Saturday, August 21, 2010

Maybe In The Future There'll Be A Cure


Breakfast Without Meat was zine put out in the '80s by Gregg Turkington (Neil Hamburger, Zip Code Rapists) and Lizzy Kate Gray, and was sort of a precursor to zines like Chunklet and The Cimarron Weekend, or if an issue of Chunklet was co-written by Rusty Smetanka and the guy from Swan Fungus maybe. Their coverage was generally centered on outsider stuff like Caroliner and Sun City Girls, with frequent nods to '60s/'70s fringe pop artists like Jimmy Webb and Richard Harris. Sometimes you couldn't tell if some of the things in the zine were totally fake (the Jimmy Webb interview is riddled with answers like "I have looked at Penthouse with lust in my heart. Sometimes I've even drawn moustaches and warts and moles and such on the pictures"), and pretty much everything in the zine was written from a totally skewed/exaggerated perspective, right down to things like the record label ads that were supposed to be serious.

My favorite issue was the "Breakfast Guide to the Movies", which was basically pages and pages of acidic one-liners pretending to be movie reviews; I used to xerox my favorite pages and write letters on the back of 'em whenever I'd answer my mail. Breakfast Without Meat's record reviews were done in a similar one-and-out manner; the only issue of that I have a copy of right now-- issue 14-- gives one-line reviews like "We were going to take this into the used record store and turn it in for credit, but it was more satisfying to put it under our truck wheels and drive back and forth over it for half an hour", or "There were 2 holes punched in the LP cover, inspiring us to take it out back and use it for target practice", or "By the time we'd gotten to this record for review, we'd lost patience with young people."

Issue #14 included a bunch of cartoons by Derrick Bostrom of the Meat Puppets-- a frequent contributor-- as well as an 8" flexi disc featuring Mark Eitzel (of American Music Club), The Easy Goings (one of Gregg's other bands, covering the Beach Boys' "Johnny Carson", written by Brian Wilson no less), and a somewhat-okay fake-infomercial thingy. I was going to post just the Mark Eitzel track, since it's the only credible thing on here, but then I figured, fuckit, the whole thing's meant to be a joke anyway so why not include all of it. Plus, as flimsy as flexis are, this could be the last playable copy in existence, and the history of bad Brian Wilson covers/ficticious hair-replacement ads needs to be preserved.




Mark Eitzel -

"Crystal Always Knows"

The Easy Goings -

"Johnny Carson"

Breakfast Without Meat -

"Paid Programming"



















9 comments:

Get Carter said...

My copy is sitting about 5 feet from me. Sadly I have no idea where the zine went. Because of the weird size, I am amazed that my copy has lasted this long.

Brushback said...

Ha! So another flexi does exist!

I was pretty surprised at how good of a shape mine was in, also.

Brian said...

I think there's a Dead Uncles tour version left over, when's the next time I'll see you?

Brushback said...

I thought I'd be at the Dylan Bredeau show on Friday, but I ended up doing other stuff. I'll almost definitely be at Sonorous Gale this weekend.

Brian said...

Sonorous Gale cancelled their tour, and The FDZ is closed pending further notice.

Brushback said...

NO SHIT. Really???

Guess I might go see Tiny Lungs and Jason Clackley, then...

Brian said...

I'll show you the letter from my landlord sometime. I'll probably be at the Clackley &c. show, I'll bring a rec for you.

Brushback said...

That would be cool.

Looking forward to finding out if Tiny Lungs are really good or not, I've been listening to some of their stuff lately and it's fairly Swear Jar-ish...

Brushback said...

Now that it's 5 bands and a ukulele player, I'm not as into it anymore.