New Dezezes – Fanzine Hemorrhage

I’ve noticed in looking back at early punk fanzines that many of the youngsters writing for them had clearly been weaned on their daily paper’s gossip column, and therefore took this time-honored scandal-sheet form into their first writings. Quite a few fanzines loved to go with these “items” about who was dating whom; who was breaking up; who got drunk at a party; who got burned by a label and so on. Even the “scene reports” that clogged up MaximumRocknRoll eventually took some of this form.It’s even more fun, in 1977’s New Dezezes #2 (we talked about #1 here two days ago), to see just how either off-base and wrong, or prescient and predictive, so many of these “items” actually were. To wit:

“Rat Scabies left THE DAMNED because of a rumoured suicide attempt and the band has decided to break up!”

“The new CRIME drummer is McDonald’s employee HANK RANK – who has never played drums before”

“David Braun, keyboard player for The Screamers, has been sacked and is now starting his on (sic) record label – DANGER HOUSE (sic)”

“The Cramps drummer Miriam left & the band has since disbanded”

“Penelope Houston got a chunk of her arm bitten off at a trendy DEVO party”

“A new punk club called THE MASQUE has opened up in L.A.”

Great stuff in ‘77! Jean Caffeine’s New Dezezes #2 has a color cover this time around as well as double the amount of staples (top left and top right!), but still insisted on printing on one side of paper only for about two-thirds of the pages, somehow switching gears every now & again and going big on “both sides”. Sometimes the pages are in landscape mode, others in portrait, and often hand-written or banged out on a clunky typewriter, as one did in those days.

Given that Peter Urban was one of the prime movers on this magazine, and that he managed The Dils, it’s only right and natural that The Dils get a big feature in this one. The Dils were also a fantastic all-timer of a punk band, and their new 45 I Hate The Rich has just hit the stores. Yet the Paul Weller (The Jam) interview seems to take the tone & tenor of this thing down a bit. The Jam clearly toured the US earlier than I’d thought, and listen, The Jam were also one of my favorite bands in high school – more the “Going Underground” and “Down in the Tube Station at Midnight” Jam, not the snotty, punk-ish sounding 1977 Jam. I still like that stuff, but I always thought Weller was a boob and a terrible interview, just a huge chip on his shoulder at all times and someone who was really, really bad at being the “common man” he so very much wanted to be. Springsteen is better at that act for sure!

Greg and Jimmy from The Avengers each get their own interviews in this one, and there are some cool photos of a new band called The Liars, who never recorded, but how about this – there’s terrific footage of them from 1978 right here on YouTube! (And while you’re at it, how about CRIME sounding like the Velvet Underground playing “Sweet Sister Ray”?). You know, the crowd from these days loved to whistle on about “the spirit of ‘77” long after those days were over, but all you need to do is watch those videos and the sheer joy of the crowds having a total ball – and then read a mag like New Dezezes #2 documenting it all in real time – and you’ll cut them some slack, when you’re not whining in your own head about missing it all because you were nine years old, like I always tend to do.

This is a now-legendary early San Francisco punk fanzine from 1977 (!) that I found somewhere about fifteen years ago, maybe at a record store or a yard sale or a church jumble, I honestly can’t remember. I’m delighted to have it, as it’s early, man – very, very early. The editor was Jean Caffeine, with heavy contributions from Peter Urban. Urban managed The Dils at this time, and is someone I connected with relatively recently when I did Dynamite Hemorrhage #8 and interviewed him about his ex-partner Caitlin Hines. Very magnanimous and helpful, and I appreciated his perspective greatly. The guy’s still very willing to talk about the scene, the old days and whatnot, as evidenced by this very recent clip.

New Dezezes #1 is stapled in the upper left corner and only printed on one side, like a pack of flyers assembled, collated and hurriedly stapled together. As DIY as it comes, as rushed as the torrent of music that was washing over these impressionable and young SF rebels. There’s loads of excitement over the fact that on commercial TV – the only kind we got back then, actually – “…the NBC Weekend show had a segment on punk rock and it was great. It showed the Sex Pistols live and in the studio….the punk club audiences were shown trashing the clubs and each other. (Lots of SF people must have been watching because the Mabuhay has suddenly gotten a lot more frantic)…..Unfortunately, actually seeing a glimpse of the English scene only whetted my appetite for more. FUCK the U.S.A.! I WANNA GO TO ENGLAND”.

My understanding is that Caffeine stuck around San Francisco a bit longer and then moved to New York and became a member of Pulsallama, and then to Texas and became a “cow-punk”. Urban was around far longer and may actually still be in SF; he certainly gets back here (which is the city in which I live) often enough to participate in various punk rock anniversary hoo-hahs/nostalgia trips (all of which I love, of course). This is their earliest work, and it chooses its targets to celebrate wisely. There’s a form-fill interview with two members of Crime; a big rave-up by Peter Urban on The Screamers; and a good interview with a rambunctious Richie Detrick of The Nuns, where I learned that he was “Crazy Richie”, an early member of The Ramones, kicked out because he had a nervous breakdown (!). He also answers a very important question, “Do you think there are any new wave bands here?” (meaning San Francisco). His retort: “There are only 3. 1) NUNS 2) CRIME 3) AVENGERS. I don’t consider Mary Monday new wave. I don’t consider her nothin’. All these bands just hopped on a band wagon. You go to Mabuhay and there’s all these shit bands.”.

This is also likely the earliest venue for the punk photos of James Stark, who’s now celebrated widely and wisely for same. (You can get his book here). And there’s a piece on Bobby Death of the band Skidmarx; Mr. Death never recorded with either this band nor his own Bobby Death Band, so this is kind of a rare treat of a guy who turns up sometimes in photos and old fanzines but who’s sort of a missing link between all the bands like Crime and The Nuns who did record.

Hey, one thing I’d recommend if you’re interested in the 1977+ San Francisco scene is this book about Mabuhay Gardens booker and fabled MC Dirk Dirkson called Shut Up You Animals!!! The Pope is Dead. A Remembrance of Dirk Dirksen: A History of the Mabuhay Gardens. The book itself is super sloppy and a bit half-baked (I think the copy editor may have been Will Shatter on a five-day heroin bender), but there’s a show-by-show overview of every show at the Mab from the first day they started booking punk to the very last day they had bands in the late 80s. It’s great! You can sit there and pick out a month, I don’t know, let’s say August 1978, and fantasize how just that month you could’ve seen Crime, The Bags, The Dils, The Flesh Eaters, The Weirdos, Negative Trend, Avengers, The Germs and so on. I mean, that’s the sort of thing I like to do, anyway. I guess if you’re Jean Caffeine and Peter Urban, you use it as a tally of where you likely were on any given night that month. We’ll talk about Issue #2 of this fanzine next time.