STEP OUT TONIGHT
THE MODS, THE GARYS, AND LAST POGO
The Mods [© Don Pyle]
December 1, 1978, 9:00 p.m. EST
There’s a scrappy film crew running around the Horseshoe Tavern tonight trying to take in all the energy of what has been announced as the venue’s final punk show. The resident promoters, Gary Topp and Gary Cormier, have been asked to move on, and as a parting shot, booked all their favourite bands onto one night of guaranteed mayhem. The Mods are onstage, thrashing through “Between Four Walls.” Before the night is over, the Viletones will have crashed the show, the cops will have crashed Teenage Head’s set, and every chair and table in the whole room will be crashed against the wall in the ensuing riot. It’s the beginning of the most legendary night in Toronto punk history, and although everyone can feel it, no one quite knows what to expect. Yet.
From the 63rd floor of the Royal Bank Tower, you can see the entire city spread out in front of you, a sea of neon, condo development, and tiny red lights travelling in and out of your vision. You can enjoy any number of sweetened canned beverages from a tiny ice bucket that has been placed in the boardroom for you to conduct your interview. And you can listen to one of the country’s foremost entertainment lawyers tell you about smashing motel windows with Teenage Head and car-surfing with Stiv Bators, frontman for Youngstown, Ohio, punk legends the Dead Boys.
Punk rock likes to make a show of its casualties. And to be fair, there are many. Not all have been buried six feet under; some are just buried under addiction, under decades of resentment, under their parents’ floorboards in the suburbs. These are the romanticized tales of unrecognized creative genius, Canada’s generation of Tom Verlaines and Debbie Harrys now selling magazines in Owen Sound. It’s almost part of the appeal, like a nation of Bukowski characters come to life and living in the shadow of the burst of brilliance they were a part of three decades ago.
And then, there are guys like David Quinton-Steinberg, who is sitting across from me at the end of a long workday, gesturing wildly with his arms as he tells me about his unlikely transition from drumming in one of the country’s best power-pop bands to representing some of the country’s biggest entertainers. He tells a different story, not of the “beautiful loser,” but the punk survivalist. The ones who took the lessons of punk and applied it to a world outside of sticky floors and hotel bars. The spark of punk — the quest for originality and rejection of dominant culture — can effect equally significant change in a courthouse as a punk house, and it makes me glad to know my life will always be filled with punk lawyers, punk real estate agents, and punk dentists. The method is different, but the energy is the same.
“I had this band with a guy named Jamie Gray when I was 15,” Quinton-Steinberg tells me. “Jamie’s dad didn’t like him hanging around with me because I had long hair and smoked cigarettes. He was instrumental in breaking up our band when we were kids, and he told my father, ‘Jamie’s going to be a professional. And with all due respect, I don’t think David’s going to amount to much.’ The irony is that Jamie — while he went on to play in Blue Rodeo for a number of years — is just a fucking piano player. And I’m a partner in a Bay Street law firm.”
“We met David at the Phillips building, where a lot of the punk bands were rehearsing at the time, along with the top 40 bar bands,” explains Mods guitarist Scott Marks. “We were neither. We weren’t good enough to be a bar band, but we weren’t bad enough to be a true punk band.” The Mods haven’t received the same hallowed historical treatment as some of their peers. One spin of their defining single, “Step Out Tonight,” and it’s hard to see why. Caught between the skill of their classic rock origins and their enthusiasm for the new sounds emerging from New York, the Mods were entirely original and tight as fuck. That Quinton-Steinberg beat the shit out of his kit like a teenage Keith Moon only added to the band’s intense assault, which started with a severe visual aesthetic and ended with massive sonic propulsion.
This isn’t the only reason the Mods are worthy of inclusion here alongside more infamous characters like the Viletones and D.O.A. There was a pervasive attitude amongst some first-wave punks that they were owed something, that the press ought to be knocking down their door simply because they were being freaky dudes and ladies. It is a mentality that got itself forcibly corrected by the overwhelming work ethic of first-wave hardcore bands and Henry Rollins’ biblical manifesto Get in the Van. So while many of their Torontonian peers waited with swastikas on their shirts for NME to show up and be shocked, bands like Teenage Head and the Mods quickly realized they needed to get out of dodge if they were ever going to make an impact. They didn’t just hit New York and drive straight home; the Mods’ touring ethic would have made Henry Rollins proud, if he wasn’t just some angry teen doing push-ups in a basement in Washington, D.C., at the time. The Mods worked as hard as any of their cross-genre continental counterparts, and they did so while playing fast, weird music that is amongst the best to come out of Toronto at that time.
Starting life as a cover band in the bowels of Scarborough, Toronto’s eastern-most suburban expanse, the Mods were only peripherally aware of bands like the Ramones and the Sex Pistols. It was the Jam, themselves outsiders to the English punk explosion, that first tweaked the band to the possibilities of writing and recording their own original songs.
“I had picked up a Jam record, and so we all went to go see them at the Colonial in the spring of ’77,” says Marks, who formed the core of the Mods’ first incarnation, along with vocalist Greg Trinier. “They blew us away, and we realized, ‘What the fuck are we doing? We can do this. We can play our own stuff. It’s minimal, it’s exciting. It’s what we like best about the stuff we’re playing.’” Having dabbled in writing their own material, Trinier and Marks dove headfirst into the process of building their own set from the ground up, and the former members, Rush devotees who were unsure of the band’s new direction, were quickly shown the door. “We didn’t like our bass player much anyways, so we arranged a rehearsal one night and didn’t invite him,” laughs Marks. With Mark Dixon taking over the vacant position of bassist, the new Mods began the agonizing process of auditioning drummers. Unlike many first wave punk bands who learned as they went, the Mods needed someone who would match their prowess and intensity, along with their enthusiasm for writing original music.
“The Androids were the first punk thing I did, around late ’76,” says Quinton-Steinberg, who was 15 when he joined the band. Featuring vocalist Sally Cato and guitarist Bart Lewis, they split when the pair formed the glam metal outfit Smashed Gladys and lit out for New York. Smashed Gladys eventually signed to Elektra Records and released two full-length records, including the awesomely named Social Intercourse; the album birthed the near-hit “Lick It into Shape,” produced by Ric Browde, the man behind Poison’s Look What the Cat Dragged In. But back in Toronto, “the people in the band other than me and the bass player were starving, so it was a real eye-opener for me, and something I had never really seen before,” Quinton-Steinberg continues. “People taking cigarette butts and squeezing the tobacco out into a rolling paper to create a cigarette. It was really bad.” Hailing from a more comfortably middle class part of the city, the young drummer experienced a punk trial by fire with the older musicians. It was in the halls of the building where the band practised that he first met the Mods.
“The Mods had shag haircuts and were doing cover tunes, but they were nice guys so I started talking to them,” he says. “I was all decked-out in punk stuff with dyed jet-black short hair, but I made friends with them. A lot of times, in those days, bands felt uncomfortable with each other if they weren’t in the punk scene. Everyone was kind of suspicious. The standard long-hair rock band hated us. There was a lot of disrespect for the punk scene. So the Mods guys, who weren’t a punk band, were being nice. And I was like, ‘Oh! Look at that! Long-hairs are being nice!’ So I started talking to them and getting to know them. S
everal months went by, and I’m club-hopping one night, and I see this band. And they were really cool and called the Mods. And I thought it couldn’t be the same guys, but I walked a little closer. I saw these guys with short hair all spiked up, and went, ‘Oh my God. It’s them.’ They had transformed themselves.”
The band’s current drummer felt the transformation could have gone further, though. Unhappy with the new-wave bent and harmonies present in the Mods’ music, he split for heavier sonic pastures, and suddenly, it was teenage David Quinton-Steinberg’s turn to get behind the kit. He played his first show with the band at the Hotel Isabella. His second was the Last Pogo.
The Last Pogo holds a hallowed place in Toronto punk history. Held on December 1, 1978, it’s Hogtown’s Vimy Ridge, mixed with Arthur Fonzarelli’s shark-jumping heroics. In a town full of musical legends, the Last Pogo has endured for years as one of the most infamous concerts in recent history. For many in the city, it marked the final night of Toronto’s first wave, a celebration, ending in a full-blown riot, that punctuated the period of startling creativity and cultural upheaval punk promised. On paper, it was just a concert marking the end of two promoters’ tenancy at a Queen Street tavern. In reality, it was the kind of reverential experience that grown men and women still speak about with such veneration that you can’t help but feel its reverberations, decades removed from the music, the energy, the riot.
One of the greatest legacies of that night is The Last Pogo, a pure gonzo documentary made by Colin Brunton. An aspiring filmmaker at time, Brunton has since gone on to produce such cult classics as Roadkill and Highway 61, along with Cube, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and a slew of successful Canuck TV shows. His second-ever film, The Last Pogo is every bit as chaotic as the scene it documents. Mixing footage of the concert and talking head interview pieces with the bands involved, the film attained mythic status amongst ’77 punk aficionados during the decades following, finally receiving a proper DVD release in 2008. Watching it now, it is impossible not to be blown away by the frenetic feeling of the night, captured by Brunton’s tiny crew, as the bands, audience, and cops slowly descend on one another in a fittingly mad, violent coda to Toronto’s first wave.
The night’s intended headliner was Teenage Head, but when the uninvited Viletones grabbed their gear and played an unannounced set, it was the beginning of the end for punk at the Horseshoe. From the moment the band put their guitars down, plainclothes cops were suddenly all over the stage, either because they were drinking in the front and noticed the swelling crowd or because, according to some, Steve Leckie from the Viletones tipped them off to guarantee his band the night’s final set.
In The Last Pogo, you can see the frustrated back and forth between Teenage Head bassist Steve Mahon and the bemused cops, as they struggle to be heard over the roar of a heavily lubricated, massively overcapacity crowd. Mahon keeps holding up a single finger, demanding that the band be allowed to play a single song. He looks pissed. The cop just looks amused.
Teenage Head launches into “Picture My Face,” and from the back of the Horseshoe, you can see the crowd beginning to dismantle the stage, then, the rest of the club. Eventually, the band can barely be heard over the noise of the room, yelling, churning, fighting. People stand on tables, shaking the lights attached to the ceiling. When they finish and a voice comes over the PA to inform the crowd that the show is over, the night dissolves into utterly legendary chaos.
Gary Topp and Gary Cormier came to the Horseshoe Tavern, a country and western bar, from stints running the Roxy Theatre, New Yorker Theatre, and promoting concerts at various venues across the city. During their tenure at the Horseshoe, they helped to usher in a new era of cool on Queen Street, turning a culturally dead portion of the city into what is still one of the trendiest neighbourhoods in the entire country. Bringing in bands like the Police, the Troggs, and Suicide, the Garys’ time at the ’Shoe was, without a doubt, one of the most important times in Toronto’s musical evolution. But it started a little further east, in a second-run movie theatre filled with some lofty ideas and a lot of pot smoke.
“I had some friends who were older than me, and they bought this building,” says Gary Topp. “One was an architect, and they renovated the building. They turned the top two floors into lofts, and I showed movies on the ground floor in what used to be a butcher shop. We used the fridge as a projection booth. We would pack the place.” Eventually, Topp took the lessons he learned in his butcher shop screening room and transplanted them into the proper theatrical setting of the Roxy Theatre in the city’s east end. Showing films like Pink Flamingos and Yellow Submarine and charging 99 cents for a double feature, the theatre quickly became the unofficial headquarters for the city’s younger, freakier contingent. Topp began inviting bands to play before films, and hosted shows by Rough Trade and Little Feet before moving to the larger, more central New Yorker Theatre, which gave him a chance to explore music and film simultaneously; while watching Amos Poe’s experimental New York proto-punk documentary The Blank Generation, Topp realized he had already screened every movie he wanted to see. Now it was time to bring every band he wanted to see to Toronto.
“It just made sense,” he says. “The New Yorker. New York bands.” Along with his new business partner, Gary Cormier, Topp tracked down the Ramones and invited them to play on the makeshift stage he had built in front of the screen. They came, and the rest is punk history; the Ramones set off a chain reaction in Toronto that led to one of the best punk scenes in North America. Soon, Topp and Cormier, known locally as the Garys, were invited to book at the failing Horseshoe Tavern on Queen Street. They succeeded in getting the old country and western bar back on its feet, and for their trouble, were asked to move on. The pair continued to book shows around the city, most notably at an old folk club at the corner of Church and Gerrard, formally known as Edgerton’s. The Garys rechristened it the Edge, and continued to bring cutting-edge bands to Toronto, while giving new bands of all genres a chance to develop in front of a paying crowd.
“I had dropped off a tape of my band for the Garys, because the Edge was the coolest venue in town, and we wanted to play,” says Dave Bidini, whose band, the Rheostatics, had their very first live performance booked by the Garys in February 1980. “I was sitting in the New Yorker Theatre, and this guy said, ‘Are you Dave Bidini?’ It turned out that on the subway ride down, Gary Topp had called my house. My mom told him I was going to see a film at the New Yorker. And he decided to come and meet me and tell me he was going to book us at the Edge.”
While it may be popular to use the Last Pogo, the Garys’ final punk concert at the Horseshoe, as the marker for the end of the first era of Toronto punk, it’s important to note that the Garys’ work in the city didn’t end there.
Today, The Last Pogo film is the best window that latecomers have into a long-gone era of Toronto punk. Like an important anthropological document, it invites the viewer into a very different world, one that looks a little like ours, but is populated by very different people. It leaves you feeling not unlike Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes; it may have been Earth all along, but for a few minutes, you really feel as if you’ve landed on a hauntingly familiar feral planet.
I meet Colin Brunton in the middle of a busy shoot week for a kids’ show he’s currently producing for a national broadcaster. After we chat for a few minutes in his upstairs office, it’s obvious that he’s excited to show me something, and he makes his crew swear to secrecy.
“There’s nothing going on down there, right guys?” he asks.
“Nothing out of the ordinary, no,” replies an obedient production assistant.
“Good. Let’s go downstairs.”
As we walk from his office to the stairwell, the smell of manure, out of place in a suburban sound stage, becomes stronger. When we get to the stairwell, there’s hay on the floor.
“You guys have a horse here today?”
“No. No hors
es.”
We turn the corner and I see a full-size African elephant lifting a child actor up onto its back. There’s a small crew standing around, taking videos on their phones, and Brunton is grinning from ear to ear. I’m just shocked to be so close to an elephant. It’s an unexpected left turn in my afternoon.
“Guess how much it costs to get this thing out here for the day?”
The number is huge. Knowing that the budget for this show can’t be that big, I ask how he’s afforded a full day of Dumbo antics. The answer is appropriately do-it-yourself: you juggle stuff around, and you make it work. Three decades later, Brunton’s ethic hasn’t changed. The Last Pogo was made on borrowed equipment and borrowed time. He made it work, and if he was stressed, it didn’t matter. Because it was fun. As he rushes off to tend to the day’s business, I can’t imagine it’s been easy to get this elephant here. But it sure was fun.
Many of Toronto’s first-wave bands may have stumbled around the time of the Last Pogo, but the Mods just ratcheted things up and hit the road. Teaming up with Teenage Head, another group of proper road warriors, the band struck out for the midwest and east coast, performing in cities like Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Detroit, a move that helped the bands build a substantial following stateside. Frequently, the Mods headlined over Teenage Head, who, despite their immense live power and popularity at home, continued to have difficulty breaking into the American market.
“It was a very, very isolated scene,” recalls Scott Marks. “Inside clubs you’d play, there were people who were into it. But to the rest of the world, it didn’t exist.” And when things didn’t go well, as they often didn’t when you’re a band spending as much time on the road as the Mods did, they went horribly. Bigger cities were generally good; in Detroit, a close relationship with new wave upstarts the Romantics helped the band win over crowds, and New York was always welcoming to Toronto bands. But touring Canada has always been difficult, and the need to fill in nights between bigger shows can lead to some uncomfortable mismatching between bars and bands. “The places you used to go to play would either have a scene, or not have a scene,” Marks says. “And if they didn’t have a scene, it was fucking horrible. We were booked to play in Cobourg, and we walked in there to soundcheck and knew it was going to be a horrible night. You can look at people and tell what they like, and everyone in the bar had on construction boots, blue jeans, lumberjack jackets, and long hair. They wanted to hear Zeppelin, Styx. We were a long way from that. It was impossible to get yourself up for the show, because you knew the reaction was going to be fucking brutal. Sure enough, we get up and do our first song, and there was no response. Not even a boo. Then we’d have some fun onstage and jam, and the bar owners would be pissed off. But there’s no point in playing our songs, because these guys didn’t want to hear it anyway.”
PERFECT YOUTH: The Birth of Canadian Punk Page 24