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 ...
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 ...
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, ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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, ...
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 ...