PERFECT YOUTH: The Birth of Canadian Punk (28 page)

Mixing a handful of previously released songs with a brand new selection of high-octane anthems-in-waiting, the band continued to hone in on a blend of hardcore’s newfound thrash and the stark melodies of peers like the Pointed Sticks. Unlike D.O.A., whom the band was often compared to, the Subhumans crafted wide-open songs, leaving room for Graham’s distinct riffs and Imagawa’s inventive style of drumming. The band fit in with the burgeoning west coast hardcore movement, but still possessed the ability to craft slower, more nuanced songs like “Firing Squad,” a tune with more Replacements than Flipper in its DNA. If Keithley and co. were a hammer to the head, the Subhumans and
Incorrect Thoughts
were the the sonic equivalent of Trotsky’s icepick.

The album’s influence, despite legal complications that have kept it out of print for decades, is measurable, even if the band themselves don’t seem to feel strongly about it.

“All I remember is being satisfied with it,” says Goble. “It was just something we could use for promotions. I don’t think anybody thought there was magic to it or that we’d created a masterpiece.”

At the time of the album’s release, Hannah said in a radio interview, “I wouldn’t buy it.”

The band’s disaffection was real. It was what gave their songs bite, but also what began to hold them back. A live review in the
Edmonton Journal
praised their “short, loud, and frenetic” songs, focusing on their tight performance and overall musicality. At the same time, the reviewer calls Goble “dispirited” and, with retrospective irony, seems to doubt the Subhumans’ punk bona fides.
Journal
critic Alan Kellogg continues,“The supposed anger came off as silly, and you get the impression that the Subhumans’ mums sew the rips into the t-shirts in cozy little bungalows in Burnaby or North Van. I wonder if this rather comfortable nation will ever produce a convincing punk band. The form just seems, well, un-Canadian.”

A few months later, Goble himself would refer to the band as “lazy as shit” in an interview with the University of British Columbia student paper,
Ubyssey
. They toured, but as much out of necessity and practice as anything else.

“We did this one really long tour, six weeks, before Gerry quit for the first time,” says Goble. “There were a couple of stops, like New York, that were pretty interesting. Other than that, it’s just the fatigue and the grueling nature of travel, and that never appealed to certain members of the Subhumans. After more than two months on the road I’d get kind of weird. I don’t know how people do it for six months or a year.” So in 1981, both Hannah and Imagawa left the Subhumans.
Incorrect Thoughts
, despite its great legacy, wasn’t putting gas in the tank, and the Subhumans remained on the tip of hardcore’s iceberg, unable to grasp the huge, dedicated audience headed toward the genre in the mid-’80s.

While the Subhumans would go on to record
No Wishes, No Prayers
for SST Records in 1983, the fire in Goble’s belly was gone. Despite joining the ranks of bands like Black Flag, Minutemen, and Meat Puppets with
No Wishes
, the band was already broken up by the time of the album’s proper release. In essence, the Subhumans without Hannah were never really destined to be the Subhumans.

“I think he was kind of dissatisfied that punk was never more than entertainment,” says Goble. “It was when he discovered that there was no real radicalism taking place, then he had no interest. He wanted to be involved with people who were more serious.”

Clearly, Hannah found those people, becoming the only person in this book who has a CBC made-for-TV movie about himself.
The Squamish Five
, produced following the arrest and conviction of the members of Direct Action, features actor David McLeod as TV Hannah, a Billy Idol lookalike with a deeply cleft chin and a penchant for drinking and whining. The film’s portrayal of punk is simplistic and cartoonish, a vibrant and evolving culture distilled for a TV audience unfamiliar with the inner workings of punk, hardcore, and the radical left. While the Pointed Sticks’ moment in the on-camera sun came through the curious and compassionate eye of Dennis Hopper and his 1980 film,
Out of the Blue
, the Subhumans and Gerry Hannah were reduced to caricatures by director Paul Donovan, the guy who created
Lexx.

There’s a lot of yelling phrases like “Get out of here, Pig!” in
The Squamish Five
. Chainsaws are used to destroy microphone stands. Throughout, Hannah is portrayed unfairly as something of a dummy, never without a bottle of beer in his band or an excuse for opting out of the group’s more extreme actions, the most infamous of which was the bombing of the Litton Industries plant in Toronto.

On October 14, 1982, members of Direct Action detonated 550 kilograms worth of dynamite outside of the Litton building. They were protesting the construction of cruise missile guidance systems, an admittedly ethically deplorable line of “first strike” nuclear weaponry. A stolen GMC van was parked near the plant’s security building with the following warning:

Danger Explosives

Inside this van are 550 lbs. of commercial dynamite which will explode anytime from within 15 minutes to 25 minutes after the van was parked here. The dynamite will be set off by two completely separate detonating systems. Do not enter or move the van — it will explode. Phone the police immediately and have them block off Highway 27, Cityview Drive, Dixon Road and other roads surrounding the Litton plants and have the workers inside the plants moved to protected areas. Nearby hotels and factories should also be notified so that no one will be hurt by the blast. On top of this box is an authentic sample stick of the dynamite contained inside the van. This is to confirm that this is a real bomb.

The bomb went off earlier than planned, injuring police, security personal, and civilians on Highway 27.

Hannah never participated in any of Direct Action’s bombings. His involvement and arrest stemmed from the planned robbery of a Brink’s truck, along with his involvement in the procurement (thievery) of illegal explosives and automatic weapons while living with the group in Vancouver. According to the secret tapes used to bring down the group, Hannah was prepared to kill the guard of the Brink’s truck.

And here is where I apologize that Hannah’s voice isn’t here to defend himself. Our only interview for this book was brief, framed by the re-release of
Incorrect Thoughts
and my work at
Exclaim!
. Our conversation lasted no longer than 10 minutes. When I began piecing together this chapter in earnest, I started to reach out to the band again, who, outside of an active publicity cycle, were all less than eager to talk. Hannah in particular was impossible to track down without a publicist to direct us to each other. And then one day he called me.

“Hey, this is Gerry Hannah. Is Sam there?”

“Uh, yeah, this is Sam. How’s it going, Gerry?”

At this point, I am frantically signalling to my girlfriend that someone I’ve been trying to track down for over a year just called my cell phone.

Hannah is charming, which is no surprise. He knows I’ve been trying to get in touch, and he’s willing to talk. He just wants to get an idea of my project, and what I want to talk about. He says he is somewhat careful about who he speaks to, for obvious reasons. I tell him what I want to talk about — the Resurrection, Wimpy and the Bloated Cows,
Incorrect Thoughts
, his arrest. He agrees to an interview and asks me to call him back the following Monday to chat.

I never hear from Gerry Hannah again.

The Subhumans reunited in 2005, releasing their first album of new material since the ’80s,
New Dark Age Parade
. In 2006, Alternative Tentacles compiled the band’s out-of-print singles and EPs as
Death Was Too Kind
. And when legal trouble with their former label prevented the proper reissuing of
Incorrect Thoughts
, the band re-recorded the album as
Same Thoughts, Different Day
in 2010. When I sit down with Graham, Goble, and Hannah in the summer of 2010, they’re excited about the future.

“We’re always working on new things,” says Goble. “We take it one day a time.”

When I talk to Hannah in early 2011, the only thing he tells me is that he’s quit the band, again.

“As time goes on, you can’t constantly be saying, ‘Fuck everything,’ because you’re just not going to live very long. You can’t function in society. Unless you actually want to get into guerilla warfare or something like that. Or else go to jail.” — Gerry Hannah, March 28, 1980

Frankie Venom [© Don Pyle]

May 19, 1978, 10:30 p.m. MST

Paul Kobak is halfway to Vancouver. Crammed into the backseat of his car are hundreds of copies of the first Teenage Head single, “Picture My Face.” Starting in his hometown of Hamilton, Kobak, the band’s manager, has taken it upon himself to hand-deliver records to every radio station west of Steeltown. The end goal is CFOX in Vancouver, where the music director is owed a few hundred dollars by Jack Morrow, another member of the band’s management team. Morrow gave Kobak a handful of cash before the manager lit out for the west coast, and when he returns from his solo promotional voyage, CFOX will, as planned, become the first station in Canada to chart Teenage Head. The other stations visited on Kobak’s cross-country delivery spree will quickly follow suit. Teenage Head has started their slow, hard-won crawl toward national ubiquity.

Teenage Head is the greatest Canadian rock and roll band. That they crawled out of the muddy waters of punk and ultimately never achieved the kind of international recognition that anyone who heard them at their peak knew they were capable of doesn’t diminish the fact that Frankie Venom was a brilliant frontman. Gord Lewis’ guitar style is as inspirational to a generation of Canadian rippers as Johnny Ramone’s. Steve Mahon is one of the most underrated bassists of the last three decades, and Nick Stipanitz held down the band’s rhythm section with as much flair and speed as any ex-Ramones drummer ever did. Teenage Head was the hardest working Canadian band of the era, and somewhere in the ether, there is a parallel universe where songs like “Picture My Face” and “Let’s Shake” play during the NBA Finals, and your uncle can’t remember if he lost his virginity to “Takin’ Care of Business” or “Teenage Beer Drinkin’ Party.”

The members of Teenage Head are real-life rock soldiers. They formed in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1975. They drew from the same set of proto-punk influences as the Ramones. They started to play short, atavistic rock and roll in 1976, before they ever heard the word “punk” or a note played by the Sex Pistols. And when punk sound and fashion hit big a year later, they didn’t turn their backs on their own musical legacy by cutting their hair and donning leather jackets. They maintained long, flowing locks and blue jeans long after punk tastemakers had declared both to be crimes against the scene, never compromising their individuality in the interest of chasing passing fads and trends. Like the Ramones, Teenage Head created their own world and invited listeners inside of it, and in doing so, became the high water mark that the next generation of Canadian punks sought to emulate. That they released an album with Marky Ramone in 2008 is only appropriate, cementing the spiritual partnership that existed between the two bands. The passing of Frankie Venom, only 51 years old, in October of that same year was one of the most gutting losses to occur during the completion of this book. Frankie was an icon, and his memory looms large over not just this chapter, but any discussion of the legacy of Canadian punk, coast to coast.

There are multiple reasons why Teenage Head never achieved the kind of gargantuan success many expected. There was bad management, crooked record labels, a car crash, and an untimely death. There was a riot — and in a book full of riots, it’s safe to say that Teenage Head’s was the most spectacular and genuinely riotous. There was a powerful first single followed by a sonically limp debut record. There was the sometimes-stifling city of Hamilton and the often-impotent Canadian music industry, the excesses of youth and success, and the expectations of the first rush of local fame. It wasn’t just one thing that went wrong somewhere between the wrestling mat at Westdale Secondary School, where Lewis and Venom (nee Kerr) first met in the ninth grade, and the stage at Ontario Place, where fans leapt into Lake Ontario to try to get closer to the band and later rioted all down Lake Shore Boulevard. It was a hundred things.

Beyond the cautionary tales is something much more powerful — simple, timeless songs, and the unstoppably energetic live performances that propelled Teenage Head to national headlining status by the end of the ’70s. They’re sometimes called the “Canadian Ramones,” a description that fits well enough, but seems to imply that the Ramones influenced Teenage Head. In fact, it was the other way around.

“Peter Case from the Nerves told me when they were opening up for the Ramones on the
Rocket to Russia
tour, all they listened to was the first Teenage Head album after every gig,” says Chris Houston, former bassist for fellow Hamiltonians the Forgotten Rebels. “Johnny left it somewhere in the bar, and he freaked out and kept yelling, ‘I want some decent music to listen to when I’ve got a long drive! Where’s that Teenage Head?’”

Gord Lewis and Frankie Kerr met in gym class at Westdale Secondary School in grade nine. Paired up for wrestling due to their small size (Lewis: “My first thought was that I would much rather be doing these moves with a girl”), it was a suitably violent introduction to a friendship that would be marked by battles of one kind or another.

“Phys ed was horrible. You had to do the stupidest things,” says Lewis, recounting his first meeting with Frankie from the stage of a memorial show in Hamilton, three years after his friend’s passing. “One of the stupidest things you had to do was wrestling. I didn’t know Frank, he didn’t know me, but we were paired up. We were taught all these horrible, horrible moves, grabbing guys’ crotches and putting your head between guys’ legs. It was Frank’s idea to just make sure we faked the routine. We planned it out, choreographed the whole thing so we could do the least-gross moves and end in a tie and pass. It was the first time he had it all planned out. That was my first taste of the genius of Frank. Getting through wrestling.”

Both had a growing interest in the new sounds out of Michigan and New York, although Frankie leaned more toward the classic sounds of Eddie Cochran and the glammed-out spectacle of Alice Cooper, while photos of the Stooges, cut from the pages of
Creem
,
were tacked up inside Lewis’ locker. The magazine had done more for the boys than provide academic wallpaper — for a period of time, subscribers to the magazine received a free copy of the Flamin’ Groovies’ 1971 album,
Teenage Head
. Even as a 14-year-old kid, Gord Lewis knew it was, obviously, the coolest band name ever.

Lewis made his first feeble steps toward becoming a Canuck guitar legend as a bassist, jamming with another friend from school, Nick Stipanitz, on drums. Lewis smartly switched to guitar following their first session, looping in another burgeoning high school hesher, Steve Mahon, to play bass. Left-handed, Mahon spent his early attempts playing the instrument upside down.

Stipanitz left the new band for reasons lost to underage drinking and time, and Lewis looked to his wrestling partner to take over behind the kit. Even though the lineup only lasted long enough to learn a few Hawkwind and Mott the Hoople covers, they still managed to play a single show at the Hillview Street Dance, a Scottish festival on Kerr’s street. But it wasn’t long before Kerr had broken his wrist in some poorly executed teenage percussion disaster, and Stipanitz rejoined. Without a singer, the band forced Kerr to the front, where he stayed.

Teenage Head with Frankie Venom on vocals debuted in 1975 at a Westdale Secondary School coffeehouse held in the school’s lunchroom, covering, naturally, the Stooges and Alice Cooper. Lewis then started to write original songs, including “Tearin’ Me Apart” and “Picture My Face,” and the band immediately abandoned their covers in favour of developing their own material.

“Frank was a real pain in the ass to write with,” says Lewis. “He was very belligerent. But he had this amazing way with words. He had a way of working words into songs that you would never expect. I could tell right away that this guy was a poet.” On the strength of the band’s new compositions, it didn’t take long for the Head to find themselves a proper rock and roll manager in Paul Kobak, a record store owner known to local musicians as “Cash Kobak” for his generously philanthropic style.

Paul Kobak kind of gave everything he had to rock and roll. And rock and roll wasn’t really nice to him in return. I meet him on a frigid Sunday in March, making the drive out to Hamilton in an old, heat-less van with holes in the undercarriage. Kobak and I spend most of the evening standing in the driveway of his basement apartment since he isn’t allowed to smoke inside, checking out the thousands of records currently sitting in storage in his garage, and absolutely freezing to death. Kobak ran the best record store in Hamilton until the ’80s, spending the ’90s and early ’00s running a similar operation in St. Catherines. He managed Teenage Head until they were stolen from under him. He worked hard his entire life in the service of the music he believed in. And now I’m here talking about the Head, a band we both agree should have made it to rock and roll superstardom. There are a lot of events that have led us to here, but standing around, freezing cold in this garage leaves me feeling like someone — Teenage Head, Kobak, the whole Hamilton crew — had the carpet pulled out from under them sometime in the ’80s and got absolutely ripped off.

“I got out of jail in ’73 and started working at my friend’s record store in Oshawa,” he says. “Two years later, I decided to open up a store in Hamilton, here at King and James. That’s where I met people. That’s where I met Teenage Head.” Star Records was the epicentre of Hamilton’s new music scene. Its walls were lined with proto-punk posters, its shelves filled with the latest singles from London, New York, and Detroit. Behind the counter, Kobak held court, ushering in a new Steeltown musical era.

“Anybody who came from Hamilton during that time would have to tell you that Star Records was just immensely, immensely important,” says Greg Dick, frontman for the Dream Dates, current vocalist for the Ugly, and owner of one of the largest record collections I’ve ever seen in my life. Dominating a full room in his Toronto home, Dick’s exhaustive archive of albums and singles, alongside his definitive interviews with bands like Teenage Head and the Viletones for the CIUT program
Equalizing Distort
(reprinted by
Maximumrocknroll
), give his statements an authoritative edge. Which is to say Star Records was the beginning of everything cool that followed in Hamilton — seriously.

“When you run a record store, you learn about everything. You can listen to anything you want,” says Kobak. “The store was doing well. I felt like it was a window into doing all kinds of things, to be a record company, open a recording studio, be a promoter.” Teenage Head seemed like the key — they were becoming fast friends with Kobak through their daily trips to Star, they had their own developing sound, and they were committed to their distinct visual aesthetic.

“I mean, the first Dolls record? That’s what Teenage Head looked like in the hallways of Westdale,” laughs Chris Houston.

“I’d finally talked my parents into getting my hair just a little bit past my ears and shoulders,” says Greg Dick. “As soon as punk came out, you had to cut your hair short. I thought, ‘Man, I just fucking got to grow my hair long.’ I always admired Teenage Head for keeping that look. They just didn’t care.” With their flowing locks intact, the band settled into a management relationship with Kobak, and throughout 1976, they played around their hometown, primarily in halls, high schools, and youth detention centres — although they did land a spot opening for Max Webster. It helped that the band’s sound seemed to fall somewhere between punk and ’50s rock, an unfiltered and genuinely youthful interpretation of the music its members had first fallen in love with mixed with their trend-setting original sound. It was the same kind of energy that was leading the Ramones, nine hours southeast, down the same path of loud, perfectly atavistic pop. And like Queens, Hamilton possessed its own history and culture, distinct from the big city just down the road. A working-class town dominated by the steel mills and the appropriately heavy music that follows after a long day spent punching the clock, Hamilton is the birthplace of pioneering Canadian bluesman King Biscuit Boy and the adoptive hometown of Ronnie Hawkins.

“I think it gave us a leg up on the Toronto bands, coming from that Hamilton rock tradition,” says Chris Houston. “Talking to Gord, everyone was aware of those guys. They hated our music, but they were legends, so you wanted to be as good as those people.”

Having spent the year honing their songs, their show, and their hair, Teenage Head knew it was time to get into the studio and put some of their original material to tape. So they tracked a five-song demo, managed to get themselves into rotation on Toronto’s CFNY, and took their show down the highway to Toronto, where punk was beginning to take hold in a major way. From their first note onstage at the Colonial Tavern on Yonge Street, it was clear that they were going to give Toronto’s biggest names (and egos) some serious competition. The fifth issue of Toronto’s first fanzine, the seminal
Pig Paper
, begins an article about the band with the simple statement that they “continue to outrun the competition on the Toronto scene,” going on to discuss how their sets were being filmed by CFTO one night and CTV the next.

“Teenage Head raised the bar incredibly high for all their Toronto contemporaries,” says Gary Pig Gold, founder of the
Pig Paper.
“Either your own band started practising every day, like they used to, or eventually you just gave up all together.” Almost immediately, the Head were at the forefront of the Toronto scene, creating a powerful southern Ontario trinity of forceful and original punk with the Diodes and Viletones. Far from the only kids on the block, they were the ones with the best songs, the best live show, and the most unimpeachable work ethic.

Ralph Alfonso, manager of the Diodes and their DIY punk clubhouse, the Crash ’n’ Burn, sums up the scene succinctly: “The Diodes were the brains, the Viletones were the heart, and Teenage Head was the physicality of it.”

Leading into the summer of ’77, there were major changes afoot in the Head camp. Kobak’s role as the band’s manager, which had primarily consisted of providing funding from the Star Records cash register and driving the band to and from Toronto, was threatened by the arrival of Jack Morrow and John Brower, promoters who had helped bring acts like the Doors and John Lennon to Toronto and were now looking to hop on the “next big thing” in music — punk, and, specifically, Teenage Head. A handshake deal with Kobak turned into a lengthy legal document between all three, and soon the band’s managerial hydra was working to secure them a proper major label record deal.