FISTFULAYENSly and The Family Stone “Fresh” and “Small Talk” Zine from 1994
Although I cut my teeth on Kiss, AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, Frank Zappa, and Rush, by the time I was a junior in high school I wasn’t listening to any “old” music except The Velvet Underground, and wouldn’t touch anything on a major label. I went from Minor Threat and Agnostic Front to ordering Isocracy and Artless vinyl from Maximum Rock N Roll. I wasn’t interested in anything you could buy at the record store at my local mall (except maybe Metallica and Slayer, to tell the whole truth).
Then I met Chad Miller. We first connected in Journalism class over Frank Zappa, but then he started bombarding me with GOOD MUSIC. Here you had a sixteen year-old kid that had the taste of a Mojo editor (not that I knew what Mojo was at the time, but in retrospect his taste may have been BETTER in most cases). He turned me on to Johnny Cash and Howlin’ Wolf, played Fun House and James Brown’s Motherload for me for the first time, and most importantly loaned me a Japanese CD import of Sly and The Family Stone’s Fresh
The albums were both panned on their release and while Fresh has gained notoriety Small Talk remains a footnote in today’s Wikipedia page on Sly. I maintain this is what drove Sly underground — he was defining the most resonant soul and the critics were cruel, saying his career was going into reverse. He was really onto something deeper than he’d been in the past, but the world wanted him to sing a simple song.
Somewhere around 1993 a tattoo artist in Bloomington, Indiana called St. Marq tattooed Sly on my right shoulder for $150. I wanted to do the shot from the inside of Fresh but Sly’s face is half-shadowed and Marq told me he needed something higher contrast or it wouldn’t look right. I took the shot from the back cover of Back on The Right Track and Marq did a pretty amazing job. Only two people have ever guessed correctly in the fifteen years since and I’ve heard it all, Buckwheat, Angela Davis, you name it. Thankfully I’m not sleeveless outside the house that often. Speaking of which, here I am inside the house on paternity leave with Lucinda about a year ago:
Early in 1994 I grabbed a bottle of Boone’s Farm wine from the Bloomington Village Pantry (a 7-11 sort of joint) and walked the mile through campus toward Kinko’s. By midnight I’d finished the bottle and stumbled into Kinko’s front door. I remember a feeling of regret at that moment, wishing the walk were shorter and I weren’t already a bottle of cheap wine deep, because I had a backpack full of albums and magazines and a birthday art project ahead of me: I was on a mission to make a Fresh/Small Talk zine for my then-girlfriend Kim Howitt. Regardless, I set up shop at a table in Kinko’s and got to work, creating what I thought to be a worthy companion to the Fresh/Small Talk cassette tape I’d sent her months previous. Remember these albums weren’t on CD yet (Small Talk was released domestically on CD in 2007, I believe) and if you didn’t have the vinyl you didn’t have the lyrics.
Cut to yesterday when my wife’s dad brought over a bunch of boxes which needed storing…I was moving things around in the garage and found the original copy of the Fresh/Small Talk zine pretty much fully in tact (surprising since I’ve lost most any of this kind of artifact since leaving Indiana). I scanned it and threw it at my Flickr account as part of an ongoing tribute to two of the best records of all time. Enjoy.
Tattooing a face on your body is almost as dumb as tattooing your fingers — I don’t recommend it. But Sly has served me well there. Alan Elliott still credits the tattoo with his first love for me, I bared it for the guy that owns Blue Note records in Miami and he came up off one of two alternate mixes of Fresh he was hiding in the back room, and my driver in SF a couple weeks back nearly fell out of the car upon seeing it — I had to show it to him after he spent half the drive telling me about hanging out with Sly in SF in the 60s. The good news is I haven’t changed my mind about Sly one bit since I put him there, those records still make me emotional every time I hear them.
ian
ps – Epic put out a decent CD box set of everything up through Small Talk
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