Perfect Youth: Journalist Sam Sutherland documents Canadian punk from coast to coast

A few years back, Sam Sutherland, Toronto-based music journalist and Junior Battles vocalist and guitarist, set out on what might possibly be one of the toughest passion projects you could imagine: to uncover and document Canada's '77 punk history from coast to coast.

There's no doubt that punk fans are hungry for a book like this. Just wondering about the story of lone punk bands behind the pine curtain is enough to peak any music geek's curiosity. But when you start to wonder about the logistics behind pulling it altogether - tracking people down in cities throughout each province, finding story threads, structuring it all from beginning to middle to end - the process behind it becomes hard to imagine.

Lucky for us, Sutherland's resiliency and dedication has helped see the project through. Even though we'll have to wait until 2012 for ECW Press to publish the finished product, Sutherland let me ask him some questions about the process behind Perfect Youth.

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Liz Worth: What’s your experience been with interviewing people outside of Toronto for this? Did you find a difference between talking to people here, who were part of one of the country's most major punk scenes, to talking to people from smaller scenes and smaller communities?

Sam Sutherland: People outside of Toronto are totally different, totally different. The people outside of Toronto, there was never any expectation that they might make it and I think as much as the people in Toronto claim that they were doing it just to do it, they were still in a major city and a major entertainment centre at that time,  and in the back of their heads they thought they were gonna be rock stars. I don’t think it matters what anybody says, if you start a band you want somebody to like your band.

But if you are making experimental noise punk in Cape Breton, you are only making music because this is how you need to express yourself. So there’s a lot less bitterness and nobody really has their back up about anything. There are more people being shocked that you tracked them down. If you’re trying to find people in Regina to talk to about punk rock, they would be shocked, but then they would also be really happy to talk about it.

For a lot of people outside of those [Toronto and Vancouver] scenes, there’s a real innocence to the way they talk about it. Nobody expected anything and nobody can believe anyone would still give a shit.

And a lot of them, because of the internet, what’s fuckin’ crazy is they now see their singles, that they thought nobody gave a shit about, being sold online for a few hundred bucks because anything from ’77 has been super fetishized. It doesn’t matter if it’s good, it doesn’t matter where it’s from, people want it.

The Extroverts, a band from Regina, only toured in the Prairies and now you see their stuff online and it goes for a couple hundred bucks. Those people see that and they don’t feel like that reverence is owed to them. They’re mostly shocked and so it makes the interviews, in some ways, more difficult, because they haven’t thought about it in so long. You have to coax stuff out or do a couple of interviews. It’s literally night and day between Toronto and everyone else.

It also totally depends on the person. Like there’s that movie, Bloodied but Unbowed, and there were people in Vancouver who were like, "I already did an interview for this movie." And I’d be like, "but that movie’s not even out yet."

“It doesn’t matter, I said everything I wanted to say in that movie.” And I was like, "but what if that movie doesn’t cover it? A book is not the same thing as a movie."

LW: And you don’t know how they’re going to cut it. Your interview might not even make it.

SS: Right. And that movie is primarily about D.O.A., which makes sense. D.O.A., Subhumans, Pointed Sticks, those are the bigger bands out there. It’s an hour and a half long movie and you think everything you want to say in the world is going to be in that movie? You should probably consider doing another interview.

LW: How has it been finding people in places you don’t live in?

SS: It was awesome because I never went to journalism school, so my journalism experience is having a zine in high school and writing for Exclaim!, so I felt like I was a fuckin’ film noir gumshoe where I would have to go through eight people to finally get someone’s number. I was just jumping from person to person to person and I would have to extrapolate.

There’s this band called the Slime who were a punk band in ’77. They actually have a website but the website hasn’t been updated in, like, 18 years. The email was bouncing or I wasn’t hearing back from them, so I found an article someone had about them written for some newspaper in St. John’s, so I contacted that person.

I had to trace a weird line of people sometimes to get to where I wanted to get to. That was the fun part. I hate the serious mechanics of writing – like I don’t mind sitting down and writing, but I really just like talking to people and finding people. If I could just think about the book and it would just appear that would be cool.

You’re not only getting in touch with people, but finding out who the popular bands were. You can objectively look at Toronto and you can say pretty easily, "these are the top three or four bands that defined that era." But you can’t do that in Saskatoon. It takes four years of researching until you’re like, "oh, sweet, the only punk band in Saskatoon is actually only the Northern Pikes." So that’s really cool when you make those connections, just trying to figure out who the notable punk bands were. Like, in Edmonton, who were the notable bands before SNFU? It’s sort of like working backwards and finding out what was happening before that. I have notebooks of insane diagrams of like this band is this band and then turned into this band.

I seriously felt like a fuckin’ private eye.

LW: Did you have to make a decision to draw lines around which bands you were going to focus on more than others? How did you determine the criteria?

SS: If other people were talking about them, they were important. In some cities I’d develop trust and rapport with someone and I’d be like, "who mattered in Calgary?" Then I might do the same with someone else and they might contradict the other person’s answer, but over time you could piece together sort of what is a reasonable picture of that city.

The bottom line is that if a band went through the trouble of recording, they were probably kind of serious and probably important in some ways. It’s not that it’s easy. It’s really hard when you start talking to someone you like that and then you realize their band isn’t really a part of the story you’re trying to tell.

My book’s divided into some band chapters, if the band was big enough. There’s a Viletones chapter, there’s a Subhumans chapter, but then the other chapters focus on whole cities, like there’s a Montreal chapter.

It’s also arbitrary and some people are going to be really pissed about it, I’m sure, which I only came to terms with about six months ago. I was sitting with my girlfriend and we were talking about it and I was like, "there’s a chance people aren’t going to like the book, and it just hit me."

LW: But the responsibility of a writer is to tell a story. It’s not to indulge in people’s feelings, and the reader can’t be expected to do that, either.

SS: I started to think about how what I publish is going to be the history of Montreal punk until someone writes a book specifically about it. That’s fucking scary, and so having to make those decisions is scary. It’s tough.

It’s weird, too, because my book has about 20 chapters, so the average number of interviews per chapter is less than 10. I wish it could be more, but I can’t do 100 interviews for Calgary and then have it just be a chapter in a book.

I just really hope that someone can come in and provide more details on these stories because there are amazing stories that I can’t tell, because it’s not a book about Calgary or Montreal one specific place, so I hope other people will do books about these cities alone.

LW: Why did you even want to do a coast-to-coast punk book? The structure must have been really tough.

SS: Canada is its own weird beast and I think there’s no unifying factor between Victoria and St. John’s but there is this element of otherness and outsider-ness that was completely lacking from any other punk scene in the world at that time.

What I think is so crazy is that there were kids in all of these places – there are kids in Winnipeg and kids in Saskatoon and kids in St. John’s – who heard punk records at the same time as the people who would go on to form the Dead Kennedys and TSOL in L.A. or second wave punk bands in New York or whatever, but who couldn’t connect, and they couldn’t leave.

And that’s the same across the board, so in that way the music has this similar weirdness. They grew up going to weird hall shows to see weird bands that didn’t really come together. These people would pick up Rock Scene magazine or a new record and feel like they had to be like the people they saw in there, but they never could be because they were in Canada.

And so even though there is no common thread between Newfoundland and Saskatchewan, there is this similarity of spirit. If you’re in England, even if you’re in different cities, the country’s not that big. But when you think of the cultural isolation of being in Winnipeg, looking down at Toronto, you can’t even fathom it.