because i said so - I was a 15-year-old kid with a love for punk rock...

Aug
4th

Tue

I was a 15-year-old kid with a love for punk rock and a desire to get involved; the act of making a fanzine was, as I saw it, both the process and the goal. My first issue was eight pages long, printed in navy blue ink, and totally dreadful. But I printed 200 copies of it, stood outside of CBGB with a backpack full of them, and after peddling them for a few weeks, earned roughly $100 in profit

—

Nervous Acid’s “How Fanzines Can Save the Magazine Industry” (via hud)

I was also a 15-year-old kid with a love for punk rock and a desire to get involved. Instead of starting my own fanzine though, I started writing for someone else’s after emailing the guy to tell him how much his copyediting sucked. That summer, I found myself backstage at Warped Tour with a tape recorder in my sweaty hands, interviewing Davey Havok (from AFI) and Spike (from Me First & The Gimme Gimmes) and the exhilerating feeling that I experienced that day would become the motivating force for the next 7 years of my life. That is, until I actually graduated from college and began applying for magazine jobs only to realize that the industry was no longer a viable career path.

Still, I don’t think I’ll ever stop loving magazines, and fanzines all the more so. I only wish that I could return to that point in my life when I was willing to pour that much energy and enthusiasm into something that I was compensated for in CDs and concert tickets.

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