Backlash/Backfire

08/05/2023

I don't know who this Dawn Giacondino person is, but she really wants me to come home. Every little bit helps. I will be driving back in a rental truck, and gas and motel rooms are hella expensive! Thank you for your support. --DA

Guys, I'm so homesick. If I can raise enough money to rent a U-Haul and pay for gas, I swe… Dawn Giacondino needs your support for Help DA return to Seattle!

20/07/2021

Here are some reviews from that "lost" issue of Backfire, written in 1984 and finally released in 1991--hence, our explanatory captions pointing out the bandmembers on the original Northwest Metalfest album who later became well-known. Since this was Backfire, metal took the lead in the Local Releases, but it was followed by the KYYX "new wave" Local Heroes and New Faces compilation cassette, plus a Green Monkey release and nasty little punk 7-inch.

15/07/2021

Backfire's "lost issue," 1984/1991. Back in '84 we ALMOST put out another issue of the glossy Backfire, but couldn't afford to get it printed. Seven years later, after putting Backlash to rest, I got bored and decided to paste it up and have it printed--sans the full color glossy cover--and then distributed the copies around town as if it were a normal zine. It featured this interview with "screamin' teens" Shadow, featuring future Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready.

31/05/2021

By request, Dogma Cipher, Backlash, October 1989. An ex-Czech-Austrian border patrol agent and his buddy defected to the US and met up with two Seattlites and formed a band. Here is their story.

24/04/2021

Here it is, the whole thing, just for you guys. Hopefully, if you click on it you'll be able to see it all.

21/04/2021

The last ever issue of Backlash, March 1991. When I (DA) began publishing zines in 1983, all I wanted to do was spread the good news of the gospel of rawk. It began with Backfire, five issues from 1983-84, and continued with Backlash, which published ¬¬¬32 issues from 1987 to 1991.
So you think Backlash cashed in on the GRUNGE explosion, then split from the SCENE, cash in hand? Not exactly. As the music in Seattle gained popularity, Backlash wasn’t quite as important as it once was, and now the bands I used to be able to reach with a single phone call were suddenly out of reach unless we wanted to deal with the pit of vipers known as THE RECORD INDUSTRY. And the major labels certainly weren’t buying ads from me when they had Spin and Rolling Stone to kiss up to.
Backlash hit the streets at a unique time in Seattle history—we talked to bands like Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Mudhoney, and so many more just as these bands were on the verge of selling their souls to the devil—sorry, signing with a record label—five minutes after playing to 50 people at the Central Tavern on a Tuesday. (We never did any articles about Pearl Jam, because that band didn’t exist yet. I have no doubt we would’ve ribbed them mercilessly.)
I knew which band I wanted on the cover of the last issue of Backlash, and I knew I wouldn’t have to schmooze my way up a ladder of snakes to get in touch with them. I had already promised Nirvana the cover—I was out of beer money at the Vogue and Kurt said he’d give me a dollar if I put Nirvana on the cover. was hardly a difficult sell—I loved those guys ever since I heard that first demo tape.
I’ve always felt that the triumph of real rock music over radio fodder, as brief as it was, validated everything I’d been trying to say for years in both Backfire and Backlash. As crazy as it sounds to stop publishing a rock music magazine in Seattle just as the grunge money started flowing, I’ve never regretted it.

31/03/2021

Green River, Backlash “Legions of Dead Bands” article, February 1988. This was one of the many times in Seattle’s history that its music scene was pronounced dead by somebody or other, always with grave seriousness and usually because a club shut down or something. This time it was because a few bands broke up at the same time, including Green River, Feast, and Melvins. In this article DA argues that it’s still very alive and that “the blob is merely changing shape.” This is the story of Lords of the Wasteland, Wasted Landlords, and the origins of the yet-to-be-named Mudhoney and Mother Love Bone. I'm only posting the GR portion of the article here for now.
In other news, Feb. 1988 was also Sid Vicious Memorial Month, according to the Vogue (see ad).

15/03/2021

Backlash was staunchly local, except when it wasn't. If I remember correctly, I timed our First Annual Non-Local issue to coincide with the Rocket's local issue (might as well be charitable and give ‘em some room occasionally). For the first time, all of our featured bands were from outside Seattle. The Pixies were our “name band,” and most of the others will be familiar to anyone who was following underground/alternative music in December of 1990 when this issue hit the streets. Steel Pole Bathtub did have a Seattle connection, as drummer Darren Mor-X once played with “the annoying beyond compare combo Mr. Epp and the Calculations,” as described by our reporter. You can read about them by clicking the images. Also on this page: an ad for new releases on PopLlama (Fastbacks! Squirrels! Girl Trouble!) and a snide cartoon about then-Senator Jesse Helms, who spent that part of his political career trying to outlaw the image of a crucifix in a glass of p*e.

07/03/2021

Alice in Chains, September 1990. As was typical for Backlash, we caught up with these guys just when they were on the verge of becoming international rock royalty. Within a matter of weeks, Alice in Chains had gone from working minimum wage jobs to owing a huge sum of money to a record label. But Facelift had just been released, and eventually, money would be the least of their problems. The interview was done by the ubiquitous JR Higgins, who doubled as photographer James Bush (or at least I’ve never seen the two of them together).
This was the pinnacle of success for Backlash—16 whole tabloid pages and not one, but two colors! Remember, every page had to be fully paid for in advance out of our ad dollars, and color was expensive. Unfortunately, after the grunge tornado hit, we began losing advertisers to the larger zines like Spin and Rolling Stone. It seemed to happen overnight. It’s as if we all woke up one morning to find ourselves living in a completely different city. But we still had no idea of how much weirder it was about to get…

12/12/2020

Backlash Writer Spotlight: Michael Cox. The ‘90s in Seattle were a very serious time. So serious that an unofficial anti-smiling law was strictly enforced within the music community, especially when posing for photos. This is not a game or a joke, their faces say. It’s serious business. A general attitude of anti-zaniness prevailed, and groves of expressionless zombies were already stumbling into the city in search of record contracts. Something had to be done, and it was obviously a job for Michael Cox.
A lot of the captions you read in Backlash that made you go “arrgghhhh!” were by Michael Cox. Remember the curvy arm thing? That was him. And I still don’t know what that means, so stop asking. He also presided over our monthly tape review column, and wrote all those silly, irreverently irrelevant things in italics between the reviews.
Mike usually covered that other large segment of Seattle indie music, the bands that sounded like they were actually HAPPY to rock like the Young Fresh Fellows, the Squirrels, and the Posies, bands on labels like Green Monkey and PopLlama. And he was always coming up with these madcap and ZANY story ideas. He failed to persuade me to let him do Rock ’n’ Roll Baseball, but this one made the cover: The Backlash Coffee Tour of the Ave, featuring the Fastbacks, Steve Turner, Kristen Barry, and other local celebs. Thank you, Mike, for your years of valuable service.

29/11/2020

Backlash Writer Spotlight: Robert Allen. I think only three people have written for all three of my publications (Backfire, Backlash, and Backfire II)—Robert Allen, Gillian Gaar, and JR Higgins (a/k/a James Bush).
I always knew I could pass any record Robert’s way, from heavy metal to folk, and he would give it a fair and thoughtful, non-fawning review. But his favorite bands always seemed to be the ones who defied description—e.g., Weather Theatre, Love Battery, the Walkabouts. This article came out in April 1988, to coincide with the Walkabouts’ PopLlama release, See Beautiful Rattlesnake Gardens. The band later said it was the best article ever written about them, and having written a shorter article myself for the Rocket, I had to agree.
And I guess we couldn’t resist printing a picture of them all reading Backlash. How tacky.

20/11/2020

Backlash Writers’ Spotlight: Matt Fox and Herb Burke
At the beginning, I wanted to keep the Backlash staff musician-free, for what I thought were obvious reasons. Nobody takes a local musician’s review of another local band seriously. But soon I found out that it was impossible to pass such a purity test in a town like Seattle, where everybody was a musician. When I met him, Matt was just an intense kid with hair halfway down his back who seemed to know a lot about local metal. Jeff Gilbert introduced us and suggested I try him out as a writer. Matt quickly became indispensable to Backlash, and later brought on his friend Herb Burke. The two of them were my main metal writers, and they did a great job.
By then, Matt’s band Bitter End had become impossible to ignore. When they released an album on Metal Blade in 1990, of course, we gave them the cover. Herb Burke wrote it, of course, and surprise, surprise, nobody bi***ed that we were writing about our own writers. Bitter End was just a little too awesome, I guess. I wasn’t sure how Matt would react to the caption on his photo, but he was a good sport.

09/10/2020

Andy Wood (Malfunkshun, Mother Love Bone) was one of Backlash’s most beloved artists. People used to complain about how often his face appeared in our pages (along with Mudhoney, Soundgarden, all of those “bad garage bands,” as our detractors used to call them). But I’ve always had a visceral distaste for the explosion of publicity and ass-kissing that follows when a rock star dies. I first noticed it when Elvis croaked, and even as a kid, I thought it was gross the way everyone around him capitalized from his death. Later Lennon died, and suddenly 60 million teenagers suddenly decided the Beatles were cool again, and more people got rich. Don’t even get me started on Nirvana.
So when Landrew the Love Child left this world in 1990, we didn’t publish an article. We didn’t put his face on the cover. I decided to just print this blown up picture of his eyes, with a handwritten note that said, “We’ll miss you, Andy.” It appeared on our back page. We left the rest of the hype to those who ignored him in life.
Most of the comments we got on this were positive, but a year later I was interviewed by someone from a Major Seattle Daily Newspaper, who didn’t seem to understand at all. “Why were you the only one who didn’t write anything when he died?” he said. It took me a while to figure out he even meant it as criticism. Doesn’t everybody feel the way I do about this sort of thing?
Apparently not. But we still miss you, Andy. You were a visionary, and Seattle was lucky to know you.

27/09/2020

Remember the ’90s? Well, Backlash was remembering the ’90s way before you. In December of 1989, I invited all the Backlash writers to contribute their “memories” of the ’90s, as if the article were written in the year 2000. In the previous decade, according to our look back, Mark Arm was named the new host of the Tonight Show, Andy Wood became pregnant (!), and Hasbro came out with an anatomically-correct Chris Cornell doll to replace GI Joe.
Little did we know the actual ’90s would be so much weirder than that…

16/09/2020

One of the Seattle bands I really dug in the late '80s was Cat Butt--"the name alone tells you this has to be a good band," sez the ubiquitous JR Higgins. I'm posting this one because I think it's one of the best combinations of headline, picture, and pull quote in Backlash history.
Such innocent times.

07/09/2020

By the end of '89, Backlash was finally becoming a force in Seattle. For me, this was symbolized by the club ads--we finally got the three big ones as far as Backlash's audience was concerned, the Vogue, the Central, and Squid Row--and the Backstage too! They didn't even have to pick up the Rocket to get a club schedule anymore! (Most people still did, out of habit--I remember scolding my roommates for it.)
Looking over the band names, you can see some of the familiar ones, but those aren't the ones that tweak my nostalgia bone anymore. Seeing the names of so many other great bands that were just as important to us at the time is what gives me a pleasant little stab in the heart. What were some of your favorites?

27/08/2020

March 1989—what a time to be putting out a zine! DA’s “Backwash” column was conceived as a monthly editorial, but the space was soon taken up with news items about who had a record coming out, who was embarking on a European tour, who was being wined and dined by a fat-cat record label, etc.
In this particular column (next to the NAMA awards ballot) I blamed Mudhoney for a snowstorm; announced upcoming records by Mother Love Bone, Walkabouts, TAD, Nirvana, Fluid, and Swallow; told an anecdote about the Screaming Trees’ Gary Lee Conner playing a pants-less guitar solo; and much, much more, ending with the obligatory Dust Blair reference.
Just look at all the band names—nearly brings tears to my eyes now. So much talent, such good times! And mostly all we did back then was bitch about how Seattle’s not really a city and there’s no real music scene. It’s hard to explain this attitude to someone who didn’t live there then—it really is a Seattle thing. People complained there was nothing happening here, and when stuff did start happening, they complained even more. It was kind of our local pastime in the ‘80s.
Incidentally, the Swallow album was SubPop’s first CD release, at a time when CDs were new. I remember CDs being one of the things people complained about. I tried to institute a vinyl-only policy on review copies, but I soon had to give in and accept CDs as vinyl became less and less available. Damn kids and their new technology.

20/08/2020

And now, the infamous Satan issue! This one got some pretty mixed reactions. Granted, the cartoon cover may have left the impression we were taking the subject lightly, but the article was an in-depth, sober look at the “satanic panic” of the ‘80s and how it affected the rock music scene. One of the guys at Consolidated Press saw the cover and refused to print it, but I guess his boss eventually persuaded him that money ruled.
I loved this cover myself, drawn by Dan Ballard, RIP.
We also peppered the issue with Satan jokes, with captions like “Satan, Schmatan, we worship Dust Blair!” In retrospect, I can understand how those who believed in the actual Satan didn’t think it was very funny. But the heavy metal Satan—that crazy nut! —still cracks me up. Hats off to Backlash’s James Bush for this rare moment of serious journalism in my zine.

15/08/2020

I like both kinds of music—punk and rock. That’s why I couldn’t understand what the big deal was when we published the October 1988 “hair metal” issue. The comment I heard the most while distributing it was, “Wow, your magazine’s really changed!”
Backlash hadn’t changed one whit—we continued to cover all genres of music, which in my mind meant all genres of rock.
These bands were part of a pretty healthy scene at that point (and yeah, I said “scene,” so sue me). It suffered from the same problems as the punks—a lack of all-ages venues. There was one over-21 club that always welcomed them, the Riveria Steakhouse in Lynnwood, which held regular battles of the bands and even a best hair contest. Meanwhile, a lot of these musicians were becoming interested in the sort of harder, grittier music that some folks were already calling grunge. Alice in Chains was the first successful crossover. I remember the first time they played the Vogue for a rather skeptical audience. I kept hearing people say, “Actually, these guys aren’t that bad,” like they were completely shocked that they didn’t suck.
I don’t know what happened to most of these guys, so if anyone can update me, please do so in the comments. I know that one of the guys in Kill D’Kor eventually went full-on punk and joined the Valentine Killers.
And Backlash continued on. We put Mudhoney on the cover of the next issue, and everyone went back to thinking of us as a SubPop magazine.

11/08/2020

Soon after I started Backlash, bands started sending us stuff, as bands will, and I tried to listen to all of it before passing it on to be reviewed. It was becoming surprisingly difficult to keep up. By 1988, music was pouring in from all over the Northwest at a rate that would’ve been unimaginable a year earlier. Even more surprisingly, a lot of it didn’t suck.
There was so much we wanted to cover, and there was always so little space. That’s an alien concept these days, a zine not having enough “space.” In the days before cyberspace, we had to fit everything around advertisements. We needed to sell enough ads so that we could add more pages. By this time, I was doing most of the ad sales as well as the page layouts, and every month was a grind toward that elusive breakeven point.
We finally got to add four more pages in the September 1988 issue. It was great to finally be able to stretch out some. It’s still one of my favorite issues, containing James Bush’s deep dive into the perilous state of all-ages shows in Seattle due to the draconian Teen Dance Ordinance; JR Higgins’ interview with the exciting new band Mother Love Bone; Michael Cox’s lovely article on the Posies (before they got slammed two issues later), and lots more.
And I decided to do a story on this band I’d heard of only a few weeks before, Nirvana. I’d heard their demo tape and thoroughly loved it. I’d seen the band’s first Seattle show at the Vogue, along with…20 other people? Unbeknownst to me at the time, this would become my most well-known interview, as Nirvana became the VOICE OF A GENERATION. Mine was the first interview of the band printed anywhere, and if I knew what was coming, I might have worked a little harder on the article.
But we were going to press, and JR Higgins was already pi**ed off at me for not giving the entire page to his article about one of his own favorites, the Bremerton band Hester Pryne. While struggling to fit both stories on the page, I got a call from Kurt (then Kurdt) telling me that Dave Foster was out of the band, and Chad Channing was in. This solved my problem--I cut Dave out of the picture, and then both articles fit. You can read about Nirvana AND Hester Pryne (whose name is misspelled in the headline) here. This story will continue.

06/08/2020

When assigning record reviews, I always gave the albums out to writers who I think at least had the potential to like the band. This resulted in a lot of positive reviews, and that’s probably what most Backlash readers came to expect from us. So when the much-loved Posies got massacred in our December 1988 issue, all hell broke loose. There was a pretty impressive letter writing campaign from their fans. I had to try to soothe one of my best advertisers, PopLlama Records, who had taken out a quarter-page ad for the record in the same issue. (Gimpy LaRue quipped, “Hey, if I send you some ad bux, will you rip me a new bu****le too?”) PopLlama didn’t stop supporting us—God bless them—but I did lose two other advertisers over that review. Here’s the offending piece and just some of the reaction. The Posies themselves were pretty good sports about it.
As editor, I was responsible for everything that went into Backlash, whether I wrote it or not, and I’m the one who dealt with the consequences. If someone turned in a review that said a band sucks, I’m going to print it, even if it’s my favorite band. A lot of people thought that was horrible at the time, because they thought a zine’s purpose is to “support local music,” which in their minds meant you should never say ANYTHING critical about a Seattle band, regardless of how you really feel.
Incidentally, years later, the reviewer, Veronika Kalmar, told me she decided she kind of liked the record after all and didn’t know what she was thinking at the time. Great. Thanks.

02/08/2020

The first ever issue of Backlash, December 1987. When I look back on it, I can’t help but wonder—who the hell did I think I was?
I called it “Seattle’s only local music magazine,” a nod to “America’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll Magazine,” Creem, but it was also a stab at the Rocket, Seattle’s main music mag at the time. (I never hated the Rocket, but I did kinda like poking them in the eye now and then). But we were, as far as I knew, the only Seattle zine that covered ONLY local bands, which turned out to be exactly the right thing at the right time.
For those of you who are still with me, here’s the Backlash story (and I’m sticking to it.) After Backfire folded due to financial ruin, I collapsed into a severe depression that lasted three years. I worked various secretarial jobs, which I was mostly terrible at, because I couldn’t even pretend to give a s**t. I had a journalism degree, but nobody was hiring. The internet didn’t exist. Finally, I got a job at Seattle Press, a North Seattle publisher of community newspapers. I was to be the editor of a new quarterly, the Lake Union Review.
Almost immediately, I started needling the publisher, Terry Denton, to let me put out a local rock magazine. He was skeptical, to say the least, but said I could do it if I could sell enough ads for the first issue to break even. It’s unheard of for the first issue of anything to break even. I worked my ass off, and up to the last minute, I don’t think Terry thought I could do it. I proved him wrong, and the first issue of Backlash was born.
I got together with some writer buddies to help me put it together. A couple of them were from the Rocket, natch, and one of them, Jeff Gilbert, wrote the first cover story. I figured, how can you miss with a metal band? It was the first and last time Jeff wrote for me, after getting a talking to by the Rocket’s editor. The others sooner or later followed after being offered a similar ultimatum, but that was okay. I appreciated their help at the beginning, and I soon had plenty of my own writers to develop a strong local identity. (I did, however, continue to rip off Creem.)
Besides the Q5 story, there were articles on Crisis Party, Terry Lee Hale, and Chemistry Set, and record reviews of Sir Mix-A-Lot, Room 9, Young Fresh Fellows, Soundgarden, Coven, and others. We were trying to cover all the bases, and I think we did a pretty good job.
It’s not my favorite issue. Because every page had to be paid for, we had to cram an awful lot into eight tabloid-sized pages. But here it is, and this story will be continued.

29/07/2020

Here are three pics from the Backlash interview in our final issue, 1991, taken by James Bush. Two of these were never published. They were taken at Kurt's house in Olympia, just after they got signed to Geffen and Dave Grohl joined the band. I like the first one because all three of them look happy. I don't know why they were holding their hands out on one of the other ones, but this photographer seemed to have a talent for making bands pose however he asked.

25/07/2020

A rare photo of Nirvana with drummer Dave Foster, taken for the Backlash article in 1988. Just as we were going to press, Kurt informed me Dave was no longer in the band, so we cut him out of the picture. Photo by Rich Hansen.

23/07/2020

By popular demand (OK, a couple people asked) here's the 10 Minute Warning interview from Backfire, 1983. It still seems surreal to me that one of these scruffy punk kids became a big star.

19/07/2020

19/07/2020

You're just jealous 'cause you never put out a zine with Quiet Riot on the cover.

18/07/2020

This is the final issue of the original Backfire, 1984. In retrospect, I think I deserve some credit for putting two female acts on the cover without naming it the “Women in Rock” issue. This issue also included our ’84 Readers Poll, which really cracks me up now. Click and read!

16/07/2020

And now, waging a one-zine war on music snobbery, here's another issue of the original Backfire, circa 1983. Iron Maiden! Black Flag! John Cale! Bad Brains! And...Bryan Adams? I had a plan, really I did.

16/07/2020

Here's the one I was missing, May '90, Slam Suzanne. We are now complete.