Zee! Ee! Arr! Oh! Zee! Ee! Arr! Oh!

July 7, 2015 1:40 AM

Ryan Richardson has recently digitised and made available the entire run of Slash, an LA punk magazine, which ran from 1977 to 1980.

Previous digitisation projects from Richardson include:

• Short-lived 70's teen magazine Star (Previously)
• A complete archive of Rock Scene magazine (Previously)
• A collection of punk fanzines

(via Dangerousminds)

posted by frimble (11 comments total)

The site is also an attempt to answer some questions that bounce around in my head. Are collections better off inside institutional libraries or in the hands of collectors? Should ancient in-fighting prevent bringing the punk print hey-day to a new generation? Should eggshell walking over copyright issues cock-block oldsters from taking a ride on the wayback machine?

These are good questions. I've been frustrated recently with how little science fiction fandom history is online, when e.g. critical books refer to seventies fanzines talking about feminist sf and you can't get hold of them for love nor money unless you have a proper reference library near you.
posted by MartinWisse at 2:47 AM on July 7, 2015 [1 favorite]

I had fun doing searches for "Punk rock zine" and "Circle Jerks" on www.Pinterest. It allows a kinship with other fans outside the stolid Wikipedia. A great place to experience serendipity.
posted by Narrative_Historian at 3:02 AM on July 7, 2015

Eighteen-year-old me just totally freaked out.
posted by D.C. at 3:54 AM on July 7, 2015 [2 favorites]

Data needs to be free and all, but I can't help wondering if any attempt was made to clear this with the copyright holder(s).
posted by Scram at 5:40 AM on July 7, 2015

I can't wait to take some time to plough through this.
posted by desuetude at 7:24 AM on July 7, 2015

NICE.
posted by town of cats at 7:44 AM on July 7, 2015 [1 favorite]

Data needs to be free and all, but I can't help wondering if any attempt was made to clear this with the copyright holder(s).

I was about to answer that Slash cofounder Claude Bessy died 16 years ago (has it been that long?) and to speculate about whether anyone connected to Slash still worked at Slash Records (once a subsidiary of Universal Music Group!).

Then I saw:

posted by Scram

…and realized that Kim probably had greater insight into the copyright issues surrounding Slash than I do.
posted by pxe2000 at 7:53 AM on July 7, 2015 [2 favorites]

I thought about digitizing my collection of zines from the 1980s and 1990s, but decided against it. I preferred personal zines, and they'd been written and published before the Web was well known. The writers -- myself included -- never imagined they'd be circulated outside of the network of post office boxes. If someone else wants to digitize their own zines that's great, but it wasn't my place to do it.
posted by The corpse in the library at 10:56 AM on July 7, 2015 [1 favorite]

This seems like the sort of thing that should exist as a torrent in order to ease up on bandwidth needs. Its a 1gb zip. I feel like they would have thought of that, though, and want this page to be a landing site for the files.
posted by lownote at 1:24 PM on July 7, 2015

I just watched The Decline of Western Civilization (which is rated to Slash in a couple of ways) the other day because they released in on Blu Ray... and there's a part three in the set, which I guess never got a release until now. Haven't watched it yet, but it's about homeless punks in LA and some bands in the late 90s.

Here it is, if you're interested.

Thanks for the post... I still look though my Flipside mags from time to time. I never read Slash, so I'm looking forward to it.
posted by Huck500 at 4:42 PM on July 7, 2015 [1 favorite]

Jeez. I didn't get to actually look at this until I got home from work. What a trove. Fourteen-year-old me might literally have killed to get her hands on these! Thank you so much for sharing it.
posted by town of cats at 8:51 PM on July 7, 2015 [1 favorite]