PERFECT YOUTH: The Birth of Canadian Punk (6 page)

Armstrong still plays, still writes, and still lives in Vancouver. Today, Bergmann lives a few hours outside of Calgary, ironically close to another rich deposit of oil. He never became Canada’s best-known punk poet, but amongst those who have been exposed to his caustic, brilliant work over the past decade, he is revered and respected. To call his catalogue “cult” would be to discredit its ambitious populist leanings; Bergmann is the voice of a generation that got lost somewhere in the haze of liquor, drugs, and bad business of the Canadian music industry. Gratefully, he’s still here, and still writing. And if you can track him down in the wilds of Alberta, he’ll talk your ear off about Russian military history, Ian Curtis, and what it meant to be truly fucked up and alive on the Trans-Canada Highway in 1977.

The Golden Calgarians [© Sue Smith]

April 15, 1979, 3:00 p.m. MST

It’s Easter Sunday, and the gym is full of orange-clad prisoners sitting politely through an opening set by teenage art-punk band the Hot Nasties. Punk rock being the latest international curiosity, dominating the newspapers and nightly news, the powers that be in the Calgary Correctional Centre — known locally as “Spy Hill Jail” — have seen fit to invite two of the city’s most popular bands to perform for the population. The Nasties are shaking nervous, but finish their set without incident. The Sturgeons, a more chaotically Pistols-influenced outfit, aren’t so lucky. Their set is immediately interrupted by the incessant need to dodge projectiles, painted Easter eggs brought by inmates’ girlfriends being hurled from an increasingly agitated audience. After two songs spent half-hid behind their amps, it becomes clear that the band will be lucky to finish their set, or leave alive. Frontman Al McDonald steps up to the mic.

“We don’t give a shit, at least we’re going home to have Easter dinner with our families!”

The room is immediately on its feet. The guards are immediately on the band. The Hot Nasties and the Sturgeons are rushed out of the prison before a riot erupts. They go home for Easter dinner.

Calgary’s first punk band wasn’t quite, as most famous firsts rarely are. Buick McKane formed in 1976, playing Kinks and David Bowie covers in skinny jeans and short haircuts. The band featured Brian Connelly and Reid Diamond, later of Toronto punks Crash Kills Five and pioneering instrumental jangle-rock kings Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet. They performed regularly for hostile audiences accustomed to generic bar rock and BTO covers, but the band was a stumbling first step into punk, long before anyone else in the oil-rich industrial centre of Alberta gave a shit about beating on brats or saving the Queen.

When Torontonian Don Pyle was preparing to make a teenage trip to Calgary to visit family, he was shown a fan letter, sent from Cowtown to local heroes and friends of Pyle, the Viletones. At the insistence of the band, who were amongst Toronto’s best-known and most-feared musical exports, he wrote the fan back, asking what kind of bands he could expect to see on his trip.

“He wrote back, ‘
Do not come here
. It’s terrible. I’m getting out as soon as I can,’” laughs Pyle. The letter-writer was Steve Koch, who would move to Toronto and eventually end up playing in his favourite band, the Viletones. His brother, Alex Koch, was the drummer in Buick McKane, which Steve described as “the closest thing we have to a punk band.” Pyle, obviously unable to insist on the cancellation of a family trip on the sole basis of a stunted music scene, went to Calgary anyway, where he was invited to watch the band rehearse.

“At this point, I was just consuming any music,” he says. “It was so weird, because it was extremely loud, and we were in this suburban house, and their mom would come down with snacks.” Not long after, the whole band moved to Toronto — minus their singer, who showed up for practice one day to be told by Mrs. Koch that his band was gone. The rest formed Crash Kills Five with Pyle in Toronto. Eventually, Alex Koch split, and the remaining three formed Shadowy Men. Their move across the country exists as one of the only threads connecting the west coast and east coast at that time, even if they left two years too early to see the birth of Calgary’s first honest punk scene. If they had stuck around, Koch might not have been so quick to dissuade Pyle from visiting his cowboy-loving home.

On December 21, 1977, Calgary had its first punk show. A high school disaster featuring a group of misfits winkingly called the Social Blemishes, the band wasn’t long for this world, but they seeded half of the Calgarian first wave. At the centre of the Catholic school chaos was a guy named Warren Kinsella, a punk twerp writing short, fast songs about Barney Rubble who would eventually move to Ottawa and play a critical role in the elections that would lead federal Liberal leader Jean Chrétien to three straight majorities. It was an inauspicious beginning to a lifetime career of headline-grabbing and shit-kicking, an important first lesson in getting people’s attention — and keeping it.

When Kinsella and I sit down in the boardroom of his downtown Toronto consulting office, he’s every bit the sharply dressed, espresso-providing professional that I pictured. But he also says “fuck” a lot, tells me about bringing D.O.A. to Calgary for the first time, and ends our conversation by lending me a record valued at a term of my university education. Kinsella, once a Social Blemish, grew into the kind of punk that the idealistic thread of the ’70s promised: one who actually makes a difference in the straight world and brings the ethos of punk into the decision-making of boardrooms and backrooms that most citizens never see. Whether working as a war room Liberal Party strategist or litigating for the rights of Northern Ontario farmers, Kinsella has taken the core values of punk rock and put a tie on over them. And for good measure, he still plays in a band, Shit from Hell.

After a stumbling beginning in the Social Blemishes, Kinsella formed the Hot Nasties, while a few of his peers started up the Sturgeons. Both bands came from Bishop Carol High School, a Catholic institution that became the ground zero for Calgary punk. A decidedly teenage phenomenon, Calgarian punk started in the school’s hallways and slowly spread into the community at large. With the first Social Blemishes lunch hour show behind them, the bands set about finding a place that would let them play a real concert. Inevitably, that meant renting a hall, which wasn’t easy at a time when media paranoia about punk was at its peak. So just like Edmonton three hours to the north, Calgary’s scene was built inside community spaces, not bars. Bands were too young and too shitty to show up on the radar of the regular rock and roll venues in the city, and questionably procured halls provided the perfect setting for bands like the Hot Nasties and the Sturgeons to develop a sound and, most impressively, an audience.

“We’d put on suits — and we had short hair when everyone else had long hair, so we looked like army cadets — and we’d go ask to rent the legion hall for our label ‘SB Records,’ which was Social Blemish Records,” he says. “They never asked and would always rent us these halls.”

“In the early days, it was like the chess club putting on a little shindig,” laughs the Sturgeons’ Mark Igglesden. “Rather than rebellion and anarchy, it probably looked more like a
Peanuts
special when those kids do that little dance.” Igglesden isn’t exaggerating — once, to deal with complaints of vandalism and property damage, a “Rock Against Glass Containers” was staged. But that crowd of little dancing kids began to expand rapidly.

“We would put on a show, and through word of mouth you’d get 500 people out,” says Kinsella. “But you’d have fights because of these people who were not there for the music.”

The music was paramount and, in retrospect, deserving of more attention and respect than it was likely receiving at that time. The Sturgeons were the scene’s token sloppy, snotty band, the influence of the Pistols apparent in their tuneful mid-tempo songs. The single 7" recording they left behind isn’t the most high-fidelity sample of late ’70s punk, but it showcases a band with some interesting tendencies, their sneer augmented by the use of xylophone on songs like “Forward Disorder.” The Hot Nasties, by comparison, left behind a treasure trove of Clash-inspired ragers, including the worldwide-anthem-in-another-life “Secret of Immortality,” along with two Canuck punk classics, “Invasion of the Tribbles!” and “Barney Rubble Is My Double.” The latter would even be covered several decades later by gonzo TV personality Nardwuar the Human Serviette and his band the Evaporators.

“We started doing shows, we were making money, so we decided we should record,” says Kinsella. Naturally, no studio engineers in Calgary had the same sonic reference points as the band, and it took some explaining to get the right sounds. “We went in and they said, ‘Whoa! What’s this?’ They didn’t understand how noisy we wanted it to be. But I think they got into it.” The result was one of the earliest Calgary scene recordings, the 7"
Invasion of the Tribbles
EP. The band looked to the exploding Vancouver punk scene for independent inspiration, finding a pressing plant through Quintessence Records, the home of big-name Vancouverites like the Modernettes and Pointed Sticks, and teaching themselves the basics of manufacturing and distribution as they went along. Operating under the SB Records banner, the Nasties record was a certified local hit. The logical next step was a two-song Sturgeons single.

“It never occurred to me that you could do that,” says Igglesden. “It’s possibly not the best record we could’ve made, but I’m certainly glad we did it. I mean, there’s ‘garage studios,’ and then there’s literally a garage with a reel-to-reel in it, and that’s basically what it was.” The Sturgeons and the Hot Nasties are both bands prized by collectors, part of the incessant fetishization of anything from punk’s first wave. “I can’t believe that some loon in Japan might want to pay more than 10 bucks for it,” he laughs. “But there you go.”

Calgary had an independent label, two records, an exploding base of new bands, and increasing media attention stemming from their self-booked word-of-mouth gigs, which were regularly drawing hundreds of kids. It only fits that a bar in the city would finally take a long look at the lineup of drunk teenagers outside of a Hot Nasties show and see dollar signs. That bar was the Calgarian. And it was fucking disgusting.

“The Calgarian Hotel was a dirty, dirty place for very down-and-out people,” say Lonnie James, drummer for the Cutz (whose “Nuclear Hall of Fame” marked the city’s first punk single) and, later, Halifax’s the Super Friendz. “It was a rough place with a cheap hotel on top where you would get scabies off the bed. There was this sign at the door that said, ‘Please leave your knives at the door.’ You’d think it was joke, but once I got to see all the knives they had. It was a lot.”

A biker bar that catered to the local King’s Crew Motorcycle Club and First Nations population, the Calgarian somehow eked out an existence in the lone seedy block of an otherwise upper-class town. Along with the knives, the table by the door had its share of biker colours, but the bar’s owners saw an opportunity to bring in a new clientele that wouldn’t mind passing through the occupied territory of drunks and hookers at the front to get to the performance area at the back. They decided to give punks free rein of an empty dance floor at the venue’s ass-end, where bands would drag in their PA for a week-long residency, a holdover from the days of pub-rock cover bands.

“My parents were horrified that their nice, middle-class kid was going to the Calgarian Hotel,” laughs Michael Nathanson, who played drums in SFY (So Fuck You). “You’d hear that people got stabbed there — sure enough, one of my friends was playing onstage one night when someone got stabbed in the back.”

By the summer of 1978, Kinsella and other local punks were putting on regular shows, and the bar landed on the radar of the Vancouver bands who had been itching to tour outside of the west coast corridor. They started coming to town on a regular basis, and as a result, the Calgarian played host to a grocery list of Canadian and American punks. Calgary was a regular stop for Hüsker Dü long before the
Zen Arcade
tour that took them to Toronto, and the city saw one of the rare early Black Flag tours with Dez Cadena singing. Along with west coast stalwarts like the Subhumans and D.O.A., they were uniformly horrified by the sheer filthiness of this rundown hotel bar.

“I moved from Edmonton to Calgary, and this friend of mine who had moved there a bit before me called and said, ‘Hey, I’m going to see D.O.A. They’re playing at this place called the Calgarian,’” says Peter Rowan, a record store owner who went on to manage bands like Sloan and Eric’s Trip. “He gave me the address, and I went down. It was on this dodgy fucking side street. I see this bar called the Calgarian, and I walk in. There are two pool tables, cowboys, Indians, drunk hookers, and I literally turned around and walked out going, ‘What the fuck was this?’ I walked across the street, looked at the address, looked at the place, and went back in. I put my head down, ran through the cowboys and Indians to this hole in the wall in the backroom where a punk band was playing. It was so insane. It was amazing. You had to run this gauntlet to get into the place where the bands were playing.”

Given the relatively young age of the Calgary punk scene, it was required that the bartenders regularly turn a blind eye to underage drinking. For the sake of the bottom line, they actually encouraged it.

“I was 16 when I went for the first time,” says Lori Hahnel, co-founder of the city’s first all-female punk band, the Virgins. “The waitress came up to us and said, ‘So, can I get you ladies a drink?’ And we’re thinking, ‘Oh, what should we order?’ And we’re kind of hemming and hawing and she says, ‘Well how ’bout some highballs?’ And I said, ‘Sure, we’ll have two of those.’ And she’s like, ‘What
kind
of highballs?’ She didn’t even ask for ID after that.”

With an influx of touring bands and a reliable
headquarters for affordable shows, it’s only natural that the Calgary scene exploded during this period. Bands popped up, played a show, disbanded, and rearranged, producing a burst of activity and creativity that, inevitably and eventually, led to the creation of some great new bands. But it also brought increased attendance and a rise in tensions between the punks and Calgarian regulars.

“I remember when we brought Black Flag to Calgary, a
bunch of bikers came, and it was a bad night,” says Kinsella. “In those days, to have dyed hair or an earring in Calgary was a revolutionary statement. You didn’t have it. There was a little guy named Joe Cool who had a leather jacket and dyed blond, spiked hair. But he was the fucking toughest guy on earth. The giveaway should have been the notches he had in his ear from when people ripped out his earrings in fights.

“So we brought Black Flag, and all these bikers showed up. Joe Cool used to walk around with a tiny lead pipe, the size of his fist. Some biker pushed him or called him a fag, and he smacked this guy on his temple so hard that his eye popped out. I called the cops on my own show.”