PERFECT YOUTH: The Birth of Canadian Punk (14 page)

“Toronto was too far away,” explains Jones. “You could be in Los Angeles in half the time it took you to get to Toronto. There was a good west coast circuit back then. The same kind of circuit happened in the ’60s, for the psychedelic bands from Vancouver like the Collectors and San Fransciso bands like Jefferson Airplane. It was easier for them to come to Vancouver than it was for them to go to New York.” Following in the footsteps of their acid-brained predecessors, the Pointed Sticks continued to build a following on the west coast, growing into one of the biggest names in the vibrant Vancouver punk scene. It was no small feat, considering the raw power of contemporaries like D.O.A. and the Subhumans. And while those bands were often known as raucous shit-disturbers, the Pointed Sticks maintained a cute, clean-cut image, even when they recruited former Subhumans drummer Ken “Dimwit” Montgomery in late 1979, prior to recording the “Lies” single. Beyond his ample abilities as one of the most entertaining drummers from punk’s first wave (not to mention one of the heaviest), Dimwit added a slight trouble-making edge to the Sticks’ perfect image during a radio interview in San Francisco.

“Gord and Dimwit went on the radio, and the DJ was baiting them, trying to get them to say something controversial. And that’s what they did,” laughs Jones. “They talked about the Grateful Dead and some people took offense to what they said. I don’t know what they were doing listening to that radio station in the first place, but that’s what happened to them.” When Nicholl and Dimwit emerged from the radio station, they found a gang of angry bikers waiting for them; they had to hide inside the station until the bikers grew tired and dispersed.

Outside of the odd pissed-off biker, the only blight on the band’s bright future seemed to be their manager, John Owens. Owens’ star client was a classic rocker named Jerry Doucette, who had scored a platinum record in 1977 and opened national tours for the likes of the Doobie Brothers. (His 1979 album
The Douce Is Loose
, didn’t fare well, for
reasons technically unknown but aesthetically obvious.) Ultimately, Owens’ methods weren’t right for a band
rooted in the punk ethos of a city like Vancouver, with the manager booking them into local discotheques and failing to understand the scene they had come from. In a 1979 interview with University of British Columbia’s student paper
Ubyssey
, Bardach was adamant that Owens was setting them up in “the wrong kind of direction,” despite an initial promise to help raise the band’s profile and turn them into contemporary pop stars.

“Owens wanted us to borrow $6,000 and go down to Los Angeles, rent a car, and take all these people out to lunch and sell them the band,” he said at the time. Napier-Hemy referred to it as the “bullshit and hype” aspect of the music industry, and the band ultimately parted ways with Owens, instead joining forces with old friend Stephen Macklam, who became, according to some, the “sixth Stick.” The Pointed Sticks were his first management contract, but they would hardly be his last; today, he manages artists like Elvis Costello, Norah Jones, and Joni Mitchell. For the second time in their career, the Pointed Sticks taught a future industry bigshot all he needed to know.

Besides helping steer the band back in the right direction, Macklam was also crucial to the creation of the
Vancouver Complication
, a full-length compilation of bands from Vancouver’s first wave that is rightly considered a classic of the genre, a valuable time capsule of an eclectic, energized music community firing on all cylinders. Funded by benefit concerts organized by Macklam and featuring bands like D.O.A. and the Dishrags, many of the songs were recorded overnight at a basement 8-track studio on the outskirts of Burnaby. Despite some rushed takes and a few sonic duds, it’s an invaluable, if imperfect snapshot of one of North America’s best and perpetually overlooked music scenes. Focused on documenting serious bands like Active Dog, Tim Ray and A.V., and Private School, the CD re-release gratefully still includes a contribution from the most prominent fuck band to ever emerge from Vancouver’s weird underbelly, the infamous Rude Norton.

“Rude Norton was Dimwit’s masterpiece, really. I was just the drummer,” explains Jones. With Brian “Wimpy Roy” Goble of the Subhumans on bass, Rude Norton rose to fuck band notoriety thanks to high-energy covers of TV themes and the brilliantly juvenile “Tits on the Beach,” becoming opening slot and house party favourites in a closely knit scene that fed on new ideas, new music, and new activity. “I think it’s things like that that really set the Vancouver scene apart. It was about not taking yourself very seriously,” says Jones. “That’s the way we all felt about Toronto. I mean, we never really had an animosity toward the Toronto bands, but they never had any fucking sense of humour. They took themselves so seriously all the time.” As a rotating cast of musicians using fake names like “Steve Roughhouser” and “Reverend Nicky Shiloh” can attest, Rude Norton and the entire fuck band concept helped to keep the Vancouver scene grounded in the fundamental precepts of punk. But sometimes, even Steve Roughhouser can get got by the machine.

“Stiff Records had a talent scout in Vancouver because they had heard there was a music scene out here that was interesting,” says Napier-Hemy. The U.K.-based home to Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, and the Damned, Stiff Records was ground zero for the British punk explosion, releasing “New Rose” by the Damned in October 1976, the very first English punk single ever released. And they liked the Pointed Sticks.

“We played a big show at the Commodore,” says Bardach. “It was a sell-out and they sent somebody down there to the show to check us out. And I guess he liked it, so they just hired us right then and there.” Rumours still circulate about a supposed bidding war between Stiff and Sire Records, founded by music industry legend Seymour Stein and home to American punk heroes the Ramones, the Dead Boys, and Talking Heads. Ultimately, it is impossible to decipher exactly what transpired behind closed doors; in a 1979
Ubyssey
interview, Macklam claims that the band turned down more money from major label subsidiary Sire to go with the independent Stiff, and Bardach claims the Stiff deal was simply a better offer. Today, the only indisputable fact is that the band went with Stiff, who immediately sent British pub-rock vet Brinsley Schwarz to Vancouver to help record an EP for the label. Stiff was happy with the result,
Out of Luck
, and brought the band to England to record their full-length debut.

“I think it went straight to our heads,” recalls Bardach. “We immediately felt that we totally deserved it. They drove us down streets that had our poster plastered all over. A couple of city blocks might have 200 of our posters up, big posters, three feet by four feet. So we would drive along
and it was like, ‘Pointed Sticks, Pointed Sticks, Pointed
Sticks, Motörhead, Pointed Sticks, Pointed Sticks, Pointed Sticks, Motörhead, Motörhead.’ They gave us a van when we got there too. It was a big Mercedes van to drive around so we could get to the studio and back.” While in England the band prepared to record what they hoped would be the defining album of their career, their tall poppy status created the beginnings of a backlash in their hometown. A
Ubyssey
review from a show prior to their departure mocks their signing with Stiff, noting, “The Pointed Sticks are going places if you believe the latest rumour of a hefty cash advance from Stiff Records. But on their way to the top the boys seem to be developing style at the expense of substance.”

Across the pond in the studio, things weren’t going well. The band had hoped to work with Nick Lowe as a producer, but were instead teamed up with Nigel Gray, who had recently found success behind the boards for the Police’s debut,
Outlandos d’Amour
. “We knew we were having trouble with the process of recording, and we weren’t making the songs sound how they should sound,” says Napier-Hemy. “We were doing silly things like direct lining a Stratocaster into the mixing board. That’s insane. Maybe it works for the Police, but it’s not something we should be doing.”

“It was just overwhelming for us,” continues Jones. “Especially being taken away from a little town in Canada and being signed to one of the world’s coolest record labels and being in the heart of everything, the belly of the beast, in London. I think we just were intimidated.” The band’s intimidation showed through on their recordings; after six shows in England and numerous sessions with Gray in an attempt to complete a full-length for Stiff, the label simply told the band to go home. The Stiff recordings have been released in Japan, but for the most part, they remain an obscure curiosity. The Pointed Sticks are rarely included in the history of the legendary label. A
Ubyssey
headline from the time simply reads, in the most
Spinal Tap
way possible: “Pointed Sticks Fall into Pit of Despair.”

“We came back and for about two weeks we didn’t really see each other,” says Jones. “We had friends who had this big house on Vancouver Island where we had gone a few times before, so we thought we should go there, just do some songwriting and be away from it all and practise. Our version of Big Pink, I guess. We went over there, we set up all our gear, we started practising, and we were arguing within about two minutes. We just went, ‘Well, that’s it. Fuck it. Break up. Pack it in.’” Somehow, Macklam intervened and convinced the band to postpone their break-up in favour of a renewed focus on touring and a final attempt at recording a full-length, cutting corners by re-recording some of the band’s singles. Once again working with Bob Rock at Little Mountain Sound, the band entered the studio one last time.

The magic that had seemed so effortless in the Pointed Sticks’ earlier recordings evaded them. The decision to postpone the band’s breakup did little to address the ongoing personal issues that were driving them slowly apart, and there was no denying that things were getting weird. “I think that we were sort of talked into making
Perfect Youth
,” says Jones of the final product. “There’s at least three songs on it that had come out on other records before. The original versions are better because they’ve got the innocence of the band, and I think
Perfect Youth
just sounds a bit too contrived. We would have been better off if we had just gone into the studio and ripped it live instead of making a produced record. We did it in a painstaking way and that pissed Tony off, too. And that’s when Tony left the band.”

“I think I was fired,” Bardach recalls, laughing. “But it came at a point where I just didn’t care what I was saying anymore. There really wasn’t any animosity surrounding that. It’s kind of like when you’re with a lover and you realize things aren’t going to work out.” The band acquired Scott Watson on bass and, in a surprising move, added a saxophone player. They wrapped the record and headed out on the road, but it was obvious that things weren’t going to last.

“It took a long time to get to Toronto, and by the time we got there, the band was falling apart,” recalls Napier-Hemy. “We didn’t have our original lineup. We were drifting into stylistic territory that wasn’t really working. We had saxophone! We were trying to incorporate R&B elements, and we were going off the rails.”

“There were still lots of good times after that, but it was a wound we never really recovered from,” concludes Jones.

The band returned home, beaten down by the rigours of touring and creatively disconnected from their roots and each other. “We came back to Vancouver, and we didn’t have any plans,” says Napier-Hemy. “It was obvious that we were sputtering. We played a gig where we were hired to play at someone’s birthday party at a warehouse in Gastown. It was funny, because it was at a warehouse. And the early gigs were at warehouses, too. But at those gigs, everyone was there for one reason, to share this music. This gig felt like we had been hired for an industrial gig, like a bar band. We had been hired because they needed some music. For me, it just felt over. That was our last gig.”

It’s not often that a band like the Pointed Sticks, formed by teenagers in the heat of a frantic scene, flown to England when they were 21 and broken up by 22, is afforded the kind of a redemptive epilogue they’ve been given. The last 30 years have been far from perfect; in 1994, Dimwit, one of the most well-loved people to emerge from the west coast’s first wave, was lost to a heroin overdose. Whenever he came up in interviews conducted for this book, his passing was spoken about like a fresh wound, his loss still reverberating through a tiny community. The Sticks faced brighter days, though, and reunited with drummer Ian Tiles in 2006 to play a series of sold-out shows in Asia, and have continued to perform since. Their steady popularity in Japan is more than an amusing anomaly; it is an entirely appropriate, if belated, symbol of the power of the band’s brilliant catalogue. The Pointed Sticks wrote deceptively simple songs that took the pop-punk of the Buzzcocks to the extreme of both possible directions, playing faster and with even more ’60s pop bombast than their British peers had ever dared. Not content to let the poetically imperfect
Perfect Youth
serve as the final word on their career, the reunited band holed up in a studio in Vancouver to track
Three Lefts Make a Right
, picking up right where they left off in 1981 and putting a perfect sonic point on a fitting final chapter. For now.

Bob Drysdale, George Wall, Jerry Woods, Moe Berg

[© Rose Kapp]

June 24, 1984, 11:30 p.m. MST

Mr. Chi Pig reaches deep into the garbage bag, feeling something viscous and meaty in his hand. SNFU is onstage in their hometown of Edmonton, a crowd of hundreds of kids pulsating through the room at a cramped, shitty bar called Scandal’s. The first half of the band’s set has been determined by a huge spinning wheel and audience members brought onstage by an underage roadie named Ford Pier, tonight dressed as
Wheel of Fortune
co-host Vanna White. As the band launches into “Cannibal Cafe,” Chi turns his back to the crowd and begins to fumble with the limp, black bag that has been sitting onstage for the whole show. When he returns to the lip of the stage, he’s holding a 30-pound dead octopus in his hands. He heaves the massive, slippery cephalopod into the crowd.

Every town has an Elm Street, a coffee shop whose name is also a pun (Espresso Yourself! Brewed Awakening!), and a punk band that used to be called the News. In Edmonton, the News eventually begat one of the city’s most influential bands, Moe Berg’s first serious stab at musical credibility, the Modern Minds. Cut from the same cloth as bands like the Replacements and Hüsker Dü, the Modern Minds probably would have blown up if transplanted 13,000 kilometres to the south; instead, they faced a similar fate to spiritual cousins like the Nils and Art Bergmann. A legend in his hometown, it took a move across the country and a decade of upheaval in the international music industry for Moe Berg to finally find a wider audience for his smart, populist rock songs in a band called the Pursuit of Happiness. But in late 1977, he was just another kid in another small town in another band called the News.

“In Edmonton, there was this band called the Nerve, who became the Smarties. There was another band called Legal Limit, who changed their name to the Rock and Roll Bitches. And that was it.” Moe Berg is perched across from me at a bar in his adopted hometown of Toronto. Now a successful record producer with a grocery list of big-name credits, he cuts the same adorably dorkish frame today that he did in the late ’70s; thick glasses, a thin frame, and long hair rimming a bright, friendly face. He’s surprisingly soft-spoken for someone whose biggest hit is a half-shouted tirade against the trials of adulthood. And he’s just so damn nice.

The Nerve had been playing since the mid-’70s, and their metamorphosis into the Smarties seems, in hindsight, to have been based on little more than a desire to capitalize on media interest in the many scary dangers of punk. With no original tunes, the band relied on a stable of Clash and Ramones covers; by all accounts, Legal Limit and the News were the first bands to play original punk music in Edmonton. But it was the News’ transformation into the Modern Minds that kick-started what became a full-fledged revolution of exciting original music in the Albertan capital, the last bastion of normal civilization before the expanse of the northern oil fields.

“We’d go see them all the time,” says Paul Soulodre, who would go on to form the Diefenbakers, another early and important Edmonton fixture. “And of course, everybody looked up to Moe as a guitar player and songwriter. We knew the words to all his songs. We were admirers and friends of his. He was very generous and forthcoming with showing us stuff and turning us onto other stuff. That gave us the spark to start bands of our own.”

“The first local punk band I ever saw was the Modern Minds. They were so fucking great,” says Mike McDonald, whose band the Malibu Kens would eventually springboard him into the pioneering cowpunk of Jr. Gone Wild. “I couldn’t believe it. That’s when I decided what to do with my life, after seeing them that night.”

“I saw the Modern Minds play two hundred times,” says Ken Chinn, who would go on to reinvent himself as Mr. Chi Pig, frontman for the most infamous punk band to emerge from the prairies, SNFU. “I thought, ‘They’re local, they’re playing music.’ I knew I could do it, too.”

Not to put too fine a point on it, but it’s rare to find such consensus in the muddy past of punk’s first wave. The Modern Minds showed younger bands that, even if Edmonton wasn’t on the cusp of punk in 1976, it could still be a city where exciting, original music happened. But what is most important about the role of the Modern Minds is that they weren’t just the first, they were committed to helping out other bands in the city, teaching the basics of playing in a band to less experienced musicians and using their local popularity to provide a gateway for new acts into the world of live performance. The music industry is a competitive, cannibalistic workplace, and the Modern Minds demonstrated an all-too-rare approach to building a music community. They were the spark that ignited a bizarre powder keg of creativity that would enable the rise of everything from a defining skate-punk band, to a pioneering metal-country act, to the first openly gay mainstream country artist.

The Modern Minds and Legal Limit played Edmonton’s first punk show in July 1979. “I had no idea it would be as cool as it was,” says Berg. “All these people came dressed . . . punk, I guess. We played every song we knew. It was like, ‘Finally, there’s something like this in our town.’ Which isn’t to say that we were good, we were just the best that you could get then.”

“That just sort of started the scene,” says Kim Upright, who, along with Bob Drysdale, rounded out the Modern Minds. “After that, it just kept getting bigger. We couldn’t play bars, but because of the liquor control laws in Alberta, if we tagged onto football or rugby teams, they could actually get a liquor license for a dance at a hall, and we agreed to provide the music. We would have all these bands playing and we would charge at the door, and the bands would get the door and the soccer groups or whatever would get the booze money.”

The opening of halls and community spaces to punk bands played a critical role in the development of the Edmonton scene. Where larger cities like Vancouver or Toronto had a handful of decaying bars that were willing to host punk shows in the interest of drawing any clientele into their moribund establishments, Edmonton wasn’t so lucky. A closed bar scene meant that new bands without six Trooper songs in their repertoire literally had nowhere to play; on top of this, many of the city’s most eager participants were too young to get into any legitimate venue in the city to begin with. While almost all punk in the ’80s and ’90s would be centred on rented all-ages spaces, the initial wave was still focused on the fringe of the usual bar scene. In that way, Edmonton was on the cutting edge of do-it-yourself punk culture. But really, it was just a closed city full of creative and determined people, a scenario that has since repeated itself all over the world, creating an international punk touring circuit that successfully exists completely outside the mainstream. It’s the lifeblood of the modern punk scene. And Edmonton did it first.

“The idea is that anybody can do it,” says Ford Pier, Edmontonian solo performer, SNFU roadie, former member of D.O.A., and veteran of the Canadian punk trenches. “You don’t have to be Roger Waters or a member of Mötley Crüe. That was something that I first got from Canadian punk bands, because they were the first bands I saw. With early forms of entertainment, you had to be someone special in order to do it. That’s the semiotics of a band like the Rolling Stones. These are five of the wealthiest, most powerful, most satisfied men in the world. You’re never going to be Mick Jagger. Trying would make you look like a fool. You can bask in that energy for a little while, and that’s what’s entertaining about that band, as opposed to seeing some guy at a hall show where the stage is three feet off the ground and the singer is right in your face and you can smell it and you can hear him even when he’s not screaming into the microphone — it’s right there. It’s something anyone can do. You’re a part of it. It is you. The barrier between the audience and the performer is virtually non-existent.”

“We’d show up at the hall party and check things out, always with our guitars in the car just in case, and we’d talk to the promoter,” says Paul Soulodre of the open atmosphere fostered at non-bar shows. “Sometimes, they’d let us go up and do a couple of songs. Everyone knew everybody else at that point. It was just like, ‘Hey, Paul and his friends are going up and doing a couple of songs. Let’s check this out.’ It was just a lot of fun.” The Diefenbakers blossomed through these informal opening gigs; it was at one such show that a future Edmonton punk rock heavyweight was first exposed to the local scene, a critical turning point in the city’s musical evolution.

“I had seen some big arena rock shows before, but I’ll never forget that first time I ever went to a hall show and saw the Diefenbakers,” says Marc Belke, who went on to form SNFU with his brother, Brent, and Ken Chinn. “It was just right there. When you walk in, you just go, ‘Holy smokes!’”

Not everyone was always impressed; Jerry Woods, who later fronted the immortal cult outfit Jerry Jerry and the Sons of Rhythm Orchestra, laughs when he remembers the same show, which featured a visiting Subhumans in the headlining spot. The band’s singer, Wimpy Roy, and Woods sat watching the band. “He looked at me and said, ‘I’ve never seen a band that couldn’t play “Louie, Louie” before,’” laughs Woods. “But it wasn’t a prerequisite that you knew how to play when this all started.”

“There were all these smart kids that recognized something great going on,” says Moe Berg. “It was the same in other smaller Canadian cities like Saskatoon and Regina. There was something smart and cool about punk rock.”

I spend my entire interview with Larry Wanagas trying not to stare at the picture hanging on the wall behind his desk, which appears to be of him and former President Bill Clinton. After walking down a hallway lined with gold and platinum records, it seems possible that the former Modern Minds manager could have been inside the oval office — he did, after all, also manage k.d. lang through the ’80s and ’90s. When we finish chatting, I ask him to explain the photo, which, upon closer inspection, is definitely of Wanagas, lang, and Clinton.

“Well, we had been invited to play a big Democratic fundraiser at some bigshot director’s house,” he says. “I just can’t remember his name . . . the fellow who started Dreamworks.”

“Steven Spielberg?”

“Yes, him.”

I’m blown away that Wanagas can’t remember Steven Spielberg’s name. He’s not being pretentious nor is he feigning ignorance; you just get the impression that he’s met enough interesting people that making
Jurassic Park
might not rank as high as, say, being President.

“After that party, the next time we were in Washington,
Clinton invited us to come to the White House to visit,” he says.
Wanagas is a man who started his career by offering a low-budget recording alternative to the big Edmonton studios, and as a result, almost the entire scene was documented inside the walls of his Bumstead Studio. This led to Wanagas taking on the Modern Minds as his first management client. And somehow, that led us to his nonchalant description of meeting Bill Clinton and the director of
Hook
.

“I see a lot of young managers out there with early success,” he says. “And when things go well right off the bat, you might not even know what you did to get there. With the Modern Minds, I learned a lot. It wasn’t the same as Toronto or Vancouver. You couldn’t fuck up there. In Edmonton, you learned by fucking up.”

Wanagas was in the business of documenting those fuck-ups. Running an 8-track studio that offered deep discounts over the major 24-track set-ups that were becoming the bigger-budget recording standard, Bumstead Studios gave punks an opportunity to record and release their own music, another invention of the era.

“That was the best part of punk, in my mind,” says Moe Berg. “Before that, no one made records. You only made records if you were with a record company. When punk came out, the idea that you could make your own records just manifested itself. You’d see that the Vancouver bands
had records, and you’d realize that your band could have a
record, too.” So the Modern Minds became the first band in the city to produce a single when, in 1980, they recorded
“Theresa’s World,” “It’s Gone,” and “Bungalow Rock” at
Bumstead.

The single showcases the band’s rough-edged charm, with Berg’s pop sensibility filtered through the band’s rudimentary style and sheer volume. It wasn’t just punks taking notice of the Modern Minds; mainstream outlets in Edmonton had clued into the group’s potential, and the power of their new recordings sealed the deal. A review of a Modern Minds show from a December 1980 edition of the
Edmonton Sun
remarks that Berg’s singing, which has “always showed the spark of creativity, has gained power and stability” and praises the band’s songs and performance as saving the evening from being a “total loss,” despite needing “selective hearing to weed out the nauseating from the worthwhile.”

The Modern Minds had opened the floodgates at Bumstead, and soon, the city’s entire punk scene seemed to be passing through the studio’s doors in order to commit their tunes to tape. Amongst the hard-working punk throng was Mike McDonald and the Malibu Kens, who went so far as to enlist Kim Upright from the Modern Minds to help guide them through their first studio endeavour. In keeping with the band’s nurturing streak, he was more than happy to show the Kens some secrets of the trade.

“Kim came in and told us some stuff about being a band that never occurred to us before, like using dynamics,” laughs McDonald. “He taught us how to play in a band and basically introduced us to professional recording. He saw something in us. We were improved within a couple of days. I mean, not improved enough to get fans.”

The Malibu Kens, like most first-wave punk bands, had started with a much more insipid name: Joey Did and the Necrophiliacs. It took three shows for the band to make it through their set without getting booed off the stage. On the verge of breaking up after their very first show, they found an unlikely set of saviours in Regina arena-rockers Queen City Kids, a Columbia Records–signed band that had opened for everyone from Ozzy Osbourne to Blue Öyster Cult.