Snfu

by Chris Walter

  Despite the disappointment, SNFU hit the highway for a fall tour that was almost identical to the one the year before. The cities, the clubs, the promoters, and even the drunken punks at those shows were exactly the same. Across the icy prairies they went, shivering with cold and numb with boredom, knowing what was going to happen before it actually happened. This time, however, even the crowds in Canada were thinner, and rooms in the USA were emptier than they’d ever been. When they crossed back into Canada two weeks later, only sixty paying guests were on hand to greet the boys at the Birdland Cabaret in Halifax. Still, even when shows were smaller, SNFU was never just background music. Whether playing for thirty underage kids or a sweaty festival audience of 3,000, the level of professionalism was always the same. Fans watching the high-energy show would never guess that several of the bandmembers had been fast asleep only twenty minutes earlier. Hard times were here, but SNFU remained a powerful and well-tuned machine.

  Some Bands Never Know When to Quit

  Knowing that difficult times were coming, SNFU brainstormed ideas to stay afloat. Peter Karroll and Jon Zazula of Megaforce Records suggested that they cut a live album. Zazula was the owner of New Jersey’s legendary Rock & Roll Heaven record store, and had famously released Metallica’s debut album, Kill ‘Em All. Although SNFU was still under contract to Epitaph, they were no longer receiving financial support from the label, and Karroll thought they should have an album ready to go when their contract expired later that year. Other record labels could have a piece of the boys later, but Peter and Jon wanted them to throw a cheaply produced moneymaker together.

  In mid-October, Karroll hustled the boys into Bakerstreet Studios on the North Shore, where they recorded Let’s Get it Right the First Time. Although the band was recorded live off the floor, the album would not be “live” as advertised, but merely a clever imitation. The stage banter and crowd noise was dubbed from a show they played earlier at the Starfish Room using the same set list. Even the sitar intro for “Reality is a Ride on the Bus” was inserted later. “We added that sitar just to see if anyone was paying attention,” laughs Brent. This is not to say that the album is less valid than, say, Kiss Alive, which paved the way for all heavily overdubbed “live” releases. Later, the boys told anyone who asked that the album was recorded at the Starfish, and the audience actually was. Rob Johnson doesn’t have a problem with the deception. “The sound on Let’s Get it Right the First Time is at least as good as any other SNFU album, and I love the way it came out,” says the bassist. Although it seemed unlikely that the band would make much money from the release, it would at least give them the sensation of moving forward.

  The contract with Epitaph lapsed in November of ‘97. After a discussion with the label heads, the band was told that they would have to start repaying the $200k they owed if they wanted to cut another album. Instead, they were advised to go with Fat Wreck Chords or Alternative Tentacles to get back on their feet. Since SNFU wasn’t in a position to pay down that debt, the suggestion seemed valid. According to Muc, Peter Karroll assured them that he could find them another deal, one that would put them on the right path. Although it was scary to be without a record label, the guys knew that it was important to focus on the present and forget about the past.

  The bandmembers, with the exception of the singer, spent the Christmas holidays with family that year. Brent and Mina visited friends in Hong Kong and celebrated Christmas with Mina’s parents. Chi Pig hung out in Vancouver and finagled an invite from friends for Christmas dinner. For now, at least, the boys could forget about the constant grind and take a much-needed break. They would be back at work soon enough.

  The New Year came and went in Vancouver. SNFU did a gig at the Niagara Hotel in January of 1998 that attracted a good crowd and brought in a few badly needed dollars. SOCAN cheques arrived periodically, but with no advances from Epitaph, they could only earn money by touring. The band was spending too much on extra vehicles and fancy hotels, so they would have to make austerity measures. Although it was hard to go backwards, SNFU didn’t need a tour bus and a full road crew to play punk rock.

  In late February of 1998, Brent Belke dropped the bomb on his fellow bandmates, telling them that he was leaving the band for good. He’d been thinking about quitting for a while now, and Chi’s failure to appear for the show in New York helped him decide. “I phoned Marc and told him the band could make more money if they only had to split the pot four ways. He knew what I meant, and I didn’t even need to say it,” recalls Brent. Even if Muc had no intention of quitting, he understood his brother’s reasoning. The glory days seemed to be over.

  To make matters worse, Dave Rees also made good on his promise to depart. The double loss evoked bad memories from ’85, when Jimmy and Evan quit almost simultaneously. “To be honest, I thought the band peaked at The One Voted Most Likely to Succeed. After that album, a bunch of weird stuff started to happen, and I just didn’t feel it anymore. I was always on the road, and I was sick of the Bad Religion stuff—I was just burned out,” says Rees, who wants the record to show that he didn’t leave SNFU because Bad Religion “spoiled him.” The drummer’s resignation didn’t take the other guys by surprise—especially since he’d quit once before—but it didn’t please them either. “I’d known Dave since he was just a little kid. I’d dated his sister and given him his first super-short haircut. Still, you could kind of see it coming,” Marc says hesitantly. “I would say the band was… stagnant.”

  At age thirty-two, Brent wanted a career in music, but was tired of driving around in a smelly old van. His backup plan slowly came together when a film director inquired about licensing an SNFU song for a movie. The director eventually selected “You Make Me Thick” for the documentary I Wanna Be Adored, but initially declined Brent’s offer to help score the film. Somewhat later, the man phoned Brent in a tizzy after encountering problems licensing songs from other bands. Brent quickly scored four pieces of music using a guitar, keyboards, a drum machine, and a small mixer. Although Bunt didn’t make a great deal of money from the project, he felt he could probably find more work using Mina’s connections in the movie industry. Things were tough at first, and at times he still struggles, but today Brent is employed scoring music for TV and film.

  The other guys accepted that Brent and Dave were leaving, but decided to send them off with a bang rather than a whimper. Although they didn’t find anything suitably grand at first, SNFU and the Wheat Chiefs eventually received an offer to participate in a three-day event with Bad Religion in Edmonton that started on March 28th. When the date finally arrived, the band drove to Maple Ridge with merch guy and roadie Dan DeVloo for a show that failed to draw a large crowd. “It was a drag that mine and Dave’s last gig in Vancouver was such a minor event,” says Brent, even though the city of Maple Ridge is not actually part of Vancouver. They should have played the Starfish Room instead.

  Directly after the show, Dan DeVloo and an associate Darren McVay, took the band to the airport and made tracks for Edmonton with the gear. “I remember it was a snowy drive through the mountains,” says DeVloo. Bunt and Dave had taken their last tour in Earl Grey, faithful old gal that she was. Along with the drifting snow, there was a sense of finality in the air. Change was coming, and for SNFU, the future was opaque at best.

  Considering that the upcoming event was expected to draw almost 5,000 fans and had the potential to earn thousands of dollars in profit, one can assume that twenty-one year old promoter “Orange County” Keith Rubuliak was a bit nervous. Keith, whose nickname stemmed from his fondness for Southern Californian punk bands, could only hope that the show went according to plan.

  Bad Religion was the headliner, but SNFU brought everything they had to the table, and the band was particularly entertaining that night. Digging out oldies they hadn’t played for ages, SNFU tore through a set list that spanned their entire career, eliciting screams of approval from fans both young and old. Finally, with a roar of distorted guitars and a cra
sh of drums, the band threw down their instruments and waved goodbye to the screaming crowd. “Marc announced that it was mine and Brent’s last show, and we took a bow. For a finale, Brent dived into the mosh pit, where he was tossed around overhead like one of Chi’s inflatable plastic alligators. Other than a guest appearance at the Commodore several years later, Brent would never appear with the band again. Dave Rees, who had been with SNFU throughout the most successful period of their career, was also gone. “I still have dreams about playing in SNFU, but I don’t regret leaving when I did,” says the drummer. He was done.

  The next day, members of Bad Religion and SNFU, including Dan DeVloo, donned ice skates to face off against power pop band the Odds at the Coronation Arena for the Celebrity Charity Hockey Game. While Bad Religion flew in several pals from LA, the Odds also beefed up their team with local bandleader and soundman Andrew White, members of Wide Mouth Mason (who had also performed at the event), and Vancouver guitarist Jerry Wong, who was considered a scoring threat. Despite both teams doing what they could to gain the advantage, they were matched fairly evenly, and the game was close. At one point, an FX guy from LA slashed Odds’ bassist Doug Elliot across the knuckles and received a cross check to the face in return. The tie game was settled by a shootout in which Jerry Wong scored the winning goal on Bad Religion bassist Jay Bentley. “When we used to play in Los Angeles, we thought we were pretty good,” says Bentley. “Then we came to Canada and played some musicians from up here. I found out that we weren’t really that good at all.”

  After the game, which raised a fair chunk of change for the local food bank, the musicians returned to Vancouver and went their separate ways. That fall, Brent enrolled in a music course at the Vancouver Community College, where he learned how to write music for strings and other instruments, which would help with his work in the film industry. He eventually graduated with a composition (Classical) BFA at Simon Fraser University, and a composition (Jazz) diploma at Vancouver Community College. Not bad for a noisy punk rocker.

  Dave Rees was on the road with Bad Religion a few months later when a friend arranged an interview for him as assistant editor for the TV show Highlander. The drummer didn’t know a thing about editing or film, but he managed to bullshit his way through the interview using movie industry jargon from a link his friend forwarded to him. Perhaps even more miraculously, Dave caught on quickly, and advanced in the industry at a steady pace. Today, he works as a film editor, and recently released his first documentary Dads. Dave Rees has a four year old son, and jams regularly with friends just for fun. His days with SNFU are but a fond and beery memory.

  For Muc, Chi Pig, and Starbuck, the time had come to search for new members. After some discussion, they decided that Brent was right about the money thing and agreed to continue with only one guitar. Being the sole guitarist would give Marc the opportunity to grow as a musician, and he began tuning his instrument to drop D, which gave the band a somewhat fuller sound. For the first time in their sixteen-year career, SNFU would be a four-piece.

  Because they were on the road so much, SNFU allowed the lease at Renegade Studios to expire, and they were now rehearsing at a cramped space downtown near Main Street and East 2nd Avenue. Though the spot was conveniently located, a strong smell of gasoline permeated the air and seeped into the gear. “We’d set up our equipment in a venue, and you could still smell the gas. That’s when we realized that the place probably wasn’t good for our health,” recalls Marc Belke. Nevertheless, they were stuck with the spot until they could find something else, and it was here that SNFU held auditions to find a new drummer. Although they’d been lucky in the past, the search would not be as easy this time. There were no upstairs tenants to invite.

  An ad in The Georgia Straight failed to draw qualified applicants. As veteran recording artists, the boys expected to draw plenty of accomplished musicians but were dismayed by the general low calibre of the applicants. One seventeen year old kid, who showed up without drumsticks, didn’t know a quarter note from a quarter ounce, while another fellow, who initially seemed like a possible candidate, turned out to have serious drug issues. “They were pretty bad,” says Starbuck, recalling the despair the band felt. Surely, there had to be someone out there who could get the job done.

  One of the names that eventually came up was a drummer who Dave Ogilvie knew named Sean Stubbs. In fact, Sean was currently helping with Let’s Get it Right the First Time, editing audience ambiance at the co-op studio, Studio X. Marc soon learned that Sean was an accomplished drummer who had worked with Bif Naked among others. More importantly, he would be happy to audition for the band. The guys crossed their fingers.

  Sean Stubbs auditioned at the gassy rehearsal spot, and was heads above any of the other applicants. An average but not excellent high school student, he had been a fan of rock groups such as Kiss until he discovered the Clash and the Sex Pistols at age fourteen. The drummer still remembers the excitement he felt when Joe “Shithead” Keithley brought The Skulls to his high school for a lunch-hour show in grade eight. Music became an increasingly large part of Sean’s life, and he and several high school friends formed the band No Ambition. “One guy had taken some guitar lessons, and the rest of us just kind of followed along,” the drummer confesses. They later changed the name to Anti-Bodies, and then to Inoxia. “We did a little home recording, and had a demo tape. We also played some high school parties and The Hot Air Show that CiTR used to run,” says Sean. Though he didn’t receive any formal instruction until much later, he learned second-hand from a friend who was taking drum lessons. Sean eventually graduated from high school, and continued to play drums for various projects. At the time he joined SNFU, Sean was also drumming for the successful live karaoke band NewWave-aoke, that performed regularly around town.

  For SNFU, the new addition was good but not perfect. Sean, who bore more than a passing resemblance to the Hollywood stereotype of Jesus Christ, couldn’t quite match the fury of former SNFU drummers, all of whom were very good at what they did. Not just that, but Sean wanted to see where the band was going before making a full commitment. Although the new drummer learned what he needed to learn, he didn’t have the time or energy to absorb the entire back catalogue, and that would lead to problems further down the road. For now, the guys were just happy that the band would soon be up and running again.

  Practice went well enough, even though Sean Stubbs admits he struggled to keep up. “Every practice was a physical workout, and I had to work really hard just to play those songs,” says the drummer. Nonetheless, Peter Karroll lined up tour dates across Canada, but not a large number in the US, which was probably just as well. The days of big US tours were over for SNFU, and they wouldn’t spend as much time there in the future. Of course, such a big market could never be ignored completely.

  Interestingly, Sean already knew Peter Karroll from his stint in Bif Naked’s band. He remembered that Bif had wanted to write songs with her band, but Karroll planned to develop the singer as a solo artist and wasn’t about to share royalties with a bunch of schmucks. “Peter wanted 50% for Bif, which I understood because it was her name, but he wanted 25% for himself, which only left 25% for the rest of the band to split. We complained, and then I found out he was trying to replace us,” says the drummer, remembering his crash course in show business. The big fish eats the small fish, time after time.

  At any rate, Let’s Get it Right the First Time was supposed to be out soon, and Peter assured the boys it would be in most cities by the time they arrived. Not that a live release would draw hordes of new fans. Mostly, the boys just needed an excuse, any excuse, to hit the trail for a full tour. However, there would be no support this time, and Earl Grey would be the sole vehicle. They would be humping their own gear and sleeping wherever they could. The brown M&Ms would not be removed from bowls of candy backstage.

  In mid-May, the new streamlined version of SNFU travelled up the West Coast, stopping at The Boot Pub in Whistler, where Sean played h
is first show with the band. Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, LA—the shows weren’t packed but they were at least partly full. Salt Lake City was dead, but the show at the Bluebird Theater in Denver was spirited and lively. Overall, however, the gigs were emptier than usual. Since the boys couldn’t see any posters, and the new CD wasn’t in many stores, they wondered how much promotion they were getting. Although Peter Karroll had booked most of the American shows, Jon Zazula was their main contact in the States, so the onus to promote the tour was on him. “Jonny Z is the epitome of a big New Jersey rock manager dude. He’s like a movie character,” remembers Stubbs. Anyway, feeling discouraged, Muc phoned Jon to ask him about the support. The rock mogul assured Marc that he was doing everything he could, and not to worry. The next day, Peter Karroll phoned Marc to tell him that Jonny was livid about being “grilled” by Marc. Chi Pig suggests that perhaps Marc actually was disrespectful to Jonny Z. In any case, Marc and Chi Pig were still divided on the subject of band management.

  The tour rolled across the Midwest to New York City, where ex-SNFU roadie Brian “Duckman” Downey saw them at CBGB. “They had the drummer with the long hair—the Jesus guy. He was real nice, but I do recall him having a little difficulty keeping up with the songs. After watching Dave Rees kill it, anything even slightly less than that was very noticeable.” The boys moved on, hitting Trenton, and Providence, where they stopped by to see Chil and Gail, of course. Rhode Island was a nice respite from half full venues on the East Coast, and a place they always looked forward to visiting. CBGB not so much.