The Last Pogo Jumps Again

Toronto’s weekly rag The Grid has proclaimed, on their front page, that Toronto is “the best music city on the planet.”  You have to take that with a big grain of salt, considering that it’s a local newsweekly that’s said it, and of course as Torontonians, our natural insecurity lays waste to grandiose statements like that, yet there might be some truth to it.  Whatever the case, it was kind of cool to see the concert The Last Pogo listed as one of twenty-five or so significant moments in Toronto’s music history. The Last Pogo, as if you didn’t know, was infamous Toronto promoters The Garys‘ infamous last stand at the iconic Horseshoe Tavern.  Filmmaker Colin Brunton, with a big helping hand from Patrick Lee filmed it, made it into a short film, and is now (along with Kire Paputts) finishing up The Last Pogo Jumps Again:  A Biased & Incomplete History Of Toronto, Hamilton and London Ontario Punk Rock And New Wave Music Circa September 24 1976 To December1 1978.   During the making of the project — now approaching it’s sixth year of production — the lightbulb went off over the filmmakers’ head and they realized “Hey — I think the Toronto, Hamilton, and London Ontario scene was actually way more interesting than either New York or London England — because back in 1976 you just didn’t really expect cool things to happen in Toronto.”   And we’re not going to argue the notion that all of those bands back then (by our count there were around 40 bands who sprung up in that 25 month period) kicked down the cultural doors that would later allow others to breeze through.

Yea, so it was 33 years ago that The Garys presented The Last Pogo at Toronto’s venerable Horseshoe Tavern.  Beauty first, safety last was the rule of the night as 800 sweating kids crammed into a bar with a capacity of 500.

A fat drunk detective waddled up from the bar around midnight to slur to Teenage Head as they took the stage that they could only play one song, and bingo — sweet fucking chaos!

The concert was captured in the eponymous short film, the riot not so much (film crew booted out) and bits of it are used in the new project.   (GEEK ALERT:  We’ve been getting High Definition transfers done of 16mm films and video footage, and its just awesome.  You see stuff  you couldn’t see in the original footage.  Mind blown.)

We’ve still got some DVD’s of The Last Pogo in stock, so … y’know…nice cheap present for someone.   Go to the Store page.  Now!  Twelve measly dollars!  C’mon!

Engelbert Humperdink rocking his ‘stache; it was always Movember for him.

Fast, cheap and good:  when you’re making a film you can’t have all three, which is why it’s taken us over five years to put our four epic together — but the end is in site.  We are what you call “picture locked”, i.e. we’re done editing — and now its all about getting people to sign release forms so we’re legal and legit.  Of course while we wait for people to mail us back the releases we continue to nip and tuck here and there and mull stuff over.  And we’re still hearing about snippets of footage that we could use (including some never before seen stuff from the Crash ‘n’ Burn that we’re going to see in a few weeks.  C’mon archival workers!   Crank up that Super-8 projector for us!)

No, no no — not the 9th Configuration, the 4th Terrabyte.

As post-production ramps up at Pogo H.Q., the hard-drive holding 300+ hours of interviews and archival footage started humming a not so happy tune, and so we instantly despatched a beleaguered p.a. to pick up a massive 4 terrabyte external drive for some back-up.  Safety first, beauty last, financial responsibility a distant third.

No, no no — not men wearing hats…

It might take a village to raise a child, but it takes the whole world to raise the red-haired bastard stepchild known as The Last Pogo Jumps Again:  A Biased And Incomplete History Of Toronto, Hamilton and London Ontario Punk Rock And New Wave Music Circa September 24 1976 To December 1 1978.

The teletype machine in the musty garret of Pogo H.Q. fired off a note to Florence Italy to ask NYC No-Wave filmmaker Amos Poe who exactly handles the leasing of stock shots for his seminal B & W & Nasty film Blank Generation, the film that inspired promoter Gary Topp (later to be one half of infamous Toronto promoters The Garys) to start booking punk and new-wave bands at the New Yorker on Yonge Street (whooo-eeeeee!) in Toronto.

Detail of Rick Trembles’ Toronto map circa 1976.

Meanwhile, Montreal’s Rick Trembles (who’s been doing our maps and is putting together a font for us to use for subtitles and tail credits) informed us that two guys who would, a year later, become part of the first lineup of Montreal’s Men Without Hats, had bombed down from McGill University in Montreal one weekend in 1977, armed with a Super-8 camera, to attend the Outrage concert at Toronto’s spooky Masonic Temple.   David Hill did the sound and John Gurrin did the shooting (and we suspect that both of them did the partying).   We got in touch with David, now in New Yawk, and with a slight discount urged on by Amos Poe, had the Super-8 footage of part of the Viletones set transferred to mini-dv;  just waiting for it to arrive.

Speaking of terrabytes, the day The Scenics opened for Talking Heads at the New Yorker (September 16, 1977), and the day before the Outrage concert T. Rex’s Marc Bolan died in a car crash in England.

Ticket courtesy of Molten Core

Eighth-billed actress Mary Nash is the grandmother of Toronto’s Nash the Slash.

This weekend co-director Kire Paputts takes the bus down to the City of Brotherly Love, Philadelphia, to clear up a couple of points with Margarita Passion, hopefully track down her ex and ex-Viletones and Secrets, Freddy Pompeii, and, natch, eat cream cheese and get stupid at sporting events.

Just a couple more questions, m’am.

Andy Paterson of The Government.  Photograph by Bobbe Besold

We received a pile of great photos of Toronto band The Government from photographer Bobbe Besold, all the way from New Mexico.  Pictured above, Andy Paterson smokes and ruminates over an article called The Illiterate Cornerback.

Photography  by Bobbe Besold.

Just last week Gary “The Garys” Cormier dropped off a bunch of Government handbills from ’76 – ’78 to Pogo H.Q. All of that, along with some wonderfully grainy video footage, make for a nice little section on them in our film The Last Pogo Jumps Again:  A Biased And Incomplete History Of Toronto Punk Rock And New Wave Music Circa September 24 1976 To December 1 1978.

The Government, photography by Bobbe Besold

Handbill from 1978 courtesy of Molten Core
The jukebox at Pogo H.Q. was blaring out the set Edie “Edie the Egg Lady” Massey did with The Viletones at the Horseshoe Tavern in May, 1978. The band has rarely sounded better, but what was most entertaining was Edie’s banter with the audience.

She singles out a hippie in the audience — “Hey, Hippie, go eat some brown rice! — dedicates a song to Nash the Slash (who squired Edie around in the evening, hitting a couple of gay bars) and ends the set encouraging the audience to support the Horseshoe Tavern, and thanking The Garys for being so nice during her stay. Her final words are “I’m a Punk, and I hate you all.” The recording is one of many gems that Gary Topp has, and we’re hoping to work some of this into the movie.

Photo courtesy of andysummers.com

He sold a guitar that would fetch $100K today to Eric Clapton for a couple of hundred bucks.  He jammed with Jimi Hendrix (Hendrix playing the bass, btw);  his band Zoot Money and The Big Roll Band tore up England in the mid-sixties;  Chas Chandler of The Animals gave him his first hit of Owsley LSD, and soon after he was swept up in psychedelia with the English band Dantaline’s Chariot.  He went back to study guitar in California after some success with The Animals;  he was in Soft Machine for awhile;  he played with Kevin Coyne, has had John Lee Hooker sit in with him, takes great photos and wrote a wonderfully evocative book, One Train Late.   In November of 1978, he and his band The Police played to a dozen or so folks at The Gary’s Horseshoe Tavern.  Today he sits down with The Last Pogo Jumps Again‘s L.A. director Amy Belling to chat about that show and the place “punk” has within in the history of rock ‘n’ roll.   We could film him for a month and still not get all the stories down.

Poster courtesy of John Catto

For the next month Pogo H.Q. will be hopping with footage of the last batch of interviews, and then the tedious grind of paperwork and deal-making begins.  This week director Kire Paputts interviews Owen Burgess late of Oh Those Pants and The Cads;   L.A. shooter Amy Bellings interviews graphic artist/photographer Rodney Bowes, and over the next two weeks we get even busier with a few more people t.b.a.

Pogo H.Q. got an electronic letter through our Internet machine from a professor in Pennsylvania asking about The Ugly, for a book being written about Bruce McDonald’s feature film Hard Core Logo.  Uh…a book about a ten-year-old film?  Wha?

Interesting tidbit:  someone in Toronto apparently has Super-8 footage of the very first Ramones show in Toronto from September 24 1976 — and were too greedy to make a deal with The Ramones management for their project It’s Alive.  Really?  I mean, we can guess who might control this stuff, but to hold out on a gem like that when it could’ve reached an audience, that’s just bullshit.

Raggedy handbill, 1976;  courtesy of Robert Malyon.

Smoking a joint in the back row of his movie theatre The New Yorker, watching the out-of-synch Blank Generation, promoter Gary Topp twigged on the idea of bringing some of the bands from Amos Poe’s movie into town.  It was 1976.  When he tried to track down The Ramones, few people in the business knew who they were.

Photo by David Andoff.

A concrete stage was built in a few 18 hour shifts over the course of a weekend;  artist David Andoff sculpted a King Kong and painted a NYC nightscape above the marquee –  and “punk rock” officially arrived in Toronto on September 24, 1976 with Johnny Lovesin & His Invisible Band opening for New York City’s The Ramones.

Two years later, Gary would be long gone from the New Yorker, having had moved to the beer-soaked Horseshoe Tavern with partner Gary Cormier;  together they were known as The Garys.   On December 1, 1978, The Garys promoted The Last Pogo, the going-away party for their favourite local bands;  they were being kicked out, and the bar would revert to it’s country ‘n’ western roots for a spell.  The Scenics, The Cardboard Brains, The Ugly, The Secrets, Teenage Head, and The Mods were set to play the historic gig.

Steven Leckie at The Last Pogo.  Photo by Edie Stiener.

Reluctant to join in at first, Steven Leckie ended up crashing the party with his latest version of his ground-breaking Viletones.   And all hell broke loose.   It was captured on film, recorded for an album — and then forgotten for years.   This is the specific time period we’re zeroing in on for our sprawling documentary The Last Pogo Jumps Again:  A Biased & Incomplete History Of Toronto Punk Rock Circa September 24 1976 To December 1 1978.

As our title — The Last Pogo Jumps Again:  A Biased & Incomplete History Of Toronto Punk Rock Circa September 24 1976 To December 1 1978 — suggests, we’re focusing our film on a very specific time and space.   September 24 1976 was the day that The Ramones first played Toronto at The Garys’ New Yorker Theatre, and December 1 1978 was the date of The Last Pogo, what we’re saying was the End of Days of the original punk scene in Toronto.   And of course we’ll try to fill in all the news that fits in between those dates.  Here’s some stuff that happened on other December 1sts in that period.

December 1, 1976 in Toronto:  Ernest Borgnine rocks, Ray Charles rolls, Robin Trower plays Maple Leaf Gardens, and Mendelson Joe was Joe Mendelson.

December 1, 1977:  The freshly dead Elvis Presley is named Male Musical Artist of The Year by something called The Academy of Variety and Cabaret Artists.  Juliet Prowse was named Female Musical Artist Of The Year.

December 1, 1978:  Folk-singer Valdy “hots up his image,” Shirley MacLaine smokes and isn’t New Age yet;  The Moody Blues play Maple Leaf Gardens, ChumCharts still exist, and cable tv was one channel.   Down at The Horseshoe Tavern the cops shut down The Last Pogo.

Photo copyright and courtesy Edie Steiner, 1978.

The bulk of The Original 99 Cent Roxy at Greenwood and Danforth has been demolished.   The front lobby remains, as does a stripped-to-the-girders marquee out front.   They’re going to turn it into a convenience store that will adjoin a gas station.   This is the back of the building.  Someone’s spray-painted “Bye Bye Roxy” on the wall.

Nash the Slash used to live in the apartment above the lobby.   He was supposed to jam with Teenage Head during The Last Pogo, but when he knocked his mandolin on the floor and broke it, he punched a wall and broke his hand.   The first live appearance by Nash was at the Roxy.  With tape-decks humming, electric mandolin in hand, and a candelabra beside him, he performed a live soundtrack to the Bunuel/Dali short film Un Chien Andalou.  And jaws dropped.

After initiating midnight screenings at Cinecity on Yonge Street, Gary Topp (later of The Garys) started The Original 99 Cent Roxy in the early seventies.  Many of who would later be called Toronto’s punks got their first taste of Roxy Music, Velvet Underground, Little Feat;  Russ Meyers, John Waters, Fellini (and much more) there.   The Last Pogo director Colin Brunton got interested in film while working there as an usher.  Filmmaker/Raving Mojos Blair Richard Martin and Viletones’ Steven Leckie were regulars, and cite the Roxy as one of the biggest influences on the Toronto punk rock scene.  Handbill courtesy of Gary Topp.

After Gary began showing Reefer Madness to stoned midnight crowds, the joint was jumpin’, pun intended.  When a severely edited version of John Waters’ Pink Flamingos played, he complained that the Ontario Censor Board “Cut out the sex, and kept in the shit.”  Photo of poster in lobby courtesy Cheryl Daniels.

The lobby in the mid-forties, courtesy of Toronto Archives.  (Please do not reprint.)   The art deco display window and doors in this photo remained the same up to the seventies, but the walls were plastered with posters and photos.

The Original 99 Cent Roxy played the best music in between shows.  Gary Topp used to offer to let people in for free if they could identify Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry from a photo, but not many could.  When Roxy Music came to Toronto for the first time, in 1975, Gary Topp got artist John Pearson to create hand-made invitations to the show for the entire Roxy staff.  (John would later design the titles for The Last Pogo.)  We had fifth row centre seats;  it was awesome.  After the show Gary Topp said:  “All the girls wanted to be in his pants and all the guys wanted to be in his shoes.”

The Roxy matchbooks that were given away.   Plans to hand out Roxy rolling papers never panned out.  On weekends there was a cloud of weed and cigarette smoke in the theatre.  Jpg courtesy Gary Topp.

In 1976, Gary’s last year at the Roxy, he and partner Jeff Silverman opened up The New Yorker Theatre on Yonge Street.  Needing to get their snack-bar redesigned, artist David Andoff introduced Gary Topp to carpenter and ex-music promoter Gary Cormier.  They immediatly hit it off and became known as The Garys.   The first band they booked into the New Yorker was The Ramones.  David Andoff painted the outside of the theatre, and built a huge paper-mache King Kong.  Photo courtesy David Andoff.