During the Summer of 2001, a free, one-page, two-sided xeroxed “fanzine” called Cherry Coke began appearing in Philadelphia records stores and alterna-culture storehouses. It had been purportedly written by a just-turned-21 “Sarah Duncan”, who “can finally go to clubs and see bands”, and who was a young woman who was exercising this right judiciously. “My goal within this ‘zine is to scope out all the local bands and try to give a fair account of what is going on” – and from my perspective, her account was more than fair. Duncan’s live show reviews of The Delta 72, Swearing at Motorists, Lefty’s Deceiver, Strapping Fieldhands and others I’ve certainly never heard of were eruditely mocking, sarcastic and funny as hell – and focused as much on their appearance and bewildering on-stage rock moves as on their music. Sarah’s reviews were half-written with a “I’m just sayin’!” sort of pretend naïveté, with the other half of any given review too informed, far too-specific and too 1970s-referential, making it clear there was almost certainly a guiding hand at play.

Turns out that guiding hand was one Tom Lax, Siltbreeze records and fanzine chief. Tom’s long been one of my all-time favorite music writers, not only for his ability to expand the boundaries of my tastes with the intense depths of his, but the cutting manner in which Lax has always been able to connect what’s he’s writing about with certain rock pomposities and poseurdoms. His style is an “if you know, you know, and if you don’t, oh well” nonchalance, but with sentences strung together so effortlessly that I’m often laughing as hard as I am rapidly writing down whatever record it is I need to research next. 

A different approach, shall we say, was taken with Cherry Coke. Lax has told me that his 80s/90s Siltbreeze fanzine was made with an eye to friend-level distribution and toward entertaining themselves, and this one from 2001 was likely no different, with the additional benefit of mass scene-level bewilderment and perhaps some level of desired anger or effrontery by the bands written about. A mysterious imprint called German Hawaii compiled the six pages that made up the history of Cherry Coke, along with an introductory page that outs Lax as the author, and a then-contemporaneous article from some Philadelphia alt-weekly about “How a one-page xeroxed zine has every junior varsity rock star running for cover”. 

Sarah Duncan (duncangrrl@hotmail.com) will usually initially play the rube, a young girl just out for a good time in the Philly clubs.  Then she’ll take notice of someone’s clothing, or hairstyle, or lack of hair, and especially their stage presence, and it’s off to the races. The Trouble With Sweeney at the Khyber Pass, 5/27/01: “..Joey Sweeney looks like a 15-year-old-boy…He wears funny shoes, too, like something a 40-year-old woman would wear if she were a lesbian and/or born again christian librarian….At one point he held up his drink & tried to encourage the audience to go to the bar & order a White Russian. Someone should tell him what he really needs is a thigh master”. Then the Lax part of it kicks in, in which the band is inexplicably compared to The Who’s 1981 Face Dances crossed with the role-playing board game D&D, before concluding with “If you like smarmy bedroom pop you’ll really like this band”. 

For Swearing at Motorists, 7/5/01 at the Khyber Pass: “…the singer/guitarist sure does have a peculiar look! I felt I had seen him before; like on a box of cough drops in my grandpa’s medicine cabinet or on one of those antique popcorn containers my Grandmom collects. He would also make a great drug addict or homosexual predator in a screenplay my friend is writing (or both! Seriously Katie, his look is perfect for that!)….If you want to see a band whose singer has hair that looks like an enormous loaf of flat bread and jumps around like a Salmon swimming upstream to die, Swearing at Motorists is the band for you”. Los Angeles, 6/21/01 at the Khyber: “Los Angeles. The name connotes an image of ‘cool”, something this band did not. ‘Lancaster County’ would have been a more appropriate name”. 

Imagine you’re in one of these bands and your pal calls you up and is like, “Hey, uh, I just saw a live review of you guys in a fanzine called Cherry Coke”. 100% the idea, I’m sure. Tom Lax would go on to do the Siltblog, whose archives are still online and available. That one was utterly daffy and at times impenetrable to me, and I didn’t know half of the deep-underground references made, but I read it religiously nonetheless and almost certainly fortified my record collection based on its stellar taste. Good to finally see this pre-Siltblog material collected in print, and no, I don’t know if German Hawaii has copies still, but here’s the place to check if so.