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Mike Heath

Michael Layne Heath January 6, 2019 San Francisco, CA. 0:00:00 to 1:00:54

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0:00:00

Davis: Today is January 6th, 2019. My name is John Davis. I’m the Performing Arts Metadata Archivist at the University of Maryland. Today, I’m speaking with Michael Heath.

Heath: Shall I introduce myself?

Davis: Yes, please.

Heath: All right. Hello. My name is Michael Layne Heath. I am a writer, poet, musician, citizen journalist, and in a previous lifetime, was a minor character in the ensuing drama of the Washington D.C. alternative community of the ‘70s and ‘80s.

Davis: All right. Well done. So just getting started, you can tell from the first issue of Vintage Violence you have already a pretty deep fascination with , and the kind of rock and roll that wasn’t readily listenable, if you will. I don’t know how much you were hearing...

Heath: Or available. Or accessible.

Davis: Right. So it kind of makes sense to me that something like punk would also wind up on your radar. But can you tell me a bit about how you got into punk?

Heath: Well, I was always an inquisitive kid as far as culture and especially music, and was very much into—thirsty for new experiences aesthetically. You couldn't hear a lot of the stuff that I was interested in, that I had read about in magazines, on the radio in the mid-‘70s, although there was an excellent show on WINX called Heavy Metal Thunder.

Davis: Skip Groff.

Heath: Run by Skip—Skip Nelson...

Davis: Right. [laugh] Mike Heath

Heath: ...aka Groff.

Davis: Mmhmm. [laugh]

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Heath: Future ruler of Yesterday & Today Records and Limp Records. Played the kind of stuff that I wanted to hear, or that I would read about in mags like , Hit Parader. Hit Parader was really such a gateway. And Creem.

In the case of Hit Parader, there was a time where Lisa and Richard Robinson were the editors, and they brought in all these amazing writers like , and even people like then- Wayne-now-, and , to write for them. And Lisa was very much into what was going on in at the time, and was avid and very vocal and literate about what was going on in ’74, ’75, ’76 in New York.

And then Rock Scene was kind of a hipper version of 16 magazine. It was all photos, and you would see, like—they would have these features like, “The Do Laundry” [laugh] or “Debbie and Chris go get a slice of pizza” [laugh] or something like that.

0:03:05

And so that also fed into it. And also in Rock Scene was the first time I read []—I had heard about her a year before in magazine, and they used to have a New York column, and they reviewed a gig that Patti Smith did with Lenny Kaye when it was just her and Lenny called the Rock n’ Rimbaud event at this gay disco called Le Jardin. And the one memory of that, aside from the photos, which were striking—“she read her songs and sang her poems.” [laugh] And so I was—“Hmm. I’m going to keep that...” So I kept that on my radar.

And then I found a copy of Rock Scene the next year, and it had a feature that she did about Television, which was the first time I had ever heard of them. And it had the famous photo of the four of them with Richard Hell with his hair up like this, holding a little portable TV. And they just looked—it just looked so—you know, so different from—even just to look at it looked so different from what I was hearing on the radio, most of what I was hearing on the radio.

And then as far as Creem, I was of course a big fan of Lester [Bangs]’s, and in the spring/summer of ’76, they reprinted Neil Spencer’s first bit of press about the from New Musical Express—NME. And it had photos, and I was reading it, and [Steve Jones] said, “We're not into music. We're into chaos.” And I was saying, “Oh! They cover and Small Faces and ?” And I was, like, “Hmm.” Because I was already a fan of all those bands -- The Stooges, particularly.

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Mike Heath

And then the Ramones also were on my radar from Lisa Robinson’s writing about them in Hit Parader. And there were two consecutive reviews that I remember coming out within, like, a week of each other in D.C. One was Howard Wuelfing writing for some free paper saying, “This music is like a hydrogen bomb dropped on Herman’s Hermits.” [laugh] And then concurrently with that was this guy Richard Harrington [of the Washington Post] who was the—just—uch!—don’t get me started about Richard Harrington! But he also reviewed the Ramones record and he said, “It is empty music for empty minds.” And I said, “Oh! [snaps fingers] I’ve got to go out and get it now!” [laugh] And I did.

I didn’t really get it at first, but I appreciated it. And in fact, one of my oldest friends—we were in a high school band together, and we still see each other when I’m back East—a guy named Sam Biskin. Amazing guitar player, and is a guitar teacher in Frederick, Maryland, now.

0:06:11

We were in high school together. It was my senior year. I loaned him a copy of the first Ramones on a Friday, and then the following Monday, we came into class, he handed it back to me, and his first words were, “It’s great, but where are the guitar solos?” [laugh]

Davis: [laugh]

Heath: So I was already hip to all of that, and then started college, University of Maryland at College Park, Fall of ’76, and discovered in the little shop that they have in the student union, a newsstand, where they had two-week-old copies of . And I’m trying to think—yeah. The first issue actually I saw of Melody Maker there was the famous cover of the Pistols caught in a fistfight onstage [laugh] or caught in a fistfight in the audience at the Nashville Rooms in . And it was, “Oh, those guys. Hmm. Let me check this out.”

And then a later issue reviewed the 100 Club Punk Festival in London. Caroline Coon was very, very much into that scene and very articulate about it and made it sound really, really fascinating and attractive. And she was also writing that it’s not just music; it’s also fashion. Or anti-fashion in the case of, you know, Malcolm and Vivienne and and the guy who ran Boy [John Krivine].

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But then there was also , in particular Sniffin’ Glue. And about an issue or two after that, I started picking them up, and I also found them in a record store—they were also two weeks old— called Aura Sounde, right on Route 1, there in College Park.

Davis: Orr [sic] Sound?

Heath: Two words—A-U-R-A, -S-O-U-N-D-E. [laugh] And they had a lot of—plus, it was great. They also had, like—they would have like import records. And the record co-op at the University of Maryland was also amazing for their selection of import at the time.

Davis: And that was in the [ Stamp Student] Union?

Heath: Yeah, basement of the Student Union. So anyway, at either Aura Sounde or the Student Union newsstand, I picked up a copy of Melody Maker. And they used to have a regular feature called “Eight Days a Week,” where they’d have a particular person from the music—either from the biz itself or as an artist, recount eight days in their life, journal style.

0:09:10

Ian Dury did one. The great poet Ivor Cutler did one. Derek Taylor, the Beatles’ PR guy. . But then I picked up this one issue—I would find all that out later—but this one particular issue they had featured Mark Perry—Mark P., from Sniffin’ Glue. And I read it, and it just sounded—again, it was very fascinating to me.

And I had done a music column for my high school paper—Paint Branch High School in Burtonsville, Maryland—when I was a kid, and reviewed a lot of out-there stuff, at least for then. I reviewed the first album, Dictators, , things like that. It was called RPM—very original title. [laugh] And so I had kind of chops as far as [being] a writer, and as far as covering music. And so reading about Sniffin’ Glue inspired me. You were going to ask something?

Davis: Were you able to obtain copies of Sniffin’ Glue?

Heath: Not until—I had a friend—well, I wanted to play music, too, around this time, and I put a classified ad—WGTB used to run a classified ad thing, like, twice a day, whether it was for getting rides in or out of D.C. or also musicians looking for each other. And this guy named Jeff Zang answered it. He was about my age, and we started hanging out. I’d come over to his place. And he was

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Mike Heath

subscribing to mags like Bomp!—’s Bomp!, may he rest in peace. And also a magazine that I had heard about from listening to Steve Lorber’s Mystic Eyes show on GTB, which was pretty much the first place I heard a lot of what was coming out of the American underground, whether it was New York or , with bands like , or London.

[Lorber] would refer from time to time to a magazine called Trouser Press. And Jeff subscribed to Trouser Press, and he would loan me copies of both that and Bomp! And so I was getting really into it. But I didn’t actually pick up an issue of Sniffin’ Glue until I discovered in, like, Spring ’77 when I first started VV that Bomp! was carrying—they had a record store, and they were carrying all these British fanzines, including Sniffin’ Glue.

0:12:08

And I remember I got the issue number three with Eddie and the Hot Rods on the cover, Barrie Masters going [makes a face]— [laugh] You know?

Davis: Right, exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

Heath: And in fact I have—over on the shelf there, I have the bound—the book version of it...

Davis: Right.

Heath: ...which was great.

Davis: Do you still have the original ?

Heath: No. But I’ve got that, and that’s good enough. [laugh] When you get to a certain age, although I do collect a lot of stuff even now, you're not—I mean, when I was working in record stores in the ‘80s, I had three orange crates like yea high stacked up on themselves of albums and 45s, and I don’t have any of that [now]. But that’s all right.

Davis: [laugh] Yeah. You ordered the zines from Bomp! or did you actually...

Heath: Yeah.

Davis: ...go? OK.

Heath: Yeah. But then later on, Hit and Run Records opened, with Skip Groff and Al Ercolani. And then Skip split off into Yesterday &

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Today and was doing a fanzine, and he actually reprinted some of my early...

Davis: Right. So there’s Hit and Run fanzine with Slickee Boys on the cover, which you—your name is in...

Heath: Yeah.

Davis: Is that just before Vintage Violence, or...?

Heath: No, actually that was singles reviews that they wanted to reprint for the zine.

Davis: OK.

[audio cuts out]

Heath: Steve Lorber was really connected with [The Slickee Boys], and that’s where I first heard them, and saw them at a little club. I think it was called My Mother’s Place? Or My Father’s Place? Just outside Langley Park, Maryland. And they were playing ‘60s British and American garage covers and things, and stuff like “What A Boy Can’t Do” by the Hangmen. Local band.

I thought they were great, and I started hanging out with them. I would visit Kim Kane at his place in Bethesda. And he actually was way much more ahead of the curve or hip to things than I was at the time, and was getting all these zines. And he had issues of Punk—John Holmstrom’s Punk. And I think he was also getting Sniffin’ Glue, too. And I would go over to his house after school some afternoons, and he would play me all this latest stuff.

But anyway, as far as Sniffin’ Glue, I was again inspired and intrigued by Mark Perry, just this guy who was a bank clerk, who was a total music fan, not seeing what he was listening to and what he was into represented in—or represented as vividly or as passionately as he felt it in the mainstream music press, or not as much.

0:15:10

And the story is he went into his local record shop and he was into zines as well, and said, “Why isn’t there a punk—are there any punk zines besides...?” I think they were already importing Punk at the time—Punk magazine. And the guy behind the counter kind of half facetiously said, “No, why don’t you do one?” [laugh] So he literally got out his little kiddie typewriter, and typed out—he had

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Mike Heath

just seen the Ramones’ first gig in London, and knocked out the first issue of Sniffin’ Glue. And the ball went rolling from there.

Davis: Which is like, what? July ’76 is that show, and then...?

Heath: Yeah, that’s right.

Davis: So within a year, you were already doing your zine, even. It was that quick.

Heath: Yeah. And again, I hadn’t seen [Sniffin' Glue], but I had seen Bomp! I had seen Trouser Press. He also got New York Rocker— Kim did—which was pretty fascinating. And so just all this was building up internally, and what I had read of [Mark P.'s] stuff, or at least this one Melody Maker piece that he did, he didn’t seem any better or worse a writer than I was, as far as that thing.

And so I got the idea to write a piece, kind of an overview of what was going on in the punk scene. Because [The Damned’s] “New Rose” had come out by then. [The Sex Pistols’] “Anarchy” [“In The UK”] had come out by then. All this stuff getting played on Steve Lorber’s show. And I had heard early Pere Ubu stuff, and [Television’s] “Little Johnny Jewel” and that, and of course the Slickee Boys. And so I just got it into my head to write up like an overview of what was going on in London.

And I took it to The Diamondback, which was the University of Maryland paper, and they turned it down. And then I took it to— they had a really great monthly, kind of, art supplement they would do called Argus, that also covered more out-there kind of stuff. And I figured, well, if—they were the alternative monthly thing. And so I said, “Well, maybe they'll want to run it.” And they turned it down. I think these [Argus] guys said, “Oh, nobody’s going to care about this stuff in six months.” [laugh]

0:18:02

And so from the of Mark Perry and all this other stuff I was doing, I said, “I’ll do it myself.” And so, yeah, found the local campus bookstore that actually I can’t remember the name of, which is on Route 1, got this pack of mimeograph paper, and as the great writer Dorothy Allison once said—“Do you know what a mimeograph machine is?” [laugh]

Davis: [laugh]

Heath: [laugh] And with my trusty electric typewriter, just knocked out all this stuff that became the first issue of Vintage Violence. But I was

8 Mike Heath

also—I wasn’t alone. This is something I want to get on record. I wasn’t necessarily alone with regards to being a local guy doing a fanzine.

There was a guy named Norm DeValliere from Northern Virginia who did a zine called It’s Only A Movie that was quite excellent and covered a lot of the early punk stuff. But it was a bit more arty in a British kind of—the weirder prog rock stuff like Henry Cow, . And in fact, I still have a letter from him that has a photo of , the singer from Slapp Happy, on the front of it. And he was writing about all that kind of stuff. And he did it—he was a bit more savvy as far as graphics and whatnot, than I was. But did it really nicely. So between that and what was going on in London—yeah.

So I knocked out the first Vintage Violence. I called it that because at the time, I was a—and still am—a huge fan. And snuck into one of the faculty offices that had a mimeograph machine and ran off about 50, 60 copies, and sent them to Greg Shaw and got them into stores and was handing them out at gigs, or selling them at gigs.

And that went on for about—I did—let’s see, first was March ’77, and then there was the second issue, which was all about Iggy’s comeback with The Idiot, where I started getting other people involved writing. And then I left home in the summer of ’77, went to for about six weeks in July/August ’77, saw the Ramones for the first time.

0:21:10

Went to Bomp Records in—Reseda? Saw the first few issues of Slash. There was an excellent moment or occurrence the week that the Ramones played there, August ’77 at the Whisky, where they were scheduled to play a free gig in a parking lot of a shopping mall in—again, I’m thinking it’s Reseda. Somewhere in the Valley. But unfortunately, the weekend before, the Saturday before, there was a TV show that was on when Saturday Night Live wasn’t on, on NBC, at 11:30, called Weekend. And they ran a feature piece about the British punk scene, and apparently the people who ran the mall [laugh] saw that, so they cancelled the gig. [laugh]

But a lot of—unfortunately, a lot of people didn’t know that, and so a lot of people showed up in the parking lot, and the Ramones also showed up [laugh], and were signing autographs and signing

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Mike Heath

albums, and things like that. And that was a pretty brilliant moment.

Davis: And then you came back.

Heath: So I came back, put out a third issue. Well, there was going to be a third issue before I split for L.A., but I never got around to doing it, so I just skipped that, went to number four, which came out in Christmas ’77.

Davis: Oh wow. No wonder I’ve never seen issue three.

Heath: Yeah.

Davis: [laugh]

Heath: Yeah, the great lost issue. And also around this time, through the Slickee Boys and through the Steve Lorber connection and hanging out with Kim Kane, got familiar with these guys in a band called The Gizmos, who were very funny. They were all like fanzine writers or people who were hanging out with these guys. This guy Kenne Highland. A guy named Eddie Flowers. Highland was from Upstate New York. Eddie Flowers was from Alabama.

But there was this whole, I guess, fanzine network that was around even before I was aware of it, and [the Gizmos] ended up in Bloomington, Indiana [laugh] and recorded an EP. And Lorber played the hell out of it. Kim Kane ended up striking up a friendship with Kenne Highland. And at the time, Highland was in the Marines—had joined the Marines, and was stationed at Quantico in Virginia.

0:24:03

And so—[laugh]—Kim sought him out and they ended up palling around, and I ended up through Kim met Kenne, and we jammed a bit. Me and my friend Jeff and him, and also with Kim, did this really shambolic gig at a pub at I think American University, which was our equivalent [laugh], in retrospect, of the infamous Siouxsie and the Banshees debut at the 100 Club Punk Festival. We had like a two-hour rehearsal, just ran through a bunch of songs, got out there and made a horrific noise [laugh].

We were on a bill with this band called The Look, which was kind of an art punk band with Howard Wuelfing on bass and the future guitar player of the Urban Verbs, Robert Goldstein. And Chris Thompson, who was a DJ at GTB and also was in Tiny Desk Unit

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later on. And [we] made this horrific noise, and that was it. We were called All-Stars [laugh].

So through that connection—I’m trying to remember—oh! What happened was Kenne Highland ended up bringing some fanzine pen pals down from I think Pennsylvania. A guy named Solomon Gruberger, who did a mag called O. Rex, and some other people. And they managed to get a gig together, I think maybe on the Quantico base [laugh], in this auditorium. And these other people who were there had read—they had somehow gotten copies of Vintage Violence and were aware of it, from record stores or whatever. And that turned out to be Rob Kennedy and his lady, Caki Kallas.

And they approached me, and we got to talking and started, you know, kind of corresponding and hanging out, calling each other on the phone. And they were slightly older than me, or at least Rob was, by a couple years, but they had so much more—had much older, richer experience than I did at the time, being this schmucky suburban kid from Burtonsville, Maryland. Rob was from New York. He had seen The Stooges at the World’s Fair in ’69. I think he used to, like, hang around with these guys who were part of this kind of radical street gang called The Motherfuckers in New York.

0:27:06

But they were both really savvy, really worldly, and we - it was a good relationship. And they saw something in what I was doing with the mag and said, “We’d really like to contribute.” So that became the team that did the last two issues of Vintage Violence. And they brought so much experience to the table, to the page. Rob being a really good writer—great writer—and Caki with her artistic comic skill, cartoon skills and whatnot.

Davis: Yeah. I might have even asked you about her, because the lettering--the hand-lettering that’s in, at least, the last issue really sort of stood out to me as striking. And I think I maybe had asked you about who did that.

Heath: That was Caki. But we were—there was a period where, yeah, we were on fire, just passionate about what was coming over from England and coming up from New York and out of D.C., and Cleveland, San Francisco, L.A. And they were a bit more—they were a bit more financially together than I was at the time, [laugh] and so they would get all this stuff. I would go over to their place and they would play me—“Oh, listen to this new Dangerhouse

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Mike Heath

record. Listen to ‘Final Solution’ by Pere Ubu. Listen to the Avengers.”

And the process of doing the mag when we were together would be...generally we would sit around their table in their flat in downtown Northwest D.C. off Dupont Circle, and we had an electronic typewriter, and Caki had her drawing board, and we would literally—just like typing this stuff out with, you know, whatever record we were reviewing blaring, and we would just— “first thought, best thought” kind of thing. And then hand it over, and she’d do her thing on top of it. Endless amounts of coffee. [laugh]

At the time, there were three mags that I think, if you look at those two issues, it really comes through what mags we were inspired by. In particular of course Sniffin’ Glue, just for the really spontaneous prose and criticism and critique, but then also Punk magazine for, obviously, Holmstrom’s genius cartooning, and the way it looked.

0:30:10

But then also they turned me on to Search and Destroy from here [San Francisco]. And in fact [the cover of] the fifth issue is this collage, and it’s got a photo of Iggy that we actually [laugh] copped from an interview in Search and Destroy. [laugh] But it was all, it was just—just bam bam bam. We got a name. And in fact that name got us eventually banned from the Atlantis Club [laugh] in D.C. [laugh]

Davis: What happened?

Heath: What happened was the guys who ran the Atlantis club were kind of—opportunists. There were so few places to play then. There was The Keg near Georgetown where the Slickee Boys and the Razz and The Look, and before that, there was a group called Overkill which this guy Keith Campbell, who later went on to be in the D.Ceats with Martha Hull, was in, which was sort of pre- punk but really—very much ahead of their time, very much of it at the same time.

Davis: [laugh]

Heath: And that was about it, unless you went up to Baltimore Civic Center like Rob and I did, and saw Iggy on the Lust for Life tour with the Ramones opening.

Davis: Wow.

12 Mike Heath

Heath: And so this guy named Paul Parsons, who was a restaurant owner, decided to open up his restaurant, the Atlantis, on 930 F Street, to live music. And he ran afoul—or he was—the business practices were not particularly above board, and he was ripping bands off for various reasons or infractions. And it came to a head when came to town for the first time, and he said, “These are unhealthy people” [laugh] after they played, and something happened, and he ended up shorting them for what they were supposed to be paid.

And we wrote about it in Vintage Violence, and the word got out, and I got eighty-sixed from there at a and the Mumps show. And then shortly thereafter, Rob Kennedy actually was— they had a security guy who actually put him in handcuffs and booted him out the door.

0:33:00

And so word got around just from the jungle telegraph of the underground rock scene at the time, and then also from our reportage in Vintage Violence, which started a boycott of the Atlantis, and they ended up closing, and then the people who took over were the 9:30 Club people. So, for that—we were enthusiasts, but also we had a conscience of a sort.

Davis: So the last issue was, what? 1978?

Heath: Yeah.

Davis: What led it to stop?

Heath: It just kind of—there was no major argument or—it just kind of ran its course, really, much in the way that Sniffin’ Glue ran its course. After 12 issues, Mark wanted to go off and do Alternative TV and pursue that. And in a similar way, I guess Rob was getting more involved with his music with Da Chumps and then later the Fair brothers—Half Jap. Him and Ricky Dreyfuss, who was a sax player in Da Chumps, ended up working with them.

Davis: Right.

Heath: And we just kind of—it was just kind of just a mutual drifting apart, although we've kept in touch over the years. And in fact, after I was interviewed for Mark Anderson’s book, Dance of Days, I [thought], you know, I don’t have any of my old copies of the mag! [laugh] And so I reached out to this person, Dave Arnson from the Insect Surfers, and then somehow or another I got in

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touch with Rob, who lives in Hawaii now, and they were able to get the stuff back to me.

Davis: So you do have one of each at least, at this point?

Heath: Yeah. Oh, and then also, there is a punk collection that this guy Johan Kugelberg put together that is at Dartmouth, I think?

Davis: Cornell. Cornell, or it’s at Dartmouth?

Heath: Oh, OK. Is it Cornell?

Davis: I think there’s something at Cornell.

Heath: OK, yeah. That’s—and then through that, I was able to get the one hole filled, which was the second issue.

Davis: Oh, right. Which you sent me...

Heath: ...the PDF of.

Davis: Oh, cool.

Heath: Yeah.

Davis: When you would put out a new issue, typically how many copies would you make?

Heath: Started out with maybe 50, 60? And then once we got a little bit more—again, a bit more savvy, a bit more sophisticated, Rob and Caki found an offset printing place in the neighborhood they lived in, and they were able to do halftones and offset, and we were able to finally put in proper photographs and artwork [laugh] and whatnot.

0:36:13

And that was very exciting. That was a step up. I think at the peak, maybe a couple hundred? Two or three hundred?

Davis: And you had mentioned that you would send it out to some stores, and some other zines?

Heath: I would send it to local stores.

Davis: But yeah, locally, where would you sell it?

Heath: Aura Sounde, Yesterday & Today. I mean, I had a friend at Kemp Mill in Georgetown that would sell it. Maybe—oh! Commander

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Salamander which was this boutique, this kind of new wavey boutique in Georgetown where I met . [laugh]

Davis: Wow. Right, that was—I feel like I saw the ad for that when he appeared. It was like December 1980 or something? Is that right?

Heath: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was working as a payroll courier in the financial district, and I had a company car, and found out [Warhol] was going to be making this appearance. And I had a copy of his philosophy book [The Philosophy Of Andy Warhol: From A To B And Back Again], so I kind of took a long lunch break, went over to Commander Salamander. And it was all these guys—all these, like, big security guys with briefcases handcuffed to their wrists.

And Bob Colacello who was the editor of Interview was there, and I was a big fan—that was another mag I was a big fan of, because of Glenn O’Brien’s Beat column, which was informing a lot of what we were doing in the latter stages of Vintage Violence with writing about the No Wave scene, the Contortions, and bands like that.

Da Chumps opened for [The Contortions], at d.c. Space, most infamously. I think the Contortions did, like, a 20-minute set and James kind of fucked off, and his girlfriend slash manager, Anya Phillips, got into a tussle with Mary Levey, who started The Infiltrator, which I later wrote for, and almost knocked her down the stairs, from the second floor.

And I went up to Bob Colacello and I said, “As long as you keep Glenn O’Brien writing for you, I’ll keep buying the mag.” And then got to meet [Warhol]—got up to the front of the line, and Andy looks up—“Oh, hi! Who are you? What’s your name?” I said, “Mike.” And he looked at me for just a second, then looked down at the book, with a big black magic marker to sign it— “Michael.” [laugh]

0:39:00

So that was—yeah. That was another place I believe it was sold at. And maybe Penguin Feather in Virginia? The chain there might have carried it. But mostly it was those areas, and mail order.

And in fact, one of the reasons that Barbara Rice ended up getting me on board at Truly Needy was because she had gotten the last issue of Vintage Violence, and at the front of it had a bit asking for people to write for us, to contribute. And I totally ripped off this bit from Creem magazine basically saying, “Nobody who writes for this has anything you don’t.” [laugh] So she said later on, when she

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brought me on board at the staff at Truly Needy, she said, “That was one of the things that inspired me and Bill to start our mag.”

Davis: Cool. So, when you finished with Vintage Violence, one still sees your byline in a number of local zines.

Heath: Yeah, the Infiltrator. The Infiltrator was probably the most immediate. That was—Mary, god bless her, pretty much picked up the ball that we dropped and ran big time with it. Yeah. And it was a tabloid. It had great graphics, a lot of them done by Michael Reidy from the Razz. Great writers. It was just brilliant. And I unfortunately don’t have any copies of that. In fact, I was looking on eBay, and I think some of the issues are selling for 100 bucks a pop! [laugh] You know?

Davis: We've put them all online, so...

Heath: Oh, great!

Davis: ...if you ever need to view them. They’re waiting online.

Heath: All right! Great! Well, I will very well take you up on that. There was that. There was Xyra Harper’s Capitol Crisis, which covered the hardcore scene that came out [of DC]. Then later on, again Truly Needy—I contributed to that. There was a one-off called Now What? that I had some stuff in. WDC Period was another— Gordon Ornelas, or Gordon Gordon, as he was known. Maybe Thrillseeker? And I just got into other things, and just making a living, kind of left writing for a while, and then various events happened and I ended up moving here.

Davis: Did you stay as interested in the music scene during your years there?

Heath: Oh yeah, I was working at record stores the whole time, from ’82 on to ’92. The Record and Tape Exchange, Route 1 College Park.

0:42:02

Then Vinyl Ink run by George Gelestino, may he rest in peace. And then [laugh], most awfully, a branch of Olsson’s Books and Records in Bethesda, which was kind of my nadir. And maybe it’s just the age difference, and I really—you know, a lot of respect for MacKaye and the Dischord crew, but a lot of that Calvinist—kind of unspoken passive aggressive Calvinist doctrine really just kind of rubbed me the wrong way.

16 Mike Heath

Although there—at the same time, very appreciative of the support that they got from people like Skip Groff, and also the Slickee Boys. I mean, they—the Slickee Boys got Minor Threat their first gig, SOA their first gig, the Bad Brains their first gigs. And I’ll never forget—I think it was either the Bad Brains or Minor Threat did a gig with the Slickee Boys at d.c. space in the second floor upstairs performance space. And I’ll never forget it, because it was just—it was oh, about the size of this flat, and it had a wooden floor. And if people got really into it, you could feel the floor bouncing under your feet [laugh]. So you're like of two minds. You're thinking, “God, boy, these guys—Minor Threat are excellent. Boy, I hope the floor holds out.” [laugh] You know?

So but yeah, there has been that mutual respect, which is great. But yeah, I guess it’s just age difference, even though it was two or three [years'] age difference. Some of it I got; some I didn’t. But I still keep in touch with a lot of people from the early punk scene up until now. This guy Tom Berard, in particular, is a great, great, great guy.

Davis: I didn’t realize you stuck around D.C. for as long as you did. So into the early ‘90s you said, right?

Heath: Yeah. I moved here February ’92.

Davis: And you mentioned some of the zines, mainly ones you had written for. During the late ‘80s and into the early ‘90s, were there any zines that you remember reading or enjoying?

Heath: Yeah! Jim Saah’s Uno Mas, which is great.

Davis: It is. Yeah.

Heath: I don’t think Thrillseeker was going on back then.

Davis: No, that one was fairly...

Heath: There was one called Zone V? It was a photo...

Davis: That was Jim’s zine that he...

Heath: A photo mag.

Davis: Yeah. The same guy who did Uno Mas did Zone V and that was I think more in like the hardcore era, like the ’82, ’83...

Heath: Right.

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Mike Heath

Davis: ...and that one—yeah, that one’s great. It has some really good interviews in it, too.

0:45:00

Heath: Yeah. His stuff, especially back then, reminds me of this guy, Glen Friedman...

Davis: Yeah, for sure.

Heath: ...who covers, like, the punk scene in L.A. and the skateboard scene. Does a really great blog called What The Fuck Have You Done? [laugh] after the Minor Threat [song “In My Eyes”]...

Davis: Yeah, he’s great.

Heath: He’s good. He’s good. Real good. And...yeah. So beyond that, no, I wasn’t really keeping up with that sort of thing.

Davis: And the music as well? From the punk scene, by the late ‘80s, was that something you just kind of drifted from?

Heath: Yeah, yeah. I was always a bit more—I mean, after I finished Vintage Violence, I was definitely much more inspired by what was going on in the post-punk scene, and ended up palling around with these guys who ran a label called Random Radar Records, who were doing progressive rock stuff. The main band was a band called The Muffins, who were very much inspired by British bands like Henry Cow and , and [inaudible] The Residents and other stuff like that.

And in fact, I just wrote a piece—their drummer, Paul Sears, just did a memoir that has come out [Angels And Demons That Play, published by StairwayPress.com], and he asked all these different people who were around on the scene at the time to contribute their memories of it, including myself, which I was very honored by.

Davis: Right. So I know you're still writing. You still write about music.

Heath: Yep. I’ve done eight poetry chapbooks for a guy in San Antonio named Bill Shute who also got his start as a fanzine writer. [He] wrote for this guy Chris Stigliano’s mag, BLACK TO COMM; [Chris] runs a blog called BLOG TO COMM now. And then Bill, for the last 12 years [ran]—he’s actually winding it down, has started winding it down—a publishing house called Kendra Steiner Editions. And he had read my stuff in Vintage Violence and Truly Needy, and I started putting out my own poetry chapbooks, and somehow or other he found out about me and got in touch and said,

18 Mike Heath

“Would you like to do something for [Kendra Steiner]?” And then I ended up doing six other chapbooks for him. The last one was a—I contributed to a collection of poems in honor of .

Davis: Right.

Heath: Which was an honor. And then have also been writing for online zines. For a long time, there was a British online zine called Tangents.

0:48:02

Wrote for them. Wrote for Perfect Sound Forever. As far as hard copy stuff, [I have] written for a mag in L.A. called Record Collector News. Even got a cover story [laugh] on there. And then also have written for fanzines—my partner and I are very much into science fiction and fantasy stuff, and I do a blog for this guy who’s sort of the Tolkien of America, a guy named Tad Williams—do a blog called The Groovers’ Grotto for him. And then also have done a local blog relating to local music, or music about San Francisco, and about the history therein, called The San Francisco Nobody Sings. And then again, I’ve got this—my first proper book coming out within the month.

Davis: Yeah. Tell me a little bit more about that.

Heath: Well, it’s another fact of just...I’ve always been a fan and I’ve always been a bit of a packrat, and always a fan of Lou Reed, and discovered this microfilm collection of underground newspapers, alternative newspapers, spanning from 1963 to 1985, called The Underground Newspaper Microfilm Collection that I discovered at the University of Maryland.

Because I was looking at old issues of mags like Creem, and a really great Boston mag that a lot of people who would also contribute to mags like Creem wrote for, called Fusion—in fact, Lou Reed, after he had retired, had split from the Velvets, would contribute poems and prose to it. And I just started looking for it, and I was looking for stuff relating to Lou, I guess, and discovered all these local papers, newspapers and magazines that had interviewed him. And I would print the stuff out, and I just had this whole cache of them for years and years.

And then one day, I was in Green Apple Books, one of the great independent bookstores [in San Francisco], second only to City Lights, and they have this little offshoot shop. There’s the main bookstore, and then two doors down, there’s what’s called the Annex, and you go in there, and there’s this area of markdown

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Mike Heath

books, remaindered books, overstock. And they had this book, a collection of interviews with , that I hadn’t seen before. And I was thumbing through it, and thinking, “Oh, I haven't seen this one before! Oh! They printed this Robert Hilburn thing.” That kind of thing.

0:51:00

But I’m also thinking, “God! Just what the world needs! Another damn book about Bob Dylan.” And I thought, “Nobody has ever done a book...”—and he has certainly been a worthy interview subject, and as articulate and captivating an interview subject, whether he was in a good or bad mood, Lou Reed. And the light bulb went off.

And my oldest friend here, or one of my other oldest friends, [is] a guy named Pat Thomas, who’s a musician and a writer and does a lot of archival music stuff these days—reissues—does a lot of stuff for a label called Light in the Attic, and has written books. He did a book about the history of the relationship between music and the Black Power movement of the ‘60s called Listen, Whitey! and then also did a biography of Jerry Rubin called Did It!

So he was connected with publishing. He has always been very, very supportive of my writing, and also has had a kind of ongoing, ever-shifting musical collective called Mushroom that has played here off and on for years, and I would get up and sing and do like a little poetry and thing with them. And they [would] have people like Ralph Carney, may he rest in peace, sitting [in] with him, or Henry Kaiser, great guitarist.

And so he was supportive, always been, and I just got the idea of, “What do you think of—I’d like to maybe do a book about a collection of Lou Reed interviews.” He said, “Well, do me a proposal.” So I sat down, maybe took an afternoon. I had all the material there. [laugh] It’s up in this little sheaf up there [laugh], in fact. Knocked out a proposal in like a day, sent it to him, and he flipped over it, and that began about a year and a half process of getting it around to publishers. Finally, one bit—an L.A. publisher called Hat & Beard Press—and it has taken another year and a half through various travails, but it’s coming out, as far as I know, within the month.

Davis: Great.

Heath: It’s called My Week Beats Your Year.

Davis: Yes.

20 Mike Heath

Heath: And I have a flyer for it I’ll give you.

Davis: Great. The last question that I have, that I can think of, is do you— chronologically jumping around, do you remember the Punk Art exhibit in Washington D.C. in 1978?

Heath: Yes! Oh, yes! [laugh]

Davis: What can you tell me about it?

Heath: I thought it was—we did a spread, a page spread about it in the last issue of Vintage Violence. They had a punk fashion show with people all dressed up in, like—women in loincloths and with fingernails out to here.

0:54:07

And this one grossly overweight guy who had—I’ll never forget— he was like balding and a big beard, and he had this snake—like a rubber snake stuck into either nostril [laugh], either end of it stuck into his nostrils, [laugh] walking around in this loincloth, [laugh] spitting at people.

I was mostly there because there was going to be music, and we sold the zine there. I gave a copy—sold a copy to John Holmstrom, who was down from New York with Legs McNeil. This was just after this fracas between Wayne-and-now-Jayne County and Handsome Dick Manitoba of . And the lead article was a review of Wayne County & the Electric Chairs' album, which is still great. And that was the lead article, and John Holmstrom opened it up and took one look at it and went [makes a disapproving face]—[laugh].

Davis: [laugh]

Heath: He was like—[growling]. But he thumbed through it. And actually, we did get it out to some other cool people. I would hand it out to—my favorite moment was—and I’ll get back to it in a sec—just sidetrack, or sidebar—was seeing Patti Smith at the Warner Theatre in summer of ’78, and our last [issue]—I managed to actually get into the sound check for that, which was great, and [I] was waiting in the alleyway out behind the Warner Theatre, and this limo pulls up. is the first one to get out, stumbles out of the limo [laugh]. then gets out, dressed [in] this kind of pastel outfit that [Mick] Jagger was wearing on the tour that year [laugh]— balloon pants and all yellow and pastel. And then Lenny Kaye. And [I] got in for the sound check. Patti lost her voice halfway through the night, but they—it

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Mike Heath

was still a great night. And I got backstage, me and some friends I had gone to the show with, and got copies to Lenny Kaye.

Davis: Ah!

Heath: And he wrote it up. He had a column in Rock Scene called 'Doc Rock', where he was actually—people were sending him fanzines, and he would review them and give all their contact info and whatnot, and he wrote a very, very, very kind review of Vintage Violence in there.

0:57:00

He said “Fifty cents and worth it. Every penny.” [laugh] So anyway, back to the Punk Art thing: I went there mainly because there was going to be music, and the two bands that were there were and Shrapnel, which Legs McNeil was managing and was fronted by Dave Wyndorf, who has since gone onto . And then Daniel Rey was playing guitar [in Shrapnel], and he went on to produce the Ramones, worked for them for a number of years.

But it was funny because I got off the bus and I see these guys walking towards the venue and we got to talking and it was like, “Oh, we're the Fleshtones.” And I had read about them in New York Rocker because Miriam Linna, [later] from , was writing for them, and she wrote a rave about them and they sounded really intriguing. And I said, “Oh my god, you're the Fleshtones! Oh, shit!”

So we ended up actually [laugh]—they brought this fifth of Tanqueray, and we ended up getting drunk, totally shitfaced, and were heckling the fashion show [laugh] and calling them, like, “You fuckin’ posers!” You know? [laugh] Me and Peter Zaremba and Keith Streng and Marek, the bass player from then. Oh, that was a fun night.

Davis: Were any of the artists there? Like was there, or Jimmy De Sana, or...?

Heath: Oh! Marcia Resnick was one of the exhibitors. She had a bunch of her photographs up. And I was kind of—she was—she was New York. She was downtown, underground, New York. Oooh! [makes scared face] [laugh] So I just introduced myself, and maybe I gave her a copy of the mag. But I did meet John Holmstrom and Legs McNeil and talked to the guys in Shrapnel for a bit. It was [exhale] quite a night. [laugh]

22 Mike Heath

Davis: But it felt sort of corny?

Heath: Yeah, yeah. I thought—yeah. Especially with the fashion show, it just seemed—they were making—you know, more of a—you know, it’s like how, what was it, Macy’s or these places would have punk fashion lines and things like that. And I was just—no, I wasn’t about it.

I mean, I had a—I had this white canvas jacket when I was in college, and at the time I was getting into the music and starting to get the idea for Vintage Violence. I had this white canvas cheapo jacket, and I just took magic marker and wrote all these band names, punk band names, all over it, and would walk around with a cassette player blaring the first Ramones album or The Idiot— things like that. And causing a stir. [laugh]

1:00:06

So the fashion thing—I think the most I got was I tried to dye my hair, and it came out like a really awful shade of—I wanted to dye it like bright red, and it came out looking, like, brown with red highlights kind of thing. So that’s as far as fashion as I ever got into it.

Davis: Well, that’s all I got. Anything else you feel...?

Heath: No, just I’m really—it’s really charming and [pauses] moving that this is still being taken seriously and not for granted, all these years later and … thank you.

Davis: Sure, thank you!

[End of recording]

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