Please remember me

The oral history of Toronto’s overlooked but influential punk rock scene is retold in Liz Worth’s Treat Me Like Dirt

NOT JUST ABOUT THE MUSIC: Worth

by JOHNSON CUMMINS

Now that punk rock has persevered for 30-plus years, its teething years in the late ’70s have been well documented—look no further than the many tomes clogging the music biography section of most bookstores. But until recently, a giant chunk had been missing. Although punk has become a household word, the three main cities in which its spark first caught were New York, London and Toronto. With the former two cities well covered in the book department, Liz Worth’s oral history Treat Me Like Dirt proves to be long overdue, finally exposing Toronto’s often forgotten punk rock scene between 1974 and 1981.

Like most oral histories worth their salt, Worth’s book is informative and a great historical document on bands like the Diodes, Teenage Head, Simply Saucer and the Viletones, and clubs like the Crash and Burn. But it’s her ability to step aside and let the characters tell their own stories that gives the book a true sense of time and place. Worth, 27, previously published the micro-novel Eleven: Eleven and works as a freelance journalist. She spoke to the Mirror from her home in Toronto.

Mirror: Coming from a different generation and with such little documentation of records and books to go on, how did you first become exposed to that era of Toronto punk?

Liz Worth: I knew bands like Teenage Head and the Forgotten Rebels because they were still playing at the time I started researching the book. I would see their posters on telephone posts and their names in concert listings, but I didn’t really have a connection with them or know that they were part of this larger history. I read this novel called 1978 by a Toronto writer named Daniel Jones and the bands from that era were referenced throughout the book, so I went to try and find books on these bands but there weren’t any. It’s ironic that my first introduction to this music wasn’t through music at all, and that really says something about how under the radar that culture had fallen.

M: In the book, there seems to be a fair bit of mudslinging between rival bands. It is often maintained that punk rock was a unification of these marginalized people but it seems this wasn’t always the case. Were you shocked at the sense of competition and petty jealousies held between bands?

LW: In one sense, it does make sense because it was an important time in these people’s lives, so of course it was going to stir up a lot of emotion.

End of the era

M: Your end point for documenting the scene was 1981. Was there a significant moment that signalled the end of the first wave of Toronto punk?

LW: I think there were lot of suspects that dissolved that scene. By the early ’80s, heroin had a strong hold, so that was changing a lot of things. Half of the Diodes moved to the U.K., the Viletones were into another incarnation altogether, the Cursed were over, the B-Girls were in New York. Everything was just winding down. When I started the book, I didn’t know where it would take me, but it seemed that this was the time that the story ended.

M: I find it really odd that this was such an important era in Canadian music, with many fans waiting years for a book like this, yet you had a hard time finding a publisher.

LW: I guess I was a little shocked, but I never doubted that it would eventually be published. Even after I was getting rejection letter after rejection letter, I never questioned the project. I did get a lot of comments early on that the focus of the book should be on the early punk scene that was happening all over Canada, as opposed to just Toronto, but that wasn’t a compromise I was willing to make. This book is about this really unique group of people. As much as it’s about a music scene, it’s also about the stories they have to tell.

Punk’s legacy

M: The influence of the early punk scene on zine culture, DIY venues, independent labels etc. is obviously huge. Did you find the early Toronto punk scene to have a lasting effect on its current independent music scene?

LW: You have to remember that, like most cities at that time, bands would be booked in for a full week at a venue playing Top 40 covers. Because of all the groundwork that was laid down by punk music and the promoters and people who supported it, you can now see different bands every night of the week playing original music in Toronto. Every time you see a concert poster stapled on a telephone pole, that comes directly out of that scene.

M: Was there a sense of commonality that came out of the people from the Toronto ’77 scene?

LW: If there was one thing that bound these people together, it was a scene made up of young people in pivotal moments of their lives who were bored and dissatisfied with the music scene that was forced upon them. They wanted something new and different, so they just went out and created it.

WORTH IN DISCUSSION WITH BOMP
MAGAZINE WRITER, FORMER DIODES
MANAGER AND PUBLISHER RALPH
ALFONSO, SATURDAY, MARCH 6 FROM
3–5 P.M. AT SONIK (4050 BERRI)