Blog this item

Treat Me Like Dirt

An Oral History of Punk in Toronto and Beyond, 1977-1981

By Liz Worth

(1)

| Others | 9780981369402

Like Treat Me Like Dirt?
Join aNobii to see if your friends read it, and discover similar books!

Critics

Punk Intensity and Passion: 'Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History of Punk in Toronto'

Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History of Punk in Toronto and Beyond 1977-1981 was originally published in 2009. Toronto writer and punk music fan Liz Worth ( Eleven: Eleven) researched, recorded and compiled several years of interviews documenting the ... (read full critics)

popmatters published on Mon, 28 Nov 2011

1 Review

As the subtitle suggests, this is a history of the nascent punk scene in Toronto in late 1970s, told in their own words by the people who were there. It covers the founding of the first punk club, The Crash 'n' Burn, the self-destructive self-promotion of Iggy Pop-acolyte Steven Leckie, the cross-po ... (continue)

As the subtitle suggests, this is a history of the nascent punk scene in Toronto in late 1970s, told in their own words by the people who were there. It covers the founding of the first punk club, The Crash 'n' Burn, the self-destructive self-promotion of Iggy Pop-acolyte Steven Leckie, the cross-pollination with New York bands, and the famous Teenage Head Ontario Place riot.
Unless you're a musicologist or a person of a certain age who lived in southern Ontario at the time, a lot of the bands and personalities will be unfamiliar -- only Teenage Head and The Diodes achieved even modest success -- and bands like The Ugly, Simply Saucer and The Curse have left barely a trace.
The book makes a compelling argument why the battle was all uphill: there were no records companies to sign punk bands, and no radio stations to play them. There were no music videos, Canadian clubs were more interested in cover and hard rock bands. And of course there was no internet and no YouTube. "Going viral" meant putting a poster up on a lamp pole and hoping that a few dozen people showed up at your show. Everything was do-it-yourself.
The Diodes' former manager (and publisher of the book) has a slightly more cerebral explanation: "You're dealing with bands and a genre of music which is completely based on and derived from, and owes all of its existence to, music by bands who had failed. So when you're talking about the MC5, Stooges, Flamin' Groovies, Dictators, Velvet Underground even, these are all bands that, in their time, were commercial failures. None of them sold records and they all got dropped. But they were so influential that they were responsible for punk. So, ergo, the cycle will repeat itself. It your whole music and attitude is based on bands that were commercial failures, chances are so will your music be a commercial failure. It's just the way it is. Your whole attitude, as valid as it is, unfortunately will not get mainstream legitimacy because they don't want it, at that particular point in time. So the first phase is almost the martyr phrase. Bands like the Stooges and Flamin' Groovies had to fail so that the Ramones, Sex Pistols, Generation X could exist. So that pattern now goes forward, so Viletones, Diodes, Teenage Head had to fail so that sadly, or not so sadly, bands like Sum 41 and the rest of them could succeed.”
The book could have used an introduction to give it some historical context (for example, Pierre Trudeau and Joe Clark were Prime Ministers, the Eagles’ Hotel California was the most popular song in 1977, and Much Music was still a few years away), as well as a healthy edit, but it’s a valuable record of an otherwise little-documented place and time.

Is this helpful?

JM said on Jan 31, 2011 | Add your feedback