Touch and Go - the Book!

This is great news...Tesco Vee's fantastic and LONG out of print fanzine, Touch & Go, is getting the compendium treatment, as all 22 issues have been put into one huge, 576 page, honker of a book. I can't wait to see it! Available June 30, what follows is all of the information from the publisher's, Bazillion Points, website:



The complete series 1979–1983. Twenty-two issues in one loud, fast volume.

ISBN 978-0979616389
576 stiff pages

Featuring new introductory essays by Tesco Vee, Dave Stimson, Steve Miller, Henry Rollins, Keith Morris, Peter Davis, Henry Owings, Byron Coley, Corey Rusk, John Brannon, and Ian MacKaye.

“I was inspired by how fearless and together Touch and Go were. They were really wild and extremely funny.”—Henry Rollins

“It was really one of the first times anyone outside of Washington really paid us any mind. The fact that Touch and Go took an interest in us really blew us away.”—Ian MacKaye, Minor Threat

“Creem may have taught me how to piss, but Touch and Go taught me how to shit. I owe my career to that magazine.”—John Brannon, Negative Approach

Touch and Go fanzine was the brainchild of Tesco Vee and Dave Stimson and was launched in Lansing, Michigan, in 1979. Major fanatics of the new punk happenings in the late ’70s, TV and DS set out to chronicle, lambaste, ridicule, and heap praise on all they arbitrarily loved or hated in the music communities in the US and abroad.

In laughably minuscule press runs by today’s standards, T & G was made by guys within the Midwest scene strictly for the edification of scenesters and pals in other cities like DC, Philly, Boston, LA, SF, Chicago, et al. Inspired by magazines such as Slash and Search and Destroy and writers like Claude Bessy and Chris Desjardines, TV and DS pumped out seventeen naughty, irreverent issues together, and TV did another five solo.

Magazines like Forced Exposure and Your Flesh, among others, soon fired up Xerox machines themselves, and the rest is history. So is the legendary independent record label launched from this zine, and so are the bands covered inside: Black Flag, Minor Threat, the Misfits, Negative Approach, the Fix, the Avengers, the Necros, Discharge, Iron Cross, Youth Brigade, Faith, Die Kreuzen, Crucifix, Poison Idea—and all the other punks worth their weight in glorious black and white.

There is a book release party/gig planned for Cleveland on July 16 with Tesco Vee's Hate Police, White Flag (yes, that White Flag), and more bands to be announced.