Ryan Richardson is one of the United States’ foremost collectors, archivists, and dealers of punk rock records and ephemera, as well as being the Internet saint who created free online archives of Star,  Rock Scene, and Slash magazines. He also runs Fanzinefaves.com, a repository of various early punk zines as well as the exhaustive punk info blog Break My Face.

We’ve written about Richardson’s punk altruism before here at Dangerous Minds. The last time was when he uploaded the entire print run of the seminal transgressive LA artpunk publication, NO MAG, over at his site CirculationZero.com.

Richardson has done his Good Samaritan work once again, this time with the upload of the complete print run of the Bay Area’s Damage magazine which was published between July 1979 and June 1981. Damage concentrated its coverage on the San Francisco and LA punk scenes, but also covered underground music scenes worldwide. Richardson calls it “a definite contender in a state crowded with fanzine heavyweights.”

Thirteen issues were published including a freebie special edition released between the 9th and 10th issue for the Western Front festival which Damage co-sponsored.

The newsprint zine featured bold graphics, photography, and loads of writing and interviews of great historical importance to anyone following the early California punk scene. Your mileage may vary, but the San Francisco scene between 1978-1983 is perhaps my personal favorite all-time music scene, so these issues are absolute gold to me. For my money, nothing beats the aesthetic of arty punk fanzines prior to the age of desktop publishing, and Damage is as fine an example of the form as any you care to name.

Publisher Brad Lapin spoke of Damage’s importance as a historical record in a 2010 statement to the San Francisco Zine Fest:

While I trust that the magazine speaks for itself, both for good and ill, I suppose I could say by way of explanation that, beyond all the sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, that is, beyond the pure visceral FUN of punk and life in the underground, there were also deeply serious issues of politics, of social justice and, above all, of aesthetics that connected and inspired the many people involved in the Damage project. Because these concerns were particularly articulated in the scene as it existed in San Francisco three decades ago, Damage’s importance today, like that of the other zines, is as a kind of constant witness to an unique time, place and circumstance; one that spoke and one hopes still speaks to the immanent primacy of youthful idealism and to the notion that there is a deep and abiding value in a radical, even desperate rejection of the commonplace, the accepted, the normal. Conformity and regimentation then, as now, are the foresworn enemies of the creative energy that is the essence and the wellspring of youth. That stance of absolute defiance to which the punk aesthetic aspires and which, in fact, is it’s raison d’etre is no less a viable ideal today than it was 30 years ago. If anything, it is more necessary and more important.

The download of the complete set is free, but Richardson asks that those taking advantage make a charitable donation to Electronic Frontier Foundation, Doctors Without Borders, or Austin Pets Alive. Donations to these charities make the project worthwhile for Richardson, so it would be, you know, the cool thing to do to toss a few bucks that way, considering the amazing gift being provided here. Richardson has placed donation links on CirculationZero.com—go there now to download Damage, and while you’re waiting on that file transfer, scroll through this gallery of covers and pages from Damage‘s history:
 

 
More after the jump…

The Avengers. Photo by James Stark.
 
Photographer James Stark got his start shooting photos for the band Crime in 1976 and thereafter began documenting the early punk scene in San Francisco. Many of his visually arresting photos of both local SF bands like Crime, the Nuns, the Dils and the Avengers, and national acts like Blondie, DEVO, and the Sex Pistols made their way into his 1992 self-published book Punk ‘77. The title was picked up and reissued by RE/Search publishing in 1999, and now exists in an expanded third edition.
 

First edition of Stark’s photobook. Click image to order the expanded third edition.
 
I bought the first edition when it came out, and it remains one of my favorite photo books documenting what is my personal favorite of the early American punk scenes.

Here are a few photos from Stark’s Punk ‘77:
 

The Screamers
 

 

Booji Boy, DEVO
 

 
What I didn’t realize until recently is that James Stark has a web presence with a lot more of his awesome photos of bands and show-goers from the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. His website is a fun place to spend some time, and his Facebook page has a lot of neat stuff not in the book—including many color photographs of San Francisco scenesters.

As much fun as band photos are, I revel in seeing what people attending shows looked like. To me, the best part of live concert footage is always when the camera pans to the audience—just to see what regular people were looking like when they went to see their favorite bands.

Here’s a sampling of Stark’s work from his Facebook page which is not featured in his fantastic and recommended book:
 

The Mutants
 

The Avengers
 
More after the jump…

(Note date on flyer. How did that work?)

I’ve always read about this film, Louder, Faster, Shorter, directed by Mindaugis Bagdon (one of the contributors to the Search and Destroy ounk zine) but never saw it until today:

San Francisco, March 21, 1978. In the intense, original punk rock scene at the Mabuhay Gardens (the only club in town which would allow it), the Avengers, Dils, Mutants, Sleepers, and UXA played a benefit for striking Kentucy coal miners (“Punks Against Oppression!”), raising $3,300. The check was actually mailed and received. One of the only surviving 16 mm color documents of this short-lived era.

If you’d like your own copy of this film on DVD, they’ve got just a few left at RE/Search.
 

 
Via Glen E. Friedman/Stupefaction

 
Acclaimed British journalist and punk historian Jon Savage has curated Black Hole: Californian Punk 1977-1980, a unique and revealing compilation of the Golden State’s hugely diverse pre-thrash punk scene that gets released November 15th.

That seems strange on the surface. Strange that it’s both taken this long into the 21st-century American punk revival and reissue era for such a quality collection to emerge, and that it’s taken an Englishman rather than a Californian to do it. But this particular Englishman is more than qualified. As noted in his recent interview in the Quietus, Savage hepped up to the scene while on the West Coast in 1978 as a journalist for Sounds magazine, hanging with the likes of the Screamers and the Avengers and confirming to himself and others that the UK didn’t own punk.

Savage’s inclusion of both Northern and Southern Cali bands like the Bags, the Alley Cats, the Weirdos, Black Randy & the Metro Squad, and the Dils makes Black Hole most resemble the compilations released by the legendary short-lived L.A.-based Dangerhouse label run by Pat “Rand” Garrett and David Brown from 1978 to 1980. But Savage augments those with a range of others, from superstars like the Dead Kennedys to second-tiers like Crime, Middle Class and the Sleepers, and on to important obscurities like the two-single-releasing Aurora Pushups.

One of Savage’s rationales surrounding the comp, on which he expounds in Quietus, proves striking:

I don’t like hardcore. It’s too ‘boy’ for me. I was into the idea of punk being made for and by outsiders. And that meant outsiders of every hue, and that meant weird boys, hopeless boys, strong women, and gay men and women. As soon as it starts to get a machismo, and this happened in UK punk, too – I’m out of there.

Black Hole will join Penelope Spheeris’s classic late-‘70s documentary The Decline of Western Civilization as primary documents of a rough and energetic multi-city underground music scene—one that reflected the social dysfunction of the state in political schizophrenia with the world’s eighth-biggest economy.

Here’s the title track by the Urinals. This is Cali.
 

 
Get: Black Hole (Californian Punk 1977-1980) [CD]