Tag: The Screamers

Street Life #2

~ Jay Hinman ~ 1 Comment

You can see that my 48-year-old copy of this one has what we in the business call a bit of “toning”. Nothing to fret about.

Street Life #2 is another early punk/”street rock” Lisa Fancher fanzine, much like this one, but quite a bit earlier, maybe even a full year earlier. Punk rock’s evolution tracked like dog years at this point, where 1 month was equal to 7 months of new releases, groundbreaking shows, instant haircuts, musical osmosis and general scene chicanery. 1977’s Street Life #2 weighs in with a pretty impressive lineup of contributors, with Bob Morris as the actual editor; Fancher as the assistant editor and chief writer; and Jenny Stern aka the soon-to-be-known-as Jenny Lens as staff photographer. And even a letter to the editor from our hero Eddie Flowers in Alabama right off the bat, too. 

You know, they’re actually calling that new sound of 1976-77 Street Rock in some places, which is marginally better than City Rock, I suppose. Seems to me the key band making waves in Street Life #2, aside from The Ramones, of course, are The Quick. The Quick! Like in the Screamers interview by Fancher with photos by Stern: “They came to LA hoping to make a splash when the entire scene consists of the Quick and….umm….the Quick”. Yet what I most enjoy about this early chat with Tomata and Tommy Gear is how it ends with “Be watching for a Screamers EP coming out on Street Life Records!”. We all know how well that went – about as well as Black Flag’s debut LP on Upsetter. (For the back story on the latter, I’ll just drop an amazing advertisement from No Mag at the bottom of this post; and The Screamers infamously never released a shred of music in their lifetime, always holding out for the better deal that never came). 

For more inexplicable things that actually did happen, Bob’s “Beat of The Street” column talks about Kim Fowley producing a Helen Reddy record. Sally Dricks does a long hero-worshippy review of Bowie’s Low, and teenager Fancher, who also did layout for Street Life #2, throws in a large-font “best yet – LF” just to ensure her voice is also heard on the matter. There’s an entire column talking about the debauchery at a Ramones after-party at the “Screamers house” in Hollywood, and then another column flipping out over The Saints’ I’m Stranded. This is accompanied by a phenomenal Stern photo of The Ramones from that 1977 gig with Blondie at the Whiskey – this one. Someone make me a poster of that thing!

Sex Pistols land on the cover because the talk of the nascent punk world was revolving around the “bad words” they said on England’s Bill Grundy TV show in 1976. Given that these are fanzine people, there’s also a long Greg Shaw interview that allows him to expound upon his theories of musical evolution, the winds of change heralded by punk, the importance of fanzines, Peter Frampton and more. And then the big surprise as I’m going through it is how it all comes to a jarring halt with about 8 pages left to go, and morphs into record collector set sales and auction listings. This is something I might have expected from Goldmine, but not from an urgent fanzine from the streets.

Twisted #2

~ Jay Hinman ~ 1 Comment

Twisted was Seattle’s finest and foremost contribution to on-the-ground ‘77-’78 punk rock documentation, and it’d probably be one of the fanzine high-water marks for any musical era, really. Their full arc was a short three-issue run, and I’ve already aired my views about Twisted #1 and Twisted #3 at the respective links. Here we are in late 1977 completing the run with the middle-issue Twisted #2. 

This issue reads not so much as a Seattle mag, but as a Northwest regional fanzine, with road trips to Vancouver, Portland record store ads etc. The Pacific Northwest, then as now, really has just those three large metro areas, and forty years ago they felt – I’m sure quite rightly – that they totally were off the map for the rest of North America in terms of touring bands and coverage. Make your own scene! The ad sales department at Twisted has clearly been taking some three-hour trips in both directions from Seattle, as we’ve got Vancouver and Portland record stores and newsmagazines well-represented, along with a few major label ads for hot new bands The Tubes and The Boomtown Rats.

A nice surprise in the early pages is “A Punk’s Guide to Stereo”, an audiophile approach to playing punk records at the requisite level of fidelity. Do true audiophile maniacs still exist now? I used to converse with some of these lunatics daily in my first job out of college at Monster Cable, which you can read about here (seriously, I think it’s my favorite piece of writing I’ve ever been involved with). I suspect they’re mostly a dying breed, with an average age of 75+ now, but whoa, what a fanatically insular subculture when it was around. Brian Tristan, Lobotomy contributor and a man who’d eventually become Kid Congo Powers, contributes a bird’s eye view of what it has been like to be the president of the Ramones LA fan club for the past year now; this is accompanied by a fantastic photo of Joey Ramone record shopping with Tomata du Plenty. And then this is followed by a stuttering and strange first-person 4-day diary of the Ramones’ visit to Vancouver.

Still keeping it north of the border, we then get a 3-band Vancouver overview, with things on The Skulls (featuring singer Joey Shithead – “undoubtedly the focal point of the band”), Dee Dee and The Dishrags (they’d come to be known as just The Dishrags) and The Furies. There’s a piece on The Mumps and a thing on The Jam in LA at The Whiskey, with loads of photos. The Lewd get their first photo shoot – they look super, super, super punk – and this is followed by what I am certain was their first feature, as they seem to have been in existence as a band for mere weeks. Clearly they were Seattle’s great white hope of ‘77. And this Screamers fan club ad, reprinted below – wow.

I’m maybe getting a little tired of saying it, but it wouldn’t be an early punk fanzine without a dumb three-dot or multi-dot gossip column. Of course Twisted #2 has one. “Screamers have ousted their keyboardist David (Brown). He is now a residing partner in the newly formed Dangerhouse Records”. The Knobs have broken up, and turned into The Lewd and The Snots. “The Damned have lost their drummer. Early reports said that Rat Scabies had been fired for ripping up a hotel lobby in Paris. Fired for being a punk?”. “Iggy has a new hair cut. It’s very short on top and looks almost ROTTEN-like. Don’t call him a punk though, the press agent at RCA says he’ll hit ya”. “In San Francisco there’s a new fanzine out – “NEW DESEASES” (sic). It’s as close to an English fanzine as your gonna find in this country”. Gorilla Rose, a semi-legendary name from around this time for his antics adjacent to The Screamers and his huge influence on the aforementioned Brian Tristan, gets his own gossip column that follows this, “The Rose Report”, mostly focused on LA happenings. 

Layout’s great, brain-rattled enthusiasm is great, writing is good enough, and suffice to say that Twisted’s one of the all-time keepers, and only 60 cents an issue back in the proverbial day.

Twisted #1

~ Jay Hinman ~ Leave a comment

Seattle, Washington ended up being pretty well-represented at the mid/late 70s dawn of punk rock by not one but two stellar publications, both of which I’ve written about before – Chatterbox and Twisted. I vowed when I typed up some words about the latter that I’d do what it takes to procure the two copies I didn’t have of the latter, and somehow I was able to do just that. All it takes is a willing and friendly seller and a highly obsessive buyer willing to forgo some of life’s pleasures in order to buy some dopey fanzine from 1977.

Except Twisted #1’s not dopey – I mean, not really. Hitting the hot, hot streets of the jet city in July 1977, there’s excitement in the air and Seattle is all of a sudden on the fucking punk rock/alterna-music circuit, with Iggy Pop and Blondie not merely having just come to town to play together, but to party it up with our editors and with all sorts of new, nascent, barely formed punk bands as well. Their whole 4-day Northwest visit is documented blow-by-blow here, like the big deal that it most assuredly was for the participants. This was when Iggy had Bowie playing keyboards for him (!), and there’s a photo of him just sitting off to the side of the stage, nonchalantly doing his thing and trying not to be noticed. “With Iggy on stage it would be hard for anyone, even him, to be noticed.”

Each day, Iggy goes off to parties and jam sessions with the editors – he does not bring Bowie with him, though there’s a message left at the hotel for editor “Robert Roberts”: “David Bowie called – looking for Iggy”. Turned out Bowie was looking for the party but couldn’t find it. I think he got lost at the shpritzer honker splasher. He missed Iggy jamming with “Blondie’s band”; he missed Iggy hanging out with Seattle band The Feelings and commandeering their instruments; and he missed a trip to Herfy’s, the beloved Sacramento hamburger chain of my youth. 

Somehow there’s a party as well in Ballard, and I’m going to guess new Seattle punk band The Knobs had something to do with it, as they are profiled in Twisted #1. This is the band that The Lewd grew out of, with lead singer J. “Satz” Beret. Hell yes. Weren’t we just talking about The Lewd? It says here that “…The Knobs never played an official show, because as SATZ says…”We had no songs.” However, The Knobs did play one intimate “performance” at a Fremont rehearsal space called The Funhole. This A-list evening was written up in a Seattle punk fanzine Twisted.” I know from having lived there that Ballard and Fremont are almost the same neighborhood, lightly separated as they are by “Phinney Ridge”. Going to guess this was the show. Anyone in the Fanzine Hemorrhage reading audience get loaded that night at The Funhole?

Other things are happening too, folks. Tomata and The Screamers have recently moved to LA but have kept their ties with the Twisted editors, which means there are a ton of a photos and a wild-eyed write-up of the band’s otherworldly synth-blast, including a snap from the legendary Slash magazine party where both entities became known to the LA underground. Tomata himself writes up a frothingly happy piece about The Damned’s visit to LA and all the partying they did together. I mean, this is all formative stuff. Any & all documents about 1977 punk in Los Angeles contains these events, and here we are on the ground with the people who either made it happen or were witnessing it. 

In the record reviews, some nameless reviewer thinks The Saints’ I’m Stranded album is pretty awful, yet digs the new ones from The Tubes and U.F.O. Cool. And there’s a Danny Fields interview. Did you know that Fields was the editor of teenybopper mag 16 back then? Somehow this fact had eluded me. Twisted #1’s a short one, 25 pages, but for 60 cents and a chance to have your mind blown & musical taste rearranged, there’s some truly excellent value for money going on.