| It seems like
only yesterday when Myself and fellow Maximumrocknroll shitworker,
Atom Turk, hooked up with our mutual friend Karen Satan and decided
to start a zine. We wanted to do a zine to instigate on some
level, but mainly just to have another reason to hang out and
drink together. Our basic position at the time was that we saw
too much segregation, too many mainstream posers who got into
punk, Gilman, and "the scene" back when GREEN DAY hit.
We were tired of watching kids chase the ghost of OPERATION IVY,
FILTH, CRIMPSHRINE and the summer of 1992. Basically, if you
wanted genralizations and sweeping statements about the current
state of Bay Area punk, then UGZ's Brisbane headquarters was
the place to be in 1996. The actual shitwork involved in putting
out a zine went very slowly, but in general Atom and I set about
reviewing demos, while Karen knocked out the graphic end of things.
Karen had a super computer that she received as a gift from her
mom after graduating from a technical institute in the South
Bay. We were enthusiastic, but not very prolific. Months passed
and there was no zine, or anything that resembled a future publication.
Our focus on publishing the zine faded as we shifted from starting
a zine to starting a band, and that got as far as writing a handful
songs with stupid lyrics that were impossible to make out, especially
when put to Atom's super fast and overly intricate bass lines.
It was hard to say where any of this was going at the time when
Atom had his falling out with Karen, but we knew it was definitely
time to plan new strategy when Karen and I bailed on the Brisbane
idea and got an apartment in Oakland. UGZ headquarters had found
it's first real home, and it was on 40th St., between Broadway
and Telegraph Avenue. After a few months of drinking and destroying
our new apartment, mostly by spilling alcohol everywhere and
putting a dart board up in the living room, I decided that enough
was enough and so I grabbed the disc with all of our zine reviews,
graphics, and contributions, and I walked into a downtown Berkeley
copy shop intent on finishing our zine. For several hours I monopolized
one of the copy shop's work stations. Equipped with scissors,
glue stick, and little to no knowledge of zine layout, Urban
Guerrilla Zine - Issue One was born. At the end of the day I
had 250 copies of UGZ #1. We later pulled a copy and run at a
downtown Berkeley copy shop, making another 250 copies which
we stapled for free at Krishna copy on Telegraph and Dwight.
The zine itself was a mess. Pages were out of order, and some
pages were cut off because the master dimensions were too big
for the actual copy area. The spelling errors were so prevalent
that it almost looked like we had intentually tried to come across
as illiterate. There was a definite political slant to the early
Urban Guerrillas, it was our way of keeping it relevant because
as much as we wanted it to be, UGZ was not a part of the scene
at that time. From where we stood, flys on the proverbial wall,
there wasn't any punk scene that we could see tourselves being
an active part of anyway. Instead, we went to political events
and rallies that were taking place around the Bay Areae, and
our main cause of choice at the time was the plight of political
prisoners in the United States. Karen and I went to Gilman about
once a week, but to us it was all about warehouse shows. 40th
street had three different warehouses on it that were having
shows when we moved into the neighborhood, and we felt well situated
as far as that scene went. The first wave had begun. |
The first issue of UGZ (Urban Guerrilla Zine)
