
30 YEARS OF HOOFSIP
The Dan Augustine Interview
by Jerry White Jr.
September 2024 / $1.50
HOOFSIP! It was a good zine to poop to and it was born thirty years ago! The first issue came out in September of 1994 and continued monthly until issue fifty. In honor of Hoofsip’s birthday, its creators and some key contributors reunited to talk about it.
Let’s start with the creators of the zine, Dan Augustine & Jerry White Jr.
JERRY: All right, today is September 5th, 2024. I’m in a fucking Ford F-150 sitting next to, and about to talk with, Daniel Frank Augustine. We are here to talk about—
[Dog barks]
DAN: A dog barking.
JERRY: A dog barking in the distance. I hope that that gets transcribed as well.
DAN: And I hope the dog shuts up soon. Shut your fucking mouth!
JERRY: We’re gathered here in honor of the thirty-year anniversary of the first issue of Hoofsip. A zine that we started together and that Dan edited about fifty issues.
DAN: No, exactly fifty issues.
JERRY: Well I guest-edited one myself. (Issue #20)
DAN: Okay.
JERRY: So you technically edited forty-nine issues, but you oversaw the project for fifty issues. And I want this to be an interview, but also a conversation with you, because we kind of realized this might be easier than writing a fucking essay.
DAN: Yes. That’s why I kept putting it off.
JERRY: What do you remember about your rationale for starting a zine and how Hoofsip got started thirty years ago?
DAN: Well, it’s because of Doug Levy. He was doing a zine and he just kept telling me, you should do one, you should do one. So he kind of inspired me to do it.
JERRY: And then you were part of our friends group. Pipper had been drawing Stick Men comics in high school when he was bored. Dennis and Jesus were also doing comics, so amongst your friends you immediately had people to draw upon. Stick Men were a major part of the first year. And then, the funny things that we would talk about, art, drawings we’d do in the artbook would become backgrounds. Jason Donovan had art that we would put in, Molly Brodak, et cetera. You quickly established the format and then stuck with it unerringly, basically, for 50 issues. 26 pages (13 pieces of paper, double-sided), stapled in the corner, though we did occasionally get some fancier bindings.
DAN: Yep, we did. Not often, but we did.
JERRY: I worked at Kinko’s for awhile and we utilized that to our benefit. Early issues, the ones that have those colored-paper covers, like green and whatever, my dad was copying them at his work copier at Ford for us. Like issue two, three, four. That’s before I worked at Kinko’s. You established early on that you’re gonna have two band interviews, pretty much every issue. You’re gonna do music reviews, concert reviews, zine reviews. There’d be an Aleister Crowley piece, which I don’t remember how that initially, I mean, it was something we were joking about. . .
DAN: We were at Denny’s and the song “Mr. Crowley” came on and then you went to say, “Do what thou wilt,” and you said, “Do what thou Willis,” and then we were laughing at that. And then that was actually the very first one. And then for frickin’ fifty issues, it was just taking the word “wilt” and changing it to something different that either rhymed with “wilt” or that came close to rhyming, like Willis. Words with almost all the same letters.
JERRY: Right, right. So Dan has basically revealed that, other than the regular pieces——which I do think are valuable as a cool snapshot of Midwest kinda punk underground culture, whether it’s the interviews with bands, the concert reviews, or the zine reviews, those have like a lot of broader appeal because we were part of that zeitgeist of what was happening——a lot of the rest of the zine is Dan’s ability to take an inside joke that we’ve come up with organically, sitting around at Denny’s, goofing off with each other, and then crafting it into a piece. Translating it——although Dan, you’re not the only one who did it. Jesus pointed out, we were doing what would become LF Characters as a thing to make each other laugh and then Joe applied that and came up with a kind of format for that. I think it is an understatement to say that a lot of Hoofsip, including the title, are inside jokes. We went all in on the inside jokes, and much like Mad Magazine, a lot of that is also wider pop culture skewering. It created its own language of internal inside jokes, that the longer you read, it’s self-referential.
JERRY: So Douglas Levy was a friend who is doing zines. He inspires you, you’re a part of this creative group. You have the summer off from school. So we work on at least the first issue all together. I have footage of us, you know, Jessey drawing flyers for 30 Minutes of Madness. You’re cutting and pasting stuff. And then you go back to college at Central Michigan and then it becomes more collaborating from a distance. We’re mailing you stuff——not even emailing yet.
DAN: No, we weren’t.
JERRY: It’s so early.
DAN: Yeah.
JERRY: As the primary editor and producer of 30 Minutes of Madness, I know what it’s like to get people to collaborate and try to get on a schedule. But with 30MOM, one episode could take a year. It was like, they’ll be done when they’re done. For Hoofsip, you really locked into a schedule. And I know what that meant for you was, giving deadlines to your friends for this for-fun, not-paid project. And a lot of the time, those friends hitting those deadlines, but a lot of times they missed those deadlines. So you’re there with three pages blank that, instead of coming out late, you would still come out on time and you would just come up with those pages yourself. Do you remember feeling frustrated at that? Or was that just part of the game for you?
DAN: Never felt frustrated at all.
JERRY: No?
DAN: No, because I knew that if someone fell through, I had a folder of ideas. So if I ran into the issue, I’d pull that out and be like, okay, I can do an article about this. And that’d be two pages, that’d be three pages, or I can do a comic about this.
JERRY: So I don’t know how strong your memory is of the different pieces and whatnot, but what are one or two bands that you’re most stoked to have interviewed?
DAN: Buzzcocks. And I know you don’t like these guys, but They Might Be Giants.
JERRY: I do like these guys, what are you talking about?
DAN: I didn’t think you liked They Might Be Giants.
JERRY: I may not have liked them then. I actually saw them in concert in the late-90s before I was a fan.
DAN: With me.
JERRY: With you.
DAN: Yeah. It actually was the mid-90s.
JERRY: It was. So that’s why you think that. When I had seen them then, I wasn’t yet a fan, but since then, yeah. Flood is my favorite album of theirs.
DAN: Okay. But yeah, those are two cool bands I got to interview.
JERRY: Joe mentioned something when I talked to him. He said you basically became a publicist. Like you were so good at mailing the zine out, making connections, trading zines. What were some of the connections you made that you most valued?
DAN: I liked this guy named Brian Bumbery, motormouthmedia. He’s still doing stuff. BB Gun Press, I think is what he’s got going on now. Back around 2012, 2013, he just popped in my head. I did some Google searching and found what he was doing. Sent him an email with my phone number at the end of it. The very next day, my phone rings. He called me, talking super fast. I barely understood a word he said. Then he’s like, “Oh my God, Dan, I gotta go. I’ll call you back!” Then he hung up. And he never called me back and I never called him back. But I could tell by his voice, he was very excited that I had gotten a hold of him.
JERRY: There are a lot of things I learned or got better at doing because of Hoofsip. Especially once I was working at Kinko’s. I was experimenting with color copy art. I used Photoshop for the first time, or really started to understand how to use it. Got into using Aldus PageMaker, which led to Adobe PageMaker, which led eventually to QuarkXPress.
DAN: And then Quark to InDesign.
JERRY: Yeah, I haven’t fully made the jump to InDesign. I was still using QuarkXPress as recently as a couple of years ago. It still exists.
DAN: Yeah, I know it does.
JERRY: And it still works well, but its days I do think are numbered. I learned a lot of that. And then just the. . .you had a way of collaborating with people that didn’t create friction, which I think was a cool thing to see. Whereas that was not always my leadership style. Looking back, what are some of the things you feel you either learned to do or got better doing, having made Hoofsip?
DAN: Well, page layout for sure. When I started it, I hadn’t even gotten into computer art at the time. About a year into it, I got into it. But I enjoyed doing it the old fashioned way.
JERRY: Well, what about those things like the distribution, reaching out to people, networking?
DAN: Yeah, for sure. I think I used to mail out like a hundred and fifty issues a month. A dollar fifty an issue too, so there you go.
JERRY: Do you feel like you still utilize some of the skills that you learned or that you mastered?
DAN: No, I don’t think so, no.
JERRY: No?
DAN: No.
JERRY: You don’t even think when you were doing a podcast, some of that is like–
DAN: Oh yeah, oh yeah, you’re right. For sure with the podcast, because like you said before, there’s not as many people are gonna see this as like, I don’t know, Matchbox 20 releasing a new album, which is sad.
JERRY: [Laughs]
DAN: That a crappy band like that has more–
JERRY: Bigger reach.
DAN: –than the awesome stuff we do. [Laughs]
JERRY: Right, right.
DAN: So, you’re like, I don’t care if it’s only gonna be seen by, back then, maybe not even fifty people, but now with online, maybe a thousand will see something, I don’t know. So, ah jeez, where was I going with this? Just. . .I took every issue of the zine very seriously and with my podcast, I did the exact same thing. I would edit it as if I was editing something that the whole world was gonna hear. I would edit down to the very microsecond, just to have the timing right on everything.
JERRY: A nice thing too about print media versus the web, it’s like, take any website you might have done ten years ago and try loading it now. It won’t necessarily look the same. It might not even be active, or it might not load correctly on your phone. But print, maybe it ages a little bit and it yellows, but the format stays the same——the way you wanted it, the way that we did it. Something that really crystallized for me in talking to some other people, and I wanna get your feeling on this, like for me, the best parts of making the zine were times where we were at Kinko’s or at Denny’s, or when I worked at Kinko’s, you guys would come in late, and it would be like Joe on a copier or doing something, you at the board cutting stuff up, Pipper doodling something while we’re all eating Taco Bell that someone brought over. The physical getting together and doing it. I still love zines, and I’ve had zine ideas since then, like I’ve always wanted to keep making zines.
DAN: I have too.
JERRY: But I find that I don’t. I’ve only made a couple of zines since the 90s, as opposed to like the hundreds of zines I’ve wanted to make, and I’ve kind of realized that doing it by myself, or even doing it with friends, but it’s like, oh, email me the thing——it’s just like, it’s not as fun. I don’t think you’ve ever been a roleplay D&D guy, right? But it’s like, you can play D&D over the internet, or Zoom or Skype or whatever, but it does not hold a candle to sitting in a room together with people. That’s how I feel about zine making, because even when we lived at the Waterford house, you had Douglas Levy’s old computer, at least there was a bit of like, people were in the room and we could see it, we would go to Kinko’s together. So, yeah, do you feel similarly like, because you more than anyone did a lot of work alone on Hoofsip. How does that time alone compare to the time when we were all in the room together?
DAN: I don’t know, they’re both enjoyable, but just in different ways. Both ways I’m doing something I enjoy.
JERRY: Okay, so it didn’t necessarily feel onerous or like a task when you were by yourself.
DAN: No, no. I’m the type of person where, say a room needs to be redone. I’d rather do that by myself than have people come over and help me.
JERRY: Really?
DAN: Yeah.
JERRY: Just so it can be done the way you like it?
DAN: No, just because I feel like other people start getting in the way. You’re trying to move something and someone’s standing there.
[Dan proceeds to sneeze and that puts the final punctuation on this topic.]

JERRY: I remember when we first had a Hoofsip website as a sub-page of Douglas Levy’s Hideous Productions. It was so amazing to see——you could go anywhere and go to a computer and see our site, which was just a couple of photos and a bio or something at first. And so my energy and my desire started shifting away from print. Like, zines are old, the web is new, I wanna make a website and I’d be really excited about that. What do you think we lost and maybe gained in the transition to the web from things like zines?
DAN: There’s a lot that we’ve lost. Like just the physical holding a copy would probably be the biggest.
JERRY: What do you think the benefits of that are?
DAN: Online?
JERRY: No, of holding a copy. Because it costs money, it takes time to print that out, to ship it to someone, etc.
DAN: I don’t know, I guess maybe it’s the same way some people feel about records. I just like it on vinyl. I just like it in print. With the web, you get to reach way more people. You put that Mr. Bungle comic online and then you said to me, like, what was it? A few hours later, this has reached more people in a few hours than it has over the past 30 years or whatever it was.
JERRY: That’s a good point, I forgot about that. But then also it’s like, it can be so immediately forgotten because it’s just lost in the online deluge of billions and trillions of images and things. So you can reach more people, but something Ethan and I were talking about was the relationships you make. When you trade a zine, like the fact that I still talk to Ethan Minsker, that is a connection that happened through Hoofsip.
DAN: Yeah.
JERRY: You trade and you make friends and you collaborate with people. Being online opens up the world, in theory. Like you could collaborate with anyone anywhere in the world, but then somehow you end up not doing it, or maybe you don’t quite connect in the same way. So I miss that aspect of it. Also this idea of like, I helped a little bit and other people helped too, but you were quite diligent about putting Hoofsip in stores. You would sell in consignment to Record Time, Off the Record, Thomas Video, a bunch of places. And the thing is, we couldn’t reach millions, we couldn’t even reach thousands, but if you were the type of person into alternative, like cool shit that’s happening locally, you stumble on a zine, it could be ours, it could be any local zine, that was such a meaningful thing to find pre-internet. Because, like, no one’s talking to you, you’re rejecting all of the mainstream shit, and then you find people that are into weird shit. There’s a value in that, so I feel like we’ve lost that. But as someone who did a zine for so long, who has by your own admission, all of these other ideas for zines, why do you think you haven’t made a zine since you stopped Hoofsip?
DAN: Just life, you know? [Laughs] A lot of it has to do with, you know, does someone want to read a guy in his fifties writing about poop and stuff like that? Which, I don’t even know if I would write about that stuff.
JERRY: Right.
DAN: It would be a completely different magazine.
JERRY: Well, you did a podcast, so life didn’t get in the way of that.
DAN: Yeah.
JERRY: Do you ever feel like you’re drawn to maybe, you know, breaking out the scissors and the glue and the tape?
DAN: No, no.
JERRY: Not at all?
DAN: No, no, no.
JERRY: Do you think that having done 50 issues, you like did it thoroughly, scratched that itch, and you have no more. . .
DAN: Yeah, I mean, it would be so hard to try to find the time to work on it. It would be so hard to find the time, so. . .
JERRY: Let’s talk about wrapping up Hoofsip. So, if you haven’t seen the documentary “20 Years of Madness,” it touches on the fact that we were all a group, and then there were some disagreements, and people went their separate ways, and life happened, and blah, blah, blah. We don’t need to regurgitate all that history here. I stopped being a part of Hoofsip around issue 34. You continued doing it for another year and a half. At what point did you know you wanted to end it? Like was it, “I’m gonna stop it at issue fifty,” and why?
DAN: Issue fifty was my last one, because that’s when my brother Mike died. So I was just like, I just felt like I couldn’t carry on, even though he really wasn’t part of the zine. However, he contributed something to issue fifty, the very last issue.
JERRY: Really?
DAN: Yeah, he contributed something to the issue.
JERRY: What was it?
DAN: He went to Woodstock, and he took photos. He was supposed to write a piece, but he never got around to it, but he had his photos in there. And I wrote a piece about Woodstock and how he was killed by a drunk driver and all that.
JERRY: Oh man.
DAN: That was the last issue.
JERRY: So it was not planned?
DAN: No.
JERRY: You weren’t like, “Okay, I’m gonna get to fifty, and then be done.”
DAN: No, yeah. It took me two years to get over my brother’s death. It did man. It was a rough time for me. And at one point, my mom was like, maybe you can find a group to go talk to. And I was like, well, there’s Mothers Against Drunk Drivers, there’s not Brothers Against Drunk Drivers. But I wound up calling them and they said, “No, you don’t have to be a mother to join.” And so I went to like three meetings with my mom. But we discovered it wasn’t for us because we felt like it was just angry, really angry people who weren’t willing to, like, um. . . I mean, when you’re mourning someone’s death, two years is kind of a long time, but some of these people had been, it’s like ten years had passed, you know? You gotta like, I don’t wanna say “let go,” but you know. . .
JERRY: Well you feel like it’s almost keeping the wound open instead of letting it heal.
DAN: Yeah, perfect, that’s perfectly put, yeah. So we went to meetings, we both felt that way——like, yeah, these people just seem really angry and bitter, and some of these people have been going for ten years and they’re still angry and bitter over it.
JERRY: Well, in a weird way, maybe going did help because you saw it and were like “Well we don’t wanna be that.”
DAN: Yeah, yeah.
JERRY: I did not know that that was the reason for ending the zine. I just assumed, knowing you–
DAN: Because it’s a nice even number.
JERRY: Yes, yes, because I’m like that too, like, oh, this is a good time to pause it.
DAN: Yeah. Then like, the same thing goes with my podcast. I’d probably still be doing it, and I stopped on a really odd number, and I had tons of ideas for shows, just like with Hoofsip, all these different ideas I kept in folders, except this was on a computer, a list of show ideas. I had like, I think a list of like over 300 show ideas to do, and I planned on doing them all, but I stopped on a really odd number, because that’s when my daughter went into the hospital last year, and then that just consumed me, just being there at the hospital for her, and just stopped doing the show, because I was being super dad, staying in the hospital.
JERRY: Well, yeah, super dad and very devoted brother, it goes to show that when you have other things going on in your life and other difficulties——it’s really these bigger challenges that ended some of your creative plans. Do you think you’ll return to the podcast?
DAN: At first I thought about it, but then I just like having the free time now. [Laughs]
JERRY: Yeah.
DAN: Yeah, I always had to put aside time, every week, like two, three nights a week, I had to put aside time. I just like having open time now.
JERRY: What was the name of your podcast?
DAN: Only a Cover Song.
JERRY: How many episodes did you do?
DAN: 336.
JERRY: Holy shit! 336. Do you have any other creative projects? Do you think you’ll start a blog? Do you think you wanna do anything like that?
DAN: I’ve been thinking about doing a YouTube channel about old video games.
JERRY: Like how old?
DAN: Like, ‘70s up to about ’86/’87. I’ve been thinking about that for a little while now. Maybe that’ll happen! [Laughs]
JERRY: What would you call it?
DAN: Joystick. No, I was thinking about calling it something like “Bushnelli” or something like that. Like someone who follows (Nolan) Bushnell, which also kind of sounds like a goofy word like Hoofsip.
JERRY: Is there anything about the zine you feel like you’d wanna cover before we wrap?
DAN: Some of my favorite pieces, one was 13 Leprechaun stories. I think we did three different ones. All those were just Joe and I. Did you contribute to any of those?
JERRY: I might have a little bit. I think that was another one that might have started as we were making each other laugh somewhere and then you made a piece out of it.
DAN: I like that one and then. . .I did this one piece. It was “a man walks into a bar.” It was just a bunch of stupid jokes. Like a man walks into a bar and sees a bunch of people getting their hair cut. Then he realized it’s the barbershop with a neon sign and B-E-R burnt out. It was just stupid stuff like that. [Laughs]
JERRY: Great.
DAN: And I think I even had it in there, walks into a bar and then discovers that it was B-A-R-R and it’s actually Roseanne Barr’s house. As if she would have that on the outside of her house. [Laughs]
JERRY: Yeah: Dad Joke, the Zine.
DAN: Exactly. And then, what’s another piece? Oh, Sesame Street versus Reality Street. That one I did with Quinn actually. [Laughs] Another funny piece. Fun Games that Cost No Money, those were always fun. Especially when I had to over-explain things, which I knew wasn’t necessary, but for some reason I thought it was some weird dry humor. It would be like, “Costs no money: first you start with a piece of paper. Well, extra paper costs money, but we’re assuming you already have it at your house and maybe someone else bought it, so make sure you use that paper.” And I was just, you know, it’s like, dude, you don’t have to over explain it like that, but I would do that on purpose.
JERRY: Yeah, that was part of the language of the zine, I think. Jesus was saying he was really drawn to the covers. He was always really excited——well, I think Joe said too, always excited to see what new covers would come up. I always loved the comics, because not only do we like create stuff in house, whether it was Stick Men or the revolving Pezz Wurld artists, but then you did a number of one-offs throughout the run of the zine, then you also had like Kurt Falk and these other artists that were part of a lot of zine culture who would contribute. And I know there’s a bunch of other names that would do it. And early on too, we had someone else that Ethan mentioned, Dr. Ducky Doolittle. There was this kind of like, almost like franchising pieces. Like you would get involved with a number of zines and maybe they would reprint your piece or you would write a piece specifically for them. A lot of really interesting local, colorful stuff. And so I do think that the zine, as inside baseball as it kind of could be often, the inside jokes and stuff, it does have a lot——a snapshot of, you know, 90s, Michigan, Metro Detroit subculture, and just what was going on at the time in other music/zine/world stuff.
Read the other interviews in the Hoofsip Restrospective Series!
Joe Hornacek | Ethan Minsker | Mike Pipper | Jesus Rivera
Click here for the first THIRTY-SIX issues of HOOFSIP! (Maybe someday Dan will scan the final fourteen and we’ll add ’em.)