Where's the Whoop?
Our Internet pal Steve (check out Fresh Meat, his column on the relationships between culture, business, design , and technology. He also blogs) recently asked us this question:
Does anyone remember Big Whoop magazine? It ran for a couple of years and was a great SF and pop-culture zine. If it was a blog, it would have been huge. I think it was done by a guy named Bill Crandall - I still have my Big Whoop t-shirt, I would love to know what led to the creation, the demise, and what the creators are doing nowadays?
"Piece of cake" we arrogantly assumed. A large component of our day job is research, so we were surprised to discover that even with many of our employer's research tools at our disposal, we managed to find very little. We found a Wired article from December 1994 by Bob Kelly, who is described in the contributors page as "proud of his New Jersey heritage, is an editor at big Whoop! magazine in San Francisco." We found a site for a band called San Tropez who had a band member who once in a band called Panda. Panda contributed a track called 'Icy Stars' "on BIG WHOOP: THE SOUNDTRACK CD compilation (with Big Whoop magazine)" in 1995. Great, that helps a lot. But that's it.
So, we went back to Steve (did we mention his Foreign Groceries Museum or his photography yet?), tail between our legs. Did he have a copy of Big Whoop! for us to look at and maybe find a more stalkable contributor than Kelly or Crandall? Here's what he said:
I don't have anything except this lousy t-shirt - no
seriously, all I have is a t-shirt. Big Whoop is trademarked on the
shirt - and the tagline is San Francisco's Music Magazine.
[Sfist note - At this point Steve tells a very funny and potentially legally vulnerable story that we wish we could post. Sorry, Suckas!]
So, I'm no help at all.
I remember after Pearl Jam's first album they wrote a nice criticism
of grunge, saying it was a bunch of marketing hooey and that PJ was
simply Bad Company in shorts. Nice.
So, we turn to you, our brilliant, jacked-in, and hip-as-hell readers. What ever happened to Big Whoop!? Drop us a line or offer your thoughts or conjecture in the comments. Steve, and now we, need to know!