a little fun history of the Canadian punk rock scene
One story, one act of resistance at a time. During my political career, there was a running joke in my office about dealing with the Library of Parliament. After every election, someone from the library would call to update my official parliamentary biography and ask about my educational background. Jan (yes, the same Jan who helps run The Resistance) always had the same answer: “Charlie’s a graduate of Punk Rock University.” For some reason, they never updated my bio. The fact was, I missed my high school graduation as I had a gig at the punk rock bar, the Cabana Room at the Spadina Hotel. While my classmates went off to university that fall, I climbed into an eco-line van and began touring the country with the political punk band L’étranger. For this instalment of the Sunday Summer Reading Series, I want to share a few lessons I learned from Punk Rock University. A Punk Rock EducationThe Toronto punk scene grew up in the late 1970s-early 80s amidst the worst recession since the depression. Industrial Toronto was disappearing. The old factories and garment businesses along Spadina/Riverdale/Liberty Village were shutting down. It provided great practice spaces and cheap rent for artists looking to build their craft. Getting a job wasn’t easy, but for artists who secured a part-time gig dishwashing or waitressing, it was possible to pay the rent and still have time to explore creative interests. University students could dabble in art, politics, or music because, if they failed a course, the debt load was nothing to worry about. They could pay their university fees with a summer job. Everything was political then — the fight against nukes, apartheid, justice for El Salvador. Cheap rent created an explosion of art spaces. Clubs like The Edge, Larry’s Hideaway, the Turning Point, the Cameron, the Rivoli, and the Bamboo offered live music to increasingly varied audiences and subcultures. Some of those clubs and art spaces flourished. Others, like the Queen City Tavern, the Club with No Name, and 100 Bond Street, were mere flashes in the pan. But all of them were made possible because people could afford to take a chance on doing something creative. Andrew Cash and I went to the same parish in Toronto (Holy Spirit). We met at 14 over a shared desire to learn to play guitar. By 17, we had formed our punk band with the intention of leaving school and heading out to discover Canada.
I loved travelling with the band. I saw Canada as a vast and fascinating land. An adventure. That feeling about this country has never left me. Playing in various punk rock enclaves was an education that taught me my first lessons in building community. The majority of time on the road was monotonous. The band filled the hours on long drives playing word games or debating the merits of the latest records, the state of hockey (the Maple Leafs under owner Harold Ballard), and politics. One time, there were seven of us—four musicians and three roadies—driving home from a gig in a van supplied by a company called Rent-A-Wreck. The vehicle lived up to the name. It only had two seats, so the driver and co-pilot focused on road conditions while the rest of us sat on sleeping bags amid the amps, drums, and guitars, with no seat belts. When we hit the road, we found ourselves driving straight into a major winter storm. About one hour into the trip, the wiper-blade mechanism on the van died. There was no money in the band’s kitty for a hotel. It was a Sunday, and there were no garages open anywhere along the highway. Necessity being the mother of invention, we pulled the laces out of our combat boots and tied them to the blades. It took almost ten hours to cover the five-hundred-kilometre distance, each of us taking shifts kneeling between the driver and co-pilot while pulling the laces back and forth to clear the blinding snow. By the time we were a hundred kilometres from Toronto, we were down to our last pair of laces. Suddenly, Pete, our driver, said, “Ah shit,” and pulled over to the side of the snowy highway. “Why are we stopping?” I asked. “We’ve been flagged down by a cop,” he said dejectedly. But it turned out that the man with a flashlight and an official-looking peaked cap wasn’t a cop but an air force officer. His car had slid off the road in the storm. He had flagged us down in order to catch his flight to Germany. We opened the side panel door, and our roadie Big Nick Baljak—who was wearing his leather jacket and a sleeping bag wrapped around him for warmth in the barely heated van—said, “If you’ve got laces, we’ll find room for you.” Touring is perhaps the quickest way for a young musician to realize why it’s important to stay in school. Long drives, crappy food, bumping up against the same five or six guys for days on end; shows where no one turns up, or the management rips you off, and you’re left without a dime in your pocket. But John Armstrong of the Vancouver band the Modernettes is quoted in Have Not Been the Same: The CanRock Renaissance of saying that it was the fans in small towns that made it all worth it:
Outside of Toronto’s downtown, the punk world of Central Canada was strung along the Highway 401 corridor from Windsor to Montreal. The punk communities were isolated outposts where small groups of fans found ways to put on shows in rented halls or dodgy bars. Many were in blue-collar towns heavily dependent on auto supply and manufacturing. In 1980, these towns were getting the shit kicked out of them. Canada’s manufacturing sector was a branch plant of the American economy, and the shock of 1980 hit it like a piledriver. There were multiple plant closures and huge job losses. Canadian banking policy followed the Americans and obediently jacked up interest rates. By 1982, there were officially 1.5 million unemployed Canadians, but this did not include nearly a million others who had given up looking for work. One summer night in 1982, our band was booked to play a punk show at the Italian wedding hall in Welland, Ontario. Prior to 1980, Welland had the highest per capita income in the country from its plethora of unionized factory jobs, but those jobs were being wiped out by the recession. Our band arrived in town oblivious to the economic devastation hitting the region. As soon as we began the first song, a group of local working-class guys rushed the dance floor and jumped the punk kids. They started slugging it out. We stopped playing and attempted to mediate. The wedding hall’s manager screamed at us to start playing again and to play louder. He pointed to the disco ball above the dance floor and said, “When you see the disco ball turning, you play fast and loud.” For the rest of the night, every time a fight broke out, the disco ball started spinning, and we played fast and loud. This was how Saturday nights in Welland went down in the Great Recession. Hamilton was a mob and biker town, with both forces to be found at a restaurant/club called the Golden Garter. From the outside, it looked like a high-end steakhouse—a hangout for mobster Johnny “Pops” Papalia. But if you went in the back way, you found yourself in a barroom that was the domain of the local motorcycle gang. They rented out a spare room in the back to punk kids, who called it the Golden Gutter. The rule was simple: stay off the bikers’ patch. No punk kid dared peek into the steakhouse side where Johnny Pops held court. On our first trip to Hamilton, our manager advised, “You boys aren’t in Toronto anymore. You’re going to the big city. Keep your mouth shut onstage because Hamilton is a rough place.” One day, on our way to the Golden Gutter, we learned that the manager had suddenly shut the establishment and hightailed it out of town. The Hammer was indeed a rough place. In the late 1970s and early ’80s, the bars in blue-collar Southern Ontario were the focus of turf wars between biker gangs like the Outlaws, Banditos, Satan’s Choice, Para-Dice Riders, and Hells Angels. A gangland biker killing at a bar in Port Hope in 1978 was the basis for Steve Earle’s song “Justice in Ontario.” At stake was the trade in drugs, violence, and women being trafficked through the industrial belt of Ontario. We were naive kids. We regularly played the Kent Hotel in Waterloo without knowing it was a hangout for the Henchmen Motorcycle Club, who were on the losing end of a gang war with the Outlaws. The punk kids hung out upstairs while the main floor was reserved for the strippers. Once again, the rules were simple—we kept our nose out of what was going on with the dancers, and the bikers made sure nobody bothered the punk and college kids who were going upstairs. But this isn’t to say that trouble didn’t happen. The Kent was the first place where someone threw a bottle at my head. In another quote from the book Have Not Been the Same, Kevin Kane, guitarist and vocalist for the Grapes of Wrath, states,
“Slumming” at dive bars across the southern industrial belt spoke to a certain element of privilege, as none of us had a clue about the growing inequity faced by the dancers in the other room. In these marginal spaces, our band had little interaction with the women who made their living doing burlesque or strip dancing to a jukebox soundtrack. But their world was quickly disappearing. The changes began in the early 1980s, when Réal Simard, a hitman for the Montreal-based Cotroni crime family, moved into Southern Ontario. According to author Stevie Cameron,
Simard’s partner was Montreal businessman Frank Majeau, who supplied nude table dancers from Quebec through his company Prestige Entertainment. Majeau’s day job was the chief political adviser to Conservative cabinet minister Roch LaSalle. When LaSalle was elevated to Minister of Public Works, first under Prime Minister Joe Clark and then Brian Mulroney, Majeau served as his political point man. The Public Works portfolio was a plum gig in Ottawa. It was the government trading space for large public construction projects and real estate dealings. Majeau had the day job of chairing the minister’s weekly meetings with key political advisers and cabinet ministers. His political connections to the Conservative government gave him serious cache with the mob. Simard told the Montreal police anti-rackets squad that,
The import of Quebec table dancers was part of a deal brokered between the Controni mob, Ontario bike gangs, and Johnny Papalia’s mobsters. But this expansion into Southern Ontario and the heavy focus on sex and cocaine quickly drew criminal competition. Simard was jailed for trying to kill a drug dealer who had attempted to muscle in on his turf. I look back on the naivety of punk rock kids and art school students who had the privilege of slumming in this twilight world while being largely cocooned from the darker realities. I think back to Larry’s Hideaway on Gerrard Street in Toronto. It was a total dive that was a notorious hive of sex work, drugs, and illegal activities. But the basement boasted a large bar with a huge sound system, and the bouncers rarely checked IDs. I remember standing outside the club with our gear at the end of the night, waiting for the band to pull up. As I stood there, the bouncers would be tossing the johns down the stairs beside me. My friend Nora Daisy Fannin worked the punk shows at Larry’s as a waitress even though she was in high school. She did her high school homework at the bar, watched over by the same bouncers who tossed the johns.
I value the education I received at Punk Rock University. It was a colourful and exciting time to grow up. The world of privatization and mercenary capitalism had not yet pushed the debt and risk onto young people. This made it possible for young people to experiment and to risk failure because they weren’t burdened by high rent and massive student debt. Gary Topp, who opened The Edge punk club, said this cultural revolution was driven by the privilege of being able to take chances without the fear of financial ruin:
The skills I brought to Parliament came from years on the road playing punk rock bars and honky-tonks across this vast land. I continue to value the lessons of punk rock resistance and DIY. But perhaps the greatest lesson I learned was seeing this vast and magnificent land. I will never forget the awe of seeing the fog-shrouded St. Lawrence past Quebec City for the first time, pulling over at 3 AM to watch the northern lights dance over the Yellowhead Highway, or driving the nose-bleed heights of the Kicking Horse Pass. I feel that same awe when I travel today. This is an interview with Andrew Cash and me when we were starting out. For more information, click here for the book Dangerous Memory: Coming of Age in the Decade of GreedIf any photos or images on this site are under copyright, please let us know and we will provide appropriate credit. This content is used in accordance with applicable copyright laws, including “fair dealing” under Canadian law and “fair use” under Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act, for purposes such as criticism, comment, and news reporting.Thank you for reading Charlie Angus / The Resistance. If you’d like to upgrade to a paid subscription your support will help keep this project independent and sustainable. I’m grateful to have you here - thank you for your support.
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