PERFECT YOUTH: The Birth of Canadian Punk (19 page)

The riots didn’t end there, though. After UBC and Detroit, the band headed to Los Angeles to play with Black Flag, with whom they’d previously played in Santa Cruz for an audience of eight. Since then, Black Flag’s popularity had exploded, and they were eager to bring D.O.A. back to town. Black Flag initially invited the band for one show, but when it sold out in record time, a second was added to the same night. The trouble arose almost immediately when the first show let out, putting 800 punks — half leaving, half waiting to get inside — out on the streets of Los Angeles, a city with an infamously hostile relationship between punks and the police. A cop car drove by and was hit with a beer bottle, and when the officer got out to reprimand the offender, he quickly realized he was hopelessly outnumbered. He wasn’t alone for long. A few more cruisers arrived, and they, too, were pelted with bottles.

“The cops said, ‘Fuck this, we’re the LAPD.’ They’re maybe the most macho police force in America, right?” says Keithley. “They came back with about 40 cars and a helicopter. They blocked off the intersection so there was no running, and the head cop came out in the middle of the intersection. He had a shotgun, and we were watching this from the windows in the dressing room. He walked around in a circle and held a shotgun above his head just to let the punks know they meant business. ‘We’re going to fuck with you because you fucked with us.’ The cops all waded in with their billy clubs and just started smashing people. People tried to run but the whole intersection was barricaded off.” The riot was front-page news the next day, with punks blamed for inciting the police and leaving them no choice but to utilize drastic measures to quell the violence.

D.O.A. returned to Vancouver, ready to record their first full-length,
Something Better Change
, released in 1980. The band subsequently hit the road, extending their reach past Ottawa and travelling to the east coast of Canada for the first time. They also trekked out into the punk wilderness of the midwestern United States, still an untapped future hardcore stronghold. Along with Black Flag and the Dead Kennedys, they continued to expand the punk touring circuit, eagerly helping any band looking to follow in their footsteps.

“All the little towns, it would either be Black Flag or D.O.A. who showed up first,” says Keithley. “The way you knew was the next time you came through, the opening bands would either sound a little bit like D.O.A. or a little bit like Black Flag. It was a funny thing.” Now a ruthlessly heavy machine made tight and precise by endless hours on the road, D.O.A. entered the studio to record
Hardcore ’81
, which, at one point, had the less-righteous title of
Hardcore Plus
. The record, of course, became the first time the term “hardcore” was used to describe the new lean style of punk emerging from the west coast, pushing the term into the consciousness of the scene and mainstream society outside of punk circles. But the always unstable band was headed for another blow-up, as tensions between Biscuits and Rampage reached a boiling point smack in the middle of the United States.

Keithley missed the actual fight, but arrived to the band’s manager picking up money from the bushes outside of a punk house in Bloomington, Indiana. The details scarcely matter; Biscuits, in a rage, had broken the passenger-side window of the band’s van and thrown the money from the tour all over the lawn after pulling a knife on both Rampage and the manager. It was the beginning of the end for what many consider the band’s classic lineup.

D.O.A. continued, continued, and continued. Keithley has remained the band’s keeper of the flame, although lifers, like Rampage, have returned for a few tours of duty since the ’80s. After the knife and the money and Bloomington, Biscuits left D.O.A., going on to play with bands like Social Distortion, Danzig, the Circle Jerks, and Black Flag. He remains one of the most respected punk drummers of all time, a notoriously private legend who aggressively avoids any discussion of his past. He’s fallen so far off the map that in 2009, when a story began circulating that he had died, his own brother had to drive several hours to confirm that he was, in fact, still alive.

Keithley took D.O.A. to some incredible heights; they were one of the only bands to play behind the Iron Curtain, touring to Yugoslavia and Slovenia in 1984 (“We’d be the only band and they had these really strange clubs and really weird sound systems, stuff we’d never seen before in the west, like Soviet-era sound equipment, right?”). Nirvana played their second-ever show opening for the band at the Underground in Seattle, and in 2000, Keithley ran for federal parliament under the Green Party banner. He lost, but received 15% of the vote, which is pretty impressive for a guy whose first interaction with the media came from narcing out his own pseudo-riot under the name “Joey Shithead.”

D.O.A. is still going strong. Long after this book has turned to dust and nuclear war ravages the earth, Joey Shithead will be in a van somewhere, teaching an all-ages hall full of kids that they need to put their money where their mouths are and truly live the alternative that they want the world to be. He’ll be showing the mutant punks of the future that talk minus action equals zero. And for good measure, I can promise you that he’ll be wearing a sleeveless jean jacket over a sleeveless D.O.A. shirt when he does it, and that his message will be just as relevant as it was in 1981.

The Reaction [Courtesy of Michael Fisher]

December 24, 1977, 3:00 p.m. AST

It’s tough to escape the familial obligations of Christmas Eve in St. John’s, Newfoundland. But five friends, reunited after a semester of mainland schooling and out-of-town work, have snuck in to the bowels of Memorial University to record the first three songs for their new band-cum-art-project, Da Slyme. Convincing the manager of the campus radio station, MUN Radio, to give them keys to the station and access to its limited recording set-up, they’ve arranged all available microphones in the only logical configurations they can think of. They play through an original song, “Piss-Eyed Sleezoid,” a few times before firing up the station’s gear and recording. They hack through an instrumental and jump headfirst into more original songs. Eventually, they have to head home for dinner, but not before promising to return the next day to finish what they started. In one of the most remote cities in Canada, a few kilometres from the easternmost point in North America, punk has grabbed a foothold on the Rock.

There were some great struggles facing this project when it came to deciding whom to include. This chapter might have been the hardest of all, and you’re holding hundreds of pages of steaming struggle right now. Combining Regina and Saskatoon into a single Saskatchewan chapter made sense, given the limited activity in each city and their geographic similarities. But combining all of Atlantic Canada into a single chapter is going to piss someone off. It’s possible that each of these chapters could begin with some kind of apology or explanation, but this one needs and deserves special framing.

The first wave of punk was slow to hit Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland and Labrador. With a few notable exceptions, it was slower than the rest of Canada. Early punk bands were often art school projects or simply a cover band specializing in Ramones and Sex Pistols songs. This isn’t true everywhere, but it does mean that a standalone chapter on Moncton or Fredericton would be remarkably concise. This packaging of all four provinces isn’t meant to insult, belittle, or disrespect the valuable contributions of bands in this region. These bands, perhaps even more than their contemporaries in more populous parts of the country, were fascinating products of creativity in isolation (like punk rock feral children), and their very existence helped to bring about new musical eras in their hometowns. Without Mark Gaudet and the Punks in Moncton, there would be no Eric’s Trip, the first Canadian indie rock band to sign with Sub Pop. Without Agro and Nobody’s Heroes in Halifax, there would have been no hardcore scene to inspire the members of Sloan to get their shit together and sign to Geffen in 1992, and without the Curbs in Fredericton, the city would have lacked a galvanizing youth cultural force to inspire a young Peter Rowan to try his hand at management, helping to orchestrate the success of both those bands.

As it stands, many of the most groundbreaking bands on the east coast didn’t emerge until the tail end of punk, and they fall outside of the guidelines arbitrarily set for this book in order to keep things reasonable. If you want to know about the explosion of mad musical genius and big-name brilliance that was centred in Atlantic Canada in the late ’80s and ’90s, pick yourself up a copy of
Have Not Been the Same
by Barclay, Jack, and Schneider. It’s the best book ever written about Canadian music, and an indispensable guide to some of Canada’s greatest contributions to the evolution of North American rock music.

We’re going to talk about the spark before the explosion.

When Mark Gaudet says I can call him any time up until three, I assume the 47-year-old rock veteran doesn’t really mean the middle of the night. But when we finally connect the next evening, he seems surprised that I didn’t call. At three in the morning, the night before.

Gaudet is an east coast institution; he formed Purple Knight, his adolescent reaction to discovering hard rock, in 1974. A few years later, he started Moncton’s first punk band, the adorably appropriately named Punks. Years later he played in Eric’s Trip, the city’s best-known rock export; Elevator, another widely known Moncton hesher institution; and a flurry of other bands from every imaginable genre. He is a pillar of the local scene, the one-time manager of a local Sam the Record Man, literally responsible for bringing punk to New Brunswick’s largest city.

Gaudet’s solo exploration of punk coincided perfectly with the crash of Moncton’s local economy in the late ’70s.
Previously sustained by the shipbuilding industry, which itself
collapsed in the 1860s, Moncton successfully rebuilt itself as a railway town and was responsible for the construction of a significant portion of the Canadian National Railway’s locomotive force. But with the slow decline of rail in Canada came the closure of Moncton’s locomotive shops, a second crash that left thousands of citizens out of work and the city financially devastated. This was the backdrop for Gaudet’s earliest sonic experimentations, an adventure he undertook primarily in solitude.

Purple Knight was Gaudet’s first project, an early
exploration of his abilities as a drummer and an attempt to exorcise the sounds that bands like Deep Purple and Black Sabbath had planted in his head. The band wrote original music, recorded it in Gaudet’s garage, and participated in a short (homemade) documentary about their career, produced by Gaudet’s grandmother. The band was over by 1976, but the DIY ethic that would define punk was already an intrinsic part of Gaudet’s musical chemistry. He just needed the music to give it a soundtrack and an outlet. It came one year later, when he tuned in to the Ramones’ August 7 performance on
Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert
, the popular syndicated variety show hosted by the former manager of the Monkees.

“That was the first time that I actually heard punk
rock,” says Gaudet. “I mean, I had a hundred records in my collection at that time, but that was the point that I was blown to smithereens, that I was smashed up against the wall. I expected kids to be talking about them the next day. But they were all talking about them negatively. They thought they were awful. At that point I realized no one else was into punk, so I started looking around.” Gaudet didn’t find anyone; in fact, his quest to understand this new obsession alienated him almost completely from his former friends and classmates.
Within a year, his social circle had dwindled to four. Says Gaudet, “I had to find new misfits to align myself with.”

By February 1978, Gaudet had at least found an enthusiastic co-conspirator, if not a fated soul mate. Switching to guitar while teaching his friend the basics of the drums, the pair formed the Punks, Moncton’s first punk band. Not that anyone noticed; the Punks never left the basement and split in April when Gaudet’s friend got too tired from playing as fast as the Ramones. Next up was the Whore-Moans, another example of Gaudet essentially tricking a few other people into playing in a punk band. Unfortunately, the nature of everyone’s instrumental talents led to an unorthodox power-trio lineup, with Gaudet back on drums and two vocalists, sans instruments, up front. “They just liked acting crazy, screaming in the basement and acting nuts,” says Gaudet. “One of the guys only bought a punk record because he wanted my paper route.”

Playing basement concerts for a handful of friends over the course of 1979, the band gained enough local steam to be offered a paying gig at a bar. When the bar found out the oldest member was 15, the offer was quickly and responsibly rescinded. The Whore-Moans fell apart soon after, with the other two members moving on to other teenage interests and, inevitably, away from punk. “I didn’t want to be alone,” says Gaudet. “It just turned out that way.”

Before he could Charlie Brown off into the Moncton night, Gaudet finally met two musicians who were actual fans of the bands he was trying to imitate, Brent Horeman and Mark Doucet. “Those guys never bullshitted me, they were actually into punk,” says Gaudet. “That was the first time I found people that weren’t just humouring me.” Together, the trio formed the Robins, billed as Moncton’s first gigging punk band, and Gaudet’s first band to feature bass, guitar, and drums at the same time. And here’s the craziest part — the Robins were fucking awesome.

Given their extreme isolation and lack of any semblance of a scene, it seems unreasonable to expect much from three misfit teenagers in a transitional industrial town. But the band used their lack of experience and dearth of proper recording equipment to produce some of the most inspired weirdness to emerge from Atlantic Canada during this whole period. The Robins’ self-titled 1980 album sounds like a field recording taken from some sort of
Wisconsin Death Trip
–like town on the edge of complete decay; there is an experimental Nomeansno-like quality to the tape, despite the fact that the Wright brothers had yet to play a note together on the opposite coast. The Robins existed in a complete vacuum, to a much greater and more literal extent than bands in Winnipeg or Edmonton, where punks could at least rely on a supportive scene of a few hundred kids. In Moncton, the Robins relied on a dozen or so curious kids to attend their basement performances, and the manner in which this was reflected in the band’s bizarre material is incredible: it is music completely devoid of any intended audience, recorded in a way that isn’t so much lo-fi as inexplicably strange, the songs themselves like an explosion of adolescent punk id.

Crucially, the band left Moncton, and twice played in Halifax, Nova Scotia, just over three hours away. They opened up the east coast to the potential for a touring circuit, and showed the lonely misfits in another city that there were kids like them all over the place, they just needed to work to bring themselves together. It was the foundation of a touring circuit that nurtured an incredible music scene and still exists to this day.

After a few years of the Robins, Gaudet was getting listless. Increasingly interested in bands like the Fall and Joy Division, the group dissolved, and he left to pursue the cold wave end of post-punk. He went on to start
Venison Creek
in 1983, an incredible annual zine, still active, that documents and archives the Moncton scene, keeping a deposit of rare tapes and VHS to distribute to curious “Punkton” amateur historians. In the composted remains of the Punks, Whore-Moans, and Robins, a truly vibrant independent music scene flourished. It’s intense, but it’s not hyperbolic, to suggest that Mark Gaudet was the reason.

When the Robins visited Halifax, there was one name they kept hearing: Nobody’s Heroes. So far as they could tell, these guys ran the Halifax scene that, when seen through the eyes of teenagers from Moncton, must have looked like Warhol’s New York.

Nobody’s Heroes were amongst the scene’s most popular bands, but their early focus was on punk covers. It was only a few years later, confidence built up by years of solid Clash cover-age, that they ventured into the requisite world of original songwriting. Still, their less original years were doubtlessly a crucial part of the evolution of the city’s punk scene, which had started as a goof-around art project by a handful of smirking college kids from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, an internationally recognized site of bizarro artistic innovation.

The Vacant Lot and the Trash Kanz were Halifax’s first punk bands, consisting of, essentially, the exact same members in different formations, playing off a staged rivalry that was used to drum up excitement for supposedly contentious billings and garner publicity from local media. With a small scene centred almost exclusively in a local hippie cafe called Odin’s Eye and the classrooms of NSCAD, members of both bands approached the concept of punk with a kind of detached academic eye.

“We could all play reasonably well, but there was also an attempt to not overdo things, and stick to strict garage band origins,” says Ron Foley McDonald, who helped form both bands in the ’70s. “There were elements of parody and trashiness. And there was the aesthetic of having bad equipment. If you couldn’t throw this stuff together quickly, what was the point?” It’s clear that both the Vacant Lot and the Trash Kanz were more of an attempt to emulate, rather than a genuine reaction to or against something. Which sounds dismissive, but shouldn’t; by revitalizing the struggling folkie-hippie enclave of Odin’s Eye, which later changed its name to the Grafton Street Cafe, they set the stage for a more earnest punk expression in the early ’80s.

The Grafton Street Cafe hosted the first shows by bands like Nobody’s Heroes and Agro, Halifax’s tougher,
weirder punk outfit. It played a critical role in the scene’s development, not just as one of the lone venues friendly to the concept of all-ages shows, but as one of the only places in the entire city to allow non-union musicians a chance to play.

The American Federation of Musicians is a pan-national union that provides benefits, pensions, and wage protection for professional musicians. In most Canadian cities, it holds little power over live music establishments, but as one of the only organizations in the country capable of lobbying for international performance visas, it still plays a critical role in the lives of musicians hoping to tour outside of Canada. The Atlantic Federation of Musicians, AFM Local 571, is an even more powerful beast. Through the ’70s and ’80s, the union blacklisted any venue that hosted shows by non-union musicians or refused to pay union scale, a measure of protection for the professionals who comprised the union’s backbone. But for young kids forming their first band and looking for a live break, performing at any venue in the city — the union ran every single one — was impossible. Punk bands couldn’t afford union dues, and venues couldn’t afford to be blacklisted by inviting a non-union band to play on a Monday night for a non-union rate. The Atlantic Federation of Musicians, for all the good it did for blues and jazz musicians, stalled the development of a viable youth culture in Halifax for decades.

“At that time, the AFM had unbelievable control over the clubs,” says James Cowan, who joined the Trash Kanz right before their implosion and started Nobody’s Heroes a few months later. “But there was so much hunger for something different that when the Heroes formed, it really lit a fire under everyone. By our sixth gig, we were showing up to a line that literally stretched around the block.” Cowan speaks of his time with the band as one would speak of a great battle, an attempt to defeat what he calls the “slug bands.” Slug bands were a holdover from the Led Zeppelin era, bands whose pomposity (and guitar solos) knew no bounds.