Behind The Curtain (7 April, 2023)
“Punk is bullshit. It’s just a fashion statement.”
Not A Fashion Statement
I woke up to my phone ringing. It was late summer 2002 and my friend and former bassist was on the other end. After I said hello, he asked me if he could quote me in a term paper he was writing for university. The line in question, which started this article, was something he had heard me say into a microphone at Q Bar in Toronto, while standing behind me with his four-string in hand. Did I really say “Punk is bullshit. It’s just a fashion statement.” to a crowd of angry punks, drunk and high on who knows what (PCP, it was probably PCP) who had already booed and thrown a pitcher at us? Apparently I did. While I didn’t (and still don’t) remember using those exact words, I do remember how I was feeling at the time, and they match. Sure, you can quote me.
Back in 2000 and 2001, I was fronting a band called [sic], at least that was until an electronic artist threatened to sue us after our first show at Barfly and we changed the name to [sik]. We were best described as hard pop rock, though I didn’t know it at the time. Having a theatre and performance background, as opposed to a musical one, I neglected the actual musical style we played and focused instead on the intensity and theatricality I was bringing to my performance as vocalist and frontman. I told people we were hardcore performance rock. We weren’t, we had catchy tunes with a bunch of distortion, and also keyboards. Plus I screamed a bit. I also took off my shirt to reveal my hairy chest every other show - when it surprised the crowd, not when they were asking for it (more on that later).
The hardcore performance rock descriptor, despite being unintentional bs, got us booked on our first out-of-town gig. It was a crust punk show in Toronto and we were opening for another Montreal band, with a Toronto act headlining. The person who added us to the lineup (part of the other Montreal band) did so without ever hearing us. She had seen the chaotic energy I could bring to a theatrical performance, so when I pitched us to her, she thought we must be some sort of metal band. We were not. She eventually heard us play, but by then it was too late. We were on the bill. [sik] was heading out on the road!
I’m not naming names of either people or other bands, because most involved have forgotten or would like to forget this happened.
(Editor’s Note: Also because Jason can’t remember all the band names and doesn’t want to ask people or use Google).
I was excited. A real out-of-town gig. We left Hope Avenue, a street I would later live on for seven years, on a cool winter morning. The trip down seemed fun and uneventful to me, but I didn’t pick up on the disparity of musical influences between my bandmates and the others in the van discussion. That night our band, and just our band, slept on a hard cement floor. I didn’t know that was going to be the case, but I figured it was a rite of passage. Some of my bandmates, the classically trained ones, saw it as an insult and were not thrilled, to say the least, that I couldn’t fix the situation.
Fast-forward to the show. The place was packed, which is usually a good thing. In this case, though, just more people to boo us. To make matters worse, the bathrooms were in a hallway behind the stage, so people had to walk on stage first to piss and then again to get back to the crowd. It soon became apparent that this crowd was not into what we were playing one bit. I tried some verbal sparring between songs, but to no avail. Now, a smart performer capable of improv would read the room and change gear, either giving the crowd what they wanted or playing the deliberate antagonist. I was, and still am, such a performer, but I wasn’t that night. The band could go heavy as I spoke and screamed some off-the-cuff words. They also could have gone hard then cut out together on my cue to go into our cover of My Favorite Things from The Sound of Music. To this day, I wish I had gone that route.
Maybe it was the lack of sleep and the cement floor, maybe it was the fact that I had been drinking all afternoon, or maybe it was because I was completely unprepared for such a reaction. For whatever reason, I stopped being a performer and became an angry guy with a microphone determined to stick to our set list. When someone yelled out “maybe it’s just your shirt!” in reference to a fluorescent yellow thing I had on, it didn’t even cross my mind that taking it off was an option. I had taken it off the previous show, so I didn’t want to break the routine. Plus these people hadn’t earned my hairy chest.
So we stuck it out on stage until it looked, to the people in the back, like I was about to lunge at a guy in the crowd twice my size who could have easily crushed me. They stepped in and stopped the show, which is when I said the quote at the top of this article (or so I’m told), threw down the mic and stormed out. As I calmed down outside, a man, who I later learned, had done some of the interior art at Bar Bifteck in Montreal, started spray painting a dinosaur on a wall. Overhearing our conversation, he interjected: “Wait, you were the first band? Didn’t see the show, but you got a reaction in Toronto. Nobody gets a reaction in Toronto!”
[sic] didn’t stay together for much longer after that show. Despite the occasional reunion shows, one of which I covered on the previous incarnation of Forget The Box, the band is pretty much a thing of the past. What happened that night, though, and my inebriated assessment of the situation at the time, have stuck with me throughout the years. Is punk really just a BS fashion statement? Of course not. I love punk music, the ethos and even the aesthetic, which I failed to adopt that night. For a few years I thought that the scene I had played in Toronto was an anomaly, or at least that the same thing wouldn’t have happened in Montreal. Yes, we are generally more culturally mixed and inclusive, but I’ve been to quite a few one-style at a time only spaces here over the years (hello Fattal Lofts).
Still, this incident got me thinking and eventually I did morph my feelings and what I said at the time into a personal mission statement, which eventually developed into a solid purpose behind doing things. While my original impetus might have been misguided, the mantra that came out of it is still valid today and was one of the conceptual building blocks of this site.
It’s all about boxes. Yes, when thinking outside of the box just isn’t enough, it’s time to Forget The Box™ (put that on a t-shirt, Andrew). But what is the box? There’s the big one that everyone thinks of. Call it the mainstream, call it the conventional way of doing things, or call it the status quo. That’s not the only box. There’s also the crust punk box, the pop box, the metal box, the theatre box, the nerdy sci-fi box, the news box, the political box, and many, many more. They’re artificial gatekeeping constructs designed to force us conform to remain in them, or to knowingly think outside of them.
Forgetting that these boxes exist doesn’t mean ignoring that differences between the communities, styles and genres exist, but rather acknowledging and even celebrating them. The contents of some boxes shouldn’t mix with the content of others, and there are some elements that shouldn’t be welcome in our communal town square. But those restrictions need to be organic, grassroots and for the right reasons, not as a fashion statement built on adherence to an arbitrary and confining code that not everyone wants to follow. By forgetting these boxes are there, we build a bigger community.
Next week: Tax Tips for Pet Owners. No, not really, I haven’t decided yet. Until Friday.
Photos 1 &2: [sic] Reunion @ Barfly 2012, (l-r) Jason C. McLean and Jerry Gabriel, by Phyllis Papoulias
Photo 3: [sic] Reunion @ Barfly 2012, (l-r) Joe McLean (not an original member) and Jason C. McLean, photo by Phyllis Papoulias
FTB Founder Jason C. McLean will return every Friday for another installment in his series, Behind The Curtain.
