The Last Pogo Jumps Again

The staff at Pogo H.Q. watched the seventh “fine cut” this afternoon, then had the last production meeting of 2011 to determine the final steps to complete 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.

There’s always picture tweaks that can be made, and we do need to chat with Gary Topp one more time to clear up a detail, but mostly its all about wrangling the last of the release forms for music, photos, footage, etc.   There’s a lot of them — 600+ photos, 50+ songs, loads of footage — so it takes a bit.  This week we’re expecting some remastered live bootlegs from The Scenics’ Andy Meyers.

Who can resist a piano-playing monkey and an audience of dogs?  Nobody, that’s who!

All Joe Strummer photos copyright Viliam Hrubovcak

One thing that’s been readily apparent since we started gathering material for our long-gestating project, The Last Pogo Jumps Again, is just how many great photographers there were in Toronto in the late seventies, early eighties.

One prime example would be Viliam Hrubovcak, who amongst many others has contributed a couple of the 600+ still photos used in our project.

Viliam reminded us about Strummerville at the annual Last Pogo Holiday Party this year.

If  you don’t know, Strummerville is a foundation that “”…gives support to aspiring musicians and help to projects that help change the world through music. Set up by the friends and family of Joe Strummer in the year after his death, the charity seeks to reflect Joe’s unique contribution to the music world by offering support, resources and performance opportunities to artists who would not normally have access to them.”

This year Strummerville is selling its first calendar, and Viliam has contributed  four of the seven photos featured in it.

Girls Together Outrageously

And while it might be too late to order a calendar in time for a holiday present you can purchase your own copy of the Joe Strummer photos and have it delivered within four days if you’re in the GTA (Greater Toronto Area, not to be confused with GTOs,  the Frank Zappa-inspired band Girls Together Outrageously.)

Email Viliam at info@photosynthesisstudio.com or photosynthesis@cogeco.ca, fork over some loot, and you can get yourself an autographed, numbered (only a hundred of each were printed) pic of the late great one to gift to a friend or yourself.

Portions of the proceeds of the sales of Viliam’s photos go to Strummerville.   Check out some other Hrubovcak photos at theiconiclife.com.

Which leads us to something a little closer to home, the charitable org The Unison Benevolent Fund — “…an assistance and referral program – created and administered for the music industry, by the music industry. Unison is designed to provide discreet relief to music industry personnel in times of personal hardship and crisis.”

Pogo H. Q. were made aware of The Unison Benevolent Fund when it licensed some Demics tunes for the film;  the license synch fees for the Demics songs you’ll hear in our movie went 100% to the fund.   So a tip of the hat to Jodie Ferneyhough and Catharine Saxberg who started the org, and to Gary Furniss and Tom Treumuth for donating the fees.   And while we’re at it, Demics Iain Staines, Rob Brent, Jimmy Weatherstone and the late Keith Whittaker for making all those great tunes in the first place.  Fo mo info on Unision check the link on the right.

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.

Illustration by Rick Trembles

Yea, we know the map isn’t accurate, but its close enough for rock ‘n ‘ roll.    It gets one more pass:  we have to dirty the streets up a little, especially filthy old Yonge Street.

Things haven’t changed that much since we made The Last Pogo in 1978: broadcasters aren’t that keen — yet — but the Toronto Arts Council and the Canada Arts Council are willing to help us out.  (For those of you unfamiliar with the arts councils here, it basically means that they give you some money to work on your project, and you have full creative control.  Boners!)

The film will be in two parts:  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, Parts One and Two.   Big reward to the usher of any movie theatre that puts the whole title up.

We’ve currently got our cut of The Last Pogo Jumps Again down to around four-and-a-half hours.  We think we can trim another half-hour or so without hurting it.

A  young Don Pyle photographed by Carm Ferrari

Ex Crash Kills Five and Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet  Don Pyle kindly sent us some photos of Tyrrana and himself as a younger man, including the one above, by Carm Ferrari.  Don wrote Pogo H.Q. a note to remind them that prior to the Ramones second show at the New Yorker, in the spring of ’77, he asked theatre manager (and Last Pogo Jumps Again co-director) Colin Brunton how he could get a Ramones’ autograph.  According to Don, Colin told him to just go downstairs to the dressing room and ask them.  Which he did.  (Is it just me or were things just a little bit looser in the seventies?)

No security concerns despite police in the poster.

Co-director Kire Paputts ventured to the wilds of Guelph, Ontario yesterday to chat with The Dishes‘ saxophone player, Michael LaCroix;  last weekend Kire interviewed Dishes’ keyboard player Glenn Schellenberg;  dishing out dishes’ details soon…

Ad for 1978′s Dishes’ EP Hot Property.

Waiting to receive our DVD of Truck Stop Women from filmmaker Mark Lester to augment the section of our film that touches on The Original 99 Cent Roxy Theatre.   Truck Stop Women was a favourite at the Roxy, where loads of people who would later be involved in the scene used to go.  Mark Lester later directed the feature Class of ’84, featuring Teenage Head.

Anywhere, Saskatchewan.

Co-director Colin Brunton is holed up for a month in an hotel in Regina, Saskatchewan meticulously grinding through the current six-hour cut (!) of 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, while counterpart and co-director Kire Paputts is living large in lurid Las Vegas with lady friend Liz Worth. (Wow! So many ells!)

Drunk photography, Las Vegas, Nevada.

While Kire takes a breather from what seems to be a never-ending quest to interview everybody who was part of the Toronto/Hamilton/London, Ontario punk/new-wave/alternate music scene slash this slash that, Brunton is alternately guzzling tap water and ordering room service, determined not to glimpse the light of day this weekend, scheming up plans for a couple of hired-gun TV series this fall, catching up on some reading (Jack Reacher rules!) and trying to stick to his Toronto body clock, which means hitting the sack at ten and getting up at six.  It almost makes him feel like he should go jogging or something, but that ain’t gonna happen.   And frankly, the sight of a 55 year old man with a Viletones t-shirt huffing down past the endless big box stores of Regina is not something you’d want engrained in your memory.   With fourteen fourteen hour days of location shooting on a TV series looming, quick evenings are devoted to making notes on the edit, and whittling down the list of Those Who Still Need To Be Interviewed.  Yes, there’s still a few more.   Hey — we want this to be complete, okay?!

Last week Kire hit London Ontario and chatted with NFG frontman Scott “Steve R Stunning” Bentley, who talked about forming NFG in late ’78 (therefore fitting into to our strict timeline) and getting a couple of opening gigs for that other band in London, The Demics.   During the shoot, they ran into Mike Niderman (sp?), who pretty much got The Demics started by convincing them to play their first gig at his loft in 1977.

Torme, not Torment.

That evening Kire set up shop at the apartment of Joey Hardin, former spiritual advisor to The Swollen Members, where he interviewed Joey and SM lead-singer Evan Siegel, a.k.a. Mel Torment, a pseudonym we’ve just discovered that John Lennon used once.   Joey slipped on his thirty-year-plus old leisure suit and demonstrated a few dance moves, and he and Evan cracked wise for a couple of hours.  In a way, The Swollen Members are a big part of why we’re taking so fucking long to make this movie.  Yea, there’s the thing about doing this on weekends, and agonizing over people’s schedules, and convincing others that they are Completely Worthy and are necessary to tell this story.  And this all costs money, yo, so some of us have to work to buy tapes and gas and transfer grainy footage and rent cars and buy lunches and all the other things that go into making a feature film project.  But what has always bugged us here at Pogo H.Q. is that when people think of “Toronto Punk”, they immediately think Viletones Curse Diodes Teenage Head Mods Poles Dents, and you fill in your personal blanks.  There was so much more.  And bands like Swollen Members just seem to be forgotten.   And they shouldn’t be.  They were audacious and awesome and alarming and always, always antertaining (wow! so many ays!)

And speaking of alarming and audacious and awesome, more respect yo, for The Scenics.  For those of you who are into porn, but are scared to buy real porn, and instead buy those “Man’s Magazines” that are, well, mostly soft-core porn — check out the latest issue of UMM (Urban Male Magazine — sorry guys in rural areas, you can’t relate apparently), and you’ll see a tasty review of The Scenics’ 2010 release Sunshine World.  They said this:  “One of Canada’s unsung heroes of first-gen punk, The Scenics reacted to slinky art-rock made popular by New York acts such as Television, The Velvet Underground, and other Warhol-esque colleagues. However, with their sublime understanding of pushing boundaries without sacrificing grooves, their low-fidelity creations are exercises in tight, post-garage accomplishments.
Celebrated on this first ever compilation of their studio works, Sunshine World provides another case in point as to why The Scenics deserve merit for being as innovative as they were- (and now are, given their reunion)- impressive.” Whoo-eee!

Monday, Kire was back in London to talk to Dan Hamilton and get some more insight into the scene in London, Ontario, and will be back again to chat with Mr. Niderman.  Okay, gotta run.