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.