The Last Pogo Jumps Again

Gary Topp at NXNE 2008.  Photo by Albert Lee

The first public screening of The Last Pogo in 28 years closed out the 2008 NXNE Festival in Toronto to a rowdy sell-out crowd. Pogo director Brunton introduced members of the audience who were in bands that played the Last Pogo concert in 1978: Andy Meyers, Ken Badger and Mark Perkell of The Scenics; Vince Carlucci of The Cardboard Brains; David Quinton-Steinberg of The Mods; and Chris Haight of the Viletones and Secrets. Saving the best for last, the final introduction was of legendary Toronto promoter Gary Topp, one-half of The Garys, the guy who brought The Ramones, John Cale, Wayne County, Dead Boys, Talking Heads and way more way cool artists and films and events to Toronto during those heady punk days and beyond, and who has been the most vital, interesting, and eclectic promoter of the arts in Toronto, period. Seriously. If you did nothing else for cultural diversions than attend Gary Topp shows, you’d be doing just swell thank you.

It was awesome to watch The Last Pogo on a big screen; a DVD doesn’t do it justice, and the optical track is so much more richer than the sound that creeps out of a computer. As Brunton told the audience before the lights went down, the last time it was shown properly, on a big screen, was at a Cineplex movie theatre in 1980. Cleverly booking The Last Pogo with another concert film, it pulled in a $100 a week, was shown a dozen times a day — and was unceremoniously yanked from the theatre after two weeks when it continually received, quote “A violent and negative reaction…” unquote from the audience who were paying their five bucks to see the concert film it was opening for – Richard Pryor Live in Concert. Needless to say, the largly urban black audience didn’t take much of a shine to the lily-white/beyond the pale Toronto punk scene. On the other hand, it was apparently a big hit with the ushers and snack-bar kids.

The fact that the screening was literally across the street from the Much Music Video Awards seemed to strengthen the consensus that the music in the film stands up well to the test of time. (Was it because each of the bands in The Last Pogo had distinct unique sounds — or because most if not all of the bands at the MMVA sounded wearily similar? We’ll give it six of one, half-dozen of the other). Like a fine-wine aging for thirty years (or a solid Canadian beer that hasn’t turned skunky), you could imagine any of The Last Pogo bands making an impact these days. If they knew the right people. And kissed the right asses. And wore the right clothes with the right hair-cuts and were the right age and had the right politics and all the wrong right stuff that in 1978 we all properly rebelled againts. Kids these days.

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.