Nick Jones and Bill Napier-Hemy met in the fifth grade. They hit it off immediately. The pair spent all their time together listening to music, showing off their favourite songs to each other, and developing an appreciation for the new wave of popular music emerging at the tail end of the ’70s. Playing in local top 40 bands like Greased Pig and picking up their chops covering King Crimson and David Bowie, the pair made the inevitable discovery of punk together. Through regular pilgrimages to the downtown music stores that sold Melody Maker and other English rock magazines, the pair became devout anglophiles, keenly aware of the musical revolution occurring halfway around the world. They were just waiting for something similar to happen in their own hometown of Vancouver, which seemed hopelessly behind the curve. Unfortunately, Jones himself would miss out on the first flurry of punk activity on the west coast, having dropped out of university and taken off for the motherland in 1977.
“When I went to England, the first thing I did was look for all of those bands,” he says. “It was pretty amazing, because Vancouver is a very isolated city. You have to go a long way from Vancouver to get anywhere else. I mean, Seattle is the closest city, but there’s a big border to cross for you to get there, and to get anywhere else in Canada it’s 600 or 700 miles. We’re sort of the Australia of cities.” While Jones was following his anglophile passions through the U.K., Napier-Hemy, inspired by the live debut of Vancouver’s first punk band, the Furies, was joining the new wave of original groups in Vancouver, forming a band with local Beefheart-esque art-weirdo Tim Ray under the moniker Tim Ray and A.V. Says Napier-Hemy of the project, “A lot of the bands were really heavy, and we wanted to do something light, poppy, and fun. Our first gig was just covers. We did ‘Psycho Killer,’ dressed up in plaid seersucker jackets. It was fun, and it was light.”
Jones returned to Vancouver in 1978, just as A.V. was winding down. “When I came back, it was a very strange scene because there were only maybe a hundred people that were involved in it, but they were all going to every gig, whether it was an art-rock band or a punk-rock band or an all-girl punk band or a pop-punk band.” He tracked down his old friend Napier-Hemy, and the pair immediately formed a band. They both insist that their songwriting union came about without any real plan or discussion. It just seemed like the logical thing to do, now that punk was in full swing and everyone was starting a band.
“You don’t have to go to music school and own a satin cape and a big rack of keyboards to be in a band,” recalls Jones. “We just started fishing around, looking to see who else was around. We went through a few different people and eventually settled on Tony and Ian.” Tony Bardach and Ian Tiles were another pair of old friends who met through mutual acquaintances when Bardach visited Tiles’ hometown of Ottawa in 1975.
“They had a lot of punk rock–type of records, like Iggy Pop, Modern Lovers, Flamin’ Groovies,” says Bardach. “It was just really weird, sitting around listening to these records, feeling like it was smoking dope or smoking cigarettes when you were 10. It was like a secret. That was the real turning point.” A year later, Tiles moved out west, and the pair spent the next few months looking for some kind of “punk thing” happening in Vancouver. It took some searching, but they eventually found their way to a Skulls gig at a local legion hall, where a band named Victorian Pork was headlining.
Victorian Pork was the Vancouver scene’s first “fuck band.” Formed out of necessity in a scene built around a tiny number of extremely driven individuals, fuck bands were random groupings of musicians from other bands, playing silly songs on instruments they were often wholly unfamiliar with. Fuck bands’ sole purpose was to provide opening acts for the scene’s legit bands, of which there were rarely enough to stage a full show; Victorian Pork’s original lineup comprised mainly of members of Stone Crazy, the pre-D.O.A. rocker outfit, but the band continued to play an active role in the scene after Stone Crazy morphed into the Skulls and lit out for Toronto.
“Even if you played once a month for a few months, after that point, people were probably starting to get a little tired of you,” explains Jones. “As a musician, that’s not enough. You want to be playing more than that, so that’s kind of where the fuck band came from. Let’s say D.O.A. is playing the Smiling Buddha on a Friday night. They’d need opening bands. So you put together a band with some of your friends.” Victorian Pork was such a band and along with Rude Norton, they became the longest-running and most popular haphazard legends of early Vancouver. Victorian Pork, in particular, remained active and important during a period in Vancouver punk history that, from the outside, looked pretty dim. The Furies had broken up by mid-’77, the Skulls were halfway across the country, and the Dishrags were still teenagers holed up on Vancouver Island, a lifetime away. But Victorian Pork, led by the charismatic Brad Kent on guitar, kept the flame burning in the halls and correctional facilities of British Columbia, and by 1978, both Tiles and Bardach had been recruited into its morphing ranks.
“One time we had to perform at Woodland Correctional, or Woodland Rehabilitation Centre, for all the poor retarded and deformed kids,” laughs Bardach. He had been arrested for driving without insurance, and while being processed, was asked by his parole officer what he did for fun. “I told her I played in a band and she said, ‘Oh, we won’t waste you on the loading dock at the Salvation Army, you guys can perform for us!’ I said, ‘Well, what kind of a thing were you thinking of?’ She told me about the Woodland thing. I told her we were a loud punk rock band with huge amplifiers and she said, ‘No, the kids will love it, it’ll be just great.’” The show was a shocking success; while half of the audience immediately left the room when the band started playing, the other half leapt into the air and pogoed non-stop from the very first note. But Bardach came close to violating his parole when he nearly missed the show due to an unpaid parking ticket.
“I had an old beat-up car, and on the way to the gig, I got pulled over by the Port Moody police and got hauled into their station for not paying a traffic fine in Vancouver,” he laughs. “I was able to talk my way out of it, and I eventually made it to the show.”
Victorian Pork is just one of many fuck bands immortalized by Bud Luxford Presents, a series of compilations released by Bud Luxford, now extremely rare and auctioned online for hundreds of dollars. The first two volumes, which run the gamut from big-name fucks like Los Radicos Popularos and Rude Norton to virtual unknowns like Sgt. Nick Penis and Tots in Bondage, are hilarious distillations of what made the Vancouver scene so vibrant and unlike any other city.
Despite the tacit support for even the silliest of punk ventures, Victorian Pork was crumbling by 1978, and Tiles, who had been fronting VP for the last year, was eager to return to his earlier role as a drummer. With Bardach on bass, they provided the ideal rhythm section for Nick Jones and Bill Napier-Hemy’s new project, one that would require the mastery of intense speed, stop-start rhythms, and the nuances of the adventurous early material of bands like the Jam.
The band chose power-pop for a simple reason — D.O.A. had the heavy shit on lock. They felt like no one was playing catchy, fast pop songs in the Vancouver scene, and as fans of bands like the Buzzcocks and Ramones, they were ideally suited to provide a lightweight take on the angsty punk sound that was so popular in the city.
“I saw the Buzzcocks in England, and most people in Canada didn’t really know much about them when I came back,” says Jones. “I was raving about this incredible band who had harmony singing and beautiful melodies but still had that great edge. That was kind of the template that we took, to capture a lighter side of what all the other bands were doing.” The new band quickly learned a few covers and landed their first show opening for D.O.A. and Rabid at the Quadra Club, a lesbian bar that let punk bands have the run of the place every Wednesday night.
“We got all dolled up in seersucker suits and made a big piss take out of the whole situation and being in a band, being glamorous, being idols, that w
hole thing,” laughs Bardach. “We kind of came out with a super bubblegum kind of music that was very tongue in cheek.”
“We played a few covers and we did one or two songs we had written ourselves,” says Jones. “But all the girls who had been coming out — all seven girls in our little scene at the time, who came to the gigs but didn’t want to get in the front row because they didn’t want to get knocked over or anything — they were in the front row.” Bardach laughs. “Well, people just started buying it right away.”
The band returned to the shed and honed in on their developing sound, ditching the covers and writing a set of inspired originals that they hoped would continue to appeal to the fairer sex, while offering the aggressive edge that had drawn them to the scene in the first place. This mix of simple “boy meets girl” lyrics and rapid-fire pop-punk instrumentals landed them a competing slot in a Battle of the Bands being staged by the Georgia Straight, the local alternative-weekly. (Jones refers to it as the “hippie rag.”) Held at Vancouver’s legendary live venue, the Commodore Ballroom, first prize was a recording session at Little Mountain Sound with the studio’s overnight guy, an aspiring musician and producer named Bob Rock.
The band faced some stiff competition. Namely the Subhumans, who were one of the best bands in the city at that time. The others were “dopey,” according to Bardach.
“They might have won the year before, but punk rock was starting to take over as what was cool, and Pointed Sticks got it easily,” he says. Now the Pointed Sticks were ready to record the first of their cleverly disguised pop songs, producing the “What Do You Want Me To Do” single and inadvertently landing the prestige of the first record to come with the “Produced by Bob Rock” seal of note-perfect approval.
“We didn’t know him as anybody other than the blond dude at the controls,” says Bardach. “We were just slightly in awe of him, being able to do that, sit there and know what all the buttons did.”
“That guy has produced multi-platinum records from Metallica and Bon Jovi and millions of other bands selling records all around the world, and the first one was us,” Jones says, laughing. “So, we obviously taught him everything he knows.”
After taking little tow-headed Bob Rock to school and giving him the tools he would need to eventually produce albums like Mötley Crüe’s Dr. Feelgood and Metallica’s entire ’90s oeuvre, the band began to play around town more seriously, pushing their new 7" single, made available through local store-cum-label Quintessence Records. It would become the second release for the brand-new label (following a single from Tim Ray and A.V.), the second step in a series of releases that would chronicle almost all the higher-profile bands to emerge from the Vancouver scene, from the Modernettes to the Young Canadians.
The single sold briskly along the entire west coast corridor, from Vancouver down to San Diego. It didn’t take long to sell out of the first pressing of 1,000 copies, and the band was spurred to record again, and, for the first time, to try their luck touring outside of British Columbia. They also expanded their sound, recruiting keyboardist Gordon Nicholl from White Rock transplants Active Dog, who brought in fellow AD member Robert Bruce on drums when Ian Tiles split around the same time. The more expansive group recorded the “Real Thing” single in 1979, proving themselves as adept as ever at producing shimmering pop songs through a Buzzcocks-like lens of slashing guitars and, now, the fullness of Nicholl’s keyboard. A vital touring circuit was developing up the west coast, bringing Los Angeles and San Francisco bands like the Avengers and Dead Kennedys to Vancouver, and it allowed bands like the Pointed Sticks a chance to throw in their lot with their American counterparts.
“Toronto was too far away,” explains Jones. “You could be in Los Angeles in half the time it took you to get to Toronto. There was a good west coast circuit back then. The same kind of circuit happened in the ’60s, for the psychedelic bands from Vancouver like the Collectors and San Fransciso bands like Jefferson Airplane. It was easier for them to come to Vancouver than it was for them to go to New York.” Following in the footsteps of their acid-brained predecessors, the Pointed Sticks continued to build a following on the west coast, growing into one of the biggest names in the vibrant Vancouver punk scene. It was no small feat, considering the raw power of contemporaries like D.O.A. and the Subhumans. And while those bands were often known as raucous shit-disturbers, the Pointed Sticks maintained a cute, clean-cut image, even when they recruited former Subhumans drummer Ken “Dimwit” Montgomery in late 1979, prior to recording the “Lies” single. Beyond his ample abilities as one of the most entertaining drummers from punk’s first wave (not to mention one of the heaviest), Dimwit added a slight trouble-making edge to the Sticks’ perfect image during a radio interview in San Francisco.
“Gord and Dimwit went on the radio, and the DJ was baiting them, trying to get them to say something controversial. And that’s what they did,” laughs Jones. “They talked about the Grateful Dead and some people took offense to what they said. I don’t know what they were doing listening to that radio station in the first place, but that’s what happened to them.” When Nicholl and Dimwit emerged from the radio station, they found a gang of angry bikers waiting for them; they had to hide inside the station until the bikers grew tired and dispersed.
Outside of the odd pissed-off biker, the only blight on the band’s bright future seemed to be their manager, John Owens. Owens’ star client was a classic rocker named Jerry Doucette, who had scored a platinum record in 1977 and opened national tours for the likes of the Doobie Brothers. (His 1979 album The Douce Is Loose, didn’t fare well, for reasons technically unknown but aesthetically obvious.) Ultimately, Owens’ methods weren’t right for a band rooted in the punk ethos of a city like Vancouver, with the manager booking them into local discotheques and failing to understand the scene they had come from. In a 1979 interview with University of British Columbia’s student paper Ubyssey, Bardach was adamant that Owens was setting them up in “the wrong kind of direction,” despite an initial promise to help raise the band’s profile and turn them into contemporary pop stars.
“Owens wanted us to borrow $6,000 and go down to Los Angeles, rent a car, and take all these people out to lunch and sell them the band,” he said at the time. Napier-Hemy referred to it as the “bullshit and hype” aspect of the music industry, and the band ultimately parted ways with Owens, instead joining forces with old friend Stephen Macklam, who became, according to some, the “sixth Stick.” The Pointed Sticks were his first management contract, but they would hardly be his last; today, he manages artists like Elvis Costello, Norah Jones, and Joni Mitchell. For the second time in their career, the Pointed Sticks taught a future industry bigshot all he needed to know.
Besides helping steer the band back in the right direction, Macklam was also crucial to the creation of the Vancouver Complication, a full-length compilation of bands from Vancouver’s first wave that is rightly considered a classic of the genre, a valuable time capsule of an eclectic, energized music community firing on all cylinders. Funded by benefit concerts organized by Macklam and featuring bands like D.O.A. and the Dishrags, many of the songs were recorded overnight at a basement 8-track studio on the outskirts of Burnaby. Despite some rushed takes and a few sonic duds, it’s an invaluable, if imperfect snapshot of one of North America’s best and perpetually overlooked music scenes. Focused on documenting serious bands like Active Dog, Tim Ray and A.V., and Private School, the CD re-release gratefully still includes a contribution from the most prominent fuck band to ever emerge from Vancouver’s weird underbelly, the infamous Rude Norton.
“Rude Norton was Dimwit’s masterpiece, really. I was just the drummer,” explains Jones. With Brian “Wimpy Roy” Goble of the Subhumans on bass, Rude Norton rose to fuck band notoriety thanks to high-energy covers of TV themes and the brilliantly juvenile “Tits on the Beach,” becoming opening slot and house party favourites in a closely knit scene that fed on new ideas,
new music, and new activity. “I think it’s things like that that really set the Vancouver scene apart. It was about not taking yourself very seriously,” says Jones. “That’s the way we all felt about Toronto. I mean, we never really had an animosity toward the Toronto bands, but they never had any fucking sense of humour. They took themselves so seriously all the time.” As a rotating cast of musicians using fake names like “Steve Roughhouser” and “Reverend Nicky Shiloh” can attest, Rude Norton and the entire fuck band concept helped to keep the Vancouver scene grounded in the fundamental precepts of punk. But sometimes, even Steve Roughhouser can get got by the machine.
“Stiff Records had a talent scout in Vancouver because they had heard there was a music scene out here that was interesting,” says Napier-Hemy. The U.K.-based home to Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, and the Damned, Stiff Records was ground zero for the British punk explosion, releasing “New Rose” by the Damned in October 1976, the very first English punk single ever released. And they liked the Pointed Sticks.
“We played a big show at the Commodore,” says Bardach. “It was a sell-out and they sent somebody down there to the show to check us out. And I guess he liked it, so they just hired us right then and there.” Rumours still circulate about a supposed bidding war between Stiff and Sire Records, founded by music industry legend Seymour Stein and home to American punk heroes the Ramones, the Dead Boys, and Talking Heads. Ultimately, it is impossible to decipher exactly what transpired behind closed doors; in a 1979 Ubyssey interview, Macklam claims that the band turned down more money from major label subsidiary Sire to go with the independent Stiff, and Bardach claims the Stiff deal was simply a better offer. Today, the only indisputable fact is that the band went with Stiff, who immediately sent British pub-rock vet Brinsley Schwarz to Vancouver to help record an EP for the label. Stiff was happy with the result, Out of Luck, and brought the band to England to record their full-length debut.
PERFECT YOUTH: The Birth of Canadian Punk Page 13