PERFECT YOUTH: The Birth of Canadian Punk Read Free Page B

bandmates, about the Viletones’ late ’70s road crew and their double life as spies for Malcolm McLaren. For an hour, Leckie lived to up to every brilliant, eccentric, and scary thing I had ever heard about him.
    If you live in Toronto, you will, at some point, stumble headfirst into the legend of Steven Leckie. He was our Iggy Pop, our Johnny Rotten, our David Johansen. He fronted the city’s most notorious punk band, the Viletones, a punk rock Ogopogo that lived even larger in legend than it did onstage — which was goddamn large. His legacy as a brilliant frontman is equalled by his notoriety as an unstable personality onstage and off, a man who created a character — the violent, unhinged Nazi Dog — and allowed it to lead him through the rest of his life.
    That he is now on the other end of my cell phone, spelling out his most paranoid fears about his art and accomplishments, is overwhelming. That he agrees to meet again and talk properly is a relief.
    So for the second time, I am seated with Steven Leckie, tape recorder between us. On the patio of a bar in the Junction — Leckie smokes, so even though it’s freezing, we opt to drink our coffees outside — we shoot the shit for a few minutes before he asks to read me something. From inside of his jacket he pulls a perfectly folded piece of paper with my name written in big, bold letters at the top of it. He reads,
    What can you do when the medium of first-generation punk requires not a stage but a tight wire because the true craft of punk demanded not a persona but a life? A life to even sacrifice on the altar of life and death, an attempt to bear witness to the purity of a spectacle that in history would be understood by perhaps the Aztecs as a human sacrifice or maybe general custom. Misunderstanding or doubting, that is only proof that those who through their mediocrity stand on the sidelines not only of punk rock, especially Viletones, but any art ahead of its own time. The words of Rimbaud not only told but warned over 100 years ago this spectacle would come, and I, far more than most first-generation punk artists, embraced and heeded that future vision. A vision that manifests in high art reality. That punk art is the bastard son of no one. Of no other movement. An orphan. But an Artful Dodger orphan. And the death count in punk is much higher than those Dickens himself could have foreseen, for there is no Fagin to pay off but something much greater. Immortality itself, though an Aztec spectacle of sacrifice, whose virtues have been eroded through time.
    The letter wasn’t entirely unlike Leckie’s usual crypto-poetic style of speech, but I struggled to grasp the essence of what he was trying to say, casting himself as an adolescent protagonist culled from the pages of Oliver Twist . When he was done reading it, he didn’t hand it to me. He just folded it into four, put it back into his pocket and started our interview.
    In many ways, the story of the Viletones is best left for Leckie to tell. Leckie is the Viletones — he is the history, and he is the heart. He is the subject of and source of all the great rumours that swirl around the band, from the claims of near-fatal onstage blood loss to the seedier stories about having sex with Debbie Harry in a Cadillac behind Max’s Kansas City.
    There are also the indisputable facts that cement the band’s status as punk visionaries. Their very first show earned them an infamous headline on the front page of the Globe and Mai l ’s entertainment pull-out: “Not Them! Not Here!” As recently as October 2007, SPIN named “Screamin’ Fist” one of the 20 best punk singles of 1977, the song having earlier made its way into William Gibson’s genre-defining novel Neuromancer as the name of an operation aimed at disrupting Soviet computer systems. Nirvana covered “Possibilities” at a 1993 concert in Rio de Janeiro. And that’s Steven Leckie framed next to Christian Bale in Mary Harron’s 2000