Posts tagged: deathrockers

As Blue Blood comes up on our fifteen year anniversary — wait a second, wtf? Did I just say fifteen year anniversary? It feels like it was only yesterday that I was sitting on the floor of my punk rock group house, folding issues of Black Leather Times with my unsavory pals, and talking about how I was thinking about trying something glossier and maybe more erotically-oriented.

Doing Blue Blood in print plunged me headlong into a world which included so much which fascinated and intrigued me. One of my favorite things was trading publications with like-minded zinesters all over the world, showing them what I made and getting to see what they created. I think it was trading zines with the late great Ghastly magazine which eventually led me to meet up with the multi-talented deathrock crew from Release the Bats.

Some of how the world has turned out is certainly not what I envisioned when I took the road less traveled, but I guess fifteen years and going strong means I chose okay. I hope. A funny thing about being a lean independent but workaholic organization like Blue Blood is that we always have a ridiculous number of projects going on at once and sometimes some projects happen bizarrely fast, while others get completed on a timeline that only seems natural to vampires.

Speaking of the undead, I have really enjoyed the photographic work Forrest Black and I have created shooting at nightclubs over the years. In current internet business terms, I guess Blue Blood is technically the media sponsor for the upcoming Nine Year Anniversary of Release the Bats. But really the Blue Blood crew is just going to be kicking it old skool …

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I only met Rozz Williams once.

A bunch of the Blue Blood crew were in Los Angeles, celebrating the release of Blue Blood #5. That was the first full color issue of the magazine. I’d used a comic book printer who did high quality art repro and had no problem printing depictions of nude women. Heck, they actually also printed tons of publications involving sexualized eviscerations of women. (Yes, we were doing cross-promo with Glenn Danzig’s extreme Verotik at the time and he used the same printer.)

But the printer had had some concerns about Blue Blood’s content. First, they were very concerned that there was bestiality. I was like, WTF? They are holding up printing my magazine because they are concerned about the bestiality? Where do they think I have bestiality? Then I realized that I had written a fiction piece about the drummer in a dykey industrial band who gets with a werewolf. I was proud of the story and it was illustrated with elegant photographs by the famous Gunter Blum. I was thrilled that someone as huge as Gunter Blum wanted to be in Blue Blood. I really didn’t want to remove the werewolf piece and I really wanted to get my magazine printed. So I call the printer ready to do battle.

It turned out that the werewolf erotic fiction was not the problem at all. NOFX had sent Blue Blood a blow-up sheep. At the time, NOFX was unpopular with a lot of music journalists because they didn’t like to do interviews. I thought sending me a Love Ewe (get it?) was a billion times cooler than any interview could be, so I thought they were totally cool. Forrest Black shot me using …

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