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The Dishes
Fashion Plates EP - 7"
Regular - 1977
Michael Panontin
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"They play to West Side Story with the sound turned off, lip-synch to Gary Lewis and the Playboys and dress like civil servants."
That is how the Vancouver Province once described the Dishes, the quirky art-punks who were actually the missing link between early-seventies glam rock and the 1977 punk explosion. They were formed in suburban Toronto in 1975 by Scott Davey and Tony Malone and were the first band of that ilk to hold court at the Beverley Tavern on Queen Street. Malone recalls the early days when their oddball mix of Bowie, Sparks and Roxy Music-lite was the furthest thing from what beer-swilling Toronto rock fans were listening to. "When we started playing there, it was a silent carcass - a shell - NOT a happening place," he writes on his web page. "We once played a whole Saturday evening to ONE audience member - a friend of [our drummer] Steven!"
But it didn't take long for the city's disaffected oddballs to take to the Dishes. "Inside of a year we were packing the place for every performance," Malone fondly remembers. "The Bev made enough off of us in 1976 to redo their stucco! God that was a beautiful moment."
Of course, as in many places around the world, things were moving fast. In Toronto, the Ramones' gigs at the New Yorker Theatre in September of 1976 kick-started the whole punk scene. A year or so after the Dishes' lonely live debut, the city was awash in DIY bands from the Viletones to the Diodes and from Martha and the Muffins to the Poles. What's more, that residency at the Beverley gave birth to a nascent scene all along Queen Street West.
Malone would leave the fold early the following year over the usual creative differences, his last appearance being the scene-defining 3-D Show at the Ontario College of Art in February 1977. But by then the Dishes were gelling into a sextet of singer/guitarist Davey, singer Murray Ball, bassist Kenneth Farr and drummer Steven Davey, with Glenn Schellenberg and Michael Lacroix rounding things out on piano and sax, respectively. Their Fashion Plates EP was issued in May and sold an almost unfathomable 4,000 copies, according to Steven Davey. Though the record is mostly forgotten today (not to mention pretty damn tough to find given those sales numbers), it was in fact one of the first DIY records in Canada, along with the Viletones' Screamin' Fist EP and the Amerigo Maras and Bruce Eves' curious 'Raw' / 'War' single.
The four tracks on Fashion Plates could probably best be described as overarching, with the sax, piano and guitar often battling it out with Ball's hiccupy voice amid a mostly muddled mix. When they do get things right, as on the Bowie-esque 'Police Band', you can start to see what all the fuss was about back in the day. Still, given the times, Fashion Plates marks an important first step in what was a rapidly changing industry.
As '77 segued into '78, the Dishes began reaching out to larger audiences. A couple of shows with performance artist David Buchan, one called Geek Chic at the King Edward Hotel Ballroom and another called Fashion Burn at the Crash 'n' Burn, as well as a performance part with General Idea at the Winnipeg Art Gallery lent the boys some well-earned cred in the art crowd. What's more, a TVO live showcase that year would be rebroadcast throughout Ontario an unbelievable twenty times. A final EP called Hot Property, with cover art by General Idea, came out in 1978, but really by then the Dishes' best-before date was long past and the six decided to go their separate ways.
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The Dishes
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