Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History of Punk in Toronto and Beyond 1977-1981

Product Description

Treat Me Like Dirt captures the personalities that drove the original Toronto punk scene. This is the first book to document the histories of the Diodes, Viletones, and Teenage Head, along with other bands (B-Girls, Curse, Demics, Dishes, Forgotten Rebels, Johnny & the G-Rays, the Mods, the Poles, Simply Saucer, the Ugly and more) and fans that brought the punk scene to life in Toronto. This book is a punk rock road map, full of chaos, betrayal, pain, disappointments, failure, success, and the pure rock ’n’ roll energy that frames this layered history of punk in Toronto and beyond.
Treat Me Like Dirt is a story assembled from individual personal stories that go beyond the usual “we played here, this famous person saw us there” and into sex, drugs, murder, conspiracy, booze, criminals, biker gangs, violence, art (yes, art) and includes one of the last interviews with the late Frankie Venom (singer of Teenage Head). The book includes a wealth of previously unpublished photographs.
This uncensored oral history of the 1977 Toronto punk explosion was originally published in 2010 by Bongo Beat and is now available to the trade. Exclusive to this edition is a selected discography of all key Toronto punk releases referenced in the book, contributed by Frank Manley, author of Smash The State (1992), the acclaimed and pioneering discography of Canadian punk (and subsequent vinyl compilations) that activated the current international interest in Canadian punk from the ‘70s and early ‘80s.

Review

“The people involved were, and are, intensely passionate about the music, the Toronto scene, their places in it. Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History of Punk in Toronto and Beyond 1977-1981 reflects its subjects; it’s filled with that same punk intensity and passion.” ― Popmatters.com
“Easily one of the best rock biographies you’ll read this year.” ― Montreal Mirror

About the Author

Liz Worth is a Toronto, ON writer. She is the author of
Eleven: Eleven and her writing has appeared in
Punk Planet,
Clamor,
ChiZine, and
ditch, among others. She has a collection of poetry forthcoming.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

John Hamilton: We had a band called the Three Little Pigs and it was like a heavy metal trio. We went out east and we rented a house trailer and played around Fredericton and Moncton and all that.
I came down with hepatitis while we were out there because I’d been shooting up. Toronto was the speed capital of the world in 1969; you can’t believe how much methedrine there was in this city. It was unbelievable, unbelievable. We were shipping it into the United States; like I knew dealers and stuff like that. Everybody was doing speed and shooting it up. We were all crazy.
Chris Haight: We closed up shop for Top Ten because we just weren’t in synch with the word “professionalism.” We just weren’t.
Johnny had hepatitis. He looked like a walking banana. He was delirious and this and that.
John Hamilton: We had reached our limit on the East Coast and were running out of money and we couldn’t pay our rent on the trailer park. We were like the original Trailer Park Boys, literally. It came down to the landlord banging on the front door of our house trailer as we were jumping out the back door and climbing into our truck. I had hepatitis and was barely getting around. I think I’d been eating all these oranges to try to fight the jaundice and I’d broken out in hives, too. But we had to do one more gig to get enough money to get back to Toronto.
We had one more gig booked at a community centre or something for a hundred and fifty bucks. So we booked ourselves into a hotel there downtown. I think it was called the Colonial Inn. I managed to play the gig with a fever of probably a hundred and ten or something like that. The next day we skipped out on our hotel bill by climbing out the window. We were bad people; we were bad.
We took off to head back to Toronto, and by this time we were f