“We were living on Queen Street, we were working on Queen Street, we were playing on Queen Street,” says Ball. “We were living in that world. When we moved downtown, we didn’t find a bunch of hip people. We became the hip people. We were hip up there, in Thornhill, and then we were hip down there.”
One of the most significant visual changes brought by the influx of hipness to Queen West was the appearance of posters. On walls. On telephone poles. On mailboxes. Posters on everything. It’s a part of downtown culture that is completely taken for granted today, unless you live in Singapore or Port Perry. Posters are the hijacking of public space, a guerilla tactic for spreading the word about something you can’t advertise on a highway-side billboard. And in Toronto, the first people to tape a poster to a pole were the Dishes. With no other method to spread the word about their shows around the area and the college, the band would take to the streets at night, taping and gluing notices for upcoming gigs wherever they found a suitable surface.
“It was a part of the urbanization of Toronto, because no one had ever done this before. Postering suddenly existed, and it changed mainstream media,” says Peter Goddard, former music critic for the Toronto Star. We’re sitting in a booth at the Rivoli, a block from the site of the old Beverley. Queen West today is barely recognizable; as with any hip, artistic area in a major city, the chains have moved in, the rents have shot up, and the artists have picked up and moved further west. It’s still a bustling part of the city with a few vestiges of alternative culture left, but it’s a vastly different street than it once was. Looking out the window of the Rivoli at a sea of posters for shows, rallies, and record releases, it couldn’t be a more appropriate time to be talking with Goddard. “It was a great era for typography. The visual arts changed because of punk, maybe even more than music.”
Visual art was a substantial component of the Dishes’ package. As part of what Goddard calls “the aestheticization of rock and roll,” the Dishes were keenly aware of their presentation as much as their music. Which isn’t to sell short the wonderfully weird Bryan Ferry–like proto-punk of “Secret Storm” or “Police Band,” but to emphasize just how important the band’s other artistic pursuits were, as well.
It was the band’s very first show at the Beverley that introduced them to an arts collective called General Idea. Pioneering conceptual artists with a keen interest in the new music the Dishes were the premier local purveyors of, General Idea very quickly brought the Dishes into their world of media-based art: beauty pageants, TV specials, and large-scale installation art all figured prominently in the collective’s work.
“We wanted to be famous, glamorous, and rich,” declared General Idea in their own FILE magazine in 1975. “Occupying images, emptying them of meaning, reducing them to shells. We then filled the shells with glamour.” The Dishes fit into the art collective’s glamour mould, an ideal vessel to collaborate with and Trojan horse into unexpected scenarios — an art gallery show with the Talking Heads being a perfect example. The pair’s symbiotic relationship gave the art-minded Dishes access to the exciting and exclusive community fostered by General Idea and gave the art collective another tool in their real-world performance art kit.
In an undated interview with the Journal of Contemporary Art, General Idea co-founder AA Bronson spoke to their early ideology, influenced by the unremarkable art culture that existed in early ’70s Toronto. “When we were first working together in Toronto there was no real audience,” he said. “And we were quite aware of trying to assemble an audience out of existing audiences for other types of material — for instance, a music audience, rock and roll audience, design audience, architecture audience, trendy audience. We were quite conscious of attempting to pull together all those audiences in order to key into a diverse public.”
General Idea achieved their goal of building a wide, inclusive audience for their brand of cross-platform artistic expression. From the stage of the Beverley Tavern to the pages of FILE to the kitchen of Peter Pan, the spirit of the collective permeated counter-cultural Toronto at its most prodigious time. That they were vocal proponents of gay and lesbian involvement in the city’s arts scene meant that all culture that sprung from their influence held inclusive beliefs at their core. The Dishes were a perfect fit for the General Idea template.
“We were young, we were talented, we liked art,” says Ball. “Possibly because we were gay, we brought those things together. We clicked with all these artists because I was the gay lead singer.” While Ball is tastefully unwilling to discuss the sexual orientation of his bandmates, he’s open about the fact that his own sexuality had an obvious effect on the band in spite of his disinterest in what he considers the city’s standard gay community “I wasn’t gay in the traditional sense, but I had a mind that was gay, and it allowed me to express myself in a certain way. Being an openly gay man back then, I never felt threatened or nervous at shows. I am the same person now that I was then, and no one put us down for that. If anything, there was a subliminal recognition that it was an asset. It helped us move through different scenes.”
With Ball as the band’s frontman, there was no doubt that the Dishes possessed a distinct gay energy, and their partnership with the equally sexualized General Idea, at a time when gay culture was still a fringe community, created an open-minded punk scene simply by virtue of them being there first. General Idea operated Art Metropole, which, for a time, was the only place in Toronto that imported and sold punk singles. And the Dishes, far from the norm in culturally conservative Toronto, built the foundation for the punk scene in Toronto, establishing its rules and social mores. That meant a community that was devoid of the homophobia that pervaded almost every other music scene at that time.
“If you look at the originals, it’s General Idea, Rough Trade, the Dishes. It was all gay,” says Don Pyle, avid scene photographer, member of Crash Kills Five and Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, and himself an openly gay musician. “There were other things involved, but the roots were very gay. Even the bands that preceded the punk thing, like Martha and the Muffins, came out of a gay-slash-arts sensibility.”
The importance of this connection cannot be overstated. Toronto’s punk scene was born of the same musical and societal influences as London and New York, but the prevalence of gay culture, along with fringe art, was much greater within the Toronto scene. Obviously there was no shortage of either in both New York and London, but Toronto’s punk scene was so deeply tied to those two cultures that it had a much greater, lasting effect on the way that punk evolved on this city.
“The influence of OCA was huge,” says filmmaker Bruce LaBruce, who arrived in Toronto a few years after the Dishes. “We thought art was hopelessly bourgeois and capitalist, but I liked General Idea because they were situationist. They were aware of themselves as a spectacle. And they had interesting ideas of sexuality.” Upon moving to downtown Toronto from the wilds of Tiverton, Ontario, LaBruce teamed up with G.B. Jones, a former OCA student a few years his senior, in order to produce the pioneering punk zine J.D.s. Jones had already proven her bona fides locally with Fifth Column, an all-female post-punk group whose approach to third-wave feminism predated the official arrival of the riot grrrl movement by almost half a decade (for extra credibility, the band’s final release, 1994’s 36-C, was released by Calvin Johnson’s legendary K Records).
While technically a product of Toronto’s mid-’80s hardcore scene, the influence of General Idea was prevalent in Jones and LaBruce’s work, and the continued presence of the early punk ideals of inclusion and boundary-pushing sexuality, as pioneered by the Dishes, was still at the core of the relatively new scene. J.D.s ended up giving birth to its own movement within a movement: homocore, later rechristened under the more inclusive banner of queercore. The zine was provocative and forthright in its mandate, which was the creation of a viable alternative gay culture, within or without the punk scene. While there had always been gay and lesbian inv
olvement in punk and hardcore, LaBruce and Jones succeeded in giving a name and a voice to those who, like them, still felt marginalized within an already marginal culture. Queercore would explode in the late ’80s and ’90s, producing such venerable punk acts as Pansy Division and Limp Wrist. And LaBruce went on to produce enduringly provocative films like Hustler White and No Skin Off My Ass, films that led Kurt Cobain to cite LaBruce as his favourite filmmaker.
“We turned to punk because we felt rejected by an increasingly conservative gay scene,” he says. “By the early ’80s, the gay scene was already unreceptive to punk.” In the late ’70s, it was a different story. Not just in Toronto, where some of the most important coupling between punk and gay culture happened, but in less celebrated cities like Victoria and Calgary. In fact, almost across the board, it seems like gay culture played a critical role in the development of punk in Canada. It’s a side note to the story of the Dishes and queercore, but it’s still vitally important. Punk was even more of an outsider here than in similarly small American cities like Minnesota or Seattle; in this way, a link was formed between two fringe cultures, neither of whom wanted to listen to Triumph or deal with bemulleted heshers.
The connection between punk and queer culture can be seen from coast to coast, and the cross-pollination of both scenes was stamped on the music and experiences of bands like the Dayglo Abortions. There is no doubt that Canadian punk would have been left struggling in the wilderness of our nation’s music community were it not for the interest and active support of the gay club owners, bookers, and restaurateurs of everywhere from Calgary to Halifax.
The Pointed Sticks played their very first show at a gay club in Vancouver. “It was at the Quadra Club,” recalls guitarist Bill Napier-Hemy. “It was a gay club, and the gay clubs were good about hosting punk. You didn’t have to jump through hoops. As a fringe community, they accepted us.” Nick Jones, the band’s vocalist, continues. “The rock rooms weren’t going to let us anywhere near them, nor did we want to be anywhere near them,” he says. “But the gay clubs were always happy to have us.”
In Winnipeg, Psychiatrists member Glen Meadmore, part of the holy trinity of the city’s first punk wave, consistently imbued his onstage persona with what vital ’90s Illinois punk promotion crew Chicago Homocore calls his “gay Christian punk” identity. Meadmore’s ongoing musical career would include collaborations with artists ranging from Pyle’s Shadowy Men to gender-bending exploratory musical artist Genesis P-Orridge.
Moe Berg of Edmonton’s Modern Minds recalls numerous shows taking place at a local leather bar. “It was a really tough cowboy bar,” he says. “Full of guys who looked like they could kill you. Just no girls, and all gay guys.”
Even in Hamilton, a working class rock ’n’ roll town, the Forgotten Rebels’ Chris Houston speaks of the importance of outsiders sticking together and the influence of the music scene on his own worldview. “Punk rock is all about tolerance,” he says. “We’re all characters, whether you’re some weirdo or you’re gay or whatever, we stick together. I think that tolerance is something people who live outside the box really need. It was very special to me when I think about the cast of characters I met.” Similarly, Calgary, another town often considered a hotbed of Canuck conservatism, possessed a thriving gay scene that eagerly embraced the new punk movement. “There’s a big gay scene in Calgary, which a lot of people are unaware of since it’s a cowboy town,” says the Hot Nasties’ Warren Kinsella. “There was a kinship there. A common theme was that we were all outsiders.”
Art Bergmann recalls the halcyon days of Vancouver punk as being when there was the most cross-pollination between all the different fringe arts communities. “We had art bands, and artists playing guitars, and mixing with the gay scene and the punk scene,” he says. “And it all mixed together into this great amalgam.”
Until it was destroyed by a fire on New Year’s Eve, David’s was one of the only clubs in Toronto to allow punk bands the opportunity to play. “The gay stuff started after we would play,” says Cleave Anderson, drummer for a grocery list of first-wave punk bands and a founding member of Blue Rodeo. “Things got going there around eight or nine, and went until 11. Then the stage would be cleared, and the glitzy gay crowd would come in. You’d hang out for a while and get a flavour of something different.” Even drugs in Toronto were spun off from the gay club scene; amyl nitrite, or poppers, were a popular fixture of early shows at the Colonial Underground, a direct influence of the gay scene on early punk.
In Halifax, where the local American Federation of Musicians controlled all the live venues, save for an old hippie cafe on Grafton Street, a local gay bar was literally the only other venue that would let punk bands play. “It was all connected,” says James Cowan of Nobody’s Heroes, one of the city’s lone first-wave bands. “The alternative scene found a natural home with the gay scene in Halifax. It was all part of this below-the-surface underworld there. It was quite interesting.”
Even the endlessly shit-disturbing and politically incorrect Dayglo Abortions enjoyed a great relationship with the gay bar at the end of the street they lived on in Victoria. “The gays and the punks were both fringe groups that had been alienated from society,” says vocalist and guitarist Murray Acton. “And for the old gay guys, I’m sure nothing was better than a bunch of young punks getting sweaty and pushing themselves around onstage.” He then tells me one the most wonderfully weird stories I’ve ever heard, about the band’s drummer Bonehead, and his gay roommate, Steve, who tended bar down the street. The pair shared a tiny bachelor apartment separated down the middle by a sleeping bag hung from the ceiling. (Mom, stop reading here.) “One night, we were hanging out at Bonehead’s apartment,” he says, pausing to make sure my mom is no longer reading the book. “We heard Steve come home from the bar with someone, and 15 or 20 minutes later, this guy rolls into the kitchen with a mailbag over his head, hogtied, buck naked, and we had to tell him he made a wrong turn and roll him back through the sleeping bag. We went back to what we were doing.
“The next day, I see Steve, and he tells me this story: ‘Two or three times a week, this cop comes in to make sure there’s no underage drinking in the bar. Monday night, he comes in and I see he’s got this rookie with him. He introduces the rookie and says he’ll be doing the beat now. Wednesday night, just the rookie comes back. Friday night, the rookie comes back, but not in uniform. He sits down at the bar and starts drinking. So I get the guy wasted and bring him back to the apartment. I get him all hogtied, with the mailbag locked around his neck. And I’m thinking about the time I got put in the hospital by the police in Regina. I got the shit kicked out of me. I lost a kidney. And I got this big Bowie knife on my dresser. And I was thinking about just slicing his throat. But I changed my mind.’ And he shows me his wrist, and he’s got poop around his wrist. He’s the only man I know who’s fist-fucked a cop. I thought, ‘Wow, what a guy!’ He’s been my hero ever since then.” He pauses, laughing. “They were a good bunch of people down there.”
But I digress. The point is Toronto wasn’t alone in forging a bond between punk and gay culture. The difference is the nature of the relationship; in other parts of the country, it appears to have been one of sympathetic tolerance, a recognition by the local gay community that punks were just another marginalized and occasionally persecuted group. In Toronto, the relationship was deeper and more symbiotic; punk might not have ceased to exist without the involvement of groups like General Idea, but punk flourished because of it. It gave the city a unique edge over places like New York, and while the measurable international benefits wouldn’t come until the mid-’80s with Jones, LaBruce, and queercore, groups like the Dishes sowed the seeds of a cross-pollinated punk and gay lifestyle that would put Toronto at the forefront of an important punk subgenre in the following decade.
The Dishes’ contributions to the city were obviously bigger than their bedroom politics. The band’s drummer, Steven Davey, w
as consistently active, co-writing songs with other Toronto bands when not busy scheming with the Dishes. Ball’s job at Peter Pan not only made for an ideal photo-op — “Look, it’s me, with all these dishes, and I’m singing for the Dishes!” — it started him down a path of restaurant and club ownership that would see him helm new-wave celebrity hotspot Fiesta Restaurant in Yorkville, establish the major lakeside club RPM (today the Guvernment/Kool Haus complex), and create club district staple the Whiskey Saigon.
By the end of 1978, the Dishes were broken up. They left behind two great EPs, compiled in 2002 on the Kitschenette best-of CD. Their cultural legacy would be lessened if the tunes weren’t there, but songs like “Hot Property” and “Chef’s Special” show a weird band at the top of their game, processing David Bowie through a lens that had been cracked and fucked up on the floor of the Crash ’n’ Burn during the summer of ’77, a time documented in the band’s own song, “Summer Reaction.” Combined with the grocery list of important Torontonian firsts that they accomplished during their short run, it’s hard to understand why there isn’t some weird, sexual statue dedicated to the Dishes in front of city hall on Queen Street.
But I guess it’s never too late.
ICE BOX CITY
WINNIPEG
Popular Mechanix [courtesy of Greg Gardner]
PERFECT YOUTH: The Birth of Canadian Punk Page 9