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BACK DOOR MAN was a rock'n'roll fanzine that operated from February 1975 through the summer of 1978 out of the bedroom of the editor Phast Phreddie Patterson in Torrance, California. It was quite possibly the first music periodical to write about local acts and events as regular editorial policy, a full year before New York Rocker and/or Punk.
First issue of Back Door Man Magazine:
BACK DOOR MAN
It was 34 years ago, but I remember it like it was yesterday … Phast Phreddie phoned me and said he was starting a magazine, it was gonna be called Back Door Man, and did I want to write for it? I said, "Yeah! And let's get Thom "The Punk" Gardner and Bob Meyers and D.D. Faye and Don Underwood, too." 'Cause I knew they could all write, had opinions galore, and shared (mostly) the same attitude toward then-contemporary music and magazines -- which was that they (mostly) sucked.
We wanted to throw a metaphorical brick through the plate-glass window of a pop-cultural world that didn't want to know about anything but an increasingly pointless worship of musical technique or "going up the country, gonna get my head together" platitudes that stifled any other type of expression. And had absolutely nuthin' to do with the all-too-real lives that we were living.
We aimed to do this with brutal honesty and, especially, humor, reasoning that if we could point out the absurdity of an opposing argument by making people -- or the person arguing the point -- collapse in paroxysms of teary-eyed laughter, we'd win more converts to our cause.
And we were downright evangelical in our love for what we considered the eternal verities of rock 'n' roll, as exemplified in the post-Raw Power performances of Iggy Pop & The Stooges at the Whisky-a-Go-Go that we'd witnessed the previous summer. To our collective minds, true rock 'n' roll was a continuum that ran from Howlin' Wolf to the Shadows Of Knight to the Doors to the Stooges … and everything else was total bullshit.
That -- in the proverbial nutshell -- is how and why we started Back Door Man. It's also how -- and why -- we managed to put out 15 issues in three-and-a-half years. During that time, punk-rock exploded -- and we welcomed that, albeit with certain reservations -- but we never bought into the wholesale rejection of the past that became so fashionable. Punk? Metal? Blues? Reggae? Pere Ubu? Chris Burden? It's all rock 'n' roll and it's all good.
So check out the covers of those semi-famous 15 issues of Back Door Man that are reproduced in all their eye-popping glory here. (Obviously, we got a lot better at what we were doing as we went along …) Eventually, the complete contents of the BDMs will be scanned and put in the blog section of this here myspazz site.
Speaking of history, it's worth noting that some of the slanguage contained therein reflects a very different time. We were -- and remain -- hugely influenced by Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, National Lampoon, and Paul Krassner's The Realist , where "Irreverence is our only sacred cow." So be ye black, brown, red, yellow or white, gay or straight, female or male (or any permutation thereof) there's bound to be something to offend every one of you. We spared no one, least of all, ourselves.
And, personally, I'm more embarrassed by all the misspellings, ungrammatical sentences, factual errors, and craptactular art direction (if you could call it that) than I am by any jokes I might -- or might not -- have written.
We were trying to be entertaining. And we were trying to build alliances between like-minded souls. (Many of our writers and photographers -- and people who wrote us letters that we printed in the magazine -- went on to greater things.)
We still are. That's why we're making these semi-legendary issues of Back Door Man available to anyone with an Internet connection. So kick back, relax, and enjoy the whacks. You know we did.
-- Don Waller (a.k.a Doc Savage)
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Stories, photos of the writers and scans of the magazines will be added in the blog section as they are prepared. Stay tuned.
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