Sniffin' Glue and Sonic Art: When Punk Zines Meet Drumsticks

A bank clerk walks out of work in 1974, goes home, and reads about bands he can't see. The Ramones, Patti Smith, Television. They're ghosts on newsprint, drifting through the NME from across an ocean. That's how Mark Perry tells it in The Guardian: he left school, took the bank job, and read about New York punk like a man reading postcards from a country he couldn't afford to visit.Two years later he started a magazine because nobody was going to do it for him.That's the whole sermon. Everything after it is footnotes and merch.The Cheapest Weapon in the RoomSniffin' Glue and Other Rock 'N' Roll Habits for Punks ran monthly from July 1976 and lasted about a year. A year. Most bands can't get the van to start in that time. It left a crater anyway. Outsideleft called it a roadmap for writers, as much as the early punk bands were for anyone yearning to create. Damn right, and it's the part people skip. The zine reported the scene, sure, and then it handed out permission slips to everybody…

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