Midweek Update 51: "The American In Me" podcast edition

My latest Fanzine Podcast. Plus: RockWrit, Fact-Checking the Supreme Court, Climbing Kilimanjaro, The Avengers, The Clash, and The Dear Boys.

A new Fanzine Podcast is up. I titled Episode 27 ‘Fanzine Lifers’ and it should be quickly apparent as to why.

Throughout the 1980s, Tim Anstaett ran The Offense, an influential, prolific, jam-packed fanzine out of Columbus, Ohio, where he still lives. In the 1990s, Jay Hinman began the underground zine Superdope fanzine out of Seattle, and after a hiatus, picked back up on zine publishing in the 2010s with Dynamite Hemorrhage, which set its stall with a 68-page debut issue. For the last few years, Jay has also been running the Fanzine Hemorrhage web site and newsletter, offering 200 reflective reviews (so far) of select music fanzines (and occasional magazines) from his enormous personal collection. The Offense is one of the few zines Jay has reviewed twice, writing that it “would have been my favorite mag in 1982 had I’d known it existed.” So for this latest episode of the Fanzine Podcast, I brought the pair together for the first time.

Over our one-hour conversation, as you will hear, Tim enthused at a mile-a-minute, and Jay reflected measuredly, each about their early entry points into punk and fanzine culture, hand-written first issues, why they each abandoned advertisers and distributors, their love of 4AD Records in general and the Cocteau Twins in particular, Jay’s cult heroes the Flesheaters, their fave zines of all time, and the best letter they ever received.

The Offense and Superdope in all their zine glory

A few other choice items came up in the discussion, like the time Tim helped bring Cocteau Twins to Columbus, Ohio, as one of just five cities the trio played on their first USA tour, in 1985, and which the local TV station covered as follows, featuring a considerably younger Tim:

Also referenced was the song ‘Letter to a Fanzine’ by Great Plains, from 1987, which asks the question “Do you like everything that comes out on 4AD? Do you like everything that comes out on SST?” to which, for a while, Jay (both) and Tim (the former at least) would surely have answered “Is the Pope a Catholic? Is Tony a Crystal Palace fan?”

And if you just can’t get enough of 4AD Records, Tim’s extensive interview with the label’s visionary founder Ivo Watts-Russell was reproduced in part for a special issue of the publication Émigré than can be accessed/downloaded from here.  

Jay Hinman’s Fanzine Hemorrhage review site, meanwhile, can be found here: 

And you can download out-of-print issues of his zines from here.

You can order Tim’s compendium The Offense Book of Books from here. He is happy to be contacted via tkarunner2001@aol.com.

Finally, I asked each of them to pick a single Desert Island Song. They both went for long ones. Jay Hinman chose Can’s ‘Mother Sky.’

And Tim Anstaett went for the longest Cocteau Twins track out there, ‘It’s All But an Ark Lark.’

(If you play these on separate YouTube pages over each other, they make for a cool mash-up!)

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ROCKWRIT

In following up on Jay’s provided links to other shows he’d been on, I discovered that the Fanzine Podcast does not have this market all to ourselves. There is a podcast called RockWrit that has been doing something somewhat – but not entirely – similar since back in late 2020, when Jay was first guest. I’m still familiarizing myself with the show, which is largely devoted to the American underground culture, and while it includes a few non-zine writers like Michael Azerrad and Tim Ellison [see comments; I stand corrected now about Tim], most of the zines (e.g. Murder Can Be Fun, The Imp, Motorbooty) fell below my own personal radar at the time. There is a lot here for me to learn and hopefully great conversations to enjoy as I do. I invite you to check it out also.

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THE AMERICAN IN ME

Via another podcast/show Jay guested on and sent me a link to, Free Form Freak Out, I was introduced to a song I feel like I should have heard back in the day and which is my current fave retro new wave rave: ‘The American In Me’ by The Avengers. This is also the title of a 2004 retrospective compilation, mostly culled from a live show in 1979 by the “San Francisco punk pioneers,” as Qobuz describes them. (Reviewing another compilation from the same era for Qobuz, former podcast guest Jack Rabid goes further and calls The Avengers one of “the two greatest U.S. punk bands that walked this earth in the late '70s.”)

This comp frontloads, however, with four demos, at least a couple of which were produced by the Sex Pistols’ Steve Jones. In its original studio guise, to my ears far superior to the one on the lone, eponymous and even-ten-posthumous album that was issued in 1983, ‘The American In Me’ is as much 1960s power-pop as it is punk thrash, with crystalline vocals from Penelope Houston that invert the famous JFK entreaty to patriotism:

“Ask not what you can do for your country/but your country’s been doing to you.”

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FACT-CHECKING THE SUPREME COURT

…That seems a fair question this July 4^th. What should be a celebratory transition period in my life – moving from an apartment building to a spacious house, from a single life back to a new (and only my second) co-habitation – has had a distressing and depressing correlating air to it as the bad news piles up on American democracy and leadership, with a series of Supreme Court decisions impacting the entire world, especially with regard to the environment.

That was far as they’d gone at the time on Monday morning that I accompanied my run with an early June episode of the wildly successful  99% Invisible podcast entitled ‘Fact-Checking the Supreme Court.’ You see, if you think – as I often have - that hey, someone has to have the final word on the law and it might as well be the most supreme justices in the land, it might come as a shock to learn from this deep dive into SCOTUS history that too many of the facts that Justices cite as their rationale for a decision are… simply not true. While there are fact-checkers for this episode of 99% Invisible, there are no fact-checkers at the Supreme Court. This allows Justices to cherry-pick “amicus briefs” that serve their own pre-determined agenda and repeat unverified statements from within as fact, especially if those statements. In short, it allows decisions that set the legal standards for generations to come, to be based on… lies? Depressing though this realization may be, the podcast itself is an entertaining listen, informed and informative radio podcast documentary at its very best.

But about those Court decisions… Monday’s “verdict” on Presidential immunity – which, let’s be honest, might just have been influenced by the fact that the President seeking such immunity also put an unprecedented three of those Justices in their job-for-life during his scant four years pretending to office – was as frightening as it was sadly anticipated. And what made it all the more frightening was what many of you witnessed in real time last Thursday night (I was smart enough to be practicing keyboards instead) and most of you will have subsequently seen as “lowlights.” I am, of course, referencing Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance, which only served to confirm the fears so many of us have had since it became apparent that Biden, a good man who has had a solid, honest, respectable and successful Presidency, was not going to provide the “bridge to the next generation” he had promised four years ago but would instead attempt to keep governing way beyond any point of common sense because - truth speaking to power here - power is addictive. There is now all too clear a possibility that his ageing ego could cost the USA’s democratic experiment… everything.

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BEN & ME

Politicians – and it’s hard not to consider the Supreme Court Justices as some form of politician, especially allowing that they are a distinct branch of US Government – love to reference the Founding Fathers, as if we all have direct insight into what Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and co. were actually envisaging for the country back in the late 18^th Century. (The Internet? AR-15s? Porn star pay-offs? Tiktok? Emancipation from slavery? The women’s right to vote?)

One person who has at latest taken time out to study one of those “fathers” in depth is author Eric Weiner, whose earlier book The Geography of Bliss was turned into an excellent Peacock TV show presented by Rainn Wilson who, unless there is an imposter out there using his name on Substack, recently subscribed to this here Wordsmith. Anyway, for his latest book, Ben  & Me: In Search of a Founder’s Formula for a Long and Useful Life, Weiner retraces the considerable overseas (and domestic) travels that made Franklin the most worldly and therefore probably the wisest of all those founders. Having heard Weiner talk with great modesty and humour about Franklin, their shared travel footsteps, and his own writing process, on a new episode of the podcast Zero to Travel just last week, I have ordered the book to join my pile of unread but still must-read material.

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CLIMBING KILIMANJARO

Part of me would love to be somewhere else right now, anywhere else than a collapsing USA, but overseas travel is not on my radar this summer, not with the move and its associated costs (much of it in “lost” time). Still, in coming across my old USB audio stick during the packing and playing it in the car, I did find myself transported back five years to August 2019, when myself and some close friends of a similar age all scaled Mount Kilimanjaro together, guided by a Tanzanian friend who lived in my old Phoenicia neighbourhood and exemplifies the best of what the USA can offer immigrants when it has an open mind to them rather than vilifies them – and, of course, vice-versa.

Six months after our successful and memorable journey, I turned the recordings I had made along the way into a four-part radio documentary of my own, for Radio Kingston; when the pandemic hit, I turned that into the podcast One Step Beyond (currently on long-term hiatus after two successful seasons); and at the end of 2022, I stripped those four episodes of extraneous material and edited them down to a single long-form documentary, Climbing Kilimanjaro. I got to be honest with you: I think I’m as proud of the documentary as I am of scaling the mountain (after all, 40,000 people a year attempt the latter). If you’re interested in taking the journey – either with another group I may put together, or through a travel company of your own choosing – the episode will help whet your appetite and ensure you don’t jump in unprepared.  

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CROSSED CHANNELS

Were The Clash dual citizens of the UK and USA? They often acted like it, which made for a great episode of our Crossed Channels podcast recently when

Dan Epstein

and I dissected the triple album Sandinista!, and simultaneously whittled it down to a single LP.

The Clash's 'Sandinista!': Masterpiece or Mess?

We also offered a copy of my book The Clash: The Music That Matters to the person who could best argue for one single track we did not include within 100 words. Five people responded, of a sort, though none following the rules precisely. Regardless, Dan assigned each a number from 1-5 and I rolled a dice at random.org, hoping it would not land on 6! It did not, and Gary Roth wins the book, assuming he lives in the US, where the last available copies remain, courtesy of publishers Omnibus Press. Congrats Gary! And remember, paid subscribers to Wordsmith get exclusive access to all of Crossed Channels, plus exclusive posts and the full archives.

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(THEY SAY) DON’T WASTE YOUR VOTE

Now where were we? It’s going to be a strange Independence Day this July 4th, as I, a proper dual citizen of UK and USA, ponder what a War fought over freedom from Monarchy means when a Supreme Court has just given the American President powers fit for a British King. (Although, now I look at this Time magazine report, there is fortunately still have a long way to go before a US President truly equals King Charles’ exemptions from arrest or prosecution.) But it also promises to be a euphoric one, as I get to vote in a British General Election that will hopefully kick out the despicably destructive Tories after 14 years of largely unchecked power that followed all too hot on the heels of a similar period of destructive Thatcherism that served to drive me away from the UK in the first place.

How do I get to vote in the UK as well as the USA? I do so thanks to a change in election law that allows British expats of over 15 years standing to regain their vote, and I have my proxy ready to attend the polling station in Beckenham and Penge should I desire it.I pause on that last statement because, while I always believed that the vote has been too hard fought for to be wasted, I also have a new song out, mainly written by my Dear Boys pal Tony Page that, as the title infers, questions that notion. Fortunately, in the New York State Democratic Primary election last week, I did have someone to vote for who “genuinely cares”: Sarahana Shrestha, a Nepali immigrant and now dual citizen who, having grown up in the Himalaya nation at a time it was roiled by the dissolution of its own Monarchy and the chaotic and inherently violent Civil War that followed, felt the need to give back to her new country. Challenged from within the Democratic party by our own local establishment leaders who clearly dislike agitation and activism, Sarahana more than held her own. There is always hope.

I will leave you then, with the video for The Dear Boys’ ‘(They Say) Don’t Waste Your Vote,’ made by my great friend Jeni de Haart, along with the lyrics. (I wrote the third verse and Jeni the penultimate one, the others are all by Pagey.) I also leave with thanks to all the DJs who have played it over the last few weeks. I imagine we will find a way to re-present the song for the US Presidential Elections too. Peace out.

I’m gonna say no to the politicians,

I’m gonna say no to the people in power.

I’m gonna say no to the super rich owners,

Makin’ a mint hour by hour.

I’m gonna spoil my card at the general election

there’s no one there deserving my cross

You’re just a bunch of giant erections

counting your profits whilst we count our costs.

They say don’t waste your vote,

they say don’t waste your vote.

Give me someone who genuinely cares and I won’t.

You say that you’re gonna be a politician 

You say that you’re gonna be the people’s man

But all I see you doing is lining your pockets  

With every bit of donor cash that you can

They give us their promise of some kind of Utopia

they preach values in their manifestos,

But in the end our hopes are broken and shattered,

with their lies and failures their fortune grows.

They say don’t waste your vote,

they say don’t waste your vote.

Give me someone who genuinely cares and I won’t.

They love it best when we’re blaming each other

They love to play in their dirty campaigns

They want us now but as soon as it’s over

Another four years and they’re at it again

They tell us it’s our right as a democratic people,

they tell us it’s our right as if they care.

We’ll put up a fight against the oppressing evil

to make the division of classes finally fair.

They say don’t waste your vote,

they say don’t waste your vote.

Give me someone who genuinely cares… and I won’t.

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