| Vancouver’s Punk History, One Snapshot at a Time |
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Nerve Magazine / April 2007 / by Ferdy Belland Over the many decades of rock ‘n’ roll’s rich history, the art of photography progressed and paralleled the art of the music itself. Many photographers have made their names by documenting the sights and moods of the eras they lived in. Annie Liebovitz’s legendary post-Watergate portraits of musicians, politicians, celebrities, and personalities gave Rolling Stone a gritty dignity that it hasn’t had since – and won’t ever see again. The blurry psychedelia of Sub Pop house photographer Charles Peterson’s double-exposures nabbed many iconographic moments in the much-hyped grunge scene of the Pacific Northwest. The massive music-photo archive of Michael Ochs is enough to stagger the curators of the Library of Congress. And no one has ever come close to matching the lovely Ms. Beverley Davies in capturing the shining, grimy, joyously human moments of Vancouver’s much-ballyhooed punk scene of the Smiling Buddha Cabaret days. This writer was gracefully invited by Ms. Davies into the cozy comforts of her quaint old Strathcona home over this past winter to sip soothing tea in a rocking chair near a warm fireplace, beside which a content old grey cat lay sprawled out with no trace of feline grace. Wrapped in a shawl, her kind eyes always smiling as she shuffles around her kitchen in her slippers to seek out the sugar bowl, Bev Davies looks like everyone’s favourite aunt – but this favourite aunt isn’t cut from the canasta-and-shuffleboard crowd. “You can’t tell anyone this,” Davies confides, “but I am SO into the Brian Jonestown Massacre.” Her smiling eyes widen with girlish glee. “I had a really bad relationship with cameras, to start off with,” explains Davies of her initial infatuation with snapping Toronto rock shows back in the mid-’60s. “I kept losing them, or had them stolen. I took the Rolling Stones shots on my father’s camera, and immediately after the show I raced back home to give it back to him before something happened to it.” Davies moved from sleepy Belleville, ON to the Big Smoke to enroll in the Ontario College of Art, but like any good art student at the time, she soon dropped out and jerked coffee in the pulsing heart of the Yorkville scene. “I moved into a communal house that was full of artists and hippies, and then I moved into a band house with the Ugly Ducklings,” Davies explains, noting Mick Jagger’s favorite Canadian group. “They were great friends of mine, and were the ones who got me into the Rolling Stones concert I took the shots at. Then I moved out west; there was a lot of freewheeling travelling between Toronto and Vancouver back then. I moved to Kitsilano, which was utterly hippie. I attended the Vancouver School of Art, which is now the Emily Carr School – I studied photographic etching. After I graduated, I moved to Bowen Island for awhile, but later on, in the summer of 1977, I went back to take a photography course, which had always interested me. I spent a little while taking shots of rocks and birds and then I went to my first DOA concert and went HOT DAMN! No more ‘still life with fruit-bowl’ for me!” This is where the plot thickens: “I always thought I got into the local scene a little late. I missed the Ramones, I missed the Clash at some little club on Hastings Street – there’s a lot of significant early stuff I missed. After that DOA show, I became a regular at the Smiling Buddha and always brought my camera with me. I would go on Friday night, take pictures, go home and develop them, and go back to the Buddha on the Saturday night and give away the pictures to whoever was playing. I would go to those legendary punk parties at DOA’s Gore Street punk house with boxes of postcards – postcards on the back and photo paper on the front – I’d make postcards out of photos I took of the party in full gong show action and mail it back to them, saying ‘thanks for the party!’” Bev commences to sift through a heap of photographs taken from the Smiling Buddha’s golden years – all in living black-and-white, all shot on the same camera (“I’m a Canon girl,” Bev says). The punk superstars everyone on earth knows about – Joe Keithley, Chuck Biscuits, Randy Rampage, Art Bergmann, John Armstrong, Gerry Hannah, Tony Bardach – they’re all here, in their moment, in sharp instant focus, happily thrashing about on that famous sagging stage and they all look so painfully young. Notorious troublemaker Simon Snotface, tilting his head back and sloppily pouring beer from an upturned stubby; his trucker’s hat and his bushy beard gives this writer an eerie start – this is Stephen fucking McBean’s Strathcona Commandos, time-travelling back a quarter-century to their unshaven sleazeball genesis. The walls of the Smiling Buddha have this weird floral print. There’s not a lot of liberty-spiked mohawks or studded leather jackets here – that punk rock look wouldn’t solidify until the Exploited came around. The punks of 1980 look like the East Van scruffsters of 2007. They look exactly alike. Fucking exactly. Fatigue jackets, hoodies, Converse All Stars, unkempt hair, Value Village clothes. It’s as if you can reach your hands through the photos, watch your flesh and clothes lose their colour, and you too can watch the Dishrags rock out while Lachman Jir plays chess. “I found the women that I met through the Buddha scene were very friendly and very supportive,” Davies remembers, speaking of the time she began to take herself seriously as a photographer, “Kim from the Devices, Sue Short, my friend Carola (Goetze), Solly – who used to go out with Art Bergmann – not that the guys weren’t friendly, but they were all up there on the stage, mostly. The first backstage pass I ever got was when the Pointed Sticks opened up for Wreckless Eric at the Commodore in ’79. That was my first taste of it, and it was like a drug, going to these other concerts. Then the Georgia Straight wanted to publish my photos – not so much the local stuff, but I remember telling them at the Straight that they could have photos of mine, but they had to run a DOA picture with them, because as you can guess, I was a DOA fan.” Davies grows serious as she recalls her bustling press-pass past. “I think I may have made an error in judgment by choosing that path,” she muses. “The big concerts, I mean. It was exciting, and it was big and flashy, but you never knew if your photo pass was going to get issued in the end and all that… and with the ‘gang shooting’ that goes on in the arena photo pit, you’re bumping shoulders with a bunch of other photographers who are all getting the same shots as you are. I wound too much of who I was into that part of rock and roll, as opposed to what I really loved - which was the local scene. Finally in 1987 I phoned the Straight and told them I didn’t want to do this anymore. I just absolutely stopped, cold turkey. I didn’t do anything for a long time. I just stayed away from it all.” But Bev’s recent rediscovery of Vancouver’s vital local music scene has apparently made her young all over again. “I went and saw the Manvils recently,” Bev beams – remember, folks, this is a lady who remembers when the Stones were a buzz band – “you know, they’re good, and there’s not 30 photographers jostling you, and there’s Carola and I there with our little digital cameras, and I noticed someone using their cell phone to take pictures and I thought: I need one of those! I saw the Black Angels at Richard’s on Richards and they’re a great band, great people, you can talk to them, take pictures of them… that’s what it’s all about, not: ‘did Madonna give me a photo pass?’ Sure, I’d love to get that, but that’s a whole other level of a career that I’m not really that into.” The conversation comes to the state of Vancouver’s talented yet generally unsung music scene. Bev remarks, “I remember when I was in Toronto in the ‘60s that the local bands had to go somewhere else and have the press say ‘wow, they’re really good and they’re from Toronto,’ before anyone in Toronto gave a damn about them. A band like the Paupers had to get good press in New York, and then people in Toronto would go ‘whoo, the Paupers!’ and line up to go see them. That blew me away when I first moved here, that people weren’t afraid to say that their favorite band was Mother Tucker’s Yellow Duck, or the Trials of Jason Hoover, or Mock Duck, and they were all Vancouver bands. People really supported their local bands, and it felt so different than Toronto. So when you look at the punk scene from Toronto, it doesn’t surprise me that they had the money come into there… there’s that drive to make it… but that money came in and destroyed that scene, as far as I was concerned. Lots of Toronto punk records got made, but lots of Vancouver punk records got made, too – the local bands had to do it themselves, which isn’t an inferior approach.” And what about the woulda-coulda-shouldas of the good old days? “I still think that ‘Rebel Kind’ by the Modernettes should have made it to Number One,” admonishes the Canon Girl. www.thenervemagazine.com/2007/04/article_template.php?id=10 |
