Cash-Making Punks

About  a month ago, the D.I.Y./punk/music website Dying Scene ma a list that showed the ''10 Punks Who Are Richer Than You Think''. Here it is:

10. Marky Ramone: 2 million
9. Lars Frederiksen (of Rancid): 10 million
8. Tim Armstrong (founder of Rancid, Transplants, Operation Ivy, and label Hellcat Records): 13 million
7. Davey Havok (of AFI): 20 million
6. Ian Mackaye (of Minor Threat, Fugazi, The Evens and founder of Dischord Records)
5. Billie Joe Armstrong (of Green Day): 55 million
4. Dexter Holland (of The Offspring): 65 million
3, 2 and 1: Blink-182, who have two members worth roughly $60M each, and drummer Travis Barker (also of Transplants) who would be worth 85...

Notable absentee were Henry Rollins (whose worth is etimated at $12M but includes revenue from spoken performances and film work) and Brett Gurewitz, co-founder of both the band Bad Religion and the biggest punk label Epitaph. Then again, the list was about those you didn't expect, and you sure as hell expect those two to be on it.

Also, Green Day, The Offspring and AFI haven't been ''punk'' in a long time, and Blink-182 might never have been...

I've had many an argument with some folks about the veracity of these estimates, particularly Tim Armstrong and Ian Mackaye.

Let's start with Mackaye. As owner of Dischord, who not only sold their CDs to stores worldwide (mom-and-pop shops as well as huge surfaces) but also by mail at $10 a cassette and $12 per CD. They have released nearly 250 titles, some of which sold very well. Fugazi themselves have three albums that sold over a million copies each.

Of the 12 bucks, say 3 goes to the band, 6 to the label, and 3 to overhead and distribution... the band revenue gets split 4 ways, the label profits gets split in two. Mackaye gets shares of both for all of his projects, plus songwriter revenue (he always writes at least half the songs); he gets label revenue for all the other bands he puts out. Then there's touring revenue - not all that high considering Fugazi played for years with tickets prices below $10 a pop, but it's safe to say they at the very least didn't lose money touring. Just through Fugazi, Mackaye would have made 5-10 million, easily. He doesn't drink nor take drugs, either, so it didn't go up in flames - or down in vomit. Add the rest, you get your 25.

Once that is established, the case for Tim Armstrong becomes intriguing: Rancid are much ''bigger'' than Fugazi, but Hellcat Records are distributed by Epitaph - which means label shares are smaller. Armstrong isn't as clean as Mackaye, so some of the money he's earned did go to, uh, waste. On the other hand, he did venture outside of punk, writing a few songs for P!nk, producing records for Jimmy Cliff and a bunch of punk bands, and collaborating with mainstream artists such as Cypress Hill. Also, Transplants licensed a song to a shampoo commercial that ran for three years - and Rancid's music was in a Gap ad. On the other hand, he did go through a really messy divorce with Brody Dalle (of The Distillers fame, now married to Queens Of The Stone Age head honcho Josh Homme). Those cost money...

Video Of The Week: Billy Talent

I wasn't gunning for two straight very-political videos about the youth revolting in Canada, it just happened that way. As a matter of fact, I'd been waiting for Queens Of The Stone Age to release a full-length video (instead of just teasers) from their upcoming album to feature them again, but I've been caught up in listening to Billy Talent's second album (II) a lot this week, and well, it just became obvious that I had to go that route.

At first known as Pezz, the Mississaugua (Toronto) band was huge in Canada at the turn of the century. I didn't like their first record myself (I particularly disliked Try Honesty, an emo-semi-hardcore number that especially lacks honesty), but the second one, on the strength of Red Flag, Devil In A Midnight Mass, and Fallen Leaves (also, on a smaller scale, Surrender) got inside my brain.

I'm featuring the Floria Sigismondi-directed Red Flag today because it is a fine piece of art, at times reminiscent of the one she made for Sigur Ros' Untitled 1 (Vaka) - albeit a whole lot less dark; the song in itself is also gripping, and the breakdown at the end (where it's just the chorus and the drums) is arena-rock power the likes of which Van Halen could only dream of.

Video Of The Week: Suicidal Tendencies

Many people judge Suicidal Tendencies on the basis of their name, which used to scare parents and entice teenagers; others see them classified as ''crossover thrash'' (a term used to define when hardcore punk meets speed metal with thrash) and decide to move on.

Big mistake.

Throughout their career - which started in 1981 - they've evolved and experimented a lot, and it just accelerated when Robert Trujillo (now of Metallica) joined the band in the late 80s, incorporating funk in the mix - which would lead to brother band/side project Infectious Grooves running a parallel career for nearly a decade.

Their most acclaimed effort may have been Lights... Camera... Revolution!, but I feel 1992's The Art Of Rebellion (released on Sony's own Epic Records, a label that also distributed Michael Jackson, Pearl Jam, Ozzy Osbourne, Rage Against The Machine and Alice Cooper - all artists with clear visions) went even further, incorporating psychedelia, ballads and spoken word poetry in the mix. It even had thrash metal songs with the rhythm played on... acoustic guitar.

That's where this video comes in: it's two songs merged into one, with I Wasn't Meant To Feel This feeling a tad like a Syd Barrett piece, and Asleep At The Wheel as the pièce de résistance, catchy, smart, but with an undertone of subdued anger that warrants a second listen. And a third. Then gets incrusted in your brain.

Chris Brown's Punk Fail

Chris Brown decided to be cool and dress up as a street punk, sporting a leather jacket with the markings of seminal bands he's never heard of, such as Corrosion Of Conformity, Suicidal Tendencies, Dirty Rotten Imbeciles (D.R.I.), Cro-Mags, The Exploited and the like:

Instead, the wife-beating R&B star ended up looking like a brat, which led to Municipal Waste posting a diss on their Twitter page...

Video Of The Week: The Sainte Catherines

It's really happening. As Montréal punkers The Sainte Catherines are pulling the plug on 13 years of ramen noodles, white econoline vans and getting drunk all over the continent, they're releasing their final video, the aptly titled I'll MissThe Boys.

Full disclosure: I've had the pleasure of working with two former members of the St-Caths, bassist 'Wood' Nadeau and drummer Mike Sokolyk for two of my own songs, including Hep C. We're talking about grounded, down-to-earth, socially active, bright individuals who were in a band that was a revolving door of such individuals. And they all love poutine.

The Sainte Catherines were legends that just went under-appreciated in terms of local recognition from the major media; like AIDS Wolf before them, they're just now getting a shitload of attention as they are promoting their farewell shows. They released an album on Dare To Care Records - a creation of friends Eli Bissonette and chief St-Cath Hugo Mudie - before releasing a bigger, international one on Fat Wreck Chords, only to have to go back to local company Indica Records for their final album.

It means they got respect from their peers, as all these labels are run by musicians, but those labels just kind of failed at broadening the band's exposure. GrimSkunk's fans already probably buy Sainte Catherines stuff; NoFX fans had already seen them in opening slots. What they could have used was help crossing over to other scenes, like Rancid's, or in Europe.

Or maybe I'm just sad that a decade's worth of honest music and quality shows is now the stuff of memories. Now, when I come across Mudie at my local Lafleur, I'll be looking at a full-time dad and husband who occasionally plays duet shows with Fred Jacques and whose country-punk-bilingual side-band Yesterday's Ring is on indefinite hiatus rather than the active punk superstar showman I saw in action the week before.

Maybe I'm reminded of my own mortality.

Or maybe I should quit whining and just be stoked that there is a farewell show on April 27th. See you there!

Video Of The Week: L7

''What's up with what's going down?
In every city, and every town''

These words rang in my yellow Sony walkman from 1992 until... well, until it broke, then in every subsequent device I've had, including my current iPod. There's no separating me from L7's Pretend We're Dead (also, from the same album, Shitlist), of which I even purchased the CD single - which also included Shitlist.

L7 (50s lingo for ''square'', as seen in Pulp Fiction) were often lumped into the ''grunge'' category, because they toured with Seattle bands and participated in the 1994 Lollapalooza traveling festival (with The Breeders and Smashing Pumpkins), but they were punk. In fact, when they formed in 1985, there was no such thing as grunge, and no one knew what a Kurt Cobain would look or sound like. Good times.

L7 are also notable for starting the Vote For Choice movement, later endorsed by the likes of Pearl Jam and Red Hot Chili Peppers.

2 Autographed Rick Trembles Books

Talk about symbiotic - a post I can put in 3 different blogs - my regular one, my collectibles one, and my film criticism blog!

Last night, I went to a show at the Fantasia Film Festival called Lost Myths, a dual slideshow/storytelling performance, with the first half consisting of texts and narration by Claude Lalumière over art by Rupert Bottenberg, and the second half consisting of an oral history of Rick Trembles' autobiographical film criticism comic strip Motion Picture Purgatory, that runs in the Montreal Mirror and often has Trembles himself in them, and at times also mentions his ''weird punk'' band American Devices (whom I have featured in my Video Of The Week segments here); the MPP is kind of a cross between film criticism, the honesty and autobiographical themes of Harvey Pekar's American Splendor series (especially those with the art of Robert Crumb) and the sex scenes of Caligula - with more shit - literally - and a sensibility for humour reminiscent of Hunter S. Thompson's.

Since the show was part of Fantasia, I'd classify the 'performance shorts'' as short ''films'', as it was, indeed, an audiovisual feast for both the eyes and ears. I did enjoy the Lalumière/Bottenberg piece, as it was a fun and innovative look at how myths may have been written in the first place, but the (perhaps Bible-like) repetitiveness of them became an issue after the first half-dozen or so, seeing as (too) many of them had a baby-God born from an unworthy mother who would die during childbirth; unless that is a real-life issue Lalumière is trying to deal with through his art, it had run its course and become redundant way before the last story. But the storytelling itself, tongue-in-cheek and with a certain beat, was fun - and the art was beautiful. Most of the images would make awesome gig posters.

But the true headliner of the night, the one who got the loudest applause, was without a doubt Trembles. His work for the Mirror is read by some 300,000 people weekly, and since he incorporates his own life into the strips, we all know he is in his second stint with them (since 1998), as they had also published him in the 80s but fired him when they deemed one of his pieces to be too controversial and obscene. He - again - told us all about it, with a few strips shown to emphasize his points, but he also delved into his past, such as the fact that his father had also been a cartoonist, and who his influences were.

Of course he also talked about his band, and about a few short films he made. Once it was all over, he even took the time to show us the three animated shorts he made: God's Cocksuckers - based on a drawing he made and keeps recycling into his other works; a video for his band's De-censor-tized song; and the Canadian government-funded coup-de-grâce Goopy Spasms, which, despite being an animated short drawn in the style of '60s counterculture icons with an endless array of things stuck up the animated Trembles plug-hole, is as real a piece of cinematic truth as anything I've seen since Gaspar Noé's Irréversible - ironically enough, reviewed in one of the MPP books. It was realer than a political documentary.

But the best part of the night came after the show, as I approached the table where Lalumière, Bottenberg and Trembles were sitting, selling their books and offering to sign them. I made my way to Trembles' side and he just looked at me and said: ''You're Mr. Hell?''

To have someone who music I've been listening to for over 20 years, whose writings and drawings I've been reading for over a decade - and to whom I had never spoken to before - know who I was... it made my week. It was way more intense than when Jeffrey Ross asked me which bar he should go drinking in.

So I purchased both Motion Picture Purgatory books, and he signed them in blue ink, with a different blurb for each, both a play on my name.

Good times!

Video of the Week: American Devices

I think I'm liking this new Video of the Week feature... the week's barely starting and I'm already all up in it...

Here's another one I upped on my Facebook page quite a few times already: The American Devices' 'You Wouldn't Understand'...

For those of you who need a description of what they're about to see, it's about a guy, sitting on a chair, in what seems to be an empty apartment, and a dominatrix walking around him, sometimes whipping him gently.

Now that that's clear, here's a bit of info on the band itself: founded 30 years ago, this all-Montréal band is 'fronted' (although I'm 150% sure he despises this term) by Rick Trembles, cartoonist extraordinaire whose work has graced the pages of such prestigious zines as Fish Piss and such renown newspapers as the Montreal Mirror; he has also just released a second volume of his Motion Picture Purgatory series, in which he critiques and analyzes a film in one page - and in comic form. Also in the band are Rob Labelle and André Asselin, other legends of our local scene, as well as another comic-book genius, Howard Chackowicz on drums.

Former member Chris Burns (who has played bass, guitar and drums in the band and whom you could also know from bands like Crackpot and Nutsak, the latter with Asselin and Chackowicz) came up with a list of former members for me to tack onto this:

Jackie Gallant (drums), Cups Von Helm (drums), Suzy Joseph (farfisa organ), Mary-Jane Lamond (keys and vocals), Louise Burns (keys and vocals), Sylvie Payne (bass), and Dave Hill (bass).

to which Trembles added:

You missed Larry Vitus & Eric (hard rock goners) Sandmark who were both on bass for a bit (in the) late eighties.

There you have it, a complete list of current and former members of the longest-lasting freak unit (and apparent revolving door, especially on bass) in town.


You can call them punk, or new wave, or rock - but you would be dead-wrong. Sure, they rock and groove harder than Devo and The Ramones, but they can also slay their instruments with more love than Ravi Shankar at Woodstock.


But, hey - maybe you get it, or maybe You Wouldn't Understand.

Buying And Selling Fear: Capitalism 102

They're at a punk-rock show on a Saturday night at a bar that takes its name from a Mickey Rourke film of the '80s in the heart of downtown. They wear glasses and their hair is perfectly undone. The totally uncool of 20 years ago trying desperately to be the best fucking thing alive right now. Like being the underest underdog at the bottom of the shit pile will make them sympathetic enough to get the win by public vote.

Except this isn't American Idol, it's a prize fight, and the phone lines aren't open.

It's a sad state of affairs to see we've regressed as a species, in not even quite a generation, no less. The over-democratization of even the dumbest trash has led to a feeling that if you can get a hundred of the lowest low-lives to congregate at one spot and send a 'normal' human there by any happenstance, you could get the normal one crucified and it would all be excused.

And it's not about how you look; there's this aura that some people emit, one that tells you just how much of a douchebag, asshole or nitwit a person is. But the problem is even worse. We seem to have inverted the process of Natural Selection, survival of the fittest - which is fitting, in a way, since most of the modern Western world is in no physical shape to survive anything. But in doing so, we've let the idiots take charge and put the slow-witted in what are perceived as positions of control as well as even stupider cats as the model we show everyone when we need a crisis to happen.

If it seems a bit vague to you, think of the past couple of weeks, the Fear Of The Day: swine flu. A pandemic, they called it, comparable to the Spanish flu. Keep in mind the Spanish flu killed anywhere between 40 and 100 million people, with a world population of roughly 2 billion people at the time.

Nowadays, we're almost (or just about) 7 billion humans on the planet, which is way more than it can handle and/or feed. A pandemic that would rid us of half of the world's population would be devastating to our species, but practically a godsend to the planet and most other species. Instead, we have 26 confirmed deaths (only one outside of Mexico, in nearby Texas), and up to 101 potential deaths. A percentage of a percentage that cannot even be considered.

But the World Owners sold it, and the idiots bought it. And by buying into their fear, once more, 6 months after they swore they wouldn't give in to fear anymore by electing Barack Obama, they bought into the bullshit again, and they bought shit to go with the bullshit, so much that the economy seems to be heading past the recession (which was called the worst ever by the same people who own our souls only a couple of months ago).

The Dow Jones is up to levels of pre-Bush eras (or just as Bush got into power eras). That means the people bought into the bullshit and bought so much actual shit that the bullshit-sellers on Wall Street also regained their confidence, six months after admitting they had lost all of everyone's money and kept some as commission, and just three months after admitting they had spent billions in bailout money in, well, unverifyable data and pay raises.

Capitalism, in and of itself, is doomed to fail. When only 5 people will own all the manufacturing plants that make all our foods and all the workers will be at so low a wage that they won't be able to afford purchasing the food (and goods) they're making and selling, the system will fall apart. By itself. And we were so fucking close.

But the System, the Machine, used the oldest (and only) trick in its book to get the train back on its rails: fear. And the best fear, too: fear for our health, in a world where you can't trust doctors to operate on you correctly, where half of North Americans don't have insurance or the cash flow to guarantee decent medical aid, where most of the Third World can't even get to see a doctor - they went with a health scare. And the media, that they own and operate, advertised the bullshit they sold, and the people bought it.

Barack Obama represented Hope. He's been in charge for 6 months now. He wasn't expected to change everything in so little time, but the one thing he wasn't supposed to let happen was this big a campaign of disinformation.

Now, Hope that he can do any good is fading, and Trust in what he's saying is near Absolute Zero.

And Hope in the human race seems... hopeless. Futile.