by Chris Walter
Marc’s last show with the band was at Red’s in Edmonton on August 20th, 2005. “The venue was packed and people were going crazy for them,” Jake Braun remembers. “That was by far the largest and loudest crowd of that tour, and it was also my favourite.” While that may be true for Jake, Muc was frustrated by technical problems with his amp. “I was hoping my last show would be flawless, but it helped confirm my decision to move on from the project that had been my life’s work. I was so depressed that I dropped everyone off at the hotel and drove to McDonald’s. I remember thinking that I couldn’t feel much worse about how it all turned out, so I might as well eat McDonald’s.” He knew how much his body hated fast food, and was clearly punishing himself.
In the end, Marc Belke learned the hard way that art and commerce don’t mix. “We had no managers, so I did as much as I could, but my creative side suffered because I had to do all the business stuff, but my business side suffered because I only wanted to be creative. For years, my original reasons for playing in a band were compromised.” Now he had to start his life over from scratch and do something else. The mere thought of it was daunting.
For Chi, who never quit SNFU and didn’t want to do anything else with his life, Muc’s departure was nothing less than catastrophic. The two may have hated each other at times, but Chi needed Muc badly. While the singer accepted that they could no longer work together, he had his regrets. “Marc and Brent were great guitarists, and we shared so much time together as kids, skateboarding and listening to music. I remember good times hanging out in the Belkes’ basement, drinking Pop Shoppe cola with Phil Larson,” the singer says nostalgically. People change, and time moves relentlessly forward.
Marc picked up his gear from the jam spot several weeks later, but some of it had been lost or stolen. “The worst part was losing a dresser that had the original SNFU banner in one of the drawers.” Several years later, he managed to track the banner down, only to lose it again. “I have no idea where it is now,” he laments. Truly, this was the end of an era.
Although he regrets losing the iconic banner, there are two things that bother Marc Belke even more. First, he wishes they had called Ted Simm back when the band reformed in 1991. “Ted was totally committed to SNFU, and he may have helped us retain some of the style we had before the breakup, which was metal-tinged for sure. Not to disrespect Jon Card, because he’s a great drummer, but it would have made more sense to get Ted back in the band,” the guitarist muses. SNFU endured many line-up changes, but that one bothered him the most.
While it is impossible to guess what might have happened had they gone with Ted instead of Jon, Marc’s biggest regret was breaking up the band in 1989. “People don’t realize that chemistry is a very delicate thing, and it’s easy to destroy. Fans get used to seeing the same members and hearing familiar sounds. If you mess with that, you risk losing your fan base.” After being voted Best Live Band by Flipside, SNFU should have been working hard to capitalize on their popularity instead of disappearing for several years. “The timing was unfortunate, both for them and their fans,” says Brett Gurewitz. “I loved their first album [on Epitaph] and was proud to have put it out, but if SNFU had written their tour de force when we first signed them, I think they would have gotten big.” The loss of momentum caused by the breakup might have resulted in an album that was perhaps not as strong as it could have been. “Brett Lober” Hopkins may have been onto something when he said that punk bands that dissolved in the late 80s and reformed later were less likely to succeed. Still, success cannot be accurately measured in terms of money. For many, SNFU was the best punk band ever.
Drifting aimlessly, Muc tried to formulate a plan. At first, he thought he would become a tradesman—perhaps a plumber or an electrician. A cousin of Jennifer’s, a plumber by trade, convinced Marc that the trades were hard work, and that the job was taxing in a physical way. “It’s not like I’m super lazy, but for some reason…” says Marc, drifting off. He doesn’t need to explain why he would rather not carry spools of BX electrical cable or dig up broken sewer pipes for a living. In the end, Marc opted to become a radio broadcaster. “I had a background in music, and I thought there was still a creative aspect to radio,” he explains. After completing his GED with little effort, Marc enrolled in a two-year broadcasting course. “The pay is not really commensurate with the level of training required, but I didn’t have a better plan,” says Marc. At age forty, the punk legend was finally trying to join the “real” world. Whether or not he would succeed remained to be seen.
Upon leaving broadcasting school in 2007, Muc applied to radio stations all over the country. Obviously, work in the larger markets is harder to find, and he eventually took a position with 106.5 The PEAK, in the small town of Smith-ers, British Columbia. “I wasn’t excited about moving to Smithers, but I made a commitment and wanted to see it through,” says Marc. The transition was even tougher than it might have been because Jennifer decided to take her masters degree at a university in Sweden rather than move to such a remote place. Marc was there for a year before she joined him in Smithers. “I hated living by myself,” confesses Marc. “I’m never doing that again.” Still, he does not regret his time in the small community. “Smithers is a beautiful place, and the people are great. Europeans fly there to hunt and fish, and it’s better than Whistler for skiing.”
At any rate, it wasn’t long before Jennifer and Marc decided to leave Smithers. He again applied to stations all over the country, and in 2009 he found work in the slightly larger market of Thunder Bay, Ontario. “I hadn’t heard bands like The Barenaked Ladies or Streetheart for decades, and I went into shock when I found out they were still playing those bands on the radio there,” Marc says in wonderment. Worse, the station was in the midst of a ratings crisis, and his employers expected him to perform immediately. “People were yelling at me!” he exclaims. The ex-SNFU guitarist has never responded well to shouting, but it was too late to turn back now. Left with no alternative, he tried his best to get through the difficult time. Again, there was no turning back.
Slowly, the station climbed from number five in the ratings to number one. While it is impossible to say how much of this was due to Marc’s hard work, he was the sole consistent factor during the upheaval. After years of mornings, he now has the afternoon slot, which he much prefers. Marc’s robust voice, trained by decades of singing, is perfectly suited for his chosen occupation. “The funny thing is that I listened to the radio growing up as a kid, but I’m not really a radio guy,” says Marc. “I wanted to get into sports radio, but everyone wants to do it and there are hardly any jobs, so it’s very hard to find a foothold,” he adds. Nonetheless, Marc found a career that he is still with today. While the iconic guitarist eventually hopes to work in a larger market such as Vancouver, he is content for now. As a founding member of SNFU, his legacy will live on.
These Crowded Streets Get So Damn Lonely
With his beloved SNFU nothing but a distant memory, Ken Chinn’s life was about to take a dramatic turn for the worse. After twelve years at his apartment on 33rd and Knight, he was evicted for failure to pay the rent. “I just fucked up,” the singer admits ruefully. Luckily, he still had friends and associates who were willing to accommodate him, or at least for a while. Ken stayed at a hostel for a week, then bounced from place to place as the days grew shorter. With no reason to stay out of trouble, the unemployed frontman partook of whatever drug entered his orbit. He even tried heroin once, but made the terrible mistake of cooking the drug in a plastic spoon. “I had a headache for a year after that, but I never touched heroin again,” says Ken. Ironically, that blunder probably saved him from even worse problems down the road.
Day-to-day survival became a challenge. Ken liquidated almost everything he owned of value, and carried what possessions survived in a green Samsonite (a garbage bag). A suitcase full of SNFU merch at the practice pad disappeared, sold off for smokes and cough syrup. “Things got sadly hellish,” says Ken Chinn his
voice full of regret. Although he stayed with Shane Smith for a while, and with Chad Mareels from Dog Eat Dogma, the singer also slept on park benches when weather permitted. After several months, the ex-frontman was reduced to sleeping in Chad’s van, and by November it was too cold for that. In desperation, Ken wandered over to the practice spot on West 7th, for which he still had keys. “In return for keeping the place clean, the landlord let me keep all the bottles and cans,” explains the artist. Now, since he had nowhere else to go, Ken decided to sleep there as well. With the mercury hovering near freezing, the experience was very unpleasant.
The landlord caught him sleeping at the space the next night, but reluctantly allowed him to stay. “I couldn’t use the washroom because he had the motion detector on, so I had to piss in a bottle. And it was freezing in there!” exclaims Ken. Along with the cough syrup he was drinking regularly, the ex-singer was also using crystal meth whenever he could. His teeth were in terrible condition, and methamphetamine is notoriously hard on the enamel. “I was in bad shape, and my teeth were causing me serious pain,” Ken recalls. Ironically, the codeine-based cough syrup that had caused the damage also helped to mask the pain. “I could pull my teeth out with my fingers, except the roots were still there!” says the artist. “I was in tears, and I asked myself how I had arrived at such a cold and lonely place.” Not for the first time, the wretched man thought about suicide but couldn’t bring himself to do it. Finally, in his darkest hour, he thought of someone who might be able to help.
“Ken showed up on my doorstep one cold, rainy winter night,” remembers the friend, who wishes to remain anonymous. “He was soaked to the bone, half starved, and almost dead of pneumonia.” The friend took Ken in and nursed him back to health. Even as they began to sort out his various medical issues, she made plans to help him with his other needs. As the sick man slowly recovered, the two formulated a plan. The road back to physical health and mental well-being would be long and difficult.
Ken stayed with the friend for several weeks. She made food in a blender and fed it to him through a straw. The man had been eating little balls of white bread and drinking cola for sustenance, and his teeth were nothing but rotted nubs. His only relief from the agony were the over-the-counter painkillers that he gulped by the handful. When Ken’s health was somewhat stable, the friend connected him to a dentist and arranged to have his teeth pulled. His ordeal could only improve.
The friend also took Ken to a mental health organization known as the MPA Society, where he could hang out during the day and watch TV. They also served lunch for fifty cents. “You could have lunch for free if you did a chore,” Ken recalls. “My friend would pick me up after work and we’d have supper at her place.” One of the friend’s first moves was to get an advocate for the singer, who began trying to find housing for him. The friend made an appointment for Ken to see a mental health professional, and he actually went. He started drawing again, and that helped him find a safer place in his head.
Before long, the advocate hooked Ken up with welfare and got him a room at the Murray Hotel, located at 1119 Hornby Street in downtown Vancouver. “What a god-awful fucking place that was,” recalls Ken. “But at least I had my own room again.” Although the bug-infested hotel was warmer than Chad’s van, it wasn’t the best place in the world for someone with substance issues. Before he left, the singer would be thoroughly addicted to crack.
Ken’s room was crawling with bedbugs, and although he eventually learned to live with them, it helped to be high. At night, the bedbugs emerged from hiding to feast on the singer’s blood. “The bites itched like hell and you could feel yourself being eaten alive,” Ken remembers. The first day he was there, a crackhead down the hall sold him a large TV for twenty dollars. Soon the addict was knocking on Ken’s door every hour or two, and the pair eventually started smoking rock together. “He showed me how to play crib, but I could tell he was cheating,” says Ken. Aside from the games of crib, which the artist inevitably “lost,” the pair continued to smoke rock whenever the opportunity arose. Outside the cracked and dirty window, winter faded slowly to spring. Somehow, the artist known as Ken Chinn had survived 2005.
Arrangements with the dentist were finalized and, over the span of several months, the singer’s rotted teeth were extracted. “They were already broken, and it was totally painful,” recalls Ken of the ordeal. The singer was eventually fitted with dentures, but they were uncomfortable and he rarely wore them. A beard and long whiskers partly covered his mouth, and he had to learn how to enunciate properly with no teeth.
A young punk couple moved in across the hall, and they fought loudly and regularly. One night, unable to tolerate the endless screaming, Ken walked over and asked them to keep the noise down. The fighting ceased, but the male punk knocked on Ken’s door several minutes later. He recognized the ex-frontman from SNFU, and was stoked to have him as a neighbour. As a token of his esteem, the punk began smoking crack with the ex-frontman on a regular basis. “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” says Ken. “Wrong!” Because so many addicts lived in the building, people were always dropping by to get high. “Of course, there was a crack dealer right down the fucking hall,” the singer adds wryly.
The punk rocker brought a six-pack over one day, and although Ken hadn’t consumed alcohol in many years, he thought this might be a good time to start. Sure enough, the singer liked the taste and the effects, and soon he was drinking regularly. Another tenant on the floor below Ken was into crystal meth, and he got into that again, too. “There was a lot of drug abuse going on at the Murray,” says Ken, declaring the blatantly obvious. On top of all the other drugs he was doing, the booze rendered him even more unstable. Ken was no longer homeless, but he was well on his way to becoming a full-blown Downtown Eastside drug addict, a lost soul drifting on a current of hopelessness and despair. He stopped drawing again and was all but lost.
Aware that he was on the brink, Ken followed through with a promise to the MPA Society to see another mental health professional. “I told the guy that I was thinking about killing myself,” recalls the singer of those bad times. “The most dangerous thing in my life at that point was myself.” The psychologist took the threat seriously, and arranged to have Ken transferred to a mental health facility at once. “They put me in a taxi and I went to a big, clean house on Robson with twenty-four hour staff. They gave me my own room,” says Ken, and that room did not have bedbugs. In fact, they immediately gave him a housecoat and washed his clothes in very hot water. The daily regimen at the house included one-on-one conferences with a staff psychoanalyst, a steady stream of chores, and group meetings. While the residents were kept busy during the day, they could watch TV and relax at night. The schedule was strict, but the residents were not actually locked up. “Sometimes I snuck away and went down to Main and Hastings,” admits the singer.
By now, summer had arrived and Ken remembers smoking cigarettes in the back yard. Time passed slowly, but the desire to hurt himself eventually receded. Doctors experimented with different drugs and dosages to stabilize his mood swings and other mental issues. After several months, they transferred the ex-SNFU frontman to a smaller, less structured facility. “The best thing about the new place was that they had an open fridge policy, and we were encouraged to help ourselves whenever we wanted,” recalls the singer. Because of this, and even though his teeth didn’t fit properly, Ken managed to pack on a few badly-needed pounds. Finally, after a month or so, the MPA moved him to a housing unit on Powell Street that featured around-the-clock staff, but otherwise left residents free to do as they pleased. Interestingly, the hotel is on the same block as Bryan Adams’ recording studio, where SNFU mixed In the Meantime and In Between Time. “I pass that place every fucking day!” says the singer.
In the winter of 2006, Ken finally came out of hiding and wandered over to the Cobalt Hotel. He caught wendythirteen’s karaoke act on Thursday nights, and she twisted his rubber arm to sing a few songs. At first, the ex-SNFU
frontman was merely part of Wendy’s show, but she eventually gave him Sunday night, and he attracted people who might have stayed home otherwise. Ken earned wages for picking up cans and bottles from the tables, and drank for free as well. More importantly, he began to network with the many musicians who frequented the place. Sometimes he even ran into Chad Mareels, in whose van he had slept during his homeless period. Chad worked at a facility for terminal addicts on the Downtown Eastside, and couldn’t help but notice that the ex-singer was more emaciated than some of his clients were. As before, there was nothing he could do. At least he seemed somewhat cheerful.
Ken Chinn continued to frequent the Cobalt, picking up empties and chatting with patrons. Alcohol, at least, brought him out of his self-imposed isolation. The man also spent time at a tattoo/skate shop on Commercial Drive, which was owned and operated by respected tattoo artist Denis Nowoselski and ex-SNFU bassist Ken “Goony” Fleming. Ken Chinn didn’t skate any more, but he knew Goony well, and felt comfortable at the shop. At the time, Goony was apprenticing to become a body piercer, but his hands shook badly at the idea of jamming a needle through human flesh. Although the accomplished musician could jump onstage and perform for thousands of screaming fans, he wasn’t cut out to poke holes in people. Fortunately, Ken Chinn didn’t want his nipples pierced.
One afternoon at the shop, Ken mentioned that SNFU’s twenty-fifth anniversary was coming up. A wave of nostalgia washed over the ex-frontman, and he began to dream about putting SNFU back together for one last hurrah. Since Ken didn’t want to phone Marc Belke personally, he volunteered wendythirteen for the job. Marc quickly declined the offer, but didn’t realize the request was coming from Ken Chinn himself. “Chi never had a phone or anything like that,” says Marc. The idea of opening old wounds did not appeal to the guitarist, and the thought of spending time with Chi was unsettling. Brent Belke claims that no one ever asked him to play. While he wouldn’t have participated in the project without his brother anyway, he wants to set the record straight.