Chapter 31

Ontario Place Forum

955 Lake Shore Boulevard West

"I remember going there," says Gordon Lewis, the lead guitarist for Teenage Head. "I took the subway. I was by myself. I had my guitar in my hand, and when I arrived I was kind of looking to find the dressing room or someplace. I was walking through the stands - this was about 4 o'clock - and there were people there. That's when I got a sense that something unusual was happening - people were there at 4 o'clock for an 8 o'clock show.

Lewis is talking about the concert of June 2, 1980, at the Ontario Place Forum, where fans rioted and turned Teenage Head into the most feared and most sought-after rock band in the country.

The group consisted of Gordon Lewis on lead guitar, Steve Marshall on bass, Nick Stipanitz on drums, and on vocals, Frank Kerr - better known as Frankie Venom, an exuberant, reckless, unpredictable performer who perfectly expressed the spirit of freedom-seeking and youth rebellion at the core of early rock and roll.

The attention was a long time coming. The members first met in the early 1970s at Westdale Secondary School, west of Toronto in Hamilton. They formed a garage band, rejecting disco and the overblown "progressive rock" popular at the time, to embrace a more stripped-down elemental form. They identified with Eddie Cochran's rudimentary guitar sounds and Gene Vincent's whooping vocal style. They listened to early Elvis, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, and some of the 1960s' precursors to punk rock such as Velvet Underground, MC5, and Iggy Pop and the Stooges. "We were listening to music everyone else was throwing away," drummer Stipanitz once said.

In 1975, punk rock's immediate progenitors, the New York Dolls, came to Toronto. Lewis and Marshall went to see them at the Queensbury Arms, at Eglington Avenue and Weston Road. The Dolls proved a revelation. With their lipstick and fishnet stockings, and taste for the same kind of raw, energized doo-wop that Teenage Head liked so much, the Dolls showed that it was possible to go against dominant trends and create a following.

"We nursed one beer the whole night and had a great time," Lewis says. "We were only 18 or 19. I knew this was where we fit in, and it felt really nice to fit in, because we were playing this music in Hamilton, we felt that we didn't."

At around the same time, the band discovered an emerging musical underground in Toronto. Teenage Head's introduction to it, Lewis says, came with a concert billed as the 3-D Show at the Ontario College of Art, featuring the Diodes, the Dishes, and the Doncasters.

"That's where we met Steve Leckie," he says. "He had Nazi Dog and the Viletones, but he hadn't had a gig yet. We were the same. We didn't have gigs either, but we were telling everybody about this band we had. 'Yeah,' we said, 'we got a band called Teenage Head.'

"After that," Lewis continues, "Leckie started to branch out. He wanted to get his band playing, and he basically founded the Colonial Underground, just a basement underneath the Colonial Tavern [at 201-203 Yonge Street]. That's where he played his first show with the Viletones. We went to that, and we asked for a gig there too. And they said, 'Okay, you're booked. You can play.'"

In September 1976, the Ramones came to Toronto for the first time. They were among the leaders of the emerging New York underground centered at CBGB, the Bowery bar where such raw new acts as Talking Heads, Suicide, Patti Smith, and Blondie (with Debbie Harry) were appearing. The Ramones were the first of them to take their act internationally - to London, then Toronto. "We booked them at the New Yorker Theatre [at 651 Yonge Street]," recalls the show's Toronto promoter, Gary Topp, "and there wasn't a heck of a big scene for that kind of music at the time. The theatre held 500 people, and we did about 1,000 people over the three nights."

Despite the moderate turnout, the Ramones conferred a legitimacy on the local underground movement that led to the next landmark event the following spring on May 27, 1977. Promoter Ralph Alfonso and his friends, the Diodes, opened a basement punk club at 15 Duncan Street, behind the Royal Alexandra Theatre. They named it the Crash 'n' Burn, and it is remembered now as the high point of the local punk era.

"The Crash 'n' Burn - that's when I noticed that the thing was growing and growing," says Lewis. "It was only one summer. You'd think it lasted a year or something, but it was only the summer of '77. The thing went from May to September, if that, but the Crash 'n' Burn was when the suburban kids caught on, and when international bands were dropping by. I remember Thin Lizzy were playing in town, and they dropped by. The Ramones would come to town and they would drop by. By the time we played there it was on its way out. Our show was packed but the club had lost its liquor licence, and as things fell apart in one place we just kind of moved to another one, like Larry's Hideaway [at 121 Carlton Street], which was definitely a showcase for all the punk bands. I remember playing there one night when Blondie was at Ontario Place, and the whole band came down to Larry's after and played a song."

On December 2, 1978, the city's punk era officially ended. The leading bands congregated at the Horseshoe Tavern for a show called the Last Pogo, starring Teenage Head. It was both a celebration and a recognition that punk had run its course. By then, however, Teenage Head was proving more than just a punk band. Their stage shows still centred on Frankie Venom's climbing dangerously up microphone stands and tossing himself bodily into crowds, but the band was also playing highly danceable music of the type that had made rock and roll popular and broadly commercial in the first place.

"We have a wide cross-section of fans now," drummer Stipanitz said at the time. "We get the punk and new-wave fans, but there's also some heavy-metal fans and the bopper crowd in our audiences. Our musical direction has changed a bit. All of us have huge record collections and we like to try different styles, add some variety. It's been a natural progression, and we're learning to play better as we go along. We've been called punk and new wave, but all along it's really been basic rock and roll. We've just kept the attitude of punk - kept the energy and the 'anything goes' feeling."

All through 1979, Teenage Head played clubs and hockey arenas across southern Ontario and the rest of the country. They released their first album, Teenage Head, which critics knocked for its production values but praised for its fast entertaining songs - particularly the single "Top Down."

In April 1980, they released their second album, Frantic City. It was a breakthrough, featuring such irrepressible tunes as "Let's Shake," "Infected," and "Disgusteen." Reviewers called it "explosive" and "like a lightning bolt," and it was just starting to get airplay when the band announced that on June 2 they would play at Ontario Place Forum. Hoping to arouse interest south of the border, they also invited label representatives from New York and music directors from several U.S. radio stations.

 The Forum was an outdoor amphitheatre. It stood on the smallest and most central of three artificial islands that make up Ontario Place, the waterfront entertainment park west of downtown. Until the Molson Amphitheatre replaced it in 1995, the Forum served for more than 20 years ad the city's premier summer concert venue.

The venue featured a circular revolving stage, sheltered by a roof, and open at the sides. Surrounding the stage was bench seating for 2,500 people. Beyond the benches stretched grassy hills offering places to sit for another 8,000 people, or more if squeezed together, putting a capacity crowd at between 10,500 and 12,000 people.

Entrance to the forum was free with park admission. Access was via four bridges. Security depended largely on the location's relaxed summer atmosphere and the co-operative attitudes of Toronto audiences. Few problems ever surfaced, but six days before Teenage Head's scheduled appearance, trouble developed among a crowd leaving a Forum show featuring local bands Goddo, and Nash the Slash. Fans on their way home kept pouring of streetcars at Bathurst subway station, but no subway trains were arriving to pick them up. A crowd of 1,500 people collected, and when a train finally arrived, some fans started kicking over garbage cans, smashing windows and ripping up seats. Damage was estimated at $5,500. As a precaution for the Teenage Head show, 75 police officers were assigned to the bridge gates. Hundreds of others prepared to monitor streetcar and subway points.

On the afternoon of June 2, as Lewis witnessed, fans began to gather early. By evening, they were converging on the site by the thousand. A full hour before showtime, the crowd stood at 12,500 people, exceeding maximum official capacity, and hundreds more continued to pour through the main park entrances, paying full admission. By the time "sold out" signs could be posted, 1,500 paying spectators found themselves being barred from the island by police.

Most of the trouble started at the east bridge. About 400 people stormed the chain-link fence, some fans hurling bottles and rocks. The police hit out with nightsticks. One youth jumped into the water to dodge an officer's stick, inspiring others to dive in and swim to the forum side, adding to the general chaos.

Onstage, unaware of the trouble, the band members charged into one of their wildest shows ever. It was Frankie Venom's birthday - his twenty-fourth - and pumped by the crowd, he leapt madly around the stage, more than once tossing himself into the front rows with abandon. "The best rock and roll Toronto has seen all year," reported Toronto Sun reviewer Jonathan Gross.

One fan clambered to the rooftop to moon spectators on the hillsides. Other people lit firecrackers, sparklers, and massive bonfires on the grass. The most frenzied fans rushed the stage, nearly tackling Venom more than a dozen times, and when the band came out for an encore, the crowd broke loose.

"We had to stop the show," Lewis says. "We came back on and people started running all over the place. It reminded me of the Beatles at Shea Stadium, people running onto the stage and running off. It doesn't happen too often, that's why I remember it so well. I remember running just to get off, and somebody snatching one of my guitars. A roadie had to chase a guy halfway up the stands to get it back."

Numbers tell part of the story. Arrests: 58. Quantity of wine, beer and liquor seized: 225 gallons. Injuries: 10 officers and several fans hurt, none seriously. Police cruisers trashed: one. Police cruisers partly damaged: two. Number of newspapers in Canada playing the story on page 1: 93. Number of rock concerts allowed at the Forum for the rest of the summer: zero.

In the week following the show, Frantic City sold 10,000 copies. Later in the summer, nervous organizers canceled a Teenage Head show at the Canadian National Exhibition, creating even greater demand. Invitations arrived from New York. Showcase dates were booked for early September, beginning at My Father's Place on Long Island, to be broadcast live on radio station WLIR-FM. Friday- and Saturday-night appearances were scheduled at The 80's club in Manhattan, with more than 100 record-company people, celebrities, and reporters representing every rock magazine from New York Rocker to Rolling Stone expected to attend. Similar dates were arranged for the following month in Hollywood.

For Teenage Head, the big break had arrived, but two days before their planned departure for New York, Lewis landed in the hospital. On the way back from a show in Palmerston, Ontario, the van in which Lewis and Marshall were traveling crashed headlong into a ditch. A security guard was driving. Marshall was unhurt, but Lewis ended up in "serious but stable condition," with a back injury and broken ribs.

The band canceled the New York shows immediately. They hung on to the Hollywood dates for awhile, but in the end had to cancel them as well. Five months later, in mid-February, Lewis recovered enough to return to the stage, but by then the buzz had died. Agents and talent scouts had moved on, and Teenage Head never got a second chance.

But they are still together. With Mark Lockerbie replacing Stipanitz on drums, Teenage Head continues to play gritty, unrestrained rock and roll every weekend in clubs around southern Ontario and other parts of the country to a loyal and ardent following. Critics still cite Frantic City as one of the best Canadian rock-and-roll albums of all time.