Argh Fuck Kill: The Story of the DayGlo Abortions (28 page)

The DayGlos did a few other shows in BC before heading off across Canada in an RV that Bonehead rented from an old man at a very reasonable price. Little did the owner know that his motorhome would never quite be the same when he got it back. There was a strange smell that never went away, not to mention the many funny noises it now made. The motorhome reminded the old man of an armoured transport vehicle he had driven in the war. When the band returned the RV, he went over it inch-by-inch looking for bullet holes, but all he found were little bits of hydroponic weed and a used condom.

The new band played remarkably well, especially given the fact that three of the members had only recently learned the songs. For Gymbo, the reality of touring didn’t fully meet his expectations. “I thought it would be all about the drugs, the booze, and the women, but there was a serious side that Spud loved to point out,” the singer recalls. “That was a bit of a bummer.”

Spud was the main man. “He did all the driving, and he collected the money every night,” acknowledges Gymbo. “But I don’t like people telling me what to do, especially when I was younger, so we clashed a couple of times. It seemed wrong to follow orders in a punk band.” Squid, Johnny, and Bonehead didn’t boss Gymbo around so he didn’t have as much trouble getting along with them. Squid, a quiet Newfoundlander, was an easygoing fellow who rarely got angry, Gymbo and Johnny seemed to get along all right, and Bonehead was friendly from the start, so there was just grumpy old Spud to avoid. “Squid was a good guy,” remembers Gymbo. “He never caused shit—he just played those guitar parts flawlessly every night.” Poor Spud never got to have any fun. “Sometimes I wished I could be one of the shitheads too,” the bassist laments.

By 1994, the country was beginning to open up, and bands were able to play in towns that had never before hosted punk shows. Starved for entertainment, the kids could be counted upon to thrash wildly in the pit and strip merch tables bare. Suddenly, it was worthwhile to visit little places such as Vernon, Kamloops, and Kelowna. Not just that, but the DayGlos were happy to perform for excited fans who didn’t care that they had a new singer.

The band rolled on. In Humboldt, Saskatchewan, promoter Kevin Kosik remembers that Gymbo consumed a large number of pork burgers beforehand, regurgitating them out the window onto fans standing on the sidewalk below. The youths waiting to get into the sold-out show weren’t deterred at all by the puke shower and clamoured even harder to get inside. Kevin didn’t know that it was Gymbo’s nerves, not the pork burgers, that made him barf. In fact, the singer routinely vomited before shows. He was always fine after that.

The shows in Edmonton, Regina, and Saskatoon were similar to the first show in Vancouver, and some fans weren’t quite sure how to react. Who was this muscular maniac with the ropy veins standing out on his neck? The new guy was scary. Never mind the messages scrawled on his abdomen in felt pen.

By now, the DayGlo Abortions did not have as many problems getting paid as they had in the past. Most clubs offered a minimum guarantee, and signed contracts were generally in place. Not just that, but the band almost always had a soundcheck and was treated with respect, something Spud and Bonehead had worked long and hard for. This reduced the stress level considerably, as Spud and Bonehead were not kids anymore, but grown men.

The DayGlos moved on to southern Ontario, which had been the traditional destination before the small towns opened up. Spud recalls that club owners and promoters didn’t much care for the new singer, who had a bad attitude and liked to throw his weight around. The owner of a venue in Thunder Bay was almost hysterical in his disapproval. “He freaked out because it was an all-ages show and Gymbo was pouring beer in the kids’ mouths,” remembers Spud. “The man hated Gymbo with a passion!” Although the DayGlos had been playing at the venue for years, the owner began treating them poorly after that, forcing them to look elsewhere. “The next time we went through town, we did a show at a bar directly across the street,” Spud says, shaking his head in regret. “Sure, Gymbo could be a bit of an ass, but he was
our
ass. Besides, he was just a young guy blowing off steam.” It must be said that Gymbo is no longer the arrogant rock star he once was. Older and wiser now, the singer is almost humble.

Pushing on, Gymbo and Squid kept themselves busy by playing pranks on all the bandmembers except Spud the Boss. Bonehead in particular was a favoured target, and the drummer was forced to protect his food carefully. “We’d go into a restaurant, where Bonehead would put his arms around his plate like he was in prison,” recalls Gymbo. One day, the drummer had to use the washroom and made the mistake of leaving his food unguarded. Gymbo quickly replaced the tomato in Bonehead’s burger with the lid from a pickle jar and sat back to watch the fun. “Bonehead bit into his burger so hard that he dented the lid,” laughs Gymbo, who still finds the gag funny fifteen years later. Even Spud cracked a smile, but he wouldn’t have been laughing had the drummer broken a tooth. Bonehead, who was not at all amused, whipped the lid at Gymbo’s head. “He really took a chomp outta that lid,” Gymbo reminisces, still laughing.

Gymbo finds it interesting that Bonehead often told road stories to strangers as if he’d found them funny at the time. “He’d be pissed right off at first, but later he’d tell people about the stuff we did to him and everybody would laugh. I guess it just took a while for the anger to wear off,” the frontman speculates. “Bonehead would be worried that we’d get kicked out of our rooms, or that the cops would see the lipstick writing on the motorhome, stuff like that.” Gymbo, who did not wish to travel anonymously, had a habit of writing the band’s name on their vehicle with purple lipstick. Bonehead and Spud tolerated this practice until a disgruntled patron that Gymbo ordered tossed from a club slashed their tires. After that, the band toured incognito.

The long trip back across the vast prairies was as punishing as ever. The same angry kids threw beer on them in every one-pump town, and every truck stop served the same greasy hamburgers. Even the girl punkers seemed nastier than usual, and sometimes they had to work to get laid. On they went, livers bleeding and feet stinking. It was a tough job, but someone had to do it.

Eventually, the DayGlos made it back to Victoria, where Spud had a final showdown with Bill Crepell. The ex-manager, realizing that he was about to part ways with the band forever, demanded money from the merch sales. At this point, Spud claims that the band had not only repaid Bill for all the musical gear, but they had also repaid him for the merch. Spud remembers telling him, “Fuck you, Bill. Those shirts were paid for by the DayGlo Abortions, and you do not own any part of them.” According to Spud, Bill then assumed a hurt and truculent expression, the look of a man caught with his pants down. To this day, Jesus Bonehead flatly refuses to discuss the ex-manager.

Having survived Bill Crepell, Spud and Bonehead faced a new problem, namely that Johnny Ward had accepted a well-paying custodian job. The loss of a guitarist wouldn’t have been such a hardship if the group didn’t plan to record soon. Sure, they could have cut the album and relied on overdubs, but it made more sense to look for a permanent replacement. The dilemma was solved easily enough when Gymbo suggested that they ask Hung Jak, who still played with Sick Sense. The offer was made and Hung quickly accepted. With few obligations or responsibilities, the guitarist could tour permanently and no one would miss him. Hell, they could shoot the guy and toss him in a ditch, and his Jaks teammates wouldn’t even come looking for him until he missed a few skate competitions. Hung was perfectly suited to be a DayGlo.

While Gymbo and Hung may have been happily reunited, the remaining Sick Sense members were somewhat less than pleased. In fact, bassist Mark Morr was absolutely pissed: “Sick Sense was doing lots of gigs and annoying the fuck out of some of the more politically-correct bands around at the time, but Bonehead saw our two main guys as perfect replacements for the departed Cretin. Although I thought Bonehead was a dickhead for crushing our band under his hooves, I understood why Gymbo and Hung went for it. I got back at Bonehead by pilfering his beer and drugs at every subsequent opportunity.” The DayGlo drummer understood Mark’s frustration and nobly tolerated the thefts, within reason of course.

Sick Sense might have been suffering, but everything was just fine on Planet DayGlo. With the guitar player problem solved, the boys rehearsed intensely throughout the winter of 1994. As it turned out, Hung had a few songs that he’d been toying with, and they soon became property of the DayGlo Abortions. Since they still needed more material to fill the album, the entire band pitched in to help. In a remarkably short time, the new DayGlos put together enough songs to complete the record. “Hung and Spud wrote a few songs, but Squid wrote most of the music and I supplied the words,” recalls Gymbo.

The senior DayGlos knew that the new lineup would be thought of as a cover band until they began performing and recording original material, which put pressure on them to cut the album ASAP. However, without Fringe Product to cover recording costs the band had to pay for it out of pocket. Sure, they’d earned a few bucks on the road, but they were already running low on funds and this would burn every nickel they had. For this record, they would have to find a cheap studio and cross their fingers. But where could they find one?

The studio quandary was solved when local soundman and musician Scott Henderson offered to record and mix the album for a mere $1000 at Sea of Shit, his basement studio. Scott, as the reader may recall, had known the band since the early days, and had co-written several songs with Cretin and Spud. In fact, Scott had once tried to cut a four-track demo for the DayGlos but, just when they were ready to record, Bonehead borrowed a skateboard and left to pick up an ounce of grass. The band waited and waited for the drummer to return, but his arm was in a cast when he finally showed up. A novice skate-boarder, Bonehead had wiped out and broken his arm on the way back. “After that, we took his skateboard away and told him to quit skating,” laughs Spud. The demo idea was shelved indefinitely.

Now, fifteen years later, Scott was ready to record an album and, with a price this low, the DayGlos quickly agreed. Soon the band moved into the studio and began to record. If this one went as fast as the other albums did, the new record would be on the shelves in three weeks. Well, maybe not quite
that
fast.

As it turned out, the DayGlo Abortions would receive good value for their money. Scott Henderson did not have the finest equipment that money could buy, but he was very adept with what he did have. The musician, who began playing guitar at age seven, would have followed his father and brothers into the armed forces had it not been for an accidental gunshot wound suffered as a child. Left with a debilitating injury, Scott focused instead on music and opened his own recording studio, which he ran for nearly two decades. Like Cretin, Scott is an aficionado of jazz fusion, and is closely associated with Victoria jazz/punk heroes Nomeansno. Curiously, online sources don’t tout his association with the DayGlo Abortions quite as loudly.

Scott had more experience, but Spud mixed much of
Little Man in the Canoe
himself, asking for Scott’s help only when he needed technical assistance. As usual, the boys were done recording in less than two weeks, but there was a fair bit of boozing and pot smoking involved. “It was a bit weird to get wasted in the studio with Spud cracking the whip,” recalls Gymbo. He was there to drink, but the bassist kept insisting that he sing. Cutting records was thirsty business. Soon the mixing was done, and now the DayGlos needed someone to master the album. Since Fringe Product was no longer involved, Bonehead approached Mark Franklin at Media Magic, which generally represented artists of a more commercial nature. “They were doing the Moffats, who were the Jonas Brothers of the day,” says Gymbo with distaste. Franklin, a solid professional who knew his way around a mixing board, viewed the DayGlo Abortions as minor players with limited potential, but he acknowledged that they had plenty of ambition and had earned a name for themselves by releasing albums and touring steadily. It is also possible that Mark liked the DayGlos because they were so radically different from the other bands on his roster. He signed the group and agreed to master, manufacture, and distribute the new LP, all of which would be done on a shoestring budget. In lieu of an advance, which Mark didn’t have to pay because the recording was already complete, he agreed to give the band $4.00 for each unit sold, which is a reasonably good deal. The DayGlo Abortions had not only avoided extinction, but they had also landed squarely on their feet.

At any rate, Mark Franklin took the master tape and polished it up as best he could for the money he was willing to spend. It goes without saying that the album could have been better if Mark had loosened the purse strings a little. He simply did the best job he could for as cheaply as possible. The album was as finished as it would ever be.

Mark then formed a subsidiary label known as God Records, specifically to produce and distribute material by the DayGlo Abortions. John, Mark’s principle underling, handled the label’s day-to-day business, but according to Spud, he didn’t do a very good job. “John was a bit of a boob, but he thought he was great,” laughs the bassist. At one point, Spud was forced to ask Mark to fix several errors the assistant had introduced to the
Little Man in the Canoe
master tape. John’s girlfriend also worked for Mark, and the three of them kept the joint running, although Mark was clearly the brains of the operation.

For now the DayGlo Abortions were happy. Media Magic was hardly the major leagues, but at least they could make the music they wanted without interference. The musicians were also happy that the company was located in Victoria. All that remained now was to manufacture the product, and Mark soon sent the tape off to be pressed into CDs. By 1995, these horrid little discs had completely taken over the market. The entire DayGlos catalogue would be released on vinyl by Unrest Records, but not until 2007.