PERFECT YOUTH: The Birth of Canadian Punk (9 page)

“John told me that a few times, and that made me very happy,” says Barry. “It made me really happy because more often than not, people were putting us down.” Sitting with Kastner and Sean Friesen, it would be hard for anyone to put down Barry, Howe, Demouy, or anyone who slaved away to build something different in a city that didn’t even know it needed a change. Montreal was never the same — even if a few kids had to take a chain to the head in the name of progress.

The Dishes [© Don Pyle]

January 27, 1977, 9:00 p.m. EST

In a tiny art gallery tucked down an alley running parallel to Yonge Street, one hundred curious benefactors have squeezed into A Space’s single room to experience the latest work from General Idea, a Toronto art collective specializing in subverting expectations. Tonight, the group has booked a band from New York City called the Talking Heads for their first-ever Canadian show, a few weeks before the band’s first single is to be released by their new label, Warner subsidiary Sire Records. Opening the show is a band called the Dishes. The audience sits quietly in fold-up chairs while the Dishes blast out an incredibly loud set of Mott the Hoople–inspired proto-punk, thoroughly aggravating the kindly audience. They are asked to turn down. They don’t. Within the year, the Talking Heads are on their way to becoming one of the world’s most popular bands, while the Dishes are in the process of completely transforming Toronto’s musical landscape. And, presumably, those hundred quietly seated audience members are feeling pretty foolish.

When Murray Ball, vocalist for the Dishes, finally agrees to meet me for a coffee, he seems genuinely perplexed as to why I’m interested in him or the band he was in that broke up in 1978. To him, bands from that era got all the press they deserved. At the time, they certainly were receiving a healthy amount of attention from the local media, and if people have moved on, well, that’s just what happened. The sentiment throws me off; so many of the people I interview sound a note of bitterness when the subject of recognition is broached, and for good reason. A band from Toronto, every bit as good and hard working as a band from New York, did not stand a chance at the kind of fame that their American peers stumbled into on a nightly basis in the bowels of the Bowery.

The Dishes have always struck me as one of those bands, one that has been unfairly lost to time, even on a local level where their pioneering sound, aesthetic, and upfront sexuality set the stage for the cultural revolution of punk and established Toronto’s hotbed of all that is cool on Queen Street West. Gary Pig Gold called them the “undisputed fathers of the Toronto new wave” in the sixth issue of the
Pig Paper
, and yet the band is rarely celebrated on the same level as many of their latter-day peers.

We leave the tape recorder off, and I explain this to Ball. That the Dishes were the first band to glue their posters to telephone poles, an accepted and widely practised guerrilla advertising campaign for everyone from staunchly independent hardcore bands to massively corporate body wash products today. That the Dishes were the first band to play the Beverley on Queen, and that between the Bev’s radically open policy toward new bands and the Dishes-staffed artist-friendly restaurant, Peter Pan, around the corner, they were the powder keg for Queen West’s late ’70s artistic explosion. That they released one of the first independent singles in the country. And that through their open approach to sexuality and active association with arts collective General Idea, they created an inclusive foundation for all the punk bands that followed, making the Toronto scene one of the most diverse in North America. Without them, the Toronto-triggered queercore explosion of the mid-’80s that further broke down the homophobic barriers of rock music might not have happened.

Ball pauses, then agrees with me. He decides he’s willing to talk, so we turn on the tape recorder.

The Dishes formed in Thornhill, a wealthy suburb just north of Toronto, in 1975. A precursor to punk’s debut on the international stage, the band was heavily influenced by Roxy Music and Sparks, a fact that their sax-and-synthesizer-inclusive lineup indicated pretty clearly. After endlessly honing their sound and theatrical stage show in the basement of bass player Kenn Farr’s parents’ quiet suburban home, they visited a near-empty bar on Queen Street to try to book their first show.

The Beverley Tavern was a struggling watering hole in a lonely part of Toronto. Its only business came from the few regulars working at their own struggling businesses nearby, keeping the first floor stools warm while an entire second floor sat empty most days of the week. Around the corner on McCaul Street, the Ontario College of Art was earning a reputation as the country’s premier post-secondary institution for creative folks. While traditional bars were off-limits to the art college crowd and their nascent musical endeavours, the Beverley seemed ready for a takeover. So the band just walked in and asked to play. They ended up with a week-long residency in February 1976.

“The beer slinging days were coming to an end,” says Ball. “They saw OCA around the corner and wanted to try and bring those people in. I think the owner really wanted us to form bands, to keep the bar busy. And they paid us well, too.” The plan worked. The Beverley quickly became an extension of the college, a place for instructors and students alike to unwind before, after, or during college classes. The Dishes were the first to provide a soundtrack, but they were hardly the last; the Diodes and the Doncasters, both featuring fellow OCA students, quickly followed in their wake.

Still the first men on the moon, the Dishes began a slow takeover of the entire Queen Street strip. What began at the Beverley quickly spread a few blocks west; Peter Pan, a new restaurant opened by Ball and local artist Sandy Stagg, almost immediately became another landmark and vital meeting place for the blossoming new community. A mixture of artists and musicians, the restaurant’s clientele would become a transformative force in the city, beginning a creative migration to a previously derelict part of Toronto.

“We were living on Queen Street, we were working on Queen Street, we were playing on Queen Street,” says Ball. “We were living in that world. When we moved downtown, we didn’t find a bunch of hip people. We became the hip people. We were hip up there, in Thornhill, and then we were hip down there.”

One of the most significant visual changes brought by the influx of hipness to Queen West was the appearance of posters. On walls. On telephone poles. On mailboxes. Posters on everything. It’s a part of downtown culture that is completely taken for granted today, unless you live in Singapore or Port Perry. Posters are the hijacking of public space, a guerilla tactic for spreading the word about something you can’t advertise on a highway-side billboard. And in Toronto, the first people to tape a poster to a pole were the Dishes. With no other method to spread the word about their shows around the area and the college, the band would take to the streets at night, taping and gluing notices for upcoming gigs wherever they found a suitable surface.

“It was a part of the urbanization of Toronto, because no one had ever done this before. Postering suddenly existed, and it changed mainstream media,” says Peter Goddard, former music critic for the
Toronto Star
. We’re sitting in a booth at the Rivoli, a block from the site of the old Beverley. Queen West today is barely recognizable; as with any hip, artistic area in a major city, the chains have moved in, the rents have shot up, and the artists have picked up and moved further west. It’s still a bustling part of the city with a few vestiges of alternative culture left, but it’s a vastly different street than it once was. Looking out the window of the Rivoli at a sea of posters for shows, rallies, and record releases, it couldn’t be a more appropriate time to be talking with Goddard. “It was a great era for typography. The visual arts changed because of punk, maybe even more than music.”

Visual art was a substantial component of the Dishes’ package. As part of what Goddard calls “the aestheticization of rock and roll,” the Dishes were keenly aware of their presentation as much as their music. Which isn’t to sell short the wonderfully weird Bryan Ferry–like proto-punk of “Secret Storm” or “Police Band,” but to emphasize just how important the band’s other artistic pursuits were, as well.

It was the band’s very first show at the Beverley that introduced them to an arts collective called General Idea. Pioneering conceptual artists with a keen interest in the new music the Dishes were the premier local purveyors of, General Idea very quickly brought the Dishes into their world of media-based art: beauty pageants, TV specials, and large-scale installation art all figured prominently in the collective’s work.

“We wanted to be famous, glamorous, and rich,” declared General Idea in their own
FILE
magazine in 1975. “Occupying images, emptying them of meaning, reducing them to shells. We then filled the shells with glamour.” The Dishes fit into the art collective’s glamour mould, an ideal vessel to collaborate with and Trojan horse into unexpected scenarios — an art gallery show with the Talking Heads being a perfect example. The pair’s symbiotic relationship gave the art-minded Dishes access to the exciting and exclusive community fostered by General Idea and gave the art collective another tool in their real-world performance art kit.

In an undated interview with the
Journal of Contemporary Art
, General Idea co-founder AA Bronson spoke to their early ideology, influenced by the unremarkable art culture that existed in early ’70s Toronto. “When we were first working together in Toronto there was no real audience,” he said. “And we were quite aware of trying to assemble an audience out of existing audiences for other types of material — for instance, a music audience, rock and roll audience, design audience, architecture audience, trendy audience. We were quite conscious of attempting to pull together all those audiences in order to key into a diverse public.”

General Idea achieved their goal of building a wide, inclusive audience for their brand of cross-platform artistic expression. From the stage of the Beverley Tavern to the pages of
FILE
to the kitchen of Peter Pan, the spirit of the collective permeated counter-cultural Toronto at its most prodigious time. That they were vocal proponents of gay and lesbian involvement in the city’s arts scene meant that all culture that sprung from their influence held inclusive beliefs at their core. The Dishes were a perfect fit for the General Idea template.

“We were young, we were talented, we liked art,” says Ball. “Possibly because we were gay, we brought those things together. We clicked with all these artists because I was the gay lead singer.” While Ball is tastefully unwilling to discuss the sexual orientation of his bandmates, he’s open about the fact that his own sexuality had an obvious effect on the band in spite of his disinterest in what he considers the city’s standard gay community “I wasn’t gay in the traditional sense, but I had a mind that was gay, and it allowed me to express myself in a certain way. Being an openly gay man back then, I never felt threatened or nervous at shows. I am the same person now that I was then, and no one put us down for that. If anything, there was a subliminal recognition that it was an asset. It helped us move through different scenes.”

With Ball as the band’s frontman, there was no doubt that the Dishes possessed a distinct gay energy, and their partnership with the equally sexualized General Idea, at a time when gay culture was still a fringe community, created an open-minded punk scene simply by virtue of them being there first. General Idea operated Art Metropole, which, for a time, was the only place in Toronto that imported and sold punk singles. And the Dishes, far from the norm in culturally conservative Toronto, built the foundation for the punk scene in Toronto, establishing its rules and social mores. That meant a community that was devoid of the homophobia that pervaded almost every other music scene at that time.

“If you look at the originals, it’s General Idea, Rough Trade, the Dishes. It was all gay,” says Don Pyle, avid scene photographer, member of Crash Kills Five and Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, and himself an openly gay musician. “There were other things involved, but the roots were very gay. Even the bands that preceded the punk thing, like Martha and the Muffins, came out of a gay-slash-arts sensibility.”

The importance of this connection cannot be overstated. Toronto’s punk scene was born of the same musical and societal influences as London and New York, but the prevalence of gay culture, along with fringe art, was much greater within the Toronto scene. Obviously there was no shortage of either in both New York and London, but Toronto’s punk scene was so deeply tied to those two cultures that it had a much greater, lasting effect on the way that punk evolved on this city.

“The influence of OCA was huge,” says filmmaker Bruce LaBruce, who arrived in Toronto a few years after the Dishes. “We thought art was hopelessly bourgeois and capitalist, but I liked General Idea because they were situationist. They were aware of themselves as a spectacle. And they had interesting ideas of sexuality.” Upon moving to downtown Toronto from the wilds of Tiverton, Ontario, LaBruce teamed up with G.B. Jones, a former OCA student a few years his senior, in order to produce the pioneering punk zine
J.D.s
. Jones had already proven her bona fides locally with Fifth Column, an all-female post-punk group whose approach to third-wave feminism predated the official arrival of the riot grrrl movement by almost half a decade (for extra credibility, the band’s final release, 1994’s
36-C
, was released by Calvin Johnson’s legendary K Records).

While technically a product of Toronto’s mid-’80s hardcore scene, the influence of General Idea was prevalent in Jones and LaBruce’s work, and the continued presence of the early punk ideals of inclusion and boundary-pushing sexuality, as pioneered by the Dishes, was still at the core of the relatively new scene.
J.D.s
ended up giving birth to its own movement within a movement: homocore, later rechristened under the more inclusive banner of queercore. The zine was provocative and forthright in its mandate, which was the creation of a viable alternative gay culture, within or without the punk scene. While there had always been gay and lesbian involvement in punk and hardcore, LaBruce and Jones succeeded in giving a name and a voice to those who, like them, still felt marginalized within an already marginal culture. Queercore would explode in the late ’80s and ’90s, producing such venerable punk acts as Pansy Division and Limp Wrist. And LaBruce went on to produce enduringly provocative films like
Hustler White
and
No Skin Off My Ass
, films that led Kurt Cobain to cite LaBruce as his favourite filmmaker.