Fresh at Twenty

The Oral History of Mint Records

By Kaitlin Fontana, Jennifer Hale

ECW PRESS

Copyright © 2011 Kaitlin Fontana
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77041-004-6
CHAPTER 1

To Have and Have Not

Late 1980s. Vancouver, B.C. The city was still recovering, in ways tangible and intangible, from the shock of Expo ’86. Day to day, however, there wasn’t a lot about the city that looked different. Especially not for two young guys attending the University of British Columbia and hanging out at the university radio station, CiTR. For them and many like them — music nerds with more knowledge than social skills — most days were spent sitting on the well-loved CiTR couches talking about music, drinking beer, and occasionally doing something resembling work — programming, writing stories for the station’s music magazine DiSCORDER, or DJing a show. It would be easy to say that Expo ’86 and the future of the two guys in question are not causally linked. And yet, in the days following Expo, one story kept resurfacing in the halls of CiTR and parts beyond: the Slow Riot.

Vancouver’s best and heaviest band Slow had played at the behest of Expo organizers as part of a concert series meant to display the city’s independent music scene. This is somewhat baffling in retrospect, but one thing’s for sure: no one really bargained for the results of a collision between Vancouver’s underground music darlings and its general public. Vancouver’s punk past was well known and, by then, celebrated; D.O.A., the Pointed Sticks, and the Young Canadians had most definitely made it into that chapter of music history. But this next phase of music, dirtier, less specific, unnamed, was just beginning. To say that Slow was grunge predates the grunge movement by a few years; however, as noted in the Canadian rock history book Have Not Been the Same (named after Slow’s seminal song, no less), “Slow … epitomized many of the elements that would comprise the ‘grunge’ movement of the early ’90s.” In other words, they fucking rocked, and everyone knew it. Still, the leap from there to Expo is a funny one. One imagines some Expo organizer having seen the cover of Slow’s I Broke the Circle, a 1985 Zulu Records release, on his teenage son’s floor: “If my kid likes it, then maybe he’ll bring twenty of his buddies down,” or something like that. Regardless, a culture clash of epic proportions was in the cards.

On that night, the Xerox International Theatre reserved for the “Festival of Independent Recording Artists” was packed with fans and curious onlookers when the band began their signature live show, a rather un-P.C. spectacle that, in dark clubs and basements, was wildly appreciated. This time, however, the open-air nature of things meant the audience was more diverse than usual. The band erupted into a shuddering, growling, loose come-on of a performance that shoved everyone under the age of 18 into a frenzy. It was, one can imagine, threatening to the image of Expo and its attempt at showing off Vancouver’s serene potential for business. It had to be stopped, no matter what. And the band had to be blamed.

A Montreal Gazette article dated August 8, 1986, with the unfortunate headline “A bum rap?” details events of that day: “The incident began when singer Tom Anselmi stripped to his shorts and pranced around the stage.” Anselmi and Slow bassist Hamm may have also mooned the audience. In some reports, Hamm allegedly exposed himself. As a result of the mayhem, Expo cut the power and cancelled the set midway through.

What happened then varies from retelling to retelling, but almost every account uses the word “riot” in a way that Vancouver would not use again until the Canucks playoff fracas of 1994: audience members leapt onstage and refused to vacate, they protested loudly and vehemently, and they swarmed and so disrupted the on-site BCTV news tent that the broadcaster was forced to end its live feed. This led to Expo cancelling not just the night but the entire slate of performances for the rest of the festival. Fourteen groups in total lost their shows, and the ensuing negative attention, along with the band’s self-destructive nature, contributed to Slow’s demise thereafter.

The Expo organizers’ response to the incident seemed, at least to the independent music community of Vancouver, totally overblown. Not that “parents just don’t understand” is news to any kid who wants to rock; that’s not the point. It was the feeling of an authoritative force that could and would giveth and taketh away high-profile shows at the drop of a hat, without mercy or explanation. Their willingness to do so stunned the local community. This wasn’t 1955, after all. Didn’t they know, went the common wisdom, when they booked us? Didn’t they know what they were in for? Wasn’t it cruel and unusual, not to mention hysterical, to punish every other band on the bill for the acts of one? A chance for Vancouver’s indie community to come out into the light of day had been, in essence, cockblocked by the Man. As a result, the scene went even further underground.

At CiTR in the late ’80s, the Slow riot story quickly became currency. The station had already been championing the plight of underground music in this strange, small, rapidly changing port city, where gigs and venues were hard to come by and would only grow more so over time. The Slow incident lent the band and the scene a whiff of infamy that indie kids crave — Vancouver underground suddenly had a cause célèbre to rally around. An argument could be made that this moment, more than any other, was the catalyst for Vancouver’s current underground music climate. No scene is a single moment brought to bear, of course, but maybe, just maybe, this is where our story starts.

Whether or not Bill Baker and Randy Iwata internalized the Slow incident, they were certainly around when the conversations were taking place. (Baker, for his part, was at the show itself. He says he was drunk and doesn’t remember it.) Perhaps subconsciously they took in the importance of this moment. Perhaps not. Regardless, one of their label’s first signings as Mint Records would directly connect with it. But that was a ways off yet. First, let’s meet our heroes.

Bill Baker was born and raised on the west side of Vancouver, an only son to parents who divorced when Bill was five. By the time he was in university, he’d already developed the acerbic wit and self-effacing humour for which he would become known. Randy Iwata, on the other hand, was born to Japanese-Canadian parents in southeast Vancouver. He and his sister Robynn, who would go on to form the band cub (much more on that later), shared a love for music. While quiet and somewhat unassuming, Randy could hold his own against Baker’s volleys. You could find them, in 1986 or so, sitting on the saggy CiTR couches and availing themselves of the beer machine (yes, beer in a pop machine). At that time, the words “Mint Records” had yet to be uttered.

Bill Baker: I used to listen to CiTR every once in a while. It’s funny, too, because I lived within that little zone where you could hear it, but I didn’t listen to it too much. I was much more into records and tapes.

Randy Iwata: For me, CiTR at UBC was many years in the making. The station had such a small wattage that you could only hear it, basically, when you got west of Cambie Street or Granville. My sister and I, as kids, if we had the chance to go to that part of town, we would tune in. It was the best stuff. You’d get this foreign, weird, neat music.

And it all began the first week that you attended university. You join CiTR, and you don’t leave there for five years. CiTR tends to lengthen your time there. In September ’84, I believe it was, I went there and plunked myself down and started to become useful.

Bill Baker: I remember in about 1981, seeing a Marx Brothers movie at the Ridge Theatre and there were all these punk dudes sitting in the front row acting so crazy. But it seemed really appealing and fun to me. And I turned to my friend and I was like [in a high-pitched voice], “Let’s go home and cut our hair!” I don’t think we did it, but it made us look into another type of music. I very quickly got involved in that, and of course all the shows, back then. That was where I cut my teeth on music, the local music scene. There were things you’d read about a record and a show and that sort of thing. And there was a record store right down the street. A Charles Bogle Phonograph Dispensary, right down the street from my house. It’s long gone, but they had an excellent selection. They had a whole shelf that was just bootlegs, which I thought was really cool. I would go there at lunch from school.

Randy Iwata: I remember being at a Black Flag show, and there was this guy in the pit, with spikes in his hair, and spikes in his shoulders. These honking huge nails; they were so obnoxious. I’d never seen that before. Half of us were trying to get away from him.

Bill Baker: My first big punk show was at Cambrian Hall. It was No Exit, Insex, and D.O.A. I was totally mortified. I didn’t fit in. But immediately, it was so exciting. There was this band No Exit, and they weren’t really that good, but the singer had amazing energy. I didn’t really know much about it, when I went, either. I just kind of had the Quincy punk episode in my mind. [Baker is referring to an infamous episode of the NBC drama, which ran from 1976 to 1983, about the titular L.A. County medical examiner. The episode is remembered as one of many examples of mainstream culture misrepresenting punk.] It was really cool that this was happening. Just seeing that crowd, the energy in the crowd. It was just this crazy explosion.

The only bummer about it was, it got kind of late, and we were young, and didn’t really know any better, and we were like, “Oh, let’s just wander around.” And we wandered down Commercial Drive — I don’t know how we got to Commercial Drive. Somewhere they were showing that Sex Pistols Tour documentary, D.O.A., and so we went in to watch it. But then we didn’t go back and watch the actual band D.O.A., and it turns out that was the last time the original lineup of D.O.A. played. And I was so, so upset. Partially because that’s the most depressing suicide-themed movie. It’s so awful. I went to University Hill Secondary at that time, and it was a very liberal school; they really encouraged kids to be different. There was this whole crowd of people talking about the show. I remember being really excited, being able to talk to all those kids who’d been there at the show.

I went to CiTR not because of music but because I was following a girl. That story has its own legs. That’s actually a good angle, though I hate to admit it. I had been in the station, and it seemed like a pretty cool place to me, but honestly, it’s because of Laurel. I had a big crush on this girl Laurel in my Women’s Literature class, and so I didn’t join CiTR until the late fall of 1986.

Randy Iwata: Laurel was very involved in the station.

Bill Baker: I just have this memory of being up there and watching her do her radio show, and then she left to go do something and I took over, even though I didn’t know how to work anything. And I remember getting in some serious trouble for that.

It’s probably a good thing that I was blinded by my crush on Laurel, because it was a pretty exclusive environment at the time. If you were inclined to not feel welcome, that was a place to really mess with you. I was pretty oblivious to that [laughs]. But it wasn’t long before I started getting involved. Something about it just spoke to me. And then, same thing as Randy, I immediately started making myself useful. And yeah, I don’t think I basically set foot outside of there until ’91. Definitely ended up being the place I would go to, much more than to my classes. By far. There were lots of times I would get up at six thirty or seven to get to an eight thirty a.m. class and then pop in to check something, and just never leave. It was definitely the kind of environment where if you were motivated to do something, you were the only person to stand in your way. People would broadcast all kinds of things. It [was] just completely unstructured. There were people that used to volunteer there, and then they would just come back. They’d get a job working for a radio station or a record label or something, and they’d be so defeated because they weren’t allowed to do anything, while at CiTR you could basically do anything you wanted to do.

Randy Iwata: We were all studying English Lit. Bill, me, my sister, CiTR’s station head was in English Lit, Bill’s girlfriend after Laurel [Lisa Marr], who he lived with at the time and who began cub with Robynn — all English Lit. What kept us at CiTR, too, was the beer machine.

Bill Baker: Oh, come on, that’s not what kept us there.

Randy Iwata: You just plugged in your quarters. There weren’t loonies then. You could only put in quarters, nickels, and dimes. The going rate was a dollar twenty-five, and it had a lottery channel that was filled with light beer and the occasional Heineken or something.

Bill Baker: That was a good thing. That’s not what kept us there. Come on. But that is what introduced us to one another.

Randy Iwata: Yeah. There was one memorable time — and this is quite telling about our characters — we sat there from ten a.m., basically, in this building, and just drank, in our station. And that was pretty much it. We still do that now.

Bill Baker: I just remember that afternoon, because everything one of us would say, the other one would echo it. It would’ve been great if it was a date. It would’ve been the best date ever. Like, “Oh my god, you toooo? Oh my god!” It was like that.

Randy Iwata: That’s true.

Bill Baker: It was unbelievable, how many things would come up. I would just pull something out of thin air and you’d be like, “Oh yeah, I did that, too.” Or, “I was there.” It was just that conversation, and then more beer, and then more of that conversation. But I think that was how our friendship started. It was very quick.

Around the same time that Bill started at CiTR, a young annoying kid who talked fast and always had a bunch of records in his bag showed up at the station. In high school, he’d already organized concerts and interviewed rock stars, against their better judgment — of these, the most talked about was with Poisoned. That’s right, Poisoned at a high school assembly. Not only that, but the skinny weird kid had filmed the whole thing and snagged an interview with the band’s singer, Art Bergmann, to boot. Who was this kid? His real name was John Ruskin, but he’d started calling himself “Nardwuar the Human Serviette.” He was at UBC to major in history, and he loved history and politics almost as much as he loved rock ‘n’ roll. In 1987, he started hosting a radio show at CiTR that exists to this day. Nardwuar ended up playing a huge part in Mint Records in the future, but for now he was just trying to make friends in a new environment, something he’d found a bit easier back in high school.

Nardwuar the Human Serviette: I was president of the student council at Hillside High School, so I was in charge of organizing music for the dances. And I knew nothing about bands, so I just went to people and said, “Hey, what band should we get?” People would say, “D.O.A., Pointed Sticks.” Well, Pointed Sticks had broken up, but there was an offshoot band of theirs called the Frank Frink Five, so we got them to play a dance. Somebody said the Enigmas, so we got the Enigmas to play. And I would go and buy their records at local record stores, so that’s how I got all into it. Just by people saying to me, “Check out the Enigmas, check out D.O.A., check out the band the French Letters, there’s a great ska band called the Villains, go get them to play at dances.” So I’d get them to play the dances.

(Continues…)Excerpted from Fresh at Twenty by Kaitlin Fontana, Jennifer Hale. Copyright © 2011 Kaitlin Fontana. Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.