The mighty TALES OF TERROR in Thrasher magazine, early 80s.
Images
Barbara & Terri Manning – KFZ, Marburg, Germany, May 23, 1992
Lovely show from way back when over on the Archive, including some typically well-chosen covers of Fairport Convention and Gram Parsons. I’ve probably said it before, but Barbara’s records definitely deserve rediscovery…
01 8’s 02 Someone Wants You Dead 03 Straw Man 04 Lock Your Room (Uptight) 05 Joed Out 06 Never Park 07 $1,000 Wedding (Gram Parsons) 08 On On and One 09 Crazy Man Michael (Fairport Convention) 10 Sympathy Wreath 11 Scissors 12 Don’t Let It Bring You Down
encore: 13 Pity’s Sake (Sneaky Feelings) 14 I’m Only Asking You 15 Green
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.
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.
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.
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….
Here’s a full and complete scan of the first fanzine I ever put out, SUPERDOPE #1. It was written 24 years ago and released to the people in Spring 1991. Obviously a project like this created in the bloom of one’s youth (I was 23) engenders a strange mix of pride and revulsion. Pride – well, I put this together completely by hand over several months, using scissors and glue and 3-cent photocopies at a local place who gave me a discount. I used to lug home a gigantic beige Mac from my workplace which was running Windows 2.0 (or whatever was five years before Windows 95) and some rudimentary version of Word, and peck this magazine out at home in the evenings, before returning it back to the “shared workstation” at Monster Cable the next day.
Revulsion? Just the normal embarrassment over meaningless in-jokes that I don’t understand myself anymore, appalling syntax and sentence structure, and reverence for ludicrous rock and roll bands that I forgot about mere months after I wrote about how amazing their records or live shows were. At this point in my life, I was going to see live music 3-4 nights per week, spending all my free money on records, and basing the great majority of my friendships and people-judgments based upon the kind of music they were most enthusiastic about. Besides that stuff, I think it’s pretty cool to be sharing it, finally. It’s been out of print since the year after it came out, and I was shocked to find that I only had 1 copy left myself. So this is truly digital self-preservation. I only made about 500 of these and I’d assume that at least 300 were at the recycling center within a decade after its release.
A few notes on the first issue of SUPERDOPE:
• The magazine’s name, which I was never truly comfortable with, but came to peace with eventually, was given to me by my co-worker Bernice Reilly. She had a habit of calling me her “superdope homeboy”, after the MC Hammer song so popular that year.
• I was fortunate enough to have 4 excellent contributors – Kim Cooper (who later went on to start SCRAM magazine and recently wrote this excellent book); Grady Runyan (guitarist for Liquor Ball and Monoshock); photographer Nicole Penegor; and the recently deceased Steve Watson, a great guy whose SONIC’S RENDEZVOUS BAND piece was actually cut off and sent to the printer before either of us noticed. Read it – it’s got a somewhat clunky ending. We talked about getting a Part 2 in my second issue, and I guess we both just sorta forgot that too.
• Re-reading this recently, I realized how in thrall I was to certain people that year, as young people can be; in particular, Brandan Kearney, the guitarist of World of Pooh and proprietor of Nuf Sed records. I thought his whole rejection of the “music scene” and sardonic personality to be a breath of fresh air, plus I totally dug his band and some of the records on his label. I just wish I hadn’t kissed his ass so hard.
• After this came out I got a personal letter from Byron Coley, who was only my favorite rocknroll writer on the planet. It wasn’t mocking me, nor was there any cease-and-desist notification attached to it. Seems that Kearney had actually encouraged him to buy a copy when Coley was visiting San Francisco, and he actually enjoyed it. I mentally coasted on that one for a few months until the next issue – the jumbo SUPERDOPE #2, which I’ll try and post here on DH in the next couple of weeks.
This is a small-batch, edition-of-66 (!) book put out by Johan Kugelberg of Boo-Hooray last year. It’s a short fanzine solely devoted to Crypt Records’ mountain-moving “Back From The Grave” series of 60s punk comps – which were not only my personal introduction to 60s garage punkers, but the standard-bearer for the form now and forevermore.
The Boo-Hooray ‘zine has a few interviews with Tim Warren (Crypt & BFTG mastermind) and a couple of pieces of hero worship by others. You may or may not know that Back From The Grave is coming out with 9th, 10th and 11th volumes later this year. There’s a big interview w/ Mr. Warren in the next issue of our own Dynamite Hemorrhage mag, coming out in about six weeks (or thereabouts), in which we discuss these new comps plus how the hell he’s able to track all these rare 60s gems down and even pay the surviving members of the bands who made ’em.
BLACK FLAG at San Pedro High School, 1981 – taken from the San Pedro High yearbook….!
(Originally published on Agony Shorthand in 2005)
“WE JAM ECONO: THE STORY OF THE MINUTEMEN”
“We Jam Econo : The Story of The Minutemen” is screening all week in San Francisco as we speak; I was fortunate enough to find a scalper on the sold-out opening night last Friday kind enough to sell me her extra with no markup. Yeah, the legend has grown, no doubt about it, but I remember even back in the early/mid 80s – those people who were into THE MINUTEMEN were really into The Minutemen. In high school I tried in vain to convince some friends to go to Palo Alto (!) with me to see the SST tour (known as “The Tour”) featuring the Minutemen, HUSKER DU, MEAT PUPPETS, SACCHARINE TRUST and – wait for it – SWA. Missed it, and later that year when D. Boon died – and I had just really fallen hard for the band’s back catalog – I kicked myself up & down the dorm room for not being a brave 17-year-old & hoofing it there by myself. It was very small penance to have seen several of the earliest fIREHOSE shows that next year, but because I did, I at least got to experience many of SST’s best & worst either opening or headlining, from the DIVINE HORSEMEN to GONE. But jesus, enough about me – how was the friggin’ film??
It’s great. The two guys who put it together obviously passionately did so on a shoestring, an irony not lost on them, doubtless, given The Minutemen’s admirable overall working man, “econo” ethos. They gathered footage from about 5 different shows spanning the band’s career, and feathered it in liberally between dozens & dozens of testimonials from scene celebs of the day. A few things struck me watching folks like Jack Brewer, J. Mascis, Ian Mackaye, Kira Roessler, Dez Cadena, Byron Coley & many many others talk up the band – first, this band touched a ton of hearts in a way that most bands never will. It may be in small part to the Minutemen’s tragic end, but I’m certain it’s far more attributable to what an incredible trio of guys they were – intelligent, funny, down-to-earth, dedicated to spreading the good word about art & music, and about as non-condescending to the audience as any band’s ever been. I mean the Minutemen talked about having shows that started at 7pm & in the suburbs or blue-collar outlying towns “so the working man can get to the shows”. As a working man, though I doubt they meant me, this would have been fantastic, and would probably have cost the band a significant amount of hipster points. Like they cared. They also took the meathead 1981-82 punk rock scene head-on, and quite literally challenged the jocks with abstract, crazy, bullrushing jazz lines woven into the fabric of of traditional punk. They played softly, or flat-out jammed improvisationally when opening for Black Flag in Huntington Beach or wherever. The name “Beefheart” comes up often in this documentary, and little wonder. These guys didn’t expand the punk rock canvas, they exploded it in a way that slid under the radar of virtually everyone but the musos. (They’re well represented here, too, in the persons of Joe Baiza, the Urinals/100 Flowers guys, the Slovenly folks etc.). Watt mentions his then-love for WIRE and the POP GROUP, and that makes a whole heck of a lot of sense as well.
Another thing I noticed, just because it’s impossible to escape for all of us, is how old everyone is now. Far more time has passed between the Minutemen’s untimely end & this documentary’s release – 20 years – than I thought could truly be possible. The 28-year olds of 1985 are the 48-year-olds of today, with lots of hard drinking and overall heavy lifting having taken their tolls. Say what you will about such a superficial observation, but it was jarring nonetheless, recognizing of course that I myself am well on the same path. The documentary is held together by two intertwined MIKE WATT interviews, who naturally serves as the defacto narrator and key historian. I was gonna get really pissed about the initial overdose of D. Boon/Mike Watt play and the lack of George Hurley recognition when the film sort of turned and devoted about 5 minutes to Hurley’s genius drumming. I didn’t used to vote him #1 drummer in the Flipside poll every year for nothing! As great as Boon & Watt were, without Hurley’s bebop-infused, rimshot pounding and cymbal manipulations, this band wouldn’t have been half the champions they ended up being. Still probably my all-time favorite drummer in rock and roll, and a total unlikely drumming lunatic – a toiling-class surfer & initial drummer-for-hire who sort of stumbled onto the Minutemen (then called The Reactionaries) and learned punk rock from them via near-osmosis.
“We Jam Econo” is an excellent documentary about a very special band. The fact that I feel more so about the band than I have in years means the film did its job quite well. I recommend it with a man-falling-out-of-chair if it happens to hit your town on the film tour now underway. Oh hey – one more thing. We got to ask the filmmakers a bunch of questions after the screening, and they said that a 2xDVD set is in the works, a set that will contain the film, tons of extra interviews, and four complete Minutemen shows, the ones that were all over this documentary. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, punker!
AGONY SHORTHAND 