The Last Pogo Jumps Again

L – R: Tony Torcher, Sam Ferrara, Steven Leckie, and Steve Koch; photo by Ross Taylor.

First, the good news. Dave “Tank” Roberts has put the worst behind him after a week-long stay at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Toronto. We spoke to him today, he sounded great, and he hopes to be home in a day or two. (Read post below for details on the whys, wherefores and what-the-effs).

The above photo is the version of The Viletones that were interviewed for The Last Pogo back in ’79.   Steve Koch wasn’t in the Viletones that played The Last Pogo, but by the time we did interviews to round out the film, he’d joined the band.

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.

As of June 6th, it’s been two years since we started shooting THE LAST POGO JUMPS AGAIN. Yup, that’s correct: we started shooting this opus on 6/6/6. Weird. Since then, shooting every weekend or so, with lots of help from other filmmakers, we’ve compiled around 150 hours of footage, discovered never-before-seen super-8 footage of The Last Pogo concert, heard never-before-heard tapes of the evening, re-connected with lots of old pals, made up with old flames, visited too many grave-yards, watched young Ollie Brunton turn from a boy into a man, had lots of laughs, and have been gifted with tons of photos, handbills, high-school essays, buttons, stories, lies, rumours and gossip and more.

As we get set to show THE LAST POGO for the first time in almost 30 years (at NXNE; Sunday June 15th, 5:30) we rediscovered those pesky things called “self-imposed deadlines”, and looking over a calendar, made a real adult decision: we’re now going to aim to have the new film completed early 2009, just in time for the Hot Docs festival. In the meantime, back at the ranch, we’ll be putting out a fairly awesome DVD of The Last Pogo and some surprises just in time for Christmas. We’re going to add on a couple of other shorts by filmmaker Colin Brunton: The Mysterious Moon Men of Canada, with soundtrack by Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, and A Trip Around Lake Ontario, with soundtrack by Nash the Slash.

We’ve just got too much footage to go through and analyze and dissect and mess around with, and there’s still a ton of people we wanna talk to so we’re gonna do it right.

We’ve chatted with members of all the bands that were there that night — Scenics, Cardboard Brains, Secrets, Mods, Ugly, Viletones and Teenage Head — and lots of the irregulars that were such a part of the scene — Tank, Wayne Brown, Zero, Roger T-Bag, Margarita Passion, Gary Topp, Don Pyle, Tony Malone, Nash the Slash, Cleave Anderson, Blair Richard Martin, Barrie Farrell, Edie Steiner, and on and on. We’ve been slowly trying to catch up with some of the international bands that made their way through Toronto during those heady daze: so far Cheetah Chrome from The Dead Boys (interviewed in a grave-yard, natch), and Tommy Ramone from The Ramones (in front of the Pogo Mobile), and if you’re reading this, we hope to snag Hugh Cornwell from The Stranglers while he’s in town for NXNE. (Hugh? ARE you reading this? C’mon, Hugh, pleeeese! 15 minutes, that’s all we need!).

When we were at CFNY last week, ex-Mod, ex-Dead Boy and current kewl lawyer David Quinton and d.j. Bookie were talking up a big Last Pogo 30th bash this December, and we thought, “Hey…wait a minute…if we’re doing a feature film about the punk scene in Toronto circa 1976 – 1978…and it’s built around The Last Pogo concert…I got an idea! Maybe we should shoot this big party”. Like, duh!

And hey, dear reader, if you’ve got any cool stuff from that era we could film, or if you’ve got a story or gossip or rumours or whatever, drop us a line, and we’ll try and catch up to ya.

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.