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The Curse
Shoeshine Boy / The Killer Bees - 7"
Hi-Fi - 1978
Michael Panontin
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The Curse were in on the Toronto punk scene right from the get-go. The all-female quartet - singer Mickey Skin, guitarist Trixie Danger (ne Julia Bourque) and her sister Anna as Dr. Bourque on bass along with Patzy Poison (Linda Lee) on drums - made their debut in support of the Viletones at the infamous Crash 'n' Burn club in June 1977. And Skin's spoken-word rant would occupy the b-side of the frighteningly rare punk artifact 'Raw'/'War', a split 7" with the Diodes issued in the summer that year by the Centre for Experimental Art and Communication.
Though it was the Ramones who first unleashed punk rock on the city with their two shows the previous September at the New Yorker Theatre, it was arguably Iggy Pop and the Sex Pistols, both of whom took their acts to a more performative level, who had the more outsize influence. At least as far as the Curse and their Viletones were concerned. The Tones' Steven Leckie, for instance, was known to put out a cigarette on his arm and even cut himself with a broken beer bottle on stage. But the Curse took the whole shock thing to another level.
At their first gig, knowing they couldn't compete with the Viletones' shenanigans, the Curse decided the next best thing was to fling food at the audience, which worked well to solidify their punk cred. Perhaps too well. "We went to London, Ontario and people brought food to throw back at us," Skin would tell Sam Sutherland in Perfect Youth. "They threw eggs, rotten tomatoes. Someone threw a steak and we were like, 'A steak? What a waste!'"
From there it was onto more feminist-inspired antics, from Skin pulling hot dogs out of her pants and squashing them on stage to the group, in protest of a tax on sanitary pads, mailing a soiled tampon to the federal government with a note that said, "Tax this!" And at the record release party for 'Shoeshine Boy', the group's controversial response to the murder of a 12-year-old Portuguese-Canadian kid named Emanuel Jaques, they went even further.
"There was a Purple Jesus punch and we put tampons in it so that when you scooped your drink, you would get this red wine-soaked tampon in your cup," Skin recalled for Liz Worth in Treat Me Like Dirt. "People were gagging...people were vomiting all over the place."
But things kind of blew up in the gals' faces when they released 'Shoeshine Boy' in the spring of 1978. Jaques' murder had repulsed Toronto in a way that few crimes had. Yonge Street at the time, especially the stretch from Gerrard south to Dundas, was a seedy cesspool of grindhouses, strip clubs and massage parlours, not unlike Times Square back in its more infamous heyday. The fact that young boys were shining shoes there unaccompanied and often late into the night would be incomprehensible today. But when Jaques, who had been lured up several flights of stairs with the promise of $75 to help move some photographic equipment, was found raped, murdered and stuffed into a plastic bag, it was more than the city could bear.
In retrospect, 'Shoeshine Boy' was exactly what punk was intended to be: a ripping, if slightly amateurish, blast of caustic guitar with lyrically topical social commentary, snarled to surly perfection. By rights, it should have sold a few hundred copies and then been left to languish in obscurity. But the subject matter was just too much for a city still reeling in shock.
"We were really surprised...We were trying to draw attention to the fact that 'Hey, look at these shoeshine boys, they shouldn't even be out there'," Skin explained. To which Julia Bourque added, "The Portuguese community was greatly offended. The Catholic Church was greatly offended. I think we had a little write-up in The Vatican News saying we were the spawn of the devil." One reader wrote in to The Hamilton Spectator to say that "in disgust, I heaved a record which is supposedly today's music into the fireplace and watched it melt away".
Much ink was spilled in the Toronto dailies. And there was no shortage of hand-wringing at city hall. The City even launched a massive campaign to clean up the strip, probably as much to placate the public as to actually make the area safe. It all seems such a long time ago. Yonge Street these days is, if not squeaky clean, at least safe enough for tourists and 12-year-old kids alike. The Curse are all but forgotten, and their lone single seems pretty lame by today's standards. For all the fuss - not to mention that one disc lost in the fire - copies of 'Shoeshine Boy', of which there were three versions, are still pretty cheap, with nice ones selling for well under USD $100.
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