The Last Pogo Jumps Again

The Last Pogo Jumps Again co-director Kire Paputts’ t-shirt continues it’s tour of Europe, here in front of the Berlin Wall.

From the website glyphjockey.com;  check it!

If there’s one thing here at Pogo H.Q. we like better than old-skool punk, it’s baseball.   And for lack of anything better to blog today, and grasping at straws trying to figure out how to give a plug to the best baseball blog ever — DrunkJaysFans — here’s some factoids for you to chew on.

On the day the Toronto Blue Jays came into existence — January 27, 1977 — The Sex Pistols broke up with temporary label EMI.   Four days after The Last Pogo happened on December 1, 1978, Toronto Blue Jays outfielder Vernon Wells was born.   Two days before The John Cale Band made their first appearance in Toronto at The Garys’ New Yorker Theatre, the Blue Jays traded Dave Roberts to the San Diego Padres, and two days after Cale’s gig, minor leaguer Mike Weathers was sent a-packing to the Oakland A’s.    The first game the Jays played at the old and breezy Exhibition Stadium in April of 1977, was against the Chicago White Sox, who according to the Internet, had a pitcher called John Lydon as pictured above.  Because you have to believe everything that’s on the Internet.

Check out DrunkJaysFan; in yer face, salty language, and right on.  Just like our favourite punk bands.   And for hours of entertainment and groovilicious graphics and pics, check out Glyphjockey.   Loads of fun, and lots more fake baseball cards featuring the likes of Sid Vicious, Ray Davies, Ian Dury and more.  Waaaay cool.

And now, for all of you who were too chicken to use PayPal and too lazy to go to the bank for a money order, you can now pay for a copy of The Last Pogo DVD using cold, hard cash — as long as it’s cleverly concealed.  So buy one already!   Twelve lousy bucks!

And go you Jays.

Okay, maybe just a blog about buildings.

One of the staff here at the bustling headquarters of the feature film The Last Pogo Jumps Again got a new pal on MySpace called Clash on the Danforth 1979, a group for people who went to the old Rex Theatre on Danforth Avenue in 1979 to see The Clash and Toronto’s own B-Girls.  Said staff member doesn’t recall much about the show, being that was the year that Thai-stick marijuana hit Toronto, and while he had a powerful buzz on, it was, alas, only for the moment.  Joe Strummer, though, remembered it well. Here’s what he said to the New Musical Express in 1979:  “The gig was in a cinema. The dressing room is actually a toilet and the PA sounds as if it’s filled with hamsters on coke. Even though it sounds rough, we really enjoy it. And so do they, storming the stage at the end English style. One of the funniest things I ever saw was these two bouncers trying to hold the whole audience back. Just the two of them! After the first number they were swamped so they gave up and went home.”

From the new MySpace group;  article by Paul McGrath;  photo by Simon White.

The Odeon Rex Theatre was at Pape and Danforth and has now been transformed into a fitness centre.  Up the street a few miles east stands the corpse of The Original 99 Cent Roxy Theatre, nee The Roxy Theatre, originally The Allenby.  Erected in 1936, the frontage is vintage deco;  the son of one of the architects went on to design the first Cineplex theatre in Toronto, at the Eaton’s Centre.   The other way down the road from the old Rex stands the Music Hall.  Not long before The Last Pogo premiered at the Music Hall, on a bill featuring The Viletones, Gang of Four and the Buzzcocks, The Clash played the gig at the Rex, a good six years after Gary Topp departed his Original 99 Cent Roxy.

Newspaper ad 1975.

After the Roxy, Gary went on to The New Yorker on Yonge Street, befriended Gary Cormier and formed The Garys, the infamous promoters who would spring punk onto Toronto in an explosion of non-stop concerts that would last for years.   The New Yorker theatre also premiered Easy Rider back in the sixties, around the same time that Gary Topp was booking movies into Toronto’s first “underground” theatre, Cinecity, just up the street.   The New Yorker is now called the Panasonic, and currently features a version of the awesomely barfable musical We Will Rock You.  Cinecity is long gone, having first being transformed into a three floor game store … and we’re not sure what it is now.  Our bet is either another fitness centre, or a Starbucks.

Around the corner from the New Yorker and down an alley-way was where Club David’s used to stand, atop of vintage clothing store Tribe.  Gay bar by late night, and punk club during the evening, the building is now a condominium.  With a fitness club somewhere in it, I’m sure.

Way down Yonge Street from the New Yorker was where the venerable jazz club The Colonial Tavern once stood, and in it’s stinky little basement, was once the early punk club The Underground, where the earliest of the early bands in Toronto played:  The Viletones, Teenage Head, and more.   Outside of the Colonial, sadly, was where young shoe-shine boy Emmanuel Jacks was murdered in 1978, marking unofficially the death of “Toronto the Good”.   All the massage parlours and strip clubs on Yonge Street were cleaned up and shut down.  Toronto grew up fast in an ugly way.  Local punk gals The Curse wrote a song about it as the “B” side to “Killer Bees”.   Google it and get a copy.

If you walked up from the Colonial and then down Queen Street West, you’d be in what is now a yuppie-saturated strip of clothing stores and bistros who owe a lot of their current design etc., to that original scene.  The Beverly Tavern, favoured by the Ontario College of Art crowd is now an upscale lunch joint;  the Horsehoe down the street still stands, albeit at half the size it was in its heyday.  Down the street a bit more there’s the Cameron Tavern, which sprouted up into a music joint around 79 or so, and continues to be a haunt for hipsters young and old.  (Kevin Quain lives and plays there and you should see him!)  Finally, whipping down Spadina, across Adelaide and up through a couple of more alleys, you’ll find the building that was home to the Crash ‘n’ Burn for a terrific summer run in 1977.  It’s now a gentrified office building jammed with lawyers.

The R & D team at Pogo H.Q. are making an investigative trip to the Toronto Archives next week where ex-Pogoer Patrick Cummins will clear away the cobwebs, open up the vaults, and let us have a peak at what treasures it might hold.  Watch out for pics in a week or two.

And next week there’s a power-surge of activity on The Last Pogo Jumps Again;  interviews, more editing, and doing this and that and the other thing.

Stay tuned, and don’t touch that google button.

Another typical week at The Garys’ Horseshoe Tavern in 1978

Half of September 1978 at The Garys’ Horseshoe Tavern.

One of the things we wanna do with The Last Pogo Jumps Again is point out the lasting and huge influence the original punk scene has had on everything from music to fashion to art to restaurants … to type fonts.  Check out the lettering on The Dead Boys above;  I’m sure you’ve got a similar font somewhere in the depths of your computer.  The one above was made by attacking some stick-on vinyl letters with an Exacto knife.

These days, of course, creating handbills involves not much more than a few hours at the computer keyboard.  Back in 1976 though, it took a little bit of work and a little bit of skill.   Here’s how Last Pogo director Brunton would’ve made the above handbill.   First, get a blank Horseshoe handbill, and alter “the guy” so he looks dead (as a nod to The Dead Boys) by putting “exes” across his eyes.  (On every Horseshoe handbill, “the guy” was changed a little to reflect one of the bands on the bill, and contrary to rumour, “the guy” is not promoter Gary Topp.)  Cut little strips of paper, get your Sharpie and write in some of the dates and bands.  Then get on your bicycle, and take your strips of paper to Midtown Reproductions in Yorkville, and have them reverse the colour from black on white to white on black.  Ride your bike home, wait a few hours, then go pick them up, pay the $15.00 or so, and get back home.  Paste the strips on.  Take some stick-on letters bought at Canadian Tire, grab your Exacto knife, and cut them up.  Check everything twice, and make sure you haven’t made a spelling error (it is such a sinking feeling when you go through all that and then realize you’ve created The Dad Boys instead of The Dead Boys;  hey, we smoked pot back then, what can we say?).  Then take the “master” and find a printing house that will print deep blacks;  this was never easy;  they’d always get annoyed.  Come back in a couple of hours, pick up the handbills, and then hop on the bike again, and ride around downtown stapling the handbills up on construction sites and telephone poles, careful not violate the unwritten urban rule of never covering up someone else’s handbill.

A couple of weeks at the The Garys’ Horseshoe Tavern in 1978.

The Horseshoe Tavern, circa 1981.  Photo by Hans Boldt.

Photo courtesy Gary Topp

Pogo H.Q. was thrilled and very grateful to get a copy of Dada’s Boys, the short filmmaker Peter Vronsky shot in ’77.   A shit-load of great footage by Vronsky and friends was lost by the CBC in thier inimitable style  — The Viletones‘ first trip to NYC; performances by The Ramones and Dead Boys — but the 30 minutes of footage existing is great:  interviews with legendary manager/photographer/journalist Danny Fields;  a twenty-year old Steven Leckie;  The Dishes’ and a key player, co-writing tunes for The Demics and The Viletones and much more, Stephen Davies;  a running discourse on “punk rock”  by Toronto Star critic Peter Goddard and Gary Cormier of The Garys (Toronto promoters Topp and Cormier); and odds and sods of shots at the Crash ‘n ‘ Burn and The Garys’ New Yorker Theatre in Toronto, and CBGB‘s in NYC, performances by The Viletones and Diodes….  Peter — thanks again.

Peter’s done a lot of shooting and writing in the past thirty years, and you can check it out at his website at http://www.russianbooks.org.  Lee Harvey Oswald, espionage, Toronto crime, Vietnam war vets, serial killers, the Third Reich, the American Civil War — and other fun stuff.

It’s been a rotten few months in the world of old-skool punk.  In October, Teenage Head singer Frankie Venom died from throat cancer;  in January, Stooges’ guitarist Ron Asheton passed away from a heart attack, and today Lux Interior, frontman of ground-breaking psychobilly punk rockers The Cramps died in an L.A. hospital from a pre-exisiting heart problem.  His wife and original guitarist Poison Ivy issued a statement today.

We here at Pogo H.Q. were fortunate enough to see The Cramps in action in 1977 at NYC’s Max’s Kansas City, and later at the Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto.  Totally entertaining, frightening to those who didn’t get the joke, and incapable of a dull moment, The Cramps were fun and rocked, playing punked up rockabily with straight-faces and tongues slightly in cheeks, murdering it with the same intensity that The Gun Club inflicted on the blues (a common denominator of both bands being guitarist Kid Congo Powers.)   One of the many bits of memorabilia that we’ve lost over the years was the original Cramps’ business card, a campy ’50′ish card with the phrase “Will play weddings and parties!”.  We fondly remember  Lux Interior in Toronto, ripping down the handmade sequined horseshoe (that Gary “The Garys” Cormier’s then wife Martha Harron made) stitched to the backdrop of the stage at the Horseshoe, and legend has it, getting it on with one of The Curse in a gutter near the Crash ‘n’ Burn.  Good times.

July ’78 Horseshoe handbill by Colin Brunton; courtesy Imants Krumins

Ripped off from MTV:

“Born Erick Lee Purkhiser, Interior started the Cramps in 1972 with guitarist Poison Ivy (born Kristy Wallace, later his wife) — whom, as legend has it, he picked up as a hitchhiker in California. By 1975, they had moved to New York, where they became an integral part of the burgeoning punk scene surrounding CBGBs.

Their music differed from most of the scene’s other acts in that it was heavily steeped in camp, with Interior’s lyrics frequently drawing from schlocky B-movies, sexual kink and deceptively clever puns. (J.H. Sasfy’s liner notes to their debut EP memorably noted: “The Cramps don’t pummel and you won’t pogo. They ooze; you’ll throb.”) Sonically, the band drew from blues and rockabilly, and a key element of their sound was the trashy, dueling guitars of Poison Ivy and Bryan Gregory (and later Kid Congo Powers), played with maximal scuzz and minimal drumming.

Because of that — not to mention Interior’s deranged, Iggy Pop-inspired onstage antics and deep, sexualized singing voice (which one reviewer described as “the psychosexual werewolf/ Elvis hybrid from hell”) — the Cramps are often cited as pioneers of “psychobilly” and “horror rock,” and can count bands like the Black Lips, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, the Reverend Horton Heat, the Horrors and even the White Stripes as their musical progeny.

Over the course of more than 30 years, the Interior and Ivy surrounded themselves with an ever-changing lineup of drummers, guitarists and bassists, and released 13 studio albums (the last being 2003′s Fiends of Dope Island). They also famously performed a concert for patients at the Napa State Mental Hospital in 1978 (which was recorded on grainy VHS and has since become a cult classic) and appeared on a Halloween episode of “Beverly Hills, 90210.” Their video for the song “Bikini Girls With Machine Guns” also drew rave reviews from Beavis and Butt-head on a memorable episode of the show.

Despite the band’s long history, fans generally agree that the group’s peak was in the early ’80s, with the albums Songs the Lord Taught Us and Psychedelic Jungle. Many clips of the Cramps’ chaotic live shows from the era can be found online; look for their version of “Tear It Up” from the 1980 film “URGH! A Music War.” One memorable (and typical) show in Boston in 1986 found Interior, clad only in leopard-skin briefs, drinking red wine from an audience member’s shoe, and ended with him French-kissing a woman (who wasn’t his wife) for 10 full minutes with his microphone in their mouths.

Due to their imagery, obsession with kitsch and dogged dedication to touring — they wrapped up their latest jaunt across Europe and the U.S. this past November — the Cramps commanded a loyal fanbase, and even earned a spot in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in the form of a shattered bass drum that Interior had shoved his head through.”

(Hey — we don’t mind cribbing notes from MTV, because they’re assholes.  Do you think they ever played The Cramps in the past twenty-years?   Or The Stooges, or Teenage Head?  Or even mentioned them?  We here at Pogo H.Q. got our taste of it when we tried to drum up interest in The Last Pogo dvd release.  We were stonewalled and duffed off with an assistant chuckled “Uh, what?  You want us to cover a thirty year old film by a fifty-three-year-old guy?  Riiiiiight.”)

But enough about us.  Well, okay maybe a bit more about us.  To trace back the threads of Lux’s death to The Last Pogo Jumps Again in a kind of Kevin Bacony six-degrees-of-separation thing:  a decade after finishing The Last Pogo, in 1990, co-director Colin Brunton produced his second feature film, Highway 61 (on the heels of producing Roadkill with director Bruce McDonald, and with a cameo by Joey Ramone) and after securing funding partly on the basis that Iggy Pop was going to play a character, was flabbergasted and majorly pissed-off when Iggy reneged at the last minute.   The film that swelled Iggy’s head was a part n a John Waters movie.  Back in 1976, a couple of years before The Last Pogo legendary Toronto Promoter Gary Topp of The Garys called up filmmaker John Waters after watching Amos Poe’s Blank Generation and Night Lunch at the New Yorker in 1976 and urged him to check out this new thing called punk rock.  A month later and the Ramones would be playing the New Yorker;  two years later Waters would cast the late and legendary Dead Boys lead singer Stiv Bators as Bo-Bo Belsinger in Polyester starring Divine, and years later Iggy Pop in Crybaby.

Back to 1990 and Highway 61.  After Iggy dropped out, Brunton went into a frenzy of letters, faxes, and phone calls and tried to come up with someone –  anyone — who could replace Iggy, and who had enough street cred, and who would fit in — and hope it got the Highway 61 team out of the jam.  (The day the news that Iggy was dropping out happened, the producers got a call from the BBC, who were putting up some of the money.  After “How are you?” and “How’s everything going?” it was all  “And you’ve still got Iggy Pop in the film, is that right?” and we’re all like “…there might be a scheduling problem, gotta go!”   They had two weeks to get out of the mess, and if the BBC money fell through because they didn’t have a “name”, the rest of the financing would tumble like dominoes, and not only would we they be in a world of hurt, money-wise, but boy, would their faces be red!

The Highway 61 wish list to replace Iggy at the last minute was The Cramps‘  Lux Interior, The Sex Pistol’s Johnny Rotten and Joey Ramone — but Joey was busy, and Lux and Johnny Rotten could not be found, no way no how.   They got turned down by the likes of David Byrne, Keith Richards (touring with some other middle-aged guys that summer) Alice Cooper (who was flattered but booked), Elvis Costello (booked for the next three years), and Ozzy Osbourne (who sent a charming note with genuine Ozzy stationary explaining that “It’s hard enough being a rock star let alone trying to become an actor”)  and ended up casting Canadian Art Bergmann, who was on the original cast wish list before they’d thought of “star power” like Iggy.  And Art is still alive ‘n’ kicking on the west coast, and he did a great job.

R.I.P. Lux, and The “Black” Donnellys, the infamous family from Lucan, Ontario who were beaten to death by a gang of thirty men — in part organized by the town priest and local constable — at the stroke of midnight on this day in 1880.  Lux Interior, meet Tom Donnelly, Canada’s first punk.  Tom, meet Lux.

If making the original The Last Pogo were some sort of test, then we did well by getting an A++++ by PunkGlobe.com’s Ginger Coyote.   Ginger is a member of the late-eighties punk band White Trash Debutantes, which besides opening for The Ramones, Green Day, Blondie and The Offspring, playing with Jello Biafra and more, once invited naughty figure skater Tonya Harding to join the band, and at one point had 85-year-old Patty Pierce in the line-up.    Check out cool news, links, gossip and reviews on the site punkglobe.com.   And then, of course, go out and purchase your very own copy of The Last Pogo to keep you interested until we complete our feature film The Last Pogo Jumps Again this yearl.