Wipeout! fanzine – Fanzine Hemorrhage

I was a major Wipeout! partisan when this thing was around, and even still, I’m not sure many fanzines have aged as gracefully thirty-plus years on as this one has. Even when Eric Friedl was finding pedantic fault in some 45 or live show, it was the man’s overall and all-encompassing joie de vivre vis-a-vis wild, sub-underground rock n roll music – and Friedl’s ability to transmit it and get you REALLY excited to come aboard – that stands out. This was a guy deeply into culturally mining multiple corners of the musical underground. You can just feel the endorphins rushing as he turns over another rock and immediately pounds his impressions into his TRS-80 or whatever. It’s hard even now to not want to make his 1992 bag your bag today, even if it’s harsh and unlistenable Japanese noise. I’m reading through his reviews just today, and genuinely wondering if I totally missed the boat on Zeni Geva and The Gerogerigegege.

Not that everyone agreed with this assessment at the time! In 1992’s Wipeout #6, Friedl reprints a review from the Denver Independent Observer’s 6/18/92 issue and an article called “New Alternative Music Magazines”: “…and of all the Bangs/Meltzer/Coley-inspired zines, WIPEOUT is by far the worst…Friedl reviews in (an) ‘irreverent’ borrowed style that merely succeed at being irrelevant, insulting and inane…has nothing to say to true followers of British and American alternative music…”. Let me state for the record that for true followers of alternative music, depending upon how defined, this may be true. There’s another letter from a guy in a Columbus, OH band called Shitfits, complaining about not being reviewed in Wipeout: “Skaters are into ska and hardcore too”. Also not untrue. But Friedl wasn’t. Glen Galloway also has a partial letter printed in which he writes about my fanzine: “Superdope reigns and I didn’t mean to imply otherwise”. Wait, what did he imply??

The linchpin piece in this one, I suppose, is the giant overview and complete discography to date of The Mummies, a band that for better or for worse helped define the “budget rock” template and aesthetic for so many bands that followed. It talks about their “final gig” on New Year’s Eve 1991 – this is a band that’s still playing multiple shows per year to this day. I like that Friedl looks askance at the band’s involvement with local San Mateo hair farmers/stoners Three Stoned Men and Wig Torture: “What is it with these ‘just say fuck hippiedom’ kinda guys’ involvement with stoner rock? Could they be closet long-hairs? Or is the San Mateo scene so small that these are the only other bands worth their time?”. I think I’m pretty sure I know the answer.

As sort of a tag-along, there’s a Supercharger overview and interview (best SF Bay Area garage band of the era by a mile, though they were thought of in some quarters as a Mummies “little brother band” at first). Clearly it’s a mail interview, as every time guitarist Darin Rafaelli makes a smart-ass remark, he’s immediately corrected by bassist Greg Lowry, who clearly filled out his portion next. Friedl gives a bunch of ink to an act called the Country Rockers, a Memphis band whose entire trajectory and decline I completely missed. Other sections include a mighty Roky Erickson overview and discography; a thing on Mexican rock and roll, a little bit of a non-judgmental tiptoe into “techno”, and loads of zine reviews.

As I’ve discussed before, Wipeout! was one of a tiny handful of fanzines that gave tons of slavish attention to obscure Japanese weirdness, along with Bananafish and Show-Kai. Wipeout! treats many things from the land of the rising sun as worthy of attention, from blistering and atonal noise to garage rock to pop. He even reviews Pink Lady. I still remember the brief 1980 TV show Pink Lady and Jeff, which you can watch here. My mom was an ESL teacher to Japanese exchange students, who’d come to San Jose and stay in our home. We went through a major “Japan” phase ourselves at 1085 Normington Way, and this unfortunately even included watching each episode of Pink Lady and Jeff when it came on.

And like any fanzine worth its salt, Wipeout! #6 is just larded up with a ton of reviews, except it’s not lard at all, and maybe unlike the following issue, most of them are totally coherent and well-reasoned, if in a “first-draft, fuck it” style. This is where you really feel the full weight of Friedl’s fetching, wide-ranging and entirely self-curated music mania. He loves The Brainbombs’ first two 45s: “these singles completely busted my wig wide open”. He gives critical and deserved hosannas to the Feel Lucky, Punk?!! compilation. He loves the Jesus Lizard; well, we were all young once…! There’s a big Sun City Girls section. You could curate a tremendous 1992 record collection from these picks, and I’m certain that this fanzine helped my own collection along a bit.

Not long after I wrote about Wipeout! #7 here, a terrific podcast interview with Friedl came out on Armen Svadjian’s RockWrit and it’s a great place to understand where the man’s head was at at the time. You’ll learn that Wipeout! actually “started with Issue #4, because I thought no one actually cared about a first issue. If anyone has copies of the extremely rare #1-#3 issues, let me know, because I didn’t write ‘em”.

Always knew that Eric Friedl’s Wipeout! was one of my hands-down favorite reads of the 90s, yet cracking it again this week only reinforced what a total blast his fanzine was. I know that given Friedl’s subsequent stature as a member of The Oblivians and as the creator and proprietor of Goner Records, these early garage punk & noise-adjacent fanzines from him are quite “in demand”. I had to regrettably trade one away to a European just to get something I really needed from a guy, and now I feel like I’m the one who got totally rooked.

I certainly remembered the sheer amount of wild and tip-top underground music content the guy shoved into each particular issue, but reading Wipeout! #7 from 1993, I’d also forgotten how absurdly chaotic an issue could be. Like Friedl says at several points in this mag: he’s really just into the music, he loves the music, and he doesn’t really care that much about what he’s writing nor what you think about it. So check out this Truman’s Water 45 review for a sense of how it all went down with this as his ethos:

Though we don’t knead no stinking badges Truman’s Water frustrate the 7” fan by making their albums essential to understanding the short 7”ers, giving keys and subject headers to look up in individual research. So these spastics don’t obey, and throw “Sad Sailor Song” into epic areas and pretty without sentimentality or icky Ricardo beat (cha cha), wires are wiry and I hear the phone ring during the whole thing (a good sign!).

I get the first sentence; the second is about as wacked-out as the Truman’s Water singles themselves, and fairly representative of any given Friedl review, in this issue at least. One of Eric’s recurring loves in these magazines is what was going on in my part of the world in ‘93, San Francisco, which he mistakenly calls “The San Mateo Scene”: Mummies, Supercharger, Spoiled Brats, Phantom Surfers, Trashwomen and so on. He was even more up on it all than I was from his perch in Memphis, and I was seeing one or another of those bands literally every other weekend around that time. Here’s a letter to the editor in this issue, referencing some of Friedl’s mania from Wipeout #6:

Eric,

Mummies mummies mummies mummies mummies mummies, you’ll be swallowing shitrock hard when you realize it’s gonna sound as shitty in one year as 77 punk does now. I can’t wait.

Cal

Vanishing Rock, CO

Took me another five/ten years to get there with The Mummies, but Supercharger still can’t be touched.

Another big love is Japan – garage punk from Japan; noise; The Boredoms; surf, you name it. If it was raw and Japanese, Friedl was on it. And this one’s got an interview with Jeff Evans from ‘68 Comeback and The Gibson Bros, quite a bit better and more incisive than the one I did in Superdope #6 that same year. Friedl also documents a roadtrip to “Garageshock II” in Bellingham, WA, which you’d probably call a proto-Gonerfest from the early 90s that was pulled together by Dave Crider from Estrus Records. Many of this issue’s heroes performed at that Summer 1993 thing, and it sounds like something maybe I should have traveled up to see myself. I don’t know, I had my garage punk favorites at the time, but anything that strayed into “hot rod” or “monster rock” or novelty shit, I really had trouble with – so yeah, while I’d see The Cheater Slicks or Supercharger or Teengenerate or anything related to Don Howland, Jeff Evans or even Jon Spencer in a hot minute that year, I probably would’ve been moping into my Red Hook and doing my best to avoid the bowlcuts and the romulans and the drunken go-go bar girls at “Garageshock II”.

Finally, this one came out when Eric’s own band The Oblivians were starting to move it into gear, putting out their killer debut 45 Call The Shots that same summer. Man, we were so overflowing with exceptional garage trash that year, weren’t we? I think that was THE year. Within a year or two The Oblivians would be touring in Europe, and Friedl only had two more Wipeout!s to give us before really devoting himself to Goner Records and his band. I’ve hung on to a few of ‘em, and I shall be dissecting them in time as this Fanzine Hemorrhage project proceeds accordingly.