TOUCH AND GO: The Complete Hardcore Punk Zine ’79-’83 co-author Tesco Vee returns to the Motor City August 27:th and along comes this absolutely stellar poster. The incomparable Vee will once again take the stage on St Andrews Hall with his The Meatmen and treat the audience to a potent witches’ brew of punk, metal, flamenco, wardrobe changes and a 130-pound air compressor gun. Great fun for anyone lucky enough to live in Michigan.

Meanwhile, TOUCH AND GO: The Complete Hardcore Punk Zine ’79-’83, by Vee and Dave Stimson, is available from Bazillion Points Books, and ships today w/ bonus badge and more!

http://www.touchandgobook.com

TESCO VEE TALK BY DAY / TOUCH AND GO BOOK IN-STORE DATES

After 100 years of film censorship, on Jan. 1, 2011, Sweden’s National Board of Film Classification officially disbanded, surrendering all hope of controlling the country’s cinema screens. In celebration, Daniel Ekeroth, author of the acclaimed Swedish Death Metal (Bazillion Points, 2008), declares victory with his scandalous new book Swedish Sensationsfilms: A Clandestine History of Sex, Thrillers, and Kicker Cinema.

Coming this March to bookstores everywhere, this lavish 328pp paperback offers a fiery retrospective of over 200 banned and cut films produced during the golden age of Swedish sin. “Into a rising whirlwind of madness I was born,” says Ekeroth (also known as bassist of Iron Lamb, Tyrant, and Insision). “As the ’70s came along, all limits were forgotten. Sweden was flooded with sexually explicit and violent films of every kind, and all morals were gone.”

Featuring a blockbuster cover painting by Wes Benscoter (Slayer, Black Sabbath), Swedish Sensationsfilms offers accounts by starlet Christina Lindberg (Thriller – En Grym Film, Maid in Sweden); scores of rare exhibition posters from works by Ingmar Bergman, Arne Mattson, and others; a glossary of curious Swedish customs; and an uninhibited cast of thousands, including: Stellan Skarsgård, Pernilla August, Lee Hazlewood, Dennis Hopper, Max von Sydow, David Carradine, Heinz Hopf, Harry Reems, Noomi Rapace, Marie Forså, Troy Donahue, Zinny Zan, and Ludde the dog.

Before Let the Right One In and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, daring Swedish films in the 1950s helped break down censorship in Hollywood, and the country’s exploitation classics are praised to this day by directors like Quentin Tarantino. “I look back with genuine joy,” says celebrated cover girl Christine Lindberg. “I am so very happy I could be a part of the ’70s. I would never deny being in those movies. I know that a lot of people do so, but I just had a blast.

For more information, page samples, and to view film trailers, visit this location:

http://www.sensationsfilm.com

The long-awaited 22-issue anthology of Touch and Go fanzine hit the bookstores on June 30, setting off a whirlwind of page-flipping, rare record rediscovery, and belly laughs the likes of which the literary world has never before seen. TOUCH AND GO: The Complete Hardcore Punk Fanzine ’79-’83 by Tesco Vee and Stimson (and edited by Steve Miller of the Fix) is like a dense rubber band ball of Midwest joy and desperation, packing layer upon layer of handmade discovery and punk frustration into a book that reveals the boyish hearts at the beginning of all this DIY hardcore punk nonsense.

So get the book, and while you’re waiting a few days for delivery, check out the straight-ahead Tesco Vee interview above. The dancing lancer of Lansing sets the scene, shows the lay of the land, and plays tracks by Necros, Negative Approach, 999, and more. He explains how the hardcore scene emerged from the punk happenings of the 1970s, how the live circuit was built, and what became of personalities like Henry Rollins and Ian MacKaye in the wake of it all. (By the way: Part 4 contained a song belonging to the Warner Music Group, so they caned that section.)

You can also keep up with Touch and Go book events and special moments at the book’s Facebook page. And another, longer podcast interview with Tesco Vee and editor Steve Miller lives at the official Touch and Go book site.

New arrival today at Bazillion Points HQ, as the printer sent us the first dripping wet samples of Touch and Go: The Complete Hardcore Punk Zine ’79-’83. If anything, they did too good a job hiding the 576-page girth of this beast in a deceptive one-and-a-quarter inch thickness, but you can feel the heft in your wrist when you shake the thing. Tesco Vee and Dave Stimson and editor Steve Miller’s book is an incredible eye-level archive of the first sprouts and eventual blossoming of hardcore punk in America. I mean, where were you in ’79, when the dam began to burst?

TV and DS were in Lansing fucking Michigan, listening to X and 999 and waiting for Reagan to take office. Already major music fiends, they got the punk bug, and inspired by Slash they huddled around the Xerox machine with glue and scissors and got to work. Their Touch and Go fanzine was a tiny crowbar that opened up a crack in the universe for anything weird and now revered, and the on-the-spot and on-the-mark reviews of crucial records by the Fall, Crisis, Pagans, Crass, Discharge, U2, the Cure, and hundreds of others (including Venom, Accept, Acid, and Blitzkrieg, hells yeah!) are alone worth the price of admission, just to make sure you aren’t suckered by nostalgia or a case of historical revisionism by someone who wasn’t there.

But the meat of matter is of course the acidic essays and wise-ass interviews with usually unknown up-and-comers like the Effigies, Necros, Void, Crucifix, Minor Threat, SSD, Negative Approach, Misfits, Youth Brigade, Iron Cross, Scream, the Minutemen, Battalion of Saints, Bad Religion, 7 Seconds, and countless others.

While sure to improve the profiles of essential U.S. hardcore bands the Fix, Necros, Meatmen, Negative Approach, and honorary Midwest bands (read non-LA or NYC) like Misfits or Minor Threat, the bleak Midwestern humor shines through:

TV: One glance at your lyrics, and it’s apparent that you aren’t much on booze and drugs.
IAN MACKAYE: I’m totally anti-drug and alcohol.
TV: In Lansing drinking is somewhat of a necessity.

The ever-gentle and considerate MacKaye goes on to describe hitting a kid with a hammer who blew pot smoke in his face, but I’ll leave that up to you to discover on your own. There will never be another book like this about hardcore, because these guys were ground correspondents and active participants during the incubation and invasion period. They not only wrote the zine, they booked the shows, they started the bands, and eventually they launched Touch and Go Records, a cornerstone of indie record labels to this day.

Go ahead and start a riot in your eyes with the fresh photos posted at the book site:

TOUCHANDGOBOOK.COM

Just don’t let your impressionable children take the book to show and tell—there are lots of wobbly penises, Xeroxed vaginas, and curly brown shapes in between all the bald heads and white T-shirts. Who else but Tesco Vee would put tit torture pics into a zine dedicated to 999??

Who’s more devotional in their ceremonial rituals, the legendary legions of Slayer fanatics, or their sworn and hated enemies from Team Jesus? Judging by this secret surveillance footage obtained by enemy agents—and the lameness of crowds at Slayer gigs lately—I’m throwing my hat in the ring with these crazy Christians. Watch and learn a lesson in violence!

Thanks, Tesco!

The low-res phase of proofs arrived at Bazillion Points HQ this morning for TOUCH AND GO: The Complete Hardcore Punk Zine ’79–’83, the illuminating and eliminating 576-page compendium of vintage punk zines produced by Tesco Vee and Dave Stimson. Obscene gestures and legendary sneers bounce off of every page like bricks and sticks during a police riot. By late June the books will be printed, bound, stitched, embossed, and blessed by a bloody nose. In the meantime, I hope to have more to show from the pompous purveyors of pop and perversity pretty soon.

More info, please?

http://www.touchandgobook.com