The Last Pogo Jumps Again

On Wednesday afternoon producer/director Colin Brunton hooked up with ex-Mod, ex-Dead Boy, and current musician/legal beagle David Quinton-Steinberg, braved the freaks on Yonge Street, and dropped into CFNY-FM to have a chat with Dave “Bookie” Bookman for this week’s “Indie Hour”. It was weird to be back on Yonge Street.

For those of you who don’t know Toronto, Yonge Street (at 1896 kilometers, the longest street in the world, yo!) has a secret trail of blood that marks some moments for fans of that original first-wave of punk in 1976.

The New Yorker Theatre up by Bloor Street was where Garys Cormier and Topp formed their now-legendary promotion team The Garys; Nash the Slash was the manager; Last Pogo director/producer Colin Brunton was his assistant. The Garys famously brought the likes of The Ramones, Talking Heads, John Cale, Jayne County and many more to Toronto and kick-started an awesome few years. First blood was spilled at the New Yorker when Brunton got stabbed in the leg throwing out an unruly patron from a Marx Brothers double-bill (the knife only managed to go in a quarter of an inch, but it’s the thought that counts). He later went to Kingston jail for a few months.

Up the street from the New Yorker was the Masonic Temple, home of the infamous “Restricted” concert (now the home of Canadian Idol, lol) in and abouts March/April 1978 (thanks for the fact-checking, Steve Travis!) where ex-lead singer of The Wads, Paul Eknes, singing for the first time in front of an audience, got nailed in the head with a full bottle of Red Cap. Bloodied, bowed, but then unbowed, he’s still got the scar to prove it, and of course he finished the song, stupid! His trip to the hospital after was right after the one for the guy who dove from the top balcony to the floor, hoping the crowd would catch him, and then being seriously disappointed.

Across and down the street from CFNY is the site of now-demolished (why must we always hurt the ones we love?) Colonial Tavern. Apart from being arguably the best jazz club in Toronto, the basement room was dubbed “The Underground” in 1977, which is where we all watched the debut of The Viletones: everyone stoned on poppers watching Steven “Nazi Dog” Leckie mutilate himself with a broken beer bottle. A few weeks after that, Teenage Head tested the new punk waters by playing there, but Long John Baldry was playing upstairs and didn’t take kindly to the “noise” coming from the basement. He promptly dispatched roadies armed with pool cues and they opened a six-pack of whoop-ass: we’ve got a copy of the Toronto Sun that shows an unconscious Paul Kobak (then manager of Teenage Head) bleeding on the floor of the club. Later at the cop shop, Paul Eknes and a few others got freezing cold feet when asked to i.d. the roadies in a line-up.

Sadly the bloody history of punk on Yonge Street doesn’t end there: in 1977 shoe-shine boy Emmanual Jacks was the victim of a sordid murder on the top floor of a building a few doors down, prompting the clean up of Yonge Street and the closing down of the massage parlours and the Times Square Junior vibe, and putting to bed the notion of Toronto as an innocent. Local all-girl punk band The Curse (one of the top ten we’ve still got to interview) later wrote and recorded a single (one of the best recordings from that era) about this black mark in Toronto’s history called “Shoeshine Boy”. The six-degrees-of-separation twist is that director Brunton had an encounter with 12-year-old Emmanuel Jacks the summer before. Waiting to sneak into the club (down the alley, up the fire-escape) to watch jazz-man Rahsaan Roland Kirk play two saxes at once, he was approached by Jacks who asked him: “I’ll bet you a dollar I can tell you where you got your shoes”. Brunton told him to go for it, and paid for the one-dollar punchline: “You got your shoes on your feet, mister!”.

Just down the road from CFNY was where Brunton, driving taxi in the eighties, spotted the unmistakable silhouette of one Joey Ramone, McDonalds bag in hand, trying to hail a cab fifty yards away. Brunton quickly talked his fares out of the cab, put the pedal to the metal and snatched up Joey, his brother Johnny, and a girlfriend up to their hotel in Scarborough after a gig at the El Mocambo. Stopping for mix at a 7-11 at Coxwell and Gerrard, Johnny and Joey freaked out the local youths hanging out in the lot, and obligingly signed autographs for them all.

But we digress! In the studio Bookie raved about The Last Pogo and gave it a number of plugs in his rapid-fire patter (it’s closing NXNE on June 15th, 5:30, 150 John Street). We played some Mods and Teenage Head and then it was adios amigo, and on to his chat with David Quinton-Steinberg and an associate from his law firm handing out free legal advise for indie musicians. We were lucky enough to her some of the new recordings of old tunes by The Mods, coming soon, and it sounds great.

For more on this years’s NXNE, go to nxne.com. For more on The Last Pogo or The Last Pogo Jumps Again, keep checking in.

The Last Pogo Jumps Again director on the left coast — Tristan Orchard — spent some time Saturday interviewing Nardwuar the Human Serviette. Good pal of Snoop Dog and The White Stripes and others, and a pest to some (Beck, Alice Cooper), Nardwuar’s talent is his well-researched and quirky interviews with Pop Culture types. Not to diminish his thing as singer/songwriter for venerable B.C. band The Evaporaters, you’ve got to watch some of Nardwuar’s interviews to get it: go to YouTube, punch in “Nardwuar”, and be entertained and impressed for a couple of hours.

Nardwuar was only a little feller in grade school when last pogo’ed in 1978, but he had to be in the new film for a few reasons: he’s a punk rock historian (as a JFK assassination scholar); he looks cool; his band The Evaporaters wrote a song inspired by Last Pogo band The Cardboard Brains; he’s interviewed Teenage Head. And he’s funny and a nice guy.

We’d already gotten some footage of The Evaporaters doing the Cardboard Brains song a year ago, and yesterday we finally synched up our schedules and did the interview proper. Dressed in his Canada suit, Nardwuar gave us his take on all things punk — and then ran around an art gallery reciting verses from said Cardboard Brains song to various people.

We hit the NXNE press conference/launch last night, and ran into Last Pogoers Gordie Lewis from Teenage Head and Vince Carlucci from the Cardboard Brains. Fast Eddie Smith snapped shots as we were deluged by a constant flow of eats and beers, and it was all pretty crammed and jammed. Kudos to Liz Anderson of Flip for doing such a decent job of promotion. Apart from hearing the low-down on the run-down of all the bands ‘n’ stuff, we ran into a few more ghosts from the past including Virginia Kelly of VK and Associates, and filmmaker Bruce McDonald.

We caught word that Hugh Cornwell of The Stranglers is going to be at NXNE to show off his new movie, and so we’re gonna have to try and track him down during the frenzy of the fest; one of the most memorable of the relentlessly awesome shows at the Horseshoe in 1978 was The Stranglers blowing the roof off the joint to an overflow crowd of 500+.

Meanwhile, back at Pogo HQ, co-director Kire Paputts is busily transferring the 150 hours of footage we’ve compiled since we started shooting The Last Pogo Jumps Again back in June 2006. On top of this footage, we’ve got miles (er…kilometres) of archival footage, some never-before-seen footage of The Last Pogo, and a growing pile of photos and handbills. Finally, in sad news, all-round helper-dude Ollie Brunton confessed that he skipped history at his high-school yesterday. We’ll have to see if his grounding affects the shooting we have planned for this weekend. Because no one loads a camera and fiddles with a tripod quite like Ollie.

And just for shits ‘n’ giggles, we dug up the above photo from a cardboard box deep in the catacombs (i.e. basement) of Pogo HQ. For those of you who didn’t have the pleasure of meeting Mr. Ramone he was the proverbial nicest guy you’ll ever meet.

After a month of down-time, we’re back with a slightly slicked up and slimmed down website and all the stuff we’ve been doing since we last left you in March…

While we gone, The Scenics snuck into town. With Andy Meyers on the left coast on Salt Spring Island and the other Scenics scattered around southern Ontario, rehearsals were taped in Toronto, sent by passenger pigeon to Andy, who’d jam and sing and add and subtract notes and riffs and after a while flew to Toronto to meet the band, version 2008: long-time partner/co-creator Ken Badger, drummer Mark Perkell and bassist Mike Young. Gary Topp presented them at the original scene of the crime, the Horseshoe Tavern with lots of family and old friends there for the occasion. They had to duck out of an interview at CIUT-FM when technology failed and everything fell apart (through no fault of interviewer Greg Dick, I should add); they got lost in the wilds of Hamilton on the way to an interview with B.F. Mowat; charged through a sweat-soaked hour and forty-five at Club Absinthe, made the hearts grow fonder, and then back to Toronto (didn’t get lost this time) for a final last blast at the Dakota Tavern.

Here to have fun, make noise, and promote their awesome and audacious CD “How does it feel to be Loved”, (on ITunes!) a collection of live Velvet Underground covers, the Scenics were big and noisy and as hell-bent creative as ever, doing old tunes new ways and new tunes old school, and looking forward to coming back in June when for NXNE.

On Friday night directors Richard Fiander and Kire Paputts headed down to Healey’s Roadhouse (r.i.p. Jeff Healey) for the Teenage Head record release of their new album, Teenage Head with Marky Ramone, a collection of olden-goldies and total-effin-goodies redone with you guessed it, legendary drummer (two terms of duty with the Ramones; drummer with the most service) Marky Ramone. The former Ramones drummer couldn’t make it up here, but we got lots of good back-stage stuff, one-liners, antics and chatter and then the show for the sold-out crowd. Tight, fun, the kind of shows they’ve been doing off on and for, oh, thirty years (!). In June, they head out west for an all-too-rare trip beyond the city limits, so take note all you cowboys and cowgirls, yee-haw, Teenage Head are comin’ to town! But seriously, kids, you get a chance, go see them.

Awesomely enough, the next day we hooked up with…drumroll, please…Tommy Ramone, the last man standing of the original fabulous four, the first manager, the producer, the guy who helped with Band of Gypsys with Jimi Hendrix when he was a teenager, the one, the only. In town for gigs with his new bluegrass band Uncle Monk (named after jazz icon Thelonious Monk and painter Edvard Monck, and “because it sounds cool”). The interview was pulled together by uber-promoter and all-round good guy Gary Topp. Tommy offered up his theories on punk rock, the line from punk to bluegrass, a bit of Ramones 101 (“Joey and Dee Dee were there for fun. Me and Johnny were on a mission…to bring rock ‘n’ roll back to America”). At the end of the interview, Tommy signed the Pogo Mobile Unit’s bumper-sticker — and that’s why we’ll never wash our truck again.

Finishing up the weekend and saving ‘best ’til last, Brunton’s Ollie and Colin finally made visit #1 with legendary promoter Gary Topp who told tales of rock ‘n’ roll, Steven “Nazi Dog” Leckie, drunk cops, misadventures, the genius and genesis of punk and the lasting effect. With a steel-trap mind (and a firm-handshake, I might add) Gary talked about gigs by Suicide and The Contortions and Edie the Egg Lady and Mike DeVille, how Gus the cook would brandish a knife and threaten Nash the Slash when he’d play the Horseshoe (“too loud, too loud!”) — endless great stores and insights. He brought us down to a basement cubby-hole to file cabinets stuffed with handbill, newspaper clippings, pictures, all sorts of stuff.

Please bear with us — we’re still working out the kinks with the new website, digging up the old archives, and picking pretty pictures to show off. We plan to update at least weekly, so please check in later.