The Last Pogo

The Last Pogo (1978, Director: Colin Brunton): In 1978, I was too young to get into bars, but I was a huge fan of punk rock. Of course, at that young age, I thought it all came from England. It wasn’t until a year or two later that I got into a punk/rockabilly band from Hamilton called Teenage Head. But in 1978, they head­lined a rather infamous gig at The Legendary Horseshoe Tavern on Queen Street West in Toronto. Concert pro­moters Gary Topp and Gary Cormier (“The Two Garys”) were well-known for pro­moting the best new music, and were booking punk bands into the Horseshoe from the begin­ning. But by December 1978, they’d lost the lease and were set to move to a new venue, the Edge. They decided to stage a going-away bash with all their favourite local bands, and The Last Pogo is the visual record of that wild night. Featuring The Scenics, The Cardboard Brains, The Mods, The Ugly, The Viletones, and Teenage Head, it was a legendary show which ended with the cops breaking up a near-riot. The film had not been screened the­at­ric­ally in 30 years, so I was really looking for­ward to the screening (part of the annual North by Northeast Music and Film Festival), and Brunton had prom­ised that sev­eral spe­cial guests would be in attendance.

On my way to the screening, I had to pass by the Much Music stu­dios, which for some unknown reason were sur­rounded by screaming teenage girls. Queen Street was closed off and there was a stage set up as well. Before long, some band of scantily-clad women jumped onstage and sang some for­get­table ditty while shaking their junk in per­fectly cho­reo­graphed time. It was ironic that on my way to see some punk his­tory, I had to be sub­jected to some of the unspeak­able hor­rors of pop­ular music.

I took my seat at the NFB cinema behind a group of rowdy fifty-something punk ladies, who pro­ceeded to hoot and howl all through the film itself. It was rather dis­turbing. The spe­cial guests included Dave Quinton who drummed for The Scenics and later for the Dead Boys, Vince Carlucci from The Cardboard Brains, and a few others, but alas, no one from Teenage Head. And the film itself, though a treas­ured doc­u­ment of the event, proved to be slightly dis­ap­pointing. The reason is that as the con­cert wore on, the club reached and then exceeded its capa­city, and just before Hamilton’s finest took the stage, they were noti­fied that they were only per­mitted to play one song and then the police would be shut­ting the place down. Understandably, the place went nuts, and so the footage from their per­form­ance isn’t the greatest. I even think the audio is out of sync.

Interestingly enough, Teenage Head would be at the centre of another riot a few years later, and for the same reasons. When they played the Ontario Place Forum, hun­dreds of fans were locked out after the venue reached capa­city, and the res­ulting riot caused the man­age­ment of Ontario Place to ban rock con­certs for many years. Luckily, I was pre­pared and had arrived early. It was one of only two times I saw the band live. The other was at my high school, and was for­get­table because in my excite­ment, I’d con­sumed an entire mickey of rye, became sep­ar­ated from my friends, and peed my pants. I was so mor­ti­fied that I ran home, missing most of the show.

In hap­pier news, dir­ector Brunton has spent the past two years filming and editing an expanded ver­sion of the film, to be called The Last Pogo Jumps Again. He’s revis­ited many of the players from that night and I’m eagerly looking for­ward to the film’s release, tent­at­ively planned for Hot Docs 2009. It was also through him that I found out that writer Liz Worth has written what looks to be the defin­itive his­tory of punk in Toronto. Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History of Punk in Toronto and Beyond, 1976–1981 should be released this year. I’ve been wanting to write this book since reading Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s incred­ible Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, but at least now I’ll be able to read it.

After the screening, I was hoping there would be a Q&A with the dir­ector and maybe some of the par­ti­cipants, but no such luck. I was able to speak briefly with both Colin Brunton and Liz Worth, and hope to con­duct some short email inter­views with them in the next sev­eral months.

P.S. It seems strange that it was at this very time and place last year that I was seeing Nightclubbing, another doc­u­ment of those years which is being made into a longer ret­ro­spective documentary.

Official site of the film

(7/10)

Tagged as: music, nxne, punk, toronto