Vancouver after Dark by Aaron

Author:Aaron
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Published: 2020-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

Jayne County and the Electric Chairs at Gary Taylor’s Rock Room, June 19, 1980. Photo: Gordon McCaw

Review of a shambolic performance by Johnny Thunders at Gary Taylor’s Rock Room in 1981. Credit: Province Archives

The two performances by former New York Dolls guitarist Johnny Thunders, on May 5 and 6, 1981, also presented some crowd-control challenges. However, Thunders, who was nursing a severe addiction to heroin, was more out of control than the audience.

The venue was at capacity the first night. The band had arrived from Seattle, but Thunders had yet to show up. Border officials would not admit him to Canada. Taylor confesses he’d been reluctant to book the show because of Thunders’s reputation.

“I had to get on the phone and speak to the supervisor at the border,” Taylor says. “[I told him] that we had a sold-out show, that Canadian jobs depended on it, and that I’d personally be responsible for him—the whole works. We begged and eventually had to send somebody down to pick him up and drive him up from the Blaine border crossing.”

John Armstrong, whose band Los Popularos was the opening act that night, had caught the New York Dolls show at the Commodore Ballroom in 1974 and was excited to meet Thunders. But the encounter didn’t go quite as he’d hoped.

“We all knew he indulged heavily in dope,” Armstrong later wrote as a columnist for the Vancouver Sun. “But nobody was ready for this. He looked like death on a cracker. Picture a terminally-ill Al Pacino, circa Dog Day Afternoon, a black leather jacket with a red sticker that read Re-Order Narcotics, black jeans and boots, but the pièce de résistance of the ensemble was a pair of black mid-bicep gloves (sans fingers), to hide his track marks … Someone who saw Johnny take the gloves off backstage said it looked like rotten hamburger.”47

The Rock Room bouncers weren’t sure what to expect that night. They were unfamiliar with the slam dancing that came with a punk rock show like this. “[The crowd was] getting edgy, chanting for him to go on,” says Taylor. “With the bouncers on edge, I thought there might be a riot. I went downstairs and got on the mike and said, ‘Listen, you motherfuckers, you think you’re punks. I run this place, and I’m going to come down there and choke you, that’s what punk is to me. I’m going to kick your asses. Don’t fuck me around, because you will die.’”

Surprisingly, Taylor’s version of crowd control worked, and the audience backed off. Finally, Thunders and the band stepped out and started the show.

“Many of the crowd had come on this Tuesday night to hear a rock ‘n’ roll guitar hero, the former New York Doll turned celebrated waste case,” wrote Tom Harrison, panning the disaster of a show in his review in the Province.48 The show was full of stops and starts, with sound equipment issues. Thunders was shambolic and distracted.

“The sold-out house felt thoroughly burned,” recalls John Armstrong. “Consequently, almost nobody came to the second night.

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