PERFECT YOUTH: The Birth of Canadian Punk (11 page)

“One night we were late, and we had just grabbed some food,” he says. “So we set up a table on the stage and just ate our food for the first set. I think people even applauded.”

The Psychiatrists were Winnipeg’s outsider art-punks. As one of the U of M performers, they hold a vital place in ’Peg Punk History. The only member of the band still on the radar works in the guitar section of a major music store in Toronto; I tracked him down on a particularly horrific winter day, hoping that a query from someone 20 years his junior about his teenage “meat throwing” punk band wouldn’t be the kind of creepy grounds to get me a lifetime ban at the store. He initially seemed caustiously enthusiastic about talking; he laughed when I brought the band up, and as we discussed Discharge, Lowlife, and Pop Mex, he seemed less disturbed by my enthusiasm and agreed to take my card. He was off to play Beatles covers on a cruise ship for the next three weeks, but would call me when he was back in town. Probably unsurprisingly, I never heard from him. The idea of someone showing up at your place of work when you’re an adult to talk about your high school band that no one has asked you about in three decades is a little too Dickensian for most folks. And that’s fair.

That leaves Lowlife. While other bands toyed with meat, soul, and Toronto, Lowlife was the truest incarnation of Winnipeg Punk. That they formed the building blocks for Personality Crisis is no surprise; the members of Lowlife embraced the promise and aesthetic of punk more immediately and completely than any of their peers, producing a lone posthumous single that resonates with all the frigid intensity of their hometown and combines a fascination with the picture sleeve singles of early British punk and the extremely pure discovery of the rudiments of writing and performing music. The “Leaders” 7" is easily the best document to come from Winnipeg’s first wave, and while it’s a shame that the band itself wasn’t able to experience the satisfaction of its release before breaking up, they clearly went on to some serious shit. So it’s cool.

“When you first start playing, you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing,” says Lowlife bassist Richard Duguay. “I remember trying to get my dad to pay for music lessons, going over and taking an aptitude test, and failing. On accordion, of all things. I failed miserably, so my dad wasn’t going to give me lessons. If you want it bad enough, you’ll get it. It’s the punk ethos. I rehearsed a lot, and it’s the natural progression of anything. If you love something and you do it a lot, even in spite of yourself, you’re going to get better.”

It’s late when Duguay and I connect, him in Southern California, where he has lived since the dissolution of Personality Crisis. Besides an active solo career, Duguay made a living on the Sunset Strip playing with Serious Rock Dudes like Duff McKagan, the former bass player for Guns N’ Roses. In fact, Duguay’s playing appears on the last GNR record of the ’90s,
“The Spaghetti Incident?”
, where he plays guitar on the Johnny Thunders cover, “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory.” Tonight, I can hear Duguay opening and closing a window to smoke, a warm breeze blowing through a night foggy enough that Duguay can’t help but comment on it. “We had nowhere to go but up,” he says succinctly.

“Lowlife was amazing because they were so incompetent and they just didn’t care,” says Colin Bryce. “I honestly thought it was one of the best things I’ve ever seen.”

“They were the closest thing to actual punk in Winnipeg,” says Greg Gardner. “They were living off the street. We were all from middle class homes with nothing to complain about, except society in general. They were the real thing.”

While Lowlife as a unit might have come from a different place than some of their more comfortably middle-class peers, they weren’t without support. Forming in the basement of drummer Mark Halldorson’s family home, the band was often treated to warm cups of tea from Mrs. Halldorson, and despite complaints from the neighbours, always had the support of both parents. It helped them rebuild after their catastrophically shitty performance at their first U of M gig, shuffling vocalists and endlessly practising in the Halldorson homestead.

“We were the least accomplished, so we progressed the most,” says Duguay. “From the first U of M show to the second, we really — and I don’t want to sound egotistical — blew everyone away. By the third one, we headlined.” In retrospect, it’s easy to see why early punk fans in Winnipeg gravitated toward Lowlife so immediately; Winnipeg was a hardcore town. When the first strains of the new wave of aggressive punk hit Manitoba, something about it clicked in a way punk hadn’t; it was music built for a once-thriving city that still hadn’t recovered from the collapse of the agricultural industry in the ’30s, a city whose climate was literally deadly, a city profoundly separate from the rest of the country. “The only goal was to put out a 45,” he says. “Once you do that, you want to do an album, and you want to tour. But at that point, it was just about Winnipeg. At that time, there were no other scenes going on that we even knew about. I mean we knew about London and New York and Vancouver, but you’re so isolated in your little cocoon. You just keep moving forward as best you can.” Lowlife bridged the first wave of punk with the invasion of hardcore, and continued to break down the barriers that used to stand between punk bands and pub rock–addicted local bars.

“Eventually, we started playing in bars with the cover bands,” says Duguay. “I guess they thought we were cute. It was a clash of cultures for sure, but it was cool.” Their profile getting bigger with every show, the band finally decided it was time to record. Fate led them to meet a local record store clerk named Mitch Funk, who saw fit to immediately offer the band a whack of cash to press a single. But as with most teenage bands, Lowlife was not long for this Earth. Tensions between the band members were at a boiling point; even the song “Leaders” reflects their fractious nature. Written by Duguay, it seems to skewer fascism and authority. It’s actually about the band’s singer. He never knew. But when a late-night of assembling sleeves for the new records ended with Duguay perched atop the guy’s chest, ready to pound the living shit out of him, everyone knew the band was over.

“Bands like the Nostrils were just starting,” he says. “The
first wave of Winnipeg punk bands were influenced by New
York and London. The second wave, which was bands like the Unwanted, Stretch Marks, the Nostrils, were influenced by west coast hardcore. That really changed punk rock in Winnipeg.”

“Lowlife was pretty sloppy, but I loved them,” recalls Bruce Hallett, founding member of the Nostrils. Hallett had been at every early Winnipeg punk show, but he was too young to get his own project off the ground. It was 1979 before he owned a guitar, teaching himself by practising endlessly to the first Ramones record. He liked the sound, but he knew he liked the speed of new bands coming from the west coast even better. As he met like-minded musicians, the Nostrils slowly coalesced around Hallett’s voice and persistent desire for uncontrolled sonic velocity. “We started playing faster and faster and faster,” he says. “We weren’t tight or anything, but we were faster than anybody else.”

“The Nostrils were great,” says Chris Walter. “They never made it big. Bruce was a twisted genius.” Walter wasn’t born in Winnipeg, but he grew up here, and his experiences in the hardcore scene have defined his career; as the creator of tenacious, semi-autobiographical works of fiction that detail his life as a punk, a drug addict, and a genuinely smart guy slumming through some of the country’s worst bars and alleys. Lately, he’s turned to band biographies, a subject that suits his aggressive style and plays to his profound knowledge of the country’s punk past.

Walter cuts a truly imposing figure; he’s huge, and if you’ve ever read his books, you know he can seriously fucking fight. And about 70% of his head is covered by a single massive tattoo. All of this makes my initial contact with him — and the discovery that he is a thoughtful, kind guy with a distinct Canuck accent — all the more surprisingly pleasant. Walter toured with the Nostrils, started his first band under their tutelage, and lived in their house, the infamous House of Noz.

“It was our first time living away from home,” says Hallett. “We had no idea how to live, and it was scuzzy. The basement was a hole. We’d have shows, have parties, people would break beer bottles on the floor. There’s no two ways about it — it was disgusting.” And it was in that hole that Walter formed the Vacant Lot, a band whose contribution to the Winnipeg hardcore scene seems to have been more visual than anything else. Walter recalls one of their more theatrical shows with a palpable sense of pride.

“We had a Ted Nugent poster glued to a piece of plywood, and it stood with us onstage,” he says. “I took a circular saw and chopped the Ted Nugent stand up into pieces. This was after sawing off the microphone by mistake, so we had no sound at all. I was just screaming my lungs out. All our props failed. We had a stuffed dummy with all this blood in his head and neck, and I cut off his head with a machete. But the blood bag had slid down into the chest cavity. So I grabbed it and threw it on the dance floor, but it still didn’t break. Finally, a friend of ours broke it open. Then she started throwing it at us, and there was this smell that was just awful. That’s when I realized she was throwing cat shit and rotten spaghetti at us.”

It was amidst the feces and food that more and more bands sprang up, forming an active scene that rivalled any other in Canada, all documented by Walter’s own
Pages of Rage
zine. One of the most popular bands of the era was the Stretch Marks, who vied with the Nostrils for the scene’s top spot, eventually ascending when the Nostrils broke up (for the first time, anyway). Like the Nostrils, the Stretch Marks were headquartered in a band house that also hosted shows, a second-floor apartment called the Stretch Pad. During the first few years of Winnipeg punk, the apartment was known as the Spud Club (where the Nostrils played their first show on New Year’s Eve, 1979). While no one seems sure who rented it, it acted as the city’s first DIY venue, doubling as a crash pad when shows went late. It should come as no irony-drenched surprise the area is now home to Portage Place, a massive indoor shopping mall in the centre of downtown Winnipeg.

“I hadn’t ever been to the Spud Club,” says Mark Langtry, the band’s bassist and the final addition to the group. “That was before my time, in the late ’70s. I hadn’t found out about that sort of stuff yet. I was looking for something, but it wasn’t advertised. You had to be in the know to find out where anything was. It was an underground scene back then.” The Stretch Marks would be instrumental in bringing bigger touring acts through Winnipeg, helping open up the underground to an even greater number of smart, disenfranchised kids looking for something more. Minor Threat, Vice Squad, Social Distortion, and Youth Brigade were just some of the bands the Stretch Marks connected with to help put Winnipeg on the map.

“I saw the Stretch Marks before they had ever played any live shows,” says Chris Walter. “I ran into the singer in the street and he invited me over to have some beers. When I got there, all the other members were there, and they actually looked kind of pissed that he had brought someone back. But they played a set, and I was blown away by how original and tight they were. They were my favourite band right away.” The band’s relationship with Youth Brigade helped them when they were finally ready to tour; finding a welcoming new home in Los Angeles, the band eventually signed to BYO Records, owned and operated by Youth Brigade’s Stern brothers. Not distracted or made complacent by their American record deal, the band continued their assault on the rest of Manitoba when not touring the States with bands like Social D and Channel 3.

“We did something called the Portage la Prairie Rock Riot, where a bunch of bands from Winnipeg went to Portage la Prairie, which is about an hour away,” says Langtry. “We played this big hall, and it was packed. We had a great time, but the cops came and shut it down. Then at the hotel, Chris Walter and I were staying in two different rooms, and somehow our rooms became adjoined. I don’t know how that happened . . . It made it to the front page of the paper there. Something like, ‘Punk rockers invade Portage la Prairie, destroying the place.’”

When Lowlife broke up, the members split in different directions. The most important direction pointed toward a band called Le Kille, which featured Mitch Funk, the clerk who paid for the unreleased Lowlife single, as the vocalist. The band was weird — weird in a city that thrived on weird, and didn’t impress easily anymore. Based out of the House of Beep, the band flipped through members until something clicked. By 1980, they had changed their name to Personality Crisis and counted former Lowlife members Richard Duguay and Mark Halldorson amongst their ranks.

“Le Kille didn’t know how to play,” says Walter. “They just kept changing members, and finally they put together a really tight unit that was just amazing. They would come onstage, and it would be all black. And then
boom
. It would be like a bomb going off. It was such an experience. When they started playing, you really got the impression that anything could happen. They made AC/DC look like wimps. You thought that if everyone else could hear them, they would be the most popular band in the world.”

Personality Crisis never became the most popular band in the world, and their lone full-length,
Creatures for Awhile
, doesn’t capture the Angus Young–crushing intensity of their live show. Despite this, it’s still the most powerful record of its era. Personality Crisis would go on to build their legend around the world, and on the stage’s Winnipeg’s Royal Albert Hall, a venue they helped to define through the ’80s. Even if history doesn’t hold them up alongside Black Flag and Dead Kennedys, there’s little doubt amongst those who saw them during their peak that that’s where they belong. And none of it would have been possible without the first tentative steps of Popular Mechanix, and the three-pronged, utterly chaotic attack of Lowlife, the Psychiatrists, and Discharge.