Why Writing for the Real Underground Press Never Goes Out of Style
Back when I was fifteen or so I started picking up these local newsprint fanzines. They were filled with mostly record & show reviews, band interviews, rants and such. I’d never heard of most of what they wrote about, but man, the writing really drew me in. Why? They were all people like me, from around where I lived, and goddammit if I didn’t understand what they wrote better than most anything else I’d ever read. I could tell right away that these people were like me. I’d read them all from cover to cover, and when I read in one called RearGarde that they were always looking for new writers, I had to go down there and be a part of this thing myself. So I did. It wasn’t hard. Anyone got to write if they were sincere enough about it. It was a very public-oriented thing – there was no other mandate besides getting whatever was going on in our young rock-n-roll-listening crowd down on paper. Best of all, there was no specific directive controlling the end result. The editors knew that all you needed was an open door, and local people would walk in and represent themselves. Its title, RearGarde, was a mix of french and english words meaning a look back. Not nostalgically, more like looking into a rear view mirror. When I read it now, the whole aura of that time comes back for me as I see all the names of bands, places and people who aren’t around anymore, and read expressions and references no one uses anymore. What was originally mostly hype for future events is now a very comprehensive document of those years.
There was a local zine, I later found out, that the RearGarde editors used to read themselves in the late seventies (called Surfin Bird). It wasn’t anything fancy looking, for sure, but once they got past that and picked it up, I’m sure that they, like I did later, got drawn in by what was unmistakably a Montreal way of writing. And what is an unmistakably Montreal way of writing? Nothing more than the little quirks in the grammar that are peculiar to this city. Stuff you’d notice in an instant when you read it, since you could read it in your head just as easily as you’d talk it. In these zines we got to read our own accent for pretty much the first time. The newspapers were too stuck in the universal dry journalist’s accent to reveal much of an identity you could relate to (or at least recognize), and the other music zines from Toronto or Boston, well, they sounded like people talk in those places. The effect is subtle, but enough to make it that much more like your own.
Anyway, after the initial youthful excitement, and after having been drawn into the community of people who made the zine (which was the same community which played in the bands, and recorded the bands, and promoted the bands etc.), the zine felt more like a part of something bigger for me. As this was in the days of typesetting and all that stuff, it was sometimes arduous to be part of the production, but it was still definitely something we had to do. RearGarde was inextricably linked to the radio station, the recording studio and the bars. Without it, few people would know about all the action going on. Without the action, we’d have little or nothing to write about. And so it went.
The magazine grew and grew to the point of it just costing way too much money, even though the whole thing was run by volunteers (by the end, each issue had a stable of at least fifty people who’d work on it). The editor, tired of being the ‘designated person whose money gets lost,’ had to pull the plug. In the meantime, a free weekly tabloid had emerged, with enough mainstream movie and culture coverage mixed in to be a stable money-making form of publication. It kept an open-door policy for contributors, so at least we still had somewhere to write (and get written about). Alas, by the early nineties, the damn thing made so much money that they closed the door, paid salaries to a certain lucky few contributors, and began representing less and less of what our scene was about. I suspect this was largely because the salaried contributors now wrote ’cause it was their job, not necessarily because they felt each article was important, like we felt when we wrote for free.
Along with radical changes at the local radio station, this change in our local media had an ill effect on the music scene. The parts were disjointed, much less of a whole. Amid all the talk about our scene starting to suck, there was the general observation that mostly all it would take to improve the scene again would be a new publication covering the Montreal underground. Luckily some among those few did just that. Another zine emerged, called Flaming Poutine, this time just a few hundred copies, photocopied and hand-stapled, but enough to start filling the gap again. After all, the others we’d had over the past twenty years never started much fancier than that, and the last one (RearGarde, later EnGuard Quarterly) ended up with over 30,000 copies printed and distributed nationally. But after all that distributing around all over the place, the local scene started getting lost in all of it. So it was quite nice to have something small again.
But now I’m talking about something so recent I don’t have the hindsight to explain Flaming Poutine’s ultimate impact on the Montreal scene. As well, I’m the one who ended up getting Flaming Poutine handed over to me to edit, since the original editor got tired of spending all his money and time on it. Under my direction, it started growing again, from a couple hundred copies to the 2000 plus copies per issue it is now (as Fish Piss). It’s growth proved that it’s obviously still something that needs to be around. As before, kids are discovering that there’s someone willing to publish whatever they write. They’re getting published for the first time, getting involved in a community of writers, artists, musicians and self-publishers. In the process, new writers are learning the importance of being able to get our opinions and identities out into the community. While the so-called “alternative” weeklies write almost exclusively about those things that have a dollar sign attached to them, there are still more than enough things worth documenting that provide no financial incentive for us to write about. That’s where people like me come in. I lose money, and I spend a heck of a lot of time on what we do, but the end result will always be worth it: We all get a paper to call our own. That is, until I get tired of it, or it gets too big, then some other zine’ll pop up. It’s happened before.
Louis Rastelli is editor of the Montreal zine Fish Piss and a regular contributor to BP.