In 2016, Felix Viton Ho showed up at La Vitrola on St. Laurent in Montreal, not sure what to expect. An undergraduate looking to feel involved in something, Ho had Googled “Montreal concerts” and come across the show listing. He climbed three flights of stairs and entered the dimly lit venue to find a crowd of two. It turned out to be a vaporwave show: a hazy, irony-soaked genre of electronic music that originated online. When the performance started, the two other people welcomed Ho into their midst, and together, they all began to sway.

It’s no secret that live music has become increasingly—and often exorbitantly— expensive. Artists and fans have to contend with a market that is effectively monopolized by Live Nation Entertainment (LNE). The 2010 merger of Ticketmaster and Live Nation means that the single company controls 70 percent of the event venues and ticketing market, gouging audiences with unexpected fees and dynamic pricing models. As Soraya Roberts pointed out earlier this year for Defector, just going to see a popular indie act these days often costs upwards of $50. From an artist’s perspective, these concert ticket prices aren’t indefensible: no one really buys records, streamers don’t really pay, and touring costs are only rising. Amidst this bleak landscape, DIY concerts can offer an adjusted model, one that exists not outside of capitalism but, at least, doesn’t require a Ticketmaster account.

After his introduction to Montreal nightlife, Ho started showing up to more local shows, frequently attending a series of small outdoor concerts put on by promoter Josh Spencer under the name KickDrum. “I asked the man at the door, Josh, if this thing was happening more often,” Ho recalls of his first KickDrum show. “He was like ‘yeah, it’s happening every Wednesday.’ So I showed up the next Wednesday, and I showed up the Wednesday after that.” Eventually, Ho asked Spencer what he could do to get involved, and Spencer asked him to hang out at the door and keep him company. “Maybe you’ll learn a thing or two,” he said. Five years later, Ho is one of KickDrum’s two promoters.

For Liz Houle, KickDrum’s other promoter, the goal is to create an artist experience that is “humane-ish…Because it’s not very humane to be an artist right now,” she says. KickDrum is not profit-seeking, which means Ho and Houle can take risks on new artists and program events that feel exciting and unusual. Meanwhile, their low overhead and NOTAFLOF policy—no one turned away for lack of funds—keeps costs down for audiences. They don’t use Ticketmaster, either, instead selling tickets on a platform they built themselves, with no extra fees.

Recent KickDrum events include two shows with PEI post-punks Absolute Losers, a show featuring rising stars Quinton Barnes and Fraud Perry, and a stripped-down folk night at underground venue MAI/SON. When they’re not worried about staying afloat, promoters can dive deeper into their communities, discovering something new—an energizing sound, a strange space—along the way.

*

DIY music as an ethos is commonly traced back to UK punk and post-punk scenes in the late ’70s and early ’80s, when bands like the Buzzcocks and Scritti Politti began self-releasing their music with a view toward transparency and anti-commercialism. But artists across genres have always innovated with what was on hand, from hip hop’s turntable experiments to the homemade instruments of skiffle. “DIY describes a music culture,” writes popular- music scholar Ellis Jones, “wherein emphasis is placed on forming and maintaining spaces for production and distribution which exist outside of, and are positioned as oppositional to, the commercial music industries.”

DIY music is not separate from processes of commodification—concerts and records still affix a monetary value to creative works. But what DIY can do is interrupt the corporate subsumption of all things artistic. “DIY practitioners,” Jones writes, create “commodities that attempt (successfully or otherwise) to bypass or mitigate consumption’s connotations of passivity, exploitation, and alienation.”

Musician and booker Daniel G. Wilson grew up studying these histories of rock, punk and DIY in Mississauga. “I liked the idea that these people were going against the grain,” Wilson says. He mentions that his earliest exposures to DIY came via his Jamaican background. “Musical culture over there already has a sort of natural DIY spirit,” Wilson says. “People wire up and fix up equipment to make soundsystems.”

As a teen, Wilson was part of a thriving all-ages scene in Mississauga, centred around the Masonic Lodge (where Billy Talent used to play in the ’90s, back when they were called Pezz). When the Lodge became too expensive to book, Wilson started trying to get gigs for his band JONCRO in Toronto. But he found bookers were hesitant to book bands without a following, and that this was even more of a barrier for bands with an aggressive sound and a diverse makeup. He points out that it can be easier for white bands to have a built-in audience and that these bands aren’t always welcoming others into their scenes.

Wilson decided to face the problem head-on. In 2017 he founded a festival for BIPOC-fronted and inclusive rock bands, Lingua Franca. “I’m like, ‘ok, I’m going to prove to everyone in this city that you can have an entire bill stacked with amazing bands that are all diverse,’” he says. The festival ran for one night in 2017, its first year, and in 2018, Wilson expanded it to three. “What made me happy was all these people—people playing and coming to the show—for the first time, they were not in the minority,” Wilson says. “The diversity on stage reflected the diversity in the crowd.” Wilson thought to himself: “I’ve done something magical here.”

Lingua Franca has never had grants or sponsorships. “I wanted to prove that you could do this with very little resources, the resources of your community,” Wilson explains. In removing corporate constraints, DIY can create space for marginalized artists who can find themselves structurally shut out of opportunities.

Removing those constraints can also create scenes in places that are ignored by the music industry. Brett Sanderson and Sophia Tweel put on DIY punk and hardcore shows in Charlottetown, PEI. For them, DIY is a matter of keeping music alive.

PEI’s population is only 150,000, Sanderson points out. “So it’s kind of hard to find people to come to shows. But if you keep at it for a long time—”

“You get a little following,” Tweel jumps in. “It introduces people to a scene that they’ve never really had access to before.”

Under the name Secret Beach, Sanderson and Tweel put on all-ages shows, aiming to provide an inclusive space where young people can get excited about music. “We have posters up at every show: no misogyny, no homophobia, no transphobia, no racism,” Sanderson says. “If you aren’t cool with that then you can leave.” They also hang posters from the harm reduction organization PEERS Alliance and emphasize a “no booze, no drugs, no jerks” policy.

Secret Beach has never put on a ticketed show, dealing instead in cash and giving as much of the proceeds as possible to touring bands. Though it may be hard to maintain a scene in a small place, Sanderson and Tweel are enthusiastic about PEI’s emerging artists. “Since we started doing shows,” Sanderson says, “we’ve definitely seen more kids starting bands.”

Likewise, Houle and Ho have noticed an uptick in underground activity in Montreal. “It’s been really lovely to see the surge of young people putting on things in their apartments or at the park,” Houle says. “People are just really down to experiment and try out new types of events and do underground stuff for just their friends.”

Up until this year, KickDrum was mostly run by Ho and Houle, but in January they started getting younger volunteers who wanted to help out and learn how to put on shows. KickDrum went from being two people to seven or eight, and Houle and Ho are excited to be able to pass on what they’ve learned.

For Ottawa’s Hannah Judge and Michael Watson, knowledge sharing is one of the primary motivators behind their DIY label, Club Records. Watson and Judge realized they were effectively running a label before they started calling it one. Watson had been producing and offering distribution to artists and Judge had been showing artists how to release their music, knowledge she gained through her band Fanclubwallet. “One day I just, like, made a logo as kind of a joke and I was like, ‘what if I made a website?’ Before we knew it I was like, ‘oh, this is a record label.’”

Club Records put out their first official release this year, emmersonHALL’s self-titled record. They are proud of the album’s reception, especially considering they spent $80 on promotion. “It feels like every day I’m getting to make a really cool art project with my friends,” Judge says. Like KickDrum, Club Records exists to uplift artists’ work, rather than extract value from it.

“When you sign with a major label, you’re thinking ‘oh, how much money do I owe them?’” Judge says. “And so nothing feels super satisfying,” Watson adds. If Watson or Judge produced the music, they will take a production royalty, but otherwise, at least for now, Club Records doesn’t take a royalty percentage from artists. Instead, when they invoice for a specific job—like producing, or music videos—they add a Club Records tax, which then goes back into their funds for artists. The DIY model allows practitioners to try out different approaches like this, instead of falling into old, exploitative dynamics.

Transparency is built into the Club Records process: the website features a resources page with how-to guides for touring, pitching music, and dealing with “the scary stuff ” (aka, money). Each of the documents on the page is editable, so users can contribute their own experiences, too. The resource page harkens back to those early UK post-punk releases, which featured itemized costs and how- to explainers printed on their sleeves.

Like Houle and Ho, Judge and Watson emphasize the vibrant DIY ecosystem they belong to, pointing to groups like Debaser and Side By Side Weekend. “It’s just cool to see all your friends in the DIY scene trying to do things to uplift the rest of the DIY scene,” Judge says.

*

DIY scenes have to uplift themselves, because their underground and non-profit nature makes sustainability a serious challenge. Venues face some of the biggest hurdles. “I often would joke,” Wilson says, “for the first couple of years every venue that I would book for Lingua Franca—except for the more sizable venues—would close the next year.” In 2017, Wilson booked Toronto vegan cafe D-Beatstro. By 2018, it was gone. The same thing happened the next time around with the classic punk venue Faith/Void. La Vitrola, the venue where Ho first fell in love with Montreal shows, closed in 2020, and underground venue La Plante followed soon after.

Longrunning Vancouver DIY venue and arts collective Red Gate Arts Society is currently facing its own existential threat. Active since 2012 (and even earlier, more informally), Red Gate has moved twice already: first after an eviction in 2011, and again in 2018 following a building sale. In their current Mount Pleasant venue, they operate under a licencing program for arts events in “unconventional spaces.” Co-founder Jim Carrico says that the city is now suggesting they apply for a new licence specifically for night clubs and sent a notice to their landlord. He’s not sure what prompted the notice, but in the time that he has been running Red Gate, Carrico says he’s seen more venues shut down than start up. “For there to be a music scene or an arts scene there needs to be a place where people can kind of mess up and make it up and experiment,” Carrico says, “and it has to be cheap.”

The housing and cost of living crises across the country place structural pressures on artists and practitioners to abandon DIY and professionalize. They also make DIY models increasingly necessary. Vinson Ng and Haina Wan of the dance music collective Normie Corp emphasize the importance of keeping events affordable. “The people that we want to cater to,” Ng says, “they’re just feeling it really hard, so there’s a lot of pay what you can, there’s a lot of pay it forward tickets.”

They started throwing events on Zoom during the pandemic and have expanded into in-person parties, mostly in Vancouver, with a focus on highlighting queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, people of colour and women artists. The organizers are especially proud of their Pride and Halloween events. “We can pack the room with like 800 to 900 people,” Wan says. “It’s just such a joy to share.” This year, they also hosted their first music festival, Camp Normie.

The question of whether to grow is a tricky one. Because they don’t prioritize profits, DIY models can lead to burnout, with organizers running out of capacity. Judge and Watson mention that the current structure of Club Records isn’t sustainable and they have still-secret plans to develop the organization.

Wilson would love to have the resources to book classic bands like Fishbone, he says. But he also knows that were he to expand, Lingua Franca would lose something in the process. “I think of the Afropunk festival, where a lot of Black punks are kind of sad because it doesn’t really cater to Black punks anymore,” he says.

For Ho, the question of what happens to KickDrum is almost beside the real point. “KickDrum is a useful resource,” he says. “But if the name KickDrum disappears tomorrow it won’t make a difference. What matters is the people, and the experience they’ve gained.”

Houle appreciates occupying a kind of middle ground between a business and a friend’s living room. “We’re not successful enough to go corporate,” she jokes. But the joke belies what KickDrum offers artists and audiences instead: community, creativity, and a fair deal.

For today’s instalment of Verbatim, Marisa Iacobucci interviews Liz Worth about her new book, Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History of Punk in Toronto and Beyond. The original podcast is available to listen to here. (To ensure you never miss an episode, how about subscribing to the RSS feed or through iTunes?)

The book chronicles the punk scene  throughout the turbulent years from 1977 to 1981, in the words of the bands and tastemakers who made it happen. Through interviews with Teenage Head, The Viletones, The Diodes, The Curse, Forgotten Rebels, B-Girls, The Ugly, and more, the book is kind of like a VH1 Behind the Music special from hell, and a Who’s Who of a musical scene that’s often been overshadowed by its counterparts in bigger American cities. Marisa Iacobucci talked with Liz Worth recently about the process of writing the book, the mystery of Mike Nightmare and Ruby Tease, and her next project.

Q&A

Marisa Iacobucci: Toronto’s punk scene—why was it slient until this book?

Liz Worth: I always thought it was really interesting that the Toronto punk scene was so underdocumented in comparison to other punk scenes. We know so much about punk in New York, so much about punk in London and there’s also been a lot about punk in L.A., but nothing about Toronto even though the Toronto scene was huge, and there’s definitely a connection between Toronto and New York. And there were also people from Toronto who were going over to visit in London and that kind of thing as well. So people knew what was going on over there, and there are some bands in the book who I talked about, like the Viletones at one time had talked about planning on moving to London, so I don’t know. I mean, obviously all of these things were happening at the same time and I just don’t know why it was so underdocumented.

When punk was happening here, there was a lot of coverage in the mainstream media although it was often negative. People thought this was really shocking, they thought it was really stupid, they thought the music was awful, they hated the fashion, so a lot of the media coverage that the bands were getting and that the scene was getting was mocking, and the writers were kind of ridiculing what was going on. It was very strange and it was very critical. But at the same time, these mainstream papers are giving really big, prominent coverage to this too, which would never happen now. If there was a reporter that didn’t like something they just wouldn’t bother writing about it, when it came to the music scene or something. But again, at least they were writing something. So, we had that kind of documentation, but it was negative and didn’t really capture the actual history of anything. Although often they talked about some of the key players in the scene, Steven Leckie from the Viletones, for example, was always a favourite person to be interviewed by media. And there were some fanzines and there were some magazines like Shades Magazine that was happening at the time, and there were some others as well.

And so they were starting to document this, but that was it, there wasn’t a lot. And once the scene was over all of that coverage kind of stopped and things moved on and people started focusing elsewhere. And I can’t really say why there wasn’t a book or a documentary or something that came out on all this before Treat Me Like Dirt. I’ve had a lot of people say that they’d always hoped there would be one, but I don’t know. I think part of it might have to do with, you know, people didn’t realize how important it was because it is important to a lot of people who weren’t involved in he scene, and there are a lot of people outside Toronto and outside of southern Ontario who are really interested in the topic, but for some reason it just never got captured that way, and I don’t know, it’s hard to say.

Marisa Iacobucci: Were you in touch with any of the people who wrote for Shades?

Liz Worth: Yeah, George Higton and Sheila Wawanash were both people that I talked to when I was researching Treat Me Like Dirt and they were heavily involved.

Marisa Iacobucci: How did the musicians and artists you speak to, how did they take to your project? Were they very open and welcoming?

Liz Worth: Yeah, for the most part people were very interested in doing the interviews, they really liked the idea. There were some people, often they were people who were major players from the scene, who had been contacted in the past by people saying they were going to do books and for some reason those projects never got completed and they weren’t followed through. So some of them said, you know, “I’ve talked to other people before and nothing ever came of that”. But I didn’t seem to be going away, I kept coming back and asking people for more and more interviews, so I think over time that helped because people could see that I was really serious about this. But I think part of it is, you know, it’s really easy for people to talk to a woman in her twenties about it, and I kind of wonder if people took the interviews less seriously because of that. And sometimes I wonder, because people were fairly open with information and it was definitely what I was hoping for (I wanted to get really candid interviews) but I wonder if maybe some people thought, you know, that I was really young, I don’t know if gender ever had anything to do with it either, but I don’t know if maybe they didn’t take me as seriously as they would have if I was older, or a different person and that maybe the answers would have been different. I always think that might affect things because it’s really easy too, to write off a younger person and to think, you know, okay I’ll just do this and I’ll humour them and nothing’s going to happen. So I wonder about that, but for the most part people were definitely cooperative, which was great. Yeah, because you know that with the book We Got the Neutron Bomb, for example, which is about the L.A. Scene. That’s an oral hisory as well, and in the introduction to that book the authors are talking about how a lot of people didn’t cooperate with interviews. So that’s unfortunate, because then you’re always left with gaps when people don’t.

Marisa Iacobucci: But that didn’t happen at all …

Liz Worth: There were some people who weren’t interested in doing interviews, but there weren’t too many.

Marisa Iacobucci: Who was your first interview?

Liz Worth: My first interview was Paul Robinson from The Diodes, he was their lead singer and I found him on the internet, which is how we often find people now, and from there it just snowballed. I talked to Paul and told him about the project I was doing and then he gave me a list of people I should try to track down and I did. And then from those people they gave me other names of people I should track down, so it just kind of went on from there.

Marisa Iacobucci: Great, and at what point did you decide that this was going to be an oral history?

Liz Worth: It was probably within the first ten interviews when I first started this. I liked the idea of an oral history but it wasn’t in my original intention. I was thinking that I would write it as a narrative, but within the first ten interviews I could start to hear all the stories falling together really well, and since there wasn’t any other book on Toronto punk I really wanted to preserve those stories exactly as they were.

Marisa Iacobucci: I’m glad you did. Did you meet any resistence along the way?

Liz Worth: Yeah, there was resistence from a few people. Some people who I wanted to interview had to be won over. They didn’t trust people that easily due to certain experiences they’ve had within their career in the music industry, which is understandable. And I think when people read Treat Me Like Dirt they’ll be able to see why because there are a lot of stories about failures in this book and a lot of things went wrong for people in this book. So there was that, but I was lucky because eventually people did come around. But, yeah, there were a few people who I would have liked to talk to who weren’t interested. But I’m kind of hoping, though, that now that the book is out there and that people are talking about it, that maybe those people will come around anyway and I can still interview them and maybe work their stories into a future project that’s related somehow.

The other resistence within the book came from a lot of editors and publishers who thought the book was too focused on Toronto—even though probably about a third of it is about Hamilton. They thought it was too Toronto-centric and that that would alienate Canadian readers across the country, which I think it compeltely wrong and ridiculous.

Marisa Iacobucci: Absolutely. What would you say to those editors now?

Liz Worth: That the book is doing so well so far. I mean, it sold out of its first print run almost right after its release, which is amazing and not something the happens very often. So I feel vindicated because of that, and it’s gotten a lot of really great buzz and there’s really great word-of-mouth around it and it’s had a lot of positive feedback. So, I mean, I never agreed with those editors, I never wanted to compromise the story, I never wanted to broaden it to appeal to a wider audience because I don’t think it’s necessary, I think it can appeal to a wider audience anyway. You can read the book because you like these bands or you can read the book because you want to read a really great story. It works on both levels.

And when I was putting it together, I wasn’t writing this book for people in the scene and I wasn’t writing it for people in Toronto, although I did want to give Toronto its own punk history, I wanted people to know about that. But I was definitely thinking that this is something that people will read outside of the city and outside of Canada, so I was always keeping that in mind. It has to be just as accessible for someone in London, England, as it is for someone in Vancouver, or someone in New York, or someone right here.

Marisa Iacobucci: And have you had any kind of reaction from people outside of Toronto, outside of Canada, outside this country?

Liz Worth: Yeah, it’s interesting, my publisher Ralph Alfonso was recently on tour with one of his artists on his label, and when he was in Europe and talking about Toronto punk with them they would mention bands like Teenage Head and the Forgotten Rebels and they were excited and, you know, people know who the Viletones are, and people know who the Diodes are. And if you go into the States, there are a lot of people in America who are involved in music scenes in their own cities, there are people who aren’t involved in music scenes, who are just fans, who really like these bands too. And I knew that before I even started working on this, but it’s great now because those people are starting to get in touch because they are hearing about the book. And that’s great because this book was written for people like that, for people who wanted to know what happened to these bands the same way I wanted to know when I started working on this.

Marisa Iacobucci: Great. What story or stories stand out most for you?

Liz Worth: It’s really hard to narrow down the stories that stand out because there are so many. The stories around Simply Saucer and the Saucer House in Hamilton are really appealing to me because their singer, Edgar Breau, really talks about living the life of an artist. And when you read Treat Me Like Dirt you’ll read about him sleeping in the rehearsal spaces and that kind of thing, and I really admire that someone could be so dedicated to what they’re doing that they’re just going to live in the rehearsal space all the time.

There’s another story about Mike Nightmare who’s the singer of a band called The Ugly and his girlfriend Ruby Tease, and their stories. Although Mike is no longer alive and no one really knows what happened to Ruby (but she seems like she’s no longer alive either), those two stories kind of weave through the whole book, and that’s a really strong story for me. When I was working on it I was trying to find out what happened to Ruby because nobody knew and people would ask me if I had heard where she was, and so I was trying to find out and, kind of, all of the stories around what may or may not have happened to her got woven into the book because I was looking. That search kind of became part of the story of Treat Me Like Dirt too. So those are strong ones, and anything around the band The Viletones is also really strong. That band has a lot of really strong personalities and interesting characters, and their singer Steven Leckie is incredibly charismatic and very well-spoken but also very memorable.

Marisa Iacobucci: Is there anyone you wish you could have spoken to that you didn’t speak to?

Liz Worth: Yeah, I really wanted to talk to Nick Stipanitz from Teenage Head. I did invite him to do an interview, he wasn’t interested (which is okay) but I feel like it would have been good to have him in there just to get his perspective. And, yeah, Mike Nightmare would have been great to talk to as well. Ruby Tease would have been great to talk to. I’m sure there are others but those are the main ones I can think of right now.

Marisa Iacobucci: Maybe for book two? What has happened to you since this book has been published, what has happened for the musicians and artists since this book has been published, and what has happened for the scene in toronto since this book has been published?

Liz Worth: I don’t know if I can speak to the scene in Toronto in general, I mean, in terms of any scene that’s happening now, I don’t know because I don’t really hang out in any scene, you know, I never have. I’ve never been able to commit myself to just one place or one group of people, so I don’t know if the book has affected anything that’s happening now. I doubt that it would have affected anyone in a younger, newer band.

In terms of what’s happened to me with the book, I guess it’s weird because I’ve always been a behind-the-scenes kind of person, and writers don’t often get a lot of recognition. And, you know, people might recognize your name if they’ve read an article or something that you’ve written that they really like, but it’s a lot different now when people suddenly start to read articles about you, and your picture is attached to them, and so sometimes you might get recognized somewhere. You know, I’ve gotten recognized in a grocery store, in a lobby, in really casual moments, so that’s different and, I mean, it’s great. It’s different for me though because I’m not used to that and I’m often happy not being the centre of attention. I definitely appreciate it, though, and I definitely appreciate that people are really excited about this book.

Marisa Iacobucci: They are, and it’s on its second print run right?

Liz Worth: That’s right.

Marisa Iacobucci: Fantastic.

Liz Worth: With the people in the scene, who were interviewed in the book, I don’t know, one of them, it was someone from Hamilton, Bob Bryden, who was really helpful with the interviews he gave me. He was joking at the launch party in Hamilton that this book was going to make them all famous agian, and while that would be amazing, I don’t know if it will go that far. But I think it will definitely renew a lot of interest in these bands. And I think that people will read this book and they won’t necessarily know the music, but as they read it they’ll go and look for it. And so they might end up discovering a whole bunch of new bands that they wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.

Marisa Iacobucci: How easy was it to get this book published? I know you started working on it in 2006, it was released this year, and now it’s in its second print run. It’s very successful. You make it look easy—was it easy?

Liz Worth: It was and it wasn’t. In a lot of ways this book was the easiest and hardest thing I’ve ever done altogether. When I started it I never doubted that it would be published. It’s weird, I don’t know if that sounds overconfident, but I just assumed that it would happen because why not? It was something that no one had done yet and I thought it was so important and so valid and these people’s stories are so interesting. So I was really surprised when I had a lot of editors and agents come back and say, “Oh, it’s too Toronto.” You know, some of them had originally expressed interest, but then they wanted the focus to be broader than it was. But even then I still never doubted that someone was going to say “yes.” It was really weird, it was like I just never questioned that this was going to happen.

And then, I was interviewing Ralph Alfonso because he was very instrumental in the Toronto scene and I did a series of interviews with him (I think I did four or five interviews with him altogether) and he was running a label called Bongo Beat, and during one of our interviews he said that if I see this project through he would be interested in putting it out. And so we kept in touch, and once the manuscript was done I sent it over to him and he was into it, so that’s how it come together. So it’s great because someone actually ended up approaching me about it, and it worked out really well because it was someone from the scene who has a connection to it. He was there, he really knows how important it is, and he understands it and appreciates it, so I feel like it ended up in the right person’s hands in the end. If it had ended up with someone else, I don’t know, it could have had a completely different outcome. So, I think it worked out well and in the end it was easy to get it published because, you know I didn’t have to shop it to Ralph. So, I don’t know, I guess it was easy.

Marisa Iacobucci: It’s definitely an inspiration. What are you working on next?

Liz Worth: Well, there’s going to be—I think I’m allowed to talk about this—there’s going to be another book on punk, but I think it’ll be on punk in Ontario, and that will be coming out through Bongo Beat. And then for my own personal project, I’m working on a rock and roll horror novel.

Cover of "Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History of Punk in Toronto and Beyond"

In today’s edition of Listen to This, Marisa Iacobucci talks with Liz Worth, author of Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History of Punk in Toronto and Beyond. The book chronicles the punk scene  throughout the turbulent years from 1977 to 1981, in the words of the bands and tastemakers who made it happen. Through interviews with Teenage Head, The Viletones, The Diodes, The Curse, Forgotten Rebels, B-Girls, The Ugly, and more, the book is kind of like a VH1 Behind the Music special from hell, and a Who’s Who of a musical scene that’s often been overshadowed by its counterparts in bigger American cities. There was clearly an appetite for the stories told here — the book has already entered its second printing and there are plans for a followup volume in the works.

In addition to her music writing, Liz Worth is an  experimental poet; her most recent book of poetry is Eleven Eleven, published by Trainwreck press.

The Islamic punk music scene would never have existed if it weren’t for his 2003 novel, The Taqwacores. Melding the Arabic word for god-consciousness with the edge of hardcore punk, Michael imagined a community of Muslim radicals: Mohawked Sufis, riot grrrls in burqas with band patches, skinhead Shi’as. These characters were entirely fictional.

But the movement they inspired is very real.

Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam follows Michael and his real-life kindred spirits on their first U.S. tour, where they incite a riot of young hijabi girls at the largest Muslim gathering in North America after Sena takes the stage. The film then travels with them to Pakistan, where members of the first Taqwacore band, The Kominas, bring punk to the streets of Lahore and Michael begins to reconcile his fundamentalist past with the rebel he has now become.

By stoking the revolution—against traditionalists in their own communities and against the clichés forced upon them from the outside—“we’re giving the finger to both sides,” says one Taqwacore. “Fuck you and fuck you.”

Sounds to me like a much-needed retort to the kind of reductive, ridiculous, or racist (or all three!) portrayals of Muslims in Western pop culture. Can’t wait to see it. Taqwacore plays this weekend in Toronto, and opens in Montreal on Monday.

Joey is a punk. His hair is bleached white blonde and styled to spiky points. He wears a black leather jacket and ripped jeans; his wrists are ringed with leather cuffs, one studded, one bearing a silver skull. He goes to protests and is known to spout revolutionary slogans. Joey is not unlike hundreds of thousands of kids who listen to punk and wear its signature look. Except this Joey is 47 years old.

Joe Keithley is the singer for D.O.A., the British Columbia band that has defined the sound and style of Canadian punk rock for 25 years. In the pages of music history, D.O.A. is right beside the Ramones and Dead Kennedys, bands that created the soundtrack to a new North American subculture seeking loud, hard, fast music that reflected their outsider social status and anti-establishment views.

Keithley (who also goes by the stage name Joey Shithead) is hardcore. His commitment to a punk lifestyle hasn’t waned with age. Even though he’s married with three children, Keithley is much the same as in 1978, when he formed D.O.A. and released the independent single “Disco Sucks.” He still dresses the part, still tours with the band, still puts out his own records (the latest is War and Peace, a greatest hits compilation), still participates in political causes, and still promotes the D.O.A. mantra “Talk – Action = 0.” He’s been called the godfather of punk, but his longevity makes Keithley a poster boy for all grown-ups who identify themselves with adolescent-oriented subcultures, who refuses to abandon the ideals—and hairstyles—of their youth. “I believe in what I do,” explains Keithley, on a visit to Toronto for Canadian Music Week. “This is how I make a living and support my family, which is the number one thing in my life. But music is just a part of it. When I started out, I wanted to change the world. I still do. That’s why I haven’t stopped.”

Ancestry, race, nationality, and (often) religion are thrust upon us at birth, but we can choose our cultural identities, our tribes. For most, this occurs in high school. While some teens dabble in different peer groups the way they flirt with drugs or bisexuality, others are drawn to specific subcultures—because they reflect their true natures. For some, being punk or goth is not just style as revolt. The way they dress and decorate their rooms is the visual embodiment of their psyches. Much to their parents’ dismay and society’s derision, these young people don’t grow out of the phase, they grow into it.

There’s an old joke that non-conformists all dress exactly alike, and it’s easy to pick on people who look funny (see celebrity worst dressed lists). But to dismiss those engaging in these lifestyles well into middle-age as vain or quixotic is to ignore the fact that consistent commitment to ideals is a much praised quality in other parts of society, and that these subcultures have more in common with other forms of devotion than many would like to admit.

Joe Keithley wasn’t able to follow punk rock as a teen: it hadn’t been invented yet. But his recent autobiography, I, Shithead: A Life in Punk (Arsenal Pulp Press), reveals his rebellious tendencies formed early in life. The first time his picture appeared in the paper, it was on the cover of the Vancouver Sun. He was demonstrating with Greenpeace against nuclear testing off Alaska in the early seventies.

“I got politicized early by anti-Vietnam war protests,” he remembers. “I liked rebellion. My favourite songwriter is Bob Dylan. I wanted to be a civil rights lawyer, but I left SFU [Simon Fraser University] after four months to play guitar. Then I wanted to be hippie but that scene was dead. All those people were co-opted and had given up. My gang had heard about punk rock and thought it was just the strangest bloody thing. Then we went to see the Ramones. “I was reborn when we saw this punk band. It was really ugly, snarling and unpleasant. It totally turned us on. I kind of learned to become a punk. But because so much of it is political, the grounding was there in high school.” In I, Shithead, Keithley outlines the early D.O.A. ethos: “Think for yourself. Don’t back down. Change your world. Be free.”

This is the kind of movement Thomas Frank referred to as “revolution through lifestyle rather than politics,” in his 1997 book The Conquest of Cool. The idea is that you can make a difference every moment of every day, not just by protesting the status quo, but by actually creating an alternative universe and living in it. Punk’s confrontational music and dress forces others—the suits—to think about why they are not. Also, a green mohawk looks really cool.

But a quarter century later, punk music and fashions are hardly as subversive. While bands such as D.O.A. have remained committed to Do It Yourself ethics, the accoutrements of punk culture are now 100% mainstream. The fundamental elements of its style—Doc Martens boots, unnaturally coloured hair, bricollage clothing, the ironic appropriation of political symbols—have been used to make “street” haute couture and market corporate products. The biggest punk group of the past decade is Blink-182, an apolitical MTV-sanctioned pop-punk trio best known for its dumb pranks. Suburban mall chains like America’s Hot Topic sell mass-produced, pre-fab fashions racked by “scene.”

Keithley knows all about this new generation of punks: he lives with one. “My daughter is the biggest Blink-182 fan,” he says. “Talk about prefab, she wanted a sweatshirt that said ‘Anarchy’ on it for Christmas. I bought it for her. I don’t care. Kids go through these things.”

One of the reasons subcultural fashion is so easily co-opted by mall culture is that it is possible to buy things that signify punkdom, gothdom or raverdom. But while dressing up announces membership in the distinct group, it cannot automatically admit you into it. Call it T-shirt – Action = 0. For every person sporting an anarchy symbol without understanding it there’s an older punk who thinks they’re a poseur. In I, Shithead, Keithley calls them “pukes”—audience members who dress as punks but pick fights or push others around. “It’s way more punk rock to come to a D.O.A. show in a business suit than a mohawk,” he says.

While he too copped some misguided fashions in his youth (he laughs about the home-made razor blade sunglasses he could barely see through), Keithley is best known for wearing working-class flannel shirts, which became regulation punk, and eventually grunge, wear because punks like Keithley wore them.

This is how punks (and goths, and ravers, and mods) end up dressed alike; they almost all start out mimicking the style of their favourite band. Then, as the group’s followers grow in number, the original devotees abandon it, the same way an underground band that scores a top 10 hit becomes uncool, not because the music has changed, but because it is now attracting too many poseurs—people the core group does not want to be associated with. In subcultures, it’s only somewhat important to look like other members of the tribe, people you admire. It’s more important to be different from people you don’t respect. A real member is defined even more by what they hate than what they love: Joey Keithley’s first original song was not called “Punk rocks!” but “Disco Sucks!”

While copying older punks is a rite of passage for the young rebels, 50-year-old punks adopting new teen looks seems, well, slightly sad. And now that the first generation of punks is about to hit retirement age, you just know it’s going to happen. Keithley says he won’t be one of those guys, but just because he’s giving up the look doesn’t mean he plans to give up the lifestyle.

“People who are middle-aged like I am should not go around pretending they are teenagers,” he says. “Lots of my friends are caught in a time warp of punk rock. But blind faith in anything, that’s crazy. I’m way too old for that. To get along in this life you have to adapt. That’s the prime reason humankind is at the top of the food chain. Still, I believe in my art, in music. When I get up there and play, I still get a similar charge I got when I was a teenager. I still want to drive the audience nuts and make them think. I may not always be in a punk band or dress like this, but I will always be an activist.”

I can totally relate to Joe Keithley. For more than half my life now, I’ve been pursuing a lifestyle that should have been a passing adolescent fad. I admit I never gave it much thought until other people started asking about it, but I’m proud to acknowledge I’m of the black cloak-pasty face-poetry reading persuasion. When I started they called us death rockers; these days we’re simply goth.

Like punk, goth is generally the domain of the teenager. It’s a lot easier to pine for immortality, spend three hours on one’s hair and hang out in graveyards when death is a distant concept and you’ve got no job. And yet, some of us continue to dress up like the walking dead long after it shocks our friends and families, although it does tend to shock strangers on the street. Growing up in a small town, it wasn’t so much a subculture as a lifestyle, because there was no group. Just me, trying to emulate the bands I saw on TV. It all started with The Cult’s “She Sells Sanctuary.” I had tried to be a punk, but was pretty much a poseur. I related to the attitude, but not the aesthetic. But The Cult’s Ian Astbury was the most beautiful person I had ever seen. His song’s chorus “and the world drags me down,” spoke more to me than “Anarchy In The U.K.”

At the time, I had no idea there was a goth subculture, a gloomy-post punk musical movement that would soon be associated with wannabe vampires, suicidal tendencies and bad poetry. I just liked the music, dark and heavy with sexual longing and despair. Then I discovered the divine decadence of candlelight, velvet and late nights indulging in grand artistic ideals. In my personal elysium, I practised ritual dressing, draping myself in black clothing, painting a dramatic face of alabaster powder and dark shadows atop mine own then covering it in impractically long blue-black bangs. The look—which I didn’t exactly master at first—was a great conversation starter. Those who weren’t scared to come ask me what I was all about earned my respect, and an earful about the beauty of decay, the blight of “normal” society and why we should all abandon the capitalist system so we’d have more time for reading Shakespeare and listening to Skinny Puppy.

Paul Samuels had a similar revelation. The 34-year-old co-owner of The Savage Garden, Toronto’s oldest goth nightclub, grew up in England, where the scene began. He too heard the music and was drawn to it like sailor to siren.

“Me and my friends were sitting around the stereo at school and ‘She Sells Sanctuary’ came on,” he recalls. “We didn’t know anything about goth subculture, but we fell in love with that song. I always liked punk sounds and horror movies. I identified a bit with New Romantic, the make-up wearing rogues. Then The Sisters of Mercy hooked me in 1984. I couldn’t get enough. Soon we were wearing [pointy] boots, black jeans and tour t-shirts; after that it was the frilly shirts with long sleeves. Then I mashed in make-up and black, backcombed hair with lots of hairspray. We became the freaks of the town.”

At Savage Garden, Samuels is known as DJ Pale. He still wears black exclusively but his hair is light brown and rests in a short ponytail rather than straight in the air. He doesn’t have to maintain an extreme look. With his entire life intertwined in the goth scene, his membership in the tribe is well established. He’s what’s known as an ElderGoth.

“If you don’t dress the same or listen to the same music anymore, it’s because there is more to it than the stereotype you follow as a teenager,” he says. “When you’re young, all you want to do is conform with other non-conformists, buy the latest album you’re supposed to. As you get older, you realize it’s more than just dressing up and partying. You realize you’ve got some weird kink in the back of your head. For me, my experience has only expanded. The only difference is a greater perspective. Everything I believe in hasn’t changed. It never will.”

Sociologist Linda Andes, in her essay “Growing Up Punk: Meaning and Commitment Careers in a Contemporary Youth Subculture” calls this “transcendence,” the stage in which members cease to concern themselves primarily with their clothes or communities. I call it “nothing to prove.” She also points out that adult punks who do continue to express themselves through image and association are generally connected to the scene on an organization level, as musicians, promoters or writers, for example. Certainly this is true of goths as well. Apart from the CorpGoths—who trade tips on dressing cool for regular jobs—most grown-up goths who aren’t in artistic careers must choose between look and livelihood.

But then there’s the weekend. Clubs like Savage Garden attract plenty of older denizens who suit themselves up in their off-hours only. Since they have no goth identity during the day, they really make up for it at night. For that, they go to Toronto’s one-stop goth shop, Siren, which outfits goths of all ages from head to pointy toe.

Groovella Blak, proprietor of Siren, is a sort of fairy gothmother. Although she won’t reveal her birth date, she was already considered an ElderGoth when the store opened in 1988. “It’s interesting. I get mother and daughter pairs coming in,” she says. “I don’t know if the parent was doing it first and the son or daughter caught on or the other way around but I have a few of those customers. The mother isn’t going to clubs anymore, she just likes the look and the way it feels. If that’s what they want to do, who are we to question? If you can still look good at 60 or 70, that’s great.”

Groovella admits she was a “late bloomer,” a private-school kid who discovered goth in London when she was already in her twenties. Soon she became Toronto’s best-known goth girl. She claims she’s not “hardcore goth” anymore, but to anyone else’s eyes, she’s still a dark princess, petite, pale, poised. Her smile betrays her devotion.

At the height of vampire mania in the mid-nineties, Groovella had her canine teeth filed into fangs. She doesn’t like to make a big deal out of it, but it definitely secures her a spot in the goth-for-life camp, which if you subscribe to one of goth’s most treasured myths, could be a very, very long time.

“Vampires are immortal, so it doesn’t matter how old you are,” she says. “Goth is the one culture you can age gracefully in. You can slip through the cracks of time.”

When I was 16, I thought the most beautiful girls on earth were goth. I still do, which is why I continue to dress like one myself. Over the years, I’ve been asked what it all means, something I’m not equipped to answer. I do know that it is more
than a fashion statement. It’s about allegiance to ideals, and the rituals—hair crimping, pit moshing, whatever—simply intensify the devotion. You become what you believe.

Like religions, subcultures have their own ideals, ethical codes, rituals and aesthetics. And as in religions, members express their devotion to their group and their faith through modes of dress. But like devout members of religious groups, goths, punks, mods and ravers will tell you that it’s not really about the outfits. It’s about what they stand for.

I’m reminded of this while interviewing Joe Keithley. Into the coffee shop where we are talking steps a sister in full habit. An actual Blue Nun. I think we’re not so different, the three of us in our regalia, at odds with the rest of the world. I wonder how often anyone asks her when she’s going to grow out of it.

Liisa Ladouceur is a music and pop culture writer for eye Weekly, CBC Radio’s Definitely Not the Opera, Rue Morgue magazine and others. She is a member of the Royal Sarcophagus Society, a shadowy collective of artists and rogues in love with lofty Pre-Raphaelite ideals.