WWW of Spin Turlock #33.3 Spin Picks the Hits!

Our guest columnist for this issue is well-known layabout, Spin Turlock. A raconteur, bon vivant, a Man of The World, if you will, Spin is perhaps best known for writing the insightful essay that graces the CD sleeve of Ted Hawkins, “Music For 2:47 A.M". (an excellent collection, by the way, of jay-uzz n' blooze interpretations, available whenever Ted plays out in public). He's also been linked to the Canadian micro-indie recording act, The Kewpies, but he has never publicly admitted this.
"That would be tantamount to admitting you wallow in your own vomit," quips the Spin-ster, and really, who could blame him?

The rest of the column is his story...

Reviews
People like reviews, because they are essentially opinions, which form the basis of a good argument. They can be educated, heartfelt, stirring or - more often than not - rewritten press releases passing for news copy, but they are still opinions. No more and no less.
My drinking buddy Glen Nott, a sport section writher and lay-out jockey @ The Hamilton Speculator, used to tell me: "make 'em mad, sad, or glad, kid." He told me this years ago, when I was a freelance advertorial writer there, writing descriptive copy for ladies undergarment ads. That was before the lightbulb turned on, and I realized a) there was more money to be made out in Beaverlodge, Alberta and b) "kid???!!"...he's younger than me fer chrissakes!
I digress..


We're going to review Don Pyle's "Trouble In The Camera Club" It's a book, a physical book, one with 297 printed pages that came into my possession. I don't know how that translates to Kindle-bytes, but hopefully people of all ages can appreciate the time I took to read this coffee-table sized tome.

If you're thinking of doing something similar in the future, may I offer some advice? First of all, pick a title with lots of pictures. It helps buffer all that print, which can get claustrophobic. As the title implies, there are many photos to be had here. Second of all, pick a topic that people have an interest in, but very little actual first-hand experi

ence with. The Toronto punk scene of 77/78 qualifies for that in spades. The number of that scene's participants could fit quite comfortably into a modest Latvian social Club- and only then if you counted the imports from Hamilton/London/et al.
Thing is, there's a rose-coloured mystique about that era and milieu – ‘scuse my French - that young people seem to enjoy reading - and writing - about.

Look at Liz Worth, for example. A seemingly bright, young person who has made a name for herself writing about the long-ago and far away exploits of middle-aged folk with saggy butts and expanding waistlines.
Thing is, she correctly sensed “Punk” was the source, the ground Zero of her generation's current DIY MO. It started there, and others built on it, albeit to the point where the current edifice bears little resemblance to the original foundation. That’s the way it goes

Pyle - who I think I may have met once or twice on the carny circuit - goes further with this book, though. He is perhaps best known as the drummist of the Toranna instrumental trio, Shadowy Men On A Shadowy Planet. As it turns out, he was also one of those few people who both actively participated AND documented his activities with sometimes grainy, sometimes blurred, but always accurate photographs of such Punk rock pioneers as the Ramones, Iggy Pop, The Viletones & Teenage Head.

The photos do the talking here, the first-person commentary provides the context, and there are some good stories told here. To use an example: if one ever wanted to know how punk rock "works" in a media vacuum, read how Freddie Pompeii of the Viletones initiated the sequence of events that led to the formation of Crash Kills Five which begat the Shadowy guys, and so on and so on and they told two friends. There's also personal slant offered up here: tales of cheap vinyl finds & hard contact lens use, both of which I can, like, relate to.
Full disclosure: Pyle is my age, separated by only one year. Whereas he was able to public transit it to gigs in Toranna, I could only wing it in Wingham some 200 klics away, or read about the thing second hand in the pages of the Toronto Star.( And lemme tell you, you got looks when you bought Ramones or Sex Pistols vinyl in a small-town furniture store "back in the day"...)
I'm digressing again.
The point I'm making here is the combo of words and pictures in the book brings it all home, even to young people. With any luck, they should walk away with a tangible sense of what those old farts actually accomplished & experienced before they started sagging - and staggering - toward Sheol.

Fug me, this is depressing. Let’s talk about living. I got this cassette tape (the cheap-o medium of the 20th century – ask your parents) in the mail from a Brantford, ON. outfit called Plant Magic, the bandonym of one Katie Iarocci.
She sings and plays an assortment of instruments seemingly selected, I swear, by the Ghost of Lewis Brian Hopkins Jones. We have harpsichords, sitars, and other period effects galore here (although I don’t think Jones ever got around to jamming on the bul bul taraang), that period being roughly defined as somewhere between the buttons of Baroque Stones and early progressive rock. That kind of thinking eventually led to the stylistic impasse the people described in Pyle’s book worked against, but here, in its most guile-less flowering, it works as an out-of-time, almost otherworldly, artefact. Part of the levitation effect comes from the neo-communal bliss invoked in the songs and part of it comes from the tea-cozy, homemade sound quality of the recordings.
And speaking of tea cozies, a word about the cassette packaging. The recording comes in a wee flour sack, much like the copy of King Biscuit Boy’s “Good Uns” LP. Since I don’t currently own a cassette playback machine, I resorted to downloading the MP3s. I guess I’m just a modern guy..
Plant Magic share a split release with Eiyn Sof, the bandonym of Melissa Boraski. ES has its own strange quirk-ness and charm: low-tech pop/rock with lyrics about The Big Hurt. Enjoyable, but I prefer the Magic side. Perhaps the suggestion of that great escape to the commune in Paris…Ontario is what’s working here. It’s just my opinion, man, but I would buy it. Straight from the source..

Well, that’s more than 1000 words, not counting the overlong intro by the editor, who owes me a bottle of Forty Creek’s finest.

WWW of Spin Turlock #27: Imants Krumins: Last Car from Union Station

To people who hear music in the background, as opposed to the foreground, the name Imants Krumins won't mean a lot.

To the rest of us, Imants who passed away Thursday morning, June 9, 2011, was the consummate fan, the interstitial glue that bound us together, and someone I counted as a friend for more than 30 years.
He was also a walking paradox: a banker by day and a raving punk rock/ wrestling fan at night, defying any & all conventions on the right, left, & outside centre. A Sun TV commentator wouldn't be able to reconcile his on-going support of the arts (especially punk rock!) with his position, and neither could a Rabble writer. Both would be reduced to apoplectic fits in his presence.

His lifestyle of living at home with his parents while amassing enormous quantities of LPs, cassettes, CDs, and MP3s might have made him an easy target for criticism and condescending remarks. The next two statements ,however, should pop that cliché balloon to Kingdom Come:

1) Extended family units USED to be the norm before the competing ideologies ruined it on BOTH sides of left/right equation. Actually , it's YOU who are the sick being. And anyway, it's none of your business, so sod off.

WHOA, did I just channel his spirit? Imants had a way with words that was feisty, succinct and in Technicolour. You could take any number of Krumins catchphrases , string them together and come up with responses to any and all situations. And at this point, I'd like to blow the whistle on Gary "Pig" Gold for doing precisely that. Specifically, in the column "Imants on Romance" in his funzine, The Pig Paper. Imants would have the last laugh, though, by actually responding in kay-fab - to use wrasslin' ring parlance - to his own column.

He made me - and a whole lot of other people laugh heartily - which brings us to the next point:

2) Collecting/appreciating music doesn't necessarily indicate a retreat from normal human contact. The makers of the documentary, Vinyl, seemed to play up this stereotype in the film (not intentionally..see comments...)but said stereotype didn't - and doesn't - stick: the memorable shot is one of Krumins pulling out one of the more ahem, graphic pieces of the collection, to the presumed disapproval of tut-tutters everywhere.
"Rare"!

Yes, Imants made record collecting, enjoying live shows (a complete tour diary would fill a book...) and pro wrestling appreciation a social experience without subordinating his ah, ah, aesthetic to fashionistic social pandering.

He was born in Ol' Blighty on April 6th, 1952 to Latvian parents displaced by the Ribbentrop pact fall-out of World War II, moved to Canada in the late sixtease, and studied at McMaster University in the early seventease. We know this, because he retained an outrageous accent, knew every other Latvian person in the Hamilton , Ontario region, and his 50th birthday party was held at the Corktown Tavern in April 2002. That was an amazing gathering of the clans, but I digress...

We also know people who went to McMaster during his time there, people like Doug Foley of the Hamilton Spectator, who recalled that Imants "was one of the first people who was into Pink Floyd at the time". Presumably, the Syd Barrett version of the group...
He did a radio show at McMaster radio during those years, when said station was essentially two cans and a piece of string, in the basement of Wentworth House. I would say those shows were legendary, except all the stuff really DID happen: the pitchers of beer passed from the neighbouring pub, the death threats from pissed jocks upset with his decision to play a complete Captain Beefheart retrospective, and so on.

True fact: Imants was not always into vinyl. At one point, he was convinced cassette tapes were the wave of the future, After several of those unravelled on him, however, he became a believer in getting "hard" copies of material and the rest is history, as they say.

Mass produced items gave way to small, independently-produced issues sometime in the mid-70's with a few major exceptions (Ramones, ABBA). Trace the mailing lists of the early Do-It-Yourselfers and you will find Imants' name there, usually - and sagely -buying records in duplicate/triplicate, showing up (and paying for) gigs, & getting other people to show up, even if it meant wedging 12 of them in his sedan delivery service.

That doesn't sound like a lot: he was basically a pro-level aesthete who didn't "get" or give industry backwash. Multiply that effort over 35 + years, spread it over five, possibly six, continents (if you accept the party line about Gwar being from Antarctica..) and you're talking about one helluva community. Even if we limit our scope, to say, oh a relative cultural backwater like Hamilton, Ontario, Canada . the range of lives touched runs from the earliest days of Simply Saucer, thru Teenage Head's formative years, thru the Problem Children, thru the Dik Van Dykes, Wet Spots, and on down to the moderne day.

The common , unifying thread throughout the whole shebang was Imants. and now that thread is cut, and the world is a lot darker place. We have the Internet , with Facebook and Twitter to keep us together now, but I believe it was Gary Pig who said - and only half jokingly - that Imants WAS the internet back in the day. You can't put your arm around a memory and you can't share a pint with a laptop . Well. you can, but it's a pretty pathetic state of affairs when people do so in public.


All my memories of Imants are centred around the shows: the big ones like the annual Ramone treks; the Australian ABBA cover bands, any number of Shows presented by the Garys.  My best memories, however, stem from the treks into terra incognita: the Lazy Cowgirls (original line-up) in Buffalo (where we accounted for a good 10% of the audience along w/the ex Mrs Greg Shaw), the 'ardcore new year's eve bash outside of Nowhere (aka Welland) circa 1982 and ESPECIALLY those CFMU-FM radio shows where it was apparent there couldn't have been more than two listeners rubbed together...especially after that Nurse With Wound superset. But again, and aye there's the triumph: multiply that effort over 35 years and hundreds of people , and I can tell you Imants Krumins made a difference to a lot of people.

During the last ten years of life, Imants took to the Internet like a fish to H2O, building an impressive list of contacts, from the past and present alike. As other writers have noted, his impact transcends generational boundaries. At one point, some of us tried to draft him as a Hamilton Mayoralty candidate. He declined, and it's our loss; we could have had both good financial management AND a healthy arts community.

He was, and is, a true original, one of the architects of punk rock, and the likes of which we will never, ever see again. And I will miss him very, very much. "Cheers"

NOTE: There will be a memorial concert in Hamilton, July 8th . a fundraiser for the Brain Tumour Foundation of Canada. Attendance is mandatory if you're in a 3000 km radius and have a pulse. Details, later, GEEK!