer would be featured in Popwatch); and from a Sleater-Kinney review: “Three hardcore girls from NYC”. Anyway, there’s stuff reviewed in here that is obviously pre-internet, and that has stayed that way for nearly 30 years, completely stuck in the analog world forever. I still want to hear that Spuyten Duyvil single Scurry praises in a very rare moment of favorableness.

The great thing about Popwatch is they were all pretty much like this: packed to the gills, full of New Zealand worship (they also documented Barbara Manning extensively, another huge favorite of mine during this era) and were bursting with highly educated, navel-gazing, record-collecting contributors. I’m stunned as to how nearly impossible it is to find anything about it online; it has stayed just as remotely analog as many of the long-tail bands it covered.