Tag: Op magazine

Op #5 (The “E” issue)

~ Jay Hinman ~ Leave a comment

We last checked in with John Foster’s Op magazine a couple of years after this one, 14 issues down the line, when they’d found their feet a bit more. Here, back in early 1981, Op #5 is fully newsprint, folded up into a couple of messy sections like a free alt-weekly. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t make the reading experience moderately frustrating, and I’d be lying further if I said some of the layout choices weren’t totally, totally eighties, with acres of white space and new wavy doodles running across them.

At this junction, Op #5 had both breadth and depth but maybe not as much heft as it’d come to feature. It hewed to its vision as a central connecting point for the North American sub-underground, which crossed paths mostly through the mail and via the airwaves at this point in 1981: fanzines, cassettes, records and local radio shows, all of which Op is there to document with addresses and call numbers and perfunctory reviews. You’ll see something like Yazoo Records’ Heroes of the Blues trading cards reviews next to some avant-noise tapes next to new punk records like the Flesh Eaters’ No Questions Asked (Foster doesn’t like it). A young Calvin Johnson, who’d soon go on to start K Records and Beat Happening, doesn’t like the Circle Jerks’ Group Sex, either. 

It’s not the place I’d have gone to build my record collection based on the sterling taste and deep knowledge of its writers. Their zeal to link freaks with freaks is messianic and all-encompassing, and in many ways a nice backward look at the hippie papers of the 60s and 70s that attempted to do the same thing. The shortcoming, at least at this stage of the fanzine, is that while I walk away impressed with all the buzzing and DIY activity across the US and Canada – and elsewhere – in 1981, it’s tough to get a read on what’s actually exciting out there. The excitement, it would seem, is that there’s a world beyond major labels, and that that’s enough. 

Op published 26 issues, each focused on a letter of the alphabet. This one is “E”, so there are somewhat half-assed features on Bill Evans, Gil Evans and Roky Erickson, among others. Interspersed in the “E” section are a bunch more record reviews that have nothing to do with that letter. One gets the sense that for many of the labels who sent Op their releases, these might be the only reviews those records and cassettes ever got. I know this was a seminal mag for many folks, but I surmise based on the evidence presented that it really kicked in around the back half of the alphabet and not quite yet in Spring 1981.

Incidentally, my copy was sent to Creep magazine, based on the mailing label on the back, so I’m holding the very copy once caressed and fondled by “Mickey Creep”.

OP #19 (The “S” issue)

~ Jay Hinman ~ 3 Comments

OP was the offspring of Olympia, WA’s John Foster in 1979, who envisioned documenting an ephemeral organization called “The Lost Music Network” in which record labels, cassette artists, radio stations, fanzines and small clubs might coalesce into a like-minded fraternity of deeply-underground comrades. Over 26 issues, he did much to further the concept, and the glossy-cover Op received some pretty strong nationwide distribution, particularly in its later years, as it traipsed through the alphabet with showcase issues for each letter. It was something I then saw as pretty gimmicky and limiting, but which absolutely aged better with time and an actual look at how they pulled it off.

Issues of Op are generally able to be found. I never owned any at the time, most likely because their musical remit went well beyond my ability to ingest it as a teenager. I sauntered down to the San Francisco Art Book Fair a few weeks ago and, to my surprise, there were paper ephemera merchants with all sorts of vintage fanzines for sale, including Oregon’s Division Leap. I procured a handful of Op issues from them at a fair price, include Op #19, the “S” issue from 1983.

Foster and his loose, extensive network of relied-upon contributors were single-minded in their dedicated focus to micro-indie iconoclasts of any genre, from hardcore to 20th century classical to experimental home tapers. It’s an intense collection of information in small-point type, and while I read the issue in detail earlier in the week, it would be wrong to say I was hanging on every word, since there’s not really a defined joint opinion or tastemaking approach outside of “celebrating the unknown” and the misunderstood – regardless, at times, of its ultimate quality.  John Foster’s record reviews in particular attempt to be magnanimous to a fault. I had forgotten 100% about SF Bay Area heshers Eddie and The Tide, the great white local hope of burnouts and stoners at my high school, but even they clearly sent their indie record to Op in hopes of not getting a beating – which they didn’t. 

That said, Jamie Rake in his Sin 34 review says “Julie must be the worst female vocalist since Debbie of The Flying Lizards”. I don’t really know who that is, but don’t you come at Julie. He also talks about a Wisconsin HC band called The Shemps and asks “when was the last time you heard a pro-sports punk tune? Check out ‘The Pack Will Be Back’”. I definitely need to hear this song. There’s a really great section of fanzine reviews from Foster and Chris Stigliano, the latter of whom also highlights and marvels at a new onslaught of Velvet Underground bootlegs. As far as the interviews go – again, only with artists whose names start with “S”, there’s a perplexingly perfunctory one with Sun Ra, in which he answers multiple questions with variations on “Well I don’t know about that, because I am not human”.

There’s also a long letters section so different from the ones we see in publications today, with “letters” pulled from emails and Twitter comments. These were letters that then had to be re-typed and transcribed. Shane Williams writes from prison. I had forgotten that one of his longtime tropes had been “You’d be a little bit racist too, if you’d seen what I’ve seen in the joint”. The more late 70s/early 80s fanzines I immerse myself in, the more the letters section often feels like the star of the show. I’m even warming to the Flipside letters section, especially when I can find some teen’s name in there complaining about their scene or their mom or the cops, with the hindsight to know that said teen later went on to be well-known in a band, or put out their own fanzine, or wrote fiction etc. – or was just a letter-writin’ gadfly like Shane Williams or Joe Piecuch. 

So you may know that Op, once Foster finished up with the letter “Z” issue, had its lofty networking mission carried on afterward by two more fanzines, Sound Choice and Option. The former even invented its own extension of the Lost Music Network: “The Audio Evolution Network”. Both suffered from some of the same shortcomings as their predecessor while each having some winning aspects of their own. We’ll talk about them some other day here on the ‘Hemorrhage.