The Dils – Fanzine Hemorrhage

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.”

I’ve noticed in looking back at early punk fanzines that many of the youngsters writing for them had clearly been weaned on their daily paper’s gossip column, and therefore took this time-honored scandal-sheet form into their first writings. Quite a few fanzines loved to go with these “items” about who was dating whom; who was breaking up; who got drunk at a party; who got burned by a label and so on. Even the “scene reports” that clogged up MaximumRocknRoll eventually took some of this form.It’s even more fun, in 1977’s New Dezezes #2 (we talked about #1 here two days ago), to see just how either off-base and wrong, or prescient and predictive, so many of these “items” actually were. To wit:

“Rat Scabies left THE DAMNED because of a rumoured suicide attempt and the band has decided to break up!”

“The new CRIME drummer is McDonald’s employee HANK RANK – who has never played drums before”

“David Braun, keyboard player for The Screamers, has been sacked and is now starting his on (sic) record label – DANGER HOUSE (sic)”

“The Cramps drummer Miriam left & the band has since disbanded”

“Penelope Houston got a chunk of her arm bitten off at a trendy DEVO party”

“A new punk club called THE MASQUE has opened up in L.A.”

Great stuff in ‘77! Jean Caffeine’s New Dezezes #2 has a color cover this time around as well as double the amount of staples (top left and top right!), but still insisted on printing on one side of paper only for about two-thirds of the pages, somehow switching gears every now & again and going big on “both sides”. Sometimes the pages are in landscape mode, others in portrait, and often hand-written or banged out on a clunky typewriter, as one did in those days.

Given that Peter Urban was one of the prime movers on this magazine, and that he managed The Dils, it’s only right and natural that The Dils get a big feature in this one. The Dils were also a fantastic all-timer of a punk band, and their new 45 I Hate The Rich has just hit the stores. Yet the Paul Weller (The Jam) interview seems to take the tone & tenor of this thing down a bit. The Jam clearly toured the US earlier than I’d thought, and listen, The Jam were also one of my favorite bands in high school – more the “Going Underground” and “Down in the Tube Station at Midnight” Jam, not the snotty, punk-ish sounding 1977 Jam. I still like that stuff, but I always thought Weller was a boob and a terrible interview, just a huge chip on his shoulder at all times and someone who was really, really bad at being the “common man” he so very much wanted to be. Springsteen is better at that act for sure!

Greg and Jimmy from The Avengers each get their own interviews in this one, and there are some cool photos of a new band called The Liars, who never recorded, but how about this – there’s terrific footage of them from 1978 right here on YouTube! (And while you’re at it, how about CRIME sounding like the Velvet Underground playing “Sweet Sister Ray”?). You know, the crowd from these days loved to whistle on about “the spirit of ‘77” long after those days were over, but all you need to do is watch those videos and the sheer joy of the crowds having a total ball – and then read a mag like New Dezezes #2 documenting it all in real time – and you’ll cut them some slack, when you’re not whining in your own head about missing it all because you were nine years old, like I always tend to do.