The sound hadn’t been quantified and qualified and marketified yet. The people playing it didn’t know it was hardcore punk rock. Machine-gun drums, random, power-saw guitar, urgent, thudding, repetitive bass, and screaming lyrics full of everything you wished you’d said when you were being chewed out by the principal, the cop, the manager of the 7-Eleven. Of course it sounded like “a bunch of noise” — it was the sound of breaking out of being trapped. That’s what real freedom sounds like, motherfucker, not that you would recognize it.
I’ll never know where I got this instinct, but I found myself desperately wanting to share that sound with the world, to see what it would do to people. I was sure that if they could hear it, some of them, just some of them, mind you, would change before my eyes, just as the music was changing me. One day, I stood up from my corner in the practice space, and told them that they had one month to be ready, because I was going to get them their first show. They gave me a look I’m now used to, that mixture of awe and suspicion, the excitement of wanting to believe, combined with the stubborn Albertan certainty they’d been raised with: that interesting things only happened to other people, people on TV or something. But even if they were pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to do it, they still desperately wanted me to be able to do it. They couldn’t hide that. With that look, they invested me with their hopes, despite themselves in spite of themselves.
Naturally, I hadn’t a clue how I was going to do it, besides some vague notions I’d derived from “the early years” segments of rock-star biographies, but the certainty with which I said it was enough to magnetize the band to my nonexistent plan.
That first show I put on, thank God I was an indigent at the time. The money we lost on renting the hall, the posters, the P.A. rental — I could walk away from it, because I owned no assets to seize and had no place to live. Deep down, I guess I knew that I had no idea what I was doing, because at least I’d made the wise decision to put my last Social Studies teacher’s address on the forms the hall custodian put in front of me. That was the last time I have ever had the poor judgment to promote a concert under my own legal name. Maybe the key lesson of that first show was that you can’t put on a financially successful concert by marketing only to people who are just like you. Especially if you yourself are penniless, and you enjoy breaking things. Whatever the lesson was, I’ve met about three thousand people who claim to have been among that sad little dimly lit smattering of ugly kids in torn denim. The crowd was so sparse that when they attempted to slam dance, about half the time they missed slamming into anybody, instead tumbling and sliding in the broken glass and beer that they’d stamped into the old hardwood floor.
Had to leave town for a few months after that one. Went and worked on the neighbour’s ranch back in the sticks. Even saw my old man a couple times, stalking the perimeter of our property with a mickey of Golden Wedding on his tool belt.
When I came back, the band had transformed. Without a place to play in public, or an audience, or jobs, or any money, or girlfriends, or anything to do, the group had festered delightfully in the basement till it was powerful, corrosive, unstoppable — like black mould. The playing and the songs were so much stronger, tougher, more pointedly aggressive. Meanwhile, in the outside world, a goodly chunk of the kids had finally got tired of New Romantic schlock and smarmy white disco. The boil was engorged. I just had to pop it.
I went around to the bars, demanding that they book us. I told them that if they didn’t agree to hire us now, they’d be begging us to play there in six months, and by then we’d be demanding ten times the money. Each time I finished making that pitch, I paused, waiting for the bar owner to respond, certain that he’d be swept up in my atomic tsunami of enthusiasm. I was very young.
So it was back to renting halls for us. This time, I picked the Polish Community Hall, across the river in the nicer part of town, instead of the scummy former church I’d rented downtown the last time. It was more expensive, but I reasoned that more parents would let their kids go there. I talked Sandy’s mother into giving us the cash for the deposit. She was feeling guilty about the divorce, so frankly, I barely had to manipulate her at all.
Then we just promoted the living Hell out of it. We postered over every other poster on the street with past-due canned condensed milk for glue. Takes hours to get that shit off. You need a chisel and a bucket of industrial solvent. We hung around the high schools, giving out handbills with the gig details and big bold print that said “Fuck Your …” and then a long list of things that ought to be fucked. Kids love that.
Even after we had paid the whole (woefully inadequate, it would turn out) damage deposit, the gig was a financial success, by our standards. And it was a perfect evening.
Fuck! The sense of release, the exhilaration in the boys’ and girls’ whole bodies, as they hurled themselves around the hall, bashing into each other, bashing into the stage, bashing into the band. These kids who had been waiting all their lives for this band, this music, these songs to come along. Finally, somebody with access to a VERY LOUD sound system was saying everything they’d been dying to say to the people who’d been crushing their horizons and sense of self-worth since they could crawl.
“What’s wrong with you? Are you stupid? Who do you think you are? You think the world owes you a living?”
“Oh yeah? FUCK YOU! I’m a punk rocker now! Look at me! I’m a disgrace to everything you believe in! Go tell the priest, the school, your boss, that you all failed as authority figures, that my very identity is an incontrovertible rebuke to your values — I’m living proof that you’re a wash-out as a parent, because I’m a punk rocker!”
And once a bunch of kids decide that an event is the place to go on a Saturday night, a bunch of other kids come, too.
These were the kids who had no idea this kind of thing even existed. Children of comfort, of affluence, whose parents voted Conservative, not out of the usual idiot false consciousness, but because it aligned directly with their interests as members of the elite one-party Petrolaucracy of Oilberta.
You could see the fear in their eyes, as they watched the Rabble celebrate their Rabbleness. It was Magic. We were comforting, no, thrilling, the afflicted, and giving the complacent a good, honest scare.
Also, we all got laid.
After a few shows we had the money thing down to a science. Sandy and I would sit with a bottle of Bulgarian wine and his little cigarette maker and spend an afternoon calculating out the best way to relieve a middle class kid of his entire week’s allowance.
Admission: $4
5-Song home-duplicated cassette of band in practice space: $4
Band shirt (band logo spray-painted on random 50-cent Salvation Army rag): $6
Band pin: a buck.
Sticker: ’nother buck.
Poster: $2
And I made a good side business out of selling pre-rolled joints and speedy acid. Okay, well, that was more like where most of the real profit came from. And so it ever shall be.
We had a good run for about nine months. I started hearing from other bands that would get in touch, looking for a gig. I was getting known as a guy who got shit going. When things became muddled or confusing, the band, and others, too, would look to me, because they knew I would always come up with a strong opinion. Later, they could bitch about me talking bullshit, and say that I was steamrolling them into disaster, but they still counted on me as the only person in the room who could forcefully state that he Knew What to Do. People started to call me the band’s “manager.”
Then Sandy’s sister committed suicide, and we all took a break for a while.
MY PLAN
BUT THAT WAS A LONG TIME AGO, and it was just by way of telling you what a genuinely extraordinary sort of fellow I am — my important strengths in terms of my ability to inspire, my vision, my perfect sense of art, my knack for Making Things Happen, et cetera. I return now to the story of what happened at the Calgary Folk Festival last weekend,