This rambling hodgepodge of a show was meant to be an involved look at how we grow as adolescents but it quickly degenerated into me punching a boom box in frustration while trying to play tapes of my old bands.
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| You know that age when you really get into something? | |
| For me, it was punk. | |
| But for other guys, it's motorbikes, or making a knife from scratch. | |
| You know, like, uh... Knifesmiths? | |
| Is that what they're called? | |
| I see them on reality shows. | |
| For my son, it was baseball. | |
| He was always into a thing, though. | |
| Like, when he was a little, little, little kid, he was into Yo Gabba Gabba. | |
| That's a show. | |
| It's a really good show, actually. | |
| It's kind of punky. | |
| Kid's show. | |
| And the main guy is, the host is this guy, DJ Lance. | |
| My dad goes, and who is PJ Banks? | |
| But, uh, he's a black dude who wears like a furry orange hat. | |
| And he, at the beginning of the show, he comes out with a ghetto blaster and he opens it up and there's all the little guys like Fufa and Muno and Broby and Plex. | |
| Sorry if I'm forgetting anyone in Yo Gabba Gabba. | |
| So he would, my boy Duncan would, my middle child, would come out when he was three with the Ghetto Blaster. | |
| We got him like a toy version that has the characters in it. | |
| And he would do the intro to the show. | |
| Yo Gabba Gabba. | |
| Again and again. | |
| He's pretty serious about it too. | |
| He wouldn't be laughing. | |
| He was doing a very good recreation of the show. | |
| And then he got into, uh... There's a thing, I've probably told you about this already. | |
| By the way, I do hundreds of hours of content a week. | |
| No, that can't be right. | |
| What do I do? | |
| Yeah, that's not quite right. | |
| Four. | |
| Six hours a week. | |
| So, you're gonna hear the same story several times. | |
| Get used to it. | |
| It's like we're married. | |
| And if you're in a marriage, you hear the same story pretty regularly. | |
| But um, he really got into this. | |
| There's a thing online and they take trailers and they redo them verbatim, frame by frame, but with cardboard or whatever they have around the house. | |
| They obviously can't do a 7 million dollar trailer, so they do a trailer for like 400 bucks. | |
| So he's obsessed with that and he did that for a while and he's making stuff. | |
| That was a cool phase. | |
| A lot of, like, duct tape and glue guns and cardboard around the house as he made a full-body RoboCop costume. | |
| But, uh, I built him an art room in our new house that's just vacant now because then baseball hit and then that was it. | |
| Sold. | |
| Found my calling. | |
| Like I caught him last night under the covers after lights out. | |
| Just like looking at baseball stats. | |
| Looking at different players. | |
| Looking at their batting average. | |
| Which is cool. | |
| I'm totally for it. | |
| Don't get me wrong. | |
| And that's kind of a fun stage in your life. | |
| So he hit it early. | |
| The rest of us, we usually hit it when we hit adulthood, right? | |
| When you turn 14, when you start getting pubes, that's when you start going, alright, now I found, now this is my fucking thing. | |
| I'm sold. | |
| Although, do we have other things? | |
| Like, I really got into cartoons, and I wanted to be a cartoonist when I was in my early 20s. | |
| But that's the thing about punk. | |
| It's not like baseball where you can love it forever. | |
| Punk is youth culture. | |
| So you're blaspheming it if you're 22 and you have a mohawk. | |
| That's irreligious. | |
| That's against your religion. | |
| So you kind of have to find a new thing when you get to be a certain age. | |
| But uh... I have some of our songs somewhere. | |
| I should bust them out. | |
| Yeah, I have a live tape. | |
| I got a Ghetto Blaster on eBay, because when my son goes up to bat, his middle name is White Thunder, and it's an Indian thing, and I like to go, Thunder! | |
| Ah, Thunder! | |
| As he steps up to the plate. | |
| So I got this Ghetto Blaster I use on my show. | |
| I got batteries for it, and I ordered the tape. | |
| Thunderstruck by ACDC. | |
| It's called, the album is called Razor's Edge or something like that. | |
| So I ordered the cassette on eBay. | |
| So now I can bring out the Ghetto Blaster when he goes up to the plate and press play. | |
| Although he said, please don't do that, Dad. | |
| But then I realized I have these old anal Chinook tapes. | |
| My band, when I was, I'm jumping ahead here in the punk story, but Uh, the band I was in in the, in 89, 90, 91 was called, uh, Anal Chinook. | |
| It was started by this guy, Blake Jacobs, who went on to create wonderful bands like Manpower and, uh, Hot Piss. | |
| I think he's at the House of Targ now in Ottawa, but, uh, it was his brainchild, but he had the smarts to hire me as the front man. | |
| And, uh, Anal Chinook means warm. | |
| Chinook is an Inuit word for warm wind. | |
| So anal Chinook meant fart. | |
| Now this was kind of a thing back in the early 80s. | |
| So we were a little late to the game. | |
| But like I think on Wikipedia it's called clown punk. | |
| But it was like goofy punk. | |
| Peter and the Test Tube Babies were part of that thing and you would just, you'd get on stage, you had political lyrics, you were serious, so it was sort of like crass politically, but you'd have funny costumes on and you'd throw, like we had this song called Use Your Brains Now and we'd throw cow brains out into the audience and And I think Tom Green kind of copied us, too. | |
| He had a band called Organized Rhyme, and they would come out with, like, ski boots on their heads and stuff and throw stuff out in the crowd. | |
| Tom, you ripped me off with that, but I'll see it as an homage. | |
| We had a song called Foreskin. | |
| It was a true story about when I was going to have my foreskin cut off, um, by a Muslim doctor, by the way. | |
| I just, I had a problem with my frenulum, which is like, it's the thing that holds your whole foreskin together. | |
| Say, you know, under your tongue, that little string, that is on your penis. | |
| And I tore that or, or Deanna Craig tore it in, uh, 1988. | |
| Um, so I went to a doctor and said, my dick's bleeding like a stuck pig. | |
| I was having sex with this other girl, and as it went in, there'd be a showerhead just going, chh, chh. | |
| So for every pump, I'd go, chh, and get a showerhead of blood back. | |
| So the room looked like Amityville Horror. | |
| So anyway, I go to the doctor and he says, we'll just circumcise you. | |
| And I thought, no. | |
| And it's funny, because as a circumcised guy, you're always wondering if you wish, I mean an uncircumcised guy, you always wondered if you wished you were circumcised. | |
| You say you don't, but no one's going to criticize their own penis. | |
| Sort of like being Canadian. | |
| Like you think, do I secretly wish I was American? | |
| Am I just pretending that I love Canada? | |
| Do I wish I could go down to the Stars and Stripes? | |
| And so when circumcision was handed to me on a silver platter, I said, no, I don't want to be that. | |
| I definitely am not faking when I say I love being a Canadian foreskin. | |
| So I just took it easy. | |
| Had baths, which is hard for a young teenage man to do. | |
| You know, exercised it very gently and didn't beat off or anything for about six months. | |
| Which seems normal now, but back then, oh my god, six months is a long time. | |
| And it worked! | |
| I fixed it. | |
| That doctor was wrong. | |
| You know, when I was in London doing that free speech thing with Tommy Robinson, my bodyguard was this pro wrestler. | |
| And he, we got talking. | |
| That's probably why my speech was so shitty. | |
| We were backstage in the boiling hot sun with barely a chair for eight hours. | |
| I was cooked, and there's riots and fights going on outside. | |
| Anyway, I'm talking to this soccer hooligan, pro wrestler, and he tells me he was circumcised for the exact same reason, by the way, at 28. | |
| He said that they had to make a Weetabix box to go around it and it was covered and Can you imagine like you know how much it hurts when you cut your hands because there's so many nerve endings on your hands Or when you burn your hand it hurts way more than anywhere else on your like on your arm Or even you get a tattoo you get a tattoo on your on this on your shoulder feels like nothing But you get a tattoo somewhere sensitive like your ribs and it kills Or your butt. | |
| I got a tattoo of a butt on my butt. | |
| Which has a tattoo of a butt on it, by the way. | |
| I showed my dad and I thought he'd laugh and he goes, oh my god. | |
| That's self-abuse. | |
| So, uh... | |
| Having an operation on your fucking penis must be... And every time, like, I had to take a knee when he told me this story. | |
| And I'd go, Is that, uh, you deserve, you should be, you should join World War II vets on Memorial Day and stand next to them with, like, a trophy that's decorated like a foreskin on your jacket. | |
| And he goes, My, it was the fucking worst. | |
| Couldn't have been worse. | |
| Couldn't have been fucking worse. | |
| Ugh. | |
| I knew another guy who had it. | |
| He had to make a sort of a boundary thing around him with couch cushions. | |
| So he had a couch cushion on each hip and then duct tape around his whole body so it could never bump into anything. | |
| I think when he slept... Oh, I don't even want to talk about it anymore. | |
| Blblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblbl I think Blake made it. | |
| He was quite handy. | |
| He tried to get into art school. | |
| And one of his submissions was what's-his-name-dances-with-wolves-guy. | |
| What's his name again? | |
| The Waterworld guy? | |
| Kevin Costner. | |
| It was Kevin Costner, surrounded by penises. | |
| And it said, dances with penises. | |
| Didn't get in. | |
| I didn't get in either, actually. | |
| My portfolio came back largely immature. | |
| Potential unknown. | |
| Which is still sort of going on. | |
| It was an accurate assessment. | |
| But anyway, we made a penis. | |
| And then Blake would... This is actually on YouTube. | |
| Blake rips my penis off with his teeth. | |
| Rips the foreskin off. | |
| And he sold his cock for punk rock, he then screams. | |
| So, I'm getting to the end of punk, because soon after this band, I did another band called Leather Ass Buttfucker. | |
| I wonder if I have that cassette somewhere. | |
| That was with Shane Smith, the guy that I hired to do Sales Advice. | |
| I think I do have that cassette. | |
| I'm going to see if I can dig it up. | |
| Anyway, this is my punk band, Anal Chinook, and this song is called Goodbye Ozone Layer. | |
| Hey, John Brown, are you aware the ozone's depleting, but you don't care? | |
| It's massive assault against the animals. | |
| It's deforestation. | |
| Did you hear that? | |
| Hey, John Brown, are you aware the ozone's depleting, but you don't care? | |
| The animals! | |
| Deforestation! | |
| Time! | |
| A time attack! | |
| - - - - - Goodbye, Ozone Lair. - Ozone Lair. - - You know what happens to these bands? | |
| Inevitably, they get good. | |
| So they start out doing good little punky riffs and then they learn to play their instruments and they start doing like 5-4 time and that's usually the end of the band. | |
| Some people can handle it like Black Flag They became a jazz trio, basically. | |
| We used to do, a few years ago, I started a band called 80s Hardcore. | |
| We covered 80s Hardcore. | |
| Black Flag were way too hard to cover. | |
| Same with Bad Brains. | |
| They're just too good. | |
| You have to do like Cro-Mags, no offense, John Joseph, and Agnostic Front and stuff. | |
| But Husker Du, they got really good at their instruments and then they just became a really good pop band. | |
| But we start, you can hear in that... The first riff was stolen from the Sex Pistols, but then the second riff was getting a little too jazzy. | |
| And that's usually when it's time for the band to break up. | |
| I won't bore you with too much of this, but let me hear another song. | |
| Oh, that's the same song. | |
| I haven't touched a cassette in so long. | |
| I forgot how much you have to fast forward to go forward. | |
| On Netflix, you just touch fast forward and you're ten minutes ahead. | |
| On cassette flicks, you really gotta hold it down. | |
| Hold it down, boy! | |
| Alright, what's this? | |
| Oh, that's Pee Wee's. | |
| Pee Wee's Playhouse. | |
| We did a cover of Pee Wee's Playhouse. | |
| Which my brother, who was about five at the time, was thrilled about. | |
| We, uh... We jammed at Blake Jacob's house and we had a song called Fuck You, and it went... Fuck you! | |
| Fuck you! | |
| And his mother didn't like it. | |
| She's French-Canadian and they're very Catholic. | |
| So we had to change it to God Bless You. | |
| And one time we were playing that song, God Bless You, and it became about atheism and how awesome it is. | |
| And we gave his dog a heart attack and his dog died. | |
| He had a little tiny little schnitzer dog, whatever they're called, like my stupid dog. | |
| And Fuckin' died. | |
| Sorry about that, Mrs. Jacobs. | |
| Alright. | |
| Oh my god, this is bad. | |
| Come on in and put yourself a push in. | |
| Let the fun begin, it's time to let down your head. | |
| We're a bag called Animal Center, and we all know how to cook. | |
| So wacky at Pee-wee's Playhouse. | |
| Playhouse. | |
| There's a crazy rhythm. | |
| Puppet's hand. | |
| There's a cool, got cheeky baby at a puppet's hand. | |
| Whoa, whoa, whoa. | |
| So I keep fishing. | |
| I keep doing it. | |
| So I wish we're getting cool. | |
| It's got to get heavy soon. | |
| Puppet's hand. | |
| Bobby is spinning, Mr. Winsman, to a hearing for you. | |
| That was a thing in, with hardcore, it was always like, it was like I was trying to scare you. | |
| So it'd be like, woke up in the morning feeling, oh that's Ke$ha. | |
| Ke$ha. | |
| But it'd be like, parents getting on my nerves, gotta make it to school. | |
| Change your mind, grab a gun, now who's the It goes crazy after that. | |
| It's like horror rock. | |
| So I don't really remember this song, but I know it's gotta get heavy soon! | |
| - The guy's getting horny, we know it sounds corny. | |
| You're the sexist ever. - This must be it. | |
| That's heavy, by the way. | |
| Alright, so it's a cacophony. | |
| You got it. | |
| I haven't heard that tape in about 20 years, but I do remember cringing at one part where I go, this next song is about how society tries to control you. | |
| What? | |
| That's a big thing with punk. | |
| Society doesn't give a shit. | |
| It's not trying to control you. | |
| Oh yeah? | |
| That's the factory. | |
| They raise you in the school, then they send you to the workforce, where you can work 9 to 5. | |
| Remember that's a Kraft song too? | |
| Where do we get it? | |
| Swimming pools! | |
| How do we get it? | |
| Follow the rules! | |
| System, system, system! | |
| I don't know. | |
| Swimming pools are awesome. | |
| There's another crass lyric where they go, teaching little Johnny to use a gun. | |
| Terrific way for a father to get to know his son. | |
| Uh, yeah, it is a terrific way for a father to get to know his son. | |
| What are you talking about? | |
| I totally agree with your sarcasm. | |
| Or they have another song called Red High Heels, and it's a woman being submissive, and it's a feminist anthem about how cruel we are to women and how gross it is that we make them wear red high heels. | |
| And she's singing this high-pitched voice. | |
| She's like, I'll be your bonza, your beautiful bonza, your black-eyed bonza, your erotically rotting. | |
| And I'm listening to it as an adult going, awesome! | |
| Great! | |
| I can't wait. | |
| Are you going to put on those red high heels you keep bitching about? | |
| My feet are bound for your desire. | |
| Sound like bound and tired I walk on fire. | |
| Hit me out. | |
| Kiss me with your lips. | |
| Beat me with your fists. | |
| Like, wow, this chick, this bitch is kinky. | |
| I'm into it. | |
| One other lyric, too, before I end the crass bashing is, what does he say? | |
| System, system, system, teach him to crawl. | |
| Uh, babies just crawl. | |
| You don't have to teach a baby to crawl. | |
| They just do it naturally. | |
| But yeah. | |
| You have that age at 14. | |
| Now I'll go back to the beginning of the podcast. | |
| You have that age. | |
| It's usually 14. | |
| You find your thing. | |
| And it's fucking great. | |
| It really is fun when you find your thing. | |
| Become consumed by it. | |
| I wish there was a way to incorporate education in that. | |
| Like with my son, the baseball kid. | |
| Can't the teachers just teach him baseball math? | |
| Or English math? | |
| I mean that's- I got him a book from the library called Strike 3 You're Dead. | |
| So he could like read thrillers. | |
| Make it? | |
| I think there's a school like that. | |
| I think it's Brown or something. | |
| There's schools of thought, right? | |
| With these fancy young private schools, like for toddlers. | |
| Not quite toddlers, but you know, five and up. | |
| Grade school. | |
| And one of them encourages the group, and the other encourages the individual. | |
| Go with individual. | |
| Fuck the group. | |
| I hate teamwork. | |
| It's so gay. | |
| Alright, does everyone contributed? | |
| What did you do for the project? | |
| Did you talk at the meeting? | |
| I see these women. | |
| There's an app for women where it tells them that they spoke X amount of time at the meeting and it gives them encouragement. | |
| A fucking app. | |
| Says, you were great at that meeting. | |
| You spoke for 1.2 minutes. | |
| Fuck meetings. | |
| If you like meetings, you're bad at business. | |
| And if you like teamwork, you're gay. | |
| Ally is the name of the fucking software. | |
| Ally. | |
| I think if you need software to encourage you to be in the workforce, you probably don't belong in the workforce. | |
| Let's cut the shit. | |
| And yeah, the nature of individuals is we find a thing. | |
| Now, if you haven't found your thing, that's not a big deal. | |
| I've always said to people, it's like fashion, right? | |
| If you're not inclined to like go ahead and get on a great outfit, And have a look? | |
| Then just go with the basics. | |
| You got your Levi's, your Chuck Taylors, you got your White Hanes t-shirt, you got a Harrington jacket or a jean jacket, whatever. | |
| You know, just... Especially with shoes. | |
| You got your Rod Lavers, you got your Clarks, you got your Red Wings. | |
| Just the basics. | |
| Don't be adventurous. | |
| And don't wear flip-flops. | |
| I wanna see your fucking feet. | |
| And it goes for you too, women. | |
| I wanna see your mangled toes when I'm at a fucking bar. | |
| Dammit, last night I went out here in the burbs. | |
| It was a madhouse. | |
| These suburbanites are lunatics. | |
| First I go to one bar by the train station. | |
| It's all hipsters. | |
| It looks like a vice party in 2004. | |
| Actually, it was an exaggeration of that. | |
| It looked like a Hollywood set of hipsters at a vice party in 2004. | |
| It was, uh, uh, I just got distracted because I remembered I want to go find a leatherized buttfuck, uh, cassette. | |
| Um, it was, uh, yeah, this, as I walk in I just see all these twenty-something and I just go, nope. | |
| I thought I was in the suburbs, by the way. | |
| So then I go back upstairs and as I'm coming upstairs there's a guy with a leather motorcycle jacket, a white t-shirt, a top bun, and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. | |
| I'm an hour from Manhattan right now. | |
| And I go, nope, too busy. | |
| And he goes, hey, howdy! | |
| I think he recognized me. | |
| And I go, hello, I'm out of here. | |
| And he goes, whoa, you leaving this fucking place? | |
| I like how he added fucking in there to be cool. | |
| Then I go to this other bar that's older people. | |
| It's jam-packed with broads. | |
| It's like Mom Central. | |
| Maybe teachers have a holiday today or something? | |
| So I can't go in there. | |
| Because we know how women are when they're drunk. | |
| They're so, they're ear-piercingly loud. | |
| Then I finally found this gross old man bar a little bit out of the ways. | |
| And there's like five drunk guys there yelling. | |
| Listening to Bruce Springsteen, he's playing My Hometown, and they're like, I love this song. | |
| What's it called again? | |
| Born in America? | |
| And there's an AMA fight on where someone's massacring another man, six foot four men. | |
| And I think, finally, finally I'm home. | |
| Why didn't I come here first? | |
| Everything they yell makes me laugh. | |
| Is this song Born in America? | |
| And meanwhile, Bruce Springsteen is saying, clear as a pin, my hometown. | |
| Once again, just to be clear, it's my hometown. | |
| That's what fucking song this is. | |
| And the other guy's like, I love Born in America. | |
| It's called Born in the USA, and it starts out with a Like it's a fucking loud jam with almost like a Liberty Bell smashing from the very beginning. | |
| It's not a sweet little ballad about being from a really small town. | |
| And he tussled my hair in my tiny town. | |
| It wasn't the Born in the USA Vietnam song that's way louder than this. | |
| BORN IN AMERICA! | |
| Fuckin' funny. | |
| I love drunk men. | |
| I'm gay for drunk men. | |
| And then, so I'm sitting there and I'm like, finally, I ordered a Maker's Mark. | |
| I haven't had a Maker's in a while. | |
| I started going off this beer starvation diet. | |
| I lost a good, like, 12 pounds, I think. | |
| But I think it's making me bald. | |
| I think my body thinks I'm dying. | |
| It's getting rid of the excess hair. | |
| So that, I don't know, the funeral will go smoother. | |
| But then, a group of lower middle class baby boomers I'm not being classist, I'm just giving you the demographics. | |
| So, likely teachers? | |
| Come in, about 50% men, 50% women. | |
| My age, 40-somethings. | |
| They come in, they're drunk, it's a birthday party. | |
| Alright. | |
| I've seen Motorhead live many times. | |
| They're known as the loudest band in rock and roll. | |
| These people made Motorhead sound like Bruce Springsteen singing about his hometown. | |
| Holy fucking shit were they loud! | |
| And obnoxious, too. | |
| One of the women, drunk women, the worst. | |
| I'm racist against drunk women. | |
| One of the women comes up and says to the bartender, Hey, can you fast forward this song? | |
| And the bartender goes, um, no. | |
| She didn't have a good response. | |
| She said, oh, he chose it. | |
| I can't do that. | |
| What she should have said is, what is this, a ghetto blaster? | |
| I can't fast forward a jukebox. | |
| You can't just go. | |
| Oh, what happened? | |
| Is it blank? | |
| I guess Pee Wee was the last song. | |
| I'll go back to the beginning. | |
| And then it was just a raging cacophony. | |
| I shouldn't have gone out. | |
| It was a madhouse. | |
| But anyway, uh, the punk phase. | |
| So I remember I was coming home with my mom, and I'm telling you this because I hope that you had a similar story when you had your sort of awakening. | |
| That moment where you'd become woke. | |
| And I was maybe 12, and uh, I was getting along with my mom. | |
| My mom and I were best friends, and then adolescence hit and we were arch enemies. | |
| I don't know what that is. | |
| I've heard women say that. | |
| That they were best friends with their dad and then they hit puberty and their dad was weird around them after that. | |
| Maybe they become too sexy and the dad's like, what the fuck? | |
| My daughter has tits. | |
| I'm not looking forward to that stage. | |
| But uh, that happened with my mom and I. But anyway, we were best pals when we were- when I was a kid. | |
| So we went shopping, as we're wont to do. | |
| And we're coming back in the car and Billy Idol's White Wedding comes on. | |
| Brilliant song, and it's brilliant for a million reasons. | |
| I did a whole episode I think on Generation X, but Billy Idol was a punk rock star. | |
| And even the way he did that was awesome, where everyone was political and serious and about the revolution, and Generation X just wanted to be pop stars. | |
| And they were. | |
| They did a great job. | |
| But, you know, punk pop has an epoch, and post-Zenith, they were dying. | |
| Oh, now we're done. | |
| And, uh, he thought, I know what I'll do. | |
| I've got a little bit of money. | |
| I'm going to move to New York City. | |
| Meanwhile, he's like 25. | |
| He's a young man. | |
| I'll move to New York City, and I'll invent a new type of music called dance punk. | |
| Where I'll take punk, and I'll maintain my YELLY THING! | |
| But I'll also add a beat to it, a drum machine, and an 808 techno thingamajiggy, a sampler, whatever. | |
| And I'll have Chick singing in like Lou Reed, Walking the Wild Side stuff, and the Colored Girls sing, doo-doo-doo. | |
| I'll do all that! | |
| Smashing success. | |
| Way bigger than Generation X. Most people have never even heard of Generation X. He's still touring. | |
| He's playing in San Bernardino, I think, this weekend. | |
| Brilliant move. | |
| You gotta read his autobiography if you're into this shit. | |
| It's great. | |
| He's from Bromley. | |
| And him and Susie Sue of Susie and the Banshees were known as the Bromley contingent. | |
| Of course, you compare that rebellion In 79, to the new Bromley contingent, which is Richard Reed, the shoe bomber. | |
| How rebellion has changed over the years. | |
| Used to be you'd dye your hair blonde and make your parents shriek. | |
| Now you try to take down a plane. | |
| Bromley's evolved. | |
| But I just became consumed with Billy Idol as a young man. | |
| Totally and utterly consumed. | |
| I dressed like him. | |
| I wore a fake leather vest with buttons and doohickeys on it. | |
| Back in the 80s you would buy these pins that were square pins or about an inch by an inch. | |
| So I had two stripes of Billy Idol pins on my jacket. | |
| And my locker was all Billy Idol. | |
| And uh... | |
| You know, you didn't have the internet back then. | |
| So you would just need to buy a Billy Idol, like, coffee table book, or you'd buy Billy Idol records, and you'd buy Billy Idol pins and stuff. | |
| And then one guy in class who was way cooler than me goes, so you must love Generation X. And I go, uh, yes. | |
| What's that? | |
| Meanwhile, we were Generation X. And I didn't know what that was. | |
| So then I went and checked them out. | |
| I know it sounds weird to be a Billy Idol fan and not have heard of Generation X, but pre-internet, that's the way it was. | |
| You know, you'd probably go to New York and stay near Central Park and think you had seen all of New York. | |
| There was no research. | |
| Any hizzle. | |
| I discovered Generation X, and then I discovered this thing called punk, and then I was like, that's it, I'm a punk, I don't fucking care how shitty this music is, I'm becoming a punk. | |
| Let's hear it. | |
| Uh-oh. | |
| If your cassette- I remember now, if you press play and it bounces off play, At 7 o'clock, the doors will open, and at 7.30, Mental Case will hit the stage. | |
| That's Sean Scallon of CKCU. | |
| And each half hour or so, we'll have a new band going on until 11.30 at night, so hopefully people who have to take buses can get home relatively early. | |
| It's only going to be $5 at the door, or $4 if you have a Friends of CKCU or CUID card, so it's definitely a bargain. | |
| $5 and five bands. | |
| As well, there will be tables set up from local environmental and other sorts of positive type of left-wing groups, or whatever you want to call them. | |
| We'll have people from... AILS? | |
| Excuse me, but AILS should occur currently. | |
| They're currently just roaming beside me in the studio here, so I guess we're gonna have to get on to them before they take off. | |
| Oh, I had forgotten about that! | |
| So while he was doing the announcement announcing our show, Blake and I took our pants off and we were pushing our butt cheeks against the plexiglass. | |
| Which, by the way, is called pressing a ham. | |
| Remember in eighth grade, we were on a school trip and we pushed our butt cheeks against the back of the school bus? | |
| And we were- I was in a special class for mostly stupid kids, but there was also children that were dying of cancer and stuff, and I was there because I was badly behaved. | |
| So it was just like the Island of Misfit Toys. | |
| That's- that's how shitty teachers are. | |
| They don't- everyone- like, there was a girl in our class, in Mr. Gunn's class, this is a Diabri Moody, who, uh, there's nothing wrong with her. | |
| She was just dying. | |
| She had cancer. | |
| And the teachers didn't want to look at her face, I guess, because she was a bummer. | |
| Isn't that insane? | |
| I wonder how she felt. | |
| I mean, we were too young to know. | |
| She was just like, that was Jennifer. | |
| Hi, what's going on? | |
| Why don't you have eyebrows? | |
| Nice pirate hat. | |
| But there was another kid in that class, I just remember, named Tony, who was a hemophiliac. | |
| And his grades were fine. | |
| And he paid attention in class, but he had a blood disease. | |
| Put him in Mr. Gunn's class. | |
| Get him out of my fucking face. | |
| I remember we would punch him sometimes. | |
| And he'd go, you know, the way, we weren't bullying him, but we were just like Canadian, you know, hosers. | |
| And, uh, I remember punching me. | |
| He goes, every time you guys punch me, every time I get punched, I have to go get a blood test. | |
| It costs $85. | |
| And I remember holding his arm and just nailing him like 20 times. | |
| And I go, "Well, we're really racking up a bill, aren't we, Tony?" I'll never forget that. | |
| But yeah, we're pushing our butts again. | |
| Mr. Gunn, who was a tough guy. | |
| He was an Alberta farmer. | |
| We have cowboys, believe it or not. | |
| They have rodeos and stuff over in Calgary. | |
| Calgary rodeo. | |
| Calgary Stampede, it's called. | |
| And he had cowboy boots on and his hair was like mine is now. | |
| He looked like Jack Palance. | |
| He had one suit that he wore every day. | |
| It was kind of polyester and brown. | |
| And he was a big grizzled guy, big Slovakian face, you know, looked like Charles Bronson. | |
| And he said, hey, in this classroom, in this class, we do not push our bare buttocks against glass on a trip. | |
| And then someone had the balls to go, it's called pressing a ham, Mr. Gunn. | |
| And Everyone in the class, it was like mustard gas. | |
| Everyone on the bus was dead. | |
| We were laughing so fu- Cause it's tense, right? | |
| Remember that in school? | |
| Someone would, you'd be in trouble, and then someone would say something out of the blue and you would all die because it would just shatter the tension? | |
| I remember Mr. Shepard, ironically, was at Bell's Corners Public School and he was yelling at us, and someone was doing something and everyone was mimicking, and he made us all leave the class and line up outside the classroom. | |
| He was so mad. | |
| It was like some weird, you know, military school thing. | |
| And he said, he said, why, someone does something and y'all have to do it, right? | |
| What are you, sheep? | |
| And then there was a long silence, and then someone at the back of the class goes, bah! | |
| Again, mustard gas. | |
| No knees could hold up any bodies. | |
| We all just, it was like a firing squad. | |
| We all collapsed instantly. | |
| Anyway, let's hear. | |
| Oh yeah, so we're pressing hams against the plexiglass. | |
| We were banned. | |
| He banned us from the CKCU studios after that. | |
| But he's clearly laughing his head off. | |
| Why were we banned? | |
| I'm not joining you right now from Aenov Sinak, and both of you are very hairy amuses. | |
| I'd like to compliment you on that. | |
| Thank you. | |
| When you talk, please talk closer to the mic. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| That's good, Gavin. | |
| Okay, let's do the usual junk. | |
| Start off by telling me who's in the band. | |
| Well actually, the last time we spoke to you there were different people in the band. | |
| What happened to the people, where did they go, and who did you replace them with? | |
| I don't know what happened. | |
| Andy Miller, who used to be our drummer, he went away to New Brunswick. | |
| So, I'll tell you what I'm gonna do. | |
| I'm gonna leave this playing, I'm gonna go try to find my other band, Leatherass Buttfuck. | |
| That was a band, we were in Amsterdam, and we went to one of these sex shops, and we said, we want your worst magazine! | |
| Oh, I don't know what you mean. | |
| Go- I want- I don't care what it costs. | |
| I want your most, like, behind the counter, behind a steel wall. | |
| You have to go into a safe. | |
| I basically- I'm lucky I didn't end up with kiddie porn. | |
| I want your most raunchy, most disgusting, most horrible thing. | |
| And they go, okay, okay, okay. | |
| So they go to the back room, and for $17 they give us a magazine, and it was called Leather Ass Butt Fuck. | |
| All one word. | |
| And it wasn't that raunchy. | |
| It was just a bunch of gay dudes in leather, like, putting stuff up their butts and beating the shit out of each other, but... I don't know. | |
| In New York, that's just... That's the New York Post. | |
| Alright, so I'm gonna play this and see if I can find that on the cassette. | |
| Yeah, to pursue a business career. | |
| Commerce. | |
| And Tommy Pigeon, who used to be our singer, but he didn't have that much time for the band. | |
| He does now, though, when he wants back. | |
| Pension arises. | |
| Kind of scary. | |
| And, uh, yeah. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Go ahead. | |
| What else do you want me to say? | |
| Oh, yeah. | |
| Morty plays bass. | |
| He's married to Nancy Reagan. | |
| And then there's, uh... Who's on drums? | |
| Pete Lawton's on drums. | |
| Pete Lawton on... A fine suburban young boy. | |
| And Mark Wieger on guitar. | |
| Lead guitar. | |
| So the new guys are myself on vocals, Gavin McInnes, and Peter Lawton on drums. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Okay, now you guys are sort of in the same respect as Orleans, kind of isolated and people in mental cases. | |
| You guys are from Canada, right? | |
| Yes. | |
| Now, how has Canada influenced your music? | |
| Well, there's not too many Canada bands to influence our music. | |
| Well, like, living in Canada. | |
| Did that drive you to a life of punk rock, Gavin? | |
| Yeah, I think the distinct lack of problems in Canada has given us a lot of money for amps and stuff. | |
| I'm afraid Canada doesn't influence us that much. | |
| All right, found it. | |
| The thing I want to get across though is I remember becoming obsessed with punk rock, getting the record Sex Pistols, Crass, I'm forcing myself to like it. | |
| Like, when I first heard GBH, I thought, this is noise. | |
| I don't like this song. | |
| But I made myself like it. | |
| And then there's this thing with punk where you're a poser, unless you get all the right gear, and go to an X amount of shows, and you have to sort of earn your stripes. | |
| And you get beat up. | |
| And it's funny... I had to run downstairs. | |
| It's funny seeing all these trans people just put a fucking wig on, and they're a woman. | |
| Which should be harder to acquire than punk. | |
| It should be kind of a big deal to become a gender. | |
| I mean, look at the movie Splash, how hard that mermaid had to work to become a human being. | |
| She had to get rid of her tail, she had to watch like a thousand hours of TV, she had to learn to speak and stuff. | |
| Or those robots, like Data, who can do everything, but they are having trouble with love and humor. | |
| I don't seem to be able to understand humor. | |
| But you can just be a broad if you put a mop on your head? | |
| And then I remember getting to the stage where I was, we were all in a punk house, which is a thing, that was a thing with punk where you would, someone would put on a suit and look nice and rent a house and then you'd all crash in there and there'd be like 15 people living in a house and it would just get destroyed. | |
| Fred Armisen does a great Portlandia sketch about punk houses. | |
| Really, really accurate. | |
| Alarmingly accurate. | |
| But I remember finally getting there and then just sort of going, eh, this isn't all it's cracked up to be. | |
| Like, there is no joy at the tavern as great as the road thereto. | |
| As Cormac McCarthy says in The Road. | |
| All right, let me see where this is. | |
| This tape player, believe it or not, this tape player from the 80s kind of sucks. | |
| Tapes don't even fit. | |
| But I think it was a good break. | |
| Uh-oh. | |
| Remember these days of cassettes? | |
| When anything remotely unusual happens, it's like working in a nuclear power plant. | |
| You have to go, uh-oh, and get it out of there. | |
| Because if you let things go too long, see, that's not good. | |
| That's not a good sound. | |
| If you let things go too long and you take it out, it's just spaghetti guts. | |
| Alright, come on. | |
| Oh, the power wasn't on. | |
| Uh-oh. | |
| Oh great, now I can't even eject it. | |
| Jesus Christ. | |
| Thank God they got rid of these stupid things. | |
| Oh wait, now it's doing shit I can't control! | |
| Shit, this is the only copy of that cassette. | |
| Help! | |
| Alright, Dave's gonna unplug it. | |
| You know, another good thing about being in a band, too, is it teaches you about fame and how gay it is. | |
| Like, you realize that it means nothing. | |
| I think a lot of people want to be famous, but when you're in a band, you're famous in your tiny little scene. | |
| And you realize all it is, really, is having boring conversations with strangers. | |
| It's not like... It's not like people carry you everywhere and you get to meet all these amazing people. | |
| It's kind of boring. | |
| Fuck, have I broken this goddamn cassette? | |
| This thing cost me a ton of money and I'm gonna take it to Duncan's Games. | |
| Now I'm pissed off. | |
| Is that punk? | |
| Is it punk to be pissed off? | |
| God damn it. | |
| I'm doing that stupid thing that men do where they just keep pushing the same button a hundred times, hoping that it's a time travel button. | |
| And you know what's even stupider is, I'm going to pry this open with a knife, get it open, and then I'm just going to push it back and press play again, and the exact same thing will happen. | |
| Here, let me get these scissors. | |
| So, on eBay it said it worked. | |
| I mean, we did get something out of it, right? | |
| Come on, you son of a... But you use it every day. | |
| Yeah, I listen to it every day. | |
| I can feel the plastic about to break when I pull on this goddamn thing. | |
| Let me get the cassette. | |
| Oh, that's not a good sound, is it? | |
| This cassette looks like it's... Oh, the cassette's sort of leaking. | |
| But it works fine. | |
| Should I try another one? | |
| What's this now? | |
| Yeah, we've got... I do have more than one copy. | |
| Can you plug it in again, Dave? | |
| I'm going to do what I just said I wouldn't do. | |
| So when you push it in now, you need a pair of scissors to open it up again. | |
| All right, here we go. | |
| Well, here, let me just press play with nothing in it. | |
| Fuck! | |
| Look at that. | |
| All right, so now I'm not touching anything, and play is just going. | |
| It can't stop. | |
| So the stupidest thing I could possibly do would be to put a cassette in to this thing that's already spinning without anything in it. | |
| Here we go! | |
| Goddammit. | |
| Fuck! | |
| It's broken. | |
| Thanks a lot, listeners at home. | |
| You just broke my ghetto blaster. | |
| I hope you're happy with yourself. | |
| I hope you enjoyed your punk special, because you just broke my ghetto blaster. | |
| Goodbye! | |
| Hi, guys. | |
| I'm better. | |
| I'm better. | |
| I'm sorry for yelling at you. | |
| I'm a man and we take it out on other people. | |
| Oh shit, I gotta go meet Milo in five minutes. | |
| Meeting Milo Yiannopoulos for lunch. | |
| I hope liberals don't scream us out of the restaurant. | |
| But I did get it working now. | |
| I had to reach in and push the thing down. | |
| This is Leather Ass Buttfuck, my other band. | |
| That probably sounds like noise to you, right? | |
| I hear it perfectly clear, because once is once. | |
| Uh oh. | |
| Just like the vocals were on an echo machine and then the drum was a drum machine. | |
| Shane Smith of Vice fame couldn't play guitar so he would just shake a guitar around and then there was one guitarist. | |
| That was the whole band. | |
| You know, I keep fast-forwarding this, hoping there'll be a song that isn't just a mess. - Yes. | |
| But that might be the selective memory we all have of our youth, where we go, we were a badass band, man. | |
| We sounded like Godflesh. | |
| But now I hear it, it's just a man yelling at a computer. | |
| Shout about nothing! | |
| Yeah! | |
| Gotta get inside, get myself some fish. | |
| There's people that dream, there's people that wish. | |
| Nothing! | |
| This song's about nothing! | |
| You make me scream and shout! | |
| And this podcast is apparently about nothing. |