Snfu

by Chris Walter

  The boys rolled out, and although the mood was still ugly, Muc eventually talked Dave into finishing the tour. There was no support act at The Snake Pit in Denver, so Simon Head and Duckman quickly formed a fuck band and wrote three songs. “Simon named the band Farm Team, and one of the songs was called ‘Squeegee Punk,’” laughs Duckman, who played drums while Simon sang and played guitar. They had another song called, appropriately enough, “Seven in a Van,” and they also covered “I Got You” by Split Enz.

  From Denver, SNFU drove all the way to Vancouver, where they took a ferry to Vancouver Island for a final gig at The Limit in Victoria. Dave Rees was right when he said there was “at least one retardedly long drive on every tour.” Worse, Simon caught a flu on the way back and was so sick that Starbuck and Marc had to negotiate the icy highways and blizzard-like conditions without his help. Unable to keep food down, Simon couldn’t even help unload the gear into the rehearsal space. The band dropped him off at St Paul’s Hospital, where he spent four hours hooked up to an IV line. Still sick, Simon found his way to the house rented by Ten Days Late and crashed on their couch until his flight home three days later. He finally arrived in Toronto on Christmas Eve, more dead than alive. Although Simon Head would work with SNFU again in the future, this would be his last tour with them.

  As 1996 drew to a close, the various members of the band and crew tried hard not to think about the difficult year behind them. Although they had been all over Europe, the USA, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, and had played for many thousands of people, they could not help but wonder what the future held in store. Exhaustion was setting in.

  Having celebrated Thanksgiving in Edmonton, Muc and Bunt Belke stayed in Vancouver for Christmas that year, attending local shows and spending precious time with friends and lovers. 1997 was shaping up to be another insanely busy year, so the musicians tried to enjoy what little free time they had. For better or worse, SNFU would soon be on the road, taking the gospel of punk rock around the world and back again.

  January was slow. SNFU rehearsed regularly, but the guys did not work on new songs. The contract with Epitaph was up in November, and they didn’t know if it would be renewed, or even if they wanted to stay. Epitaph was barely promoting the band these days, so the guys thought it might be prudent to look for another deal. Under these circumstances, the band didn’t feel pressed to write new material. Dave Rees, meanwhile, left on tour with Bad Religion after agreeing to stay with SNFU for the next two tours, which would be in Australia and Europe respectively. He might have quit on the spot had the band been planning to tour the dreaded American Midwest again.

  The band boarded a 747 and made the eighteen-hour flight to Sydney, where Bad Religion was touring to support The Gray Race. Immediately, SNFU was back in action, playing massive shows for thousands of excited fans, living the good life and soaking up the applause. The last year had been a bit tough on the self-esteem, and they needed to know they were still loved. There would be no reason to continue if no one was listening.

  On February 22nd, 1997, SNFU and Bad Religion destroyed Selinas Entertainment Centre in Coogee Bay, moving on to the next show like noisy carnivorous beasts. The tour rolled up the Gold Coast, going as far as the Festival Hall in Brisbane before doubling back for a date at Oxide in Melbourne with Bad Religion and locals H Block. SNFU fan and guitarist Alex Pullar opened the show with his band Trevor. “The show not only put the club on the map, but it also invigorated our local punk scene,” says Pullar. “Few international bands were coming to Australia at the time and, for most, this was their first exposure to SNFU. The atmosphere was part joy, part fury, part sweat, and part blood. We’d never seen anything like it.” Shows with Bad Religion were always huge, successful events, and sometimes it was difficult for SNFU not to feel a little jealousy. Although they never let it show, a certain amount of envy was always present when they opened for Bad Religion. There was something quirky about SNFU that mainstream punk audiences couldn’t quite seem to grasp.

  Before they knew it, the tour was over and the boys in the band were flying back across the Atlantic Ocean. With ringing ears and shaking hands, they tried not to think about the future and what it might bring. So far, Peter Karroll had not magically lifted them from financial distress, and their relationship with Epitaph was more strained than ever. But it was even more complicated than that. Although the Belkes missed Dave Fortune and regretted firing him, Chi defended Karroll and felt he could work with him. The division over management couldn’t have come at a worse time. Instead of working together to solve their problems, the issue was pulling them further apart.

  SNFU landed at LAX and shuffled slowly through customs. After checking into a hotel and resting briefly, they took a taxi to Epitaph headquarters. Brett Gurewitz was hearty and full of enthusiasm, showing off the new website the label was about to launch and gabbing animatedly about a number of current projects. Melissa Cohen, head of sales and marketing, entered the room with a pizza and Brett helped himself. The group continued to talk while Brett ate lunch, but when the mogul couldn’t find a napkin, he took a T-shirt from a desk drawer and wiped his face with it. The musicians sat there stunned, unable to believe what they were seeing. “It was an SNFU shirt!” says Chi Pig, reliving the shocking moment. No one said anything about Brett’s choice of napkins, but the rest of the meeting was a blur. “I doubt that was an accident, and for the way we were behaving, I don’t really blame him,” says Marc. Brett Gurewitz, however, is horrified at the suggestion that he would do such a thing on purpose. “We had tons of promo stuff kicking around, and it could just as easily have been a Bad Religion shirt. I’m not that manipulative.” For decades, the guys in SNFU thought that Brett had delivered a psychological coup de grâce. Now they knew how Michel Langevin from Voivod must have felt.

  Despite the incident, SNFU retired to Paramount Recording Studios in Hollywood the next day, where they recorded a version of Devo’s “Uncontrollable Urge” with producer Jim Goodwin for the tribute album We Are Not Devo. To be included on the album was a great honour for Chi Pig and the Belkes, who had grown up listening to Devo. In and out of the studio quickly, the band returned to Vancouver and tried to keep their heads above water.

  In the last week of March, 1997, Paget Williams, who had worked with SNFU in the past, booked them to play approximately a dozen Canadian shows on the Third Annual Sno Jam Tour, with Good Riddance, Satanic Surfers, Diesel Boy, and Pridebowl. The somewhat oddly matched tour started with an all-ages show in North Vancouver before moving on to Kelowna, where the band had four days off, complete with free lift tickets and snowboard equipment rentals.

  As the musicians grew older, life on the road began to take a toll on them, and Muc developed allergies to certain food additives, causing eczema and swelling of the fingers. On several occasions he had to visit hospital emergency rooms, where he was given powerful antihistamines. While fast food was partly to blame, Marc also became sensitive to an additive commonly found in Coca-Cola. The guitarist eventually stopped drinking pop, but problems persisted.

  While the turnouts were fairly good, the two Montreal shows were the high-light of the tour and other dates weren’t quite as spectacular. The comparison had been made before, but a music journalist who reviewed one of the Montreal shows likened Chi Pig’s voice to that of Talking Heads’ singer David Byrne, even though Chi never sounded that annoying even on his worst day. Music critics or punk historians should never be taken seriously, not even for a second.

  A local musician Dan Moyse, took Ed Dobek’s spot on the drum stool and the Wheat Chiefs did a few shows around town. Ed didn’t actually quit the band, but it simply wasn’t practical for him to travel back and forth across the Georgia Strait from Victoria for rehearsal and shows.

  The Wheat Chiefs weren’t doing a lot these days, but Marc still hoped the band might succeed. “Peter Karroll thought we had some good songs and wondered what they would sound like with Chi singing,” says Marc, not that he or
Chi ever seriously considered joining forces in the Wheat Chiefs. The two spent enough time together as it was. Dan Moyse remembers his days with the Wheat Chiefs warmly. “We rehearsed on Hastings probably three or four times a week, and every rehearsal was a songwriting session. Muc, Brent, or ‘Buck would come up with a riff or idea, and we would work on it collectively until it was a song. I have to say that even though it was short, the Wheat Chiefs was the best band I ever played in.”

  In April of ’97, SNFU did an interview with Thrasher magazine, which had always supported them through thick and thin. At one point, the interviewer asked them how they felt about being voted the fifth favourite skate rock band of all time. Chi Pig responded eloquently: “Devout skaters, over the years, have pushed the limits of what a human can or cannot do by attempting to do the impossible. That’s what draws mortals to the sport—the quest for mastering a seemingly unreachable goal, like getting killer air, or taking a plank of wood, throwing on some wheels, and literally leaving the ground. SNFU formed at a time when record labels didn’t want anything to do with us, so we blazed our own trail and did as we pleased all these years, which, by some strange coincidence, attracted the skateboarding faction, who could relate to our lifestyle.”

  SNFU’s relationship with Peter Karroll hadn’t yielded much, but he set them up with a British booking agent who got them into some large festivals they would have missed otherwise. On May 14th, 1997, Garnet Harry drove the band to Seattle, where overseas flights were cheaper. Crossing the US border, one of the members accidentally overlooked a large bag of weed, and didn’t find it until after they had already entered the States. “That was silly,” says Rob, downplaying the incident. Instead of taking Simon Head, who wanted badly to go, Peter Karroll recommended a soundman named Ken Turda. “We should have taken Simon, and we suffered the consequences,” says Brent. “It was just a bad call.”

  The band landed in Amsterdam, where Epitaph had just opened a big office. Luckily, the first show was two days away, so the band was able to party all night without having to worry about playing the next day—not that they would have done anything differently anyway. The next day, the group wandered around Amsterdam before setting off for Nuremberg, but the driver mistakenly headed towards Nüberg, which gave SNFU an extra hour to drink beer and play video games in the back of the tour bus.

  The boys arrived in Nuremburg for the Rock at the Ring festival on May 16th, which was predictably loud and sweaty. Although SNFU played in a tent on the Alternative Stage, a crowd of more than 2,000 shouted approval as the band kicked out the jams at top volume. At times like this, the boys could almost forget about flat record sales and half-empty rooms in the USA. The moment was all that counted, and that moment was now.

  At the entrance to the Dynamo Festival in Eindhoven, Brent spotted Korn guitarist James “Munky” Shaffer and decided to give the man a second chance. James was amiable enough, and the pair talked about the bill they’d shared in New Orleans before Korn made it big. When James mentioned that the coke he’d done earlier was making him jittery, Brent invited him back to the SNFU bus for a few beers. After a while, the colour returned to James’ face, and when the subject of his bandmates came up, the guitarist drew big laughs by referring to them as a “bunch of fucking assholes.” Unfortunately, soundman Ken Turda embarrassed SNFU by making a big deal out of the guitarist’s presence. Even rock stars like to get away from that sort of thing backstage.

  After a small club show in Brussels, the band drove to Munich where they teamed up with tour mates Millencolin and Voodoo Glow Skulls. Millencolin was almost as big as Bad Religion was, and SNFU were selling more albums in Europe than they did in North America, so all the dates would be unvaryingly chock-a-block. Trying to understand why they were more popular overseas than they were in the States, Marc wonders if perhaps Europeans are more open-minded towards Chi Pig’s sexual orientation and general freakiness. Whatever the case, Europeans seemed to know something about SNFU that Americans couldn’t quite fathom.

  In Berlin on May 24th, Peter Karroll phoned to tell the boys that he’d arranged for an A&R representative from a major label to see the next show, which was in Hamburg. Peter stressed that SNFU should “save everything” for that gig in order to impress the man. However, in a passive/aggressive display of rebelliousness, the boys partied all night and arrived in Hamburg having slept not a wink. “We played just an okay show, because we were all fucking exhausted, but the dude never showed up anyway,” Brent laughs.

  Peter Karroll placed a great deal of importance on getting SNFU signed to a major label, but the chances of that happening seemed slim. Because they were suffering from terminal apathy, the boys failed to embrace Karroll’s strategies. “If he told us to get our rest, we’d party all night,” says Bunt, recalling the negativity the band was feeling. In a sense, they’d given up trying to make it big and sell tons of records. They just wanted to be a punk band and stop worrying.

  Braunschweig, Koln, Wiesbaden, Stuttgart, Essen, Bremen—the tour plowed through Germany, leaving a trail of empty beer cups and blown amplifiers. Ken Turda was a good soundman, but he had a nasty habit of treating the band like rookies. “He’d say, ‘What are ya, new?’” says Brent, still bristling. “He was from the school of bar bands, so his view of the world was different than ours.” According to Brent, Turda also stormed into Epitaph’s Amsterdam office and screamed at the employees on behalf of the band. “I think Peter Karroll told him to stir up some shit. We should have brought Simon, who was a brother,” says Brent. On the last day of the tour, Dave Rees flipped out on Ken [Turda], calling him every name in the book. Brent wishes that Dave had straightened him out on the first day rather than the last. Chi disrespectfully referred to the soundman as “Turdburglar.”

  Flying home from Amsterdam on June 5th, the band reflected on their fourth European tour. While the shows had been large and well-attended, they knew that Millencolin was largely responsible for that. How would they do the next time they went out by themselves? There was no real way to tell how popular or unpopular they were when touring with bigger bands. Perhaps it was best not to think about such things.

  The tired musicians enjoyed their time at home while they could, attending baseball games, hitting the clubs, spending time with loved ones, and—especially in Chi Pig’s case—watching television. Starbuck returned to the Gin and Sin, and moved into the second basement suite in Chi’s building on Knight and 33rd. Meanwhile, Dave Rees hit the road with Bad Religion again. The man was away from home so much that fatigue was unavoidable, and his days with SNFU were clearly numbered. He just wanted to hang out with Louisa, not traipse all over the world setting up drums for Bad Religion.

  In fact, the members of SNFU knew that the story of their lives read more like a travelogue, but there was little they could do to change that. Even now, the next tour was in the works, and they had to go if they wanted to eat. Relying on art to pay the rent certainly took some of the fun out of it, although playing live would always be great. Unfortunately, the lifestyle that involved spending long periods of time cooped up in a speeding van was wearing a bit thin.

  In mid-June of ‘97, Peter Karroll sent SNFU, Bif Naked, Raggadeath, and Face the Pain on an ill-fated excursion across Western Canada. Doug Fury of Face the Pain and Peter Karroll were Bif’s main songwriting partners, so the odd mish-mash of genres was no coincidence, even if the concept didn’t work as planned. As it was, the eight dates SNFU did with Bif Naked’s Rap Punk Pop Invitational were poorly attended, and the few fans who did show up expected to hear main-stream or “alternative” music. “I was being marketed to ‘normal’ audiences, and it took a long time to get anywhere. I’m sure the tour was disappointing for my pals in SNFU, as they were likely accustomed to huge halls with huge audiences and huge merch sales,” says Bif, who shouldn’t have felt responsible for the mis-match. At that point, SNFU may not have been as big as she thought they were, except maybe in Edmonton and Calgary.

  The tour
wound down, but even the show in Edmonton wasn’t as full as it could have been because of the weird line-up. After a final show in Calgary, SNFU parted ways with Bif and flew to Montreal, where they played eight dates on the Polliwog Tour with Groovy Aardvark, BARF, Overbass, and Rusty. Booked by James MacLean, this tour was much better, even though Peter Karroll advised against it. Aside from shows in Montreal, Trois Riviéres, and Quebec City, the tour also reached Chicoutimi, Rimouski, and other far-flung districts. “They love punk rock in Quebec, and it was a whole new market for us,” Bunt remembers of the successful outing. If only the rest of the world would support SNFU the way Quebec did.

  Back in Vancouver again, the boys had time to reflect on the cyclical road of insanity their lives had become. Although Brent didn’t say anything to his brother, he thought hard about leaving the band. While being a musician was better than most jobs, it was exhausting to tour day after day, year after year. SNFU wasn’t even stuck in a holding pattern any more; the audiences were noticeably smaller, and punk was falling from favour again. 1996 may have been a weird year, but 1997 was just downright gruelling.

  Nonetheless, the boys were excited when Brett invited them to The Epitaph Summer Nationals at the Roxy in New York City on September 2nd. The showcase of Epitaph bands, and its newly-formed sister label Hellcat Records, was a prestigious three-day event and tickets were only six bucks a night. Pleased at last to have a good show in the Big Apple, SNFU arrived four days early, determined to show New Yorkers what they could do. Unfortunately, Chi Pig failed to arrive, and the rest of the band could only watch from the sidelines. “Chi slept in and missed his flight. That really sucked,” says Rob Johnson, making a huge understatement. For Brent, this was the last straw, and he emotionally disconnected himself from the band. From this point on, both he and Dave Rees were simply riding out the clock.