Touch and Go fanzine was the brainchild of Tesco Vee and Dave Stimson and was launched in Lansing, Michigan, in 1979. Major fanatics of the new punk happenings in the late ’70s, TV and DS set out to chronicle, lambaste, ridicule, and heap praise on all they arbitrarily loved or hated in the music communities in the US and abroad.

In laughably minuscule press runs by today’s standards, T & G was made by guys within the Midwest scene strictly for the edification of scenesters and pals in other cities like DC, Philly, Boston, LA, SF, Chicago, et al. Inspired by magazines such as Slash and Search and Destroy and writers like Claude Bessy and Chris Desjardines, TV and DS pumped out seventeen naughty, irreverent issues together, and TV did another five solo.

Magazines like Forced Exposure and Your Flesh, among others, soon fired up Xerox machines themselves, and the rest is history. So is the legendary independent record label launched from this zine, and so are the bands covered inside: Black Flag, Minor Threat, the Misfits, Negative Approach, the Fix, the Avengers, the Necros, Discharge, Iron Cross, Youth Brigade, Faith, Die Kreuzen, Crucifix, Poison Idea—and all the other punks worth their weight in glorious black and white.

• Label: Bazillion Points
• Title: TOUCH AND GO - The Complete Hardcore Punk Zine '79-'83
• Format: Paperback, 8.5x11, 576 pages
• Author: Tesco Vee (Author), Dave Stimson (Author), Steve Miller (Editor),
• Published: US/2010
• Condition: New

"Bazillion Points has done the world the great service of collecting Touch and Go’s entire four-year, 22-issue run in a handsome paperback. The zine eventually expanded from its initial 14-page format to include other writers and interviews, and even ended up printing color covers towards the end. Through it all, Vee and Stimson never wavered from their irascible bent, and now it’s been preserved in these 570-odd pages. Though rendered with DIY technique, T&G never applied the kind of dogmatic blinders of, say, Maximumrocknroll, instead never hesitating to sing the praises of any band they found boundary pushing and/or simply appealing. (U2’s Boy gets a thumbs-up.) They also had a penchant for a little bathroom humor, which seems extreme by today’s PC punk standards, but somehow also incredibly cheeky. For the four years of its existence, Touch and Go was the documentation of all that mattered in music, uninfluenced by anything other than its publishers’ own inclinations." —Stephen Slaybaugh, The Agit Reader