MY 1983 PUNK ROCK FANZINE

A long time ago, in a midwestern town far, far away, I had my own fanzine. I was 14, and opinionated, and all the cool kids were doing it, so why not me? I named it “Payson Briggs“, after this goofy kid in my middle school. He was actually a very nice young man - just a bit goofy. And he had an odd name. And I guess it was an inside joke between my best friend and I, so that was the name of my zine. After Payson’s father got wind that there was some kind of magazine named after his son, he threatened to sue me if I didn’t change the name. I promptly changed it to Poison Briggs, which his father interpreted as some kind of death threat. I published five issues between the fall of 1983 and the spring of 1985.

Having a punk rock fanzine was awesome, because it gave you a reason to connect with other fanzine creators from all over the country (and the world). You’d mail them your zine, they’d mail you their zine. Most of them were free.

There was no money to be made. The only cost was postage. We were all motivated by pure creativity – and, even better, connectivity. Through the fanzine I made friends from all over. We would trade photos and stickers and flyers and cassettes. We would write content for each other: record reviews, show reviews, breakfast ceral reviews, scene reports. If I was in their town, I could crash at their house, and they could crash at mine. Through the vast American Hardcore zine network, I knew what has happening in the punk underground in almost every major city in the country.

And this was all done through the U.S. Mail. We had no worldwide web, so we just sort of created a defacto network. Coming home from school at age 14, to find a huge stack of mail waiting for you almost every day, was really cool. You felt like you were part of something bigger than yourself. An underground movement.

Some of the zines that gave us all inspiration.

My zine was made by hand – laid out with glue and scotch tape, then xeroxed at a local printing shop. I typed the first three issues on the family typewriter. By the fourth issue, we had gotten our first Macintosh, so I switched to dot matrix printing. What I didn’t create myself, I cut out of magazines and newspapers and pasted in the blank spaces of each page. This could be anything from random headlines taken out of context, snippets of news articles, cutouts from religious pamphlets – you name it. Everything was fair game. I was inspired first and foremost by Winston Smith, the master collage artist of the Dead Kennedys. His impact on the graphic sensibilities of the hardcore generation cannot be overstated. And all of this meticulous laying out of elements was surely a big factor in me ending up being a professional graphic designer.

I started out printing about 50 copies – giving them to friends and mailing them to other zine creators. By the last issue, I was up to about 300 copies, and I was getting requests from all over the world (if you can believe it…). Punk rockers had a unusual thirst for knowledge of what was going on elsewhere. We wanted to know every band, every flyer, every sticker of everything punk, no matter where it was. There was so much to uncover, and so much great music. And again, nobody made a DIME from any of it. So there was nothing to ruin it (yet).

I recently dug up the original layouts for all five issues from that aforementioned magic box of hardcore memorabilia in my parents’ attic. I present them to you here, unedited. My next project is to start scanning in all the OTHER fanzines I still have from that era, from Cincinnati and beyond. Stayed glued to your computer screens for the latest postings!