Shane Williams – Fanzine Hemorrhage

I remember Sporadic Droolings fanzine mostly because it served as a repository for much of Shane Williams’ writing before he wrote for Flipside. When I came to “know” Williams – a story which I wrote about in detail here – he reminded me frequently about his time served at this fanzine. The man was, indeed, “a talker”. I almost didn’t write about Sporadic Droolings #5 because, in flipping through it, I came to editor Dave Burokas’ intro to an article of his that starts out, “If there is a person who is extremely dedicated to punk rock, it is certainly Donny the Punk”. Yet for better or worse, we plow onward.

Sporadic Droolings #5 came out in 1986. Burokas was based in Kearney, NJ, and was a devotee of tiny type and of cramming a ton of information into small spaces. He apologizes for not answering all his letters because “he’s going to college full-time”, and good for him. I was doing the same in the year of our lord 1986. You have to wade through some mire to find the good stuff here, such as a “save the punk scene” editorial written at a sub-kindergarten level by one Bill McLaughlin, but in general, there’s good materials to be found.

Shane Williams, in prison at this time, interviews shitty punk band 76% Uncertain and then redeems himself by interviewing Laura and Stacey from Austin’s Rabid Cat Records, who helped bring the world Scratch Acid, a band who that year were in the process of becoming one of my favorite things on the planet. He then writes a ham-handed but not altogether wrong editorial inveighing against political correctness of the MRR variety. I get the sense that Shane, having let’s say some time on his hands, was allowed by Burokas to just do his thing and send letters full of questions to various bands; they’d then take the answers back, type up an interview, and shove it into Sporadic Droolings. Shane also does this for Philadelphia’s Ruin and for Orange County, CA’s Pontiac Brothers.

Regarding the latter, it’s unfortunately a lot more Shane than actual answers from the band. Guitarist Ward Dotson is asked about his time in the Gun Club, and says, ‘I have been out of the band for over three years, and I’m doing my best to try and forget about the whole mess”. I have a real soft spot for these guys, the Pontiac Brothers, not just because my pal Jon W was in the band for a bit, but for their devotion to tiny clubs and bars in Orange County and for actually being the rare sort of bar rock band that I can envision seeing three sheets to the wind in a cramped bar and totally loving it. Here, here’s why. Alas, I missed them and never was allowed the experience.

Burokas catches Gerard Cosloy as Homestead Records has really hit its stride, with Sonic Youth having just announced they’re leaving for SST but with the label otherwise hitting big with Big Black, Squirrel Bait, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds and so forth. Apparently, as was his wont, Cosloy had “tangled” with Sporadic Droolings and/or Burokas in the pages of his Conflict fanzine recently, and this interview was meant to be an amends-maker. In the intro, Burokas says, “He started out with two strikes, Gerard did. First, he was late for the interview. Second and worst of all, he had a Mets duffle bag with him. But he managed to escape the strikeout”. The interview actually fills in quite a few gaps in my personal understanding of Cosloy’s rise through, and eventual all-seeing lordship over, the US rock music underground.

Kudos as well to Burokas for his Honeymoon Killers interview – no one was writing about this NYC band at the time, and they sound like inspired & deranged people you’d want to hang out with. There’s a piece on the Celibate Rifles and much excitement about Birdman-inspired Aussie garage punk that was well-distributed at the time, and that was about to start clogging up my personal record collection with Psychotic Turnbuckles, Seminal Rats, Eastern Dark and Hard-Ons vinyl. In the live reviews section, I had to laugh at the entry on Dinosaur and Squirrel Bait at Maxwell’s in Hoboken NY on 1/9/86. Squirrel Bait were TOO LOUD for Dave, and I’m thinking, oh man if that was hurting his eardwums, what’s he going to think about….and then he predictably complains that Dinosaur were “even louder!!”. I heard all this stuff about how punishingly loud Dinosaur were for a good 18 months before I finally saw them, and when they finally came to the west coast, not only did my ears survive but they were perhaps the biggest live-music disappointment in my young life up to that point. Pussy Galore, on the other hand – oh dear. I’m still saying “whaaaat?” to my wife on their account.

I just couldn’t read the Donny the Punk interview, I just couldn’t. But there’s a nice full-page ad for the Ed Gein’s Car LP on the back cover. I’ll keep Sporadic Droolings #5 around for sure.

It’s possible that overly judgmental folks like me have given Flipside the proverbial “short shrift” over the years. I didn’t even buy a copy until well into college, 1986 or so, mostly because they gave such energetic and frothing coverage to any & every punk rock lame-o band, differentiating not in the least and really just there to innocuously champion all of it. No one cared much about their prose, because (as I saw it) no one there could effectively convince you with any sort of engendered credibility to buy a record or see a particular band anyway.

Yet when I read an issue like Flipside #32 from 1982 cover to cover, all it makes me do is wish I was there side-by-side with Al & Hud and the whole Flipside gang at every single show from South Orange County to the North San Fernando Valley, watching hardcore punk explode and share stages with creeping death rock bands (45 Grave, Christian Death), that next LA wave of over the-top art/performance acts (Johanna Went, Vox Pop) and those few rarified bands that were just miles ahead of everyone else (Minutemen, Dream Syndicate, 100 Flowers, Flesh Eaters).

This was the thrill of reading a Flipside, well into the 1990s. These people really lived it. I’d always marvel at their live reviews. A typical Friday night would have Flipside correspondents jumping from show to show all over the greater LA area, trying to document every last jot & titter coming from the clubs. I got to sort of brush shoulders a few times with editor Al Flipside and a guy named Bob Cantu in the early 90s, and it was all very real: they would start the evening seeing a band in Hollywood, say, then hustle down to Long Beach for another show and then make their way to a 2am wind-down party afterward, drinking and reveling all the way, then file their broken and disjointed dispatches in the next Flipside (“we missed so-and-so but I heard they were good; then the cops came”). I thought I was personally going pretty hard in my 20s, but these folks had me licked – and Al was in his thirties, having started Flipside in 1977. (To say nothing of scene correspondent and “rock and roll bank robber” Shane Williams – I’ve documented my direct encounters with him here).

It was the same in 1982. You read this thing and you still can’t believe LA had so many amazing shows you’d have gone to yourself in June ‘82 alone. You too would be humping it to Canoga Park and Hollywood and Costa Mesa and San Pedro all month long. It’s quite the time capsule, this one. There is such a buzz of punk rock activity that there are “Southern California H.C.” scene reports from Northwest O.C., Palos Verdes, Riverside and “More O.C.” respectively, while the rest of the magazine reports many wild shows that took place in Los Angeles proper.

There’s a priceless letter to the editor from teenager Mark Arm from Seattle, WA, exhorting punks to “think for themselves”; decrying the use of drugs in the scene, and relaying the fact that he had to talk his mom out of joining “Parents of Punkers” after punk rock music and fashions were featured on the Phil Donahue show. “She sees a counselor instead.”

Name an active LA-area punk-adjacent band in 1982 and they’re in here somewhere, as you can see from the cover, but there’s also a Flesh Eaters interview; a Twisted Roots family tree; an interview with the hideous Jeff Dahl about his awful new band Powertrip (“Fuck it all. The only thing I’m into is speed, beer, rock & roll and young girls.”); Eddie and the Subtitles; The Big Boys; and lots of love in the live reviews for the totally-zonkers Meat Puppets (they played with The Cramps in San Pedro this summer; where were you?) and brand-new band the Dream Syndicate, who are said to “sound blatantly like the Velvet Underground, yet are so unselfconscious about it that their plagiarism can’t be held against them.”

About 18 months later, in my estimation, it all started to go sideways in LA, music-wise. By 1984 the city and its nether regions still held more good bands per capita then most anywhere else, but it was a fast fade through the rest of the 80s. Of course my years of living in Southern California happened to be 1985-1989, and so I’d look at Flipside at record stores, then compare it to the vitality, breadth and craft of a Forced Exposure or Conflict and find it all quite “lacking”. Thus my attitude about it over the years, save for my awe and immense admiration for the crazed show-going of their staffers. This issue’s making me a little more generous in my retroactive estimation for the thing.