Bruce Saltmarsh
Top 5 Memphis Frontmen:
1. Elvis
2. Jerry Lee
3. Tav Falco
4. Jeffrey Evans
5. Harlan T Bobo
Top 5 Aussie Punk Bands:
1. Radio Birdman
2. Saints
3. X
4. Scientists
5. Victims
Top 5 Contemporary Aussie Bands:
1. Eddy Current Suppression Ring
2. Deaf Wish
3. Royal Headache
4. Ooga Boogas
5. UV Race
Top 5 Aussie Movies:
1. Crocodile Dundee
2. The Propostition
3. Wake in Fright
4. Mad Max
5. Picnic at Hanging Rock
Cyclops (featuring Tina Boom Boom of The Trashwomen) out of Cyclops Island play with Portland's Guantanamo Baywatch at Redwood Bar in Downtown Los Angeles, January 7, 2012.
Photos by Ryan Leach and Mor Fleisher-Leach.
Especially our single, which they highlighted for Christmas. We just found out about this!
GONER GIFTS FOR 2011... a small smattering of stuff in stock now!
Nick Zedd is the founding member—and seemingly the last filmmaker standing—of the Cinema of Transgression. An early ‘80s post-punk, Lower East Side school of filmmaking (Zedd worked with Lydia Lunch and Richard Kern), Cinema of Transgression descended from Jack Smith and John Waters; the movement specialized in anti-academic, confrontational filmmaking experiments. Zedd’s work has now spanned five decades. And he’s still persevering against adversity and indifference—which only seems to make him stronger.
When I interviewed Zedd in 2004, he was collaborating with Rev. Jen on the TV series The Adventures of Electra Elf. The following discussion started at midnight, a week after the presidential election. I found Nick to be very soft-spoken—contrary to his intense and brooding public image—yet when it came to biting social commentary he did not disappoint. His insightful contempt for the ruling class makes Zedd a very likely heir to the vacant throne of William S. Burroughs and other great critics of the American way of life.
Interview by Gib Strange
(Note: This interview first appeared in Strange’s fanzine, Halloween All Year.)
Gib: You’re one of a very small number of filmmakers who have successfully maintained a political edge in filmmaking. When did you become politicized?
Zedd: During the Vietnam War when I read the transcripts of the Chicago Seven trial. I was inspired by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. I had an English teacher who denounced William Kunstler (the defense lawyer for the Chicago Seven) who I found to be really inspiring in his honesty in denouncing the fascism of the judge who attempted to muzzle these anti-war activists and make them scapegoats for the police riots that happened in Chicago.
Then seeing with my own eyes the insanity of the Vietnam War radicalized me. Viewing the succession of ruling-class puppets who have ignored the will of the people in this country, be they Democrats or Republicans…realizing that the only real autonomy we can have in our own lives can be found solely in organizing and mobilizing resistance to this evil regime in Washington—which the entire world has now united against. Of course, that’s a positive thing.
Gib: What did your parents do? What were they like?
Zedd: My father is deceased. But he was a lawyer for the US Postal Service and before that the State Department. He was extremely conservative. My mother is also a conservative. She’s a very religious person. So I’ve seen firsthand the fallacies of their belief systems. (laughs)
Gib: When did you start making films?
Zedd: I made short 8mm movies starting at the age of twelve. I continued off and on in high school. The first feature I made was They Eat Scum.
Gib: Did you go to film school?
Zedd: Briefly. I was making movies before I ever went to film school. I went mainly to get access to the equipment.
Gib: How did you come to know Jack Smith?
Zedd: Living in the Lower East Side (of New York), Donna Death, who starred in They Eat Scum, appeared in a film called The Bubble People with Jack Smith. The director (Warren Sonbert) asked me to be in it, too. But I wasn’t into appearing on film at that point. I did go to the set and I met Jack. I would run into him in the East Village and I visited him in his apartment in the early ‘80s. Have you seen his films?
Gib: I’ve seen Flaming Creatures and Normal Love. Was Jack pretty inspirational for you then?
Zedd: Jack Smith was a genius. He maintained his integrity in the face of indifference.
Gib: Two of the greatest chapters in your memoirs (Totem of the Depraved) are the ones dealing with Jack Smith and G.G. Allin. In the case of the latter, you write a very beautiful passage about transcendence in a world of corruption. It occurred to me as I read it that most people who watch your films, and deem them offensive or useless, may be astonished to find that you could be so moving and articulate. As you get older, do you find more acceptance from audiences or do you think this void between people who love your films and people who hate them is just getting larger?
Zedd: It’s hard to tell. I think my movies are now more accessible in that they’re distributed on video and DVD. I may be reaching a wider audience. I have no awareness of their existence although on occasion I do get emails or fan letters. I’m also making new work that people who watch my old films are probably benighted to. I feel like I’m defined, probably inaccurately, by different generations who’ve encountered my work which has evolved and gone through different stages. People who’ve seen my movies in the ‘80s probably have this idea of what I’m doing without having seen the recent stuff. I think that what I’m doing now is just as subversive.
Gib: Your current creation is the Electra Elf TV series.
Zedd: Yeah. Actually this week Manhattan Neighborhood Network is examining the most recent episode that was aired for sexual content and possible obscenities.
Gib: Uh oh!
Zedd: I tried to clean it up. I thought I had censored it enough but apparently you’re not allowed to show a bare nipple. (laughs) Hopefully they’ll give me another chance. I purposely designed The Adventures of Electra Elf to be as G-rated and clean as possible. In this filler episode, “Lord of the Cock Rings,” I cut out the erect penis with the cock ring on it, but I think if something’s on primetime they get more upset. If it had been shown after 11:00 PM they wouldn’t have gotten so upset. But I’m intentionally trying to make it as devoid of genitalia as possible so that I can sneak in the subversive political ideas and social commentary into the comedy.
Gib: At the beginning of your career you were blatantly subversive; now you’re subliminally injecting your message.
Zedd: Right. I think I can reach more people this way. I don’t want to turn off potential audiences with the same kind of shock value I used in the past. I also don’t want to be predictable—just repeating myself forever is something I’m not interested in. But I have found that I’m getting rejected and banned everywhere because I’m not doing what they expect me to. Underground film festivals now don’t want to show my new work.
Gib: (laughs) You’re right back where you started.
Zedd: Right (laughs). I think these film festival people find the new stuff too clean to be underground.
Gib: They’ll catch up eventually. You had some trouble in Sweden, but in general do you find it easier to show your films in Europe? I guess all American audiences are different.
Zedd: Audiences tend to be fine anywhere I show my films. It’s usually governmental organizations that give me trouble.
Gib: Have schools censored you?
Zedd: There’s the censorship of omission. (laughs) It’s hard to get any kind of acceptance from art institutions, although I go through phases of being in fashion and out of fashion. I think it has some connection to the political climate. It seems that when there’s a lot of fear in the atmosphere and repression people get timid, even the art institutions. It’s strange. I showed at MOMA in 1989. Since then, they’ve rejected attempts to screen War Is Menstrual Envy. These places are not at all supportive; they’re largely hostile, which is why I keep going to different places. If I get banned from one place, I’ll just go somewhere else. I’ve been showing films at this one place in New York, Collective Unconscious, since I can’t get shown at Anthology Film Archives anymore…some blockhead took over as manager. Real estate a lot of times dictates the greed of the people running these places. When the rent goes up, they want to foist the cost onto filmmakers. I felt making a TV show and putting it on public access would bring me a bigger audience. Theoretically, it could reach a million people. It’s hard to tell how many people are watching when you’ve got a TV show that doesn’t have Neilson Ratings.
Gib: It feels like in times of war good horror movies come out. Do you think there will be more horror films and political art?
Zedd: A lot of political documentaries came out this year (2004) before the election.
Gib: I can’t believe they didn’t work—sending Bush out of the White House.
Zedd: Well, I think they worked. Kerry did win. It’s just that we’re being led by the media to believe that that was not the case because he prematurely gave a concession speech and they have not counted all the votes still. There are all the provisional ballots from the military that they are now being forced to go kill. Plus there are the Diebold voting machines which were hacked into and possibly gave more votes to Bush.
But about horror: I think that there were great horror movies in the ‘30s and ‘40s as well. And Night of the Living Dead was excellent, of course. There have been a lot of great horror movies since made since then too, like The Exorcist and They Live. I think They Live is relevant now (laughs). I feel like I’m in that movie.
But we just have to keep resisting. There have been tyrannies throughout history and it’s up to us to fight against them.
Gib: A lot of low-budget filmmakers are still reluctant to use video, but you’ve embraced it. Is that purely for financial reasons or have you found a video aesthetic that you like?
Zedd: It’s more immediate. I still like film, but it’s so expensive and my income hasn’t increased at all. Meanwhile the expenses of surviving keep going up. So mini DV is great. I just wish more places had video projection. But that’s why I’ve designed this new series for public access. I was inspired by the Dogme 95 filmmakers—just go out with a camera and shoot.
Gib: You're sort of at the point now in your life where you must be joining people like Kenneth Anger, George Kuchar and others who've been ripped off by commercial filmmakers and music video directors. Have you started to notice anything like that yet?
Zedd: Yeah. I was told there was a Domino’s Pizza commercial that ripped off a scene from Electra Elf. Of course, Natural Born Killers. Oliver Stone directly stole images from War Is Menstrual Envy.
Gib: He didn’t send you a paycheck?
Zedd: (laughs) Uh no.
Gib: Did you ever get the feeling that John Waters’ movie Cecil B. Demented was a jab at you and other filmmakers that took his place in the underground?
Zedd: I guess it was. A lot of people mentioned that to me—that the main character (played by Stephen Dorff) seems based on me. People have mentioned it to John Waters but he always denies it.
Gib: Well what do you think?
Zedd: I think it’s definitely based on me because he took Stephen Dorff to this nightclub where I would show movies every weekend and introduced him to me before they filmed it. One time I asked him if the character was based on anyone in real life and he said, “It was not based on you.”
Gib: Right now you’re directing Electra Elf episodes. You write half an episode, the other half is written by Rev. Jen. How do you feel about directing other people’s stuff?
Zedd: I like it. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for many years. But it’s a whole different mental state when you’re working with someone else’s material. I’ll throw in ideas as we go and if Rev. Jen likes them then we do it. With the episodes that she’s written, it sometimes motivates me to come up with even more inventive fight scenes.
Gib: War is Menstrual Envy, your most expensive film, is truly horrifying—like some kind of post-apocalyptic nightmarish satire of our world. Tell me the film’s origins?
Zedd: I was living on E. 10th Street in the East Village and it was at a time when there had been an uprising in Tompkins Square Park. There was a homeless camp in the park and there was a police riot where the cops went on a rampage after trying to impose a curfew. It got a lot of media attention and the Mayor (of New York) decided to put up a barbed wire fence around the park for a year. I think that contributed to a sense of doom (laughs).
Also at the same time I was following the fall of the Iron Curtain and the transformation of the East Bloc. The people there united and rebelled and had their own anti-Communist revolutions, except Albania which I was fascinated by—that this tiny country would be so isolated. I also went eight months without having sex with anyone and I think that contributed to some sort of self-loathing (laughs).
Then when I met Annie Sprinkle and Ray, the burn victim walking up 6th Avenue, I thought it was some kind of miracle that I ran into them because that resulted in one of the greatest scenes I ever filmed (War Is Menstrual Envy). I felt that at the time he embodied a lot of the pain that was being experienced by victims of war. This all happened around the time of the Gulf War, which I felt was an unjustified and immoral invasion.
The film was a vision of the future. I had very limited resources, but I was showing both beauty and the ugliness at the same time.
Gib: That film is lost?
Zedd: The edited work print was in the trunk of a cab that drove away with it. I still have the original negative, but it’s not edited. I was able to transfer it to 3/4 inch before the work print disappeared, so that is now what is in distribution.
Gib: What happened with the rest of the Transgressives?
Zedd: A lot of them had children or got married or something. That seems to destroy creativity. I don’t know why the other filmmakers haven’t remained as productive. They went into other areas I guess.
Gib: Your autobiography was the most thrilling read I've had since Kinski Uncut. You've written a novel too. What's that about?
Zedd: That was From Entropy to Ecstasy. It’s a historical novel set in Albania. It’s about a psychopathic police lieutenant in the Sigurimi, a collection of sadomasochistic encounters that sort of turn into an adventure novel. I just let my imagination go wild.
Gib: What do you read usually?
Zedd: Well lately I’ve been reading Howard Zinn’s book A People’s History of the United States and also this book The Lucifer Principle, A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History by Howard Bloom. I like reading autobiographies, like this book on Emile de Antonio. He was a filmmaker I really love. And I like Oscar Wilde, Bukowski, and Nietzsche.
Gib: You did a Nietzsche movie right?
Zedd: Thus Spake Zarathrustra. I was approached by this kid from Maine who came with a hi-8 camera and we shot it on the streets of Williamsburg. We made it look like a silent movie. That was the first movie I shot with Rev. Jen in it and some other strange Goth people. It’s a condensation of some of the book’s ideas updated. I thought it was pretty pure to the vision of Nietzsche.
Gib: Do you have plans to write other books?
Zedd: I have been writing thousands of pages since the mid-nineties. I’ve got a bunch of spiral notebooks. There’s so much there. I hope someday it’ll get published.
Gib: Does it start up where Bleed left off?
Zedd: Yeah, it’s all what’s happened in my life with all the different girlfriends and all the different problems surviving and making movies. There’s enough there for several books. I started typing it into a computer and then one girlfriend had a temper tantrum and smashed the computer with a baseball bat. I still have the original manuscripts.
Gib: Well, don’t lose them.
Zedd: They’re well hidden. I have a lot of valuable stuff that’s in storage too. It’s an enormous financial strain paying the rent every month, but that’s the first thing I pay—the storage where the master tapes are. It’s a constant struggle trying to pay all these bills and shit. Everybody has to do it. I must be some kind of dreamer because I keep thinking it’s worth it to keep shooting in spite of the obstacles. I’m stubborn. I just keep doing it even when the actors act like dicks or whatever. They’re so talented that you have to look past the personal problems. Most actors are really easy to work with. My life is bizarre. I don’t know if anyone else has a life like this.
Gib: What about famous creature feature host Zacherle? What was it like working with him in Geek Maggot Bingo? Did you grow up watching him?
Zedd: No, I just saw pictures of him in Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. I saw him on TV in New York in the ‘80s—he did some kind of Halloween special. I hadn’t heard about him in a long time so I thought maybe he was going to make a comeback. I contacted him and shot him up at his apartment. He was a pretty funny guy to hang out with. It was just me and him and I was filming him and it was really hard to hold the camera steady because he was making me laugh. He was reading off the script but he sort of embellished some of the lines. He thought up the part where he injects himself in the neck.
Gib: I read that you and I have a favorite film in common—Last Tango in Paris.
Zedd: That’s one of my favorites and it has had a big influence on me. Marlon Brando gave an amazing performance. I love that movie.
Gib: In that movie you feel like you’re seeing a glimpse of something you shouldn’t when you watch Marlon Brando. You don’t know if he’s acting or it’s real.
Zedd: I’m trying to achieve that same kind of effect with the Electra Elf episodes I’m shooting with Rev. Jen. I really try to push her with going to the extremes with her emotions and I think she’s been really great. Sometimes with actors you almost have to torture them to get them to stretch and expand what they’re doing, to go beyond themselves. It’s really important.
Gib: Are there any contemporary filmmakers that interest you?
Zedd: Michael Moore. I went to visit my mother a couple months ago and I asked her, “Have you seen Fahrenheit 911?” And her response was, “Michael Moore is a fucking piece of shit! He’s disgusting.” I couldn’t believe it—my mother never talks like this, and I said, “Have you seen the movie?” and she said, “No, I haven’t.” I replied, “What are you judging him on? You’re judging work you haven’t even seen.” It’s just amazing to me the brainwashing that she got from watching Fox News. I think I’m going to give her a DVD of Fahrenheit 911 for Christmas. It’s the same kind of response she had to the Sex Pistols. It’s amazing to really get under someone’s skin like that when they know nothing about what you’re doing, just somebody trying to tell the truth about something that’s been hidden.
Gib: In 1924 D.W. Griffith was asked what he predicted for the cinema in 2024. Griffith said cinema would "help largely to eliminate all armed conflict in the world." Ironically, right now movies and TV are being blamed for all the violence. Growing up, how much did your parents shelter you from movies and music?
Zedd: They took me to see Last Tango in Paris. I asked them to see Clockwork Orange and Gimme Shelter, so they were actually pretty open minded parents. They drove me to see Alice Cooper when I couldn’t drive. My parents were victims of the propaganda of television. I don’t know why people become Republicans or Christians.
Gib: So do you have any predictions for the future of film? Maybe not 2124; let's stick with Griffith’s 2024.
Zedd: I think that the success of documentaries like Outfoxed and The Corporation—movies shot digitally and distributed and shown in theaters—demonstrates that you don’t have to have a big budget to reach an audience. If the Republicans have their way, they’ll eliminate movie theaters as a way of reaching people. But there’s always the Internet and the availability of DVDs. What really matters is the communication of ideas, telling stories and entertaining people. That’s timeless. That’s going to continue in whatever medium is used. There will always be an underground somewhere, doing something.
Gib: And finally, these are seven questions I got from a book; questions some school children in Germany sent to different public figures including Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Question One: How do you react to negative criticism?
Zedd: With bemused contempt.
Gib: Question two: Do you believe in the existence of extraterrestrial beings?
Zedd: I accept the scientific probability of such.
Gib: Question three: Do you think suicide can be justified on principle?
Zedd: Sure.
Gib: Question four: In time of personal crisis would you consult a psychiatrist/psychologist?
Zedd: If I could afford it.
Gib: Question five: Who is your hero and why?
Zedd: (long pause) Mahatma Gandhi, because he was able to mobilize a nation through nonviolence to eject an imperial power that had used force to exploit and oppress the people of India. He had a genius for inspiring and organizing people. I really admire him.
Gib: Question number six: Do you have any advice for young people?
Zedd: (laughs) Don’t knock yourself out.
Gib: Question number seven: How do you picture your old age?
Zedd: I think I’ll stay a young person my entire life.
Gib: How come you don’t age? You look so much younger than you are. Do you have a painting of yourself rotting in your attic?
Zedd: (laughs)
Photo by Ryan Leach
Alicja Trout, Photo by Jamie Harmon
by Alicja Trout
Top 5 things I love about Prince:
(Hmmn, this will be hard to just list 5.)
5. Ballad of Dorothy Parker
4. Album cover artwork for Lovesexy.
3. When You Were Mine
2. Dez Dickerson, guy in The Revolution with Japanese Headband, once wore a clear suit, played solo on Little Red Corvette.
1. When Doves Cry
Top 5 Timmy from Human Eye photos:
Top 5 favorite shows I have watched with my kid (not including the Muppets because I watched it when I was a kid):
5. Busy Town (Richard Scary)
4. Gofrette
3. Rugrats
2. Yo Gabba Gabba
1. Pingu
Top 5 favorite things to include in drawings:
5. Bottles with "xxx" or "magic potion" on them
4. Cute but slightly suspicious bunnies.
3. Flowers, trees and roots.
2. Angels and devils battling.
1. Night sky with stars, comets, and spaceships.
Top 5 reoccuring themes in my songs:
5. Rats
4. Robots
3. Shadows and something following me
2. Being attacked, killed, dying, drowning
1. Brain not functioning right
Top 5 reoccuring dreams:
5. I have a famous boyfriend and I am confused how I even know him...such as Patrick Swayze, Tom Cruise, and Ice Cube.
4. It's the zombie apocalypse, I've bashed in dozes of heads and I'm tired of it, then I wake up.
3. I'm walking around a really cool house with lots and rooms, bright colors and nice stuff.
2. Pets from the past I thought were dead but they are alive and I haven't fed them in a really long time!
1. Beautiful "wall of sound"-like music.
The Spits and The Mouthbreathers at Billy O's in Ventura, California, November 11, 2011.
Photos by Ryan Leach.
Renate Winter
Top 5 current bands out of Texas:
1. John Wesley Coleman III
2. OBN III’s
3. James Arthur’s Manhunt
4. Flesh Lights
5. Bad Sports
Top 5 venues in Austin, Texas:
1. Beerland
2. 29th St Ballroom
3. Trailer Space
4. Mohawk
5. Emo’s
Top 5 current record labels:
1. Goner
2. In The Red
3. Burger
4. Dirtnap
5. Tic Tac Totally
Top 5 things you miss about Sweden:
1. Family
2. Friends
3. Speaking Swedish
4. Delicious Fishy Things
5. The Deep Dark Mossy Pine Forest
Top 5 things about photographing bands:
1. Being There: Practices Recordings & Shows
2. Documenting What I Love
3. Capturing & Sharing Moments/Angles Not Seen By Most
4. The Befriending
5. (Relatively Easy) Access To The Front!
Review by Ryan Leach
Auckland’s the Scavengers was one of New Zealand’s first punk bands. The group’s time in the sun was brief; not counting this posthumous collection, the Scavengers’ output consisted of two tracks on the AK79 compilation and a Propeller single (as the Marching Girls). Nevertheless, the group’s influence transcended its limited vinyl output.
Like the London SS to the Clash, the Scavengers had roots in a proto-punk band called the 1B Darlings. Formed by future Scavengers Paul Cooke (Johnny Volume), Simon Monroe (Des Truction), Mike Simons (Mike Lezbian), and Marlon Hart (Mal Lcious), the 1B Darlings debuted in 1975, playing an end-of-the-year celebration at Auckland Technical Institute. The show was a disaster. Nevertheless, the group continued undeterred, banging out a few more glam covers at subsequent shows before calling it a day.
The Scavengers formed in 1977 after its members read about the British punk scene. Like the UK movement, punk in New Zealand created a scandal. The press ate it up; it was easy and cost-effective for news stations to cover the milieu.
Mal Lcious was ejected from the Scavengers early on; Ronnie Recent (Brendan Perry) replaced him on bass. Sessions for Polydor Records ensued, only to have vocalist Mike Lezbian leave the band to pursue a career in advertising.
Ronnie Recent, with his short-scale Fender Mustang bass (which likely made the difficult task of playing bass and singing somewhat easier), took over for Lezbian. Unfortunately, this lineup change put the brakes on The Scavengers releasing material for some time. Nevertheless, the setback was, at least in retrospect, somewhat fortuitous: it provided the subject matter for the group's classic song, “Mysterex”, a critique of their career-minded former front man:
Well you’re a bloody hypocrite, just a dirty social climber
Nine to Fiver
Social Climber
Oh, yeah
The Scavengers held down a residency at Zwines, Auckland’s first punk venue, in April 1978. The group later appeared on Barry Jenkin’s Radio With Pictures program on New Zealand television before making the ill-fated decision to move to Australia.
Australia didn’t care about the Scavengers (or the Marching Girls, as the group renamed itself). Gigs didn’t materialize, and the Scavengers were marginalized. A single, “True Love”, was released before the band went on hiatus. Brendan Perry later formed Dead Can Dance (seriously).
This eponymous collection contains 10 tracks; two are versions of “Mysterex” recorded at different dates (the second take is likely the Greg Lear-recorded track that appears on AK79). The fidelity is surprisingly high.
The Scavengers’ sound is heavily indebted to the Sex Pistols and Stiff Little Fingers. Perry has a caustic delivery, while Volume’s guitar work is influenced by Johnny Ramone’s barre chords (although the tempos on most Scavengers songs are closer to those found onNever Mind the Bullocks). “Mysterex”, “True Love” (a catchy pop song), and “Violence” are likely the Scavengers' best moments.
Interspersed throughout this collection are news audio bites from a New Zealand television program, describing punk rock to curious audiences at home. Their inclusion is appropriate. The Scavengers weren’t meant to last. They were a product of their time—back when simply being a punk band was reason enough to get coverage. That doesn’t take away from the Scavengers’ music: the members produced some great ’76-style punk rock, nothing more and nothing less. They pioneered a scene that produced formidable artists, like Chris Knox and Alec Bathgate; stellar musicians, such as Paul Kean; and labels like Ripper, Propeller and Flying Nun.
The Scavengers is a great collection of a special moment in New Zealand rock ‘n’ roll, where nearly everything seemed possible.
(Thanks is due to John Dix’s Stranded in Paradise, Andrew Schmidt’s liner notes to The Scavengers, and the accompanying booklet to the recent AK79 reissue for the historical information.)
Todd Taylor has been writing about DIY culture for more than a decade. After finishing up a master’s degree in literature (in 1996), Taylor started covering music and politics for Los Angeles-based fanzine Flipside. From doing a little bit of everything at the rag—including schlepping issues around L.A. and proofreading interviews—Taylor learned the ins and outs of running a zine—eventually becoming Flipside’s managing editor. After Flipside’s anticlimactic implosion in 2001, Todd started Razorcake fanzine (and Gorsky Press) with friend Sean Carswell. To aid in Razorcake’s efforts to cover esoteric music and polemics, the fanzine received its 501(c)(3) non-profit status in 2005. Razorcake is the first magazine in America dedicated to independent music to bear this distinction.
Razorcake has covered musicians ranging from DIY diehards Dead Moon to Alicja Trout; polemics such as Howard Zinn and Candace Falk (Emma Goldman Project); and punk photographers Dawn Wirth and Ed Colver. Although the magazine covers musicians from all over the world, Razorcake has a strong emphasis on its local East Los Angeles scene; the magazine has run interviews with East L.A.’s Alice Bag and members of bands Los Illegals, the Brat, and Circle One. Razorcake is on the eve of releasing its fiftieth issue.
Interview by Ryan Leach
Leach: Not many people running punk rock fanzines have a master’s degree in English literature. What were you doing in your mid-twenties? What were you envisioning at that age?
Taylor: I got my master’s degree in literature at Northern Arizona University. I then was accepted into the Ph.D. program at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg. It was a program in literature, but with an emphasis in creative writing—meaning I could still study literature but write a book as my dissertation. So I drove out to Mississippi from Arizona. Unfortunately my personality immediately clashed with the people running the school’s program. It reminded me of some of the problems I had getting my master’s. Shortly after arriving, I called my mom to check up on her. And I found out that my grandmother was really ill. My mother is very deft—she said, “We’re not telling you to do anything, but your grandmother would like it if you stayed with her.” I thought about it for a week and decided I’d rather spend time with someone I really loved than grind it out in a Ph.D. program I didn’t like. My grandmother lived in Camarillo, California—just north of Los Angeles.
After about six months, my grandma got better. I then moved to Los Angeles to get a job. I did odd things…made coffee for a while. I also called up a fanzine I really liked, Flipside. It took them six months to get back to me and their initial questions were: 1.) Do you have a car and a driver’s license?; and 2.) Can you pick up our mail? I told them, “Sure.”
Can you briefly tell me some of Flipside’s history?
One of the amazing things about Flipside was its pedigree. It was started in the summer of 1977 and was continuously publishing until I got there—in 1996. The guy behind the magazine was named Al Flipside. Al was super intelligent. He was one of the zine versions of (venerable KROQ DJ) Rodney Bingenheimer; Al put California punk rock on the map right when it was burgeoning. Since the very beginning—from the legendary Masque shows to what was the present when I arrived.
I started at Flipside at a very low level. But then I moved up. I knew how to proofread. And I started to get very organized. I really learned how to run a fanzine from the inside out. Flipside, for better or worse, had a lot of inertia. So a lot of it worked because the zine had been around for so long, not because it was well run. By the time I arrived, Al was getting burned out. And that’s understandable: he had been at it for a long time. Consequently, he put his energy into other things, like getting a website going when websites were a brand new thing; we were putting out our own films, which was stupidly expensive. Al just liked the process of it.
How long were you at Flipside?
Five years straight.
And then Flipside imploded in 2001.
Yeah. The real brief version—Flipside had its own record label. By pure happenstance Flipside had Beck’s first recorded full length—not the first one out sequentially, but the first he had recorded. Our distributor burned us on the deal—it was selling like hotcakes but he wasn’t paying us. Next thing we know Al’s getting sued by Beck’s lawyers for the money we weren’t receiving from our record distributor. And that was the end of Flipside.
That must have hit you hard. You had worked indefatigably for Flipside.
I was traumatized, walking around in a stupor for about a month. I was physically conditioned to getting up in the morning and working on the magazine. Literally everything that I had been working up towards was gone. I played around with the idea of starting a website after Flipside ended. By that time it was pretty cost effective. And I wanted to get something up. Although I wanted to do something completely different from Flipside, I still wanted to contribute something to the legacy of Flipside. My friend Skinny Dan and his wife put together the first round of Razorcake’s website. I was also able to get some of the people at Flipside (Liz O., Kat Jetson, Jimmy Alvarado, etc.) to come over with me. I was really the contact point for a lot of Flipside’s writers toward the end, so it wasn’t that hard to get them together.
How long did Razorcake the website exist before Razorcake the fanzine came into existence?
For only about three months. Although I think the internet is a great tool, my heart wasn’t really into a website. I wanted to do a print magazine again. I got in contact with my friend Sean Carswell, who I had gone to college with in Arizona, and told him my ideas. He agreed to move out to California to help me with Razorcake—but only if we’d get the magazine version going. It was a big commitment for him because he was just about to get married; he had a lot going on in his life.
How did you create a print magazine that was self-sustaining and published regularly from the get-go? I know you had very little funding.
It all had to do with my work at Flipside. I knew the printer, the subscribers, the writers, and the advertisers. And because I knew the problems at Flipside, I could kind of work them out as Razorcake in its magazine form started going. Of course a lot of these problems were very painful. Creating a database is very boring, but it makes sure you’re on top of things.
One of my favorite early interviews in Razorcake had little to do with music at all: your (and Sean’s) interview with Howard Zinn.
Looking back—some stuff is amazingly simple. Sean and I were putting out a book (through their small publishing company, Gorsky Press) by an author in Boston. And we made a list of points of interest in Boston. On the top of that list was “the place where Howard Zinn teaches!” I think we just emailed him. That was it. And he was very gracious.
Prior to going to Boston, Sean Carswell had just written a book. Sean had sent it to Howard before we went. As we were leaving the interview with Howard, Sean very sheepishly asked, “Hey, Mr. Zinn, do you get a chance to look at my book?” Howard opens up his briefcase and takes the book out. And it’s marked with some sort of notation—post-it notes kind of thing. He told Sean, “You know, I really enjoyed it.” Sean was just floored.
I’m hard pressed to find a higher accolade!
Howard was great. Here’s a guy who is in his late 70s or early 80s. And he is just so spry. He still takes the stairs. Howard is incredibly quick and very funny. He just took an hour and a half out of his day to talk to two schlubs.
Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair put out an amazing collection of essays called End Times: The Death of the Fourth Estate. As the title suggests, the essays in the book revolve around corporate media’s failure to provide reliable information to the public. While this knowledge is nothing new, Cockburn and St. Clair’s writings are enlightening in their detail of just how uncertain these corporate elites are about their own future. I’ve always felt magazines have more stability—and could better encourage long-term critical writing—with a non-profit status. And you can see that in publishing houses like AK Press and South End Press; and magazines like Monthly Review and Z. Can you tell me about your decision to go non-profit?
Yeah. Since day one with Razorcake we’ve really paid attention to our finances. It’s out of necessity. No one has a pot of money we can dip into. And none of us have any sort of courage with credit cards. I don’t think, “Hey, if I do this one thing, in two months I can make all this money.” I just don’t have that sort of mentality. So we just kept looking and looking at things that were going well and things that were dying. And a thing that was dying was traditional magazine distribution. We also didn’t want to raise our ad rates. Because then we would have to change our focus. So for instance we would then have to allow bands that are corporately funded into our magazine due to increased rates. Or maybe we’d have to incorporate this loosely lifestyle stuff. Like beer ads. And that would be our death sentence. So we had to figure out how to keep costs down or how to better maximize what we had. We were like squirrels trying to crack open this nut. We kept thinking and thinking. I honestly can’t tell you the exact moment where we seriously thought about becoming a non-profit. But it was one of those things where—just because it hadn’t happened to someone in our position before—we didn’t think that it was impossible. Meagan Pants (a regular contributor to Razorcake) was really instrumental in the process. So we just looked at our situation and the situation of print media over and over again. We just thought, “Hey, we can do this. And it’s totally justifiable. We’re not lying to anyone.” But the things that we do naturally on a day-to-day basis fit a non-profit model. They just haven’t been put together before. For instance we have bands stay at our house. We throw shows. It’s a really viable subculture that’s incredibly overlooked. The bands making this music—they’re living poor. You have enough money to go on tour. But then you realize all the money made went into funding the tour.
And you have to take into consideration the fact that these musicians are not receiving any kind of governmental subsidy. It’s not like Scandinavia—where bands have received economic support from their respective governments.
There is no funding for musicians in the States. To be an independent artist—people here look at that like, “Oh, you’re not successful enough to be a corporate-backed artist.” It’s like a Social Darwinism. These artists have made conscientious choices not to act a certain way. And instead of being lauded for it, they’re further punished. Nothing against manual labor—I totally see the nobility in it—but people who make music, who write about music, we’re looked at as scoundrels. We’re “trying to avoid hard work.” And that’s simply not the case. A large component of American life is eroding. We’re at a point now where the mindset is, “Oh, you’re not smart enough to get sponsorship by an energy drink. That’s your fault.”
You can see that in education too. The way educators are paid and how poorly public schools are funded. Schools are now encouraged to get the soft drink endorsements…to put in the vending machines.
Exactly. Libraries are another example. Most of the institutions in the public sector you cannot base on a financial system. These are twenty year returns that will yield incredible benefits down the road. But there’s no patience for that anymore. On that note, we at Razorcake don’t care who is on the cover of our zine. It’s not like a certain artist on the cover is going to sell us two to three times more issues. That became clear to me when we put a band called Against Me! on the cover one issue. They were starting to become very popular at around the time the issue came out. On the next issue we put Alicja Trout on the cover. Not as many people know about Alicja—an awesome lady from Memphis who has been in a ton of bands and runs her own distribution label. Nevertheless the two issues sold almost identically. It takes a long time to have a relationship of trust with readers. I would rather have that trust than to try and cash in on putting some Warped Tour band on the cover of Razorcake. That’s hard for people to understand.
You’ve done interviews with bands that don’t even have a record out. So much of our culture is commodity driven. That’s really incredible. I can’t think of too many other music magazines that would do something like that.
I still have this romantic notion that music has the ability to soothe; and that it’s a good force in and of itself. Even if it expresses agony. Music has a soul to it. And it doesn’t have to do with physical appearances or superficialities. We deal with stuff that has been castoff. The music we cover is ethnically and geographically diverse.
One thing that I think works in Razorcake’s favor is the variety of musicians covered. Although the magazine kind of falls under a punk rock umbrella, Razorcake has covered musicians like rockabilly eccentric Hazel Adkins. There doesn’t always seem to be a stylistic nexus between some of the interviews in the magazine, yet it all works.
I just trust our writers. I’ve been dealing with some of the same writers in a creative way for more than a decade. I know them and they know me. And if something is of interest to them—enough for them to dedicate a lot of time to it—then I’m interested in what they’re going to say. It keeps things interesting. Even if I disagree with them.
Getting back to your non-profit status, can you briefly tell me about the process of receiving that distinction?
I’m interested because as you were saying earlier, Razorcake doesn’t fit the traditional paradigm of a non-profit.
The process was grueling. Again, we were trying to do something that hadn’t been done before. Literally, if we said that we were going to have a non-profit theatre in our community—and had shown them the need for it—they would’ve known how to respond to that. It ended up taking two years and we had literally four inches of paperwork. We went through three rounds. The first round—twenty questions. The second—ten. The third—four. And I have a degree in literature, I knew what the words were in the questions they were asking us, but I had no idea what they were asking. No clear understanding of the legal jargon. So we went to a non-profit entertainment lawyer and he decoded the paperwork for us. They were concerned: “Why don’t you want to make money? Music magazines are on a business model for making money.” And we had to explain it to them very explicitly that we were not interested in making money. That we were interested in promoting artists who we felt were great, but weren’t economically very alluring to other music magazines. It was very weird. It was like self-examining your own life. And explaining these things to beaurocrat in Middle America—who has no idea about what punk rock is about—was very surreal.
In the last two years I’ve noticed that you’ve really branched out. I know you’re currently trying to get an all-ages venue going in East Los Angeles. You’ve also just gotten some podcasts underway and recently put out a few 7”s. Your non-profit status seems to have really galvanized you into trying to do more…
Very much. My favorite things in the world are listening to music and writing. The magazine is the perfect synthesis of those two things. But I’ve learned that maybe we can share this stuff with other people—that’s where the podcasts come in. And we’re not an ideology, we’re not dogmatic—so here’s a bunch of things our writers like that you might like too. There’s this misunderstanding that the internet can meet all your needs. Nothing could be further from the truth. And we started doing records under the auspices of the non-profit. It’s just accounting. The band gets a certain amount of money. We sell the record for a certain amount. Razorcake recoups its loses. And we’re done. Again, we’re just trying out new things to promote music from people who are off the radar. It’s a lot of work—we’re doing things that haven’t been done before—but it’s certainly worth it.
For more information, check out: www.razorcake.org