“Between Mickey and me, we’d always be trying to out-gross each other,” Houston says. “Mickey would always show up with really great songs, and we’d work on them together. I’d always be on the floor laughing. He’s a bit of an exhibitionist when it comes to saying things; we just tried to write the most disgusting songs we could possibly think of.” Enlisting Bob Bryden once again, the band set about recording In Love with the System, their second full-length record, in 1980.
“We instituted what I call ‘Commando Raid Recording Techniques,’” Bryden says. “We did everything really fast.” Much of the record consists of live-off-the-floor first takes, and Houston credits the prep work done by Bryden for their crispness. Despite the speed with which the band had to run in and out of the studio, the result was even better than its predecessor. Containing some of the same songs as their demo and Tomorrow, the Rebels had finally figured out how to behave in the studio, deferring to Bryden to add a few sonic bells and whistles to keep things interesting. The record is light years ahead of the output of many of their peers from the same period, owing to Bryden’s studio creativity and the stellar songwriting of Houston and DeSadist.
“It was just well-crafted,” says Bryden. “There’s a tremendous musical and lyrical ability on those first two records that is far superior to 99% of what was happening in punk all over the world. Mickey wasn’t afraid to write great songs. I felt like he was closer to the Clash.” Bryden has a point, although it’s a leap to imagine “Lost in the Supermarket” being about fucking a corpse. But ultimately, it was that tension between the craft and the subject that made the Rebels’ material so compelling; if they had written about love or the looming threat of nuclear war, who knows where things would have ended up. But they wanted to write about Elvis.
Despite the work that had gone into crafting In Love with the System, the Rebels still weren’t connecting with a big enough audience. The band was never embraced in Toronto the way Teenage Head was; DeSadist would always hold a sarcastic grudge about being snubbed by the Last Pogo — in the documentary film of the same name, DeSadist appears, giggling and clutching a Rebels LP, to declare, “The Last Pogo was one big fart. That’s ’cause we never played. They can’t take a real punk band here.” It would take years (and the invention of the internet) for them to really find a niche and grow into one of Canada’s most legendary punk bands. But in 1980, they were still an unpopular bunch of guys forced to travel by Greyhound between shows.
“We were so desperate that we would actually load all our gear on the bus,” says Houston. “The secret of touring by bus is you put all the drum hardware in a golf bag or a hockey bag and they think you’re hockey players. They don’t want to see guitar amps, so you have to hide it in sports gear. They think you’re a sports team.”
In the end, there were a few factors that led Houston to leave the band, marking the end of the first truly great era of the Forgotten Rebels. The first is pretty simple: “You can’t have two Hitlers in one band,” laughs Houston. “I’m a control freak, and so is Mickey.” The second was touring — the band didn’t.
“Paul Kobak had lined up a tour, but Mickey didn’t want to do it because he wanted to stay close to work,” says Houston.
“I got hired by an elevator manufacturing company, and I was making grown-up wages,” says DeSadist. “We thought we were going to be rich as fucking hell because we were so far ahead of everything. We were nastier sounding than the Sex Pistols on record, and we thought we were going to make a fortune. Think of how few gigs the Sex Pistols played. Think of how few gigs the Beatles played. They probably played less gigs than the Rebels did.”
Ultimately, songs like “I Left My Heart in Iran” just couldn’t compare to “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” and the band split for the umpteenth time. DeSadist’s follow-up was This Ain’t Hollywood, which still contained a handful of songs co-written with Houston, including the classic “Surfin’ on Heroin,” a simplistic ode to exactly the activities implied by the title. The song has become one of the most infamous of Canada’s generation-spanning punk oeuvre. The Rebels eventually ended up touring, helping them become one of the most popular punk bands in the country. Still, it’s hard to compete with the raw power and unfiltered craziness of DeSadist and Houston’s vision.
“Those records are so raw and so much fun,” says Bryden. “You might have to turn them up louder than a normal record, because we didn’t know much about mastering.” He laughs. “But they’re so much fun.”
I’m back at the sign for This Ain’t Hollywood in Hamilton, watching happy drunks young and old stumble out into the night. There’s something reassuring about knowing that, even when the records are all out of print and the band has long stopped playing, there will be something lasting in this town to remind everyone that something really great happened here. Because it was fun, it was original, and it was local. That’s the most important thing. The Hammer made its own Hollywood in the shadow of Toronto, one double double and sarcastic ode to Nazis at a time.
I CAN’T GET THE SOUNDS I WANT
VICTORIA
The Neos [© Pete Ells]
November 16, 1979, 4:30 p.m. PST
Pink Steel is performing at the Spectrum Community School variety show, and they’re out of tune. Horribly out of tune. Their sound is shambolic and embarrassing. It’s so bad that other students look at each other and realize that there is no reason they can’t start a band. Within a few weeks, Victoria goes from having one punk band — the out-of-tune, unrehearsed Pink Steel — to several, including those unimpressed variety show attendees, who now go by the moniker the Infamous Scientists. The I-Sci’s would help seed some of the city’s best and brightest punk outfits, including Nomeansno, an internationally respected three-headed beast still touring three decades later. But right now, Pink Steel just an eight-piece mess, rambling their way through “Sat on a Slug,” a song about the perils of smoking pot near railway tracks, and the kids are just thinking, “Even I can do that.”
There was once a thriving underground city in Victoria. Not just below the radar, but, quite literally, below the streets. The bucolic capital city of British Columbia, Victoria is like Canada’s upper middle class impersonation of Florida; popular with retirees, it’s a city that lacks much of its own youth culture, at least superficially. Known as the City of Gardens and located on the southern tip of Vancouver Island, roughly 90 minutes by ferry from the mainland, Victoria is one of the sunniest cities in Canada. And it’s really warm, pretty much all the time. Why everyone in Canada hasn’t moved there escapes me as I write this paragraph.
In many ways, the explosion of punk and hardcore in Victoria mimics the social conditions present in the early Southern California scene. Kids here couldn’t relate to the bleak urban image of bands from New York and London, even if they loved their music. But a heroin addiction isn’t a prerequisite for feeling out of place inside dominant culture, and disaffected youth, whether they were getting beat up by surfers in Huntington Beach or beat up by gardeners in Victoria, were able to seek solace in the promise of punk. And metaphorically, it’s hard to ignore that Victorian underground. In a city as perfect as the City of Gardens, a maze of tunnels under its sidewalks and streets functions as a constant reminder that superficial impressions are rarely complete. And, more importantly, that Victoria is hiding some dark shit.
Tunnels, long collapsed, weave their way under the city. Once used to transport Chinese slaves brought into the country to help build the railroad — a gross humanitarian injustice that the Canadian government formally apologized for in 2006 — they later found use as connecting passages between gambling parlours and opium dens, doubling as secret escape routes from police raids. Later, the tunnels helped bring goods from the shipping yards to more respectable businesses growing in the downtown core. The tunnels have since collapsed, but a handful of spaces that run under the sidewalks in Victoria remain. Ceilinged by prismatic purple tiles, the
se huge underground areas, supported by wooden beams and cast in a pale purple light by the translucent tiles above, still remain hidden in plain view along the streets of downtown Victoria. It doesn’t matter if it’s punk or gambling or evening wear; the underground might change, collapse, or disappear completely from view. Even in a place as pristine as Victoria, British Columbia, it is always there.
The punk scene here sprung from a cancelled drama class. A subtle beginning, but we’ve all got to start somewhere. “We were high school drama students,” says Jeff Carter, keyboardist for the first punk band on Vancouver Island, Pink Steel. “It was the spring of 1978. We had a high school play on the go, and we had an evening rehearsal scheduled that was cancelled as we arrived. So five of us ended up smoking a little pot and launching into a long, stoned improvisation where we basically invented this band and came up with a whole story, a song, and everything.” The band was Pink Steel, and the song, detailing a friend’s unfortunate contact with a slug, was titled “Sat on a Slug.” While the band spent six months as little more than a stoner drama student joke, by October, Carter and vocalist Peter Campbell decided it was time to turn Pink Steel into a living, breathing rock and roll band. Says Campbell of the long-simmering decision, “We just followed through on that implicit threat.”
Depending on your point of view, Pink Steel is either the very essence of punk, or a prolonged drama exercise. The band themselves make no claims to any righteous motivation or greater punk plan. “When we formed, we were calling ourselves a punk rock band, but all we knew about punk rock was reading the occasional newspaper story about the Sex Pistols,” says Carter. “I didn’t own a Clash album until January 1979. I mostly listened to Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones.” Influences aside, Pink Steel still formed under the same conditions as other explicitly punk bands of their era, and their initial influence locally was immeasurable.
“There was no scene in Victoria at that point,” says Carter. “As far as we knew, we were a completely isolated phenomenon. We played house parties, because that was all you could do.” Slowly, Pink Steel began to take notice of other bands like them, as punks gently bubbled to the surface in Victoria. They were musicians with no hope of playing a local bar, but with an enthusiasm for doing something different in a culturally conservative city. Pink Steel first met the Sickfucks, a precursor to the infamous Dayglo Abortions, while practising in a second-floor apartment; the band’s drummer yelled at them from the street.
“After that, I saw the Infamous Scientists for the first time,” says Carter. “That’s when I knew a little scene was about to start.”
When John Wright and Tom Holliston, drummer and guitarist from the legendary Victoria band Nomeansno, pause outside of the bar I’m holed up in, I’m seized by panic and immediately begin to sweat. The band’s publicist, a mutual friend, has arranged for us to meet, but I was not planning on staging our introduction here. I’m across the street from the venue where they’re performing later tonight, tucked inside a loud zebra-print booth in a vulgar martini bar, one that doesn’t scream out “Tell me your secrets, because I am a legitimate punk journalist.” While the wood-fired pizza oven (and, if we’re being honest, the half-price martinis) justifies my presence here internally, I’m not sure how this looks from the outside and I’m not in the habit of conducting interviews from a castaway Sex and the City set. I clam up at the thought of one of my favourite bands thinking that this is the kind of bar I hang out at. Even though I obviously hang out here.
Unfortunately, this is exactly where I meet John Wright and Tom Holliston. Mercifully, they agree that the pizza is delicious.
Both Wright and Holliston have been pillars of the Victoria scene since its inception. Wright played drums and keyboards with Infamous Scientists, and Holliston fronted Pat Bay and the Malahats, later becoming the manager of Club Hacienda in the mid-’80s and thus helping to keep the scene in the city alive by giving alternative bands a place to play. He joined Nomeansno in the ’90s.
The Victoria scene flourished from 1981 to 1982. Which isn’t to say incredible contributions weren’t made after; some of the best punk bands to emerge from the city, like Nomeansno and Red Tide, didn’t produce their seminal works until the mid to late ’80s. But the creative explosion that started with Pink Steel expanded to unforeseeable proportions within a few years, producing an incredible number of bands out of a few small high schools and a few neighbourhood skaters.
“I lived in Edmonton for a while, and I feel like the two cities were really similar,” says Holliston. “You didn’t meet people who were aspiring to be major label artists. It was like trying to get to second base in heavy petting matters. You just wanted a show, or to be able to buy a guitar. There was no grand scheme, and things would just fall into place, or they wouldn’t.”
Bands sprung up, played a show, dissolved, and reformed in some new configuration. But unlike other cities where this kind of cycle was the norm, the Victoria bands almost all recorded. Even if it wasn’t in a studio for a proper vinyl release, they would find a way to preserve their original songs before moving on to the next short-lived project. The city also possessed a valuable tool that helped set it apart from other first-wave scenes: Rob Wright.
“My brother got into the Ramones right away,” says John Wright, who founded Nomeansno with his brother Rob in 1979. “I was still in junior high school at the time, playing in the jazz band, and listening to whatever popular rock was out there. I wasn’t really into rock all that much at all. He had been playing guitar for a while on his own, listening to jazz and blues-rock, but had become pretty disenchanted. But these original punk bands were inspiring to him. He got a TEAC 4-track, which, at the time, was a pretty high-tech piece of gear for a home recording studio. Me and him just started playing around and recording.” The Wrights’ basement would become ground zero for many of the recordings to emerge from the city during the late ’70s and early ’80s. In a country full of woefully under-documented bands, Victoria is an exception, an advantage exemplified by the unbelievably complete All Your Ears Can Hear project.
Undertaken by a handful of area archivists led by Jason Flower, All Your Ears Can Hear compiles biographies, discographies, and photos of every single punk band in Victoria from 1978 to 1984, accompanied by two CDs featuring recordings from each band in the book. It’s a remarkable anthropological feat, one that speaks to the greatness of the era documented as much as the passion of those documenting it. There was no shortage of wonderful, strange music being made in Victoria during the time period covered by All Your Ears Can Hear, and the very existence of such a fantastically complete work tells you all (or, a lot of what) you need to know about the value of Victorian punk and hardcore.
Amongst the bands who recorded with the Wrights were the Neos, regarded by many as the best of the early scene. A proto-thrash band, the Neos were obsessed with speed before it became standard practice, much like Winnipeg speed freaks the Nostrils, who also amped their tempos up to inhuman levels long before the popular reign of thrash and speed metal. Formed in 1979, their express intent was to be the world’s fastest band, which, for them, simply meant playing faster than Never Mind the Bollocks. Future bassist Kev Smith saw Neos’ first show, a night he still remembers vividly.
“There was a particular excited vibe that night — I think most of us knew this was the beginning of something great, where the local punk scene really coalesced for the first time,” he says. The band took the stage of the Ray Ellis Dance Studio, rented through “subterfuge,” in front of about 150 people. “I’ve never seen another performance quite like it. It was like they had a very definite idea about what they wanted to do, but were so raw and amateurish that it was hard to figure out what was going on. It wasn’t even clear who was in the band at times. The sound was powerful but so chaotic that the whole thing came across as a really exciting but virtually unintelligible explosion.”
Smith recognized that he and the ban
d shared similar ideas about music, and before long, he had joined as their full-time bass player. The Neos only got better from there, and it wasn’t just locals that noticed; after sending their demo to Jello Biafra, iconic frontman for Californian hardcore forefathers Dead Kennedys and owner of Alternative Tentacles Records, the Neos were asked to come and open for the band on an American tour. They couldn’t. They were 15 years old, and their parents wouldn’t let them. Years later, the Neos would still retain their international profile, regularly covered by bands like Charles Bronson and NOFX.
“The Neos were one of the fastest bands out there. It sounded out of this world,” says Steve McBean. Best known today for his Polaris Music Prize–nominated sludgy rock outfit Black Mountain, McBean was even younger than the Neos when he formed his first hardcore band in Victoria, Jerk Ward. “The Neos were our blueprint. That was the band. All of a sudden, it made sense. The Ramones and the Clash were larger than life. The Neos were like us.”
Rumours about their early practice habits and methods of delivering their signature speed-crazed punk abound; my favourite comes courtesy of one of my pizza partners, Tom Holliston, who met the band after they threw a hammer at him on the street. The reason, apparently, was that they liked Holliston’s clothes.
PERFECT YOUTH: The Birth of Canadian Punk Page 22