Art Punk Bands
Scott Beadle | January 22, 2010 in AKA, Exxotone, Generators, Tunnel Canary, [e?]
From its beginnings at Pumps Gallery, punk in Vancouver has been closely tied to the art school/gallery scene. Here are some of the bands most closely identified with the “art punk” scene.
The Generators grew out of an earlier combo, The Rest, who played at the Japanese Hall in 1977. Led by Randy Pandora and Gary Bourgeois (aka Gary Middleclass), the Generators played a handful of shows in the first half of 1978 and recorded a proposed single, but it was never released (until I Wanna Be A Girl surfaced on Zulu Records’ Last Call compilation in 1991).
Exxotone (originally The Detectives) was Randy Pandora’s post-Generators band, formed in early 1979. Exxotone had two tracks on the Vancouver Complication album.
[e?] was the intentionally-enigmatic moniker of Gary Bourgeois’s post-Generators project. The lineup varied during the band’s existence, but the nucleus was always Gary and his wife Gina Daniels.
AKA formed in late '78 or early '79 and lasted until early 1981. Fronted by singer/saxophonist Dennis Mills, they released the Red Therapy 12-inch EP in 1980, and played in Seattle and San Francisco. In 1981, core bandmembers formed Rhythm Mission, who existed until 1989; their career overlapped with the Jazzmanian Devils, featuring Mills and company supporting various guest vocalists (including Vanessa Richards, of Bolero Lava, and Madeline Morris, of Moev and Family Plot).
Rhythm Mission
Of Course! Last Call...(King Blood)
the final version of the band was Mills, Hunter, Harding, Hales.
AG
AKA and on
it's great looking at the timelines etc., I've been having conversations from time to time with Colin Griffiths about aspects of this history.
Also cross referencing some dates from this site with the timeline you sent me a while back.
Here I am again to correct a couple of lineups...
Rhythm Mission: Lee was the keyboard player. (V.2 ), add Andy Graffiti, percussion (V.3) I think Ross Hales replaced Warren Ash after I left, also; not sure about the keyboard situation, maybe not replaced.
Jazzmanian Devils first lineup: (I have the 1st gig cassette here, somewhere...oh yes,@ Tamara, 11/5/83) Dense Milt vocals and sax, Scott Harding guitar, Finn Maneche cello, Lee Kelsey keys, Andy Graffiti drums. Then Chris Grove sax, Brian Harding trombone were added, and that lineup was solid for some time.
Andy G
Tunnel Canary documentary
Filmmaker Eric Lupe has made a documentary on Tunnel Canary (self-titled). A short trailer can be viewed here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=HP8icVH5PU4
AKA didn't have dots in our
AKA didn't have dots in our name; at least not intentionally.
Also- although we played our first gig at Pumps (at an erotic art show curated by Peg Campbell)none of us ever went to art school.
That said, most people did lump us with the so called "art punk" bands, like Generators, e, U-J3RK5 etc. Was there any kind of link musically? Not really. There was much cross pollination. For example, Randy Pandora guested with us at Monde Arte at the Commodore, and we co-wrote a song or two. We both played with Tunnel Canary at one time or another, and share the Exxotone connection (the Warrens squared)
For more information on AKA, go to Reverbnation, or www.densemilt.com
AKA
Darn, and I was trying to be grammatically correct! Thanks for the details, info & clarification, Dense. I don't think any of the bands were 100% comfortable with the "art school" tag (even the ones who DID attend art school!) but... Of lumping-together for convenience, we're guilty as charged.
In the first AKA lineup
It's Tommy Wong not Chong. Sadly, Cheech was never in AKA either.
Tommy Wong
Fixed - thanks for the heads-up! (my brain went Up In Smoke)
Tommy Wong
Tommy Wong was a child prodigy world concert level classical pianist. As a teenager he became interested in Glitter and then punk and gave Monsieur Bourgeois' various bands a real credibility. There was a very expressionist edge to art-punk/new wave music in Vancouver then that is not registered anywhere. Most of it was musically wanting but it was big on sensation.
Randy Pandora tried very much in this vain but as he recounts in your film, he mostly just plain scared everyone in a way Nazi Dog of the Viletones could only dream of.
The Haters were also very scary, I saw one gig at "John Barley's"??? or something like that name. It was a gay leather bar on Cordova at Carrall streets that became a serious punk/New Wave venue for at least a year or more. The Haters were pale, skinny, shirtless guys who looked like they had been huffing paint and living on Cheezies for a year. THey started the concert by lighting several bleach bottles on the stage with lighter fluid. Then they started playing their spirited, hateful noise as the tiny, black, tadpole-like carbonized plastic particles started to rise and fill the air. The singer had an Auschwitz pallor and horrible teeth. I left before ingesting any of the plastic.
Negavision were also an interesting band. They performed previously under a different name that I can't recall. I saw them a few times at Pumps, Helen Pitt Gallery and other places. They were fronted by an impish Quebecois art/guttersnipe, and I think all of them were Quebecois. None of them were over 5'6" and 135 lbs.. They made proto-No Wave music that was all diagonals but less cartoonish than Braineater. They also made nega-paintings that nobody in the artworld took seriously but all noticed and maybe wished could actually be possible. There is a Gina Show video of them made by John Anderson of Pumps Gallery, the first site of a punk concert in Vancouver.
There was another noise/No Wave proto band that was a vegetarian husband and wife team that went to the art school. They were actually really mellow people who had a small child and they seemed like a happy family. The guy had an incident at the school because he made a video with simulated razor blade mutilation of his penis that was inspired by Rudolf Schwarzkogler, the Austrian Aktionismus artist. But it was just simulated and he would have the video playing when he did music performance. He and his wife looked like they stepped out of Egon Schiele portraits. Thin, good bones and spiky hair (for those who didn't go to art school the spiky hair of punk came from the paintings of Schiele and David Bowie's Glam manifestations). I saw them perform at their Emily Carr School of Art graduation in front of all the school and parents. She was wearing a black corset and panties and black heels and shaking a realistic 14 inch black rubber dildo at the audience as she shrieked like a cross between a vampyre and a rape victim. Her husband was shirtless playing metal noise. The parents took note at the colour and conviction of the performance. Anybody remember their name?
So, there is a whole wing of the scene that this movie and site hasn't registered. These bands are just a few. Most of this was pre-1980 ...i think.
Alvin Balkind
Alvin
Great comments Alvin! The band you're thinking of was named Tunnel Canary, an astonishing musical ensemble. They're there in the "family tree" above. And please also note the link to the trailer of the documentary film about them! The film can't include every single band in the Vancouver scene, of course, and that's why this website was created, to lend some background, and fill in the gaps. Great comments by people like you help in this regard. Thanks again!
Alvin,
Alvin, thanks for the images, I remember those bands. I think they were inspired by Alan Vega, the NYC rockabilly, coke-synth duo that Bruce Springsteen supported. But all the Vancouver bands were guitar based. Nobody in Vancouver ever got Kraftwerk or even later synth-pop like Human League etc...
Vancouver is a guitar town. The more I think about Vancouver punk it seems that like everywhere else it was an arty phenomena but in Vancouver it eventually came to rest on Joey Shithead as all the other bands could not function with the low economics and moved on with their lives. Shithead made the legacy of punk seem like a working class, Mack jacket, hockey loving culture. But that is just because the media are lazy and lowbrow themselves and Shithead was a willing actor. He also mastered the art of the 'socially conscious' rocker. DOA took their cues from the Ramones and English punk but they never understood anything of the culture of the Ramones or Lydon etc... The DOA/Subhumans clique were just pub-rockers/metalheads in punk drag. Compared to all of the exciting range of what happened in Vancouver between 77-82, DOA might as well be Nickelback. This is not personal, they earned whatever they got but the story of Vancouver punk as being DOA and whatever is really tired and simply wrong and probably the least interesting.
Diego Cortez
Tunnel Canary
The only time I saw Tunnel Canary they were playing the OddSmelling Hall on Gravely. The guitar player (sic) had his guitar on the stage floor and he was dropping GI Joe figures on to the strings - creating ear-shattering feedback and noise. The spectacle practically cleared the room.
Ed Banger
Diego, Wow!
You neglected to mention that Alan Vega's band was called Suicide. I saw them perform live on the TV show Midnight Special. I always thought it was a shame that the legacy of Vancouver punk came down to DOA. They always reminded me of the kind of rednecks you used to see with mullets that had no idea that it came from Ziggy Stardust. What DOA really wanted to be was Bachman Turner Overdrive as they demonstrated in their TCOB video. What that had to do with the Arthur Rimbaud meets Egon Schiele Glam baby of Punk/New Wave exemplified by the Sex Pistols, Voidoids, Elvis Costello, Television, CLash. Stranglers, Talking Heads etc...
is to be explained.
cheers,
Willoughby Sharp
class / imagination
British Punks were not a fashion, conditions in London at that time for young kids on their own (and there were many) were Dickensian, precisely. So the proletarian anger of British punk was historical and natural. Vancouver's working class had in contrast had their world-historical heyday in the 50's-70's.
DOA weren't angry, they were just rednecks. There was a homophobia underneath that knew better than to raise its neck.And never did. But their political correctness wan't convincing, it felt like politicking. The rest of the scene was magnanimous toward them as the rest of the scene was basically the arty people that had emerged from hippiedom wanting something more urban. So there was a hippie sense of community. That was always the nicest thing about Vancouver, the sense of community that came from the hippies and actually quite flourished during disco and then into punk. I remember going to loft parties in Gastown or Yaletown and staying up listening to bands and waking up the next day to rainy streets and the white bread and butter with fish and chips on the side at the Only Seafoods.
Ciao from Roma
Fabio Mauri
Rimbaud
Richard Hell invented the look of punk single-handedly by crossing Schiele and Rimbaud. Punk came from poetry and painting. The baby-boomers had rediscovered the historic avant-gardes of Symbolism, Constructivism, Dada and Surrealism. They added Beat poetry and tried to marry it with an amalgam of Glam (Velvets/Bowie) and Garage (Stooges/Ramones)to carry it to the public or at least out of the academy. Richard Hell was seen by Malcolm McLaren who took the look back to his wife Vivienne Westwood in London.
Even early Talking Heads are more 'punk' than DOA. The whole notion of 'authentic' punk promoted by the DOA school of Vancouver music is ridiculous - Iggy wouldn't be impressed by the lack of culture, nor Lydon or even the Ramones. But I had a great time in Vancouver then too, it was great to be able to do my work without police harassment or interference and it wasn't difficult to find the sea bass or the gallons of fresh cow's blood to make the celebration.
Hermann Nitsch