PERFECT YOUTH: The Birth of Canadian Punk

by Sam Sutherland

“There were less than 10 bands in Montreal at that time. One or two of them were kind of a pastiche, pop groups that were just trying to adopt a punk image,” says Howe. “But then there were the Chromosomes, who were super nihilistic, like the Dead Boys to the max. We were more in the social conscience, Clash end of things.” The Normals failed to record anything during their brief lifespan, but they were documented in the cult concert film The Normals, an impossible-to-find piece of celluloid that even some members of the band haven’t seen in years.

  “The Normals are lucky, because that guy made that movie,” says Howe. “I heard that they did a thing in Montreal last year where they had three bands, and this movie. We had some great songs, though, and I think it’s a shame we never recorded.” Howe isn’t the kind to puff out his chest over past musical endeavours; after all, his post-Normals career has been an unequivocal success, from the new wave of Heaven 17 to the pioneering electronic experimentation of Rational Youth. The lone recording of the band seems to be “I Wanna Be Considered a Nice Guy,” a verge-of-destruction demo plied from some old reel-to-reel tape by scene champion, Montreal Mirror cartoonist and Electric Vomiter Rick Trembles, which gives little indication of the band’s true sonic direction. Says Howe, “It was just too wasted to do much with it. It’s a pity.”

  The stylish nihilists of the bunch, the Chromosomes are perhaps one of the most infamous of Montreal’s first wave; not a bad distinction for a band that never managed to record a note. Montreal’s answer to the visceral violence of Toronto bands like the Viletones and the Ugly, the Chromosomes scared the shit out of people. One of the only interviews I was able to track down with them, from the November 1978 issue of the zine Surfin’ Bird, comes with the postscript that the band has since broken up due to the drummer’s imprisonment on drug charges.

  “Our reasons are simple,” says Chromosomes vocalist and guitarist Dave Rosenberg in the interview. “Playing music gets you laid and gets you more free drugs.” The band’s logo was a bat impaled by a hypodermic needle; by the end of the ’80s, Rosenberg would be dead from a heroin overdose. But in 1977, he was still just a hell-raising punk, in and out of jail, and the charismatic frontman for one of the city’s most popular bands. And it was up to 2000 Plus’ Marc Demouy, who quickly became their de facto manager-cum-babysitter, to try to steer the Chromosomes’ ship in the most upright fashion he could.

  “They would rehearse in the store’s back stock room,” recalls Demouy. “Those guys were just absolute delinquents. Their pastime was, like, breaking into pharmacies to score dope. We were finding needles behind posters and stuff like that.” When asked what it was like to try to manage a band with the fabled hunger for narcotics and deviant behaviour of the Chromosomes, Demouy is frank. “We’re talking about putting out fires from morning to night. And these guys were actually really fucking good. Their absolute lust for drugs just prevented them from being able to carry out any plan.” The band was a vital pillar of the early Montreal scene, but their instability took its toll. Rosenberg was gone by 1998, and drummer Gery Lecker passed away shortly after filming his interview for Montreal punk documentary MTL Punk: The First Wave in 2011. It was with great difficulty that I finally tracked down the band’s bassist, Allan Fine, and snuck in an interview between Stanley Cup playoff games (his sign-off at the end of our interview: “Go Bruins”) long after I had turned in the first draft of this book.

  “I don’t see all the importance in it,” he says, somewhat indifferent to the continued interest shown in his band. “It’s music, it happened. You keep going. More music.”

  “The Chromosomes were scary crazy dudes, but they were really funny,” says Tracy Howe. “They lived hard. They had some serious drug habits. But they were really good when they were onstage. It was really intense. I would try to be as nice to them as possible. They’d smash stuff, break stuff, attack the audience. They’d beat on the audience with their guitars. In those days, people who went to those gigs were into letting themselves go, or acting how they thought they should just based on what they had read. They thought you acted like as much of a dick as possible. Dave would just wade out into the audience and beat on people. We were terrified of them. We were real nerd-punks compared to those guys. They were so fucked up it was unbelievable. But when they were halfway straight, they were really nice guys.”

  Demouy recalls his time as their manager as a major learning experience, and there is an honest, fond inflection to his accounts of his dealings with the band, though it frustrated him as a business owner. “I didn’t think they stood a chance of doing something significant, because of their pure self-destructive nature,” he says. “But it made them crazy live, made them a wicked band onstage because these guys just didn’t fucking care, you know? They were loud and they hit those drums hard and they were really in your face, like nobody else. But unmanageable.”

  Howe recalls a particularly unruly show in the Côte Saint-Luc neighbourhood of Montreal, a predominantly Jewish part of town. “It was right by this pool. Dave had organized all of it, and he got this massive PA system, but we had to put it together,” Howe says. “We had these bass bins, horns, tweeters, and 16 mics.” Howe and the rest of the Normals set about putting together the sound system, but quickly realized that Rosenberg had failed to bring a snake, one big cable that all other cables are plugged into in order to keep things organized. It’s a crucial part of making a large-scale PA system manageable.

  “We had 50 fucking cables going everywhere, all tangled up, and it took us hours to get going. And there were all these girls from Côte Saint-Luc with Charlie’s Angels haircuts standing around being really bored and complaining. Finally, we had everything set up. The Chromosomes started, and Dave immediately jumped into the swimming pool with his guitar, and pulled half the PA system down with him. That was it. It took us three hours to put the thing together and it lasted 25 seconds. All these girls were like, ‘Oh my God.’”

  “He got a little exuberant,” states Fine. “But someone was sharp enough to hit the power switch pretty fast so nothing happened. It was not very glamorous. It was just one crazy guy not thinking for a second that he was strapped to an electrical guitar, plugged into something.” The spectacle of the Chromosomes truly set the standard for the outrageous behaviour of punk in the Montreal scene.

  “For better or worse, my teenaged initiation into ’70s punk was fraught with chaos, drug paranoia, and impending violence; an element of early punk that couldn’t be denied, a voice of the underworld that often superseded the music itself,” recalls Trembles in a recent comic he penned for the Montreal Mirror about the Chromosomes. “‘Getting away with as much as you could’ was their interpretation of punk.”

  “These guys were my friends,” says Fine, as we start to detail some of the band’s more nefarious tales. “They were who they were. What’s known about them, so be it. Live your life.”

  At the other end of punk’s professionalism spectrum, as far from Dave Rosenberg nearly electrocuting himself in a community pool as they could get, were the 222s. Besides recording the scene’s only singles, the band was the first Montreal group to venture off the island, booking shows in nearby cities like Toronto and Ottawa, and putting as much stock in musicianship as showmanship.

  “We wanted to sound good and we wanted to be tight like the Ramones,” states Chris Barry succinctly. “We wanted the show to run like the Ramones, not a lot of time between songs. We wanted to be as slick as we could be, and that rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. Slick just meant doing our best and being in tune and trying to not drop songs in the middle of them. We did get chastised for that, like it wasn’t punk. ‘Sell outs. That’s not real punk.’ A lot of people started playing punk rock because they couldn’t do anything else, which is fine. They celebrated their lack of talent, but I never really found that very entertaining.” Even 30 years later, the line in the sand between Montreal’s first batch of bands is clear: Beatles and Stones, 222s
and Chromosomes. Which isn’t to say the 222s were impervious to the kind of violence preached by some of their peers. Violence found everyone.

  “I carried a weapon with me and I used it,” says Barry. “I remember once, I was walking down Saint Catherine Street on a Sunday night, coming from rehearsal. These kids, maybe my age, I could see them coming. They pushed me. I had a big bicycle chain. Normally, I would just go, ‘Fuck it,’ but this time, it was like, ‘Fuck you.’ I grabbed the chain and whack, right in his neck and his collarbone. The guy went bang, right down on the ground. I must have hit him in the side of the head, blood spurting out of his ears and shit. His friend went running off in the other direction, and his friend is fucking lying on the ground. I went off in the other direction, concerned that I may have fucking killed the guy, you know? I was scared. I remember the next morning in the newspaper, expecting to read that there had been a murder on Saint Catherine the night before. There wasn’t, and I never got arrested, so I guess I’m safe now.”

  When they weren’t busy dodging murder raps, the 222s were helping to open even more venues in the city to original, local talent, thanks to a succession of forward-thinking compatriots, most notably former Teenage Head manager Jack Morrow. By encouraging larger venues like Station 10 and the Hotel Nelson to book punk bands, they proved that bars could make just as much money serving Sid Vicious look-alikes as Tony Manero wannabes. The 222s gave pioneering local promoters Bambi Productions a greater opportunity to bring bands like the Stranglers, Pere Ubu, and Madness to a town that just a few years prior would have been an impossible tour stop. But the 222s wanted more than Jack Morrow or any other manager was getting them, so they started looking down some unexpected, alternative avenues.

  “We started playing New York at Max’s Kansas City. We would do okay there. People would come out and see us, but it still wasn’t going anywhere,” says Barry. “We couldn’t seem to take it any further. No one was going to want to make a record for us, and there was no way we could have afforded it ourselves. It was just very frustrating. So, the mobsters came around and they had big plans for the 222s.” The plan involved turning the 222s into “fucked-up teeny bopper idols,” playing off Barry’s youth and good looks. With no other options, the band signed on, wary of their new business partners.

  “They would use their influence with radio stations — in other words, ‘Play this record or we’ll kill you’ — to get us exposure in Quebec, and maybe we would sell a few records and make some money,” says Barry. “The mobsters were the only people offering to do any of this stuff.” Within a few weeks, the band found themselves in a basement in Laval, recording an old French pop tune while a gun sat on a kitchen table upstairs. The single they recorded would go on to be a minor hit in Quebec. Unsurprisingly, given the circumstances under which it was produced, the band broke up almost immediately following its release.

  It wasn’t until the mid-’80s that a punk band would escape from the island of Montreal. But without the work of bands like the 222s, the Normals, and the Chromosomes, it would have happened much, much later.

  “Part of the beauty of what you make is where you’re from,” says Nils guitarist Carlos Soria. “It makes your character. Even though we were far apart, every city had its own thing. Vancouver had D.O.A. Toronto had the Viletones. Montreal had us. That’s cool. At the time, it was a little behind. Not too much, but just enough.” While the Nils’ story would be cut short with the tragic suicide of Carlos’ brother, Alex, in 2004, the story of some of the city’s other brightest punk rock lights is (gratefully) still going. The American Devices, featuring Rick Trembles of the Electric Vomit and the Normals’ Rob Labelle, is still confronting and confounding audiences. Carlos Soria plays his brother’s songs with a new crop of musicians as the Nils FC (featuring Carlos). The 222s have reunited, as have the Asexuals, who remain in the crammed booth across from me, still discussing the finer points of Chris Barry’s abilities as a frontman while they wait to take the stage almost 30 years after their first show in Montreal. I relate the story of John Kastner spying the 222s through the window of Station 10 to Chris when we speak on the phone a few weeks later.

  “John told me that a few times, and that made me very happy,” says Barry. “It made me really happy because more often than not, people were putting us down.” Sitting with Kastner and Sean Friesen, it would be hard for anyone to put down Barry, Howe, Demouy, or anyone who slaved away to build something different in a city that didn’t even know it needed a change. Montreal was never the same — even if a few kids had to take a chain to the head in the name of progress.

  HOT PROPERTY

  THE DISHES AND THE NORTHERN ORIGINS OF QUEERCORE

  The Dishes [© Don Pyle]

  January 27, 1977, 9:00 p.m. EST

  In a tiny art gallery tucked down an alley running parallel to Yonge Street, one hundred curious benefactors have squeezed into A Space’s single room to experience the latest work from General Idea, a Toronto art collective specializing in subverting expectations. Tonight, the group has booked a band from New York City called the Talking Heads for their first-ever Canadian show, a few weeks before the band’s first single is to be released by their new label, Warner subsidiary Sire Records. Opening the show is a band called the Dishes. The audience sits quietly in fold-up chairs while the Dishes blast out an incredibly loud set of Mott the Hoople–inspired proto-punk, thoroughly aggravating the kindly audience. They are asked to turn down. They don’t. Within the year, the Talking Heads are on their way to becoming one of the world’s most popular bands, while the Dishes are in the process of completely transforming Toronto’s musical landscape. And, presumably, those hundred quietly seated audience members are feeling pretty foolish.

  When Murray Ball, vocalist for the Dishes, finally agrees to meet me for a coffee, he seems genuinely perplexed as to why I’m interested in him or the band he was in that broke up in 1978. To him, bands from that era got all the press they deserved. At the time, they certainly were receiving a healthy amount of attention from the local media, and if people have moved on, well, that’s just what happened. The sentiment throws me off; so many of the people I interview sound a note of bitterness when the subject of recognition is broached, and for good reason. A band from Toronto, every bit as good and hard working as a band from New York, did not stand a chance at the kind of fame that their American peers stumbled into on a nightly basis in the bowels of the Bowery.

  The Dishes have always struck me as one of those bands, one that has been unfairly lost to time, even on a local level where their pioneering sound, aesthetic, and upfront sexuality set the stage for the cultural revolution of punk and established Toronto’s hotbed of all that is cool on Queen Street West. Gary Pig Gold called them the “undisputed fathers of the Toronto new wave” in the sixth issue of the Pig Paper, and yet the band is rarely celebrated on the same level as many of their latter-day peers.

  We leave the tape recorder off, and I explain this to Ball. That the Dishes were the first band to glue their posters to telephone poles, an accepted and widely practised guerrilla advertising campaign for everyone from staunchly independent hardcore bands to massively corporate body wash products today. That the Dishes were the first band to play the Beverley on Queen, and that between the Bev’s radically open policy toward new bands and the Dishes-staffed artist-friendly restaurant, Peter Pan, around the corner, they were the powder keg for Queen West’s late ’70s artistic explosion. That they released one of the first independent singles in the country. And that through their open approach to sexuality and active association with arts collective General Idea, they created an inclusive foundation for all the punk bands that followed, making the Toronto scene one of the most diverse in North America. Without them, the Toronto-triggered queercore explosion of the mid-’80s that further broke down the homophobic barriers of rock music might not have happened.

  Ball pauses, then agrees with me. He decides he’s willing t
o talk, so we turn on the tape recorder.

  The Dishes formed in Thornhill, a wealthy suburb just north of Toronto, in 1975. A precursor to punk’s debut on the international stage, the band was heavily influenced by Roxy Music and Sparks, a fact that their sax-and-synthesizer-inclusive lineup indicated pretty clearly. After endlessly honing their sound and theatrical stage show in the basement of bass player Kenn Farr’s parents’ quiet suburban home, they visited a near-empty bar on Queen Street to try to book their first show.

  The Beverley Tavern was a struggling watering hole in a lonely part of Toronto. Its only business came from the few regulars working at their own struggling businesses nearby, keeping the first floor stools warm while an entire second floor sat empty most days of the week. Around the corner on McCaul Street, the Ontario College of Art was earning a reputation as the country’s premier post-secondary institution for creative folks. While traditional bars were off-limits to the art college crowd and their nascent musical endeavours, the Beverley seemed ready for a takeover. So the band just walked in and asked to play. They ended up with a week-long residency in February 1976.

  “The beer slinging days were coming to an end,” says Ball. “They saw OCA around the corner and wanted to try and bring those people in. I think the owner really wanted us to form bands, to keep the bar busy. And they paid us well, too.” The plan worked. The Beverley quickly became an extension of the college, a place for instructors and students alike to unwind before, after, or during college classes. The Dishes were the first to provide a soundtrack, but they were hardly the last; the Diodes and the Doncasters, both featuring fellow OCA students, quickly followed in their wake.

  Still the first men on the moon, the Dishes began a slow takeover of the entire Queen Street strip. What began at the Beverley quickly spread a few blocks west; Peter Pan, a new restaurant opened by Ball and local artist Sandy Stagg, almost immediately became another landmark and vital meeting place for the blossoming new community. A mixture of artists and musicians, the restaurant’s clientele would become a transformative force in the city, beginning a creative migration to a previously derelict part of Toronto.