As much as I’ve been a fan of 60s punk and archival garage raunch for so long, I’d have to admit that my “fanzine game” in these areas has been pretty weak overall over the years. Sure, we’ve talked about Brown Paper Sack, Not Fade Away, Ugly Things and Who Put The Bomp! in these pages before, but I kinda feel like this whole group of obsessive/compulsive 60s garage punk maniacs emerged at once in the early 1980s, and I have to feel like they left some other good small-batch fanzines behind them. Right? Well Ken Aronds from New Jersey did, and the lone copy I’ve ever seen of his is the sole one that own, Living Eye #4 from 1982.

And look, I’m not talking about NY goofballs who ogled the Fuzztones or the Fleshtones or whomever. I mean those rubbing elbows with Tim Warren or Mike Mariconda, and who were sincerely crate-digging for 40-cent gems at Venus Records and Midnight Records, not dressing up like dipshits. Aronds and his pals seem to have been the former type. Doing this in 1982 is pretty ahead of the curve for sure, but Aronds casts a jealous set of loins toward Los Angeles, who “have the best neo-60s scene”, which was almost certainly true. “The scene here in the big city is followed almost entirely by guys, which is kind of depressing”. Amen, brother. If I could have been rubbing shoulders with Susanna Hoffs around this time, I’d have been all-in myself. “How come there aren’t any girls on hand trying to look like Marianne Faithfull or Edie Segewick or Raquel Welch or Nancy Sinatra???”. How come indeed, New York???

Living Eye #4 takes the various micro-genres that make up what I guess we’ll call “underground oldies” and provide them with their own review columns. For instance, there’s a surf 45s review column and a rockabilly reviews column by one Tina Valentine, then a girl groups column – all 60s stuff. Aronds has his own column of 60s punk and psych records, then there’s another by Dave Baldwin with more of them, mostly total obscurities. Again, I’m not getting the sense that these were high-spending collectors in the Tim Warren sense, but rather accumulators of anything raw, high-energy and fun that they could afford. The column authors stitch together whatever information’s on a no-PS record’s label with whatever arcana they already know about that scene (“Is this from San Jose? I think this is from San Jose. Did they go to school with the Count Five?” etc).

Aronds lands what I’m sure for him was quite a coup, an essay by Greg Shaw, “Why Collect Old Records?”. It’s a paean to the 1960s and a justification for burying oneself into spending money on records from it. There’s a rockabilly revival underway again (this every-three-years cycle seems to have completely died in the 21st century), so Wanda Jackson gets a reverent feature. Aronds also provides a feature on Ann-Margret, yet with a mere single photo of Ann tucked in the back. Clearly the man wasn’t yet able to shamelessly pilfer from the internet the way I do.

Right there in New York City keeping the flag flying in 1982 were cover stars The Zantees, with Miriam Linna and Billy Miller. Kicks, their fanzine which I’ll cover in these parts shortly, is talked about in the past tense. Maybe my favorite underground-fanzine thing about Living Eye #4 is how loads of pieces will start on one page and continue on another, including my favorite no-count fanzine move, in which a piece starts on Page 26 and is then “continued on pg. 23”, earlier in the magazine a few pages back. It’s a truly fumble-fingered, backed-into-a-corner layout choice that even I haven’t erred into yet, and I’m terrible at this stuff. I’d love to see the other Living Eyes, if anyone out there perhaps knows where I might see them…?