Lithium Magazine

Pictured: Art Bergmann & Susanne Tabata

Conducted on Friday, September 2nd, 2011

Interview by Mike Bax

When I was asked if I would consider checking out a documentary on the Vancouver punk scene from 1978 to 1983, my immediate answer was, “Yes, I’d love to”. Even though I started listening to this music in 1984, a year after the Vancouver scene fell apart in the eyes of the artists involved, bands like D.O.A. and The Subhumans ranked as highly with me as their US compatriots, Black Flag, The Dead Kennedys, The Circle Jerks, and The Bad Brains. Getting to a see a documentary on the early days of these bands featuring new interviews with Jello Biafra and Henry Rollins, discussing the Vancouver scene, was something of great interest to me.

After watching the feature (which has been edited a few times for integration into television slots and to run as a feature film documentary) I was impressed with the interview and archival footage, as well as the overall narrative that ran through the film. The story told in Bloodied But Unbowed isn’t always a pretty one, but it’s engaging from beginning to end. Interview footage of Gerry Hannah (The Subhumans) and Art Bergmann (The K-Tels, Young Canadians) is particularly interesting, and ranks with the finer footage in the film.

With a scheduled DVD release on the horizon, fans all over the world should be able to purchase this film and watch it in the comfort of their living rooms, but a firm release date has not yet been set. Bloodied But Unbowed is still showing is select cities (a gala showing is set for Pop Montreal on September 22nd at Blue Sunshine) and the creators sound like they would love to take the film abroad and showcase the film in some foreign countries before it goes worldwide on DVD.

Bloodied But Unbowed director Susanne Tabata took a sizeable chunk out of her pre-holiday weekend to talk with me about the film and her efforts in putting it together.

http://www.thepunkmovie.com

Mike: First off, I really want to thank you for making this film. I really enjoyed it.

Susanne: Did you like it, really?

Mike: Very much so, yes.

Susanne: What’s your connection to this history of that kind of music in Canada?

Mike: Well, I got into that genre of music in 1984, which according to your movie, is after the bottom fell out of the scene.

Susanne: In Vancouver, that is. Yeah.

Mike: I’m more or less from the Toronto area; most of the cool punk shows I got to see were in Toronto, and my age (44) puts me at just a few years too young to have really thrived in what were the seminal years of punk rock in North America. But the bands I got to see back there were bands like The Subhumans and Black Flag and D.O.A. What’s interesting to me is that back then, I didn’t know D.O.A. and The Subhumans were even Canadian.

Susanne: Wow, that’s interesting. In the film, I’m very specific to say that Bloodied But Unbowed is specific to that particular scene in Vancouver, and it is not meant to suggest that music never happened after that scene ended. That is just a different chapter and a different story in Canadian music. It resuscitated itself and a new scene started shortly after 1983, but so far as the first wave of Vancouver punk if you’d like to call it that, (we tended to call it the independent music scene out here as it was happening) it paved the way for the independent music scene in Vancouver, out of which sprung Nettwerk Records and Terry McBride. It’s a chapter that I don’t talk about in my film at all, but Terry McBride and all the Nettwerk guys were all around through that scene. They were involved in DJing at the local gay bar called The Love Affair which was like THE hip place to experience all of the cool music coming in from all over the world back then. It all got played at The Love Affair. These guys were the DJs that were sourcing music coming from around the world and playing for Vancouver fans at The Love Affair. Mark Jowett and Terry McBride, and some of the original people who started Nettwerk Records – Terry, in particular, was sort of born out of that particular music scene.

Mike: That was when I got into a lot of the music that shaped me as a music fan - Skinny Puppy and the Severed Heads, Sarah Mclachlan as well; early Nettwerk stuff. But primarily, Skinny Puppy is a band I still love today. I don’t know what to call them, exactly… electronic music, I guess. Or industrial music, although most bands hate that label.

Susanne: Yes, it’s fair to say Skinny Puppy was electronic music. The Skinny Puppy story is another great one in and of itself. That’s a whole other narrative, so when I talk about this film and this particular scene, which I was a part of, I do talk about it as a chapter of music history. I’m pretty widely supported by the people in the film with that particular storyline.

Mike: When did you know you wanted to make this film, Susanne?

Susanne: In 2006. I’d done a couple of documentaries at that point as a producer / director; a film on Canadian surfing subculture called 49Degrees and another film on women’s professional skateboarding called SkateGirl, for a US TV Station called FoxFUEL. I was sort of coming out of that film and I was looking through my scrapbook of things that I had done throughout my life and I saw these really interesting pictures and scrapbook collections of the music scene in Vancouver. I pretty much started the idea right there. I was involved in a cable television show here called Night Dreams and we used to have these bands on TV.  I got back in touch with some of the guys I’d done that TV show with and we were looking at some of the old videos. I was hooking up with John Armstrong as Buck Cherry was doing a show downtown and the Pointed Sticks were doing a show downtown around that time as well.

At the beginning of 2007, there was a real sort of resurgence of old punk bands playing gigs again. It seemed to happen everywhere, really. I think it might have happened through this whole movement on the internet through social media, which is a throwback to the whole do-it-yourself attitude that fueled the scene back then, in the first place. These nostalgia shows were showing up everywhere, and I kind of got lucky and tapped into that at the right time. I was fortunate to have really great people working with me along with experience producing television to help me get through the financing part of making this film. There wasn’t a lot of money available for the making of this film, by the way.

Mike: Interesting. You can’t really tell, Susanne. I watched the Bloodied But Unbowed screener online, so I didn’t get to see the film in a theatre environment, larger than life. But, the feeling I got watching the screener online was that there was attention to detail and quality throughout the film. Some of the old television feeds are a bit dated; the archival footage and whatnot, but overall it looks well put together.

Susanne: The version you saw has Jello (Biafra) in it, right?

Mike: Yes.

Susanne: I must tell you that there is a fifty-five minute version of this film edited together for a television show funded by the Canadian Television Industry that is twenty minutes shorter than the version you watched. That version just flies by. That’s the one that was pre-sold or pre-licensed to three television stations in Canada and it’s already aired on all three of them. But the one you saw that will be screening in Montreal is basically a fresher version. This version will eventually be seen on Super Channel as well.

Mike: Are you thinking ahead to putting this out as some form of packaged media, like a DVD or Blu-ray release?

Susanne: Exactly, yes. We are working up a DVD, that’s ready to go. It’s got nine hours of material on it…

(Laughter)

It has the extended version of the show, lots of out-takes, some extended performances of songs included in the film and three other documentaries that have been made by other people associated to this era of music. It’s really funny, we put this together and it cost so much to produce that we might keep it a real collectors’ edition and put it out as a numbered collectors’ edition. It has Bloodied But Unbowed extended version, it has Tunnel Canary included on it, which is a documentary on the noise pop band by Eric Lupe, there’s a documentary on Gerry Hannah from the Subhumans called Useless, and that’s all about his activities in music and political actions. There’s another documentary included about a guy in 1978 who just goes to a Subhumans show, and it’s a total underground film included in this package, as well. So we do plan on putting this out on DVD and we will like do a single and a DVD package, available through our website, hopefully. We do not have a defined deal just yet for the DVD, and if that happens, it may change the release of the DVD, depending on the company we end up working with.

Mike: Ok, cool.

Susanne: These days, it seems like you have to be prepared to just slog things out. DIY seems to be the way anything gets done. There’s just so much media and information floating around out there on the web. We are looking forward to our screening in Montreal of course…

Mike: That’s going to be cool. I’m glad you’ll be there.

Susanne: It’s going to be fun. We’d like to get some interesting screenings on the Eastern Seaboard. We haven’t done one in L.A. yet either. We’d like to do more Screenings in the States, and also Europe would be awesome.

Mike: I’m pretty close to this genre of music. Much of my youth was spent listening to this style of hardcore punk. From my standpoint, to see this film and see people I STILL care about like Jello Biafra and Henry Rollins talking openly about Vancouver Punk – that’s just a win-win for me. Rollins and Biafra are very articulate and passionate talkers. I think the film would play well in any region because I think that punk rock touched the world in the late seventies and early eighties. I would imagine there would be a lot of people all over the globe interested in seeing footage like this.

Susanne: It’s interesting; I was talking to this girl at a Montreal radio station earlier today and I was saying to her about the connection between this film and what’s going on today with music and pop culture. This film is very much about a movement that did it itself. What resonates with an audience into today’s music and pop culture is that so much of music and the creative process making music right now has gone back into the hands of the artist. Not that this is equating to being able to make a decent living… that part of it is a whole other thing. But right now, people are making their own music, creating their own promotional devices, and doing their own gigs. I think that what happens when you see our story is that you see a story with a serious level of authenticity about a time and a place where there was nothing BUT doing it all yourself. For a twenty-something year-old looking at a bunch of fifty something year-olds on screen harkening back to the trail blazing days of making punk rock music, I think it might be inspiring. It could ALSO be a big turn off… I don’t know. Maybe these guys are too old to be inspiring today’s youth, but so far the audiences I’ve had the privilege to screen with: if there’s a musician or an artist who is creating right now, they have been saying that they took inspiration from the film. That’s the sort of feedback we’ve been getting, and this is early days for us right now. We really haven’t had a very wide exposure with this film yet.

Mike: I think kids will totally draw something from your film. I don’t think they’ll feel the artists are washed up because they’re older than they are. In this genre of music, if you’re playing what you’d deem independent music or hardcore punk rock, these new artists will go back to pioneers like the Dead Kennedys and D.O.A. and the Circle Jerks. All the stuff that was exploding back in the late seventies and early eighties is the stuff that musicians today try to emulate. Sure these guys are older now, but it doesn’t change the fact that they were once just as young as artists today, trying to make their music. All of these artists in your film helped to pioneer a genre a music that kids are STILL playing today.

What’s your favourite quote from the interviews that you gathered for your film, Susanne? Do you have one? I’m sure you have a bunch of them, but is there one that you can zoom in on?

Suzanne: Oh, “History is not written by the losers” by Art Bergmann. He went into the Kings and Emperors thing and finished off with, “Nobody ever talks about musicians. If you don’t make it, then you don’t count”. That’s gotta be one of my favourite quotes. That is the quote that I end the film with. I like Bill Scherk’s quote, “I was a fag, but I was THEIR fag”. That’s a great quote. Gerry Hannah was fabulous. He has a number of great quotes in the film.

Mike: I enjoyed him saying that he felt like he spent his youth trying to avoid the stereotypical jock types at school, and that he was seeing them showing up at Subhumans shows in the early eighties, and it depressed him.

(Susanne laughs)

Susanne: Yes. He said that suddenly punk was dominated by those kinds of people, and the irony is that in the early days of punk, around which the story is being crafted, this would be prior to the real explosion of American hardcore Southern California punk rock. David Spaner has a great quote that says punk had shifted from the British influence to the Southern California style of punk and that is the axis shift that also ends our story in the film. If you’ve seen American Hardcore, that really is a story about the early eighties. The irony, I guess, in Gerry’s comment is that we see what he was disgusted about in punk rock actually became the iconic symbols of punk later on, right? Beer, spit and aggression.

Yeah, I like Art Bergmann’s clip. I love the out-take clip of Gerry Hannah talking about the highway being a metaphor for how people treat each other – people looking to get ahead, cutting each other off and a general kind of a ‘fuck you’ mentality. I like that, but it was an out-take. I think that Bergmann clip is the one quote that I like the most, because when I went to make this film, you have to understand that there was a lot of resistance in terms of financial support for a Canadian story about quote unquote RELATIVE UNKNOWNS. I was told by one distributor that The Clash was not in my film.

(Laughter)

And I said, “OK, but Joe Strummer is dead. How can he be in my film?” Never mind that the film has nothing to do with The Clash in the first place. I think that when you look at models of entertainment, everybody just looks like audiences based on sales and residuals and so on. In that kind of a matrix, a story about Canadian punk, particularly punk on the West Coast in Vancouver – a film like that wouldn’t be something that would entice funding. I was told in the production phase of my film that this was an irrelevant storyline. I was told that this was a bunch of people who really haven’t influenced music in the same way as a Bob Dylan, the same way as many other iconic superstars.

Mike: Wow. These people haven’t watched the Anvil story then, have they? On paper, that Anvil film must have sounded like a belly flop, right?

Susanne: Oh, yeah. I love that film. That came out when I was still making this film, and that whole story is kind of based on being a loser or an underdog, right? The perception of not making it, right? It has high points as a piece of entertainment, because everybody wants to feel good about themselves as they watch this film. That is kind of what reality shows are all based upon. I thought the Anvil story was really great and I would have played to more of that in contemporizing the D.O.A. story, the problem was as I started making the film, it really became apparent that there were so many other important contributors to that era and the only way to serve my picture was to do it in short vignettes and stories. Bloodied But Unbowed is a series of short stories that all form together to make the feature.

Mike: I enjoyed that aspect of the film, as well. I could see all of these different tangents you could have gone off on, - and likely had raw footage to pursue if you wanted – as I watched the film. I imagine you have tones of footage, which is likely why the DVD will be so bloated with uncut footage.

Susanne: Is Lithium an online magazine?

Mike: Yes. I’m in my forties. I started the site off with my partner as a vehicle to pursue our interests in music. Like yourself, we don’t make a lot of dough doing this, we just really enjoy it.

Susanne. You know, you are our key target market groups for this film. Our analytics are showing your age as the majority of our viewership. Our audience skews male, with prominent interest in 35 to 45 year old males.

Mike: People who were living this music back in the day. That makes sense.

Susanne: It’s the generation of guys who were directly affected by the forefathers of this genre of music. That’s where our audience seems to thrive.

Mike: I saw Bloodied But Unbowed listed on the signature at the bottom of an email from a Toronto publicist, after I covered a show in Toronto she was involved with, and I asked what it was. That is the title of one of my favourite D.O.A. albums from the early eighties, and it piqued my interest. When I realized it was a film on a genre of music that meant so much to me back when I was a teenager, I got quickly interested in seeing the film and writing about it.

Susanne: Oh, wow! You know Bloodied But Unbowed was a working title for the film. It was never intended to be the title of the film. It’s a title taken from an idiom from the English language with a translation that suggests a tough journey but an unwillingness to surrender. The gist is ‘no surrender’. But it also is, of course, the title of a 1984 D.O.A. album. When I was scouring around for a working title, we all liked that title so we tagged the film with it as a working title. It stuck because it took so God damned long to put this thing together, that it aptly described the journey about making this film, so the title stuck and we didn’t change it. It was really meant to be a mechanism to describe this film, and I did have to describe that to the guys in the Subhumans, because I didn’t use a title of one of their albums, or a title of one of their songs, and as you know, the two hardcore bands that really came out of that scene were D.O.A. and The Subhumans.

Mike: Well, for me, it was the title that resonated with me. I have some affinity with that album from D.O.A.  If the title was Slave To My Dick: the Punk Rock Movie, I don’t think it would work as well for you as Bloodied But Unbowed does…

(Laughter)

Susanne: I love that song by the way. In a poll from people involved in the era, where we’d ask: "What are the top three songs from the Vancouver punk movement?” it’s ‘Fuck You’, which we used as the film’s anthem and was written by Gerry Hannah in 1978. It’s such a great song and anthem. ‘Slave To My Dick’ comes up all the time on that list as well, also written by Gerry Hannah the same year. ‘Hawaii’, an Art Bergmann & Ross Carpenter song performed by the Young Canadians, and ‘Disco Sucks’, the great D.O.A. single also from 1978. That was the first Canadian punk single that broke into the United States on any American radio. It actually broke on college radio in the San Francisco Bay area. It’s important to note, and I think it’s quite clearly illustrated in the film, that there was a strong relationship between Vancouver and San Francisco. There was a West coast relationship between bands that worked all the way up and down the coast. Just with Geography and the way things are laid out, our relationship was very tight with the US back then.

Mike: I think that came out in the film very well. Certainly, Jello Biafra talked about it extensively when he was being interviewed.

Susanne: Isn’t he great?

Mike: He is. I was a huge Dead Kennedys fan as a kid. I still am, really. I still play a lot of their material. He’s a very articulate speaker, and he seems so learned.

Susanne: He is such a great story teller.

Mike: I also love Henry Rollins - such a great talker, and so into the medium. Henry IS the consummate music fan. He just loves his music. I find him quite inspiring. It was so great to see him included in your film and talking so favourably about these Vancouver bands.

Susanne: We were lucky to get a lot of these guys for interviews.

Mike: Aside from Pop Montreal, are there other showings coming up, Susanne?

Suzanne: We are looking to get into Reel Madness in Toronto. There is an aspect of drug addiction in the film and that’s appealing to the festival organizers.

Mike: That’s true. The back half of the film does include some dealings with addiction.

Suzanne: I don’t want to say that my film is about drug addiction, but there’s an element in the film that certainly IS there. It would be such a misnomer to say its film about addiction though. It would take away from what is really in there in the Vancouver punk scene. I don’t think that’s what this movie is really about.

Mike: I don’t either. Ironically, one of my favourite quotes from your film is what you got out of Art Bergmann – him saying, “Now I'm clean and I don't write anymore” with that look off camera as he says it. That was soul crushing.

Susanne: Oh, that’s a fabulous quote.

Mike: I couldn’t believe that he said it, honestly.

Susanne: I’m just going to talk a bit about that scene. It’s one of my favourite pieces of the film. When I was researching the film, and you have to understand that I know Art – I know him from twenty to thirty years ago, so I hadn’t spoken to him in decades and I got his number, phoned him and said I was coming over to visit him. And I went with Randy Rampage to Alberta and took my camera, and he was saying I was just insane to be doing a film about this the whole time… and I said that I wanted to make it and that it would be good to do a little interview for the teaser for the film. And I’m not a very good technician - I can do producing and directing and writing but I’m not a camera person by any stretch of the imagination. I brought my camera and we walked out into the field and shot that footage and that piece of tape sat in the editing room edited and complete waiting for everything else to catch up to it for a year and a half before we finished the film.

And we tried to re-create it later using a different camera person who was really good and we never got close to the magic of that first cut that I filmed. It’s a wonderful little performance by Art on camera and every musician that watches this show – they just hang on that quote because it really talks about the whole aspect of writing and creating music. I’m not surprised that you liked that clip.

Mike: I don’t think you could re-film that interview, Susanne. I think you got that footage because you know him and the interview was likely just you and him and Randy. He was likely a bit more at ease with you than with a bigger crew trying to re-create it.

Susanne: I’m going to be doing a little university lecture about documentary film-making, and you as an interviewer will totally understand this: When you do a documentary film or interviewing, never underestimate the power of working by yourself with very minimal equipment when doing your interviews. You may very well get the best pieces for your film when you least expect it. More isn’t necessarily better. More people around is actually worse in a documentary setting. If you are trying to shoot a concert, then by all means, bring a big crew. But if you’re trying to get candid interviews, keep it minimal. I think less is definitely more.

Mike: I’d agree with that. I tend to do all of my interviews with a small hand recorder, and by trying to put whomever I’m talking to at ease as much as possible. Jamming a bunch of lights and cameras in front of an artist will do nothing to put them at ease.

*****

Susanne and I talked for a good forty minutes. The last fifteen minutes of our interview was largely back and fourth on pursing our respective interests in music and film without any kind of financial backing.

We traded a few stories on shows we’ve seen, and talked about the recent demise of Richards on Richards in Yaletown in Vancouver (I didn’t actually know that it was a disco / pick-up bar in the mid-eighties).

I could have talked with Susanne for ANOTHER forty minutes easily. She is passionate about her film and music in general, and I always find people like that very easy to talk to.

Spend a little time on www.thepunkmovie.com. You’ll find lots of information on Bloodied But Unbowed, the bands and creators that were/are involved with both the film and the music scene on the West Coast, along with some great photos, video footage, and articles relevent to the film.