Nuthing Sacred #5 (Hollywood CA)

Although punk in attitude and appearance, Jay Sosnicki's Nuthing Sacred zine was much more than your typical jugheaded punkzine. Published out of the sleaze-rock capital of the world, Hollywood CA, Nuthing Sacred had a very "street" vibe to it; between the covers you'd find a mix of underground culture, punk poetry, observational articles, literary fiction and artist interviews.

I picked up a copy of Nothing Sacred #5 somewhere because it included an excerpt from Pleasant Gehman's "Rock 'N Roll Diaries." I had interviewed Pleasant back in '85 for the second issue of The Metro, Nashville's music magazine, when she was singing with the Screamin' Sirens. The Sirens had just put out their debut album on Enigma, and since I had a good relationship with the label at the time, I agreed to talk to Pleasant. Aside from being drop-dead gorgeous, Pleasant also turned out to be intelligent, quick-witted, flirtatious and creative, and I subsequently hung out with her and the band (which also included the talented Rosie Flores on guitar) whenever they came to Nashville. We kept in touch, sporadically, throughout the years that followed....

Gehman had a lot of stories to tell, and a few of them are included in this segment of her "Rock 'N Roll Diaries." Pleasant was a well-known fixture on the LA punk zine, good friends with Darby Crash of the Germs and Jeffrey Lee Pierce of the Gun Club, and an early writer for local zines like Slash and publisher of her own zine, Lobotomy. Her diaries are exactly that, a day-by-day, blow-by-blow accounting of her life, no matter how mundane or glamorous any given moment might be. It makes for interesting reading. Unfortunately, I don't remember seeing any other issues of the zine (distribution for Nuthing Sacred, particularly in the Nashville area, seemed to be spotty), so I missed further excerpts from Pleasant's diaries.

Nuthing Sacred #5 also includes a lengthy interview with underground film legend Nick Zedd, humorously starting out with a conversation between the zine's Jay Sosnicki and Film Threat publisher Chris Gore on whether or not Zedd had actually died, as per Film Threat's 1991 obituary, or if it was just another Zedd publicity stunt. To provide balance to Zedd's self-promotion during the interview, Sosnicki also interviews NYC underground filmmaker and Zedd nemesis Richard Kern. The rest of this issue includes an interesting illustrated interview with young comic book artist Aaron Bordner, stark fiction from Conrad Nava, Sosnicki's funny "Slacking Off On Venice Beach" story about trying to score LSD in Venice, and lots of fair-to-middling poetry, including one by my old buddy Bob Z.

Nuthing Sacred featured a semi-punkature styled lay-out, a lot of text transposed against black backgrounds, columns askew and graphics landing wherever they felt like it. The zine made good use of the limitations of publishing in black & white, creating impressive-looking pages with high-contrast photo reproductions and bleak pen-and-ink drawings.

Altogether, I enjoyed Nuthing Sacred as something quite different from the standard fare of music zines that I was consuming during the early-90s. Unfortunately, this seems to be the only issue of the zine that I have in my possession, although I'll keep digging...one never knows what lurks in the next unpacked box!

The Official Site Of Her Majesty Pleasant Gehman

(Click on cover thumbnail to see larger picture)

VITAL STATISTICS:
• Issue #5
• September 1992
• B&W, 52-pages (including covers)
• Style: underground culture

ARTICLES/INTERVIEWS
Nick Zedd
Richard Kern
Aaron Bordner
Pleasant Gehman's "Rock 'N Roll Diaries"
--> also reader mail, a couple of zine reviews and lots of poetry