PERFECT YOUTH: The Birth of Canadian Punk (13 page)

“We got into John’s beaten-up old car that had the windscreen in the back smashed out,” recalls Robinson. “We got a flat tire and had to get the car towed to New York. I don’t know how we got there. But everybody was there. All of these people we had read about. Blondie, the Ramones, the Dead Boys. Everybody came to see us. It really was an event.” The Torontonian takeover of New York lasted three nights, and included headlining sets from the Cramps each night. And it was a takeover — even the
Toronto Star
, in a feature about the city’s underground clubs, noted that the Crash ’n’ Burn didn’t host a show that weekend because everyone was in New York.

“When you walk into CBGB, it’s like
Rock Scene
magazine come to life,” says Alfonso. “There’s Seymour Stein sitting right there. Sylvain Sylvain is walking around. There’s Richard Hell! It was so friendly it was unbelievable.” The Diodes returned to Toronto and almost immediately found themselves being courted by CBS Records; at a time when no band in town could even get the time of day from a major label, the band’s hard work really seemed to be paying off.

“Literally the day after the Crash ’n’ Burn closed, CBS asked to hear some demos,” says Catto. “We didn’t have any, so we went into a practice space with Dave Stone and recorded four songs, just bang-bang-bang. Just throw up a mic.” Those hastily recorded demos were enough, and almost immediately, the band found themselves in the studio recording the first Diodes record in September 1977. Alongside producer Bob Gallo, the man who discovered Elvis Costello and whose credits also include an early KISS demo, the band tracked 12 songs live off the floor at Manta Sound in Toronto in just two weeks.

The Diodes
was released in October 1977, and its first single, a cover of the Cyrkle’s “Red Rubber Ball,” reached 96 on the Canadian singles chart. The
Pig Paper
, the Toronto punk scene’s first dedicated magazine, called the band “top contenders for the title of First Canadian International Punk Sensations.” Anxious to make good on that promise and emulate the success of their American punk idols, the band immediately hit the road to support the album.

“We toured with the Ramones. We played all over the States and Canada. Then all of a sudden, we were playing the El Mocambo [an upscale Toronto rock club], which never would have given us the time of day,” says Robinson. “We were the first punk band to play there.”

“There was a great gig we played in Chicago with the Ramones and the Runaways, and we got an encore, which was amazing,” says Alfonso. “But our road manager got all our gear stolen, so that kind of deflated that one. It was classic — he picks up this girl, goes to her place with the van that all our stuff is in, and I guess it was all a set up. I remember he comes back to the hotel and knocks on the door to tell us all the gear was gone. I told him he was paying for it.” Despite positive fan and critical reception, the band was already feeling disconnected from their label, CBS; swept up in the punk fever that followed the Clash’s massive commercial success in the U.K., no one at the label seemed to have any genuine interest in, or understanding of, the Diodes.

“We had our big debut at Max’s Kansas City, and it was great,” recalls Alfonso. “All the guys from CBS New York were there, and the Diodes went way over the top. Then we got the word back that we weren’t punk enough or something. Then we got word from CBS Canada that they wanted us to go down to the National Lampoon office and protest this satire they had done on Canada. We were like, ‘No, that’s not what they do.’ And they were like, ‘Okay, well, we’ve got these guys doing a “Save the Whales” campaign, why don’t you go down and do a “Kill the Whales” campaign? Stir it up?’ As soon as we started saying no to all that, I think they felt like, ‘I thought we had a punk band we could fulfill all our punk fantasies with! What’s this?’”

Their American tour also included the live debut of a new song, “Tired of Waking Up Tired,” in Boston; Alfonso and the band all recall the song eliciting an immediate reaction that felt decidedly different from the rest of the band’s catalogue. They were right: the song would go on to become an understated classic of the Canadian rock and roll canon, regularly featured on best-of lists and making an appearance in Bruce McDonald’s classic piece of punk road cinema,
Hard Core Logo
. Recorded in 1978 for the Diodes’ second full-length, the song was never released by CBS. The band was dropped just before Christmas 1978, their record shelved indefinitely.

“The label had a lot of missed opportunities, and they completely ripped us off,” says Robinson. “They sold 30,000 albums in America and we never saw anything. They were exporting things left, right, and centre. There was a huge scandal about it in the ’90s when this all came out, but we never got compensated. We probably would have got a gold album. But we never did.”

The international impact of the band, on the strength of the “Tired” single, is still ringing in the ears of a worldwide fanbase. The Diodes are the lone Canadian band featured in Jon Savage’s definitive history of the British punk movement,
England’s Dreaming
. In 2010, an Italian label, Rave Up Records, released a Diodes live album,
Time/Damage
. And when I meet up with the Rheostatics’ Dave Bidini to talk about his impressions of the early punk scene, he recounts a particularly memorable night in China, wandering the streets drunk at the end of a short tour.

“As we were coming back to our hotel, we saw this record store down an alley that was still open at four in the morning,” he says. “There were sofas, and the first thing I saw was a beer fridge. I cracked a beer, and I went to the racks of CDs. The first thing I pulled out was the best of the Diodes. We played them ‘Tired of Waking Up Tired,’ and tried to explain to them all about this band. It’s such a great rock song.” Bidini’s enthusiastic tale of trying to break the language barrier between him and the shop’s Chinese clerks speaks volumes of the Diodes’ status well outside of Canada’s borders.

“According to CBS, we never sold a single import copy,” laughs Catto. “Even though we’d go into the office in New York and they’d be waving charts in our face saying, ‘You’re our number two import! Just behind the Clash.’”

The band split in different directions, with Robinson taking off to New York to rethink his role in the group. In the meantime, “Red Rubber Ball” was included on a CBS compilation and began garnering substantial radio play stateside. The label scrambled to release the shelved second full-length,
Released
, and attempted to re-sign the band. Having had enough of the major label ringer, the band did the punk thing and politely told them to go fuck themselves.

Working independently again, in 1980 the Diodes
recorded their third and final full-length,
Action Reaction
, clocking long hours on the road opening for Split Enz and, most impressively, U2 on their
Boy
tour. But the fire was gone.

“We were completely wasted on the road,” recalls
Robinson. “Completely what you think of a rock ’n’ roll band. Lots of drinking too much. We were into speed and things that woke you up. I used to sleep on top of the speakers in the van with no seatbelt. I’m lucky to be alive,” he laughs. “I’ve said to my kids, ‘If you ever want to know anything about drugs, just ask me. I’ll tell you what’s good and what’s bad.’”

“You’re limited by your country,” recalls Alfonso, speaking specifically of the final U2 tour. “It’s not like England, where every minor accomplishment is trumpeted by somebody. You’re in Canada. Nothing happens. We had always known that we were doing the right thing in the wrong country. Time had worn us out.” Alfonso himself conducted a telling interview with the band for the first issue of
Shades
in 1978.

Shades:
How do you think people will react to a Canadian punk band?

Hamilton:
Just don’t tell them you’re a Canadian band and you might get away with it.

Robinson and Catto ended up moving to England in an attempt to reignite their flagging musical fortunes, but, according to Robinson, “nothing really came of it,” although Catto would spend some time in a post–Seona Dancing, pre–
The Office
band with Ricky Gervais. Alfonso had started a job at Attic Records and continued to plug away at the business side of the Canadian music industry, while the rest of the Diodes moved on to new projects. Unceremoniously, the band was done. The Diodes didn’t play together again until 1999, reuniting for a single appearance on
The Mike Bullard Show
to promote a Sony reissue of their CBS-era material, including “Tired of Waking Up Tired.” Recently, the band’s classic lineup of Robinson, Catto, Hamilton, and Mackay began touring Canada and Europe, with plans to record new material in the future.

“Apparently, Nirvana liked us,” says Robinson. “Bob Mould really likes us, as well. Dave Grohl loves the Toronto scene. The right people like us. We were a pretty small scene, and the people who are important really liked us. Maybe we’ve been sidelined because we haven’t had huge commercial success, but I think we’re respected.”

Alfonso, perhaps most succinctly, sees the band’s legacy with the clear insight of an old friend. “I think one of the reasons why the Diodes managed to translate so well is because people sensed that there was some intelligence in what they were doing,” he says. “It wasn’t just another paint-by-numbers punk band. We didn’t come later. We were actually there at beginning, when it was still possible to forge your identity.”

The Pointed Sticks [© bev davies]

November 29, 1979, 1:00 a.m. PST

Hours late and preceded by two massive brawls and a fiery performance from Victoria all-girl punks the Dishrags, Dennis Hopper has finally arrived at the rented hall currently serving as the set for
Out of the Blue
, his Vancouver-based neorealistic exploration of family, drugs, and Elvis Presley. When the Pointed Sticks finally take the stage in front of 500-plus delirious and thoroughly drunk extras drawn by a last-minute radio campaign offering a “well-known local punk band playing a free gig” and driven into a frenzy by a long wait in the cold and an even longer wait inside, the room explodes. Cebe, the film’s 15-year-old protagonist, wanders through the staged concert while very real violence explodes around her; she ends the show standing at the back of the stage while the Sticks rip through an encore of “Somebody’s Mom,” a tightly wound slice of power-pop that rips like a technically minded Canuck Ramones. By the song’s end, Ken “Dimwit” Montgomery, the band’s drummer and a pillar of the Vancouver scene, has traded off his sticks to the ecstatic teenager, who loosely pounds her way through the song’s final 15 seconds. In Vancouver, the party spills out into the night; onscreen, we cut to a devastating car crash, as a semi slams into the side of school bus.

“We just wanted to be a part of the excitement. There was a lot of really bad music, and punk came and swept that away. The ethos was that anyone could do it, and we thought, ‘If anyone can do it, why not us?’” Pointed Sticks vocalist Nick Jones is sitting in the brightly lit front room of Toronto’s legendary Horseshoe Tavern, a few hours away from his band’s first show in the Ontario capital since 1980, and almost a full 30 years since their performance in Hopper’s acclaimed film. The Sticks have just returned from a hugely successful reunion tour of Japan, where, in their absence, the band has grown into a full-fledged collector phenomenon; in fact, they are on the verge of releasing their first piece of new music since their break-up, the very appropriately titled single “My Japanese Fan.” In Toronto, they’re running the interview gauntlet with a set of journos who don’t look a day older than the band’s final full-length, a testament to the lasting power of the vibrantly original power-pop they churned out for their four years as a band. And in a few days, they’re headed over the border to play in New York City for the first time in their career. A few years later, the Pointed Sticks will complete their reunion with the release of their first album of original songs in 29 years,
Three Lefts Make a Right
. Full of nuanced, mature pop songs cut with a vintage punk edge, it’s as good as anything in the band’s classic discography. The band is proud, and critics agree. Nick Jones is a happy guy.

Nick Jones and Bill Napier-Hemy met in the fifth grade. They hit it off immediately. The pair spent all their time together listening to music, showing off their favourite songs to each other, and developing an appreciation for the new wave of popular music emerging at the tail end of the ’70s. Playing in local top 40 bands like Greased Pig and picking up their chops covering King Crimson and David Bowie, the pair made the inevitable discovery of punk together. Through regular pilgrimages to the downtown music stores that sold
Melody Maker
and other English rock magazines, the pair became devout anglophiles, keenly aware of the musical revolution occurring halfway around the world. They were just waiting for something similar to happen in their own hometown of Vancouver, which seemed hopelessly behind the curve. Unfortunately, Jones himself would miss out on the first flurry of punk activity on the west coast, having dropped out of university and taken off for the motherland in 1977.

“When I went to England, the first thing I did was look for all of those bands,” he says. “It was pretty amazing, because Vancouver is a very isolated city. You have to go a long way from Vancouver to get anywhere else. I mean, Seattle is the closest city, but there’s a big border to cross for you to get there, and to get anywhere else in Canada it’s 600 or 700 miles. We’re sort of the Australia of cities.” While Jones was following his anglophile passions through the U.K., Napier-Hemy, inspired by the live debut of Vancouver’s first punk band, the Furies, was joining the new wave of original groups in Vancouver, forming a band with local Beefheart-esque art-weirdo Tim Ray under the moniker Tim Ray and A.V. Says Napier-Hemy of the project, “A lot of the bands were really heavy, and we wanted to do something light, poppy, and fun. Our first gig was just covers. We did ‘Psycho Killer,’ dressed up in plaid seersucker jackets. It was fun, and it was light.”

Jones returned to Vancouver in 1978, just as A.V. was winding down. “When I came back, it was a very strange scene because there were only maybe a hundred people that were involved in it, but they were all going to every gig, whether it was an art-rock band or a punk-rock band or an all-girl punk band or a pop-punk band.” He tracked down his old friend Napier-Hemy, and the pair immediately formed a band. They both insist that their songwriting union came about without any real plan or discussion. It just seemed like the logical thing to do, now that punk was in full swing and everyone was starting a band.

“You don’t have to go to music school and own a satin cape and a big rack of keyboards to be in a band,” recalls Jones. “We just started fishing around, looking to see who else was around. We went through a few different people and eventually settled on Tony and Ian.” Tony Bardach and Ian Tiles were another pair of old friends who met through mutual acquaintances when Bardach visited Tiles’ hometown of Ottawa in 1975.

“They had a lot of punk rock–type of records, like Iggy Pop, Modern Lovers, Flamin’ Groovies,” says Bardach. “It was just really weird, sitting around listening to these records, feeling like it was smoking dope or smoking cigarettes when you were 10. It was like a secret. That was the real turning point.” A year later, Tiles moved out west, and the pair spent the next few months looking for some kind of “punk thing” happening in Vancouver. It took some searching, but they eventually found their way to a Skulls gig at a local legion hall, where a band named Victorian Pork was headlining.

Victorian Pork was the Vancouver scene’s first “fuck band.” Formed out of necessity in a scene built around a tiny number of extremely driven individuals, fuck bands were random groupings of musicians from other bands, playing silly songs on instruments they were often wholly unfamiliar with. Fuck bands’ sole purpose was to provide opening acts for the scene’s legit bands, of which there were rarely enough to stage a full show; Victorian Pork’s original lineup comprised mainly of members of Stone Crazy, the pre-D.O.A. rocker outfit, but the band continued to play an active role in the scene after Stone Crazy morphed into the Skulls and lit out for Toronto.

“Even if you played once a month for a few months, after that point, people were probably starting to get a little tired of you,” explains Jones. “As a musician, that’s not enough. You want to be playing more than that, so that’s kind of where the fuck band came from. Let’s say D.O.A. is playing the Smiling Buddha on a Friday night. They’d need opening bands. So you put together a band with some of your friends.” Victorian Pork was such a band and along with Rude Norton, they became the longest-running and most popular haphazard legends of early Vancouver. Victorian Pork, in particular, remained active and important during a period in Vancouver punk history that, from the outside, looked pretty dim. The Furies had broken up by mid-’77, the Skulls were halfway across the country, and the Dishrags were still teenagers holed up on Vancouver Island, a lifetime away. But Victorian Pork, led by the charismatic Brad Kent on guitar, kept the flame burning in the halls and correctional facilities of British Columbia, and by 1978, both Tiles and Bardach had been recruited into its morphing ranks.

“One time we had to perform at Woodland Correctional, or Woodland Rehabilitation Centre, for all the poor retarded and deformed kids,” laughs Bardach. He had been arrested for driving without insurance, and while being processed, was asked by his parole officer what he did for fun. “I told her I played in a band and she said, ‘Oh, we won’t waste you on the loading dock at the Salvation Army, you guys can perform for us!’ I said, ‘Well, what kind of a thing were you thinking of?’ She told me about the Woodland thing. I told her we were a loud punk rock band with huge amplifiers and she said, ‘No, the kids will love it, it’ll be just great.’” The show was a shocking success; while half of the audience immediately left the room when the band started playing, the other half leapt into the air and pogoed non-stop from the very first note. But Bardach came close to violating his parole when he nearly missed the show due to an unpaid parking ticket.

“I had an old beat-up car, and on the way to the gig, I got pulled over by the Port Moody police and got hauled into their station for not paying a traffic fine in Vancouver,” he laughs. “I was able to talk my way out of it, and I eventually made it to the show.”

Victorian Pork is just one of many fuck bands immortalized
by
Bud Luxford Presents
, a series of compilations released by Bud Luxford,
now extremely rare and auctioned online for hundreds of dollars. The first two volumes, which run the gamut from big-name fucks like Los Radicos Popularos and Rude Norton to virtual unknowns like Sgt. Nick Penis and Tots in Bondage, are hilarious distillations of what made the Vancouver scene so vibrant and unlike any other city.

Despite the tacit support for even the silliest of punk ventures, Victorian Pork was crumbling by 1978, and Tiles, who had been fronting VP for the last year, was eager to return to his earlier role as a drummer. With Bardach on bass, they provided the ideal rhythm section for Nick Jones and Bill Napier-Hemy’s new project, one that would require the mastery of intense speed, stop-start rhythms, and the nuances of the adventurous early material of bands like the Jam.

The band chose power-pop for a simple reason — D.O.A. had the heavy shit on lock. They felt like no one was playing catchy, fast pop songs in the Vancouver scene, and as fans of bands like the Buzzcocks and Ramones, they were ideally suited to provide a lightweight take on the angsty punk sound that was so popular in the city.

“I saw the Buzzcocks in England, and most people in Canada didn’t really know much about them when I came back,” says Jones. “I was raving about this incredible band who had harmony singing and beautiful melodies but still had that great edge. That was kind of the template that we took, to capture a lighter side of what all the other bands were doing.” The new band quickly learned a few covers and landed their first show opening for D.O.A. and Rabid at the Quadra Club, a lesbian bar that let punk bands have the run of the place every Wednesday night.

“We got all dolled up in seersucker suits and made a big piss take out of the whole situation and being in a band, being glamorous, being idols, that whole thing,” laughs Bardach. “We kind of came out with a super bubblegum kind of music that was very tongue in cheek.”

“We played a few covers and we did one or two songs we had written ourselves,” says Jones. “But all the girls who had been coming out — all seven girls in our little scene at the time, who came to the gigs but didn’t want to get in the front row because they didn’t want to get knocked over or anything — they were in the front row.” Bardach laughs. “Well, people just started buying it right away.”

The band returned to the shed and honed in on their developing sound, ditching the covers and writing a set of inspired originals that they hoped would continue to appeal to the fairer sex, while offering the aggressive edge that had drawn them to the scene in the first place. This mix of simple “boy meets girl” lyrics and rapid-fire pop-punk instrumentals landed them a competing slot in a Battle of the Bands being staged by the
Georgia Straight
, the local alternative-weekly. (Jones refers to it as the “hippie rag.”) Held at Vancouver’s legendary live venue, the Commodore Ballroom, first prize was a recording session at Little Mountain Sound with the studio’s overnight guy, an aspiring musician and producer named Bob Rock.

The band faced some stiff competition. Namely the Subhumans, who were one of the best bands in the city at that time. The others were “dopey,” according to Bardach.

“They might have won the year before, but punk rock was starting to take over as what was cool, and Pointed Sticks got it easily,” he says. Now the Pointed Sticks were ready to record the first of their cleverly disguised pop songs, producing the “What Do You Want Me To Do” single and inadvertently landing the prestige of the first record to come with the “Produced by Bob Rock” seal of note-perfect approval.

“We didn’t know him as anybody other than the blond dude at the controls,” says Bardach. “We were just slightly in awe of him, being able to do that, sit there and know what all the buttons did.”

“That guy has produced multi-platinum records from Metallica and Bon Jovi and millions of other bands selling records all around the world, and the first one was us,” Jones says, laughing. “So, we obviously taught him everything he knows.”

After taking little tow-headed Bob Rock to school and giving him the tools he would need to eventually produce albums like Mötley Crüe’s
Dr. Feelgood
and Metallica’s entire ’90s oeuvre, the band began to play around town more seriously, pushing their new 7" single, made available through local store-cum-label Quintessence Records. It would become the second release for the brand-new label (following a single from Tim Ray and A.V.), the second step in a series of releases that would chronicle almost all the higher-profile bands to emerge from the Vancouver scene, from the Modernettes to the Young Canadians.

The single sold briskly along the entire west coast corridor, from Vancouver down to San Diego. It didn’t take long to sell out of the first pressing of 1,000 copies, and the band was spurred to record again, and, for the first time, to try their luck touring outside of British Columbia. They also expanded their sound, recruiting keyboardist Gordon Nicholl from White Rock transplants Active Dog, who brought in fellow AD member Robert Bruce on drums when Ian Tiles split around the same time. The more expansive group recorded the “Real Thing” single in 1979, proving themselves as adept as ever at producing shimmering pop songs through a Buzzcocks-like lens of slashing guitars and, now, the fullness of Nicholl’s keyboard. A vital touring circuit was developing up the west coast, bringing Los Angeles and San Francisco bands like the Avengers and Dead Kennedys to Vancouver, and it allowed bands like the Pointed Sticks a chance to throw in their lot with their American counterparts.