| |
Cardboard Brains
Cardboard Brains 77 EP - 7"
(independent) - 1977
Michael Panontin
|
For John Paul Young, Toronto's 1977 summer of punk was an amazing time.
"It was a revolution," the actor-turned-singer told CM. "I was living on top of a film lab on Alexander Street off Church. And I had a popular radio show Friday nights on CRFM Radio Ryerson. I noticed a second British Invasion with bands heading towards a rougher, simpler approach to songs and a refreshing new attitude."
It was while one film was in post-production - Tibor Takacs' Metal Messiah, to be exact - that Young made his big jump from celluloid to vinyl. He formed Cardboard Brains with guitarist Vincent Carlucci, bass player Paul O'Connell and drummer Richard Miller, and the four dove head first into the burgeoning Toronto punk scene. They became one of the first bands on the block with a record of their own when they issued their four-song Cardboard Brains 77 EP in August.
On stage, Cardboard Brains often melded prog elements with their punk antics, but on Cardboard Brains 77 the band sticks more to the basics, with a somewhat sloppy version of the Monkees' '(I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone' that beats out the Pistols' version by a few years, as well as more perfunctory numbers like the plodding 'Can Stress Kill?' and 'Living Inside My Head'. The highlight, though, has got to be the scathing 'I Wanna Be a Yank', where the witty Young skewers both sides of the border with his angry scowl and clever lines like "The kids are r-r-rotting at U of T / Just to work for the U.I.C.", with Rs rolled to acerbic perfection.
But though Cardboard Brains played at many of the punk venues of the day, including The Horseshoe, David's and The Shock Theatre, they were perennial outsiders in the city (which, I suppose, may explain why they were curiously excised from Liz Worth's otherwise excellent book, Treat Me Like Dirt). Young in particular found the whole scene to be a bit of a musical strait jacket.
"I never related to the Toronto punk scene," explained Young, whose musical world at the time revolved much more around bands like Magazine, Ultravox and Kraftwerk. "I was part of it. But that scene was a clique. Everybody wearing the same outfits, trying to be tough, wearing leather jackets like the Ramones. Not for me."
When the group were approached by Gary Topp to appear at what was to be the mother of all punk gigs, The Last Pogo show at the Horseshoe on December 1, 1978, they couldn't be any less interested. For Young, the thought of playing "in front of 500 drunken punks and pseudo punks" was not something he wanted to be a part of.
Somehow Topp managed to convince them to perform. And when Cardboard Brains showed up, Young's worst nightmare was realized. "A giant vat of water someone put on stage for bands to douse themselves with had overturned and the entire stage was soaked. I was sure someone was going to be electrocuted. I was petrified." he recalls. "Then when we started to play, the monitors shorted out and I couldn't hear myself at all and I was behind a wall of sound. I attempted to sing but strained my voice because of all of this and my voice gave completely out. Nothing but a squawk came out."
As luck would have it, the recording engineer had forgotten to take off the safety on the tape heads, so nothing of the Brains' fateful set ever made it to tape. What you do hear on The Last Pogo LP was in fact recorded in a studio after the fact.
Cardboard Brains would veer off on a more adventurous - and frankly much more interesting - path with the 12" Black EP in 1979. And then the ever-restless Young would move even farther out, taking on the synthesizer and cold wave electronics with his left-field The Life of Ermie Scub full-length in 1980. The Brains' (nearly) entire output, including the ...Ermie Scub LP, was issued digitally in 1998 on the career-spanning CD comp John Paul Young And Cardboard Brains (MEG Entertainment).
|
|
Suggestions
The Brandy Alexanders
The Brandy Alexanders EP
(independent)
Hilotrons
Theme from a Lonely Cinema (download track)
(independent)
Sunday Morning
Junky Don't Care / Explain the World (download single)
(independent)
Godspeed You Black Emperor!
All Lights Fucked on the Hairy Amp Drooling
(independent)
Intersystems
Free Psychedelic Poster Inside
(independent)
|
