Mike Stax was eighteen years old in 1980 when he left London for San Diego to join The Crawdaddys, a band steeped in the sounds of the 1960s. Three years later, armed with an electric typewriter and a passion for the garage rock that mainstream music journalism had forgotten, he started a fanzine. He printed 200 copies, cut and pasted the layouts by hand, shot the halftone photos on film, and sold them at local record stores. That fanzine was UGLY THINGS — a name that is a loving pun on The Pretty Things, the British R&B band whose rawness embodied everything Stax wanted to celebrate.
More than four decades later, UGLY THINGS is still here — now in its 42nd year, publishing three times annually from the San Diego suburb of La Mesa with a print run of around 5,000 copies. Stax remains the editor, publisher, and longest-tenured writer. His wife Anja, German-born and a fellow 1960s obsessive who had her own epiphany watching the mod film "Quadrophenia" as a teenager, has designed every cover since their marriage in 2000 and handles subscriptions, social media, and marketing. There is no real staff in the traditional sense — just a small circle of writers around the world who share an encyclopaedic knowledge of bands that pressed 300 copies of a single in 1966 and then vanished.
The magazine's tagline — "Wild Sounds from Past Dimensions" — captures its spirit precisely. Each issue is a deep excavation: discographies, band biographies, oral histories, regional scene reports, and record reviews that treat forgotten 45s with the seriousness of archaeological finds. Patrick Lundborg of The Lama Workshop once called Stax perhaps the single best 1960s-oriented music writer working today. Tim Mays, owner of San Diego's legendary venue The Casbah, has described each issue as offering a great wealth of knowledge about both well-known and deeply obscure artists. There is also an Ugly Things record label, focusing on rare 1960s releases, and a podcast hosted by Stax. For anyone who believes the greatest rock and roll was made in garages by teenagers who could barely play, this magazine has been proving them right — one forgotten 45 at a time.
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