The ‘Zine Party

At least one guy at the Dandercroft showcase on Saturday, May 21, at the Brick, had no idea what Dandercroft was.

“I think it adds a different sound to the overall Kansas City experience,” Nathan said. He assumed I was asking about a band, and boy, did he lay it on thick. “I was just bullshitting to get my name in the Pitch,” he said later, laughing as he admitted that he had never heard of the ‘zine at all.

Well, Nathan and you others who still don’t know the d-word, it’s past time you were enlightened. Here’s the skinny.

Since mid-2003, a now-26-year-old dude named John Bersuch has been producing an underground music magazine called Dandercroft. Somewhere around 10,000 Dandercrofts exist, either in their original form or biodegrading somewhere — 2,000 copies of five issues, all of them created and funded by Bersuch and a handful of writers and artists and given away for free. It’s not your average fanzine — no scribbled-up, Xeroxed pamphlet but rather a 60-page music magazine on good paper, complete with ads, staples, art and an occasional sampler CD. Each previous issue cost around $2,000 to produce; funds were raised mostly at benefit concerts, or “showcases,” as Bersuch prefers to call them. (Benefit sounds too needy, he says.)

Now the magazine is in need. After its sixth issue arrives this summer, Bersuch says, Dandercroft is going on hiatus, possibly for a year or two, until he can get things together money-wise to start churning it out again.

I’ll be the first to say it: That sucks.

Thumbing through back issues is a journey through the lives of the city’s current generation of musicians. Shotgun Idols, Elevator Division, the Ssion, Rex Hobart, Cody Wyoming, CES Cru — they’re all there, many of them in Q&A interviews only their admiring little brothers could stand to read all the way through.

As history, each issue contains haphazard impressions of the KC scene, a who’s who of its incestuous indie community. But Dandercroft‘s black pages don’t just document the underground. They capture a woozy concentration of the Brick’s smoky air and the Hurricane’s Westport grit. Readers who aren’t in bands either feel disconnected (it’s definitely a musician’s mag) or they long to be in a band themselves.

Even to insiders, Dandercroft can seem precious and self-congratulatory. But anyone familiar with the scene should be able recognize that this magazine, which regularly features bands such as the roots-rockin’ Snakebite Orphans (alas, also on hiatus) and hardcore misfits the James Dean Trio only pages apart in the same issue, is anything but cabalistic and snooty.

What’s most enjoyable about Dandercroft, however, is Bersuch’s insuppressible love of the absurd, which seems to be a result of the man’s pathological fear of mundane music writing — or of normality in general. For example, no rock journalist in his or her right mind (and therein may be Bersuch’s abiding problem) would ever ask a respected indie celeb, in the middle of an interview and apropos of nothing, “Would you be afraid of a giant worm with a panda bear head?”

But that’s exactly what Bersuch asked David Lowery of Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven. When Lowery responded that he would indeed be frightened by such a creature, Bersuch followed up with, “Yeah, well do you think you’d kill it? Or would you try to be friends?”

You could argue that Bersuch is too in love with his own sense of humor to invest real thought in his interviews — one of his many stock questions that never gets him anywhere is “How would you describe your music?” But anyone who’s lived in a town where the underground is represented by a few universally positive and uniformly dull fanzines ought to appreciate the Red Meat-flavored weirdness that Bersuch cultivates.

Nothing demonstrates the full scope of Bersuch’s cleverness like a performance by his hip-hop act, Bacon Shoe. See, for better or worse, Bersuch considers himself a musician first. His other project, Minds Under Cover, which Bersuch began when he was 16 and is now on its tenth album, has become a nails-on-chalkboard combination of gothy electroclash and gnashing singing (or rapping) about things like fried chicken and death. But in Bacon Shoe, Bersuch purifies the mix to straight rap, and when he assumes the identity of Lethal D, he can put Beck to shame.

I need a breath like I’m holding my nose and wearin’ pantyhose, he rapped at the end of the first exhausting Bacon Shoe number at the latest Dandercroft showcase, accompanied by “Toine” (short for Antoine). Toine is really John Ferguson, one of those nondescript white guys who’s in a million different bands. But in Bacon Shoe, Ferguson becomes an aerobics instructor on crack, throwing his hands in the air like he really, really don’t care and shouting out stock rap phrases (mostly “My name is Toine!”) while Bersuch unleashes yards of cerebral, lurid, hilarious lyrics. Goddamn, your nipples are like little bits of ham, and I’m the bacon man, for instance.

The final song of the set seemed to shed a bit of light on Bersuch’s personality. That number told how, when he was a kid, his mom confiscated his gangsta rap CDs, so he began rhyming on his own. His father didn’t approve of this activity and, according to the tale, once hit young John with his shirt and told him to straighten up. Bersuch then rapped about eating gonorrhea from a can.

After the show, he insisted the last part was also true. “First, you get a can, then you put gonorrhea in it,” he said. “No, that’s not good.” He stopped and thought. “You can buy it on eBay already canned.”

The will to weirdness is as natural a part of Bersuch’s identity as his signature, James Worthy-style glasses and the camcorder always attached to his eye at noise-band concerts. Someday he may grow out of it all and become a “serious” musician or journalist. But then Dandercroft would be only a happy memory, and I, for one, am not ready for that just yet.