Art Bergmann - John Armstrong! Buck Cherry! The Modernettes! Pachuco!

John Armstrong! Buck Cherry! The Modernettes! Pachuco!

Nerve Magazine / December 2006 / by Ferdy Belland

One of the more exciting bits of news crackling forth from the current Vancouver rock community is the reappearance of one of the most memorable bands from the city’s early punk days: by cracky, it’s the Modernettes! YAY!!! The new Modernettes will return to the Vancouver stage (for the first time since the filming of the punk rock pseudo-documentary Hard Core Logo) on Friday December 29th at Richard’s on Richards with the Manvils, Rich Hope, and Junior Major - holy shit! Quadruple awesome or what?

CANADIAN PUNK HISTORY LESSON: Bursting onto the amazing Smilin’ Buddha Cabaret scene, out of the sardonically intelligent mind of ex-Active Dog guitarist-vocalist John Armstrong (known by his ‘nom-de-punk,’ Buck Cherry), the Modernettes were one of the first and best pop-punk bands Canada will ever see. A co-ed power trio, sonically akin to the Ramones, the Modernettes’ lineup was rounded out by the striking Amazonian bassist Mary-Jo Kopechne and bash-bash-bashful drummer John “Jughead” McAdams. The band was busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest at the turn of the 1980s, releasing classic EPs like Strictly Confidential, Teen City, a full-length LP Gone...but Not Forgotten, and the final EP View From the Bottom. A frantic West Coast touring schedule and growing frustration over the band’s unfathomable obscurity (in the shadow of better-known Van City exports such as the Pointed Sticks and DOA) lead to the Modernettes’ premature demise; John later formed the short-lived supergroup Los Popularos with his longtime friend Art Bergmann, but even a pop-punk demigod reaches a breaking point, and Cherry/Armstrong thought he had hung up his Cuban-heeled boots (and his splintery Gibson SG) for good. Not so.

“For all intents and purposes, I had retired from playing music,” Armstrong explains from the controlroom comfort of Paramount Recording Studio, where he currently resides as one of Vancouver’s prime underground recording engineers. “I still wanted to write and record songs, but I didn’t want to go out and tread the boards. But then I met the guys from (the local Vancouver band) the Philharmonic, around the time my partner Gord Nichol and I bought Paramount Studio here in the Downtown Eastside. We started talking about music, and we liked a lot of the same music. And we had the studio here. I’d been playing on other people’s records and was anxious to start doing some of my new songs. I got (guitarist) Adam Sabla and (bassist) Hayz Fisher, along with (New Pornographers drummer) Kurt Dahle together last winter and recorded 16 songs, plugging away at them and recording them live in the room. We took the Beatles approach, where we track them live and then go back and decide to work another part into it, or trim another part out. So we got the spontaneity of playing live, but then we fucked with it for a while. Most of the songs were recorded on the same day they all learned them. So it was all bang-and-crash threeand- a-half-chord symphonies.” Armstrong goes on: “I thought I’d have an album in the can, and then I’d write another album, and that was where it was up until Joe Keithley got a hold of me about reissuing the Modernettes compilation that Zulu Records had done. And I said, ‘Sure, great!’ And then the next thing I heard was, ‘Here’s a cheque!’ and ‘Boy, you guys are selling a lot of records in Japan!’ I started playing music in 1975 when I quit high school and moved in with Art Bergmann, when we formed the Shits, and this was the first cheque I had ever gotten from a record company.”

“So we had this album completed, and were ready to get out and play out under a new band name, when all this Japanese attention happened,” Armstrong explains. “The promoters really wanted the Modernettes to come overseas to do these shows, and I was of course agreeable to traveling to Japan for free…but, do we have to call it ‘The Modernettes?’ Jughead’s down in California and Mary-Jo’s up in some remote village in northern British Columbia, raising exotic housecats. What we’re traveling to Japan with is an entirely new, and entirely different band, so the plan is to tour Japan as ‘the New Modernettes,’ splitting the repertoire halfway between selections off the first three records, and half being new material. When we come back to Vancouver, we’ll continue as a new band: Pachuco.” Those of us who aren’t cholos are advised that a pachuco is a Mexican-American youth who dresses in flashy clothes and usually runs with a street gang.

Sabla explains the New Modernettes / Pachuco genesis from his viewpoint: “Hayz and I became friends with John. We started out barbecuing more than playing music, just hanging out over the summer we met, with a lot of beer and a lot of roasted chicken. I don’t know how exactly it came to be… we were at one of these barbecues one night, talking about the genius of Randy Newman, which might be one of the least punk rock topics of conversation going… we started hanging out and jamming, playing for fun.”

“When I first met Adam,” Armstrong explains, “He told me his two major musical influences were the Beatles and the Sex Pistols. I felt that anyone who can keep those two bands in the same heart is someone I have to play with.” “Kurt was originally going to go to Japan with us,” notes Armstrong, about drummer Dahle, “but he’s already too busy with the New Pornographers. Kurt’s been all around the world, all year long, reading paperbacks in airports. They’re still out there promoting Twin Cinema; they’re off to Australia shortly.” Consequently, The New Modernettes will take (Ex-Frequency Fall) drummer Ryan Betts for the Japanese tour, which covers seven shows in 10 days during March 2007, and will see Mssrs. Armstrong, Sabla, Fisher, et Betts rocking up classic Buck Cherry tunes like “Barbra” for the good people of Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, and other sprawling metropolises across the Land of the Rising Sun, with the type of fire and fury that hasn’t been seen since the Enola Gay took flight one cloudy August morning in 1945. “I’m sorry we’re not playing the Budokan,” Armstrong laments. “I was hoping to find one of Bob Dylan’s old hymnals in the dressing room. But I believe we’re playing fair-sized venues, Commodore Ballroom-sized places, the same rooms the Pointed Sticks played. We’re using the same promoter who brought the Sticks over, and they did very well by all accounts – as they should. They didn’t book enough shows to meet their demand, and they sold everything out. I have no idea if this will open any inroads into the Fuji Rock Festival or anything… like everything else in my career, I’ve blundered into it unwittingly. You end up drunk in a basement, playing too loud, and the next thing you know, you’re making a record. And the next thing you know, you’re in a band, going to some other city. And then I quit all that for years and years, and you’d think I’d learned something, but it’s exactly what happened this time. It’s all been absolute happenstance and blind luck and ignorance.”

So what we have is the Modernettes and not-the Modernettes. Explains Armstrong, “I’m not comfortable with playing too many more Canadian shows as ‘the Modernettes’. That band name was a joke to begin with, just as ‘Buck Cherry’ was a joke name. We were all on welfare and they’d kick you off of welfare if you used your real name. When that LA band buckcherry came out in the late ‘90s, it was great because they had to pay me a whole bunch of money! Rich Duguay (of Personality Crisis) was in town one day and picked up a copy of Rolling Stone, which had a ‘hot bands to watch’ feature, and buckcherry was one of those bands. The only smart thing I’ve ever done in my entire musical career was that I didn’t get a showbiz lawyer; I got a trademarkand- copyright lawyer. I said, look, I’ve got a body of work here that spans a number of years, I’ve got a book, the book’s been optioned as a film, and the legal basis for any complaint like this would cause confusion in the marketplace. If I decided to call myself ‘Billie Holiday,’ the estate of Billie Holiday would have a pretty good case that I would be causing confusion in the marketplace… some old jazz snob saunters into HMV looking for Strange Fruit and ends up with another strange fruit. So I approached Dreamworks – and I smiled when I saw buckcherry was on Dreamworks; brand new big label with LOTS of money to spend – and the first thing the lawyer said when he took a look at the material we supplied them with was, ‘Is this a problem that money can solve?’ So I got a really nice payout in American dollars – being Steven Spielberg’s record label, what he paid me was the money he leaves on the bar table - and my lawyer earned every penny I paid him by saying, ‘Don’t sell them the name – LICENCE it to them. Allow them to use it and you can still use it. So I can’t print Buck Cherry as all lower-case, one word, and I can’t call the band ‘Buck Cherry,’ but I personally am Buck Cherry and have been for much longer than they’ve been around.”

One of John Armstrong’s many endearing traits is his seemingly bottomless well of anecdotes, vivid recollections, and just plain good stories, all laced with humour and poignancy. Not surprisingly, he’s a gifted writer. His must-read mini-opus Guilty of Everything predated Joe Keithley’s uber-hyped backpatting session I, Shithead by two years and (in this writer’s opinion) better captures the sights, sounds, and smells of what Vancouver’s early punk days must have been like for those of us who weren’t there. “The weirdest thing and the shittiest thing about punk rock was the jettisoning of all this really crucial musical history,” Armstrong says. “The idea that nobody had ever made a record before the MC5, the New York Dolls, or the Stooges. If it was a band that was sufficiently obscure, you were allowed to like them, but literally, you could never say that (Howlin’ Wolf sideman) Hubert Sumlin was a great guitar player. You weren’t allowed to say that your favourite guitarists were Tom Verlaine, Richard Thompson, and Ry Cooder. I got in to see Iggy and the Stooges on the Raw Power tour at the Pender Ballroom with my brand-new fake ID when I was 15, which I only knew about because I bought Rock Scene every month. Greatest magazine ever; Bergmann said, ‘This is the perfect magazine because it’s all pictures and captions!’ And it looked like everybody in New York were all buddies. ‘Barbecue at David Johansen and Cyrindra Foxe’s apartment,’ and they’d have a hibachi on the fire escape, and there’d be Walter Lure and Richard Hell standing beside the record player, singing along and drunk off their asses. It was the most wonderful magazine, and it made it seem like if you could only get to New York, you could go to those parties too, because you knew all these people. It was a very small world for people who liked that shit. Sort of like here.”