Tag: san francisco punk fanzines

Puncture #10

~ Jay Hinman ~ Leave a comment

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.

Search and Destroy #3

~ Jay Hinman ~ Leave a comment

It is not difficult in our current times for a San Franciscan to happen upon V. Vale, late 1970s editor of Search and Destroy fanzine, sitting in front of City Lights bookstore or at an art event of some kind, selling intact and original back issues of Search and Destroy at around $25-$30 a pop. I was fortunate to come by my copies in a different manner, and certainly not by being one of the original 100 Bay Area punks in 1977. This is when Search and Destroy #3 was published, presumably in the back half of the year, given the killer New Year’s Eve Crime/Weirdos show advertised herein.

Let’s start with the mystery of the cover of this one. I’m still not sure who this is! For years I reckoned it was someone from The Damned, but nah, none of those guys looked like this. Who is this dude? What a photo. Wait, is it Stiv Bators? Someone tell us. Search and Destroy #3 is as up-to-the-minute on the whys and wherefores of punk rock music as anything contemporaneous you’ll read anywhere; you’d think from the tone taken that it had been around and thriving for several years by this point. No one’s jaded, but neither is anyone blithering around like a weeks-old convert, pie-eyed about the Sex Pistols or what have you. The scene is raw, hot and exploding, and the coverage reflects it. Search and Destroy always defined “punk” with a pretty wide remit, so even in ‘77 The Residents are included. There’s even a super-brief Don Van Vliet interview.

The first piece is an interview with Black Randy, who does everything in his power to ensure that he’ll alienate everyone around him, telling many matter-of-fact stories from his times in jail and as a male hustler. The real deal, this guy was. Debbie Harry, long before Blondie has come near anything approaching popularity, is asked if she’s had any offers to be in movies and says, “No, only Amos Poe”. Sorry, Amos. Cliff Roman from The Weirdos attempts to turn Northern California on to In-N-Out Burger – we didn’t have them back then up here; in fact, when I went to college in Southern California eight years after this, I couldn’t get SoCal folks to keep their yaps shut about In-N-Out and Tommy’s. Perhaps the best of the interviews is with Mark Perry of Alternative TV and Sniffin Glue fanzine, already years-old before his time and with a perspective so far ahead of his gobbing, safety-pin bedecked contemporaries.

Oh, there’s a Devo interview as well. I just saw Devo’s 50-year anniversary show in San Francisco a couple weeks ago. They’re in their seventies now, and they were great.  Devo in 1977 loves Germany, the country, because “they avoided the hippie 60s” and because “German cinema is the only thing happening in film, practically” – hyperbole in 1977, coming off an absolutely incredible 8-year run for American film. You often can’t see it when it’s happening right in front of you, can you? Search and Destroy #3 has a Crime centerfold (!) and reprints a bunch of lyrics by brand-new bands like X, as well as The Germs’ “Forming”. These feel like space-fillers, but I’m also wondering how anyone was able to interpret and transcribe anything Darby was muttering. 

Finally, I’ll leave you with some snippets from The Dils, who got to collectively author the Los Angeles “Street Report”. They’d moved down there from San Francisco as a band at one point; I’m not positive on the timeline but I’m guessing their stay down south wasn’t taking so well:

“A big thing in LA is people telling each other to FUCK OFF, & getting involved in little, petty street skirmishes – imitating English punks they’ve seen on TV. Like the strangle-dance – it’s stupid!”

“LA likes bands gaudy and silly on the surface – we get slagged off because we have a political outlook, for being Too Serious. We get shit like “Communist Chairman Mao” and “Dils Suck” written on our cars.”

“Audiences here are totally infatuated with the Johnny Rotten star trip. They don’t realize that when he first took a suit and ripped it apart, then fastened it together with safety pins, he was SAYING SOMETHING – not that “safety pins are cute” – the clothes like the music are supposed to be a threat.”

“The BAGS are a joke band – they wear bags over their heads, nipples and kotexes all over their bodies. VENUS & THE RAZORBLADES are garbage – Kim Fowley puppetoons.”

“The DILS don’t hate the poor.”

Creep #4

~ Jay Hinman ~ 1 Comment

Earlier this year I bought a near-complete run of San Francisco’s top-drawer late 70s/early 80s punk fanzine Creep from the ZNZ store – who still have three of the five issues for sale as of this writing. I excitedly wrote up Creep #2 in these pages here, so I’ll spare you another introduction to the mag and let you go read that first if you’re interested, allowing us to get right to the heart of 1980 west coast punk rock USA in the here and now.

Creep #4 lives at an interesting intersection of several strands of California punk “journalism”, such as it was. There are half-hearted attempts at intellectually unpacking various scene controversies and kerfuffles of the time, such as a piece on Noh Mercy’s acerbic and still spine-rattling “Caucasian Guilt”, or a total mess of a P.I.L. show that almost didn’t happen – something akin to a piece you’d find in Damage around this time. There’s truly stupid punk-sneer writing by birdbrains such as one might find in Flipside. And given this magazine’s tenuous connection with Maximum Rocknroll, which wouldn’t publish its first issue for another two years, you can see a little bit of a political slant sashaying its way into these pages – but not too much to make Creep #4 intolerable.

I actually have to give much credit for the breadth of the interviews here. There’s one with Alex Chilton by Ray Farrell, not at all something I’d expect here – and Alex is great, totally calm and cool as Farrell takes him to task for Like Flies on Sherbert (shame on you, Ray!). There’s a brief one with Steve Tupper of Subterranean Records, which was just getting off the ground. He tells it like it is: “415 (an S.F. label) appears to be primarily interested in very commercial or very well known bands. That means exclusion of everybody else. We’re much more interested in experimental kinds of things – the kind of music being made by hordes of kids just picking up guitars and synthesizers and making music. Everything we do has this hard, grey feel to it. That’s the way the world is. Let’s face it – a lot of this stuff just isn’t hit material.”. Subterranean were the label who first released Flipper, and they were covered at length in the excellent book Who Cares Anyway? – Post-Punk San Francisco and the End of the Analog Age.

On the other hand, the interview with The Vktms doesn’t do them any favors – with all due respect to Nyna, she definitely comes across as a major league dum-dum in this interview. And I’ve done some bellyaching about Gregg Turner, Mike Saunders and the Angry Samoans before but never have I seen their misanthropy and queer-baiting at such a jacked-up level as it is in their interview here, in which they go off on all the high crimes & misdemeanors of the LA punk scene, a scene that was known to blackball the Samoans for just such behavior. I mean, these weren’t 15-year-olds from Canoga Park writing into Flipside, these were guys in their early thirties play-acting as punks and – in Saunders’ case – saying Iggy, Iggy, Iggy whenever handed the opportunity. Of course, I laughed at “Get Off The Air” and I still love large chunks of Back From Samoa and I always will, but Saunders and Turner are (or were, in 1980) detestable human beings. Watch their brief interview in this 1980 LA punk “expose” called What’s Up America and you’ll see what I mean. And Gregg Turner’s recent book was an abomination that I couldn’t get even a third of the way through. Do I make myself clear?

This was the year of collective disillusionment with The Clash, and the piece by “Austin Tatious” (great punk name I’d somehow never heard before, but still not as classy as my friend Christina’s DJ moniker Geannie Lotrimin) expresses great disappointment in their San Francisco show. The whole Lee Dorsey (“Working in a Coal Mine”) “bored cocktail lounge a la Holiday Inn backup band” opening act bit was pretty funny; I suppose this was the time that they were bringing incongruous opening acts on the road with them, which, hey, hats off for trying I guess. The Specials are also on the road in America – “Horace’s impression of U.S. AM radio: ‘Great if you like ‘Hold The Line” or ‘Life in the Fast Lane’’. He swears he heard each at least 80 times across the country with only sporadic listening.” Oh yes, 1980 commercial radio in the United States was just awful if you were there, and I was there.

Creep #4 is a content-rich goldmine for you punk historians, probably one step up from Ripper and very much in the same vein, from size to breadth to paper type to regions covered. Now let’s see a Silicon Valley Bank-like run on the few copies remaining in the ZNZ store. 

New Dezezes #1

~ Jay Hinman ~ 1 Comment

This is a now-legendary early San Francisco punk fanzine from 1977 (!) that I found somewhere about fifteen years ago, maybe at a record store or a yard sale or a church jumble, I honestly can’t remember. I’m delighted to have it, as it’s early, man – very, very early. The editor was Jean Caffeine, with heavy contributions from Peter Urban. Urban managed The Dils at this time, and is someone I connected with relatively recently when I did Dynamite Hemorrhage #8 and interviewed him about his ex-partner Caitlin Hines. Very magnanimous and helpful, and I appreciated his perspective greatly. The guy’s still very willing to talk about the scene, the old days and whatnot, as evidenced by this very recent clip. 

New Dezezes #1 is stapled in the upper left corner and only printed on one side, like a pack of flyers assembled, collated and hurriedly stapled together. As DIY as it comes, as rushed as the torrent of music that was washing over these impressionable and young SF rebels. There’s loads of excitement over the fact that on commercial TV – the only kind we got back then, actually – “…the NBC Weekend show had a segment on punk rock and it was great. It showed the Sex Pistols live and in the studio….the punk club audiences were shown trashing the clubs and each other. (Lots of SF people must have been watching because the Mabuhay has suddenly gotten a lot more frantic)…..Unfortunately, actually seeing a glimpse of the English scene only whetted my appetite for more. FUCK the U.S.A.! I WANNA GO TO ENGLAND”.

My understanding is that Caffeine stuck around San Francisco a bit longer and then moved to New York and became a member of Pulsallama, and then to Texas and became a “cow-punk”. Urban was around far longer and may actually still be in SF; he certainly gets back here (which is the city in which I live) often enough to participate in various punk rock anniversary hoo-hahs/nostalgia trips (all of which I love, of course). This is their earliest work, and it chooses its targets to celebrate wisely. There’s a form-fill interview with two members of Crime; a big rave-up by Peter Urban on The Screamers; and a good interview with a rambunctious Richie Detrick of The Nuns, where I learned that he was “Crazy Richie”, an early member of The Ramones, kicked out because he had a nervous breakdown (!). He also answers a very important question, “Do you think there are any new wave bands here?” (meaning San Francisco). His retort: “There are only 3. 1) NUNS 2) CRIME 3) AVENGERS. I don’t consider Mary Monday new wave. I don’t consider her nothin’. All these bands just hopped on a band wagon. You go to Mabuhay and there’s all these shit bands.”.

This is also likely the earliest venue for the punk photos of James Stark, who’s now celebrated widely and wisely for same. (You can get his book here). And there’s a piece on Bobby Death of the band Skidmarx; Mr. Death never recorded with either this band nor his own Bobby Death Band, so this is kind of a rare treat of a guy who turns up sometimes in photos and old fanzines but who’s sort of a missing link between all the bands like Crime and The Nuns who did record. 

Hey, one thing I’d recommend if you’re interested in the 1977+ San Francisco scene is this book about Mabuhay Gardens booker and fabled MC Dirk Dirkson called Shut Up You Animals!!! The Pope is Dead. A Remembrance of Dirk Dirksen: A History of the Mabuhay Gardens. The book itself is super sloppy and a bit half-baked (I think the copy editor may have been Will Shatter on a five-day heroin bender), but there’s a show-by-show overview of every show at the Mab from the first day they started booking punk to the very last day they had bands in the late 80s. It’s great! You can sit there and pick out a month, I don’t know, let’s say August 1978, and fantasize how just that month you could’ve seen Crime, The Bags, The Dils, The Flesh Eaters, The Weirdos, Negative Trend, Avengers, The Germs and so on. I mean, that’s the sort of thing I like to do, anyway. I guess if you’re Jean Caffeine and Peter Urban, you use it as a tally of where you likely were on any given night that month. We’ll talk about Issue #2 of this fanzine next time.

Creep #2

~ Jay Hinman ~ 4 Comments

Fantastic 1979 second issue from one of San Francisco’s more revered punk fanzines, Creep, which I’d long known was helmed & stewarded by one “Mickey Creep” (in actuality, Dean Sampson, sometimes known as Mickey Sampson). Sampson and his band of contributors capture the frenzied zeitgeist of 1979 punk and of San Francisco writ large better than nearly any other publication I’ve read, and unlike the jaded first-wave scenesters who were already crying punk-is-dead around this time, Creep #2 is very much about helping to document and further its vitality or rebirth, however it is you want to cut it. 

I really learned some things, too! First, all these years I thought the Maximum RocknRoll Radio show, which I used to listen to religiously on KPFA on Tuesday nights, started in 1980 or even 1981. It was started in 1977, folks – and was originally a combination of the new “punk rock sound” that was sprouting up and 50s rockabilly & oldies (!). There was even a dude named Al “Professor Pop” Ennis on the show who ran the 1950s portion; he was long gone by the time I started listening – a time of Jeff Bale, Ruth Schwartz, Tim Yohannan (of course), Ray Farrell and sometimes Jello Biafra (blah). Ennis can barely be found & connected with this show online at all, but hey, that’s why I accumulate these old fanzines, to get the real fuckin’ story.

I also learned via an advertisement about Portals to Music, a new wave record store at Stonestown Mall, now home of Target, Whole Foods and multiple Asian-themed restaurants and boba places – and a place two miles from my home that I find myself in weekly. Absolutely incongruous and baffling. Another world entirely. One final new thing I learned was that the worst bit of music writing I’d ever read had been hiding all along right here in Creep #2! One Thomas Sinclair, with his Freshman English classes surely barely in hand, writes about MX-80 Sound:

“As perchance this brisk July eve in the Bay Area, I was to experience a delightful musical and aesthetic encounter. As unpretentious and undistinguished as the visual accoutrement of the band may have been, the sound of MX-80 Sound was brilliantly polished and pulsated as rhythmically as could be expected for their indigenous brand of semi-eclecticism would allow…” – and it only gets worse from there. It’s truly mind-bending, and I’m glad to know where to find the worst piece of music writing of all time should I ever need it!

Creep #2 takes us on a tour of the state of it all, circa 1979. Jello Biafra is running for mayor. Punk violence is threatening to close down The Deaf Club, because some drunken knucklehead decided to take a chain to three parked cars outside of the club after a show. The Canadians have just come to town, and locals are hopped-up about D.O.A. and the Pointed Sticks. (D.O.A. were always hugely popular in the SF Bay Area; when I first started hearing punk for the first time, my perspective was that the biggest bands in the entire North American scene were the Dead Kennedys, Black Flag and D.O.A. pretty much in that order). And there’s a terrific interview with Craig Lee from LA’s Bags. Lee wasn’t just a shredding punk guitarist; he was always one of the good guys, and a man who shuffled off this mortal coil far too early.

I think my favorite thing in Creep #2, though, is the respectful and just-enough-noose-to-hang-himself interview with Joel Selvin, who was then, and for a long time afterward, the chief rock music writer at the San Francisco Chronicle. I grew up reading Selvin, because I read the newspaper every day, and just like the old man that I am, I still do. It was definitely de rigeur for punks to hate the mainstream rock critic; Selvin got a ton of vitriol over the years; his counterpart Robert Hilburn at the LA Times got just as much if not more. I’ll say right now that I recently read Selvin’s book about early 1960s Los Angeles pop music, Hollywood Eden, and while no masterpiece, it’s quite entertaining and very effective at calling up an ephemeral time and special place in music’s history, with his Beach Boys “Good Vibrations” chapter at the end being especially well-put-together. 

But here, in Creep #2 – wow. This photo they ran is really the epitome of the late 70s, coked-out, record-industry sleazeball; I don’t think Selvin was really that guy, but I can only imagine what the sneering punks reading Creep in ‘79, the ones who had to suffer through his weekly writings about Journey, the Doobie Brothers, Elvin Bishop and Maria Muldaur, had to say about it. Selvin himself gets off some pretty self-damaging zingers; to wit:

“Over the past few years the quality music in the local clubs has plummeted. In 1975, the Longbranch – unbelievable. It was everything a nightclub should be….I haven’t seen a show at the Mabuhay that I thought was good. I’ve checked these places out. They’re just not happening the way a club should be happening.”

“One time the Eagles were really good. It was the time that they opened for the Doobie Brothers that they were spectacular.”

“However important or significant The Clash may be, it’s “Sultans of Swing” that’s gonna be remembered from 1979….I have no doubt the American public wants the Knack and not the Clash. And certainly the sales figures reflect that.”

I guess on that last point he’s not wrong; I mean, I disliked The Clash as much as he did. And I suppose it is “Sultans of Swing” that I hear inside of Safeway or Chipolte, not “Guns on the Roof”. But oh for those days at The Longbranch, watching Sammy Hagar, Earthquake, Eddie Money and Commander Cody! 

One final note, a thing that got a lot of hearts racing here in San Francisco: Penelope Houston of The Avengers works at the San Francisco Public Library, and she helped establish a “punk rock collection” there of zines, flyers, videos and other ephemera that I’ve had the good fortune to go check out, albeit only once, and albeit only in brief because her snotty co-worker was bogarting so much of the material on a day she wasn’t working. Here’s a 90-minute panel discussion the library put on with the folks who put out Search and Destroy, Ripper and Creep – including our boy Mickey! You can learn more about the library here.