The Last Pogo Jumps Again

There aren’t many people more beloved than Dave “Tank” Roberts for those of us who were involved in the original Punk scene in Toronto circa 1976. Tank started off as the bodyguard for The Viletones, and quickly became a much-loved (and much-feared) fixture on the scene.   For those of us who were in on the joke, the scariest thing about Tank was his intimidating size — he’s a big man — but his heart was even bigger and he rarely, if ever, had to use violence to expel anyone from a club, a doorway, a backstage, or a dressing room.   At worst, “…I’d just sort of lean on them…”, and people got the message fast.   He worked the door at many clubs, and a couple of years after The Last Pogo, took a crack at booking bands into the Horseshoe Tavern.   A favourite of many visiting bands, Tank was especially fond of The Ramones and struck up a lasting friendship with them. When we interviewed Tank for the feature, he showed off the drum skin that the Ramones had all autographed and sent to Tank on the occasion of his marriage to Joanne. After he got out out of the business, he started working for the city down at the CNE, and is still there counting down to retirement.

All our thoughts are with Joanne and Tank as we await on news regarding the big guy:   Tank was admitted to hospital a couple of days ago suffering from pneumonia (and other things), and is currently in intensive care. Better today than he was yesterday it’s “…and hour to hour thing”, according to Joanne, and we’ll let you know as soon as we get more news. Hang in there, Dave, we love ya.

Chick Parker with The Ugly at The Last Pogo, 1978, photo by Edie Steiner…

…and Chick in 2008, photo by Paul B. Toman.

The cool chick we’re talking about is Chick Parker, who we ran into at The Last Pogo screening at NXNE last Sunday. We’re going to interview Chick sometime soon, because he was a vital force in the scene, being a member of Zro4, the incarnation of The Ugly that played The Last Pogo, and a founder of post-Pogo band Dick Duck and the Dorks.

Gary Topp at NXNE 2008.  Photo by Albert Lee

The first public screening of The Last Pogo in 28 years closed out the 2008 NXNE Festival in Toronto to a rowdy sell-out crowd. Pogo director Brunton introduced members of the audience who were in bands that played the Last Pogo concert in 1978: Andy Meyers, Ken Badger and Mark Perkell of The Scenics; Vince Carlucci of The Cardboard Brains; David Quinton-Steinberg of The Mods; and Chris Haight of the Viletones and Secrets. Saving the best for last, the final introduction was of legendary Toronto promoter Gary Topp, one-half of The Garys, the guy who brought The Ramones, John Cale, Wayne County, Dead Boys, Talking Heads and way more way cool artists and films and events to Toronto during those heady punk days and beyond, and who has been the most vital, interesting, and eclectic promoter of the arts in Toronto, period. Seriously. If you did nothing else for cultural diversions than attend Gary Topp shows, you’d be doing just swell thank you.

It was awesome to watch The Last Pogo on a big screen; a DVD doesn’t do it justice, and the optical track is so much more richer than the sound that creeps out of a computer. As Brunton told the audience before the lights went down, the last time it was shown properly, on a big screen, was at a Cineplex movie theatre in 1980. Cleverly booking The Last Pogo with another concert film, it pulled in a $100 a week, was shown a dozen times a day — and was unceremoniously yanked from the theatre after two weeks when it continually received, quote “A violent and negative reaction…” unquote from the audience who were paying their five bucks to see the concert film it was opening for – Richard Pryor Live in Concert. Needless to say, the largly urban black audience didn’t take much of a shine to the lily-white/beyond the pale Toronto punk scene. On the other hand, it was apparently a big hit with the ushers and snack-bar kids.

The fact that the screening was literally across the street from the Much Music Video Awards seemed to strengthen the consensus that the music in the film stands up well to the test of time. (Was it because each of the bands in The Last Pogo had distinct unique sounds — or because most if not all of the bands at the MMVA sounded wearily similar? We’ll give it six of one, half-dozen of the other). Like a fine-wine aging for thirty years (or a solid Canadian beer that hasn’t turned skunky), you could imagine any of The Last Pogo bands making an impact these days. If they knew the right people. And kissed the right asses. And wore the right clothes with the right hair-cuts and were the right age and had the right politics and all the wrong right stuff that in 1978 we all properly rebelled againts. Kids these days.

Today we had the distinct pleasure of interviewing English punk/new-wave icon Hugh Cornwell, formerly of The Stranglers, for our feature. In town for NXNE, he performed a solo show last night at the Dakota, and will be screening his performance film Blueprint tonight at the NFB. With help from manager David Fagence, record company rep Charlie Kennedy and NXNE publicist Liz Armstrong, it was a cinch to organize, thank you very much.

With a demeanor more fitting of an English gentleman than a so-called punk rocker, Hugh clearly suffers no fools gladly and basically told us to get our shit together (“…we either do this right or not at all…”) if we wanted our fifteen minutes of fame with him. Music fan and NXNE volunteer Melissa Feeney stepped up to the plate for us, and stood guard outside the “green-room” we’d hijacked, making sure no one bugged us while we filmed our talk with Hugh.

He was candid about past drugs (speedballs) current highs (excercise, endorphins, cricket, maybe a drink), insightful about the Stranglers’ (“…the pub bands hated us ’cause we couldn’t play, and the punk bands hated us cause we could…”) and excited about his new album Hoover Dam (“…Within You or Without You is the best song I’ve written since Golden Brown…”). Download the album for free at hughcornwell.com and find out everything Hugh’s up to.

Ken Badger and Andy Meyers of The Scenics at The Last Pogo, 1978

…and The Scenics at NXNE, 2008; photo Richard Fiander

The Pogo Mobile Unit were determined to get to The Scenics’ NXNE gig well in advance of the (strict) 9:00 kick-off, but were blocked by a stream of joggers on a charity run down Yonge Street. As we pulled a you-ee to escape, we spot none other than Patsy Poison, ex-Curse, walking her dog. Channelling long-forgotten cabbie skills, we drove a few blocks down a lane, hoping to cut ahead of the Bay Street Rat Race (really, do you always have to jog to raise money? Can’t you just like…raise money? I’d much rather give you money to NOT stop the traffic. But we digress). We go south a bit — and we find Patsy again! We get stuck again, then escape again, and this time bomb down to Gerrard Street, thinking that because it’s an ambulance route and surely the cops will provide a break for cars to get through — but no. Except, no lie, there she is again! She’s Batman!

We made it to Rancho Relaxo in time to hook up with another of our shooters, had a beer, shot the breeze with Rancho owner (and Forgotten Rebels’ manager) Donnie Blais, and then shot The Scenics’ scorching set to a small but appreciative audience of twenty or so, including author Liz Worth, getting set to launch her book “Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History of Punk in Toronto and beyond”. It should be hitting the bookshelves sometime this year. With a night off tonight, The Scenics are off to Hamilton on Saturday, so if you can make it out, y’know… make it out. It will be their last gig in a while.

And hey, big thanks to Peter Howell and Jenny Punter of the Toronto Star and Globe & Mail respectively for nice little plugs for the NXNE screening of The Last Pogo this Sunday. Be there, be square, etc.

Cleave Anderson; photo courtesy Paul B. Toman

Secret cult organization The Illuminati have invaded Toronto, spreading “culture” and dreaded “art” all over the joint. Or at least we presume it’s the Illuminati, otherwise why would they have called their event Luminato?   In any case, they put on, from all accounts, a fairly decent show of Queen Street West stuff at OCAD, formerly OCA, a.k.a. Ontario College Of Art. Peter Vronski’s Dada’s Boys was screened, featuring one Cheetah Chrome playing with the Viletones. One of the surviving Demics got up on stage with Mary-Margaret O’Hara to sing a round of the Demics’ ole chestnut, “New York City”, with drumming supplied by none other than Cleave Anderson. Among other things, Cleave plays punk classics with The Screwed and dons a black wig for his gig as one of The Raclones; one of the newer things he’s playing with is a Chuck Berry tribute band, Monkey Business…

Which is a real roundabout way of segueing into the news item of the week: we visited Cleave out in the West End for a second interview. Cleave gave us a walking tour of Queen West last year — from the x that marks the spots where The Beverly Tavern and Crash ‘n Burn were, over past the Black Bull, across the street from Peter Pan and ending up at the Horseshoe Tavern, now half the bar it used to be back in the day — but with some sound issues for some of it (namely a jack-hammer as we sat down on the Horseshoe porch to chat) we popped by his house for a little Q & A. He reminded us that in the line to see The Ramones’ way back in 1976 was O’Hara’s Mary Margaret and big sis Catherine, and right in front of Cleave was the one, the only, Mr. Shit, one of the few people we have not been able to track down for the new movie. Where art thou, Mr. Shit?! Before we left Cleave gave us a rough mix of a song he wrote and recorded called…The Last Pogo. VERY cool!

A couple of things in the press coming out this week about The Last Pogo playing at NXNE, and we’re still trying to figure out how many free passes we can hand out, so stay tuned ladies and gentlemen.

As of June 6th, it’s been two years since we started shooting THE LAST POGO JUMPS AGAIN. Yup, that’s correct: we started shooting this opus on 6/6/6. Weird. Since then, shooting every weekend or so, with lots of help from other filmmakers, we’ve compiled around 150 hours of footage, discovered never-before-seen super-8 footage of The Last Pogo concert, heard never-before-heard tapes of the evening, re-connected with lots of old pals, made up with old flames, visited too many grave-yards, watched young Ollie Brunton turn from a boy into a man, had lots of laughs, and have been gifted with tons of photos, handbills, high-school essays, buttons, stories, lies, rumours and gossip and more.

As we get set to show THE LAST POGO for the first time in almost 30 years (at NXNE; Sunday June 15th, 5:30) we rediscovered those pesky things called “self-imposed deadlines”, and looking over a calendar, made a real adult decision: we’re now going to aim to have the new film completed early 2009, just in time for the Hot Docs festival. In the meantime, back at the ranch, we’ll be putting out a fairly awesome DVD of The Last Pogo and some surprises just in time for Christmas. We’re going to add on a couple of other shorts by filmmaker Colin Brunton: The Mysterious Moon Men of Canada, with soundtrack by Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, and A Trip Around Lake Ontario, with soundtrack by Nash the Slash.

We’ve just got too much footage to go through and analyze and dissect and mess around with, and there’s still a ton of people we wanna talk to so we’re gonna do it right.

We’ve chatted with members of all the bands that were there that night — Scenics, Cardboard Brains, Secrets, Mods, Ugly, Viletones and Teenage Head — and lots of the irregulars that were such a part of the scene — Tank, Wayne Brown, Zero, Roger T-Bag, Margarita Passion, Gary Topp, Don Pyle, Tony Malone, Nash the Slash, Cleave Anderson, Blair Richard Martin, Barrie Farrell, Edie Steiner, and on and on. We’ve been slowly trying to catch up with some of the international bands that made their way through Toronto during those heady daze: so far Cheetah Chrome from The Dead Boys (interviewed in a grave-yard, natch), and Tommy Ramone from The Ramones (in front of the Pogo Mobile), and if you’re reading this, we hope to snag Hugh Cornwell from The Stranglers while he’s in town for NXNE. (Hugh? ARE you reading this? C’mon, Hugh, pleeeese! 15 minutes, that’s all we need!).

When we were at CFNY last week, ex-Mod, ex-Dead Boy and current kewl lawyer David Quinton and d.j. Bookie were talking up a big Last Pogo 30th bash this December, and we thought, “Hey…wait a minute…if we’re doing a feature film about the punk scene in Toronto circa 1976 – 1978…and it’s built around The Last Pogo concert…I got an idea! Maybe we should shoot this big party”. Like, duh!

And hey, dear reader, if you’ve got any cool stuff from that era we could film, or if you’ve got a story or gossip or rumours or whatever, drop us a line, and we’ll try and catch up to ya.