Press Enter to Search

Say What?

pogo2posterFINAL2The Last Pogo Jumps Again studies the evolution of Toronto from small town to big city and it’s pop/counter-culture lifestyle during the early and mid-70s.  It centers around the first wave of Toronto punk rock and new-wave music, from the Ramones playing the New Yorker Theatre in ’76 through the police shutting down Teenage Head and causing a riot at the Horseshoe Tavern’s infamous “The Last Pogo” concert in December 1978.

London had the Sex Pistols, New York had the Ramones, but Toronto had a punk movement all it’s own.  The Toronto landscape by the late ’70s was forever changed with the infusion of the DIY/Punk/Alternative Culture(s) movement.  Six years in the making, The Last Pogo Jumps Again successfully explores the whys and wherefores of what was arguably one of the most exciting but misunderstood movements in Toronto’s history.

The DVD contains the 204 minute documentary, plus over a 100 minutes of added material, and a snazzy 24-page booklet.  Check the Shop for details on where you can purchase it.

The Last Pogo (1978) is the documentary that chronicled the last punk rock show at the Horseshoe Tavern when it was run by legendary Toronto promoters The Garys (Topp and Cormier) featuring The Scenics, Cardboard Brains, The Secrets, The Mods, The Ugly, The Viletones and Teenage Head. The Last Pogo was released on DVD in 2008 to great reviews.  Available at the Shop.

the original 99 cent roxy

R.I.P., Nash, you were one of a kind.
May 13th, 2014
Screen shot from The Last Pogo Jumps Again. It was a terrible shock today to find out that our good friend Jeff “Nash the Slash” Plewman died over the weekend at his house in Toronto.  It’s a very sad day.  Our condolences to his family and friends. Nash would have appreciated the synchronicity we experienced here at Pogo H.Q.:   we were writing notes on the various extras we ...
Cinema and Punk
October 22nd, 2013
The opening shot of the title sequence for our film The Last Pogo Jumps Again is a photo of an empty movie theatre, The Allenby, opened in 1936.  It would become The Original 99 Cent Roxy Theatre (just 243 steps from the Greenwood subway station!) in 1972, run by Gary Topp.   As Stephen Perry of the radio show Equalizing X Distort (on the University of Toronto’s radio ...
Vice. And versa.
0
February 7th, 2011
When former Viletone Steven Leckie took to the stage at The Last Pogo 30th Anniversary Bash at the Horseshoe Tavern back in 2008, he told the audience (to paraphrase via shoddy memory) that he could “…quote more lines from A Clockwork Orange than things my father told me.” In one of the three interviews we did with Leckie for our soon-to-be-completed project The Last Pogo Jumps Again, ...
Shadowy Men
0
October 26th, 2010
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 ...
Hemingway Hated Disco Music
0
February 27th, 2010
An absolutely rollicking week at Pogo H.Q.: We topped off last week by chatting with fangirl Erika Larner, who’s lineage goes from  Gary Topp’s Original 99 Cent Roxy Theatre, where many seeds of punkish suberversion were planted,  to the Ontario College of Art when it was directed by avante-garde administrator Roy Ascott to helping and hanging out with OCA-based bands like The Cads, and Oh Those Pants, and selling beer at ...
More Buildings about Food and Songs, Part One
0
February 20th, 2010
The B-movie Caged Heat was shown often at Gary Topp’s The Original 99 Cent Roxy Theatre in Toronto in the mid-seventies.  Written and directed by Jonathon Demme, with an original score by John Cale.   Demme would go on to direct (among many films), The Talking Heads‘ concert film Stop Making Sense. John Cale would play the New Yorker (Gary Topp‘s new venue) theatre in February of 1977, fanning the flames that ...
Remake/Remodel
0
November 6th, 2009
The bulk of The Original 99 Cent Roxy at Greenwood and Danforth has been demolished.   The front lobby remains, as does a stripped-to-the-girders marquee out front.   They’re going to turn it into a convenience store that will adjoin a gas station.   This is the back of the building.  Someone’s spray-painted “Bye Bye Roxy” on the wall. Nash the Slash used to live in the apartment above the lobby.   He was ...
The Ludovico Technique
0
July 19th, 2009
Last weekend we spent a few hours going over some of the hundreds of hours of footage we’ve compiled since starting to shoot The Last Pogo Jumps Again three years ago — and this not counting the equally humungous pile ‘o’ footage that co-director Aldo Erdic has, nor the batch of footage we’ve dug up from other filmmakers and broadcasters. Compelling, hilarious, occasionally heart-breaking — and with lots of interesting chatter, ...
And in the beginning there was the Original 99 Cent Roxy…
0
July 12th, 2008
Photo courtesy Cheryl Daniels And the Lord of Rock ‘n Roll said unto them: Yea, though it would be another few years before one or six people claimed to coin the term “punk rock”, a lot of people who were at The Last Pogo or into the original punk scene in Toronto got a lot of their counter-culture edjamucation at The Original 99 Cent Roxy theatre courtesy of Gary ...
Back
t Twitter f Facebook g Google+