I have excellent news for the world. Ryan Richardson, one of the United States’ foremost collectors, archivists, and dealers of punk rock records and ephemera has given us a most welcomed gift.

Richardson has uploaded the entire print run of the classic L.A. punk magazine, Slash, to his website Circulationzero.com.

A true Internet saint, Richardson has previously blessed us with free online archives of Star magazine, Rock Scene magazine, and Fanzinefaves.com, a repository of various early punk zines. Richardson also hosts the exhaustive punk info blog Break My Face.

Unlike crucial, pioneering magazines such as Touch and Go and We Got Power!, which have recently gotten deluxe anthology treatments, Slash magazine has remained hidden from public view since its demise in 1980, save for the surviving copies in the hands of primordial punks and collectors with the scratch to afford valuable originals on eBay.

Richardson has collected the entire print run of 29 issues from 1977 to 1980.

The importance of Slash to the L.A. punk scene, and really to the worldwide punk scene in general, cannot be overstated.  The writing of Claude “Kickboy Face” Bessy, Jeffrey Lee Pierce, and Chris D. helped to define the attitude and outlook of the nascent subculture, while the imagery of illustrators Gary Panter and Mark Vallen established punk as an art movement working outside of—but in conjunction with—the music scene. Photographers like Ed Colver and Jenny Lens provided essential documentation of the era, making names for themselves producing some of the most important rock photography ever captured.
 

 
The layout design, graphics, and writing put Slash spiky-head-and-shoulders above most any other punk fanzine before or since. And in terms of being a historical record of a cultural time and place, this print run is priceless. We hope you have several hours to kill. You can download the entire archive right here or from Circulationzero.com.

The zip-file download of the complete run is free, but Richardson asks that those taking advantage make a charitable donation to Electronic Frontier Foundation, Doctors Without Borders or Austin Pets Alive. He has provided donation links on Circulationzero.com.

While you’re waiting on this large file to download, here’s a gallery of covers and pages included in the archive:
 

 

 
More after the jump…

Culture Club on the cover of Smash Hits, July 19, 1984
 
Music magazine Smash Hits started out in 1978 and was a mecca for pop fans. It had a strong rotation of writers back in its heyday such as Dave Rimmer (author of the 1985 book, Like Punk Never Happened), Mark Ellen (MOJO), Steve Beebee (Kerrang!) and Neil Tennant of The Pet Shop Boys. Regular content included interviews and pictorials but Smash Hits also published some fun features like “Bitz” (a smattering of industry information like fan club addresses and such), and was filled with pages of lyrics to the current top 20 songs (you know, so you didn’t have to keep trying to write them down on your own). There was always a centerfold spread, and in addition to the magazines eye-catching covers they also ran a special “back cover” with glossy photos of hot at-the-time artists like Limahl the spiky-haired vocalist for Kajagoogoo or the Thompson Twins.
 

Limahl of Kajagoogoo, May 24th, 1984

In 2009, Smash Hits superfan Brian McCloskey, an 80’s kid who had hung on to his copies of Smash Hits since youth, decided to rescue his collection from his parents’ attic at his childhood home in Derry, Ireland. McCloskey had the magazines shipped all the way to his home in California, tracked down copies he was missing in his collection from the magazines inception, then took on the painstaking process of scanning and uploading every page of every issue he had to his blog, Like Punk Never Happened. McCloskey’s collection of Smash Hits represents every issue of the magazine from 1979 to 1985.
 

Big Country, April 14th, 1983

As I can’t help but admire his dedication to this pop-culture gem, I contacted McCloskey to learn more about his recollections from the early days of Smash Hits.

Smash Hits took music very seriously, but they didn’t take musicians seriously. A very sensible distinction. I think that people have either forgotten or didn’t realize to begin with that Smash Hits was quite a serious magazine. During their peak years they would receive thousands of letters - handwritten letters! You could read great interviews with real artist like Paul Weller or Ian Dury. After the magazine’s redesign at the end of 1981, the snark really took over. I’m glad that the my archive has reminded, or opened people’s minds to the early days of Smash Hits.

Gary Numan, September 1983

Smash Hits continued to publish issues well after its official decline in the early 90’s, then ceased its print run in February of 2006. McCloskey updates his site with new vintage issues every two week and hopes to continue posting issues beyond 1985 with the help of fellow fans. I highly recommend you get comfortable, set your Pandora station to “80’s Pop,” then head over to McCloskey’s blog and lose yourself for a few hours. A number of images published during the years 1982-1984 from Smash Hits follow.
 

The Belle Stars, February 3, 1983

Cyndi Lauper and Thomas Dolby lyric sheet, March 29th, 1984

Scritti Politti lyric sheet, June 7th, 1984

Thompson Twins, November 24th, 1983

Billy Idol, July 19, 1984

Adam Ant lyric sheet, December/January 1982

 
To the modern eye, vintage men’s mags rarely elicit more than a bit of kitschy amusement, but that’s only because you’re not looking at the right genre of vintage men’s mags. Behold this collection of covers from Man’s Life, a veritable visual symphony of testosterone-soaked pulp and smut. The covers tend to fall in one of a few categories: man being manly, man versus beast (such as the “Weasels Ripped My Flesh” feature above, made famous by Neon Park’s Mothers of Invention album cover), man versus woman, man saves woman, man and woman versus beast, man versus foreign man, and many, many permutations of all the aforementioned—all rendered to glorious, if perhaps slightly repetitive, effect, I might add.

The headlines of Man’s Life not only advertised dangerous and/or lascivious adventures, they sometimes promised the reader actual instructions on how to access such debauchery in real life.  One would assume the writing inside is… similarly less than sophisticated, especially since the captions aren’t any more diverse than the cover art. One screamer declares that “love-starved women are lousing up college towns,” while another proclaims that “women are lousing up sports.” (You know us women, always lousing everything up!)

Tragically, like most adventure-smut of its time, Man’s Life fell victim to the specialization of publishing in the mid-60’s. Bookish readers flocked to literary magazines, while oglers flocked to more explicit porn—no longer was there a need to compile the two between the covers of one absurdly masculine volume.

Nowadays the boobs-and-essay giants like Playboy like to exercise a bit of subtlety in both their prose and their pinups. Long gone are the days of such flagrantly absurd machismo, and I for one believe our culture to be the poorer for it. But I suppose we’ll always have the weasels…
 

 

 

 
See more covers after the jump…