“CEAC was this weird, radical arts group,” explains Catto. “Real cutting-edge performance art, early European kind of thing where people would go onstage and cut their fingers off. Really out there.” The band had initially teamed up with the group through Catto and his studies at OCA, with the Diodes acting as musical accompaniment for spoken word performance art, hammering a few chords once a week in exchange for a free place to rehearse. “Then they went off to Europe for the summer, leaving us with the keys,” laughs Robinson. “We opened up this club without telling them.” Sneaking into lumber yards at night, the band built a primitive stage at the back of the room, erecting a bar using discarded doors and tracking down a bathtub to function as a beer fridge. When they got word that Californian power-pop trio the Nerves (the guys behind “Hanging on the Telephone,” later re-recorded and turned into an international superhit by Blondie) were in need of a Toronto date on their current North American tour, they got in touch with the band and put out the word that they would be hosting their first show. The Crash ’n’ Burn survived on a week-to-week basis using special events liquor permits for weddings and stag parties, and was born on that night in the summer of 1977.
“The beauty of it was that it was a social vortex for us. A place where like-minded people could get together,” says Alfonso. “It was barely a venue. It was a rec room. From the initial inner crowd of people that knew each other, you had new people coming in and making friends and expanding it and expanding it.” Now featuring longtime friend and former Zoom member John Hamilton on drums and Ian Mackay on bass, the Diodes were as solid as they had ever been, and after the first night with the Nerves and the Diodes, word quickly spread through the new (and very limited) punk touring circuit that the Crash ’n’ Burn was worth the trek to Toronto. The Dead Boys played two legendary nights in the building’s dank basement, and the Ramones showed up one night after their own gig just to take in a performance from the Diodes and fellow Toronto legends the Viletones.
“I saw the Dead Boys at the Crash ’n’ Burn that summer,” says Cleave Anderson, a founding member of Blue Rodeo and drummer for multiple first-wave Toronto punk bands including the Battered Wives, who once opened for Elvis Costello across Canada, and the vastly underrated Tyranna. “Stiv [Bators, the Dead Boys’ lead singer] was all over the place. They played one set. Ten songs, bang-bang-bang-bang. Fifteen to twenty minutes long. I guess they had to play two sets, and after standing around for not too long, they came back out and played the exact same set over again. The exact same set, top to bottom. I didn’t care. I loved those songs.”
Even with a more understanding behind-the-scenes team than the average Toronto watering hole, Alfonso, who acted as the venue’s de facto manager, didn’t always have the easiest time handling the clientele. “There was one night this guy who was on parole came down and smashed his way through the front door of the building, which is not the door you came in on,” he recalls. “You were supposed to come in through the side. And I was like, ‘Well, what did you do that for?’ And he’s like, ‘It’s punk man, hey!’ So I chased him all the way to the Rex [an old jazz club several blocks away] and got him arrested. I started to see all these hooligans coming out. People started thinking you could do whatever you wanted. I remember one night Goddo was there, smashing his glass on the floor, and I’m like, ‘What are you doing that for?!’ ‘It’s punk, man!’ And I go, ‘No, it’s not. Now I have to clean this up.’” Greg Godovitz, an icon of Canuck rock and roll in the ’70s and future classic rock radio host, wasn’t the only guy trashing the Crash ’n’ Burn when it wasn’t entirely necessary; a recurring character at the club — and future roadie for the Ugly — was a fellow by the name of Johnny Garbagecan, christened as such after making his first appearance at the venue by throwing a full trashcan into the room for no particular reason. “This one night, after we threw Johnny Garbagecan out, I’m upstairs counting the money and I hear someone just getting the shit beaten out of them,” say Alfonso. “And I’m like, ‘Wow, what the hell is going on?’ The next morning I go out, and there’s pieces of skin on the wall. It turns out Johnny had tried to pick up someone’s girl and just got the bejesus beaten out of him. There’s only so much you can do to scrape that off.”
Despite its importance to the local scene and growing popularity with New York punks, the Crash ’n’ Burn was winding down by the summer’s end, an unsustainable business undone by its own infamy. “CEAC’s income came from renting out the middle floor to the Liberal Party of Ontario,” Alfonso says. “These guys are pretty cool until you start coming in on Mondays and everything reeks of beer and there’s pee in the alley. I think the blood and skin might have been the last straw.” The band and its manager were, not surprisingly, politely asked to move along. While the loss of the Crash ’n’ Burn stung, its success had proved to bar owners in Toronto that punk could be viable, even when it was dangerous.
“I think it was a mistake to close it,” recalls CEAC’s Bruce Eves. “I know it’s hard to imagine what that neighbourhood was like 20 years ago, but there was nothing there. No SkyDome, no nightclubs, nothing. It was the only thing alive for blocks. No restaurants. No bars. Nothing. When they were doing the venue, it was real lively. When out of town bands came in, it was always really exciting. It was the first time a lot of the New York bands ever came outside of their city.” But the venue did open up new opportunities; in the same way that their west coast contemporaries would later benefit from their proximity to the Los Angeles scene, Toronto suddenly had an open invitation to visit punk’s ground zero, CBGB in New York City.
“I can remember standing outside the Crash ’n’ Burn discussing this while Teenage Head was playing,” laughs Catto. “Everyone headed down on a week’s notice — Teenage Head, the Viletones, the Curse, us, and the Dents. Most of us stayed around the corner from CBGB. Julia [Bourque] from the Curse had a friend who went to the Nova Scotia College of Art, who had a loft in New York. It was just a big floor. This open-plan loft, literally right around the corner from CBGB. Right in the middle of the Bowery.”
“We got into John’s beaten-up old car that had the windscreen in the back smashed out,” recalls Robinson. “We got a flat tire and had to get the car towed to New York. I don’t know how we got there. But everybody was there. All of these people we had read about. Blondie, the Ramones, the Dead Boys. Everybody came to see us. It really was an event.” The Torontonian takeover of New York lasted three nights, and included headlining sets from the Cramps each night. And it was a takeover — even the Toronto Star, in a feature about the city’s underground clubs, noted that the Crash ’n’ Burn didn’t host a show that weekend because everyone was in New York.
“When you walk into CBGB, it’s like Rock Scene magazine come to life,” says Alfonso. “There’s Seymour Stein sitting right there. Sylvain Sylvain is walking around. There’s Richard Hell! It was so friendly it was unbelievable.” The Diodes returned to Toronto and almost immediately found themselves being courted by CBS Records; at a time when no band in town could even get the time of day from a major label, the band’s hard work really seemed to be paying off.
“Literally the day after the Crash ’n’ Burn closed, CBS asked to hear some demos,” says Catto. “We didn’t have any, so we went into a practice space with Dave Stone and recorded four songs, just bang-bang-bang. Just throw up a mic.” Those hastily recorded demos were enough, and almost immediately, the band found themselves in the studio recording the first Diodes record in September 1977. Alongside producer Bob Gallo, the man who discovered Elvis Costello and whose credits also include an early KISS demo, the band tracked 12 songs live off the floor at Manta Sound in Toronto in just two weeks.
The Diodes was released in October 1977, and its first single, a cover of the Cyrkle’s “Red Rubber Ball,” reached 96 on the Canadian singles chart. The Pig Paper, the Toronto punk scene’s first dedicated magazine, called the band “top contenders for the title of First Can
adian International Punk Sensations.” Anxious to make good on that promise and emulate the success of their American punk idols, the band immediately hit the road to support the album.
“We toured with the Ramones. We played all over the States and Canada. Then all of a sudden, we were playing the El Mocambo [an upscale Toronto rock club], which never would have given us the time of day,” says Robinson. “We were the first punk band to play there.”
“There was a great gig we played in Chicago with the Ramones and the Runaways, and we got an encore, which was amazing,” says Alfonso. “But our road manager got all our gear stolen, so that kind of deflated that one. It was classic — he picks up this girl, goes to her place with the van that all our stuff is in, and I guess it was all a set up. I remember he comes back to the hotel and knocks on the door to tell us all the gear was gone. I told him he was paying for it.” Despite positive fan and critical reception, the band was already feeling disconnected from their label, CBS; swept up in the punk fever that followed the Clash’s massive commercial success in the U.K., no one at the label seemed to have any genuine interest in, or understanding of, the Diodes.
“We had our big debut at Max’s Kansas City, and it was great,” recalls Alfonso. “All the guys from CBS New York were there, and the Diodes went way over the top. Then we got the word back that we weren’t punk enough or something. Then we got word from CBS Canada that they wanted us to go down to the National Lampoon office and protest this satire they had done on Canada. We were like, ‘No, that’s not what they do.’ And they were like, ‘Okay, well, we’ve got these guys doing a “Save the Whales” campaign, why don’t you go down and do a “Kill the Whales” campaign? Stir it up?’ As soon as we started saying no to all that, I think they felt like, ‘I thought we had a punk band we could fulfill all our punk fantasies with! What’s this?’”
Their American tour also included the live debut of a new song, “Tired of Waking Up Tired,” in Boston; Alfonso and the band all recall the song eliciting an immediate reaction that felt decidedly different from the rest of the band’s catalogue. They were right: the song would go on to become an understated classic of the Canadian rock and roll canon, regularly featured on best-of lists and making an appearance in Bruce McDonald’s classic piece of punk road cinema, Hard Core Logo. Recorded in 1978 for the Diodes’ second full-length, the song was never released by CBS. The band was dropped just before Christmas 1978, their record shelved indefinitely.
“The label had a lot of missed opportunities, and they completely ripped us off,” says Robinson. “They sold 30,000 albums in America and we never saw anything. They were exporting things left, right, and centre. There was a huge scandal about it in the ’90s when this all came out, but we never got compensated. We probably would have got a gold album. But we never did.”
The international impact of the band, on the strength of the “Tired” single, is still ringing in the ears of a worldwide fanbase. The Diodes are the lone Canadian band featured in Jon Savage’s definitive history of the British punk movement, England’s Dreaming. In 2010, an Italian label, Rave Up Records, released a Diodes live album, Time/Damage. And when I meet up with the Rheostatics’ Dave Bidini to talk about his impressions of the early punk scene, he recounts a particularly memorable night in China, wandering the streets drunk at the end of a short tour.
“As we were coming back to our hotel, we saw this record store down an alley that was still open at four in the morning,” he says. “There were sofas, and the first thing I saw was a beer fridge. I cracked a beer, and I went to the racks of CDs. The first thing I pulled out was the best of the Diodes. We played them ‘Tired of Waking Up Tired,’ and tried to explain to them all about this band. It’s such a great rock song.” Bidini’s enthusiastic tale of trying to break the language barrier between him and the shop’s Chinese clerks speaks volumes of the Diodes’ status well outside of Canada’s borders.
“According to CBS, we never sold a single import copy,” laughs Catto. “Even though we’d go into the office in New York and they’d be waving charts in our face saying, ‘You’re our number two import! Just behind the Clash.’”
The band split in different directions, with Robinson taking off to New York to rethink his role in the group. In the meantime, “Red Rubber Ball” was included on a CBS compilation and began garnering substantial radio play stateside. The label scrambled to release the shelved second full-length, Released, and attempted to re-sign the band. Having had enough of the major label ringer, the band did the punk thing and politely told them to go fuck themselves.
Working independently again, in 1980 the Diodes recorded their third and final full-length, Action Reaction, clocking long hours on the road opening for Split Enz and, most impressively, U2 on their Boy tour. But the fire was gone.
“We were completely wasted on the road,” recalls Robinson. “Completely what you think of a rock ’n’ roll band. Lots of drinking too much. We were into speed and things that woke you up. I used to sleep on top of the speakers in the van with no seatbelt. I’m lucky to be alive,” he laughs. “I’ve said to my kids, ‘If you ever want to know anything about drugs, just ask me. I’ll tell you what’s good and what’s bad.’”
“You’re limited by your country,” recalls Alfonso, speaking specifically of the final U2 tour. “It’s not like England, where every minor accomplishment is trumpeted by somebody. You’re in Canada. Nothing happens. We had always known that we were doing the right thing in the wrong country. Time had worn us out.” Alfonso himself conducted a telling interview with the band for the first issue of Shades in 1978.
Shades: How do you think people will react to a Canadian punk band?
Hamilton: Just don’t tell them you’re a Canadian band and you might get away with it.
Robinson and Catto ended up moving to England in an attempt to reignite their flagging musical fortunes, but, according to Robinson, “nothing really came of it,” although Catto would spend some time in a post–Seona Dancing, pre–The Office band with Ricky Gervais. Alfonso had started a job at Attic Records and continued to plug away at the business side of the Canadian music industry, while the rest of the Diodes moved on to new projects. Unceremoniously, the band was done. The Diodes didn’t play together again until 1999, reuniting for a single appearance on The Mike Bullard Show to promote a Sony reissue of their CBS-era material, including “Tired of Waking Up Tired.” Recently, the band’s classic lineup of Robinson, Catto, Hamilton, and Mackay began touring Canada and Europe, with plans to record new material in the future.
“Apparently, Nirvana liked us,” says Robinson. “Bob Mould really likes us, as well. Dave Grohl loves the Toronto scene. The right people like us. We were a pretty small scene, and the people who are important really liked us. Maybe we’ve been sidelined because we haven’t had huge commercial success, but I think we’re respected.”
Alfonso, perhaps most succinctly, sees the band’s legacy with the clear insight of an old friend. “I think one of the reasons why the Diodes managed to translate so well is because people sensed that there was some intelligence in what they were doing,” he says. “It wasn’t just another paint-by-numbers punk band. We didn’t come later. We were actually there at beginning, when it was still possible to forge your identity.”
WAITING FOR THE REAL THING
THE POINTED STICKS AND FUCK BANDS
The Pointed Sticks [© bev davies]
November 29, 1979, 1:00 a.m. PST
Hours late and preceded by two massive brawls and a fiery performance from Victoria all-girl punks the Dishrags, Dennis Hopper has finally arrived at the rented hall currently serving as the set for Out of the Blue, his Vancouver-based neorealistic exploration of family, drugs, and Elvis Presley. When the Pointed Sticks finally take the stage in front of 500-plus delirious and thoroughly drunk extras drawn by a last-minute radio campaign offering a “well-known local punk band playing a free gig” and driven
into a frenzy by a long wait in the cold and an even longer wait inside, the room explodes. Cebe, the film’s 15-year-old protagonist, wanders through the staged concert while very real violence explodes around her; she ends the show standing at the back of the stage while the Sticks rip through an encore of “Somebody’s Mom,” a tightly wound slice of power-pop that rips like a technically minded Canuck Ramones. By the song’s end, Ken “Dimwit” Montgomery, the band’s drummer and a pillar of the Vancouver scene, has traded off his sticks to the ecstatic teenager, who loosely pounds her way through the song’s final 15 seconds. In Vancouver, the party spills out into the night; onscreen, we cut to a devastating car crash, as a semi slams into the side of school bus.
“We just wanted to be a part of the excitement. There was a lot of really bad music, and punk came and swept that away. The ethos was that anyone could do it, and we thought, ‘If anyone can do it, why not us?’” Pointed Sticks vocalist Nick Jones is sitting in the brightly lit front room of Toronto’s legendary Horseshoe Tavern, a few hours away from his band’s first show in the Ontario capital since 1980, and almost a full 30 years since their performance in Hopper’s acclaimed film. The Sticks have just returned from a hugely successful reunion tour of Japan, where, in their absence, the band has grown into a full-fledged collector phenomenon; in fact, they are on the verge of releasing their first piece of new music since their break-up, the very appropriately titled single “My Japanese Fan.” In Toronto, they’re running the interview gauntlet with a set of journos who don’t look a day older than the band’s final full-length, a testament to the lasting power of the vibrantly original power-pop they churned out for their four years as a band. And in a few days, they’re headed over the border to play in New York City for the first time in their career. A few years later, the Pointed Sticks will complete their reunion with the release of their first album of original songs in 29 years, Three Lefts Make a Right. Full of nuanced, mature pop songs cut with a vintage punk edge, it’s as good as anything in the band’s classic discography. The band is proud, and critics agree. Nick Jones is a happy guy.
PERFECT YOUTH: The Birth of Canadian Punk Page 12