Margaret Moser Tribute: Chris Gates
The power of print – and a 20-inch dildo
as told to Tim Stegall, Fri., June 30, 2017
My first awareness of Margaret wasn’t long after I discovered Raul’s, either in high school or still the earliest days of the Big Boys. At that point, she was predominantly part of the Texas Blondes, a roving group of insane, quasi-groupie girls that basically scared the hell outta me! I was just a kid, 18, so a lot of people that were part of Margaret’s crowd were grownups, people seeing how hard they could push you before you freaked out. It’s so hard to think of now, but Margaret was part of the establishment, as much as there was an “establishment” around punk rock. She was there in the beginning, and I was not.
A lot of people from the second and third generation of the punk scene had an us-versus-them mentality toward the Chronicle, but I never did. Starting the Chronicle at all was a very punk rock thing to do. It was so DIY. It was three or four people who literally had no money: “We don’t have jobs – let’s start a magazine!”
Later, I was in Dino Lee’s White Trash Revue for about a year, and I remember Margaret taking that Jam & Jelly Girl thing very seriously in the beginning. One was a great singer, but the other two were up there because they looked great in the outfits! I remember we did a Caligula-themed show at the Ritz not long after the movie came out. The two entrances to the backstage areas were done up like giant vaginas, and we had these two-foot-tall penis columns in the back. Everyone’s wearing togas and shit, and down at the front, all three of the Jam & Jelly Girls have these dildos they’re waving around. I’m fairly certain it was Margaret who had this double-ended thing that was about 20 inches long that she was waving around, and I swear to God, this girl in the audience just grabbed it out of her hand, put about half of it down her throat, bit it, and gave the other half back!
There’s something to be said for how Margaret came to writing by being a groupie, not through journalism school. She brought a different perspective to it. That first column, “In Your Ear,” was more of a gossip column than anything else, but without even realizing it, it gave a legitimacy to what was going on. I mean, who gives a crap about the stupid shit we’re doing, but it’s in print. Plus, everything else aside, you don’t stay in the thick of it that long without caring about it.
