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.