PERFECT YOUTH: The Birth of Canadian Punk (7 page)

No one was getting rich from these shows, but playing at the Calgarian had its advantages. On the first three nights of Hüsker Dü’s residency, SFY opened with Lonnie James filling in on drums. With no money to pay him, the bands offered up a quarter-ounce of black hash in return for his rhythmic services. The first two nights went fine, but on the last night, his indulgence started to creep up on him. He returned home from work to take a nap before the show, and woke up 10 minutes before the end of SFY’s scheduled set.

“I got there, and they were just finishing the set with Hüsker Dü’s roadie as a drummer,” says James. “I ran in, and they all saw me and started laughing. They got me up to play the last song, and everyone had a good laugh. And I kicked over the drums.”

Somewhat separate from the initial Social Blemish Records scene, the Verdix were one of Calgary’s best, a tightly wound unit that, thanks to their slightly older age and the advantage of a few years’ musical experience, burst out of the gate with a professional sound and a charismatic frontman, Mick Joy. Until the Calgarian, it seems like the two scenes barely interacted; the Verdix were older art-school kids, the Nasties pimple-faced teens, and both camps seem wary of each other, even today.

“I didn’t like the Verdix, but we were civil,” says Kinsella. “We were suspicious of their motives.”

“The Verdix were the top of the heap. The coolest punk band in town,” counters Lonnie James. “The Hot Nasties were more of a nerdy kind of a punk. They had a few good songs. No one really liked them at all.”

Looking back, it’s pretty clear that a lot more than “no one” liked the Hot Nasties, but it highlights the inherent divisions within the scene. Many of the people I talk to simply attribute the division to geography and age; there was a scene in the north, and a scene in the south, and no one had a car to get from one side of town to the other.

“The Verdix were different from the Calgary bands that had gone before, which tended to be pretty young, like 17-, 18-year-olds,” says Allen Baekeland, the former station manager of CJSW, the University of Calgary’s campus station. “They were a little bit older and they could play. So immediately the scene sort of coalesced around them.”

The Verdix pop up in interviews with everyone from Art Bergmann to the Pointed Sticks’ Nick Jones, so their place somewhere in the upper echelon of Calgarian punk is clear. Their only single, “Media,” backed with “Lookin’ Around,” showcases a band that probably could have held their own against many of Vancouver’s finest. “Media” boasts a strong sense of dynamics, a basic concept lacking from many first-wave punk bands’ bag of sonic tricks. The song’s hushed, harmony-laden chorus jars against the slashing verse, while “Lookin’ Around” could be a long-lost Teenage Head demo. Mick Joy’s voice is expressive and unique, and his unfortunate passing is noted with palpable sadness by those in the scene who knew him well, including Bergmann, who counts him as a close friend.

“That single was done on a shoestring budget, of course, in the cheapest studio in town we could find, in somebody’s basement,” says Rick Lee, who managed the Verdix and played in the Breeders with Mick’s wife, Virginia McKendry. “I remember at one point in the process, looking through the glass out at Mick, and I was almost getting a Frank Sinatra feel, an Elvis Presley feel. Mick had great charisma, and his stage presence was killer. He was one of the best, next to Art Bergmann.”

“Calgary has some really interesting punk bands,” says Bergmann. “Mick was one of my best friends. Then he died a couple of years ago. I was really sad, man.”

The Virgins formed, Warren Kinsella jokingly claims, as the “Hot Nasties fan club.”

“I think that may be kind of a fantasy on his part,” laughs Hahnel. “We certainly liked them, but they weren’t the reason for us getting into that little branch of the punk scene.” While the Virgins never recorded, they were active participants in the scene, and as the first all-female band in the entire province of Alberta (the second was another Calgary outfit, the Downing Street Derelicts), they played a critical role in helping open up the macho, male-dominated world of live rock and roll. Not that it was easy.

“There was a huge amount of sexism,” says Adele Wolfe, the band’s bassist. “Even in punk where anything goes. You’d think there would have been a bit of tolerance, but there was still a lot of really antiquated notions. We were a novelty. We didn’t have a lot of support, not a lot of bands wanted us to back them. If we made mistakes, the same kind of tolerance that was given to other bands wasn’t given to us. We had to try twice as hard to do half as much as another band.”

Wolfe, despite her small stature, was not one to back down from the regular confrontations that went along with dressing punk, travelling to the Calgarian, and being a woman in 1980. She recounts numerous brawls, the worst of which involves her fighting another woman in a bathroom and shattering her hand on a mirror, leaving her with crippling arthritis as an adult. We both agree that at least it’s a cool story. And there’s more.

“Me and a friend were walking to the C Train, which was our above-ground subway,” she says. “And these heads asked us if we wanted to buy drugs. And we said, ‘No, fuck off, rockers.’ So they said something about fighting, and I said, ‘Okay, let’s go.’ And we went to a back alley and they smashed a tire iron into my head. I had blood running out of my ears. I had a shattered nose, a broken cheek bone. My teeth were loose. They just kicked the crap out of me.”

Much of the band’s career is chronicled in Hahnel’s 2008 novel, the wonderful
Love Minus Zero
. A fictionalized account of the Virgins’ experiences in Calgary at that time, the book portrays an exciting moment in the city’s history with the emphatic enthusiasm of a teenager discovering music for the first time, touching on the fights, the sense of community, and the vomit-inducing stage fright.

“The parts where I’m actually talking about playing music are all true,” says Hahnel. “I mean, it’s all true in essence. But a lot of the incidents that I talk about didn’t actually happen, like we didn’t go to Tuktoyaktuk.” In the book, the fictional Virgins, dubbed Misclairol, travel to Tuktoyaktuk, an Inuvialuit hamlet in the Northwest Territories, on a year-long contract to provide entertainment at a local bar for oil workers. In the wake of the Iranian Revolution of 1979, a massive international energy shortage occurred, leading to a push for continental oil production. The
Beaufort Sea became the site of tremendous oil and natural gas exploration, and the sleepy community of Tuktoyaktuk was suddenly overrun with workers, executives, and a few musicians. And the Virgins were almost some of them.

“We were actually offered a contract to go up there for a year, and I’m so glad that we didn’t end up doing that,” says Hahnel. “I’m thinking, ‘Oh my god. Four girls under the age of 20 working in that kind of environment?’ It would have been horrible, you know?”

Toward the end of punk’s first wave, the Golden Calgarians emerged and blew everyone’s mind. Featuring Jeff Hunter-Smith, kid brother of the singer from the Sandwiches, one of the city’s more prominent bands, they started life as the Remains. Performing Stranglers covers and shadowing Hunter-Smith’s big brother, they watched the Sandwiches write and perform their own songs and were galvanized to challenge themselves to move beyond punk covers. A few members and name changes later, the Golden Calgarians were born. Several years younger than the first crop of bands, their experiences indicate the degree to which punk had changed the Calgarian live music landscape, one that was allergic to original music only a few years earlier.

“You couldn’t really get a gig with a bunch of cover tunes,” says Jeff Hunter-Smith. “With bands like the Hot Nasties and the Verdix, we were basically told, ‘If you want to play with us you’ve got to have originals.’ And once we wrote four, we wrote six, and we just never looked back.” Interestingly, it was a holdover from the era of bar-rock that led to many Calgary bands developing such huge repertoires of original music. Take the Hot Nasties, who only released one official vinyl record, but have a cassette discography containing 18 songs. The Calgarian was still booking bands for week-long stints, expecting three full sets per night. Since cover songs were verboten, this standard meant bands were forced into a writing frenzy in order to secure a paying gig.

The Golden Calgarians became the first punk band to record in a commercial studio, cranking out the “It’s Fun to be Alive” single soon after forming. They then hustled their way into a bigger studio and became one of the most infamous punk exports from the city when they hustled, once again, to get the single to campus radio across the country. The band’s sound was slower than that of many of their peers, like a prairie Replacements riffing on the Sex Pistols’ “Bodies.” They became the first Calgary punk band to tour, spending the ’80s driving across Canada, producing some great records, and carrying the torch for the first wave of Calgarian punk that had been snubbed out at home.

By late 1980, the punk scene in Calgary, like in many cities across Canada, was changing. Hardcore and an increasing skinhead population moved in, displacing many of the more art-minded punks who had populated the first wave. The violence at the Calgarian had gotten out of control.

“A woman I know picked a fight with one of the hookers outside,” says Lori Hahnel. “And it came into the bar. It was this huge melee — it was unbelievable. It was like a movie or something. So they stopped booking the punk acts after that.” Bands found a new home at the National
Hotel, a marginally less seedy establishment that was equally
enthusiastic about inviting the heavy-drinking punk masses. But the first set of bands had already begun to go the way of the buffalo. The Sturgeons broke up and reformed as the more aggressive Riot .303; the Virgins broke up, and Adele Wolfe moved to Edmonton to found Jr. Gone Wild with Mike McDonald; the Verdix imploded; and the Golden Calgarians hit the road and did their best to spread the Cowtown gospel. And the Hot Nasties provided a fitting final explosion to punctuate the end of an era by performing at Calgary’s biggest annual tourist attraction, the world famous Calgary Stampede.

“Leading up to the big show at the Stampede, I told the other guys I wanted to stop,” Kinsella says. “The fights, the fascism. They felt the same way. It was just that none of us knew how to tell each other.” At a huge outdoor show with the Sturgeons and Edmonton’s Rock and Roll Bitches, the band played in front of thousands of curious families and a few familiar faces. Invited by Kinsella, the local punk contingent stormed the stage, and a dozen cops swarmed the band and the crowd, trying to prevent what they saw as an inevitable riot unfolding at the 100-year-old rodeo. The riot never happened. The band finished their set, and then broke up.

“Never in my wildest dreams while this was happening would I have imagined that people would be interested in it 30 years later,” says Lori Hahnel. “Or that I would be talking to groups of people as part of a local history program.” Thanks to the success of
Love Minus Zero
Hahnel has been part of an initiative put together by the Calgary Public Library, giving presentations — complete with a detailed PowerPoint presentation — at local branches. “I always knew, even while we were performing, that I would have to write about it in some way or another. I didn’t know what form it was going to take, but I knew I was going to write about the experience. I didn’t ever think that it would command the sort of attention that it does.”

“They value their history there,” sums up Kinsella, now 3,400 kilometres from his hometown. “I go back and a kid will tell me he bought a Hot Nasties record for three hundred dollars on eBay. Fuck, if you write me, I’ll just send you one.”

The Electric Vomit [© Marcel van der Aa]

February 12, 1981, 4:30 p.m. EST

The gun is on the table. Recording for the latest 222s single has reached something of an impasse; the thick-necked men who brought a band of ratty teenagers from the south end of the city to the sleazy French suburb of Laval are at their wit’s end, and the band has been called to kitchen on the second floor of the home studio they have been holed up in for several days. No progress has been made on the planned recording of “Come to Me Cold,” and the men, each of whom belong to one of the city’s entrenched and powerful crime families, have had enough and decide to settle the creative power struggle that has stalled the sessions in the clearest way that they can. The 222s see the gun and get the message. All resistance to the creative ideas of their new management ceases immediately. Singer Chris Barry steps into the booth to record his vocals for “La poupée qui fait non,” a kitschy and unapologetically saccharine French pop song from the ’60s that the band is being forced to record as the A-side to its own song. Barry finishes his take, leaves the house, and never looks back.

More than many cities featured in this book, Montreal in the 1970s was an inhospitable punk landscape, especially when you consider its size and population. One of the biggest cultural centres in Canada, and today home to some of the most innovative (and popular) independent music in the world, the city was dominated by disco until the ’80s. Bands in Toronto may have been despised, but they could rely on a sensationalist press to give them coverage and a sales-hungry bar scene to give them a place to play; out west, the availability of community halls led to a strong DIY ethic and a healthy all-ages scene.

In a telling New Year’s Eve radio interview with Terry David Mulligan on
The Great Canadian Gold Rush
in 1977, Juan Rodriguez from the
Montreal Gazette
lambasts the international press circus over punk. Rodriguez, the paper’s entertainment gatekeeper, is upset that punk has overshadowed what he feels are “very good musicians” who had made “very good music” over the past year: “I think punk rock is media hype. I don’t see any selling power in this whatsoever. It’s fine to go to one or two shows to let off a bit of steam, but the record industry is geared to more expensively produced music. People are used to listening to music that was produced over two or three months with lots of layers and different kinds of music, because people are into very expensive hi-fi units. Punk rock, if you’ve listened to it once, that’s about it.”

In the European-style boroughs of Montreal, it was disco or death, and the dearth of first-wave punk bands reflects this hostile culture. Which is not to say that the bands born on the bilingual island were any less vital than their national counterparts; like the remote punks of Edmonton and Victoria, Montreal’s new wave of musicians fed their isolation into their sound and aesthetic, creating some truly exciting music in the process. Today, enthusiasm for that lost era means that several of these underappreciated acts are reuniting and touring, happy to earn the praise that the disco kings and queens denied them 30 years ago. But like many fringe creative movements before it, the body count of Montreal punk is high, and not every unsung hero of the city’s first wave will get a chance to find a new, appreciative audience in a new century.

John Kastner and Sean Friesen first saw the 222s through the windows of Station 10 in downtown Montreal. They were 14, visiting the city from their familial homesteads in the nearby bedroom community of Beaconsfield, and far too young to get into the club. Eager to glimpse what a homegrown punk band might look like, they had travelled into the city that night just to stand outside and experience what they could. Soon, the pair would form the Asexuals, the first punk band from Montreal to tour North America. Kastner would eventually splinter off to start the Doughboys, a band that would sign to A&M Records and become one of the most popular Canadian rock bands of the ’90s, leading to a successful career working for major music festivals and writing Hollywood film soundtracks. But right now, the boys are squeezed into a tiny booth at a downtown Toronto diner, a few hours before the reunited original lineup of the Asexuals is to take the stage at the bar next door. It’s part of a tour that has taken the band to old stomping grounds just like this. It’s a long way from the sidewalk outside of Station 10, but it’s all part of the same weird journey.

“We went to a high school with 2,000 kids, but the four guys in the Asexuals and three of our other friends were the only punk guys,” recalls Kastner. “We were freaks to everybody, and we basically just took a lot of acid, went downtown, and saw punk shows. The 222s were the first punk band that we saw in Montreal. We couldn’t get in to see them, but we liked them because of Chris Barry. We thought he was like Iggy. Once we saw him kick some guy in the face for spitting on him. We thought that was the coolest thing ever.” The 222s had played a handful of shows around Montreal before recruiting Barry, a shit-disturbing 16-year-old high school student, to front the band.

“I was thrilled because all I had was my high school band, and those guys couldn’t really play,” recalls Barry, on the phone from his home in Montreal. “These guys, they were a professional act, you know? Well, they weren’t really, but they aspired to be a professional act and presented themselves as such.” But Barry’s new position had very immediate consequences.

“The 222s were on TV a fair bit, so I sort of became a minor celebrity in my high school,” says Barry. “Actually, not a minor celebrity. I was a huge celebrity in my high school, but in the grand scheme of things, minor.” Soon, the school’s administration began to feel that Barry’s teenage micro-fame was a distraction to other students. They called his mother and insisted that she take him out of school, or they would find a reason to fail him. “A bad influence,” he was called.

“They suggested that I was mentally unsound and that my parents should really consider getting me a psychiatric evaluation,” says Barry. “This was because I wore leather pants to school.”

Barry’s introduction to the band had come through a mutual friend made somewhere amongst the crates at a record store called 2000 Plus. Tracy Howe, a fellow sonic early adopter and drummer for start-up punks the Normals, shared a rehearsal space with the 222s. When he heard they needed a vocalist, Barry was the first person he suggested. 2000 Plus had quickly become the nerve centre of Montreal punk — its message board, swap meet, and listening post. It was, after all, the only shop in the city to stock albums by bands like the Stooges and the Damned.

“We had discovered the Ramones and we were the first store that really stocked 7" picture sleeve singles,” says Marc
Demouy, who ran 2000 Plus and played an integral role in the
development of Montreal’s music scene. “We concentrated our import department on more of that New York, U.K. sort of music. Television, Talking Heads, Suicide, and of course everything under the sun from the U.K.”
Providing a clubhouse for local anglophiles and burgeoning
punks, 2000 Plus also served as the literal clubhouse for the city’s second punk band, the Chromosomes. Formed shortly after the 222s hit the city’s limited circuit, they represented a much more violent, unhinged musical force. And soon, they were about to collide with the savvier, slicker 222s in a major way.

Chris Barry’s time with the Montreal public school system was at an end, and with the help of his new bandmates, he was moving on to higher education . . . sort of. His first show fronting the 222s was in January 1978, headlining a music festival at McGill University. Since Barry had joined the band, they had recorded and released their first single, making them the only band from Montreal’s first wave to produce a record. This accomplishment naturally made them an object of scorn for the less professionally minded Chromosomes. In front of an audience of 800 curious students, the 222s were forced to compete with a squealing PA and amps that had been sabotaged by the earlier act. As soon as they started, the members of the Chromosomes began throwing cups of beer on the band from the side of the stage. Before long, the crowd was following suit.

“Of course, all the frat boys said, ‘Well, that’s an idea.’ They’re spitting and throwing shit on us. I’m just a kid and I don’t have much experience. I mean, I played a few high school parties with my band but I don’t know anything. So I took a cue from
Metallic K.O.
, the Iggy Pop record, and thought, ‘Okay, I’ll just taunt them.’ So I started taunting them as best my 16-year-old intellect could muster. And it wasn’t a good idea, because it made them even fucking crazier. They were throwing shit, and it ended up being a riot. They killed the PA and turned on the house lights and the place just erupted. The university was all fucked up and then the riot spilled out onto the street.” What followed was the kind of negative press early punks dreamed of, with the accompanying city-wide ban on performance that they dreaded. The 222s, the Chromosomes, and the Normals were unwelcome everywhere, from the universities to the discotheques. Until Tracy Howe heard about an old storefront on St. Paul road where some guy was throwing crazy parties.

“There was no intention of putting on punk shows. There was no intention of putting on any shows at all.” Robert Ditchburn is seated across from me at a coffee shop near his hotel, a massive folder full of show posters, photographs, zines, ticket stubs, and press releases laid out all over the table. They tell a story of Ditchburn’s unexpected hard left into the world of punk at 364 Rue St. Paul Ouest.

NO. 7 PRESS RELEASE

THE 364 SOUND

The music of a society in collapse, the voice of resistance, white urban rock, the 364 SOUND shatters this, the best of all possible worlds. It rejects the lies for freedom for the rich, love for the beautiful, peace for the dead. Our daily spectacle — the banality of evil — is overturned, wrenched apart, and reflected. “It is a terrorism of our basest sensibilities” (Susanne Harwood,
Montreal Star
).

“We heard about it, but we had never been there,” recalls Tracy Howe. “It was a storefront in Old Montreal. I still don’t know why he rented it.” Howe was working at the McGill audiovisual department at the time and had discovered a fellow new wave and punk fan in his co-worker, Scott Cameron. The pair started jamming with a friend of Cameron’s, and soon, the Normals were born. It was through McGill that they met Ditchburn. “He would pretend to be a student and rent audio equipment,” laughs Howe. He and Cameron let Ditchburn’s deception go unreported, and in return, they were given the keys to the proverbial kingdom.

“I just thought I’d open a store,” says Ditchburn. “No plan at all. It had windows onto the street, onto a nice little Montreal street. It was a cool, funky store with jive windows. My friends were either artists or poets, so I got them to put some art in the front. We opened the store the day after I started renting it with no paperwork, with no nothing.” Long before Old Montreal was the cleaned-up tourist destination it is today, it was just another run-down part of the city, and it was here that Ditchburn began to throw unlicensed parties, art shows, and poetry readings. Eventually, Howe got wind of the space, and, banned from the rest of the city’s legitimate venues, approached Ditchburn about hosting a show. Montreal’s punk scene might have been small, but it was dedicated, and the drought that had come after the McGill riot meant that there was no shortage of thirsty revellers travelling to Old Montreal on the night of the first show at 364 St. Paul.

“A huge amount of people showed up, and I don’t know where they heard about it or how they found out about it,” recalls Ditchburn. “Somebody got up to the microphone at the end of the night and said, ‘Come back next week, we’re playing.’”

Carlos Soria, future guitarist for Montreal punk legends the Nils, remembers finding the venue for the first time. “This show was in Old Montreal, on this really scary street. It was in the middle of nowhere,” he says. “You’d walk in and there was this first wave of crazy punk rockers. I had my hockey jacket on and people looked at me funny, ’cause I didn’t realize you were supposed to dress punk. I was 15.” Soria returned home to his brother Alex, energized by what he had seen. Together, the pair would form the core of one of the most influential punk bands ever produced inside this country’s borders, a band name-checked by artists as diverse as the Goo Goo Dolls and Superchunk. “It was just insane. It was music you’d never heard before, and anyone could do it, make it. They brought it down to our level. It wasn’t like seeing something on TV. You were right there, it was right in your face. And that made you want to go out and do it yourself.”

“It changed my life,” says Rick Trembles of his first night at 364. A barely teenage member of a band called the Electric Vomit, a cobbled-together group that once opened for the Viletones, Trembles started the long-running post-hardcore outfit American Devices in 1980, with former Normals member Rob Labelle. Because of that night, he says, “I still consider it a privilege to be playing with one of the Normals.”

Destined to be a short-lived solution to The Punk Problem, 364 provided a necessary stage for new bands to learn the ropes of live performance, helping to save Montreal from the ever-present threat of disco by encouraging a new generation of musicians to play original music, play it aggressively, and play it weirdly. Ditchburn even let the Normals use the store as a practice space.

“I don’t know how he never got arrested,” says Howe. “There would be four hundred people wall-to-wall, and he’d be selling beer. We had never been to anything like this, and the first time we played, we just got trashed by people. We were covered in beer, ketchup, just crap. It was messed up, but we liked it. We just kept doing it, and people ended up liking it. Things grew during that period, and shows started happening at real bars.” Ditchburn had proved, from illegal beer sales alone, that punk was a financially viable type of music to book. And it wasn’t just the owners of more legitimate establishments that were taking note. So were the legitimate businessmen of the neighbourhood.