Tag: Lester Bangs

New Wave #1

~ Jay Hinman ~ 4 Comments

This, for lack of a better term, is a “my cup runneth over” fanzine from 1977. It’s somewhat amazing to even be allowed to look at it. I was not aware of the existence of New Wave #1 until I found a way of procuring a copy on eBay – nor was I aware of the absurdly great bounty within it, save for a drunkenly-written Lester Bangs piece about punk that ended up being sadly uneventful once I actually read it. 

I’m 99% sure that this is the only issue of this San Francisco-based newspaper-style fanzine ever created, and I’m just as assured that a 1-issue run was not at all what the editors had intended when they excitedly put this together in August 1977. (For instance, in the back there’s a plea for subscribers. $9.50 for 12 issues, plus your choice of either The Ramones’ Leave Home or Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers). Who were these editors? Proving that he was in fact ultimately useful for something, the main editor was Howie Klein; the associate editor was Steve Seid, about whom more later.

Excited is definitely the word. We’re into punk pretty early here: the long-awaited and much-prophesized rocknroll revolution is finally here, which doesn’t stop many of the big-name rock writers assembled from sneering about punk anyway, Bangs included. As it should be. Where do I start? How about with some of the bigger names: Billy Altman writes about Mink Deville, and Richard Meltzer gets his own column on jazz: “Bebop on Your Mama”. It’s really funny, actually, and full of his patented discombobulated snark. He even saw Dizzy Gillespie play live that year. Patti Smith pens a mostly unreadable poetry slam-type thing on Robert Bresson that I’d probably have sent back to her for rewrite (“come on, Patti, I know you can do better”). 

Loads of excitement and hot gossip in the San Francisco, LA, NY and UK scene reports. LA’s is by Gregg Turner, he’d go on to do an almost identical column in Take It! in the 1980s. An “Amy G” is mentioned in the SF column; she’s a “former punk of the month” who has just moved to Memphis. Would this – be still my heart – be Amy Gassner, who’d join The Klitz in Memphis?? Gotta be, right? If you’ve never heard her 1979 rendition of “Brown Sugar”, which was recorded “under the influence of hog tranquilizers” and absolutely sounds like it, you’ll need to do so right now. And if you have a copy of that record and need to part with it, please get in touch.

Maybe my single favorite page in New Wave #1 is the one compiling some instant-reaction crowd interview snippets after Crime’s June 18th, 1977 show at the Mabuhay Gardens; this includes quotes from Jean Caffeine from New Dezezes, Britley Black (sic), who’d later join the band; Don Vinyl and Michael Snyder, the latter of whom was an SF rock critic I think at the Chronicle, back when daily newspapers actually had multiple in-house rock critics. Also in various spots throughout this magazine is talk about how Jennifer Moscone, the Mayor’s kid, is going to punk shows at the Mabuhay. Sheriff Michael Hennessey was into punk, too, and he used to regularly show up at the Mab. 

There are too many other features for me to go deep into: Cheap Trick, The Dils, Avengers, Nuns pieces; the only one on Ozzie from Sacramento I’ve ever seen; a Mary Monday (!) article plus a centerfold; The Negatives, a Richard Hell interview and more. There’s a country music overview by Ed Ward that tries to tie modern country outlaws like Johnny Paycheck to punk, rather unsuccessfully. And the capper, the thing that just makes this a chef’s-kiss A+ fanzine in my book, is the Steve Seid film column, “Enter The Avant Garde Surfers”. It calls out genius films like Payday and The King of Marvin Gardens and Three Women, among others, and is essentially a paean to how utterly amazing 70s American filmmaking was up to that point. Seid realizes he’s living in a golden age, and is essentially admonishing readers that they ought to realize it as well. Alas, “Star Wars”, a popular children’s film that helped to quickly bury major-studio risk-taking, was released more or less as this magazine was being written. Seid was not to know, but one of his cultural worlds was ending just as another was excitedly being born.

New Wave Rock #2

~ Jay Hinman ~ 8 Comments

We return again to a prime example of one of my favorite recent discoveries, which has been the mere existence of high-circulation, newsstand-friendly punksploitation mags from 1977 and 1978. Right there, right in the grocery store’s magazine aisle, next to Creem, Circus and Rock Scene. I’ve written about previous examples here, here and here. Despite whatever moderate corporate backing was propping them up, they have the same immediacy and documentative relevance of nearly any given fanzine of the era. Yeah, you’ll certainly have to excuse some of the artists featured, In this one, new waver and cover star Bruce Springsteen is said to be “Walkin’ Streets of Fire”, and is also the creator of “the most exhilarating and passionate rock ‘n’ roll you will ever hear”. Arguable. But get past that, and you’ll find some real ore to mine in November 1978’s New Wave Rock #2. 

As I talked about when we discussed New Wave Rock #3, this was produced by Whizbang Productions from their offices on East 43rd in New York City. Diana Clapton was executive editor. While I can’t find anything online about Whizbang (I’m talking nothing), Ms. Clapton wrote a Lou Reed/Velvet Underground book in 1983. She did a fine job corralling the talent. For most folks, the linchpin piece here is a continuation of a long Lester Bangs article about “The Roots of Punk” that was originally started in another publication, a 1977 fanzine from San Francisco called New Wave. The only way to read that, the editors say, is to order a copy from Aquarius Records in San Francisco. I don’t think it’s going to work anymore.

Bangs says his piece, and it’s a good piece, about The Sonics, Troggs, Count Five, Music Machine and so on, and posits that San Francisco’s dominance over rock and roll sounds in the late 60s led directly to the “punk backlash”. Speaking of the 1960s, there’s an interview with one Michael Hollingshead, who apparently turned Timothy Leary and various rock stars onto psychedelic drugs in the 60s. He believes that they “will become increasingly popular among those associated with new wave music”. I’m not sure it happened. New wavers I’ve known tended to drink, drink and drink some more. Some smoked illegal marijuana cigarettes. A couple were into “horse”. But psychedelics were for disco turds and hippie-hangover creeps.

“Scene reports” are a big deal in New Wave Rock #2 – only it appears that the only scenes worth reporting on are in NY, London, LA and SF. London’s is chock-full of color photos from a “Carnival Against The Nazis”. Paul Grant’s column about the LA scene, “Hot Stoopids on the Sunset Strip” has a bit of effortlessly casual anti-Mexican racism. He also talks about how The Cramps played “with Kim Fowley’s awful Dyan Diamond, who was pelted with ice by an unappreciative Kickboy Face (Slash’s pet frog)”. In the SF report, Howie Klein actually blames President Jimmy Carter for why The Nuns, Avengers and The Dils aren’t signed to record deals, and unfortunately it doesn’t sound like he’s joking. 

Over in New York, there’s been a big benefit for Johnny Blitz of the Dead Boys, after he was stabbed on the street and couldn’t pay his hospital bills. John Belushi is pictured sitting on drums in his place; tons of photos from this thing. This issue’s got a quartet of small, colorful features on “New York’s finest”, who happened to be the Helen Wheels Band, Nervus Rex, The Erasers and the Slander Band. I seriously don’t think I knew what Helen Wheels looked like until today. And then stepping outside of the scene reports, there’s a big thing on Generation X’s “sexy singer” Billy Idol by Pam Brown, as well as a boring piece on XTC, who are said to have “a complete dislike, bordering on contempt, for the punk movement as a whole”.

Best of all – even better than the Bangs piece – is Mary Harron’s article interviewing Nico in Paris. Yeah, it’s the very same Mary Harron that would go on to direct I Shot Andy Warhol and American Psycho. We’ll end this wrap-up of New Wave Rock #2 with two gems from her piece on Nico:

“Nico has no tact. She says whatever comes into her head, and it can be frightening. The first indication I had of this was when she was explaining why she was dropped by Island Records. ‘I made a mistake. I said in Melody Maker, to some interviewer that I didn’t like negroes. That’s all. They took it so personally. I had no idea that Island was a Jamaican company. They took it very personally, although it’s a whole different, entirely different race. I mean, Bob Marley doesn’t resemble a negro, does he?’. She then goes on to describe Idi Amin eating people and believes it’s indicative of the “entire race”.

Nico: “I think I’m a terrorist actually. Maybe I would like to spend the rest of my life in prison. Just shoot somebody and just do what Andreas Baader did. But that would be a pity because there’s no other singer like me. And if I’m in prison I can’t appear on stage, right?”

Throat Culture #2

~ Jay Hinman ~ 2 Comments

I had some vague sense of a “gonzo” rocknroll writer named Lester Bangs when I was growing up and becoming rock-savvy, yet I’d really never read anything by him until the 1987 publication of Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, a collection of his writings in Creem and elsewhere. I was excited to, though – by that time I knew he’d loudly championed both The Stooges and The Velvet Underground when exceptionally few were doing so, and I figured it’d be great to see what real-time early 70s writing about both bands might look like. I totally loved the book, as many did, and the cult of Bangs grew rapidly and much further from that point onward.

In 1990 this “collectors’ edition” of a New Jersey fanzine called Throat Culture showed up on the racks, and was a no-brainer purchase at the then-normal price of $3.50. Editor Rob O’Connor and his fellow co-editors were pretty smitten with Bangs as well, and as they tell it, Throat Culture #2 was supposed to be a “normal” indie-rock fanzine until the Bangs mania totally took over, and they just decided to go all-Bangs this time around, for what ended up being their 2nd and final issue. 

I gobbled it up once I bought it, and until last night, I hadn’t read it again. Since then I guess we had the Almost Famous film and Jim DeRogatis’ biography Let It Blurt, which I have read and very much enjoyed. But this Throat Culture mag has proved to be a key link in the Bangs chain! The editors’ mania ensured that they went down a number of Bangs-related rabbit holes, included talking to DeRogatis about his teenage meeting w/ the man (O’Connor’s piece even says “Jim DeRogatis, myself and no doubt less than a handful of others entertain the idea of writing Lester’s biography but that seems like a longshot, Who would care?”). 

I guess at the time I totally bought into the “Lester Bangs was such a great writer that his pieces are more like literature than rock criticism” thing. I guess I still do today. I remember how eye-wateringly hilarious those Carburetor Dung things on The Godz, The Troggs and his Lou Reed interviews were. I also was a bit saddened, if chagrined, by the fact that this highly self-destructive, probably utterly depressed young-ish man medicated himself by guzzling cough syrup and alcohol by the bucket. There are numerous essays to that point in Throat Culture #2 from the folks that knew him best; childhood friend Roger Anderson; MC5 singer Rob Tyner; Joe Nick Patoski, Richard Reigel, Voidoids guitarist Ivan Julian; Creem co-founder Jaan Uhelszki and more. 

The real killer, though, the pièce de résistance, is actually two pieces, both with Richard Meltzer involved. The first is Throat Culture’s reprint of his 1984 essay “Lester Bangs Recollected in Tranquility”, written two years after Bangs’ death. The San Diego Reader reprinted it later when the internet came along, so you can read it here, right now. Even better is a piece commissioned just for this fanzine, in which Meltzer and Nick Tosches turn on a tape recorder and start talking about Bangs – their memories, his shortcomings, his frailties, his incredible lust for life and encyclopedic knowledge of rock (and jazz), and much more. Many have been the times that I have found Meltzer to be quite absurd, pedantic, and/or too pleased with himself to consider him readable at all. These two fantastic pieces are not those times.

It would also be foolish not to note that this magazine prints, for the first time, a “rejected” Bangs piece that the NY Rocker wouldn’t take, written about Sid Vicious’ death. I wonder, knowing what we all know now, just how much attention anyone would have paid to Vicious’ antics. I sometimes find it difficult to read about the Sex Pistols at all. So much of my so-called musical education was formed with them as the dominant example of “punk”, the band that had changed the world and so on – it’s hard to even contextualize those guys now due to over-familiarity. I’m also not all that hopped-up on their music, and never really have been. Anyway, it was a nice score by Throat Culture, and it was later reprinted in the second Bangs collection, Mainlines, Blood Feasts and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader in 2003. Man, I need to read that again too. 

When I published my own Dynamite Hemorrhage #8 fanzine and made it all about Slash Magazine, I absolutely took my cues from this particular issue of Throat Culture. If they could subvert the dominant fanzine paradigm, so could I! I’m glad to have engorged my brain with the thing again last night. Keep an eye peeled for it if it turns up on resale sites, as it’s definitely a gem worth having.