Flashback: The Young and the Useless Zine

When I was in high school, I didn't have a whole lot of money week to week to go out and buy records. This made things tough, because without the internet, you were left with word of mouth or reading the description of the record in the Very Distro catalog to decide whether or not to pull the trigger on purchasing a particular album. That being said, it meant that more often and not, you were stuck with a few clunker CDs, 7 inches and LPs that weren't exactly the greatest.

My friend Dave and I used to grab at least five or six of these from our collections and go to trade them in at Double Decker Records in Allentown for what we hoped would be the equivalent of one CD. I cringe when I think of the amount of stuff that the two of us got rid of just to feed our appetite for new music. There are many a record that I wished I hadn't traded in, but at the time if it wasn't youthcrewstraightedgehardcore, chances are I wasn't interested.

To make a long winded point even longer, one of schemes that Dave and I concocted was to create our own zine. We figured that if we were to have our own zine, record labels would be looking to flood our mailboxes with CDs and records for us to review. Free music right? Idiots. We ended up doing one issue of a ska themed zine a year or two back from the one posted below and ended getting one or two free CDs from Moon Records (Maybe why they went bankrupt?), but not much else. A year or two later, I tried to ressurect the zine into a one page format in a second futile attempt to gain free music. It was called The Young and the Useless and had columns written by yours truly on the front and music reviews also done by me on the back. It was terrible and I cannot believe that Jamie Holmes even let me leave them at Double Decker. At least it was free.

I have been meaning to post this for a while, but reading the reviews and the columns in really pretty painful. My opinions and views have changed a lot over the years and to go back and read what I have to say makes me say to myself, "What the hell was I thinking?!?!" in some instances. Some of the music reviews are down right hysterical to me. Maybe if I get the courage, I will actually post the FRONT of the zine which includes the most lame columns ever written. For now here are my music reviews circa '97. Click on the page to enlarge: