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Music

This Crude Canadian Zine Was into Punk Before It Existed

Started in the summer of 1971, "Denim Delinquent" covered the angry young bands that the high-minded rock press refused to touch.

All pages of 'Denim Delinquent' courtesy of HoZac Books

By the dawn of the 1970s, rock 'n' roll had gone from being a rebellion to an august cultural institution, and both musicians and critics were taking advantage of the genre's newfound cachet. While bands dipped into bottomless recording budgets to fill up album sides with long, ponderous suites of progressive rock, journalists kept pace by writing sprawling, navel-gazing reviews. The visceral charge of bands such as the Stooges, Grand Funk, and the New York Dolls was written off as silly kid stuff by the puka-shell-donning tastemakers of the high-profile rock publication, creating a gap between the top of the rock hierarchy and the fans who loved the joyous, insensitive noise coming out of the gutter.

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That's where guys like Canadian Jim Parrett came in. Inspired by the the scant irreverent voices in rock journalism—namely Lester Bangs, Richard Meltzer, Mike Saunders, and Nick Tosche— Parrett and others like him created small-time publications that predated the now-infamous punk 'zine boom by almost a decade. "Rolling Stone opened up new avenues with some interesting takes on the music scene until they started getting into the intellectual trip" says Parrett. "But when it comes to rock 'n' roll, intellect only gets in the way. What I wanted to do was communicate how it feels. How it sounds."

He tried to do that through Denim Delinquent, a zine he started in the summer of 1971. It lasted for eight smudgy, mimeographed issues, and it chased the roar of rock coming from London, Los Angeles, and his native Canada. Delinquent was inspired by equal parts raucous sounds, cheap drugs, and Mad magazine.

"Denim Delinquent didn't have as wide a view as Rolling Stone or Creem on what constitutes rock 'n' roll," declares Parrett."For [co-editor] Mark A. Jones and I, it was the power, the volume, the sound of a guitar, pounding drums, and just having a ball. We, like many other zine editors, were on a mission. It was a passion for us. What separated the big players from us is that we just did what we wanted without the pretty articles on Joni Mitchell or James Taylor. We had the freedom to invent ourselves without worrying that anybody would read the stuff. It was like our diary, with wacky illustrations and a whole lot of rocking going on. We were writing for ourselves, never thinking anybody would want to read it."

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But people were reading. Delinquent fans included not only fellow zine editors like Phast Phreddie Patterson of Backdoor Man out in California or future Dictators member and Teenage Wasteland Gazette head honcho Andy Shernoff, but some of the the editors' inspirations. When Lester Bangs mailed in an unsolicited review of Lou Reed's fourth solo record Sally Can't Dance, Parrett and Jones knew it had to run. "Denim Delinquent number six had been completed, but there was no way we weren't going to include something by one of our idols," Parrett says. "So a page got cut with Bangs's piece in its place. However, Bangs's article was so long, the type ended up being tiny, so it would fit on a single page—it really should have been a two pager."

Denim Delinquent also had future rock stars courting the mag's favor. It supported Kiss from the get-go, and the band never forgot that. "I first saw Kiss opening, I think, for Blue Oyster Cult in 1974," remembers Parrett. "While the makeup and all that was fun, it was that monstrous sound they put out—everything up to the max, with thudding drums and power. It was that sound that I loved so much then. The fact that they were dismissed by so much of the rock press made them even more attractive. Gene Simmons contacted us and kept contacting us. He was very polite and always remembering our names, even a year apart from appearances. The band was nice enough after a 1976 show to autograph a dozen copies of the the magazine that we gave away in a contest with subscribers."

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By this point in the game, Parrett was reaping the rewards of his passion project by getting his first paying freelance writing gigs in professional rock mags and being flown around on record labels' dime to check out band showcases. By 1977, he had a job and a family, was living in Dallas, and had stepped away from zine making.

"I put together a couple of punk groups and just stopped writing, which was truthfully a blessing—always hated writing, always will," he says. "Instead, I became another corporate stooge, dreading every moment of it, spending weekends with my poor kids in tow at record shops."

In the past few decades, proto-punk historians like Black to Comm's Chris Stigliano and Ugly Things co-conspirator Jeremy Cargill have sung the praises of Denim Delinquent in the pages of their magazines and their voices must have been pretty piercing, because now a compendium of the entire run will see the light of day via the publishing branch of the Chicago-based punk label HoZac later this month. Now back in Canada after years in the Middle East, Parrett is excited but skeptical how his down and dirty zine efforts will be taken 40 years after the fact.

"I don't know that Denim Delinquent will ever be anything more than a footnote." muses Parrett. "Most of the stuff I wrote was drunken, stoned stream of unconsciousness. It was something made to be fun, without any specific intellectual purpose. Remember, today's zines are wonders of dogged research into every nook and cranny of a band's music and their histories. Sure, Denim Delinquent has some cool interviews with Ron Asheton and Iggy Pop and others, but if you're looking for intellectual nourishment, you've come to the wrong place. If you just want to have fun, welcome aboard."

The Denim Delinquent compendium is available for pre-order from HoZac Records.