ebook excerpt: The Punk Scene - The Province (blog)

NewsBot

Posts 23328
Location Mobilism
WRZ$ 221.00
Device Not Specified

Aug 9th, 2015, 12:22 am

#2859225 by NewsBot

From The Poppy Family to BTO, Bryan Adams to Sarah McLachlan, Nickelback to Michael Buble — No. 1 stars all — the history of Vancouver rock ’n’ roll is their story and the story of countless others.

In his new ebook, Tom Harrison’s History of Vancouver Rock ’n’ Roll, The Province’s Hall of Fame writer looks back at the pioneers, visionaries and mavericks who started the local recording industry from an office with a few microphones and turned it into a music hotbed with international stars and producers. To celebrate its release, The Province is running excerpts from the eBook every Sunday this summer.

This is from Chapter 11: The Punk Scene.

T-shirts proclaim, “Punk’s not dead!” Maybe, but it’s hard to find its pulse.

As a movement, punk lasted approximately from 1976 to 1982. If the term “rock ’n’ roll” was coined in 1954, “punk rock” came along only 23 years later and fizzled 30 years ago. In other words, it’s been dead longer than original rock was alive.

For true believers, though, punk still holds the promise of change.

That’s probably what keeps Joe Keithley going. He formed his first punk band, The Skulls, 37 years ago and has been the leader of DOA for at least 35. In 2013, Keithley put DOA on ice while he unsuccessfully bid on a career in provincial politics as a candidate for the New Democrat Party (NDP). This was a punk thing to do if you’d lived your life guided by politics.

DOA in 1979: Joe Keithley (left), Chuck Biscuits and Randy Rampage.

Keithley was raised in a family of activists, which helped him form a highly developed sense of right and wrong, and punk rock was a good forum for his views.

“Yeah, I did think I got a lot of my views from that,” Keithley said. “I got a lot of my political angle from my sister, Karen. She’s older than me and started bringing home all these folk records.”

Two books, two DVDs, many albums, world tours that include China and a stab at politics later, punk is still the best forum for Keithley.

“I look for all kinds of ways to express myself,” he said. “Punk is one of those ways.”

***

In the documentary Bloodied But Unbowed — itself taken from the title of a DOA album — filmmaker Susanne Tabata featured many of the old Vancouver punk scene’s main players: Keithley, Art Bergmann, John Armstrong (a.k.a. Buck Cherry), Randy Rampage, Brad Kent, members of The Pointed Sticks, members of The Subhumans and Jade Blade of The Dishrags.

Most of them came from the suburbs: White Rock, Surrey, Burnaby, New Westminster, North Vancouver. Who knows what they were expecting to find in Vancouver? Perhaps, as Keithley speculates, a better alternative to what they had.

When Bergmann got tired of missing the last bus to White Rock after seeing a show and having to spend the night walking the streets, he did the inevitable and moved to Vancouver.

“Vancouver became a home for outsiders,” he said.

Punk legend Art Bergmann recently returned to the stage.

But it was a city he and his like-minded co-horts had to shake up. The attraction was a place to play and maybe find a like-minded audience.

“You didn’t have to do anything to be outrageous,” Bergmann said. “You just had to create your own music.”

***

One of the places that gave punks a home was The Smiling Buddha Cabaret.

“I don’t know how many times we played there,” Keithley said. “Maybe 50 times. You wanted to be different and at the Buddha you could be different.”

The Smilin’ Buddha is now best known for its 800-pound neon sign. For many people, that’s all they know about the place.

It was opened in 1952 as a dance room that had entertainment provided by strippers and transvestites.

It was bought in 1962 by Lachman Jir and mutated into a rhythm-and-blues club, with Tommy Chong leading in the first R&B band. Lachman famously fired a Jimi Hendrix — then still using the name Jimmy James and trying out the stunts that later became trademarks of his showmanship, from playing guitar with his teeth to using feedback.

“I asked him about that,” said son Robert Jir. “He said, ‘He played too loud and the customers didn’t like him.’”

The neon Smilin’ Buddha sign, seen here oin this 1964 photo of East Hastings St.

By 1979, when Bergman’s Young Canadians became the first punk band to play the club, the Smilin’ Buddha Cabaret had been all but forgotten and the neighbourhood was a slum overrun by drug addicts, alcoholics, prostitutes and derelicts.

“I grew up with these guys,” Jir says of DOA’s Biscuits, Rampage and Dave Gregg. “They were my friends. We had the Smilin’ Buddha baseball team.”

The Buddha burned down in 1983 and Lachman Jir died five years later. He never got to see the historical importance with which the Buddha is now regarded.

***

THE STORY CONTINUES … To read about Bergmann, the fall of punk scene and the transition of the Commodore Ballroom from a big-band dance club to an iconic rock venue, download the ebook at the Apple iBooks, Amazon, Kobo and Google stores.