Once upon a time back in the late 80’s (when all things METAL ruled the music industry) I decided to take a stab at publishing a fanzine called: DEMOLISH. For all of you “newbies” out there, there were literally hundreds of such “fanzines” at the time and were scattered all over the world.
While I am sure the “metal conviction” was there, some were better than others, some were great, some really crappy and a very select few looked just like a regular “magazine.” This was the goal for DEMOLISH:
To create a respectable, professional underground mag. that featured the best of the Rock/Metal world including up and coming bands, demo tapes, album reviews, concert reviews, photos etc.
Our coverage included pretty much any style of Metal/Hard Rock/Rock etc, which was quite rare at the time for an underground ‘zine.
The name was partly inspired by the great METAL FORCES (UK mag.) who regularly featured “demo” reviews in their DEMOLITION section. I loved this part of their magazine and so I thought that America needed something such as this to support and help promote all the great bands over here on these shores!
The first “demo-only” idea didn’t last long as we received support from all over the world very quickly and this is where the tides started to turn and aspire to be a “real” magazine and treat this as a professional “job.”
Orig. logo/sketch by Curt Reinitz
To make a long story short, after working on the zine’ 24/7 for over a year and a half I was not able to get the final [pro printed] product out to the masses. At some point I had to cut my losses (as I spent my entire life savings on this project). Maybe it was not the “right” time for DEMOLISH? So as the saying goes: “better late then never.”
Much to my surprise, upon a routine visit home for Christmas, I found all this material perfectly preserved in an entire walk-in closet. I would like to thank my mom for saving all of this memorabilia. Without her meticulous organizational skills, none of this history would be archived. Horns up to her! \m/
*I would like to add that we did in fact hire a real editor back-in-the-day to correct all the bad “metal grammar” (sic) and to make sure we were to be presented in a professional journalistic way, however, all those 3.5″ floppy disks (yes, the one’s that held a whopping 1.44 MB) were either lost or damaged.
What we are forced to use for the blog posts are all the original hand-written articles, non-edited manuscripts, and a few that were actually typed from our writers and contributors. With that in mind, I will be doing my best to make it readable and grammatically correct, but I am not going to go off the deep-end with this (I might add) either!
After all, it’s about the MUSIC and always has been…
Misc. Demolish Memorabilia Collage
I plan on digging into the DEMOLISH vaults until every item I have is posted. Hopefully we will be able to touch the hearts of all 80’s Metal lovers and perhaps gain some new fans along the way.
Update: Life After Death
For the past 7 years we have enjoyed our rebirth as an online magazine [Demolish A.D.] and urge you to tell your friends about us. Peep the Demolish A.D. Category tab at the top of the site for our ongoing current coverage. If you would like to link to our site or exchange links then please contact us.
-Curt “Crusher” King
Demolish Magazine 