This here is a good old fashioned 'zine: a bunch of cheaply
photocopied pages stuffed with interviews, record reviews, super dark photos and other assorted ramblings, all stapled together and mailed out to friends and
strangers by some driven person just for the hell of it.
In this case the person in charge seems to be one Mr. Joseph K. He starts things off with a rather disturbing introduction called "Words of Wisdom", in which he
details the events that transpired after he was incapacitated for three months by the sudden onset of mysterious "severe nerve damage". In short, he freaked out,
met a very special person named Cyra who helped him through the pain, listened to lots of music, read lots of zines and ultimately decided to do his own once the
pain went away. Whew.
Next up is a brief interview with Alasdair MacLean of The Clientele, a band that Joseph has "nothing but a strong love for." Some of the questions are a little
awkward ("What is wrong with music today, and what/how do you think The Clientele offer the listening public a remedy to this problem?"), but MacLean is a
good sport and he comes off as an interesting guy in a pretty interesting band. I guess that's the point!
For those of you who have always wanted to know just how much cash you'd have to cough up to put out a modest zine of your own, Joseph is kind enough to
include his Kinko's invoice. Total price, including 112 minutes of rental computer time: $40.66. Unfortunately I'm not smart enough to figure out how many issues
he printed for that price...
A few more interviews follow, including a brief chat with Ted Leo, who used to be in Chisel, a post-mortem talk with Gayle Harrison from the defunct Scottish
band Electroscope and a very entertaining couple of pages with Mr. LD Beghtol, who sang on The Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs, is in a band called The Three
Terrors (haha) with Stephin Merritt and Dudley Klute and fronts his own band called Flare. Any interview with the line "Satisfy the sex-starved lonely boys and
overweight TVTs that want you to call them daddy and tell them they're good girls" in it is okay by me!
In general the interviews are earnest and straightforward, and Joseph is clearly more interested in talking to musicians that he admires than he is in racking up
hipster points. That's nice.
Next up are several pages of record reviews. There's a fair mix of mostly alt-rock type music, although it's a little emo-heavy for my taste. But as they take in everyone from Spoon to Sarah Cracknell (Saint Etienne) to Archer Prewitt, these reviews cover some pretty good ground. Joseph is not exactly a punctuation, spelling or
grammar freak, but he does write some pretty entertaining reviews. Take, for instance, this excerpt from his review of The Mercury Program's From the Vapor of
Gasoline (Joseph's punctuation is left intact):
"Imagine, say, if Steve Shelley said, hey Thurston, let s fire Lee and get a percussionist to make softer, more intricate and musically challenging melody lines, and,
hey, while we re add it, let s make Kim shut up with her sucky speak rap thing that used to be cool and innovative, say, 14 years ago, and you have the Mercury
Program."
Heh.
Last up is a longish interview with Travis Morrison, lead singer of The Dismemberment Plan. It's a pretty interesting conversation about the unpredictable things
(both good and bad) that can happen when a band like The Dismemberment Plan gets picked up, mostly ignored and then summarily dropped by a major label
like Interscope. (Editor's Note: Mr. Bellemead, as you might have guessed, is sufficiently detached from the world of indie rock that, if he happens upon a D-Plan-related article, his immediate response is not "Christ, not another one!")
The zine ends with some sincere thanks to the people that helped make Lois Is My Queen and a promise from Joseph to crank out issue number two real soon.
It's a fitting end to a charming project. There's nothing particularly innovative, "edgy" or hip about this zine, but that doesn't seem to be the goal anyway. This is
really just an intimate peek into the life and thoughts of what seems to be a very nice, earnest guy. I like that.
-- Irving Bellemead
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