It’s hard to believe we did this back in the days before an internet. But the evidence is clear – some 93 issues of Jet Lag were published between 1980 and 1991. In the beginning, it was the definition of amateur, a labor of love and errors which was as impressed by the very fact of its existence as by the quality of its viewpoints. By the end, it was a slickly-done, albeit still without turning pro, full-size self-published magazine. This web site will chronicle Jet Lag from start to finish; we'll be adding issues every week, so check back often. There's also a blog where you can join in the discussion.
John the Mailman and I started publishing Jet Lag because I, along with my friends Duwan and George Dunn, had interviewed the Ramones, and he had taken one of the best photos of the band I’ve seen. We had to get together and put these things out in the world. Thanks to the enormous helping hand of Duwan Dunn, who did much of the early lay-out work and drew the first two covers (the first one while we drove to the printers), in late February or March of 1980, we had a physical property in hand. For almost two years, we kept things going on a strictly monthly basis, and only missed three or four months in the first five years.
Nobody ever got paid to work on Jet Lag, but dozens of people contributed over the years. When we started, there were only a handful of fanzines devoted to music – Talk Talk out of Lawrence, Kansas was a big influence, and the one-page Noise, published for free by St. Louisian Jim Roehm over the year preceding Jet Lag, was an invaluable inspiration. We didn’t know what we were doing, but our enthusiasm, and the enthusiasm of both readers and contributors, kept the thing going for a long, long time.
Looking back on it now, Jet Lag documents a number of things. First, of course, there is the music that was covered – the St. Louis local band scene, the New Wave scene in general, and within a couple of years, a wide, constantly expanding range of other stuff as well. There is also our growth as critics and writers and photographers – the first few issues are more interesting historically than anything else (though the Ramones interview is terrific), but quickly, we started getting a handle on saying things worth reading.
Of course, it also documents a time now past. Those of us who discovered punk rock and new wave in the late 1970s, just before the magazine started, were isolated; it wasn’t unusual for a high school to have only one such fan on its campus, for example. Read through all the issues (which we plan to put online over the next year or so) and you’ll watch that isolation turn into community, fragment, and expand.
I want to dedicate this site to all who read Jet Lag, who played the music we covered, and who contributed to it, most especially John “The Mailman” Korst, Duwan Dunn, Bob Chekoudjian, Tony Patti, Tony Renner, Dana Ong, Alex Weir, Rene Spencer (now Saller), Cathy Alsobrook (then Renner, now Pick), and on and on up to Joe Williams and Pat (now Toby) Weiss, the final publisher.
