Beginnings
The magazine began as a photocopied publication featuring interviews with punk and "alternative" rock bands of the era (including such then up-and-comers as Ethyl Meatplow, Nirvana and Hole) alongside the confessional and often shocking writing of Romeo, editors Mikki Halpin and Kerin Morataya, and her many contributors (which included such colorful personalities as Vaginal Davis, Ron Athey and Lisa Crystal Carver.) Starting with issue 10 ("Mother"), each issue had an overall theme ("Revenge," "Obsessions and Bad Habits," "Sex," etc.) which the zine's writers would explore in exhaustive detail, freely recounting their own suicide attempts, kinky sexual adventures, addictions or family horror stories. The zine gradually became much more slick-looking and featured interviews with such mainstream acts as Tom Jones, "Weird Al" Yankovic and Duran Duran alongside underground notables like William S. Burroughs, Johnny Rotten and Anton LaVey. Eventually Ben Is Dead had a circulation in the tens of thousands and was being sold in Borders and Tower Records across the USA.
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Famous quotes containing the word beginnings:
“The frantic search of five-year-olds for friends can thus be seen to forecast the beginnings of a basic shift in the parent-child relationship, a shift which will occur gradually over many long years, and in which a child needs not only the support of child allies engaged in the same struggle but also the understanding of his parents.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)
“Those newspapers of the nation which most loudly cried dictatorship against me would have been the first to justify the beginnings of dictatorship by somebody else.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“The beginnings of altruism can be seen in children as early as the age of two. How then can we be so concerned that they count by the age of three, read by four, and walk with their hands across the overhead parallel bars by five, and not be concerned that they act with kindness to others?”
—Neil Kurshan (20th century)