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The Fits
Bored of Education 7" EP
Stage Fright - 1979
Michael Panontin
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The Fits were perennial outsiders in Toronto's late-seventies punk scene. Their lone 1979 seven-inch arrived in the shops unfashionably late and the band themselves looked...well...unfashionably un-punk.
But the Fits were there almost from the beginning, forming in far-flung Etobicoke in 1977, just as punk was breaking out across the city. The group's second drummer Claude Kent walked us through the early days. "I was 16, fresh out of high school but still a bit too young to get in legally to most licensed establishments," he recalls. "One year makes all the difference in the world and so the following year - 1978, when I was 17 - that's when I looked mature enough to go to bars and see live music. This is also when I joined the band."
In the three years that the Fits were active (1977 - 1980), gigs were few and far between, and the ones they did get were sometimes violent. "We made a few enemies along the way," Kent remembers.
"Particularly, we used to play with the Viletones quite a bit, and there was this clique that hung out at all of their gigs, the Blake Street Boys from the east end. They didn't like the Fits at all, so they used to come out to our gigs and bust them up."
But the Fits may have had the last laugh on everybody. When the four (singer Paul Bonk, bassist Terry Webber, guitarist Art Davis and Kent) walked into Cottingham Sound to lay down a few tracks for an obscure indie single, they had no idea that their topical 'Bored of Education' would become one of the finest punk songs ever to come out of Canada.
Cottingham was located on Queen Street West at Ossington, just across from the psychiatric hospital that is today known as CAMH. When the Fits arrived, they were met by producer Tom Atom, who perhaps sensing that the boys were neophytes warned them that Long John Baldry was recording and that they had better be careful around the equipment. Atom set them up in separate rooms with headphones and "headphone jack boxes built into Twinings Tea cans". The whole experience was new and alien but luckily not an issue. "We adapted quickly. Our ace in the hole was that we were very well rehearsed, so we were able to bang off the songs in short order."
Unfortunately, there was what Kent describes as a "hidden agenda". "Our manager and the other members wanted to censor the words 'shoot the fucking teacher with a gun' so that we could get some airplay. I was incensed and dug in my heels. Our music wasn't going to get any airplay anyway and I told them if you start to censor the music now, at this point, I'm out."
In the end, Kent won out and 'Bored of Education' was left as is. And thank the Lord for that, as it is truly what punk rock was always intended to be: taut, topical and torrid. With the anthem's machine gun drumming, scything guitar chops and blistering chorus of "I'm bored of ed-u-ca-tion...I just want to be free!", this song leaves smoke virtually billowing from the grooves...right up to the trail-off wax!
Though the Fits shared the stage with an assortment of bands, from locals like the Viletones, the Ugly and the Secrets to out-of-towners like the Forgotten Rebels and the Troggs, they were never headliners. And as you might expect, their story ends not long after the release of 'Bored of Education'. Which hardly surprises Kent after all these years.
"We were independent and unsigned, unbridled and unruly, rogue and vagabond. We had no connections or friends in the business. None. Had it not been for the vision and resourcefulness of our manager Evan Adleman, the single wouldn't have been recorded and the band wouldn't have achieved one modicum of success. After all, we were just a bunch of punks."
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