There's a new book coming out soon that pays tribute to the visual legacy of classic hardcore demos. Titled Demo Demo - The Book, the 320-page tome features hundreds of cassette covers from the ’80s and ’90s, featuring both well-known and more obscure hardcore bands from those decades.
"I love documenting and puzzling things together," Patrick Kitzel of Tribal Publishing (and Reaper Records) told me via text message about his latest project. "It sarted out with my demo collection and ended up with a bunch of people contributing.
"When it comes putting these things together, it’s always important to me that it’s not a one-sided end product. Meaning, everyone has a specific taste in music / hardcore usually but that never does it justice when you want to present something as a whole."
Also behind recent No Echo-friendly books like CIV: A Roadie's Tale, Cut & Paste - The American Hardcore Fanzine Book, and Collected Obsession, Demo Demo - The Book (its title is a nod to Don Fury’s 1980s NYC studio) showcases Kitzel's DIY approach to everything he does. "I did the layout for the book. Someone asked why there is only demo covers displayed. Well, it started out with the whole picture. The tapes themselves with the cool hand-written band names on them and the inserts displayed. Then I started realizing that this way it would eat up a lot of space, effect the page size that I envisioned and so on.
"So then it was down to the tape cover and one side of the cassette itself. The next hurdle was realizing that only 70% roughly of all cassettes had actually the band names written on them. So what now… use only the ones that had them on it? In the end I decided to just go with the cover graphics themselves. All these compromises are always a lil bummer but whatever. Life is all about comprise and hardcore music books ain’t no different."
Since we were talking about his book projects, I asked Kitzel what else had cooking. "Well, I am working on two tattoo books. One of Mike Wilson from Florida, and another one on my good friend Scott Sterling, famous tattoo machine builder. I also just send off a book/fanzine on Eddy Deutsche.
"Andrew Kline (Strife, WAR Records) and I have been working pretty intently on a book about California Hardcore. We felt that the same bands (Circle Jerks, Dead Kennedys, or Black Flag, etc.) are usually written about, or already have books standalone books made about them. Our goal is to capture all the other bands. There is so much more to cover than those big names!"
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Demo Demo - The Book will begin shipping in early September via Tribal Publishing.
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