As previously mentioned, most of my teenage years were spent dealing with stamps and mail: writing letters, tape trading, printing fanzines… Sure, I had my fair share of soccer and basketball games with my friends, but more often than not I was glad to skip the playground because I had some letters or (very naive) articles to write, tapes to record, packages to put together, and so on. No regrets, as I was never a good sports player anyway.

I mostly covered Italian unsigned bands at first, but then I slowly started to “branch out” and tried to get in touch with musicians from abroad. Contacts were not too hard to find, either through word of mouth from other fanzine publishers or even online in the earliest internet days. You would get in touch with someone via email, exchange physical addresses, and go from there. MP3s were not a thing yet, and you obviously couldn’t attach cassettes and CDs to an email after all.

I was very happy the day I got an answer from American underground hero Jeff Dahl. For those who are not familiar: a one-time vocalist for hardcore pioneers Angry Samoans, after dabbling with some other projects he went on to release a long string of no-frills punk rock’n’roll records under his own name. A few years earlier, I had discovered his album ‘Wicked’ by chance at my local record store, and that was my gateway to American punk music, along with a few other incidental events, such as checking out Germs because Pat Smear had joined Nirvana, or discovering Fear, Dead Boys and Misfits when Guns N’ Roses covered their songs. Another big favourite of mine is his debut LP ‘Vomit Wet Kiss’. It’s a little rougher than his later stuff, yet very punchy, and features none other than ex-Dead Boys guitarist Cheetah Chrome on most of side B.

I eventually interviewed Jeff for my fanzine (you can see bits of it under the CDs in the picture), and when I sent him a copy, he answered back with a lovely postcard to say it was cool. As it happens, his postcard was even cooler, as it depicted the cover of ‘Chrono.naut’, an EP by stoner/doom metal band Electric Wizard!

I kept a couple of big boxes full of mail from those days, and digging through them I found a couple of issues of Welcome To The Dahlhouse, Jeff’s printed newsletter. I’m pretty sure I must have more of them somewhere, as I remember older ones printed on grey paper. For now, you can read these ones here below.