PERFECT YOUTH: The Birth of Canadian Punk (23 page)

“Rob and I decided to write just as bass and drums so we could do it ourselves,” Wright says. “Over a year or so we worked up seven or eight songs, all those early songs on
Mama
. And we played live as a two-piece. It was just anything goes. There was nothing weird about being a two-piece. You just did what you did. It hadn’t become cookie-cutter music, the way it eventually became. Punk rock was an all-encompassing term that meant anything. No one had any idea how to be ‘a style.’” Nomeansno has continued to push the boundaries of punk and hardcore every year since; their last EP incorporated cut-and-paste electronic elements alongside their usual mix of unhinged, aggressive power trio madness.

Against the background of this creative explosion, Pink Steel continued to grow as a band, discovering that punk was much more than a photo of a junkie in the morning paper.

“The first time I heard a Clash record, it took about two songs for me to realize that half of my record collection was obsolete,” laughs Jeff Carter. “We didn’t even know music like this could exist. It was what you had been looking for, without even knowing you were looking for it.” Born just before Victoria’s punk onslaught, Pink Steel quickly noticed things changing by the early ’80s. “At the very end of 1980, we did a gig with the Infamous Scientists in a roller rink,” he says. “We had a bunch of kids show up wearing punk gear, which was the first time we realized there were kids who were getting into it.”

While Pink Steel continued to grow into their new scene, a darker, sort-of-opposite Pink Steel began to emerge. Where Pink Steel was playful and polite, the other guys were seriously fucking vulgar. They started out as the Sickfucks, but they quickly became the Dayglo Abortions, the most notorious punk band in Canada’s legal history.

“The one thing that Victoria has going for it is it’s got so little for kids to do — they banned skateboarding right when it came out; it was like you could get arrested for being a kid — so you could either become a criminal for just doing what you were doing, or you could start a band and do something creative.” Murray Acton, better known simply as “the Cretin,” is the guitarist, vocalist, and twisted mind behind the Dayglo Abortions. While the band’s lineup has changed over the years, the core has remained Acton, Brian “Jesus Bonehead” Whitehead, and Trevor “Spud” Hagan. Unlike the decidedly middle class Pink Steel, Acton and the Dayglos emerged from less prosperous neighbourhoods, immediately marking them as outsiders in a small city.

“Me and the other two guys had been arrested for the illegal manoeuvres we were doing, robbing drugstores in the middle of the night,” Acton says. “Spud got caught with a large amount of Quaaludes. He actually did 10 months in jail for it, because he had just turned 18. We just left the downtown scene, stopped hanging out on the streets, because it looked like everyone was going to jail. So we just started doing our own thing. It’s a good thing, too, because everyone we know from that time is either dead or in jail. And for all our partying over the years, we’re not in too bad shape.”

Ironically, Acton hated punk when he first heard of it. He took music seriously, and everything he read about punk — from the goonie attitudes to the deliberate musical primitivism — sounded like bullshit. A fan of early proto-punk bands like MC5 and the Stooges, Acton turned to jazz fusion in the late ’70s because he wanted to hear “people playing hard, heavy music, but not in drag.” Turned off by what seemed to be the gimmick of the new genre, it wasn’t until several years into the global takeover that Acton even heard an actual punk record.

“I was playing music that might be considered punk, like ’70s metal mixed with jazz fusion and lyrics telling everyone to fuck off,” he says. “I was hitchhiking with a friend of mine, and a guy picked us up who had
Never Mind the Bollocks
playing on his car stereo. When he told me it was the Sex Pistols, I was like, ‘Get outta here.’ The album actually sounded pretty good. I was really impressed.” Late to the game, Acton quickly picked up albums by bands like the Dead Boys and the Clash. But it was the Dead Kennedys who truly sold him on the genre’s potential, their winking parody of left-wing politics and punk imagery connecting instantly with the naturally smart but utterly vicious Acton. He ditched the jazz fusion and formed the Sickfucks with vocalist Anne Archy. (Pete Campbell: “Imagine a time when punk was so fresh that you could actually have a singer with that name.”) Despite having to constantly spell their name differently to keep from running afoul of obscenity laws, they made an impression immediately. Their first show was with Pink Steel.

“We had a riot at our first show,” says Acton. “I think if you don’t have a riot at your first show, you should rethink the whole thing. Pink Steel was playing, and we just turned the place into a total riot zone. I didn’t want to be a punk band, I wanted to be a satire of a punk band. The audience isn’t going to spit on us, we’re going to spit on them. I dove off the stage and started fighting with the crowd. ‘You’ll never play in this town again!’ they said.”

So began the band’s contentious relationship with Pink Steel, one that seems to have its roots primarily in class division and local geography. But the Sickfucks had their own problems without needing to start fights with other bands; after falling apart after a show in Vancouver involving a simulated shooting onstage (a roadie dressed as Eddie Van Halen ripped a massive guitar solo before Acton fired a blank at his head and dragged him offstage), Acton reformed the group, sans Ms. Archy, as the Dayglo Abortions. Pink Steel still hated them, but the rest of the world was about to fall in love. Ish. In fact, a lot of the world was about to hate their fucking guts.

The band moved into the basement of an old second-hand clothing store in downtown Victoria. In a crowded storage room next to an entrance to one of the city’s old tunnels, the band began to write the bat-shit crazy material that would comprise their first album, a collection of violent, maniacal songs that showed off Acton’s pre-punk obsessions with fringe artists like Frank Zappa, shining through a prism of primitive metal and Californian hardcore.

“The Dayglos were more hardcore in the sense of being . . . They were a scene unto themselves,” says Jeff Carter. “There were a lot of gigs that would be six Victoria bands, and they weren’t a part of those gigs. There wasn’t a lot of social interaction with them.” It’s clear that the band wasn’t interested in making friends. A long-standing rumour insists that the Dayglos once stole all of Pink Steel’s gear, while another involves a Dayglos show that Acton stopped mid-song to leap into the crowd and beat up Pink Steel’s guitar player. Whatever the separation and its reasons, it’s clear that the Dayglos were a band with a singular goal in mind, rehearsing endlessly in the bowels of the Victorian downtown, building a collection of songs that would dwarf any local band’s recorded output for years. When they were ready, they got enough cash together to produce one sinister debut record.

Out of the Womb
, the band’s first full-length album, is still a powerful piece of music. The production is cutting and energetic; it bears all the best markings of an early ’80s recording without any of the gimmicky mistakes that often stop similar records from aging well. There are weird instrumental quirks, like organs and auxiliary percussion, that are rarely heard on other punk records from that era. The writing strikes an impossible balance between measured stupidity and highbrow satire; any dumber, and you’d swear the band had emerged from the paleolithic era, but without the extra bite, it would sound like a gimmick. As it stands,
Out of the Womb
is a nuanced, smart takedown of punk tropes and assumptions. Which would be worthless if the melodies weren’t top-notch.

Hiring Pointed Sticks vocalist Nick Jones to produce the sessions, the Dayglos set to work recording 14 blistering songs of weirdo mayhem. “Nick did those cool harmonized back-up vocals and gave it that good ’70s punk sound,” says Acton. “But it still sounds a little off the normal map.”

“I arrived late and they had already recorded bed tracks, which I couldn’t for the life of me tell one from the other,” explains Nick Jones. “Which is why every track has some kind of funny little thing on it, like organ or weird percussion. So I could tell them apart.”

The biggest uncharted territory the band was preparing to explore was language, and Acton was well aware that the Dayglos would be getting some people’s ire up. “I don’t think, at the time, that anyone was really swearing like that on records,” he says. “I thought we should count them and put it on the sticker, like, ‘Guaranteed to have at least 47 fuck-words.’ I was always inspired by the way Frank Zappa and John Lennon would use obscenities to get people’s attention. I decided, what the hell. Let’s throw sensibility out the window and make an album that will make sailors blush.” Blushing is just one reaction that the average sailor might have had to a song like “Suicide,” a vicious ode to (in order) matricide, incest, patricide, and shooting yourself. Elsewhere on the album, “Black Sabbath” waxes philosophical about Ozzy Osbourne’s potential reaction to being urinated on, while “I Killed Mommy” tackles zoophilia, urophagia, pedophilia, corpse mutilation, and gun violence in two brisk, surprisingly catchy minutes.

So, the Dayglo Abortions were undoubtedly offensive. But their mean-spirited lyrical content was as winking as it was vicious, a parody of punk, hosers, and cartoon violence, like
Itchy and Scratchy
set to a vicious musical backdrop. The band’s delivery was always playful, with the Dayglos themselves at the centre of the joke. In the end, the band’s barbs were always focused inward on their own anger, shortcomings, and stupidity.

“I saw the humour in their message right from the start, so we endeavoured to make the record funny, as well as totally shredding,” says Jones. “I think we succeeded.”

The band faced resistance on a local level almost immediately. Stores refused to stock the album. One that carried it had its windows smashed. Something about the Dayglo Abortions upset people on a gut level; Acton was accosted on his way to class at college, and they found themselves in constant fear of violent, anonymous threats. Not that they were exactly trying to avoid any controversy.

“We did dumb stuff for publicity,” Acton says. He’s right — when Henry Morgentaler, the prominent Canadian pro-choice advocate, came to Victoria to help open a clinic, the Dayglos made sure they were there. “We made up all these signs with coat hangers and baby dolls and got pissed out of our heads and went to this thing,” he says. “The pro-life people were facing off against the pro-choice people. We almost settled the whole thing, because they came together, joined forces, and attacked us.”

That the record sounds as good as it does — and had the initial media push and status that it did — owes itself to Acton and Bonehead’s friendship with an older man named Robin Sharpe. It is a relationship that would continue to affect both parties for decades, in very unexpected ways.

“Bonehead was living in a group home on the edge of town,” says Acton. “He was hitchhiking home, and Robin picked him up.” It was obvious to Whitehead that Sharpe was trying to come on to him. He was invited to the older man’s home for dinner, and accepted, despite his friend’s concern that Whitehead, young and vulnerable, was being preyed upon.

“Brian was just happy to have a free meal,” says Acton. “He had been in boarding school, he didn’t have a family, and anyone who was willing to give him their time, he wasn’t going to turn him down. He told me about it, and I went over with the intention of physically threatening him and telling him to keep away from my friend. I knew a guy who had fallen in with someone who sounded similar and ended up drugging and raping him.” So Acton made his way to Sharpe’s house, temper raised. He wasn’t expecting to be drawn into an evening-long conversation about art, politics, and censorship.

“The guy just had such an incredible wit, and was such a bizarrely free-thinking guy, he won me over in minutes,” recalls Acton. “We became friends. Without a doubt, I consider him my mentor.” It’s an unlikely pairing on paper — the hateful punk band and the older gay man — but it highlights the subversive politics at the heart of the Dayglos’ music, and Sharpe’s own thoughts about free speech.

A year after their initial introduction, Sharpe ended up inheriting a significant amount of money. He was advised by his accountant to invest some of it in a “guaranteed loser” of an art project; a kind of
Producers
-type gamble to claim the money as a donation to the arts in the hope of avoiding paying taxes. Which is how the guaranteed losers of the Dayglo Abortions were afforded a $5,000 budget, a colossal bankroll for an independent punk band, on their first album.

Less than a decade later, the Dayglos would be drawn into court by obscenity charges laid by Ontario Provincial Police over their 1986
Feed Us a Fetus
album. Canada’s anachronistic laws in this area cost the band and their label, Fringe Product, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Prominent feminist academics and television producer and author Daniel Richler (stepson of Mordecai) came to their defence, the charges were dismissed, and national obscenity laws were updated and clarified as a result. Still, the legal costs crippled the band for years.

Another decade later, Robin Sharpe would be arrested by a customs official when returning to Canada from a trip abroad. In his possession were erotic stories and poems involving children that he had written. The officer, searching Sharpe’s bags, identified them as child pornography. His case went all the way to the B.C. Supreme Court. He was vilified by the national media. In an emotional ruling, Justice Duncan Shaw declared that Sharpe’s freedom of expression had been violated. It was a decision that led over half of the sitting Members of Parliament to request that the prime minister overturn the ruling. In the end, Sharpe was acquitted, a decision at least partially attributed to the free speech precedents set by the Dayglos case.

While bands like the Neos and Infamous Scientists helped ignite a local creative explosion in the early ’80s, the scene changed quickly.