PERFECT YOUTH: The Birth of Canadian Punk (30 page)

It’s the ass end of winter, and I’ve driven to Hamilton, once again, in my unforgivingly cold van. Tonight is Teenage Head’s first show since Venom’s death and the debut of new vocalist Pete MacAulay. The bar, its name lovingly and appropriately cribbed from a Forgotten Rebels record, is slammed front to back, the average audience age around that of my own parents, but drunk and playing grab-ass while classic Motor City tunes grind out of the PA. By the time Lewis takes to the stage to shower the room in waves of feedback and the band joins in to crank out some thunderously simple four-on-the-floor rock and roll, I’m already won over. MacAulay does his best to sidestep Venom’s long shadow, and he makes the songs his own. As hard as it is to imagine a band like Teenage Head without its defining personality, I’m grateful that Lewis and Mahon, joined these last few years by drummer Jack Pedler, are still kicking out “Let’s Shake” and “Bonerack.”

After the show, I’m talking to the owner of the bar when a guy comes up to tell us that he’s seen Teenage Head over 200 times, and that this was far and away the best show yet. As a child of ’80s who clearly fetishizes ’70s punk to the point of writing this entire book about it, I’m struck by his innocently enthusiastic reaction. It suggests every time he’s seen the band was the best time. And then I realize that’s the point. Punk shouldn’t just be about looking back and talking salad days and rare vinyl. It should be about today, and making the art you want to make, playing the shows you want to play, drinking the drinks you want to drink and playing grab-ass at the bar before you have to drive the babysitter home at the end of the night. It’s about being guys like Gord Lewis and Steve Mahon and not letting other people tell you what kind of band you’re supposed to be, whether it’s 1975 or 2011.

I realize that I’m so fucking glad Teenage Head still exists for a million reasons that are only articulated correctly when the bar is full, the music is loud, and everyone is singing along, together.

Hardcore either killed punk rock, or saved it. It depends on your age, your tastes, and how much you like young, bald dudes hurting each other. The epitaph to nearly every chapter here is that a younger generation, angrier and leaner, moved in, and the one that initially found punk so promising and so interesting, moved on. For many, hardcore represented the macho knuckle-dragging that punk had so vocally rejected; the involvement of anyone not straight, white, or male, was greatly diminished. Where all fringe culture had been welcome under the umbrella of punk, hardcore felt like a closing-off of that community. One look at the pages of Steven Blush’s genre history,
American Hardcore
, reveals this to be true. The music and image were more extreme, and the violence was much more real. In the over 100 interviews I conducted for this book, the invasion of hardcore into the scene was cited nine times out ten as the reason that the interviewee dropped out and moved on.

But consider where punk had taken itself by the early ’80s: The Ramones were producing wall-of-sound pop records with Phil Spector. The Clash was a comedic parody of its former self, the bloated, untouchable stadium rock outfit it used to rage against. The Sex Pistols recruited a cartoon character as a bass player and dissolved embarrassingly onstage in San Francisco. Punk, in the end, hadn’t delivered on the promise of breaking down the walls of goofy rock stardom. It was consumed whole by the very machine it formed in opposition to. Punk was no different than T. Rex or Creedence or Zeppelin.

Hardcore could never have filled Shea Stadium. It was built to be an insular culture with no possible hope of mainstream acceptance. It was punker than punk. So while the invasion of those bald, angry white kids may have spelled the end of many people’s interest in the punk scene, it’s likely that, without them, punk would have been a flash in the pan, an amusing rock and roll footnote that produced a few great records before consuming itself. Hardcore kept punk viable and underground when it was moving out into the sunlight.

All of this is simply to say that, while hardcore doubtless altered the punk landscape when it arrived on the scene in the ’80s, it didn’t mark the end of all that made punk great. It was just another mutation, another link in the chain that continues to this day. It alienated many early participants, but it kept the genre relevant and alternative at a time when it would have been easy to remain anything but. Without a new generation of young, disenfranchised kids moving in, punk risked losing its relevance and its edge.

It’s unfortunate that so many people felt as if the ideals of hardcore and the ideals of first-wave punk were incompatible. There are exceptions: in Vancouver, where punk was late to bloom, hardcore bands like D.O.A. and the Subhumans existed alongside ’77-style punk bands like the Pointed Sticks and the Modernettes, and the scene they created was inclusive and sonically diverse. In Calgary, first wave originators the Sturgeons morphed into the more aggressive Riot .303 and, later, Color Me Psycho, and its members felt as at home in the new hardcore scene as the one they founded a few years prior. In both Victoria and Winnipeg, an assortment of bands happily coexisted in a weird amalgam of ’77 punk and hardcore. But these are the exceptions that prove the rule.

The hardcore scenes in many of the cities featured in this book were as transformative as their punk predecessors. Even more so than in the ’70s, punk and hardcore in the ’80s actively rejected dominant culture. Bands didn’t play in community halls because the local bar wouldn’t have them — they played in community halls because they had no interest in the local bar. The subculture produced by punk thrived in the ’80s thanks to hardcore, a community dedicated to existing outside of the mainstream.

Bands could now tear across the entire continent without ever setting foot inside a traditional music venue, a trend that started in the prairies of Canada and became the standard for punk and hardcore shows across North America. Hardcore stripped away the contradictions and frivolity of the initial wave and distilled its ideology to an ecclesiastical level of purity. That meant losing the goofy bullshit that makes watching some old punk interviews — the kind where blank-faced middle-class kids proclaim that society is dumb and they cut themselves to feel — uncomfortably adolescent. The nervous teenage rumbling in our guts was replaced with a dogmatic severity that cleanly brought the core values of the genre into the ’80s.

The tricky thing about dogmatic severity is how alienating it can be to the “fuck art, let’s dance” crowd. So while hardcore likely saved punk from the untimely death forecasted by so many short-sighted and small-minded rock critics, it also sped up the generational turnover between eras. Very few of the over 100 people interviewed for this book feel anything positive about hardcore, because for them, it signalled the end of the party. Which is fair, because, while punk could be very, very funny, hardcore was usually anything but. Even bands like the Dead Kennedys, who deftly utilized satire to make political points, were only being funny as a way of dealing with Big Issues. Hardcore brought new ideas into punk — third-wave feminism in the form of riot grrrl, abstinence from drugs and alcohol in the form of straight edge, and pushups in the form of Henry Rollins.

A book about Canadian hardcore is another long overdue addition to this country’s storied musical literary canon. With the quiet cavalcade of belated coverage creeping out into the world, hopefully this history isn’t far behind.

I’m sitting here with a pile of academic papers prepped for integration into a high-minded closing argument. “Homophily, Cultural Drift, and the Co-Evolution of Cultural Groups” was going to illustrate how the splintering of punk into different camps after the initial wave was a natural subcultural development. I planned to use big-money ideas like the co-evolutionary model of cultural dynamics. My defence of some of the loftier — and potentially untrue — claims made within these pages rested on a exploration of post-industrial folklore and “The Kentucky Fried Rat: Legends and Modern Society.” The clunkily named “An/Other Canada. Another Canada? Other Canadas” was to bring it all back home by cleverly negotiating the presentation of the power dynamic betwixt us and the Americans.

Assembling this nuanced, intellectual argument bypassed the whole purpose of this project. These are living, breathing stories about bands that played in basements and the shittiest bars in town, that slept in their vans somewhere along the Trans-Canada Highway between Winnipeg and Calgary, and whose explosive creativity deserves more than a tossed-off epilogue about social structure and communication.

It is my hope that this is a fragment of the book they deserve. The bigger ideas are written between the lines, in the tales of lonely drives and violent nights. Punk is crushed into every kilometre of highway in this country, from Victoria to St. John’s. It is the deviance from niceties that brought about a meaningful shift at a staid cultural time. It’s being young and willing to open your mind to something strange and new. And it’s growing old and never forgetting that the parts of the world they told you were immutable are anything but.

This is a book about people whose stories and music are fading in a country that they helped to change. So rather than hear about homophilous social clusters, go buy a record. Tell a friend about a band. Walk a little slower the next time you pass the place where the Crash ’n’ Burn, Punk Manor, the Calgarian, the Spud Club used to be. Our cities have secret histories lurking just below their new facades, and they tell some of the wildest stories you’ve ever heard. Because here’s the simple truth — Canadian punk was there, and it was transformative. Not just for kids with green hair and safety pins stuck through their ears, but for anyone hoping to experience something new in a country that never rushed to adopt much.

Canadian punk was there.

Introduction

Adams, Michael.
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. Toronto: Penguin, 2004.

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Victoria, B.C.: AYECH International, 2007.

Armstrong, John.
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Atwood, Margaret.
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Barclay, Michael, Ian A.D. Jack, and Jason Schneider.
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Cohen, Andrew.
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. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2007.

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Keithley, Joe.
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Pyle, Don.
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Walter, Chris.
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———.
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. Vancouver: Gofuckyerself, 2008.

Worth, Liz.
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Montreal: Bongo Beat, 2009.

Yacowar, Maurice. “The Canadian as Ethnic Minority.”
Film Quarterly
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Back Door to Hell: The Viletones

Author Interviews:
Damian Abraham, Colin Brunton, Greg Dick, Chris Haight, Chris Houston, Steve Leckie, Gary Pig Gold, Don Pyle, and Paul Robinson.

Other Sources

American Psycho
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Gibson, William.
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———. “Since 1948.” Web log post.
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Pig Gold, Gary. “Outrage.”
Pig Paper
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———. “Pig Punk Part One.”
Pig Paper
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———. “Viletones.”
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Swirsky, Bryan. “20 Best Singles of ’77.”
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,
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Worth, Liz.
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Get Modern or Get Fucked:
The Modernettes and the Young Canadians

Author Interviews:
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Other Sources

Armstrong, John. Liner Notes.
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———.
Guilty of Everything
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Ubyssey
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Thompson, Hunter S.
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Allen Beakeland, Art Bergmann, Lori Hahnel, Jeff Hunter-Smith, Mark Iggelsden, Lonnie James, Warren Kinsella, Rick Lee, Michael Nathanson, Don Pyle, Peter Rowan, and Adele Wolfe.

Other Sources

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———.
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Kinsella, Warren.
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Chris Barry, Marc Demouy, Robert Ditchburn, Allan Fine, Tracy Howe, John Kastner, Carlos Soria, and Rick Trembles.

Other Sources

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,
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———. Liner Notes.
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,
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Hot Property:
The Dishes and the Northern Origins of Queercore

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Other Sources

Decter, Joshua. “General Idea.”
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Du Plessis, Michael, and Kathleen Chapman. “Queercore: The Distinct Identities of Subculture.”
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A
uthor Interviews:
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Other Sources

Godovitz, Greg.
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Tudor, David.
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Walter, Chris.
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———.
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Photographs from Mars:
The Diodes and the Crash ’n’ Burn

Author Interviews:
Ralph Alfonso, Cleave Anderson, Dave Bidini, John Catto, Bruce Eves, and Paul Robinson.

Other Sources

Alfonso, Ralph. Liner Notes.
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———. “The Diodes: Time Damage.”
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Dick, Greg. “The Diodes Part 1.”
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———. “The Diodes Part 2.”
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Toronto Star
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Guettel, Alan. “New Clubs Erratic but Entertaining.”
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Pig Gold, Gary. “Pig Punk Part Two.”
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Savage, Jon.
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Worth, Liz.
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Montreal: Bongo Beat, 2009.

Waiting for the Real Thing:
The Pointed Sticks and Fuck Bands

Author Interviews:
Tony Bardach, Nick Jones, and Bill Napier-Hemy.

Other Sources

Mack, Adrian. “Welcome to the Pointed Sticks.”
Straight.com
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McClure, Steve. “Pointed Sticks Fall into Pit of Despair.”
Ubyssey
[Vancouver], 5 December 1980: 6.

Moon, Daniel. “Nicaraguans Reap Benefits from Punk.”
Ubyssey
[Vancouver], 28 September 1979: 12.

Munson, Kathryn. “Pointed Sticks.”
Ubyssey
[Vancouver], 4 October 1979: 8.

Out of the Blue
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Smith, Phil. Liner Notes.
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Various Artists.
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Wiese, Dale. Liner Notes.
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Someone Could Lose an Eye: Edmonton

Author Interviews:
Marc Belke, Moe Berg, Ken Chinn, Mike McDonald, Kenny McKay, Peter Rowan, Paul Soulodre, Kim Upright, Larry Wanagas, and Jerry Woods.

Other Sources

King, Stephen. “Punkers Stage a Clunkathon.”
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,
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McGowan, Gary. “Metaphorically Comatose: Malibu Kens.”
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Something You Can’t Tell Your Mother: The Curse, the B-Girls, and the Vital Role of Women in Canadian Punk

Author Interviews:
Jade Blade, Lori Hahnel, Cynthia Ross, Lucasta Ross, Mickey Skin, and Adele Wolfe.

Other Sources

Goddard, Peter. “Punk Rock’s B-Girls Show Improvement.”
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———. “Toronto’s Best Bands Are Waiting to Be Discovered.”
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,
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Leblanc, Lauraine.
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O’Meara, Caroline. “The Raincoats: Breaking down Punk Rock’s Masculinities.”
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Reynolds, Simon, and Joy Press.
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