by Chris Walter
Although the brothers were already aware of the new music after watching a TV performance by Devo in late 1978, the revolution was on for real when Phil Larson played a mix tape for the boys. “He had a tape with ‘Eruption’ by Van Halen, followed directly by ‘God Save The Queen’ by the Sex Pistols,” recalls Brent, thinking back to that life-changing moment. “Although ‘Eruption’ blew my mind, the Sex Pistols were something else entirely. I could hardly believe what I was hearing.” At first, Brent thought Phil was lying when he told them they were listening to punk rock. “I’d been told that punk rock was horrible, but this was super cool!” He couldn’t understand why people would say bad things about music that was so energetic and exciting. Marc had heard about the Sex Pistols earlier, but news reports failed to mention how great they were.
Marc and Brent borrowed the wild new tape and set off to tell the world about punk rock. “We’d play it for friends and they would just look at us like we were crazy,” Brent laughs. “The Pistols just seemed like the logical progression that went from Kiss to Cheap Trick to Blondie or Devo. This was what rock n’ roll was supposed to be. I never liked Led Zeppelin.” Despite the less-than-favourable response from their friends, Brent and Marc decided to get some guitars and start a band. Mrs. Belke was not going to be happy when she learned that her sons wanted to be punk rock musicians. While they were not yet planning to quit school and throw their lives away, it was never too early to start worrying.
Brent Belke, like many fledgling guitarists, first owned a black Les Paul copy, and Marc, interestingly enough, started with a bass guitar, purchased by Mr. and Mrs. Belke from Mother’s Music on Whyte Avenue. The Belkes were willing to spend hard earned money on musical instruments for the twins, but they would eventually have real misgivings. Later on, when she saw Marc and Brent were serious about being in a punk band, Mrs. Belke did her best to discourage them. “Mom would point to musicians on TV and say, ‘Look, they’re sweating. Music is hard work.’ She’d make little comments like that,” says Brent. “Music was seen as a good thing, but we took it to extremes when we embraced punk rock,” Marc admits. Mr. and Mrs. Belke saw music not as a career choice but as a hobby. Music was good only in moderation.
Mom and Dad weren’t overly enthusiastic when Brent and Marc started the Dogmatics with neighbourhood friends the Tokarski brothers in the Belke basement. “Kevin [Tokarski] had a drum kit, so he drummed, and Tim also played guitar,” Brent remembers. “We jammed for a bit, but Marc was the best guitarist out of the three of us, so Tim got moved to bass.” “Mongoloid” by Devo was a no-brainer, since it was by one of their favourite bands and was easy to play. Brent also recalls that they covered The Undertones and The Dickies, though the particular songs escape him. For now, they bashed along as best they could.
Marc still didn’t know the all-important barre chord, but even with his basic skills, the songs they played were clearly recognizable. Upstairs, Mr. and Mrs. Belke patiently endured the caterwauling that seeped through the floorboards from below. Surely the boys would soon outgrow this foolishness and move on to something else. At least they weren’t racing motorcycles.
Tim and Kevin weren’t just bandmates but friends as well. “Marc and I hung out with those guys all the time,” says Brent. “Tim was a year older than us and had his driver’s licence. We would just drive around listening to music.” Once in a while, the boys would drive to a liquor store on the south side that didn’t ask for ID before heading back to the Tim’s house to drink beer in the backyard. They also bought albums and singles from Students’ Union Records at the university, which tried to carry the latest new music. Later, Sound Connection became the place to go, and Marc and Brent shopped there instead.
Music was just one component of daily life, and in order to get good jobs later, Mr. and Mrs. Belke urged their sons to work hard at school. While Brent was able to get through his lessons and would eventually graduate grade twelve, Marc found school stifling and oppressive. “Two teachers said to my face that I was an idiot,” says Marc, still smarting decades later. One of those teachers also told Marc he was “too old” to be a musician, and that he was wasting his time playing guitar. At the time, Marc was unable to see that the man was wrong to make such hurtful and ungrounded comments. Many successful and intelligent people struggle with school, and to say that those who fail academically are stupid is not only harmful but is also untrue. Like most troubled students, Marc simply couldn’t find the necessary motivation to apply himself to schoolwork.
Mr. and Mrs. Belke were unhappy to see the twins drifting towards a life of shiftlessness and tomfoolery. Couldn’t the boys see that they were wasting their time with this punk rock? When Brent took several university courses after finishing high school, Mrs. Belke chided him for not completing them. “I went back later and got my degree. It only took me twenty years,” laughs Brent. As it stood, the boys needed educations. It was unlikely that they would make a career of music, or that people would be writing books about them thirty years later. They would end up washing cars if they didn’t buckle down to schoolwork.
When they weren’t at school or making loud noises in the basement, the twins could be found skateboarding. Although Brent wasn’t having problems with his classes, he would much rather ride a board than solve math equations. When the fourteen year old twins learned of a half-pipe skate ramp behind Skiers’ Sport Shop just off 109th Street, they hurriedly made the trek from Malmo. As fate would have it, they met Ken Chinn there, and that chance encounter would eventually change the face of underground music in E-Town forever. At the time, Brent and Marc were impressed only with Ken’s skills as a skater. “Most of the kids didn’t really know how to skate a ramp, but Ken and his younger brother Danny really ripped it up,” recalls Marc. Another youth, Jim Algie, was usually with Ken. Jim is also important to the SNFU story.
Fifteen year old Ken was outgoing and charismatic, but the slightly built teen didn’t talk much about his large, dysfunctional family or his alcoholic mother. Instead, he preferred to shred the half-pipe, soaring high into the stratosphere as Marc and Brent watched in awe. “We would go down to Skiers’ on Saturday morning so no one could see us fall on our asses,” says Brent. Not only was Ken an expert skater, but he was also hip to the latest groups. Being slightly older, the Belke twins soon began to regard him as something of an authority on music as well as skateboarding. But why wasn’t Ken Chinn happy unless he was riding his deck or listening to music? Their new friend was a bit of a mystery.
Although Ken came from a large family, his parents separated when he was still young. Edna Braun and Donald Chinn emigrated from Germany and China respectively, and busily produced twelve offspring together, of which Kendall Stephen Chinn, born October 19th, 1962, was the second youngest. The rowdy, free-spirited clan of six boys and six girls lived in a sprawling, ramshackle structure built by Donald Chinn and his father on Fort Road next to the Sands Hotel. According to Ken, the big house had poor heating and no running water. “The older boys took turns carrying water from the pump to the house with a board across their shoulders and a bucket on each end,” Ken remembers. Despite the large number of offspring they propagated, Ken’s parents chose to remain unmarried, which raised a few eyebrows in those days. The older boys had a tendency to get into trouble, and Ken and his brother Danny, who would always be particularly close, were the only males in the family who would never spend time in jail. As they would learn later, this wasn’t the only commonality they shared.
The large but sparsely furnished house was very cold in the winter. Although Ken doesn’t remember much from his early childhood, he recalls falling into the outhouse, even if he can’t recollect how it happened. The youngster recovered from this trauma only to learn that the woman he’d thought was his mother was actually his grandmother. Apparently, Ken’s real mom left Grandma to raise the kids and moved to Winnipeg, returning to take him and Danny away only when Dad went to jail for operating a common bawdy house. Ken later real
ized that their father’s “hotel” he and Danny had visited wasn’t really a hotel after all. “I remember there was a long hallway with all these little rooms on one side,” grins Ken. “Something just seemed a bit weird.” One can imagine that Mr. Chinn needed plenty of money to care for twelve kids, even if the house had insufficient heating and no plumbing. Despite the occupational hazards of running a whorehouse, he must have felt it was worth the risk. Anyone who says that crime doesn’t pay is doing it wrong.
At any rate, Edna gathered her youngest offspring and hustled them off to Winnipeg. The brood hit town in February, and the -30° Celsius temperature was a shock even to the hardy Edmontonians. Ken and Danny felt out of place in this strange city with a mother they didn’t know. The newly formed family moved into a housing co-op not far from the Native Club on River Avenue, and soon a stepstranger named Eric was living with them. The stay in Winnipeg would not be a pleasant one. Arriving home from school one day, the boys heard screaming and shouting, accompanied by a barrage of pots and pans flying out the door. Inside, they saw Eric beating their mother, and the ugly scene would become a common occurrence. “Me and my little brother were fucking terrified, and I saw Eric kicking the shit out of my mom so many fucking times,” Ken recounts. Some things are best forgotten, but the singer still hasn’t been able to do that.
Ken claims that an incident at school that fall suddenly made him aware he was gay. “It fucking wrecked me, actually,” the singer chuckles bitterly. Having been given a beautiful jack o’ lantern by a thoughtful teacher, Ken was horrified when an older female classmate snatched the treasure away from him outside the aforementioned Native Club. “She climbed the steps and was swinging it back and forth. I don’t know if she dropped it on purpose or by accident, but my jack o’ lantern hit the cement and smashed to pieces,” recounts the singer, still mourning the loss. “I was born in October, and I love Halloween!” At that moment, and even though he had not yet reached puberty, Ken recognized his sexuality and understood implicitly that he would never marry a woman or have children. Despite this cruel act, Ken later wrote several songs championing women’s rights. Unlike the pumpkin, his sense of fairness was hard to crush.
After the longest six months of Ken’s life, Edna finally ditched Eric and returned to Edmonton with her sons. “That’s when the shit really started to hit the fan,” recalls Ken. The small family bounced from house to house, always on the move. While the singer subscribes to the theory that alcoholics are always running from themselves, perhaps Edna was simply short with the rent. Whatever the case, midnight moves were frequent, never giving Danny and Ken a chance to settle down. Restless, the boys wandered aimlessly, bored and looking for adventure.
Eventually, the small family moved into a low-income housing project known as Highland Court, where Edna struck up a relationship with a black man, Willy Rose. Although Ken didn’t love Willy like a real father, he didn’t actively hate him either. “The only thing I really disliked about Willy Rose was that he beat my little brother just because he was late for supper,” remembers Ken, outraged that anyone would hurt his younger sibling with such little justification. “He took him in the bedroom and whipped his bare ass with a belt. I could hear the screams.”
Life in the housing project was not easy. Donald Chinn was out of jail by now but Ken and Danny didn’t see him often. “Highland Court was approximately three-quarters Native Indians. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, but it was a tough place to grow up,” says Ken. “I went to school with those kids. We played football and Frisbee, and got into trouble.” Walking around at night past their bedtimes, the boys witnessed many disturbing incidents.
If that weren’t enough, Ken and Danny often had to clean up after a drunken fight between Edna and Willy left the apartment in a shambles. “My mom would take the cast iron rings from the gas stove and throw them at my stepfather’s head,” Ken remembers. Lucky for Willy, Edna was a bad shot, often breaking a window or putting a hole in the wall instead. Even if they somehow managed to keep Child and Family Services out of the picture, Edna and Willy were not about to win any good parenting awards. Ken and Danny cleaned up more than their share of broken glass.
The boys attended Queen Alexandra Elementary School where, despite their unstable home life, both Ken and Danny were able to pull down good grades. According to Ken, the school still has his yearbook picture on the wall. “I don’t know why they had my photo up there but they did,” claims the singer.
Donald Chinn, an inveterate hoarder, presented his boy with a plastic genie lamp one day. Ken says that he rubbed the lamp and wished that he could be anywhere else other than where he was. Not soon, but eventually, that wish would come true. Today, the performer known as Chi Pig has been around the world many times. Donald had given his son a wonderful gift.
Aside from his duties as a brothel owner, Donald Chinn was a welder by trade. Virtuous when it came to personal indulgences, he didn’t smoke, drink, do drugs, or gamble. So what if he ran a few whores on the side? When the man wasn’t too busy with his various enterprises, he made guest appearances into the lives of his children, dropping around to visit briefly before disappearing again. Hoping that Ken and Danny might stay out of mischief if they were otherwise occupied, the part-time father signed them up for the Boys Club on 109th Avenue. “That’s where we got into the most fucking trouble,” recalls Ken, acknowledging the irony. “We started hanging with kids that came from broken homes and troubled backgrounds. We weren’t a gang, but we definitely knew each other.” Activities at the Boys Club included glue sniffing, petty theft, and general tomfoolery. The brothers didn’t know it yet, but they would soon become involved with the worst criminals of them all: skateboarders.
One of the kids at the club owned a skateboard, and Danny took to it instantly. Although the board was an old-fashioned model with a plywood deck and steel wheels, the boy was born to roll and soon became one of the best skaters at the centre. When Peggy, one of Ken and Danny’s older sisters, learned that Danny had taken an interest in skateboarding, she bought him a composite board with urethane wheels. Somewhat envious, Ken decided that he also wanted to skate, which led to pitched battles over possession of the deck. Eight-and-a-half year old Danny was not the equal of his ten year old brother, but he somehow managed to hang onto his property. Danny later put himself through university on his own dime, and is now a massage therapist, treating professional athletes for sports injuries. Not bad for a skater kid from the wrong side of the tracks.
With no skateboard of his own, Ken simply stole one from the local mall. With that problem out of the way, he followed Danny’s advice and went to the library to learn about skating. The books helped Ken a great deal, and he soon began to catch on. “I took out every fucking book on skateboarding they had, and three of them were how-to books,” Ken remembers. “I learned a bunch of tricks, and me and Danny would practice every day just to get away from the bullshit that was happening in the low rentals.” The sport was more important than they knew. “Skating shaped our fucking lives,” the singer recognizes.
Skateboarding continued to be a major influence when Danny and Ken Chinn graduated to Victoria Composite High School. When Edna relocated again, only Ken, Danny, Peggy, and sometimes Gordon, moved with her to a big old house on 156th Street. By now, the other kids were mostly married or in jail, taking any opportunity to escape the craziness of home. “Me and Danny ripped up that base-ment with our skateboards,” laughs Ken. “We destroyed the place.”
One November night at 156th Street, fifteen-year-old Ken saw a TV news report claiming that Sex Pistols’ bassist Sid Vicious had vomited, spat, and swore at Heathrow Airport as the punk band prepared to leave for a tour of Holland. “That woke up my mind, and that’s when things started to change again,” laughs the singer. Just the sight of the Sex Pistols walking through the airport was enough to capture his imagination and give him direction in life, even if it was not a path that most people could appreciate. The next day
after leaving school, the youth walked to the Kingsway Garden Mall (now Kingsway Mall) and stole Never Mind The Bollocks and the “God Save the Queen” single from Kelly’s Records. Something about those outlandish, laughing, sneering Sex Pistols appealed to him in a way that the average person would never understand. Punk rock struck a power chord within him.
Ken’s big brother Gordon couldn’t stand the Sex Pistols, and the album was gone when he got home from school one day. “He stole my stolen record,” quips Ken, unable to appreciate the irony. Undeterred, Ken went back to the mall and swiped another copy. This time, he grabbed the domestic release with the pink cover rather than the rare import with the yellow cover that Gordon had taken. “The imports were all gone,” laments Ken, not that he cared so much at the time. He couldn’t wait to get home and take his revenge on Gordon.
At school, Ken learned of Redmen Radio, a radio club that often played punk rock. “I befriended the DJ and joined the club,” Ken recalls. “That’s how we got back at the fucking jocks. We’d play the Dead Kennedys first thing in the fucking morning.” At this point, Ken jettisoned most of his old friends by cutting his long hair. “Me and Danny were allowed to have long hair and the other kids weren’t, so they freaked out when I cut mine off,” laughs the singer.