some kinda fun

There is no band I saw as often or as avidly as Teenage Head. Between 1978 and '81, years I also saw Elvis Costello, The Jam, The Stranglers, the Stones, Simple Minds, Peter Tosh, UB40, The Vibrators, Bruce Springsteen, The Pretenders, Iggy Pop, Ultravox and a very green U2 in an Ottawa bar (where they played 'I Will Follow' three times for lack of encore material), I must have seen the Head nearly twenty times.

There were nights when they might have sloppy, and nights when the rowdiness in the crowd threatened to turn ugly, but they were never less than full-on smokin'-hot balls-out  fun. Certainly the most consistently fun band I ever saw, definitely the most fun Canadian band since Confederation, and maybe one of the most fun rock bands ever.


I'm not just talking good time here. Because 'good time', especially in those days of collegiate pretension, import-only record collecting, NME-reading, punk authenticity stand-offs and general post-teen white middle-class seriousness, there was something very close to uncool to just having a good time. Music had to be somehow important,  confrontational, ugly and stripped to the sinews. Fun was something much less committed music listeners had, something the new music that mattered had a kind duty to oppose. It was Costello singing of radio's mass market suckage, The Clash roaring about class warfare, Talking Heads' cerebral East Village minimalism, U2 bleeding the Irish Troubles all over the lip of the stage, Springsteen's lonesome highway howl.

God what dreary gits we were. And hypocritical -- at least I was. While my public music appreciation persona was all about the punk purity, in private I was just a suburban rec-room riff rat, every bit as likely to air guitar to Tom Petty, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC or The Cars as soberly shred my ear drums to 'White Riot' or 'Holiday in the Sun'. Secretly, I deeply dug The Eagles.

So along comes Teenage Head and completely gives the game away. Because they looked just punk enough to pass -- at least lead singer Frankie Venom, who bore an uncanny resemblance to Transformer-era Lou Reed, did -- they easily infiltrated the domain of skinny ties, Marlboros and spiky hair, and because they generated a thunderous runway take-off noise, they passed muster as agents of misrule. But the ruse was exposed by the dance. Within just a song or two, say the foundation-shaking You're Tearing Me Apart or Top Down, these Hamilton high school rejects never failed to get even the most statuary of punk poseurs on the floor and full-on frantic.

Inevitably, they got called punk, and just as inevitably, they got called on being called punk. I mean Frankie Venom might have a suitably threatening moniker and death's-head glare, and he might make a nightly habit of leaping from the stage onto teetery, beer-soaked tables (at least one of which I happened to be sitting at), but where was the anger? And, despite the fact these guys were from Steeltown, the country's toughest working class burg and smokestack capital, where was the revolt? But that was to theorize well out of earshot of the propulsively catchy 'Picture My Face' or (the best-named Canadian rock song of all time) 'Teenage Beer Drinkin' Party'. If you were anywhere near the songs themselves, you were probably having way too much fun to give a shit.

Besides, there might be something in this propensity for joyful ass-shaking noise that is the purest expression of bona fide Canadian punk, if such a categorical conceit really even matters. What I mean by that is that the most enjoyable Canadian rock music has always been rather proudly brainless and solar plexus based, party music for the heedless hoser. I'm thinking of much of The Guess Who here, all of BTO, the best of April Wine, the melody (if not the lyrics) of 54-40 and The Tragically Hip, Sloan at their power pop goofiest, even the early pocket-Springsteen Bryan Adams. It's music drink beer and barf too, or play so loud in your car the dashboard vibrates and your smokes fall on the floor. This is the Great Canadian Sonic Release (and I suppose I'd best include Rush, despite the fact their music is about as danceable as the sound of an old internet dial-up connection), a ready-for-the-weekend assault on reason and responsibility that's only really as dangerous and revolutionary as losing your wallet on the way for an after hours all-dressed slice.

(It's probably not coincidental that the worst shellacking I ever took was on Bank St. in Ottawa following a Teenage Head gig. We were jumped by four guys exiting a country music club -- Ottawa was not exactly a punk-positive place at the time -- and I didn't even know until the next day that my nose was broken. Picture my face, indeed.)

In other words, Teenage Head -- whose named was derived from a classic power pop anthem by The Flamin' Groovies -- allowed you to play punk while really and truly just rocking the fuck on. Their songs, which were insanely hooky garage-rock nuggets derived from Eddie Cochran, The Troggs, the New York Dolls, The Ramones, The Archies, Slade, the Groovies and all manner of chewy electrified bubblegum, rang through your head in such an insistent manner that you had to go back and hear them again, if only to dislodge them your skull. (It never worked, not even with a broken nose.) And they never, ever let you down. Even if you saw them on a Wednesday night in Barrie which, come to think of it, I probably did.

I remember I bought their first album (Teenage Head) in 1979, which I purchased from Sam the Record Man at Yonge and Dundas in Toronto on the same day I got the first Police album. (Which I still love and listen to, despite everything Sting has done subsequently to compromise the legacy.) I rushed home and put it on, ready for a sonic boom that never happened. The production on the record was so crappy that even Picture My Face sounded enervated, and heralded a prolonged spotty studio career that plagued the band throughout their recording career. Indeed, up until the Head re-recorded a number of their vintage shit-kickers with ex-Ramone Marky in 2003 (released on CD four years later, and within a year of the death of Frankie Venom in October, 2008), nobody seemed to know how to bottle that lightning in a studio. Which only meant you had to be there, now more than ever: you had to see them live to know what they were capable of, and to let people know that that sorta so-so Hamilton band you heard now and again on the radio was only a pale whisper of the real live thing.

In 1991, I was working for CBC Radio as host of show called Prime Time. We did a week long series on the legacy of punk music, and one of the show's producers managed to track down Frankie. At the time, he was working as painter on a construction site in Toronto, and he showed up in the studio in splattered overalls. He was a lovely guy: articulate, funny, smart and seemingly devoid of regret. The band might  not have attained the heights it deserved, he said, and it might not have ever done in the studio what it could on a stage, but it had a pretty amazing time while it lasted. And he was genuinely touched that I was still such a slobberingly devoted fan. "We never got much interest from the CBC," he said.

The band I saw more times than I can remember formed in 1975 in Hamilton. It consisted of Frank Kerr (Mr. Venom in embryo), Gord Lewis, Nick Stipanitz and Steve Mahon, four guys who had met while slacking in the halls Westdale High in Hamilton. It worked hard, played (musically and, I'm guessing, otherwise) hard and, maybe because it was Canada, never really got the rep it deserved. And on it rolled: past the brief instant of infamy precipitated by the so-called "Punk Rock Riot" that occurred at Ontario Place in 1980, the near-fatal car crash of Gord, the departure of Frankie, the ill-fated makeover (to "The Teenage Heads") by a dumbly cautious American record label, and all the endless dissolutions, reconfigurations and rumours of imminent -- and this time, this time, proper -- recordings.

Which happened, actually, with the Teenage Head With Marky Ramone album. A collection of re-recorded songs done right -- yes, this is the Picture My Face I always wanted to hear -- it's easily the closest thing you'll ever hear to what the band once sounded like in the flesh. And thank god they got the chance, despite the fact the album's release was, to say the least, muted. Indeed, I didn't even know it existed until October 2008, when I returned from a weekend in New York and learned that Frankie had died, at age 52, a few days before.  I instantly downloaded the thing and played it. Over and over and over again. Fuck, I thought, somebody finally got it. Before it was too late, but too late to get the punks up off their asses and dancing again.

Apropos of nothing but fun -- big fun, serious fun, sublime fun -- I guess what I need to say is this: all hail the mighty Head.

thumpa thumpa

My wife and I like to watch TV in a large black leather chair. It's not quite a double, but big enough for a cozy squeeze. We were into the second season of AMC's Breaking Bad -- brilliant, nasty fun -- when the episode called "Grilled" came up. I won't tell you what goes on, because getting there is considerably more than half the fun, but suffice to say a very, very unpleasant character finally gets his in a suitably unpleasant and deeply satisfying way. ("Let him bleed," is what's said afterward.) It doesn't happen quickly, but then again nothing in Breaking Bad does. It may be one of the most glacially paced all-stops-out TV crime thrillers ever, but make no mistake: when it comes to thrills, Breaking Bad kicks like the methamphetamines the show's lead character cooks.

"Wow, you must have really enjoyed that," my wife, who had been leaning against me, said when it was over. "Your heart was racing."

It was. And this is nothing new. My reaction to movies, at least of a certain kind, has always been as much physical as emotional or intellectual: my heart pumps, my body shifts, my limbs twitch. Sometimes, during an especially satisfying fistfight -- as in, say, the climactic bare-knuckle brawl of Walter Hill's Hard Times (1975, seen at age 17), my own clenched fists move in a kind of dopey mirror pantomime.

(Only boxing has ever a similarly limb-twitching effect, and then only boxing practiced by Muhammad Ali during the '70s. Never before and not since. I'm still working on that one.)

I can't help this. Pure motor response. But I do know one thing. Nothing will get the body going in unconscious response to what's on screen quite like a particular kind of violence. Note I did not say violence, for it isn't all violence that sets the kettle a-boil. In fact, most violence passes by me with all the impact of scenery flashing by through a car window, with no more discernible impact than the vague subliminal thump of Lady Gaga on a shopping mall muzak playlist.

What does the trick is payback. The kind of violence which is perpetrated on somebody who themselves have perpetrated unspeakable acts of cruelty, torture and gratuitous bodily harm, and who finally get what's coming to them in a suitably gruesome, elaborate, meticulous and ritualistically drawn-out fashion. This is what pulls my body into the act.

I wish I could remember more specific scenes than I currently do, but hopefully a generic description will suffice at least to let you click to what I'm talking about. It's a scene where the protagonist finally, after a number of failed near-attempts and near fatal encounters, turns the tables on the psycho-killing, puppy-torturing, sexually-sadistic, shit-eating grinning and usually under-shaved antagonist and makes him suffer a little dose of his own medicine before drawing last breath. And sometimes it is just a tiny dose, just enough so that the bastard knows he's fully aware of the fact he's being cooked before the job is done.

It's a scene you'll see in quite a few crime movies, especially if they feature Charles Bronson or Clint Eastwood, a fair number of horror movies -- although, for some reason, these never jazz me the way other payback scenes do -- and it's pretty much a hot-branded staple of the western.

Revenge is the western's primary source of narrative horsepower (more, much more, on that in future posts), and it's never sweeter than when perpetrated under a big sky on someone who kicks up a cloud of dust as they go down. But sweet and satisfying it must be, because that's a sign that a western has done it's job: it has not only justified the act of violence but made it necessary to satisfying narrative closure. It's made you root for it, and it has successfully convinced you that the only reasonable way of settling things is by righteously kicking some  high holy ass.

Could part of this be sexual? Jesus, it probably is, but I wouldn't want to go to far with that. Because I do believe that it truly is cathartic, and therefore probably usefully so. What I get is a sense of release during these sequences, and this is what, if they're working properly, they're engineered to do: to open the valve that has been slowly tightened for the preceding ninety or one-hundred some minutes, and release with a long sigh of escaping tension -- or bursting hiss of psychic steam -- the deliberately compressed emotional material built up so methodically in the process of getting there. Come to think of it, a cigarette would sometimes be nice under the circumstances.

(A thought. You know what would have made Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ an immensely more fun, satisfying and, dare I say it, honest movie?: if Jesus had rolled away that stone after three days and gone to beat holy crap out of a Roman legion or two: "I'll be right up, Dad. But first I've got some business to take care of..." I mean, you just know Mel's got that movie in him.)

But then it's done for me. I don't walk out into the streets spoiling for a fight or ready to pile heaping servings of whup-ass on anyone, and I never have. If anything, I'm as conflict-averse as a monk (although motivated less by religious principle than sheer cowardice), and a truly do believe that ultimately revenge is not only pointless but poisonous. The desire for it pollutes the soul and saps it of spirit, and usually produces nothing more effectively than its own blowback. In life, and eye for an eye just ends in blindness.

But on screen? It's the best. Thrilling, satisfying, stirring and almost transcendentally transporting. And physical. It gets my body going. So call it what you will: sick, sad, dubious, disturbing, or just plain weird, but there it is. There may be nothing I enjoy more, on the sheer level of vicarious joy, than seeing somebody deserving get theirs. This is probably why I have an unusually overdeveloped appreciation of Charles Bronson movies, and why the western has held me in thrall for so long: it takes me to the frontier of my civility, where the wild things are only the desires dare to go. However, it is probably a good thing that I never got into video games. My heart probably would've given out years ago.

the rubber burner

I took a break from work my usual way the other night, by pulling a movie more or less randomly from my shelf. (By the way, when I was a kid, my dream was to have a home movie theatre. In this regard anyway, the future's been okay by me.) It turned out to be a British DVD I bought a few years ago, a 1967 movie called Robbery.

Funny thing is, Robbery was directed by Peter Yates (born in England in 1929), and Mr. Yates is somebody I've given more than a little thought to over the past few years. (Don't ask. That's me.) It began with my modestly epiphanic viewing of Bullitt a few years back. It was probably the fifteenth or so time I'd seen that movie since my father took me (at age ten) back in 1968, but this time something clicked that hadn't before: that movie is all about Steve McQueen's eyes.

It's true. Just watch it. Apart from that monumentally perfect car chase sequence, very little happens in Bullitt. A police-protected mobster appears to be killed at the beginning, and McQueen's Lt. Frank Bullitt ventilates the real mobster at the San Francisco airport at the end. In between, apart from that game-changing Mustang rubber-burner, it's mostly McQueen laying back and looking. No part of McQueen's body moves nearly as much as his eyes, which survey crime scenes, people's faces, the corner store frozen food section, and the road ahead with equal degrees of probing intensity. Yates understands this. Note how much of the movie consists either of close-ups of McQueen or shots where McQueen is standing slightly out of centre just looking on. And here's the thing, at least if you really want to understand why Bullitt is the movie most often cited as the one defining the McQueen Cool or how to direct a movie around a true star's persona: even when he's just looking, even though he may not be saying or doing anything, you can't take your eyes off his. The movie is anchored in the man's silent gravity, the result being that just about anything he does -- and he really doesn't do much more than his job -- becomes a dramatic event of transfixing interest. Everything about him is detached and cool but the eyes: they burn with concentration. The thrill of watching Bullitt is watching McQueen watch.

A year or so after that, I watched Yates' 1973 adaptation of George V. Higgins' The Friends of Eddie Coyle, a movie I'd seen parts of on TV some years before. It was recently released on DVD courtesy of the dangerously reliable Criterion Collection label, and this time I was welded in place. Once again, not a whole lot really takes place in the movie, at least not if you consider 'action' to consist of events involving objects moving at great velocity toward some kind of collision. Indeed, The Friends of Eddie Coyle is damned talky, and almost Europeanly so: people speak in restaurants, bars and cars, on telephones, street corners and windblown parking lots.

The guy doing the most talking is Robert Mitchum, age 55 at the time of shooting, who plays the title role: a guy out on parole who doesn't want to go back to jail, and who is providing information, in exchange for leniency, to the Boston cops about the wiseguys Eddie is a street-level gunrunner for. So talk is embedded into the ritual and routine: the movie's all about negotiating angles and playing your best game face, trying to lie effectively while reading the lies you're being told. So, once again, Yates is making a movie about faces, and while the movie is packed with some of the period's most seedily expressive -- Peter Boyle, Richard Jordan, Alex Rocco -- none comes near the creased, leathery elegance of Mitchum's. He's heartbreakingly good. Doomed from the gitgo as you know he must be -- it's 1973, after all -- he slouches from scene to scene with a final-inning, faint hope determination that he might actually thwart the fate he knows in his bones will probably prevail. But it's all he can do.

This is another astutely-directed, 20-20 sharp movie about star persona, but where Bullitt pulled the various strands of prior Steve McQueen-ness into the ultimate expression of the star's singular cool -- something Don Siegel would do, in the same city and with another lone wolf cop, with Eastwood in Dirty Harry -- Eddie Coyle draws from Mitchum's formidable iconic noir gravitas and pours it into the battered existential receptacle of this sadly stale-dated smalltime crook. Watching this guy come to terms with his own impending irrelevancy is almost unbearably sad, and it make you realize how much of the Mitchum aura has always been steeped in doom. Eddie Coyle is another unassumingly stunning movie from Yates, fully in command of its atmospheric eloquence and unspoken undercurrents, and so quiet and seemingly incidental in its execution you barely notice how tightly engineered the damned thing is.

Then comes Robbery -- at least to my attention, it was actually made before Bullitt and Coyle -- and it's very nearly as good. Opening like the other two movies with a crime in process -- a heart-thumping daylight robbery-and-car-chase on London's teemingly crowded mod-era streets -- Robbery then gets down to its real business, which turns out really to be, well, business: how the heisting of a Royal Mail train is planned, architectured and executed by a conspiracy of thieves led by the falcon-eyed Stanley Baker (in another mostly silent, largely glance-based performance) who almost get away with it.

Perhaps because it was based on the notorious 'Great Train Robbery' then so familiar to British audiences, Robbery largely disavows character, context or motivation -- but with that kind of cash, who needs it? -- in favour of pure, methodical process. Like some of the best crime movies of Don Siegel, Jean-Pierre Melville, Henri-Georges Clouzot and Michael Mann, it's really an exercise in observing men at work: how plans turn on intricate processes of concentration and collaboration, and how you can get to made to root for anybody provided you're fully sympathetic with the seriousness of their dedication and skills.

It's interesting that both Robbery and Bullitt were criticized for the seemingly lackadaisical nature of the way they handled their few moments of heterosexual interface. Both feature sequences in which the protagonists go home to their woman (Joanna Pettet and Jacqueline Bisset respectively), only to be implored once again to give up the dangerous life and settle down. These passages have both been dismissed as half-hearted, obligatory and sexist, but there's another way of looking at them: they underscore just how supremely comfortable, in control and natural these guys are when they're working -- the ultimate measure of a certain kind of man's worth -- and how the domestic realm leaves them feeling like strangers in their own skin. If these scenes feel awkward, that may be the point: home is not where men like this belong. But then look at Mitchum's at-home moments with his wife (Helena Carroll), a woman he clearly loves, aches for having hurt and is willing to risk his increasingly worthless life to bring some -- any -- degree of peace and comfort.

Peter Yates, who's now 81 years old, made other kinds of movies than crime dramas -- Breaking Away, The Dresser, The House on Carroll Street -- but his crime dramas were so good you're kind of left wishing that's all he'd made, or wonder what he might've done if he'd come along earlier and, like Siegel, Sam Fuller or Anthony Mann, cut his teeth on hard-as-nails studio B-movies. This trio of crime movies are especially impressive for their restraint, their vivid sense of location, their immense sensitivity to action-as-character, and their formidable respect for the pure getting-done of jobs.

I think that, as much as anything else, is why I love -- L.O.V.E.: love -- a good crime movie. (By that, I include film noir and gangster films.) What compels me is the subtle luring to the dark side: the understanding I can get of men doing things I'd never dream of doing, the sly seduction of my affinities toward solipsistic pragmatism and purely situational ethics. And, if I was compelled -- let's say at gunpoint -- to make a categorical thematic distinction between crime movies and westerns -- my other favourite kind of movie -- it would be this: crime dramas are about ethics, and westerns are about morality. Crime dramas are about the codes of professionalism by which you conduct your business no matter what that business may be, and westerns are about what you're willing to do -- i.e., kill -- in the name of what you think is right.

In their own ways, all of these movies are ultimately about cool. Not so much in the sense of style or attitude as in the sense of doing what must be done and, without compromise or second thought, doing it as best as you can. That's a pretty good description of what McQueen, Mitchum and Stanley Baker are up to in these movies, as well as the approach taken by the guy who's directing them.