BAM was a free monthly rock magazine back in the day when free newspapers and magazines ruled the earth. It was an acronym for Bay Area Music, and they were sort of a local version of Rolling Stone magazine. . . BAM is kind of virtually forgotten today. But it was kind of a force during it’s day. All the local rock musicians read it religiously I can tell you that, to see if they got a plug. . . And they did things like the Bammies — which was like an annual local rock award show, and people like Jerry Garcia and Grace Slick and Huey Lewis and the Tubes (and maybe even Greg Kihn) would show up for the party.
It’s kind of nostalgic for me now, when I saw this cover pop up on my news feed tonight. Remembering the glory days of the San Francisco Bay Area rock music scene. People wax nostalgic about the “60s scene,” but it kept building for decades after. ….
I actually went down to the BAM offices once. God I can’t even remember when, maybe around 1986??…. they had their offices in some nebulous zone between Berkeley and Oakland. I was trying to see if I could talk the editor into publishing my comic strip, I wanted to do a regular rocknroll comic strip (I was already doing a regular porn comic strip for the local porn papers so this would have been a step up for me). . . And I remember showing the BAM managing editor (whoever he was) samples of my comic strips. Which is kind of an embarrassing and humiliating thing to do because they’re likely to reject you. And they did reject me. I never got my comics in BAM.
But years later BAM did give me a good review when I put out the Telegraph Street Music CD (I still have the press clippings).
And that’s pretty much my memory of BAM magazine.
Ace Backwords Photos 