Bang #19 (Medford MA)

Published by my old buddy Rocco Cipollone out of Massachusetts, Bang! was a classic, '80s-era old-school music zine. Black & white covers, standard magazine-size pages printed on 11"x17" 24# stock, folded and stapled in the middle, typewritten text...this was the way that music zines were supposed to be! Unfortunately, Nirvana and "grunge" and the whole damn "Seattle scene" ruined all of that as a massive influx of major label advertising dollars propelled many alt-rock zines into the mainstream with slick covers and innards. I certainly never benefited from the label's largese, and I'm bettin' that Rocco didn't either!

Bang! may never have been very pretty to look at, but it's what's between the covers that counts, eh? Rocco had his finger on the pulse of the late-80s alternative rock scene, and he knew how to cobble together an interesting zine with solid writing and interviews. Issue #19, from some undetermined time in 1988, offers up features on such diverse bands as the Wipers (Greg Sage), Live Skull, Penelope Houston of punk legends the Avengers, Big Stick, Bullet Lavolta, the Pandoras, the Fleshtones and the Cynics. Album reviews were just as varied, this issue covering discs from Scrawl, the Misfits, Eric Ambel, Fatal Flowers, Dinosaur Jr and Sonic Youth, among others.

Rocco also liked his women, and he liked his horror films, so Bang! had a smattering of both, this issue's interview with '80s "scream queen" Linnea Quigley featuring a couple nice photos of the good-looking actress alongside an interesting conversation, and the zine reproduces ads for a number of movies, including The Corpse Grinders, Deep Red and Surf Nazis Must Die! Surprisingly, Rocco wasn't a writer himself, so he depended on some pretty good scribes like Mike Snider, Joe Harrington, Chris Porter and Aram Heller to carry him through. Bang! was always a lot of fun to read, and the zine covered music that, more often than not, lined up nicely with my own tastes at the time.

(Click on cover thumbnail to see larger picture)

VITAL STATISTICS:
• Issue #19
• 1988, no month given
• B&W, 28-pages (including covers)
• Style: alt-rock zine

ARTICLES/INTERVIEWS
Greg Sage/The Wipers
Live Skull
Bullet Lavolta
The Pandoras
Penelope Houston
The Fleshtones
The Cynics
Big Stick
Linnea Quigley
--> also album reviews