Tag: scott soriano

Record Time #3

~ Jay Hinman ~ 1 Comment

Record Time tracks, measures and elucidates upon the long tail of analog musical history in a manner unlike no fanzine before it. It’s not here to champion the “winners”, although some of what it champions are indeed winners. It exists to cover anything that you’d likely find in a thrift store, a shitty record store or at a garage sale, and that you’d likely be able to buy for the price of 1 or 2 Venti no-whip lattes. I gave a bit of detail on its modus operandi in a bit I wrote on Record Time #1, and now we shall briefly explore the latest issue, Record Time #3, because it could very well be the best of a fantastic trio.

Editor Scott Soriano has an omnivorous and over-active brain, clearly, and this has powered a record fetish that knows few bounds. He’s turned me onto so much treasure and trash over the years. His Crud Crud blog in the 2000s was the digital embodiment of what Record Time is attempting to accomplish, and I loved that thing so much that I made myself four outstanding mix CD-Rs from the mp3s I’d hoovered up from him back then. When he wants to go deep, he absolutely goes deep, as in the Plastic Bertrand-inspired records piece in #1, the Sex Pistols novelty & backlash records thing in #2, and this issue’s absolutely absurd and breathtakingly complete overview on mainstream artists who decided to dip a toe into “punk” in the late 70s/early 80s.

Like how could I forget Alice Cooper’s Flush The Fashion LP from 1980, produced by Roy Thomas Baker (!) and with a “punk party platter” of song titles like “Clones”, “Model Citizen”, “Nuclear Infected” and “Pain” (no, sorry, not this Pain). Or that The Tubes had a whiny song called “I Was a Punk Before You Were a Punk” that insecurely recites all the ways in which their mid-70s zany costumes and trash debauchery schtick helped bring San Francisco punk rock to life in 1976-77? And Soriano briefly relays the tale of Van Halen turning into Scottish punk band “The Enemas” for one night in 1977, a story you can read more about here. This is why we spend $15 on the mostly ad-free Record Time magazine, folks.

There are well over a dozen deeply-researched and well-written pieces in here by a plethora of contributors, so I’ll restrain myself to conveying a couple big highlights. “…The worst thing that happened in 1973 was a TV special and accompanying album which only those outside of a handful of die-hard diva fans and enthusiasts of shitty records know about: Barbra Streisand…and Other Musical Instruments”. Soriano then proceeds to describe this atrocity in painstaking detail, a record and TV special that seems to have almost totally disappeared from the Streisand legend. You must read it, and then you must watch as much of the special as you can handle. Those were different times.

Chris Selvig’s piece on and record-by-record dissection of Colorado 80s-90s improv-skronk destroyers Blowhole was quite welcome, and he even brings the band back together to rehash the good times over a microphone. Somehow I’d never known the story of boyfriend-murderer and 60s easy listening fox Claudine Longet, but “Johnny Sunshine” relays it all here, and in true Record Time fashion, also feels the need to assiduously evaluate the relative merits and demerits of each of her 99-cent LPs, currently sitting in bulk at a Community Thrift near you. 

And look, I’m even in this one, briefly. Soriano sent out an entreaty last year to a few folks he knew, asking them to pick one 80s SST record from the 1986-88 glut that they like, but not the popular ones, so no one was permitted to slop out another paean to Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr or Bad Brains. I picked Das Damen’s Jupiter Eye, and I stand by it. $4.71 on Discogs. There’s a real cast of heavy hitters picking theirs here as well, including Gerard Cosloy, Tom Carter, Brian Faulkner, Bill Chen, Mike Trouchon, Ryan Wells, Karl Ikola, Chris Selvig and other top-drawer stars of the scene. Some picked the album I should have picked, but naturally no one picked Swa. Of course not.

“They” tell me that Record Time #3 is finding its audience more limited than it should be, which would be a goddamn crime. There’s really nothing else like it on the planet. Jarvis Cocker even writes for it. I don’t really know who that is, mind you, but he writes for it, and perhaps that’s all the inspiration you’ll need after my yammering to go seek this one out.

Record Time #1

~ Jay Hinman ~ 1 Comment

There exist, as we’re all aware, many observable subspecies of the record collector. I was one myself at one point, but later lost any earned credibility in this world by evolving in the 2000s to instead be more of a, um, “digital file accumulator” or CD hound instead. It saved me thousands upon thousands of dollars that might otherwise have been spent on records that I’d have loved to own, but that couldn’t have been well-stored in my exceptionally small San Francisco home, a home which also included a wife, kid and dog and all these goddamned fanzines. However, I’ve recognized myself as something of a fraud whilst traveling and conversing in the worlds of the record collector, where I am still sometimes allowed, so I’m therefore on safer ground reading from afar the fanzines that are created by and for them.

Record Time #1, which came out just this year, is unlike any music mag I’ve ever seen. Scott Soriano, a guy we’ve championed on this site (here and here) for being half of the creative team behind Z Gun, has assembled an even larger team for this one, dedicated to and written by the folks who accumulate cheap, bargain-bin LPs and 45s of many genres with obsessive zeal, strange passion and unending curiosity. Adam G. Taub, a contributor here, unintentionally states the magazines’ overriding ethos well: “I have amassed a lot of records that no one wants to listen to, about which some have asked, on more than one occasion, ‘How can you listen to that shit?’”. It’s full of many other contributors you know and love such as Brian Turner, Ryan Wells, Mike Trouchon, Laurent Bigot, Rose Melberg and quite a few others. Record dorks. We love ‘em. You might liken it to sort of a Bull Tongue Review, but only about records.

I have to say, the pièce de résistance has got to be Soriano’s deep dive on any and every tenuous recording link to Plastic Bertrand’s “Ca Plane Pour Moi”: tribute records, soundalikes, covers, ripoffs, cash-ins etc. This is why fanzines exist, and why you’ll only find top-tier research about what most would find utterly meaningless in a mag like this. Soriano also has a great piece on Rooky Ricardo’s Records in San Francisco and its owner Dick Vivian, an incredibly affable guy who knows absolutely everything about every American 60s pop and R&B 45. I was once looking for some girl group stuff there, and he asked me what my favorite girl group single of the era was – ostensibly so he could find me some obscurities from the store’s vast collection. I watched his face drop when I came up with “Breakaway” by Irma Thomas. How pedestrian! Not even a group! This is Dick Vivian you’re talking to!

There’s another stellar article here about Droll Yankees, described herein as “the perfect record label” by author Stan Appleton. The label’s mission was to rescue all things “Yankee” from modernity, such as quaint Eastern language, plus “sea sounds, bird songs, frog croaks and other sounds threatened to be silenced by the modern world”. Seriously, it’s field recordings of deep sea fishermen and farmers, along with a few records of folk songs by Protestants. It’s a great aesthetic and a thoroughly bizarre label which gets its own complete 1960-69 discography here as well. The label, believe it or not, morphed into a bird feeder company. 

A column called “Cash or Trade” is penned by Mike Trouchon, and he illuminates a dozen of the 50s and 60s instrumental 7” records he’s collected on the cheap. He helpfully expands the boundaries of “instrumental” – and I agree with him 100% here – by saying “I should mention that songs that are mostly instrumental, meaning they include some chanting, a handful of lyrics, and/or vocalese, still go down in my book as instrumentals”. Amen. There are other pieces on Dutch prog wonders, some sports records, Lee Harvey Oswald-themed records and even more prog by Owen Maerks. Joey Soriano – I believe it’s Scott’s brother? – expounds all about fuckin’ Montrose, giving us the full vinyl history of this band who’d often be the opener at the hard-rock “Day on the Green” concerts at the Oakland Stadium. This is all topped off by a review section called “Bargain Bin Reviews” with everything from the Los Angeles Police Pipe Band to Reddy Teddy to the Kent 3. 

And while I don’t really need to comment on it since you can see it right here – how about that cover design? Dennis Worden is the guy’s name. I hope he’s been brought back for future issues, as I know a #2 of Record Time is wrapped up and will be ready to go in the weeks to come.

Z Gun #2

~ Jay Hinman ~ Leave a comment

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

~ Jay Hinman ~ 1 Comment

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?