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Derek Emerson and Shawn Chirrey
Tomorrow Is Too Late
UXB Press - 2018
Michael Panontin
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If you were invited round to the pub for an Eighties Night out, I am willing to bet that the last songs you would expect to hear would be Minor Threat's 'In My Eyes', Bad Brains' 'Pay to Cum' or 'John Wayne Was a Nazi' by the ominously named MDC (a.k.a. Millions of Dead Cops). The TV history shows peddle an image of big hair, shoulder pads, Michael Jackson and John Hughes, but there was a virulent undercurrent of rage running through the suburban wastelands of North America that for the most part went completely unnoticed.
Hardcore punk, the louder, faster version that was in many ways a reaction to 1977 punk, had already started to take root on the coasts in the late-seventies - in SoCal and DC to be specific. By the mid-eighties, there were well-established scenes in nearly every state. Vancouver was probably ground zero up here in Canada, with bands like D.O.A. and the Subhumans gigging frequently up and down the west coast. In Ontario, you can put your finger on August 2, 1981, when Minor Threat, the Necros and the Meatmen crossed the river to play at Windsor's Coronation Tavern.
You could hardly blame the average Reagan-loving soccer mom for not fretting over hardcore's corrupting influence. For one, the media itself were pretty clueless at the time. Radio and TV missed the boat entirely (save of course for PIL's totally incongruous appearance on American Bandstand). In some cases, it was not for lack of trying. Quincy and CHiPs both featured risible caricatures of punk culture in respective 1982 episodes. (And as an aside, my precocious 13-year-old brother once called in to Detroit radio station WWWW while a then-unknown Howard Stern was on the air, asking why they didn't play punk rock, only to be shot down with retorts like "What do you mean? We play the Knack and we play the Romantics!")
Shawn Chirrey and Derek Emerson were both mainstays in the Toronto hardcore scene. Chirrey once ran the Still Thinking record label and fanzine as well as hosted a number of local radio shows, while Emerson's resume boasts a couple of EPs as a member of M.S.I. (More Stupid Initials). Tomorrow is Too Late (subtitled Toronto Hardcore Punk in the 1980s) is in the authors' words "the yearbook we never had", a valiant attempt to fill what they felt was a dearth of information on that relatively fertile scene.
Tomorrow is Too Late is about as exhaustive an account as one could hope for. The 320-page brick chronicles the whole of the movement, from the early days with bands like Young Lions, Youth Youth Youth and Direct Action through the Kensington Market period of the Quoc Te, DMZ and the Bunchofuckinggoofs' clubhouse, Fort Goof, to its final (d)evolution into queercore, metal and grunge. There are also sections dedicated to the clubs, the fanzines, the promoters, the record shops, the important shows and, as one would expect, reams and reams of reproduced concert flyers.
Chirrey and Emerson logged in the area of a million words from 150 interviews and amassed a collection of over ten thousand images from various contributors. If there is any doubt that Tomorrow is Too Late is truly a labour of love, the book comes with an accompanying fold-out cardboard insert with more flyers and six postcards of black-and-white photos. The first edition came with a swell seven-inch EP and sold out its entire run in a matter of weeks, so if you want a copy, you might want to get off the sofa and make that call.
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