Bruce Albacore

It was the mid 70’s. I’d quit my job as a chokerman in a float camp up the coast on Knight Inlet and come down to Vancouver to see if I could fit in in art school. I was living on Powell east of Main about a block from Oppenheimer Park in a street-level place beneath the Daroka Rooms and next to the Reverend Melinda Thorpe's Revival Centre. The lock on the front door didn't work, and often there were people sleeping in the doorway. My roommate, a painter, somehow got a handgun, which he seemed to think was a good solution. He would bring it out to cradle and gaze at–his object of desire. I told him to throw it off the Burrard Bridge, but I knew he loved that thing too much to part. 

My object of desire was a black Stratocaster that I'd seen rentable cheap at Long and McQuade. The grass-roots movement of loud and fast bands following groups like the Ramones, New York Dolls, and Buzzcocks had just started in Vancouver, and the first gig that I saw knocked me out. Right flat out. Suddenly, everything that mattered seemed possible. Like a lot of people, I thought: if they can do it, so can I. I knew a guitar player, Richard, and we immediately decided to make a band, which we originally called Bands are Out. I wrote a bunch of songs, one of which was the one people remember, Waiting for the Drugs to Take Hold.

I moved to Pender and Heatley, in spitting distance of Hastings, part way between the Carnegie Centre and the Raymur Project in a house with Grant, who was later in bands, the one I remember called The Worst. Years later, one of Grant’s songs was used in Sponge Bob Square Pants and I heard that he’d get regular cheques rolling in setting him right up sweet. In those days, Grant had this great, exhaustive collection of 45's that stretched way back, and he'd take them out and play them and I got a music education that way: "OK, now we're going to hear just the singles that Dave Davies wrote". Grant’s gone now.

A social worker that I knew wanted me to meet a very troubled youth on his caseload that played drums. Kenny played so hard that he was always smashing up parts of his kit, so he kept having to stop to fix it. He had the fattest sticks you could buy, and he'd turn them around and hammer his kit with the butt ends. It was both exhilarating and terrifying. The cymbals would crack, so he'd have chunks ground out to stop them from spreading. They looked like alley cat ears.

I don't know how I met Ray. I guess he was just around. He hadn't played bass, in fact, he’d never been in a band either, so he borrowed a short-neck Danelectro bass, which was easier for a guitar player. In those days, Ray looked spookily like Jerzy Kosiński, the Polish novelist who wrote The Painted Bird and Being There. That was before a night in Calgary when we fist-fought our way off stage and he got his nose broken. We got outside in the parking lot followed by the half dozen that had attacked us. They broke my arm and smashed in the windshield of the rented van with loose chunks of cement. The club owner had some deal with the cops, who came down and took them away. Later that night after being discharged from the hospital I was asked to come down to the cop shop to ID the ringleader, some guy who was apparently fresh out of jail. I stood in the darkened hallway, and they cracked the door just enough so that I could see into a brightly lit room. There was a guy who’s swollen head looked like a basketball with chunks of meat taped to it. Sure, that was him.

We practiced in the basement at the Pender house and had our first few gigs as rent parties there, now as The Secret V’s. Then we moved across Hastings down to 343 Railway Street, where Ray was living in a warehouse on an upper floor that we called City Space. That was far better for gigs. Actually, it was damned wild. It's hard to believe that we got away with the speakeasy action that we did, although there was a raid once and I did have a court date, but a music fan lawyer got me off. After practice, we'd eat late night Chinese food on Pender, and then I'd go to a video arcade on Hastings a few doors west of the Carnegie Centre and play Galaga until well after midnight. After gigs, we’d all be wound up for hours unable to sleep. I turned to watching back-to-back episodes of Hawaii Five-O that one channel played every night until rosy-fingered Dawn. Later, I found out that there were musicians in other bands that could also discuss the finer details of Five-O.

Richard quit the band after about a year and Naomi took his spot. We played in clubs all around town, including the Smilin' Buddha a lot—in fact, a whole lot. Bands would vie to book gigs on King For A Day day, the last Wednesday of the month, when welfare cheques came out and the scene was briefly awash in cash. Another good day every month was ... I think it was the first Tuesday of the month, when art galleries had their openings, and you could go from one to the next looking for hors d'oeuvre platters.

I remember one night at the Buddha, putting my lip to the mike which wasn't properly grounded and getting a blue flash shock, blacking out for an instant to come to in the dim-sharp Buddha spit-mist light seeing Naomi on one side, fiercely charging forward toward whatever was awaiting at the edge of the stage, propelled by a wall of feedback behind her urging her on, Ray on the other side in a sharp sharkskin suit springing around with his bass, making rubber legs and funny faces, and turning to see Kenny burning like magnesium, punishing his traps for the sins of the world in a spray of splintered sticks and rage, his face tilted at the ceiling, eyes rolling back in his head, and tongue lolling out like he was in the grip of an explosive epileptic fit.

Everyone was hit hard when Ray died. That was a handful of years after the V’s, after he’d reinvented himself as wild downtown Hank Williams. He had that charm that drew you right in and immediately brought you along with him. Kenny died around the same time, but not so many people knew. I hadn't seen him in quite a while, and I'd heard that he hadn't been doing well. Kenny. Kenny.

When I first showed the band Waiting in rehearsal back around 1978 or 1979, nobody wanted to do it, because at that time everyone wanted to just play fast songs. And in fact, we did play a lot of very fast songs. But, I wanted to do it, and we did, and it worked. We recorded it in December 1980. Jim Bescott, who played bass with the Young Canadians, was the producer. He was gone within a few years, too. And I remember being in the studio for that session when we heard on the radio that John Lennon had been shot. Probably while we were recording that song.

Waiting has been covered by a number of bands. It still is, and there’ll probably be a Vancouver band singing it after I’m gone. Who could have guessed. It appeared briefly in a movie, and for a handful of years I received the odd royalty cheque from time to time for a wonton dinner's worth of coin when it was played on late night TV somewhere out there in the aether. 

– Bruce Albacore