The Misfits – Fanzine Hemorrhage

Great God Pan was not, during its finest years, a music fanzine. It had started as one, more or less, but by the time they really got rolling in the mid/late-1990s, it had morphed into the “The Journal of Californiana”, funded by ads from indie record labels who probably still thought they were promoting their wares in a music publication, and not one devoted to unpacking California and western lore in an exploratory, often tongue-in-cheek manner. Sure, Great God Pan still had record reviews at the end of each issue, but this had never been the draw, and, later, may have been a sop to keep that ad revenue flowing in.

The fanzine, if it can be called that, is among my highest-order “keepers”, especially the ones that ran from about #9-14. These were full of outstanding writing and a sense that GGP had almost fully evolved into an erudite and still down-to-earth essay journal from its garage-rock fanzine roots. The final one was basically a book about editor Mark Sundeen’s travels in the Utah/Nevada desert. During the pandemic, I read every one of the ones that I owned cover to cover, which resulted in this short piece in my own Dynamite Hemorrhage #9 fanzine.

Great God Pan #9 sees them in full evolutionary mode. The record reviews are there, as is Part One of a piece with various contemporaneous fanzine recollections of The Misfits’ early 80s visits to Southern California, along with one from Chris O’Connor talking about buying Horror Business and the Government Issue Legless Bull records at Zed in 1980. These, once again, prove just what a horrible, egotistical, misanthropic little braggart Glenn Danzig was back then. Raymond Pettibon, forever associated, mostly against his will, with punk rock music, gets a great interview feature as well in this issue, with the questions asked and associated essay written by Tom Watson, formerly of the band Slovenly.

There’s a multi-page section at the front of Great God Pan #9 that’s full of wacky modern tales from California, almost like a “police blotter” of items from local newspapers anytime from the 1880s to the 1920s, written in a droll, I-can’t-believe-these-fucking-people tongue. This is of a piece with Sarah Taylor’s well-written “Soiled Doves: Prostitution & The Gold Rush” bit of important historical fodder, which even has photos of some San Francisco “parlor girls” of the 1850s. Excerpt:

“In May of 1850, the Alta California, a San Francisco newspaper, announced with approval the arrival of ‘fifty or sixty’ young women. ‘The bay was dotted by flotillas of young men, on the announcement of this extraordinary importation’, the paper reported. Earlier that year, two hundred girls had sailed into the bay on a ship from Sydney, Australia. Another city newspaper, The Transcript, described the eager San Franciscans rowing out into the bay to greet the women. What were they doing? ‘Trying to engage housekeepers’, the paper said, with more than a hint of irony”.

Of special note to me is the “Our Lady of the Angels: Southern California in Print” piece. This might be where I discovered the novels of John Fante, every one of which I’ve devoured in the subsequent years (although I also remember Jon Behar buying me one – Ask the Dust, still my favorite, so good I’ve read it twice, something I almost never do with books). This piece and my engendered Fante mania also set me onto obsessions with the Bunker Hill neighborhood; the Angel’s Flight funicular; LA-set film noir of the 40s/50s; Dan Fante, John’s son; James M. Cain and virtually anything else related to the dark LA underworld of the times. These were the sort of jumping-off articles that made Great God Pan so valuable. These guys (and their contributors) weren’t just dilettantes, either – they did their own primary research; they camped in out-of-the-way locales to gather the best story, and they seemed very content to push it all onto the page without any real thought to any remuneration beyond what it might take to publish another issue. If any 90s magazine is ripe for a book-length compendium, it’s this one.

History was made with this April 1982 issue of Flipside, at least in my world. My older, clued-in cousin had it and let me peruse it frequently, mostly to laugh at The Misfits interview and to ogle Tracy Lea from Red Cross, my ultimate punk rock girl crush for many years. It struck a major chord for me because this one came out right at the tip-top of “peak LA hardcore” – peak US hardcore, pretty much – and it reads accordingly, in all of its stupidity, squalor, excitement and chaotic splendor. In fact, its tiny type truly packs in an entire universe of slam-your-ass-off punk rock mania, written for teens by people who weren’t teens, yet who wrote as intelligently as any dim-bulb high school simpleton from Canoga Park or Hawthorne or La Mirada might.

Lest you think I come here to bury Flipside #31, let it be said that I do not! I tried to capture my general feeling about the fanzine when I wrote about the issue that’d come out right after this one here. This one’s even better, for many reasons, mostly for how on-the-ground it all is, documenting the scene at eye level and in the words of its jackbooted and bandanna’ed participants. A nicely representative letter from Mark Evans gets us started:

Hey Flipside: I’m from the SF area and I’m 14 years old and I go to all the shows I can in S.F. We have some good shows up here like just a while ago Fear played with Circle One and some other bands from around here like Fuck Up’s, Lewd Crucifix and Domino Theory. Up here our Vex is the Elite Club, we have shows about every two weeks it’s totally cool. I want to say another thing: you probably have heard about the Mabuhay Gardens where they have shows every night, it sucks all they have is new wave shows, it sucks total big dick!!! — Mark Evans PS: Print this so I can show my mommy

On the opposite page is another fine missive about the scene from one “Falling” James Moreland of the Leaving Trains; I’ve done you the favor of scanning it in its entirety at the end of this post. Boy did I have some interesting run-ins with that guy over the years. There was the time in the late 80s when I tried bantering with him at a show at the Coconut Teazer (!) in LA, and he was aggressively licking his lips and jittering. I was like, oh, so that’s what speed does to you. A few years later I watched him get kicked out of Al’s Bar in LA at his own show, then later eavesdropped on him having an intense argument with Taquila Mockingbird in the parking lot. Soon enough he’d show up all around LA in dresses, yammering incessantly, and my understanding is gender fluidity has been a part of who he is ever since. There’s a “Dead or Alive?” page up for him here. I’m very glad he’s still with us: an American original.

So – the Misfits article. Now I do enjoy The Misfits myself, at least the pre-Walk Among Us 45s. But I don’t need to tell you what a horrible human being Glenn Danzig was. I don’t know about now. My cousin and I – who were huge Flesh Eaters fans – used to get a real kick out of this part of the interview:

Flipside: And you and Chris D. mixed the album. Weren’t you supposed to play with Chris D.’s band the Flesheaters?

Glenn: Yeah, but they’re scared of us.

Flipside: Why’s that?

Glenn: I don’t know…maybe because we’re all (make a mean scary face gesture) and they’re all homos, ya know?!! I don’t care what they like, I hate them. God this is homo city around here!!

Jerry: We try to avoid going down that street (Santa Monica Blvd. near Starwood).

Glenn: You go to the supermarket or to use the phone and it’s so yeecch (makes kissing sound), “Fuck you, leave me alone for 5 seconds!!” In N.Y. it’s not like that. Everybody is into their own trip. No one bugs you, if you’re a homo, fine, you are a homo and go where homo’s go. But here it’s so fucked up, everybody’s pushing on you. You have a lot more homos here than in New York!!

Flipside: Well, right here is where they all concentrate…

Glenn: And Frisco is fucking homo land!! Yeah we wanted to eat at McDonald’s and the Flesheaters wanted to go into homo-ville, we just said, “fuck you, you give us the money, we’re getting out of here!!”.

You sometimes forget from the vantage point of 2023 just how rabidly anti-gay the youth of America were forty years ago. I was in high school then, and I remember. The letters section of Flipside #31 is just “fag”, “homo”, “that’s gay”, “I hate that queer”, etc., ad nauseam. HR, in the interview with the Bad Brains, responds to the question “How’d it go in SF?” with, “Well, it’s ok, but too many faggots.” Back to The Misfits – their interview here took place after their infamous San Francisco show at the Elite Club, during which “Doyle” totally brained some kid in the crowd with his guitar. (The incident is very well-described here). That show is reviewed in this issue, and ends a little shakily, “We figured someone might have been murdered but I haven’t read anything about it in the paper.”

So aside from all that, there’s a nice interview with Pagan Icons-era Saccharine Trust, who are already tiring of punk and moving on to what they’d become one album later; Tracy Lea and the always reliably hilarious Red Cross; Jodie Foster’s Army reveal the origins of the song title “Beach Blanket Bongout”, quite seriously among the top five song titles of all time as voted by Fanzine Hemorrhage; and a plethora of tiny-type scene reports mostly written by morons, which are yet Illuminative of a pretty special and unique time in the American underground. It’s an insanely-packed issue that all criticisms aside was highly worth the dollar my cousin spent on it in the HC Spring of 1982.