Snfu

by Chris Walter

  The gang arrived in Los Angeles for a show at the legendary Cathay De Grande. Marc remembers that El Duce of the Mentors tried to sneak in by carrying a cymbal under his arm. Brent was dumbstruck when audience members sang along with “Victims of The Womanizer” and several other songs from the new album. Somehow, the guitarist had never really thought about having fans outside of Edmonton, and he realized that SNFU was no longer just a Canadian band, but one that was known internationally. If kids in LA knew the songs, then fans in Germany might know them too. The popularity was a bit surreal.

  SNFU stayed with Youth Brigade that night, taking a few boxes of records before hitting the road the next day. BYO would have given them a bigger supply, but the first pressing was almost gone, and they were in the process of pressing more. However, the Sterns would not be able to use the original cover again for fear of legal repercussions. Not only would BYO and SNFU have to come up with something new, but they would also have to do it fast. Sales depended on it.

  The boys moved out with Youth Brigade, who would accompany the Canadians for several shows before returning to LA. Although the Americans were too busy running the record label to take too much time off for touring, they were able to do a few gigs with their hottest new band. They were also adding dates to the SNFU tour, which wasn’t fully booked.

  In Orange County, SNFU played a legion where several legionnaires overheard Gubby mutter something derogatory about “America” and “freedom,” which led to a big kerfuffle. “They got all pissed off and wanted to close the show,” laughs Marc. After much smoothing of ruffled feathers, the band went on and all was well. Later, during load out, Brent dropped a 4 x 12 speaker cabinet on Dave Bacon’s toe. The injured bassist wasn’t very happy about the accident, causing Bunt to fear for his own safety. “I still feel bad about that,” says Brent.

  Friend and roommate Tim Dutka from the Nose Dive showed up in LA and travelled with SNFU and Youth Brigade to Tucson, where both bands had played the previous year. “Tim couldn’t handle the heat. We were in the desert, and it was way too hot for him. He almost died,” says Bunt, recalling Tim’s discomfort.

  The show in Tucson was better attended this time, partly because the popularity of both bands had grown. Not just that, but the Asexuals from Montreal were also on the bill, giving the show a distinctly Canadian flavour. The Sterns themselves were Canadian nationals, born in Toronto but immigrating to the USA with their parents as youths. To complete the equation, the Asexuals had an efficient Canadian roadie named Monk who agreed to work for SNFU on their next outing. Tours were great for networking.

  Bookings often didn’t follow any logical order, which made it necessary for touring bands to cover a lot of ground. SNFU doubled back for a show in Phoenix, and Dave remembers seeing a girl get hit by a car in front of the venue after the show. “Her head cracked the windshield and she flew over the roof to land on her ass. The car struck her so hard it knocked the gob out of her mouth and it was all over the windshield,” the bass player says incredulously. “Then she got up and walked away.” Images like that can be hard to forget.

  Tim went back to Edmonton and the tour rolled on. Monk remembers that Ken was drinking a lot. “He passed out at a party after a show, and we got him pretty good with felt markers. When he woke up, he had a bunch of new sailor ‘tattoos’ and stuff,” recalls the roadie. Surprisingly, they didn’t get the frontman with the standard cock n’ balls.

  At a roller rink in Las Vegas, steroid-fuelled bouncers bashed the punks near the stage with an eagerness that was disconcerting. Somehow, a number of fans slipped past and began to stage dive, motivating the promoter to grab a microphone and threaten to shut down the show. Unsurprisingly, the punks did not heed the warning, at which point the security goons muscled the band off the stage, ending the gig. While SNFU loaded out, the Sterns argued with the manager. When they couldn’t convince him to let the bands continue, the Sterns tried to extract payment. The negotiations got out of hand, causing Mark Stern to take a swing at one of the administrators. “We were still loading gear, when suddenly the Sterns’ van comes wheeling around and someone shouts that the cops are coming. We got the hell outta there as fast as we could,” laughs Dave Bacon. “When we met up with the Sterns later, they were playing blackjack in the casino as if nothing had happened.” Just a day in the life of Youth Brigade.

  The new material was going over well with the fans, and “The Ceiling,” with its advanced musicality was a showcase of thundering drums and bass. The Belkes were also at the top of their game. Forced to keep up with Card and Bacon, the guitar-playing brothers rose to the challenge and then some. Likewise, Chi Pig was becoming a master at mesmerizing crowds and putting them under his spell. On “Mind Like a Door,” Chi would lean out over the pit and drill the fans with his eyes while he sang:

  Sometimes my mind’s just like a door

  and I lose the key. I find myself locked outside

  trying to break back in so desperately.

  At the time, fans and bandmembers alike had no idea that Chi Pig was telling the truth—that his psychological problems ran deeper than even he knew. Over time, those issues would become more pronounced, especially when he began to self-medicate. The singer was currently drinking a fair bit, killing more than a few beers before hitting the stage. Some performers find it difficult to perform sober, but Chi Pig just liked to drink.

  Next stop: El Paso, Texas. Being a border town, Mexican nationals could be seen running across the highway carrying their personal possessions in garbage bags. Jeeps full of border patrol guards roared after them, crossing the road and tearing through ditches. Dave stepped out of the venue for a smoke just in time to see a team of border agents apprehend a group of illegal aliens at gunpoint. While the drama was exciting enough for Dave, the residents of El Paso saw it nightly, and such occurrences were more of an annoyance than anything else. There would always be people wishing to make better lives for themselves, so those crossings were not about to stop any time soon.

  The musicians themselves crossed the border into Mexico, walking over a long footbridge later featured in the movie No Country for Old Men. Jon and Dave bought a bottle of mescal, the type with the worm, that they would take back and forth across the Canada/USA border several times until US officials in Michigan eventually confiscated it. For now, the jug sat miraculously untouched.

  A girl named Kim hopped aboard the SNFU van in San Antonio, and Gubby became acquainted with her. The two kept in touch via telephone after the band returned from tour, and the pair eventually married. After living in Montreal for a while, the couple moved to Chicago, where they resided for many years before splitting up. But on this tour, Kim travelled with the band to Houston to see a doctor about injuries she suffered in a recent car accident. For better or worse, Gubby would never have met his future wife if American citizens had proper health care.

  The Upright Citizens from Germany joined the tour in San Antonio. Although the German punks did only three shows with SNFU before continuing on in the other direction, the two groups would meet again later. “We ended up playing quite a few shows with them that summer. They were great,” says Dave.

  After the show, Jon and Dave spent forty dollars on plaster of Paris that was supposed to be cocaine. When the pair confronted the rip-off artists, one of them lifted his shirt to expose the butt of a pistol. Even this failed to stop Jon, Dave, and a number of other unhappy suckers from chasing the pair into a deserted parking lot, where much screaming and shouting ensued. “I was the acting road manager and had access to the cash, so I had to at least try to get our money back,” Dave rationalizes. In the end, the angry musicians came away empty handed, but at least no one ended up with gunshot wounds. “I think it was just a knife with a handle like a gun, anyway,” says Dave, as if knives weren’t dangerous enough. For the rest of the tour, the guys joked about getting “plastered.”

  South of Shreveport at five o’ clock in the morning, the van picked up a flat. “T
he sun was already beating down on us, and the jack was sinking into the road because the asphalt was so hot,” remembers Dave Bacon of this tribulation. “We had to go into the bayou for wood to put under the jack.” After wrestling the spare in place, they stopped at a very rural gas station to fix the flat tire. The scene was like something out of Deliverance, and the boys had to hide Chi Pig in the van so the locals wouldn’t lynch him. When the singer had to take a piss, his band-mates made him wear a hat. Duelling banjos wailed in the background.

  At a duplex where the band crashed in New Orleans, resident punks showed the horrified bassist a room where they kept several massive pit bulls. “There was shit everywhere. It was horrible,” says Dave, disgusted that anyone would treat animals so poorly. Later, Dave went mushroom picking with the neglectful punks. While they picked very few fungi, Dave collected many. SNFU left New Orleans bound for Pensacola, and Dave ate all the mushrooms he’d picked. “We stopped at a BBQ pit outside Pensacola and my food was jumping off the plate.” Too high to eat, he asked for a doggy bag and then hid in the van.

  When kids at the show in Pensacola found out that SNFU was from Canada, they crowed enthusiastically about Rush. Despite this inexplicable and confusing hunger for Canadian prog rock, the kids were also punk fans, and aficionados of SNFU in particular. In fact, the band was well-received at every date on the tour, and only a few were poorly attended. SNFU put so much energy into those performances that Dave lost thirty pounds over the course of the summer. “We were as tight as fuck, and those shows were killer,” says Dave Bacon. The band was hot indeed.

  In Jacksonville, a massive, sex-crazed skinhead named Curtis offered to tag along as free security. Six-foot-eight with shoulders wide as a fridge, Curtis was a failed jock who had given up his dream of becoming a pro football player after suffering a career-ending knee injury. “He was really annoying, but Jon thought he was amusing,” recalls Marc. Curtis warned SNFU that Florida was full of nasty skinheads, but he could protect them. Since the band had never been down that way and didn’t know what to expect, they felt it would be only prudent to bring security. “Curtis wasn’t a Nazi—just a dude who shaved his head,” Dave assures us.

  As it turned out, a large number of Nazi skinheads actually were present at the show in Gainesville. “There were at least fifty of them, and there were fights everywhere. I tried to break up a scrap in the parking lot for some reason,” Dave laughs. “Even the guy who was getting beat up told me to fuck off and mind my own business. They spoke in a southern drawl that you could barely understand.” After the crazy show, the lead singer for the metal band Death gave Marc their first demo tape. “He was a cool guy,” Marc recalls.

  Curtis disappeared before load-out in Fort Lauderdale, causing the guys to wonder where he’d gone. He reappeared with a big grin on his face after all the gear was packed away. “Sorry, boys,” he drawled, “Curtis met a girl, and he was out balling her in the parking lot.” The gigantic skinhead often spoke in the third person when describing his various exploits. Curtis, who wasn’t quite all there, soon began to grate on everyone’s nerves except Jon, who still thought he was hilarious. Finally, after their self-appointed guardian almost gouged out a fan’s eyes for snatching a bottle of water from the stage, the band dumped him in Tallahassee. “He could only find one of his size sixteen shoes,” Dave recalls. “We gave him twenty bucks and left him at a gas station.”

  Skinheads in St. Petersburg loudly proclaimed their love for white power and assaulted SNFU fans in a store near the venue. The storeowner phoned the police, who brought in the fire department, who in turn shut down the show for overcrowding. “We were all set up and ready to play, but we never got the chance,” Chi Pig recalls angrily. “It’s not like we had driven down the block to get there. That was Florida, a place we considered avoiding after that.” SNFU might have wanted to stay away from the Sunshine State, but they couldn’t.

  In Washington, DC where the band played with Flipper and Gang Green, Flipper bassist Will Shatter told Dave Bacon to fuck off if he didn’t like the show, prompting Bacon to shout, “I would, but you’re using my bass amp!” Flipper had annoyed Bacon by arriving late and without sufficient gear. “Flipper weren’t as good as we’d thought they would be,” remembers Marc Belke. “Their records were great, but…”

  The guys had several days off in Raleigh, North Carolina, which they spent mostly in the studio doing background vocals for Corrosion of Conformity, who were cutting the Technocracy EP at the time. “We were staying with the drummer Reed Mullin and hanging out with Woody,” says Dave Bacon nonchalantly. “We were really into COC, and we liked them a lot.” While SNFU did not immediately display any noticeable metal influences, metal flourishes would eventually appear in their music. Still, unlike many hardcore punk bands, SNFU would never make a complete “crossover” to metal.

  Accommodations in Baltimore were non-existent, forcing the band to sleep on the filthy stage after the show while rain dripped through holes in the roof. “But it was cool because Ian MacKaye (Minor Threat, Fugazi) was at the club the next day and I got to meet him. I was really into Minor Threat and the DC scene at the time,” Marc recalls. “It was a revelation to me that you didn’t have to drink. That seemed like the most punk rock thing ever.” Ken reminisces about lying on the stage after the little club closed, realizing that life on the road wasn’t for everyone. “I didn’t care,” he insists. “I’ll still sleep anywhere. I don’t give a fuck.”

  The band played Philadelphia before continuing on to New York City. “We played at the Rock Hotel on Jayne Street, where we met Andy Warhol,” Dave remembers. In fact, the clumsy bass player got a bit closer than he’d intended. “I lost my balance climbing out of the van and nearly knocked over a dude walking past with two bodyguards.” The Belkes, who were walking behind the famous artist and his bodyguards, pointed excitedly at Andy Warhol. “I almost crushed the little bastard,” laughs Bacon. The bodyguards had clearly failed in their duty to protect the pop art icon.

  That night, Andy Warhol took a box seat to see SNFU at a BYO showcase that also featured Youth Brigade, Seven Seconds, and the Upright Citizens. Whatever Andy had heard about SNFU was enough to drag him away from The Factory and bring him to the gig. The band was a well-oiled machine, even if the sound that night was a bit iffy. Muc knew how to ask for more vocals in the monitors by then, but that didn’t mean he’d get them. Although the sound got better when the band started playing bigger rooms, they never knew what to expect when they walked into a venue. Soundcheck? What the hell was that?

  After the show, while the members of Tex and the Horseheads nodded off in various locations around the venue, Andy Warhol took photographs of Chi Pig and spoke to him for a while. “We all stuck our heads in to say hello,” says Dave. The band didn’t intend to be left out just because Warhol’s focus was on their singer. They were important too.

  The next night, SNFU did another BYO show in Rhode Island with Youth Brigade and the Upright Citizens. Afterwards, the Sterns told the guys that they were having difficulties pressing more copies of …And No One Else Wanted to Play. Although the process should have been very simple and straightforward, problems with the cover were holding them up. The Sterns wanted to hire an artist to come up with a new concept. The band wasn’t happy—especially since they needed records now—but there was nothing they could do about the situation. Hopefully, the problem would be resolved sooner rather than later.

  On Sunday, SNFU drew about eleven fans in Newport, Connecticut, but the Edmontonians played for all they were worth anyway. “Sometimes it seemed as if the best shows were in joints that were almost empty,” says Bacon with a weary acceptance. The tired musicians, who slept in the van that night, were not living in the lap of luxury. Jon Card was familiar with the bare bones lifestyle, but the others had never done any extended touring, and the hardships took a toll. Now that they had been gone a while, the boys were really starting to miss their girlfriends. Bewhiskered and flatulent G
ubby, bless his heart, wasn’t the first person they wanted to see when they woke up in the morning. Home was still a long way off.

  Customs officials tore the van to pieces when the band crossed back into Canada for a show in Montreal. Ken had all sorts of props and toys that he’d picked up along the way, and the border guards examined them with the careful attention to detail that specialists devote to brain surgery. “They were shaking Ken’s rubber chicken around, speaking in French, and having a good laugh,” Dave remembers. Customs officials made the band unload all the gear from the van so they could remove the interior panelling. Although the officers promised to put the van back together later, they made up some lame excuse about a bomb threat and told the boys to get lost. “We stuffed everything back in the van and drove down the highway to reorganize everything. We kept waiting for the border crossing to blow up, but it never did,” laughs Bacon.

  In Montreal, ex-Edmontonian Randy Boyd asked SNFU if they would like to supply a song for It Came From the Pit, a compilation on his record label, Psyche Industry Records. Back in the early days of Edmonton punk rock, Randy had run Obscure Alternatives, a record store doomed to fail in conservative Alberta. “Marc and I had been there a couple of times,” Brent Belke recalls. “It was just a tiny little place with a few spray-painted T-shirts and some records.” Now Randy had relocated to left-leaning Quebec, where his quirky projects at least had a fighting chance. SNFU agreed to contribute, but not until they found a way to record the track, since Randy couldn’t afford to pay for studio time. They would have to figure it out when they got home.

  Problems with the album cover were more immediate. The Sterns couriered an alternative concept to SNFU, which the band immediately rejected. “It had some lame skull on it that we hated,” Brent remembers. In a panic, the band commissioned a friend, Jah Rick, to draw a pointillism version of the photograph by Diane Arbus. The Sterns felt that cover was still too close to the original, but they printed a batch with Rick’s drawing under the name Better Youth Canada (BYC) to shield them from legal troubles. This version was only available in Canada, and only for one pressing. SNFU later shipped BYO yet another version, this one showing a gory Christmas scene. Although the new artwork incorporated a severed head of the image by Diane Arbus, (the face was clearly recognizable), the rest of the artwork bore no likeness to the original photograph. Another friend, Al Warnock, drew a cover in red ink, with the same little kid riding a train, for Southern Studios in the UK. “They finally used an old file illustration of a family with the kid holding a gun for the US printing. Which, ultimately, is what we should have used for all the versions,” says Muc. Hindsight is 20/20.