Crustacean Zine Library’s Zine of the Month
Images of Wiring Dept. covers. On the left, Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth. On the right, Michael Franti from the Beatnigs.
I can still draw a perfect picture in my mind of the box I left behind in that ramshackle un-air conditioned house in Austin, located less than a block from the access road to i-35, behind an auto body shop. The box sits atop the broken washing machine, and is as dilapidated as the house surrounding it from being moved cross country multiple times. That’s my memory of it, anyway, and how it used to be. Likely by now that house has been razed to the ground and converted into modern condos that look like two shipping containers humping, and the box has been long thrown in the trash after I left it there in my haste to leave behind the smell of rodent urine in the oven and my failed relationship with the boy I moved cross country to live with.
I’m thinking about this box because I believe, regretfully, that it was the final resting place of the letters sent to me by an influential zinester in my formative high school years. The letters were penned in perfect elementary schoolteacher blocky print, and contained quotes and stories about revolutionary people and strategies, mixed in with stories of a houseless person the author met in a laundromat, or a conversation had in passing with someone asking for spare change on the sidewalks of San Francisco.
The letters filled me with hope, and it seemed fitting that the author’s pseudonym, Eric Cope, sounds like hope when you said it fast.
At the time we were communicating, Eric was a musician and label owner in San Francisco who also published a large-format, uniquely designed zine called Wiring Dept. I reached out to the label, Insight Records, when a “punker than thou” friend of mine urged me to stop listening to Joy Division and listen to a cooler, more underground band that sounded a lot like Joy Division, but had way better punk rock credibility. This band was Glorious Din – Eric Cope’s band.
I remember ordering “Closely Watched Trains,” Glorious Din’s second LP, from Insight. I can’t remember if I ordered the other albums on the label that are currently in my collection, including the compilation “To Sell Kerosene Door to Door” and Spahn Ranch’s “Thickly Settled,” but I loved them all. The label and the bands on it shared a certain folk sensibility that was rare in punk at the time, and the aesthetic of the label and the zine were woven into the way the releases were designed and distributed.
Eric wrote a personal letter and included it in the package, along with Wiring Dept. And I was intrigued. While it was common for label owners, distributors, and artists to communicate personally with their “fans” – Insight and Wiring Dept. had a polished look to them that made them seem somewhat inaccessible in that way. While the zine contained a lot of interesting revolutionary rhetoric, I’m not sure I would have been as drawn to it as I was after hearing stories from the perspective of the artist himself. In spite of the admonishment of punk to “kill yr idols” and not to engage in hero worship, I felt somewhat intimidated by the fact that this accomplished artist was interested in sending multi-page letters to a bored kind in high school who only vaguely understood the sociopolitical landscape from which Cope emerged.
I can’t say Eric introduced me to revolutionary politics. I’d already earned my degree in imperialist and colonialist history from Punk Rock University. However, he was the first to introduce me to the breadth of leftist politics, both in his letters and in Wiring Dept. In an issue of Wiring Dept, featuring Michael Franti (then of The Beatnigs – currently, yes, THAT Michael Franti!) the words of Malcolm X, George & Jonathan Jackson, Kwame Nkrumah, Bobby Sands, Steve Biko, Angela Davis, Huey P. Newton, Ericka Huggins, Bob Marley, and Silvia Plath hug up against interviews and reviews of bands like Big Black, Stickdog, Sonic Youth, Andrew Worsdale, Barnacle Choir, Comic Book Opera, Adrian Sherwood, Systems Collapse, and Wire. All of this is interspersed with photography, art by Sue Coe, and short articles about Israeli Imperialism, El Salvador, Indigenous Americans, and Nicaragua. It was a lot of information packed into a large format with striking graphics and typesetting, and it opened me up to an entire world of political philosophy that began with my introduction to Taoism, continued through my discovery of the Clash, was furthered by my introduction to anarcho-punk, and became solidified by pen friendships with several remarkable people, and their zines. Particularly, Mr. Cope.
Almost as clearly as the image of that dilapidated box, I have an image of myself as a teenager. I’ve stayed home from school to read and write letters, which was a fairly common occurrence through my high school years. I hear the sound of the front storm door suction as it opens to receive a stack of mail that is too large for the mailbox, and the whoosh of the aluminum blinds against the door as the storm door closes against it.
I read up on Eric Cope when I started writing this article, and it seems he continued to lead an interesting life long after we ceased communication. From the articles I read, he’s STILL doing some pretty cool stuff. It makes me glad. I have two issues of Wiring Dept. in the Crustacean Zine Library that are old and damaged and falling apart, and I absolutely treasure them and wish I had preserved them better, but I was too busy reading and learning and gaining inspiration from them to care. If ANYONE has any copies of this zine that they would like someone to care for, please consider sending it to me. I promise, I will cherish it.
Other sources:
UnrulyMom.Com 