Difficult Music

Perfect Youth
I finally read John Armstrong’s Guilty of Everything this week. Actually, I devoured the book like a late lunch of grilled cheese sandwich and fig newtons. He won me over right away with the statement “All musicians are scum.” Hear, hear. Takes one to know one, and Buck knew a few. What follows his preface is an excellent account of Vancouver’s (and White Rock’s) emergent punk scene. The era that the book chronicles has a personal mystique because it was a time when I was just becoming aware of Vancouver’s music scene. I was too young to enjoy or fully understand it (how significant could The K-Tels be compared to Rush and Queen?), but I knew the names of the key players and the places they frequented.

Places like the Smilin’ Buddha. We all knew about the Smilin’ Buddha, but no one I knew had gone there. Years later, in ’88, when Alick and I were in DEM, we refused an offer to play the Buddha. We turned it down based mainly on the reputation of the fellow who made the offer, but we also, I think, factored in our personal safety and the security of our equipment. Not very punk rock, I know. I never did set foot in the place, which is partly why Armstrong has a book out and I’m messing around with this thing.

The book succeeds because, as we like to say around our house, Armstrong doesn’t let the facts interfere with the truth. He tells some good stories, fleshes out situations and conversations for maximum effect, and only admits to memory lapses when they’re caused by severe intoxication. Convenient, but believable.

But out of the chaos, some interesting (purported) facts emerge: Art Bergman stole the song “Hawaii” from the songwriter in his previous band. Burnaby punk bands were into heavy metal, while the White Rock scene was inspired by 60s garage rock. Armstrong wrote the Modernettes’ signature tune “Barbra” after a friend issued him a challenge, and he mispelled Barbra because he was drunk. Fascinamating, no?

The book is short. The detail hound in me wanted something longer, but as a reader I thought the length was about right. Like a Modernettes song, Guilty of Everything is tight and packs a lot into a short space. It would have made an appropriate but lengthy subchapter for Have Not Been the Same—perhaps a digression in that depressing chapter on Art Bergman.

Guilty of Everything was everything I hoped it would be—a trip back to a time when you could get attacked on the street for having short hair, when CFOX grudgingly broadcast live punk shows from Gary Taylor’s Rock Room, when The Pointed Sticks played my sister’s high school, and when some quiet boys played loud little concerts for their siblings and parents in a basement on Huxley Ave.