Tag: Thurston Moore

Bite Down #1

~ Jay Hinman ~ Leave a comment

Over the course of Fanzine Hemorrhage’s reign of error, I’ve had the distinct pleasure of dissecting several 80s and 90s fanzines by one Brian Berger: Crush #3, Grace and Dignity #1 and Constant Wonder #1. Last time I even sirened a call that I sent across the internet for Berger to get in touch for a real old-school “Fanzine Hemorrhage grilling”, but our bait was left bobbing on the water. The common themes of any given Berger fanzine were a very learned abrasiveness; a high intellectual quotient that didn’t show itself off too much; complete & total independent music immersion; and a bit of horndoggery that did little to advance the seriousness of his cause. Thanks to one BH, I now have Fall 1988’s Bite Down #1, which I believe may be the very first of all the Brian Berger fanzines.

At this point, he’s a student at the University of Michigan, and therefore publishing Bite Down from Ann Arbor. Of course, Ann Arbor, especially its clubs, TOTALLY SUCKS. I love how college students from big cities, such as my own beloved progeny vis-a-vis Tucson, Arizona, often have the perspective of living and cavorting in exactly two places in their lives, and therefore if the second falls short of the first for, say, nightlife, the whole place just SUCKS. Berger places his zine’s opening editorial and statement of purpose on the inside back cover, the last place you’d think to look, and professes his love for rock and roll while also sheepishly admitting he’s a mere 19 years old. Well jeez, I was 20 myself at this exact time, and his obsessive interests very much mirrored mine: what various mythic fanzine types were up to (especially Forced Exposure and Conflict); Sonic Youth; the Gibson Bros; and the releases that were pouring out monthly by the dozens on Touch & Go, Homestead and SST. 

Most/all of the reviews I wrote for Sound Choice at the same age are just as guileless and uninformed as Berger’s, so any mirth-making here is refractory and probably aimed at myself, okay? But it’s funny! The Mekons’ 7-7-88 show at Maxwell’s was “the best show I’ve ever seen”. It may well have been! I say the same thing about the 9-28-87 Sonic Youth show at Borsodi’s Coffeehouse in Isla Vista, CA, which took place when I myself was 19.  “While a goodly amount of praise has been heaped upon the combo known as B.A.L.L., IT AIN’T BEEN ENOUGH!”. Really? B.A.L.L.? Richard Meltzer’s L.A. is the Capital of Kansas: an all-caps “MASTERPIECE”. (Maybe I should read that one). 

He cares even more about Shimmy-Disc records, a label whose program I struggled to get with at the time, but Berger is full-bore. B.A.L.L.’s new one is their “second straight masterpiece”; King Missile are “hilarious”; and even that Carney Hild Kramer record is a “masterwork” (there are nineteen copies of this LP currently selling at $3.48 on Discogs, not to conjoin art and capitalism, nor try to make any statements about price as a cue for quality). He also swipes the Forced Exposure “C/U meter” for his own 45 reviews, which was shorthand for “Could/Use x amount of copies”. So with a C/U of 1, you’d keep your lone copy; C/U of 500 meant, in theory, you needed to go find 500 copies. Tad, who is called “the friggin’ messiah” for his Daisy/Ritual Device single, gets a “C/U Entire Pressing”. Fuck, so that’s why I can’t find the goddamn Tad single – Berger got them all.

Only one more bit of funnin’, and then I’m done. (For the record, I enjoyed reading Bite Down #1 cover to cover today). His interview with Thurston Moore of, yes, Sonic Youth, is really good, mostly because Moore was and is always game to talk shop with a fellow record/music obsessive. It makes me laugh because the questions are so the sorts of questions I would ask bands not just in the 80s, when I’d meet them in person, but even through the 90s, as if they didn’t have anything else to talk about. “How’s the tour?”. “So you guys are playing with Laughing Hyenas”. “What’s the deal with this one record I collected from you” etc. Questions that were just as one-dimensional as I was at that age. I also learned that Thurston Moore’s tour diary in Forced Exposure was enlivened by some somewhat mean-spirited edits by Jimmy Johnson, which, I guess if it happened to me, I’d never submit anything to anyone ever again.

I do think Berger made a quantum-sized developmental leap from Bite Down #1 to Constant Wonder #1 in four years, and some of those rougher edges were never sanded down – mostly to the good in his case. They certainly made for more readable and more memorable fanzines, and I reckon the guy’s still a person of interest from this era, even if I’m the only one still interested.

Luggage #1

~ Jay Hinman ~ Leave a comment

I believe Luggage #1 was the first and only in its run – a Boston-based digest fanzine from the haphazardly-xeroxed school of design, focused on music skirting the boundaries of rock. The editors were Jason Castolene and Mike Zimbouski, and there’s an excited sense of newfound discovery in the fanzine, that they’ve very recently unlocked a hidden portal to the deep underground and are newly bathing within a deep well of improvisational noise, jazz, not-quite-rock and related experimentation. It all comes off as wide-eyed and prone to the disproportionate obsession and over-analysis that can make life in one’s twenties so fun and so frivolous. 

Trans Am, purportedly a krautrock-inspired band who are interviewed here, put that myth to rest by telling Luggage that they’ve just heard most of it for the first time, with one guy piping up to say he’d just heard Faust today. There’s an interview with clarinetist Don Byron, whom the editors are chastising me for not knowing in 1997; alas, I’ve only heard of him now, 26 years later, reading this old fanzine I’ve recently found. Good, prepared questions from the Luggage team and it gave me a great sense of that late 90s NY/Knitting Factory downtown era that I wish I’d have been able to experience a bit of firsthand. 

The final of their trio of interviews is with Thurston Moore, and I’m always game to read his explorations of record collecting, navigation of the obscure, and straddling of the major label and micro-indie worlds. The editors flummox him a bit with the sort of rookie questions I unfortunately still ask my subjects in the interviews I do: “What are you listening to these days?”  “What books are you reading?” “What’s Sonic Youth doing next?”. Byron Coley is referred to here and in another part of the magazine as “Byron Cohen”. 

Moore makes a particularly relevant point in the interview about what’s driving such a strong interest in improvisational and far-underground, out-there music in 1997 – and while he doesn’t quite say it with these words, it’s effectively the turned backs of underground music freaks who once revered major label bands like his own Sonic Youth. The underground, having seen their bands so thoroughly co-opted, are digging deeper into formless tuneage, distant krautrock, harsh noise and even the strange, loose psychedelic folk music starting to coalesce around this time, just to see what might turn up and excite them the way bands did in the 1980s. Here I was in 1997 thinking it was just a buncha scene credential hogs pretending to enjoy Keiji Haino and The Tower Recordings, and it was Moore’s evenhanded take that probably explains it all better. As I’ve mentioned before, it took me quite a few years before I’d personally come back to the late 90s to really dig into all I missed by turning my own back on the sub-sub-underground.

Therefore, I still don’t know what’s what with some of Luggage #1’s favorites: Analogue, Five Starcle Men, Oval etc. The fanzine closes out with an incongruous show review of Polvo playing in Boston in 1996, “an epiphanic experience” for the unnamed writer. “Polvo” is one of those you-had-to-be-there-I-guess 90s fanzine-rave bands, much like “The Grifters”, from whom I’m still waiting for a first decent song to penetrate my consciousness. Anyone know if Castolene and Zimbouski went on to write elsewhere? (Yes! Just found out that Zimbouski published this collection of short stories…).

Sonic Death #5

~ Jay Hinman ~ Leave a comment

I’ve long had a hankering to own a copy of Thurston Moore’s multi-issue 80s fanzine Killer, but I’ve never seen the thing and don’t know anyone who has one (do you?). Sometimes I’ve gotten it confused with a 90s fanzine called Sonic Death, which is maybe a little more easy to come by but still often quite “dear” if you’re looking to trade money for one. I did it anyway. It’s a publication of the Sonic Youth Fan Club – there was, in fact, such a thing (!). And it’s 100% written by Thurston, Lee, Kim and Steve. How about that?

Sonic Death #5 finds us in 1994. I was sort of following Sonic Youth at that point but I’d mostly tuned out; suffice to say I was not in the fan club. This was not due to any anti-SY stance on my part; I still maintain the September 28th, 1987 show of theirs at Borsodi’s Coffee House in Isla Vista, CA was one of the capital-G Great Nights of My Life. And maybe my second-favorite time I saw them of the 7-8 times I did was a year after this fanzine, a blowout performance on the Washing Machine tour in San Francisco, with The Amps and Bikini Kill opening. Tremendous band, but I was spoiled for choice in those years and when it came down to, say, High Rise, Dadamah and the Cheater Slicks vs. “Kool Thing”, I had my lines drawn when it came to my record-buying dollar, and was highly resistant to just about anything on a major label, including my previous independent favorites who’d grabbed at the brass ring. 

This issue totally sucked me in with one of my favorite photos ever of the eternally perplexing Royal Trux from 1987; you can see Jennifer’s eyes, for one. There’s another one here. No other Royal Trux content graces Sonic Death #5 – a great fanzine move! Lee Renaldo writes a chatty and excited introduction and catches up the club w/ recent doings on the last day of 1993, talking about recent shows playing with Neil Young, Metallica, The Black Crowes and Faith No More, among many others. “I had to wonder at one point how we’d managed to get our foot in this door!”. Indeed. 

Here’s what I love about these folks; this dumbfounded wide-eyed marveling gives immediate way to an interview with The Ex, followed by Thurston Moore going bananas with a few dozen reviews of far-underground 45s and LPs spanning from Keiji Haino to The Frumpies to Skinned Teen to The Shadow Ring to Merzbow to the Screamin’ Mee-Mees. The distance from MTV to PSF was really bridged by this band, and this band only. There’s a bunch of banter about the next album, xeroxed fan letters (including those screaming “sell out!”), and something pretty cool – “print-outs” of missives from the online Sonic Life mailing list, all from 1993. I don’t believe I really understood that there was something called an internet and that I could be on it until at least a year later, despite being 25 years old at that point; it was my late-fortysomething Mom who gave me the lowdown on chat rooms and America Online and all that, if you can believe it. I’ve written here about just how amazing it was to get “email” at work, which I and my favorite co-workers immediately used for pranks only. There was a Sonic Life listserv, and I didn’t even know about it.

Sonic Death #5 is a sloppy and chaotic fanzine through and through, in the very best sense of both words. I’d have to think it introduced quite a few Fan Club members to an aesthetic and a revelatory “mode of seeing” that they’d never cottoned to before. Lucky for all of us, each issue of this fanzine is available to read right here and right now as a PDF, thanks to Sonic Youth themselves. Download them before they go away like that amazing Contextual Dissemination site did!