With Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History of Punk in Toronto and Beyond being released this month (!!), I thought it would be fun to dig out some of the articles I had the opportunity to write while I was working on my book.

The following article (along with the poster) was published in the Toronto Star's Ideas section in 2006 as one of their "A Picture and A Thousand Words" pieces:

This poster looks like any other you might pass by on downtown streets.

But despite that the artwork seems almost juvenile, obviously intended to shock and repel, its gently torn corners and adolescent angst tell a secret history of Toronto.

When it comes to punk history, we typically look to the Ramones in New York City and the Sex Pistols in London, although the Toronto of the 1970s unleashed its own burgeoning punk movement with the Viletones, the Ugly, the Diodes, the Curse, and many others. It was a scene that came up hard and fast and sent Toronto reeling with its subversion. Toronto punk rode high on the unbridled energy of its scenemakers, who were fuelled by sheer boredom and a mission to create a culture they could call their own.

But before raucous streams of noise started hurtling from the stage, before pretty young things started to let rips and tears set into their clothing, Toronto was a thousand shades of grey.
Bars closed at one a.m., so the nightlife was dismal. Queen Street West was a strip comprised of fabric stores, greasy spoons, and abandoned spaces. The music scene offered up the predictable fare of bar bands that played a succession of Led Zeppelin and Rolling Stones covers.
And then, somewhere in this frigid cultural landscape, a circle of people – many barely out of their teens – developed a blueprint from all of this and things started to happen.

The city hasn’t been the same since.

Part of the proof is in this poster. This past spring, as I started writing a book about the local punk scene, posters became my first realization as to how much this youth movement shaped the city we know today.

Though often dismissed as eyesores, those poster-covered telephone poles that jut into our visual environment are actually remnants of a cultural upheaval in Toronto. Before punk, those poles were bare. But when punk acts first started sprouting up, word of mouth was all they had when it came to the spread of information, so promoting a show meant getting creative. Armed with scissors, paste, and whatever imagination they could muster, the Toronto punk scene unwittingly began what is now a tradition in DIY advertising.

I can't walk down Queen Street West anymore without stripping it down in my mind. When punk cropped up, this strip was nothing more than a bleak whisper in Toronto’s urban dialogue.
Queen Street offered a cracked landscape and gritty sensibilities. Getting to the Beverly Tavern, the city’s earliest punk hangout for the art school set, meant side-stepping the blood spilling out onto the sidewalk of the chicken slaughterhouse next door.

Seizing the cheap rent and proximity to the Ontario College of Art, which produced many a punk rocker, bands and artists adopted Queen as their playground, using its vacant real estate for rehearsal spaces and a place to house empty booze cans.

And so began the gentrification process that would make this stretch into what it is today. Many of those who were there say entrepreneur and scenester and owner of the Peter Pan restaurant, Sandy Stagg was the catalyst, as members of the Diodes and the Dishes worked in his establishment.

Slowly, Queen West’s facades started to change and its attitude opened up. The Horseshoe relaxed its country and western policy. A few years later, the Cameron House popped up. Goodwill was replaced by Le Chateau and the slaughterhouse beside the Beverly closed its doors.
The contrast between the Queen West of old and what it has turned into today is astounding. A lot of what can be seen there now – for better or for worse – is a product of what the punk scene created in those early days.

Queen West circa the late 1970s is virtually unrecognizable in contrast to the area today, but dregs of its old memories still linger. Stepping past the Gap, which was formerly a furniture store, I can almost hear straggling bits of haphazard bass lines and dramatic shouts of a Curse rehearsal coming from the top floor where the band used to practice.

But like this poster suggests, punk wasn’t seen as anything immediately influential, more as something to be reviled.

The scene was quick to produce anti-heroes like the Viletones, who became instantly notorious after frontman Steven Leckie performed a public-self mutilation at their debut gig. The night erupted in a whirl of broken glass and spilled beer.

In punk’s earlier days, gigs were already hard enough to come by for bands that played original material instead of Top 40 covers, and it didn’t help that punk set a precedent for the unpredictable. Punk’s devoted fans didn’t make it much better, as the audiences could be just as dangerous as the music they loved.

Venues willing to step out of the ordinary and take a chance on punk were few and far between, and those that did were often short lived, forcing the scene to shift from bar to bar. When there was no place to play, bands made their own, like the legendary Crash N’ Burn club in a basement on Duncan Street, or in the various boozecans that dotted the city.

The punk scene’s perseverance paid off, though. Not without its allies, like Gary Topp and Gary Cormier, two local promoters who championed the underdogs, the tenacity of the scene helped obliterate the bar band and nourish the fertile music scene Toronto knows today. Try to imagine our downtown without the live music it offers up every night of the week and it seems an impossible reality.

For all of its inspired amateurism, caustic vibrations, and unwavering offensiveness, our clubs, culture, fashion, art, and music can all be attributed to the energy that burned through the punk scene’s frenetic energy and unwillingness to settle for mediocrity. These young people left a legacy, and punk’s fingerprints are all over Toronto.