Bad Newz #15 (San Francisco)

With punkzines mostly a relic of the past by 1990, and with grunge about to jumpstart a new zine revolution in a mere year or so, my buddy Bob Z's Bad Newz kind of fell in the middle. Bob took late-70s "punkature" styled lay-out to the extreme, and this issue of Bad Newz, #15 from some undetermined month during the fall of 1990, was his biggest and best to date, a visual feast of cut-n-paste columns, "found" art, mind-blowing graphics and punk attitude.

Zine publisher and show promoter, Bob Z. was a well-known fixture on the NYC punk scene for several years before pulling up stakes during the summer of '90 and moving lock, stock and barrel to San Francisco. Z had won a decisive victory over the NYC "postering police," who had cited him for littering with show posters and fined him $3,700; when the authorities found out that Bob was campaigning against the postering laws, they jacked up his fines to over $22,000 and took him to court. "Bob Z vs the Postering Police" became the underground "cause celebre" during 1988 and '89, and Bob raised money and received support from dozens of zines (mine included), some as far away as Poland. In the end, Z won his battle on appeals and the city's anti-postering law was found to be unconstitutional as it was being enforced at the time.

Bad Newz #15 was the first issue Bob published from San Francisco, I think, and Bob put some good stuff in these jam-packed pages, including interviews with Mojo Nixon, the Fixtures, Bloody Mess, the Amateur Gynecologists, 8-Bark and Steel Pole Bathtub. Bob also provided some pretty in-depth coverage of the era's underground zine scene through interviews with Factsheet Five's Mike Gunderloy, Maximum Rock & Roll's Tim Yohannon and cartoonist Ace Backwards. There's also a slew of album and zine reviews crammed into every free corner of each and every page.

I always enjoyed each issue of Bad Newz and corresponded regularly with publisher Bob Z at the time, trading zines and sharing war stories about the battles fought just to get our zines in print. These days, with the resources of the Internet providing anybody that can string together two sentences a potential audience, people forget (or don't know) just how hard it was to publish something...anything...back in the pre-web days.

Besides the arduous and time-consuming work of physically typing up and preparing a zine for printing, you had to worry about money and advertising (which mostly came from bands and indie labels – the sort of people who would support a zine were unfortunately also those who wouldn't or couldn't pay for their ads) and, finally, the possibility of censorship. It was a free press minefield, to be sure, especially for good folks like Bob Z who would push the envelope of free speech and free expression with every issue of Bad Newz.

(Click on cover thumbnail to see larger picture)

VITAL STATISTICS:
• Issue #15
• 1990, no month given
• B&W, 54-pages (including yellow-colored covers)
• Style: punkzine

ARTICLES/INTERVIEWS
Mojo Nixon
The Fixtures
Steel Pole Bathtub
Mike Gunderloy/Factsheet Five
Tim Yohannon/Maximum Rock & Roll
Ace Backwards
--> also live show reviews, album & zine reviews