Back in action: John Armstrong and the Modernettes
North Shore News / Friday, December 22, 2006 / by Greg Potter

Meeting your idols can be tempestuous affairs.

People admired from a distance tend to mutate horribly when you get too close. Public facades are not meant to be pried open because the reality lurking beneath ain't always pretty.

Vancouver writer/author John Armstrong, a.k.a. singer/songwriter/guitarist Buck Cherry, discovered this the hard way when his band the Modernettes backed up former -- New York Doll Johnny Thunders at Gary Taylor's Rock Room in 1981. Thunders, who would die of an apparent methadone overdose a decade later, was Armstrong's greatest guitar hero short of Keith Richards. Perhaps fittingly, JT ended the club date by trying to steal Armstrong's prized 1957 Gibson Les Paul TV from the dressing room (ignoring the word "Modernettes" splattered across the guitar case in blazing red letters).

Whether karma or coincidence, Buck Cherry had been one of my idols at the height of Vancouver's highly influential punk scene, circa 1977 to 1982. In 1986, he joined my band Lost Durangos. After a show at the Savoy one night, he stole my guitar. Maybe that's what idols are supposed to do.

I mention this purely in the interests of disclosure. Though I'm ostensibly plugging the return of the Modernettes (Richard's on Richards, Dec. 29) with a brand new album (tentatively titled Buck Like Me) and a forthcoming Japanese tour (seven shows in four cities in March), I'm writing about the John Armstrong/Buck Cherry I've known, admired, played with, worked with, drank with, fought with, been tossed out of bars with, and still remain friends with after a quarter century of questionable lifestyle choices that would have slain lesser mortals.

Having celebrated his 50th birthday last summer, Armstrong has mellowed (in as much as his temperament will allow), eased up on the drink (within reason) and flushed the drugs (before they flushed him). He co-owns Paramount Recorders with ex-Pointed Sticks keyboardist Gord Nicholl and produces his own music when not recording others. His brutally frank and funny 2001 book, Guilty of Everything, has been optioned by filmmaker Patrick Carroll, and he recently delivered Wages, his second set of "memoirs" (as he calls them), to publisher Rolf Maurer at New Star Books.

DOA leader Joe "Shithead" Keithley has reissued Get It Straight, a superb 25-song Modernettes' compilation on Sudden Death Records. The CD includes tracks from 1980's Teen City EP, 1981's Gone But Not Forgiven LP and 1982's View From the Bottom EP, plus assorted demos and live recordings. Its success in Japan prompted the tour, predicated on using the name "Modernettes." Thus, a reunion it is not; more like a resurrection in name only, as Armstrong -- in the guise of Buck Cherry -- is the sole founding member. Rounding out the quartet are former members of the Philharmonic, wholly half his age: guitarist/vocalist Adam Sabla, 25, bassist/vocalist Hayz Fisher, 27, and drummer Ryan Betts, 23.

"There was never any intention to play the old songs or call the band Modernettes, but that was before the offer to tour Japan," says Armstrong, perched in front of his studio mixing console in cowboy boots, black jeans and a black Western shirt with white piping, elegantly wrinkled. "I really would like to retire the name gracefully, but one thing this band has never been accused of is decorum or grace.

"When I first met Adam," Armstrong continues, "he told me his favourite guitar players were the Sex Pistols' Steve Jones and the Beatles' George Harrison. We share a love of melody and feedback, often at the same time -- not an approach you find too many players in favour of. How could I not love playing with these guys? They're great players, there's no temper tantrums, they just show up ready to play and have a blast doing it. When we're not playing, we hang out together. They're my illegitimate children, really. It's heartwarming. Disney should buy the rights."

Sabla, who grew up in Toronto, confesses that he'd never heard of the Modernettes before being introduced to Armstrong. Upon hearing the Get It Straight CD, "I really took to it," he says. "Sometimes you have friends in bands and you listen to their CDs to be polite, but I really liked this stuff."

With acts such as the Stooges and New York Dolls reuniting after three decades with younger members replacing dearly departed ones, the age difference is irrelevant. "I think people have gotten over that," says Sabla. "Rock'n'roll today is so postmodern, it doesn't matter anymore. The only difference is that John was around when it was happening, whereas I only started reading about it and going to used record shops as a teenager. But I don't look at it like he's 50 -- he's John and he's my friend."

Armstrong feels like he missed "the awkward years" from 30 to his late 40s: "The age when, if you keep at it with music, people start saying, 'Aren't you a little old for this foolishness?' But if you bugger off at 30 and show up again at 50, they have to be a wee bit more polite in deference to your advanced age. I'm counting on it -- as a matter of fact, I'm insisting on it. And I'd also like you to give me your seat on the bus."

I first experienced the Modernettes -- Armstrong, bassist/vocalist Mary "Jo Kopechne" Wichar and drummer John "Jughead" McAdams -- at the Helen Pitt Gallery on Halloween night 1979. The lasting impression is one of leather jackets, polka-dot shirts, leopard-print miniskirts, fishnet stockings and gloriously catchy pop songs played loud and fast. It was like the Archies on crystal meth, or maybe the Partridge Family if Danny Bonaduce had had it his way.

"I started playing when I was 18 and did my first gigs in White Rock that same year, 1975," says Armstrong, who was reared in Surrey and a member of the Monitors and Active Dog prior to the Modernettes. "Back then it was very pure. No one had any dreams of making a living playing music -- if we got drunk, stoned and laid it was a successful engagement. Being in a band was like being in the best sort of gang."

But when the Modernettes had records out and had a following, the fun declined.

"Once you have managers and a record company, things turn to shit in a real hurry," says Armstrong. "Suddenly people start seeing dollar signs -- if only they can get you to stop saying what you think, or enjoying yourself. I remember the head of PolyGram flew out from Toronto to see us and was quite shocked that I was smoking onstage. We were playing the Railway Club, for chrissake, which was like playing my living room -- he's lucky I was wearing pants!

"It didn't take long for all those concerned to figure out that I was completely unsuited to being a member of the music industry. What's funny is that all of my friends who tried to accommodate labels and managers got reamed horribly. I mean, the sort of horror stories you associate with old bluesmen being conned out of every copyright and royalty for a pack of cigarettes and a soda."

Among others, Armstrong is referring to singer/songwriter Art Bergmann and Pointed Sticks' keyboardist Nicholl, with whom he escaped the outer-lying districts and headed for Vancouver in 1977. Friends from high school, they were drawn together by mutual interests, not all of them popular with the big kids on campus.

"Gord and Art taught me to play guitar," says Armstrong. "We lived in the same uninhabitable apartments and houses, starved and drank, wrote songs, discovered punk rock and moved to the city together. We didn't really have a choice about becoming friends -- we were the only people we knew who liked the same shit. We all thought glam was the first good thing to happen since the British Invasion and we hated hippie music. That was enough to get you tarred, feathered and run out of town on a rail back then."

They fared little better in Vancouver. On April 23, 1978, Armstrong and Bergmann -- clad in black leather jackets, black jeans and sporting short dyed hair--were attacked in the West End by two carloads of Lynyrd Skynyrd-types. The pair were kicked and pummelled mercilessly, and Bergmann suffered a broken jaw. The story made the "Crime" section of the Vancouver Sun. It was far from the last time John Armstrong's name would turn up in the city's "newspaper of record."

Following the 1983 breakup of the Modernettes Mach II -- a more musically adventurous outfit that, with guitarist/vocalist Randy "Valentino" Carpenter and drummer Ian Noble, combined Television's guitar interplay with Gram Parsons's proto country-rock -- Armstrong and Wichar, now man and wife, quietly set up housekeeping on the East Side. Armstrong worked for a video distributor and began freelance writing for Vancouver Magazine and the Georgia Straight. By 1987, he was a working journalist at the Vancouver Sun.

I was sitting in Armstrong and Wichar's living room (watching a porn video that Armstrong was reviewing for a wank mag) when he got the call. I was enlisted to drive him to the Pacific Press building at Granville and Seventh for his first day on the job. "I guess I'm a 30-year man, now," he said. Amazingly, he lasted half that long.

"It was just a really bad marriage," he says of his 15 years at the Sun. (In fact, his marriage to Wichar headed for the rocks shortly after his hiring.) "The editors were aghast at everything I was proud of. I remember being told to write an obit for Chris Farley. It came screaming back to my desk with a note saying, 'The Sun would never publish such a vile, ugly piece of writing.' I thought it was warm and touching. Like they say, 'We had a failure to communicate.'"

In 1990, a bout with cancer took him off the job for about a year. I was hired as his replacement in the Sun's features and entertainment department. "One man's cancer is another man's job," he quipped at the time. When his mop of jet-black hair fell out during chemotherapy, he began calling himself, "the third Jake," owing to a more-than-passing resemblance to Jack Nicholson.

The early 1990s is remembered as a kind of golden era for the Sun's features and entertainment department. Though mocked by cityside hackers as "The Toy Department," the section boasted some of the best writers in Vancouver. By the mid-'90s, however, a parade of inept and inconsequential managerial drones had sent morale plummeting. Before long, Armstrong was petitioning for a buy-out.

The end came swift and sure when a sub-editor rewrote one of his stories in simple-sentence paragraphs, known in the newspaper racket as "dumbing it down"; i.e., for the benefit of readers who might be tight on time or short on smarts. Armstrong snapped and very nearly crowned the sub-editor with a computer monitor, deciding at the last moment to put it down and proceed immediately to his doctor's office. The Sun's management fast-tracked his buy-out.

"That pretty much sealed the deal," he says. "I didn't really want to end up being a front-page story in my own paper. I don't know why it's such an evil place to work, but the atmosphere is just . . . Christ! They have to lock up sharp objects."

Leaving was like being released from prison. "I didn't get a new suit, but they paid me to leave so I could go somewhere and buy one. I think everyone concerned was happy to see me go - I know I was."

It was around this time that author/journalist Terry Glavin, another former Sun staffer who had bolted the fold, introduced Armstrong to New Star Books publisher Rolf Maurer. "I remember Terry calling attention to the fact that this guy could write like an angel who had got a good price for his soul," says Maurer. "When you're a fan of good writing, there's a certain pleasure to be had in watching somebody at work who knows their way around a typewriter. John has absorbed a lot from the writers he's read over the years -- echoes of Raymond Chandler and Jim Thompson are obvious -- but he's developed a voice that is distinctively his own."

Guilty of Everything (published by New Star on Glavin's Transmontanus imprint) met with unanimous praise -- eliciting both shock and mirth from reviewers -- and was nominated for a B.C. Book Prize. Armstrong arrived at the ceremony after draining several pitchers of margaritas with artist, musician and longtime pal Jim Cummins (a.k.a. I, Braineater). The Globe and Mail duly reported that, while Armstrong didn't win, he fell backwards out of his chair and landed on the floor, sending a dessert plate sailing across the room. "I don't get out much," Armstrong sniggered when I later asked about the incident.

The book prompted filmmaker Patrick Carroll to option the rights. "It made me laugh," says Carroll, "and I thought it would make the kind of movie I'd want to see -- a cross between 24 Hour Party People and American Splendor." An outline is being pitched to potential co-producers, and Carroll hopes to premiere the finished product at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival.

Meanwhile, there is the new album, a Vancouver-only edition which will be available at the Dick's on Dicks show. With basic tracks cut in two days by Armstrong, Sabla, Fisher, Nicholl and New Pornographers' drummer Kurt Dahle, the CD features such raucous and melodic new tunes as Doll Hospital, Wisteria and The Ballad of Sal Mineo. Older songs to be included in live sets include underground classics Rebel Kind, Confidential, Red Nails and Suicide Club.

"Sex, death, love, loss, regret, guilt -- there are only a few topics, anyway," says Armstrong. "I have a broader experience at 50 than I did at 20 but, for good or ill, I come to about the same conclusions. I was either pretty bright then or else I'm quite dim now."

Through it all, he has been -- to some of us, at least Buck Cherry. Even when cheesy L.A. glamsters Buckcherry appropriated the Chuck Berry spoonerism (without bothering to do a name search), Armstrong held his ground and was rewarded with a hefty settlement from the band's label, Dreamworks. "It was the first time I'd ever made any real money from music," he says.

And though he still complains to those of us who were around at the time that, "it still hurts when I sit down," he bears no ill will toward the industry for which he remains "completely unsuited."

"A woman from the CBC interviewed me and asked if I was bothered by the fact that the Modernettes have such an incredible reputation yet were so unsuccessful," Armstrong says with a chortle. "Unsuccessful? I stalled off any kind of regular work for years, travelled around the continent playing music with my friends, made records, got free drugs, liquor and every kind of sex -- by my lights it was a roaring success. What more do you want -- breakfast in bed?"

Why not? I already got my guitar back.