When I went gaga for punk music around the age of fourteen, it was the Ramones who got their hook in my gums and hoisted me out of the heavy metal doldrums. I converted with the kind of zeal only the pubescent possess. Every three months some book, movie, or album changes your life. I had a dope hand-me-down oldschool Marantz stereo my parents had bequeathed to me when they upgraded. I could play CDs, records, and tapes through high quality speakers and thus could not help but become an audiophile and a snob. I loved punk music wholeheartedly, but I owned nothing by the Sex Pistols or the Clash, much preferring Buzzcocks, and only a very small amount of hardcore. It was with street-fighting bubblegum pop that the Ramones had first hooked me, and the 1990s bands descending from the punk tradition that I fell most in love with around the age of fourteen were groups I now tend to categorize as power pop. Redd Kross, The Muffs, Fastbacks. As good as these bands or better, by my estimation, were Flop, who sang songs about stuff like Gregor Mendel's genetic experiments, Albert Einstein's Unified Field Theory, and Charles Laughton's gothic noir masterpiece The Night of the Hunter. I first encountered Flop when I saw the video for "The Great Valediction" on MuchMusic's vital underground music showcase City Limits. (MuchMusic was Canada's version of MTV and City Limits the rough equivalent of 120 Minutes.) That song came off Whenever You're Ready, the only album Flop would do with the participation of a major label, in this instance Epic Records subsidiary 550 Music. They did do one more album after that, but like so many bands that came before and after, the demoralizing major label experience helped accelerate their breakup. They were not around nearly long enough to my mind. (While you can stream the entirety of Whenever You're Ready as a single convenient file on YouTube, you cannot embed that file on Blogspot, so below you will find the two music videos that accompanied that album upon its release.)
The only thing that excited me as much as the Ramones when it came to discovering and exploring punk music was the revelation that my hometown of Calgary had a robust and highly idiosyncratic punk scene. Like Seattle, good bands seldom passed through Calgary so we had to do it ourselves. I had read about mysterious local music happenings and had become curious but it was only when I bought the legendary local underground/punk compilation Bloodbath at the Chinese Disco at Sam the Record Man that I figured I basically knew what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. Capriciousness? Maybe a little. The most interesting and bizarre songs on the comp were the two by mysterious local outfit the Primrods, who I had the luxury of seeing perform many times before going away to university. They influenced my approach to the guitar and songcraft at least as much as John Fahey would subsequently do. Playful anarcho-syndicalism, with lyrics often referencing the mayhem of Western history—warfare, sabotage, spycraft—each member identified by the letter P followed by a number. When they released 1995's Kneecappin', their first proper non-cassette-only full-length, my friend Clifford and I were in total awe, quickly deciding that it was the greatest, most totally ingenius rock album ever. Amazingly enough, in a tale that would live in infamy, Chicago-based headbutting schizophrenic Wesley Willis was for a short, mercurial period a kind of über fan of our dissonant mystery men. Is that how the Primrods got signed to Geffen?! No other story is likely to make any more sense. If you had asked local scenesters in 1998 which hometown rockers would be least likely to get signed to a major, I suspect they'd all have identified the Primrods as suspect numero uno. Around the time they were recording the doomed Geffen album I asked P2 how they had managed to actually record an album for that outsized enterprise and he told me that they'd just taken their old approach and given it the "classic rock radio" treatment. Typically enough, the main reason the album never came out is because there was a sudden front office overhaul at Geffen and scorn was cast by the new executives upon most projects then in the works. And that was the unromantic end of the Primrods. Listen to the album—which I have been able to embed below—and I think you'll agree with me and P2 that it is brimful with remarkably palatable rock-and-roll music.
When we value people we tend to value them based on our own needs, desires, experiences, and hopes. When I decree that for me Bill Wilson—co-founder of and prime mover behind Alcoholics Anonymous, beginning in the early 1930s—is the most important man of the 20th century that is doubtlessly in large part because I am a low bottom alcoholic with three kidney failures behind him (one of those culminating in a brief across-the-boards organ failure), a blood transfusion, and a long and demystifying experience of having found nobody who doesn’t have the same problem who understands or even cares (emergency room doctors especially despise alcoholics, doubtlessly due to overexposure). Often when we alcoholics relapse the people we love or depend on the most are quite furious with us, which ends up being just another thing to drink over, though usually we get it; that doesn’t help us at all with respect to explaining what we are going through or why our conduct/behaviour is so cataclysmically wretched. In the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous the alcoholic condition is described as cunning, baffling, powerful. I’ll say it is! Meetings are a central part of the program. It is where we go to identify instead of comparing. I have come into contact with many a soccer mom whose story is remarkably similar to my own, which would not likely happen in a workplace or at a swanky nightspot. Bill Wilson was a New York stockbroker with a good but rapidly diminishing reputation who, already a problem drinker, dove deep into the abyss following the huge market crash commencing in October of 1929. His salvation arrived, to the awe of those who were certain he’d soon be dead or in the nuthouse (especially the medical professionals who’d seen him at his ever-worsening worst), primarily because he found a way to embrace, though previously agnostic, a personal God while at the same time bolstering his spiritual fortitude through work with others alcoholics whose conditions were especially grave. When Bill connected with Dr. Bob Smith of Akron, Ohio while visiting that city, asking after alcoholics who might be in especially bad shape, a doctor Bill had phoned up randomly pointed him toward Dr. Bob, who was definitely the worse for wear…Alcoholics Anonymous as a not-for-profit operation immediately began to adopt a concrete form…
The first A.A. groups met at Bill Wilson’s apartment in New York and a good deal of those in regular attendance got sober and stayed that way. A.A. gradually expanded and in the early years success rates were extraordinary. By 1941 the Saturday Evening Post caught wind and passed the message on to Americans of all stripes. People took note. Bill Wilson was an eminent fellow who had the luxury of taking private meetings with people like Carl Gustav Jung and John D. Rockefeller Jr.: the former believed that in localizing alcoholism/addiction as an explicitly spiritual disorder and developing a workable framework for treating that disorder, A.A. had literally changed the world; the Rockefeller Foundation offered an obscene amount of money to A.A. as such, but Bill rejected it flat-out, the seventh tradition of A.A. stipulating that any given A.A. group “ought to be fully self-supporting, declining outside contributions.” Naturally, it was the original core A.A. group in collective unanimity that came up with the steps, the traditions, and the texts that would comprise the first edition of the Big Book. If the groups that spawned out of that original group that met in Bill and his wife Lois’s apartment had much higher statistical success rates than A.A. has today, operating as it does on a planetary scale, that is largely because Bill and Dr. Bob made a point of scouring hospitals for alcoholics on death’s doorstep, and these men and women were overwhelmed by such agony and terror that they were willing to do just about anything to alleviate the suffering. Some folks say that rock bottom is simply where you stop digging, and there’s no small amount of truth in that, but it is also true that if you are totally ruined and absolutely debased you may be more inclined to take strenuous measures to save yourself. That is certainly my story. I am exactly the kind of alcoholic Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob would have found, in all their unvanquishable compassion and mercy, in some random godforsaken hospital somewhere. The meetings will help you stay sober, but it is the program itself that is the fundamental grounding operation and design for living: we admit that we are powerless over alcohol and all persons, places, and things beyond our control; we turn our will over to God or some great majestic cosmic power and stop steering the careening wagon our woebegone, hellbent selves; we identify our defects of character and past misconduct, undertaking at a measured and thoughtful pace to clean up the mess we have for a good long time been making; we pray, meditate, and learn to be of service to others. What we get in turning over our will and our lives is nothing short of a second life…just like those fuddy-duddy born again Christians, by God!
Though my primary interests going back a long way were art, literature, philosophy, and history, I also loved playing and watching sports until well into my teens. We lived out in the country starting when I was thirteen and I commenced playing hockey for the town of Okotoks, Alberta in the position of goaltender. I tried out for Bantam AA hoping against hope that I might have a chance to move on from there to junior hockey and maybe even college hockey, though I was already perfectly aware that I didn’t have a professional career ahead of me in the NHL, my not exactly being supernaturally gifted. I’d had to work really hard to be as good as I even was. I was doing well in Bantam AA tryouts but I found the locker room energy oppressive and the coaches sadistic. Late in the running my game totally collapsed on me and I made a complete ass of myself, such that not only did they cut me in the final round, they demoted me, with all the unfeeling meanness at their disposal, to the lowest division of minor hockey, division five. The other boys had already heard what had happened to me when I walked into the locker room for the first practice and though they teased and poked at me a little it was clear that almost all of them were nearly as embarrassed as was I to be way down in the dirt of division five. That being said, the locker room energy was so much more congenial at the bottom of the ranks and we had a marvellous coach—a farmer and mechanic named Coach Joe—who made us both enjoy the game and excel, each in our own individual capacities. This team turned out to be unusually excellent, cutting a wide swath through the competition. Early on we played a scrimmage against the division four team and kicked their ass handily. As the starting goaltender I was essentially the team’s quarterback, but I was only the second best and most critical player. We had a fairly short and innocuous kid with an NHL-level slapshot—I’m not fucking with you—that he could also aim with unusual precision. He was by far our highest scorer. In the end, we actually managed to win the provincial championship for division five. I remember it extremely well. We were up by one goal in the final two minutes and I told one of the defensemen to please not let the other team get a shot because my legs felt like jelly. When we actually won the collective exultation was the most emotionally intense thing I have ever experienced. The whole team dogpiled on me, screaming and yelling, a clamour of insane joy. I think I knew then that I was going to quit hockey. What had just happened could not be topped, at least not by the likes of me. However, we still had to go and play the big North American minor hockey tournament in Montana where the teams were of a much higher caliber and we did not win even a single game, getting outright obliterated on a couple occasions. Okotoks was a bit of a rough town. Two of my fourteen-year-old teammates almost couldn’t go to Montana because they already had criminal records. I grew very close to all those boys in a short period of time…and then never saw them again. Well, there is sort of one exception. A few years later I was watching television and saw an anti-smoking PSA featuring Thelon, a former teammate, who was dying of emphysema or something like that. Most of the kids on that team had been smokers. It really drove Coach Joe crazy. He was constantly benching kids he’d caught smoking behind the arena.
My father was a workaholic but he was also passionate about sports and I suspect that a lot of my own enthusiasm derived directly from that. He played football and basketball in high school and part of the reason he had me start working out with a personal trainer quite young was because he didn’t want me to have the kinds of chronic knee and back problems he’d suffered on account of sports injuries. I remember one time when I was really little I worked up an elaborate treasure hunt for my dad’s birthday which ended with us playing catch with a football in a soccer field near where we then lived on the southwest edge of town. I originally had no intention of playing basketball with the school team at Strathcona-Tweedsmuir, but the coach, Mr. Nelson, encouraged me to try out in grade eight so I gave it a shot. That year was a nightmarish disaster. The other boys were ruthless with me, calling me “chicken legs” and suggesting that I might want to consider the possibility that I was genuinely retarded. They were all vicious little vipers. I got one basket the whole season. Whenever me dad would come and see a game I was crushed by humiliation and shame.
Toward the end of high school I basically lost all interest in team sports. I would tease the jocks by insisting that all team sports are inherently homosexual in nature. Quite often they’d chuckle contentedly and admit that I might be onto something. They never really had the same contempt for me that the arts kids did…and do to this day (grade eight basketball aside). By the end of high school the only sports I watched voluntarily and with any regularity were boxing and tennis. That hasn't really changed. In both boxing and tennis I marvel at the stamina of the competitors. How is that person still standing?! I liked to smoke weed and watch tennis because it enhanced the metronomic pulse of the game, the announcers only intervening during pauses. We had a little satellite dish out at the acreage that didn’t pick up more than about twenty-five stations but one of them was HBO, so I got to watch a lot of top-tier boxing and became quite a connoisseur. I was also the only person I knew who was watching the early seasons of Oz and Mr. Show with Bob and David. Naturally, I liked to get properly high for those also. Ah, kids.
* Why haven't I killed myself yet? It's simple: I believe in myself. ✌
