Just A Minor Threat
Before MRR or Jersey Beat, Howard Wuelfing's fanzines paved the way for the Amerindie Underground
DESCENES AND DISCORDS: An Anthology (DiWulf Publishing)
Howard Wuelfing and I met at Rutgers-New Brunswick, worked on the Daily Targum together, became close friends, and even lived in the same house for junior and senior year. After school, Howard eloped with his girlfriend, Tina Sickel-Moore, and - eager to escape New Jersey - relocated to Washington, D.C. with the idea of becoming a rock journalist. There, he played in bands and pitched stories to the alternative paper, The Unicorn Times. What he experienced there was much like what I was seeing in New Jersey: the beginnings of what could potentially become a fertile music scene being either overlooked or, worse, disparaged and dismissed by the local media.
So Howard started a fanzine
Descenes debuted in January, 1979, published as a broadsheet newspaper (inspired by the format of New York Rocker.) Unlike the messy cut-and-paste of typical pre-Personal Computer Era zines, Descenes looked quite professional. Howard’s wife worked at The Chronicle of Higher Education, and would typset everything on the company’s high-end equipment. Mark Jenkins, a close friend (who would go on to a long career at The Washington Post as their rock critic,) provided the art direction, and Howard utilized the skills he’d gleaned working overnight shifts at the Targum’s production shop.
”The purpose is simple,” Howard wrote in the first issue’s editorial (or rather, “I-And-I-ditorial,” a homage to his love for reggae.) “We hope to promote fun in the greater Washington D.C. area by lending whatever support we can to the formation of a vital, ongoing community of exciting/excited rock and rollers. We will expose local acts and publicize local clubs and provide a forum for local opinion.”
And for six issues, stretched over a span of a year and a half, Descenes did exactly that. But the idea of fomenting a musical community proved more idealistic than practical, and frustrated with the state of the scene he was trying to help create, Wuelfing decided to 86 Descenes and try something else.
That proved to be Discords, which debuted in March, 1981, and had a more wide-ranging focus. Yes, the zine still covered D.C., but the primary goal had become to “help re-establish and then maintain the lines of communication in the world of underground music culture.”
To that end, Discords - a few years before Maximum Rocknroll came along - introduced the concept of scene reports: Columns written by scenesters in the towns across America that, by 1979, had started to develop their own take on the musical revolution launched in New York and Los Angeles a few years before.
You can call it prescience or call it luck, but with Discords, Wuelfing anticipated the “Our Band Could Be Your Life” DIY movement years before it became an established part of America’s cultural landscape. The zine eschewed coverage from major cities and focused on flyover scenes like Olympia, WA, Madison, WI, Dallas/Ft. Worth, Baltimore, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, and Des Moines.
Terry Katzman, who’d figure in the careers of Husker Du, the Replacements, and the Suburbs, reported from Minneapolis; K Records’ Calvin Johnson covered Olympia; and Tesco Vee (of Touch & Go Records and The Meatmen) chimed in from Detroit. Howard covered local D.C. news in his “Descenes” column, and I reported from the nascent Maxwell’s scene in a column I dubbed “Jersey Beat.” (Yeah, that’s where I got the name, a pun on Mersey Beat and a nod to Tiger Beat.)
Ironically, Howard’s first wife Tina (who sadly passed away in 2010) served as the publisher for the zines, while his current wife - Amy Yates-Wuelfing, co-owner of DiWulf Publshing - published this anthology. It’s a gorgeous two-sided coffee table book that recreates the broadsheet newspaper format of the original zines. One cover introduces you to Descenes; flip it over and you get the Discords issues. While it’s a bit more cumbersome, it’s just like reading the original fanzines.
As a document of the D.C. music community - including the almost imperceptible arrival on the scene of hardcore (or “musclehead music,” as Wuelfing called it) - the Descenes anthology offers a treasure trove of knowledge, opinions, gossip, and personalities. Mark Andersen and Mark Jenkins’ Dance of Days - a history of two decades of D.C. punk - might cover a wider time frame, but this anthology is a lot more fun to read. And when Wuelfing went national with Discords, it was like discovering Rolling Stone’s hipper younger brother.
Full disclosure: I was a participant in the Descenes/Discords saga, so my objectivity is obviously suspect. I will say that I haven’t looked at this material since it was published more than 40 years ago. Reading it now, I take enormous pride in some of my contributions, from the minutiae about bands, clubs, and labels in my “Jersey Beat” columns to the feature stories (which included Harlem dance/pop sensations ESG, rock journalist Vivien Goldman, and a VERY early chat with the Bongos.)
And with the perspicacity of a career music journalist, I can vouch for the quality of the other writers. If your idea of fanzine writing hails from the enthusiastic but amateurish Maximum Rocknroll, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the intelligence, knowledge, and integrity of the interviews and features in these issues, not to mention some of the by-lines. How can you top a teenaged Ian MacKaye interviewing the pre-Rollins Black Flag? How about a teenaged Gerard Cosloy interviewing Mission of Burma?
There’s very little of the rah-rah scene cheerleading that later zines indulged in, and - typical for the era, not to mention the legacy of our patron saint, Lester Bangs - quite a lot of snark. Bad music didn’t just bore or fail to puss muster, it offended. No feelings were spared if a writer had something negative to say. Then again, a little hyperbole never hurt if you found something you loved.
The anthology comes with several “extras,” starting with a current conversation between Wuelfing and Ian MacKaye, with the two reminiscing about their first exposures to punk and fanzines, and how those early experiences influenced their future careers. There’s also a pullout poster of the infamous “D.C. Family Tree,” which traces the lineage of D.C.’s punk and new wave scene (the original of which hung for years in Don Zientera’s legendary Inner Ear Studios.)
Each issue of both zines is given a chapter that begins with an introduction by Wuelfing, in which he frames that issue’s historical context (what was happening when it hit the stands) and humbly noting any shortcomings or regrets. (Descenes, he admits, could be incestuous, mentioning the same bands over and over.)
With the wisdom of hindsight, though, there’s also a good deal to be proud of, from giving new writers a national voice to the scene reports that extolled ”underground” bands like Husker Du, the Replacements, Half Japanese, Mission of Burma, Youth Brigade, Zero Boys, and Bush Tetras.
The Descenes/Discords Anthology is available now from DiWulf Publishing. If you have any interest in how the American indie underground came to be, it’s an invaluable resource, endlessly fascinating, and quite entertaining.