Snfu

by Chris Walter

  Although the songwriter is willing to admit that gays can be every bit as promiscuous as their heterosexual counterparts are, the lyrics “proved to the world that he isn’t gay” are especially poignant. The force with which he sang those particular words meant more than most people knew. Sexual orientation notwithstanding, the song is a condemnation against anyone who uses another person for sex, regardless of gender. “She’s Not on the Menu” from SNFU’s first album also lashes out against the objectification of women, and Chinn’s lyrics are not ambiguous.

  He wants her luscious breasts on the end of his fork

  But all this menu offers is chicken, beef and pork.

  In late October, a local scenester and punk music fan named Steve Honeyman asked Society’s NFU to contribute several songs for West Watch, a compilation album of Edmonton underground bands. Since the other groups fell solidly within the realm of pop or new wave, and Society’s NFU was the only hardcore band in the bunch, they were pleased to be included.

  To raise money for the upcoming compilation, Steve Honeyman organized a series of benefits, and Society’s NFU agreed to perform on November 7th, 1982 with Dammerung, The Thieves, and Bastille, who would also appear on the album. The benefit was spread out over three weekends, and other bands involved in the project, including Evan’s old band, the Reverb Angels, performed on alternate dates. “The Thieves were total Clash clones,” Ken Chinn chuckles. At the time, Society’s NFU was just another unsigned band, no better or worse than the others.

  The West Watch benefit was held in an unlicensed after-hours club run by a young entrepreneur named Mark Smith. “The Krieg was a cross-genre, broad spectrum venue—a place where skins, punks, new wavers, hairstylists, and rockers could hang out. Evan ‘Tadpole’ Jones was one of our bouncers (post SNFU), and the playlist included songs such as ‘God Save The Queen,’ ‘The Magnificent Seven,’ ‘Come On, Eileen,’ and the ‘Theme from Hawaii 5-0,’” says Mark. The boys loaded the van in preparation for the show, trying hard to ignore Warren’s stage fright, which can be psychologically traumatizing and even physically debilitating for some performers. He would just have to conquer his fears.

  But because this show was bigger than anything they had done before, Warren could not overcome his anxiety. All was in readiness, and the guys were set to play, except for one small hitch: Warren was nowhere to be found. Finally, after a frantic search of the venue, Brent located the bass player in a corner somewhere. “Warren said we didn’t need two guitars, and he wanted me to play bass,” says Brent, still a little dumbfounded. Warren managed to get through the show somehow, but the subject was front and centre at the next practice. “We were all talking about how freaked out we were, and it turned out that Warren was lying behind the speaker column listening to us the whole time,” remembers Brent. “Obviously we couldn’t have a bass player who couldn’t play any live shows. He knew it was over.” Almost everyone who has ever stood on a stage has experienced stage fright in one form or another, so the point of this story is not to embarrass Warren, but to explain why Society’s NFU suddenly needed a new bassist. Just the thought of looking for another member was enough to cause the musicians a different sort of fear. Where could they find someone as hardcore as Warren was? They hated the idea of trying to find a replacement.

  Despite the fact that they no longer had a bass player, Society’s NFU entered CJSR (the University of Alberta radio station), to record the tracks for West Watch. The studio, with its eight-track mixer and beat-up microphones, was very rudimentary. CJSR recorded mostly radio production material, and the engineer was not hip to the latest punk rock groups. Brent Belke remembers working on his sound in preparation for the recording. “My guitar wasn’t loud because I was using a Fender Princeton, but it was very distorted, and I was playing adrenaline-fueled power chords as fast as I possibly could. The engineer asked what effects I was using, and the look on his face when I told him that I’d forgotten to plug in my distortion box was priceless.”

  Luckily, the band had Scott Juskiw AKA Scott Alloy from the Malibu Kens to help them in the studio. Scott had recorded material for his own band previously and knew how Society’s NFU wanted to sound. The musician also stepped in to play the bass tracks. Given the primitive nature of the equipment and the relative inexperience of the engineer, “Life of a Bag Lady” turned out remarkably well. The song came into existence when Ken saw a TV news story about a homeless woman who was raped. “They described her as a ‘bag lady, ‘and I didn’t think that was very cool,” says the singer, who has long been a champion for the underdog. That the singer has himself become the underdog is beside the point.

  Society’s NFU resumed their search for a bass player, and again the solution was incredibly simple. One night, when the boys drifted upstairs for a brainstorming session at the practice space, one of them wondered if a tenant named Jimmy Schmitz might be able to fill the vacancy. They asked him if he’d like to try out, but the twenty-two year old punk rocker wasn’t so sure. Although Jimmy had played bass for the short-lived Winnipeg band Pissed & Broke with Matt Vinet, Doug Humiski, and Chris Walter, he was doubtful of his abilities. He warned the guys that he couldn’t play very well, and that Pissed & Broke were rank amateurs in comparison to Society’s NFU, but eventually agreed to give it a shot. Unemployed and bored, he had nothing better to do and little to lose.

  The band returned to the basement. Since all the rehearsal with Warren was lost and they had to start over again, the guys felt they might as well shorten their name to SNFU while they were at it. The upside of this latest upheaval was that they knew the songs better than ever by the time Jimmy finally started to catch on. True to his word, Jimmy was no Mike Watt, but he didn’t have to be. The Belke guitar attack covered up most of his mistakes, and drummer Evan C. Jones, with his steady metre, helped to guide Jimmy along. At least the new bassist was a good fit music-wise with the other members. This was a new beginning.

  Jimmy Schmitz worked hard to learn the songs. Unlike the slack bastards he’d played with in Winnipeg, who used rehearsal mostly as an excuse to get even drunker, his new band practiced relentlessly. “There was nothing else to do in Edmonton,” Brent remembers. “We were all into it, and we didn’t have to force ourselves.” SNFU also wanted Jimmy to be reasonably sober for practice, which was something that took a little getting used to. They didn’t mind if he killed a beer or three, but they were there to rehearse, not drink.

  Born to Robert and Monique Schmitz on April 16th, 1960, Jimmy was the oldest of three children—two boys and one girl. Emigrating from Germany and Belgium respectively, Robert and Monique were typically hardworking Edmontonians. Although Monique entered Canada as a child with her parents, Robert left Germany at seventeen because he wanted a motorcycle and his parents wouldn’t let him have one. “He was kind of a rebel,” chuckles Jimmy, who clearly approves. Picking Edmonton at random, Robert found work in the trades and got married, but he never did buy a motorcycle. By the time Robert was twenty, he and Monique already had Jimmy, so there was no time to go roaring around the city on a bike. Instead, he buckled down to the serious business of work and family. The children weren’t going to raise themselves.

  Jimmy’s childhood was normal enough but, like his father, he rebelled in his teens. “I was a bad kid hanging with the wrong crowd, and I was kicked out by the time I was sixteen,” the ex-SNFU bassist admits. He moved back home for a while, but was gone for good before he was eighteen. “It was kind of the same way with school, too. I didn’t have much use for that.” Dropping out by grade ten, he met Gubby Szvoboda, Bill Schuler, and Brian Rosewell (RIP), who became known across Canada as the Dirty Boys. The youths lived together in chaos, renting beat-up houses and trashing them before moving on to the next. In 1980, when Jimmy was nineteen, he and his friends took a road trip across Canada, stopping in Winnipeg long enough for him to meet a girl named Kimmy Ivaniuk at the Marion Hotel before heading east again. He returned to Edmonton briefly, but soon took a bus
to Winnipeg and moved in with Kimmy.

  During his year in Winnipeg, Jimmy had time to meet all the local punks and form Pissed & Broke with three of them. Sadly, his unemployment insurance soon ran out, and he and Kimmy suffered through a very long, cold winter. “She had a crappy apartment near Main Street almost right underneath a train bridge. The whole building shook when trains went by. I don’t know how we could live there,” Jimmy remembers of this brutal period in his life. No doubt the rent was affordable, even for unemployed punk rockers. The starving lovers survived one terrible three-week stretch where they ate only one box of Kraft Dinner per day, with no milk or margarine. Jimmy eventually found work at the Paulin’s candy factory for the Christmas season, and was able to buy beer for band practice once in a while. The five weeks of work soon ended and the couple went hungry again. There were few bright spots on the horizon.

  Such crushing poverty is tough on any relationship. Miserable and hungry, the couple split up in the summer of 1982 and Jimmy returned to Edmonton, where he moved into the house on 106th Street with Gubby, Brian, and others. Not long afterwards, Kimmy relocated to LA with a girlfriend, only to suffer a drug-related death shortly after her arrival. For Jimmy, the drinking and carousing continued even more wildly than before, punctuated with lousy jobs and midnight moves. Jimmy grieved the loss, wishing that somehow things could have been different. His short life had not been full of happiness and joy, and although he had done more than his share of partying, there was little to motivate the young man when he woke up each afternoon. And then SNFU came along.

  As life-changing as the band was for Jimmy Schmitz, he still had to borrow equipment from the band and didn’t know when he might be able to buy his own. For now, the young man could only throw himself into practice and do his level best to keep up. He knew that he was the weakest link and that the band was ready to play as soon as he learned the songs. The heat was definitely on.

  Jimmy had barely acquainted himself with his borrowed instrument when the producer of a cable TV program known as White Pages on the Air asked to shoot a half-hour segment on SNFU for a story on underground music. “They were doing all the local bands and we managed to slide in there somehow,” Jimmy remembers. Although the new bassist had only been with the band a few weeks, the boys hurried to prepare six songs. All too soon, the band transported the gear to The Krieg, where a camera crew would film the band while the bar was closed for the afternoon. “I remember being really nervous,” says Jimmy, thinking back almost thirty years. His uneasiness notwithstanding, he managed to get through the show without falling apart. Although they had a brand-new bass player and the band didn’t move around much yet, they felt that they performed fairly well. “Chi would pace clockwise in the same direction, so his mic cable would get all coiled up,” recalls Marc. “Later, he planned his stage moves very carefully. I didn’t realize how much work he put into choreography.”

  Immediately following the live performance, the TV station interviewed the band at the practice pad on 106th Street. This time, the shoot would not go quite as planned. “Really, the only members who didn’t come off like complete idiots were the Belkes,” Jimmy laughs. “Evan was wearing a giant cowboy hat over his mohawk and he kept making silly faces, and Kenny just looked stupid. We all looked and acted ridiculous. Only the Belkes seemed like normal young guys.” Evan C. Jones recalls he and Ken Chinn consumed a large amount of Olympia beer beforehand and were fairly lubricated. “We had to drink that watery swill because there was a beer strike,” Evan explains. “We were joking around and got a bit carried away.”

  Ronald Ramage, who produced the show for cable TV, remembers the session well. “Roszay Baumgartner, who published the original White Pages fanzine, was the interviewer. I saw White Pages on the Air as an extension of what she was doing and asked for her involvement. The guys were very boisterous, and likely intoxicated. They sat in a row on a couch, and started shoving each other like school kids. In my memory, the couch actually tilted precipitously. I still remember asking what the acronym ‘SNFU’ stood for. Instead of a direct/correct quote, each band member answered with a personal interpretation. I remember ‘Sally Never Finds Us’ and ‘Sausages Never Fry Unevenly.’” Some later claimed the acronym stood for “Sally Never Fucks Us,” but it didn’t work for Ken Chinn.

  Despite repeated warnings from the producer, the bandmembers were vulgar and foul-mouthed, possibly stealing a page from the infamous Sex Pistols/Bill Grundy interview from 1977. After all, what self-respecting punk rocker would miss an opportunity to swear on TV? The Shaw Cable representative who tended the equipment and drove the van disliked SNFU for being so ill mannered, but producer Ronald Ramage did not feel the same way. “Even when the shoving on the couch got out of hand, I never felt disrespected. They were playing to their audience, for sure, but they answered Roszay’s questions forthrightly, and they weren’t wasting our time. Besides the shared glee in the sense of outrageous fun they projected, I remember a smirking pride in not cleaning up their act for Mom and Dad on TV.”

  The television show aired several weeks later, preceded by a “viewer caution” disclaimer. While the inclusion of SNFU with older, more established acts made it seem as if they were already a mainstay in the local scene, the group still hadn’t played a live show with the new bassist. “Of all the bands that WPOA hosted, SNFU probably went on to the most successful career,” reflects Ramage. “Some members of facecrime became The Pursuit of Happiness, but both were really Moe Berg vehicles. Idols became Northern Pikes. SNFU was definitely the greatest band to come out of that whole scene, probably the best band to ever come out of Edmonton.”

  White Pages on the Air garnered some respect for the band and helped cement their position as top dogs in the small hardcore scene. Unfortunately, as fall gave way to winter, the house on 106th Street developed electrical wiring problems, giving Jimmy Schmitz and his friends no option but to move. Usually the rowdy youths were responsible for the damages, but this time they had done nothing wrong, or at least nothing to cause the wiring problems. The residents soon found another place to live, but the band had already moved to a garage owned by the parents of a friend named Andy Rodgers, who was at every show and an active member of the scene. “People thought Andy was our roadie because he was at every single gig,” laughs Brent Belke. Practice resumed as rigorously as before, and the band continued to write new material. Wiring problems would not be enough to stop E-Town’s most ambitious hardcore punk band.

  Unfortunately, West Watch compilation sank without a trace and was never released. Steve Honeyman, the promoter who was supposed to have produced the album with money earned from the benefit, was rumoured to have been seen driving a fancy new automobile around town. While it seems extremely unlikely that he could have made enough money from the three-day event to buy a car, the man left Edmonton shortly afterwards and was never heard from again. The incident helped demonstrate to SNFU that the music industry was full of shady people looking for a free lunch, and that everything Hunter S. Thompson said about money trenches and long plastic hallways was true.

  Disappointed but not overly surprised, the musicians carried on as before. They didn’t know it yet, but the current line-up would remain stable for the next few years. The band was shaping up nicely and they were ready to play. All they had to do now was find some shows and continue to practice. Unfortunately, there was not an abundance of venues from which to choose, and they struggled to find a place that would have them. Why wasn’t anyone doing shows at the Spartan Men’s Club? Maybe they should look into that.

  Aware that their favourite punk musicians all sported clever nicknames, the band decided that the time had come for them to develop their own. Fans of the British band Discharge, who used terse, one-syllable monikers, Brent and Marc decided to style their own nicknames in a similar fashion. To this end, Brent soon became “Bunt,” and Marc simply became “Muc.” Brent’s tag sounded like slang for a certain portion of the female anatomy, but
Jimmy Schmitz got his name when he reacted to the current rockabilly revival by saying he would start a band called Floyd and the ‘Roids when he was fat and old. Ken Chinn just looked at Jimmy and said, “Okay, you’re “Jimmy ‘Roid’ now.”

  Ken Chinn showed up at practice one day and told the guys that he wished to be known as Mr. Chi Pig from now on. The singer says he got his tag when Anthony “Guido” Fulmes suggested that they use three letters of their surnames as nicknames for just one night. Anthony took the last three of his to form “Mes,” and Ken took the first three to make “Chi.” He added the “Pig” because he was rude and crude, and the “Mr.” because he felt it lent the tag a certain dignity. Coincidentally, there was also a band from Akron, Ohio known as Chi-Pig. The quirky new wave power trio, that formed in 1977 and released one album before breaking up, wore flamboyant flamenco-style Latin-American outfits that had nothing to do with their musical style. Chi-Pig also wrote a song for Devo, but Ken Chinn would like readers to believe that his name is not related to the band.

  Evan C. Jones didn’t get his nickname until 1984 when SNFU was on tour with the Dead Kennedys. He remembers taking a good dose of LSD outside a club in Saskatoon where the band was scheduled to play that night. “I was sitting on the curb looking at a bandana I bought for twenty-five cents. All these colourful, deep green and pink paisley designs were dancing a beautiful synchronized dance, and the little paisley designs turned into groovy tadpoles in my brain, dancing together in perfect timing. I just wanted to be a quiet tadpole, so I wrote “tadpole” on the back of my jean jacket, and soon everyone was calling me Evan ‘Tadpole’ Jones.” The LSD-inspired moniker is still with him today.