Chapter Thirty: Frustration and Heartache is What You Got

If every music journalist is a failed musician then perhaps every blogger is a failed music journalist. Count me in for that generalization.

I failed to write a brilliant article on the Winnipeg scene of the late 80’s. I interviewed a few future legends and a few old warhorses and while the bands all did their part I never finished the damn article for the Manitoban.

One of my interviews was with Honest John and his Merry Men, a mild moniker for a band that encapsulated the history of Winnipeg punk rock; including singer Mitch Funk of Personality Crisis and the three former members of the Stretch Marks. Honest John (who have just recently re-formed for a local show) used to perform the Stretch Marks’ classic “Dog’s World with half the audience (yes, including yours tunelessly) singing the ‘arf, arf’ backing vocals. That night, Mitch said that he’d been offered good money to re-assemble PC for an East Coast tour but that his heart wasn’t in that old material.

Well his heart was pumping in the early 80’s when PC with Mitch’s hulking, yet animated, frame out front dominated the scene. Never a hardcore band per se, the band featured stinging, metallic guitar, steady beats and Mitch’s deep bass vocals. A band without a single clear antecedent (the NY Dolls influence is not pronounced) they simply stomped in the same way that DOA, who also had a taste for beer, rock and thrift store clothing, did. On this collection (which has all their studio tracks plus a live track) the hits come thick and fast with the anthemic, “Twilight’s Last Gleaming” and the pummelling “Mrs. Palmer” being early contenders for standout track. The album is relentless - so stay focussed till it's all finished, unlike yours truantly.

Enjoy this neglected masterpiece and be prepared to buy the re-issue when (and keep faith here - even if it’s never been on CD) it arrives.



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Chapter Twenty-Nine: Compiling the Future

Punk Rock was prophetic: it’s forbearers were voices in the wilderness, it’s leaders revelled in ‘the-axe-is-at-the-root-of–the-tree’ proclamations and it’s followers envisioned a kingdom of heaven wherein each believer wrought their own culture.

That’s why prophets struggle with acceptance; once their prophecy comes to pass they’re left to explain the fall-out.

How much of our debased culture can be blamed on the democratizing influence of punk's DIY philosophy? Warhol’s maxim that in the future everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes required his own slackening of artistic principles as well as his patronage of those standard bearers of punk: The Velvet Underground. How many limpid, tuneless indie rock bands could have been prevented if Moe Tucker had never been allowed to sing-speak her way through a couple of numbers?

And how about that glut of cheap compilations that clog up retail racks? That’s a punk problem. Before punk the compilation, soundtracks aside, was primarily an exercise in nostalgia, a history lesson. But punk and especially hardcore would turn those sepia snapshots of the good old days into blurry Polaroids of the near future. The Rodney on the Roq compilations envisioned LA punk’s long desert-march to the pop charts and Bruce Pavit and co.’s American Youth Report, besides being a near-perfect compilation, predicted the riotous growth of the American Underground.

MRML would now like to dig deeper onto the chicken entrails of the past. First up is It Came From the Pit, which (along with the Something to Believe In from California’s Better Youth Organization) laid bare Canada’s contribution to this Revelation. Besides the requisite hardcore acts, ICFTP featured the garage rock of the Enigmas, the, jazz-punk of NoMeansoNo, the proto-riot girl of the Ruggedy Anne’s and the inevitable crossover of S.C.U.M. So, like all those great comps it expanded the definition of punk by the power of juxtaposition, thereby helping to spread the word to all the nations of the earth. Sorry about all those monotonous budget-priced sampler CD’s though…

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Punk comps often came in series whether it was SST’s the Blasting Concept or the aforementioned Rodney on the Roq, even It Came From the Pit got a resurrection of sorts in the way-earlier mentioned It Came From Canada series of the late 80’s. (We'll go back there...)

Now The Sound of Hollywood (a six-parter) is a different animal. Mystic Records pretty much defined the term “generic hardcore” with its massive catalog of thin-sounding cramped vinyl releases. Volume Two, however, was a strange one. Dedicated to LA in ‘83 just as metal and jangle began to splinter the hardcore scene. Straight up hardcore like SVDB and Battalion of Saint is here but that nostalgia that inspired Tom Wolfe to call the 80’s the “Re Generation” is all over this record. There’s the mod sound of F-Beat, the metallic Würm and the all-acoustic Bad Religion. Yeah, you read that right. Following their disastrous plunge into the Paisley Underground, Bad Religion (or what was left of them) went all singer-songwriter. My first Bad Religion song was “Only Gonna Die” from American Youth Report. I loved the pseudo-erudite lyrics and that acoustic breakdown but spent years hunting for more when everything they did was out-of-print. These two ballads were the next thing I found. Disappointing? Partly, but I loved these songs – I still do and the production (such as it isn’t) served them better then the often cringe-inducing sounds of Into The Unknown. It also predicted Greg Graffin’s future plunge into Americana on his solo albums.


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Chapter Twenty Eight: Guns, Heroin, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc.

(Art looking a mite like a member of the Legion of Substitute Clancy Brothers)

I turned down a Cadillac ride to Seattle with Art Bergman and a one-time muse of Guy Maddin. The prospect of a cross-border raid (to which my not-yet-ex was pointedly dis-invited) led by the man who’d screamed out his response to the musical question, “What is your reason for entering the USA?” with the chorus; “Guns and Her-o-i-i-in!” was unnerving. I’m not opposed to celebrity-stalking or name-dropping but the set-up stank, so to avoid becoming an unwitting drug mule or a voyeuristic tag along, I declined.

It was 1991 and it was what must have been, by the standards of Art Bergman’s career, a good year. He’d released a stinging, yet wide-appealing, self-titled album that got the push from Polygram (even the terrible music store where I worked got a play copy). Those used CD shops of Vancouver (of the type that sprouted up across North America in the 90’s) were full of used Art Bergman play copies that he’d pawned himself – but his name was still spoken of reverently in critical circles. While Art sang on Bound for Vegas that he was “a never-was trying to be a has-been on the comeback trail,” he was being lauded as “Canada’s Paul Westerberg”. He shared a gruff vocal style, an unflinching honesty and a crippling addiction with Westerberg but rather than cleave to a mid-western rock n' roll style, Art adhered to the gutter junkie-poet archetype of Jim Carroll and Lou Reed. John Cale even produced his debut solo album –though Art supposedly hated the results. (For more Art history see one of MRML’s most Googled posts. And Here, here and here)

Art built a reputation for furious live shows (I saw Poisoned rip through a set at Verna’s a tiny basement club just outside of Winnipeg’s notorious Murder’s Half Acre) where he honed the songs herein; “Remember Her Name” with it’s heart-chilling chorus that pays to tribute to Marianne Faithful, the tortured ballad, Guns and Heroin and the vindictively catchy pop song that is “If She Could Sing”.

“God’s got an answer in that jukebox

I pick the wrong song every time.”

Take this ride with Art (the former-muse spoke well of him) to find out how often he chose the exact right song.

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This album is not available in stores at any cost; it exists only in MRML’s hard drive. It was cherry picked from the following out-of-print releases: the Poisoned e.p., Crawl With Me, Sexual Roulette, What Fresh Hell is This? and Vultura Freeway.

The only Art that is clearly in-print would be the K-Tels/Young Canadians compilation No Escape which is available here

Chapter Twenty Seven: Now Playing

The wonder of music retail (and everyone went record shopping on National Record Store Day, right?) is being surprised by joy. It's the joy of hearing a crisp, new noise pounding out over the speakers and asking, “What is this?”
It happens just often enough to maintain your faith. I remember striding across the floor of the rock/pop room (on my way to fill out some Bob Seeger-dominated insurance claim) and being stopped dumb by the music. The album cover showed four dorks and a blue screen, the song mentioned Buddy Holly and Mary Tyler Moore and…well, you know the rest. No more on Rivers Cuomo and co; The blue Weezer album is beloved by millions and needs no further praise from me.
Instead, I’d like to offer you another, albeit much smaller, “What is this? moment. A reggae-infused disaffected anthem, named Suburbia was the culprit. It made me zip to the front of the store and grab the CD from the Now Playing stand.
Schleprock? Schleprock!? I muttered.
Schleprock were known as one of the many not-ready-for-prime-time pop-punks of the Dr. Strange label (great name, great sense of history, spotty talent-spotting). After a few pedestrian albums (and in the thick of the Great Green Day Panic) they got sucked up by some major label. Then they delivered, “America’s Dirty Little Secret” not a pat pop-punk record but an SLF-Ruts-Clash ‘79 punk rock shout-along album. The slicked-up production obscured the rough and tumbleness of it all– but not the songs; the nagging menace of “Suburbia”, the double-fist-pumping chorus of “Ain’t Got No Heroes” and of course the optimistically defiant “You Can’t Hold Me Down.” Just download and play it now.



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P.S. You can, regrettably, buy this album for one cent on Amazon or you can support the band members who have re-configured as The Generators.

Chapter Twenty Six: Retail Redux

During my longest stint in music retail, I worked in the E.T.C. room. E.T.C. (as in etcetera) was a room was tucked along the side of a massive music store (Musiplex) and housed what didn’t fit in the Rock/Pop/R + B room or the Classical/Jazz room (which had a separate entrance to keep the riff-raff and the hoity-toity from colliding).
E.T.C. had the leftovers - reggae, children’s, gospel, folk, soundtracks, easy listening, world, comedy, blues, new age and – gasp! – country. Quite the musical education for a punk purist. First Johnny Cash happened. When American Recording arrived it went on the store stereo every bloody day. The next Boxing Day, I purchased the Essential Johnny Cash box set (a shining light in a dim packaging
format) and began looking back. And what I saw (and heard) was the raw power of country music. Yes, sappy Nash-Trash (in its shifting forms) has infected country music for a donkey’s years but when that devious formula (3 Chords + Truth = Country) is followed the aural impact is devastating. (It helps the listener along if a long love affair has reached an explosive conclusion.)
It was in this mental and personal mix-up that I heard the Blue Shadows {Billy Cowsill (guitar, vocals) J.B. Johnson (drums) Jeffrey Hatcher (guitar, vocals) Elmar Spanier (bass) Barry Muir (bass)}.“Hank goes to the Cavern Club” was the Blue Shadows M.O. and they built a rock-country hybrid that stands up along a thousand other rural-urban fusionists. Uniting Winnipeg’s local legend Jeffrey Hatcher (who fronted power-pop band the Fuse in the late 70’s) and former sixties teen-pop idol Billy Cowsill of The Cowsills (the model for the Brady Bunch) in the early 90’s seemed a strange idea on paper but it played out like fevered dream version of pre-psychedelic rock n’ roll – Everlys, Orbison, Beatles, Buck et al. The harmonies soar, the guitars ring, the lyrics lament; everyone wins whether you’re a power-pop fan, a British Invasion fanatic, a lover of gut-bucket country or just damn broken-hearted. On the debut you can take in Coming on Strong which hits like the Buck Owens freight train sound, then sway along to the old-fashioned hurtin’ tunes like The Embers. The second ‘rocks harder’ as the sophomore cliché goes so you get to enjoy more driving tunes like the harmony-drenched kiss-off song, Born to be Riding Only Down.
So whatever your genre bias, wander into the E.T.C. room for a spell…



On The Floor of Heaven



Lucky to Me

Blip, Again

Andrew W.K., The Mclaughlin Group and Carl Sandburg.

Chapter Twenty Five: Music Retail Ruins

Ah music retail a concept growing quainter by the day and soon to be as smitten into redundancy as elevator operation. Every generation feels the sting of becoming anachronistic and we all respond with our own particular band of bitterness. We lament, we protest and finally we either become a cranky holdout or we acquiesce.
“You guys wanna hear a great song?” asked a music retail lifer who works for one of the surviving stores in my hometown. We (my fellow throw-back with whom I do a weekly Saturday Rock Walk to seek musical treasure) did. He played us “Your Love Alone is Not Enough by the Manic Street Preachers and we each had to buy the album. A High Fidelity moment perhaps but a communal one, which is something transferring bits per second can never quite replicate.
The Tone were a communal experience. I walked down into The Cellar (another retail casualty of downloading) the subterranean home of deliberately ugly sub-genres and an employee we’ll call…Hedberg said, “You gotta hear this!” Damn! Exploding guitars, trade-off vocals and those supple ska-inflected beats – this is a high. It’s Jam-Clash-SLF again, I know, but they still found their own tiny patch of space in the musical universe. The Tone actually were English and were led by Thatcher on Acid’s Ben Corrigan as well as Dan Bernstein and featured the minimally credited Bob and Paul on bass and drums respectively. Everybody sings, which promises something great in a band plus the fully credited Dave “Fingers” Eve adds some rippling organ. Twelve songs (almost of which were singles) and not one that should’ve been thrown into a weighted bag and dropped into the river. “Pauline”, which enumerates all of their influence including Pauline Murray of the Selecter and the less-than-celebrated Jilted John (which explains the cockney-novelty cover song “Bloody”) is the album’s raison d’etre and high water mark. Anachronistic but not tainted by bitterness.
Take the Tone - you’ll have no more regrets than you already do.


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