PERFECT YOUTH: The Birth of Canadian Punk Read Free

but the context created something very, very different. It created a mirror for Canadians to see themselves in; showing us a hard, funny, mixed-up group of people in need of a serious paradigm shift.
    To try to sell first-wave punk as nothing more than a revolutionary force — a cultural means to an end — is to sell out the tremendous value of some of the amazing music that was created in this country during that period. One of the greatest pleasures of assembling this book has been the hours spent tracking down rare recordings by previous unknowns, along with having an easy excuse to listen to the Pointed Sticks all the time. Admittedly, barriers to production meant that more first-wave bands didn’t record than did, and those that did weren’t always afforded the most ideal options for premium fidelity. The result is an endless parade of “Yeah, but you should have seen them live,” a sentiment found in every city in this country. “Sure, the first Teenage Head album is great, but shit, they were fuckin’ heavy live . . . Yeah, the Red Squares single is pretty good, but you should have heard the first mix. It’s like Sabbath . . .” Context certainly helps to understand the roughness of the Normals’ recordings or the unnecessarily ’80s effects on the first Popular Mechanix songs, but there’s no need to offer excuses for bands like the Modern Minds or the Bureaucrats, bands that wrote and recorded incredible collections of songs that have been unfairly lost to time.
    The efforts of Sudden Death Records in Vancouver have helped to keep much of the early west coast material in print, and it’s clear why; bands like the Modernettes and the Young Canadians hold their own against the best of the States and the U.K. Toronto, as mentioned, hasn’t been so fortunate, and neither have cities like Calgary, Winnipeg, or the entire east coast. But just because these bands don’t have music shelved at the mall doesn’t mean they weren’t interesting or innovative. Like the early CBGB scene, punk in Canada was an umbrella that welcomed all kind of freaks, from the angular fuzz of the Government in Toronto to the early electronic experimentation of Phil Walling in Halifax. It encouraged musicians who would later form genre-bending bands like Nomeansno and the Rheostatics to rethink the boundaries of genre and the need for mainstream acceptance. And, more importantly, it sounded great.
    Perfect Youth is a far-from-complete look at punk’s first wave in Canada. To offer the stories of every band, every musician, and every scene would take volumes, years, and a comically miniscule typeface. The Canadian punk scene may have been small, but it was active, and it was everywhere. After years of talking, reading, and listening, I’ve tried to piece together a collection of snapshots that I feel capture the energy and the personality of that time, and the bands and the scenes that had the greatest impact on the cities around them. From Victoria to St. John’s, these are the stories of the frenetic bands and the close-knit local communities that helped to shape Canada’s punk identity.
    There has been an explosion of coverage of this era in the past few years. Anyone looking to dig deeper into a particular scene is likely to find not just a wealth of information and long-lost music online, but some amazing published material to sink your late nights into. Liz Worth’s oral history of the Southern Ontario scene, Treat Me Like Dirt , holds the distinction of being the first published account of bands like the Viletones, the Diodes, and Teenage Head; it’s an invaluable resource and fascinating local history. Similarly, Don Pyle’s Trouble in the Camera Club tells the story of early Toronto punk through incredible photographs and Pyle’s confessional personal narrative. The west coast boasts three immensely readable and mostly factual autobiographies, Joey Keithley’s I, Shithead , his recent photo book, Talk – Action =