I was digging through my record shelf the other day and was kind of surprised to find that I had a relatively complete collection of split singles that all came from the same place: Gearhead Magazine. In the 1990s, if you were into cars and loud, fuzz-laden three chord rock and roll, played through crappy amps, Gearhead was where it was at.

The magazine launched in 1993, the brainchild of Michelle Hanould and Mike LaVella, who had worked together at Maximum Rocknroll magazine. It was at a time when you could launch a print publication with a solid DIY ethic, and still have some means of distributing it in some volume without paying the extortionists at the handful of gigantic magazine distributors that still existed.

What allowed that was that these things called “record stores” still existed in fairly substantial numbers, offering metallic discs known as “CDs,” on which artists would embed their music in exchange for currency. Crazy talk, I know, but it happened.

“Music” and “cars” don’t often go together, unless you’re talking about the three gazillionth play of “Mustang Sally” at any car show, cruise-in or meetup of more than three cars in America. The music that independent record stores were selling in the 1990s and early 2000s was most certainly not Wilson Pickett’s Greatest Hits. Nirvana’s Nevermind exploded in 1991 on the SubPop label, and suddenly grunge, garage rock and punk was a happening commodity.

And that’s where Gearhead magazine found some modicum of success, because along with the magazine, Hanould and LaVella launched a record label called Gearhead Records, churning out the kind of raw rock and roll that bands like Nirvana inspired.

Each issue of the magazine was packed with cool articles about cars and hot rods, but it balanced all of that out with interviews featuring some of the most legendary bands of the era. Every issue was wrapped in a poly bag, and where you’d find a centerfold in a Playboy, you got an honest-to-God 45 RPM record with A-sides and B-sides split by some of the most kick-ass bands in the 1990s and early 2000s.

The artwork on the magazines, the 45 sleeves, and later, the LP jackets and CDs are incredible, with cars, girls, and all manner of subversive nonsense. The bands that came and went as Gearhead Records artists read like the Hall of Fame induction ceremony at whatever event would be the opposite of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony: Mudhoney, Gas Huffer, The Melvins, Rocket from the Crypt, The Dukes of Hamburg, New Bomb Turks, The Hives, Nomads, The Hi-Fives, The Hellacopters, Man or Astroman?, The Donnas and The Quadrajets all had either shipped albums, split singles or been involved in some kind of Gearhead compilation.

It’s hard to find any of the music on YouTube now, but you can hear the AWESOME song “Certain Year’d Something” from the Hi-Fives on Grooveshark here, introed by a clip from the Munsters episode referenced on the cover of the All Punk Rods compliation.

The magazine itself was a raw, largely black and white ‘zine-ish book sandwiched between heavy stock covers with eye-catching, unmistakable artwork. Covers were inked by guys like Coop, Robert Williams and Von Franco. It was everything a kid with gasoline in his veins and The Sonics in his eardrums could’ve wanted.

It was over pretty quickly. By 2006, the magazine and the record label split into two separate entities. The expense of postage, printing and paper went through the roof, making a 96-page magazine with little to no national advertising a money-losing proposition.

It’s still a functioning record label today. In 2008, it released a DVD documentary in conjunction with David Perry’s great cars-and-chicks book Hot Rod Pinups, but the magazine is long gone, as are most of the record shops that sold it. Newbury Comics — where I purchased all my copies in the early 2000s — has turned into more of a Spencer Gifts than a cool music store now. I still have a half-dozen issues of Gearhead magazine, and a small collection of Gearhead Records split singles, LPs and CDs, and I regularly rip through them not so much for nostalgia, but for the good feeling I get for being so fortunate to experience something cool as it was happening.