The Modernaire: A History

Brothers and sisters, friends and neighbors this is the reason. This is the excuse for why I'm utilizing this little spot on the internet. To fulfill my longtime fascination with getting to know people through the discipline of the interview. This interest dates all the way back to my high school years in the 80's. In 1989 I had the idea of doing a 'zine about anything that interested me. At that point in my life I had only ever encountered 'zines of two type. Punk 'zines, and comic/sci fi fanzines. The idea behind my first aborted attempt was a 'zine for anybody in my generation that agreed with me. I put together a team of contributors but I was the only one who produced anything. I was too distracted by completing my first screenplay, Chrome Highway to push any of my contributors to finish what they had committed to.

My only completed article was a comment on the twentieth anniversary of the Woodstock Music Festival. It was a rebuttal to all the baby boomers crying about how it could never happen again. Apparently, my age groups' pop music was insignificant next to the soundtrack of America's most self -congratulatory generation. I created a list of groups that could play our own music festival that included The Pixies, Jane's Addiction, R.E.M., Fishbone, and De La Soul among others. Then I railed on about how the boomers didn't know who most of those groups were because they had created a series of radio stations catering to"the lowest common denominator." That our generation wouldn't give a fuck about Paula Abdul or Roxette if they knew how good college radio bands were. Ah, youth. Two years later the future proved me right with the Lollapalooza Festival. A traveling festival of college radio groups of many genres that outsold every other tour that year save for the Grateful Dead, and the New Kids On The Block. Both of whom were juggernauts at the time.

My Second Attempt

Three years later. I began work on a 'zine called Staggering Bob (named after the cow from Ulysses). This was a combined effort between me and my dear friend Natalie Jacobs. We did the first interview together bnefore she moved to England for a year. I did a few more interviews while she was away, and we continued joint interviews after she moved back to the states. After awhile Natalie got busy with school and Staggering Bob was abandoned. A few years later I decided to do a new 'zine with my friend Big Tony O'Farrell A.K.A. Big Tony Fero. Over the summer of 1994 we decided we were going to collaborate on several art projects together. We were at the time both recently evicted, lower class, non-college attendants, who had both wound up living with our parents while working a dead end job doing phone surveys from the basement of an office building. Good times.

I had just finished my second screenplay Teach Me To Kill  A.K.A. Dial M For Motherfucker but I wanted to do something more immediate. After work Big Tony and I would eat greasy food at the nearest 24 hour establishment and plot our next contributions to the world of self expression. Ann Arbor at the time was full of these noise bands like Scheme, Nautical Almanac, and countless others. We decided we would make a 'zine and start  a noise band.

Over the summer of '95 we cut and pasted the fuck out of the premiere issue of our 'zine. We had two names at the time, Mazinga and Grandizer. Both taken from robot comics by the legendary Go Nagai. We would use one name for the 'zine and one for the group. The 'zine became Grandizer and the group we formed that winter would be called Mazinga. Grandizer was laborious. We didn't even have a typewriter between us. We paid kinko's for computer time by the minute. Every damn copy cost us money we barely had. Living off of minimum wage is a bitch. In the end we padded it with the old-ass, unused interviews from the aborted Staggering Bob.

We started Mazinga in late November as a proper four piece band instead of the noise collective we originally planned it to be. In hindsight this was foolish since those noise groups ended up attracting much more attention than our traditional band ever did. We ended up not doing another issue of Grandizer for multiple reasons. Tony started an online 'zine called Rock Fiend International several years later. Here is where I will revisit my interviewing bug. And this time I'm doing it solo.