LOBOTOMY: A BRIEF HISTORY OF LA'S NOTORIOUS 1970'S PUNK FANZINE

 

  Some of the original  1978 cut 'n' paste layouts for the pages of Lobotomy Magazine; photo of Billy Idol by Theresa Kereakes,  collage art  with hand writing --and shitty typing-- by me

The early 1970’s punk scene was significantly different than it is today. In New York, London and San Francisco, but especially in LA, unless you actually lived through it, there’s almost no way to describe how electrifying-or how small and totally underground- it truly was.

 Punk wasn’t considered cool in those days, we were outsiders. Our look threatened “normal” people, and many of us actually got beaten up for our outlandish appearance. On the rare occasions that  I actually attended school, I’d walk through the cafeteria while tablefuls of jocks with feathered haircuts would chant the lyrics to Kool and The Gang’s  “Hollywood Swinging”, while throwing salads at me. Because they were football players, they had great aim, and I’d often wind up covered in Thousand Island dressing. At least it matched my  bright orange hair!

It’s pretty funny when I study my old punk old photos, because in hindsight, we didn’t really look scary. Even though we thought we appeared dangerous and outré in our solid-black getups, most of us were so young we looked like little pubescent kids, but we were also dressed exactly the way everyone does now!

Back then, we were underage and therefore too young to be tattooed…unless we did it at home, jail-style (which we all did) by melting a sewing needle into the handle of a toothbrush, dipping it in India ink and poking the needle into our skin by hand. There was also no Krazy Kolor on the market yet, so when we dyed our hair, we had a choice of only three shades: black, Lucille Ball red, or bleached white. Nobody (in the States, anyway) was making punk accessories, so we made due by wearing dog collars from the pet store and bought $4.00 studded leather cock rings from The Pleasure Chest to wear as wristbands!

In the spring of 1978, I founded my punk rock fanzine Lobotomy with my best friend from high school, the late Randy Kaye. Randy and I –and an assortment of friends -went out every single night, and cut school all the time to feed our rock ‘n’ roll obsession, usually going to Hollywood Boulevard to visit Peaches Record Store. Chris Ashford- who later founded What? Records and  released The Germs’ first single worked  there, and  would let us listen to the new British Import punk 45’s and give us posters and other swag that came with them.  Often, we’d all convene at the house of  someone whose parents weren’t home  to listen to music and get wasted on whatever substances we could scare up.

 

Randy Kaye and me in San Francisco, 1978. The entire Lobotomy staff went up to the Bay Area for a series of shows Blondie was doing in  SF and Berkeley. Photo by Theresa Kereakes

The main reason we wanted to start a fanzine was so we could get free records and get into shows. We took our title from The Ramones song “Teenage Lobotomy”. Because  the LA scene was close-knit,  there were also a few other  fanzines running concurrently, including Flipside , which had started in East LA in  1977, Generation X, published by sisters Jade and Zandra, and Phast Phreddie’s Back Door Man, which had started in the South Bay. Though it wasn’t strictly punk,  it  was definitely underground, and had been publishing since 1975. There were many  others, but none of them lasted as long as Lobotomy or the ones just mentioned.

 Though everybody on the scene referred to our fanzine simply Lobotomy, the real title was Lobotomy: The Brainless Magazine. Later, we amended it to Lobotomy: Where Glamour Is A Way Of Life, ironically stealing the phrase that was printed on the shopping bags from Frederick’s Of Hollywood. Lobotomy was published usually-but not always- monthly from 1978 to early in 1982.

 Looking back on it, Lobotomy was kind of patterned after those  old school slam books from Junior High, and it also functioned like today’s Social Media sites.

Randy and I immediately enlisted our friend Theresa Kereakes to take photos, and then drafted our pals Anna Statman and the late Herb Wrede to also be our photographers, since we wanted to write about our local Hollywood scene and no one who was “legit” was covering it. We knew it was important to have photos from the shows we reviewed and the interviews we did… although I also combed Sounds, NME, Melody Maker and Creem Magazine to appropriate- photos and make collages.

Kid Congo Powers and me in the Lobotomy "office", photo by Theresa Kereakes

Around the same time, I’d met a kid named Brian Tristan and we became fast friends. He looked like Maynard G. Krebbs by way of the Sharks in Westside Story. At the time, he was the President of the Ramones Fan Club, and started writing a lot for Lobotomy. He also wound up being my roommate for years, at a variety of different places… before his name to Kid Congo  Powers and joining the Gun Club and later, The Cramps.  

 Since punk was a totally underground subculture, when we were working on Lobotomy, we never had to deal with agents, managers or major record companies-we had access to everyone in the bands themselves. Our friends were in bands, or we’d meet bands who were friends of friends, or simply call a hotel where a band we liked was staying (usually the Tropicana Motel or The Continental Hyatt House on Sunset, which was known locally as “The Riot House”) We’d ask the band if they’d want to hang out, go record or thrift store shopping or take them to a gig, and interview them.  Most of the time, we became fast friends.

We were semi-delinquent teenagers who hung out with and interviewed artists  who later became known as the groundbreaking stars of the late 20^th Century. Just some of the interviews that we did for Lobotomy were with The Clash, The Damned, The Cramps, Blondie, X, The Go-Go’s, Billy Idol, Lydia Lunch, 999, The Germs, The Mumps, Black Randy, The Jam, James Chance, The Screamers and director David Lynch. And since no one was on guard and absolutely nothing was being filtered through a publicist, those interviews were extremely candid and totally wild. For example, Brian Tristan aka Kid Congo and I interviewed Lydia Lunch while she and her new husband Johnny O’Kane were in bed having sex; Theresa and I interviewed Blondie while crammed into the tiny bathroom in Theresa’s apartment during a raging party, while all of us were high on Quaaludes and beer. I probably don’t need to tell you that shit like that just doesn’t happen any more, right?

Randy, Brian aka Kid Congo and I did most of the writing, and we also all used several pen names so it would look like Lobotomy had a big staff. Nick Garrard who managed the British psychobilly band The Meteors was our London correspondent and Joe Katz of The Student Teachers was our New York correspondent. They’d snail mail us accounts of the recent goings-on in their cities. We’d also rope our roommates, houseguests and friends to write things- even if they hadn’t ever written!  We'd get them drunk and shove a piece of paper and a pen at them and literally force them to write a record review. Some of those contributors were Marcy Blaustein, Nancy Nitro aka Nancy Nagler, Dennis Crosby (grandson of Bing Crosby) and Ann McLean.  Randy got our pal Joan Jett to dictate an account of a 1978 Runaways UK tour to him which became  “Joan Jett’s Holiday In The Sun” in the second issue.

These magazine layout sessions were always done shit-faced drunk at “The Lobotomy Apartment”- as Theresa’s place off La Brea and my place on Palm Drive were both called… although in some issues of the issues, my place was referred to as “The Lobotomy Pig Stye”!  We’d stay up all night typing and gluing stuff to the pages… which weren’t even the same paper!  We’d use whatever was lying around: onion skin typing paper stolen from various office temp jobs, the backs of gig flyers, and once, even a bunch of    corporate stationary I’d stolen from the Los Angeles department store Bullock’s Wilshire.  Usually, I’d   draw the various fonts (which weren’t even called that back then) freehand, reproducing logos for The Cramps or the Clash by copying whatever was on the cover of their latest single.  Someone gave me a few sheets of Press Type rub-on letters and using it seemed so…professional. Insert the Crying With Laughter Emoji here.

 Lobotomy finally quit publication in 1982, because miraculously, all of us on the staff were getting real jobs by doing what we did for the fanzine!   Theresa was taking photos for all sorts of mainstream rock publications, I’d started writing for LA Weekly  - and many other magazines and papers-in 1978, and founded the popular “LA Dee Dah”  Hollywood scene gossip column, which ran for years.   Randy and Anna both became A&R execs at various record companies, and Kid Congo became a bonafide rock star in his own right.

Never in our wildest dreams did any of us consider that the loopy Xeroxed fanzine we started as a lark nearly forty years ago would be a turning point in our lives, let alone a significant piece of Los Angeles punk rock history.

 

A Lobotomy "staff meeting" at Joan Jett's apartment on San Vicente:  Left to Right: artist Brad Dunning, who created the Lobotomy logo, Joan Jett, Billy Idol and  the extremely underage Wendy Bowie. Photo by Theresa Kereakes

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 March 5, 2016, in Los Angeles, Theresa Kereakes and I are having an opening for our art show (Teenage) Lobotomy:  Fanzine Art And Photos From The 1970’s LA Punk Scene.  It will feature Theresa’s amazing   live and backstage photos from that time period, as well as the original paste up art I did for Lobotomy.

(Teenage) Lobotomy:  Fanzine Art And Photos From The 1970’s LA Punk Scene

Lethal Amounts Gallery

1226 West 7^th Street, LA

 8:00pm-11:00pm

 

Rhys Williams and John from LA band The Joneses hanging out with Belinda Carlisle backstage at The Whisky in 1978...photo by Theresa Kereakes, original  Lobotomy logo by Brad Dunning

 And come say hi to me on the interwebs at these fine locations:

 Link to the (Teenage) Lobotomy Facebook event:

  https://www.facebook.com/events/566459213511914/

 To read more about my sordid punk rock past, or to order my memoir Showgirl Confidential visit my website: www.pleasantgehman.com 

And come  say hi to me on the interwebs at these fine locations:

www.facebook.com/pleasant.gehman
www.twitter.com/PleasantGehman1
www.instagram.com/princessofhollywood

NIRVANA: A WALK DOWN MEMORY LANE 1992

Nirvana, about the time my article was published in Spin

I've been going through my archives, getting ready to compile a book on my writing from 1977 to 1977.  The book  is called Journalista!  and will be published by Punk Hostage Press in late 2015. Below is an article of mine on Nirvana,  who were named "Artist Of The Year" by  Spin Magazine in December 1992. There's some back story and  a few fun facts that were left out of this article                 ( obviously) when it went to publication.

 The first is that  Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love were experiencing a lot of negative feedback  due to an inflammatory  article that ran in Vanity Fair in September of 1992.  I knew Courtney  from her pre-Hole days, and knew Kurt  from the  rock 'n'roll circles we ran in, where , back in those days, everybody knew-or at least knew of, each other from mutual friends. When  Nirvana was  going to be named as Artist Of The Year, Kurt and Courtney  specifically asked  Spin  for me to be the interviewer and author of the article that was going to be published.  The second is that even though I was an invited guest,   at first, Nirvana  regarded me suspiciously...because, I was, after all, A Journalist.  They were all pretty suspiscious and mono-syllabic until  new ( at that point) Nirvana member Pat Smear, mentioned out loud that in his pre-Germs days, I'd been his first serious  girlfriend. Suddenly,  the ice was broken,  and everyone got comfortable and opened up.

  Here's my article, the way it was published by Spin  in 1992

Spin, December 1992

 "Lost amid a flood of rumors and the glare of the public spotlight lies the very real fact that in 1992 Nirvana changed the course of popular music."

 PLEASANT GEHMAN journeys to Seattle and finds the trio bloodied by unbowed. 

---

ARTIST  OF THE YEAR 1992: NIRVANA

I'm on my way up to Seattle, which is currently to the rock 'n' roll world what Bethlehem was to Christianity, and the only thing the passengers on the plane seem to be talking about is the movie Singles. I'm grateful to be sitting next to a serene-looking woman in a coral sweater and Bermuda shorts, a string of cultured pearls around her neck, her upturned nose buried in a paperback. An hour and a half into the flight, the turbulence starts. It's bad. She's white-knuckling it. In an attempt to take her mind off the frantic bouncing around, I engage her in small talk. She's a 24-year-old mother of three, going to Seattle to visit her father, whom she hasn't seen in five years. A devout Catholic, she's worried that if the plane crashes, her kids won't be raised Catholic. She, in turn, asks me questions. I'm going to Seattle to interview a band, I tell her.

 She asks about rock writing politely, almost disinterestedly. Finally, she asks which band.

"They're called Nirvana," I say.

"Oh my gawwwwd!" she screams in a 15-year-old's ecstatic falsetto.

 "No way! How awesome!"

 She looks at me hard for a second, and then in a conspiratorial tone, whispers, 

"Do they know you're coming?"

From out of nowhere, 25-year-old singer-songwriter-guitarist Kurt Cobain, 27-year-old bassist Chris Novoselic, and 23-year-old drummer Dave Grohl breezed in to 1992 and turned the music world upside down and inside out, transforming "alternative" music into a bona fide big-bug category, and Seattle into a modern-day music mecca. Nirvana made grinding, slush-toned guitars, hoarse-voiced wailing, and alienated lyrics into something that anyone could hum or relate to: It's hard enough for metal heads, and sensitive enough for popsters. The lyrics and voice may belong solely to Cobain, but the sentiments are universally felt; sadness, frustration, alienation, and confusion. What dysfunctionally raised, co-dependent, recovering whatever, growing up while there's a hole in the ozone layer, couldn't get into it?

In 1987, Nirvana was formed by Novoselic and Cobain, who lived his own private version of Twin Peaks with his cocktail waitress mother in an Aberdeen, Washington, trailer park. They played with a series of drummers, gigged locally, wrote songs, and without much hoopla eventually made their first album, Bleach, in 1988, recorded in three days for $600. The band toured and became fairly hip in some circles (mainly college radio and among members of other bands). In 1990, they added Grohl, formerly of the D.C. punk band Scream. Eventually Nirvana signed a deal with DGC, recorded Nevermind, toured Europe with Sonic Youth, and then, kaboom, the Nirvana bomb exploded. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" became a huge hit: MTV wouldn't leave the video alone, and you could turn on practically any radio station in the U.S. and hear Nirvana.

"Teen Spirit" is the sort of megahit that will earmark 1992 in kids' lives. Ten Years down the line, they'll hear that song and their adolescence will come back to them in a neat little parcel. It's the sort of megahit that spawns parodies ("We were the foundation of 'Weird Al' Yankovic's comeback," says Cobain, with a dubious look on his face). It's the sort of hit that catapulted Nirvana so deep into the limelight so quickly, that their heads are still spinning, with nary the chance to turn into jaded, decadent rock stars. While most success stories are struggling to retain credibility, Nirvana hasn't even had a chance to lose it yet.

"I get recognized every day, every day," says Novoselic, shaking his head. "I just kind of get used to it."

"I'll never get used to it," mumbles Cobain.

Western Washington University: Nirvana has made the two-hour trek north from Seattle to Bellingham to do a secret opening spot for its pals Mudhoney, which is playing in the sizable gymnasium. The crowd goes insane when Nirvana saunters onstage and plugs in. The band barrages the audience with a string of old songs-some off its first-ever demo tape, a few of which will soon be released on a DGC album called Incesticide that will also feature live BBC recordings. Though the audience has never heard the songs before, the entire stage-front is a whirlpool mosh pit, and the stage is covered with four or five single shoes, T-shirts, baseball caps, even a dead pigeon. Courtney Love, Cobain's wife and lead singer for Hole, is standing on the side of the stage, well out of danger. She stands out as a black-velvet and perodide-haired beacon, her eyes focused intently on her husband.

"Most of these songs are so old," she says with a giggle, "that Kurt can't even remember with words! He's just standing there going, 'blah blah blah.'"

 No one in the crowd seems to notice. The set ends when Mudhoney bassist Matt Lukin brings two kids, no more than eight years old, onto the stage. Novoselic relinquishes his bass to one of them, who looks simultaneously delighted and completely terrified. He bangs away at it, his left arm raised in a metal salute. As Cobain and Lukin put Cobain's guitar around the other kid's shoulders and cameras click away, the crowd begins chanting, "Smash it! Smash it!" so after a moment's hesitation, the kid with the bass gleefully complies. It's a moment he'll never forget, but probably won't realize the significance of until years later. Eight years old, and he's done something millions of fans and aspiring musicians would kill to do-jam with Nirvana in front of thousands of people.

Later on backstage, everyone's enjoying a good laugh over the tots' brush with fame. Grohl is shoving slices of deli-tray meat into football players' lockers, while Novoselic politely chats with two fans, explaining why he doesn't want to give autographs. It's about as far from a star-studded, trendy backstage scene as you can get, and that's part of the beauty of Nirvana. It made it the old-fashioned way-with virtually no record-company hype, through word-of-mouth street talk, on its own.

"I've never seen anything like it," says Mark Kates, Geffen's director of alternative music. 

"It was an amazing thing, unbelievable to be part of. No one even anticipated what happened." He thinks a moment, and then rephrases: 

"Anyone who thought that a thing like this could even happen was full of shit."

"It's great," enthuses L7's Jennifer Finch. "It's about time we can walk into a 7-Eleven and hear something cool. It's about time we don't have to listen to crap on the radio anymore. And we're happy for their success because now Nirvana has made it possible for bands like us to have constant bags under our eyes from all the hectic touring. We love them for that."

"I went home, went to bed, and suddenly they were No. 1," says Rodney Bingenheimer, a DJ at KROQ in Los Angeles and an early Nirvana supporter. "Now, all the bands that were hairdo metal bands have Maynard G. Krebs goatees, flat hair, and flannel shirts, all because of Nirvana."

As with all situations of an underground band or artist coming up with an across-the-board crowd-pleaser, a backlash seems inevitable. Hip kids are already dissing the entire grunge scene, snickering about sellouts. Record companies are in a feeding frenzy for the next Nirvana. The pressure is on.

"Everything happened so quickly," says Grohl. "I don't think anyone knows what's gonna happen next."

"Everytime somebody says the word 'Seattle,' you have to say 'Nirvana.' People are sick of us," sighs Novoselic. "More people probably hate us in Seattle than anywhere else in the country."

Through Novoselic still tools around Seattle in his battered Volkswagen van, and the band still practices in a weathered, unfinished warehouse space where, until recently, squatters were hydroponically growing marijuana in the basement, Nirvana can feel its own fame breathing down its neck. Though Grohl still dresses like an outdoorsy ragamuffin-hunting caps and saggy-assed long johns-he admits to giving Madonna prank calls from Europe. Now, that's budding rock star decadence at its finest.

"It's not that great being on MTV 20 times a day," Cobain says, not in a bratty way, but earnestly, "It's great for record sales, but I wish there was some kind of contract you could draw up where there was only a certain amount of time they could play you in a week."

"And when people write about you, everything gets screwed up," Novoselic says.

"I don't believe anything that's written about anyone anymore," Grohl adds. "You just have to read it and form your own perspective."

"It's amazing the shit people can get away with," Cobain says. "I don't understand. If I had known about all this crap, I would've thought twice about putting myself in the public eye so much. I had no idea people could abuse you so much.

"I don't even care about the band as much as I used to. I know that sounds shitty, but the band used to be the only thing that was important to me in my life, and now, I have a wife and a child. I still love the band, but it isn't the only thing I'm living for."

But the fact remains that for millions of people, Nirvana's music is something that makes a difference, something that takes them higher. Realizing their position, do the guys still manage to have fun?

"Yes!" the trio emphatically exclaims, without even a second thought.
 
  **

If you'd like to find out more about my writing, books of mine that have been published and my  rock'n'roll history, please visit my website:  

http://www.pleasantgehman.com