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The Dry Heaves
Shoot Yourself EP - 7"
Salem - 1981
Michael Panontin
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To borrow from an old punk cliche, Kevin 'Hevy Kevie' Shannon and his brother Tommy Vomit were bored. And so with 1970s Detroit radio force-feeding them a steady diet of, as a good pal of mine used to say, REO Journeywagon, the Windsor lads decided to take things into their own hands.
"Anyone who wanted to hear something good had to seek it out," Kevie told CM, "so it seemed only appropriate to start a band."
The guys dubbed themselves Dry Heaves and set up shop on the top floor of keyboardist Ray Maybe's house on Riverside Drive ("The Dive on the Drive"). They proceeded to hash out a litany of songs with punk-inspired titles like 'I Hate', 'Scab Labour, 'Swimming in the Sewage' and - of course! - 'I Can't Puke'.
In the late summer of 1979, with those hastily scribed originals and a few covers thrown in for good measure ("Some Stooges, 'Can't Explain' by the Who, 'Sweet Jane' by Lou Reed"), Dry Heaves plunged headfirst into the notoriously metalhead-infested waters of the annual Labour Day Battle of the Bands contest. "We plastered the town with flyers and spread the word that Dry Heaves were playing the Battle," Kevie fondly recalls. "When the Labour Day weekend rolled around, we took the stage along with many other bands - I believe there were twenty-two the first day - and we were pummeled with rotten tomatoes supplied by my childhood friends. We exhorted the audience to 'shut up!' and 'get out of it!'"
Though they were barely able to play their instruments (to further the punk cliche), Dry Heaves managed a surprise third-place finish, and thus the legend of Windsor's most notorious punk band was officially launched. The group spent the next year or so gigging on both sides of the Detroit River, including at such locally famous Detroit bars as Bookie's, The Red Carpet and Nunzio's. By early '81, with two dozen or so originals under their belts, the four - by now singer Kevie, guitarist Vomit and bass keyboardist Maybe (ne David Boroski) along with Dave 'Cookie Man' O'Gorman on the skins - headed down to Salem Studios in nearby Kingsville to record the three-song Shoot Yourself EP.
"The original plan was to record a song we had been working on called 'We Want to Be Bigger Than the Beatles'," Kevie explained. "We also did a shoot in Cookie Man's basement with the CBC that was airing on December 8, 1980. And as we all know John Lennon was murdered by Chapman that day, so we scrapped the song and decided to write 'Shoot Yourself'."
As one can imagine, 'Shoot Yourself' was pretty topical at the time. The EP cover sported photos of Ronald Reagan and his attempted assassin John Hinckley Jr. in addition to those of Lennon and Mark David Chapman. On it, Hevy Kevie implores the would-be and actual assassins in his best Rotten-esque scowl to promptly off themselves. ("Your gun could save us a lot of pain / if you just put a bullet in your brain.") But musically it's a bit of a plodding beast, veering at times from the Heaves' typically taut, frenetic punk.
The flip side, on the other hand, sticks to the bones and is infinitely better for that. 'Portable' and the band's signature song 'I Can't Puke' leap out from the vinyl, as punk should, and virtually maul the listener with razor-sharp distortion...a sound, it would appear, that was not entirely unintentional. "Tommy brought his fender twin amp to the sessions, but we found an old Gibsonette amp at the studio," Kevie remembers. "It had a cracked speaker which sounded great, so that's what was used in the recording."
Though Dry Heaves disbanded shortly after the release of Shoot Yourself, more recent interest overseas and the occasional reunion bash (again, the cliche) led to some full-length releases, including an excellent outtake collection from the original Salem session, the Shoot Yourself LP. As for the seven-inch Shoot Yourself, it's value has gone positively stratospheric of late, with copies now trading hands for upwards of 600 Canadian smackers.
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