A fanzine from mid-Michigan, 1979 to 1983.

Touch and Go was a magazine before it was a record label. English-language Wikipedia says it began in 1979 as a self-printed fanzine in East Lansing, Michigan, written and published by Tesco Vee and Dave Stimson. In a feature for the Lansing weekly City Pulse, published in July 2010, Rich Tupica described the two men listening to new hardcore punk, post-punk and ska pressings in Vee’s apartment in nearby Williamston and browsing the bins at the East Lansing shop Flat, Black & Circular, where the opening issue went on sale in November 1979.

The making of the zine was entirely by hand. City Pulse reported that issues were typed on an IBM Selectric typewriter, printed page by page on a Xerox machine after hours at the Williamston elementary school where Vee taught, and stapled by hand. Vee told the paper that each man wrote his own pages, so that every spread was either a Tesco page or a Dave page, and that they read each other’s copy only when they met to put an issue together. Each piece ended with a short byline, “Vee” or “DS”, and recurring features included a “Top 40” and a “Bottom 40”. Tupica summed up the formula as blunt record reviews, wild page layouts, raw editorials and coarse humour.

Stimson said there was never a strict schedule; an issue came out whenever there was enough material, once a month or once every couple of months. According to City Pulse, Stimson left Michigan for work in the autumn of 1981 after 17 issues, and Vee wrote the remaining five on his own. The final issue, the 22nd, appeared in September 1983 with Ian MacKaye and Henry Rollins on the cover. The whole run was later gathered in the book Touch and Go: The Complete Hardcore Punk Zine ’79–’83, published by Bazillion Points and edited by Steve Miller with Vee.

From two seven-inch singles to a Chicago label with its own warehouse.

The label grew out of the magazine in 1981. City Pulse wrote that Touch and Go that year became a small independent label, releasing singles by hardcore bands including the Necros, the Fix, Vee’s own band the Meatmen and Negative Approach. In an interview with Pitchfork published on 4 September 2006, Corey Rusk, then the Necros’ bass player, said the label’s opening two records were the debut Necros single and the debut Fix single, issued in the early months of 1981, and that Tesco and Dave from the fanzine paid for them and did much of the work. Rusk recalled that the records were initially sold only in shops in Detroit, Ann Arbor and Lansing, that the band carried copies to stores in cities where they played, and that a San Francisco distributor called Systematic was the one that got in touch ahead of the rest.

Rusk took over in 1983. City Pulse reported that Vee moved to Washington in September 1982 and then handed Touch and Go to Rusk, who had been helping to run the label side since 1981 and wanted to keep the name alive as a record label; Wikipedia says Vee passed it to Rusk and Lisa Rusk in 1983. Rusk told Pitchfork that he left the Necros that year because the label was by then putting out full-length albums. Accounts of the move to Chicago carry different dates. City Pulse placed it later in 1983. Illinois Entertainer, in a 25th-anniversary cover story published in August 2006, wrote that Touch and Go arrived in Chicago in late 1986, and Rusk told Pitchfork that the label had been based in Detroit for a few years, where he helped run an all-ages club called the Graystone, and that he knew only the members of Big Black when he arrived.

The company then added a second label and a service arm. Illinois Entertainer reported that in 1990 Rusk created the sister label Quarterstick Records for music he felt did not fit what Touch and Go was doing, and that the same year, after computerising the business, Touch and Go began manufacturing and distributing records for other labels. Rusk told the magazine that the label had always worked on handshake agreements made one record at a time. On 18 February 2009 the Chicago Tribune’s Turn It Up blog reported that Touch and Go was ending those manufacturing and distribution services for around twenty labels, among them Drag City, Kill Rock Stars and Jade Tree. Rusk’s statement said Touch and Go would return to its roots and focus solely on being an independent record label, and he told the paper it would not be the same company it had been for the previous twenty years.

A name that stayed after the magazine stopped.

When a label is run by musicians, its identity often starts with the band that needed a way to release its own records. The label name may come from a lyric, a joke or a nickname, and the early design work tends to be done by the same few people who write the songs, book the shows and pack the parcels. Before there is an office, the label may be little more than a post-office box, a rubber stamp and a stack of envelopes, and the printed matter that travels with each record carries much of the brand. A folded catalogue tucked into a sleeve, an order form on the back of an insert or a list of releases with catalogue numbers turns every purchase into an introduction to the rest of the roster, and a consistent layout lets a buyer recognise the next mailing before opening it.

Compilations and samplers do similar work at a larger scale. A low-priced collection of tracks from bands on the same label invites listeners to sample the whole catalogue, and a running series with a numbered volume, a recurring joke in its titles or a shared cover format becomes an identity of its own. Some series change designers along the way, so their covers record how the label saw itself at different moments. Merchandise extends the mark further: tour shirts, stickers and patches put the label name on clothing and instrument cases, often at sizes and in single colours that a sleeve never demands. For designers, a musician-run label shows how an identity can grow out of practical printed pieces before it is ever written down as a system.

A borrowed masthead, anniversary parties and a catalogue kept in print.

The label’s name is the fanzine’s name. Stimson told City Pulse in 2010 that Rusk could have changed it, in which case Touch and Go would have disappeared as a footnote, and that keeping it had preserved a link between the magazine and the label. Rusk, for his part, told Pitchfork in 2006 that he could praise the zine freely because he had not been involved in it, and described it as well written, with a sense of humour, at a time when fanzine culture was small but solid.

Touch and Go marked its quarter-century with a party rather than a compilation. Pitchfork and Illinois Entertainer both reported that the label staged a block party at Chicago’s Hideout on 8–10 September 2006, with 25 bands from its 25 years over three days, including one-off reunions of Big Black, Scratch Acid and Negative Approach. Rusk told Pitchfork that the label did its own pressing and distribution and had learned the business by trial and error; he also said Touch and Go did not tell its bands where or with whom to record.

Since the 2009 change of scale, Wikipedia says, Touch and Go has concentrated on limited editions of releases by its bands and associated acts, among them a remastered edition of Slint’s Spiderland in 2014, while still issuing new records such as Shellac’s To All Trains in 2024.

For a design guide, Touch and Go shows how a hand-typed fanzine masthead can carry over intact into a record label and outlast the publication it named. Compare Dischord Records, the Washington label whose debut single reached the Touch and Go fanzine in early 1981, and Drag City, a Chicago label that Touch and Go distributed until 2009. For this guide we use fanzine red, Xerox black and photocopy paper with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Touch and Go Records’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.