Despite the humble disclaimer on the homepage of his web site, “BB GUN is not out to make literary history but just to be a little keepsake – a thank you (if you will) to friends and family and fans over the years,” Bob Bert, the co-creator of the annual Hoboken-based music magazine, is often impressed with his own written work.
“I did a great interview with Elliott Smith right around the time when he was nominated for the Academy Award,” Bert said last week without a trace a hubris. “We were the first magazine to put him on the cover. He told me all about the experience of playing at the Academy Awards. And he talked about his love life, and the time he took acid when he was younger. It was by far the best interview I’ve ever read with him.”
Bert, who describes himself as a magazine junkie, started BB GUN in 1995 along with his wife Linda Wolfe. (Bert is responsible for editorial and Wolfe is in charge of the layout.) Along with music reviews and full-page pinups, the first issue of BB GUN features interviews with Boss Hog, Richard Kern and Howie Pyro of D Generation. Other issues contain articles on The Muffs, Lydia Lunch, and, of course, Elliot Smith. After a three-year hiatus, Bert and Wolfe released the magazine’s fifth issue last April. The much- anticipated edition features Cynthia Plaster Caster, the legendary ’60s groupie famous for making plaster casts of rock stars’ penises, on the cover. The issue also includes interviews with Nancy Sinatra, Jerry Stahl, Debi Mazar and Robert John Burck, a.k.a. the Naked Cowboy.
With a surfeit of spiked hair crowning his head, Bob Bert looks like a rock star. So it makes sense that prior to BB GUN‘s beginning, Bert was better known for making music than writing about it.
The New Jersey native began his career in the early ’80s as the drummer for Sonic Youth. In 1986, after he was replaced by Steve Shelley, Bert joined Pussy Galore, a Washington D.C.-based band named after Honor Blackman’s renowned Bond-girl performance in Goldfinger. Over the years, Bert has also been a member of the Action Swingers and Chrome Cranks. He is currently the drummer of The Knoxville Girls, a raw rock band that recently released its second CD entitled In a Paper Suit.
Despite his vast and varied rock and roll resume, Bert’s background is actually in art. “I took some classes at [the School of Visual Arts] and ended up being a fine arts silk screen printer for a living,” he said with the same humble pitch he used to describe his magazine. His modesty notwithstanding, however, Bert wasn’t just any fine arts silk screen printer. During his Sonic Youth years, he supported himself working as a fine arts silk screen printer in Andy Warhol’s studio.
“I made all of his silk screen printings,” Bert said. “It was great job and a lot of fun. I recently had the opportunity to go to the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and it was really cool to see the stuff I worked on.”
While Bert rarely brushed paths with the eccentric artist, the position provided him the opportunity to meet other celebrities. “One night, when I was working the night shift by myself, my boss called and said some people might stop by to see the studio,” he said. “And it was Debbie Harry. That was pretty cool.”
Between his drums and his silk screens, not to mention his encounters with some of alternative music’s most celebrated characters, Bert’s life is the stuff that BB Gun interviews are made of, a fact that is not lost on the editor-in-chief.
“New bands don’t have the experience or the stories that even I have,” he said. “So we try to interview legendary figures. And I grew up going to CBGB at an early age. So, to interview people like Lydia Lunch or Richard Hell is really cool.”
Bert listed Cynthia Plaster Caster, who regaled him with tales of kissing Andrew Loon Oldham and casting Jimi Hendrix, among his favorite interviews. But his conversation with Nancy Sinatra, he said, was the “biggest thrill” of his life.
“It’s like Warhol’s Interview,” he said, offering an explanation for his transformation from rock star into rock journalist. “You get to talk people you’d never get to meet, and get invited to parties you wouldn’t normally be invited to.”
Celebrity hobnobbing aside, Bert began BB GUN to provide alternative music fans with a periodical that publishes the kind of candid and complex interviews he would like to read.
“Every interview I’ve ever read with Nancy Sinatra has been 90 percent about her father,” he said. “But I really love her music. So we hardly talked about her father at all.” Instead, Bert asked Sinatra about her music, her acting, and her decision to pose for Playboy.
“Our interviews tend to be more interesting than other magazine because they are with people I’ve met and known on a personal level,” he said. “And we try and cover the gamut of underground culture.”
While BB GUN can currently be found in alternative music and magazine stores across the country, like too many labors of love, Bert and Wolfe have yet to enjoy any monetary rewards for their efforts.
“We don’t really make a profit,” Bert said. “We do it for the love and the fun of it.”
In Hudson County, BBGUN can be purchased at Tunes (225 Washington St., Hoboken). For more information, visit the magazine’s web site www.bbgun.org, or write to Bob Bert at bbgunzine@aol.com or Linda Wolfe at bbgunfanzine@aol.com.