Punk No Dead - from the Fanzine Collection in the Stairwell - Swellsville - Winter Edition 1989/90

Hey, I found a copy of Swellsville in my 'zine vault (a moving box full of zines, stored in the stairwell). This old blog Teenage Gluesniffer wrote up a fine piece on Jack Thompson's labor of musical love from Seattle. I think I got slightly involved with this through my friend Richie, who's been writing about music since around the dawn of time and now, besides publishing fine rock history books, lectures and teaches in the Bay Area.

Anyhoo, who's interested in musical thoughts of the 1980s? True, the bands mostly disintegrated but our thoughts and relationships with them never fully faded away. Partially because we were all "coming-of-age" and this was our youthful soundtrack and blah blah blah and so on and so forth, but most importantly because this was truly an underground scene for us and we didn't know that was not going to last. So it's like a dream from the subconscious that if you don't write it down, you'll forget about it in the morning. We were all compulsive writers.

"Punk No Dead" was my thoughts from a three-month stay in Mexico where I was based in Guadalajara, attending school to learn Spanish (which I still need to learn, thanks to my mom's family buying into 1950s' assimilation ideals that encouraged them not to speak the language around their kids, and also I'm a lazy language-learner), but traveled throughout the southern regions of the country as well. My friend Rosanna and I were underground-music chicas who had to forgo underground music for the most part during our stay in Mexico. Until that faithful night in San Cristóbal de las Casas...

And I included a coloring page, which Thompson was so nice to print full-page for this 1989/90 issue. Thanks, Jack. I hope you're still writing.