Pogo H.Q. has closed down for the holidays, but we’ll be back at it in January 2010, slowly putting all the pieces together and getting our labour of love, The Last Pogo Jumps Again: A Biased & Incomplete History Of Toronto Punk Rock Circa September 24 1976 To December 1 1978 ready for public consumption.
Hey ho ho ho!
On-line memorabilia traders Molten Core gave us a bootleg of the first Ramones show in Toronto — the precise moment the time-line our project The Last Pogo Jumps Again: A Biased & Incompleat History of Toronto Hamilton London Ontario Punk Rock Circa September 24 1976 to December 1 1978, Part One — starts.
Randy Johnston had had the incredible foresight to interview people in the audience that night (September 24, 1976) at the New Yorker Theatre and ask them what they thought of The Ramones.
Peter Gabriel didn’t like the Ramones?! Whaaa?!
Randy didn’t catch Peter Gabriel (he’d walked out ten minutes into the show, muttering “Bullshit,”) but he did manage to catch glam-rock band Goddo‘s own Greg Godovitz. After wondering how “…a lead-singer from New Yawk could have such a good English accent…” he summed up his impressions with a simple “They’re no Goddo.”
So today we called Greg on it (yo, bitch!) — and to talk about how he got Joey Shithead‘s pre-D.O.A. band The Skulls their first gig in Toronto’s beloved shit-hole The Gasworks. Greg had a million stories. Sex, Drugs & Rock ‘n’ Roll, much?
Hey, the Holidays are coming! What better way, etc. $12.00! Cheap!
“Greg has stories that would make Caligula blush,” said Toronto legend Rompin’ Ronnie Hawkins and you can read them in Greg’s self-penned memoir and awesomely titled Travels With My Amp (which you can be sure kicks Anvil‘s Steven Spielberg-financed book’s ass.) Now in it’s third printing — buy it at This Ain’t The Rosedale Library.
Our favourite stories were of Greg’s best trick: climbing out the back door window of a car going a 150 klicks on the 401, then crawling across the roof of the car, and slipping into the window on the other side. At 150 klicks an hour. Really. Read the book.
Goddo slipped out of the skin-tight silver pants of glam-rock pop band Fludd in 1975 when the core gang of punks in Toronto were fretting about where to buy black jeans and wising up to Patti Smith, The Dictators, The Ramones, et al.
But like Max Webster and F.M. (w/Nash the Slash), while they might not have fit perfectly with the trends and rules, they fit into the scene — especially with Hamilton’s Teenage Head.
Roxy matchbook cover courtesy of Gary Topp. Greg was a Roxy regular.
Goddo and Max Webster have both toured with them, and Nash the Slash was supposed to join them at The Last Pogo, but he broke his hand and couldn’t make it.
Nash’s electric mandolin repaired faster than his hand.
Callum Keith Rennie screams at Maurice Dean Wint in Curtis’ Charm
“It’s time to shine your shoes, it’s time to comb your hair,” ’cause there’s a double-bill (described by Eye Magazine as “scrappy“) at the Art Gallery of Ontario tonight, Tuesday October 20: John L’ecuyer’s Curtis’ Charm and our very own The Last Pogo will be screened at Jackman Hall, presented by TIFF CInematheque in a program called Toronto on Film. $10.14 for non-members
members/students/seniors are $5.90
Not the real cover of the heroin memoir Use Once And Destroy, by John L’ecuyer
Curtis’ Charm is a tight seventy-five minute adaptation of the late great Jim Carroll‘s short story of the same name. Blending fantasy and reality, and shot in glorious black & white, Curtis’ Charm is about the low-living high-life of heroin addict Curtis (played by Maurice Dean Wint from Hedwig & The Angry Inch) and ex-junkie Jim (Callum Keith Rennie from Hard Core Logo, natch) who tries to help Curtis ward off a voodoo curse inflicted upon him by his mother-in-law, no shit. Ex-Headstone and current Movie & TV Star Hugh Dillon plays a White Trash Thug, and a gritty Toronto plays itself.
Real Haitian voodoo priest; photo by Frank Polyak
Getting the opening gig that night is The Last Pogo, and they’ll be using a nice clean 16mm print (remember 16mm kids?) that’s only been used once at the NXNE screening in 2008. Prior to that, The Last Pogo had been screened at local legend Reg Hartt’s Cineforum, and in a hilarious blunder of epic profuckingportions, booked to open for – wait for it — Richard Pryor: Live in Concert at the original Cineplex at the Eaton’s Centre (it was pulled after two weeks because of “violent, negative reaction.”)
Handbill for Reg Hartt’s Cineforum in 1979. If you look closely, you’ll see that the punk in the picture has a hard-on. Reg was convinced that this detail would subconsciously attract women to the screening.
The idea was that…uh…they were both concert films, right? So like, buses full of African-Americans tourists from Buffalo and Detroit would dig the musical stylings of White Punks on Dope, right? Not so much! Brunton remembers going to a screening of it and sitting in the packed audience behind a couple of ladies, eavesdropping on this gem: “What the hell is this shit?! They otta pay us five bucks to watch this shit! Fuck this, I’m goin’ for popcorn!”
The Last Pogo had only been on for about, oh, five minutes; the appearance of Viletone Freddy Pompeii was the last straw. Little did they know the film went on for another twenty minutes. For the remainder of the screening Brunton and his pal pretty much had the auditorium to themselves; everyone else was at the snack bar. Gabba gabba hey-o!
The original flyer by John Pearson.
Filmmakers John L’Ecuyer and Colin Brunton will be in attendance to introduce the films and sell some swag. Immediately prior to the screening, they’ll be hanging out at the side door smoking butts and glad-handing suits in a pathetically blatant attempt to engage deep-pockets in conversations about money (and how to get it!) for a variety of totally interesting and culturally important yet not-so-mainstream projects they’re individually working on.
The fun starts at nine. Jackman Hall is in the AGO, 317 Dundas Street West; use the McCaul Street entrance.
The original press release written by Gary Topp, badly rewritten by Colin Brunton
A phrase that could mean different things for different people (and I mean you!) Suffice to say, here at Pogo H.Q. we’re ramping up all of our work on The Last Pogo Jumps Again, and hope to picture lock this winter, and then go through the grueling post-production phase and get this sucker out there in 2010.
While co-director Brunton makes his yearly pilgrimage to Indian Head, Saskatchewan, directing and editing duties will be handed off to co-director Kire Paputts. Holed up in his Super-8 Motel (now with touch-tone phones!) Brunton hopes to dig up some more gold vis a vis lost and forgotten footage of Toronto in 1976 – 1978. The more ya dig, the better you feel (beans beans at every meal.) Kire’s got a whopper of a line-up of people to catch up with, and even though sometimes it seems as though Everyone In The Universe is only a half-dozen degrees of seperation from either Kevin Bacon or ye olde punke scene, we do gotta call it quits at some point, so we’ll be doing our best to wrap things up.
Text from Neuromancer; tattoo by Nigel Palmer, Temple Tatu, Brighton, England.
Of course, there’s always the wish list of celebs we’d love to get to spice up attention and beef up the cred, and that takes relentless pursuit and tons ‘o’ luck. People like: Novelist William Gibson (“Was it the Toronto punk scene that inspired you to use both Screaming Fist and New Rose in Neuromancer?”); Sting (“A lot of people claim to have been at The Police’s debut at the Horseshoe Tavern in 1978. Were you there?”), and Punky Dogfathers Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, and John Cale.
The Dead Boys’ Stiv Bators; photo copyright/courtesy of Rodney Bowes
We’re still on the hunt for any footage of Toronto circa 1976 – 1978, especially y’know, punky stuff — and we’re still scouring the archives etc for stills of some of the old Toronto clubs from back then: Crash ‘n’ Burn, Horseshoe, New Yorker, Davids, Turning Point and all the others that we’ve missed. So don’t be shy!
Until next time…
Steven Segal and a panda. Copyright HimalayanExpeditions.com
After sending nasty emails to Radio Silence in NYC, about some show in Toronto featuring The Last Pogo they were promoting, but that we’d never been informed of (hello!), we’ve cleared it all up. The Radio Silence folks were associated with a Toronto company called Embrace Presents who got permission from our p.r. guy, but he either forgot to tell us or we forgot he told us, but then the show couldn’t happen anyway because there was a Pillow League fight set happening that night and blah blah blah. After chatting with all parties, all is cool, and there may be a screening sometime this fall.
Decent maxima mea culpas all around.
Go Blue Jays!
Last weekend we spent a few hours going over some of the hundreds of hours of footage we’ve compiled since starting to shoot The Last Pogo Jumps Again three years ago — and this not counting the equally humungous pile ‘o’ footage that co-director Aldo Erdic has, nor the batch of footage we’ve dug up from other filmmakers and broadcasters.
Compelling, hilarious, occasionally heart-breaking — and with lots of interesting chatter, we certainly have enough stuff for a feature — but are greedy for more. But as much as we’re intent on continuing to search for more footage of Toronto, the “talking heads” aren’t as static as we’d originally feared. We’ve been in contact with various Toronto filmmakers who were active back in the late seventies, and still trying to grab as much footage as we can to make our deadline of finishing this sucker sometime in 2010 (hey, good things take time.) As we’ve noted before, Toronto was and is rich in some pretty great artists, filmmakers and photographers and so hats off to all of you. (You know who you are.)
For 99% of the Toronto rock audience, Toronto 1977.
We’re not just looking for any super-8, 16mm, and/or video footage of bands from ’76 – ’78, we’re on the hunt for virtually any footage of Toronto back then. Local filmmaker Alan Zweig has joined the fray lately and is crawling through his attic looking for some 16mm footage of — whoo-eee! – Yonge Street from 1976; King of Super-8 John Porter is chatting with us about some way-cool pixellated stuff he shot; today documentary master Ron Mann has filled us in on some stuff he shot in 1978. This stuff is gold.
It’s the kind of footage we’d run underneath someone’s interview, and we’ll be able to remind ourselves just how many people back then had mullets, flares, and cowboy boots. We’re not so much deep-pocketed, but at the least we can promise you a snazzy 21st century DVD dub, and you get your name in the credits of a bona-fide motion picture. Home movies, commercials, industrials, errors, omissions, whatever — we need your stuff!
Voyage par la route! This weekend Kire Paputts packed up the Pogomobile and headed off to Montreal for some R & R, and to spend sometime with Bongo Beat’s Ralph Alfonso. We hope to get Ralph to fill in the blanks on some questions we have about The Diodes, his publication of Liz Worth’s “oral history of Toronto Punk and beyond”, Treat Me Like Dirt as well as our usual inquiries. (Six degrees of separation note: the cover graphics of Treat Me was done by Marc Duboisson who in the mid nineties was on a couple of awesome East York Little League ball-teams, ineptly coached by Last Pogoer Colin Brunton.) Cover photos by the one, the only, the Don Pyle, who is also the young dude on the cover, and edited by Gary Pig Gold. Cha-cha-cha!
At The Last Pogo 30th Birthday Bash in November 2008, original Viletone (and one of the first founding fathers of Toronto punk) Steven Leckie spoke of the huge influence Gary Topp, The Garys, and Gary Topp’s rep movie theatres the Original 99 Cent Roxy and New Yorker Theatre had on him. With a creaky memory (and not having instant access to the footage), to paraphrase Leckie:
“I remember more lines of dialogue from A Clockwork Orange than I do things my father told me.”
This seemed appropriate to mention, since yesterday staffers at Pogo H.Q. were feeling a twinge of the old ultra-violence when it came to our attention that something in NYC called Radio Silence had arranged the Toronto Weekend, a screening at an undisclosed Toronto location of punky films Not Dead Yet and The Last Pogo. And we hadn’t been informed, which is beyond rude. However, Nathan from Radio Silence sent us a note this morning, and they are innocent! (We’ll post later about the conclusion to the confusion.)
The staff at Pogo H.Q. contemplate visiting Radio Silence people in NYC.
Kat Citroen, touring her art show in Germany with husband Richard Citroen (ex-drummer boy of The Diodes) sent us these pics from the Ramones Museum in Berlin. Kat promises to bring The Last Pogo Jumps Again crew a Ramones Museum bumper sticker to adorn the Pogomobile. Heil, ho!
Yuppers. Three years ago today we started shooting our feature documentary The Last Pogo Jumps Again. We’ve amassed a hundred plus hours of interviews; secured yards of rare footage of the “never before seen” variety; and have jammed our external drives with tons ‘o’ jpgs. We’ve captured a dozen or so sets of old-school bands from the back in the day, and watched as our hard-drive collapsed in a fit and die on the floor. The Last Pogo Jumps Again survived, and will be released sometime when we’re about four or so.
Kire wearing the colours at the Berlin Wall
Co-director Kire Paputts is hard at it, piecing together all the stuff and trying to make sense (or not) of it. Co-director Aldo Erdic is finding bits of time between shooting his own stuff to compile the many hours of footage he has, the goldmine being the pile of stuff he’s shot of Greg Dicks‘ interviews on CIUT-FM’s Equalizing Distort series: Viletones, Ugly, Mods, Zero4, Teenage Head, and a screwy let’s-bail-before it gets any worse debacle with The Scenics.
Co-director Brunton is focusing on getting the last interviews, and flogging The Last Pogo dvd (only three cartons left people! Hurry up and order already!) We’re also trying to get our hands on some pretty awesome footage holed up in the archives of the CBC and MuchMusic; stuff we’re sure you’ve seen on your Internet Machine — but that would be great to see, y’know, full screen and only second-generation. At a hundred bucks a second, it’s a little intimidating, but we’re doing our best dripping honey in The Man‘s ear, hoping to catch a break.
Make sure you hit The Ugly, The Mods, The Superstitions and DJ OPP tonight, and keep on keepin’ on.
Homemade pin courtesy of Deirdre Wear
A G-Man came to the door of Pogo H.Q. today and hand-delivered a package from the hinterlands (east coast) that contained a bunch of cool jpgs of photos ‘n’ stuff, so a big thanks to Deirdre Wear. If anyone out there reading this is in the mainland Maritimes, and you’ve got a nice video camera, etc., give us a buzz — Deirdre has shared some great stories with us via the Internet Machine, and it would be cool to get her on tape.
The Mods, back in the day; photo Dierdre Wear.
There might be a few tickets left for the show this week at Sneaky Dee’s in Toronto: The Ugly, The Mods and The Superstitions, with DJ O.P.P. The fun starts at nine. Founding Punk Godfathers Steve Koch, Tony Torture, Sam Ferrara and Greg Dick (in lieu of the late, great Mike NIghtmare) are The Ugly, and all of the original members of The Mods — Greg Trinier, David Quinton, Scott Marks, and Mark Dixon — will be there. Word on the street is that first band up The Superstitions will be taking names and kickin’ ass. And if that ain’t enough, DJ O.P.P. will be spinning gold on turntables. Plus beer, old friends, etc.
Dierdre Wear, back in the day, courtesty Dierdre Wear.
This weekend’s gig with The Ugly, The Mods and The Superstitions coincides with the third birthday/whatever of our work-in-progress The Last Pogo Jumps Again. It was three years ago we got the idea to start hunting down all the bands and fans from the early punk days in Toronto, and our first day of shooting was June 6, 2006 (for those keeping satanic score, that’d be, weirdly, 6/6/06.) We’re still going strong-ish. There’s still a bit of shooting to do — what would a film about Toronto punk be without so-and-so and whats-her-name — and we continue to collect jpgs of photos, while flaunting the dvd of the original movie that ultimately spawned this one, The Last Pogo. Big thanks to everyone out there who’s been sending in stuff and lending a hand.
