Argh Fuck Kill: The Story of the DayGlo Abortions (4 page)

It was at his mother’s house on Gorge View Drive that a neighbour gave Trevor his first guitar. The twelve-year old boy was delighted to receive the instrument, and was equally thankful for the chord chart that came with it. “A boarder painted the guitar all psychedelic for me,” recalls Trevor. This was the 70s after all, and a colourful instrument was mandatory. He plunked away at the bright acoustic guitar, determined to make it reproduce the sounds in his head. Although he soon learned the basics, the youth realized that it would be some time before he could play with the dexterity he desired. This was not the end, just the beginning.

When Trevor was fourteen, he decided to go into the world to seek his fame and fortune. He also wanted to get away from his oldest brother, who was a bit of a bully. The two clashed regularly, and Trevor was at a disadvantage. “My mom was great, but…” says Trevor, leaving the obvious unspoken. Packing a bag, the boy took the ferry to Vancouver and looked around for somewhere to live. It hadn’t occurred to him that accommodations might be hard to find, and though Spud stayed in charity hostels at first, he eventually found himself sleeping under the Georgia Street Viaduct with the junkies and winos. “Welfare gave us vouchers for $3.50 every day, and there was a store on Hastings that would sell us tobacco products, even though they weren’t supposed to,” recalls the bassist. He also remembers the large heating ducts under the viaduct that provided warmth in the winter. Nowadays, of course, those pipes are fenced off in a heartless bid to deprive homeless people of warmth. In many ways, life in Vancouver is tougher for the poor than it has ever been.

Eventually, street life became too hard and Trevor returned to Victoria. The thought of a hot shower and a home-cooked meal was too hard to resist. Rather than hang around too long, he soon found an apartment and a job to go with it. Freedom was great but problems soon arose. It is not uncommon for fifteen-year olds to struggle with the realities of independent living, and Trevor was no exception. “I was there for about six months,” says the bass player, recalling the stacks of dirty dishes and unpaid bills. The defiant youth returned home, bloodied but unbowed. If his older brother wanted to fight, he was ready. Well,
almost
ready. The sonofabitch had thirty pounds on him. Today, Trevor gets along fairly well with his sibling, though he still wouldn’t work with him. The fistfights, at least, are behind them.

Now that Trevor was back at home, his ma insisted that he return to school. The pupil did so reluctantly, but didn’t put much effort into it. His grades were bad but consistent, and our boy was not known for wild fluctuations. Often, he would skip school entirely to seek adventure on the streets of Victoria. Trevor soon found his way downtown, where he hung out at a combination pool hall/bowling alley known as Mayfair Lanes, and at the bus depot where he met other young hellraisers. Known as “townies,” the youths spent their days committing petty crimes and dealing small quantities of weed. Trevor became handy with a pool cue and learned how to hustle suckers at a young age. He is reluctant to talk about his juvenile activities but readily admits that he was a “teenage shit disturber.”

Trevor could not find the time and patience necessary for schoolwork. He bounced around, smoking pot and playing hooky. “I went through a whole bunch of schools,” the bass player remembers. Indeed the list is lengthy. A high-paying white-collar job somewhere down the road did not seem likely for the future DayGlo Abortion. Rather, he was on track for a lifetime of hard labour, with no time off for good behaviour.

As many teens did in those days, Trevor purchased rock albums solely on the basis of the cover. If a record looked appealing, he bought it. As a result, the youth became the proud owner of such gems as Atomic Rooster’s
Made in England,
which features a psychedelic cover that only those with a fondness for LSD could truly appreciate. Though Trevor listened to such standard fare as Black Sabbath, King Crimson, Alice Cooper, and Camel, the boy also had a taste for country music, which his older sisters often played. The sound of steel guitar and the lonesome yodel of Hank Williams was a constant at the Hagen household, but instead of rebelling against country music, Trevor became a lifelong fan of such greats as George Jones, Johnny Cash, and Hank Williams Sr. Later, touring with the DayGlo Abortions, Trevor would endlessly bombard his fellow bandmembers with Hank Williams, driving poor Jesus Bonehead and Nev the Impaler to distraction. “They were sick of Hank, I’ll tell ya!” laughs the country-loving bass player. Bonehead and Nev (who we shall meet later), were lucky that Trevor does not have an affinity for Shania Twain or Brad Paisley. New country need not apply.

There was no such thing as cable at the Hagen homestead, and Trevor recalls that their small black-and-white TV only picked up two stations, one of which aired
The Ed Sullivan Show
when the Beatles made an appearance in the late 60s. The boy was amused but not overly impressed.

Trevor recalls that the mid-70s were also a bad time for music. Punk rock had not yet appeared when he met Brian and Murray, so the trio listened to popular rock music of the day. Trevor, not wishing to invite ridicule, kept his love of country music to himself for the time being. When Murray switched from metal to jazz fusion over Ozzy’s departure from Black Sabbath, he also introduced Trevor to the genre. Indeed, progressive 70s rock groups such as Atomic Rooster and King Crimson were not so far removed from jazz fusion anyway. To this day, both Murray and Trevor have a taste for The Mahavishnu Orchestra and John McLaughlin. Brian Whitehead, on the other hand, always preferred hard rock, with or without the participation of the naughty Ozzy Osbourne.

Brian Whitehead became a ward at St. Michael’s School because his mother was unable to care for him properly. The youth also had a permanent social worker because of his unsettled home life. “Brian’s mom was fucked up on barbiturates or something—she couldn’t even take care of herself, let alone her son,” claims Murray Acton. The boys occasionally hung out at Brian’s house, smoking cigarettes and listening to music. “Things weren’t so great there, and his mom tried to kill him a bunch of times. Brian didn’t have such a great childhood,” remembers Murray. The youth, in other words, was perfectly qualified to become a famous punk rocker.

Once, when Brian was planning to stay overnight at Murray’s, they dropped by Brian’s apartment first. “His mom was facedown on the floor in her nightgown, so we went to my house and forgot about her,” recalls Murray. “We came back two days later and she was still there. I asked Brian if she was okay, so he took a spoon from the drawer and held it to her mouth to see if it fogged up. He said she was okay—that she was like that all the time.” It is not uncommon for barbiturate users to spend a lot of time on the floor.

St. Michael’s School expelled Brian the night of the annual dance. After stealing a good-sized bag of weed from Brian’s social worker, Brian and Murray were having a grand time. “Brian was smoking everybody up, but the teachers found out and he got the boot,” remembers Murray. School was over for young Mr. Whitehead.

In Grade Nine, Murray and classmate David Waddington took their wicked shenanigans to a new level. One particularly devilish stunt involved a kilo of potassium metal stolen from the science lab. “We blew the doors off the swimming pool enclosure and deflated the roof,” brags Murray. Because potassium metal reacts violently with water, all they had to do was toss a softball-sized chunk of the volatile stuff into the pool. Murray and David also blasted a huge crater in the soccer field with a pipe bomb. The frontman goes on to describe how he and other students terrorized a gay music teacher, sanding the grooves off a rare Beatles album and reducing the poor man to tears. The deputy headmaster sided with the boys and wasn’t at all concerned at the plight of the tormented teacher. “The deputy thought it was great fun,” recalls Acton. Heterosexual teachers were not spared, but when it came to abusing staff members, Murray and David zeroed in on the easiest targets—even if it meant destroying rare Beatles albums.

Later that year, Murray was also expelled from St. Michael’s School. Trevor had acquired a large quantity of Quaaludes, and he and Murray were selling them at a school dance. Trevor, who was not a student at St. Michael’s, lurked in the parking lot while Acton made the sales. Whenever Murray needed more ‘ludes, he would simply step outside and get more from his associate in the parking lot. The plan was flawless; well,
almost
flawless. The pair forgot to take into account that the students would be staggering around comically, drawing unwanted attention from the staff. Trevor poked his head in the door and was dismayed by what he saw. “The band was playing, but the students were too fucked up to dance and the floor was empty,” laughs the failed dope dealer. “The teachers grabbed some kid and he ratted me out,” Murray says ruefully. Although St. Michael’s allowed him to finish Grade Nine the youth was not invited to return the next year. The dance was over.

Murray’s parents were not impressed. Somehow, with much pleading and wrangling, the Actons managed to get their son enrolled at Esquimalt Sr. High School. By now, Murray and Brian Whitehead had become good friends, and Brian’s new foster home was just down the road from Esquimalt High. Much pot was smoked.

Jazz fusion replaced metal in the Acton household, but for Mrs. Acton, change didn’t always mean better. At one point in his jazz fusion period, the teenager’s bewildered mother walked into his room and said, “You know, I can’t tell you how nice it would be to hear you play something like Black Sabbath that I could recognize as music.” Poor Mrs. Acton was not a huge fan of The Mahavishnu Orchestra.

For his sixteenth birthday, Murray’s parents bought a Mann electric guitar for their son and told him to write them a song. The youth retreated to his room with the instrument and quickly recorded a thought-provoking little number entitled “Suicide,” that he had composed at an earlier age, using couch cushions for percussion. Murray’s parents were so impressed that they forced him to see a psychiatrist. “I was just pushing their buttons,” Murray laughs.

The youth survived the psychiatrist and, with a little Peavey amplifier and his guitar, he began to rediscover rock music. He tried to play when his mom and dad weren’t home, and the only people to complain were the neighbours. One neighbour, who happened to be a high-ranking police official, was also Richard Acton’s best friend. The narco cop made Murray uncomfortable, and though he still played his guitar loudly, the youth also hid his pot well.

A period of relative calm ended abruptly halfway through Grade Ten when Esquimalt High expelled the troublesome student for disrupting math class. With no pesky schoolwork to get in the way, the fledgling songwriter spent his time hanging with Brian Whitehead, smoking grass, scrounging for money, and listening to music. For now, Murray was taking a little break from life.

After driving his parents completely insane for a while, Murray moved in with a professional foster mom named Jill, who had some sort of deal with the Ministry of Child and Family Services. Murray’s friend Steve Andres also lived there. Along with the incorrigible Brian Whitehead, the boys formed a tight little crew. The lax supervision made for some wild times, and the trio was pleased to have so much freedom. Parental guidance was overrated.

Although Murray was eager to meet a girl or two, he was also very shy. In fact, the singer/guitarist was seventeen before he met his first real girlfriend. “Patty was cute, Dutch, and blonde,” the singer remembers. He didn’t lose his virginity to Patty, however, but to an adventurous and slightly deranged twenty-year old girl. “She was this kinda fat chick who looked like Raggedy Anne on steroids. It was a terrifying and traumatizing ordeal,” recalls the singer, trembling a little at the memory. To this day, Murray will not go near overweight girls, especially those with red hair. “Even that episode of
South Park
about the ginger-haired kids was enough to give me the creeps.”

It so happened that Murray’s next sexual encounter would be much more enjoyable, and he and Brian could hardly believe their good luck when three attractive girls moved into Brian’s foster home. As Murray so delicately puts it, the young females were “total nymphomaniac sluts.” The girl who picked Murray also dated a large jock who had once bullied him at school, so the dalliance was extra satisfying. “That jock would have freaked if he ever found out I was fooling with his girl,” Murray laughs. In 2009, the DayGlo worked on a construction site where the bully was foreman. “He was still an asshole, shouting at everybody. I just about told him.” In the end, the frontman’s sense of self-preservation prevailed.

Murray eventually got around to signing up for the electronics course, where he did significantly better than he had at school. In order to qualify, the youth first took night courses in math, English, physics, and chemistry, which he aced. “I got 100% on the math,” the guitarist claims. Perhaps the deputy headmaster at St. Michael’s was not completely insane when he decided that Acton had it in him to be a top student. Much later, his employers discovered that Murray was several credits shy of his Grade Twelve but by then they valued his work too much to let him go. Not bad for a pill-popping, pot-smoking punk rocker.

While Murray was taking night courses, his father found work for him as a temporary deckhand at the shipyard. This led to employment with the BC Coast Guard, a dream job compared to anything else the youth might have landed. Murray took to the water like a rat to cheese, happier than he’d been in recent memory. He vividly recalls standing midnight watch on the prow of
The Endeavour,
the majestic snow-topped mountains silhouetted brightly in the moonlight. Murray found his duties so easy that he took a handful of mushrooms on the second night just to liven things up. “That’s when the first mate told me to take the wheel,” laughs the ex-Coast Guard employee. Piloting the 200-foot vessel around the southern tip of Vancouver Island, the teenager could only wonder if anyone in the history of the Coast Guard had run a vessel aground while ripped on mushrooms. Luckily, Junior Seaman Acton managed not to scuttle
The Endeavour,
and his survival skills in cold water remained untested. With deep regret, Acton turned down a long Arctic mission in order to concentrate on his studies. “I had a great time on that boat,” reminisces the DayGlo Abortion, smiling.