Drawn and Quartered

I'm kind of a nerd when it comes to zines. Always liked collecting them, reading them, storing them and then reading them again years later. Arty zines, hardcore zines, one-sheets, newsprint, photocopied, whatever was around was good for me. Nobody did it better than Frank Foe. I can't say I was a regular reader in '84, but FOE was still going strong in the mid-90s and I didn't miss an issue. While I feel like FOE was the gold standard, the quality never matter much to me: I've been responsible for some lame zines in the past (Young & the Useless) and read some pretty lousy attempts, but lately, I scooped up some really good zines that are really well crafted.

The first is from Easton's Giancarlo DeMarchi. He's responsible for some of my favorite show flyers, prints, t-shirts and artwork for hardcore bands over the years. Analog Dreams is a pretty sick collection of some different prints that he has done. I have always dug his style of drawing and really like the color scheme of the whole book. Not sure if it was intentional, but the size is similar to a 7 inch record and comes in a similar sized protective sleeve.

The second pair come from the Drug Money Art collective, run by Tin Ojeda. A little on the pricey side, DMA book 1 and book 2 (Everything You Know is Wrong) are a collection of photographs that are screened (yup screened) over newsprint to make a killer collection of random images that are a mix of the east coast longboard and art scene. Each one is handmade and there is some overlap in images in both books, but there is something really unique about the pages being fully screened as opposed to printed. I would imagine the overall aesthetic would be frowned upon by the usual weekend joe-longboarder , but it's good to see an effort to document the culture outside of the bigger magazines. Surfing needs more zines.
An interior shot of Everything You Know is Wrong. The dimensions are 14x11 or something really cool like that.
Last up is Through These Eyes by Robby Redcheeks. Again, a screened cover, with the inside being newsprint. The cover should be your first indication that it is not just another hardcore fanzine. What makes this zine unique is that along with some pretty incredible live shots (and set lists), the writing comes off as a manual for how to do it yourself, whether it be booking shows or creating zines. It's not only a great read, but a pretty good push for the reader to get going and get get creative with whatever he or she is in to.
I don't think I did any of the books any justice with this write-up. I'm not a zine reviewer, just a couple that I was stoked on over the past couple months. It's zines like this that help me get through a long winter. Happy first day of spring.

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: