Tag: Wind-Up fanzine

Wind-Up Industrial Burnoff #4

~ Jay Hinman ~ Leave a comment

First, a big thanks to Tim G, who is the patriotic American who sent me Wind-Up Industrial Burnoff #4. To be more precise, this is Wind-Up #4 – the longer tag-on title was sort of their thing, as with the other one in this series I wrote about two years ago, Wind-Up Butter Cow (which was #5, and the final issue in this series). And “their” = “her”, as in Liz Clayton, the fanzine’s editor and omnipresent interviewer, live show reviewer, city reviewer, editorial writer and so forth. No, this one’s definitely not a “perzine” as I sort of hinted at with #5 – this is a 1995 music fanzine that leans 90s indie underground and then kind of spins off from there.

First, let’s just say it: so, so many ads. This is not all bad. Despite ads taking up 40-50% of the real estate here, Clayton clearly had the micro-indie “loss leader” labor-of-love record label in mind, and I was marginally happy to be reacquainted with New World of Sound, Walt, Brinkman, Roof Bolt, IMD, Anyway, Union Pole, Tube Alloy, Dark Beloved Cloud, Cher Doll and Car in Car Disco Product. I bought or was mailed nearly every 45 under the sun during those years, and so many of the ones from New Zealand artists in particular are the big fish that got away when I decided around 1999 that vinyl was dead and I’d better clear it all out, right now. Many are advertised here. And funding a fanzine doesn’t come cheap, I get it. I did the same thing, until I crapped out and decided to go low-tech and ad-free.

I’ve also got this perverse pride, which I’ve written about before, on never having heard certain bands or musicians, despite them being important to people I might be adjacent to. Sometimes I just don’t want to, you know? Ignorance being bliss and so forth. Silkworm are one of those bands. I don’t know ‘em. They’re interviewed here, and it’d probably be interesting if you knew ‘em! Six Finger Satellite and The Renderers I know, same with Dick Dale – him, that guy, he’s one I totally know. He comes off as a great, cranky S.O.B. in his chat with Rob Warmowski. Warmowski tries and fails to bait him several times into acknowledging the existence of punk rock, with questions about Agent Orange and JFA. How awesome would it have been to get Dick Dale sharing his take on the Blatant Localism 45 and “Beach Blanket Bong-Out”?

There’s a somewhat striking set of short Q&As with various scene denizens about their parents: what they inherited from them, what they find maddening about them and the like. The supposition might have been that we’re punks, and we got to this point probably through something our parents did or didn’t do for or to us. Happily, like me, most folks like their parents just fine, and see their strengths and foibles as clearly as anyone else does. My dad was just telling me two days ago about how much he enjoyed going to see Claw Hammer live in 1993 with me – a show at which he was quietly called an “old man” by a friend of mine who didn’t know it was my father, and despite his then being nine years younger than I am right now.

Better still – and better than the music stuff – are Liz Clayton’s “City Reviews” from various road trips that year. Clayton strikes me as someone I’d have enjoyed breaking bread with in 1995; this was around the time that I was also pretty fascinated with the US of A, which I’d only just started seeing, and especially with “local scenes”, music and otherwise. While we absolutely decried the “homogenization of America” at the time, the Wal-Martization of the country and all that, it now seems like she was traveling a set of quaint isolated villages with names like “Memphis” and “Albuquerque” with their own quirky local customs, compared with the true monoculture of 2026. She also wins my admiration with her simple yet pointed review of Phoenix, Arizona: “Phoenix sucks!”. Aside from Stinkweeds, it still does.

All the Wind-Ups are in that RILM Archive of Popular Music Magazines, which I guess you need to register for and maybe pay a little, I suppose, and you can then read a whole mess of fanzines on your computing device, including some of my misbegotten 1990s fumbles. Liz Clayton’s contributions to the cause are all right here.

Wind-Up Butter Cow (Summer 1996)

~ Jay Hinman ~ 2 Comments

I’ve never made much of an effort to connect with any “perzines”, if you will: personal fanzines, which are much more about the teller than the tale. It may be why I didn’t know about Liz Clayton’s and Summer 1996’s Wind-Up Butter Cow (“The All-Ohio Issue”) until TP wrote about it in my own Dynamite Hemorrhage #1 fanzine back in 2013. I almost certainly would have pegged it as a wacky perzine and kept walking had I seen it at Tower Records, which I’ve subsequently learned would have been a mistake. Here’s what TP had to say about it:

WIND-UP

“Not so much a record review ‘zine as the personal diary of coffee and soup aficionado Liz Clayton, Wind Up actually offered very little in the way of fuckin’ record reviews. In contrast, Liz spent the 90’s interviewing bands, submitting questionnaires, sharing recipes and highlighting the happenings in her life and the lives of her friends from Michigan to Chicago to Ohio and beyond. So what, right? Were there not hundreds of young Americans doing the same thing at the time? Maybe, but Liz wrote within the frame of a music head in love with her times and did so with classy aplomb. She changed the title of the zine with each issue, publishing five or six distinct epistles between 1991 and 1997: Wind-Up Toy, Wind-Up Frozen Entrée, Wind-Up Toaster Pastry, Wind-Up Industrial Burnoff, Wind-Up Butter Cow… 

Like her Editor-In-Chief colleagues around music zine nation, Liz also nurtured a syndicate of like-minded writers, many of whom were musicians. Her crowning zine achievement was the 1996 issue Wind-Up Butter Cow: The All Ohio Issue, which, as can be deduced, exclusively cheered Ohio bands and culture: Gaunt, Moviola, My Dad Is Dead, Scrawl, TJSA, Bela Koe-Krompecher (“sum him up in seven words or less!”), as well as Ron House trashing the 4AD editor fanny who wrote The Offense Newsletter. Liz’s book Nice Coffee Time was published by tinyperson press in 2013.”

Here’s what I’ll add. First, Ron House’s piece in Wind-Up Butter Cow doesn’t trash Tim Anstaett’s The Offense at all; in fact, it’s a full-stop tribute to the fanzine, with its idiosyncrasies and out-of-step-with-the-herd tendencies both noted and praised. Also, Tom Lax of Siltbreeze Records – an Ohioan himself – gets several pages to give a second listen to some of his 70s/80s Ohio “art-punk” 45s to see if they’re any good or not, and rounds ‘em up for the fanzine. Most don’t seem to make “the grade”. And while the standard questionnaire conceit at the heart of this fanzine ultimately gets a wee bit tiresome when applied to more than a half-dozen bands, their answers to questions like “What would you say Ohio is shaped like?” and “What is your favorite place in Ohio?” do generate some pretty interesting, and dare I say educational answers. 

I mean, I’ve been to Columbus and Cincinnati once each on work trips, and three times to Cleveland – once with Claw Hammer on a 1993 tour; once for the 1996 Case Western dental school graduation to see my now-brother-in-law matriculate; and once again for Content Marketing World in 2013. I can’t therefore say with any confidence that I’ve got a unique read on the state of Ohio. But it’s a little bit more robust now that I’ve read Wind-Up Butter Cow. I mean, I could now go to Licking County and potentially find a few things to do, and/or follow Mike Rep’s advice and check out Serpent Mound or some civil war burial sites. 

Oh, and a couple other things: Jeff Curtis tells the story (as a comic) of coming to college and immersing himself of the Kent, OH underground scene in the early 80s and playing in bands without once mentioning Moonlove, his phenomenal mid-80s band whose May Never Happen got reissued a couple years back. Finally, and completely refuting any notion that this might be a perzine and not really music-related, Clayton writes some truly funny live show reviews that have absolutely zero to do with Ohio, and Wind-Up is all the better for it. I wouldn’t mind one bit taking a look at the other issues that she did both before and after this thing.