The Last Pogo Jumps Again

Chris Haight at the screening of The Last Pogo at NXNE, June 2008.

We’re making plans to get The Last Pogo out on DVD by December 1 this year, the 30th anniversary. Since the original Pogo is but a scant (yet action-packed and aurally exciting) half-hour, we’re going to beef up the DVD to a full two hours with “extras” and a couple of “easter eggs”. We can’t tell you what the easter eggs are going to be (for the non-tech-savvy of you, an “easter egg” is a hidden extra usually found while clicking around the main menu) but one of the extras will be a commentary by original Viletones’ guitar-player Chris Haight. What’ll make this a bit different than most commentaries is that a tiny head of Chris will float in the corner of the screen while the rest of the screen is filled with The Last Pogo. Chris’ commentary is hilarious: at first he can’t remember that he was even there, but then proceeds to make some great comments on the bands and characters you see in the film, including himself in The Secrets, the band of ex-Viletones who on the night of the Pogo were also playing the Beverly Tavern, and literally had to run down Queen Street to hit the stage in time. And the adrenalin shows. Another extra will be some recooked studio footage of The Scenics, with the audio juiced up by Scenic Andy Meyers.

We’re aiming for a suggested retail price of … $19.78 (get it?!), which is also the new price for our snazzy retro Last Pogo t-shirts (once the webmaster gets the PayPal thing figure out). Stay tuned for more info on where you can get the DVD, and of course, all the news that’s fit to print on the progress of the sequel — and reason for this blog — THE LAST POGO JUMPS AGAIN.

In addition to all the people we promise to interview, but haven’t gotten around to yet (Steve Koch, Nora Currie, Patrick Lee, Anna Borque, Johnny Garbage Can, Isobel Harry, Gary Cormier, Stephen Davies, MIchael Jordana and more…it’s hard to keep track), we’ve recently been contacted by Evan Weber of The Wads who will wax poetic on all things Wad-ish at some point in the future, and we hope to make return trips to chat with Steven Leckie, Gary Topp and Gary Pig Gold.

We’ve also been contacted by an old buddy who might be able to unearth some old video of The Ugly from 1978, as well as recorded interviews with the likes of the Viletones and Teenage Head. He just has to convince the ex to let him in the door. Fingers and other things crossed.

And if that ain’t enough, kultural king Gary Topp has found a 32-year-old reel-to-reel recording of his band Corvettz, featuring drumming by Chris Massingham and “bass playing” by Pogo director Colin Brunton. Truly underground, they never made it out of the basement of the New Yorker theatre, where they were legends in their own minds with a hit song “Let’s Roam”, and a killer version of “Hava Nagila (sic?)”. The only way Topp could top that discovery was by coming up with a new “cut line” for The Last Pogo: “Just like The Last Waltz, but with different bands”.

Today we had the distinct pleasure of interviewing English punk/new-wave icon Hugh Cornwell, formerly of The Stranglers, for our feature. In town for NXNE, he performed a solo show last night at the Dakota, and will be screening his performance film Blueprint tonight at the NFB. With help from manager David Fagence, record company rep Charlie Kennedy and NXNE publicist Liz Armstrong, it was a cinch to organize, thank you very much.

With a demeanor more fitting of an English gentleman than a so-called punk rocker, Hugh clearly suffers no fools gladly and basically told us to get our shit together (“…we either do this right or not at all…”) if we wanted our fifteen minutes of fame with him. Music fan and NXNE volunteer Melissa Feeney stepped up to the plate for us, and stood guard outside the “green-room” we’d hijacked, making sure no one bugged us while we filmed our talk with Hugh.

He was candid about past drugs (speedballs) current highs (excercise, endorphins, cricket, maybe a drink), insightful about the Stranglers’ (“…the pub bands hated us ’cause we couldn’t play, and the punk bands hated us cause we could…”) and excited about his new album Hoover Dam (“…Within You or Without You is the best song I’ve written since Golden Brown…”). Download the album for free at hughcornwell.com and find out everything Hugh’s up to.

Cleave Anderson; photo courtesy Paul B. Toman

Secret cult organization The Illuminati have invaded Toronto, spreading “culture” and dreaded “art” all over the joint. Or at least we presume it’s the Illuminati, otherwise why would they have called their event Luminato?   In any case, they put on, from all accounts, a fairly decent show of Queen Street West stuff at OCAD, formerly OCA, a.k.a. Ontario College Of Art. Peter Vronski’s Dada’s Boys was screened, featuring one Cheetah Chrome playing with the Viletones. One of the surviving Demics got up on stage with Mary-Margaret O’Hara to sing a round of the Demics’ ole chestnut, “New York City”, with drumming supplied by none other than Cleave Anderson. Among other things, Cleave plays punk classics with The Screwed and dons a black wig for his gig as one of The Raclones; one of the newer things he’s playing with is a Chuck Berry tribute band, Monkey Business…

Which is a real roundabout way of segueing into the news item of the week: we visited Cleave out in the West End for a second interview. Cleave gave us a walking tour of Queen West last year — from the x that marks the spots where The Beverly Tavern and Crash ‘n Burn were, over past the Black Bull, across the street from Peter Pan and ending up at the Horseshoe Tavern, now half the bar it used to be back in the day — but with some sound issues for some of it (namely a jack-hammer as we sat down on the Horseshoe porch to chat) we popped by his house for a little Q & A. He reminded us that in the line to see The Ramones’ way back in 1976 was O’Hara’s Mary Margaret and big sis Catherine, and right in front of Cleave was the one, the only, Mr. Shit, one of the few people we have not been able to track down for the new movie. Where art thou, Mr. Shit?! Before we left Cleave gave us a rough mix of a song he wrote and recorded called…The Last Pogo. VERY cool!

A couple of things in the press coming out this week about The Last Pogo playing at NXNE, and we’re still trying to figure out how many free passes we can hand out, so stay tuned ladies and gentlemen.

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.