I’ve come to terms with Flipside in its early 80s guise not as a taste-building nerve center, nor as a place where one might gather intelligent discourse on the state of the scene, yet rather as a sociological excavation of punk rock as it was actually lived. Every time I saw/see something like The Vandals or Suicidal Tendencies on a Flipside cover I mentally classified/classify it as a taste-optional children’s magazine, but that’s not totally fair. You can get more on-the-ground sociological punk research in any given Flipside letters section alone than anywhere else of its time, and if that’s your thing, then issues like late 1982’s Flipside #36 are worth their weight in gold.  

In this one, Susanna Hoffs writes on a postcard with the breaking news of how The Bangs were forced to change their name. Someone else writes to defend the honor of Al from SS Decontrol, who’d apparently come under some scene criticism of late; Sothira from Crucifix writes to complain about a racist cartoon of him in a previous issue; and all manner of punk cretins write in from godforsaken Southern California towns like Norco, Glendora and El Toro, the latter of which is now called Lake Forest. We’re in the peak hardcore era, but Flipside was relatively magnanimous in their coverage breadth, extending it even to an Allen Ginsberg mail interview by “roving reporter Helen”.

There’s a whole page interviewing The Misfits about the fallout from Doyle recently clocking a kid on the head with his guitar in San Francisco. Needless to say they’re both defensive and dismissive. The editors talk to Rebel Truth from Sacramento; to 100 Flowers; to Bill Bartell from White Flag (who has a Dave Markey movie coming out about him); and to MDC from San Francisco, who for once don’t strike me as complete nincompoops. I will grant that band the quote-unquote power of some of their blitzoid hardcore on their first album, but they really turned me off at age 15 when I’d hear them on MRR radio, trying to out-Left Wing their hosts to the point of absurdity. There’s also a big interview with The Necros, with lots of discussion about English spike-haired punk; anarchy and its deeper meaning; bands that sing about Reagan etc. All the teenage punk hits of ‘82, brought to you by the deep thinkers at Flipside.

Want to know what else was going on with folks trying to “catch a wave” on the sub-underground in 1982? There’s an ad for Chris Ashford’s What? Records for a new Davie Allen and the Arrows 45, “Stoked on Surf”. “You may remember David’s 1967 twangy fuzz-tone hit ‘Blues Theme’ from that outrageous biker movie ‘The Wild Angels’. Now he’s off bikes and onto boards!”. Well that didn’t last long. I actually read an entire interview last night with a band that was unknown to me, The Romans, who had ex-Monitor, Human Hands and Deadbeats folks, and who loved the Symbionese Liberation Army and the paisley underground. My kind of people. Had to go listen to some online. I’ve heard worse! In fact, I totally dug it and ordered a cheapo used copy of their You Only Live Once off of Discogs. Who was it that said Flipside weren’t tastemakers? Me?!?

It’s apparent that if you’re looking to truly piece together the rough corners of Los Angeles music history during the glory years of 1977-83 that Flipside, given its breadth and dogged documentation, would have to be a primary resource. The amount of content in any given issue is staggering, honestly, and as I talked about before, one thing I actually admired and even sort of envied about Al, Hud, Gerber and the crew was how they really were out there and in clubs, veteran’s halls and parties – every night of the week, anywhere there was a show. 

For better or worse, they set the historical record in ways that others never could or did. For that alone, I’ll keep reading and unpacking these with pleasure, because 15-year-old “Slammy” from Buena Park in the letters section gets to capture the essence of being young and dumbstruck by the power of the ‘core for eternity, in a way that some nostalgia-ridden 50-something meathead like myself simply can’t. Copy of this on the Internet Archive here!