PERFECT YOUTH: The Birth of Canadian Punk (16 page)

The B-Girls [© Marcia Resnick]

October 1, 1978, 8:30 p.m. EST

Feedback rings out through the New York City television studio as Sid Vicious, Nancy Spungen, Stiv Bators, and Cynthia Ross from the B-Girls sit at a sparsely decorated fold-out table. On set for a cable-access call-in show, everyone appears either disinterested or stoned. The endless parade of asinine callers, all of whom seem to have failed to follow instructions to turn down their television sets, gives the whole scene an eerie quality, as endless feedback makes deciphering questions and answers nearly impossible. Spungen flies off the handle and violently threatens a female caller who flirts with Vicious.

“Hey, I was wondering why one of the beautiful girls doesn’t take her top off?” asks another slurring caller. The host issues a quick “Have a good night,” hangs up, and moves on. The rest of the show is unremarkable, but the tape of the night is a haunting and compelling picture of all four individuals at a pivotal moment in punk history, drenched in a surreal layer of incessant feedback. A few weeks later, Nancy Spungen was found stabbed to death in the Chelsea Hotel, in the room next door to the one shared by Bators and Ross. It’s a curious Canadian connection to the grisliest crime in punk’s history, and a stark example of the close relationship between the two cities, best exemplified by Toronto’s amazing all-female contingent.

North America’s very first all-female punk band was Toronto’s the Curse. In a crowded field of potential original gangsters, this important step toward rock and roll gender equality is a big deal. The fact that it was centred in Toronto, a city whose 1970s alternative culture was founded on the sexually inclusionary ideology of bands like the Dishes and the art collective General Idea, is no surprise.

At the peak of punk’s popularity and relevance in Hogtown, the skinny top tier of the scene consisted of not one, but two all-female bands. The Curse and the B-Girls, Toronto’s second all-female punk outfit, were similar in gender only, both tackling their songs, live shows, and careers with the variety and disparity of any of their male counterparts. And importantly, they were every bit as respected — by the audience, other groups, and local media — as the dudes who had previously dominated the city’s music scene.

It should go without saying that the contributions of the Curse and the B-Girls went far beyond their gender. Both bands produced some amazing, memorable songs and played critical roles in the development of the Toronto scene, spreading their punk tendrils across Southern Ontario and into New York State. But it’s impossible to ignore the boys’ club nature of rock and roll, and the difficulty in being a confident, outspoken woman in that world. In the noble, if unintentional, movement to break that club open, Canada was at the forefront, with strong female contributions in cities like Vancouver, Calgary, and Winnipeg rounding out a national attack on dude-dominated live music.

In her extensive academic exploration of punk’s gender politics,
Pretty in Punk: Girls’ Gender Resistance in a Boys’ Subculture
, Lauraine Leblanc points to punk’s lyrical content as the window through which female involvement crept. “Early punk was the first rock scene in which women and sex were not the main focus of song lyrics, allowing punk music to avoid gender stereotyping in large measure,” she writes. More specifically, she cites punk’s deconstruction of the “cock rock” musical style that emphasized virtuosic playing as opening the door to female musicians who, across the board, had been given fewer opportunities to develop the musical chops of their male counterparts.

“Women created new roles that challenged the image of women rock fans as drug-and-sex-crazed groupies,” Leblanc says. “In mainstream rock youth culture, female fans had only submissive roles in the consumption of rock music: they could be teenyboppers, and when they grew older, groupies.”

Simon Reynolds and Joy Press’ Harvard-published investigation of the role of gender in early punk,
The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion, and Rock ’n’ Roll
, arrived at a similar conclusion; that ultimately, a decreased focus on the kind of masturbatory musical skill that women had been aggressively excluded from for years gave female musicians an actual opportunity to play a crucial role in the development of a whole new style. “The untutored are more free when it comes to making unprecedented, out-there music,” they wrote. And they were right. From the Slits and X-Ray Spex in England to the Dishrags and B-Girls in Canada, creative women made valuable contributions to early punk that might have been impossible in a different kind of scene. In almost all cases, they started with the bare minimum of musical skill, but those who continued often developed into some of the best players in their city. They opened up live music to the generations of women that followed, and while they may not have shattered the glass ceiling of rock and roll, they definitely punched a few serious holes right through it.

Sitting down for a beer with Mickey Skin from the Curse to talk Toronto punk is like pulling up a chair at the local legion hall and asking about K-rations. Skin is gregarious and outspoken, recalling her punk exploits like a vet from the trenches of a long forgotten war. Albeit one fought while holding a stubby of Labatt 50 and throwing vegetables at a perplexed audience.

The Curse started when Skin was offered the chance to open for her dance instructor’s band, the Tools, at a local high school in May 1977. Skin, who had absolutely no background in music or performance, jumped at the opportunity to try something new. So she recruited a few friends, borrowed a bunch of equipment, and set up shop in her parents’ suburban basement, working hard to write a set’s worth of material under the gun of a three-week deadline. Then she met the Viletones.

“I met Freddy Pompeii at the music store at the corner of my street, at Major and Harbord,” says Skin. Pompeii was the Viletones’ guitarist, and while the band had only just made their live debut that month, their violent reputation in the city had already spread like a creeping disease. Skin didn’t know anything about the band, but her dance instructor obviously did — maybe he had seen the “Not Them! Not Here!”
Globe and Mail
headline: The Viletones meant chaos, and it seems like everyone, save for Skin, knew this.

“We started talking, and he said his band was going to come and see us,” she says. “When word got out the Viletones were coming to this gig, they freaked out and cancelled it. And I was like, ‘Oh man, I started a band just for this gig.’” The Viletones, playing against their boogeyman reputation, felt bad for losing the new band their first show and invited them to open a few weeks later at the brand new Crash ’n’ Burn club, the barely legal garment district operation run by the Diodes and their manager. It only ran for a single summer, but hosted some of the city’s most infamous concerts, breeding the first wave of Torontonian punk from within a clubhouse of cheap booze and amyl nitrate. It was here that the Curse, hardly able to play their instruments, made their live debut before the chaotic spectacle of the Viletones. Aware that they weren’t ready to compete musically with their new peers, the Curse did their best to turn their set into a spectacle that would stand up alongside the violent thrill of the headliners. They weren’t about to cut themselves or puke on the stage or smash the water pipes overhead, so they did the next best thing they could think of — throwing rotten food all over the audience.

The band’s first show was a success. Even early scene bible the
Pig Paper
noted the Curse as, “the only band to open for the Viletones and live to tell about it,” calling them “bona fide trendsetters and worth watching.”

Unfortunately, the “food fight punk” gimmick that worked so well in endearing them to a crowd looking to be shocked eventually came back to haunt them and their rented equipment. “We went to London, Ontario, and people brought food to throw back at us,” laughs Skin. “They threw eggs, rotten tomatoes. Someone threw a steak and we were like, ‘A steak? What a waste!’” Not long after, the band was visited by employees of the music store Long & McQuade, looking to repossess their rented drums owing to lack of payment. They were unimpressed. “They came and saw the drums caked in egg yolks, fruit, and said, ‘Just keep them.’”

The Curse made their recorded debut as the B-side to a Diodes single, but the song was (literally) just noise with Skin shouting over top. It would take a few more practices and a few more shows for the band to develop their own sound, a unique take on the stripped-down, atavistic rock and roll of their local mentors, the Viletones. In the meantime, the band’s steady rise in popularity meant access to the traditionally male-only perks of local rock stardom. Namely, groupies.

“Oh, we had groupies. Lots,” laughs Skin. When asked for details, she simply and smartly responds, “You think I remember anything about them? That’s the whole point! I once slept with three guys in one day.”

It wasn’t until the single “Shoeshine Boy” that the Curse truly came into their own, producing one of the most enduring songs of Toronto’s first wave. The song cemented an identity for the band, both sonically and thematically. But “Shoeshine Boy” started a shitstorm.

The song addressed, in brutally succinct and accusatory
language, the murder of Emanuel Jaques. A 12-year-old
shoeshine boy working a seedy part of Yonge Street late into the night, Jaques was invited to help move photographic
equipment for $35, then kidnapped by three men, imprisoned, photographed nude, raped repeatedly over the
course of 12 hours, and killed. Prior to the boy’s murder, the public had turned a blind eye to Yonge Street’s underbelly,
but the Jaques killing focused the bright light of every
newspaper in the city on the darkest corners of Yonge Street.

“Victim of a sexy orgy — Boy was drowned in a sink,” screamed the front page of the
Toronto Star
on August 2, 1977. The shock to Toronto the Good was widespread and overpowering, shaking awake a slumbering Victorian colony that refused to accept the grim reality of the country’s sleaziest strip. “When he was murdered, things couldn’t have got any worse on Yonge Street,” says Skin.

The entire city of Toronto felt the same way, and it resulted in a tremendous amount of pressure on Toronto Police Chief Jack Ackroyd from the media and the office of mayor David Crombie. A series of raids, lacking any significant policing purpose but intended to put the public’s mind at ease, followed. The actions, a symbolic reclamation of the longest street in the world by the powers of justice, satisfied the citizens of Toronto, but most of them still absolutely hated the Curse, whose song asked Emanuel Jaques’ parents what they thought their son was actually doing on Yonge Street.

“That song was about asking people to look seriously at these kids,” says Skin. “You think they’re going down there to shine shoes at nine at night and coming home with a hundred dollars? Come on. I’m going to go down there and get that job, then.” The lyrics in “Shoeshine Boy” didn’t hold back, hinting at the violence lurking in the shadows of Yonge Street and questioning anyone who pleaded ignorance to the actual work done by young men on the strip. The song immediately drew the ire of a sensitive public and an outraged press. It was, in the end, just a low-budget punk single, and the band never anticipated that it would become the lightning rod that it did.

“We never expected the publicity,” says Skin. “We got threatening hate mail. People thought we were exploiting it, but what about the newspapers? We got all this attention for something that seemed like such an obvious story for a song. At least anything that made people mad also made people think about things.”

A few months into the Curse’s existence, another expression of mutated punk femininity emerged from the bathroom of a Thin Lizzy after-party at a swanky downtown hotel.

“Watching all these guys we knew play the Crash ’n’ Burn and slowly learn to play their instruments, I thought, ‘I don’t need to stand around, I can do this, too,’” says Cynthia Ross. It was a feeling that continued to grow inside the budding musician until one night when she grabbed another fan she recognized from the recent spat of punk shows in the city.

“Thin Lizzy was in town for a couple of months,” recalls Lucasta Ross (no relation). “I was sort of seeing Phil Lynott, as were a lot of girls. We were at this hotel with the band, and there were all these girls just acting really stupid. So Cynthia and I went into the bathroom to escape it.”

The pair locked themselves in the washroom and schemed.

“I said, ‘Do you want to start a band?’” recalls Cynthia. “And she said, ‘Sure, but my best friend has to be in the band.’ And I said, ‘Sure, but my sister has to be in the band.’” The B-Girls were born. They followed a similar path as the Curse, practising in a basement in Thornhill and benefiting from the support of a more established band — in this case, the Diodes. The girls spent their first practice playing on borrowed gear and learning Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Were Made for Walkin’,” quickly developing a set of originals and preparing for their live debut at David’s, Toronto’s token punk-friendly gay bar.

The B-Girls worked hard to hone a sound that was closer to ’60s girl groups than ’70s nihilism, drawing influence from Phil Spector and bands like the Ronettes and the Crystals. Still, the B-Girls’ lack of technical ability gave their attempts at classic pop a distinctly punk edge, and, combined with Lucasta’s trained, professional singing voice, they were the perfect mix of punk ethos and pop ideal, a compelling mix that garnered the band a substantial fanbase almost instantly. Says Cynthia, “Our naivete won them over.” That their first show consisted of playing six songs twice, in a different order, seemed either lost on those in attendance or simply part of the B-Girls’ charm.

The band improved quickly. While
Toronto Star
critic Peter Goddard once called them “too bad to set a bad example,” a review of their opening gig with Pere Ubu in March 1978 finds him citing them as “the most improved band in rock and roll.” In the same review, Goddard finds a perfectly succinct way of summing up their outsider-pop charm: “To know what the B-Girls are really like you have to imagine one of those all-girl slumber parties, where everyone lounged around in pastel bunny-jammies. Well, the B-Girls are the girls who weren’t invited to those parties. Not that they are particularly tough, or anything. They just looked tough — but with hearts of plastic.”