Hey, y’all,

Just letting you know I’m still alive, and i still intend to scan in more old Jet Lags. Real life has a way of getting in between the best laid plans of bloggers and archivists. But, one of these cold days, the scanner will heat up, and we’ll catch up on some of the best issues of the magazine.

In the meantime, circle Jan. 4 on your calendar and show up at Off Broadway. John the Mailman is putting on a celebration of the magazine (and a farewell party to himself, as he wings his way to Romania shortly thereafter). The Aviation Club is reforming just for the event, and Tony Renner’s Learn, Artist is working up a set, as well. I’ll be there, so come on down and say hi.

English Beat fans undoubtedly recognize the inner sleeve of their debut album “I Just Can’t Stop It,” adapted for our cover purposes with this last issue of 1980. We figured it was okay, since they told us we could do it when we interviewed them the preceding month.

Neither John nor I were especially political beings in 1980, though that was the first year I was eligible to vote in a Presidential election. But, we were both somewhat bummed out by the nation’s decision between our 9th and 10th issues to put an out-of-work actor into the White House.

John was always fond of appropriating artwork from outside sources, but he rarely hit upon a better piece than this picture taken out of an issue of the Jehovah’s Witness publication. Usually, when they knocked on my door, I’d get pretty pissed off, but you can’t argue with a nice visual like this one.

See, all it took to look like Marilyn Monroe was the right bra, and that’s why St. Louis women in 1981 were able to successfully pull off that image. They all shopped at Edgar Desoto.

Boy, somebody thought it was hilarious to write a fake obituary for Chuck DeClue, some fifteen years before he actually passed away. That was the twisted sense of humor he had, though. I wouldn’t be surprised if he wrote it himself.

That first visit by Joan Jett to St. Louis was a lot of fun, and it merited a lot of coverage in Jet Lag. (I think she would return four more times in the next two years, and make a few of our covers, too.) I remember hanging out with Jett and her guitar player of the time Eric (later Roscoe) Ambel (later of the Del Lords) in Blueberry Hill, and I remember Bob Chekoudjian’s displeasure at not being old enough to join us. More, I remember that later that night, Jett’s bass player, who at the time was 16 years old, kept turning up the music at an after-show party hosted by Tony Cornejo, who was then arrested for disturbing the peace. My favorite moment in that situation was the fact that Charlie Langrehr came up into Cornejo’s apartment moments before the police, and asked the interesting question, “Hey, Tony, why is there a paddy-wagon parked in front of your place?”

Speaking of Charlie Langrehr, here we have an interview showing just how seriously he took what he was doing at the time. I don’t know for sure, but I think this was the time I met Charlie in his Central West End apartment. At that time, I would have killed to be able to live in one of those high rises, too.

Hey, another great Vintage Vinyl ad. This one features JC and JB.

Kinda cool to see a review of “Remain in Light” written before it became one of the most acknowledged standards of greatness. And, hey, remember back in Jet Lag #2, when we ran photos of Rommie Martinez and Alicia Feinberg backstage at the Dixies. Here’s Alicia writing a review of Jambox, a band which included Tony Patti, who would very soon be playing a strong role in helping Jet Lag improve its layout.

View issue #10

The cover of our ninth issue was a simple but effective one. The “rock rock rock” thing was taken from flyers advertising gigs by the Strikers (formerly the News). I like the contrast between that thick block lettering and John the Mailman’s thin handwriting letting us know what will be featured in this issue.

I love the fact we were excited enough by a gig featuring the Strikers and Anti-Mation being advertised on TV to run a photo of the Three Stooges on the local band news page.

Ah, the Carriage Bowl. Sadly, this old-school bowling alley, with the echoe-laden tiny ballroom downstairs, has long since been torn down and replaced with a Walgreens. There weren’t many rock shows there, but I remember having a great time whenever I went.

Charlie Langrehr did as much as anybody to make the St. Louis original music scene viable back in the early days of Jet Lag. Getting a gig at the Tivoli Theatre was brilliant. It made an event out of what otherwise would have been a routine performance. There was a big difference between sitting in a theatre and hanging out at Billie Goat Hill. Jerry Huth’s photos of the event are terrific, by the way, especially that second one of Reed Nesbitt and a slightly blurry Charlie Langrehr, from an angle you rarely see in rock photography.

“People who don’t play an instrument don’t know what they’re missing.” That pearl of wisdom from Jon Consiglio of the Oozkicks, when he was approximately 16 years old, remains one of my all-time fave quotes. There was a real feeling of enthusiasm from these guys, as they managed to simultaneously discover sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll. By the way, since I didn’t explain the reference in the article, “Lucas Tanner” was a TV show set in Webster Groves, MO, where the hero was a teacher at the local high school. No Oozkicks were involved in the production.

Oh, my God! Look how young Ranking Roger and Dave Wakeling were. We were all just babies then, but geez! Were these guys even shaving yet? This was the first of three interviews Jet Lag ran with the Beat over the next couple years. They were always a blast to talk with.

I noticed in several places in this issue that my writing style was becoming looser and more personal, and I was dropping in more humorous asides which made more sense to me than to the readers, but which, I hope, were funny either way. Take the reference to my friend moving to Indianopolis. That was George Dunn, possibly the first person I met on the New Wave scene back in 1979, because, as I recall, he liked my “KSHE Unfair to Rock & Roll” t-shirt. Anyway, the Kinks review strikes me as a nice hodge-podge approach, mixing in my opinions with those of other concert-goers and even a pro of the time.

I love the double coverage we gave to the Pretenders, whose concert was one of the biggest deals of 1980 in St. Louis. Cat pointed out that I never use the phrase “using the john,” so I’m guessing Mailman edited that one in there. Bob Chekoudjian’s tale of failing to get an interview is a hoot, too.

I was dating a girl at this time who was mostly away at college. I remember she was taking a course in which she had to assemble examples of effective advertising, and I gave her the Vintage Vinyl ad from this issue. Tom Ray, not yet a “Papa” usually assembled the Vintage Vinyl ads at the last minute, and this one came even later than usual, but I still think it’s cool.

Funny thing, I never did buy that Revillos album.

View Issue #9

First, an apology for taking so long to get this next batch of issues up online. Suffice it to say that Roy Kasten, who does yeoman work on this website, and I both have actual lives apart from this labor of love. We will be getting more up sooner than it took last time.

So, now we turn to the first issue of Jet Lag to have smaller type. Oh, how I remember the fun of typing up everything in a given issue, then running it to a print shop such as Kinko’s so we could shrink the print down, thus enabling us to cram a lot more words on to each page. I think in future years, we got even smaller than this.

For your eyes, however, this means we’ve increased the dpi of the scans, making it impossible to fit the pages inside the margins of a web browser (at least on Firefox). I hope this isn’t too much of an inconvenience, but believe me, the tiny print gets difficult to read after a while (especially on our much older and more tired eyes).

Honestly, I don’t remember who doesn’t like compliments on his or her ass, though I suspect it was Duwan Dunn. At any rate, I know it wasn’t me, because around this time, I was informed at a White Castle late at night that I didn’t have an ass. Oh, the things children will laugh about, especially considering that the real issue was I didn’t have a tight enough belt, or the understanding of where my waist should be on my pants.

Check out the Mort Report, and Mort’s allusion to Martin Mull’s comment about writing about rock music being like dancing about architecture. For years, that line has been credited to either Elvis Costello or Frank Zappa. I suspect Mort was much closer to the original citation, and it sure does sound like something Mull, who was a year or two before this issue hosting the brilliant Fernwood (then America) Tonight shows, with Fred Willard, would have said.

Let’s travel back in time to consider my review of the film “The Harder They Come.” For one thing, gather up the kids and tell them that when we were young, the only way to see a cult film was to wait for it to be scheduled at the Tivoli Theatre, whose quarterly calendars in those days read something like the daily schedule now on Turner Classic Movies. Not only didn’t we have DVD players, we didn’t have VHS or even cable TV. For another thing, bet you can’t tell I was still writing papers in English classes at UMSL. Or that I was far from being a graduate student, despite a more competent understanding of forms such as tragedy than I display here.

The Felons were ruling my world at the time this article was written. I bet I saw them two dozen times in those days, and I danced like a madman every time. Back then, I wasn’t very self-conscious, and simply assumed my wild thrashings in response to the music were as cool to the rest of the people in the room as they were to me. I like the photo John took of these guys, too. If I’m not mistaken, it was snapped outside the home of Mark Condelire (I didn’t get the spelling right in the story), a place where many parties back in the day took place.

I don’t spend much time thinking about the Rockats, or any of the rockabilly revivalists that we would cover over the next year or two of the magazine. As such, I completely forgot the fact that I actually saw and met former New York Dolls drummer Jerry Nolan.

See, Steve McCabe, Jet Lag wrote nice things about the Nukes.

This photo at the bottom of the page, by the way, was of the first time I ever saw Mike Burgett play on stage. I bet I’ve seen him 50 or 60 times since then, in a wide variety of bands. If I recall correctly, PG, who lived out in St. Charles at the time, got to play two nights at Billie Goat Hill. Most of the crowd was at Bernard’s Pub that night, but I remember a bunch of us drove over to the Hill simply because somebody came in and said there was a good band with a girl bass player. See, we boys didn’t know very many girls who liked our music back then.

You’ll have to ask Duwan what was going on with the cartoon series over the next few issues. I will reveal, however, that I had a shirt much like the one worn by the taller co-publisher of the local fanzine, while John the Mailman wore clothes much like the other one.

John had a great knack for putting together photo collages capturing the spirit of events we attended. The Surgery page at Bernard’s Pub will bring anyone who was there back to their largely fake-id’d youth. Say hi to Janice Tatkow accepting Howard’s gratitude in one of these pics.

I always considered the review I wrote of Watson/Beasley, a completely forgotten band by just about everybody but their children, to be a turning point in my “career.” For one thing, it was the first time I broke the standard mold of essay form, though I’m fairly sure I ripped the idea of creating two characters to have a dialogue about the subject at hand from somebody in Creem. More importantly, it pointed me to the realization that the barriers between white and black music fans caused a distinct difference in understanding what was happening at any given time. Though eventually, white youth would come to accept contemporary hip-hop, in 1980, whites accepted only the older stuff from blacks. Within months, I would discover WESL and KATZ radio, which provided a virtually non-stop soundtrack in my car for the next couple years.

Goddam, those Retros were skinny dudes, weren’t they? This is a great shot of the post-Bob Chekoudjian version of the band, taken in a studio by Mark Skinner.

View Issue #8

The time has come to talk about Beatle Bob. It’s funny. I refused to speak on camera to the people who have been working on a Beatle Bob documentary, yet here I am throwing out comments on a blog. But, there’s no way to discuss issue no. 7 without discussing the man familiar to all St. Louisians who have attended concerts these past 25 years.

I think John met Bob before I did, but we all became friendly very quickly. Bob’s contributions to the magazine in the early days gave us a much needed historical context. He didn’t seem interested in the New Wave/Other rock binary that had us so hung up. As a result, he covered the likes of Jan and Dean, and, as you can see with this issue, Chuck Berry.

I’m not going to discuss the rumors and innuendo surrounding Beatle Bob’s non-dancing life, but I can say that a few years down the road, we did catch him in the act of plagiarizing an article from another obscure fanzine. From that point on, I had to question everything he’d turned in before, which means I have no idea if he wrote the Chuck Berry interview in this issue, or if it really happened at all. I know I’ve never seen evidence of this same interview in any other publication, and I know it reads very much like a Chuck Berry interview circa 1980 would have read.

Check out the answer to the first question. “A friend of mine, Johnnie C. Johnson, needed a guitarist.” This was several years before the “Hail! Hail! Rock and Roll” film brought Johnnie Johnson back to the limelight. Chuck Berry would have needed to explain the name to his interviewer in 1980, because nobody but the most acute liner-note readers would have ever heard of him. I’m also pretty sure all the great Chuck Berry collections were out of print at this point, making it even harder to know anything about Johnson.

The sidebar, wherein Bob purports to have played new wave records and solicited Chuck’s reactions, sounds plausible, too. The Bo Diddley references, and the question of what the singers are so angry about ring true. I just wish I lived in a world where I could simply assume my old friend gave us something we could trust. We certainly lived in that world when we published this issue of Jet Lag.

What other things were in that world? Enter Mort Hill, then known as Mort Blando, a man who had returned to St. Louis from the East Coast, where he soaked up higher levels of hipness than we were used to experiencing. His contributions to this issue and the next few were informative, hilarious, and frankly odd at times.

Nowadays, you can find a million sources for expensive used clothing from the 1950s, but in 1980, it was an unbelievable thing to suddenly have a warehouse chock full of the stuff right here in St. Louis. Edgar-Desoto lasted in business a few years, and Jet Lag was there right from the beginning, again thanks to Beatle Bob.

In the local band section, the rumors about Insect Fear and the Non-Dairy Creamers were entirely fabricated, as were the bands at that time. Insect Fear was the name my friend Don Hollenbeck concocted for his imaginary band, and the Non-Dairy Creamers was my own. Within a few months, though, the Non-Dairy Creamers would merge with the made-up band the Nazi Seamen, and would actually wind up performing on stage.

Little did I know that the Heels, the St. Louis band featured in this issue, would within six months morph into Be-Vision, and become my favorite local band for a couple years.

Hah, Bob Chekoudjian didn’t like the first X record because it didn’t live up to his experience of seeing them live in 1978. Back then, I didn’t know what he was talking about. Now he gets to brag about seeing X in 1978.

The front cover was done by Matt Feazell, a talented cartoonist who was working at Wuxtry at the time. I haven’t seen nor heard of him since not long after this issue came out. I like the cover, but I remember thinking at the time that he didn’t really know much about the New Wave scene.

View Issue #7

I’m willing to bet no other American publication ran a longer interview with the Pop Group during their year or two of existence. But, because John the Mailman happened to be in New York at the same time this English band was playing Max’s Kansas City, and because John was always willing to check out any new band that came his way, Jet Lag snagged the exclusive.

Now, neither you nor I nor John nor just about anybody gives a rat’s ass about the Pop Group anymore (though a few fans of the decidedly funkier Pigbag, which emerged out of the ashes of this band a year or three later might be interested in knowing their history), but that’s not the point. The point is Jet Lag was there, providing an interesting viewpoint from a band that, in the middle of 1980, seemed as likely as anybody else to be important.

I always thouht the cover of this issue was one of John’s all-time classics, and, in fact, to this day I associate this image with the music of the Pop Group, even though they never (to my knowledge) used a clarinet. It just somehow turns this guy from a moldy fig jazz image into an avant-garde rock image, merely through the act of putting him on the cover of our little zine.

In other news from this issue, we find that the much beloved American Legion Hall 555, site of a dozen sweaty, exhilarating nights of local shows, was closing its doors to the rock scene. To this day, I look down that little street off Kingshighway whenever I drive by, and smile with a feeling of satisfaction and joy, even though the place has long since been torn down. Also, we see the first appearance of Bernard’s Pub in the St. Louis original music tale. It will be mentioned a few million more times over the years of Jet Lag.

Hey, check out the little ad at the bottom of page 5. Who knew Jet Lag was that far ahead of the file-sharing game?

“Nobody is ever seen buying Jet Lag, but everyone seems to have read it.” That quote came from the article in the Post-Dispatch, as pictured at the bottom of page 3. It wasn’t true, of course, since people did buy the thing, but we liked the sound of it.

View Issue #6

This issue continued my New York adventure and Steve’s dig at my writing style. He always hated it, as did Mr. Lizard.

Featured was the interview I did with the Pop Group the night of their US debut gig. All-in-all, as I read the interviews they don’t seem bad as done by a yabo from the mid-west in hip NYC.

Graphics were always a problem in the pre-internet era and as lay-out artist I would grab them wherever I could whether they made sense or not. The cover was just some random musical image I found somewhere.

I took all the photos and even developed them in my basement. The back cover was a contact sheet from the nights at Max’s Kansas City.

Chuck DeClue had a way of turning his head, laughing, and talking with great excitement. “Let me draw a cover for your magazine,” he said, and his enthusiasm, coupled with the fact that John and I never knew what would go on the cover in those days, won me over. After all, Chuck was the singer in the Retros, my favorite local band back then, and I pretty much always had a great time when he was around.

Still, when he presented to me the crazy Big Daddy Roth-goes-punk drawing you see on the front cover of the fifth issue of Jet Lag, I was taken aback. My comic book tastes were much more naturalistic, and I’d never been a fan of monster movies or other trash culture. Nowadays, however, I look back and see just how much this picture reminds me of Chuck (who passed away in the mid-1990s). And, I can really appreciate the hilarious way that he made the monster so perfectly adapt the stance of a typical punk rocker of 1980. The hand that would actually fit there being kept in the pocket makes the picture work.

In many ways, this was a landmark issue. For me, personally, it reminds me of the ways my musical taste expanded outside the narrow confines of New Wave and even rock. There’s the review of Third World and Toots and the Maytals – I wrote it, even though the S.P. was dropped off the end of the article. From the earliest days of my punk involvement, I was aware of reggae. You couldn’t love the Clash as I did without having some idea of the form, and I had friends who would play Culture’s “International Herb” or “Trenchtown Mixup” by the Gladiators when we’d get together to play Risk. But, this was a revelation. I still remember that half hour I caught from Toots as one of the most thrilling concert experiences of my life.

Jump ahead to page 20, and you’ll see what was in 1980 an even more radical discovery. I loved “Funky Town” by Lipps, Inc. I was converted to the glories of disco singles, which suddenly sounded as magnificent to me as any punk single. Actually, my interest in the genre began earlier in the year, when Jim Roehm convinced me to buy “Stomp” by the Brothers Johnson. While actually more of a pop/funk hybrid than disco, it made me realize for the first time that rhythmic-based music could have its own charms. The simplicity of “Funky Town” won me over completely, and from that point on, I was on a path that would stop me from judging music based on genre labels.

So, John the Mailman went to New York City, and scored an interview with Jayne County. Now, I’ve never had much interest in the music of Jayne County, but I have to say, this interview, while rambling, is entertaining. I doubt there was ever a more in-depth interview with County outside of, perhaps, a New York fanzine. The review of bands playing at Max’s Kansas City is historically intriguing, since one of the bands playing that night was the Zeros, featuring Javier Escovedo, brother of Alejandro Escovedo and later of the True Believers.

“Oops, he ain’t dead!” is one of my all-time favorite headlines. We found out after publication that the story of Mitch Ryder’s death was completely ungrounded. So, John and I went through every copy of the magazine, crossed the R.I.P. off the headstone, and wrote, “Oops, he ain’t dead!” I wonder if Ryder ever saw my loving tribute?

“Where’s the Rock & Roll At, Bub?” offers my opinionated review of the various options for live music in St. Louis at that time. You can tell I was only a few months past legal age because I was so concerned with finding ways for my under-21 friends to join me at shows. Considering that I never drank in those days, my points about high drink prices almost certainly were referring to how much they charged for Cokes.

Full page ads from Wuxtry and Vintage Vinyl (which had just opened a couple months before this issue went to press), and a half page from Streetside. The record stores were supporting us, and selling us. The Vintage Vinyl ad began a long tradition of very cool designs, frequently put together at the very last minute, which would appear in the magazine for many years.

The back cover is an interesting collage. I don’t remember where it came from, but I definitely know the phrase “Rock & Roll is in a lot of trouble!” came from Chuck DeClue, who would say it as he took the stage for Retros shows sometimes.

View Issue #5

Do you remember when you used to say things you thought were brilliant, but which turned out years later to be really stupid? Aren’t you glad that nobody else really remembers these things? Say, do I really want to bring some of these articles back to the light of day?

Embarrasments? Let me count the ways: “Pete Townshend still hasn’t learned to write a melody.” What was I thinking? I know it would be another year or two before I had the vaguest idea of what the word “melody” actually meant, but there I was tossing it around as if I could insult a songwriter of Townshend’s caliber. And right after that, I point out “he still thinks every song has to have a slow bridge in it.” Oh, how sad that I’ve gotten my wish, and it has come to pass that songs don’t even usually have bridges at all anymore, let alone a sense of dynamics.

Then, let’s turn to the Welders story. There I was, trying to defend these women against the complaints from some misguided souls that, as mere girls, they were incapable of rocking out. But, did I have to do it with some thinly guised homophobic insult about “the confused sexuality” implicit in that point. I know, I know, as homophobia goes, that’s pretty minor, but I twinged when I saw it after 27 years.

And, then there is the insistence that the Who were a New Wave band. As I glance through the next few issues of Jet Lag, I see that by June, 1980, I was at the tale end of my New Wave requirement phase. Still, it’s really hard to remember that once upon a time I was this xenophobic about anything, let alone a movement as restrictive as “New Wave.”

Lou Reed once sang about a life being saved by rock’n’roll, and I’ve always believed that’s what happened to me. And, certainly, it took my identification with New Wave to push me out of my loner shell and become a social being. The 100 or so fans of that music who showed up at various local band performances in 1979 and 1980 made up the first network of friends and acquaintances I ever really had. Once unleashed, I never looked back, and both my musical taste and my interest in humanity expanded far beyond that initial connection.

Anyway, the fourth issue of Jet Lag is a St. Louis-centric issue, and it featured more writing by me than most of the early ones. John designed that cover, if I recall correctly, and I think it looks pretty cool, right down to the little “We’re Looking Good” sticker in the middle of it.

Checking out the early Local Band News pages is like taking a time machine for those of us who were there. Bands were forming every time you turned around back in 1980, as were places to play (as you’ll see in issue #5). Radio remained a major interest for us – this was seven full years before KDHX came along to give St. Louis a real musical voice that could be heard twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, in all parts of the metropolitan area. So, we reported on what we heard on the radio at the time.

Look at the well-informed young music critics, snagging an interview with the one guy in Squeeze who only lasted a short time, bassist John Bentley. It is interesting to hear him say how much he wants the band to be truly successful, I must admit.

I have no idea who Leo DeJanero was. A lot of the early writers in Jet Lag were people who met John, gave him a piece or two, often under an assumed name such as this one, and then disappeared. But, the page with reviews of the Clones and the Nukes shows that we were at least covering what we considered a controversial type of band at the time. These two bands had virtually no original material, but played quite good versions of New Wave hits of the day. Another embarrassment of mine is that, back then, I thought that meant they shouldn’t be mentioned at all, but I’m glad now to be reminded of the times I saw these guys.

I don’t know if the Welders ever played another gig after this article appeared. Frankly, I don’t think they’d played for a year before it appeared, but I was sincerely a fan. The Zanti Misfits was a local band I loved, loved, loved, and can still bring to life in my head, despite the fact they only wound up recording two songs (about which, you’ll read in a future issue). Their photo appears in number 5, not this issue.

“Articulate, polite, and serious” was a quote about the Retros from, if I infer correctly, an article in St. Louis magazine. There’s the in-joke for the month.

The back cover was a collage of ads ripped off from various English newspapers, Melody Maker, Sounds, and New Musical Express. At the time, we all thought those papers knew more about music than just about anybody, though, honestly, we only rarely read them. Money was very much an object back in 1980, as I was paying for going to school and working very limited hours as an usher at Busch Stadium for Cardinals baseball and football games.

View Issue #4

“Some people call this a rock and roll magazine.” How long did we keep that slogan? I don’t remember discussing it, in fact, I couldn’t have told you when it first appeared until I noticed it on the scan of this issue’s cover. John the Mailman came up with that one on his own.

Obviously, it was a reaction to the famed slogan of Creem, “America’s Only Rock’n’Roll Magazine.” We were pretty sure we were American, and we knew we were writing about rock’n’roll, with no wasted space on Ted Nugent or Kiss, or any of the other mainstream rockers Creem was prone to feature. So, John came up with this nicely biting response, that some people called Jet Lag a rock and roll magazine, too.

At the same time, there was the question of whether we were a New Wave magazine, or a rock’n’roll magazine. Look at the line-up of acts on the cover of this third issue. 999, the Dickies, and St. Louis favorites the Retros were clearly aligned with the movement. Iggy Pop was a forefather, to be sure, but wasn’t exactly New Wave, was he? Then there was Jan & Dean, even less punk than Mitch Ryder, who had been featured in the previous issue. In my head, it all made sense, because I was convinced I knew exactly what rock’n’roll meant – it was basically everything cool between 1956 and 1966, and then everything cool after 1975, with only the Stooges and the New York Dolls allowed to be grandfathered in.

You may have noticed that John’s slogan used the phrase “rock and roll,” while I consistently use the phrase “rock’n’roll.” For some reason, we used to fight about this all the time. (We fought about all sorts of crazy things in those days – whether or not we should have page numbers in the magazine, whether or not we should sign the articles, etc.) I convinced myself it was pretentious to use “rock and roll,” that “rock’n’roll” was somehow more working class and real. As though somebody who used the arbitrary taste-determining dividing lines I just described knew anything about keeping it real.

Speaking of slogans, you may have noticed in these early issues that we put a quotation on the inside front cover every month. This one says, “I don’t know, what can I say?” Jet Lag was an easily accessible read, to be sure, but as with Creem, it was chock-full of in-jokes. Bob Chekoudjian, Retros bassist and sometime contributor to the zine, said “I don’t know, what can I say?” the way some people use the filler syllable “umm.” So, we thought it would be fun to immortalize the saying.

For the record, “Whittlin’ em down for the eighties,” from the first issue, was a reference to the games of Risk I regularly played with members of the Retros, the Zanti Misfits, and Anti-Mation. We used to shout, “Whittle ‘em down” whenever anybody tried attacking a country with a large number of armies. “Ruining it for everybody” is associated with Anti-Mation’s Tony Carr, though I can’t remember if it referred to something he actually did at a show, or something he said about what somebody else did at a show. Now these things can be told.

On to the actual contents of this issue: There’s a letter to the editor from Tracie White, who was then a 16-year-old kid, and who now lives, I believe in Switzerland. Man, that was gratifying to be told we made a difference for somebody we hadn’t yet met. Her description of feeling all alone as a New Wave fan was something that was common in those days, though it wouldn’t be for too much longer.

My road trip to Lawrence, Kansas to see Iggy Pop was the first time I ever left St. Louis for a concert. Donna Knott, Dave Beckman, and I drove across Missouri and stayed with Nick Moon, who was attending the Art Institute in Kansas City at the time. Maybe those names mean something to you.

The Retros were my favorite St. Louis band in those days (though I remember most all of the bands quite fondly). It’s nice to see that photo, with the late Chuck DeClue looking so young and healthy.

The photo accompanying the article on the Dickies (who, I believe, are still running around playing punk rock versions of Black Sabbath songs) includes Rommie Martinez, who would go on to become one of St. Louis’s most prominent scenemakers in the upcoming hardcore punk days, and eventually would become a noted hairdresser in town. It was her 16th birthday.

That back cover photo collage of RayMilland (my all-time favorite St. Louis band name) still looks amazing. And, boy, oh, boy, how young were those guys back then?

It occurs to me, by the way, that I haven’t mentioned the little New Wave Hot Line ads that show up in all these issues. During the Radio Radio days, I came up with this brilliant idea of letting people know our phone numbers, so they could call us any time to ask what shows were happening. John, being more worldly than I was, knew of the existence of telephone answering machines, a decidedly exotic item back in 1980. He was able to get an old one, somehow, and hooked it up to a second phone line in his house, which Jet Lag paid for. And, he regularly updated that recording, letting thousands of callers over the years know what was going on in the St. Louis concert scene. I love the ad in this issue with the panels stolen from an old Heart of Juliet Jones comic strip.

View Issue #3