How This Rock Star Once Won Sassy Magazine’s “Biggest Cure Fan” Contest — Entry Signed In Blood
March 1988, Saucy Magazine — founded by 24-year-old Jane Pratt for teenage girls they felt like outsidersbut who can still pass as normal in the high school cafeteria?” and “I didn’t want to completely reject mainstream culture, but I also didn’t want to completely embrace it.” —Newsstand debut Thirty-five years later, the lackluster magazine against vogue, rookie, bitch, bust, Crowd, Jezebel, hello gigglesand later publications of Pratt, Jane and xo janeinspired a lovingly curated Tumblr account.Sassy Magazine LIVES” and the book How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter To The Best Teenage Magazine Ever.
The groundbreaking magazine really changed many The lives of Generation X girls. This includes future Eagles of Death Metal/Palay Royale bassist and fashion designer Jenny Vee. Saucy‘s “Biggest Therapeutic Fan” contest, thanks to her metaphorical bloody, and literal blood oath.
Vee, who grew up on a farm half an hour from Sudbury, a “boring and desolate” mining town of 80,000 in Ontario, Canada, recalls:Saucy It was the magazine that spoke to me Seventeen Didn’t it feel like it was on the cusp of an alternative wave that happened to us and was written by your cool older friend. Apparently, it was a little “controversial” at times. It was cool. Wrong. Admittedly, it wasn’t your typical teenage magazine.
During its eight-year run, Saucy featured cover stars like Grunge power couple Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain (with magenta hair) And the 90’s it girl Juliana Hatfield to Central America. Coining the term “cute band alert,” the unisex monthly honor honors college rock heroes like Sloan, Lucious Jackson, Guided by Voice, Lemonheads, Vienna, John Spencer Blues Explosion, Bikini Kill and Bratmobile. Given.Influenced by repetition Phil Hartman sketch saturday night liveran a “Dear Boy” advice column with guest writers such as Iggy Pop, Billy Corgan, Mike D. of Beastie Boys, and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth;Created an in-house indie band Saucy Chia Pet, the staff best known for feminist anthems.”hey baby“and Deadpan cover of Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me” For Planned Parenthood Benefit Albums.
In the mid-to-late 80s, Vee’s only connection to alternative youth culture was Saucy MTV came along thanks to her parents equipping the house with a satellite dish. Even at the young age of 10, the self-proclaimed “awkward girl” who “felt out of place everywhere she went,” was “turned off” by her own cute band, The Cure, her alert. Music for “Close to Me” was drawn to her video. Vee said, “I’m not an ambassador for Sudbury. … I think it’s just a dark, gray place that most people don’t leave. felt Or From an early age, I had a feeling of wanting to go outside, to escape. So Cure became a kind of escape for me. … gave hope to this lonely city. Somehow, as a young girl, I [frontman] Robert Smith lyrics.
“Music is all It seems like a fantasy world to me. I decorated my room with Cure posters. I painted it purple. I hung a chandelier. That’s how I express myself and how I found my own sense of creativity and expression. It gave me something. It wasn’t just listening to music. It became my world,” Vee continues. “Then I found a Norman, Oklahoma-based Cure fan club called Other Voices. We decorated and sent back amazing packages, photocopied magazine photos and painted them with watercolors, that was the grand social network that was before the internet, when you felt like you were nothing and nowhere. , 100% saved.In addition, Cure’s music inspired me to play music myself.I couldn’t imagine myself without it.”
Years after she woke up with “Close to Me,” Vee, now 14, Saucy In the fall of 1990, in her gothic purple bedroom, she found a great way to impress her other vocal peers. “I was an early fan of the magazine and I was flipping through the pages and there was a full-page ad. Saucy It said, “Mix it up with Cure! Prove you’re the number one Cure fan in the world!” recalls Vee. jumble remix editing. “So I knew, it wasn’t a random lottery. It said, ‘Send something to this address.’ rehearsal You are Cure’s biggest fan.Well I play to win…and I take a bite This was what I was able to win.and i was decision to win.
“I thought, ‘Okay,’ and my teenage brain went crazy. It’s completely hijacked my life,” Vee continues with a laugh. “I had a deadline of six weeks, so I had time to work here, so I used up every moment. I worked until that deadline.”
“I felt like a little poet,” Vee says, “so I decided to write 365 poems dedicated to the Cure. I was probably already 100 or so, so furiously—even at school, after school.” But—usually I would write poetry in response to a song, I would listen to the song and then kind of stream of consciousness write the poem and put it in a black Duo-Tang folder that was decorated with red nail polish. bottom.
Vee then added with some hesitation: “And I didn’t mean to mention this—I’m not sure what I meant to keep it for—but I didn’t even sign it. bottom. Saucy contest, each poem my blood”
hello or It wasn’t enough to prove to Pratt’s staff that she really was the biggest Cure fan among them. SaucyA reader of Vee said, “I decided I needed to build a dollhouse. Yes, cure doll houseI painted each room separately. It was three episodes. I tiled the floor with small black and white tiles. I made a Robert Smith doll out of a little shirt buttoned up like him. It was Christmas themed. The deadline was December, so I made it a Christmas specification. There was even a small miniature Christmas tree with little black spider ornaments and Robert Smith ornaments.
“Such, or was my entry. I put the poetry book in the dollhouse, packed it in a box about 3 feet high, and FedEx it. I spent about $200 to send this. At the time, I was working two jobs. Sent to New York. and i won”
A few months later, “an official letter with Saucy A return address and a small logo on the envelope” arrived by Sudbury Mail. Vee immediately “ripped it up” and saw several names of her Cure correspondents listed in the magazine’s top 10 ranking of Cure fans. …but myself It had a name on it. I was stunned,” Vee says.
With bragging rights as holder of the title of “Biggest Cure Fan” (“Because I bottom Join in some discussion with other fans about it at the time!”), Vee said. Saucy The prize was an autographed print by Robert Smith, a self-portrait of Robert himself. “Vee recently posted a faded photo on their Instagram account proudly holding the prize, sadly indicating that in this pre-iPhone, pre-social media era, real dollhouses existed.” There is no photographic evidence,” she says. Saucy I didn’t even post a picture of the dollhouse. She still doesn’t know where the dollhouse is or what happened. “You’ll have to take my word for it,” she laughs.
Vee is Saucy The contest’s “mystery prize” was just a portrait and “the entire Cure discography, which I had many times already, and was in a CD longbox, if anyone remembers them.” A small town girl won her “trip to London” and she dreamed of “going to Fiction Records where she hangs out for a day.” …I thought I was going on a wonderful world trip! However, Vee now lives in Los Angeles with her Cats husband, Slim, her Jim Phantom, and she didn’t stay in Sudbury for long.
just a few years after Saucy The contest — the year Vee’s father died who was “mostly hated” but “in many ways embraced” by Vee’s bloody Cure fandom — Vee dropped out of high school and “took my bass and flew off.” The Cure’s native England, where she will live for the next five years. Back in America, she even played bass on the music show mentioned above. Saucy A cover of the beloved Courtney Love solo band.And Vee can partially give her credit Saucy A win for motivating her to strike out herself.
“You have to create your own opportunities in the world,” says Vee.
This interview Totally 80’s podcast SiriusXM show “Volume West”. Full audio of the latter conversation is available in the SiriusXM app.
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