“I was jamming with some guys and wanted to start a band,” he says. “I had this sound in my mind, Mott the Hoople meets the Stooges, and they said, ‘That sound’s not going to do any good.’ I was trying to write songs like that because I was listening to those bands so much, and they just didn’t think it was good. So the second I heard ‘Anarchy in the U.K.,’ I quit the band.” Not only did Gerlecki abandon the non-believers; he reinvented himself as Mickey DeSadist, an homage to the punk personas adopted by his British heroes.
Walking through Hamilton one day, DeSadist heard some kids playing sloppily in their basement. He walked into the house, uninvited, and the first lineup of the Forgotten Rebels was born. It was a simpler time.
“I never found musicians that really understood what I wanted to do, but I did find guys that wanted to drink and party so much that they didn’t care what they played,” he says. Inspired by the new imported singles showing up every week at Star Records, DeSadist tried to hone in on the sound and attitude he wanted to convey. Star was an anomaly for a city Hamilton’s size; stocking punk records in the middle of downtown long before similar stores popped up in Vancouver or Toronto, it became the nerve centre of the city’s music community.
Hamilton was also ahead of the curve musically; hometown boys Teenage Head had been together since ’75, pre-dating the official worldwide coming out party of punk. They were The Real Deal, a stripped-down rock and roll band in the vein of the Ramones or the Dead Boys, and when DeSadist saw their first show at Westdale High School, it further galvanized him to get his shit together and get the Rebels off the ground. Serendipitously, a Toronto writer named Gary Pig Gold reached out to DeSadist around this time and invited his new band to open for Hamiltonian psych-rock weirdo pioneers Simply Saucer at the YWCA on Ottawa Street.
“They were kind of like Syd Barrett with Pink Floyd meets the Kinks,” says DeSadist. The description fits; Simply Saucer was too weird for the Hamilton bar crowd, and when punk hit, they were too weird for many of the punks. Their landmark LP, Cyborgs Revisited, was recorded by Bob and Daniel Lanois in 1975 but didn’t see the light of day until 1989, falling out of print for the better part of a decade before being reissued in 2003. The album is a dazzlingly adventurous near-forgotten piece of experimental proto-punk, its lo-fi sound only serving to highlight the creativity in its songwriting and production — it’s no surprise that Daniel Lanois would go on to a brilliant career as the producer of landmark albums by U2, Bob Dylan, and Neil Young. Cyborgs is frequently cited as one of the greatest Canadian records of all time, and it is doubtlessly deserving of any accolade you could throw at it.
Saucer might have been a little outside of the punk world, but their importance to the development of the city’s music scene can’t be understated; their house was a centre of musical experimentation through the ’70s, a place where they rehearsed daily, wrote an album a week, and performed for whoever was interested in stopping by. The advent of punk, if not ideally suited to their prog-leaning style, helped them put down stronger roots in the city and gave underage punks a work ethic and who-gives-a-fuck attitude to aspire to. And, at this immediate point in the story, an opening slot on a show guaranteed to be attended by at least a hundred people in downtown Hamilton.
“We overwhelmed the audience,” says DeSadist. “Even though we couldn’t play very well, it was overwhelming to the audience to have someone writing the kind of songs we were writing at that point. I mean, it was overwhelming to me. Even if we couldn’t play well, we were already becoming a great band.” It wasn’t just the band’s songs that were shocking; DeSadist burnt a Canadian flag onstage, destroyed everything in sight, and shattered a door. Gary Pig Gold received the bill weeks later from the venue, citing $400 in costs, broken down as such:
Cleaning — 5 people x 5 hours x 5 = $125
Replace Door (Memorial Room) = $200
Damage to Vegetables (Carrots and Lettuce) = $25
Damage to Ladies Washroom = $50
No one knows what the YWCA meant about carrots and lettuce, but the rest seemed fair enough. Not a bad list for a first gig. The Forgotten Rebels were off and running.
Like Toronto’s Viletones, a menacing method of delivery for Steven Leckie’s strange brand of punk performance art, the Forgotten Rebels were, in many ways, a single man’s vision masquerading as a complete band. DeSadist was the driving force and central figure, enduring countless lineup changes and continuing to write and perform as the Rebels over 30 years later. The band’s aesthetic — smart, catchy, too offensive to be believable — is a direct extension of Mickey himself, a sarcastic, intelligent guy with a distinct patter and a continuing need to push the boundaries of good taste. Ultimately, he’s just trying to make people laugh, and maybe make a political point or two.
This was apparent from day one, when the song “Reich ’N’ Roll” appeared on the band’s first demo. Its slow, catchy, chorus intones, over and over again, “I wanna be a Nazi,” and for the casual listener, the song could easily be interpreted as anti-Semitic. But for anyone following along, the third verse spells things out quite literally: “I only wrote this song / Just to screw up the press / You gotta be quite an idiot for believing this mess.” DeSadist was right, and the media immediately pounced on the band for their supposed racism. It was a stigma they initially invited under the time-honoured cliché of “all press is good press,” but the need for DeSadist to consistently explain himself eventually wore thin. He’s just a provocateur, and a silly one at that.
“I’m not a racist, I just watched Sanford and Son a lot,” he says, laughing. “My humour was based on that, and Abdullah Farouk. He was the manager of the Original Sheik, Ed Farhat. I got a lot of my inspiration from wrestling. Ernie Ladd was another huge influence.” As the list of damages from the band’s first show can attest, the Rebels were about showmanship and shock from day one, and DeSadist seems surprised that no one made the connection at the time. In fact, the Forgotten Rebels are part of a long line of punks who channelled wrestling theatrics into their music and performance.
“Even David Thomas, when he was doing Rocket from the Tombs, claims that his persona was taken from wrestling,” says Damian Abraham, vocalist for Polaris Music Prize–winning art-punks Fucked Up, and my go-to expert on all things related to the crossover of punk and wrestling. Abraham has built his own career around the kind of theatrics that DeSadist is describing, embodying not just the persona of classic wrestlers, but the physical aspects of performance as well. Abraham regularly juices, which is to say the guy tends to smash stuff into his forehead so that he bleeds all over himself. After years of razor blade and pint glass-induced damage, Abraham now sports the same scars as veteran wrestlers like Terry Funk and Abdullah the Butcher, making him the ideal candidate to explain the frequent intersection of performance culture that is punk and wrestling.
When I ask Abraham to elaborate on the connection DeSadist is citing, he rambles off a grocery list of punk and hardcore groups that have drawn influence from classic wrestling personalities. David Thomas of Rocket from the Tombs, a Cleveland-based proto-punk band active from ’74 to ’75, is an early example, as Thomas’ stage persona was imbued with the over-the-top dramatic flair of ’70s wrestlers. Similarly, the Dictators’ 1975 debut, Go Girl Crazy!, sports a cover shot of vocalist Handsome Dick Manitoba in full wrestling regalia; the band’s whole career is marked by references to and reverence for professional wrestling. The Forgotten Rebels are part of the same continuum, one that grew even stronger throughout the ’80s with wrestling-obsessed hardcore outfits like ANTiSEEN and the Stretch Marks from Winnipeg carrying the torch for legends like Invader One and Terry Funk through wrestling-themed songs, records, and stage personas.
DeSadist’s mix of wrestling and strong, original songwriting was enough to attract manager Stephen Burman, who had just returned from a trip to the U.K., ostensibly to visit family, but, basically, just to see the Clash.
“I told Mickey I’d seen all these bands,” Burman says. “We were hanging out at Tim Hortons. I guess I got into the city and I sat down for a coffee and we started talking. He was just totally thrilled with me having been there and everything. And then he showed me what was going on, what the scene was in Hamilton at the time.” Tim Hortons on Ottawa Street was like DeSadist’s CBGB. He was there almost every day, holding court, drinking double doubles, eating doughnuts. If you wanted to find him, you went to Tim Hortons. It doesn’t get much more spectacularly Hamiltonian than that.
The Forgotten Rebels’ lineup shifted again, just in time for Burman to insist that they record a demo, the 1978 cassette release Burn the Flag. The tape helped the band get their first shows in Toronto and gave them enough momentum to justify entering a proper studio to record their first full-length album. Unfortunately, they had no idea what they were doing and didn’t have enough money to pay someone to help guide them through the process. The result was an unreleasable mess that the band had to find a way to salvage. Someone suggested Bob Bryden, the new manager at Star Records. Credited as the producer of the band’s debut, Tomorrow Belongs to Us, Bryden is emphatic that his initial role with the band wasn’t quite so prestigious.
“It wasn’t so much a production job as a salvage job,” he says. Despite being left with a collection of botched tapes to remix and master in a way that would leave the end product listenable, at the very least, Bryden was enthusiastic about the job. A newcomer to the city, he had approached the punk scene, Star Records, and Hamilton, as an outsider, but was eager to get his hands dirty.
“I consider myself a ’60s person,” he says. “I was very idealistic, and I still am. I spent most of the ’70s wondering where the revolution went. I took the ’60s really seriously, and I was put off by the appearance of nihilism and negativity that went along with the punk explosion. At the same time, I was amazed and refreshed by the idea of ‘Let’s get back to the garage, the basement, and make some fun two-and-a-half minute songs again.’” Before making the move to Steeltown, Bryden was living in Toronto and floundering. His own musical efforts had wound down by the middle of the decade; he was jobless and feeling aimless and apathetic. On a whim, he went to visit an old friend who owned a few record stores, driving about an hour out of the city to the flagship store in Oshawa. When he walked in, his friend was on the phone, in the midst of a heated conversation and visibly exasperated.
“He put his hand over the mouthpiece and said, ‘Hey, Bob. You want to go to Hamilton? Like, now?’ I was floored. I had gone into Oshawa just to hang around for the day. And I said yes.” The next day, Bryden visited the Hamilton store, the infamous Star Records. Though it was managed by Paul Kobak, Bryden had been told in no uncertain terms that he was to wrest back control of the business. It seems that Kobak had gone the way of Mistah Kurtz, with Bryden left to steamboat his way up the 403 highway and go all Charles Marlow on everyone.
“I went into Star Records, and I was basically undercover because no one knew I had been told to go in and take over the store,” Bryden says. “And it was just insane. It was crazy. It was wacky. All the punks were behind the counter. There was no sense of order or any business-like approach to anything. You walked in the store, and it was just chaos. It sounds fun and cool, but my job was to restore order. Which I did.” Kobak had been using the store as an informal bank to fund Teenage Head, who he was managing. Money from the Star Records till went to everything from Teenage Head equipment to practice space rent; on one particularly busy Saturday, it’s been said that Kobak simply handed Head guitarist Gord Lewis enough cash to buy a brand new Les Paul. Bryden was the killjoy who had to stop the party, and it made him pretty unpopular for a brief period of time.
“I tried to do it creatively,” he says. “I didn’t want to go in like a bureaucratic suit. But the business was dying. If someone didn’t do something, Star Records wouldn’t have lasted another six months.” Eventually, the city’s punk populace forgave him. And while Teenage Head’s reign at Star Records came to an end, the Forgotten Rebels’ was just beginning. “In the long term, what Star Records did was get Teenage Head going,” Bryden says. “Teenage Head had their day at Star. They practised there, they got their equipment. It was time for the Rebels to step up.” With the eventual release of Bryden’s version of Tomorrow Belongs to Us, they did.
Leaps and bounds ahead of the band’s first attempts in the studio, the record took the best elements of their demo and presented them in a tidy package: the catchy choruses, DeSadist’s unique vocal style, and, most memorably, his vicious sense of humour and worldview. While there was plenty on the record designed to draw the ire of sensitive folks, the band faced the greatest criticism for the Nazi imagery of “Reich ’N’ Roll,” and “3rd Homosexual Murder,” a song about a rash of murders happening in gay clubs in Toronto, written from the perspective of the killer. The band was labelled anti-Semitic and homophobic, despite the fact that one song was barely veiled parody, the other a ripped-from-the-headlines account with no sympathy for the narrator. It didn’t matter; the band was boycotted by local alternative media and radio, including the only punk-friendly radio station in Ontario, CFNY. It took all of Bryden’s charm and contacts in the industry to get the band a coveted slot opening for the Ramones at a CFNY-promoted show in the nearby suburb of Burlington.
“There was a lot of politics and back and forth about what they could play,” says Bryden. “Finally, they were allowed to play, but they weren’t supposed to play ‘Reich ’N’ Roll.’ That was the deal. It was in writing. So of course, three songs into their set in front of 3,000 kids, Mickey goes, ‘I know we’re not supposed to play this song, but we’re going to anyway. One, two, three, four!’ And suddenly you have all these kids singing, ‘I wanna be a Nazi.’ I did not anticipate what was going to happen, though.” A few days later, Bryden was at work at Star when he got a call from the Halton Regional Police. A formal complaint had been lodged, and the Attorney General was now investigating the band to determine if they were a neo-Nazi organization.
“I literally said to these detectives, ‘I assure you, the Forgotten Rebels are not a neo-Nazi organization bent on overthrowing the Canadian government. They’re just kids, trying to shock people,’” Bryden says. “‘And guess what? It worked. You’re shocked.’” The charges against the band were eventually dropped, but the repercussions continued, with radio and media refusing to cover the Rebels as a result. They went from getting press for their outrageousness to being ignored for it, which made capitalizing on their local popularity difficult. Despite the trouble it caused the band, Bryden offers up the most succinct defence of the band’s dark approach to musical comedy. “The devil hates humour,” he says. “Hitler hated humour. That’s the only weapon we have against tyranny.”
The heat proved too much for the rest of the band; DeSadist was faced with having to build the Forgotten Rebels from the ground up once again when everyone quit on him, for the third time in just over a year. But he would soon find more than an able, beer-thirsty, and otherwise disinterested rhythm section; new recruit Chris Houston would prove to be every bit as weird and funny as DeSadist, as adept at writing a catchy melody, and, importantly, as capable of handling the reactions that came with being a Rebel.
“I’d hang out with him at Tim Hortons and just let him talk,” says Houston, who is sitting in his office in a downtown Hamilton music school. A lifetime musician, Houston is one of the kindest and most enthusiastic people I’ve spoken to during this entire period. His genuine affection for the Rebels, a band he was only in for a short period of time, is apparent in his lengthy, thoughtful answers. And his passion for the city is unmistakable — after our conversation, he insists on taking me to his favourite Italian restaurant, tucked away in a basement on James Street, before guiding me around the city and pointing out all the long-gone sites of important local punk history: Star Records, the Saucer House, the house wh
ere he and DeSadist first recorded demos for the second Forgotten Rebels LP. It makes sense that he spent days just talking to DeSadist, developing an understanding of his motivations and his goals, before joining the band officially. Chris Houston is smart and thoughtful, and it’s doubtful he commits to anything without being fully invested. “I guess I just convinced him to let me join the band,” he laughs.
A guitarist by trade, Houston’s first home in the Rebels was behind the kit, before he eventually moved to bass. His first show happened at the Turning Point in Toronto, and proved to be par for the course with early Rebels gigs. Whether or not Houston was ready was another thing. “I saw one person have their teeth smashed out on the table; someone had their ribcage smashed; there were four broken arms and three broken legs,” he says. “This is while I’m playing onstage, my first time with the Rebels playing drums, and you’re looking at, literally, mayhem. That was just horrible. It makes a good story now, but for those people . . . Jesus Christ.”
“It was gang related,” explains DeSadist. “The gangs hung out together, beat the shit out of each other, and then would go drinking together. Rival gangs that weren’t that rival until they got drunk, you know? That whole crowd, they hung out together after. They drove each other to the hospital.” It was an appropriate beginning to Houston’s time in the band, and the new Rebels quickly circled their wagons to begin work on a new batch of songs. With two equally twisted and creative songwriters in the band, the Forgotten Rebels looked to push good taste even further than they had in the past, drawing once again on the theatrics of classic wrestling and the natural absurdity of the news of the day. Songs like “Bomb the Boats and Feed the Fish” played on the violent xenophobia of older generations, rallying against immigrants coming to Canada to steal jobs (and suggesting that we “bomb the boats and feed their fucking flesh to the fish”). “Elvis Is Dead” attacked rock and roll’s greatest sacred cow with a rollickingly rockabilly beat, DeSadist’s best Elvis impression, and lyrics about stealing the King’s body from his grave. And “Fuck Me Dead” extolled the virtues of necrophilia with such subtle poetry as “A pillow and a coffin’s just as nice a bed / Baby I love it when you fuck me dead.”
PERFECT YOUTH: The Birth of Canadian Punk Page 21