Tag: Tim Anstaett

The Offense Newsletter #59

~ Jay Hinman ~ 1 Comment

We’re getting to the point in this Fanzine Hemorrhage endeavor where certain publications are coming around two, three, sometimes four times now. Which makes it easy for me to spare you the backstories of some of them, like The Offense / The Offense Newsletter – you can just check out previous explanatory posts on that one in particular here, here and here, if that’s something you’d be interested in doing. This allows me to skip the set-up for The Offense Newsletter #59, which wasn’t just from 1985, and wasn’t just from July 1985, but was from July 19th, 1985. 

Cocteau Fever is almost here! In only two months the Cocteau Twins will play one of five dates they’d play on their first-ever US tour in Columbus, OH – totally shafting Chicago – and it was all thanks to Tim Anstaett and his 4AD-besotted, typewriter-cranked Offense Newsletter. Your Fanzine Hemorrhage editor saw one of those five shows, which took place the week before I left home and moved to Santa Barbara for college. There’s not really a ton about it in here – just some acknowledgement that it’s for real and it’s happening. There are also some ‘85 Columbus show listings for the weeks ahead that are super 1985: Black Flag, The Chameleons, Sonic Youth/Die Kreuzen, New Order/A Certain Ratio, Gang Green, Meat Puppets, 7 Seconds. 

As with other issues I’ve read, the letters section sorta rules the roost and in fact takes up six of the twelve overall pages in this one. To read The Offense Newsletter, it seems, was to enter into conversant dialog with The Offense Newsletter. It offered a chance for readers around the country and indeed the world to pop off with scene reports (Gerard Cosloy does so from Boston); to slag and/or praise Tim for his tastes; to broker offense with others who’d written previous letters for their tastes; to complain about Husker Du; to clarify whether or not Tim hates your fanzine (Barbara Rice of Truly Needy); and even, in the case of Great Plains’ Mark Wyatt, to pen an unsolicited, show-by-show mini-tour diary. You’ll get more true pulse on the actual contours of Underground America here than you probably will anywhere else.

Of course I’m probably most drawn in by what comprises another 1/3rd of the pages here – an interview with Craig Scanlon and Simon Rogers from The Fall, accompanied by some spectacular live photographs of the band (and I’ve fallen in love with 1985 Brix Smith all over again, just like I did that year). They’d been touring on The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall, and were just gearing up to release their last truly fantastic record, This Nation’s Saving Grace. Scalon tells Tim aka TKA that Room To Live was “the worst LP we’ve ever released”, and I suppose a case can be made – but can you imagine being super-ashamed of a record that contains “Solicitor in Studio”, “Marquis Cha Cha” and the title track? Not me. Embarrassment of riches up until 1985.

Finally, there’s a small live review section at the end. Don Howland at that point was sometimes writing as “Chet Howland”, and he took on the 6/4/85 Black Flag / DC3 / Twisted Roots show in Lafayette, Louisiana. It’s another gem from Howland, one of my all-timers for music writing. He takes ‘Flag bassist Kira Roessler to task for morphing her look to fit in with the skeezy horndogs she’s playing with, and bemoans the fact that he’s really there to hear them play the ‘79-’81 stuff: “…But when they did an oldie like ‘Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie’ I was just reminded how much this band used to matter to me. But that’s just ole Chet…poor ole Chet. Poor poor poor Chet”. It wasn’t just ole Chet – it was almost every punker who showed up at a Black Flag show from 1983-86 and got a shirtless man in dolphin shorts grinding & sweating all over them to turgid, plodding dirge-metal, and a band totally stoned out of their gourds. Then they’d do “Six Pack” or something, and the crowd would go apeshit. Run the tapes!

The Offense Newsletter #13

~ Jay Hinman ~ 5 Comments

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?

The Offense #15

~ Jay Hinman ~ 1 Comment

Last summer I worked myself into a small lather attempting to pick apart 1981’s The Offense #12, which you can peruse right here. I’ve got a few other issues of this thing in my stacks that we ought to talk about, such as March 1982’s The Offense #15. Not only must I beg and struggle for good lighting and total concentration in order to actually read its microscopic print, my head aches all the more for just how ridiculously stacked it is. Really, it’s 51 pages of content that could have easily been 102 pages with different layout decisions, and its breadth is just mind-boggling. 

Hailing from Columbus, Ohio – no one’s real idea of any sort of musical hotbed at the time, yet it was just about to be rightly perceived as such over the following 15-20 years – The Offense was helmed by Tim Anstaett, who staffed it with a group of dispersed individuals, each intensely devoted to underground music and the life surrounding it, as well as to extending their tentacles to contact and convert every like-minded soul. I mean, it’s almost a crusade with these folks, and I remember very well this devout intensity of feeling of both being an outsider and worshiping other outsiders, and to gobbling up every bit of underground music, film, writing and gossip as I could. 

Honestly, The Offense would have been my favorite mag in 1982 had I’d known it existed, because it was over-the-top anglophilic (as I was), while deeply interested in the American underground and what was happening in individual cities, or, as we once called them, “scenes” (as I was). UK chart-toppers live uncomfortably here side by side with the fastest and meanest American hardcore bands, and letter writers range from nascent goth girls to new wave goobers to Barry Henssler of The Necros, raving about his visits to the DC scene. You can see on the cover here that much mirth & merrymaking is being had at combatting the mag’s reputation as “anglophilic”, right up the dawn of the USA-love-it-or-leave-it Reagan era. 

The 1981 readers poll results lean way more post-punk and English, which likely reflects that, at this point, there were no American publications covering that music with any sort of knowledge nor intelligence save for perhaps Trouser Press – and they were really just trying to stay alive at that point by putting Adam Ant or whomever on the cover. I’d buy two-months-old Sounds, NME and Melody Makers if I wanted to read about my faves Bauhaus or the Au Pairs or Simple Minds. At The Offense #15, the big winners are The Psychedelic Furs, Joy Division and Siouxsie and the Banshees – but also, there’s some serious coverage of underground Ohio as well. Human Switchboard are on the cover, and there’s lots of love for Naked Skinnies (who I only know as Mark Eitzel’s first band) and something called Razor Penguins.

The writing staff is populated by heavy hitters such as Ron House, Don Howland, Steve Hesske and the “controversial” Seattlite Joe Piecuch. I think it’s House who writes all his reviews like they’re song lyrics, like this for the Process of Elimination comp (currently selling for $271 on Discogs – I had this record!!): “Necros alternately try to be the scariest and fastest of all and succeed / Violent Apathy win shit production recognition, with most the others close runners-up / what’s wrong with saving your gig money for time in a decent studio with someone behind the board who halfway knows what he’s doing? / guess then it wouldn’t be a team effort /” – and so on. It takes some getting used to, but hey, “why be normal”, right?

There’s really no sense of what someone’ll think about something; records now part of the canon get slammed; commercial mediocrities like U2 and the “Fun Boy Three” are canonized; tiny underground bands can go either way. Hesske loves The Bongos’ “The Bulrushes” – so did/do I. Again, if I’d come across this at John Muir Junior High toward the end of 9th grade I’d have absolutely taken out a subscription and likely been king shit of turd mountain at my school (nah, I’d have absolutely gotten my ass kicked if I brought it to class). 

Anstaett bemoans that only 1000 copies were able to be printed of his mag each issue due to various distribution snafus the past year. I’m just glad one of them landed in my paws eventually, and as it turned out, this was the final issue of The Offense before it relaunched as the smaller The Offense Newsletter later that year.

The Offense #12

~ Jay Hinman ~ 6 Comments

In 1987 and 1988 I accepted an offer from a fellow college radio DJ at KCSB-FM in Santa Barbara and “interned” at his fanzine/magazine, Sound Choice in Ojai, CA. At some point I’ll explore an issue of this, and we can talk a little more deeply about all this entailed and what came of it during my twentieth year on the planet. For now, I can state that one of my many jobs there was opening the mail, and then asking editor Dave Ciaffardini if I might take some of the hundreds of promo records and fanzines he’d receive each week home with me, which he always said yes to.

The Offense Newsletter from Columbus, OH was one that arrived in Ojai with regularity. Because this was a time of fanzine abundance, and particularly of fanzines that covered the raw punk, noise and, uh, “pigfuck” that I craved, I was flummoxed enough by The Offense Newsletter that I never took any of them home with me. Editor Tim Anstaett was really, really, really into 4AD Records and had an intense anglophilia and some tolerance for what by then I thought of as “new wave garbage” that, even though he and his contributors also deftly wrote about all the things I loved, I found too discordantly strange and therefore untrustworthy. 

Of course, now that I’m all growed up, I applaud the breadth of his tastes and passions, even if some of the chosen material in 1981’s The Offense #12 is to my ears laughably trendy or pedestrian, such as interviews with U2 or the Comsat Angels, or time spent reviewing Heaven 17 and the Human League records, right next to Cracks in the Sidewalk, Minor Threat and Dow Jones & The Industrials. (The fanzine changed from a larger fanzine to a smaller newsletter format at some point, hence the minor name change). I do like the part where the guy from the Comsat Angels says he spends most of his time listening to Pere Ubu and Chrome, and wonders why his band plays the considerably less challenging music that it does.

Want to know just how intense the 4AD worship was over here? Not only are there letters to the editor mocking Anstaett for it already in 1981, but a few years later he’d be the catalyst for the Cocteau Twins playing one of their five US tour shows in Columbus, which thankfully resulted in one of my favorite pieces of local TV news coverage ever (please watch it). Fun fact – Fanzine Hemorrhage’s editor, a San Jose, CA Gunderson High School student and part-time new waver, attended one of the other five shows in 1985, in the considerably more logical tour city of San Francisco.

The Offense #12 – actually dated as having come out precisely on November 12th, 1981 – is an even more rewarding time capsule than I’d imagined it might be. First, it’s clear that Anstaett is getting some really strong distribution on this thing, with copies all over the UK and thus loads of underground promos and letters to the editor from there and from all across the United States. He prints a ton of letters, some of which take him to task, some of which praise him to the heavens, a couple of which are flirting sexual entreaties from women that he flat-out takes the bait on. There’s a letter from a guy in Seattle named Joe Piecuch – anyone remember how ubiquitous this guy’s letters were across various publications across the 1980s? Go check your Forced Exposures. There’s also a long, snotty one from NY Rocker editor Andy Schwartz and even one from a young Randy Russell in Kent, OH, a guy whom I interviewed last year in my own Dynamite Hemorrhage #10 about his later musical endeavors in Moonlove.  

Also – remember that it’s Columbus, Ohio that we’re talking about here. Who knew that Don Howland and Ron House were big contributors to this one? Not I! Howland’s music writing is some of my favorite music writing ever, and here we’re fortunate to get his first thoughts on The Gun Club’s debut album Fire of Love, which has just come out: “‘Fire of Love’ hits turntables across America with all the impact of a severed penis hitting a crowded sidewalk after falling SOME ONE THOUSAND feet from the roof of a skyscraper. It’s that good.” Howland also praises that Scritti Politti 45 “The Sweetest Girl” (the A-side only, which he gives an A+ to the b-sides’ “F-”) – it’s a really great song, I totally agree; major KFJC college radio hit when I was a teen – while copping to a lot of the confusion and dismay on display here that so many post-punk bands are so blatantly chasing “Rock of the 80s” cash. Anstaett, too – he eviscerates records by Adam and the Ants, Human League and other UK bands that were soon to become big US alterna-radio staples.

The aforementioned Joe Piecuch isn’t merely a letter-writer, he’s also a contributor, and he’s clearly going through some major Throbbing Gristle mania in late 1981, reviewing and lauding everything and anything he can get his hands on. Anstaett reviews some recent fanzines and gets a bit frosty when Tim Tanooka at Ripper calls The Offense “80 pages of really stupid drivel published by a very pretentious Anglophile who doesn’t like hardcore punk.”. I mean it’s 42 years too late, but I’ll state for the record that this magazine neither reads as pretentious, nor does it slight nor demean hardcore punk – quite the contrary. I plowed through this issue last night and it made me think that maybe I need some other issues. Thankfully, there’s The Offense Book of Books from 2019, which compiles the first 18 issues across two mega-volumes – for real! More here, and good luck tracking this one down if you’re so inclined.