PERFECT YOUTH: The Birth of Canadian Punk (3 page)

“Even though we were all friends, it just wasn’t firing on all cylinders,” says Haight. Hamilton joined forces with the art school–oriented Diodes. Haight took a different route, following the trail of blood to the vacant bassist position in the Viletones. (Jackie had been recently booted from the band for being unreliable and irresponsible, impossible as it sounds.) Haight clicked immediately with the Dog, Pompeii, and Motor X, helping to pen their first three classic songs: “Screamin’ Fist,” “Possibilities,” and “Rebel.”

“The Ramones had that whole Beach Boys thing that
harkened back to the ’60s, but the Viletones didn’t have that,”
says Cleave Anderson, drummer for the Battered Wives and
himself a one-time member of the band. “They’d play two
chords, but then it wouldn’t even go to the third chord the way the Ramones did.” It’s a fact noted in
SPIN
’s 2007 write-up of “Screamin’ Fist”: “Punk’s early critics often condemned
the genre as nothing more than three chords and an attitude.
In this Toronto band’s case, two generally sufficed.”

The band’s simplicity was an integral part of their charm; while other local bands like the Government and Cardboard Brains were exploring the artier end of punk’s left-field spectrum, the Viletones were holding it down on the bottom rung, stripping a simple genre down to its barest parts. Before long, the band was a mainstay of Toronto’s fast-growing punk scene, and by summer, they were taking the show on the road.

Depending on who is telling the story, it was either Leckie, Teenage Head, or God who drove down to CBGB in New York to ask Hilly Kristal for a chance to play the American punk Mecca. Kristal agreed, and a few weeks later, nearly every active Toronto-area punk band with a reliable ride was part of a Canuck convoy pulling down the I-90 for a three-night weekend stint with the Cramps, who were enjoying their first opportunity to play for a weekend crowd (having been previously relegated to the “prove yourself” slot of Monday through Wednesday). It was the beginning of the Viletones’ intimate relationship with the city and a sign that they had cemented a deadly triad of Southern Ontario punk menace with the Diodes and Teenage Head, the three bands leading the area’s new musical charge. The August 1977 issue of the
Pig Paper
, Toronto’s definitive early punk zine, refers to the bands as “basking in media attention of Beatle proportion.” It concludes that “only good things lie ahead, as well as in their wake.”

The Viletones returned to Toronto and got down to the business of recording their initial batch of songs, first inking a management deal with Mega Media Productions. Helmed by Tibor Takács, the future director of such righteously titled made-for-TV horror flicks as
Mansquito
,
Ice Spiders
, and
Killer Rats
, the new managerial muscle gave the band the confidence to release the three-song
Screamin’ Fist
EP on their own Vile Records.

There’s an odd bit of controversy that dogs the record to this day; “Rebel,” one of the Viletones’ best-known songs, is claimed by Steven Davey from the Dishes as an original composition, given to the Viletones in good faith and never acknowledged following their large-scale success. Davey is adamant that the song, along with several well-known Toronto punk classics from the era, are his. Leckie is equally vehement in his denial of the claim. In Liz Worth’s excellent oral history of the early Toronto scene,
Treat Me Like Dirt
, there is a fair representation of both sides of this argument. But Davey, incensed that the book doesn’t editorialize or vindicate him beyond a doubt, now refuses to talk. He won’t talk to me. He won’t talk to Colin Brunton, who has interviewed hundreds of participants in the early Toronto scene for his astonishingly in-depth follow-up documentary
The Last Pogo Jumps Again: A Biased & Incomplete History of Toronto Punk Rock and New Wave Music Circa September 24, 1976 to December 1, 1978
. Davey’s voice is absent here, so while there may be lingering doubts as to the true author of “Rebel,” we must now leave these tough rock ’n’ roll questions to the brilliant scientists of the future.

The legacy of the “Screamin’ Fist” single isn’t just in malformed copyright controversy; as mentioned the title track also supplied the name of Operation Screaming Fist in William Gibson’s seminal 1984 piece of cyberpunk fiction,
Neuromancer
. The South Carolina–born author had moved to Toronto in the late ’60s to evade the draft, but settled in Vancouver long before the rise of the Viletones, attaining his degree from University of British Columbia in 1977. But Gibson remained fascinated with the rise of punk culture worldwide and particularly attuned to its mutation in his former home.

“If you’re gonna be name-checked, and that book wins the Hugo Prize as the best science fiction book of the year, that’s fucking awesome,” says Leckie. “It would only be things like that that took away the loneliness of being an artist.” That loneliness, despite fronting one of the city’s most popular bands, was a direct result of the terrifyingly confrontational Nazi Dog persona that had come to define Leckie. His antics, while humorously grotesque in hindsight (and with the knowledge that everyone survived), must have been alienating beyond belief in the late ’70s.

“Especially after I got to know him a bit better outside of his nocturnal environment, I got the feeling Nazi Dog was, first and always foremost, a very clever, quite calculated role he was busy playing,” says Gary Pig Gold, creator of the eponymous
Pig Paper
. But even precise calculations can lead to unexpected consequences.

“They played a show at Max’s Kansas City when Leckie hit an artery and was spouting blood,” recalls the Forgotten Rebels’ Chris Houston. “People were running up with their mouths open as if he was an open shower and sucking down the blood. This was pre-AIDS, but top that, motherfucker. He had spent the whole afternoon shooting speed, too.” Other tales from Max’s involve a show promoted by Leckie as his last — he promised to kill himself onstage, not the first or last time he made the threat to drum up publicity for a gig. While he never followed through, he did knock Pompeii unconscious for several minutes after dropping him from his shoulders mid-song. Another often-circulated story involves a woman walking right up to Leckie mid-set at CBGB and pinning his foot to the floor with a knife.

“There were fans, so to speak, that would get so caught up in it, like the girl who stabbed me in the foot in CBGB’s,” says Leckie. “She must’ve separated. She went right into the movie. She became a part of the lyric.” But Leckie’s movie was quickly evolving into something that other people were nervous to become a part of. Sometimes, it wasn’t just what was happening onstage: the band had aggressively courted a violent following and found one in a local gang called the Blake Street Boys.

Hailing from the city’s rougher east end, the Blake Street Boys became a mainstay of Viletones gigs, controlling the offstage violence and intimidating the hell out of any audience member that wasn’t part of their crew. Admittedly punk had always had elements of violence at its core, but this was different — more powerful, deliberate, and direct.

“It was a real drag,” recalls Don Pyle. “The scene before was fun. There were fights here or there, but people didn’t come looking for a fight. The Blake Street Boys came looking for a fight. Out of the blue, you’d see six people beating on one person. And Leckie would use them as his fist. He’d just point at people and they’d get beat up.”

“I really sought it out,” says Leckie, who had moved to a live-in rehearsal space at Parliament and Dundas, just east of Toronto’s psychological border along Yonge Street. “I’d just
drive around with Motor, making it clear that, ‘Hey, we’re
your band.’ It was pretty rough, and these guys were really
fucking cutthroat and dangerous. There was a fair number of them in the beginning. There’d be 25 of them. Then
20, 15. It would depend. Because they were always getting arrested. Other bands in Toronto would present themselves as punks, but on the weekends go to their parents’ cottages in the Muskokas. These boys would never, ever get that. If it was anything to do with water, it would be Wasaga Beach at best.”

As successful as the Nazi Dog name and personality — combined with the Blake Street Boys’ muscle — had been in garnering newspaper headlines and CBC features right out of the basement, it was, not shockingly for discerning readers, a growing hindrance.

“I go backstage to introduce myself to Leckie because he had been phoning me, and he goes, ‘Hey, man, you should be managing us,’” recalls Diodes’ manager Ralph Alfonso. “And I’m like, ‘Well, I’m kind of already committed to managing to the Diodes.’ And he goes, ‘You should manage both of us!’ And I go, ‘Yeah, well, that would be kind of cool.’ Then I look at him and he’s dripping blood and obviously a psycho, and I’m like, ‘Ah, you know, maybe I’ll just do what I’m doing right now.’”

“I think everyone was pretty shocked when we got signed to CBS,” says Diodes’ vocalist Paul Robinson. “But basically, when you look at the Viletones, how signable is a band with a singer called ‘Nazi Dog’? I remember all the big people from Warner Brothers coming down to check them out, and just going, ‘Oh my god, what is this?’” It was the opposite of what they were used to.”

“He was the closest thing to a star,” recalls
Toronto Star
entertainment writer Peter Goddard. “But he lacked a Svengali. Steve, plus somebody else, would be living in the Hollywood Hills right now. He created a performance persona that worked. His intellectual reach was great, but he was alone.”

In a 1978
Toronto Star
profile, Leckie remarked to Goddard, “Before I do an album I want a contract with a major label. I want lots of money behind the album to promote it. We don’t get along at all with the guys now working with us. I mean, they want to put our record out with a company called Razor Records. Razor Records? Why don’t they call it Safety-Pin Records? Don’t they know what’s happening?”

There were a lot of claims made by the Viletones through 1978: that the band was on the verge of signing to CBS, or Sire, or Stiff in the U.K.; that they were about to leave for England — on May 3, 1978, according to an April interview in the
Pig Paper
. The band never moved. And there were the continued threats that Leckie would finally follow through and kill himself onstage. From the same issue:

Gary: Are you going to kill yourself?

Nazi: I will.

Gary: When?

Nazi: Before I’m 23. I’m 20 now. I just can’t see much more of this. I’m getting away with murder right now.

Leckie never killed himself.

In 1978, the Viletones released their second EP, the four-song
Look Back in Anger
, on Razor Records. The band’s DNA had already begun to change with the addition of Sam Ferrera, bassist for thug rock powerhouse the Ugly, on second guitar. The beefed-up new lineup never quite nailed the violent simplicity of those first three songs, and despite
the inclusion of great songs like “Back Door to Hell” and the controversy-baiting “Swastika Girl,” failed to advance the
band toward their major label goals. Frustrated with Leckie’s control over all things Viletones and their seeming lack of progress, the remaining members of the band, save for Ferrera, quit unexpectedly, unveiling their new band, the Secrets (get it?) days later.

The Secrets, which also featured former Diode (and Haight’s Zoom partner) John Hamilton, debuted with a slicker, dancier sound than the Viletones ever had, more in line with the school dance-ready Teenage Head than, you know, horrifying nihilism. While the band never achieved the local renown of their previous groups, their records are a fresh take on the often joyless late-era recordings of many of their peers, fleshed out by a cappella detours and doo-wop bounce.

The defection and formation of the Secrets left a gaping hole in the Viletones lineup, partially filled by the unexpected arrival of Calgary transplant Steven Koch on guitar. Koch had moved to Toronto as a Viletones fan, having written a letter to the band while still living out west, and came to Toronto with his brother, Alex, the drummer in Crash Kills Five with Don Pyle. Then, there was the arrival of Ferrera’s former bandmate in the Ugly, drummer Tony Vincent. Suddenly, there was a concern bigger than lineup problems — it was a guy named Mike Nightmare, who represented the Ugly in the same way that Leckie embodied the Viletones.

“The Ugly were probably way worse than the Viletones. Or better, ’cause Mike Nightmare was pretty fucked up,” says Colin Brunton. “He was pretty real, man. Mike Nightmare was a legit, tough kid. We’ve got a shot of Mike Nightmare, he’s shooting up onstage. Like, he’s got a syringe in his arm. It wasn’t pretend. He was shooting up heroin.” Nightmare, from all accounts — he died in 1997 — was the real-life incarnation of the Nazi Dog character, a Blake Street Boy who didn’t need a gang to do his fighting. He also lacked Leckie’s vision, and while many accounts of the era lump the pair together, it’s clear that their approaches were wildly different, with Leckie’s detached intellectualism countering Nightmare’s brute thuggery. Still, the bands occupied the darker, more nefarious end of the the city’s punk spectrum, a bond best exemplified by the riot they caused at the infamous Outrage concert.

Staged by Teenage Head’s management team at Toronto’s Masonic Temple (it is not without great irony that MTV Canada now broadcasts from the same building), Outrage was, ostensibly, a showcase for the Head, framed by a complementary bill of Simply Saucer, the Battered Wives, the Concordes, and the Viletones. Promoted as a de facto sequel to “RockShock,” a concert presented by the same folks not four months prior, Outrage signalled that punk in Toronto had arrived in a major way, the crowd packed and the local media in full effect. Contrasted with RockShock, a limp, poorly attended gig that felt like a sad high school dance, Outrage looked to be an unequivocal success. Until the Ugly showed up.