https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jv_kBFbNcoQ
I have found as a rule that a media person who knows what they are talking and/or writing about is very, very rare.
Fortunately, they do exist.
Unfortunately, Toronto Mike is not in that number.
He should be as his interest in what he is speaking about is genuine.
In this interview Liz Worth states Steven Leckie of THE VILETONES was not a singer, he was an artist.
Not all singers are artists. Not all artists are singers.
Steven Leckie, who died on my birthday (June 12) was consummately both.
As an artist/singer he was on a par with Frank Sinatra.
His peers sensed that which is why there was and is so much animosity towards him in the “PUNK” community.
I put quotations around the word “PUNK” because few in that community, perhaps only one, knew what it meant to be a PUNK artist.
That Steven Leckie did is clear from the first interviews with him.
“We can’t do in five years what we are doing now,” he stated.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM5NGHDAO0c&list=RDgM5NGHDAO0c&start_radio=1
Steven Leckie was saddled with back-up musicians who were completely off the beat. They were ten years too old.
“With a singer that billed himself as “Nazi Dog” (real name Steven Leckie), The Viletones led the insurgent punk scene in the mid ’70s with furious music, trashed clubs, self inflicted violence, and a change in the way things were done.
“Formed in Toronto in 1977 by Leckie, Jackie Death (aka Jack Tasse) on bass, and drummer Mike Anderson (dubbed Motor X, ex of Arson), they added Philadelphia native and former Bubble guitarist Freddy Pompeii (real name Frederick DiPasquale), when he answered a newspaper ad that stated “Ramones/Iggy stylist seeking same in guitarist.” After barely a month of toiling on the local dingy club circuit, they were on the bill with The Curse, Teenage Head, and The Diodes playing at New York’s CBGBs club, arguably the hottest nightspot in North America for live music.” https://canadianbands.com/viletones/
Why?
“When we’re in our teens 24 is ancient,” said Leckie.
Pompeii and Haight were ten years older than Leckie. Ancient is putting it mildly.
They were clueless.
“THE VILETONES are like a hit of junk,” interjects Pompeii in an interview with the CBC’s Hannah Gartner and Leckie.
There is a barely susceptible flash from Leckie at this.
It was the moment Leckie realized he had to cut himself loose from his band.
Not only were they old, they were farts.
In this podcast Mike’s guests are Liz Worth, author of Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History of Punk in Toronto and Beyond, ” and Kire Paputts.
Mike says, “I think I have the right people for this.”
Worth was 27 when her book was published. That puts her in the ancient list.
Paputts personifies the word conventional underlined three times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kire_Paputts
Paputts is about as far from troublemaker as we can get.
Leckie personified it as do I.
“He who without the Muse’s madness in his soul comes knocking at the door of poesy and thinks that art will make him anything fit to be called a poet, finds that the poetry which he indites in his sober senses is beaten hollow by the poetry of madmen.”-Plato.
Much is made of Leckie’s lack of schooling which is seen as a weakness.
It is a strength.
“I had wonderful teachers in the first and second grades who taught me everything I know. After that, I’m afraid, the teachers were nice, but they were dopes...I have a lack of ideology, and not because I have an animus against any particular ideology; it’s just that they don’t make sense to me…they get in the way of thinking. I don’t see what use they are…University and uniformity, as ideals, have subtly influenced how people thought about education, politics, economics, government, everything…We are misled by universities and other intellectual institutions to believe that there are separate fields of knowledge. But it’s clear there are no separate fields of knowledge. It is a seamless web.”-Jane Jacobs
“Most teachers say you should go to school to get your degree to have something to fall back on. Aside from being a huge lie, that also creates a very high level of mediocrity, because nobody who really believes that is going to take the leap of faith required to be a serious artist. Stay out of school.”–Ellis Marsalis to his sons Branford, Delfeayo and Wynton.
Like Rimbaud Leckie burned bridges.
People who frequents shows rarely listen.
At one of my JAZZ IN ANIMATED CARTOONS programs an older couple said to me, “You never hear this music the way we heard it.”
My first thought was, “They are going to say they talked over it.”
They said, “We talked over it.”
There comes a point where, if one is truly an artist, we draw the line.
Nina Simone was called disrespectful to her audience for walking out of the theatre when the audience talked during her performances.
There nothing more to say.
These are banal people.
They are in the majority.
“To outrage public opinion was a basic principle of dada…The devising and raising of public hell was an essential function of any dadaist movement, whether its goal was pro-art, non-art, or anti-art. And when the public, like insects or bacteria, had developed immunity to one kind of poison, we had to think of another.”-Hans Richter, THE DADAIST MANIFESTO.
For a Jewish kid to take the name NAZI DOG was about as outrageous as it gets.
If it was outrageous to Jews it was even more outrageous to Nazis.
In fact, it was the ultimate outrage to Nazis, the ultimate cultural appropriation.
Steven Leckie was hip.
One of the interesting things about watching Colin Brunton’s 3 and 1/2 hour documentary THE LAST POGO JUMPS AGAIN (2013) on which Paputts worked is how solid Leckie is in every moment he is on screen. Everyone else looks like a ghost.
I am not the only one who noticed this.
Mike, Liz and Kire come across as solid as a soup sandwich.
Watching this I learned that Leckie, who sat by concert promoter Gary Topp at the film’s premiere, was booed and hissed by the audience every moment he appeared on screen.
It was ten years before Leckie spoke to Topp again.
Gary said he spoke with Leckie the day he died.
Did something Gary said drive Steven to leave this world?
I don’t know.
“The musical exhilaration and reverie of (Herman) Hesse’s early years were antipodal to what he was undergoing at school, which, until his fourteenth year, had for Hesse “the close atmosphere of a penal institution.” At twelve he was already clear in his own mind that he wanted “to become either a poet or nothing at all.” But this astonishingly early clarity of purpose was soon followed by the painful realization that, although there is a road, a school, a course of study by which one can become a teacher, a pastor, a physician, an artisan, a merchant, a postal official, and even a musician, a painter or an architect, there is no road, school, or course of study by which one becomes a poet. Out of the child’s question— whether his goal could be realized—grew criticism of the school’s authority. Leading to serious conflict, this precipitated the first real crisis in Hesse’s young life. The child had perceived lucidly the equivocal nature of pedagogy—indeed, of the adult world in general—that because of its own mediocrity and lack of existential courage, allows greatness only as a distant idea in remote historical perspective. It was the very same with the poet as with the hero and with all strong or beautiful, sanguine, and out-of-the-ordinary people and movements: If they lived in the past they were glorious and every schoolbook was full of their praises; but if they lived in the real world of the present day they were hated. Presumably the teachers were specifically trained and hired for the purpose of preventing as far as possible the growth of magnificent free men and the committing of great, splendid deeds. Thus the young Hesse soon saw nothing but abysses between him and his goal. Everything seemed devalued and uncertain. But he adhered stubbornly to his plan to become a poet.
“Presumably the teachers were specifically trained and hired for the purpose of preventing as far as possible the growth of magnificent free men and the committing of great, splendid deeds. At thirteen the conflict began. Hesse’s conduct at school and at home left so much to be desired that he was sent “into exile” to the Latin school in Goppingen. His stay there lasted only a year.”—Franz Baumer, HERMAN HESSE.
What I do know is that Steven Leckie personified the PUNK generation.
Not only that Steven personifies every generation seeking to become its self.
“We can’t do this in five years,” he said.
For myself as for Steven there is something pathetic in watching yesterday’s rock stars trying to today the kids they once were.
Sinatra knew he could not be a teenage idol. He knew he had to grow,
Leckie knew it as well. In this performance at The Phoenix he shows how well he knew it.
Steven Leckie died hated.
He died loved by me.
–Reg Hartt
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