The Three O’Clock – Fanzine Hemorrhage

I’ve discussed it before in this forum (here, here and here), but I’ll repeat: I believe my memory to be correct in that no one looked to Flipside while it was around as a place for “rock criticism”, nor as a place to have one’s mind blown and taste defined by the immortal power of its prose. Nay, Flipside in the 1980s was more a clubhouse, bulletin board, connection point and gathering place for teenagers, night owls and newly-minted punk obsessives – a place to get the Southern California-centric ground-level view of it all, straight from Los Angeles & Orange Counties, where everyone’s favorite bands (Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Adolescents, Fear et al) were from. Consequently, it’s those early 80s issues that I still have and cherish, and/or have acquired after the fact.

In the 90s Flipside served a similar function, even once the bloom had almost completely worn off the SoCal musical rose. Today, as I’ve tried to make clear in previous Flipside unpackings, their issues remain one of the single best collections of archival material we have to make sense of it all, and I enjoy the fanzine far more now than I did then. Because I love LA punk rock of this era more than I do my family, my country and life itself, I still find myself quite enraptured with the slamtastic goings-on in this Flipside #30 from early 1982.

This magnanimity even extends to an early photo of Rodney Bigenheimer with Unit 3 and Venus and a Shane Williams with letter from prison. But I’m more entertained by this era’s letters from punks complaining about scene violence, poseurs, Serena Dank and “Parents of Punkers” and of course about the outstanding Phil Donahue episode with “mothers of punks”. A guy from Jodie Foster’s Army (from Phoenix) writes in complaining about how messed-up & angry the LA scene has become, and about a fight he nearly got into with some lunkhead when his band played the Cuckoo’s Nest. Editor Al Flipside responds, “We know things are a mess, our scene has been invaded by lots of assholes, most of them big”. Someone named “Kansas City” writes in complaining about San Francisco’s punks, but then blurts out this curveball kicker: “I liked the Sex Pistols and all that other shit too, but that was more than three years ago, anyway, what are the Sex Pistols compared to The Minutemen and The Meat Puppets? Or Tav Falco?”. Kansas City, contact Fanzine Hemorrhage with your real name and coordinates, please!

There are a ton of random-passing interviews; because Flipside staffers were at all the shows; they’d just corner a band before or afterward and let the tape roll. Sometimes it yielded some quotables; often it did not. The Adolescents are back after a short stint with Pat Smear on guitar (!); an item a page later says Smear is going to tour with Paul Roessler to back up Nina Hagen on a world tour (!!). Can confirm! There’s an interview with local band Godhead, who had a 45 on the Bemisbrain label (who gave us Hell Comes To Your House) that I thought I’d never heard, then I just listened to it here and yeah, I totally know this one – and without a doubt, I have not heard this song since the 1980s.

Other early ‘82 groups interviewed included Fear; The Effigies from Chicago, RF7, Anti-Pasti and a brief Greg Hetson/Circle Jerks chat. New Order – yes, the very same – are being extremely difficult; Flipside #30’s interview with them is an interview of them saying they don’t want to be interviewed. They still snapped two smiling band member photos nonetheless (incidentally, I think New Order were fantastic around this era – listen). There’s also Modern Warfare, who get compared to The Germs and don’t mind in the least, and unfortunately TSOL and Crucifix interviews as well, both of which still remain unread 43 years later so that I can eventually apply those five minutes to charity work instead.

And look who’s on the cover. Salvation Army, who would change their name next year to The Three O’Clock, talk about an upcoming New Alliance 45 called “Blow Your Mind” that never actually happened, as well as a full-length album that will be called Looking Through The Walking Four O’Clock. This also never happened. On one of my podcasts I back-announced some early Salvation Army material and authoritatively remarked they’d never put out an album, and that this material only ever came out later as Befour Three O’Clock – you know, the one with “She Turns To Flowers”. My pal Nick corrected my dumbassery – there was a Salvation Army album, and the two records were one and the same. Singer Michael Quercio was known as “Rickey Start” at this time, and in this interview. Some real mythmaking going on in early ‘82.

What else? Scene reports! From Seattle’s” “The group I like and think has a lot of talent is Solger” – oh hell yeah. The Phoenix report talks about how Madison Square Gardens is likely to close because of (imported?) punk violence. The scene reporter – Michael Cornelius – is crossing his fingers it won’t be more of the same at the upcoming Black Flag/Saccharine Trust/Minutemen/Plebs show. Plebs fans were totally nuts! There’s a photo of The Flesh Eaters’ Chris D. standing with two fellas from Social Distortion. There’s just been a Masque Revival Night in February 1982 at the Cathay de Grande with Controllers/Skulls/Bags/Plugz/Arthur J & The Goldcups, put together by Craig Lee, at which attendees were instructed to dress like it was 1977, a mere 5 years earlier. What would you dress like if instructed to dress like 2020? I shudder to think. At said event, The Bags only played “fast stuff” and were purportedly amazing. I would have gone if you’d have told me about it.

Well, I just spent a ton of time flipping through my own copy of Flipside #30 taking notes in order to painstakingly capture the mood and the magic for you, only to just now find that you can experience it all yourself thanks to the Internet Archive. Enjoy!

The Offense Newsletter was what The Offense quickly evolved into when it became clear that editor Tim Anstaett had hit the point of no return with distributors; and, one might imagine, his own sanity, given the breakneck pace of publishing The Offense had from its perch in Columbus, OH in the early 80s. (You may or may not recall we took a look at this fanzine here and here – that’s probably a good place to start in order to better understand what’s going on with the Newsletter).

Yet the breakneck pace didn’t stop. That Offense #15 I talked about was a March 1982 issue; by the time of this “December 3rd, 1982” Offense Newsletter, Anstaett and his contributors were already on their thirteenth issue of the newsletter. It would go at least into 80-something issues, and they’d vary in size. The Offense Newsletter #13 is a mere 8 pages (7, really – with a blank back cover), with so much crammed into it it’s kinda like I said before – could easily have been sixteen or more without too much art filler.

Anstaett and I actually guested together on a podcast about fanzines recently, which you can listen to here. I should probably know this already as a result, but I surmise that the Newsletter only received minimal if any distribution in non-Columbus stores. There’s no cover price, for instance. It’s also 8 pages – in 1982, that might’ve garnered about 25 cents. I only became aware of it when Tim sent copies to Sound Choice magazine in 1987, where I was a “summer intern”, so I’m guessing that was the main conduit – distributed to other fanzines, given to friends, mailed to contributors, traded for records and so forth. Compile any three or four of these together and you’ve got a real-deal, content-packed fanzine proper.

Better than that, even. The Offense Newsletter #13, with the Three O’Clock on the cover right after they were forced to change their name from The Salvation Army, carries on with what I really admire about the thing – its figurative status as a “meeting point” for highly opinionated letter writers, highly opinionated contributors (Don Howland, no less!), the deep wells of the American sub-underground at a time when hardcore was steamrolling the midwest in particular; and the UK post-punk and its ascendent global equivalents that were particularly near & dear to Anstaett. Just one interview – this one by Blake Gumprecht, who challenges the mostly moronic Bad Brains with sharp questions and thrown elbows, which they mostly try to dodge. I can imagine Gumprecht wasn’t the most captive interviewer they’d come across, as he goes after them for their Rastafarianism and all the idiocy it leeched into their personal stances on women, gays, and apostate Christians, then leavens it with “so when’s the new record coming out?”-type queries.

Aside from this, it’s reviews, letters and a short story about a dream. Steve Hesske’s name is taken in vain by one Dan Rouser of Wichita, KS. The LA paisley underground gets some notice, as well it should have in 1982. Billy Idol is summarily dispatched with for his “hey little sister” song in a review. The first UK82 Punk and Disorderly comp – which was hugely popular and distributed everywhere – gets a write-up. And, given this is effectively a weekly newsletter – at least this week – there’s a show calendar for December 3rd-9th that displays what’s going on in Ohio; in Lawrence KS; and for some reason, at Danceteria in New York – and only those places. The Plasmatics at the Columbus Agora, anyone?