Here is the English translation:

Back from the Grove: The story of Bananas Magazine

It was 2009. I was living in New York and I was as obsessed as ever with garage rock, in particular with the garage revival sound of the 80s. I had acquired a Farfisa Combo Compact and a Vox Jaguar but couldn’t play a simple riff to save my life. Frustrated by the fact that I would never be able to join a band, I looked for other ways to contribute to the scene I loved so much. As part of my obsession with the 80s revival scene, I was collecting ‘zines from back then. I had a hefty collection of What Wave, 99th Floor, Mystery Scene etc. I loved those ‘zines as much for their DIY xeroxed aesthetics as for their content, and then it hit me that the way to go for me would be to start a ‘zine about New York garage punk bands. 

The scene in those days was thriving, with lots of great local acts like the Above, Twin Guns, the Othermen, the Back CCs, the Jigglers, the Electric Mess, Daddy Long Legs. Going to gigs about 3-4 times a week I was chummy with a lot of that crowd. I was particularly good friend with the two promoters running Hullabaloo, Charles and George. Those guys were responsible for bringing most of the out of town garage bands playing in New York. In addition, George was running a website called garagepunknyc.com where he listed all events related to the genre. So one night, I brought up the idea of turning garagepunknyc into a printed ‘zine which would be all about the New York punk scene. Charles and George were immediately on board. We figured the more of us there would be, the more fun it would get. Charles asked his friend Brandon to join. We were now four very enthusiastic guys wanting to make a ‘zine with no idea how to go about it. That’s when Charles asked his ex-bandmate (in Red Ties) Alessandra if she’d like to join. She had experience running a ‘zine and we thought that would be very useful. So the five of us started meeting up, usually in my kitchen to brainstorm. We needed a name, a way to print the ‘zine that wouldn’t cost us too much, and ideas for content. 

We quickly came to the realisation that covering only local bands and labels, we would probably run out of content after a couple of issues. As a result we decided to cover the global scene, while always bringing focus on at least one or two NY acts. The more we talked about content, the clearer it became that we wanted to not only cover music but the lifestyle that usually goes along with that music. We’d talk vintage movies, cocktails, food. Anything that people listening to that music might find of interest. It was a great direction for the ‘zine to go, but unfortunately we progressively let go of all other subjects. Golden age of porn (written by the Above bassist Frank) lasted seven issues, movie reviews two issues, cocktail recipes and restaurants reviews one issue. What stayed until the last issue was the beloved Todd’s Tabs, which consisted in Todd (of the Spinns, Siberians, Gondoliers, Church Bats and many many more) writing down guitar tabs to some classic and obscure tunes of the ‘60s and explaining how to play those parts. Anyway, back then we thought we had content pinned down. 

The next step was to find a printer and see how much we’d have to shell to put the ‘zine out. It was very clear from the start that we wanted the ‘zine to be free and available as widely as possible while not going broke in the process. We wanted to print cheap but we didn’t want it to LOOK cheap. We didn’t want to do laser printing because we thought it looked like shit and too modern. We wanted newsprint but the problem is that very few printers did newsprint on a small run and it was usually very expensive. We asked around and it was the people from Norton Records who pointed us to a printer in Queens that used to do their catalogues. OK so now we had content ideas, we had a place to print and a general idea of what it’d cost us to print 1500 copies of a 48 pages black and white ‘zine.

The last and most difficult task was to find a name for the ‘zine. We spent way too many hours trying to find something. Then one day Charles came to us all grin telling us the name of the ‘zine had come to him in a dream: Bananas. We all liked it. We were ready to start working on the first issue!

We were all assigned tasks. As an illustrator, I was to take care of the look of the zine, design the logo (inspired by the Dead Moon logo which was a band we all loved), draw the cover and do all the artwork. Brandon who is also an illustrator helped by doing some spot illustration. Charles and I would take care of the layout. Charles used to do lots of flyer and poster design in Art Chantry style and that was definitely one of our big inspiration for the look of the ‘zine. For that first issue, we did most of it by hand, doing collage, photocopies of photocopies to achieve that grainy, dirty look of the old fanzines. It looked cool but was way too time-consuming. From issue 2 on, everything was done digitally. With today’s digital tools you can achieve that xeroxed look very easily anyway.

Writing was a group effort, and we all participated, although some of us didn’t feel too comfortable with writing skills. We also asked a bunch of friends if they would like to contribute and until the last issue we had a rotating roster of writers. 

For that first issue, we thought it would be good to have a few ‘big names’ to grab people’s attention. We interviewed Eric Davidson from New Bomb Turks who was about to release his book ‘We Never Learn: The Gunk Punk Undercut 1988-2001’ but also J.D. Matignon in what I think remains one of our best interview. For those who don’t know him, just grab a copy of Bananas #1 and read the interview! Nah I’m kidding, I dunno where you’d find a copy. Anyway J.D. was the owner of Midnight Records, a staple of the NYC 80s garage scene and released classic records by the Fuzztones, Vipers, Outta Place, Tryfles etc. What very few people knew was that he was still running some sort of record store on appointment only from his loft on 23rd street and George would occasionally go there. He offered to interview him and surprisingly J.D. agreed. They did the interview over a few sessions in J.D.’s loft. The interview was so long that it carried in the second issue of Bananas. 

We all did our part and a few months later the ‘zine was sent to print. Here some new problems arose. The printer wouldn’t deliver. None of us had a car. 1500 ‘zines take a shit load of space and weights a ton! Anyway, George and I rented a car, drove to Queens and brought back all the ‘zines to my place. The plan was to distribute the ‘zine locally as much as possible. That part was easy. Any given night, either one of us would be at a gig, so it was just a matter of taking some magazines before going out and dropping them at the venues. We also left some at record stores, drift shops and other places we deemed cool enough to carry Bananas Magazine! 

But we wanted distribution outside of NY as well. We sent copies to all the labels we knew in North America, Europe and South America. We wanted them to be aware of the ‘zine but more specifically, we wanted them to advertise in the next issue to cover the printing costs. All the copies we sent to labels came with a letter explaining that if they bought an ad in the magazine, we’d send them 50 copies free of charge for them to distribute. Tons of labels loved the idea. In turn they would put a copy of Bananas in each of their customers orders. People love to receive freebies! We set the ad price so that minus the shipping of 50 copies, the allotted ad space would cover printing cost. We never aimed to make any profit with Bananas. Anyway, thanks to ads placed regularly by labels such as Slovenly, Get Hip and Voodoo Rhythm we managed to keep the magazine running and keep it free all these years.

With the second issue, we really established what the template of all future issues would be. Interviews with international bands and labels. An in-depth article on the scene in one specific country, reports from some wild party-goers attending the best garage festivals of the years usually accompanied by professional shots of bands in action, a spotlight on an artist connected to the scene and the usual dozen pages of record reviews. Oh and my favourite part of each issue, bands posing with bananas and/or Bananas. Some people (I’m thinking of Michael Kastelic of the Cynics) took it really seriously and sent us hilarious pictures. 

It took us a good six months to get the second issue ready. For the release we wanted to make it a bit more memorable than just dropping copies anonymously in dive bars and venues. With Charles and George being promoters it wasn’t too hard to make one of their event an ‘official’ Bananas release party. I can’t remember the venue but I think Back CCs, and Charles’ short lived surf band the Ape Hangers were playing. There was also an out of town band, possibly the Insomniacs. What I remember is that we wanted to have free merch. to give away, ideally t-shirts but ordering shirts to give away would have cost us too much. I had vague notions of silkscreening from art school and so we figured we’d print the shirt ourselves. Charles and I set up in my studio in Bushwick and printed the Bananas logo in various colour on cheap white shirts we had bought. The shirts turned out great and we gave them all away that night.

Originally, we wanted to put out an issue every trimester. I think we kept up the pace for the following 3-4 issues. However, enthusiasm of some of the contributors started to falter and soon we were only putting two issues per year. Bananas has always been a labour of love, but in the end it was my project more than the others and when someone didn’t have it in them to contribute anymore there really wasn’t much I was able to do to convince them to stay on board. By issue 12, only Todd and me were left of the original contributors. However, I regularly received emails from people asking if they could write for Bananas, and I also reached out to some people and one way or the other I always managed to have 10 or so contributors per issue. Most contributors in the last issue had been contributing for 8-9 issues, so they were definitely part of the team. At that point though, I was no longer living in NY and none of the contributors lived close-by so the vibe was very different from the time when we’d all meet in my flat to talk about the next issue. Still, we went on to release 18 issues in total. By the end of 2019, issue 19 was in the works but it was my turn to lack the time and enthusiasm to finish the issue and so we called it quit. It was a great experience while it lasted, made me discover innumerable numbers of bands that I certainly wouldn’t have heard about without Bananas and I’m still thinking of one day contacting all the contributors for a nice full colour final issue. I actually have a list of bands and labels I would love to interview!

Edit: With issue 10 we started releasing free to download Bandcamp compilations featuring bands covered in the current issue. Those are still up at bananasmagazine.bandcamp.com

Check it out!