The Two Hundred Pound Underground #1

First time I ever came across the name “Tony Rettman” was through a relatively strange pathway, back when I was doing my Agony Shorthand blog around 2004. Before there was really any social media of note, if you wanted to “troll” someone, you did so in the comments of someone’s blog. My blog was usually exempt, but at one point it got continually and habitually trolled by someone named Don Rettman – nothing too over-the-top, just some nastiness about whatever music I was writing about, mixed with some light-touch character assassination. All in good fun. In seeking to figure out who this guy was, I was told by a few east coasters in the know that Don Rettman was a longtime & well-known underground record collector, and a guy who had a younger brother named Tony, whom I came to find out actually looked at my blog on occasion and who I got in touch with via electronic mail.

Tony Rettman eventually cleared up the smoke somewhat; his brother wasn’t the rogue commenter, nor was it he, and it was someone anonymous out to besmirch us all in one way or another. All of those comments vanished when the comment-hosting provider I was using went belly-up. I then came to find that Tony Rettman was a main player on the Blastitude website, a really great digital fanzine of the era – not really a blog – which I eventually came to read daily. I soon found that Rettman was not only exceptionally versed in the minutiae of hardcore punk, he’d very much “lived through it”, and his subsequent books like this one and this one and this one have since crowned him as perhaps the preeminent historian of the genre. I remember one bit of correspondence between us back then in which he was jealous that I’d seen the band “Doggy Style” live. Now that is some truly omnivorous and forgiving ‘core commitment.

I came to track down some issues of his five-issue fanzine, The Two Hundred Pound Underground, which was later shortened to 200lbu. We’ll be talking about #1 today. It came out in 1996, and was co-edited by Nick Forte in New Brunswick NJ. The true pièce de résistance in this one is the extensive interview with Brian McMahon of the Electric Eels, going deep and going long on Cleveland in the 1970s at a time when many folks were waking up to just how incredible the sub-underground music scene had been there twenty years previous. McMahon is asked about Charlotte Pressler saying in From The Velvets To The Voidoids that he’d lived something of a double life, split between his Catholic upbringing and his involvement with the Eels, to which McMahon responds, “Charlotte is misguided…sounds like creative writing….Charlotte was insane at that time. She was abusing drugs too much. She was probably right in the middle of a nervous breakdown at the time. I mean look what Peter (Laughner) did to get away from her!”

There’s also a full page about something called the “God Says Fuck The Reunion” tour, in which bands in every town get to pretend to be The Electric Eels, in support of whatever bands the ex-Eels members are playing in at the time. I’ve never heard if this fiasco actually happened in 1996-97. Did it? Beyond that, there are a couple of pieces of fiction by V-3’s Jim Shepard, and a tiny, effectively unreadable print piece by Dwayne Zarakov about a tour by New Zealand’s Space Dust in the US. Can’t even read it to tell you much about what it says, but apparently my old pal Doug Pearson of Oakland, California is featured in it.

I’m always up for reading anything and everything by and about Eddie Flowers, whose Vulcher and Slippy Town Times fanzines I’ll eventually get to writing about sometime here. He talks a great deal about how his band Crawlspace came to be in Los Angeles, and how and why they morphed rather suddenly from the ramalama MC5-ish rock band I saw live in the late 80s to the sprawling, druggy, improvisation freak-noise act they’d become in the 90s. Todd Homer of Mooseheart Faith also gives a nice spin through how and why he broke from his bandmates in the Angry Samoans to do something similar, and just how uncaring and unkind the vacuous masses LA could be to bands like his and Flowers’ around this time (not that I liked them any more than said masses did!).

Rettman and the 200lbu crew at this point are really setting out to explore the outer limits, and do so in a large set of record reviews that, again, due to tiny blurred type are effectively impossible to read: Kevin Ayers, Brother JT, Climax Golden Twins, the Hampton Grease Band reissue, the LAFMS box set and so forth. As befitting The Two Hundred Pound Underground #1’s tenor and tone, it closes with a rapturous endorsement of the Siltbreeze 1996 live extravaganza with The Shadow Ring, Charalambides and Harry Pussy. Kids were going bananas for that stuff in ‘96. Aside from the readability concerns, it’s a highly effective and well-crafted snapshot of refined and expansive music taste, with the chops to communicate about it deftly and effectively. And zero Santana live record reviews to speak of.