Tag: Patrick Amory

Conflict #36

~ Jay Hinman ~ 4 Comments

I’ve discussed Conflict #37 and Conflict #42 on this site previously; the former was (obviously) the issue of Gerard Cosloy’s fanzine that followed the one we’re discussing today, yet it took 18 months after Conflict #36 to actually see publication, by which point Cosloy had taken the entire year of 1985 off from publishing a fanzine, and had moved from Boston to New York City. So this one, Conflict #36 from August/September 1984 was the last of the Boston issues, and was definitely included in that whopping batch of Conflicts and Matters that Jackie Ockene let me borrow over spring break 1986, and which I count as a “germinal” event in my overall musical appreciation development, such that it was. 

Conflict #36 begins with something truly incongruous and unusual: what appears to be a heartfelt apology to folks like Mike Gitter and Billy Ruane and Al Quint whom he’d spent much mirth and merrimaking mocking in previous issues, the ones Jackie let me borrow. Mostly these folks were Boston-area publishers who wrote about punk & hardcore, and wrote about it poorly, as I gathered. Whatever happened in issue #35, I don’t know, but there are multiple letters printed in this one calling Cosloy out for being an asshole/jerk/too critical etc. It either had finally hit home, or this young man was being incredibly facetious in his apology; in any case, I have most issues of Conflict after this one, and sensitive and magnanimous they are most certainly not. So it didn’t hold for long – not even past page one in this one, to be honest.

What’s different about this issue from the ones that followed, aside from centering on Boston scene jibber-jabber and mock controversies rather than NYC, is its general girth. There are an obscene amount of reviews in here, everything under the 1984 sun that lived at the underground crossroads of hardcore, goth, college rock and nascent pigfuck. That could be X or R.E.M, Siouxsie and the Banshees or New Order, or Fang and the Sluglords and Flipper and Gang Green. Or Circle X or Sonic Youth or Live Skull. Interesting times, my friends. 

Patrick Amory, whom we last visited in these pages when we talked about his Too Fun Too Huge #2 fanzine, gets his own jumbo section to wax about records and live shows he’s seen around Boston. He puts out a contrasting (to Gerard’s) view of live 1984 Meat Puppets, calling them “heavy metal” and not worthy of the insane underground hype then-circulating around the Meat Puppets II record (one of my all-timers, for what it’s worth). Frankly, once I’d see them live for the first time two years later, that’s what they were – a shitty 70s rock band. Since I missed their berzerk, blitzoid hardcore days, I kinda feel like I missed their live genius entirely, because after I saw them in 1986, they were even worse!

Now Amory also reviews SSD’s How We Rock, which he rightly calls the worst album title of all time, yet he still thinks the whole thing is “powerful”, “supertight” and “awesome”. I wonder if he still listens to it. (Cosloy also reviews it, also digs it). I would have loved to see SS Decontrol live in 1981-82, but I personally believe “Springa” was hands-down one of the five worst vocalists in hardcore punk history. I really, really hope Al Barile, Choke and the Boston Crew don’t read this. Speaking of Boston ‘core, Forced Exposure’s Jimmy Johnson is a kid that has his say in Conflict #36, and gets a big section of reviews that mirror the interests of his own mag at the time – also HC, but also bizarro UK goth and noise. Cosloy’s excited about a ton of stuff in this one, with special lionizations of the latest records from Saccharine Trust and Big Black.

That’s it – no interviews, just dozens upon dozens of short reviews, laced liberally with scene reports, gossip and invective. That’s precisely what I needed when I read this in 1986, and Conflict from that point forward became one of the only two 100% totally essential fanzines for me in the late 80s, right alongside Forced Exposure.

Too Fun Too Huge! #2

~ Jay Hinman ~ 2 Comments

Since the day I purchased this one in the Spring of 1988, Too Fun Too Huge! #2 has been a “top quartile” fanzine in my overall “fanzine collection”, so much so that I’ve been trying to find a copy of TFTH #1 for the better part of my life. Do you have one? 

I’m going to say right here that it’s not for everyone. Ostensibly there are two editors here – a guy named George Boulukos, who writes an exceptionally unfunny “I Hate Rock and Roll” editorial and then reviews a bunch of metal records, and the guy whom I really associate with this otherwise mostly fantastic fanzine, Patrick Amory. The Too Fun Too Huge! mailing address happens to also be Patrick Amory’s New York street address, so my guess is that he did most of the heavy lifting on this one. What very little I know about Amory came from this lone fanzine and the knowledge that he later went on to help run Matador Records in a “senior position”. Hey, he’s got his own Wikipedia entry.

This magazine epitomizes the late 80s fanzine gusto, panache, and sangfroid (if you will) that made me such a rabid fanzine accumulator at the time. Often nasty, undermining and downright mean, it’s of a league with Forced Exposure, Conflict and Disaster, all top-tier fanzines of the era that knew everything about music, reviewed nearly every record, and were absolutely standing by to tell you why certain small independent bands were not merely “bad at music”, but were the scum of the earth, ought to be shot etc etc. Or even more so, why certain other writers or scene denizens were; Jack Rabid and Chris Stigliano come under pretty heavy incoming fire in this one, as they both so often did.

And listen – I loved every bit of it then, even if it was bands I liked being trashed. I still enjoy reading this 100x more than most music things now. I’ve written about this elsewhere, but I remember unnaturally affecting a bit of this know-it-all east coast fanzine persona in my own conversations & arguments with friends about the music they personally liked, verbally trashing The Replacements or Sham 69 or whomever because I felt it was the right cool move at age 20. Then I’d wince when someone I totally loved at the time – Soul Asylum or Lazy Cowgirls, say – would get the same sort of treatment from one of these adored mags. 

My persona didn’t last that long. I really just couldn’t fake enough negative emotion about an independent rock band, and it’s rarely felt satisfying enough to unequivocally trash something in print, mostly because I could never do it as wittily nor with half as much invective as these fellas. And they were running into many of their targets at NYC/Boston shows all the time, I’d have to imagine. I wasn’t, but I still remember the time Mick Collins cornered me at a show in San Francisco in the mid/late 90s and was like, “Hey man, what the fuck is your problem with the Dirtbombs?”. “Um no, Mr. Collins, jeez I….well I really liked The Gories and I….”. Nah, I wasn’t built for it. 

TFTH #2 is the first place I ever read anything about Fairport Convention, not exactly a “Topic A” band on most late 80s hipsters’ lips at the time. Amory is also a huge New Zealand music fiend and especially cottons on to The Chills and The Clean as the most essential of the bunch. Somehow this guy reviews basically every Bill Direen disc released over the previous two-year period as well; my take was that those (not-very-good) records were mostly impossible to find in the US. They interview Michael Hudson of The Pagans, who’d recently reformed and who, in 1987-88, were among my top 3-4 “favorite bands of all time” (please note that I heard them for the first time most likely in 1987). 

But it’s funny, too, the way Amory gets super worked-up about music he thinks is shit and then devotes a long interview to the Moving Targets (most readers: who??) and then praises the comedic & art skills of Peter Bagge (really?). I mean, there’s no accounting for taste, and thankfully that’s a point Armory himself makes in his full-page Chris Stigliano takedown as well. I also, in today’s re-read, quite enjoyed a guide to what food to eat to every track of Wire’s Chairs Missing (!) and his great defense of record collecting, featuring some Swedish Heartwork Records reviews (which by the way – overrated record label. See, I can do it!).

 I don’t know why there’s so much anti-California blather in this one but at least he let his fanzine get some distribution out here, where I happened to be ready & waiting to buy, devour and then liberally quote from it (…”and Rikki from Satan’s Rats leaned over with his horrible breath…”).  You’d have to read Armory’s riposte to Jack Rabid to understand this even a little, and to also know who Jack Rabid was). So yeah – anyone have an extra copy of Too Fun Too Huge! #1?