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Misfits & Miscreants: An Oral History of Canadian Punk Rock

Misfits & Miscreants: An Oral History of Canadian Punk Rock

Chris Walter

 

Verlag BookBaby, 2018

ISBN 9781927053324 , 200 Seiten

Format ePUB

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10,70 EUR


 

Chapter Two
They Looked Like Dynamite Right to the End
Chris Arnett
I went to high school with a guy Malcolm Hasman in West Vancouver. We wore black leather jackets and hated the music on the radio. We were really into Bowie and Lou Reed, but West Vancouver was very white, straight, and conservative, so we got called faggots and all that stuff. When I bought the Velvet Undergrounds’ White Light White Heat, I was like, holy fuck! You know? That was our musical background, and we wanted to form a band that would be true to that sound. We were tired of groups with tons of fancy equipment, and we didn’t like professional musicians. It all seemed so removed from real rock n’ roll.
Remember that you couldn’t learn about bands on a whim by checking them out online back then. There was no internet, so we’d drive down to Seattle to get albums by John Cale and the like because there were so few good stores in Vancouver— which had huge stores like Kelly’s with tons of albums, but they were all crap. You might find the odd Velvet Underground album in the discount bin if you were lucky. I think punk started as a result of critical mass in cities all over, where certain key bands just got into that sound. It was like punk had to happen because everything else sucked.
We wanted a stripped-down sort of band, and we kind of wanted to model ourselves after a ’50s revival act that was touring around called Teen Angel and the Rockin’ Rebels. They had one guitarist and one bass player, and that was what we wanted, so I put up an ad at Long & McQuade at Fourth and Burrard. Our ad was like “guitarist looking for players into the New York sound,” or something like that. We thought musicians would be quick to pick up on it, but we got no calls at all.
This chick finally phoned me up. Kat Hammond was a very critical person—I don’t know what ever happened to her—but she was very instrumental in getting everything going at the beginning. I got into bands to meet chicks, and Kat had a sultry voice on the phone and said she wanted to get a band together, but when she came over, I saw that she was kind of lanky and not really my type. But Kat knew about the punk thing going on in New York. She was also into fashion and was associated with Pumps Gallery, which is where all the artsy people hung out. We yakked all night and she wanted to stay over, but I wasn’t attracted to her that way. Our attitude was the same though, and we hated the same music—we were all, fuck this and fuck that. But we didn’t get a band together.
Through Kat, I started hanging at Pumps Gallery and meeting all these interesting people from East Van—guys like Ross Drummond and his friends, who are all dead now. Then I met Simon Werner through some losers I was jamming with in North Van, and Simon was important because he was the link between us and Stone Crazy. Joe Shithead is the only one of those guys who is still alive.
I started hanging out with Simon and two other guys, who had a house in North Van with a rehearsal space. Maybe the guys weren’t into my abrasive barre chord sound, because they decided to get another guitar player. I showed up one day, and they had this funny-looking religious dude from Alberta with flared pants and curly hair. We started playing, and he was very suspicious of my style. These guys were pros and wanted to be in a cover band and become rock stars or whatever. But they weren’t what I had in mind, so it ended fairly quickly.
But Simon liked my style of playing, and we hit it off because we both smoked weed and listened to the same kind of music. That’s when Simon introduced me to Dimwit, Joey Shithead, and Wimpy Roy from Stone Crazy, who were all living in a house in Coquitlam and being taken care of by Joe’s girlfriend Cathy. Simon and I went out there to meet them, but they were typical ’70s guys with long hair and those Mac shirts everybody wore back then. They were really into Sabbath and the Steve Miller Band and stuff, and I knew just by looking at them that this wasn’t going to be my band. Joe was this big kind of quiet guy, who Simon likened to a Lab pup. He was quiet but watched everything that was going on, and the other guys were super friendly.
We jammed and smoked some pot and drank beer a bunch of times. I remember driving out there in early ’77 with broken windows on our car because Joey had smashed them with his pickup truck. We had plastic over the windows, but that wasn’t working very well. We’d been rehearsing a few days earlier, when Joey went to get more beer after we ran out. He climbed into his old green pickup truck and he was like, vroom vrooom! Then he backed up straight into Simon’s Valiant. He cracked the window, but then he went ahead a bit and backed up and hit the car again. Joey eventually got the beer, but Simon’s Valiant was a bit fucked-up after that. And it was fucking cold.
Joey Shithead
I think I backed into Simon’s Valiant two or three times. He took it in a very good-hearted way, whereas some people might not have. I just blindly got into my truck and threw it into reverse, but Simon was parked square behind me, and I ended up T-boning the driver’s or passenger-side window. At first, I thought I’d hit a rock, so I reversed and hit it again. Then I knew it wasn’t a rock. People walking past the house used to throw burger wrappers and whatnot into the back of my truck because we were close to three fast-food joints, so that was always nice.
We did a show at the Port Moody Legion with Neil McCray, who was a high school buddy of mine I haven’t seen for forty years because I don’t think he likes punk rock very much. I don’t remember Chris Arnett playing with us, but I’m not saying he didn’t. Somehow, we used a sports team to get a liquor licence, so we sold tons of beer. Not that we were any good, but the place was packed. That show worked out well for us, but we still couldn’t get any traction with the local promoters and booking agents. They didn’t want anything to do with us.
Stone Crazy got a gig with the Whitefoot Agency, which was a second- or third-rung booking agency in Vancouver. We couldn’t get on with Bruce Allen and Sam Feldman, who were the gold standard of bookings at the time, and they actually paid you a bunch of money if you got on with them. Those guys controlled the circuit, but they suppressed punk because they were making so much money with commercial rock in all the bars. Not that Stone Crazy was punk, but that came later the same year.
The Whitefoot Agency got us a four-night gig at the Grasslands Motor Inn just south of Merritt. We were supposed to get $125 a night, plus hotel rooms and half off food or whatever, right? It sounded good, so we rented a van and went up there, but we got a horrible reception the first night. People were yelling and threatening to dismember us—that sort of thing. We got booed off the stage at the end of our first set, so I went up to the mic and said, “The problem with you guys is that you don’t have the balls to accept this kind of music!” Some loser in the crowd yelled back at me, “I’ll have your balls for bookends, buddy!” The rest of the guys totally freaked on me, so I had to go back on the mic and make a half-hearted apology to preserve our lives. The crowd did not like us at all.
We started into our next set, but two huge guys came up while we were playing and said we were too loud. They told us to turn it down or they’d tear it down, and I guess I was being snarky because I told them we wouldn’t turn it down unless they phoned the management. They made some gestures like they were going to get me later, which seemed entirely possible. The guy who ran the place was also named Joe, but he was a real prick, so we called him Big Fat Joe From the Grasslands. He came up to us after the show and said, “Tell you what, guys, you’re fired.” We told him he couldn’t fire us because we had a contract, but he said he had a baseball tournament coming in that weekend and that they would kill us. Then he wouldn’t give us any of the money, and after saying we could have the rooms and food for free, he told us to get the fuck out. Of course I was calling him names and threatening him in my usual manner, but that didn’t help any. We left town, and we weren’t very happy either.
We got to Merritt and Wimpy said, “Y’know, this rock ‘n’ roll isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.” We’d done one high school show, a hall gig, and had been fired from our first cabaret gig. When I thought about it later, we hadn’t really given rock ‘n’ roll much of a chance. Everybody gets fired and that sort of thing, but we gave up easy. Then Dimwit said, “Well, why don’t we start a punk rock band?”
Chris Arnett
I did a gig with Stone Crazy at the Port Moody Legion in early 1977. I had my short hair and leather jacket, and there I was, onstage with all these longhaired guys, which was weird but fun anyway. Joe and I traded off, with me singing some of the songs and him singing others. People liked the show, and we even made money...