It’s just now dawning on me that the Boston-based Debbi Shane who put out this “collector’s edition” fanzine in 1986 has got to be the Debbie Shane who moved to San Francisco and was in the band Dumbhead a few years later….right? She wouldn’t remember me from the proverbial Adam, but I saw her band a time or two, and one time in the early 90s she and I worked cheek by jowl at “Rough Trade Records inventory day”, for which I was remunerated with free records that they were distributing. I sold these some years later, including original Flying Nun records by The Clean. I wonder if those are worth anything?

Poison Penn’s #2 apparently takes its name from the recently betrothed Madonna and Sean Penn, who, stoked by Sonic Youth, somehow became a cause celebre in the deep underground that year. It was this sort of in-joke that seemed to teeter between irony and sheep-like conformity, and something I did everything I possibly could to ignore at the time. Having not seen the first issue of this fanzine, it seems from letters to the editor to have overdone the Madonna angle even more than this one, and I’d likely find that a little hard to bear. This one keeps it in check, aside from ladling on too many questions about her/him to interview subjects like Peach of Immortality and Mike Watt, who try their best to wriggle away. 

There’s much to recommend here, however! Shane, who admits to not even having hit drinking age yet as of this date, is an attack-you-with-a-tape-recorder-after-the-gig type of interviewer, and I like that approach. She’s also, this year, very fond of “the cinema of transgression”, as evidenced by R. Kern on the cover; a printed manifesto from Nick Zedd about all the people who’ve fucked him over; and an interview with Marty Nation, who famously dangled his participle in the film Fingered and did some unthinkable things to Lydia Lunch with a gun. At the same time, she’s also enamored with Big Dipper, an indie-rock quartet of dorks who had a few albums on Homestead and whom she’s moony over in multiple reviews and asides. 

The mail interview with Tom Smith of Peach of Immortality is in that same highly unreadable fractured-punctuation style that he’d recently done in some Forced Exposure thing. He talks about his label’s upcoming Laughing Hyenas and Drunks With Guns records, which did not, in fact, actually happen. Shane then disses the band in her live review, happy that they’re from DC and therefore “will be leaving in the morning”. Then there’s a club-bomb interview with Bob Forrest of LA’s Thelonious Monster (!?!), who were just awful, in which Forrest – whom people said was a real fun guy! – admits to having just done a bunch of coke in the bathroom. The things an intrepid, spontaneous reporter with a tape recorder can obtain can be pretty magical. 

Mike Watt claims that the aforementioned Madonna wrote “La Isla Bonita” about his hometown, San Pedro, CA – which, if you’ve experienced the sheer natural beauty of that town, you’d understand is 100% true immediately. Shane goes to see Saccharine Trust at TT’s in Boston on 10/30/86; at said show, “Jack Brewer pulled his arm outta his socket mid-set. He ran back stage, dove chest first onto a table, and dangled his arm back into place”. That had to be absolutely awesome to see, right up there with Jeff Connolly of The Lyres beating up a bandmate mid-song, or the guy from Lubricated Goat having a narcolepsy attack on stage. 

She ends with a live review containing a fanciful tale very much in the spirit of phony live reviews that fanzines like Conflict and Flesh and Bones were writing at the time. In this one, the members of Sonic Youth, at the 11/22/86 Irving Plaza NYC show, see Shane taping said show; drop their instruments, and dive off the stage to pummel her, after which she’s hospitalized, where she’s now suffering from amnesia and attempting to write these words. Heeey, now that I think about it, maybe that Jack Brewer story was bogus too. Damn. Great fanzine! Does anyone have any other issues?