ryan wells – Fanzine Hemorrhage

I believe it’ll serve the world and the ultimate digital historical record in some meager way if I take a crack on this site at each of the three Z Gun fanzines that came out toward the end of the 2000s. I talked about Z Gun #1 a year ago here. In Spring 2008, Scott Soriano and Ryan Wells sprung a second issue upon us, one they manifested as Z Gun #2. Like its predecessor, it was probably the best print fanzine that came out in its year, and I suspect I’d be hard-pressed to find examples to the contrary.

For instance, it contains one of my favorite interviews in any fanzine, ever – one with Australian duo Fabulous Diamonds. Not only was their dubbed-out experimental delay some of the absolute finest music of the day, the band were a male/female non-couple who seemed to cultivate this bizarre, right-out-in-the-open sexual tension that made them hate each other. In this too-brief interview by contributor DX, they talk about how they love to yank people’s chains about the sex they’re having with each other; how Jarrod wanted their record cover to be them actually 69’ing, and Nisa giving him tons of crap about how “if it came to the crunch I think he wouldn’t do it”, and Jarrod riposting that he wouldn’t be able to perform if it was with Nisa. Just a total gem of a chat, almost entirely about how much they loathe or fake-loathe each other, with nothing at all about their music.

There are Sightings and Ceramic Hobs interviews as well, with none of the interviews here having any photos of the bands whatsoever, a clearly deliberate anti-fanzine choice that I’ll have to ask one of these San Franciscans about one of these days if we ever find ourselves on the same cable car. Monty Buckles interviews Mike Doscocil of Drunks With Guns, and quite memorably says their band’s guitar “sounds the way burning plastic smells”. Bravo! This was never more apparent than on “Wonderful Subdivision”, one of the late 20th century’s most towering and majestic works of art. Doskocil admits that seeing Flipper in Kansas City at the local VFW in ‘83 or ‘84 had a major impact on his band, as you’d have expected it might have.

Rich Kroneiss, bless him, does an overview and survey of Amphetamine Reptile Records, which honestly, in 2008 was probably a label we were all a little too long in the tooth to pretend had any lasting power beyond its ability to fry the severely underdeveloped synapses of 19-year-old male faux misanthropes and colored-vinyl fiends. Hard for me to even get excited about Halo of Flies any more, much as I’d like to. Cosmic Psychos, sure. I’d have to really think beyond that, but nothing’s coming to me, and I saw just about all of them live at one point or another (King Snake Roost were a total blast).

2008, wow. A ton of underground records were still coming out on 45 and LP. In Z Gun #2, was the era of Eat Skull, Billy Bao, Black Lips, Eddy Current Suppression Ring, Hospitals, Mayyors, Pissed Jeans, Sic Alps and Slicing Grandpa. As I rather belatedly came to sort of realize putting out my own fanzines, reviewing everything that comes into the office helps no one – not the readers that have to wade through a plethora “it’s alright, I guess” reviews; not the bands whose work is given the cursory once-over and the tepid, “highly qualified” endorsement; and neither does it serve the writers, who spend some of life’s finite time padding the fanzine with mediocrity when it could have been perhaps better spent giving another 5 pages each to the Fabulous Diamonds to fight with each other, or to more stories from Mike Doscocil. This was the Art for Spastics era for me, a radio program I used to listen to religiously online made by DJ Rick of KDVS. His aesthetic fit neatly in line with that of the Z Gun editors, and even with my griping about too many reviews, when you get to the end of them you come to realize/remember that 2008 was actually a pretty healthy time for the scene.

We could use more Soriano and Wells in print right about now, couldn’t we? But hark! Scott Soriano has a new fanzine, Record Time, about to drop any day now. Pre-orders here!

Z Gun #1 came out on glorious newsprint in 2007 as a stated counterpoint to “the Internet maw” that was, by the founders’ lights, aggressively swallowing up the analog world, and at the same time leading to the disappearance of great internet-based music writing due to belly-up ISPs, vanishing comment boxes and spam-choked Blogger accounts. The guys that put it together, Scott Soriano and Ryan Wells, had cut their musical teeth in a pre-internet era of fanzines and vinyl, so wanted to ensure that there was something of theirs that lived on after any sort of digital apocalypse. I know the feeling.

I was pretty excited when Z Gun #1 came along that year, and by the evidence presented here, I was right to be. Fanzines – good ones – were pretty much extinct. I was doing my own blog called Agony Shorthand just before this, and reading back through this issue today, I even saw it referenced in a review. I came to personally know Wells and Soriano before this time. Ryan Wells in the 90s, mostly because he was a gadfly and record-collector-about-town here in San Francisco, and we’d clink glasses and slap backs, and talk about limited pressings and rad bands at shows.

My introduction to Soriano, who lived in Sacramento, was a little more comic; I’d seen his band Los Huevos play at some dive bar in the Mission in 1997, and in reviewing the band’s record (on Wells’ “Cheap Date” label, as it turned out) in my fanzine Superdope #8, I made light of “the young vocalist’s affected Neanderthal act (diving into the crowd’s knees, knocking pint glasses from hands, etc.”). Well turned out “young” Soriano was easily as old as I am, perhaps older (just better-looking), and he wrote me a quite magnanimous and only moderately defensive email that pleaded his case. He and I then struck up a correspondence, and I’ll always be thankful to and ironically pissed at the guy for teaching me how to use eBay so I could sell off my vinyl collection.

He’d very soon go on to start S-S Records, one of the top-tier sub-underground weirdo/punk labels of the early 21st century. So he and Wells are cranking along, supporting the scene, helping unite the skins & the punks, running a killer garage punk blog called Static Party etc etc. They get the idea for a print fanzine, and Z Gun comes out in 2007. And it’s great! Wells wrote a terrific guide to San Francisco artpunk of the late 70s/early 80s (from Chrome to Flipper to Factrix to The Residents to Church Police and back again) – much the same world that existed just prior to that discussed in our Wiring Dept. review, and a world that’s covered in depth by the forthcoming Who Cares Anyway? book – and Min Yee of the A-Frames takes it one step further and writes about San Francisco’s completely forgotten Black Humor and their 1982 LP.

There’s also a symposium on The Brainbombs, with multiple contributors, and I suppose I’ll just say “folly of youth” – both theirs and my own. I put that band on the cover of my own Superdope #4 in 1992, and despite my undying and enduring love for their first two 45s, I’d very quickly aged out of their fuck/kill/destroy/rape/maim “comedy” by the end of that decade. Wah wah wah, aren’t I special, Mr. Grown Up etc. If you want to know more about the Brainbombs, and pick apart each of their releases in all their intellectual complexity, the single best place to do it is almost certainly in the pages of Z Gun #1.

Really, the rest of this excellent magazine, aside from the Pink Reason and Not Not Fun record label interviews, is given over to a heaping batch of reviews, most of them strong and well-written enough to actually trust. And how often can you say that about a print fanzine? Thankfully they did two more issues as well, and we’ll maybe get to those in time. It all brings back a lot of 2007/2008 “memories”: the Art For Spastics radio show; Terminal Boredom; Tom Lax’s Siltblog; Population Doug; and the whole sick underground crew.

Soriano and Wells kept their Z Gun website, last updated in 2010, still active – and it’s still sitting there, unmolested. So who really needed a print fanzine anyway, right?