The time has come to talk about Beatle Bob. It’s funny. I refused to speak on camera to the people who have been working on a Beatle Bob documentary, yet here I am throwing out comments on a blog. But, there’s no way to discuss issue no. 7 without discussing the man familiar to all St. Louisians who have attended concerts these past 25 years.

I think John met Bob before I did, but we all became friendly very quickly. Bob’s contributions to the magazine in the early days gave us a much needed historical context. He didn’t seem interested in the New Wave/Other rock binary that had us so hung up. As a result, he covered the likes of Jan and Dean, and, as you can see with this issue, Chuck Berry.

I’m not going to discuss the rumors and innuendo surrounding Beatle Bob’s non-dancing life, but I can say that a few years down the road, we did catch him in the act of plagiarizing an article from another obscure fanzine. From that point on, I had to question everything he’d turned in before, which means I have no idea if he wrote the Chuck Berry interview in this issue, or if it really happened at all. I know I’ve never seen evidence of this same interview in any other publication, and I know it reads very much like a Chuck Berry interview circa 1980 would have read.

Check out the answer to the first question. “A friend of mine, Johnnie C. Johnson, needed a guitarist.” This was several years before the “Hail! Hail! Rock and Roll” film brought Johnnie Johnson back to the limelight. Chuck Berry would have needed to explain the name to his interviewer in 1980, because nobody but the most acute liner-note readers would have ever heard of him. I’m also pretty sure all the great Chuck Berry collections were out of print at this point, making it even harder to know anything about Johnson.

The sidebar, wherein Bob purports to have played new wave records and solicited Chuck’s reactions, sounds plausible, too. The Bo Diddley references, and the question of what the singers are so angry about ring true. I just wish I lived in a world where I could simply assume my old friend gave us something we could trust. We certainly lived in that world when we published this issue of Jet Lag.

What other things were in that world? Enter Mort Hill, then known as Mort Blando, a man who had returned to St. Louis from the East Coast, where he soaked up higher levels of hipness than we were used to experiencing. His contributions to this issue and the next few were informative, hilarious, and frankly odd at times.

Nowadays, you can find a million sources for expensive used clothing from the 1950s, but in 1980, it was an unbelievable thing to suddenly have a warehouse chock full of the stuff right here in St. Louis. Edgar-Desoto lasted in business a few years, and Jet Lag was there right from the beginning, again thanks to Beatle Bob.

In the local band section, the rumors about Insect Fear and the Non-Dairy Creamers were entirely fabricated, as were the bands at that time. Insect Fear was the name my friend Don Hollenbeck concocted for his imaginary band, and the Non-Dairy Creamers was my own. Within a few months, though, the Non-Dairy Creamers would merge with the made-up band the Nazi Seamen, and would actually wind up performing on stage.

Little did I know that the Heels, the St. Louis band featured in this issue, would within six months morph into Be-Vision, and become my favorite local band for a couple years.

Hah, Bob Chekoudjian didn’t like the first X record because it didn’t live up to his experience of seeing them live in 1978. Back then, I didn’t know what he was talking about. Now he gets to brag about seeing X in 1978.

The front cover was done by Matt Feazell, a talented cartoonist who was working at Wuxtry at the time. I haven’t seen nor heard of him since not long after this issue came out. I like the cover, but I remember thinking at the time that he didn’t really know much about the New Wave scene.

View Issue #7