On December 3, 1981, an anti-authoritarian countercultural collective’s one-ring circus was performing in a Jesuit college prep’s parking lot as a group of us handed out copies of the second issue of an underground student newspaper, The Third Degree. 3-D for short, its first issue had been handed out 17 days earlier without any bylines, and none of us had gotten into any trouble. That didn’t quite hold for this second issue, though not for a reason you might expect. ...
On pp. 6-7 of Jan Harold Brunvand’s The Choking Doberman and Other “New” Urban Legends (1984, W.W. Norton & Company), he writes that “the earliest reliably dated complete American version” of the story he has found comes from the 24 June 1981 issue of Phoenix’s New Times (by Dewey Webb, though Brunvand doesn’t mention the byline): GAGGING DOG STORY BAFFLES POLICE It happened in Las Vegas. A woman returned from work and found her large dog, a Doberman, lying on the floor gasping for air. Concerned over the animal’s welfare, she immediately loaded the pet into her car and drove him to a veterinarian. ...
My friend Steve introduced me to punk rock in the early 1980s, and I went to a few shows and picked up flyers and copies of The Gagging Dog punk zine. This represents a very thin slice of Phoenix punk history, with a few non-punk inclusions towards the end. The flyers aren’t a good representation of my experience, since I usually picked up flyers at shows but then didn’t go to the shows advertised in those flyers, with some exceptions (e.g., the first two flyers were for the first two shows I did attend, and the Siouxsie flyer was advertising a film she was in and was given out at her show). ...