PERFECT YOUTH: The Birth of Canadian Punk

by Sam Sutherland

  “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.”

  No one was getting rich from these shows, but playing at the Calgarian had its advantages. On the first three nights of Hüsker Dü’s residency, SFY opened with Lonnie James filling in on drums. With no money to pay him, the bands offered up a quarter-ounce of black hash in return for his rhythmic services. The first two nights went fine, but on the last night, his indulgence started to creep up on him. He returned home from work to take a nap before the show, and woke up 10 minutes before the end of SFY’s scheduled set.

  “I got there, and they were just finishing the set with Hüsker Dü’s roadie as a drummer,” says James. “I ran in, and they all saw me and started laughing. They got me up to play the last song, and everyone had a good laugh. And I kicked over the drums.”

  Somewhat separate from the initial Social Blemish Records scene, the Verdix were one of Calgary’s best, a tightly wound unit that, thanks to their slightly older age and the advantage of a few years’ musical experience, burst out of the gate with a professional sound and a charismatic frontman, Mick Joy. Until the Calgarian, it seems like the two scenes barely interacted; the Verdix were older art-school kids, the Nasties pimple-faced teens, and both camps seem wary of each other, even today.

  “I didn’t like the Verdix, but we were civil,” says Kinsella. “We were suspicious of their motives.”

  “The Verdix were the top of the heap. The coolest punk band in town,” counters Lonnie James. “The Hot Nasties were more of a nerdy kind of a punk. They had a few good songs. No one really liked them at all.”

  Looking back, it’s pretty clear that a lot more than “no one” liked the Hot Nasties, but it highlights the inherent divisions within the scene. Many of the people I talk to simply attribute the division to geography and age; there was a scene in the north, and a scene in the south, and no one had a car to get from one side of town to the other.

  “The Verdix were different from the Calgary bands that had gone before, which tended to be pretty young, like 17-, 18-year-olds,” says Allen Baekeland, the former station manager of CJSW, the University of Calgary’s campus station. “They were a little bit older and they could play. So immediately the scene sort of coalesced around them.”

  The Verdix pop up in interviews with everyone from Art Bergmann to the Pointed Sticks’ Nick Jones, so their place somewhere in the upper echelon of Calgarian punk is clear. Their only single, “Media,” backed with “Lookin’ Around,” showcases a band that probably could have held their own against many of Vancouver’s finest. “Media” boasts a strong sense of dynamics, a basic concept lacking from many first-wave punk bands’ bag of sonic tricks. The song’s hushed, harmony-laden chorus jars against the slashing verse, while “Lookin’ Around” could be a long-lost Teenage Head demo. Mick Joy’s voice is expressive and unique, and his unfortunate passing is noted with palpable sadness by those in the scene who knew him well, including Bergmann, who counts him as a close friend.

  “That single was done on a shoestring budget, of course, in the cheapest studio in town we could find, in somebody’s basement,” says Rick Lee, who managed the Verdix and played in the Breeders with Mick’s wife, Virginia McKendry. “I remember at one point in the process, looking through the glass out at Mick, and I was almost getting a Frank Sinatra feel, an Elvis Presley feel. Mick had great charisma, and his stage presence was killer. He was one of the best, next to Art Bergmann.”

  “Calgary has some really interesting punk bands,” says Bergmann. “Mick was one of my best friends. Then he died a couple of years ago. I was really sad, man.”

  The Virgins formed, Warren Kinsella jokingly claims, as the “Hot Nasties fan club.”

  “I think that may be kind of a fantasy on his part,” laughs Hahnel. “We certainly liked them, but they weren’t the reason for us getting into that little branch of the punk scene.” While the Virgins never recorded, they were active participants in the scene, and as the first all-female band in the entire province of Alberta (the second was another Calgary outfit, the Downing Street Derelicts), they played a critical role in helping open up the macho, male-dominated world of live rock and roll. Not that it was easy.

  “There was a huge amount of sexism,” says Adele Wolfe, the band’s bassist. “Even in punk where anything goes. You’d think there would have been a bit of tolerance, but there was still a lot of really antiquated notions. We were a novelty. We didn’t have a lot of support, not a lot of bands wanted us to back them. If we made mistakes, the same kind of tolerance that was given to other bands wasn’t given to us. We had to try twice as hard to do half as much as another band.”

  Wolfe, despite her small stature, was not one to back down from the regular confrontations that went along with dressing punk, travelling to the Calgarian, and being a woman in 1980. She recounts numerous brawls, the worst of which involves her fighting another woman in a bathroom and shattering her hand on a mirror, leaving her with crippling arthritis as an adult. We both agree that at least it’s a cool story. And there’s more.

  “Me and a friend were walking to the C Train, which was our above-ground subway,” she says. “And these heads asked us if we wanted to buy drugs. And we said, ‘No, fuck off, rockers.’ So they said something about fighting, and I said, ‘Okay, let’s go.’ And we went to a back alley and they smashed a tire iron into my head. I had blood running out of my ears. I had a shattered nose, a broken cheek bone. My teeth were loose. They just kicked the crap out of me.”

  Much of the band’s career is chronicled in Hahnel’s 2008 novel, the wonderful Love Minus Zero. A fictionalized account of the Virgins’ experiences in Calgary at that time, the book portrays an exciting moment in the city’s history with the emphatic enthusiasm of a teenager discovering music for the first time, touching on the fights, the sense of community, and the vomit-inducing stage fright.

  “The parts where I’m actually talking about playing music are all true,” says Hahnel. “I mean, it’s all true in essence. But a lot of the incidents that I talk about didn’t actually happen, like we didn’t go to Tuktoyaktuk.” In the book, the fictional Virgins, dubbed Misclairol, travel to Tuktoyaktuk, an Inuvialuit hamlet in the Northwest Territories, on a year-long contract to provide entertainment at a local bar for oil workers. In the wake of the Iranian Revolution of 1979, a massive international energy shortage occurred, leading to a push for continental oil production. The Beaufort Sea became the site of tremendous oil and natural gas exploration, and the sleepy community of Tuktoyaktuk was suddenly overrun with workers, executives, and a few musicians. And the Virgins were almost some of them.

  “We were actually offered a contract to go up there for a year, and I’m so glad that we didn’t end up doing that,” says Hahnel. “I’m thinking, ‘Oh my god. Four girls under the age of 20 working in that kind of environment?’ It would have been horrible, you know?”

  Toward the end of punk’s first wave, the Golden Calgarians emerged and blew everyone’s mind. Featuring Jeff Hunter-Smith, kid brother of the singer from the Sandwiches, one of the city’s more prominent bands, they started life as the Remains. Performing Stranglers covers and shadowing Hunter-Smith’s big brother, they watched the Sandwiches write and perform their own songs and were galvanized to challenge themselves to move beyond punk covers. A few members and name changes later, the Golden Calgarians were born. Several years younger than the first crop of bands, their experiences indicate the degree to which punk had changed the Calgarian live music landscape, one that was allergic to original music only a few years earlier.

  “You couldn’t really get a gig with a bunch of cover tunes,” says Jeff Hunter-Smith. “With bands like the Hot Nasties and the Verdix, we were basically told, ‘If you want to play with us you’ve got to have originals.’ And once we wrote four, we wrote six, and we just never looked back.�
�� Interestingly, it was a holdover from the era of bar-rock that led to many Calgary bands developing such huge repertoires of original music. Take the Hot Nasties, who only released one official vinyl record, but have a cassette discography containing 18 songs. The Calgarian was still booking bands for week-long stints, expecting three full sets per night. Since cover songs were verboten, this standard meant bands were forced into a writing frenzy in order to secure a paying gig.

  The Golden Calgarians became the first punk band to record in a commercial studio, cranking out the “It’s Fun to be Alive” single soon after forming. They then hustled their way into a bigger studio and became one of the most infamous punk exports from the city when they hustled, once again, to get the single to campus radio across the country. The band’s sound was slower than that of many of their peers, like a prairie Replacements riffing on the Sex Pistols’ “Bodies.” They became the first Calgary punk band to tour, spending the ’80s driving across Canada, producing some great records, and carrying the torch for the first wave of Calgarian punk that had been snubbed out at home.

  By late 1980, the punk scene in Calgary, like in many cities across Canada, was changing. Hardcore and an increasing skinhead population moved in, displacing many of the more art-minded punks who had populated the first wave. The violence at the Calgarian had gotten out of control.

  “A woman I know picked a fight with one of the hookers outside,” says Lori Hahnel. “And it came into the bar. It was this huge melee — it was unbelievable. It was like a movie or something. So they stopped booking the punk acts after that.” Bands found a new home at the National Hotel, a marginally less seedy establishment that was equally enthusiastic about inviting the heavy-drinking punk masses. But the first set of bands had already begun to go the way of the buffalo. The Sturgeons broke up and reformed as the more aggressive Riot .303; the Virgins broke up, and Adele Wolfe moved to Edmonton to found Jr. Gone Wild with Mike McDonald; the Verdix imploded; and the Golden Calgarians hit the road and did their best to spread the Cowtown gospel. And the Hot Nasties provided a fitting final explosion to punctuate the end of an era by performing at Calgary’s biggest annual tourist attraction, the world famous Calgary Stampede.