First, an apology for taking so long to get this next batch of issues up online. Suffice it to say that Roy Kasten, who does yeoman work on this website, and I both have actual lives apart from this labor of love. We will be getting more up sooner than it took last time.

So, now we turn to the first issue of Jet Lag to have smaller type. Oh, how I remember the fun of typing up everything in a given issue, then running it to a print shop such as Kinko’s so we could shrink the print down, thus enabling us to cram a lot more words on to each page. I think in future years, we got even smaller than this.

For your eyes, however, this means we’ve increased the dpi of the scans, making it impossible to fit the pages inside the margins of a web browser (at least on Firefox). I hope this isn’t too much of an inconvenience, but believe me, the tiny print gets difficult to read after a while (especially on our much older and more tired eyes).

Honestly, I don’t remember who doesn’t like compliments on his or her ass, though I suspect it was Duwan Dunn. At any rate, I know it wasn’t me, because around this time, I was informed at a White Castle late at night that I didn’t have an ass. Oh, the things children will laugh about, especially considering that the real issue was I didn’t have a tight enough belt, or the understanding of where my waist should be on my pants.

Check out the Mort Report, and Mort’s allusion to Martin Mull’s comment about writing about rock music being like dancing about architecture. For years, that line has been credited to either Elvis Costello or Frank Zappa. I suspect Mort was much closer to the original citation, and it sure does sound like something Mull, who was a year or two before this issue hosting the brilliant Fernwood (then America) Tonight shows, with Fred Willard, would have said.

Let’s travel back in time to consider my review of the film “The Harder They Come.” For one thing, gather up the kids and tell them that when we were young, the only way to see a cult film was to wait for it to be scheduled at the Tivoli Theatre, whose quarterly calendars in those days read something like the daily schedule now on Turner Classic Movies. Not only didn’t we have DVD players, we didn’t have VHS or even cable TV. For another thing, bet you can’t tell I was still writing papers in English classes at UMSL. Or that I was far from being a graduate student, despite a more competent understanding of forms such as tragedy than I display here.

The Felons were ruling my world at the time this article was written. I bet I saw them two dozen times in those days, and I danced like a madman every time. Back then, I wasn’t very self-conscious, and simply assumed my wild thrashings in response to the music were as cool to the rest of the people in the room as they were to me. I like the photo John took of these guys, too. If I’m not mistaken, it was snapped outside the home of Mark Condelire (I didn’t get the spelling right in the story), a place where many parties back in the day took place.

I don’t spend much time thinking about the Rockats, or any of the rockabilly revivalists that we would cover over the next year or two of the magazine. As such, I completely forgot the fact that I actually saw and met former New York Dolls drummer Jerry Nolan.

See, Steve McCabe, Jet Lag wrote nice things about the Nukes.

This photo at the bottom of the page, by the way, was of the first time I ever saw Mike Burgett play on stage. I bet I’ve seen him 50 or 60 times since then, in a wide variety of bands. If I recall correctly, PG, who lived out in St. Charles at the time, got to play two nights at Billie Goat Hill. Most of the crowd was at Bernard’s Pub that night, but I remember a bunch of us drove over to the Hill simply because somebody came in and said there was a good band with a girl bass player. See, we boys didn’t know very many girls who liked our music back then.

You’ll have to ask Duwan what was going on with the cartoon series over the next few issues. I will reveal, however, that I had a shirt much like the one worn by the taller co-publisher of the local fanzine, while John the Mailman wore clothes much like the other one.

John had a great knack for putting together photo collages capturing the spirit of events we attended. The Surgery page at Bernard’s Pub will bring anyone who was there back to their largely fake-id’d youth. Say hi to Janice Tatkow accepting Howard’s gratitude in one of these pics.

I always considered the review I wrote of Watson/Beasley, a completely forgotten band by just about everybody but their children, to be a turning point in my “career.” For one thing, it was the first time I broke the standard mold of essay form, though I’m fairly sure I ripped the idea of creating two characters to have a dialogue about the subject at hand from somebody in Creem. More importantly, it pointed me to the realization that the barriers between white and black music fans caused a distinct difference in understanding what was happening at any given time. Though eventually, white youth would come to accept contemporary hip-hop, in 1980, whites accepted only the older stuff from blacks. Within months, I would discover WESL and KATZ radio, which provided a virtually non-stop soundtrack in my car for the next couple years.

Goddam, those Retros were skinny dudes, weren’t they? This is a great shot of the post-Bob Chekoudjian version of the band, taken in a studio by Mark Skinner.

View Issue #8