The Last Pogo Jumps Again

Of all the memorable music scores out there, one that has bored it’s way into the collected consciousness is the menacing and foreboding “daDA…daDA…daDA” cello riff from “Jaws”.

Oddly, that was all our external hard-drive had to say for itself after it plunged from the coffee table to the floor during an editing session a couple of nights ago.   No picture, no sound, just the creepy hum that spells certain death.    We suspect that it might have been trying to end it all, sick of over a 100 hours of punk rock, but whatever the case, it is currently in the care of data retrieval experts (at least that’s what the sign in the variety store window said), and we hope to get a positive prognosis by Monday. “But you had it all backed up, right?”, everyone and his brother have asked us. Yeah. Right.

We’re not freaking out — we do have all the original tapes — and really, for all the shooting we’ve done, it’s been relatively painless. The odd mistake (great interview with Steven Leckie; no sound), the occasional blunder (nice chat with Steve Mahon, framed from the neck down), but no big whoop, and no one’s been hurt, so knock on wood, we should be back soon.

Steven “The Dog” Leckie at The Last Pogo, photo Edie Steiner

With the dog days of summer coming on, Pogo Post Production is revved up and ready to go. We’re whittling away at the hit list of those that still need to be interviewed, plus a couple more we’d like to check in with again, and going over miles, whoops, kilometres of footage, inching, whoops again, millimetering towards our release date of March 2009, an editing epiphany, or complete mental breakdown, whichever comes first.

Up this weekend is authoring the DVD of the re-release of The Last Pogo, the original 26 minute film (Colour! 16mm! All singing! All dancing! See people smoking in a bar!) scheduled to hit your very favourite record store this October. Only seen publicly once in the last 30 years (and many times privately on bootleg VHS versions) the DVD will be comprised of The Last Pogo, some recently restored footage of The Scenics from 1977, and a commentary track featuring original Viletone and member of The Secrets (amongst others) Chris Haight. For whatever insights into the scene and the bands that the esteemed Mr. Haight offers up, it’s worth it just to hear his infectious laugh. Through the magic of digital editing, whenever Chris makes a comment you’ll see his face pop up in a box in the corner of the frame. (On a geeky filmmaker note, this kind of thing would have cost thousands of dollars back when we made The Last Pogo, and it’s only because of digital that it’s now possible. You’d also have had to rent a Steenbeck editing system — the size of a Smartcar — and be cramped in some room downtown. Now we can be cramped in some room uptown, the whole editing system on our lap, and if you slip a twenty into the hard-drive, cheap thrills galore). Flashy retro graphics by John Pearson, the guy who did the very cool titles for the original film, and a wee booklet of liner notes, this snazzy package is the ideal Christmas present. Or Hallowe’en present. Or Kwanza, or Hannaukah, or birthdays, weddings, stags, golf-dates, chance encounters, one-night stands, etc. We haven’t finalized the details yet, but ideally you’ll be able to pick this up for the low low price of $19.78. For the mathematically impaired, that’s not even twenty bucks! All proceeds will go towards replenishing the “This Used to be Ollie Brunton’s College Fund, LOL”, which has been hit hard since we started this project a couple of years ago. (In 2006 he was on his way to be able to afford a university degree; as of today, a half-semester of Refrigeration & Air Conditioning Technique at George Brown College).

While we’ve slowed down on the interviews of late (life gets in the way), we’re still well at it, buster. This weekend Ricky Swede from The Poles checked in, and we’re hoping to catch up with that iconic band sooner rather than later. We here at Pogo H.Q. remember many an awesome Poles show and the show they put on with The Viletones and The Dead Boys at the New Yorker stands out in particular. (P.S. If anyone could shoot us a jpg of the awesome poster of that concert, many brownie points will be sent your way). Director Brunton recalls the show both vaguely and vividly, the vivid moment being when he was dispatched by The Garys to fetch the slow-to-leave-the-dressing-room Dead Boys. A friendly yell down the stairs was answered by only a grunt, but minutes later they came up the stairs. “What took you so long, you’re supposed to be on stage?!”, asked Brunton. “Blowjobs”, replied a Dead Boy, then Cheetah Chrome chimed in with “Hey, we can’t go on stage with hard-ons, man”. They then limp-dicked their way through the lobby, down the aisles, and up onto the stage. Wicked awesomeness ensued.

Speaking of wicked awesomeness, one of the stongest local artists who helped document the scene was photographer/artist Edie Steiner, who checked in this weekend wondering what’s what and who’s on first etc.. Edie’s going to hunt through her thousands of photos and see what she can find from the Toronto 1976 – 1978 punk period. (See photo above). Living on the Toronto waterfront (and apparently in a large bottle of formaldehyde or something — she hasn’t aged a bit) her current bio reads: Edie Steiner is a Toronto filmmaker, photographer and educator whose work is shown internationally. Her award-winning films are presented at film festivals, in arts and education venues, and broadcast on Canadian television, and her photography is commissioned for publication and exhibited in art galleries. She has published original music with international collaborators, for films and radio. Community activities include board of director and committee positions for arts and community organizations. Ms. Steiner is currently a doctoral candidate in environmental studies at York University, Toronto, with a research focus on relationships between the arts and environmental thought. Check out Edie’s stuff on your internet machine at ediesteiner.com.

Heavily influenced by Hamilton’s Teenage Head, actor/musician Hugh Dillon fronted the Headstones, became an actor and got head-shots made, and now as one of the leads in the new TV series Flashpoint, makes head shots of another kind as he plays a sniper for a fictitious Toronto swat team. And if that ain’t enough to keep a fella busy, Hugh also fronts his band The Hugh Dillon Redemption Choir. What’s the Last Pogo connection? Hugh allowed us an interview last summer at the scene of the crime, the venerable Horseshoe Tavern where he raved about Teenage Head’s Frankie Venom, Gord Lewis and Steve Mahon and was one of the most candid interviews we’ve done (i.e. he’ll talk about drugs…). So, if you’re not at The Screwed at the Cadillac Lounge on Friday (see poster below), then cosy up, watch Hugh kill people, and see if you can detect a little Venom in his character.

Pogo H.Q. has ramped up the editing suite (sweet!), but that was balanced out by P.S. Productions finally demanding the tripod they’d lent us for … uh … the past two years. So if any of the shots in our feature THE LAST POGO JUMPS AGAIN seem a little shaky, it’s all their fault! All joking aside, it’s nice to get support from a big-ass company like P.S. (Unlike, of course, the lack of support from the likes of big asses like The National Film Board and Telefilm Canada.)

Been there? Done that? Uh…wanna buy another rock t-shirt? A reminder that tres-cool Last Pogo t-shirts have been reduced in price to the oddly coincidental low low price of $19.78. How can we sell them that cheap? Volume, volume, volume. As in, we’re not selling too many, so maybe we’d better lose a few bucks and have more fans nattily attired.   Hey, if Telefilm won’t help us, and the NFB see little merit in our project, t-shirt sales will go a long way towards video stock and stuff.  Especially stuff.

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”.

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.

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.

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.