The Future Sounds Of Tidewater

Perhaps my early 90's nostalgia is coming on earlier than expected, and more surprisingly, since I am really not up for revisiting much of the past that soon ago, as delightful fun as it was at the time. But I've been rummaging through my old comic and magazine boxes lately searching for my old issues of Subliminal Tattoos zines and have run across some of the old punk and music zines that I have kept over the years. There was a time when I kept every zine I was handed, no matter the quality or subject matter. Because to me, zines were or at least could be such a fascinating creative art form, depending on what was done with them. Personal zines were like little chunks of a boy or girl's soul -- and I especially loved the zines made by girls (this was at the height of the Riot Grrl era so the girl-zines were plenteous) and I am pleased to see that I still held on to many of them. I'll try in the next few weeks to cover some of the ones I have and post them here while still on my search of Subliminal Tattoos. But I thought I'd start things off with a local punk zine that I was involved with back around the mid-90's or so.

One of my oldest friends Big Kev created Bowling Doughnuts around 1992 or 93 and solicited many local punk types to contribute art, photography, band interviews, music reviews, and op-ed pieces, although a majority of the material came from our own insular group at the time, or at least in those early issues. But Joe was booking most of the bands at both the (now defunct) Nsect Club in Hampton and King's Head Inn in Norfolk so there were plenty of great bands coming through to interview. One of our favorite reoccurring questions posed to every band at the time was "Cheese: Food or Condiment" and I suppose I still ponder that one to this day. For Issue #5 (above) our friend Stan drew the cover back while doing a stretch in the can. I think I still have his letters to me from that time, filled with lots of hilariously great artwork. He's now a tattoo artist in Virginia Beach.

We also covered the local scene as well, like the interview with Norfolk's Jerm Flux, back when my friend Randy was in the band. Sean and Jimmy were great guys, too, and Sara was a little powerhouse of vocalist, like something monumentally Lovecraftian evil crawling up out of the earth. I still have one of their tapes, and a 7" single. Man, I could do a blog post on 7"'s alone!

My contribution? A reoccurring comic strip I called "Dexter Diatribe", named after the memory of the word scrawled across my basement wall in spray paint at my old Massachusetts Avenue house before I had moved in, and secretly based the character on many of the local punks that I knew who constantly bitched about the meaning and nuances of what they thought "punk" should be about. I was afraid that too many of these same people (many of whom were good friends) would start to see their own words echoed back at them in this format, but if they ever caught on, I never told me. Then again I was sharing comix space with the great Ted Rall at times, and my rinkydink strip was by no means in the same running.

And I also did my shared of album reviews, like these reviews of Boredoms' Soul Discharge and Negativland's Free. And an appearance from Dexter Diatribe tucked away in the corner, haunting a few of the pages even in issues where he didn't make an appearance (I don't know who did the poem underneath my reviews, but it still pleases me to read it again after all these years.

The back cover of issue #5 features an autograph glossy of professional wrestler Big Slam, actually a relative of the more widely known and similarly garbed Vader, and a participant from the old pro-wrestling performances down at the giant flea market in Newport News where Joe and Big Kev and I often attended for barrels 'o laffs (Joe has the same glossy framed and hanging over our fireplace). Joe had even booked Big Slam at the Nsect Club to open for the band Killdozer, just by getting onstage and doing his schtick. Hell, I hardly even remember the Killdozer set after that!

Hampton Roads once had a pretty thriving little music scene at one time, and in a way it felt as if we were documenting some of its final glory days, before most of the little venues were bulldozed in Norfolk, and larger corporate venues like the Norva dominated, and many of the really notable local bands either moved to bigger cities or broke up... oftentimes both. But it was good times while it lasted. And at least I still possess a few tattered documents to cling to once the inevitable Alzheimer's sets in.