"Ten Years Ago Chris Beyond Had A Strange Dream..."

It's hard to be artificially nostalgic for the last 10 years of producing No-Fi "Magazine". I know I have to have some grand special intro for this issue which does mark our 10 year anniversary. I guess that I feel like I shouldn't be the one telling the tale of No-Fi "Magazine" alone because without the help of all my friends and many of you out there, I wouldn't even be able to bring this to you every month or so (depending on how late we're running at the time).

A LOT of people ask me all of the time how I'm able to keep the magazine going all this time, especially since we went online and chose to not run advertising (at least in the form of the reviled banner ad). Nor do we send out robotic advertising drones for ourselves in the form of e-mail spam. I try not to think about this question when I'm alone. I really don't know how I'm able to do this. I usually answer in some garbled gibberish about friends, good music, and something about monkeys.

The truth is that in order to do this, I have to go to shows all the time, keep in contact with all of the writers, djs, bands, and artists who appear in our pages, constantly listen to new music and watch movies sent to us, write to the people who I hope to get in the magazine or on the radio show, not get to pursue a lot of my other artistic work (painting, music), somehow keep track at my day job, and survive on only a few hours of sleep a night.

Don't get me wrong though. I love it. I love it a lot. And because of this weird magazine I've met a lot of great friends, met a lot of talented people, and have been able to rub shoulders with people who I considered to be personal idols growing up. I can't speak for all of them, but I even got the impression that most of them liked having their shoulders rubbed too.

The only way to explain it all is to go back to the beginning...

Before No-Fi "Magazine" my first writing stint was with a zine called A MIND LIKE PUMICE put together by my friends Jessica Shoemaker and Christine Urevig. Then I interned at BEN IS DEAD Magazine, along with eventual No-Fi "writer" David 1-X. A bunch of you probably already know this because of my interview I did with Mr. T that was printed there and then reprinted in HARPERS.

By the way, I have no idea how this made it into Harpers. It was certainly a funny interview, but to be printed in a magazine like that next to actually respected authors and writers was pretty strange to me.

No-Fi "Magazine" was actually started as a personal class project for my advanced computer design class (a class which was made up of maybe 3 people) at El Camino College in Torrance, California. My goal was to produce a small independent music magazine with almost no budget that utilizes the same design programs used to create major magazines. This is where I saw the distinction between a zine and a magazine;...thus..."magazine". Another goal of the magazine was to keep it small enough to fit in your pocket that you could pull out and read in the bathroom. And I can't say that I did all this without the intention of entertaining my audience. Of course, the hidden goal was to also advertise my band POPULAR GIRL in the concert calendar.

The first issue had a lot of support from my friends who gathered at the ECC art building tables between classes. Ernie and Quin were there from the beginning. We would write articles between whatever classes we were taking, sometimes IN them. As the page count in each issue was really light in those first days, We actually had the first two issues already done for the most part and the third one started before the first one went to print. I had a few advertisers, (Jimmy from the band DIOS MALOS actually being the first one - he was one of our classmates from those ECC tables.) but the real way most of these got paid for was from a secret friend who worked at a certain office supply store with access to their copy machines. This is how I got so many issues out there around town.

Oh... er... I mean... Shhhhhhhhh.

On an odd note, I once told Quin that I didn't think we would be friends for very long because of the nature of school relationships. I wonder if he ever regretted not running as far away from me as possible after me saying that.

I already had a lot of friends in the L.A. scene having played all over the South Bay and Silverlake with my bands EAR BEYOND and POPULAR GIRL. I saw No-Fi as a way to get the word out on all these great bands playing around, not getting the notice they deserved. Of course it also helped that the SIlverlake scene was blowing up at the time. Thus...instant audience. I also had some light support from people at KROQ radio in Los Angeles. Yes, KROQ. Say what you will about how terrible that station got, they do have some cool people working there. This was how I was able to get Wesley Willis to play our 1st Issue release party. So many people showed up that I actually ran out of issues to give to people.

I learned a lot of lessons about magazine making in those days of outdoor magazine making 'round the art tables.

1) People DO judge a book by its cover. I've always tried to have snappy covers inspired by old movie posters, album covers, and old magazine design. The first time I learned about just how far people will judge a book by its cover is when the third issue of No-Fi "Magazine" (featuring a heavyset and very busty model on the cover) was pulled from our local coffee shop by the hippies running the place. The man explained that his wife was disgusted by the cover and had thrown them all out. I argued that had she read the actual content of the magazine, she would have seen that that we were in fact poking fun of adult magazines rather than trying to be like them. I wouldn't be surprised if more copies of that issue were thrown out. One thing though is that when we started doing zine conventions, that issue ended up being one of the most popular, even being picked up by a certain celebrity all of you know, but I ain't tellin' you who here. Later when I had moved to Hollywood and was working in a record store which was always freshly stocked with the newest issue, I observed WHO was picking up WHICH issues and I was totally surprised. Issues that featured gals on the cover were more likely to be picked up by guys AND girls than any of our other issues. Issues that had more experimental covers would take weeks to disappear from the store while issues with a female coverstar were usually gone the first week. So there it is. It's not that SEX sells, but CUTE certainly does.

2) ALWAYS be honest with the people who work on the magazine with you. Through the years we've had people rotate in and out and we're always talking to new (and sometimes older, well known) bands. I'm always very up front with them, what kind of magazine we are, and who I think our audience is. Having worked with people who try to bend the truth to get you to help them, I feel better as a person to just tell it like it is. Hey, we're not some big corporate magazine. We do have a surprisingly large amount of readers. We're probably going to ask you strange questions if we interview you.

3) ONLY work with nice people. Being in a band, as most of us who do No-Fi "Magazine" have done, you can meet a lot of jerks. Therefore I decided that even if I love a band, if they don't treat me or any of our writers with respect and kindness, we don't need them in our magazine. We're spending our time trying to promote them so I think that we deserve a little respect for that. If they want to act like they're doing US a favor by letting us interview them, I'd rather they go somewhere else.

I think these policies have worked for us and may also be why we've been able to get interviews with bands who are a bit more in the public eye... Bands who've,...yikes,...been on Mtv. But I can tell you first hand that each of those people we've interviewed;...totally lovely. Oh sure we've had a band or two slip through that just didn't get it. But that's going to happen every now and then. This is our house, they are our guests, and sometimes you have a guest over that leaves stain on the couch or thinks that every interview about them should be serious or about how great they are.

We aren't the Howard Stern show. Our interviews are certainly not like his interviews. Nothing AGAINST his interviews... It's just not our way. We're weird, but we're our kind of weird...and I like to think we're smart too. ;)

So fast forward several years, We ran the last paper issue of No-Fi "Magazine" in 2000. Between then and 2002 we put out a few compilations on Spiffy Records, I traveled to Japan, England, and France for the first time, I kept up a photo diary at the old No-Fi "Magazine" address...and then at the start of 2002 we were born again (but not in a Christian "born again" kind of way) as an online magazine. And we started up No-Fi "Radio" as well. Our first online issues featured a few English bands that had come to the US, which in turn inspired the scene in Silverlake that had become overrun by a tidal wave of powerpop bands. In fact most of our first readers for the online version of No-Fi "Magazine" were from England judging by the e-mail we got back then. Eventually it evened out, but I was glad to be getting e-mail so quickly after I restarted the thing.

And here we are know. Over 10 years have passed since I began production on No-Fi "Magazine" and 10 have passed since the first black and white folded issue made its way into people's hands. I am truly grateful for all of you who choose to read this silly lil mag every month or so because it really is a lot of hard work and it's always nice to know you're out there even when I'm yelling about the latest horrible thing our president has done or what tv shows are really ticking me off at the moment.

All I ask of you is that you pass the word on to others to get them reading and that you be nice to everyone around you. If enough people are nicer to one another, it can only make the world that much nicer to be in.

Well, there you go. That's the basics of the whole thing. I summed it up pretty quickly. There are many adventures and silly tales I could tell you, but since you don't have days to read this, I'll leave it all at that. If you ever want to see just what we're done in the last 10 years in more detail, you can always check out the Issue Archive.

And, yes, I did get an A+ in that class for starting this thing.

yr no-fi pal,

Chris Beyond
editor, no-fi "magazine"
http://www.nofimagazine.com
http://www.nofiradio.com