Tag: Lisa Fancher

Street Life #2

~ Jay Hinman ~ 1 Comment

You can see that my 48-year-old copy of this one has what we in the business call a bit of “toning”. Nothing to fret about.

Street Life #2 is another early punk/”street rock” Lisa Fancher fanzine, much like this one, but quite a bit earlier, maybe even a full year earlier. Punk rock’s evolution tracked like dog years at this point, where 1 month was equal to 7 months of new releases, groundbreaking shows, instant haircuts, musical osmosis and general scene chicanery. 1977’s Street Life #2 weighs in with a pretty impressive lineup of contributors, with Bob Morris as the actual editor; Fancher as the assistant editor and chief writer; and Jenny Stern aka the soon-to-be-known-as Jenny Lens as staff photographer. And even a letter to the editor from our hero Eddie Flowers in Alabama right off the bat, too. 

You know, they’re actually calling that new sound of 1976-77 Street Rock in some places, which is marginally better than City Rock, I suppose. Seems to me the key band making waves in Street Life #2, aside from The Ramones, of course, are The Quick. The Quick! Like in the Screamers interview by Fancher with photos by Stern: “They came to LA hoping to make a splash when the entire scene consists of the Quick and….umm….the Quick”. Yet what I most enjoy about this early chat with Tomata and Tommy Gear is how it ends with “Be watching for a Screamers EP coming out on Street Life Records!”. We all know how well that went – about as well as Black Flag’s debut LP on Upsetter. (For the back story on the latter, I’ll just drop an amazing advertisement from No Mag at the bottom of this post; and The Screamers infamously never released a shred of music in their lifetime, always holding out for the better deal that never came). 

For more inexplicable things that actually did happen, Bob’s “Beat of The Street” column talks about Kim Fowley producing a Helen Reddy record. Sally Dricks does a long hero-worshippy review of Bowie’s Low, and teenager Fancher, who also did layout for Street Life #2, throws in a large-font “best yet – LF” just to ensure her voice is also heard on the matter. There’s an entire column talking about the debauchery at a Ramones after-party at the “Screamers house” in Hollywood, and then another column flipping out over The Saints’ I’m Stranded. This is accompanied by a phenomenal Stern photo of The Ramones from that 1977 gig with Blondie at the Whiskey – this one. Someone make me a poster of that thing!

Sex Pistols land on the cover because the talk of the nascent punk world was revolving around the “bad words” they said on England’s Bill Grundy TV show in 1976. Given that these are fanzine people, there’s also a long Greg Shaw interview that allows him to expound upon his theories of musical evolution, the winds of change heralded by punk, the importance of fanzines, Peter Frampton and more. And then the big surprise as I’m going through it is how it all comes to a jarring halt with about 8 pages left to go, and morphs into record collector set sales and auction listings. This is something I might have expected from Goldmine, but not from an urgent fanzine from the streets.

Biff! Bang! Pow! #1

~ Jay Hinman ~ 1 Comment

Lisa Fancher was a highly precocious Southern California teenager who got very much involved with the Hollywood glam, proto-punk, power pop and straight-up punk scenes well before she hit her 20th birthday. As she put it in an interview down the line: “no hippie shit”.  She’d go on to run Frontier Records in the 1980s, and wrote a ton for various publications. I’ve noted her contributions on this site here, here and here. What you perhaps didn’t know – because I didn’t, until I found this – was that she also put out a series of her own fanzines: Academy in Peril, Street Life, and two issues of Biff! Bang! Pow! in 1978.

And it’s funny, because Biff! Bang! Pow! #1 really reads to me as Fancher making a very overt move to not document and hype up the Masque/Dangerhouse LA punk scene. While it’s referred to here in passing, it’s almost as through she was doing everything in her power to stay as far away from what Slash, Lobotomy and Flipside were championing as possible. So instead of The Bags, Germs, Screamers and Weirdos, there’s The Dickies – the funnypunk band whom many of the “original 100 Hollywood punks” relegated to the sidelines pretty quickly, particularly when they were the ones to sign to A&M. There’s the Rich Kids – lots of Rich Kids. She loves this UK band w/ Glen Matlock, a combo who wouldn’t even be together any longer by the end of ‘78. If I’ve heard them, I cannot remember having doing so.

The linchpin for Fancher seems to be Midge Ure. Now me, I remember this guy as a mustachioed synth-pop singer of Ultravox. We had MTV from day one in 1981, and my sister and I spent that summer watching it from sunup to sundown. Only a handful of bands had made videos at that point, so MTV just ran stuff like Ultravox, The Pretenders, REO Speedwagon, The Shoes and Blotto over and over again. Biff! Bang! Pow! #1 not only hypes up his Rich Kids, but also has a piece on his mid-70s band Slik. “Midge Ure is a star. It’s as simple as that. Some guys have it, other guys haven’t”. 

The Dickies interview actually has the band somewhat taken aback at their turn of fortune, and it seems like they really still see themselves as part of the ground-level LA punk scene, despite not really caring so much about “labels”. There’s also an interview and ego-stroking of famed producer and early Sparks member Earl Mankey, and a doubling back onto lots of talk about The Dickies in his piece, since he ended up producing that first record of theirs.

The only real overlap I see in the reviews section with what I’m used to seeing in punk-era LA fanzines are reviews of Pere Ubu’s and The Buzzcocks’ debut LPs. Otherwise, the focus is more on Squeeze, Tom Robinson Band, Nick Lowe, Elvis Costello and the pre-Midge Ure Ultravox. English shit, pretty much, not that there’s anything wrong with that, or even with some of these records – although Fancher was willing to totally savage the Lowe record, which is pretty fun. And in case you might have thought that the fanzine’s title was some 60s “Batman” reference, she helpfully photocopies her original Creation 45, not the Raw Records 1977 thing that would be my first exposure to the band, and puts it on the back cover. All told, a true ink-blooded fanzine in every sense you might imagine.

Who Put The Bomp! #13

~ Jay Hinman ~ 2 Comments

Except for the couple of times I’ve written about fanzines that a friend personally xeroxed and assembled for me, my rule here at Fanzine Hemorrhage is to only blather on about zines I personally own. So, while I’m absolutely long in the proverbial tooth, that’d negate stuff like Who Put The Bomp! #13 that came out when I was seven years old; unless, of course, I went and paid some large multiple of its Spring 1975 $1 cover price in order to own it – which is exactly what I did. As discussed last time we looked at Greg Shaw’s fanzine, my goal is to try and hunt down as many of the pre-punk issues of this as I can find and/or afford. Recently, this one came into my hands, and I’d like to tell you about it.

I don’t know about you, but I have a weird fascination with what rock & roll nostalgia looked like for folks when rock music was not even two decades old. Elvis, Charlie Feathers and Carl Perkins were still alive. Even Keith Richards was still alive. So Shaw’s big thing here on the rockabilly revival is kind of a hoot; many of the late 50s/early 60s 45s are being dug up for the first time and thrown out into the world on cheap-looking compilations, and “record collecting” is really starting to become a thing as a result. Shaw talks about it in detail. You’ve seen some of these comps before; they’d look like this and used today they sell for about what they did new back then.

Of course, Happy Days was something of an instigator of all the 50s nostalgic hullabaloo, but what I’m more interested in is what record collecting looked like in 1975. Set sale lists, painstaking discographies with catalog numbers, and man oh man – the sorts of mind-melting finds in record stores that guys like me only dream about in 2024. Can you imagine having a 60s punk 45 want list and stumbling across all the original singles for a buck or less, the monsters that’d come out on the Back From The Grave comps ten years later? Anyway, if you were that guy – and you were almost certainly a guy – Who Put The Bomp’d certainly be required reading. 

Greg Shaw, an eternal optimist, surveys the world of rock music in early 1975 in an opening editorial, and sees that “70s rock is reverting to a 60s pop aesthetic”. His entire essay pushes against a narrative that 1975 is just as godawful musically as 1971 was, and hey, depending on one’s perspective, I suppose he was probably correct that “good times” were on the way. I’m just not sure it was a Beatles-esque 60s pop aesthetic that would lead the way in 1976-77. And honestly, looking at the record reviews in Who Put The Bomp! #13, it all just seems super grim to me, warmed-over glitter and boogie and pub rock. There’s a great review of the first AC/DC single, a total laff I’d never heard, and which you can watch an early video of here (do it!). He says “Their similarity to the early Easybeats is startling”. 

He also reviews the debut King Uszniewicz & His Uszniewicz-Tones 45, and of course totally gets it and loves it to death. There’s a big piece on Michigan sixties rock, including a discography of A-Square records who put out MC5 and Rationals singles, and a related bit on Bob Seger, where I learned to my surprise that he did the original of the Lazy Cowgirls’ “Sock it to Me Santa”, released by Shaw’s Bomp Records nine years after this fanzine. Seger’s B-side was called “Florida Time”, “the only known song to glorify Florida’s surfing scene”. You might need to listen to that too. 

Here’s another fun peek at the 1975 vantage point: Shaw writes that “The MC5’s best song, ‘Black to Comm’ was never recorded”. By the time I got into said band around 1985, that particular song had such the underground cache, total holy grail music that everyone wanted to hear. I’d wildly imagined this crazed, long, howling guitar blowout that’d be “Rocket Reducer” x100 and the total personification of “dope, guns and fucking in the streets”. Big disappointment when I finally did hear it, a fun rave-up but a huge sonic drop off from “Sister Ray” and “Fun House/LA Blues”. The MC5 never really had one of those, did they?

The single best thing in Who Put The Bomp! #13 is “The Rise & Fall of The Hollywood Stars”, written by Kim Fowley, and who happened to be the guy who sired them into existence and, for all I know, helped to screw them up and ensure their demise in one year. It’s really a fun read. I get this band confused with another flame-out band called The Hollywood Brats who had an entire book written about them that I see remaindered every now & again. After Fowley’s piece, a supposed 15-year-old Lisa Fancher follows up with her own piece about how special the Stars were over the course of their five gigs at The Whiskey. Here’s a good interview with her about those days. Next time I’ll try and give the 15th issue of Who Put The Bomp! a whirl, OK?

NY Rocker – September 1980

~ Jay Hinman ~ 1 Comment

The personal, hand-assembled music fanzine’s always been the place that cultural pontificators like to point to when directing nostalgia seekers to the real pulse of an era, the sociological beat of the streets and the place where a given music’s early adopters were the ones helping to define that music’s formative boundaries and key players. I think there’s much truth to this assertion, or I otherwise wouldn’t be bleating as much as I am here. 

Yet I think there’s actually far more sociological and on-the-ground ore to mine from the music periodicals of particular musical eras, back when, unlike now, music periodicals were a thing. A single issue of the NY Rocker, say – or of Slash, or Damage, or Take It!, or Sounds, or Rip It Up, or Melody Maker – those newsprint periodicals, packed with columns, reviews, interviews, musings, artwork, listings, ads and photographs – each issue of these provided an incredible bounty of detail and real-time reportage and opinion that actually tops much of what irregularly-produced fanzines did. So I like to read ‘em, myself, just to put myself in the same frame of mind as any other music dork might have been in during 1980, or 1972, or 1967. In the US these local newsprint music papers pretty much died out by the mid-1980s, replaced by the local alt-weeklies that themselves have now died out.

This preamble is so we can talk about how much I loved reading NY Rocker’s September 1980 issue, OK? It’s the proverbial portal to another world, itemized and particularized extensively and exhaustively from the viewpoints of folks like Andy Schawrtz, Byron Coley, Ira Kaplan, Lisa Fancher, Jeffrey Lee Pierce, Peter Crowley and many others. Some Los Angeles names on there, right? That’s because this is a very heavy “The Best of the West” issue, with three different features on X (who’ve just released Los Angeles and played New York) and a particularly fantastic Lisa Fancher piece trying to make sense of the LA/beach hardcore scene and place it all in context. Like Kickboy Face’s similar piece in Slash around this time, she is an advocate of letting the kids be kids, hating the cops and grooving to the pure adrenaline of nascent hardcore punk. “Though it may have taken three years, these California kids have finally broken away from English apery and come up with something so crazy and incomprehensible it could only be American.”. God bless Lisa, and God bless the USA.

Oh – and she talks about a show she’s just attended in Redondo Beach at the Fleetwood with a bill of Fear / Bags / The Gears / Circle Jerks / Gun Club / The Urinals. I know, I know. She casually mentions “Slash is filming the proceedings”. Folks, this is the The Decline of Western Civilization show; “Slash” = Penelope Spheeris, the then-Ms. Bob Biggs. I know that some of The Gears footage made it to a Decline DVD; does anyone know if she actually filmed The Urinals and Gun Club as well?

Aside from the heavy LA focus in this one, there’s a “the scene is totally dead” San Francisco report from Tony Rocco, who was a staff writer for Damage and who was parroting the party line of that magazine in 1980, which we told you about in this post. There’s a (true) report about The Cramps’ Bryan Gregory quitting the band to join his girlfriend in her intense worship of Satan (!), and his new replacement, Julien H (you can see her in this clip, one of the greatest pieces of rocknroll ever committed to film). There are also great bits on The Raincoats, Gang of Four and The Selecter, all interesting, all of their time and all so exciting in the context of everything else also going on around them.

There was another reason this was such a great year – The Shaggs’ world-destroying Philosophy of the World had just been reissued, and it was blowing minds from Nashua to Great Neck and back again. Byron Coley reports on it all, in the context of a review that unsuccessfully (and tongue-in-cheek) attempts to compare it with some Slits demos that have just come out. I heard it not long after this and got quite the laff out of it, but it wasn’t until about 1983 or so that Shaggs mania would enter my home from the most unlikely of sources.

The comedian Bob (“Bobcat”) Goldthwait was a local San Francisco comic in 1983, and I was a 15-year-old who listened to the Alex Bennett Morning Show on KQAK (“The Quake”) every weekday morning before school. Every morning Bennett had someone on, a local comedian, who’d later go on to be moderately famous, like Dana Carvey, Kevin Pollak and Mark Pitta. Anyway, Goldthwait was on at least once a week, and he decided to bring The Shaggs to the west coast, both figuratively (by making Bennett play “My Pal Foot-Foot” and “Who Are Parents?” on the air all the time) and “literally”, by pretending to bankroll their big trip to San Francisco, where they’d be greeted on the ground at the airport as heroes who’d come to save rock & roll. 

Goldthwait used Bennett’s show one morning to pump up the in-studio crowd who’d come to KQAK for every show – as well as the audience listening at home – to get themselves to SFO airport immediately to cheer and hoot for The Shaggs, whose “plane was just about to land”. Goldthwait had a live mic and several dozen amped-up people around him at the airport chanting “We love The Shaggs! We love The Shaggs!” as their plane landed. I was quite entertained listening at home, let me tell ya. I don’t quite remember what happened when the Wiggin sisters didn’t actually get off the plane, but perhaps I had to get to Social Studies 1 and missed it entirely. 

Anyway, like I’ve said in previous items, I haven’t entirely lived up to my promise to write more unasked-for stream-of-consciousness diversions in these blog posts, so there you go. NY Rocker’s September 1980 issue is a real gem. I have others to review in the weeks to come. (And hey, does anyone have any info on the lone issue of NY Rocker Pix? It has on the cover one Donna Destri, the sister of Blondie’s Jimmy – I just this very week heard her name for the first time when I watched this not-especially-good documentary called Nightclubbing about Max’s Kansas City.)