popwatch fanzine – Fanzine Hemorrhage

Popwatch fanzine was one hell of a tremendously informative compendium, and as thickly-packed a time capsule of what was going on in the post-Forced Exposure underground in a given year as anything this side of Butt Rag. It was edited by Leslie Gaffney in Somerville, MA and, as we discussed the last time I dissected Popwatch, had probably the single best American pipeline into New Zealand’s tripped-out noise and abstract pop ensembles & artists of the time. Clearly, whatever intersections there were between lo-fi pop, psych and experimental heavy guitar rock informed the Popwatch outlook and who they covered, and those happened to be some intersections that were exceptionally prevalent around the time of 1993’s Popwatch #4.

I mean, this plethora is all too much for even Peter Jefferies to handle. He’s interviewed here, and his The Last Great Challenge in a Dull World has just come out. He’s asked to provide a scene report for NZ, and he says he can only focus on Dunedin. “In the last few days I’ve seen The Puddle, Alastair Galbraith, the 3Ds, King Loser and Snapper play live….there’s so much talent down here, it gets difficult to keep up with”. Barbara Manning, who had her own connections to multiple NZ heavyweights at the time, talks about working at Reckless Records on Haight Street (I used to see her behind the counter all the time, along with filmmaker Jon Moritsugu) and about how “Byron Coley has me and Seymour Glass doing a series of Captain Beefheart songs….each single will have a painting on it”. What the hell happened to all of that? Tying it all together, she also discussed how she wants to do a couple of Peter Jefferies songs on a Siltbreeze 45 (!); oh, and she’ll also be conceiving babies in 1999.

I was truly excited to go through this one again just now and see a Giant Sand and Howe Gelb interview, a mythic rarity one hardly ever came across in the wild back then. This was right as Center of the Universe was coming out, which is a record I dig so much that I’m joyfully listening to it right now. Gaffney does a thing that I once did in my own fanzine. A band once didn’t answer my carefully-prepared questions, so I just printed the questions themselves in my fanzine anyway as a means of conveying to the reading audience why I was interested in the first place (The Fall-Outs, in my case). “Getting Howe to talk when he knows the words are gonna wind up in print somewhere has proven to be a difficult task (which might explain why there aren’t a helluva lot of known Giant Sand interviews)”. She does get him to talk, a little. I was personally so smitten by Giant Sand that year, 1993, that I actually wrote the band a letter in May 1993 offering my meager services to them as their tour manager, having just come off of a 6-week North American tour as roadie/t-shirt seller/money-holder with Claw Hammer. I penned a similar letter to Come, too. I’d never met anyone in either band. Neither wrote me back. It’s a trip to think what my life might’ve become had either or both taken me up on it, and in retrospect I’m quite glad they didn’t.

There are further interrogations with Combustible Edison and Madder Rose – bands I’ve never heard – and with Azalia Snail, a woman given to off-kilter, strange traipsing-through-the-tulips psych and who was pretty special there for a while. She is someone I’ve neglected far too often, and her new one sounds like something worth digging into further for sure. Crystallized Movements garner a big discussion, too – and it’s the only interview with them I’ve ever seen. Wayne and Kate sound like folks I should have known and/or should still get to know while we’re all still alive and totally psyched about killer records. Stewart Moxham from Young Marble Giants gets his say as well. Yeah, I know – it’s all in the same $4 issue.

The reviews squad for Popwatch #4 included Lou Barlow and Bob Fay from Sebadoh and James McNew from Yo La Tengo, along with world-class American Tim Bugbee, and with Leslie Gaffney really taking the reins on most of them. And there are dozens upon dozens upon hundreds of reviews – really, everything moderately interesting that came out that year and even a few things that weren’t. It was kind of a gas to see a review of the A Band Artex/A Lot LP on Siltbreeze, which was a Richard Youngs project and the first of that label’s releases that actually pissed me off. I even loved the Sam Esh record (and I still do). When Popwatch reviewers didn’t like something, they mostly tended to cover up for it by changing the subject rather than slamming the record – or by saying things like “Good, I’m afraid, is all it is”. That’s what counted as a supremely harsh bummer in this fanzine, a nice if unhelpful counter to the preening vitriol that informed so many of the dude-helmed fanzines of the era.

We were all seriously spoiled for choice when it came to underground fanzines in the early/mid 1990s, and didn’t even know it. Some, like Popwatch and even my own Superdope, weren’t even all that underground, and could be easily found in nationwide Tower Records stores and had print runs in the thousands (mine only actually hit those numbers once). Yet there was only so much that I could or would read back then, to say nothing of my limited-means income that only allowed just so much superfluous fanzine spending.

I actually passed on all of the Popwatch mags I saw then, with merely one exception – then only later wondered why I hadn’t accumulated them in the 90s. It may be that I incorrectly saw it more as a corporate-leaning magazine rather than as a fanzine per se; such were the very important distinctions that dictated the terms of my pocketbook.

What became retrospectively clear was just how strong a line Leslie Gaffney’s Popwatch had built to the incredibly fruitful New Zealand music scene of the time. Popwatch #6 arrived in 1994 when there was just one amazing NZ 45 after another coming out on US labels like Majora, Siltbreeze, New World of Sound, Ajax and Roof Bolt. Alastair Galbraith and Bill Direen each came and played shows in the US – I saw ‘em! – and this issue interviews both gentlemen. Galbraith actually contributed the glossy cover collage art you see here. I particularly like Bill Meyer’s “Who Is Bill Direen?” piece – honestly didn’t read this until after I’d interviewed Direen myself for Dynamite Hemorrhage #2, twenty years later, thinking that I’d finally cornered the US market.

There’s a whole passel of top-tier contributors to Popwatch #6, including our old pal Brian Turner, then the publisher of Teen Looch fanzine (and don’t worry, Brian, if you’re reading this – we’ll be getting to the ‘Looch one of these days). Turner contributes a piece on Japanese noise; Tim Bugbee interviews Jim Shepard; Gaffney herself interviews Crawling With Tarts. Corporate magazine my ass.

It was a laff to see reviews by Les Scurry, a guy I used to DJ with on KFJC circa 1989-90 when he was the music director over there. The dude was a serious curmudgeon and seen-it-all nihilist before his time, and it comes out in his many dismissive reviews in this issue. He did the same thing when he’d stand in front of the entire KFJC stuff at our mandatory weekly meeting on Wednesdays and go through that week’s new releases that’d been mailed to the station – “this is garbage”, “this one’s a big pile of dumper”, “you can forget playing this on the air” and so on.

The reviews section is really the only blot on the Popwatch record, as aside from Scurry, it’s relentlessly positive to a fault, and it attempts to review absolutely everything, as was the wont of many fanzines that styled themselves as comprehensive guides did at the time. I’ve written about these tendencies before; there were and remain irreconcilable pet peeves.

I also magnanimously recognize that not everyone reads these things the same way that I do; I’m always looking for guidance as to what’s the next set of records to buy, while others might be looking for some larger context on the state of underground music in 1994, be it San Diego pop-punk, twee midwestern jangle or UK industrial noise. But it’s tough for me to really contextualize anything when reading a review of some indie-pop doofus that concludes, “This is what music should be”. Oh yeah?

Or these choice sentences: from an Alastair Galbraith review: “Dedicated to Pip Proud, an English singer that no one’s ever heard of…” (three issues later this Australian singer would be featured in Popwatch); and from a Sleater-Kinney review: “Three hardcore girls from NYC”. Anyway, there’s stuff reviewed in here that is obviously pre-internet, and that has stayed that way for nearly 30 years, completely stuck in the analog world forever. I still want to hear that Spuyten Duyvil single Scurry praises in a very rare moment of favorableness.

The great thing about Popwatch is they were all pretty much like this: packed to the gills, full of New Zealand worship (they also documented Barbara Manning extensively, another huge favorite of mine during this era) and were bursting with highly educated, navel-gazing, record-collecting contributors. I’m stunned as to how nearly impossible it is to find anything about it online; it has stayed just as remotely analog as many of the long-tail bands it covered.