LISTEN HEAR • MILWAUKEE PUNK ZINE• WINTER 1981

I came across an interesting piece of history recently and thought this would be the best place to share it. My girlfriend had spent the last year working at a film archive. I talked about it briefly in my blog about the Trolley Record. Basically, it's a giant warehouse filled to the brim with canisters of film and stock footage. They'll host screenings every once in awhile and show bizarre movies that they have in their endless arsenal of long lost films. It's pretty disorganized and messy. There's no telling what you'll find in there. Well, as chance would have it, she was digging through a box of papers and magazines when she came across a rare specimen of zine wonderment. What she found appeared to be a long lost Milwaukee music-based zine called "Listen, Hear" from 1981. When she brought it home, I flipped my lid. This was an amazing find! I had spent quite a few years in the underbelly of the MIlwaukee punk scene so I was pretty well aware of that region in the world. My own 'Plastique Pop" zine was born out of there as well. This was like some sort of link to the past.

In standard zine form, the pages were chock full of crude cut-and-paste layouts and typewriter fixed content. Actually, the design of the magazine is pretty solid. I mean, this was well before the age of computer dominant ease and convenience.There is a real skill with hand setting every square inch of these 12 pages and as crude as it may seem, I feel that a lot of hard work went into this thing. It really couldn't happen any other way. A good majority of the zines that I see today still retain this primitive form of practice. Call it a budget thing or an art/craft thing…… there is something special about spilling your imagination on paper through simple hand rendered processes. I'm interested in knowing what this particular zine's mode of construction was.

Sadly, this was the only copy of "Listen, Hear" that my girlfriend could dig up. There are so many unanswered questions. How many issues did this last for? This particular issue is number three. How did it find itself being circulated among the early 80's Milwaukee punk scene to ultimately land in a random box tucked away in the recesses of a San Francisco film archive? Are their other issues somewhere hidden from the outside world? Is the author still out there with master copies of a zine he had slaved over in his younger years. Or for that matter, is he even still alive?

What makes artifacts like this so fascinating is that it gives us a little glimpse in how the culture worked back then. In the punk world, this is really the only documentation we have other than word of mouth and a few sprinklings of photos or films. Obviously, a lot has been captured and distributed, but this is Milwaukee we're talking about. The Midwest did not have the national attention like New York or Los Angeles had, so it wasn't as easy to spread the local talent out to bigger media outlets. We relied on good ole' "do it yourself" work aesthetics. But then again, isn't that what punk rock is all about anyway.

One of my favorite quotes in this thing comes from the second page introduction. The author goes on to say some of the local Milwaukee bands felt offended that "Listen, Hear" hadn't given them much attention and then that they claim that the zine is "facist." I would really like to know the full story behind this, but I think that little bit of trivia has sense vanished with the passage of time. From what I gather, the early 80's Milwaukee punk scene was really hot. You had bands like The Shivvers, The Haskels, The RPM's, Plasticland, Oil Tasters, and my personal favorite, The Prosecuters, playing in a wide variety of clubs in and around the city. The "History in 3 Chords" compilation is a testament to it's greatness. While this zine appears to fall on the side of a lot of those bands (punk, garage, new wave, etc.......) I can't help but to wonder what bands or niche of the scene felt left out.

Some of my other favorite moments in this rag include a Cramps glossy card xeroxed for one of the pages, The Purple Hearts record review, The Plastic Land advertisement and the back cover which depicts some punk chick trying to sell a "giant truckload of new wave sunglasses".