Guilty Punk
A member of Canadian punk rock's old school relives his early days
Review
GUILTY OF EVERYTHING
by John Armstrong
New Star Books, 107 pp.
It was the late ’70s when a Vancouver suburban teen dropped out of high school to fulfill his rock ’n' roll dream of playing electric guitar. This kid was raised on Iggy and the Stooges, the New York Dolls and MC5 – brilliant sweating weirdoes crashing around stages in smoky venues. They were America's early contribution to the punk rock scene, when everybody else was grooving to Brit pop heroes like Elton John and Peter Frampton. This particular teen's parents had even bought him a guitar and amp after he promised to stay in school. But if your son was already living with and being taught to play guitar by Art Bergmann, the Stompin' Tom Connors of Canadian punk rock, you'd already lost him to rock ’n' roll's siren call.
Now older and apparently smarter, Vancouver Sun journalist John Armstrong finally tells it like it was in his first book on the old school, West Coast punk scene and the scenesters that inhabited it. Mostly set in the third point of the punk hot-spot triangle (London, New York and Armstrong's Vancouver), we get the sordid, insider's scoop on early bands like Active Dog, The Young Canadians, DOA, Subhumans and The Pointed Sticks – West Coast outsiders that toured through Calgary many a time.
Armstrong's own band, The Modernettes (using the moniker Buck Cherry), with longtime girlfriend Mary Jo Kopechne on bass and the aptly-named Jughead on drums, actually scored a minor hit and a video on The New Music, the precursor to Much Music. This brief rocket to stardom thrust him into lean-and-mean roadtrips down the U.S. West Coast, to Prairie cities hungry for punk rock, and eventually onto his last band, Los Popularos. There's an especially funny anecdote about when the Modernettes stayed and played at the old Calgarian Hotel, a place Armstrong calls "the natural habitat of anyone too fucked-up or strange to mix in polite Calgary society."
Unlike fellow Vancouverite Michael Turner's fictional Hard Core Logo, Armstrong's true sordid tales of early punk rock debauchery – often witnessed by eager green-haired punks and punkettes – takes us down his rock ’n' roll road and sometimes back again: shitty gigs in sleazy strip clubs doubling as music venues; even sleazier booking agents, promoters and indy record companies ripping him off; days and nights of drug and alcohol abuse with money for food, gas and tour van repairs competing for last on the essentials list; or the "Krafty," ingenuous recipes from Los Popularos bandmate Bill Shirt that used the old stand-by, K.D., to stave-off starvation between gigs.
On the other hand, Armstrong's frequent brushes with fame did include an opportunity to drink cheap draft beer with The Clash during their inaugural North American tour, and to witness former New York Dolls guitarist Johnny Thunders backstage at a Vancouver club being serviced with junk by a pit crew before going onstage.
This is caustic, acid-tongued writing with enough rock world anecdotes to either warn you off the music business or encourage you to pursue it – Guilty of Everything certainly takes a funny stab at it with lots of queer tales that Armstrong can tell his grandchildren.
(If you can't find it in town, contact NewStarBooks.com to score Buck Cherry's 107-page memoir that, just like a punk rock dittie, is short and sweet.)
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