See Hear sign, 7th Street | photo by Mike Macioce (2002)
See Hear music magazines and books, also known as See Hear Fanzines, was an underground subculture emporium located in the East Village, first in a 300-square-foot space in the basement of 59 East 7th Street, followed by a short stint on Saint Marks Place. From the start, See Hear was the de facto epicenter for the diffusion of fan-made magazines covering punk, metal, hardcore, free jazz, alternative, and any other musical genre under the sun as well as underground comics, tattoo/piercing newsletters and magazines, religious/political tracts of every persuasion, horror/indie film publications, and just about anything related to trash low-brow culture under the radar. I was extremely lucky to work there in 1991, and the incredibly diverse range of eclectic material I was exposed to on a daily basis profoundly shaped and influenced my life—as it did the countless aficionados who walked through its doors. I spoke to owner and founder Ted Gottfried, a few of my old coworkers—Reuben Radding, Chesley Hicks, Rob Price—and longtime supporter/customer Thurston Moore about what it all meant. For a lengthy printed history of the store, pick up the great Demystification magazine.
How did See Hear come to be, and what was the impetus to carry mostly music-related fanzines, along with assorted underground publications?
Ted Gottfried: In the beginning there was music. All my friends were in bands. We saw lots of shows. We collected lots of records. Then there was work. I didn’t like working for people, so I used my record collection to open a record store. Then I moved to NYC. In the 1980s, there were a lot of downtown records shops, but few of them carried periodicals or books, so I decided to open a specialty magazine and bookstore focused on music.
How did you find out about the store, and do you remember your first time there?
Reuben Radding: I found out about the store very shortly after moving to NYC in Oct of ’88. I saw an ad in the Village Voice for the CBGB benefit with Sonic Youth and didn’t even learn what See Hear was until, during the show, when Thurston Moore referred to it as a “zine store” and brought Ted up to say a few words. I made a mental note to go visit as soon as possible. My first trip there was probably the following week. I was out job searching, and it wasn’t going well, so I went by See Hear to buy myself a cheap present, and there was a flyer up on the bulletin board saying, If you want to work here, talk to the guy behind the counter. So I did!
Thurston Moore: Sonic Youth used to rehearse just a few blocks away from where See Hear was, first at Michael Gira from Swans’ place, then another, tinier hole-in-the-wall on East 8th Street somewhere. After Ted opened See Hear, we’d always fall by there to check out the music mags and books and generally just shoot the breeze with Ted, Nancy [Breslow], and whoever else was manning the cash register then, usually Reuben Radding. Reuben was always interesting and sharp and funny, and I had no idea that he was a free-improvising contrabass musician until sometime after the shop had closed.
Chesley Hicks: This is almost verbatim what I told Demystification and all true. Two strokes of luck marked my early days in NYC; First, when I moved to the East Village in 1989, I brought my stereo, which was preset to the college radio station near my childhood home, 91.1 WCNI, which happened to be the same frequency as WFMU. So I didn’t have to wait years to discover FMU. Despite being located in Jersey, it was and remains a lively locus for local music heads. Second, I wandered into See Hear soon after arriving in NYC. Pretty sure because I’d walked by it. That shop was exactly the sort of reason many of us wanted to live in the East Village/LES back then. I don’t recall my first visit, but after I’d found it, I’d stop in regularly, learning the RE/Search and Feral House catalogues and checking for the latest Roller Derby, Factsheet Five (long waits for that), Ugly American, Your Flesh, countless music mags, and anything else I had missed, which was easy to do: the ceiling was the only place in the shop not layered thick with lit. And I’d linger to talk at the register with Reuben and you, Freddy. Thanks for pitching me comics! I think the first hook was Julie Doucette’s Dirty Plotte. Later, it was Peter Bagge’s, Bob Fingerman’s, and Dan Clowes’ various series. Would also eavesdrop on other conversations, which, in a space that size, was also easy to do. In 1992, I moved into an apartment directly across the street from See Hear and would talk with Reuben from the fire escape.
Rob Price: Like so many things, it was all my brother’s fault. My brother, Ed, was studying jazz piano at the New School and had been playing with saxophonist Andy Haas and bassist Reuben Radding. Reuben worked at See Hear, of course, and Ed met him there one time and told me about this cool zine shop in our neighborhood. Ed and I both lived on East 13th then, on the same block but on different sides of the street.
How did you wind up working there, for how long, and what was your role?
Reuben Radding: I started in the tail end of 1988, and I believe I left in the fall of 1995, so nearly seven years. At first, I was just a counter guy, but I had a lot of responsibility, ’cause Ted’s daughter was born within a couple weeks of me starting, and I had to practically run the place myself for a while. Ted would come by some evenings to make sure I didn’t fuck things up too bad. After that, I became sort of de facto co-manager. It wasn’t long before Ted trusted me to make some decisions about what to carry, or he would ask me my opinion of something. Mostly though, I was the most common face for the store for several years while I was the only employee.
Chesley Hicks: Sometime in the summer of 1993, when I stopped by See Hear, Reuben asked if I might be looking for a job. I’d just graduated and was walking dogs and freelance writing in the famously lucrative indie mag and zine industry, so the answer was an easy ‘Yes, please!’ I left about a year later, summer of 1994, to drive cross-country. I sublet my room in the apartment across the street from See Hear. After return, I resumed at See Hear part-time—was also working at the Blue Note and Orpheum Theater, while freelance writing and editing—and left again in June 1996. I didn’t want to go full time, and Ted no longer needed a part-timer, so he set me on my way before moving the store to Saint Marks Place. It was an agreed-on and agreeable ending.
Rob Price: I was dropping out of school and thinking about what kind of job I should get. One of those early times I went to See Hear, Reuben, who knew me by this point, asked me if I knew anyone who would want to work there, as Chesley was about to leave to go on a cross-country trip. I said, yeah, I want to work here! Reuben was relieved because, as he put it, I “had a clue,” and apparently the other applicants for the position hadn’t given much to look forward to. I worked there full-time for about three years, I guess, taking Chesley’s place at the register at first and then taking Reuben’s place as manager after he left to play music full-time and Chesley returned to reclaim her previous spot. I ended up back there off and on after the move to Saint Marks Place, so I was working in both locations [the old store was still used for wholesale distribution], but I don’t remember for how long.
Freddy Alva: I found out about the store in the summer of 1986 when getting into the NYHC scene: it was a required pit stop going to See Hear, followed by Some Records, and then the CBGB’s matinee on a Sunday afternoon. Picking up some of the classic publications there inspired me to do my own fanzine. I got hired in early1991, just by hanging out at the store when Ted happened to need help, worked there for about one year.
What are some of the more notable or favorite zines you carried and what was the process for selecting what to stock?
Chesley Hicks: Roller Derby. Lisa’s liquid wit and naked honesty were unlike anything I’d ever read in any magazine before then. She felt like a friend. I always read The Probe for somewhat similar reasons: often-drunk publisher Aaron was a vulnerable ball of partially examined contradictions. Happyland was a scabrous raw porno and other degenerate culture zine by Selwyn Harris, who turned out to be Mike McPadden, aka “Mr. Skin,” who wrote hilarious film reviews based on the nudity in them and was a smart metal and other culture writer who sadly died in 2020. His writing was also autobiographical. I always picked up Happyland when it showed up. Hmmm: all these zines often featured pix of naked people, usually ladies, for seemingly different reasons but … this was a pre-blog, pre-social-media time, and diary-like talk mixed with album and show reviews and band interviews—and apparently nudity?—were compelling combos to me. I regularly read and bought Bust, Chickfactor, and Answer Me too. The goth and metal zines were some of the best looking! Sounds of Death was the best extreme/experimental metal zine I recall from then; Propaganda was the goth leader and also covered punk and darkish everything; confessional mag Morbid Curiosity arrived late in zine years and later became a book. I also regularly read Forced Exposure and Chemical Imbalance, (when they came out, that is), B Side, Flipside, and Alternative Press: on the slightly more slick side of the zine music realm. Jersey Beat, The Big Takeover: devoted music chronicles with distinct personality-backed coverage.
There are too many that I’m not mentioning here! Panty Line Fever was a cheeky, smart sex, film, and culture zine published by Rick Hall; Plotz started on the free rack and landed on the paid shelves: a smart, funny culture zine by a local woman filtering it all through an iconoclastic Jewish vibe. Heeb magazine was another smart underground pub that arrived in later zine years with a tongue-in-cheek Jewish twist, and it apparently kept going. I was very involved with Sound Views, which was a black-and-white zine devoted to local music and culture and stubbornly staying free in the city, published by Lee Greenfeld throughout the ‘90s. I wrote for the zine for years. Our friend Bill Florio’s amusing Greedy Bastard was a reliable arrival and button pusher. Matt Guard’s Radio Riot was too: both were devoted to chronicling mostly local punk/hardcore culture. Sex-positive Ducky DooLittle was prolific with her mini-mini chapbooks and zines. I might long for the days when I would fully read these things because they showed up by dint of devotion, and I couldn’t just scroll away. This last batch I mention here was all local and on the free rack, by the way. I never took the free rack for granted. And then there were the eccentric single-filter zines: Murder Can Be Fun predated true crime shows and podcasts; Chairs Missing, a true fanzine devoted to Wire and the band’s ilk, 8 Track Mind, Beer Frame, the narrowly focused film zines, the fetish zines … more than I can list here, though they all deserve all their props.
Ted Gottfried: Maximum Rocknroll, Forced Exposure, Kicks, Big Takeover, Conflict, and many others. Later, we carried Comix, Kinky Incorrect, and not-erotic sex zines, tattoo books, trash culture, and many others I can’t remember. In the beginning, I contacted the zine maker and said that I would like to carry your magazine. Later, people started asking us to carry their publications. We carried it if I liked it and thought it would sell.
Rob Price: Even though See Hear started as primarily music-centered, and that remained its main focus, I wasn’t especially interested in the music stuff. I liked Psychotronic Video, Murder Can Be Fun, Shock Cinema, and many of the comics we carried. I also liked the zines that were harder to categorize: Rollerderby, the early days of Bust, some of the fetish titles, and unsettlingly provocative zines. I didn’t really want to read record reviews or interviews with musicians unless it was Chesley’s work!
Reuben Radding: I knew a bunch already and was psyched to find those, like Forced Exposure or Sound Choice, but once I started there and became a professional zine salesman, my knowledge exploded.
You were known for curating a censorship-free literary experience: what kind of push back did you get for carrying controversial stuff like the White Aryan Resistance or NAMBLA newsletters?
Ted Gottfried: In the beginning, there was no World Wide Web. I loved checking out the fringe and the absurd. I would watch evangelical preachers on UHF TV just for kicks. It wasn’t easy tracking down fringe publications, and I thought it was cool that See Hear carried things that no one else could get or would display. Some people accused me of promoting whatever they didn’t like. They would argue that these publications would turn people into racists or pedophiles. I would ask, So, if you read the White Aryan Resistance newsletter, are you going to turn into a racist? The answer was always no but that there were people out there that need protecting. To my mind, I was exposing these once-fringe groups to the light of day. I had people of color who would buy them. I always assumed they wanted to know their enemy or stare down the devil. An editor of The Jewish Daily Forward once thanked me for carrying WAR.
Did you ever do a zine and carry it at the store?
Ted Gottfried: Slambook and Modern Monuments.
There was an explosion of zine-related media coverage in the early ’90s: Do you feel See Hear was one of the catalysts for that, and ultimately was it a bad or good thing?
Rob Price: I don’t know if See Hear was a catalyst, but the shop was a major hub for zine activity. Did See Hear have any serious competition for mail order and wholesale distribution? It felt like we were a lifeline for people who were living in places where they couldn’t find much of a cultural community. And if we weren’t selling directly to those people, we were selling to the one cool shop in their town, a record store or bookstore that would carry a few zines. Was it a good thing or a bad thing? I don’t think it was either good or bad. It was something that was happening for a while. MTV dutifully showed up with cameras one day to check “zines” off their list; William Safire tackled the word “zine” itself in his New York Times column (which included a completely deranged suggestion for an alternative pronunciation of “zine”); the interest and enthusiasm from all directions eventually peaked and subsided, as interest and enthusiasm tend to do; and now, decades later, there are still some zines out there, though there are a lot more mini-comics.
Ted Gottfried: Maybe, for a short time people thought putting out a zine was a career move. Then the World Wide Web happened.
Chesley Hicks: Seems likely that See Hear played a significant role and could be considered a catalyst. Ted gathered far-flung lit and zines into a single space and generated a community around it. Countless browsers would come in there looking for one hard-to-find thing and end up leaving with an armload of other hard-to-find things that they wouldn’t have seen otherwise. And that fire catches. Am sure I bitched about the mainstreaming and coopting of this or that back then but can’t recall any deleterious effects on zines. Zines didn’t blow up the way bands did; seems any new reader was a boon to any zine publisher. And then the internet arrived, and that was that.
Reuben Radding: I don’t think the store was the catalyst at all, although it couldn’t have hurt. I saw it as yet another symptom of the underground getting over, which was happening in other ways at the time, for sure. The indie music scene was becoming significant and cracking the mainstream. You have to remember, grunge was already a word by ’89, and by 1991 (only three years after I started working at), major labels were signing, or at least courting, all the scum rock and downtown weirdos. The zine explosion was under way by the time I got to See Hear, and every so often some label or publicist would send an intern down to buy 300 bucks in zines so they could understand what was going on.
Any memorable interactions with music and or underground luminaries stopping by the store?
Ted Gottfried: Notable heroes included The Sun Rhythm Section (they heard I had a book they were in), two-thirds of ZZ Top (Billy Gibbons buying just about every blues book I had for Frank Beard), Quentin Tarantino (Hey, you sell my book? Yeah, which one? Oh, you must be Mr. Tarantino), and plenty of others I didn’t readily recognize, plus every downtown band and musician, including Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon, who were two of my first and most loyal customers. Outsiders included Daniel Johnston (Could you please leave now?), Herbert Huncke (Can I do drugs in your backroom?), Genesis P-Orridge (Richard Branson owes me money that I lent him), and I am sure there are many others that I am blocking out.
Thurston Moore: As a fanzine geek, See Hear was seventh heaven for me, and I loved hanging there at any given time—and I would! It was a great social spot and meeting point for all kinds of punk no-wave literary ambassadors. I was already hip to Ted and Nancy from their one-page hardcore punk rock zine called Short Newz, [Editor’s note: it was Nancy’s zine] and in some ways, I saw See Hear as an extension of that. It became an extremely significant spot for our micro subculture, as much as Tier 3 had been or what 99 Records had been. It was more concurrent with the aesthetic gleaned from Pier Platters out in Hoboken, New Jersey, which became the true record store scene for us after the Manhattan ones, particularly after Bleecker Bob’s (ugh) and 99 (yes!) had faded.
Chesley Hicks: The steady stream of downtown musicians, writers, filmmakers, and artists animated the place, and seeing them could be a quiet thrill. But part of working there involved being ostensibly inured to celebrity. You didn’t react when the known names came in, partly because some of them had been coming in there since before they got known. There was also the likelihood that your coworker truly didn’t know the celebrity: we weren’t regular followers of popular culture. Mike D used to come in to check on Grand Royal when it was running. Nick Tosches was a regular; still his visits felt like an event. Thurston Moore frequently visited and would introduce visitors to the store. I know Kim Gordon came in but don’t think I ever had the pleasure of serving her. John Zorn, Matt Shipp, Andrea Parkins, John Joseph: all neighbors and regulars. We had numerous excellent regulars: the WFMU crew—Jim, “The Hound,” Marshall and Bruce Bennett; Gaylord Fields; “Todd-o-phonic” Todd, who came in weekly to deliver and collect on the Maxwell’s tickets we sold there from a little metal box under the register. We had a favorite outsized-in-every-way cab driver, who Rob and Reuben remember, named Joseph. Dee Pop, rest in rock, was another welcome presence. He was one of a good handful of good people, like Andy Haas, who came down for thoughtful conversations.
See Hear cross-pollinated with most of the local indie record and guitar stores and clubs and also Porto Rico coffee, which was staffed by musicians back then. The Porto Rico union resulted in a steady supply of chocolate-covered espresso beans flowing into See Hear, courtesy of friend and regular Chris Pramas, who worked at Porto Rico. We all got hooked, and, eventually, Ted got a gumball-machine-style bean dispenser — I think it was a quarter for a small handful? Those bittersweet beans prompted some amped-up conversations and explosions in a small space. The standout for me was when Reuben did a cartwheel inside the store — and didn’t hit anything. I think we were listening to his tape of Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus, which tended to hype us up even more than the beans.
With the big names, you’d notice a difference in purchasing style. The celebrities bought a lot of stuff, quickly. Where most our shoppers took time reading and carefully selecting purchases, the wealthier and more famous customers would grab things off the shelves without reading them first and pile ’em on the counter before whipping out an AmEx (the only credit card we took then). It was, to me, a distinct sensation ringing up stacks of merchandise all at once. I had a few star-struck and celebrity-chaos moments. Ann Magnuson: she’s deeply downtown, so it makes only sense that she stopped by. She came down the stairs one night while I was working alone and the store was empty. I’d never seen any of her TV or film work but had been enraptured by her probably since I’d heard “Folk Song,” on FMU in the headphones a few years before. Had lived in the East Village just long enough by then for all of that song to make profound sense. I did after all move to the East village during the year that I think snarky historians agree is when it died: 1989. I’d seen her perform her solo show You Could Be Home Now and was, by 1993, an admirer. I don’t know what she was looking for in zines or books that night, but she was scintillating. I wish I recalled what we discussed; I was just so damn happy to meet her. But I didn’t say that of course. Shortly after she left, Bruce Bennett came down, and I told him that she’d been there (feeling sheepish about being so stoked), and then he let forth with all his fond feelings about Ann. I think he’d worked with her on a set or something, and all the news was good. We both agreed that she’s extra wonderful and somehow even more beautiful in person.
Courtney Love: It was May 15, 1994, about six weeks after Kurt Cobain had died. The store shelves were lined with mag covers featuring his pained face. She came down alone, and I think there was one other person in there, who didn’t notice and soon left. I’m not sure how to describe this scene. To the jaded part of me, it went as expected: smoking was allowed in the store, so there was an ashtray on the counter. She lit up immediately and tossed the matches and ashes in only the general direction of the tray. She regarded one of the Kurt covers and asked, “Is this pre or post?” and then asked for the NME with “me on the cover.” She also mentioned that she was looking for girl zines. I put what I used to call “my white trash” cookies—vanilla cookies with sweet vanilla centers (I liked ’em and ate ’em, and it was the early ’90, so do with that problematic term what you will in 2024)—on the counter, and she went right for them. When she went to pay, it turned out her AmEx card, which said “Courtney Love Cobain,” was demagnetized, which she blamed on her new purse. I had to call AmEx, and the verification process took a long while, during which she read the entire Alternative Press article about her dead husband. While this experience met all the Courtney clichés (I wrote it down in my diary, which is why the details are so specific), it was also complicated and sad. She didn’t look well. Shortly after she left, a regular, a woman I knew had worked lightning for Nirvana and Sonic Youth, came down. I told her that she’d just missed Courtney, and she said, “Good,” and asked which direction Courtney’d gone, so that she could go the opposite way. Still, we’re talking about a person who’d just lost her husband to a violent death. On a lighter note, a celebrity oops: I’d been a The The fan since early teenage years. During the See Hear years, I saw Matt Johnson at a photo show on the LES and screwed up the courage to approach and thank him for his music or some such. I was carrying a 32-ouncer of Midnight Dragon, and he said, “Thank you. Don’t drink too much.” I instantly wanted a redo and fantasized that he might visit the store. Which he did, with Foetus /JG Thirlwell, but I was at home on my lunch break and missed the visit.
Reuben Radding: Sure, many. Regular customers included everyone from the Sonic Youth folks, to free jazz pianist Matthew Shipp. Elliott Sharp lived down the street and came in frequently. Major icons like Dee Dee Ramone or Martin Rev came by a lot. The hot indie bands like Pavement and Mercury Rev were regulars. And then there were fun one-offs, like a couple guys from ZZ Top. All the major music writers came through, and it was incredible how this tiny basement became a clubhouse kind of scene for music mavens.
Rob Price: Eh, not really. Chatted with Fred Frith about Hank Williams and with Merle Allin about Patsy Cline. Sold a zine to Beck once, but I didn’t know who he was. Met Dave Grohl once because he used to be in Reuben’s band, and he dropped by with Reuben so they could go play those old songs together again. He was really nice. I wouldn’t have known who he was either if Reuben hadn’t introduced him to me.
Do you recall playing a benefit for the store?
Thurston Moore: See Hear held a benefit in 1988 at CBGB, which SonicFlyer for See Hear benefit show at CBGB (1988) Youth played (with B.A.L.L. and Galaxie 500, supposedly their first appearance in NYC, though I recall seeing a tiny flyer for them earlier, while walking around downtown NYC with Susanne Sasic of Pier Platters fame). It was a cool gig, and I brought Ted onstage at the end of our set to rouse the audience into a “See Hear” chant.
Retail chain outlets like Tower Records started to carry fanzines and have “fanzine” sections; did that impact in any way what See Hear was doing?
Reuben Radding: I don’t think so. They had very limited space for fanzines and tended to carry the things they knew they could sell, like zines devoted to a particular band. We had some of those, but they weren’t our biggest sellers. We might sell five copies of any issue of Backstreets, and Tower could probably do a lot more with that. But, we could sell 200 copies of Maximum Rocknroll, and they probably didn’t bother with that.
Ted Gottfried: Maybe. The internet and e-commerce changed everything.
At what point did you feel the store had outgrown its 300-square-foot space and needed a bigger arena?
Ted Gottfried: My girlfriend thought I could move and make more money. I should have stayed. We moved to Saint Marks Place.
The move to a much bigger location on Saint Marks seemed like a logical progression; did it come with a new set of challenges?
Ted Gottfried: Yes. More staff, more shoplifting, and not being in a good state of mind after the end of a long-term relationship.
Thurston Moore: The store did move to Saint Marks Place for a minute, then shut its doors—the city became more and more unattainable for lo-fi realty, and here comes Starbucks, etc…
Rob Price: I’m guessing only in that it cost a lot more money, but I wouldn’t have known anything about that. By the time it moved, I think I was just doing the wholesale distribution from the original East 7th Street location and only going over to Saint Marks to work the register when needed or to help during in-store events, like readings.
Chesley Hicks: Definitely. Ted has detailed them. I didn’t work in that location, but for a customer, it had lost some of its intimacy and maybe a sense of lineage. The 7th Street See Hear was a place where the old guard mixed with the ever-new because it had to. I’m not sure that carried over in the bigger, brighter space. That said, it was still a distinct, needed space.
Reuben Radding: I was only around for the initial planning or brainstorming of the move. I remember Ted was highly confident that he could make it work, and a lot of his strategy seemed to be based on the idea of connecting the zines with coffee. In one sense, it was visionary, when you consider that a couple years later, there were like 100 espresso bars downtown, but I think none of us imagined the World Wide Web was going to destroy the zine explosion almost as quickly as espresso got big.
Did you feel that toward the end of the store’s days, the zine explosion had reached mass saturation levels or there was still room for growth?
Rob Price: In those last days, after the Saint Marks location was gone and everything was back on East 7th Street, I didn’t work there anymore, but I would drop by, and it felt really quiet there, like not much was going on. I think that yes, probably it had reached mass saturation. I doubt there was anywhere to go from there. Zines would eventually become blogs, and then there were millions of blogs, and after mass saturation of blogs, we all moved to social media— and we really should be at peak “everyone is sick of this and there’s way too much of it” saturation of social media, but apparently we are not.
Reuben Radding: No, as I said, the dwindling zine explosion coincided with the rise of blogging. Why go spend all your money at the xerox shop when you can just stick up a website?
Ted Gottfried: The internet was the end of print media.
What was the reason for shutting down the store on Saint Mark’s and returning to its original location at 59 East 7th?
Ted Gottfried: Financial. We projected that the new location would triple our income, but it only doubled.
Did you feel burnt out by the time the store closed and what are currently up to?
Ted Gottfried: Not so much burned out, but broke. I am now a freelance bookkeeper.
What did you go on to do after See Hear and what are you currently doing?
Reuben Radding: I left See Hear because my music career was really taking off, and I needed more time to practice or sleep. I had been working full-time at the store and then playing gigs five to seven nights a week, and I was really stretched. I asked Ted if I could cut down my hours, but he said no, so I gave notice. I think he was a little shocked by that, but it was time. My life took a lot of twists and turns in the years since. The music kept going, but I got obsessed with writing and moved out West for a while to focus on it. I wound up in Seattle for about five years and got sucked back into playing music, which made me miss NYC, so I came back. Shortly after I did though, I got obsessed with cameras and photography. It was just a hobby for a while, but at this point, it’s completely taken over my life. My first photo book was published this year, and I am a busy teacher, privately and also at the International Center of Photography. I hardly ever play music these days. One thing that does connect all my recent activity to See Hear is that in 2019, I started making zines! In fact, at this point, I’ve made 14 different titles. I remember back in the day people asking me when I was going to do a zine. It took 30 years but I got around to it. My zines are made from only photographs, but I do feel like they connect me to my roots.
Chesley Hicks: Professionally, I’m a writer and editor. I traveled long distances for sometimes long periods of time and recently moved out of the East Village and New York City after 35 years. And 7th Street will always be home.
Rob Price: I ended up working in publishing for several years and continued playing guitar in bands and writing music. I still actually have a blog, in fact, but am not very active on social media.
Freddy Alva: I went on to go to school to become an Acupuncturist and also have a side vocation of writing books and online articles that are just glorified fanzine rantings!
What do you feel is See Hear’s place is in the pantheon of East Village/NYC purveyors of underground subcultures?
Ted Gottfried: I have no idea. I have seen a couple of reproductions of our sign in some businesses in the East Village.
Chesley Hicks: The vital, creative community and exchange of information and ideas in a living, breathing, evolving, spontaneous tactile environment were crucial. It was an era of tremendous exposure and learning for me personally that granted a sense of place and friendships that remain tight to this day. It stands out also as bridging record stores, performance spaces, bookstores, coffee shops, and bars: a place where we could all check in, in person, during the day—you didn’t need to buy anything to be there, and you didn’t need an ID to enter. In the pantheon of purveyors: it’s becoming more clear to me now that See Hear, with Ted’s background and ideas, offered a bridge between earlier decades’ outsider/underground cultures and what was growing and dying in the 1990s. I was as interested in the previous generations’ counterculture as they were uninterested in mine: yet we were all cross-pollinating in person, and that was all alive. And the culture and physical space down there melded the musicians and literati and freaks and punks and obsessives in a space and way that was not like any other.
As I’d said in the Demystification interview, the space was a palimpsest and living collage: The store’s tagline used to be “music and trash culture.” Turns out that’s a broad swathe of life, which was compressed into a small space. And you and John pulling together these discussions is more than reminiscing: it’s a record of a time, people, and a place that itself carried records of time, people, and places—and, ultimately, the trajectory of this small space carries the story of a definitive worldwide cultural transition.
Rob Price: It should be way up there, I think. I’m far from the most informed person on that subject, but I really think it was rather beautifully important in that way.
Freddy Alva: See Hear sits in among the legendary subculture emporiums in the East Village that opened up the minds of generations of seekers that in turn went on to influence popular culture at large.
Reuben Radding: It’s strange how the store is largely forgotten until you mention it to people who’ve been around NYC a long time, and then everyone has fond memories. I know we turned a lot of people on to music and literature that has meant a lot to their lives. The place never got to the iconic status of record stores like Bleecker Bob’s, but See Hear was really special in that it was neutral ground. It’s hard to explain, but it really was the hub of an information network pre-internet. People came by just to find out what was going on, either from the bulletin board or by eavesdropping. People came in and constantly asked me what cool shows were happening or what zine to get to read about this or that super obscure band. It was a major neighborhood spot where people felt at home, or wanted to. I would say Mojo Guitars on Saint Marks was in a similar category. People who didn’t have any intention of buying a guitar would squeeze in there to soak up the vibe and chat with whoever was there. It was a great time to be in the East Village and a great time to hang out.
Thurston Moore: All things must pass I s’pose, but those few years in the ’80s/’90s when someone could actually open a storefront in the East Village selling only fanzines—wow—whatta time.
Thank you so much to everyone for their recollections and Chesley Hicks for editing, please check out Reuben Radding’s fantastic new photography book Heavenly Arms.
