PERFECT YOUTH: The Birth of Canadian Punk (24 page)

“Things really dried up by ’83 because of people fucking shit up and smashing things,” say Tom Holliston. “No one comes to town because there’s nowhere to play.”

“Victoria was really producing its own amazing bands,” counters Wright. “The DIY punk scene blossomed here. Victoria produced a lot of music, a lot of bands. Many of them never made it off the island, but it was a very prodigious period of music on the island.”

Gratefully, it is a musical legacy that is easier to trace and discover on your own than many chronicled in this book. It’s amazing to look at such a tiny, insular scene, so many years removed from its former self, and see the impact that it has managed to have in a way that has reached far beyond the tunnels under Victoria, and the shores of Vancouver Island.

“Our choice of entertainment happens to be ridiculous, but we’ve made a lot of people quite happy,” says Murray Acton. “I’ve heard people tell me I’ve saved their lives and shit. The people that like us are so devoted its unbelievable. In Europe, we have a whole train of campers and buses following us when we’re on tour. I met a guy who had been to 230 Dayglos shows. I’ve never
really
figured it out, but I think that it’s because, if there’s a message to the Dayglos, it’s that you have to be able to laugh at shit. No matter how dark and grim it is, you’ve got to be able to wink at the firing squad and say, ‘Give me your best shot.’ If you can’t laugh it off, it will pile up on you. It can be a shitty world for a lot of people these days.”

He pauses. “I have not had the most stress-free of lives. I’ve had an awful lot of turmoil in my life. If everything is completely fucked, just light a joint. It will all go away eventually.”

The Mods [© Don Pyle]

December 1, 1978, 9:00 p.m. EST

There’s a scrappy film crew running around the Horseshoe Tavern tonight trying to take in all the energy of what has been announced as the venue’s final punk show. The resident promoters, Gary Topp and Gary Cormier, have been asked to move on, and as a parting shot, booked all their favourite bands onto one night of guaranteed mayhem. The Mods are onstage, thrashing through “Between Four Walls.” Before the night is over, the Viletones will have crashed the show, the cops will have crashed Teenage Head’s set, and every chair and table in the whole room will be crashed against the wall in the ensuing riot. It’s the beginning of the most legendary night in Toronto punk history, and although everyone can feel it, no one quite knows what to expect. Yet.

From the 63rd floor of the Royal Bank Tower, you can see the entire city spread out in front of you, a sea of neon, condo development, and tiny red lights travelling in and out of your vision. You can enjoy any number of sweetened canned beverages from a tiny ice bucket that has been placed in the boardroom for you to conduct your interview. And you can listen to one of the country’s foremost entertainment lawyers tell you about smashing motel windows with Teenage Head and car-surfing with Stiv Bators, frontman for Youngstown, Ohio, punk legends the Dead Boys.

Punk rock likes to make a show of its casualties. And to be fair, there are many. Not all have been buried six feet under; some are just buried under addiction, under decades of resentment, under their parents’ floorboards in the suburbs. These are the romanticized tales of unrecognized creative genius, Canada’s generation of Tom Verlaines and Debbie Harrys now selling magazines in Owen Sound. It’s almost part of the appeal, like a nation of Bukowski characters come to life and living in the shadow of the burst of brilliance they were a part of three decades ago.

And then, there are guys like David Quinton-Steinberg, who is sitting across from me at the end of a long workday, gesturing wildly with his arms as he tells me about his un
likely transition from drumming in one of the country’s best
power-pop bands to representing some of the country’s biggest entertainers. He tells a different story, not of the
“beautiful loser,” but the punk survivalist. The ones who took the lessons of punk and applied it to a world outside of sticky floors and hotel bars. The spark of punk — the quest for originality and rejection of dominant culture — can effect equally significant change in a courthouse as a punk house, and it makes me glad to know my life will always be filled with punk lawyers, punk real estate agents, and punk dentists. The method is different, but the energy is the same.

“I had this band with a guy named Jamie Gray when I was 15,” Quinton-Steinberg tells me. “Jamie’s dad didn’t like him hanging around with me because I had long hair and smoked cigarettes. He was instrumental in breaking up our band when we were kids, and he told my father, ‘Jamie’s going to be a professional. And with all due respect, I don’t think David’s going to amount to much.’ The irony is that Jamie — while he went on to play in Blue Rodeo for a number of years — is just a fucking piano player. And I’m a partner in a Bay Street law firm.”

“We met David at the Phillips building, where a lot of the punk bands were rehearsing at the time, along with the top 40 bar bands,” explains Mods guitarist Scott Marks. “We were neither. We weren’t good enough to be a bar band, but we weren’t bad enough to be a true punk band.” The Mods haven’t received the same hallowed historical treatment as some of their peers. One spin of their defining single, “Step Out Tonight,” and it’s hard to see why. Caught between the skill of their classic rock origins and their enthusiasm for the new sounds emerging from New York, the Mods were entirely original and tight as fuck. That Quinton-Steinberg beat the shit out of his kit like a teenage Keith Moon only added to the band’s intense assault, which started with a severe visual aesthetic and ended with massive sonic propulsion.

This isn’t the only reason the Mods are worthy of inclusion here alongside more infamous characters like the Viletones and D.O.A. There was a pervasive attitude amongst some first-wave punks that they were owed something, that the press ought to be knocking down their door simply because they were being freaky dudes and ladies. It is a mentality that got itself forcibly corrected by the overwhelming work ethic of first-wave hardcore bands and Henry Rollins’ biblical manifesto
Get in the Van
. So while many of their Torontonian peers waited with swastikas on their shirts for
NME
to show up and be shocked, bands like Teenage Head and the Mods quickly realized they needed to get out of dodge if they were ever going to make an impact. They didn’t just hit New York and drive straight home; the Mods’ touring ethic would have made Henry Rollins proud, if he wasn’t just some angry teen doing push-ups in a basement in Washington, D.C., at the time. The Mods worked as hard as any of their cross-genre continental counterparts, and they did so while playing fast, weird music that is amongst the best to come out of Toronto at that time.

Starting life as a cover band in the bowels of Scarborough, Toronto’s eastern-most suburban expanse, the Mods were only peripherally aware of bands like the Ramones and the Sex Pistols. It was the Jam, themselves outsiders to the English punk explosion, that first tweaked the band to the possibilities of writing and recording their own original songs.

“I had picked up a Jam record, and so we all went to go see them at the Colonial in the spring of ’77,” says Marks, who formed the core of the Mods’ first incarnation, along with vocalist Greg Trinier. “They blew us away, and we realized, ‘What the fuck are we doing? We can do this. We can play our own stuff. It’s minimal, it’s exciting. It’s what we like best about the stuff we’re playing.’” Having dabbled in writing their own material, Trinier and Marks dove headfirst into the process of building their own set from the ground up, and the former members, Rush devotees who were unsure of the band’s new direction, were quickly shown the door. “We didn’t like our bass player much anyways, so we arranged a rehearsal one night and didn’t invite him,” laughs Marks. With Mark Dixon taking over the vacant position of bassist, the new Mods began the agonizing process of auditioning drummers. Unlike many first wave punk bands who learned as they went, the Mods needed someone who would match their prowess and intensity, along with their enthusiasm for writing original music.

“The Androids were the first punk thing I did, around late ’76,” says Quinton-Steinberg, who was 15 when he joined the band. Featuring vocalist Sally Cato and guitarist Bart Lewis, they split when the pair formed the glam metal outfit Smashed Gladys and lit out for New York. Smashed Gladys eventually signed to Elektra Records and released two full-length records, including the awesomely named
Social Intercours
e
; the album
birthed the near-hit “Lick It into Shape,” produced by Ric Browde, the man behind Poison’s
Look What the Cat Dragged In
. But back in Toronto, “the people in the band other than me and the bass player were starving, so it was a real eye-opener for me, and something I had never really seen before,” Quinton-Steinberg continues. “People taking cigarette butts and squeezing the tobacco out into a rolling paper to create a cigarette. It was really bad.” Hailing from a more comfortably middle class part of the city, the young drummer experienced a punk trial by fire with the older musicians. It was in the halls of the building where the band practised that he first met the Mods.

“The Mods had shag haircuts and were doing cover tunes, but they were nice guys so I started talking to them,” he says. “I was all decked-out in punk stuff with dyed jet-black short hair, but I made friends with them. A lot of times, in those days, bands felt uncomfortable with each other if they weren’t in the punk scene. Everyone was kind of suspicious. The standard long-hair rock band hated us. There was a lot of disrespect for the punk scene. So the Mods guys, who weren’t a punk band, were being nice. And I was like, ‘Oh! Look at that! Long-hairs are being nice!’ So I started talking to them and getting to know them. Several months went by, and I’m club-hopping one night, and I see this band. And they were really cool and called the Mods. And I thought it couldn’t be the same guys, but I walked a little closer. I saw these guys with short hair all spiked up, and went, ‘Oh my God. It’s them.’ They had transformed themselves.”

The band’s current drummer felt the transformation could have gone further, though. Unhappy with the new-wave bent and harmonies present in the Mods’ music, he split for heavier sonic pastures, and suddenly, it was teenage David Quinton-Steinberg’s turn to get behind the kit. He played his first show with the band at the Hotel Isabella. His second was the Last Pogo.

The Last Pogo holds a hallowed place in Toronto punk history. Held on December 1, 1978, it’s Hogtown’s Vimy Ridge, mixed with Arthur Fonzarelli’s shark-jumping heroics. In a town full of musical legends, the Last Pogo has endured for years as one of the most infamous concerts in recent history. For many in the city, it marked the final night of Toronto’s first wave, a celebration, ending in a full-blown riot, that punctuated the period of startling creativity and cultural upheaval punk promised. On paper, it was just a concert marking the end of two promoters’ tenancy at a Queen Street tavern. In reality, it was the kind of reverential experience that grown men and women still speak about with such veneration that you can’t help but feel its reverberations, decades removed from the music, the energy, the riot.

One of the greatest legacies of that night is
The Last Pogo
, a pure gonzo documentary made by Colin Brunton. An aspiring filmmaker at time, Brunton has since gone on to produce such cult classics as
Roadkill
and
Highway 61
, along with
Cube
,
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
, and a slew of successful Canuck TV shows. His second-ever film,
The Last Pogo
is every bit as chaotic as the scene it documents. Mixing footage of the concert and talking head interview pieces with the bands involved, the film attained mythic status amongst ’77 punk aficionados during the decades following, finally receiving a proper DVD release in 2008. Watching it now, it is impossible not to be blown away by the frenetic feeling of the night, captured by Brunton’s tiny crew, as the bands, audience, and cops slowly descend on one another in a fittingly mad, violent coda to Toronto’s first wave.

The night’s intended headliner was Teenage Head, but when the uninvited Viletones grabbed their gear and played an unannounced set, it was the beginning of the end for punk at the Horseshoe. From the moment the band put their guitars down, plainclothes cops were suddenly all over the stage, either because they were drinking in the front and noticed the swelling crowd or because, according to some, Steve Leckie from the Viletones tipped them off to guarantee his band the night’s final set.

In
The Last Pogo
, you can see the frustrated back and forth between Teenage Head bassist Steve Mahon and the bemused cops, as they struggle to be heard over the roar of a heavily lubricated, massively overcapacity crowd. Mahon keeps holding up a single finger, demanding that the band be allowed to play a single song. He looks pissed. The cop just looks amused.

Teenage Head launches into “Picture My Face,” and from the back of the Horseshoe, you can see the crowd beginning to dismantle the stage, then, the rest of the club. Eventually, the band can barely be heard over the noise of the room, yelling, churning, fighting. People stand on tables, shaking the lights attached to the ceiling. When they finish and a voice comes over the PA to inform the crowd that the show is over, the night dissolves into utterly legendary chaos.

Gary Topp and Gary Cormier came to the Horseshoe Tavern, a country and western bar, from stints running the Roxy Theatre, New Yorker Theatre, and promoting concerts at various venues across the city. During their tenure at the Horseshoe, they helped to usher in a new era of cool on Queen Street, turning a culturally dead portion of the city into what is still one of the trendiest neighbourhoods in the entire country. Bringing in bands like the Police, the Troggs, and Suicide, the Garys’ time at the ’Shoe was, without a doubt, one of the most important times in Toronto’s musical evolution. But it started a little further east, in a second-run movie theatre filled with some lofty ideas and a lot of pot smoke.

“I had some friends who were older than me, and they bought this building,” says Gary Topp. “One was an architect, and they renovated the building. They turned the top two floors into lofts, and I showed movies on the ground floor in what used to be a butcher shop. We used the fridge as a projection booth. We would pack the place.” Eventually, Topp took the lessons he learned in his butcher shop screening room and transplanted them into the proper theatrical setting of the Roxy Theatre in the city’s east end. Showing films like
Pink Flamingos
and
Yellow Submarine
and charging 99 cents for a double feature, the theatre quickly became the unofficial headquarters for the city’s younger, freakier contingent. Topp began inviting bands to play before films, and hosted shows by Rough Trade and Little Feet before moving to the larger, more central New Yorker Theatre, which gave him a chance to explore music and film simultaneously; while watching Amos Poe’s experimental New York proto-punk documentary
The
Blank Generation
, Topp realized he had already screened every movie he wanted to see. Now it was time to bring every band he wanted to see to Toronto.

“It just made sense,” he says. “The New Yorker. New York bands.” Along with his new business partner, Gary Cormier, Topp tracked down the Ramones and invited them to play on the makeshift stage he had built in front of the screen. They came, and the rest is punk history; the Ramones set off a chain reaction in Toronto that led to one of the best punk scenes in North America. Soon, Topp and Cormier, known locally as the Garys, were invited to book at the failing Horseshoe Tavern on Queen Street. They succeeded in getting the old country and western bar back on its feet, and for their trouble, were asked to move on. The pair continued to book shows around the city, most notably at an old folk club at the corner of Church and Gerrard, formally known as Edgerton’s. The Garys rechristened it the Edge, and continued to bring cutting-edge bands to Toronto, while giving new bands of all genres a chance to develop in front of a paying crowd.