I have a couple issues of Bob Bert’s late 90s/early 2000s BB Gun in the files and on balance I’m glad to have them around, though its “underground sleaze” horndog aesthetic was pretty off-putting even in its day. At its worst, it was sort of a lower east-side NYC parallel to the “lad’s mags” of the era, what with its lascivious droolings over various alterna-females and the constant written bloviations of Lydia Lunch. Thankfully, BB Gun #5 from 2001 is rarely at its worst, and can be much more generously read as a “glossy entertainment yearly”, albeit one drawn from fringe sub-scenes across music, film and literature, with many if not most participants plucked from Bob Bert’s most obvious orbits (i.e. Sonic Youth, Pussy Galore and Lydia Lunch, all of whom he drummed for). 

BB Gun #5’s really one of those “all in the family” affairs. Bert interviews Kim Gordon and Ikue Mori; there are Richard Kern photos and many references to the man; Nick Zedd gets to say his piece (which is unreadable); Thurston Moore helps out with a Yoshimi interview. That sort of family. Actually, and this harkens back to the Sho-Kai #1 fanzine I wrote about here, here’s Bert’s description of encountering Yoshimi’s band for the first time:

“When Pussy Galore played in Osaka, Japan in 1988, the opening act was the Boredoms. In all my years of witnessing every kind of rock-noise attacks, I was never so blown away, as I watched this raucous, barrage of kamikaze sounds snap the air in two. There were two drummers, one who (at least three times per number) would stand up on his stool and fall face first into the set and continue playing, wildly and ferociously; thunder-driven. Behind the other kit was one of the most remarkable drummers I ever heard. I had a translator-friend next to me, who taught me how to say, ‘Yoshimi, will you marry me?’. I yelled it after every song!”

Cute!! I wish The Boredoms had performed that falling-into-the-drums trick when I saw them. Richard Hell is interviewed by Bert, and Hell is already defensive at the fannish questions being asked at the start of the interview: “So how exhaustive is this gonna be?”. Well, it ends up being really exhaustive and extremely interesting, so journalistically I’m glad Bert stuck to his guns. Bert also gets a big piece in on Nancy Sinatra, who was in a sort of comeback phase around that time, if you’ll recall, as well as an interview with cover star Cynthia Plaster Caster, who’s just come off of casting the engorged member of longtime Fanzine Hemorrhage hero “Danny Doll Rod”. 

Evelyn McDonnell, who used to be the lead rock writer at my local free alt-paper SF Weekly during the years when I read those things cover-to-cover, has a good interview with Ari Up of The Slits in BB Gun #5. Ms. Up has lived a life, shall we say. Lunch is awarded with the literature beat, and she interviews Jerry Stahl, the sort of barely-readable “transgressive” writer you’d expect her to admire. She also talks to Hubert Selby Jr., who apparently “stomped a new asshole in the face of literature”. One of the other main editors here is Jack Sargeant, and he talks to both Mary Woronov (!) and to Bleddyn Butcher, a photographer whom I always get mixed up with the woman in My Bloody Valentine. 

There’s plenty of other things to mention in what’s nearly a 100-page tome. There’s an utterly insufferable “Beatles/Stones Dialectic in Music” by Ian Svenonius, a piece that makes Nick Zedd’s look like Percy Blythe Shelley. Bert’s really into a fetching underground actress named Misty Mundae, who acts in some guy named William Hellfire’s low budget exploitation films, and it all reminds me of the Film Threat era which has passed us by. And while I can’t fault Bert for falling for the JT LeRoy swindle, it’s still pretty funny to read “if he keeps it up into his twenties he could be the next Burroughs or Shelby Jr.”. We could’ve only hoped!