Post by Fuggle on Aug 3, 2006 9:39:40 GMT -5
Classic Punk
Jul. 30, 2006
MURRAY WHYTE
ENTERTAINMENT REPORTER
HARRISON SMITH/TORONTO STAR
The Screwed at Cadillac Lounge. Vocalist
Steve Saint, (formerly of the Sinister) next to
Steve Koch (formerly of the Viletones) on
guitar. John Borra (formerly of A Neon Rome)
is in the background on bass and Cleave
Anderson (originally of the Battered Wives)
is unseen on drums.
It's near midnight on Friday night, and at the Cadillac Lounge in Parkdale, time is turning backwards. On stage, The Screwed, Toronto's one and only classic punk cover band, is firing through a set of standards at high speed and no pause in between: The Ramones. The Clash. The Undertones. The Sex Pistols. A little of Hamilton's finest, Teenage Head.
Then it starts — the lazy, angry three-chord grind that leads into one of Toronto punk's few anthems: The Demics' "New York City." The crowd rises up from their chairs in unison, and for a moment, at least, it's 1979 again.
But, of course, it's not. The crowd, for the most part, is greying or balding. So is the band: Both guitarist Steve Koch, an original member of seminal Toronto punk band the Viletones, and drummer Cleave Anderson, originally of the Battered Wives, are pushing 50 — or pushing past it. John Borra, of A Neon Rome, is a baby by comparison at 40, while singer Steve Saint, of the Sinisters, is of a different era, the punk revival of the '90s.
That punk could have a revival — or a history, or an anthem at all — is something of a conundrum for a movement meant from the start as violent endgame to cultural excess. "Punk rock was supposed to be the brick wall at the end of the highway, the ne plus ultra of popular (or unpopular) music," wrote Andrew Pearson, who runs the Vancouver-based Red Cat Records, in the online publication The Tyee recently. Or, as Sex Pistols frontman Johnny Rotten, in his sneer-inflected troglodyte howl more succinctly put it in 1977, in the band's second single, "God Save the Queen" : "NO FUTURE! NO FUTURE! NO FUTURE FOR YOU!"
Of course, it didn't quite work out that way. Thirty years on, punk rock, it turned out, had a future — whether it wanted one or not.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From its beginnings as an urgent, stripped-bare, reactionary assault on the bloated virtuosity of mid-'70s rock — think Yes, circa 1974's orchestral snorefest Tales from Topographic Oceans — punk has followed the well-trod path from full-throated rebellion to record-store category.
Diluted by decades of revivals and repackaging, for almost anyone under 30, punk is little more than a neatly defined genre, marked by a propensity for rapid-fire three-chord rock and a vocal to match. Think of flavour-of-the-month chart-toppers like Good Charlotte and A Simple Plan. But, to borrow a well-used phrase, the old punk's not dead. It's just a little harder to recognize. A few nights earlier at The Paddock, Borra and one of his many side projects, the Rattlesnake Choir, cruised through a set of mournful, mostly downtempo countrified tunes. Another former Viletone, Sam Ferrara, 52, alternately played the cheese grater, the Slinky, or drummed on the sidewall of a prone stand-up bass.
This afternoon, at Graffiti's in Kensington Market, Borra and the rest of The Screwed will crank it back up — old-school punk rock writ large, and loud — for the latest Car-free Sunday there. But for Borra, all that changes is the sound.
"I hate defining words absolutely," he said, between sets at the Paddock. "Whether I'm playing a Hank Williams song or a Demics song, what I bring to it hasn't changed. And I think that's essentially a punk ethic."
As a term, punk may have wandered off and become a mainstream music category. But for the thousands of young people who witnessed its beginnings in the mid-to-late '70s, punk is still a galvanizing force, far beyond just music, that stood up and screamed something they needed to hear: That culture wasn't just something you consumed — it was something you could make, right here, right now.
"Punk wasn't a style of music, it was a style of life," Ferrara said. And that lifestyle sparked countless numbers to speak for themselves — people like Anderson, 55, The Screwed's drummer. He remembers his first exposure: A Ramones concert at Toronto's New Yorker Theatre in 1976.
"Up `til then, I was listening to fusion jazz, trying to figure out how to play it," he said. "All of a sudden, there was something I could just walk into. I totally just bought into it."
For Anderson, punk started right there, with the Ramones. But punk's birth is a point of contention. Some would argue its roots lie with the mid-'60s garage-rock aesthetic of bands like Iggy and the Stooges. Others would cast even further back, to the birth of rock 'n' roll itself as the original, social-order shaking rebel music.
But as a full-blooded movement, it emerged in New York in 1975. From the beginning, it dismantled notions that only trained (male) musicians could play rock.
Case in point: The two seminal acts playing at CBGB's, punk's original temple in New York, were the Patti Smith Group and the decidedly unpractised Ramones. Punk magazine emerged that year, and the scene had a name. A year later, the Ramones' U.K. tour triggered an explosion there, and the revolution was on.
Punk's beginnings here, in Toronto, are a little hazier. ("They're hazy for me, too, and I was there," jokes Ferrara.) That said, if you had to peg a 30th anniversary, 2006 will do as well as any. It may well have been that Ramones show that did it. Or maybe it was Patti Smith's concert at Massey Hall, in December of 1976. Whatever the catalyst, by January of '77, Toronto had its first punk club, the Crash and Burn, and a blossoming scene.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
`The way Sam approaches his cheese grater or Slinky, playing these old country songs, is more punk than something like Good Charlotte.'
John Borra
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When I saw the Dead Boys there for the first time, it was madness," Anderson recalls. "I had given up on playing drums. And all of a sudden, I was back in. I knew what I wanted to do."
Not long after, Anderson joined his first punk band, Jasper and the Dirty Looks, then moved on to the Battered Wives, who would become part of a roiling punk scene that included The Demics, the Diodes, the B Girls, the Hi Fis (where a young Greg Keelor and Jim Cuddy, of Blue Rodeo, cut their punk teeth) and the Forgotten Rebels.
Ferrara left his first punk band, The Ugly — featuring singer Mike Nightmare — in 1977 to play with a band that would become central to the Toronto scene: The Viletones. Go down the punk checklist, and the Viletones had them covered: A bombastic frontman (Steven Leckie, nom-de-punk: "Nazi Dog") who often threatened to kill himself onstage (it should be noted, he's alive and well in Toronto); a repertoire of searing songs like "Screaming Fist" and "Danger Boy;" and a surly, sometimes dangerous following.
"Our audience was more mad than we were," Ferrara said. "We had a group who just cause fights — and Steve Leckie would instigate it."
Borra smiled. He got his start in 1982, as a 16-year-old. "In the early gigs, half the people were there because they hated you," he said. The scene here was a diverse brew, though. "It was half kids from the Ontario College of Art, and half guys like Mike Nightmare, and the guys in the Viletones, who had spent time in jail," Anderson said. "You put them in a room together, and it was insane."
How times have changed. CBGB's, punk's cradle on Bowery, will close at the end of September and slide into crass self-parody, relocating in Las Vegas of all places. The Sex Pistols first album, Never Mind the Bollocks, is the stuff of mass-produced T-shirts, available to pre-teen shoppers at hipster chain retailers like Urban Outfitters. (There's even punk baby clothes nowadays.)
As Pearson put it in the Tyee, "Time stands still for no one, so punk died, drifted for a few years in limbo, was reborn as one of the most popular forms of music around, and then wandered off into what is now a mostly harmless dotage."
That's a fair description of the top-of-the-pops position a new generation of neo-punk has embraced. (Punk had no hits, and didn't want any; "it was an underground movement — art for art's sake," Borra said.)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
But even for first generation punk rockers, the inherent nihilism has given way to a little moist-eyed nostalgia. Jan Haust runs a local label called Other People's Music, which has reissued material from the Viletones and The Ugly. "This is documentation of our country's culture," he said.
Last month at the Horseshoe, members of some of those same first-generation local punk bands gathered to perform for the launch of a series of T-shirts bearing their old insignias. The show was enough of a hit that they're doing it again Sept. 16 at Hamilton's Corktown Tavern.
Decades later, onstage, they exuded the same raw sincerity that spawned them long ago. "It's not dead to them. It's not nostalgia," said Deirdre O'Sullivan, who sells the shirts at her Parkdale shop I'm With Stupid. "There's nothing cynical about it."
Most of them are pushing 50, or like Anderson, pushing past. So much for live fast, die young. Punk lives on, but in a way no one could have imagined: It grew old gracefully.
Case in point: At the Paddock, Ferrara, seated next to the piano, abraded a sheaf of high-grit sandpaper against a cheese-grater, creating a subtle percussive rhythm to accompany Borra's rendition of "Clap Hands," a Tom Waits classic from 1985. As the song ended, the small but devoted crowd clapped with genuine gratitude.
"For me, the way Sam approaches his cheese grater or Slinky, playing these old country songs, is more punk than something like Good Charlotte, or any of those other whiny little bands that are writing bubblegum pop songs," Borra said. "Punk is about being creative with almost nothing at all — that's how I define it."
Anderson's not exactly the live fast, die young type, either. After 31 years as a Canada Post mail carrier — through every band he's been in, including Blue Rodeo — he retired this year.
Nothing lasts forever, he said. With punk, in its purest form, it was maybe a year before the mainstream took hold and things changed. But much of the ethos endures.
"Maybe punk's been Disneyfied, kind of, but I'm still passionate about it," he said. "I feel like I take a lot of it with me still. It taught me to go deeper within myself, and become engaged with what I'm uncomfortable or afraid of. That's something I'll never lose."
Jul. 30, 2006
MURRAY WHYTE
ENTERTAINMENT REPORTER
HARRISON SMITH/TORONTO STAR
The Screwed at Cadillac Lounge. Vocalist
Steve Saint, (formerly of the Sinister) next to
Steve Koch (formerly of the Viletones) on
guitar. John Borra (formerly of A Neon Rome)
is in the background on bass and Cleave
Anderson (originally of the Battered Wives)
is unseen on drums.
It's near midnight on Friday night, and at the Cadillac Lounge in Parkdale, time is turning backwards. On stage, The Screwed, Toronto's one and only classic punk cover band, is firing through a set of standards at high speed and no pause in between: The Ramones. The Clash. The Undertones. The Sex Pistols. A little of Hamilton's finest, Teenage Head.
Then it starts — the lazy, angry three-chord grind that leads into one of Toronto punk's few anthems: The Demics' "New York City." The crowd rises up from their chairs in unison, and for a moment, at least, it's 1979 again.
But, of course, it's not. The crowd, for the most part, is greying or balding. So is the band: Both guitarist Steve Koch, an original member of seminal Toronto punk band the Viletones, and drummer Cleave Anderson, originally of the Battered Wives, are pushing 50 — or pushing past it. John Borra, of A Neon Rome, is a baby by comparison at 40, while singer Steve Saint, of the Sinisters, is of a different era, the punk revival of the '90s.
That punk could have a revival — or a history, or an anthem at all — is something of a conundrum for a movement meant from the start as violent endgame to cultural excess. "Punk rock was supposed to be the brick wall at the end of the highway, the ne plus ultra of popular (or unpopular) music," wrote Andrew Pearson, who runs the Vancouver-based Red Cat Records, in the online publication The Tyee recently. Or, as Sex Pistols frontman Johnny Rotten, in his sneer-inflected troglodyte howl more succinctly put it in 1977, in the band's second single, "God Save the Queen" : "NO FUTURE! NO FUTURE! NO FUTURE FOR YOU!"
Of course, it didn't quite work out that way. Thirty years on, punk rock, it turned out, had a future — whether it wanted one or not.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From its beginnings as an urgent, stripped-bare, reactionary assault on the bloated virtuosity of mid-'70s rock — think Yes, circa 1974's orchestral snorefest Tales from Topographic Oceans — punk has followed the well-trod path from full-throated rebellion to record-store category.
Diluted by decades of revivals and repackaging, for almost anyone under 30, punk is little more than a neatly defined genre, marked by a propensity for rapid-fire three-chord rock and a vocal to match. Think of flavour-of-the-month chart-toppers like Good Charlotte and A Simple Plan. But, to borrow a well-used phrase, the old punk's not dead. It's just a little harder to recognize. A few nights earlier at The Paddock, Borra and one of his many side projects, the Rattlesnake Choir, cruised through a set of mournful, mostly downtempo countrified tunes. Another former Viletone, Sam Ferrara, 52, alternately played the cheese grater, the Slinky, or drummed on the sidewall of a prone stand-up bass.
This afternoon, at Graffiti's in Kensington Market, Borra and the rest of The Screwed will crank it back up — old-school punk rock writ large, and loud — for the latest Car-free Sunday there. But for Borra, all that changes is the sound.
"I hate defining words absolutely," he said, between sets at the Paddock. "Whether I'm playing a Hank Williams song or a Demics song, what I bring to it hasn't changed. And I think that's essentially a punk ethic."
As a term, punk may have wandered off and become a mainstream music category. But for the thousands of young people who witnessed its beginnings in the mid-to-late '70s, punk is still a galvanizing force, far beyond just music, that stood up and screamed something they needed to hear: That culture wasn't just something you consumed — it was something you could make, right here, right now.
"Punk wasn't a style of music, it was a style of life," Ferrara said. And that lifestyle sparked countless numbers to speak for themselves — people like Anderson, 55, The Screwed's drummer. He remembers his first exposure: A Ramones concert at Toronto's New Yorker Theatre in 1976.
"Up `til then, I was listening to fusion jazz, trying to figure out how to play it," he said. "All of a sudden, there was something I could just walk into. I totally just bought into it."
For Anderson, punk started right there, with the Ramones. But punk's birth is a point of contention. Some would argue its roots lie with the mid-'60s garage-rock aesthetic of bands like Iggy and the Stooges. Others would cast even further back, to the birth of rock 'n' roll itself as the original, social-order shaking rebel music.
But as a full-blooded movement, it emerged in New York in 1975. From the beginning, it dismantled notions that only trained (male) musicians could play rock.
Case in point: The two seminal acts playing at CBGB's, punk's original temple in New York, were the Patti Smith Group and the decidedly unpractised Ramones. Punk magazine emerged that year, and the scene had a name. A year later, the Ramones' U.K. tour triggered an explosion there, and the revolution was on.
Punk's beginnings here, in Toronto, are a little hazier. ("They're hazy for me, too, and I was there," jokes Ferrara.) That said, if you had to peg a 30th anniversary, 2006 will do as well as any. It may well have been that Ramones show that did it. Or maybe it was Patti Smith's concert at Massey Hall, in December of 1976. Whatever the catalyst, by January of '77, Toronto had its first punk club, the Crash and Burn, and a blossoming scene.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
`The way Sam approaches his cheese grater or Slinky, playing these old country songs, is more punk than something like Good Charlotte.'
John Borra
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When I saw the Dead Boys there for the first time, it was madness," Anderson recalls. "I had given up on playing drums. And all of a sudden, I was back in. I knew what I wanted to do."
Not long after, Anderson joined his first punk band, Jasper and the Dirty Looks, then moved on to the Battered Wives, who would become part of a roiling punk scene that included The Demics, the Diodes, the B Girls, the Hi Fis (where a young Greg Keelor and Jim Cuddy, of Blue Rodeo, cut their punk teeth) and the Forgotten Rebels.
Ferrara left his first punk band, The Ugly — featuring singer Mike Nightmare — in 1977 to play with a band that would become central to the Toronto scene: The Viletones. Go down the punk checklist, and the Viletones had them covered: A bombastic frontman (Steven Leckie, nom-de-punk: "Nazi Dog") who often threatened to kill himself onstage (it should be noted, he's alive and well in Toronto); a repertoire of searing songs like "Screaming Fist" and "Danger Boy;" and a surly, sometimes dangerous following.
"Our audience was more mad than we were," Ferrara said. "We had a group who just cause fights — and Steve Leckie would instigate it."
Borra smiled. He got his start in 1982, as a 16-year-old. "In the early gigs, half the people were there because they hated you," he said. The scene here was a diverse brew, though. "It was half kids from the Ontario College of Art, and half guys like Mike Nightmare, and the guys in the Viletones, who had spent time in jail," Anderson said. "You put them in a room together, and it was insane."
How times have changed. CBGB's, punk's cradle on Bowery, will close at the end of September and slide into crass self-parody, relocating in Las Vegas of all places. The Sex Pistols first album, Never Mind the Bollocks, is the stuff of mass-produced T-shirts, available to pre-teen shoppers at hipster chain retailers like Urban Outfitters. (There's even punk baby clothes nowadays.)
As Pearson put it in the Tyee, "Time stands still for no one, so punk died, drifted for a few years in limbo, was reborn as one of the most popular forms of music around, and then wandered off into what is now a mostly harmless dotage."
That's a fair description of the top-of-the-pops position a new generation of neo-punk has embraced. (Punk had no hits, and didn't want any; "it was an underground movement — art for art's sake," Borra said.)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
But even for first generation punk rockers, the inherent nihilism has given way to a little moist-eyed nostalgia. Jan Haust runs a local label called Other People's Music, which has reissued material from the Viletones and The Ugly. "This is documentation of our country's culture," he said.
Last month at the Horseshoe, members of some of those same first-generation local punk bands gathered to perform for the launch of a series of T-shirts bearing their old insignias. The show was enough of a hit that they're doing it again Sept. 16 at Hamilton's Corktown Tavern.
Decades later, onstage, they exuded the same raw sincerity that spawned them long ago. "It's not dead to them. It's not nostalgia," said Deirdre O'Sullivan, who sells the shirts at her Parkdale shop I'm With Stupid. "There's nothing cynical about it."
Most of them are pushing 50, or like Anderson, pushing past. So much for live fast, die young. Punk lives on, but in a way no one could have imagined: It grew old gracefully.
Case in point: At the Paddock, Ferrara, seated next to the piano, abraded a sheaf of high-grit sandpaper against a cheese-grater, creating a subtle percussive rhythm to accompany Borra's rendition of "Clap Hands," a Tom Waits classic from 1985. As the song ended, the small but devoted crowd clapped with genuine gratitude.
"For me, the way Sam approaches his cheese grater or Slinky, playing these old country songs, is more punk than something like Good Charlotte, or any of those other whiny little bands that are writing bubblegum pop songs," Borra said. "Punk is about being creative with almost nothing at all — that's how I define it."
Anderson's not exactly the live fast, die young type, either. After 31 years as a Canada Post mail carrier — through every band he's been in, including Blue Rodeo — he retired this year.
Nothing lasts forever, he said. With punk, in its purest form, it was maybe a year before the mainstream took hold and things changed. But much of the ethos endures.
"Maybe punk's been Disneyfied, kind of, but I'm still passionate about it," he said. "I feel like I take a lot of it with me still. It taught me to go deeper within myself, and become engaged with what I'm uncomfortable or afraid of. That's something I'll never lose."