Bad Newz #14 (New York City)

This might be the last issue of Bob Z's Bad Newz punkzine that I have buried away in the vaults. I would be remiss if, over all of these reviews, I didn't mention the overall quality of writing to be found in Bad Newz. Bob Z was a decent punk-poet and some of his free verse was reminiscent of Bukowski in its street-smart style. Bob could write pretty well when he had a lot of passion for the subject, and his band interviews were generally entertaining. Although almost always presented in a Q&A format – not my favorite style – Bob always tried to coax something interesting out of otherwise less-than-glib subjects. Other Bad Newz scribes, like longtime supporter Chris Caggiano or frequent contributor Holly Day, wrote decent-to-great copy, and the zine would regularly publish the works of the usual suspects from the underground, writers like Feral Faun and Mike Gunderloy.

Issue #14 of Bad Newz includes an interview with the phenomenal underground musician Eugene Chadbourne, as well as conversations with Alien Sex Fiend and hardcore punk legends Murphy's Law. Articles include "A History of Scum Rock," "Touring Europe: One Person's Experience" and "The War On Drugs: A Kinder, Gentler Vietnam." Of course, there is the usual glut of live show reviews, album and zine reviews, poetry and fiction, and "Twisted Image" cartoons by Ace Backwards. A lot of folks consider Maximum Rock 'N' Roll, Flipside or Punk Planet to be the best punkzines ever published, and they each have a unique voice and loyal following. But in its day, Bad Newz walked the walk and talked the talk, Bob Z and crew refusing to get too slick, too lethargic, or too far removed from the street.

(Click on cover thumbnail to see larger picture)

VITAL STATISTICS:
• Issue #14
• Spring 1990
• B&W, 66-pages (including red-colored covers)
• Style: punkzine

ARTICLES/INTERVIEWS
Eugene Chadbourne
Alien Sex Fiend
Murphy's Law
Carrion Dog
"The History of Scum Rock"
"Touring Europe: One Person's Experience"
"The War On Drugs: A Kinder, Gentler Vietnam"
"Twisted Image" cartoons by Ace Backwards
--> also live show reviews, album & zine reviews

Bad Newz #13 (New York City)

Bob Z and friends delivered another fun read with Bad Newz #13, their "Death To The '80s Issue." Included in this hefty collection is an interview with punk band the Dickies, another on Chicago alt-rockers the Effigies, a lengthy interview with Johnny Puke, lead singer of punk band Stinky Finger and the publisher of Wrong Conclusion fanzine, Jenifer Blowdryer of the Blowdryer Experience band, and performance artist Fucia Doll of Bloodsuckers From Outer Space. There is a great article by writer Randall Reid, "If This Is How Life Makes You Feel..." that outlines the 1984ish turns taken by the Bush administration (shit, the old man was a piker compared with W's assault on civil liberties!), as well as an update on Bob Z's problems with the "sanitation police" in New York City.

Bob Z always published a lot of letters from readers and fellow zinesters in Bad Newz, every bit as many as Anarchy zine has always published, tho' maybe not as many as you can find in The Match anarchist zine. Bad Newz #13 includes a lengthy letter from Fred Woodworth, publisher of The Match, on his battle with Madalyn Murray O'Hair and her atheist organization, another letter from Gordon of WDC Domination and the usual batch of live show reviews, record reviews and a slew of zine reviews, not to mention a little poetry and, of course, "Twisted Image" cartoons.

(Click on cover thumbnail to see larger picture)

VITAL STATISTICS:
• Issue #13
• No month given - late 1989?
• B&W, 68-pages (including red-colored covers)
• Style: punkzine

ARTICLES/INTERVIEWS
The Effigies
The Dickies
Chumbawumba
Stinky Finger
Jenifer Blowdryer/The Blowdryer Experience
"Twisted Image" cartoons by Ace Backwards
--> also live show reviews, album & zine reviews

Bad Newz #12 (New York City)

Since he was busy fighting with the NYC sanitation department through the summer, it took a while for Bob Z and his crew to get issue #12 of Bad News out on the streets of the Big Apple. It proved to be worth the wait, however, 'cause this issue had a lot of meat on the bone. To begin with, it was 76-pages of awesome punkature-styled lay-out with a lot of content crammed between the covers. There's a lengthy article on "The Gemstone Files" (a ubiquitous presence on the late-80s zine scene), the 'Holy Grail' of conspiracy theory that allegedly ties everything together with a nice, neat bow. It makes for fascinating reading, even if you have to take the most of it with a grain of salt. Of course, if even a few of the article's assertions are true, well....

Issue #12 also includes a lengthy and very interesting interview with Lainie "The Oyster" Duro, a prolific poet and zine publisher that all of us on the scene corresponded with, swapped ads with and reviewed each other's work. There is a series of articles on "Outlawing Abortion" that tackle the Christian rights' attempts to overturn the landmark Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court Decision. An interview with punk stalwarts the Dwarves and the bands Spongehead Experience and Dead Steelmill are complimented by loads of live show reviews, record and zine reviews, some fiction and a few poems, as well as a bunch of Ace Backwards cartoons. Oh yeah, there's Bob Z reprinted a letter that the Reverend sent to him about the city of Nashville's own fight against postering by local bands and promoters. It also seems that I sent Bob $20 for a zine sub ($7) and one of Z's cassette compilation tapes ($4) with the remaining funds a donation to his legal defense fund.

(Click on cover thumbnail to see larger picture)

VITAL STATISTICS:
• Issue #12
• August 1989
• B&W, 76-pages (including covers)
• Style: punkzine

ARTICLES/INTERVIEWS
"The Gemstone Files" article
"Outlawing Abortion" article
Lainie "The Oyster" Duro interview
The Dwarves
Spongehead Experience
Dead Steelmill
"Twisted Image" cartoons by Ace Backwards
--> also live show reviews, album & zine reviews

Bad Newz #11 (New York City)

The Reverend had to dig deep into the back of the filing cabinet to find these earlier issues of Bob Z's legendary Bad Newz punkzine. Issue #11 was published while Bob was still located in New York City, during his infamous battle with the "sanitation police" that first brought him and his fine zine to my attention. The deal went like this: after NYC had passed an anti-postering ordinance, inspectors with the city's sanitation department went kookoo-bananas, grabbing whatever "evidence" they could from posters stuck to city lamp-posts and then fining the "culprits." Their brilliant Holmesian investigation found Bob Z's phone number on posters for punk shows that he was promoting, and they fined him $3,100 for his transgression. Bob fought this injustice and, in the process, spent thousands of dollars that he didn't have on legal fees and promotion.

This issue also includes "A Jaded Look At NYC Clubs," a follow-up of sorts to a similar line-up published in issue #9. As the writer states, the Big Apple club scene changes rapidly, and most of the clubs discussed in this article were probably history a year later (and certainly almost all of them are gone now). Nevertheless, it is an interesting read from a historical perspective. There is a short Bob Z. interview with Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, just prior to the time of the band's signing with Geffen Records; as well as interviews with Chicago bands Screeching Weasel and Sponge Tunnel.

Amidst the eye-popping "punkature" styled graphic lay-out, you'll also find the zine's usual mix of political commentary, records and zine reviews and lots of funny cartoons by ubiquitous underground artist "Ace Backwards." You'll also see a lot of ads for other zines (Bob used to swap ads with everybody...he was cool like that) and low-budget indie labels in the pages, resulting in a trip back through time to a simpler, much more civilized era of alt-culture.

(Click on cover thumbnail to see larger picture)

VITAL STATISTICS:
• Issue #11
• February 1989
• B&W, 56-pages (including green-colored covers)
• Style: punkzine

ARTICLES/INTERVIEWS
Screeching Weasel interview
Sponge Tunnel interview
Sonic Youth interview
The Unsane interview
"Polish Punk" article
"Twisted Image" cartoons by Ace Backwards
--> also live show reviews, album & zine reviews

Bad Newz #17 (San Francisco)

Bob Z bounces back after a fractured issue of Bad Newz with a slightly bigger, but much more focused issue of his erstwhile punkzine. Issue #17, from sometime during 1992, includes interviews with Greg Sage of the Wipers, Gifthorse, the Lie Detectors, Internal Malfunction Institute and an older-but-still-cool interview with Fred Frith from 1987. There's a lot of stuff on the death and attempted rebirth of the legendary zine Factsheet Five, and lots of poetry crammed in between scores of album and zine reviews.

Bob gets more political with this issue of Bad Newz as well, running the anti-corporate satire "Union Of Time Thieves #00," another piece on unrest in Yugoslavia and, ahem, my rant on the Ice T and Body Count controversy from the time. The "punkature" styled graphics are still present, and although not as busy and claustrophobic, still delightfully crowded on the page. Altogether another enjoyable issue of Bad Newz courtesy of Bob Z.

(Click on cover thumbnail to see larger picture)

VITAL STATISTICS:
• Issue #17
• 1992, no month given
• B&W, 34-pages (including purple-colored covers)
• Style: punkzine

ARTICLES/INTERVIEWS
Greg Sage/The Wipers
Fred Frith
Gifthorse
The Lie Detectors
Factsheet Five zine update
--> also live show reviews, album & zine reviews

Bad Newz #16 (San Francisco)

A year or so after moving to San Francisco, my buddy Bob Z (a/k/a "Robert Beaper") has fallen on some hard times. Benefit shows for Bad Newz have barely broken even, bands have backed out of their support, and it seems like Bob's just not having a very good time on the left coast after leaving NYC. That doesn't stop him from putting out another issue of his fun-to-read punkzine Bad Newz, though, even if issue #16 is smaller, somewhat disjointed, and offers up confusing pagination and lay-out.

Nevertheless, Bob includes the second part of his interesting Mike Gunderloy interview; by the time of this late publication, Mike had sold Factsheet Five and gotten out of publishing, but there's still a lot of interest for zine people to read. There are also interviews with New Mexico punk band Red, White & Black and with Debbie Jaffe of Master/Slave Relationship, some cartoons by Ace Backwards, and the usual bunch of album and zine reviews. Bob rails against the local SF scene with a couple of well-placed rants and there's your usual, invigorating "punkature" styled graphics as only Bad Newz could do it! By this time, methinks, Bob Z was spending more time and focus on his poetry and less on the zine, but this issue still provides a lot of value for a couple bucks.

(Click on cover thumbnail to see larger picture)

VITAL STATISTICS:
• Issue #16
• 1991, no month given
• B&W, 32-pages (including purple/blue-colored covers)
• Style: punkzine

ARTICLES/INTERVIEWS
Mike Gunderloy/Factsheet Five
Master/Slave Relationship
Red, White & Black
--> also live show reviews, album & zine reviews

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