“Leading up to the big show at the Stampede, I told the other guys I wanted to stop,” Kinsella says. “The fights, the fascism. They felt the same way. It was just that none of us knew how to tell each other.” At a huge outdoor show with the Sturgeons and Edmonton’s Rock and Roll Bitches, the band played in front of thousands of curious families and a few familiar faces. Invited by Kinsella, the local punk contingent stormed the stage, and a dozen cops swarmed the band and the crowd, trying to prevent what they saw as an inevitable riot unfolding at the 100-year-old rodeo. The riot never happened. The band finished their set, and then broke up.
“Never in my wildest dreams while this was happening would I have imagined that people would be interested in it 30 years later,” says Lori Hahnel. “Or that I would be talking to groups of people as part of a local history program.” Thanks to the success of Love Minus Zero Hahnel has been part of an initiative put together by the Calgary Public Library, giving presentations — complete with a detailed PowerPoint presentation — at local branches. “I always knew, even while we were performing, that I would have to write about it in some way or another. I didn’t know what form it was going to take, but I knew I was going to write about the experience. I didn’t ever think that it would command the sort of attention that it does.”
“They value their history there,” sums up Kinsella, now 3,400 kilometres from his hometown. “I go back and a kid will tell me he bought a Hot Nasties record for three hundred dollars on eBay. Fuck, if you write me, I’ll just send you one.”
FIRST RADIO BOMB
THE 222S, 364 ST. PAUL, AND MONTREAL’S PUNK PAST
The Electric Vomit [© Marcel van der Aa]
February 12, 1981, 4:30 p.m. EST
The gun is on the table. Recording for the latest 222s single has reached something of an impasse; the thick-necked men who brought a band of ratty teenagers from the south end of the city to the sleazy French suburb of Laval are at their wit’s end, and the band has been called to kitchen on the second floor of the home studio they have been holed up in for several days. No progress has been made on the planned recording of “Come to Me Cold,” and the men, each of whom belong to one of the city’s entrenched and powerful crime families, have had enough and decide to settle the creative power struggle that has stalled the sessions in the clearest way that they can. The 222s see the gun and get the message. All resistance to the creative ideas of their new management ceases immediately. Singer Chris Barry steps into the booth to record his vocals for “La poupée qui fait non,” a kitschy and unapologetically saccharine French pop song from the ’60s that the band is being forced to record as the A-side to its own song. Barry finishes his take, leaves the house, and never looks back.
More than many cities featured in this book, Montreal in the 1970s was an inhospitable punk landscape, especially when you consider its size and population. One of the biggest cultural centres in Canada, and today home to some of the most innovative (and popular) independent music in the world, the city was dominated by disco until the ’80s. Bands in Toronto may have been despised, but they could rely on a sensationalist press to give them coverage and a sales-hungry bar scene to give them a place to play; out west, the availability of community halls led to a strong DIY ethic and a healthy all-ages scene.
In a telling New Year’s Eve radio interview with Terry David Mulligan on The Great Canadian Gold Rush in 1977, Juan Rodriguez from the Montreal Gazette lambasts the international press circus over punk. Rodriguez, the paper’s entertainment gatekeeper, is upset that punk has overshadowed what he feels are “very good musicians” who had made “very good music” over the past year: “I think punk rock is media hype. I don’t see any selling power in this whatsoever. It’s fine to go to one or two shows to let off a bit of steam, but the record industry is geared to more expensively produced music. People are used to listening to music that was produced over two or three months with lots of layers and different kinds of music, because people are into very expensive hi-fi units. Punk rock, if you’ve listened to it once, that’s about it.”
In the European-style boroughs of Montreal, it was disco or death, and the dearth of first-wave punk bands reflects this hostile culture. Which is not to say that the bands born on the bilingual island were any less vital than their national counterparts; like the remote punks of Edmonton and Victoria, Montreal’s new wave of musicians fed their isolation into their sound and aesthetic, creating some truly exciting music in the process. Today, enthusiasm for that lost era means that several of these underappreciated acts are reuniting and touring, happy to earn the praise that the disco kings and queens denied them 30 years ago. But like many fringe creative movements before it, the body count of Montreal punk is high, and not every unsung hero of the city’s first wave will get a chance to find a new, appreciative audience in a new century.
John Kastner and Sean Friesen first saw the 222s through the windows of Station 10 in downtown Montreal. They were 14, visiting the city from their familial homesteads in the nearby bedroom community of Beaconsfield, and far too young to get into the club. Eager to glimpse what a homegrown punk band might look like, they had travelled into the city that night just to stand outside and experience what they could. Soon, the pair would form the Asexuals, the first punk band from Montreal to tour North America. Kastner would eventually splinter off to start the Doughboys, a band that would sign to A&M Records and become one of the most popular Canadian rock bands of the ’90s, leading to a successful career working for major music festivals and writing Hollywood film soundtracks. But right now, the boys are squeezed into a tiny booth at a downtown Toronto diner, a few hours before the reunited original lineup of the Asexuals is to take the stage at the bar next door. It’s part of a tour that has taken the band to old stomping grounds just like this. It’s a long way from the sidewalk outside of Station 10, but it’s all part of the same weird journey.
“We went to a high school with 2,000 kids, but the four guys in the Asexuals and three of our other friends were the only punk guys,” recalls Kastner. “We were freaks to everybody, and we basically just took a lot of acid, went downtown, and saw punk shows. The 222s were the first punk band that we saw in Montreal. We couldn’t get in to see them, but we liked them because of Chris Barry. We thought he was like Iggy. Once we saw him kick some guy in the face for spitting on him. We thought that was the coolest thing ever.” The 222s had played a handful of shows around Montreal before recruiting Barry, a shit-disturbing 16-year-old high school student, to front the band.
“I was thrilled because all I had was my high school band, and those guys couldn’t really play,” recalls Barry, on the phone from his home in Montreal. “These guys, they were a professional act, you know? Well, they weren’t really, but they aspired to be a professional act and presented themselves as such.” But Barry’s new position had very immediate consequences.
“The 222s were on TV a fair bit, so I sort of became a minor celebrity in my high school,” says Barry. “Actually, not a minor celebrity. I was a huge celebrity in my high school, but in the grand scheme of things, minor.” Soon, the school’s administration began to feel that Barry’s teenage micro-fame was a distraction to other students. They called his mother and insisted that she take him out of school, or they would find a reason to fail him. “A bad influence,” he was called.
“They suggested that I was mentally unsound and that my parents should really consider getting me a psychiatric evaluation,” says Barry. “This was because I wore leather pants to school.”
Barry’s introduction to the band had come through a mutual friend made somewhere amongst the crates at a record store called 2000 Plus. Tracy Howe, a fellow sonic early adopter and drummer for start-up punks the Normals, shared a rehearsal space with the 222s. When he heard they needed a vocalist, Barry was the first person he suggested. 2000 Plus had quickly become the nerve centre of Montreal punk — its message board, swap meet, and listening p
ost. It was, after all, the only shop in the city to stock albums by bands like the Stooges and the Damned.
“We had discovered the Ramones and we were the first store that really stocked 7" picture sleeve singles,” says Marc Demouy, who ran 2000 Plus and played an integral role in the development of Montreal’s music scene. “We concentrated our import department on more of that New York, U.K. sort of music. Television, Talking Heads, Suicide, and of course everything under the sun from the U.K.” Providing a clubhouse for local anglophiles and burgeoning punks, 2000 Plus also served as the literal clubhouse for the city’s second punk band, the Chromosomes. Formed shortly after the 222s hit the city’s limited circuit, they represented a much more violent, unhinged musical force. And soon, they were about to collide with the savvier, slicker 222s in a major way.
Chris Barry’s time with the Montreal public school system was at an end, and with the help of his new bandmates, he was moving on to higher education . . . sort of. His first show fronting the 222s was in January 1978, headlining a music festival at McGill University. Since Barry had joined the band, they had recorded and released their first single, making them the only band from Montreal’s first wave to produce a record. This accomplishment naturally made them an object of scorn for the less professionally minded Chromosomes. In front of an audience of 800 curious students, the 222s were forced to compete with a squealing PA and amps that had been sabotaged by the earlier act. As soon as they started, the members of the Chromosomes began throwing cups of beer on the band from the side of the stage. Before long, the crowd was following suit.
“Of course, all the frat boys said, ‘Well, that’s an idea.’ They’re spitting and throwing shit on us. I’m just a kid and I don’t have much experience. I mean, I played a few high school parties with my band but I don’t know anything. So I took a cue from Metallic K.O., the Iggy Pop record, and thought, ‘Okay, I’ll just taunt them.’ So I started taunting them as best my 16-year-old intellect could muster. And it wasn’t a good idea, because it made them even fucking crazier. They were throwing shit, and it ended up being a riot. They killed the PA and turned on the house lights and the place just erupted. The university was all fucked up and then the riot spilled out onto the street.” What followed was the kind of negative press early punks dreamed of, with the accompanying city-wide ban on performance that they dreaded. The 222s, the Chromosomes, and the Normals were unwelcome everywhere, from the universities to the discotheques. Until Tracy Howe heard about an old storefront on St. Paul road where some guy was throwing crazy parties.
“There was no intention of putting on punk shows. There was no intention of putting on any shows at all.” Robert Ditchburn is seated across from me at a coffee shop near his hotel, a massive folder full of show posters, photographs, zines, ticket stubs, and press releases laid out all over the table. They tell a story of Ditchburn’s unexpected hard left into the world of punk at 364 Rue St. Paul Ouest.
NO. 7 PRESS RELEASE
THE 364 SOUND
The music of a society in collapse, the voice of resistance, white urban rock, the 364 SOUND shatters this, the best of all possible worlds. It rejects the lies for freedom for the rich, love for the beautiful, peace for the dead. Our daily spectacle — the banality of evil — is overturned, wrenched apart, and reflected. “It is a terrorism of our basest sensibilities” (Susanne Harwood, Montreal Star).
“We heard about it, but we had never been there,” recalls Tracy Howe. “It was a storefront in Old Montreal. I still don’t know why he rented it.” Howe was working at the McGill audiovisual department at the time and had discovered a fellow new wave and punk fan in his co-worker, Scott Cameron. The pair started jamming with a friend of Cameron’s, and soon, the Normals were born. It was through McGill that they met Ditchburn. “He would pretend to be a student and rent audio equipment,” laughs Howe. He and Cameron let Ditchburn’s deception go unreported, and in return, they were given the keys to the proverbial kingdom.
“I just thought I’d open a store,” says Ditchburn. “No plan at all. It had windows onto the street, onto a nice little Montreal street. It was a cool, funky store with jive windows. My friends were either artists or poets, so I got them to put some art in the front. We opened the store the day after I started renting it with no paperwork, with no nothing.” Long before Old Montreal was the cleaned-up tourist destination it is today, it was just another run-down part of the city, and it was here that Ditchburn began to throw unlicensed parties, art shows, and poetry readings. Eventually, Howe got wind of the space, and, banned from the rest of the city’s legitimate venues, approached Ditchburn about hosting a show. Montreal’s punk scene might have been small, but it was dedicated, and the drought that had come after the McGill riot meant that there was no shortage of thirsty revellers travelling to Old Montreal on the night of the first show at 364 St. Paul.
“A huge amount of people showed up, and I don’t know where they heard about it or how they found out about it,” recalls Ditchburn. “Somebody got up to the microphone at the end of the night and said, ‘Come back next week, we’re playing.’”
Carlos Soria, future guitarist for Montreal punk legends the Nils, remembers finding the venue for the first time. “This show was in Old Montreal, on this really scary street. It was in the middle of nowhere,” he says. “You’d walk in and there was this first wave of crazy punk rockers. I had my hockey jacket on and people looked at me funny, ’cause I didn’t realize you were supposed to dress punk. I was 15.” Soria returned home to his brother Alex, energized by what he had seen. Together, the pair would form the core of one of the most influential punk bands ever produced inside this country’s borders, a band name-checked by artists as diverse as the Goo Goo Dolls and Superchunk. “It was just insane. It was music you’d never heard before, and anyone could do it, make it. They brought it down to our level. It wasn’t like seeing something on TV. You were right there, it was right in your face. And that made you want to go out and do it yourself.”
“It changed my life,” says Rick Trembles of his first night at 364. A barely teenage member of a band called the Electric Vomit, a cobbled-together group that once opened for the Viletones, Trembles started the long-running post-hardcore outfit American Devices in 1980, with former Normals member Rob Labelle. Because of that night, he says, “I still consider it a privilege to be playing with one of the Normals.”
Destined to be a short-lived solution to The Punk Problem, 364 provided a necessary stage for new bands to learn the ropes of live performance, helping to save Montreal from the ever-present threat of disco by encouraging a new generation of musicians to play original music, play it aggressively, and play it weirdly. Ditchburn even let the Normals use the store as a practice space.
“I don’t know how he never got arrested,” says Howe. “There would be four hundred people wall-to-wall, and he’d be selling beer. We had never been to anything like this, and the first time we played, we just got trashed by people. We were covered in beer, ketchup, just crap. It was messed up, but we liked it. We just kept doing it, and people ended up liking it. Things grew during that period, and shows started happening at real bars.” Ditchburn had proved, from illegal beer sales alone, that punk was a financially viable type of music to book. And it wasn’t just the owners of more legitimate establishments that were taking note. So were the legitimate businessmen of the neighbourhood.
“Most of the clubs in Montreal at the time were Mafia controlled,” explains Ditchburn. “Even though nobody ever used the word Mafia. Montreal is its own old world, not so clean cut as Toronto.” The venue’s trouble with a local contingent of made men started when, during a hit, several Mafioso took cover inside the open storefront. A week later, they were back, in an attempt to make Ditchburn an offer he couldn’t refuse. “This limo showed up and these big guys came out,” he says. “A couple of guys guarded the door and one went and examined the back. Then some other guy in a suit came up to
me and said, ‘I hear you’re running shows here. Maybe we can make a deal.’ I guess he was trying to say I could reach a new clientele. He could set us up, he’d be the manager and put some plants here and the bar there. Our bar at the time was a gift that we were using, the old section of a bowling alley on a couple of parking signs.” When asked if he felt intimidated, Ditchburn explains the complexities of the situation. “It wasn’t that they were scary, but they were opening a whole door of underground life that nobody . . .,” he trails off. “We ran. I ran. I didn’t want to be on the payroll when somebody started asking questions. It was like Mean Streets out there. I don’t know what they really wanted, maybe I was in their territory, maybe they had that section of Montreal.” With Ditchburn gone, the punk rock social experiment of 364 Rue St. Paul Ouest was over, but it helped establish the 222s, the Normals, and the Chromosomes as viable local acts with distinct, devoted followings.
PERFECT YOUTH: The Birth of Canadian Punk Page 7