8Sided Blog

thoughts about music’s place in the 21st century

Aliens That Look Like Automobiles

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In the late ’80s, I was heavily into zine culture. Isolated in Central Louisiana, I was an outcast kid into weird stuff, craving connections to an outside world of strangers. I can’t remember how I initially discovered zines and the related mail art community. I’m sure my love of DIY punk rock played a part.

Eventually, I obtained an issue of Factsheet Five. The mag inspired me to open a secret post office box, so all this unusual mail wouldn’t arrive at my parents’ house. After sending off several envelopes containing a few quarters, or postage compensation, or an enthusiastic letter, I was part of the zine scene. I was connecting and corresponding with like-minded weirdos across the world. Kind of like I still do today — but without sending out stamps.

Let’s get a couple of definitions out of the way. ‘Zine’ is short for ‘fanzine’ — a short-run, self-published, often obsessive, and sometimes free magazine made by (and for) a ‘fan’ of something. The first documented fanzine was created in the ’30s, probably by mimeograph. That original zine, like most zines in the mid-century, was focused on science fiction. Punk rock created another significant zine movement, and, in the ’90s, the format reached an apex with riot grrl zines.

But zines could be about anything. There were zines for collectors of you-name-it, anarchist zines, intimately personal scream-for-help zines, zines by moms about mom-life, conspiracy and UFO zines, comix zines, and on-and-on-and-on. One of the most unique and heartfelt zines I read at the time was Duplex Planet. Published by an employee of a nursing home, the zine featured interviews and updates with the residents as they arrived and (often sadly) departed. I’m pleasantly surprised to see that it’s still around. Duplex Planet showed the possibility of zines and self-publishing as a vehicle for a personal voice.

If you think this sounds a lot like blogging and email newsletters, then I’d say you’re not off course. I recently subscribed to Rusty Blazenhoff’s Electric Dreams email newsletter, and right there in the header, it’s called “An Inbox Zine.” Wherever you go, there you are.

I’m thinking about zines because of Factsheet Five. Factsheet Five was like a search engine for zines but it was also a zine. Hundreds of single paragraph reviews of zines filled its pages. And the reader was also given the zines’ addresses and how to get them (such as “.50 or two stamps”). There were also music etc. reviews and editorials from various zine luminaries. But you got this for the zine listings. It was a joy to go through all these zine descriptions and highlight the ones that created the most curiosity. From my perch in Tioga, Louisiana, these were pre-internet windows to the wider, weirder world.

One could receive Factsheet Five a few different ways — by sending three dollar bills and a couple of quarters to the editor, or by mailing something to review (music, your zine), or by contributing something (writing, artwork). I did all three of those throughout college to get my issues.

And here’s why Factsheet Five and zines are on my mind. Early this week, I was on Archive.org and thought, “I wonder if any old issues of Factsheet Five are archived here?” I did a quick search and discovered just under a dozen issues. I picked one from 1988 — as that’s the time I was most active in my zine-collecting — and flipped through the virtual pages. Amazing! I recalled when, to me, all of this was new and dangerous. I glimpsed some familiar names, including a few ‘pen-pals’ who I met through zine-trading. And then, to my surprise, I ran across a name I certainly recognized:

Plague On Wheels reviewed in Factsheet Five

In 1988 I decided to publish my own zine. It was called Plague On Wheels. The name comes from the title of a fictitious book written by Kilgore Trout in Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions. It’s about aliens that look like automobiles. And ‘Michael Behaviour’ was my punk rock name. A lot of us young miscreant-wanna-bes had punk rock names in the ’80s.

The review refers to Plague On Wheels as a ‘pfanzine,’ which is zine slang for a music-oriented zine. The ‘p’ stands for ‘punk,’ but a pfanzine can be about any genre of music. My zine had a lot of music in it, including interviews with a few random bands that answered my letters. I doubt I even heard these bands beforehand — I wrote them to get free music in exchange for some ‘press.’ Luckily, none of their music was awful.

Plague On Wheels was handwritten, not typed. I didn’t have access to a photocopier (or the money to photocopy), so I had a pen-pal friend in Miami do it for me. I met this friend via Factsheet Five. He was a school teacher and could get free photocopies, but the quality was poor, and all the blacks faded in various tones of gray. Combined with the sometimes difficult to decipher handwriting, my distant friend and I agreed the flaws added a distinctive character.

My friend Flipper — also from Tioga — wrote the ‘How To Start a Radio Station’ piece. Now he has a book out through HarperCollins and regularly writes for established music magazines. I sent him this Factsheet Five review, and he told me that I was the first ‘publication’ to publish his writing.

Plague on Wheels. What a trip.

I feel like there’s something I can say here about zines and blogs and newsletters. I should pull out my recurring theme of ‘the way we use new technologies can’t escape tradition.’ It does feel like I’ve been doing this a while. Running across a blog with an exciting point of view is similar to finding a cool zine on Factsheet Five. It just seems, with zines, the freak flag flies a little higher.

Zines are still around. And blogs and newsletters are resurgent. As long as singular voices are looking to connect — to find the others — we’ll have zines and blogs and all these things. And maybe our current state of isolation, this self-quarantining, has me thinking about how vital these voices are when we can’t seek each other out in person. Many of us need the weird little windows to the outside world, especially when those worlds seem cut off from us.

This post was adapted from Ringo Dreams of Lawn Care, a weekly newsletter loosely about music-making, music-listening, and how technology changes the culture around those things. Click here to check out the latest issue and subscribe.

Foreign Dissent: International Punk Rock in a Digital Age

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Craig Mazer frequented Bad Mood Records, the rag-tag record store I owned 25-ish years ago. He was active and instrumental in Florida’s punk rock scene and published a slick-but-not-too-slick newsprint fanzine called IMPACT. Decades later, and here I am doing my thing in music-land, and Craig’s still championing the local punk rock scene. Give some credit to the lifers.

For six consecutive years, Craig’s promoted an Orlando event that might’ve been unimaginable without the internet. It’s called Foreign Dissent, and the idea is to showcase mostly undiscovered punk rock bands from all over the world to Orlando’s scenesters. It’s a diplomatic gesture from a group of fans that often get misconstrued as antagonistic and uncompromising. But punk rock is a welcoming tribe. It’s always fostered connections and curiosity among its global family. For example, my punk rock adolescence involved trading fanzines and cassettes across the ocean to addresses in exotic places like Croatia and Poland, usually copied from the classifieds in Maximum Rocknroll.

This year’s Foreign Dissent — held Monday, October 28 at the respected local venue Will’s Pub — features five countries across eight raucous bands. Denmark, Canada, Northern Ireland, Italy, and England are present, their representatives united by independence, rebellion, and a love for this music and lifestyle. Here’s the flyer:

We know that punk rock is the most DIY of music genres, its historic DIY-ness an unspoken influence on today’s shift to self-release and toward self-reliance. But punk rock was doing this when the internet was basically two guys at a military base sending chess moves to each other. How has the scene adapted to an age where the idea of DIY promotion only conjures social media tactics? Are ‘the old ways’ of punk rock word-of-mouth, city-to-city networking, and flyer slinging still in the mix?

I’m curious, and Craig Mazer — whose promotion of Foreign Dissent happens under the punkily named Punching Babies — obliged my question. “I don’t see too many people handing out flyers. I think it has largely moved to social media as the main avenue for promoting. I do still see posters put up, and I’m sure that word of mouth is still important, but social media, to me, is the main avenue.”

He continues: “Social media is where so many people are. Between Facebook and Instagram, you have a huge audience right there. Now, the question of how effective it is is debatable, but it’s undoubtedly effective to some extent. Personally, I still love the DIY aspect, so I still put up posters and flyers at shows.”

It’s interesting because promoting punk rock was once different than promoting rock n’ roll or bands of other music genres. Just as the internet has lowered the barriers of musical preferences, it’s somewhat homogenized how we promote music. But how does social media — run by corporations of a size that would make Jello Biafra have a seizure back in the day — fit into punk rock?

Craig: “Man, that’s a tough one. I don’t know that it fits into punk rock as much as punk rock has had to give in to it. Social media is so pervasive. And it’s free (putting aside the idea of buying ads on social media), so it would be foolish not to have some amount of promotional presence on it for an event. It also allows for the ease of sharing and spreading the promotion, which can help a lot.”

But there is an upside that enhances punk rock’s tight, idealistic community. Craig adds: “I think that elements of the punk ethos have ‘weaponized’ social media by calling out abusers in the scene, exposing shitty booking practices or venues that are discriminatory.”

I remember local fanzines serving that purpose. People would even make one-off fanzines to expose certain undesirable elements in the scene. It seems that sort of scene networking has moved onto social media spaces.

Craig: “Yeah, definitely. That said, i don’t remember at any time in the ’90s that there was a means (or even much of a chorus of voices) for exposing that kind of stuff. There has been a huge wave of empowerment around it in the last 5-10 years.”

Canada's Bad Waitress are playing Foreign Dissent 6 in Orlando
Canada’s Bad Waitress are playing Foreign Dissent 6

I’m sure the internet makes one other thing a lot easier — organizing an international punk rock showcase. Says Craig, “It would have been very difficult 20 years ago. Even ten years ago, maybe. The internet is truly key, both for the organization of it upfront, but then also for the logistics and communications necessary as it gets closer to the day of show. I couldn’t imagine what it would have been like for a foreign band to organize a tour back in the ’90s, like when I booked tours for [legendary Orlando punk band] Shyster and had to use a (gasp) phone.”

But some things haven’t changed despite the internet. Getting punk rock bands into the US is still a hassle. Probably even more of a hassle.

Craig: “When I did the first Foreign Dissent six years ago, I had no idea what I was getting into. I hadn’t considered that these bands generally aren’t traveling with any gear. Getting into the US is hard enough, but if they come with all their gear, they’ll get tagged as coming here to work. And these small bands can’t afford work visas for a trip where they are probably going to lose money as it is. So I had to quickly scramble to find amps, a drum kit, and everything else. Some amazing friends in the music scene now loan their gear for the backline, or the bands borrow from other bands playing or buy something inside the US.”

But for Craig and many other promoters passionately exposing new acts, the hassle is worth it. “For many of these bands, it’s their first time in the US. And for some, Foreign Dissent is literally the first show they’ve ever played over here. That’s such a fulfilling feeling for me, to be able to give them that opportunity.”

He Provides the Soundtrack, We Make the Movie

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Be sure to check out this mini-documentary from Mixmag on the enigmatic Detroit producer Moodymann. I love his vision for his city, his ruminations on record shops, and how the staff at Archer Record Pressing warmly welcomes him. But mostly I love this, said to Gilles Peterson:

We went to the club to get down and dance. Everybody knew the DJ and we didn’t sit there and look at the DJ. He provided the music … we was more into the room. He provides the soundtrack, we make the movie. Well, nowadays everybody just stands there and looks at the DJ. It’s not like that’s Prince up there performing live. That’s the fucking DJ.

I got into DJ’ing via punk rock. That may seem like a non-obvious association, but hear me out. What I liked about underground punk rock was that the band wasn’t the star — the band was merely the facilitator, and everyone in the club was on an equal level. We were all part of the show, and together we made it memorable.

There was a similar feeling in underground dance music when I started DJ’ing. It was fine — even preferable — if the DJ was in the dark or behind a wall looking through a slit.1Many clubs in the early ’90s had ‘the slit.’ I admit that I hated this at first as it seemed like a (literal) wall between the DJ and the audience. But I’ve grown nostalgic for a time when the nature of the booth implied that the music was the true star of the show. We were there to come together, every person as necessary to this party as the next, rejoicing in the feeling of the music. That vibe, combined with the fiercely independent distribution and economy of underground dance music, was, to me, a new kind of punk rock.

I’m not shaking my fist at a cloud or feeling like things are worse or better than ‘back in my day.’ But it’s different. And I feel Moodymann’s frustration here. A couple of decades ago the role of DJs changed, elevated to stars as punk rock bands eventually were. And more and more it’s a DJ’s responsibility to be the movie. When that happens, who’s the soundtrack really for?

Related: On the Music Tectonics podcast The Verge’s Dani Deahl mentions, with trepidation, a new AI engine that selects, programs, and mixes music from a DJ’s predetermined selection. That way the DJ can focus on ‘performance’ rather than pesky details like queuing up and beat-matching songs. Canned performance is nothing new — the draw of many DJs and music artists is a cult-of-personality anyway — but the thought of such an app has me looking testily toward the sky.

Singles Going Steady

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I’m self-taught on guitar, and I learned by playing along to some of my favorite records. I started on one string, which strengthened my ear and warmed up my fingers. Over time I’d add another string, then another, and eventually I could pick out and play chords.

The records that I selected had to fit specific criteria. First of all, they couldn’t be too complicated: mostly open chords, not too riff-based. And I needed to love the songs — I’d be enthusiastic about learning if the songs were favorites. Also, it was a bonus if a whole album fit these specifications — then I could just put the album on and play along, like a concert. Circa 1985, when I was starting to learn guitar, two records perfectly fit the bill: The Feelies’ The Good Earth and Buzzcocks’ Singles Going Steady.

The Buzzcocks got back together around 1990 and did a tour of the USA, which brought them to Jannus Landing in St. Petersburg. I made the drive over from Orlando to see them. The Buzzcocks were as good as I hoped they would be. Once the show ended and the club emptied, I stayed behind in a happy daze from finally seeing one of my favorite bands. That’s when I looked over to the bar and saw Steve Diggle, the lead guitarist, sitting down for a drink.

I walked over and introduced myself, and after his casual acknowledgment I decided to tell him, “I learned to play guitar to your songs.” Diggle’s reaction was like no one had ever told him this before. “Really? To my playing?” He then quickly ordered a pint for me and exclaimed, “You should meet the rest of the guys!”

So he took me backstage and introduced me to an incredibly friendly Pete Shelley. I stuck around, drinking their beer and chatting for about an hour. Somehow, they had no qualms about this excited fanboy hanging out in their dressing room while they were decompressing from the show. Everyone was so nice, and even Pete seemed interested in my compliments and questions. One of my best ‘meeting my heroes’ memories.

Pete Shelley died yesterday of an apparent heart attack. At 63 he was way too young. The Buzzcocks were still a going concern, with the reunion never quite ending. I see they were supposed to do a show in a couple of weeks.

Before you get to an age when your friends start dying, you experience your heroes dying. In a way, the loss probably feels about the same. You’re losing the ones you love.

Here’s the Buzzcocks song that’s rolling around my head today (not one that I would have expected):

And this one, too, which was used as the end-credit song for the great documentary They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead (no correlation — Pete Shelley was very much loved while he was alive): 

Update: A friend with a much better memory than mine and who was also at the show reminded me that it actually moved to the smaller Club Detroit because, if you can believe it, Buzzcocks didn’t sell enough tickets to adequately fill Jannus Landing. We also figured out the year was 1990. BTW – this friend saw Buzzocks in Manchester in 1979, opening band: Joy Division.

Decolonise: A Punk Fest Celebrating People Of Color

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The Quietus:

For those who have no experience of being a person of colour the fact that this event is even happening may come as a surprise. Why would anyone need a punk festival for people of colour in 2017? What does race have to do with the music you listen to? Why are you complaining, isn’t racism over? You might be reading this thinking the very same. Well despite your misgivings I can explain why WE ALL need a festival dedicated to the music of people of colour, today more than ever.



Looking back at the snotty, gob-throwing days of the late 70s punk scene in the UK you might at first think the stories of punks of colour ended with Poly Styrene, lead singer of the effervescent X-Ray Spex. Of course, delve a little deeper and we find other bands such as Alien Kulture, a majority Pakistani Muslim punk band who formed in the late 70s in defiance of Thatcher’s ‘fears’ of being swamped by new cultures. Even going back to the roots of punk you’ll find Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a queer black female guitarist who combined the fire of gospel preaching with the soul of early blues to devise the earliest form of rock & roll.



No matter where you look in history you can find stories of people of colour going against the norm to either add to genres previously considered white or create whole new spaces for themselves. We are there but our stories are fragmented across history. There is no linear narrative to this narrative because as with all history it is written by the dominant culture who, whether with malice or ignorance, repeatedly seek to prop up their own achievements forgetting to acknowledge the black and brown people who inspired or helped them along the way. It’s why the Sex Pistols had two documentaries made about them but a Poly Styrene documentary is only just in the making and had to be crowdfunded by her family.



The Decolonise Fest starts June 2 in London. More info HERE.

Remembering D. Boon Of The Minutemen

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Daily Breeze:

Dennes Dale Boon died 30 years ago this month, on Dec. 22, 1985, to be exact.



{As frontman for the Minutemen} Boon had become a talented guitarist with a distinctive staccato picking style that meshed with {Mike} Watt’s increasingly fluid bass playing and {George} Hurley’s innovative, jazz-influenced drumming. They were a part of the punk scene, but the band’s music, with its elements of funk, hard rock, jazz and punk, was unlike anyone else’s on the scene.



Daily Breeze music writer Michael Lev captured it best in this 1985 appreciation of Boon:



“On stage, D. Boon as performer and singer was pained. He didn’t bother to keep his huge body under control. Instead, it grabbed him, flinging him around the stage so it appeared he was holding onto the neck of his guitar for dear life.”



Gary Waleik in The Observer:

D. Boon was a self-described corndog, but he shed his inhibiting outer layer and became much more; a prodigiously talented guitarist, a spectacular showman and a wonderful songwriter and singer. He fronted a band that, though usually labeled “punk” or “post-punk” was sui generis. Minutemen records sound as fresh and challenging today as they did over 30 years ago. But the most ringing endorsement I could offer is that D. Boon was truly one of the nicest men I have ever met, a rare kind soul in a business that usually exalts and rewards the exact opposite.


It almost seems like an understatement to say that the Minutemen changed my life. They opened me up to the idea that a band doesn’t have to be pigeonholed to exist. They introduced me to the art of the lyric. They helped me become politically aware and concerned with what happens in other parts of the planet. They sold me on the worthy ethos of ‘jam econo‘. So much change in so little time … I embraced the Minutemen in their heyday and soon after I’m reading about D. Boon’s fatal accident in a bottom-of-the-page news item in Rolling Stone Magazine. I still listen to them often – unarguably more than any other band that I was into in my teenage years – and I believe I’m still learning from them.

Here’s an ‘Intro To Minutemen’ playlist on Apple Music.
Here are the Minutemen on Spotify.
Here’s the Minutemen channel on YouTube.