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Pages from DYNAMITE HEMORRHAGE #2, an 84-page fanzine now being printed available for pre-order here. We should have them in stock by November 20th or so.

It’s written by Jay Hinman and Erika Elizabeth, and the thing took the better part of 2014 to throw together. Seemed to have turned out all right despite some typos that I’ve already caught post-production. You can handle it, right?

Learn more about what’s in it and order at this link here….!

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NOW AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER: DYNAMITE HEMORRHAGE #2

We’ve shipped DH #2 off to the printer, and they tell us we’ll have it back in our hands within 2-3 weeks. With that in mind, Dynamite Hemorrhage #2 is available for pre-order, and will ship to you as soon as we have them.

Here’s what’s in it:

– An interview and retrospective with BILL DIREEN, the New Zealand-based musical iconoclast and creator of some of the most weird and wonderful underground pop music of the last 35 years. Great old photos of Vacuum, Six Impossible Things and more – and Direen’s take on his many recordings, bands and general outlook on creation & creativity.

– Tim Warren from Crypt Records, on the eve of two new volumes of the mind-destroying “BACK FROM THE GRAVE” 60s punk compilations, takes us through how he’s been putting these comps together since 1983 and the pain he’s endured to make sure we get to here some of the most raw and rare rocknroll chaos of all time

– Interviews with current musical superstars HONEY RADAR, NOTS and KING TEARS MORTUARY

– Erika Elizabeth’s overview of lost and neglected female-fronted punk and post-punk bands and records you’ve never heard of

– The Layman’s Guide to 1970s Jamaican DUB – an overview of wild, weird and wacked dub reggae during its peak era, along with ten essential dub recordings, explored

– Interviews with Jon Savage and Stuart Baker on the new PUNK 45 series of archival 70s punk reissues

– 87 record reviews
– 15 book reviews
– Advertisements from today’s top hit making labels

Pre-order you own copy here.

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SUPERDOPE #7 – 1994

My scanning of SUPERDOPE fanzine, which I used to write and put out myself back in the 1990s, continues apace. Here’s the lone issue that came out in 1994, SUPERDOPE #7. It was a small digest-sized mag centered around two in-person interviews I did with the bands Doo Rag andVirginia Dare. The interviews are then followed by a few book reviews and then a whole mess of record reviews. 

I can’t say that I’ve spent a whole lot of time listening to either Doo Rag or Virginia Dare since then, but hey, that’s where my 26-yr-old head was in 1994, and I still like ‘em both. Around this time I was also “running” a small record label called WOMB; you can see on the back of this ‘zine the ad I made for the Monoshock 45 I put out. A few months after this came out, Anthony from Past It Records and I put out a Demolition Doll Rods 45 as well, and that was the end of Womb Records.

Turned out it was pretty much the end of Superdope fanzine, as well – at least for four years. In 1998, I came back and published one final issue of the magazine. Alas, it’s the only one I still have any copies of anymore, and if you’re interested in it, this post provides some details on how to order it. #7, the one I’m posting here – well, I’m afraid you’ll have to scour the fanzine aftermarket. Or just download it here. 

DOWNLOAD Superdope #7 (1994)

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SUPERDOPE #6 – Summer 1993

SUPERDOPE was a print fanzine that I made from 1991 until 1998, in various sizes and formats and varying degrees of quality. This issue, SUPERDOPE #6, was not only the one with the largest print run and the widest distribution, I’d have to argue it was the one that I think came out the best, “all things considered”. Outside of the then-modern computer I’d use at the very patient and gracious Kimberly MacInnis’s house, who very much helped with the design structure (like, teaching me how to make columns), it was completely and totally hand-made, up to and including the bold lines that separate one article from the next. I actually would type those lines out by hitting the “dash” button multiple times in a big font, then cut the long strip of paper out, then glue it down onto my cardstock proof sheet (or whatever the thing is called that you send to the printer). Just look at this ridiculous cover here and you’ll see what I mean.

Considering its size, this one came together in record time, too. I had just come off of a 2-month pseudo-gig in April/May 1993 as “road manager” for then-active rock band Claw Hammer, and had even kept a tour diary that I’d intended to use in this issue, which came out in August 1993, I believe.

When I gave the band of whiff of this idea, the sour looks of disapproval and reproach that I received were most telling. What happens in Wichita and Boise stays in Wichita and Boise. So I set about to doing a few interviews, banged out a ton of record reviews, wrote up the first piece on film I’d ever done, and solicited some great contributions from the likes of Tom Lax (“Gregg Bereth”), Doug Pearson and Grady Runyan, as well as multiple gig photos from Sherri Scott, who took on the “chief photographer” role for the fanzine and who was also my roommate. It ended up in a print run of around 2,500 copies, and my inventory-keeping skills were so bad that I now have a mere 2 of them left.

DOWNLOAD SUPERDOPE #6 

A few notes on this one, in case you’re interested in downloading and reading it:

– It’s a pretty big download, 248MB. Previous issues I scanned were well less than half of that, so it might take a few minutes to get to you.

– The interviews I did with Don Howland and Jeff Evans from THE GIBSON BROS were both on the phone, fully recorded and fully transcribed. I’d never done that before, and somehow it ended up working very well. The interviews with COME, DADAMAH and HIGH RISE were either done via mail (the High Rise interview, which is a piece of lost-in-translation weirdness I’m very proud of) or on cassette tape, with the band reading my questions aloud and then verbally answering into a tape recorder.

– Naturally, with the passage of 20 years, there’s a lot that looks silly now. There are bands I can’t even imagine listening to again that I make sound like godz and geniuses here. The Dead C, for one, although I’m actually coming around to them again after a long layoff. The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, a band that only a drunken 25-year-old could worship. Rocket From The Crypt. Please.

– I really like Doug Pearson’s piece on 60s/70s heavy psych private-press records. The title I gave it, “I’m Going To Punch You In The Face, Hippie”, was not Mr. Pearson’s idea, nor was the photo of “him” that I used to accompany the article. He was kind enough to take it in good spirit back then, and I thank him for it. I would have probably flown off the handle.

– The photo of World of Pooh used to accompany my review of them was actually given to me by guitarist Brandan Kearney to use. He didn’t want Barbara Manning to know he’d loaned it to me, for some reason, so the credit went to Nicole Penegor, Superdope’s former “staff photographer”. Thanks, Nicole!

– Superdope #6 was the last large-format magazine I ever did. The following year I published a mini digest-sized edition, and then one more four years later, and that was it. I’ll try and get those scanned and posted soon in case anyone wants to take a look at ‘em.

DOWNLOAD SUPERDOPE #6

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For those just joining the SUPERDOPE saga – a set of 90s rocknroll fanzines I’ve been posting on Dynamite Hemorrhage the past week – Superdope was a music fanzine that I personally published from 1991-1998. 7 of the 8 issues came out in a three-year period, ’91-’94, with one last one completing the set in 1998. I wasn’t trying to build any sort of empire, further a writing career or even make money, and as life would have it, none of these happened in any case. Yet it was a pretty consuming part of my life during that time. I got especially serious with this issue and its follow-up later in 1993. Both were well-distributed, and if any of the issues still make their way around the fanzine-trading sphere anymore, it’s these.

A few notes on SUPERDOPE #5, which was written during the Fall and early winter of 1992, and came out at the very start of 1993:

  • First, apologies for the scan coming out a little “dirty”-looking in spots. Everything’s perfectly readable, but in order to get a successful scan on my home-based all-in-one printer thing, I need to physically press down each page with the palm of my hand as it’s scanning. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes I’m a little too lazy to go scan it again. I suppose it adds to the “raw vibe”, right? I guess your physical fanzine might have aged far worse.
  • I don’t believe there were too many interviews with THE NIGHT KINGS and the THOMAS JEFFERSON SLAVE APARTMENTS in their day. This was back when I was still doing interviews by mail. Mail! I’d send a list of questions and a blank cassette to the bands, and they’d usually record their answers after a practice. They’d then put the blank cassette in the mail, and I’d transcribe the whole thing. Most would usually send along some flyers and photos as well, and that’s what usually ended up in the magazine. There were no (accessible) scanners, nothing digital at all – I’d copy them at Kinko’s and then carefully send them back to the bands. Part of the narcissism involved in the struggle making a ‘zine back then was the payoff in finally seeing your finished product, the one cobbled with scissors and glue and sheets of white paper surreptitiously printed at work. I’d get in the car and start immediately driving it over to friends’ houses and to San Francisco record stores to be sold while the ink was still smudging.
  • FLY ASHTRAY were a NYC band I’d gotten really into from their first two 45s. They didn’t want to send me any real photos of themselves (faces made for radio?), so they instead sent along a bunch of strange, clipped art and photos that I passed off as legitimate pictures of the band. I got more than one comment about the “band photo” that shows 4 stupefied zombies, two of whom are African-American, as being “surprising” since the readers didn’t quite expect the band to “look like that”.
  • I had some very strong contributors this issue – Tom Lax, who was running Siltbreeze Records in full swing at that time (he got a great back cover ad for free for his efforts); Doug Pearson, the designated “hippie rock” record reviewer (reissues of 70s private-press records were really big at the time and Doug had them all); Glen Galloway, who besides fronting the band TRUMAN’S WATER had his own excellent fanzine “Zero Gravity”, and Grady Runyan, who submitted this weird and not altogether flattering piece on what was then my #2 favorite band in the universe, the THINKING FELLERS UNION LOCAL 282, which I published “under my breath”, as it were. Then there were two excellent photographers – Nicole Penegor and Sherri Scott (my roommate) – who contributed a ton of original photographs that I very much wish I could have represented better than with cheapo 10-cent photocopies from Kinko’s.
  • Finally, I find way more to cringe about in this issue than even in the earlier ones. I was getting cocky, with a fanzine that (a few dozen) people actually liked, and started writing a little over my head. I was just 25 years old, but should have known far better than to start cracking so many BANANAFISH-like dumbass in-jokes that I don’t even understand to this day. My credo at the time appeared to be, “If this line will make my friend Brett (or Doug, or Steve, or Grady, or Mitch, or whomever) laugh, then I’ll put it in there”. Other fanzines seemed to employ this trick, and perhaps at the time I thought it helped cultivate an air of mystery – like something I might want to get in on – but there are things in this one that would have made me just put the thing down and call the editor an insufferable bore. But it was a blast at the time, and perhaps you’ll like it better than I do.

I believe SUPERDOPE returned to form later that year with Issue #6, and I’ll probably post that tomorrow or later this week. You can download this one – it’s a big PDF – right here.

Download SUPERDOPE #5

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Of the 8 issues of SUPERDOPE fanzine that I self-published in the 1990s, this fourth issue from Summer 1992 probably had the lowest print run and is the most “rare” (which is not to be confused with “desirable”). If anyone’s been waiting to read it, and has been bidding up the price of any copies that make it to eBay (this truly happens with some of Superdope’s back issues, which is amazing to me), well, here you go. It’s so rare that I only have one beat-up copy myself.

This came out only about 4-5 months after SUPERDOPE #3, which you can download here. Like that one, it was a small-format ‘zine I pumped out very quickly, run off at some long-gone printer on Fillmore Street and distributed mainly at Tower Records stores, local San Francisco record stores, and See/Hear in New York. I got more serious (again) with the subsequent issue, but I’m getting ahead of myself and will post that one presently.

A few thoughts about this one:

• The contributors this time were Doug Pearson – a local pal who, until recently, was front & center at every single rocknroll show I went to, leading me to believe that for every show I attended (which is one every 6-8 weeks, maybe?) he was holding court at twenty – and Tom Lax, then as now the proprietor of SILTBREEZE records. I wrote the rest. I knew of Lax as a writer first, before he started the label. His stuff was funny, deeply knowledgeable and intensely aware of every sub-movement and sub-sub-movement in every forgotten crawlspace of underground rock, in every nook & cranny of the globe. When he still writes for his Siltblog, which is unfortunately infrequently, it’s essential reading. I thought it was a “pretty big coup” that he felt Superdope good enough to lend his name to.

• Though THE BRAINBOMBS interview was the first attention they ever really got in the US or elsewhere (I had been blown away by that “Jack The Ripper Lover” single), I’m not all that happy that I furthered their legacy, such that it is. I’ve come to see this hate/kill/blood music as stunted children’s music. It’s something that underdeveloped twentysomethings appreciate, but like Freddy Kreuger and Che Guevara, also something that is easy, and relatively painless, to “age out of”. When the otherwise right-on Z-GUN magazine, put out by intelligent thirtysomethings/fortysomethings who should have known better, did a frothing, multiple-contributor “Brainbombs tribute” in one of their 2010 issues, it struck me as totally preposterous. Smart people, with highly-developed BS detectors, praising a band who sings about mutilation, child rape and torture, like it was somehow bold, daring and shocking. What’s shocking is that anyone could be intellectually stunted enough to still get a thrill off these mental pygmies. Mea culpa. I made a mistake giving these guys any press beyond a record review or two, despite the musical thud of their early 45s.

• 1992 was obviously a very good vintage for raw and exciting underground rock. Looking at the then-new records we covered in this one – Night Kings, Claw Hammer, Sun City Girls, Cheater Slicks, Thinking Fellers, Venom P. Stinger – I’d have to mark this particular year as my “peak” for intense music & record adulation. The stuff we covered was better than in previous issues, and the records we praised are more lasting (“The Woggles” – wha? – notwithstanding). 

I’ll be back in a few with three of the final four issues we published.

Download SUPERDOPE #4 (this is a big PDF file)

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This 1992 issue of my self-published music fanzine is the first in the 8-issue series I can legitimately say that I’m more or less proud of. SUPERDOPE #3 came out about six months after I’d “threatened to quit” publishing (oooh!) for reasons I don’t really remember. I even went so far as to send back promo records on my own dime to certain labels I respected who’d sent me freebies, because I was embarrassed to keep them if I wasn’t going to, you know, review them. I remember meeting Mac from Merge Records the next year in Chapel Hill, and he was just bemusedly shaking his head that I’d bothered to do that. Rest assured, I gave up those ethical qualms later on. So after making a big to-do about being “too tired” to publish or whatever, I just said aw fuggedaboutit and put out this tiny, digest-sized, 16-page minizine.

SUPERDOPE #3 captures a bit of the (un)popular rise of the great garage punk bands of the 1990s, with the piece de resistance being this interview with THE GORIES. Though I had no idea at the time, the band would soon break up, and gave few other interviews during their career. I simply mailed them a list of dopey questions and let them record their answers on a cassette tape; as it turns out, it was my favorite interview I “did” outside of the DON HOWLAND one that made it into issue #6. That I never got to see the band play always stuck in my craw, a situation that was rectified when they hit my town on their reunion tour in 2010.

 A few other thoughts on this issue:
  • I wrote and edited this one completely solo, though, having just recently seen “Beyond The Valley of the Dolls” for the first time, I uncleverly appropriated the name “Lance Rock” for several items. This doesn’t wear as well in 2010, I concede.
  • My list of over-the-counter stimulants in my “Top 10” was nothing but bluster. It stemmed from an incident that year where I’d taken two (very much legal!) Ephedrine – the ingredient in No-Doz – pills to keep myself awake at a Thinking Fellers Union show, mixed it with a couple of pints of beer, and proceeded to suffer through one of the weirdest, malarial, hallucinatory nights of pseudo-sleep I’d ever had. Not sure I ever used one again – but it sure was fun pretendin’.
  • It is indeed true that the first CD I ever bought was MONSTER MAGNET’s horrific “Spine of God” – I proudly waived my “no bad reviews” policy especially for that one.
  • The “Late Reviews” consist of clipped reviews from other magazines like Maximum Rocknroll and Your Flesh, married to records that weren’t actually being reviewed (and in the case of “Ska Derr & The Rejectones” and “Cognitive Drought”, bands that didn’t ever form). I thought the Barbara Manning one was pretty funny; I’m pretty sure it was for the first LIQUOR BALL LP.

I’ve got five more issues to scan and post for you, and rest assured, before I shuffle off this mortal coil I shall do so.

DOWNLOAD SUPERDOPE #3 – 1992

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To rehash the story told when I posted SUPERDOPE #1 yesterday: I self-published a music fanzine in the 1990s, and put out 7 issues from 1991-1994 before calling it quits, then ultimately resurfaced with an 8th and final issue in 1998. There are some people who believe this magazine to be one of the halfway-decent ones plumbing the depths of loud underground music to surface during the era, and sometimes I even agree – though perhaps mostly not on the evidence of these first two issues. I feel in looking through this mid-1991 issue that there was a great deal of needless in-jokism, and a lot of wasted effort put toward praising musical mediocrity. My world was too heavily dominated by my love of buying obscure records, going to live shows 2-4 times per week, and joking about all manner of music-related topics with my friends. Not that I regret it, of course.

SUPERDOPE #2 was the last issue that relied so heavily on the contributions of others. As with #1, which had big contributions from Steve Watson, Kim Cooper and Grady Runyan, this too devotes a huge chunk of its pages to interviews conducted by Kim Cooper, with other excellent (unpaid) contributions from Mr. Runyan and Doug Pearson (Rubin Fiberglass assisted with the BOYS FROM NOWHERE interview as well – I’d tried to heavily recruit that guy for some time into becoming a “staff writer”, but it never quite worked out).

After #2 came out in the late summer months of 1991 I petulantly took my ball and went home, quite literally, and published the next three almost totally by myself – save for all the fantastic photos taken by Nicole Penegor, who was our “staff photographer” during the six years she & I worked together at Monster Cable in South San Francisco. 

Here are a few thoughts on the making of this issue:

  • Kim – who went on to found the long-lived SCRAM magazine and now leads all sorts of tours of the seedy side of Los Angeles – got to do both of the main interviews because she knew some underground “rock stars” personally, and because she and I were friends. She was pals with Deniz Tek from RADIO BIRDMAN, a band I really dug at the time and whom I thought it was a real coup to do such a long interview with. Ironically, I can’t even listen to the Radio Birdman stuff anymore and find it to be fairly moronic bar-punk with cringe-worthy vocals. That’s what getting old(er) will do to you.
  • I wasn’t really a fan of RUDOLPH GREY’s solo stuff, either – but Grady sure was, and he did a terrific interview that really holds up today.
  • The large section of live reviews should give you a pretty good idea of where my head was at in 1991 and where my time was being spent, most of it in the company of my ne’er-do-well friends and large quantities of beer. A girlfriend would likely have helped reduce the size of this section a bit. One ultimately arrived in due time. It was pretty fun going out all the time on my exceptionally small salary – and Superdope eventually even helped in that effort quite a bit, allowing me “pest list” status from time to time, since the magazine was sold in every record store in town.
  • And man did I start getting a ton of packages full of 45s and LPs after this time – in 1991, going to the mailbox was the second best part of every day, right after walking home from it with my arms full of records I now no longer own.I can’t even begin to scare up a memory of what some of the records I reviewed with gusto sounded like – Juan Carlos? 27 Devils Joking? Rake? Brief Weeds? Are you kidding me? At least I helped catapult Pavement to stardom.
  • I still feel bad about my critical evisceration of a LAZY COWGIRLS record in this issue; I know that the band saw it, and singer Pat Todd gave me a stern talking-to the next time I saw them play. I had pretty much followed that band around California in the late 80s whenever they played. Not that I think I was wrong in any way, but confound it, I just don’t like hurting good folks’ feelings. I more or less decided to focus on good records after this issue, and stopped expending energy on bad or mediocre ones (a position I’ve mostly continued with Dynamite Hemorrhage as well).

Lest I be too hard on myself, I will say that I printed over 2,000 issues of this issue, and thanks to widespread demand from all over the globe, I had to print it in two batches. Tower Records sold the bulk of them, including in their London and Tokyo stores, and as a result I got some incredible letters from those countries, South Africa and elsewhere. The other big distributors were See/Hear in New York, Subterranean in San Francisco, and a couple others who are most definitely not with us any longer.

I have SUPERDOPE #3 – THE GORIES issue and easily the hardest to find of my self-published ventures – scanned and ready to post shortly. Until then….

DOWNLOAD SUPERDOPE #2 (1991)