I, Shithead

A Life in Punk

Joey Keithley

• Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781551523095
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Punk Music

Joey Keithley, aka Joey Shithead, founded legendary punk pioneers D.O.A. in 1978. Punk kings who spread counterculture around the world, they’ve been cited as influences by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Green Day, Rancid and The Offspring; have toured with The Clash, The Ramones, The Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, Nirvana, PiL, Minor Threat and others; and are the subject of two tribute albums. They are the band that introduced the term “hardcore” into punk lexicon and may have turned Nirvana’s lead singer Kurt Cobain onto a career in music.

But punk is more than a style of music: it’s a political act, and D.O.A. have always had a social conscience, having performed in support of Greenpeace, women’s rape/crisis centres, prisoner’s rights, and antinuke and antiglobalization organizations. Twenty-five years later D.O.A. can claim sales of hundreds of thousands of copies of their 11 albums and tours in 30 different countries, and they are still going strong.

I, Shithead is Joey’s personal, no-bullshit recollections of a life in punk, starting with the burgeoning punk movement and traversing a generation disillusioned with the status quo, who believed they could change the world: stories of riots, drinking, travelling, playing and conquering all manner of obstacles through sheer determination.

Praise for D.O.A.:

“They rock out. They blow the roof off. Some of the best shows I’ve seen in my life were D.O.A. gigs. I’ve never seen D.O.A. not be amazing.”—Henry Rollins (Black Flag, Rollins Band)

“The proper medicine growing young minds needed.”—Jello Biafra (Dead Kennedys)

“Joey Shithead casts a long shadow.”—John Doe (X)

“They’ve changed a lot of people’s lives.”—Dave Grohl (Nirvana, Foo Fighters)

Joey “Shithead” Keithley has long been an activist, including as a candidate for the Green Party, and is the founder of Sudden Death Records (www.suddendeath.com). He lives in Vancouver with his wife and their three children.

CHAPTER ONE
GROWING UP

Like Bob Marley said, “In this bright future, you can’t forget your past,” and I have not. I grew up in Burnaby, British Columbia. At the time it was known as Canada’s biggest suburb. What a fucking claim to fame! We lived on Burnaby Mountain. It was a rural outpost then, complete with small farms, swamps, bears, and cougars, even though it was only ten miles from downtown Vancouver.

I was an average kid, with an older brother, Jef, and an older sister, Karen. My parents were worn out from raising kids by then, I think, so they didn’t pay much attention to me. My early years were directionless, you might say, but by the time I was eight, some influential things had started to happen. We were seeing the Vietnam war on TV every night. Sucked into the brainwashing, I would get out my toy machine gun and crouch and shoot those Viet Cong.

When I was ten we got a colour TV, and things suddenly became a lot more graphic. Right in our front room, in full living colour, were images of soldiers holding their guts in with dinner plates and monks setting themselves on fire. We saw neighbourhoods burning during the race riots in Watts and Detroit, and hundreds of thousands of people protesting the war in Washington. It all made a deep impression on me.

The other event that had a profound effect was my sister Karen’s wedding in 1965, when I was nine. That was the night I fell in love with music. As the wedding guests danced and partied, I sat with my eyes glued to the drummer, banging along on the chair beside me to keep time.

Warmonger I was 8 years old I watched a black & white TV I had a toy machine gun And I aimed it at the screen I shot at Viet Cong While the general’s medal gleamed They stood there like heroes While the napalm dropped like rain chorus: Warmonger – don’t make us count the dead Warmonger – waste your own life instead I hope you get, get what you deserve Warmonger – will you help us to bury the dead When I turned 10 years old We got a colour TV And it showed how a tin plate Could hold a soldier’s guts inside And it showed monks burning And villages ripped apart And it showed me hatred Every nite at 6 o’clock chorus Joey Shithead Keithley, Prisoner Publishing

From then on, I wanted a drum kit. My brother agreed to let me work part of his paper route to get the dough. I did the steepest third of his route for ten percent of his pay. (Jef has since gone on to be a great union organizer and negotiator.) Finally I had saved up $125, half of what I needed. I asked my parents for the rest.

My dad yelled and screamed. “You want to become a drummer? Goddammit! You’ll end up being a hophead like Gene Kruppa.” Not knowing what a hophead was, I wasn’t deterred one bit. A couple of days later, when my father was at work, my dear old mom took me down to the music shop. She made up the cash shortfall, and I had my first drum kit. The drum lessons started, and then the practicing, which, over the next few years, would just about drive my parents nuts.

Shortly after I got to high school, some friends and I started our first band. Scott Flear and Ken McLeod were the only two guys I knew who had guitars and amps. We called ourselves Lead Balloon; that was definitely the way we were going to go over, because we sucked so much. We chickened out of our first and only gig.

By the time I was sixteen, though, a core part of the future punk rock scene in Vancouver had started jamming together. Brian Goble, Gerry Hannah, and I had all been friends since grade two, and Ken had moved into the area when I was eleven. Brian and I played a lot of hockey. I was a rough and tumble defenseman; penalties seemed to be my specialty. Brian was a good digger on the forward line, but he wasn’t loud or brash. I also spent every summer playing lacrosse. Gerry was the hip outcast among us. He had long hair and sideburns and occassionally got kicked out of school. He was also the only one of our pals who managed to get a girlfriend. Ken was the unhip outcast. He had long hair and fucked-up clothes and his family were really different: they were the only Americans in our neighbourhood.

At fifteen, Ken ran away to Alberta with his pal Dave Noga for six months. They lied about their age and got jobs working in an asylum. When he came back, he had changed. He called Brian and me “rubbernecks,” a term for kids who were really regular, with short hair; I was the only guy in school with a crew cut. He had turned onto mind-altering substances. But he also discovered something else that was mind-blowing. He had a copy of the epic album Paranoid by Black Sabbath. We had never heard anything like it.

Soon we were jamming every chance we could get. Our instrumentation was bizarre; the only part that made sense was the drumming. Ken and I both had drum kits. Brian played a chord organ. (If you’ve never heard one, let’s just say it is one of the worst-sounding pieces of shit going.) Brian also had an acoustic six-string guitar until the top half of the neck broke off. We just strummed the three remaining strings. If we were over at Gerry’s house, Gerry would play the organ that his ultra-religious mother practiced on for church. Nobody had an amp, so the drums drowned everything else out. We had no vehicle either, so we constantly carried our drum sets up and down the mountain.

Our practices drove my father so insane that he rigged up a separate power switch for my room. Whenever he had had enough, he would hit the switch and cut our power, then yell at the top of his lungs, “Goddammit, Joe! I can’t hear myself think!” That was always our cue to move on.

Sometimes we practiced at Brian’s place on the back porch. I remember us doing a tortured version of “Sweet Leaf” by Black Sabbath there. But sooner or later Brian’s father would come running out and implore us to quit because the noise stopped the chickens from laying eggs. Chickens, for christ’s sake, when we were trying to make rock ‘n’ roll history. Next we would try Ken’s garage, but his dad would scream, “Kenny, what is this awful fuckin’ noise? Why don’t you get a real trade? You won’t get anywhere with this music bullshit!” So that would leave Gerry’s place, and we could only go there when his mom was at church or working at the hospital. As soon as we got the green light, Gerry would bust out with the massive water pipe and the wild jam would start.

After a while, we managed to borrow an Ace Tone amp and an electric guitar. We would plug the organ, guitar, and vocals into this poor defenseless amp, then max the distortion. Gerry, who had developed into our singer, lived on the main road to Simon Fraser University, built on top of Burnaby Mountain in 1965. On a hot summer day, with the SFU students walking up and down the hill, the real fun would begin. The students always looked perplexed as our wildly distorted jam blared out the open windows. Inside, Gerry would be writhing around on the floor, screaming, “Burn in hell! Burn in hell!”

Around this time, in 1971, the U.S. government announced that they were planning to test a series of nuclear devices on Amchitka Island, part of the Aleutian Islands chain off the tip of Alaska. Members of Greenpeace, which had been founded in Vancouver a few years earlier, started passing out pamphlets, urging people to come to the American consulate in Vancouver and demonstrate against the nuclear testing. They also approached local high schools with the idea that kids from each area would march down to the consulate on a rotating basis. Every day that week, high-school students from all over Greater Vancouver marched and chanted at the consulate. It was an all-out barrage. When our day came, about 300 students from Burnaby North and Kensington high schools walked out of their classes and headed downtown. Our route led us past some other Burnaby and East Vancouver schools, and we shouted up to the kids in their classes to join us. By the time we arrived at the U.S. consulate, we were 1,500 strong. What made it even more special for us was that Ken Montgomery had strapped on his bass drum and was leading the demonstration.

The next day, actor John Wayne, “the Duke,” happened to be in town, on his way to a fishing trip somewhere in B.C. He stopped in at a local radio station to talk to right-wing smear-tactic host Pat Burns. Burns asked Wayne what he thought about all these Vancouver kids voicing their opinions, to which the Duke replied, “I think these goddamn Canadians should mind their own goddamn business!” That was infuriating and funny, but the topper for me was when I got home from school that afternoon and I checked the Vancouver Sun for coverage of the demonstration. My father read the paper fanatically; he was the type of guy who would berate the paperboy if our paper was so much as five minutes late. That day I beat my father home, though, and you can imagine my panic when I discovered a picture of Ken and me on the front page, leading the fucking march! I hadn’t told my parents I’d skipped school to go, and at that moment I thought I was a dead fifteen-year-old. So I grabbed the paper and hid it in my closet. You should have heard my old man ranting and raving that night about his missing newspaper. Little did he know!

That demonstration really politicized me. Like John Sinclair said, “You got to decide if you’re part of the problem or part of the solution.” Another thing that changed my perspective on the world was my trip to Jamaica. My brother Jef had gone to a little town there to teach building construction to high school students, and in the summer of ‘73 my parents and I flew down to visit him. What a culture shock. Jamaica is a great country, but what really got me was the music. I had never listened to reggae or even heard of Rasta culture. My brother loaded me up with a bunch of a records like the soundtrack to The Harder They Come, and I was hooked. Little did I realize that a whole amalgamation of reggae and punk rock lay just a couple of years down the road.

High school eventually came to an end. I had a good idea of what I wanted to do: go to Simon Fraser University to become a lawyer. Not a slimy corporate hack who twisted and deflated the truth for his own ill-gotten gains, but rather a man with principles, a civil rights lawyer like William Kunstler, famous for defending the Chicago Seven. SFU appealed to me not only because I knew every inch of Burnaby Mountain, but because radical students had occupied the campus there in the early seventies. I wanted to be one of them.

In the summer of 1974, I worked on the green chain in a sawmill, pulling 2x4s and 2x6s off the conveyor belt. I quit when my dad, a machinist, got me a job working with him at Osborne Propellers. I love my father, but working with him was tough sledding. He had this unending temper which he inherited from his own father, an English salesman and miner who had been the black sheep of his family back in Yorkshire. I was lucky there was a balance, though; I got my compassionate side from my mother and her family of Finnish immigrants, who had been involved in the radical Fisherman’s Union.

The day after I enrolled at SFU, I bought my first guitar from San Francisco Pawnbrokers on Hastings Street. During the fall, I worked a lot harder at learning to play it than I did at my courses. I spent too much time at the school pub and the university radio station, and it seemed as if the radical element that had drawn me there had either left or gone silent. I dropped out after four months – so much for being a lawyer.

I idled away the first few months of 1975 at my parents’ house. Then Gerry Hannah started talking about moving out of the city to the country. Brian, Ken, and I were stunned.

“How the fuck are we going to be a rock band out in the country?” we demanded.

Gerry had an answer for that. “We’ll all play acoustic instruments, and that way we won’t be supporting the evil BC Hydro power corporation and their ability to flood valleys at the drop of a kilowatt. Back to the land, man!”

Gerry started to peruse the Georgia Straight, Vancouver’s local alternative weekly, for places in the country. Before long, we got word from some commune (this was way before punk rock, remember!) that a forty-acre farm near Lumby, in British Columbia’s interior, was going to be open for squatting.

Me and Fast Eddie, another colourful character from north Burnaby, were the vanguard. So we hitchhiked up there. Now, if you’ve never been to a small, forestry-based town in British Columbia, you haven’t missed much. Lumby is one of those towns. The first thing you see when you drive into it are thousands and thousands of dead trees, and everybody in the whole fucking place is proud of it.

The farm was four miles out of town, on Cooper Mountain, and it had two cabins, no running water, and no electricity. Eddie and I squatted it, and shortly after, we were joined by Brian, Ken, Gerry, and Bruce Coleman, another neighbourhood friend. They had all quit high school just short of graduation for this idyllic paradise. (Really bloody smart.) The best thing on the farm was the outhouse; you could leave the door open as you did your business and enjoy a panoramic view of surrounding mountains. Sometimes when I would be taking a crap, Gerry would nudge the outhouse with his truck while honking the horn.

We were like junior hippies, and as we got to know the townsfolk, we found ourselves growing more unpopular by the day. The town had two cops; the head of the constabulary had apparently been demoted because of a despicable incident that involved kicking a sixty-year-old First Nations man to death in the mud. The other cop we nicknamed Carl the Cow, since he bore an uncanny resemblance to a cow we had run into. I looked up “redneck town” in the dictionary, and there was a picture of Lumby.

To make things worse, there was a brewery strike that summer. Hardly a drop of beer to be got in the entire province. Everybody was desperate. There were huge lineups at the liquor store whenever word got out that a rare shipment of suds was coming in from Alberta. People even lined up for American beer. Like I said, they were desperate.

After the strike had been going for a while, somebody stole the only beer truck to reach our area in over a month. A day or two later, a cop car roared up Cooper Mountain. Carl the Cow jumped out with a bovine look of satisfaction on his face. He started shouting at us. “All right! Come clean with me! Where’s that beer truck?”

We could only look bewildered and collectively scratch our heads, which further infuriated him. Right around the time the beer truck was stolen, somebody had seen Gerry’s truck in town, Carl explained accusingly. We told him to check the local garage, where Gerry’s truck had been in pieces for the last week. Now he was really pissed. He jumped back in his cruiser and raced off. Great bit of police work. (Carl was an inspiration when I wrote the D.O.A. song “Royal Police.”)

After three months of ongoing tension with the locals, including threats that they were going to beat the crap out of us and rip off all our musical gear – by this point, we had told Gerry to screw the accoustic thing and rented some electric amps – we got evicted. We were turfed because some real hippie had rented the farm legally. Shit! Imagine that!

We decided to move further into the Monashee Mountains, to a tiny burg called Cherryville. The only things there were a general store, a community hall, and a bridge. But the place we rented five miles up the road was huge; it had power and water, and we could make as much noise as we wanted with our obnoxious rock band. Nobody had a job, but Gerry and I were collecting unemployment enjoyment. We had lots of time to practice.

We landed our first gig at a wake at the Cherryville Hall. The name of our band at that point was The Resurrection; maybe that’s why they hired us. The wake was for a logger who had been crushed by a tree in the bush, and it was attended by everybody in the vicinity: aunts, uncles, grandmothers, you name it. There were maybe a hundred people all told.

The first musicians on stage were the Foise Family Band. The band featured the entire fucking Foise family, right down to grandpa on the fiddle and the little kid on the drums. Then it was our turn to play. We played one Beatles song, one Black Sabbath song, and a couple of others. After each song, the crowd stood and stared in disbelief. One guy clapped, but it was our friend Derek, the guitar repairman, and eventually he stopped, too. After the fourth song, we were asked to stop playing altogether. To add to the embarrassment, the next band, the Cherryvillains, went over like gangbusters. Shit! What a first gig.

As the months went by, we landed a few more shows, and got into plenty of hassles with the cops and the locals, who just didn’t get us. One night our house was attacked by a bunch of drunk rednecks. We started up the chainsaw to chase them away, and you could almost hear them shitting their pants as they took off.

Fall turned to winter, and it got very, very cold. First we ran out of money, then firewood. One...