Geisha This

Digging through old files, I found this collection of the first six issues, made between 1975 and 1979, of Destroy All Monsters magazine. The cover is proving hard to reproduce, since some of the ink is metallic. My scanner doesn't like it, and my camera is dying (hence not one but two crummy versions).

Each issue mostly contains hectic collages (using comics, ads, photos), newspaper articles about the group, and music reviews (one of which aptly quotes John Cage: "You needn't call it music, if the term offends you"). There is also a smattering of full-page drawings by Niagra (such as the cover image above). The one to the right is my favorite. The magazines are an amazing repository of early reactions to their sound, which didn't always go over well in Detroit Rock City. "Kelley remembers their first such 'gig' as being an assault on Black Sabbath's 'Iron Man' that went on until the plug was pulled, the only resemblance to the original being the repeated recitation of two lines of the songs lyrics accompanied by a deafening wall of tape loops, feedback, and aural pain."

Jim Shaw, Mike Kelley, Niagra, and Cary Loren formed DAM in the early '70s as an "anti-rock band." Niagra played a scratchy violin and sometimes sang off-key, they bought their first guitar and keyboard at K-Mart and used a bunch of broken pedals. They were art students, after all, so experimentation seems mainly to have been the point. This, from the "Manifesto of Ignorance": "We were . . . freaky nerds flying through time in a blur of art and noise. Our music sometimes contained a narrative or storytelling direction that was never explored . . . a sense of gloom, disaster and apocalypse mixed with a dose of anarchy, comedy and absurdity kept us together and were some of the major themes which colored our small scene . . . our alienation and heightened anxiety was a psychotronic view of life we each shared to various degrees. We were creating sounds we wanted to exist but weren't to be found in the slick desolate landscape around us . . ." Gee, sounds a bit like Fort Thunder/Lightning Bolt.