Slovenly – Fanzine Hemorrhage

I didn’t exactly provide the most ringing endorsement of BravEar #12 when I talked about it here, and I’m not going to pretend that BravEar #10 from 1985’s a whole lot better, though remember I’m nitpicky and regrettably still fighting some of my teenage/early twentysomething “scene battles” in my head even now. What’s unique about this nearly forty year-old fanzine is that it’s one of the few that I have that old that I bought when it came out, and that I didn’t lose or damage somehow. You can see from the cover – which is actually a very well-done minimalist cover – that this San Francisco fanzine mixed it up stylistically without fear or favor, and good on ‘em for it.

Rory Lyons was the editor, Michael Miro the publisher and Seymour Glass – yeah, that guy – the star/ace reporter. There’s an opening faux gossip column that I know they carried over multiple issues called “Viv N’ Sandie”. They provide news you can use, such as the hot item that MDC’s rad-anarcho-veggie singer Dave Dictor “has opened a groovy veg-a-mighty snack bar in the midst of SF’s Mission District. Dave whips up millions of dead alfalfa sprouts as well as fro-yo and other delicacies”. Why is this culinary landmark not still around??? Who killed it? Reagan, that’s fucking who. They’re also giving unfortunate ink to the birth of one of San Francisco’s absolute worst trends of the late 80s, the “punk-funk” bands, by talking up “SF’s answer to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Three Mouse Guitars”. Thank christ I never saw that band, but I’ll admit that somehow I once caught a set by “The Freaky Executives”.

Frightwig get a post-first LP interview by Terri Sutton. I greatly enjoyed Frightwig interviews through the years, such as the one we discussed here. Here they say “We’re the female equivalent of macho men” and talk about reactions to them when they play live: “From Kansas City to Denver to back here, the consistent reaction I’ve heard – same words too – was these guys goin’, ‘Man, I’ve got a HARD-ON’”. Billy Bragg comes off as a pedantically boring lefty, total P.E.A.C.E. creep all the way. The Three Johns – yeah, Jon Langford from The Mekons was in this band as a part-timer; these Brits also talk about The Tories and the Miners’ Strike for their American underground music audience, raptly paying close attention I’m sure. And Social Unrest are called onto the carpet to defend why they’re still playing hardcore punk in 1985. Why indeed.

For whatever reason – and hey, I’m good with it, it’s definitely breaking the mold, there’s “part one” of a big piece about Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle. “Der Ring Des Nibelungen”, baby. If you’re like me, you first heard “The Ride of the Valkyries” from this in that badass helicopter gunship scene in Apocalypse Now, and thought that this was some classical music you could get into. Then you learned a bit more about Wagner and his anti-semitism and how Hitler loved the guy and then you maybe thought you weren’t that into him. Then you remembered not to mistakenly conflate art with the artist, and recalled that this is always the best rule to follow, and were cool with Wagner again.

Seymour Glass gets to say his piece and interviews Slovenly. My takeback from this interview and others I saw with the band around this time was that they were ridiculously (and undeservedly, in my eyes) unpopular, and they knew it. Glass asks them, “Do you consider the album successful on any level whatsoever?”. Guitarist/bassist Tom Watson responds “At least we got it out”. Aim high, Slovenly! And in the reviews section, I had to laugh when I read Lyle S.’s review of Alex Chilton’s show at the I-Beam on 6/24/85: “Granted, when a singer/guitarist is 34 years old the voice and fingers don’t do what they used to at age 21 and 22, and it was evident this night, especially when Chilton performed those ‘72-’73 Big Star classics”. Ouch, 34 years old and too old to rock effectively. Keep that in mind if you’re in a band right now and creeping up on 30, okay?

I haven’t really sat down and given Summer 1993’s Osmotic Tongue Pressure #3 any sort of true once-over in the thirty-plus years since I enthusiastically bought it, devoured it and then mostly forgot it. I’d really only remembered & marked it as a real good one, one named after some Richard Meltzer-ism of unknown provenance. Gave it the full re-read last night in order to properly consider it for a true Fanzine Hemorrhage exhumation, and I’ll come out and say that it was a really great one, now ranking in whatever imaginary ledger I’ve got going internally as “one of the top music fanzines of the 1990s”. Allow me to explain why and how!

I once scanned the cover of this for another blog and said it was an early 1990s fanzine from San Diego put out by a guy named Mike Kinney, whom I also knew had shuffled off this mortal coil far too young – only eight or so years after this issue was created. I was half right. There were two editors, with Kinney holding down Southern California and Kevin Cascell as the other half, living and creating this from San Francisco, my hometown then as now. In fact, it’s almost eerie reading all these show reviews how often he and I were rubbing proverbial shoulders without actually knowing each other. It’s not like this is a really big city, just one with a subcultural footprint larger than its actual population.

Anyway, Cascell went to the May 1992 Pavement show and disliked it as vehemently as I did; he and I overlapped at shows ridiculously in this opening section. Sebadoh/Some Velvet Sidewalk at Morty’s (unlike him, I thought Some Velvet Sidewalk were fantastic, yet have barely thought of them since, let alone listened to them); Claw Hammer at the Nightbreak; Antiseen at Brave New World; I think I was even at the MX-80/Slovenly show in Oakland, although I missed Slovenly. I also saw the Helter Skelter: LA Art in the 90s thing w/ Raymond Pettibon, Robert Williams, Mike Kelley and many others at Temporary Contemporary/LACMA that Mike Kinney went to. Life is a drink and you get drunk when you’re young. In fact, when Kinney sees The Cows at the alcohol-free, all-ages Jabberjaw club in LA and, while he’d had a decent time and likes the band, concludes rightly that “it’d have been nice to throw some beer on ‘em”.

Cascell, by the way, would join the band Truman’s Water within a year of the release Osmotic Tongue Pressure #3, and he’d also put together stuff as the No Friends Band, whose unearthed stuff has received a ‘lil deserved airplay on my podcast. He’s also a phenomenal collage artist, one of my favorite offbeat forms of creativity, one I keep saying I’ll explore more of and never do.

I suppose I’m not really explaining yet just why this mag was so fantastic. To start with, these were young men of taste and class. I’ll enumerate further in a bit, but both wrote exceptionally well, each with a healthy combination of highly literate snark and excitable fanzine jive talk, and who just come off as the sort of lads you’d simply want to be talking music with. I’ve no doubt they’d have turned me onto some of the free jazz they were ably comprehending years before I was. For instance, a representative sampling from the reviews section finds the Gibson Bros, Pharoah Sanders, Rudolph Grey, William Hooker Sextet, Royal Trux, The Humpers, Eugene Charbourne and the Dead C – and a consistent bashing of a coterie of Merge Records / power-pop-turd / indie-lite bands. As well they should, my friends, as well they should.

These guys are also both clued-in enough to totally love the feral energy of rock beasts Claw Hammer, and accordingly have an interview with them here. Reviewer Cary Holleran observes their dip in form on Pablum in the reviews section, even though he knows & concedes they rule live and hadn’t lost a step there in the least. This happened to be right at the time I was along on a tour w/ those fellas as their road manager, somewhat discussed here. Kinney really digs Tim Ellison’s Rock Mag, to his immense credit. The interview with Slovenly is also really insightful and wide-ranging, and came at the absolute end of their run, as they wouldn’t be a band for even a few more months after the execution of this discussion.

Finally, showing off the style and taste of these erudite young scholars, there’s a guide to “cyberpunk” books and a set of reminiscences by Byron Coley, some of which are in such miniscule type that I can’t even read them with my reading glasses on. Now there’s a sentence I hadn’t conceived of myself typing in 1993. It kinda kills me that I wasn’t clinking glasses and slapping backs with these two guys when I was in my quote-unquote prime. We’d have had many a fine bro-down together. They made it to an issue #5 in 1996, but I’ve seen neither hide nor hair of the other three in my lifetime thus far. Have you?