"A Titanic Evening": The PUNK Magazine Awards
DOA/Sex Pistols Tour Chapter 38: September/October 1978
Narrator: In our last episode, Jimmy Carter was overheard on the White House lawn during a jazz festival saying: “We have to shut this punk thing down,” and Mutant Monster Beach Party (PUNK #15) was sent to the printer.
Newsstand sales arrived for PUNK #15 (Mutant Monster Beach Party) in September. They were beyond terrible: Total copies sold were less than 20% of the total distribution, which had been around 25,000 copies. So it sold around 5,000 copies. With mail subscriptions (almost 2500), alternative distro and free copies (we had a huge “Press List”) this would have meant that around 7-8,000 people got a copy. Back then, a magazine needed to hit 20,000 in sales to qualify as a national magazine to advertising agencies. So our goose was cooked.
What took place after the bad sales reports seemed more than a bit weird.
Sometime in late September (or early October, I can’t remember exactly when), I was summoned to a meeting at High Times magazine headquarters. Tom Forcade was beyond depressed as he told me that he could no longer support PUNK Magazine due to the poor sales. I was totally cool with this news so I was calm, cool and collected. But Tom’s depression was so deep it filled the room like a fog. I knew there was something else going on… He did hold out a bit of hope by saying: “If you can get a good business manager…”
I’ll admit that I couldn’t handle the double duties of both Publisher and Editor back then. It was too much switching between the left and right brains! On the other hand, along my long life’s journey I have seen so many “business experts and consultants” rip off every dime they could steal that I… Speaking of which…
After the mind-numbing meetup with Mr. Forcade, I had a short meeting with Jack Braunstein, the Vice President of Trans-High Corporation (THC) and its Treasurer: The guy in charge of the money. He seemed to take a special delight as he told me that Trans-High Corporation would no longer be supporting PUNK Magazine. “Things are going to be different around here from now on,” I remember him spewing out, discussing how they were getting rid of dead wood or whatever. He seemed to delight in the fact that the suits had just taken over the company from Tom Forcade. The clear, blatantly personal message was: “Forcade is no longer in control of his company. WE ARE! And PUNK Magazine is a total waste of our resources, so Fuck You and there’s the door.”
Oddly, this part of the High Times saga didn’t make it into Sean Howe’s excellent book about Tom Forcade (Agents of Chaos: Thomas King Forcade. High Times, and the Paranoid End of the 1970s), but looking back, I think it was a pivotal moment. Tom Forcade had everything and everyone working against him.
According to one of his lawyers, a former smuggling partner, Chic Eder, was “ratting him out to the Feds, who were closing in on him and determined to send him to prison.” (There are conspiracy theories that the lawyer was lying about this in order to drive Forcade into a paranoid state so that they could take over his empire. That is how crazy the paranoia was back in the day.)
No wonder Tom Forcade was in a deep depression. And no wonder some people think there was a plot to take him down and take over his publishing empire. In a way he was the Julian Assange of his day.
I wasn’t surprised by the decision to cut PUNK loose. It never seemed to me that PUNK magazine was a good fit for High Times (or anywhere else, we were too weird for any traditional publishing company). Forcade often ran free advertisements for PUNK Magazine, but we rarely got more than a few subscriptions as a result. But that can’t be blamed to our amazing advertisements, right? It was a classic case of “Pearls Before Swine.”
What I think Tom Forcade wanted most of all was credibility from the “elite.” He did not want High Times to be a “stoner rag for potheads” (although sadly, this is what it became, 1970s readers tolerated the coverage of Andy Warhol and the punk scene but purchased the product for to its pro-pot content). Forcade wanted High Times to be viewed as a ground-breaking and respected journal that broke important news stories. But things always went wrong with his plans.
There’s a funny (but telling) incident recounted in Sean Howe’s book about an incident that took place a few days after his 33rd birthday in September 1979: High Times threw a party for Tom’s birthday. When Andy Warhol showed up a photo shoot was quickly set up, but before Mick Rock’s camera clicked Aron Kay (the YIPPIE “Pie Man”) threw a pie in Warhol’s face! (Kay was not happy that Andy recently had dinner with the Shah of Iran.)
Toni Brown, High Times Art Director, was furious! After all, she had just talked Warhol and Truman Capote into posing for a cover shoot, and now THIS? But Forcade, the first and original pie man, was in a compromised position. “Andy Warhol’s our guest,” he says in Howe’s book. “But I look at Aron Kay and… I’ve created him! I can’t censor him!”
The incident sums up why High Times never reached the elite, when you think about it. In its role as a haven for the 1960s underground press, it was more underground than “alternative.” It was always an outlaw publication and unacceptable to the mainstream.
On the other hand, Andy Warhol later said he wasn’t bothered by the incident and took it in as all good fun. (Which IMHO is how the rest of the world should see “Pie Throw Protests” but instead they are now criminal acts that can send a pie-thrower to jail for many years. I hope you agree.)
Dissecting our failures further, PUNK Magazine never sold well on newsstands. The best sales were from independent record stores, alternative/underground bookstores, clothing stores, and other venues. I wasn’t very surprised when “Trans-High Media” cut us loose, it was just the more bad news when it came to never-ending bad news about sales back then. The world wasn’t ready for us, I always figured, and a lot of people who worked in the media encouraged us to keep going and that it would catch on some day. “Someday, the world will understand what a great product I am creating and everything will be different!” I fooled myself into thinking.
When I got back to the office, I delivered the bad news about High Times dropping PUNK Magazine to our small staff: Elin Wilder (Associate Publisher), Bruce Carleton (Art Director), Patricia Ragan and Alexandre Blair. We needed some kind of miracle to stay in business, I figured: We were now free from High Times and on our own. Yay!
We decided to raise money for a new issue by staging an event, sort of like the PUNK Magazine Benefit at CBGB (May 4th and 5th, 1977)), which raised just enough money to print PUNK #10. This time I didn’t want to stage a benefit: We needed more money faster! I figured “If we were probably going out of business anyhow, why not go for broke: Let’s stage a star-studded awards show!” People (especially musicians) always love a good awards show. Punk rock was at a peak! Why not celebrate our success and somehow raise enough money to publish a new issue. Wow, did I ever screw up…
I posted two versions of what happened that night at punkmagazine.com:
It was a very strange night. Nancy Spungen had been murdered a day or two earlier, and it became front page news on the day of our event (Friday the 13th, October 1978). Everyone from the punk scene was in a state of shock. Almost everyone at the event knew Sid and/or Nancy, especially since they had recently been performing around town, and he was the most famous Sex Pistol!
There had never been such a horrific incident in the history of New York music. The only analogy might be the Charlie Manson murders a decade before, which changed the history of the hippie movement. The Sid & Nancy incident had the same kind of effect on punk rock. As a result it was madness that weekend: punks getting beaten up, a near riot at the end off the show, rumors of guns pointed at the staff to recoup the money taken at the door, and an epic after-party at a no-name bar that became The Mudd Club.
The awards show was attended by Tom Forcade, who congratulated me on the evening and suggested that we take advantage of the publicity. It was such a fiasco that I was dumbstruck. Sadly, I ignored him. I was too shocked by how terrible the evening was. Everything went wrong, but he thought the night went well?
It was the last time I would see Tom Forcade alive.
NEXT: Hollyweird!
Well, the way they pulled weapons on us to get the money that someone seems to have "lost" was no fun... And Robert Romagnoli got booed off the stage, that was no fun.
And the fact that Nancy's death hung over the room was definitely no fun...
It was a weird, sad, bad day...
Wanna write a story about it?
Yeah, that was something else...