PERFECT YOUTH: The Birth of Canadian Punk (20 page)

Nobody’s Heroes did eventually record two of their originals (grand total of original songs: three) right at the end of their time together, when the band was regularly drawing several hundred kids to a too-fucking-packed Grafton Street Cafe. Thanks to support from a local DJ who helped set the band up in his station’s studio, they did their best to whip through the two songs, which show a serious dedication to the craft of songwriting, along with the undeniable influence of Stiff Little Fingers. The songs were never properly released, which is a shame, as they demonstrate a promising band on the cusp of figuring themselves out. Cowan continued to play long after the dissolution of the Heroes; after moving to Toronto, he formed the Little Ministers, a classic rock radio staple, as well as Absolute Faith, the first vehicle for future reality TV star and INXS frontman J.D. Fortune.

Along with Nobody’s Heroes, the other band providing the soundtrack to early all-ages shows in Halifax was Agro. While the Heroes did their best impression of Stiff Little Fingers, Agro was a boundary-pushing collection of weirdos right out of the gate, an almost-immediate post-punk response to what had barely come before them. Confrontational and intentionally obtuse, the few live bootlegs that exist of their early shows hint at a Pere Ubu–like sonic attack, a very literal assault on their limited audience. The bootlegs remain nearly impossible to track down, but the band’s purposely confrontational style made an obvious impact in the city.

“They scared me a bit,” says Phil Walling, who helped run sound at early shows and produced the pioneering — and expensive eBay collector’s item — electro-punk single “Orphan Baby,” under the moniker Phollop Willing P.A. “I never knew where the jokes stopped and the truly psychotic behaviour began.”

“They were very troublesome and totally incompetent,” says Cowan. “They were just total amateurs, and awfully fucking noisy, and they had no respect for music. It was awesome.”

“Their shows were kind of phenomenal, in that there was a certain degree of randomness and chaos, which was kind of attractive,” says Allison Outhit, vice president of operations at FACTOR, and a fixture of the early Halifax scene. “Picture this scene: a church, on top of a hill, on a main street. In front of the church there were some steps and a couple of working electrical outlets, so every so often people would show up with amps and stuff, and you had to do it quick because it would take half an hour for the cops to show up and shut it down. You only found out about those gigs if you were at Backstreet 10 minutes beforehand.”

Backstreet Amusements — on paper, nothing more than an arcade — appeared in the mid-’80s in Halifax, ushering in the first real era of punk and hardcore in the city and providing a meeting place for a burgeoning community of like-minded musicians and fans who didn’t have a union card. Greg Clark, owner of the arcade, would open the Flamingo on Grafton Street when the Grafton Street Cafe finally closed shop, becoming the first venue in the entire town to reject the AFM outright, securing a liquor license and regularly booking non-union bands. Clark and the Flamingo put Halifax on the map for North American touring bands, who had previously stopped in Montreal and turned around. As a result, Halifax would experience such an intense musical creative boom through the ’80s and ’90s that it would be dubbed the “next Seattle” by an alternative-hungry post-Nirvana music industry.

“Halifax is a dark town, a fucking port town,” says Peter Rowan, who moved from Fredericton in the ’80s and ended up managing Sloan, a product of an exploding independent underground. “It’s a dirty, nasty fucking town. It’s got an underbelly. That’s part of how great art gets created. If it’s all
Brigadoon
, who’s going to give a shit? You need that thing to be opposed to. You need things to be kind of dark.”

The Curbs were the first punk band in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Two hours west of Moncton, Fredericton is the third largest city in the province (after Moncton and Saint John). The provincial capital, it is a city built around the needs of the public sector employees who comprise the majority of the town’s workforce. It also enjoys the highest per capita income in New Brunswick, along with the highest percentage of individuals with a post-secondary education. While punk happily breeds amidst industrial decay and economic downturn (see: Ohio), it has proven itself just as suited to the expression of adolescent rebellion against a bourgeois upper class (see: Southern California).

“Punk in Fredericton was there in response to the middle-of-the-road, very conservative aspect of the city,” says Peter Rowan, who began his storied career in the music industry at a record store in town. “It’s a university and government town, and that’s the kind of atmosphere that you need there to be an alternative to.” Clearly Fredericton was perfectly suited to the kind of rebellious, freaky punk that emerged from the beaches of California, and the Curbs were the first manifestation of this age-old teenage instinct. A short-lived local phenomenon and staple of local basements and house parties, the Curbs quickly evolved into the Angered Wrecks.

“We became a more serious band,” says John Westhaver, a member of both early Fredericton acts. “And we were definitely more dedicated to fucking with people’s minds live.” Speaking with Westhaver, it seems like fucking with minds was the Angered Wrecks’ primary purpose for being; hall shows began to happen around the turn of the decade, but given the size of the town and age of the crowd, adults were a fixture of the scene, necessary to chaperone punks to and from early shows. It was the parents that the band ended up focusing on, doing their best to break any adult at an Angered Wrecks show down into a tiny ball of uncomfortable parental energy.

While the rest of the city enjoyed a relatively high standard of living, the Angered Wrecks, along with a collection of local multimedia artists, moved into a single dilapidated house in one of the only bad parts of town, dubbing it Punk Manor. Soon after, the Wrecks and their consistently noisy practice space moved on to an equally decrepit house, this time across from a strip club. “There was also a boarding house that used to house all the strippers,” says Westhaver. “We used to rehearse at night, and after they finished their dancing, they all used to come over and hang out at our place.” He pauses. “It was crazy times.”

Before the Angered Wrecks had a chance to play outside of Fredericton, the band broke up, with some of the members moving on to the Vogons, a band that Westhaver sang in for the first two years. The Vogons became the first band in the city to produce a record, working with Rowan and his upstart label, Dressed to Kill. By the middle of the decade, DTK would be producing local records and staging an annual festival in an attempt to bring together a viable local scene. Between the label, the festival, and the tireless ethic of the Vogons, Fredericton possessed a thriving original music scene by the mid-’80s. In a way, it was a lot like Moncton.

“Mark Gaudet and I always used to joke that in that time period of ’79 to ’81, we were the only two punks in the entire province of New Brunswick,” Westhaver says. “The Angered Wrecks were in Fredericton and the Robins were in Moncton. And besides that, it’s the same thing.”

On Christmas Eve, 1977, Da Slyme recorded their first four songs in St. John’s. The capital of Newfoundland and Labrador, St. John’s is the oldest English colony in North America, owing to its position on the far eastern tip of the Avalon Peninsula. With the exception of a few months in the summer, when the government operates a direct ferry route between the city and the mainland of Sydney, Nova Scotia, getting to St. John’s requires embarking on an eight-hour ride across the Cabot Strait, followed by a 10-hour drive across the island. Despite a population of almost four times Fredericton, St. John’s extreme geographical isolation makes the fact that it had an active original punk band in 1977 genuinely mind-boggling. The fact that it actually had two is just fucking crazy.

The Reaction was the city’s other punk band; a louder, edgier expression of early punk influences than Da Slyme. Vocalist and bassist Michael Fisher had spent the ’70s in Toronto as part of a run-of-the-mill cover band. There, he stumbled into a Viletones show, blowing open his perception of what he could do with a band.

“I returned to St. John’s and realized nothing here was going on like that,” he says. “The Viletones were a real inspiration. I liked the energy and rawness of it.” When Fisher returned to Newfoundland, Da Slyme was the only band playing punk-influenced music, although, like the Trash Kanz and Vacant Lot in Halifax, the band had a slightly comedic element, teetering on a kind of punk parody.

Da Slyme made their live debut in February 1978,
following their first recording session over the Christmas holidays. Posters for the show proclaim it as a “BYOSP” event — bring your own safety pins — an indication of the parodic elements present. Still, the show ended in a fight and sent one band member to the hospital with a mangled foot, the result of kicking over numerous tables and chairs. Parody
or not, it was still punk in execution. While the band was
initially relegated to on-campus shows and the odd house party, they eventually ventured out into the city proper.

“Most of the bars that booked Da Slyme were on the skids and about to close,” says Slyme member Peter Morris. “This was consistent from start to finish. They were on their last breath and desperate for one last shot at revenue. Desperate enough to gamble that free beer for Da Slyme was worth the trouble.” A pub called Middle Earth became one of the only bars to regularly hosts gigs for both Da Slyme and the Reaction, pushing their 70-person capacity well into the hundreds on a good night. Still, the steady turnover of new bars in the city is a consistent reality for the highly competitive industry, particularly in Newfoundland, where carousing is an integral part of local culture; for example, in 1776, there were 42 permanent homes on the island . . . and 16 taverns.

In 1980, Da Slyme compiled their self-produced radio
sessions on a single record, which they pressed without
thinking of packaging needs. The result was a series of spray-painted
Saturday Night Fever
and
Mr. Dressup
LP sleeves, all bearing the dripping DIY lettering of Da Slyme. Ironically, but not surprisingly, this incredibly cheap method of housing records now fetches serious money online, a rare artefact of the first-wave punk scene made rarer by its handmade quality.

The members of the Reaction, by contrast, were consummate professionals. Where Da Slyme was a group of university students looking for a laugh and a hobby, the Reaction was all seasoned bar-rock vets, bored with the standards of the pub scene and inspired by the promise of punk. It was their goal to be a full-time band, and they attacked the province of Newfoundland as best they could in an attempt to make enough money to sustain themselves.

“We played a lot of small port towns,” says the Reaction’s Michael Fisher. “A lot of people had money, because fishing was big then. So bars would be packed, and we’d take home, like, $1,200 for two nights.” The band knew that an audience more accustomed to country duos or Trooper tributes might not always react positively to their original material, so they worked hard to make their show as engaging as possible on other levels.

“We’d come out in spandex leopard tops,” says Fisher. “And we would have flash bombs made out of gun powder in tin cans. I’d light a cigarette, introduce a song, then drop it into the can, and it’d explode.” He pauses and adds, “It was rather smelly, actually. And you can’t buy gunpowder like that now.”

The Reaction recorded 12 original songs before calling it a day in 1981, by which point the original music scene in St. John’s had exploded to include one other band. It would be a decade before punk and hardcore would take hold on the island, and while a thriving music community exists today, it remains a rare tour stop for bands, owing to the time and money required to get there.

Equally brain-bending as quality first wave punk in Newfoundland is the presence of a punk band in Meat Cove, Nova Scotia, in 1979. Located at the northern tip of Cape Breton, an island to the north of the mainland province, Meat Cove is an isolated fishing village accessible only via a dirt road from the Cabot Trail. And somehow, thanks to the miracle of the CBC and shortwave radio, a few kids formed an experimental punk band here, amidst the lobster traps and fishing boats.

Without the codified structure of a normal music community, the Dry Heeves blended their enthusiasm for the Sex Pistols and Kraftwerk into one madcap clusterfuck of sound and energy. “Industrial Cape Breton in the 1970s and early 1980s was a lot like
Trailer Park Boys
, only a little darker and a lot more depressing,” says founding member J.D. MacNeil. “Anything that could enlighten our horizons was welcomed.” Despite churning out cassette after cassette of feedback-drenched punk-type music, the band didn’t perform until 1984, when their live debut came in Reserve Mines, Nova Scotia, a city of barely 2,000. It was greeted with a muted, confused mix of shock and laughter.

“When you consider what an economically depressed shithole of darkness Cape Breton was back then, it should have been a perfect breeding ground for a punk rock scene,” says MacNeil. “The whole thing in industrial Cape Breton, the scene itself, didn’t really take off for some years.”

The Dry Heeves are still active, still melding tape loops, electronic noise, and the shortwave punk influence of the late ’70s into something that could only come out of Meat Cove, Nova Scotia.

The influence of early punk bands in Atlantic Canada is extremely localized, but every bit as important as that of bigger name Canadian acts. Even isolated scenes like Edmonton and Victoria would play host to a major touring act like D.O.A. or the Diodes every few months, providing a loud, aspirational example of how great a band from this country could be. It’s a consistent anecdote from across the country — getting to open for the Subhumans or the Viletones changed a band’s entire approach. It kicked scenes into high gear and encouraged newcomers to start their own bands, underground venues, or zines. Those bands, without exception, never toured past Montreal until well into the ’80s, when scenes had been entrenched in cities like Halifax and Moncton. As a result, bands and fans in the Maritimes were forced to be even more self-sufficient and creative than their peers across the country, battling a powerful union in the process. The tremendous uphill struggle to create a viable punk scene in these cities meant that, when things finally did kick off, the bands they produced were hungry war-ready machines, indestructible wharf rats that created an incredible and diverse independent music scene.