Puncture fanzine – Fanzine Hemorrhage

When all the dust clears, when all the debates are finished, when all the fists stop flying – what will you say was the best San Francisco music fanzine of the second half of the 1980s? I feel like the contenders were probably BravEar, Wiring Dept and Puncture, right? Unless I’m forgetting someone. These three fanzines were the most adventurous in terms of traversing the wider underground and going deep where necessary, and yet all three suffered a bit for their overtly sleeve-wearing left wing politics, and for pandering a bit too heavily to quote-unquote college rock at times. But listen, I did myself at the time, no question. That’s why I still own copies of all these mags that I bought during 1984-87. I think it’s probably a pretty easy call at the end of the day: Wiring Dept, then BravEar, then Puncture.

Said the guy who’s here to talk about Puncture #9 from Spring 1985! We’re not talking about Forced Exposure or Conflict levels of quality, taste and information here – those east coast zines really set the standard during this period in my unforgiving eyes. I mostly like Puncture, though, and I believe the value-for-cost quotient you’ll get from this book of their first six issues is pretty high, at a mere $14.95 a pop. Patty Stirling was really the main driver behind this one, and of all of the fanzine’s first, I don’t know, 10 or 11 issues? Then it really did become a true alterna/indie/Lollapalooza abomination that I don’t think she had anything to do with. (Although looking at these covers, any fanzine with a “Remembering Flipper” article couldn’t have been too hideous).

In the rado update that kicks the thing off, it talks about how Ray Farrell is leaving the Bay Area and KPFA to go work at SST in LA. Weren’t we just talking about that guy? The interview with Test Dept is quite standoffish and a little pretentious, and yet I actually come away admiring these UK proto-industrial performance art freaks and maybe wanting to see if I might like them 40 years later. Sure, it’s fine. It brings KFJC’s Mark Darms and his Industrial Report radio show from those years screaming back to life for me, which is great. The thing in here on the Violent Femmes isn’t too annoying, either – you have to remember, that second album of theirs, the one where frontman Gordan Gano “found Jesus”, was not received well by the frat boys who partied their asses off to “Blister in the Sun” and “Add It Up”, but there’s some love for it here, along with Gano’s religious side project The Mercy Seat, which I guess I never heard, because I absolutely loathed the Violent Femmes.

Aaaaaaaah and there’s a review of Husker Du / Minutemen / Meat Puppets (no Saccharine Trust or Swa??) from The Stone in San Francisco, 3/1/1985. This was SST’s celebrated “The Tour”, and a show that took place here and at the Keystone Palo Alto the night before. It was my senior year of high school, and my friends weren’t really cottoning to the American underground the way I was, so I didn’t go despite really wanting to. San Jose State’s station KSJS was playing Double Nickels on the Dime and New Day Rising incessantly; Palo Alto was a mere 30 minute drive from my home in San Jose, and my parents were definitely in the “we don’t care what you do” phase of my youth. But go to a show by myself, at age 17? Absolutely not, out of sheer embarrassment and introversion. So I ended up never seeing The Minutemen, Husker Du nor Saccharine Trust. It is no consolation whatsoever that I did, in fact, see SWA live on stage several years later.

There are great pics of Sonic Youth from a 1/14/85 show at The I-Beam, and kudos to Patty Stirling for finding a way to compare them to both Hex Enduction Hour-era Fall and The Stooges. She also contributes a fantastically ludicrous meathead drawing of an ultra-buffed Henry Rollins to her Black Flag reviews. Other reviews abound of the Cocteau Twins, Billy Bragg, Aztec Camera, Rank and File, Einstruzende Neubauten, This Mortal Coil and all that SST stuff – this was 1984/85 to me at the time, and from my vantage point of Gunderson High School in San Jose and especially from my bedroom’s clock radio, it was “magic hour”. I couldn’t have been more excited about music, and I had so much still to learn. (I still do). I would renounce virtually all of it in the year to come, once I got to college, except for those SST bands and my newly-discovered Homestead and Touch & Go heroes, and all that blitzing hardcore I’d been too chicken and/or broke to actively buy circa 1982-83. Now I can go back and very much enjoy the Cocteau Twins and This Mortal Coil, as well as a few others whom I never strayed from, such as Siouxsie and the Banshees – still a Fanzine Hemorrhage favorite to this day. Listen!

I guess Puncture ended up capturing the time better than I thought. I mean, here’s this issue’s back cover, pictured. Flipper! I suspect this is where I stole a thing I did in my own Dynamite Hemorrhage fanzines of putting a band photo of someone not even talked about in the issue on the back cover, then letting readers guess who it is. Let’s go Wiring Dept/Puncture/BravEar, then. What say you? What high-quality Bay Area fanzines am I missing from this time?

I’m pretty sure I know where I got my idea that the San Francisco underground music scene was so mediocre-to-downright-awful around 1985-86. It was from the San Francisco fanzines like BravEar, Wiring Dept and Puncture that championed it. I bought those mags, sure, but I also turned my 18-year-old nose up at them, even at the time. This was my first year of college, and my first year away from the SF Bay Area, and therefore everything that was going on in New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, Boston and even LA was just so much more visceral, exciting and new to me than the SF peace punk/political protest communal hippie-tinged shtick that just bored and at times angered me no end. Especially that year, as punk morphed into speed metal or “cowpunk” or even lamer versions of post-hardcore punk. Steve Albini and my other new heroes that year said San Francisco music was the absolute worst, and I could present very little evidence to counter with.

It was MRR and all my record shopping excursions to peace-punkified Berkeley that probably left me so bereft. That and the explosion of Camper Van Beethoven mania my senior year of high school on college radio and the local music press. As it turned out, I came to eventually enjoy that band’s second record II & III and certainly my issues of Wiring Dept. fanzine down the line. Puncture, not so much, although in reading through Puncture #10 from Fall 1985, it’s still a terrific curio and a strong attempt at making lemonade from lemons. Exhibit A is Mia from Frightwig on the cover here, and several tributes to the band inside. I dug Frightwig; saw them live twice, including once at the world-famous Mabuhay Gardens. In ‘85 they’d have been one of my favorite SF bands; a year later, they actually were.

There’s a piece in here about the goings-on at an Agnostic Front / Fuck-Ups show that was held at the Sound of Music instead of the Mab, because Ness Aquino of the Mab was warned that 200 skinheads were going to show up and cause havoc, as skinheads are wont to do. This was considered an “anti-Maximum Rocknroll” show (hear hear!) because that mag was critical of skinheads, right-leaning politics and so forth, which is understandable, but I’d have liked to have supported an anti-MRR event in any case, just for fun. Shame about the bands.

J. Neo Marvin has a piece in here reviewing four Velvet Underground records – one sometimes forgets just how tough these were to easily find in the bins in the 80s – as well as the new Victor Bokris book on the band, Loaded. This was when a big wave of new Velvets fandom was just starting to crest, with myself included in said wave. In fact, the first songs by the band I ever enjoyed were “Foggy Notion” and “Temptation Inside Your Heart” that very year, because of the recent archival/unreleased LP, although once I heard “I’m Waiting For The Man” and “Sweet Jane” later that year, I was like, hey, I know these songs.

There’s an uneventful Blixa Bargeld interview and a fun pooh-poohing of a Diamanda Galas show at the I-Beam. In the reviews section, there’s loads of love for the Meat Puppets’ new Up on the Sun and for Camper Van Beethoven’s Telephone Free Landslide Victory, of course. Other new favorites included the Butthole Surfers Psychic…Powerless…Another Man’s Sac and locals Glorious Din and their Leading Stolen Horses. The Knitters’ Poor Little Critter on the Road gets compared to “Hee-Haw”, which sounds about right. I honestly don’t think I could bring myself to listen to that record for even a minute in 2024. By the way, if I’m ever sick in bed for an extended period of time, I might just binge-watch a couple seasons of Hee-Haw. I watched so, so, so much television in the 1970s, whatever was on our six channels, that I put in some quality time with this outstanding American television program. If you’ve never seen it, check this out or this one. I’ll take that over The Knitters any goddamn day.

Puncture #10 wraps up with book reviews of the new Less Than Zero as well as a takedown of the punk photo book Loud 3D: “the vast majority of the pictures are performance shots of big-name hardcore bands that would do any photographer from the San Francisco Chronicle proud”… “many of the shots are too dark, out of focus, or lacking sufficient depth. All these factors are important for photography of any kind”. Tell it! Henry Rollins’Two Thirteen Sixty One book is also taken down for having two pieces printed twice in the same book and for its many typos. “Surely Henry Rollins could give us strong street writing if he tried harder”. Try harder, Rollins! I think he had other priorities; around this time is when I saw Rollins write something about his workouts: “When I go into the gym, it’s like I’m going into WAR.” So much to make fun of from 1985, so little time.