In Too Deep: When Canadian Punks Took Over the World

In Too

Deep

When Canadian Punks

took over the world

Matt Bobkin &

Adam Feibel

Copyright © 2025 Matt Bobkin and Adam Feibel

Published in Canada in 2025 and the USA in 2025 by House of Anansi Press Inc.

houseofanansi.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

House of Anansi Press is a Global Certified Accessible™ (GCA by Benetech) publisher. The ebook version of this book meets stringent accessibility standards and is available to readers with print disabilities.

29 28 27 26 25 1 2 3 4 5

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: In too deep : when Canadian punks took over the world /

Matt Bobkin & Adam Feibel.

Names: Bobkin, Matt, author. | Feibel, Adam, author.

Description: Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20250114143 | Canadiana (ebook) 20250114283 |

ISBN 9781487012687 (softcover) | ISBN 9781487012694 (EPUB)

Subjects: LCSH: Punk rock music—Canada—History and criticism. |

LCSH: Punk rock musicians—Canada—Interviews.

Classification: LCC ML3534.6.C2 B663 2025 | DDC 781.660971—dc23

Cover and book design: Alysia Shewchuk

Cover image: BillionPhotos.com/stock.adobe.com

Ebook developed by Nicole Lambe

House of Anansi Press is grateful for the privilege to work on and create from the Traditional Territory of many Nations, including the Anishinabeg, the Wendat, and the Haudenosaunee, as well as the Treaty Lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit.

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada.

For Harry and Sally Weltman, who let me stay up late

to watch the 2004 MMVAs.

—M.B.

For my friends and family, and for every kid

who puts their faith in four chords.

—A.F.

Prologue

Just about every chapter in the long history of punk rock begins with a group of teenagers in a garage or a basement. Canada’s began in 1975, when four high school students in Hamilton, Ontario, picked up their instruments and started a band called Teenage Head. The group played their first show that year in the cafeteria at Westdale High School, and over the next few years started gigging around town and then in Toronto, where a countercultural music scene would take shape just as similar movements were cropping up in the United States and the United Kingdom. In New York City, the Ramones, Blondie, and Patti Smith were turning the dive bar CBGB into the birthplace of punk rock. In London, the Clash, the Sex Pistols, and the Damned were rising from the gutters to become chart-climbing British icons. In Toronto, Teenage Head, along with bands like the Viletones and the Diodes, formed their own explosive scene with its own legendary stories—the Toronto Weekend showcase at CBGB in 1977, The Last Pogo concert at the Horseshoe Tavern in 1978, and the Teenage Head show at Ontario Place in 1980 that came to be known as the Toronto Punk Rock Riot in headlines across the country—to make the city a supporting player on the world’s stage of first-wave punk rock.

Within the Toronto scene, Teenage Head stood above the rest. Known to some as the Canadian Ramones, the band earned a reputation as one of the wildest live acts on the local club circuit and gained a rabid fan base across the country, especially after their infamous show at Ontario Place, which drew an estimated fifteen thousand people to the outdoor theatre—about six times its 2,500-seat capacity—and resulted in fifty-eight arrests, numerous injuries, three totalled cop cars, and one near-drowning. Teenage Head’s second album, 1980’s Frantic City, sold so well across Canada that it was certified platinum within three years.

Despite their success at home, Teenage Head struggled to find an audience outside of Canada. The band’s efforts to break out south of the border were thwarted when they crashed their van, breaking guitarist Gord Lewis’s back, just before the group was due to head out on their first major U.S. tour. The band eventually got fed up with their lack of U.S. distribution and broke things off with their label, Attic Records. And so, by the end of 1982, one of Canada’s hottest bands no longer had a record deal.

Just as quickly, Teenage Head’s fortunes changed. The U.S. major label MCA Records stepped up to offer the Hamilton punks a recording contract, but it came with several conditions: the band would have to change their name to the pluralized Teenage Heads, to avoid any potential controversy; they would start by releasing an EP, not a full-length album, to test the waters in the U.S. market; and they would need to significantly polish their sound to appeal to radio programmers. The resulting EP, 1983’s six-song Tornado, was a complete disappointment. Many fans decried the overly produced, radio-friendly sound. Critics’ reviews were mixed, at best. And MCA Records, in the midst of internal upheaval, completely abandoned them. The entire team that had signed us was gone, bassist Steve Mahon said in a 2023 retrospective for uDiscoverMusic. We got a one-page letter in the mail that basically said we were off the label. And … good luck.

Within a year, Teenage Head were back in Canada, destined to spend the rest of their career on independent labels in their own backyard. For many years, it was the closest a Canadian punk band would come to breaking through internationally—and it wasn’t really that close at all.

Teenage Head were just one of many victims of a common theme among Canadian recording artists: you could be a big deal in your own country, but in all likelihood, people living outside of those borders wouldn’t even know your name. Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and Rush were among the rare exceptions. The Tragically Hip was the rule: national headliners; international footnotes.

At the time, and still today, Canadian artists look at companies in a very binary fashion: you’re either a conduit for me to get out of Canada, or an obstacle, says Michael McCarty, a veteran of the Canadian music industry who was president of emi Music Publishing Canada from 1992 to 2008. Unfortunately, the Canadian label system all too often has been perceived as an obstacle.

It was a tricky situation to navigate, filled with geopolitical pitfalls and easily bruised egos. Signing to a Canadian label meant international labels were unlikely to pay attention, while signing outside of Canada could breed resentment among the nation’s music industry bigwigs. You could be popular in Canada or outside of Canada, but rarely both.

Throughout the remainder of the twentieth century, punk rock was constantly evolving, largely without any major involvement of Canadian acts—though not entirely. By the end of the ’70s, the punk pioneers in New York and London had moved in different directions, while punk scenes had popped up in practically every county seat in California. This ignited a frenzy on the West Coast, turning into a lively touring circuit that brought punk rock to the suburbs, a type of punk that was harder, faster, and more ferocious.

It wasn’t long before this more aggressive sound moved north of the border—this time to Vancouver, on the West Coast. One of the biggest names in the city’s early punk scene was D.O.A., led by the inimitable Joey Shithead. When the band called their second album Hardcore ’81, the name stuck. D.O.A. went on to be one of the pioneers of the subgenre called hardcore punk, alongside U.S. acts Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, and Bad Brains.¹ Canada didn’t birth hardcore, but it almost certainly named it.

Being Canadian meant we had to work twice as hard ’cause we were from the Great White North and we weren’t accepted that easily in the States, Keithley wrote in a short essay displayed at the Punk Rock Museum in Las Vegas. I think the Canadian bands went out on tour with a bit of a chip on their shoulders.

In the early ’90s, a new crop of bands from Southern California turned punk rock into a widespread commercial success. One by one, yet seemingly all at once, they signed major-label deals, recorded hit songs, and sold millions of records, transforming a mostly underground scene into a full-blown mainstream movement. The Sex Pistols and the Clash had managed to climb the charts in the U.K. in the late ’70s, but this was different; when Nirvana emerged from the Seattle punk scene to become world-conquering superstars as 1991’s Nevermind sold more than five million records in two years, they blew the door open for other underground bands to step through. Green Day’s Dookie soon followed in 1994, along with the Offspring’s Smash, and then Blink-182’s Enema of the State in 1999. Between them, an abundance of other successful and influential punk-rock records—NOFX’s Punk in Drublic, Rancid’s … And Out Come the Wolves, Bad Religion’s Stranger Than Fiction, and many more—each sold hundreds of thousands of copies and shaped the counterculture of the ’90s and beyond.

For the first twenty-five years of punk rock’s history, the bands that rose to international fame emerged from the places you’d expect: New York City, London, Los Angeles, and a few other parts of California—highly populated cities that served as major hubs of music, arts, and culture in the global superpowers of the United States and the United Kingdom. Meanwhile, the influential acts that were breaking new ground and stirring up trouble in places like Toronto and Vancouver were relegated to mythical cult status among diehard punk rockers, far from the notoriety that had been achieved by punk rock’s big breakthroughs. Only the real-deal punks know Teenage Head or D.O.A., but even your parents know Green Day.

But at the turn of the century, something unexpected happened: a bunch of Canadian teenagers started their own punk bands in the garages and basements of their small-town and suburban homes and managed to break through the barriers of their domestic music industry to become the face of their generation’s own counterculture.

These bands were coming from small, sleepy suburbs and unassuming towns in Canada that most Americans couldn’t even begin to place on a map—places where the suits and ties at the big record labels hadn’t thought to send their talent scouts. Within just a few years, these artists went from playing sparsely attended gigs in basements, community halls, and mom-and-pop restaurants to performing for millions of TV viewers at the mtv Video Music Awards, the Grammy Awards, and Saturday Night Live, and to thousands of rabid fans at the main stages of some of the world’s biggest music festivals. And twenty years later, they’d be embraced by a new generation of kids who weren’t even alive when all of this was happening.

This is the story of the Canadian punks who defied the odds to become the world-conquering icons they never dreamed they could be.

1 D.O.A. released their third album, 1985’s Let’s Wreck the Party, on Dead Kennedys’ label Alternative Tentacles.

1

Gob

Seventeen seconds into the music video for Gob’s I Hear You Calling, a sickly grey arm breaks forth from a grass-covered pitch to grab the ankle of the band’s lead singer, Tom Thacker. He’s frantically freed by his bandmates, and they watch in shock as a zombie and several of its comrades emerge from the ground, complete with mottled skin and soccer jerseys. What unfolds isn’t just a supernatural soccer match between the foursome and their undead adversaries, but a breakthrough moment for the Vancouver punk band.

It’s the fall of 2000, when many millennial kids are stepping off the school bus every day and running home to play Pokémon and watch mtv—or, in Canada, MuchMusic. Kids these days are mostly listening to boy bands, girl groups, pop stars, and rappers, but punk rock is becoming increasingly popular, having moved beyond the skaters and snowboarders, pranksters and burnouts, and other misfits that kept the torch burning in the ’90s.

Gob are four of those misfits, and they’ve been having a pretty good time over the past seven years touring around North America, writing and performing fun and irreverent punk tunes, and pushing video after video onto Canadian TV to become their country’s first real answer to Green Day and the California punk scene they idolize. But it hasn’t been easy. Beneath the Hollywood-size concept of their music video’s thrilling soccer match between humans and the undead are four guys from the Vancouver suburbs who have spent their career toughing it out in an era of punk rock that wasn’t quite ready for them.

Now, they’re being rewarded for it. After living it up in the subcultural trenches, the stage is set and the world is primed for a punk band like theirs to make it big. These days, the music industry is more willing to lend a hand. Their older videos were made with minimal costs, but I Hear You Calling was made with a six-figure budget, which included costumes, choreography, and a host of actors playing zombie soccer players and zombie cheerleaders. It all looks pretty professional. And within the next couple of years, I Hear You Calling will be among a handful of songs by Canadian punk bands to be heard through the speakers of hi-fi systems, boomboxes, clock radios, and family minivans across the country.

Now, all they have left to do is make the leap from the Canadian underground to the international stage. When Gob started in the early ’90s, that felt as likely as raising the dead.

***

High school buddies Tom Thacker and Theo Goutzinakis grew up together in Langley, British Columbia, a small city on the other side of the Fraser River from Vancouver with a population, at the time, of just under twenty thousand. After they graduated high school, Thacker and Goutzinakis decided to stick around town instead of going to university, where they could work dead-end jobs, ride their BMX bikes, and make music together. Thacker and Goutzinakis looked like punks (especially Thacker, with his six-inch spiked mohawk dyed a deep blue), they listened to punk bands, they went to punk shows, and they admired their local punk legends. Naturally, they wanted to start their own punk band. But they weren’t interested in pursuing the hardcore punk sound that dominated Vancouver throughout the ’80s thanks to local legends D.O.A. They were more into a new strain of poppier, Ramones-influenced punk rock being released by bands on Lookout! Records, an independent label in Berkeley, California.

Lookout had been born out of a Berkeley venue known as 924 Gilman Street. It was the closest thing the West Coast had to CBGB, and it helped birth a new wave of bands that, coincidentally, were more inspired by the melodic stylings of that original New York scene than the West Coast–led hardcore style that followed. Bands on the label’s early roster, namely Green Day, Operation Ivy, Rancid, and Screeching Weasel, had begun influencing a new generation of punks, and even teetered on the cusp of mainstream viability, which Green Day would achieve with their 1994 album, Dookie.²

Further Listening

Propagandhi

Hometown: Portage la Prairie, Manitoba

Years active: 1986–present

After playing a show with NOFX in 1992, punk trio Propagandhi impressed Fat Mike so much that he signed them to his label, Fat Wreck Chords, on the spot. Their 1993 debut album How to Clean Everything sounded like standard ’90s pop-punk, but for their 1996 follow-up, Less Talk, More Rock, Propagandhi displayed a political vehemence more in line with their ’70s and ’80s forebears than their ’90s scenemates, proudly emblazoning the album cover with a declaration that they were animal-friendly, anti-fascist, gay-positive, pro-feminist. (After this album, bassist John K. Samson left to form indie rock band the Weakerthans.) Propagandhi was seen as so radical that their song lyrics and vocalist Chris Hannah’s onstage speeches put a target on their heads even at their own shows, and they were often subject to verbal and physical threats. The band has continued to move forward on their own terms, running their own record label—G7 Welcoming Committee Records—from 1997 to 2012, and moving musically into a heavier, more metal-influenced sound starting with 2001’s Today’s Empires, Tomorrow’s Ashes.

But that hadn’t hit Vancouver yet. When Thacker and Goutzinakis started their new Lookout-inspired project in late 1993, it was so out of step with the local scene that they struggled to find a drummer, even after putting an ad in the local alt-weekly, the Georgia Straight. People would call up and be like, ‘Yeah, I love punk rock.’ It’s like, ‘Great, what do you listen to?’ They’re like, ‘Nazareth.’ I mean, Nazareth’s great, but it’s not going to work, says Thacker. We had an idea of what we wanted to do. It was going to take a specific personality—someone with a high tolerance for playing as fast and as hard as they could. That person was Patrick Paszana, known as Wolfman Pat, a slightly older guy with long hair and a dark beard who was already a veteran of the local music scene. Along with bassist Kelly Macauley, who worked with Thacker at the A&B Sound electronics store in nearby Surrey, the quartet set out to introduce Vancouver to the Lookout school of punk rock. Wanting to separate themselves from the bands in their scene who they thought were taking themselves too seriously, they gave themselves a short, unserious name: Gob.*

As Vancouver’s lone ambassadors for this poppier new punk style, Gob initially struggled to connect with local audiences and developed an irreverent attitude. "The fans didn’t really accept bands like us. It was a little too different. If we sounded exactly like D.O.A. or Bad Brains or something, yeah, but we set out to sound like something newer, says Thacker. Not many people had dyed hair or punk clothing. We really stood out everywhere we went, so we’d push people’s buttons in a friendly way. We never meant any harm. We weren’t fighters or anything like that. We kind of avoided that scene—that was the old punk scene. We just liked to fuck with people."

Shortly after forming, Gob piled into Ridge Recordings studio in Maple Ridge, just north of Langley, and recorded their self-titled debut EP, cramming nine songs into just fourteen minutes. They first released the EP in 1994 on Thacker’s one-man label Positive Records, and it was reissued a few months later on Landspeed Records, an imprint started by music scene friend Jay Clark. They brought in Jamie Fawkes as the band’s new bassist and followed that EP with two seven-inch records in 1995: the first was a four-track effort called Dildozer, with record packaging that included a cartoon of the titular vehicle looking exactly like you’d think it would, along with crass wordplay and ass-related humour. The second, another four-song collection titled Green Beans and Almonds, showed off the group’s humour with more restraint—the cover art was a parody of the mascot for the frozen food company Green Giant, and two of the songs were called I Don’t Want You Back Baby and I Want You Back Baby.

While Gob was a novelty in Vancouver, their first few releases were very clearly cut from the same cloth as the American bands signed to Lookout. That meant their sound was perfectly viable and marketable south of the border, but it also meant that they faced stiff competition. That reality set in on their first tour of California, when they finally got to check out the region’s storied punk-rock scene for themselves. "It became clear to us just by reading the population on the Road Atlas: there’s more people in California than there are in Canada, says Thacker. So, when we got down there, we saw how many bands there were and how good those bands were. Like, ‘I don’t know if we could ever make a dent here.’"

Of course, that didn’t mean they weren’t going to try.

A band with a strong work ethic to counterbalance their mischievous, goofball personalities, Gob were staunch proponents of the punk DIY philosophy—do it yourself—and, well, insisted on doing everything themselves. We weren’t gonna wait around and try to get a record contract, says Thacker. We’re gonna do everything ourselves: the recording, contacting the CD pressing plant, the cassette plant, the record plant. We did every single thing; we were just going to do it.

Like any good DIY band, Gob sent their music to campus radio stations and a few record labels. They were soon contacted by Vancouver music scenester Grant Lawrence who, along with singing in garage rock band the Smugglers and booking concerts around town, was working as a publicist, booking agent, and A&R rep for a fresh local label called Mint Records. Lawrence was a fan of Lookout! Records, particularly bands like the Queers and Screeching Weasel, and a friend had told him about this wild crew from Langley and sent him one of the band’s demos. The Mint staff began listening to it on repeat.

It was very raw, and it was not that well formed, but you could hear both Tom and Theo’s ability to write a catchy song, Lawrence says. Rancid were like the Clash reborn, and Green Day were like the Jam reborn, so I felt that Gob could be a Canadian answer to those American bands. That’s what labels were starting to look for at the time.

Mint offered Gob a one-album contract, gave them some money, and hoped for the best.

Presented with the opportunity to record their debut album, Gob took their fast-and-furious punk approach to the next level, tracking twenty songs that clocked in at just over half an hour. The resulting album was an explosion of suburban alienation and sexual frustration that included an interlude composed of a kazoo melody and a bunch of fart noises, and as a tribute to Lawrence, a cover of the Smugglers’ song Hey Stephanie to close out the album. When Thacker and Goutzinakis went into the Mint office to pitch their vision for the album cover—a photograph of a total loser-type guy sprawled out on the ground after wiping out on his bike—they had one person in mind: Lawrence, who dutifully sprawled on the asphalt outside of the Vancouver Film School in blue coveralls while a pair of students stood nonchalantly behind him.³ Gob called the album Too Late … No Friends, a playground saying they’d use to taunt each other.

Gob had no real expectations that their debut album of minute-long punk jams would change their lives in any tangible way. And yet it did.

***

By the time Mint was ready to release Too Late … No Friends in the summer of 1995, Gob had amassed a small but dedicated base of supporters, with fans, allies in similarly minded local band d.b.s., and steady label support. But Mint felt that there was one promotional tactic that the band still needed to help them break out: a music video.*

In the mid-’90s, music videos were a vital way for new artists to find an audience. mtv had revolutionized the way young Americans listened to music in 1981, followed by MuchMusic in Canada three years later, featuring a similarly styled lineup of original, music-centric programming.⁴ Just like its American counterpart, MuchMusic filled the all-important need of creating a place where new artists could find their audiences, whether through more general programs like The NewMusic and Videoflow, genre-specific shows like RapCity (hip-hop), Electric Circus (dance), Power 30 (hard rock), and The Wedge (indie rock), or regional programs like Much East and Much West that fought against the Canadian music industry’s bias toward Ontario, not coincidentally the station’s home province.

Canadian artists were also given a leg up due to laws that mandated broadcasters to air a certain percentage of Canadian content—material created in Canada or by Canadians, also known as Cancon. Plus, Lawrence was privy to a MuchMusic loophole that could give an edge to bands like Gob: the shorter the song, the more likely it was to get played at the end of the hour, between programs. It’s not exactly an endorsement of your art, Lawrence concedes, but it was a strategy that had worked for the Smugglers’ single Vancouver BC a few years earlier. The only downside: the songs couldn’t contain any swearing, and Gob, as Lawrence puts it, swore so fucking much—irony intended.

further listening

d.b.s.

Hometown: North Vancouver, British Columbia

Years active: 1992–2001

Many pop-punk bands built their brands on acting like children, but d.b.s. didn’t have to play such games: they formed the band when they were in Grade 8 and released their debut album Tales from the Crib when they were still in high school. Tales from the Crib straddles the line between new-school irreverence and old-school aggression—among its twenty-one tracks are speedy takedowns of racism and the education system and a hilarious sendup of the Canadian national identity that features one of the best-timed burps in recorded history. The scene agreed: Gob took the teens on a California tour in 1995, D.O.A. took them on a six-week tour of Europe, and Joey Shithead released d.b.s.’s I Is for Insignificant on his label Sudden Death Records in 1998. The band broke up in 2001 and moved on to other artistic pursuits. Vocalist Jesse Gander went on to be a recording engineer for hundreds of artists including Japandroids, the Pack A.D., and Misery Signals, while guitarist, Andy Dixon became an acclaimed painter.

Mint asked Gob to make a music video to promote Too Late … No Friends, and the band went to the office to meet with the label with every intention of laughing off the suggestion. They thought music videos were stupid. But on the way to the meeting, the band came up with a better idea: If we build a ramp, we can go lake jumping, and then we can make a video of that. The label will like it because it’s cool, and we will get to go lake jumping. It’ll be fucking awesome.

Buried halfway through Too Late … No Friends was Soda, ninety-five seconds of thrashing guitars, Thacker’s sneering vocals—miraculously free of swearing—and a simple chorus about wanting to jump in a lake on a sunny summer day. It would be the perfect soundtrack to a video of dudes biking off a ramp into Cultus Lake in the Fraser Valley. Mint loved the concept and gave the band roughly $1,400 to make the video.

Gob left the meeting thinking they had totally pulled one over on their label. Mint knew they had a hit on their hands, and it barely cost them anything.

The Soda video was filmed by Goutzinakis’s cousin, Peter Papas, and mostly features the band and their friends riding their BMX bikes around the streets of Langley, at a skatepark, and, as promised, off a giant ramp into the water. The most incredibly dangerous part, according to Thacker, wasn’t flying off the ramp, but lip-syncing into the camera while biking. We’re on the street in Langley, someone’s driving the van, Peter’s filming, we’re looking forward once in a while because a car could come out at any time and hit us. While filming the opening scene, one of their friends got a concussion attempting a 360 tabletop.

The video was supposed to end with a top-down shot of the bikers in the water, singing along, but Goutzinakis was the only person who showed up to the last day of shooting; Thacker had to work, and the other guys only showed