Just a really cool video for a lovely song. Happy Saturday.
Tag Archives: books
Jim Marshall (SF Summer of Love 50th Anniversary Photo Exhibit Lunchtime Tour (feat: V.Vale)
This was one of the many things going on celebrating the 50th anniversary of ‘The Summer of Love’ here in SF. If you saw my recent post on Susanne Ciani at the Berkeley Museum you might remember I shared a photo with some friends including V.Vale. from Re/Search Pubs. This post features him speaking in front of a photo taken by Jim Marshall during the summer of 1967. He is featured in the foreground of the photo and just the look on his face captures the awe and wonder of what it might have been like to arrive at that infamous corner of Haight and Ashbury at that time. While most of those people have moved on in life or have since passed, Val manages to still have that curiosity in life and culture/counterculture and remains in a perpetual state of awe and inquisitive-ness.
The first few minutes of this video is from part of the guided tour of the photos that line the hall in the basement of SF City Hall including a couple of bits of insight to what was happening in some of the pics, such as the story behind the Moby Grape album cover that was censored and how Otis Redding really stole the show at Monterey Pop. There were plenty of photos of The Dead and Jefferson Airplane as well as some great pics of various Hippies and Diggers and counter-culture icons like Ginsberg and Ken Kesey.
Val’s talk was mostly a deconstruction of the photo he was in which provided some really cool behind the scenes info about the original line up of Blue Cheer. Not a lot of people know that Val was a founding member let alone that Blue Cheer was originally a 6 piece (that was news to me too). They just happened to be on the way to Golden Gate Park for a proper band shoot when this was captured.
Enjoy this first hand account of the Summer of Love SF by someone who was there:
TINY BUBBLES
SFAC also has a show up called Tiny Bubbles a group show that Val also has a bunch of photos in which is up until August 19th.
Keith Morris “My Damage”(Instore)
I’ve never seen Black Flag or The Circle Jerks…or OFF! even, but when I lived in LA I was lucky enough to run into Keith Morris a bunch of times. It was almost always in a record store, whether at Bleeker Bob’s on Melrose or when I worked at a small record store on Sunset Strip or at a Pasadena Swap meet and he was almost always with Bob Forrest (Thelonious Monster). We talked about all sorts of music and I was always impressed with his depth of knowledge about a wide variety of genres…Bob too! We never talked about any of his old bands or the short lived Hollywood punk scene heyday which centered around The Masque, a bomb shelter rehearsal space that had some legendary shows, the earliest punk shows, run by Brendan Mullen. I was just as lucky to get to meet Brendan as well at a Punk Rock Bar B Que I attended with Chris D. around 96 or so. Brendan did a dj set of old jazz 78’s! Spectacular! Anyway, Keith was always a blast to talk to, high energy and his enthusiasm for music always came through.
What I’m really happy to see is that these Hollywood OG punks are all releasing their perspectives on the scene in written form. Alice Bag’s Violence Girl, John Doe’s Under The Big Black Sun and My Damage by Morris, all recently published, are welcome and much needed perspectives on such a short lived scene. A handful of these artists were able to maintain a prolonged ‘career’ of playing music after the initial wave imploded scattering most of these bands to the 4 winds. Keith’s perspective is unique also as Black Flag were from Hermosa Beach and pretty much considered outsiders in the Hollywood scene but the sheer rawness and purity of their music endeared them to Brendan Mullen who considered them his favorite band, so they were sort of honorary members and rightly so.
Following is a video of Keith reading from some of his book, which seemed like a bit of a task as he kept jumping from the page to a more natural telling of the story and it was cool to hear his voice and his perspective this way. I look forward to reading this one.
Available via Da Capo Press
The video is by Louis Elovitz who has a ton of great LA/Hollywood Punk related videos on his vimeo channel. He has video he shot in the old days as well as new happenings by people from the original scene who are still active.
KEITH MORRIS
” My Damage ” release
skylight books hollywood
aug 26 2016
a PUNK SCENE film by
Video Louis Elovitz LApunk13.com
MY DAMAGE: THE STORY OF A PUNK ROCK SURVIVOR.
Keith Morris is a true punk icon. From Black Flag and the Circle Jerks to OFF! and FLAG no one else embodies the sound of Southern Californian hardcore. Over the course of his forty–year career, he’s battled diabetes, drug and alcohol addiction, and the record industry. MY DAMAGE is a look at rock ’n’ roll through the lens of someone who has shared the stage with just about every major figure in the music industry and appeared in cult films like The Decline of Western Civilization and Repo Man. It’s a Hollywood story from a native’s perspective. MY DAMAGE is Morris’s streets, his scene, his music—as only he can tell it.
Keith will be joined by his co-author Jim Ruland for a spirited conversation.
SF Zinefest 2016
Many of you old fart punk rockers out there will remember the days of cut-n-paste collaging in order to create an eye catching and status quo challenging advert for your old band’s basement gigs. Usually containing crude imagery, shocking content in black and white with ‘ransom note’ style text cobbled together from various sources. Many of you will also remember the next level DIY collaged zines that were painstakingly assembled late at night in a 24 hour Kinkos that your buddy worked at…
The content usually involved coverage of a regional or more accurately, ‘micro-regional’ underground music and/or art scene, covering shows and events with occasional short fiction or comics and music reviews. They were xeroxed and collated and stapled manually upon completion and subsequently given away to anyone remotely interested. Seldom did they charge for these. If anything, 25cts or a trade sufficed.
A lot of these ‘rags’ also travelled to other micro-regions via snail mail and this was before the internetz, so this was a lifeline for people seeking out new and exciting happenings in places other than their own. It went hand in hand with the burgeoning DIY music scene as this was also how bands contacted each other as well as venues to put together tours and find places to stay while out on the road, especially in smaller areas off the beaten path where folks didn’t have access to a big city to see shows of any level. Black Flag is a good example of a band that mastered this and in fact blazed a trail that is still used by bands today. Check out Spray Paint the Walls for a more detailed read about how they did it.
These were really small run, handmade and practically ephemeral which makes zines an interesting literary niche that is still going strong to this day.
THE EVOLUTION OF THE ZINE
Some zines that I know from back in the day started out as crudely xeroxed and stapled handmade affairs but eventually evolved into full-on mags with excellent content and credibility. A couple of examples that come to mind are Ugly Things run by Mike Stax out of San Diego Ca. who’s focus is 60’s garage and psych music. His staying power is a result of really thorough sourcing and in depth coverage of really obscure bands. He is really good at finding surviving members of these long forgotten groups and interviewing them at length which usually reveals some fun and interesting behind the scenes happenings we would never hear about anywhere else.
Early Ugly Thing’s (circa early 80’s)
Current Ugly Things
Also very in depth with lengthy articles to get lost in…as you see the early issues were very text heavy.
Early Big Takeovers (circa early 80’s)
Recent Big Takeover
Another example that I hold close is Bomp magazine created and maintained by Greg Shaw who started making zines by hand as early as 1966 with Mojo Navigator, an inspiration for Rolling Stone Magazine. He made Tolkien related mimeographed zines in the 60’s also, a very early representation of zines not music focused. His real legacy though lies in Who Put the Bomp which I’ve mentioned before as one of my old record store bosses Gary Apollo, who recently passed away also worked with Greg for a few years in LA on the magazine. Even the infamous ‘Powerpop Issue’ which looked really polished and professional was all done by hand! Cut-paste for days…
Early Bomp (circa 1971)
1978 issue
I had just read this article the day before in the New York Times: “No, the Internet Has Not Killed the Printed Book, Most People Still Prefer Them” and on our way to the event there were 2 separate people sitting across from us reading books, so as far as I can see, books and printed media are still important to people and if you think otherwise, you’re sadly mistaken and likely missing out on a lot of information you will not find online. It’s also similar to the Record experience in music, the desire to hold something in your hands crafted by artists through painstaking processes to create something significant and tangible which helps drive the experience deeper into your psyche…
This was further driven home when we entered the festival and saw how many people turned out to look at and buy these mostly tiny handmade mags! There were artists, musicians, printmakers, poets and authors, lefties, activists and anarchists and a wide array of items to be had. In addition to xeroxed zines, self published books and underground comics were t-shirts, posters, bags, buttons, some musicians had small run cds, cassettes and even vinyl all DIY and small runs. There were too many artists to mention but I’ve included links where possible and SF Zinefest has it’s own site at sfzinefest.org as well as an instagram and twitter where you can explore and discover a large group of artists both young and not so young! There were some OG’s in the house which leads me into some pics from the event.
RESEARCH PUBLICATIONS
First I had to catch up with V.Vale of REsearch Publicatons who is known for his zine Search and Destroy going back to 1977 and his Industrial Culture Handbook and coverage of all things weird and subversive under the REsearch imprint. I purchased this collated, unfolded printing of ‘A Visit From Monte Cazazza’ which I look forward to devouring.
PM PRESS
PM Press had a table. The previously mentioned Black flag book Spray Paint The Walls can be obtained through them as well as some other important punk lit.
SPITBOY RULE
It was really cool to meet Michelle Cruz Gonzales from the SF all girl band Spitboy who were around from 1990-95. We grabbed her book Spitboy Rule also available through PM Press, but it was nice to be able to get one directly from her and she signed it. This will be a welcome read next to our recently obtained copy of Alice Bags book Violence Girl as these are the voices of xicana women from the old school punk scene, there were very few!
TEAM PRINT SHOP
I also ran into an old friend who worked for a t-shirt print shop I also worked at for awhile in Oakland. He’s since broken off and started his own thing called Team Print Shop
UNITY PRESS
Pretty randomly, I walked past this one table and had to stop because I recognized the curious artwork on the t-shirts first, then the table also had zines with these similar cartoon-like characters in weird homoerotic poses I remembered from some show posters I grabbed from the bulletin board at my band’s rehearsal studio (images below) they were posters for a show that had already passed, so I wasn’t hindering the band’s progress!
Turns out these guys rehearse down the hall from us in Oakland and the band is a bit of an artist collective that release zines under Unity Press and the creator of these weird ass images are by the artist Jeffrey Cheung.
I was also stoked to hear they recorded their debut record in their studio on a 4 track and released to vinyl via the Oakland based label Digital Regress. The DIY ethic instantly endeared them to me and we also have the same name…Jeff’s Rule!
I gave the album a whirl and it’s really good for a 4 track recording! The style is very 90’s indie rock but without the pretentiousness of a lot of that stuff and it also lacked the noisy angst ridden aspect that turns me off to so many of those bands. There are some nice melodies here and simple arrangements and nicely played!
BAGGER43
This table caught my eye also but we were on our way out, so I didn’t get a chance to say hi, but here’s a shout out to Bagger43 they had some nice looking stuff and I dug their aesthetic.
EVENT PICS
SLIDESHOW
There were 2 rooms full of tables and plenty of people milling around!
We walked out of the event quite sated and it was great to see so many people out there just to celebrate the printed word, and of course to support art and artists operating on their own terms! Get off the internet and go read a book now! We came home with plenty of stuff to read and enjoy!
All pics by Jeff K. 2016 (except Bomp, Big Takeover and Ugly Things covers)
DaDaEntry23 