How this rock star once won Sassy magazine's 'Biggest Cure Fan' contest — with an entry signed in blood

In March 1988, Sassy magazine — founded by then-24-year-old Jane Pratt for teen girls “who felt like they were outsiders, but who could still pass for normal in the high school cafeteria” and “didn’t want to completely reject mainstream culture, but didn’t want to completely embrace it, either” — debuted on newsstands. In the 35 years since, the not-so-glossy mag has laid the groundwork for millennial/Gen Z feminist publications like Teen Vogue, Rookie, Bitch, Bust, Bustle, Jezebel, Hello Giggles, and Pratt’s subsequent publications, Jane and XOJane, and it has inspired the lovingly curated Tumblr account “Sassy Magazine LIVES” and the book How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time.

The groundbreaking magazine in fact changed many Gen X girls’ lives, including that of future Eagles of Death Metal/Palaye Royale bassist and fashion designer Jennie Vee, who to this day can still boast that she won Sassy’s “Biggest Cure Fan” contest, thanks to her figurative bloody-mindedness — and a literal blood oath.

Growing up on a farm 30 minutes outside the 80,000-population, “dreary and desolate” mining town of Sudbury in Ontario, Canada, Vee recalls, “Sassy was a magazine that spoke to me because Seventeen did not. It was on the cusp of the alternative wave that was upon us, and I felt like it was written by your cool older friends. It definitely wasn't condescending. It was a little ‘controversial’ at times, apparently. It was cool. It was different. It wasn't your typical teen magazine, for sure.”

Over the course of its eight-year run, Sassy introduced cover stars like grunge power-couple Courtney Love and (a magenta-haired) Kurt Cobain and ‘90s it-girl Juliana Hatfield to middle America; coined the term “Cute Band Alert,” with that unisex monthly honor going to college-rock heroes like Sloan, Luscious Jackson, Guided by Voices, the Lemonheads, Ween, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Bikini Kill, and Bratmobile; inspired a recurring Phil Hartman sketch on Saturday Night Live; ran a “Dear Boy” advice column with guest writers like Iggy Pop, Billy Corgan, Mike D. of the Beastie Boys, and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore; and even spawned an in-house indie band of Sassy staffers, Chia Pet, best known for the feminist anthem “Hey Baby” and a deadpan cover of the Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me” for a Planned Parenthood benefit album.

Back in the mid-to-late ‘80s, Vee’s only connection to alternative youth culture, before Sassy came along, was MTV, thanks to her parents equipping their home with a satellite dish. Even as early as age 10, the self-described “awkward little girl” who “felt out of place everywhere I went” was drawn to the “Close to Me” music video by her own cute-band-alert, the Cure. Vee says, “I'm not the ambassador for Sudbury. … I think it's just a grim, gray place where most people don't leave, and I could feel that. From a young age, I just had this sense of wanting to get out and needing to escape. So, the Cure kind of became my escape. … They gave me hope in this town where I felt isolated. I could relate, somehow, as a young girl, to [frontman] Robert Smith's lyrics.

“Music was everything to me, like a fantasy world. I decorated my room with all Cure posters. I painted it purple. I hung a chandelier. That's how I could express myself, how I found my own sense of creativity and expression. It gave me something to do. It was more than just listening to music. It became my world,” Vee continues. “And then I found a Cure fan club called Other Voices that was based in Norman, Okla. I had pen pals, and that was my social network. We would trade tapes and send each other these amazing packages, decorated. We photocopied pictures from magazines and painted them with watercolors. It was really an epic kind of pre-internet social network. It saved me, 100%, when I felt like I had nothing and that I was nowhere. And furthermore, the Cure’s music inspired me to play music myself. If I didn't have that, I can't even imagine who I would be now.”

It was a few years after her “Close to Me” awakening that a now-14-year-old Vee, poring over Sassy in her gothic purple bedroom in the fall of 1990, figured out a fantastic way to impress her Other Voices peers. “I was an early fan of the magazine and I was flipping through, and there was a full-page ad in Sassy that said, ‘Get mixed up with the Cure! Prove you're the world's biggest Cure fan!’” recalls Vee, whose favorite band was about to release the Mixed Up remix compilation. “So, right there I knew, it was not a random draw. It said, ‘Send us something at this address proving you're the biggest Cure fan.’ Well, I play to win… and I knew this was something I could win. And I was determined to win it.

“I was like, ‘I got this,’ and my teenage brain's going crazy; it's completely taking over my life,” Vee continues with a chuckle. “I had some time here to work on this, because there was a six-week deadline, so I used up every moment. I found out with FedEx how long it would take to ship to New York to their offices, and I worked all the way up until that deadline.”

Vee says she “fancied myself a bit of a poet,” so she “decided to write 365 poems dedicated to the Cure. I was probably up to about a hundred already, so furiously — in school and after school, at any time — I was writing poetry, usually in response to a song. I'd listen to a song and then, kind of stream-of consciousness, write the poem and put it in a black Duo-Tang folder that I decorated with red nail polish. It was a whole thing.”

Vee then adds, a bit sheepishly: “And I wasn't going to mention this — I was going to save it for what, I'm not sure — but I also signed, for the Sassy contest, each poem with my own blood.”