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Recent Reviews
The Staccatos
Half Past Midnight / Weatherman - 7"
Following the success of early rock 'n' rollers the Esquires, Ottawa's most successful sixties group got their start in 1964 as the backing band for local DJ and singer Dean Hagopian, releasing a seven-inch that year ('Just in Case'/'This is the End'), before striking out on their own as the Staccatos. A residency at the Chaudiere Club over in nearby Hull, Quebec sharpened their young chops, while attracting the notice of the Esquires' manager Sandy Gardiner, who took the lads under his wing...more
Deja Voodoo
Too Cool to Live Too Smart to Die - mini LP
Montrealers Tony Dewald and Gerald Van Herk carried the Cramps' fascination with all things rockabilly to the extreme, pairing a four-string guitar with a minimal drum set (no cymbals or hi-hat), cranking the amps to the max, and dubbing the whole distorted mess "sludgeabilly". The pair then rifled off the Monsters in My Garage EP in 1982, and the 17-song cassette, Gumbo, 17 Sludgeabilly Greats!, the following year, both issued on their own newly formed Og label. Their 1984 bre...more
The Paupers
Ellis Island
Following the tepid response to their 1967 debut LP Magic People, and the near-mythical meltdown at the Monterrey Pop Festival that followed it, the Paupers went back to Toronto to regroup. Essentially broke, travel-weary, and on the verge of break-up - bassist Denny Gerrard was given the boot for his constant drug use and errant absenteeism, and co-leader Skip Prokop even considered bailing - the band played an impressive set at CNE Stadium in suppo...more
Roger Rodier
Upon Velveatur
Roger Rodier was originally a member of the Mike Jones Group, whose 'Funny Feeling', the b-side of their only single (Jet Records 1967), seems to have struck a chord with garage rock collectors after all these years. By 1972, however, the Montrealer had already released a couple of painfully obscure psych singles on the Pax label in the late sixties, one anglophone and the other francophone, before settling into the Andre Perry studios in Montreal to record...more
Liz Worth
Treat Me Like Dirt (An Oral History of Punk in Toronto and Beyond)
Has their been any other scene in pop music so obsessed about and fawned over as 1970s punk, a movement that lasted a scant two years in its prime, was rejected outright by North American audiences, and in the end probably left us with more musical chaff than wheat? Poet and frequent Exclaim magazine contributor Liz Worth was not even born when the Toronto scene exploded, probably somewhere around Yonge and Isabella Streets on September 24, 1976, when the Ramones played the New Yorker Theatr...more
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