The Last Gang in Town

by Chapman, Aaron;

  The Out to Lunch Bunch (c. 1970s) helped with security at the Rock and Roll Revival concert.

  PHOTO: Courtesy of Jesse Longbear

  While chaos began to erupt outside the Coliseum, inside the Rolling Stones kicked their set off with “Brown Sugar.” The concert went on to feature what would be the first live performance of Exile on Main Street songs like “Turnbling Dice,” a Rolling Stones classic, and was also apparently the only time “Ventilator Blues” has been performed live by the band.

  Mick Jagger, wearing a white jumpsuit and scarf, clapped and danced back and forth across the stage. Much of the press reviews focused on him alone. The Vancouver Sun reviewer noted that “Jagger is a bolt of lightning on stage, lightning that never dies, his presence is overwhelming, carrying the people away into fantasies which went unexpressed at the concert but still no doubt laying there in the mind, exciting them to visions the very opposite of psychedelic,” and claimed that the performance “shook the foundations of Rock music.”42

  While bootlegs of the concert reveal that it wasn’t the tightest performance by the band, few who were there cared, especially those on the floor of the arena who could watch the Stones up close in the Coliseum, then a new building, which opened only four years earlier in 1968.

  “I remember thinking the show was great,” says John Armstrong. “Stevie Wonder’s set was probably really good, but all I wanted to see was the Stones. Had Jesus walked out on stage playing a kazoo, I wouldn’t have noticed or cared. I just remember how fucking cool both Mick and Keith [Richards] looked on stage.”

  While the Stones launched into “Rocks Off” inside the Coliseum, the thumping rhythm could be heard outside, where Bradley Bennett—now locked out of the concert—found himself in a group of fifty or sixty people charging the doors in an attempt to break in. “I was running and everybody was yelling and screaming and charging against one of the doors, when all of a sudden some guy arm-barred me in the head and loosened up my teeth. I was flat on the ground seeing stars when somebody picked me up, walked me to the street corner, told me I was in rough shape and ought to head home.”

  As Mick Jagger strutted like a rooster on the Coliseum stage, and Keith Richards and the band rocked behind him, some Clark Parkers were doing their best to storm the ramparts. Mac Ryan had been in another crowd running the gates and managed to break through successfully. “We went charging in, and a few of us made it through the doors. But what those guys from The Grape hadn’t told us the night we met with them was that the Out to Lunch Bunch would be there that night.”

  A self-styled bunch of cowboy roustabouts from Kitsilano on the west side, the Out to Lunch Bunch had been a kind of gang unto themselves. They were comprised of a loose affiliation of would-be ranchers, and men who had worked as horse wranglers on local film and TV productions (such as Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller, shot in Greater Vancouver two years earlier). Some of them picked up additional work as security guards for local concerts; the two-fisted crew could be depended on for their size and strength. Despite a strong appetite for marijuana and some alleged dealing of it, they disdained hippie fashions and looked more like they’d just come from an East Texas ranch than a Stanley Park Be-In. “They were huge guys. They just overwhelmed us and gave us a bit of a beating,” Ryan says of the fight that broke out. “We started to run out of there and then the cops came in behind us with the riot squad, so we got caught between the Out to Lunch Bunch and the police. All hell broke loose,” he recalls, shaking his head.

  At the height of the chaos in 1972, the riot squad pushed the crowd back to Renfrew Street,

  PHOTO: Dan Scott, Vancouver Sun

  As Ryan found himself between the cops and a hard place, out on the plaza, Mouse Williamson, who had been drinking most of the day, now found himself in the middle of the crowd when the riot began. “That’s when people stared throwing the Molotov cocktails. It wasn’t any of the Clark Park guys, and I don’t know if those people were connected to The Grape. Just then, a cop came up on horseback, grabbed me by the hair, and lifted me off the ground.” Williamson broke free, but as he did, the bottle of wine he’d been drinking broke, cutting his fingers. Blood dripping from his hand, he saw a friend being chased by two older men. “He ran by yelling, ‘Hey, Mouse! You gotta help me—these guys are going to kill me.’ So when the two guys got close, I clotheslined the first one, hitting him so hard he smashed his cheek on the ground and was out cold, and I jumped on the second guy and had him on the ground ready to punch him in the face. In my stupor, I thought something wasn’t right and a second later, the riot cops just jumped on me like crazy and pounded on me.”

  Rioting East Enders initially threw rocks and pieces of fencing at police before they began to toss Molotov cocktails.

  PHOTO: Dan Scott, Vancouver Sun

  Up on Renfrew Street where Bradley Bennett was shaking off the blow to his head, he watched as the riot got more involved. “There were people starting to pull the rearview mirrors off cars parked along the street, and throw[ing] rocks and bottles. It was getting wild.”

  As the night set in, reinforcements from surrounding RCMP detachments in North Vancouver and Burnaby were dispatched. The sounds of screams, swearing, glass breaking, and police sirens echoed across the plaza. Rioters had filled empty wine bottles with gasoline at the station on the corner of Renfrew and Hastings and were now hurling Molotov cocktails at police vehicles. When one of the gasoline bombs hit a passing RCMP patrol car, it sent a sheet of flames high above the vehicle, while another exploded on the street. At one point, Bennett saw a young woman carrying a baby walk untouched through the no-man’s land between police and the rioters and enter the Coliseum. Police feared the situation would worsen if the riot was not quelled by the end of the concert, when 17,000 fans would leave the Coliseum and potentially enter the fray. One officer told reporters on scene, “If we don’t [clear the plaza], we are all dead.”43

  At eleven p.m., Constable Grant MacDonald was still standing firm on the riot squad line. “One thing I remember is how deafening the noise was with all the rioters yelling,” he says. “At one point, rocks hit me in the helmet and the thigh at the same time, and I thought I’d been shot. It was nasty.” The patience of the squad continued to be tested as police supervisors held them back, only temporarily moving the line forward to push rioters back to Renfrew Street.

  Constable Bill Harkema was standing next to Grant MacDonald on the line. “I remember it all too well,” he says of that night forty-four years later. “People were throwing rocks and bottles at us from Renfrew. I was standing next to big Grant, who is six-foot-four. People see him and maybe don’t want to hit him, so they aim for the shorter guy next to him, and that was me,” Harkema laughs. He had been on duty the night of the Gastown riot and was also on shift during the Sea Festival troubles. “We’d been taught crowd control, but each time we went out to deal with those riots, it wasn’t a dedicated unit,” he says. The Vancouver riot squad then was a pick-up squad of whoever happened to be on duty that night. There was no special riot squad uniform, so when a constable arrived on scene, he was directed to grab one of the general-issue white helmets (which didn’t always fit) and a night stick. Squad members even wore their ties during riots—though at least the ties were clip-ons, which, in an altercation, would just break away.

  Harkema concurs with MacDonald that the squad was held back for a prolonged period, as superiors “kept telling us to stand back and not do anything. We’d been held back as the rocks and bottles were being thrown at us, seeing some of our guys getting hurt, when they finally told us to charge—we’d had enough—and we charged like the charge of the goddamn Light Brigade.” Grant MacDonald recalls the moment: “Finally, shortly after eleven p.m., our superintendent Ted Oliver gave the order and yelled, ‘Get them!’ and let us go.” The riot squad ran into the crowd while VPD mounted police charged on horseback onto Renfrew Street.

  Two East Enders arrested in the riot.

 
; PHOTO: Dan Scott, Vancouver Sun

  In addition to rocks, rioters had begun to throw flattened tin cans at the police, which bounced like skipping stones. Mac Ryan saw rioters overturn cars as police advanced on Renfrew Street. Columnist Allan Fotheringham, writing for the Vancouver Sun, noted, “As [police] approached, bottles, boulders, and sections of two-by-four torn from a fence pick them off. A constable staggers back, his face visor shattered by a rock.”44

  Ryan saw the constable get knocked down. Police charged and turned, racing in his direction. Ryan ran across Renfrew Street and up the front steps of a house, hoping the front door was unlocked—it was. As a mounted horseman charged onto the lawn with other police behind him, “I burst right through the door and ran through the fucking house. There’s this poor family in their dining room, having their spaghetti dinner at the table, while the cops are right on my ass, and I run through the dining room and out the back door.” Ryan kept running and fled into the alleyway. With his lungs on fire and almost out of breath, he ran nearly all the way back to Clark Park. “All I wanted to do was get out of there. But I’ll never forget the look on that family’s faces, sitting at the dining room table with napkins tucked in their shirts as I ran through,” he says, laughing.

  Within fifteen minutes, with the riot squad fully deployed, the Rolling Stones riot was all over—and just in time, as the concert was scheduled to end at 11:30 p.m. The band finished their set with (appropriately enough, considering what had been going on outside) “Street-Fighting Man.” Thousands left the Coliseum and walked onto the plaza to head for home. Bewildered looks came over faces in the crowd as concert-goers picked their way over and around broken glass, torn shirts, ripped jackets, crushed eyeglasses, and overturned trash cans. As John Armstrong exited the arena, he wondered if the rapture had taken place outside while the concert was going on. “There was muttering in the crowd as we left that there had been a riot. I’d watched the Watts riots on TV, but I couldn’t believe that a riot had happened here.” Nick Jones was just as confused. “Nobody who was inside had any idea that something had taken place. Everybody was into the show, and nobody heard the police sirens outside.”

  The night wasn’t over for Armstrong or his cousin Dennis. On the way to the bus stop, they stopped to ask someone on the sidewalk about what had happened. “My cousin Dennis took his pouch of Drum tobacco out of his jacket and started to roll a cigarette when a cop jumped out of nowhere and said, ‘That’s it, you’re under arrest,’ and he was in handcuffs.” Armstrong and his cousin protested that it was only tobacco, but the officer wasn’t interested, and took Dennis off to jail, threatening to take Armstrong along with him if he kept protesting the wrongful arrest. “I had to go to a pay phone and call my mom. You can imagine how that went. ‘How was the show, dear?’ ‘Oh, good, Mom. Um, Dennis is in jail.’ She asked what he was in for and when I told her it was for smoking a cigarette, she didn’t believe it—‘I hardly think he’d be in jail for just smoking a cigarette.’ So my stepdad and mom had to drive in from White Rock. When we got down to the police station, Dennis was out on the sidewalk. When they impounded the evidence they realized what it was, kicked cousin Dennis out, and told him to get lost.”

  For both John Armstrong and Nick Jones in the crowd that night, the evening made for an early influential glimpse of the potential wild nocturnal pleasures of rock and roll. Before the decade was out, they would both go on to form their own legendary Vancouver bands, with Jones as the lead singer in the Pointed Sticks, and Armstrong the lead singer and guitarist in the Modernettes.

  Most of the Clark Parkers had escaped arrest, including Bradley Bennett, who made it back to Clark Park around the same time Mac Ryan arrived. Others who had participated in the riot returned worse for wear after being clubbed by the riot squad. Paul Melo had actually made it into the Coliseum, but was unable to find any friends after the show and was just as confused as the other concertgoers who left the Coliseum that night, so he also drifted back to the Park.

  “There was a moving and storage company on 12th Avenue,” Bennett says. “We used to take the moving blankets out of the back of a truck and sleep under the trees in the Park and just bring them back in the morning so we could use them again.” On what was left of a warm summer evening, the gang camped down for the night, trading war stories and eventually falling asleep under the stars in Clark Park.

  However, the night was hardly over for Mouse Williamson, who had been arrested for fighting at the concert. He was dragged into the Showmart building, where police processed his arrest. “They had their command centre with desks in there, and all the riot squad gear,” Williamson says. “They made me run a gauntlet of cops who hit or kicked me as I went down the row with handcuffs on me, and ran me into a desk where they made me sit for a while. Every time a cop asked what I was in for, the processing guy would yell, ‘Assaulting a police constable,’ and I’d get another backhand from the cop who’d asked. But I had no idea what they were talking about.”

  Williamson was transported to jail in a police wagon. The driver seemed to take the long route to the station, adding some sharp turns that earned Williamson a few more bruises as he was bounced around, handcuffed in the back of the wagon. “When I got to jail, I got kicked and punched a bit more. They put me in a thin cell nicknamed the Telephone Booth, where you couldn’t lie down, and could only sort of stand up inside. By this time, the alcohol I’d drunk had really hit me, and I was taunting the police. I was hoping they’d just knock me out so I could get a night’s rest. But I’d had enough of their shit already, and was yelling, ‘I’ll take you all on.’ I punched the police from my cell as they tried to grab me. Finally they got me and pounded the piss out of me again. I don’t remember much after that.”

  Williamson woke up the next morning hungover, sore, and unable to remember anything from the night before. Initially he’d thought he’d merely spent the night in the tank for being drunk in a public place. But as he tried to piece together the previous evening, a police officer escorted him out of his cell to handle some of his arrest paperwork. “I said to the guard, ‘Hey, I guess I fucked up last night?, ‘Yeah, you fucked up alright—you got arrested for assaulting a police officer.’ It turns out that the guy I’d clotheslined on the plaza was a plainclothes police officer.”

  Looking down at a sheet of paper at the desk, he saw a mug shot of a man with his hair matted and filled with blood. “‘Who’s that poor fucker?’ I asked, only to notice the name on the photo. It was me. I was so beat up, I didn’t recognize myself.”

  The Rolling Stones riot made front-page headlines. And as the concert was the kickoff date for the Stones’ North American tour, the riot made headline news across the continent. The Vancouver Sun quoted Police Inspector Frank Farley, a veteran of the Dieppe raid in World War II, who commented that he was disgusted at “Canadians fighting Canadians with Molotov cocktails.”45

  Media coverage was overwhelmingly favourable to the police. The level of chaos during the riot suggested it had been a wholly different kind of event than what had occurred in Gastown. The police department’s strategy of inviting the media to stand among them during the riot ensured not only accurate but also sympathetic coverage, as reporters and police alike dodged rocks and bottles thrown at them. The reporters experienced first-hand what it was like to be in the middle of such a melee.

  Mouse Williamson and other rioters were not the only ones in rough shape the next day. The riot left thirty-one police injured, thirteen badly enough that they were taken on stretchers to hospital. Constable Stan Ziola suffered a cracked sternum after being hit with a railroad spike. Bill Harkema was also one of the injured, with a bruised ankle caused by a rock thrown at him as he stood on the riot squad line. “My foot swelled up pretty badly the next day,” he says. “My ankle still smarts from it, but I’m seventy-three now, so it’s just another ache. But that was a bad evening.”

  A total of twenty-two people were arrested on charges including posses
sion of an explosive and a dangerous weapon—a four-foot-long logging chain with a hook on one end and a leather handle on the other. Another associate of the Clark Park gang, who’d been inside watching the show, was mistakenly arrested for throwing one of the Molotov cocktails outside and would spend six months in jail despite his innocence.

  Gary Blackburn—who’d spent the previous day locked up with an unused Rolling Stones ticket in his pocket—watched that night as many of those arrested showed up at the jail. He was released the next day. He’d not only missed the concert, but now had a charge of drug possession on his record. Later, his friend confessed to the police that the jacket was his, and Blackburn’s charge was dropped. “The whole thing was a waste of time, and I never got to see the Stones,” he says.

  In the days that followed, Vancouver police took the opportunity to both praise their own and point the finger at a new enemy. In an emotional statement at a press conference the following day, Police Superintendent Ted Oliver told reporters, “I’m proud of every one of those bastards I had working for me. They were cool, and they were very, very brave.” Oliver alarmed some citizens and city council members by using language that some considered more befitting a soldier on the battlefield. But Oliver’s emotion was forgivable, as most people admired the loyalty and respect in his statement. He further praised what he called “the professionalism of the riot squad,” especially considering the “shaded image” they had received in the wake of the Gastown riot. “There is no way, ever, that I want to have to ask my men to go into a situation like that again,” he said.