“We simply said to the union, ‘Go fuck yourselves. We don’t care who you are. We don’t care what you do. We’re never going to deal with you ever. Your days are numbered.’ We didn’t even know how outrageous that was at the time.” It wasn’t just outrageous, it was prophetic; punk was part of the slow loosening of the American Federation of Musicians’ grip on the live music circuit in North America. The appearance of a viable alternative culture meant that bars no longer had to concern themselves with the AFM blacklist. Punks were drinking as much beer as anyone else, and that was good for the bottom line.
Altruism and rainbows weren’t the only motivating factors that led Smith, Schultz, and MacDonald to the Rotters Club. They had also invested in a studio in Smith’s basement in Larrimac, Quebec, about a half hour from Ottawa. The space was designed to give new bands an option somewhere between a tape deck in the practice space and a bank-breaking professional studio; with an 8-track in a house in a small town, they hoped to lure upstart bands with reasonable prices and quick, high-quality recordings. Of course, thanks in part of the musicians’ union, there were no new bands needing to record. So they created a space designed specifically to foster new talent. And it worked immediately.
“We would only allow bands that played original music to perform,” says Carl Schultz. “Suddenly, there were lots.”
“We never treated it like a business proposition,” says Smith. “We saw it as a way of getting original music front and centre and getting away from the cover bands in bars that had blighted our musical careers and our experiences in music. We were all fed up with it.”
The Rotters Club immediately gained a reputation as an anything-goes den of depravity; the washrooms were co-ed, and more than one person recalls walking in on people having sex in the middle of the room. Pot smoke filled the club, and alcohol was served until three or four in the morning, well after the city’s official last call. Smith is under the impression that the restaurant owners above the club had a “special relationship” with the Ottawa Police Service, a mutual understanding that seemed to be working to everyone’s advantage.
One regular character at the club was known as the Puppet, named for his marionette-like dance moves. He would start every night in a long, jet-black rain coat, and by the end of the show, would be marionetting in a skin-tight black leotard. Another couple were well known for their abuse of Quaaludes, which regularly led to them being passed out and intertwined at the foot of the stage, and once saw them fall down a full flight of stairs before stumbling off into the night. I’m told that someone once pogoed so hard that their head got stuck in the low tile ceiling, and that the son of a local psychiatrist would regularly bring crushed-up Ritalin to shows for the bands. There was a New Year’s Eve party with Johnny and the G-Rays from Toronto where two audience members left the show in an ambulance, the result of kidney failure and alcohol poisoning. There are persistent rumours that Margaret Trudeau visited once during the “Mick Jagger years,” and endless speculation for the reason that the cops never visited.
A regular feature of the club was National Film Board movies, which would be screened before bands every night. One evening, a sweet young couple began to make love behind the screen, their silhouettes visible to the entire audience. When their movements became too powerful, the screen was knocked over; the couple was asked to take it elsewhere.
But even more importantly than uppers and public sex, there was music.
Both the Action and the Bureaucrats had been attempting to gig sporadically before the appearance of the Rotters Club. Along with the Red Squares, they formed the foundation of the Rotters Club scene, each occupying a distinct part of the expanding punk universe. The Action was a sleazy, New York Dolls–esque group who practised endlessly, not wanting to sacrifice the quality of their live show for the quality of their depraved image. The Bureaucrats resembled the Nerves, a tightly wound power-pop group with a dark edge. And the Red Squares were the token art weirdos, a mix of the Talking Heads and Captain Beefheart — though their only recording sounds nothing like that.
The most effective locals at marketing themselves, the Action has survived; they regularly appear on festival bills as “Canada’s first punk band” (often with the caveat of “self-described”). Doubtless that they work as hard today as they did in 1977, and while their approach emanates an undeniably meretricious quality, it’s grounded in a genuine love of first-wave punk and a unimpeachable work ethic. The Action is all about a good story and a pose, and they have the songs to back it up.
When I get vocalist Ted Axe on the phone, it’s like he never missed a beat between our conversation and 1977. He’s as seasoned as the full-time professional musicians I interview for my day job, and I know he’s not doing 15 other interviews today. But Ted Axe has an image to sell and a story to tell, and he is remarkably, admirably, effective at both. He spent 1976 squatting in London, England, attending the notorious 100 Club Punk Special, the two-day coming out party for English punk where bands like the Clash, Sex Pistols, and the Buzzcocks rocketed to national prominence. Returning to Ottawa with a fire inside him, Axe looked to kick-start the same kind of scene in his hometown.
“Coming back to Ottawa was ludicrous because nobody had even heard of punk,” he says. In search of a creative outlet, Axe auditioned for a Stones-y blues rock band called the Action and didn’t make the cut. He went away and practised for three weeks. When he returned, he was invited to join the band. Under his guidance, the Action began to skew their sound toward Axe’s new set of influences, drawn from his time abroad and voracious appetite for whatever was being spit out of the Bowery on a monthly basis. The band didn’t try to entirely shed their original blues flavour, creating a sonic mix similar to the Dolls or the Stooges. They wrote a handful of sloppy originals and set out to destroy the world.
Their first booking came from the Chaudiere Club in Aylmer, Quebec, ostensibly providing the soundtrack for the comings and goings of bikers and prostitutes. For Axe, it seemed a perfect fit, but in order to get through their three 45-minute sets each evening, they began writing at a furious pace. Plus, there were always new era classics by the Ramones and the Damned to pad things out. It didn’t take long to develop a dedicated audience, with stints opening for Toronto bands like the Ugly and the Mods helping to put the band centre stage in front of equally disenchanted new music fans looking for a local band to call their own.
Soon, the band was making moves outside of Ottawa. Travelling to a high school in rural Ontario in the fall, Axe smashed a series of student-carved jack-o’-lanterns, pretended to go down on his bandmates, and vomited on the stage. On the drive back home, he had the bright idea to call the Ottawa Citizen and suggest that they had been banned from the musician’s union for their gimmicky antics. Axe claimed that their ousting from the American Federation of Musicians, a kiss of death for any band hoping to make it in the Ottawa bar circuit at that time, made the Action the city’s first punk band. The ensuing press was exactly what the band hoped for, a rich series of adjectives essentially calling them no-talent perverts.
The band’s notoriety began to spread beyond the beltway, and on a trip out to Montreal, the band met Tony Roman. A Quebecois pop singer who was looking to invest in punk with his new record label, Montreco, Roman viewed the spectacle of the Action as the ideal investment — an image-conscious group to live out the label’s punk fantasies. In the end, Montreco only signed two bands — the Action and the Viletones.
“We managed to sign probably the worst record contract in the history of rock,” says Axe. The band only recorded four songs with the label, who released it with a cover that simply read “Punk.” Evidently, Montreco’s business plan involved getting records into department stores for curious non-musical folks to discover. The result just looked silly. Still, the Action continued to command significant crowds in Ottawa, taking up the mantle of the city’s best-known punk act, popular enough to share a labe
l with punk’s Torontonian public enemies. Their shows at the Rotters Club became floor-to-ceiling spectacles.
“We had groupies come in, and I was doing some blow that they had provided,” Axe says. “I heard our set start, and I ran to the stage. When I jumped, I landed on the mic stand, and it whacked into my chest and I broke a rib. I was lying on the ground while they were clapping. They thought it was all part of the show. I couldn’t move. I had to be taken out in an ambulance.”
But the band was falling apart, not the least because of the massive amount of cocaine being consumed by all parties and Montreco’s failed marketing plan. They did manage a string of Canadian dates opening up for the Stranglers, but a scheduled 1978 American tour with the Ramones fell through when the band tried to cross the border without the proper paperwork. According to Axe, they were turned away from Sarnia’s Blue Water Bridge as they tried to get to a show in Flint. After getting rejected again at the Windsor-Detroit crossing, they resorted to — his words — going down to the Detroit River, where the band claims that “some guy took us across in a boat to the other side.” If you ask the Action, they rowed their way into America and successfully played 20 dates in the U.S. with the Ramones, including a show at CBGB in New York City. Problematically, the Ramones only played Flint once in 1978, and two weeks later, they were on a plane to Helsinki. They also didn’t play CBGB once that year. Here’s the thing — even if the whole story is a lie, it’s an awesome one to continue to perpetrate over 30 years later.
Everyone in the Action was broke, and everyone in the Action was high. They fell apart as soon as they got back to Ottawa.
The Bureaucrats were like the Action’s geeky kid brother, less prone to grandiose tales of debauchery and talking shit with Dee Dee Ramone, and more likely to be in the basement on a Friday night learning how to play every song on The Nerves note for note. There was no coke and no groupies. There were no shady record deals, and no talk of tours with the Stranglers. But for what it’s worth, the discovery of the Bureaucrats remains my favourite of this entire project.
They were never a major touring band, and their material is hard to track down. “Feel the Pain,” one of their best songs, is led by a hook every bit as good as “Hanging on the Telephone,” and I have no trouble believing that Blondie probably would have covered their songs, too, if they just lived a few hours south. They represent the kind of aggressive minimalism that made early records by the Clash and Wire so compelling, and possess the same coiled-snake attitude that doesn’t age over time. Their style sounds as fresh today as it did 30 years ago, which is rare. When you consider the sheer number of new songs I heard compiling this book, I hope you’ll understand why me saying that “Feel the Pain” is the best song I uncovered isn’t an unnecessary personal detail I offer lightly. It’s an unnecessary personal detail that, I hope, will encourage anyone reading this to track down the band’s complete discography and turn them into belated Grey Cup halftime show performers, like a come-from-behind Blue Rodeo or BTO. But a power-pop band.
The band played their first show at the School of Architecture at Carlton University, a gig booked by their manager (read: friend who couldn’t play an instrument), Carlton student David Whales. The energy was strange; it was a Friday the 13th, the day after Nancy Spungen’s apparent murder at the hands of her boyfriend, punk’s most famous junkie, Sid Vicious. Engineering students provided the security and everyone acted as self-consciously “punk” as possible.
“I think it ended in a riot, if I’m not mistaken,” says vocalist and guitarist Joe Frey. “I think I remember things being thrown. It was pretty funny, in retrospect.”
“I feel like a lot of people’s first shows ended in riots at that time,” I tell him.
“Yeah, there was a weird energy. I think a lot of the audience thought that it was about jumping up and down in front of a band and throwing things at them and spitting on them.”
“I was a social leper at school the next day because I’d brought punk to the School of Architecture,” concludes David Whales.
Things improved from their first pseudo-riot, and by the time they had rehearsed enough to feel ready for a second show, the Rotters Club had opened. Frey remembers the club as “dark and stinky” and the band’s first few shows as “very shaky,” but admits that, after a few duds, they finally began to improve. By the end of ’79, the Bureaucrats were ready to make the trip to Larrimac and record at the Rotters offshoot studio, Double Helix. Since none of the bands ever had enough money to pay for recording, a deal was worked out where they would receive a lower cut of the door at their shows in exchange for time at the studio. It was a relationship that worked for everyone, since the door money wasn’t about to make anyone rich, and it left the Ottawa scene with a remarkably strong catalogue of original recordings. Double Helix wasn’t just a cheap basement operation; it was a cheap basement operation that cared, and many of the recordings produced there sound leagues better than anything that came out of bigger cities like Toronto. And the Bureaucrats’ first single is among the best.
With an increasingly proficient live show and a freshly pressed 45, the band decided to hit the road, touring regularly to Montreal and Toronto, filling dates with lunchtime high school gigs in between.
“We played one of those strange daytime shows, and all I remember is all the girls screaming like it was the Beatles,” says Whales. “They all ran up to the front and all the teachers were trying to stop them. To see that it was like, ‘God, are they insane? It’s just the Bureaucrats, not the Beatles.’ But it was fun to watch. And the teachers were suitably flustered and unhappy.”
The band’s van required constant work, with members frequently banging pieces back into place on the side of the highway to avoid a catastrophic accident. They played regularly at the Edge in Toronto and the Hotel Nelson in Montreal, but things started to fall apart when half the band began insisting they move to the Big Smoke and try to give the band a serious go.
“I wanted to move things along, and in my mind, Toronto was the next step,” says Frey. “I wanted to get to Toronto and break into the Toronto scene. A few of the other guys were just not into it. They didn’t want to leave Ottawa.” The friction led to the untimely dissolution of the Bureaucrats in 1980. Like many bands of that era, you have to wonder what would have happened if the band had taken the leap and moved to Toronto. Maybe nothing, maybe the halftime of the Grey Cup.
The Red Squares were the strangest act at the centre of the Rotters Club scene. Everyone I meet describes them in a different, often completely contrary way. Their lone single only hints at their utter live weirdness, and I am told numerous times that it is barely representative of the band’s true sound. What is clear is that Ottawa’s scene was an incredibly diverse one, and the Red Squares provide the perfect proof.
“The Red Squares were never really punk,” says Stuart Smith, who played bass in the band when they recorded their first single. “They had a punk attitude, but you had an M.A. in art history in that band. Extremely highly educated, literate people.” That single, “Ottawa Today,” hints at a bizarre mix of classic R&B, psychedelia, and the Talking Heads, but it’s clear that the final product is not what Smith ever intended. The original mix, which had such standard effects applied to it as reverb and compression, was rejected by the band’s singer, who saw fit to remix both songs himself. He had never mixed anything before, and the final product shows it. Even today, Smith is still burned by the way things went down and is insistent that he intends to re-release the songs as he originally mixed them; he’s gone so far as to track down the necessary reel-to-reel equipment and have it delivered to his home. As it stands, the two Red Squares songs in existence are a very weird mix of dry, hardcore-style production and weirdo psychedelic guitars. And not much else is known about the band. Consider this paragraph a warning shot, and an invitation to get the original mixes out, so that the band’s legend can transcend hushed oral tradit
ion and rip through some speakers in the new millennium.
It didn’t take long for the Ottawa scene to outgrow the Rotters Club. With the increasing popularity of local bands, and the steady presence of major Canadian touring acts like D.O.A. and the Viletones, that “dark, stinky” basement was no longer adequate, and Smith moved his punk clubhouse to a proper venue just up the street, the Eighties Club. Suddenly, running the venue was a serious full-time gig that was losing more money than it was making, despite some high-profile bookings. Two key factors led to the demise of the club; primarily, the higher overhead, which made any potential losses, such as a John Cale show booked during a snowstorm, near catastrophic. A minor irritation involved a former Rotters Club employee opening up the old venue under the RC moniker, a hurtful act of insubordination that still irks Smith to this day. Feeling unsupported by the scene he helped to build, Smith cut his losses and moved to Toronto. He bummed around the city for a year before stumbling into real estate, then commercial real estate. And it looks like things have gone pretty well since.
There is a long out-of-print compilation of Rotters Club artists, recorded at Double Helix, called Rot ’n’ Roll. Given the calibre of what I’ve heard from first-wave Ottawa bands, this record has been built up in my mind as Ontario’s mythic answer to the legendary Vancouver Complication album. When we finish our conversation, Smith tells me I should come over to his place some time and listen to it. I just hope I’m not the only one who gets to experience it in this decade. Consider this my plea to someone to get behind the reissuing of as much Ottawa punk as possible. It might be some of the best music covered in this book.
PERFECT YOUTH: The Birth of Canadian Punk Page 27