“We were the least accomplished, so we progressed the most,” says Duguay. “From the first U of M show to the second, we really — and I don’t want to sound egotistical — blew everyone away. By the third one, we headlined.” In retrospect, it’s easy to see why early punk fans in Winnipeg gravitated toward Lowlife so immediately; Winnipeg was a hardcore town. When the first strains of the new wave of aggressive punk hit Manitoba, something about it clicked in a way punk hadn’t; it was music built for a once-thriving city that still hadn’t recovered from the collapse of the agricultural industry in the ’30s, a city whose climate was literally deadly, a city profoundly separate from the rest of the country. “The only goal was to put out a 45,” he says. “Once you do that, you want to do an album, and you want to tour. But at that point, it was just about Winnipeg. At that time, there were no other scenes going on that we even knew about. I mean we knew about London and New York and Vancouver, but you’re so isolated in your little cocoon. You just keep moving forward as best you can.” Lowlife bridged the first wave of punk with the invasion of hardcore, and continued to break down the barriers that used to stand between punk bands and pub rock–addicted local bars.
“Eventually, we started playing in bars with the cover bands,” says Duguay. “I guess they thought we were cute. It was a clash of cultures for sure, but it was cool.” Their profile getting bigger with every show, the band finally decided it was time to record. Fate led them to meet a local record store clerk named Mitch Funk, who saw fit to immediately offer the band a whack of cash to press a single. But as with most teenage bands, Lowlife was not long for this Earth. Tensions between the band members were at a boiling point; even the song “Leaders” reflects their fractious nature. Written by Duguay, it seems to skewer fascism and authority. It’s actually about the band’s singer. He never knew. But when a late-night of assembling sleeves for the new records ended with Duguay perched atop the guy’s chest, ready to pound the living shit out of him, everyone knew the band was over.
“Bands like the Nostrils were just starting,” he says. “The first wave of Winnipeg punk bands were influenced by New York and London. The second wave, which was bands like the Unwanted, Stretch Marks, the Nostrils, were influenced by west coast hardcore. That really changed punk rock in Winnipeg.”
“Lowlife was pretty sloppy, but I loved them,” recalls Bruce Hallett, founding member of the Nostrils. Hallett had been at every early Winnipeg punk show, but he was too young to get his own project off the ground. It was 1979 before he owned a guitar, teaching himself by practising endlessly to the first Ramones record. He liked the sound, but he knew he liked the speed of new bands coming from the west coast even better. As he met like-minded musicians, the Nostrils slowly coalesced around Hallett’s voice and persistent desire for uncontrolled sonic velocity. “We started playing faster and faster and faster,” he says. “We weren’t tight or anything, but we were faster than anybody else.”
“The Nostrils were great,” says Chris Walter. “They never made it big. Bruce was a twisted genius.” Walter wasn’t born in Winnipeg, but he grew up here, and his experiences in the hardcore scene have defined his career; as the creator of tenacious, semi-autobiographical works of fiction that detail his life as a punk, a drug addict, and a genuinely smart guy slumming through some of the country’s worst bars and alleys. Lately, he’s turned to band biographies, a subject that suits his aggressive style and plays to his profound knowledge of the country’s punk past.
Walter cuts a truly imposing figure; he’s huge, and if you’ve ever read his books, you know he can seriously fucking fight. And about 70% of his head is covered by a single massive tattoo. All of this makes my initial contact with him — and the discovery that he is a thoughtful, kind guy with a distinct Canuck accent — all the more surprisingly pleasant. Walter toured with the Nostrils, started his first band under their tutelage, and lived in their house, the infamous House of Noz.
“It was our first time living away from home,” says Hallett. “We had no idea how to live, and it was scuzzy. The basement was a hole. We’d have shows, have parties, people would break beer bottles on the floor. There’s no two ways about it — it was disgusting.” And it was in that hole that Walter formed the Vacant Lot, a band whose contribution to the Winnipeg hardcore scene seems to have been more visual than anything else. Walter recalls one of their more theatrical shows with a palpable sense of pride.
“We had a Ted Nugent poster glued to a piece of plywood, and it stood with us onstage,” he says. “I took a circular saw and chopped the Ted Nugent stand up into pieces. This was after sawing off the microphone by mistake, so we had no sound at all. I was just screaming my lungs out. All our props failed. We had a stuffed dummy with all this blood in his head and neck, and I cut off his head with a machete. But the blood bag had slid down into the chest cavity. So I grabbed it and threw it on the dance floor, but it still didn’t break. Finally, a friend of ours broke it open. Then she started throwing it at us, and there was this smell that was just awful. That’s when I realized she was throwing cat shit and rotten spaghetti at us.”
It was amidst the feces and food that more and more bands sprang up, forming an active scene that rivalled any other in Canada, all documented by Walter’s own Pages of Rage zine. One of the most popular bands of the era was the Stretch Marks, who vied with the Nostrils for the scene’s top spot, eventually ascending when the Nostrils broke up (for the first time, anyway). Like the Nostrils, the Stretch Marks were headquartered in a band house that also hosted shows, a second-floor apartment called the Stretch Pad. During the first few years of Winnipeg punk, the apartment was known as the Spud Club (where the Nostrils played their first show on New Year’s Eve, 1979). While no one seems sure who rented it, it acted as the city’s first DIY venue, doubling as a crash pad when shows went late. It should come as no irony-drenched surprise the area is now home to Portage Place, a massive indoor shopping mall in the centre of downtown Winnipeg.
“I hadn’t ever been to the Spud Club,” says Mark Langtry, the band’s bassist and the final addition to the group. “That was before my time, in the late ’70s. I hadn’t found out about that sort of stuff yet. I was looking for something, but it wasn’t advertised. You had to be in the know to find out where anything was. It was an underground scene back then.” The Stretch Marks would be instrumental in bringing bigger touring acts through Winnipeg, helping open up the underground to an even greater number of smart, disenfranchised kids looking for something more. Minor Threat, Vice Squad, Social Distortion, and Youth Brigade were just some of the bands the Stretch Marks connected with to help put Winnipeg on the map.
“I saw the Stretch Marks before they had ever played any live shows,” says Chris Walter. “I ran into the singer in the street and he invited me over to have some beers. When I got there, all the other members were there, and they actually looked kind of pissed that he had brought someone back. But they played a set, and I was blown away by how original and tight they were. They were my favourite band right away.” The band’s relationship with Youth Brigade helped them when they were finally ready to tour; finding a welcoming new home in Los Angeles, the band eventually signed to BYO Records, owned and operated by Youth Brigade’s Stern brothers. Not distracted or made complacent by their American record deal, the band continued their assault on the rest of Manitoba when not touring the States with bands like Social D and Channel 3.
“We did something called the Portage la Prairie Rock Riot, where a bunch of bands from Winnipeg went to Portage la Prairie, which is about an hour away,” says Langtry. “We played this big hall, and it was packed. We had a great time, but the cops came and shut it down. Then at the hotel, Chris Walter and I were staying in two different rooms, and somehow our rooms became adjoined. I don’t know how that happened . . . It made it to the front page of the paper there. Something like, ‘Punk rockers invade Portage la Prairie, destroying the place.’”
When Lowlife broke up, the members split in different directions. The most important direction pointed toward a band called Le Kille, which featured Mitch Funk, the clerk who paid for the unreleased Lowlife single, as the vocalist. The band was weird — weird in a city that thrived on weird, and didn’t impress easily anymore. Based out of the House of Beep, the band flipped through members until something clicked. By 1980, they had changed their name to Personality Crisis and counted former Lowlife members Richard Duguay and Mark Halldorson amongst their ranks.
“Le Kille didn’t know how to play,” says Walter. “They just kept changing members, and finally they put together a really tight unit that was just amazing. They would come onstage, and it would be all black. And then boom. It would be like a bomb going off. It was such an experience. When they started playing, you really got the impression that anything could happen. They made AC/DC look like wimps. You thought that if everyone else could hear them, they would be the most popular band in the world.”
Personality Crisis never became the most popular band in the world, and their lone full-length, Creatures for Awhile, doesn’t capture the Angus Young–crushing intensity of their live show. Despite this, it’s still the most powerful record of its era. Personality Crisis would go on to build their legend around the world, and on the stage’s Winnipeg’s Royal Albert Hall, a venue they helped to define through the ’80s. Even if history doesn’t hold them up alongside Black Flag and Dead Kennedys, there’s little doubt amongst those who saw them during their peak that that’s where they belong. And none of it would have been possible without the first tentative steps of Popular Mechanix, and the three-pronged, utterly chaotic attack of Lowlife, the Psychiatrists, and Discharge.
“It’s nice to see bands that came as a result of the early days here,” says Bryce. “The Weakerthans, Greg MacPherson, Propagandhi. Those guys came out of here, and they’re doing really good. It’s satisfying to know that if it wasn’t for us doing these shows, playing punk rock . . .” There is a long pause. “I do think it mattered. This is such an isolated place. We eat our own. So it really matters what happens here.”
PHOTOGRAPHS FROM MARS
THE DIODES AND THE CRASH ‘N’ BURN
The Diodes [© Ralph Alfonso]
January 22, 1999, 5:30 p.m. EST
The Diodes are onstage together for the first time since 1980. The audience isn’t the cramped basement of their old local haunt, the Crash ’n’ Burn, and it’s not the packed crowds of their final American tour with U2. It’s the soundstage for Open Mike with Mike Bullard, a Canadian late-night talk show that tapes in the back of Wayne Gretzky’s Restaurant in the heart of Toronto’s theatre district (at 99 Blue Jays Way, natch). The band drives through the opening riff of “Tired of Waking Up Tired,” and their image will be broadcast across the country, doing for the band in three minutes what three years of driving back and forth from coast to coast couldn’t quite accomplish. The appearance, planned to promote a new best-of collection being released by the band’s former record label, is a reminder of the power of the Diodes, and of “Tired of Waking Up Tired.” In another life, it’s a song that would be a new generation’s “Four Strong Winds” or “Acadian Driftwood.” And for tonight, with hundreds of thousands of people watching, it will be.
Standing where the Crash ’n’ Burn once was, you would have no idea how close a shitty Toronto basement came to touching the iconic greatness of legendary American punk clubs like CBGB and Mabuhay Gardens. Here at 15 Duncan Street, in the heart of what is now a neighbourhood full of chain stores and sleazy, overpriced dance clubs, a small community of like-minded kids came together in the summer of 1977, filled a bathtub with some ice and some beer, and created something previously unseen on Toronto’s muted cultural landscape. It might not have the cool-kid cachet of late ’60s Michigan or mid-’70s New York, but Toronto possessed a thriving, self-supported punk scene that the Diodes, along with their manager Ralph Alfonso, helped to nurture with the help of a few friends and some unnaturally understanding landlords.
On September 24, 1976, the Ramones played their first show in Toronto at the New Yorker Theatre. “It was like the legendary story of how they came into a town and everyone who saw their show started a band,” says Ralph Alfonso, the Diodes’ close friend and future manager. “And it’s true.” As the explosive growth of punk in Toronto that followed demonstrates, those classic rock and roll clichés are always based on a kernel of truth.
“The first punk show I saw was the Ramones at the New Yorker,” says Diodes vocalist Paul Robinson. “I think everyone who started a band was there.” John Catto, the Diodes’ guitarist, reiterates, “That gig was important to everyone.” Along with the rest of Toronto’s fringe youth, Catto and Robinson left the New Yorker on Yonge Street that fall night with a completely flipped understanding of what a band could be and the desire to engage with a new cultural revolution.
Toronto in the 1970s couldn’t have been less like the grimy, exciting metropolis of New York City, or the glitzy, scary sprawl of Los Angeles. Most of Toronto was still a flat, cultureless bastion of Victorian morality, known as “Toronto the Good” and ruled by prohibition-era liquor laws. Which is to say that, beyond a few bars scattered throughout the downtown core, there was no nightlife. No patios. No club district. And no fun. As a result, Toronto’s first few punks all seemed to emerge from the already-alternative media labs and classrooms of the Ontario College of Art and the closest bar, Queen Street’s Beverley Tavern.
John Catto and Paul Robinson, both university students, had initially met at a party, their mutual enthusiasm for the original music emerging from New York drawing them together. The pair also made fast and fortunate friends with fellow punk and OCA student council president John Armstrong. Armstrong, later of the Concordes, had seen the Talking Heads at their first Toronto show when the band had only a few demos to their name, and, as student council president, he offered to bring them back to Toronto for a show at a small gallery the following January.
“The Diodes weren’t really a band yet. They were just some jam band that played in the basement of OCA somewhere,” says Alfonso. “Their whole purpose of being was to open for the Talking Heads at OCA. That was the extent of their life as a band as they saw it.” Catto addresses the band’s intentions point-blank: “We booked the Talking Heads into OCA so we could open for them.” The band already had seven or eight original songs, and by all accounts their debut show went well enough for them to continue what they were doing. At this point consisting of Catto and Robinson, along with drummer Bent Rasmussen and bassist David Clarkson, the band made their first tentative steps to engage with the scant few musicians also writing original music in bar band–dominated Toronto. Their second show was billed as the “3-D Show,” featuring pre-punk innovators the Dishes and the Doncasters at another OCA gallery. The real trouble came in finding a willing venue when the time finally arrived to move things beyond the walls of the insular arts college scene.
“The next gig we did was at the Colonial Underground. That was a disaster which ended in a riot,” says Robinson, matter-of-factly. “We were downstairs in a place called the Colonial Tavern on Yonge Street. Long John Baldry was playing upstairs, and I think that what happened was that he was doing an acoustic set, and we were very loud downstairs. The bouncers came downstairs and asked us to turn down. We didn’t, and they pulled the plug, and the whole placedturned into mayhem, with bouncers hitting people in the head with pool cues. It was a mad, mad way to play your third gig. Pretty much every venue in Toronto from then on banned punk bands.” A few months later, two Colonial employees were charged with assault during a particularly rambunctious Teenage Head show.
Riots weren’t unique to Toronto, and venues across North America were frequently afraid of inviting the fans and potential police attention implied by hosting a punk show. While it became popular to claim that every show with a spat of violence ended in a “full-blown riot�
� (see: every chapter in this book), there were times when the violence associated with punk, whether in the Colonial Underground or the streets of Los Angeles, was a very real concern. The Diodes experienced both.
“We were playing with the Circle Jerks, and that broke up into a riot that actually made the wire services across the world,” says Robinson. “My parents read about it. It was really scary. They thought it was really odd.” The story starts typically — an exuberant crowd takes to the stage while the band is playing, and, defending their equipment, that band takes action.
“It had very little to do with us,” continues Robinson. “There were some really crazy people trying to get onstage and knock over our equipment, and John hit someone over the head with a guitar, then a bouncer threw some guy down the stairs, and then some more people tried to get to our equipment. The whole place exploded, and we just grabbed our stuff, loaded up our van, and got out of there. They ended up on a rampage, all these L.A. punks smashing every plate-glass window within a few blocks of the venue. It was crazy.”
While cities like Los Angeles and New York were lucky enough to have a few oddballs with a bar and an interest in supporting what they saw as a new, exciting creative movement, there wasn’t anyone or anywhere like that in Toronto, save for the New Yorker promoter team of Gary Topp and Gary Cormier (or, the Garys), who had brought the Ramones to town but had yet to take over the Horseshoe Tavern. “They didn’t book punk bands anywhere,” says Robinson. “Which is why we started our own club.”
“We had this big building on Duncan Street,” explains Bruce Eves, co-founder of the Centre for Experimental Art and Communication. “CEAC was on the top floor, and the two middle floors were rented out. The basement was vacant. The guys from the Diodes approached us and proposed this project, and we said, ‘Sure, go ahead.’” What started as a practice space quickly morphed into something much more in the minds of a few punks with nowhere to call their own; along with their manager Ralph Alfonso, the band started to dream a lot bigger.
PERFECT YOUTH: The Birth of Canadian Punk Page 11