Misfits & Miscreants: An Oral History of Canadian Punk Rock

Walter/2018

Chapter One

Rubbin’ My Load On the Bathroom Wall

Art Bergmann

We graduated from high school in 1970 and went berserk with three chords and our fourteen-year-old drummer, Murphy. Mostly the Schmorgs played in the jungles of Mount Lehman, which was just a large overgrown property and not an actual mountain. Along with bowls of peyote and gallons of dandelion wine laced with at least 900 mics of LSD per glass, I remember oil-drum fires, monkey trees, and wild sexual experimentation. The songs were about teenage drinking and sex, but we weren’t punk—just a bunch of noisy hippies from White Rock. Those parties left a permanent impression on my young mind.

The owner of Mount Lehman was Anders Skantz, who was wise beyond his nineteen years. He performed nude with us on the inimitable I’m a Greaseball Baby, but I Sure Do Get Fucking Around. Our hit was Pissin’ the Blues, with the chorus pissin’, shittin’, jackin’, blowin’, rubbin’ my load on the bathroom wall. To hear a thousand kids screaming this was nirvana art indeed. As far as content goes, we were very far from political. I wasn’t very confident as a songwriter at the time, and you could say that my lyrics were somewhat misdirected. Dr. Schmorg aka David Mitzo, who named the band, was very charismatic and was hard to corner if we had an above-ground show, as he was loved by all and sundry. By above-ground, I mean the odd hall we were able to rent. Up to a 1,000 kids would show up from one end of the Fraser Valley to the other, so we tried to keep the band going after Dr. Schmorg left to attend college in ’72—later becoming the head of the Canadian Policy Institute, believe it or not. Murphy and I floundered around in every bar in British Columbia for awhile, getting fired on Monday nights for not playing covers. We sold drugs at schools to pay our way around. Playing my bent half-hour epics, we met some cool people until we heard of the great goings-on in Vancouver around 1976.

Chris Barry

I managed to see the New York Dolls in Montreal, towards the end of their career. Although it was a school night, I was allowed to go out if the shows were at big venues like the Forum or Show Mart. I was like twelve years old at the time, but I made an effort to dress up for the event. The Dolls were in Creem and Rock Scene, so I figured they had to be huge.

On my way to school that day, I looked out the bus window and saw some red leather platform shoes with a matching red purse that someone had tossed in the garbage. They looked like the shoes Johnny Thunders was wearing on the back cover of the first Dolls’ record, so I got off the bus and grabbed them, and the purse as well. I was late for school because of that, but it was totally worth it. I put the shoes in my locker and took them home after school. They were a bit too big, but I made them work.

None of my friends wanted to see the Dolls that night. They dismissed them as total shit and wanted nothing to do with them. I finally managed to convince a friend to come with me. He didn’t really like the Dolls, but he had an adventurous spirit. Meanwhile, I was all dressed up in my pre-pubescent vision of drag, with my red leather platform shoes, matching purse, and cut-off homemade Bowie T-shirt that left my midriff bare. We got to Show Mart, which was a giant venue, but the place was almost empty. Aside from the bikers taking tickets at the door, I’d say there was maybe a hundred people in a building meant to hold thousands. My friend got scared, for some reason, so he turned around and went straight back to the metro.

So there I was, twelve years old, alone at a New York Doll’s show with my red purse, platform shoes, and poorly applied makeup. I was a bit nervous to say the least, so I hid in the corner and tried to make myself invisible. The Dolls took forever to come on. I think it was close to midnight before they started, and I had to be at school the next day. They only played a handful of songs before I had to leave, and by then only about twenty five people remained. I loved the first record and everything else about the Dolls—they were so outrageous, and they offended almost everybody. I couldn’t understand people who didn’t like offensive music. For me, it was an absolute prerequisite.

Rock music was total crap in 1974. Bands like Seals and Crofts and the Doobie Brothers were all you’d hear at high school parties. I played Bowie’s Aladdin Sane at one of those parties, and my gang called me a faggot without even giving it a chance. I guess I was a big homo for being a Lou Reed fan as well. People weren’t exactly enlightened back then.

There were no venues in Montreal for bands playing their own stuff until 364 came along. 364 wasn’t even a real venue—just an abandoned storefront, back when Montreal real estate wasn’t worth anything. This guy Robert Ditchburn got two huge street-facing windows with a loft that stretched to the back of the building for only $75 a month. I think the place only held four or five events, at least as I recall. Nobody ever mentions Arthur’s Dilemma, but I still think they were the first band in Montreal to play what some might call punk rock.

Gary Pig Gold

The music wasn’t even called punk rock when I first started hangingaround with people like Teenage Head. That was the term that got applied later, but what I can say in general is that any band that played original music got lumped in with punk rock at first. Not even hardcore; but anything that wasn’t Top Forty became punk rock. Bands playing original music couldn’t get shows, so they had to find guerrilla promoters willing to take a chance. Why would bands like the Ramones and the Talking Heads both be called punk? They couldn’t have been further apart, and the term made no sense at all. The only thing those bands had in common was that they were playing their own music.

Chris Houston

Punk in Toronto goes back to Simply Saucer, a band that started in the early ’70s. Teenage Head started in 1975, before they really knew about punk rock. Head would show up at Toronto punk shows and make everyone look like the total amateurs they were because they’d already been playing for a year and a half. The Viletones, who were simultaneously Toronto’s best and worst band, couldn’t begin to keep up with Teenage Head, who wiped them and every other band right off the stage. Those guys dressed like the New York Dolls in grade twelve, but we were only in grade nine.

Teenage Head was a bit like Circus magazine come to life. They were definitely ahead of the curve for Hamilton. Aside from being a total wild-man, Frankie Venom was also an amazing singer, and the band was very tight. They took their music very seriously and worked really, really hard. That made a huge impression on the first generation bands from Hamilton and Toronto.

Bill Shirt

Our friend Gord Nicholl had a teeny little apartment in a building that has long been demolished, so Buck Cherry and I rented an apartment there as well. Just a three-minute walk down Marine Drive in White Rock was the Beach Aps, or Beach Apartments, where Art Bergmann and a circulating tableau of musicians, including the remnants of the Schmorgs and what would have been considered the alt-rock community, congregated to make noise. I think the impetus came when we heard something out of the UK. I don’t remember who it was, maybe the Damned, but the notion was that anyone can play, anyone can write, and anyone can perform. So the step from, Hey, I wrote a song, to Hey, do you want to write a song with me? to Hey, let’s get drunk! followed very naturally and rolled like a snowball down a very steep hill.

Warren Kinsella

In 1975, we had a band in Southeast Calgary called the Porno Brothers. We didn’t know how to play our instruments, and we’d barely heard of punk rock. At fourteen or fifteen years old, our goal was to be as profane and disgusting as possible. Unsurprisingly, we got in a lot of trouble from our parents. One of the guys had a bass guitar, and another had a guitar, but the drummer had this crappy toy drum kit that was absolutely terrible. We’d record all sorts of nasty things, but I have no idea what happened to those tapes. It was just kid stuff.

That went on for awhile, but we still couldn’t play. The first punk record I purchased was the Ramones’ first album, which came out in April 1976. Sire Records was distributed through WEA Canada, so the album arrived in Calgary a few months later. It was the usual cliché, life-transforming event for some of us. A couple of guys in the band didn’t get the Ramones, but I told them that I could breathe now, and this was what I wanted to do. Half the band left, and the half that stayed became the Social Blemishes. We were growing up, sort of.

We opened for a normal rock n’ roll band Foster Child at Bishop Carroll High School. I’m not sure how we got on the bill, but we did, and nobody beat us up. It was fun. Although we were doing mostly covers by the Ramones and Elvis Costello at the time, we practised regularly and began to improve a bit. We even attracted enough attention for the Calgary Herald to write us up. Maybe they noticed us because we were still sixteen or seventeen, but whatever. I don’t know if we actually were, but the Herald credited us as Calgary’s first punk band. I think we were, but mostly we were just a bunch of goofs. Despite that, we had some fun.

Jade Blade

I was on a road trip with my parents in 1976 when I picked up a copy of the first Ramones album in Seattle. I took it home and was totally awed. My friends Scout and Dale loved it, too, and we thought we could play those songs. We cut our teeth as musicians learning how to play most of the tracks on that album. The Ramones were fun, simple, smart, totally rocking, and real.

Art Bergmann

My repertoire became much more pointed after I heard the Sex Pistols in ’76. I was very critical of everything I wrote, but all my self-doubt went out the window after that. You could say what you wanted to say, and you could say it loud and clear. Everything was different.

John Catto

1976 was the year when everything started to change. I’d been playing guitar for years, but hadn’t thought seriously about doing a band, and the Canadian music scene had much to do with this. There was never a time when New York was shit; you could always go to Max’s and see local, original bands that were great, and the same in the UK with pub rock, but the live scene in Canada was dead as far as original music went. Some of this might have been due to the strength of the musicians’ union in the early ’70s, when Canada became cover-band paradise. On a local level, there was almost no original music at all. I had a number of high school friends who’d tried to make a go of playing, but the experience was ultimately soul-destroying for them.

I’d already seen hints of the genesis of English punk first-hand a year or so earlier in the summer of ’75, when I visited the UK. I’d made it my priority to hunt down everything I’d heard about, so I saw the Rocky Horror Picture Show on the King’s Road, and found Let It Rock — which had just changed its name to Sex — on the very day I arrived. I was searching for interesting clothes, and Sex was a bit of a mess to be honest; a mishmash of fetish gear, 1950s Teddy Boy drapes, and other odd stuff. (Malcolm) McLaren was standing on a stepladder, and there was a framed photo of the New York Dolls in their red patent leather phase on the wall. I asked McLaren about it, and he told me that he’d just gotten back from New York, where he’d managed the Dolls for a bit. I’m not totally sure if I believed him, but being a huge Dolls fan, the story certainly grabbed my attention, so I chatted with him for a bit and bought a pair of brothel creepers. Later, when the Diodes started rehearsing, we fully identified with what we’d seen happening in New York and London. Punks were kindred spirits.

A year later, in July of ’76, I got to know the New York Dolls a bit when they played a full week in a straight cover bar, the Queensbury Arms. I was with Rob Sikora from Hamilton, and we later found out that all the guys from Teenage Head had trekked down for this as well. Basically, everyone who became involved in the Toronto punk scene was there. What’s kind of funny is that the Dolls were forced to do that typical Ontario bar thing, where bands play two, or maybe even three sets a night, and they’d never done anything like that in their lives. Lacking any other material, the Dolls simply played the same set, more or less, over and over. By the end of the night, everyone knew the new songs, many of which eventually ended up on the first Johansen and Sylvain solo albums.

I’d bought the Ramones’ album about a month before they played Toronto on Sept. 24, 1976 and was really big on them by then. I’d been playing the thing on repeat since I got it. Again, I went to the show with Rob, and we went backstage afterwards to ask the Ramones if we could interview them for our magazine New Century Gazzette (sic). We interviewed the Ramones, and then, perhaps more interestingly, we did a short interview with Danny Fields, where we talked about the Stooges and Iggy (Pop) in particular. It’s a wild read because we’re all talking about Iggy like he was dead, but six months later he was back, and at the top of his game. None of us expected that, not even Danny.

To digress a bit here, glam rock was the great unifying connection between everyone in every punk scene I ever met. All the people in the Toronto scene went to the same shows in that ’72-’74 period and shopped in the same places (Long John’s on Yonge Street especially, as many future band members worked there as well.) In fact, if you were to look at the front row of any of these shows: the Stooges, Dolls, Mott the Hoople, or Silverhead — you basically saw all the main people from the ’77 scene; myself, Steven Leckie, Teenage Head, all the girls from the B-Girls, and a huge chunk of the future audience as well. And it’s the same everywhere: all those CBGB people came from the Max’s glam scene (which continued as a punk club, obviously), and when I talk to the UK people I know, they all came out of the UK glam thing. This is widespread, although a few people also came from Captain Beefheart, German prog, and the Velvet Underground indie alt angle as well.

That aside, I was hanging around the Eels’ rehearsal space in October of ’76, where I picked up a guitar and started playing a bit. When I left later that day, future Diodes singer Paul Robinson chased me down the street raving, We have to put a band together! I was thinking Oh, good, a lunatic! But somehow, the Diodes came together within a couple of days. (Note: recent conversations indicate everyone being in the same place might not have been so much of an accident after all. Hard to tell, since no one seems to have the same story.)

The Diodes rehearsed until November before recording a demo tape at the Ontario College of Art with engineer Mark Gane, who later joined Martha and the Muffins. Paul took the tape to New York City in Christmas of ’76, and ran around pestering people like Danny Fields and Boston DJ Oedipus with it. No luck, ha ha.

Gary Pig Gold

I was the first guy to interview the Ramones in Canada, and they did not want to use the word punk. They weren’t even sure what it meant, but by early ’77, they couldn’t get airplay because the Ramones were being called punk rock. Punk was a bad thing in show business terms, and the Ramones, who were just a great pop-rock band, would have been on their way to having hit records, but the North American radio stations refused to play punk rock. I knew people who were running Sire Records up here, and they told head office not to call it punk — that they had to call it new wave. Punk was a dirty word.

Teenage Head was covering Alice Cooper and Aerosmith when I first started hanging around with them. They were just kids who played hockey and baseball with each other until guitarist Gord Lewis saw the Monkees and decided they had to put a rock group together. Teenage Head was way ahead of everyone else when they came in from Hamilton to play the Crash n’ Burn because they’d already been together for several years. Bands like the Diodes and the Viletones had only been playing for a few weeks, so they were at a big disadvantage. Teenage Head was incredible.

I was promoting shows, and all the bands got together because there was nowhere to play. CBGB opened for that very reason, and so did the Crash n’ Burn in Toronto. The only reason I started Pig Paper — which turned out to be Canada’s first fanzine — was only because Toronto newspapers wouldn’t take my stuff. I wouldn’t have gone to all that trouble if they had. I would have preferred for the Toronto Daily Star to write about the Ramones, but they said no, this is shit — this isn’t music. If it wasn’t Top Forty, nobody wanted to know about it. Luckily, I had a friend who owned a record store, and he told me I could either give up trying to cover bands I liked or I could write about them myself. That’s what I was up against.

That’s how I met Simply Saucer, and it all came about when my photo-grapher friend John went to a show at the Ontario College of Art in February of ’77. One of the bands was playing a song by the Kinks, and John was sitting behind a guy who was talking about how much he liked the Kinks. John tapped him on the shoulder and told him that I was trying to put together a magazine about the Kinks, and asked if he’d like to be interviewed for it. The guy turned out to be singer/guitarist Edgar Breau from Simply Saucer, who invited John and me to the infamous Saucer house, where they lived and rehearsed. I didn’t even know he was in a band, but they started playing, and I thought they were great. Edgar said they’d been playing for years, and when I asked why I’d never heard of them, he told me it was because there was nowhere to play. I looked around and eventually found them a show at a club called David’s. It was a weird place because the main floor was a punk club, the second floor was a disco, and Steven Leckie (Nazi Dog) lived on the third floor. The Canadian media had latched onto the term punk rock by then, but the Sex Pistols were already known more for puking and spitting on people than they were for the music. So, whatever.

Edgar’s record collection contained albums by Faust, Can and other elec-tronic music. He was also into Sun Ra Arkestra, so Simply Saucer was not a rock n’ roll band and would never be defined that way by today’s standards. They even had a theremin, and Dave Thomas from Pere Ubu thought they were incredible, which might give you some idea how they sounded. They didn’t fit with bands like Teenage Head at all, but that was the beauty of it. People complain that punk became so conformist, but it just became more compartmentalized. Quirky bands like Simply Saucer are still around; we just don’t call them punk rock anymore.

I continued to work with Simply Saucer and found them a show with Teenage Head at the Rockslide, which was a very famous club with a seating capacity of 2,000 in the Masonic Temple. They were on a bill advertised as Rock Shock, but only twenty people showed up, and most of them were friends of the bands. The show was a huge bust, of course, but the promoter got really excited anyway. He decided to book another show about four months later, and that one was completely sold out.

Edgar Breau

The Rock Shock show was at the Masonic Temple, which I think was known as Rock Pile at one point. Jimi Hendrix played there when he first came to Toronto, and Led Zep, too. The MC5 played there, and tons of other bands. The second show was called Outrage. It was much bigger, and so was the lineup. Some guy Johnny Loveson was on the bill with us, the Viletones, Teenage Head, and others. Word was getting out, and more and more bands were coming onto the scene. The Viletones were getting a lot of press, and everybody else was along for the ride. Teenage Head and the Battered Wives were also getting a lot of attention. Teenage Head had elements of punk, but they weren’t really a punk band. Simply Saucer wasn’t a punk band either, but we were all on the same bills playing with the Viletones, who were very punk. We were all listening to bands like the Pistols, but Saucer never fit that specific genre.

We weren’t the only band that didn’t fit; there were the Poles and the Dishes, who were one of the first Toronto bands. Simply Saucer was more in the category of groups like the Phoenix, because we weren’t an out-and-out punk band. We followed English bands like the Pink Fairies and Hawkwind, but Toronto seemed a bit more one-dimensional. Saucer was received well at some shows but not others. We never knew what to expect.

The thing I remember most about Outrage was that the power went off when we started to play. We had just launched into our second song when someone suddenly killed the juice. You never knew what was going to happen in those days, and the scene was certainly competitive enough. Finally, after about ten minutes, the electricity came back on. Toronto was like that.

Art Bergmann

We’d all take the bus into Vancouver from White Rock, but we’d miss the last bus home and scuz around all night getting into trouble. That went on for awhile, and I had all sorts of shitty jobs in White Rock, but then I somehow moved to the city and got welfare. They said I’d never get a job looking like that, man, ha ha. Dave Gregg’s girlfriend Cathy Kleghorn worked at Perryscope, and she found us the little shack in Japantown that we called 509. I lived there with Buck Cherry and Bill Shirt. We shopped in thrift stores and ate bean deluxe. The Schmorgs were almost done by then. We were replacing guitar players and didn’t have any real songwriting focus. I was still teaching Buck Cherry how to play guitar, and then he started up the Amazing Shits. By then, punk rock was very much upon us.

Chapter Two

They Looked Like Dynamite Right to the End

Chris Arnett

I went to high school with a guy Malcolm Hasman in West Vancouver. We wore black leather jackets and hated the music on the radio. We were really into Bowie and Lou Reed, but West Vancouver was very white, straight, and conservative, so we got called faggots and all that stuff. When I bought the Velvet Undergrounds’ White Light White Heat, I was like, holy fuck! You know? That was our musical background, and we wanted to form a band that would be true to that sound. We were tired of groups with tons of fancy equipment, and we didn’t like professional musicians. It all seemed so removed from real rock n’ roll.

Remember that you couldn’t learn about bands on a whim by checking them out online back then. There was no internet, so we’d drive down to Seattle to get albums by John Cale and the like because there were so few good stores in Vancouver— which had huge stores like Kelly’s with tons of albums, but they were all crap. You might find the odd Velvet Underground album in the discount bin if you were lucky. I think punk started as a result of critical mass in cities all over, where certain key bands just got into that sound. It was like punk had to happen because everything else sucked.

We wanted a stripped-down sort of band, and we kind of wanted to model ourselves after a ’50s revival act that was touring around called Teen Angel and the Rockin’ Rebels. They had one guitarist and one bass player, and that was what we wanted, so I put up an ad at Long & McQuade at Fourth and Burrard. Our ad was like guitarist looking for players into the New York sound, or something like that. We thought musicians would be quick to pick up on it, but we got no calls at all.

This chick finally phoned me up. Kat Hammond was a very critical person—I don’t know what ever happened to her—but she was very instrumental in getting everything going at the beginning. I got into bands to meet chicks, and Kat had a sultry voice on the phone and said she wanted to get a band together, but when she came over, I saw that she was kind of lanky and not really my type. But Kat knew about the punk thing going on in New York. She was also into fashion and was associated with Pumps Gallery, which is where all the artsy people hung out. We yakked all night and she wanted to stay over, but I wasn’t attracted to her that way. Our attitude was the same though, and we hated the same music—we were all, fuck this and fuck that. But we didn’t get a band together.

Through Kat, I started hanging at Pumps Gallery and meeting all these interesting people from East Van—guys like Ross Drummond and his friends, who are all dead now. Then I met Simon Werner through some losers I was jamming with in North Van, and Simon was important because he was the link between us and Stone Crazy. Joe Shithead is the only one of those guys who is still alive.

I started hanging out with Simon and two other guys, who had a house in North Van with a rehearsal space. Maybe the guys weren’t into my abrasive barre chord sound, because they decided to get another guitar player. I showed up one day, and they had this funny-looking religious dude from Alberta with flared pants and curly hair. We started playing, and he was very suspicious of my style. These guys were pros and wanted to be in a cover band and become rock stars or whatever. But they weren’t what I had in mind, so it ended fairly quickly.

But Simon liked my style of playing, and we hit it off because we both smoked weed and listened to the same kind of music. That’s when Simon introduced me to Dimwit, Joey Shithead, and Wimpy Roy from Stone Crazy, who were all living in a house in Coquitlam and being taken care of by Joe’s girlfriend Cathy. Simon and I went out there to meet them, but they were typical ’70s guys with long hair and those Mac shirts everybody wore back then. They were really into Sabbath and the Steve Miller Band and stuff, and I knew just by looking at them that this wasn’t going to be my band. Joe was this big kind of quiet guy, who Simon likened to a Lab pup. He was quiet but watched everything that was going on, and the other guys were super friendly.

We jammed and smoked some pot and drank beer a bunch of times. I remember driving out there in early ’77 with broken windows on our car because Joey had smashed them with his pickup truck. We had plastic over the windows, but that wasn’t working very well. We’d been rehearsing a few days earlier, when Joey went to get more beer after we ran out. He climbed into his old green pickup truck and he was like, vroom vrooom! Then he backed up straight into Simon’s Valiant. He cracked the window, but then he went ahead a bit and backed up and hit the car again. Joey eventually got the beer, but Simon’s Valiant was a bit fucked-up after that. And it was fucking cold.

Joey Shithead

I think I backed into Simon’s Valiant two or three times. He took it in a very good-hearted way, whereas some people might not have. I just blindly got into my truck and threw it into reverse, but Simon was parked square behind me, and I ended up T-boning the driver’s or passenger-side window. At first, I thought I’d hit a rock, so I reversed and hit it again. Then I knew it wasn’t a rock. People walking past the house used to throw burger wrappers and whatnot into the back of my truck because we were close to three fast-food joints, so that was always nice.

We did a show at the Port Moody Legion with Neil McCray, who was a high school buddy of mine I haven’t seen for forty years because I don’t think he likes punk rock very much. I don’t remember Chris Arnett playing with us, but I’m not saying he didn’t. Somehow, we used a sports team to get a liquor licence, so we sold tons of beer. Not that we were any good, but the place was packed. That show worked out well for us, but we still couldn’t get any traction with the local promoters and booking agents. They didn’t want anything to do with us.

Stone Crazy got a gig with the Whitefoot Agency, which was a second- or third-rung booking agency in Vancouver. We couldn’t get on with Bruce Allen and Sam Feldman, who were the gold standard of bookings at the time, and they actually paid you a bunch of money if you got on with them. Those guys controlled the circuit, but they suppressed punk because they were making so much money with commercial rock in all the bars. Not that Stone Crazy was punk, but that came later the same year.

The Whitefoot Agency got us a four-night gig at the Grasslands Motor Inn just south of Merritt. We were supposed to get $125 a night, plus hotel rooms and half off food or whatever, right? It sounded good, so we rented a van and went up there, but we got a horrible reception the first night. People were yelling and threatening to dismember us—that sort of thing. We got booed off the stage at the end of our first set, so I went up to the mic and said, The problem with you guys is that you don’t have the balls to accept this kind of music! Some loser in the crowd yelled back at me, I’ll have your balls for bookends, buddy! The rest of the guys totally freaked on me, so I had to go back on the mic and make a half-hearted apology to preserve our lives. The crowd did not like us at all.

We started into our next set, but two huge guys came up while we were playing and said we were too loud. They told us to turn it down or they’d tear it down, and I guess I was being snarky because I told them we wouldn’t turn it down unless they phoned the management. They made some gestures like they were going to get me later, which seemed entirely possible. The guy who ran the place was also named Joe, but he was a real prick, so we called him Big Fat Joe From the Grasslands. He came up to us after the show and said, Tell you what, guys, you’re fired. We told him he couldn’t fire us because we had a contract, but he said he had a baseball tournament coming in that weekend and that they would kill us. Then he wouldn’t give us any of the money, and after saying we could have the rooms and food for free, he told us to get the fuck out. Of course I was calling him names and threatening him in my usual manner, but that didn’t help any. We left town, and we weren’t very happy either.

We got to Merritt and Wimpy said, Y’know, this rock ‘n’ roll isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. We’d done one high school show, a hall gig, and had been fired from our first cabaret gig. When I thought about it later, we hadn’t really given rock ‘n’ roll much of a chance. Everybody gets fired and that sort of thing, but we gave up easy. Then Dimwit said, Well, why don’t we start a punk rock band?

Chris Arnett

I did a gig with Stone Crazy at the Port Moody Legion in early 1977. I had my short hair and leather jacket, and there I was, onstage with all these longhaired guys, which was weird but fun anyway. Joe and I traded off, with me singing some of the songs and him singing others. People liked the show, and we even made money because we sold beer—in fact, that’s one of the only gigs where I ever made any money.

A couple of weeks later, Malcolm and I met Jim Walker, who was a friend of Simon Werner’s. Jim had studied at Berklee College of Music and later played drums on PiL’s first album, and just listen to that thing! Jim was in some cowboy cover band at the time, and him, Simon, and John Werner all wanted to be professional musicians. They were in the union and wanted to make a living with music, but that was the furthest thing from my mind. I thought we could become rich anyway, or famous, because we’d start playing and everyone would