Tom Lax from Siltbreeze Records has been selling off a bunch of fanzines and records online, and I figured I ought to get in on some of the action. I’d never heard of nor seen the Australian Year Zero #1 from 1993, but the Tom of Finland cover caught my eye. When “Tom’s” art wasn’t being used in the explicitly gay/leather/roughneck context it was intended for, it was at times being appropriated by straight fellas in the underground rock environment. I’m not the sort of guy who wantonly ascribes homoeroticism to straight men, such as football players or fanzine editors, so I won’t try to unpack it except for to say that these muscled, at times violent drawings were likely the only homoerotic images subconsciously deemed allowable in the snarky, ironic early 90s fanzine world – precisely because they push so brutally against a fairied, sissified gay male stereotype, and because they totally knock the non-gay viewer off balance for a second or two. Call your semiotics and gender studies professors for a deeper read.

The editors of this Melbourne-based journal of class and taste (“Buy me, butt stain!” on the cover) are named “Dave Boofhead”, “The Wiz” and “Jan the Man”, which makes it a little tough to get a read on ‘em as people. Could one of these folks have been Melbourne’s Dave Lang, who’d later put together a record label and a blog called Lexicon Devil? There was evidence that pointed both for and against it, so I decided to do some digging into his blog to see if I could come up with evidence for the affirmative, and sure enough! “….Early that year, I dropped off copies of the first issue of Year Zero to ML. To be honest, I wrote a lot of it when I was drunk and I didn’t expect anyone to buy it, let alone read it, but was surprised when I went back a week later to see that the half-a-dozen copies I’d left the previous week had apparently all sold….”.

This makes sense. The editors’ collective understanding of underground rock music appears to all-consuming and obsessive, if somewhat nascent and overly informed by Maximum RocknRoll and Flipside, two (of course) well-distributed fanzines that I know were highly formative for Dave. When I later started reading Dave’s excellent online writings, maybe ten years after this, he’d totally ditched the buy-me-butt-stain and GG Allin-celebrating shtick you sometimes see here for a more sober consideration of decades’ worth of jazzy skronk, psych, offbeat punk and so forth. Here, he and his team are still a little more impressed by Peter Bagge comics and scene gossip than I’m sure they’d care to remember, but as I always say with regard to these things, given my own early-20s missteps  – never apologize for having been young and dumb. 

The marquee item here is a great talk with Ron House of the Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments, who brings Mike Rep along for the ride. “Dave Boofhead” is able to draw them out quite a bit & get both to explore Columbus and Ohio writ large as places to make music; drinking; the current scene & market for their strange musics, and more. Two eminently interesting and opinionated gentlemen for sure, and they still have much to teach us to this day. An Australian group called Peril are interviewed, along with a GG Allin prison chat. It’s all coming back to me now: GG was supposed to get out of prison and immediately go on tour and kill himself on stage, perhaps taking some of the audience with him. It didn’t quite go to plan. 

Dave and Jan and The Wiz each get the own “scene report” columns, sort of, a very MRR-like move where they get to piss & moan about various scene indignities. There are also many record reviews and they’re all fun, tossed-off sort of blatherings, clearly written at a time when these guys were just intensely & totally devoted to rooting out the wildest, weirdest music they could find (Skullflower, Styrenes, Brainbombs, Merzbow, Zeni Geva, Dead C, Electric Eels) – then sometimes making mirth with it and shredding it to pieces, as Dave does with Boyd Rice and Non.

Oh, and while I hadn’t been aware of Year Zero in 1993, they were aware of me and my own early-20s then-fanzine Superdope. They even swipe an image directly from it! I did get orders from Australia every now & again, and I got a kick out of hearing how my fanzine was received by these gentlemen 32 years ago: “An excellent Northern Californian zine that is both totally analy-retentive and cliqueish, but yet also a damn good read….I swear, all this bunch seem to do all day is piddle around all day worshipping the goddamn hell out of the Thinking Fellers Union, Dead C, The Ex, Sun City Girls and just about any New Zealand, Finnish or Japanese band you care to mention….they don’t get too smart-arsey about the whole thing (unlike ourselves here at YZ)…My only complaints concern the slightly ‘garage’ bias of the zine (that genre, with a few exceptions, bores the shit out of me) and the totally over-the-top Thinking Fellers Union worshipping sessions that seem to accompany just about every issue…They also say that the last issue was ‘the last issue’, but they seem to say that every issue”. Wow. 100% guilty as charged.