Bang! #24 (Medford MA)

Flash-forward five years and Rocco is still plugging away at it with Bang! Unfortunately I didn't see copies of the zine at Tower all that often, and I seem to remember actually trading zines with Rocco by this point in 1993, so my knowledge of Bang! suffers from several lost years. Compared to the previous issue I reviewed, #24 has largely moved away from mostly being a music zine towards being a sort of alternative culture zine with lots of movie stuff. This issue does include a good cover story on Babes In Toyland and a cool article on White Zombie as well as a wealth of album reviews, including such varied fare as Jesus Lizard, Tori Amos, Lunachicks, Scott Kempner and Celtic Frost.

Rocco did love his women, though, and he usually found some way to sneak a little cheesecake in between the rock music stuff, and with this issue he scores an interview with '90s "Scream Queen" Brinke Stevens, including several pulse-quickening pics of the lovely and brainy actress. This issue also includes interviews with strippers Niki Knockers and Pandora Peaks as well as a handful of video reviews and a nice pin-up photo of B-movie actress Jewel Shepard. An alluring photo of zine queen Lisa Suckdog graces the back cover of the issue. So there's a lot of music coverage still going on between the covers, but by '93 Bang! obviously had bigger things in mind!

(Click on cover thumbnail to see larger picture)

VITAL STATISTICS:
• Issue #24
• 1993, no month given
• B&W, 24-pages (including covers)
• Style: alt-rock zine

ARTICLES/INTERVIEWS
Babes In Toyland
White Zombie
Brinke Stevens
Pandora Peaks
Niki Knockers
--> also album & video reviews

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