The Last Pogo Jumps Again

Okay, not quite yet, but here’s hoping.   Original Viletone Freddy Pompeii has been starting to lobby his Facebook pals to nominate The Viletones to Canada’s Walk of Fame.

Haven’t heard of it? Don’t worry, you ain’t missing much.   The Research & Development Division of The Last Pogo Jumps Again haven’t been too deep into any sort of investigation or anything, but something’s kind of rotten in Denmark when apart from usual suspects like Rush and Celine Dion, they’ve also managed to have American born actor Brendan Fraser‘s signature set in concrete for all of us Canadians to be … proud of?   Well, golly, sure thing, why not!?  After all, he played an uncredited role as “Placebo Patient” in fellow Walk of Famers’ Kids in the Hall‘s movie Brain Candy, and literally not taking credit for that, well that’s very Canadian.  He furthered an embarrassing stereotype by playing Dudley Do-Right in the film of the same name, and we’re pretty sure the mind-blowingly offensive Al Jolson‘s got a spot on the Hollywood walk, so that seems to fit.   And he went to the snot-filled halls of the fancy-pants Upper Canada College, so there.   Okay, okay, we’re sure Brendan’s a nice guy, but we think the jury’s a little out to lunch on this one.  I mean,  Talking Heads‘ singer David Byrne lived in Hamilton for a little bit when he was a kid — does he qualify?  And what about The Rolling Stones?  They live in Toronto for weeks at a time whenever they get set to tour.   Steppenwolf‘s lead singer, German-born John Kay fronted Toronto band The Sparrow, what about him?  (Oh, wait, he’s there too.)

So while we can off-hand think of a couple of dozen artists and such that we’d like to nominate (author David McFadden, Gary Topp, the guy who used to yell “Doggie Doggie” at the Ex) nominating such an iconic band as The Viletones would be somewhat fucking hilarious and well-deserved, and you just know the acceptance speech by Steve Leckie, Chris Haight, Motor X and Freddy (and second and third gen ‘tones like Sam Ferrara, Tony Torture, Steve Koch and on and on) would put a hearty eff you in the fun it would be.

The deal is, is that you can only nominate one person per year, and since this ball seems to be rolling along, why doncha take five minutes out of your day, cut and paste this link — http://www.canadaswalkoffame.com/nomination– and let’s see if we can stir things up in 2010.   Gabba gabba hey-o!

The New Yorker box-office, September 1976;  photo by Brad Foster (we think.)

Continuing to organize the archives at Pogo H.Q., the better to get set for some fancy footwork during post-production of The Last Pogo Jumps Again, we came across this photo of the New Yorker box-office.  Very top left you can see the handbill for the first Ramones show that artist John Pearson did with a sharpie in about fifteen minutes.  Beside that, a flyer for Ali Akbar Khan;  on the right side, a one-sheet for Paul Bartel’s Private Parts (awesome!);  below that the seating plan for the shows (not a bad seat in the house, yo);  centre bottom a great shot of Bryan Ferry from the first show Roxy Music did at Massey Hall, and placed in the window of the box-office for no other reason than the fact we loved Bryan.   And dead center, the double-bill that was currently playing — and an announcement of the Ramones gig that upcoming Saturday.

A pig farmer is showing off his farm to a visitor.  He points out a huge pig, glowing with health, lounging in the corner of his stall (which was, frankly, a pigsty, hyuk hyuk hyuk.)  The visitor asks him why the pig looks so much better than the others.  “Well,” said the farmer, “This here’s my favourite.  I feed the other pigs plain old slop, but this one’s going to be a prize-winning pig, and I treat her right.  So what I do every morning is walk her out to the apple orchard.  We search the trees for only the freshest apples — I won’t feed her one that’s bruised or wormy — and we go like this from tree to tree to tree until she’s finally full.”   The visitor was stunned.  “Uh…doesn’t that take an awfully long time?”  The farmer chuckled and shrugged his shoulders.   “What’s time to a pig?!”

Which is a long way of saying that The Last Pogo Jumps Again has become a bit of pig;  we’ve been feeding her goodies since June 2006, and she’s getting nice and fat — but soon it will be time for the slaughter when we chop her portly four-hour length in half,  killing babies and moving on.  (“Killing babies” is a term editors and filmmakers use when they have to edit out parts that are great but just not what the doctor ordered.)

Odds & sods: we grabbed a noisy interview with Walter Lure (of The Heartbreakers & Waldo fame) at Sneaky Dees last night; he was backed by Teenage Head’s Steve Mahon and Gord Lewis, with Battered Blue Screwed drummer Cleave Anderson, and Steve Saint helping out on vocals;  Alex Topp sat in and played keyboards for openers New York Junk, featuring home-town beauty queen and former B-Girl Cynthia Ross…the cut line for The Last Pogo Jumps Again is going to be “A Biased and Incomplete History of Toronto/Hamilton/London, Ontario Punk Rock from September 24, 1976 to December 1, 1978″….

Discovered a new blogger called Son of Spam who blogged a story about John-Paul Young and The Cardboard Brains in Model Citizen Zero Discipline, and added them to the links…Andy Ramesh Meyers continues his Saturday night radio show from 7 to 9 on cfsi-fm.com, and ponders the five date tour coming up with his band The Scenics…spoke to Nash the Slash yesterday to confirm that he got his name from Laurel & Hardy‘s short film Do Detectives Think?;  after noodling on the ‘net for a bit, the Pogo Research & Development Department discovered that it was actually a narrator of a 1960′s compilation of Laurel & Hardy movies who may have erroneously called the character Nash the Slash; our researchers discovered that the character’s name was actually called The Tipton Slasher;   we’ve since been in contact with a Laurel and Hardy expert who is trying to find out what the deal is…

The Tipton Slasher (a.k.a. Nash the Slash);  photographer unknown.

Hey, big thanks to Henry Martinuk for digging up this torn and frayed Bollocks poster for us here at Pogo H.Q.

Bollocks was a short film made by The Last Pogo Jumps Again co-director Colin Brunton and Elizabeth Aikenhead, when they were taking a film course in 1977 at the now-demised Toronto Filmmakers’ Co-op.   Good times! We dragged our somewhat reluctant teacher, Patrick Lee (who would later jump in to help Brunton make The Last Pogo) down to Club David’s on Hallowe’en (anyone got a poster of that gig?) to shoot The Viletones and The Ugly — and all manner of punk irregulars who hung out there.   We got shots of a guy horking in another guy’s palm, and then another guy slurping it up;  Viletone Chris Haight (proud pappy of The Last Pogo Jumps Again co-director Kire Paputts) sticking his head in a noose;  Wayne “The Gothic Cowboy” Brown sticking his head in a noose and other such fun antics.   Using a live rat borrowed from a pet store, we recreated the back cover of The Stranglers’ first album, and made a huge plastic safety pin that burgeoning artist Alex “Runt” Currie then wore like an arrow-through-the-head gag.

Having the original negative of Bollocks safely in our hands again (long ugly story), all we’ve gotta do is find a sympathetic lab who’ll be able to slip on some hermetically-sealed kid gloves and carefully get a new print made, ’cause we’ve got a cool idea of how to incorporate this into the epic “Chinese Democracy” of Punk Feature Films, The Last Pogo Jumps Again:  A Biased and Incomplete History of Toronto/Hamilton/London, Ontario Punk Rock from September 24, 1976 to December 1, 1978.