Cheetah Shine has written about and done more to help the original Mobile, Alabama music community than just about anyone outside of the musicians themselves. While Ear Damage covers national acts, the main focus is on local and regional bands at all levels of success and performance.

Cheetah Shine

Cheetah Shine has reviewed successful acts like The Ugli Stick, but has also spotlighted less well-known acts like German Honor Society. It makes for a nice mix of reading. It’s just too bad that more bands as diverse as these two don’t play together more often. His efforts to close this gap with Ear Damage are to be applauded.

Why did you start Ear Damage?
Well, I had wanted to do a zine as far back as late 1997. A few other people had shown initial interest in collaborating on a local fanzine that would feature music, art, culture, and maybe politics. Time went on in the coming months, and mostly everybody that was supposed to have been involved either lost interest or had no real intention of holding up their end of the bargain.

Ear Damage #13

By the time the summer of ’98 rolled around, I’d conducted interviews with Lee Ving of the seminal punk band Fear and Ray Ball, who at the time was a co-owner of the local adult toy store The G Spot, with little chance of them ever being seen. Over the next couple years my desire to do a zine was on again, off again until maybe sometime in 2002, when I figured I had enough material to put out a zine myself. Once I made my mind up to put out that first issue, I became pretty determined, I guess. Anywhere you go there’s people that say they’re gonna do this and that, without much follow-through, but it just seems to be especially bad here in Mobile. I’ve been in bands that have never even jammed more than twice and leaving something unfinished that you think has potential can be frustrating. With the zine I have a lot more control over how I want things to go.

What articles have been your favorite to work on?
I’d say some of the best interviews were Reverend Horton Heat, Captain Sensible of The Damned, the first Criminal Class USA interview, and Jello Biafra. The Reverend Horton Heat has sort of a reputation for being an asshole, but he was pretty cool to me, and the interview was lengthy, informative and entertaining. I don’t know if Captain Sensible could ever say something that wasn’t hilarious or relevant.

That first interview I did with CCUSA was pretty funny and informative too, since at the time they’d just released they’re first album on GMM Records out of Atlanta. As far as I know, CCUSA is one of the relatively few bands from Mobile of any genre to sign to a real record label and still reside in Mobile, which I think is an accomplishment of sorts. (Lead singer) David Mathews is a total shithead, but when his words are read in print it makes for pretty entertaining banter!

Jello Biafra is one of the godfathers of punk as most people know, to say I enjoyed interviewing him is a no brainer. Last and certainly not least, the interview I did with local punk show promoter Harold Graham is one of my favorites.  Of all the “celebrities” I interviewed, if I added them all together they couldn’t touch the amount of feedback I got from the Harold interview. Harold’s fairly unpopular and has pissed of his fair share of people over the years, and honestly, I myself have had major differences with him in the past, but I can’t help but to agree with much of what he says in parts 1 and 2 of that interview.

What is your publication schedule?
I’d like to put an issue out every other month, but there’s not much reality to that. I haven’t met my bi-monthly deadline very often. I was in school the past fall and spring semesters and I was only able to put one out the whole time. Sometimes there are unexpected setbacks, sometimes I just don’t feel like getting in a rush to get it done, but it usually takes at least two months to get done with an issue.

What are you looking forward to doing in upcoming issues?
Featuring girls modeling swimsuits and whatever else it is they want to wear in pictorials. This is something I’ve been trying to get the ball moving for a while but it was slow going until just recently. Being from Mobile I wanted some of the first girls featured to be local as well, but so far trying to recruit girls that live here in town has proven to be somewhat of a headache. Corrina Von Slaughter, from Arizona, and another girl from Florida will be featured in no. 14. Also I’d like to interact with other cities and towns in the southeast region a little more than what I have been, and hopefully before the end of the year I’ll have a website.

What is your take on the regional music scene?
As far as what’s going on regionally, I don’t know a whole lot, but I think it’s a pretty safe bet any town of comparable size to Mobile within a 500 mile radius has got a better music scene. As far as bigger concert events, often I hear older people talk about how Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, Elvis, or whoever used to play Mobile all the time. 

It’s my understanding that sometime in the 80s some people on the city council or whatever tried to bilk some major touring acts out of some money, and relatively few big acts have come through Mobile since. Besides Bayfest, if there’s any well known national acts that you want to see you have to go to Atlanta or at least Pensacola to see them. As far as the club scene, it comes and goes in waves I guess, and things seem to be picking up lately, but it probably hasn’t been all that great since the Void, The Vincent Van Go-Go, and The Culture Shock were around, even though I missed out on much of that. The Splash was jumping for a while, but in time it turned out the management had no concept of how to cater to bands and audience members of the underground rock community.

It’s hard for original music to prosper here, but I think for the most part The Cellblock is doing well. It seems like people program themselves to only see cover bands and see bands only when they know someone in the band, but with The Cellblock and
occasionally Pickelfish, original music is starting to get noticed a little more.

Personally I’d like to see more touring bands, and that’s been picking up lately too. In the past few years when things weren’t going so well downtown, house shows picked up a pretty good bit, especially at the Touchton brothers house (of xbxrx) and the fabled “Casa." I’m really not a fan of house shows but they’re good for underage kids I guess.

As far as bands, it might not seem like it but there’s a good deal going on. There’s probably more good underground rock and punk-oriented bands in Mobile than there ever has been. You got All Get Out, The Tiles, Nuees Ardentes, The Difference Engine, CCUSA, Thee Hibachi Stranglers, The Western Lands, Spunji, Adelle, RGT’s Beast, Hotcakes, and at least 5 or 6 other bands who I can’t think of right now. A couple of these bands have gotten attention from indie and even major labels, but that could end up being good or bad. One of the guys in All Get Out even co-owns a label based out of Mobile, and has stared recording several local acts. I’m not sure but that may be unprecedented in Mobile, to have a local record label putting local bands under their wing.

Something else I want to bring up, not to disrespect a band that were doing what they were doing before a lot of people reading this were even born, but I don’t understand all the nostalgia behind The Vomit Spots.  They’re decent, but at least half the bands I named earlier are at least twice as good as them. They have a reunion show once or twice a year, and a shitload of people come out to ‘relive their youth’ or whatever you want to call it. How come all those people don’t come out in droves like that to see The Western Lands? But then again, maybe I’m saying all this because I find myself trying to keep from living in the past so much and trying to find out about some new things. But overall, even though Mobile’s kind of culturally deficient, things seem to be on somewhat of an upturn locally.

It seems a little unfair to call Ear Damage simply a “scene” zine or music scene. Particularly in your editorials, you tackle a lot of social issues like race and politics. Has that been part of your idea all along or did it grow out of working on the zine itself?
Even though Ear Damage is music oriented, it was a part of the plan all along to address social and political issues. Being into punk, I’ve heard a lot of political and social sloganeering over the years, and for many that say they’re so concerned about certain political and social issues, they might as well go to the mall, pay $150 for a pair of Nikes and go, “Hey, I just got a new pair of kix, whuduya’ think?”

Quite honestly, being somebody that’s black and interested in a vastly white subculture, I hear lyrics in songs and people tell me things in person, and I know a lot of times people mean well, and often it’s something I’d rather not think about myself, but I find much of what I hear hard to believe at times. Writing a column or writing an article in a zine gives me a chance to think out what I want to say, because I know a lot of people would think it’s pretty strange that I like the things that I like and the fact that I associate with as many whites as I do. Not that I’m all that politically minded, but I’d like to expose as much bullshit as I can, on all sides. If I had to label it, I’d say I’m in a more libertarian state of mind lately. Being into punk you come across a lot of self-proclaimed liberals that are really latent rasicts, sexists, fasicts, or whatever. In a crowd like that, even though in theory I could agree with most of the views being expressed, in the past I’d be afraid to say what I might be conservative about. I wouldn’t be so scared now ‘cos in reality nobody’s completely left or right wing about everything.

How has reaction been to Ear Damage? Good, bad, indifferent? What are some of your favorite reactions to it?
Fairly good, overall, I guess. And pretty funny at times too. Some of the craziest reactions I got was when I put out the second issue. I really don’t want to get into it right now, but let’s just say the cover was “deemed objectionable by a handful of people.” Some liked it, some went apeshit when they saw it, some didn’t know what to think. There were some interesting reactions though.

You’re not shy about letting a friend’s band know that they were rude or played a bad show. Has anyone gotten upset by this?
There’s probably at least a couple, but the one instance that sticks out in my mind the most is when I wrote an unfavorable review of Spunji’s Rock This! album. I said something to the effect of the production being really watered down and lead singer Judi’s voice being best suited for torturing dogs. I think I might have went overboard with some of that stuff, but it was an honest review. Judi’s barely spoken to me in over a year and a half, and when she does it’s usually pretty hostile. She doesn’t remember all the good things I said in the review. Women, always looking for something negative to gripe about!

Where can people find Ear Damage?
Mainly at random underground rock shows I may happen to be at-- usually The Cellblock, Pickelfish, or maybe Ground Zero. Sometimes I drive out of town and sell a few. You can also buy a copy at Bay Sound in Daphne, Sassy Cat, and Subterranean Books in Pensacola. Maybe I can get a few more businesses in town to try and sell them for me. Newer issues are also available online at Parcell Press.

Do you ever need contributors?
‘Need’ might be too strong a word right now, but it would definitely help sometimes to have some different points of view. Sometimes people come up and ask why I didn’t write about this band or that show, but if they’re so interested why didn’t they write about it and send it to me? If somebody wants to submit something to me to put in the zine, all they have to do is get in touch with me.