Beach Boys Fanzine Archive

  The Beach Boys are one of those bands who are famous for their unreleased material. Smile is perhaps the most famous, at least among the more mainstream music crowd. Then of course there are the wealth of offcuts from Sunflower and Surf's Up, the pile of covers left off 15 Big Ones, the Criteria sessions that marked the end of Brian's return, the Caribou material.... The list goes on, is all I can say. And since the 70s, these have been slowly leaking out to fans. I'm sure anyone reading this who's familiar with the Beach Boys' outtakes has thought to themselves "The stuff they left off was better than half of what they released. What idiots!". Or something to that effect at least... Since there have been bootlegs, there has been a pecking order. Those tracks that exemplify the prior sentiment. The best of the suppressed. That was the name used for Beach Boy Stomp's multi-issue series of fan-submitted 'best of' lists. Readers would submit lis

 Hot on the heels of the Still Cruisin' album and in the midst of his new solo career, Beach Boys Stomp got yet another chance to speak to the big man himself. This interview stemmed from Brian's guest appearance at the 1988 Stomp convention. Panayiotis Bogdanos was tasked with delivering a plaque commemorating the event to Brian in Los Angeles. Accompanied by friend Tim Roehm, they arranged a meeting on November 17th 1989. The details of that meeting were recorded in two pieces published in Stomps 77 and 78 the following year. In it Brian delves into his past with the Beach Boys, the plans for his upcoming album (the ill-fated Sweet Insanity), and even the possibility of Smile seeing the light of day... A Visit With Brian - By Panayiotis Bogdanos Taken from Beach Boys Stomp Issues 77 and 78, published February/April 1990 Part 1 - The Meeting It had never occurred to me that I would be so nervous about finally having the chance to meet Brian Wilson. Yet, that is exactly how I f

Over the past couple of years, myself and a handful of friends have been compiling an archive of Beach Boys fanzine issues. Foremost among them is our collection of Beach Boys Stomp fanzines. Mostly spanning the 1980s and early 1990s, so far we have amassed 55 issues in total. These 20 page tomes are all but forgotten among the modern generation of fans, but reading through any one of them reveals a treasure trove. Some issues contain obscure facts, rare interviews, exclusive photos. However, they are also valuable as a window into the past. To see a snapshot of the Beach Boys fandom as it existed 30 or 40 years ago. To see people raving about bootlegs that we take for granted nowadays. To read rumours of recordings that we know well (or in some cases, that we didn't know about at all). To see what the popular consensus was at the time.  As you can tell, I have a particular fondness for these little booklets and the treasures within. That is why I (and others) have spent so much ti

 What follows is a list of all the issues presently missing from our Beach Boys Stomp archive.  01-20 / 1977 - 06/80 22-23 / 12/80 - 02/81 26 / 08/81 31-32 /  06/82 - 08/82 39 / 10/83 41 / 02/84 108 / 1992/ Spring 1997 110-??? / All issues since Fall1997 Also of interest are issues of Add Some Music, California Music, Surfer's Rule, and all other vintage fanzines. Unfortunately our collections for those are far patchier and as such gaps are much more common. If you have copies of any of these, we would be very thankful if you took the time to provide quality scans. Keep in mind that the archive will only publish out-of-print fanzines. Anything that's still being sold by the creators is off limits. This is about preservation, not piracy.