Eddie Flowers – Fanzine Hemorrhage

Though we’ve barely met, I’ve been somewhat connected with Eddie Flowers, the founder and editor of Vulcher fanzine, for going on 35 years now. I spent huge portions of the years 1985-89 routinely driving two hours from Santa Barbara to see live shows in Los Angeles, during that grim era when LA music was still mostly ruled by jean jacket cowboys and bullet belt bullshit. My patron saints in those years were the Lazy Cowgirls, and I loved everything and anything in their orbit. That very much included Eddie Flowers’ band Crawlspace, who started life as a high-energy, MC5-adjacent compliment to the Cowgirls – as you can hear on the 1988 Gimme The Keys!! Trigon Records comp that featured Crawlspace, Claw Hammer and many of the other bands I/we then considered part & parcel of the Cowgirls’ hallowed, hard-driving cadre.

I remember “chatting” with Ed and the Lazy Cowgirls’ Keith Telligman in Isla Vista, CA – the student ghetto adjacent to UC-Santa Barbara – during an all-day Trigon Records fest at AnisQ’oyo’ Park while the two of the them were totally tripping their brains out on LSD. A short conversation! Later, Flowers would self-publish a tiny ‘zine in the late 1990s called Slippy Town Times, and he’d routinely send them all my way, and sadly, I lost every one of them in the great fanzine disaster of 1999. The previous year, I’d published the eighth and final issue of my own 90s fanzine called Superdope, and I’ll never forget how Flowers responded to my “Forty-Five 45s That Moved Heaven and Earth” piece with an absolutely frothing electronic mail pointing out ALL the amazing 45s I’d missed in my personal list of the greatest 45s of all time.

Frankly, if I’d never met the guy, I’d still know he was one of the good guys by his general tone, tenor and track record. Now you also might know him as the fella from all-timer 1970s Indiana punk band The Gizmos, and you’d be right about that. But we’re here today to talk about his Vulcher fanzine, and specifically Vulcher #4 from Summer 2018, which I chose randomly from the five issues that were published during the back half of the last decade, up through 2019. It boasts an incredible roll call of contributors and friends, including Byron Coley, Todd Novak, Alexa Pantalone, Eric Friedl, Bruce Cole, Tim Hinely and a couple dozen others. Vulcher was akin during its brief run to a free-form Ugly Things mixed with the haphazard contributions in Bull Tongue Review, with no real concern for whether music covered therein is from the 50s, 60s, 70s or 2018.

Flowers and his crew are excellent at staying current with the spaced-out, free youth making music around the planet. He’s super supportive of young bands he meets along with way such as Rays, who were probably my favorite band around this time. I also like that he does the thing that I tried to always do in my mags, which is throw a random record review into any available spare space, rather than actually try to adjust layout and photos to make it all look professional. Too hard. I truly know the feeling.

Vulture #4 includes some real ringers. There’s a great Richard Lloyd (Television) interview by Kelsey Simpson, a woman who is a major contributor here and in other issues, probably because she’s actually Vulcher’s co-editor. Rich Coffee – once himself a Gizmo with Flowers – interviews Michael Rummens of The Sloths, and later The Hollywood Stars. You know “Makin’ Love” by The Sloths, right? Right?? Jay Dobis writes an open letter to Sean L. Maloney, who wrote the 33⅓ edition on The Modern Lovers (a top ten gem for me). It’s chock full of “wrong!!!” corrections, the sort of totally obsessed navel-gazing esoterica that I live for.

I really dig the Screamin’ Mee-Mees photos and essay by Flowers. Eddie understands their genius as too few others did. There’s also a Flowers thing on strange CD label Eastern Prawn, one of whose bands were Celebrity Handshake, a band who at their best are absolutely fucked rocknroll of the highest caliber, and who fit neatly into the man’s improvisational, ultra-raw, drug-friendly worldview quite well. Finally, and perhaps a little strangely, Chris Sienko contributes a long history of Crawlspace circa 1985-97, including a picture taken from LA’s Anti-Club where I saw them play in their early days. Hey, who cropped me out of the photo?

I can’t find any issues of Vulcher for sale online at the current moment, which is a true shame because, I mean, these just came out five minutes ago in the relative timeline that this website covers. Flowers is still just in his late sixties, so if he’s got the gumption to get another printed endeavor off the ground, there’s still time and I’d be all over it.

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.