In 1974, a very young Jim Shaw and an even younger Mike Kelley, together with Cary Loren and Niagara, all students at the University of Michigan, formed the psychedelic, noise, experimental band Destroy All Monsters. Their appearances were sporadic but intensely performative. Between 1976 and 1979, the collective also published an eponymous zine that brought together Xerox reproductions, photographs, drawings, writing, collage, and comics, creating a visual language that can today be associated with the proto-punk and dystopian aesthetics of the late 1970s.

Extremely rare in its original form, the zine was revisited on several occasions, first in 1995 and again in 2011, when Primary Information published a facsimile edition of the 1970s issues: six original issues, plus a seventh “lost” issue that had never seen the light of day.

In his “Manifesto of Ignorance”, published in a 1995 re-edition of the zines to coincide with the Destroy All Monsters exhibition held at Book Beat Gallery in Oak Park, Michigan, artist and musician Cary Loren distills the collective’s eclectic vision:

“Destroy All Monsters began as an anti-rock band. Our menagerie of words, images and sounds was an attempt to thumb our noses at the pretentious circus of rock-star bullshit and musical emptiness that filled the airwaves during the early to mid-1970's. The images that drove us were strange combinations of film-noir, monster movies, psychedelia, thrift-shop values and the relentless anarchy of an overstimulated popular culture. We were all edgy mid-western art students toying with everything and flying through time in a blur of art and noise. It's predictable that it would take twenty years to gain some perspective. Our music sometimes contained a narrative or storytelling direction that was never well explored. A sense of gloom, disaster and apocalypse mixed with an infectious sense of comedy and absurdity kept us together and became some of the major themes which colored our art and music. This alienation and heightened anxiety was a Psychotronic view of life and culture we each shared in various degrees. I felt we were creating sounds we wanted to exist but were nowhere to be found in the slick desert of a landscape around us. With virtually no audience and little support we continued in blind determination, expressing our end-of-the-times messages and outsider viewpoints: a sort of paranoiac-critical garage band.”

With a cover conceived by artist and lead vocalist Niagara, this original Gala Christmas issue was printed in 1978 at Wayne State University. Alongside works by the group’s members, it features contributions by Di Piepol (Diane Piepol), Larry Miller, Dr. Zero, and other artists from Detroit’s underground scene.