¹ This is the main lyric to the chorus of The Modern Minds' song Twenty Years Old, written by Moe Berg

² RATT was where my friends and I tried and failed to get laid constantly. Guido, Ed and I would be drunk there almost every weekend. We'd buy booze downtown and walk to the university, stopping in the middle of the High Level Bridge to drink it. That way we wouldn't have to spend so much at the bar, and could consequently make the cover charge

³ Yes, THE Jerry Jerry, of Jerry Jerry + The Sons Of Rhythm Orchestra

⁴ Six Days On The Road is a Dave Dudley song...as if you didn't know

⁵ this "somewhere" happened to be Ed's house: 70's decor rec room, fluorescent lighting, fluorescent neon green carpet. Good for headaches...

⁶ written by Moe Berg

⁷ written by Pete Townshend, of course.

⁸ The following occurred at the Riv Rock Room:

MIKE- Kim, I think you guys are the greatest band in the world!!

KIM- So do I.

The following happened at Homestead Recording Studios:

MIKE- How long did it take to record all the songs?

KIM- What is this, a Rolling Stone interview?

⁹ Be My Barbie was the first record I ever made, produced by Kim Upright and released by The Malibu Kens in 1981. It was a very shitty seven inch. Remember vinyl?

¹⁰ Example:

MIKE- Hey Graham, is it a G chord that comes next?

GRAHAM- Uh...yeah!

¹¹As far as this particular song is concerned, I apparently had written some of it, but later in life Graham recorded it with his band Brilliant Orange, and was after me to contact SOCAN and have my name removed from the credits as they had to edit my bits out. I don't know if I ever did that or not.

¹² anyone who has had to catch the last St. Albert bus to downtown Edmonton knows what high-lonesome paranoia is

¹³ front man for SNFU. As a gag one day, one of their guitarists, Brent Belke, took some of my lyrics off my coffee table and made an SNFU song out of it, as it was known that I hadn't developed the same taste for the genre of Hard-core as some of my friends. They were meaning to irk me, and they quite likely did. The irony is this: the lyrics were called I'm Real Scared, and JGW had just rejected the song because of the music. I was definitely irked about that. The song survived because of Brent however, making it to their first album, and even the live album they released years later. In fact, my very first royalty cheque from CAPAC was for that song. $1.98. It shows up on my writing royalty statements from time to time, but I never did collect any mechanicals, and those albums sold pretty good

¹⁴ Blank Generation showed up on the scene a year or so after the Necrophiliacs did. They brought many new people and many new ideas. Ronald was among them

¹⁵ Graham Hicks is on the city beat at the Edmonton Sun now, but back then he was the entertainment writer. He hated the Malibu Kens. Joey Did changed their name early in 1980 to The Malibu Kens. Hicks reviewed (unfavorably) the last Joey Did gig before the name change without even staying to see the show. The best Hicks story though, is a review he gave the Kens a year later: "No praise for The Malibu Kens...hopeless." I was upset over that review then, but it sure makes good copy now.

¹⁶ To this day, I walk around generally opinionless about my own stuff. Every now and then I come up with something I truly enjoy (Just The Other Day, Day Of The First Snow, stuff like that), but often I seem to not be able to believe that I'm capable of quality, so I yearn for people to tell me I'm appreciated, and needed, and vital to the community; but sometimes when these reassurances are bestowed upon me I react with the typical disbelieving paranoia us stereotype artists are afflicted with. I'll accuse people of being crass and tasteless and patronizing because I guess I secretly want people to tell me " It's hopeless! It really is! Go get a life!", and release me from my struggle. I don't know why, but compliments frighten me. They oft-times anger me irrationally. I just can't get past the idea that no-one is being entirely truthful. I've been told that my standards I set for myself are pretty lofty. It's true. Some days I just can't live in a world that is an iota short of perfection. You can imagine the problems I've been having lately...

¹⁷ at least most of us did until we had to get real jobs. You know, I was a pretty good punk, at least philosophically. I actually believed what I thought I thought myself back then

¹⁸ Do I feel like Jr. Gone Wild now? Good question. I think so. A reporter once asked me if I thought my being sober invalidates the material from my past, and do I feel justified being in a band with that name at my age. That made me mad. My response was melo-dramatic. I said "Is a Vietnam veteran's experience any less horrible and real now that they are no longer there?" My point was that it will always be a part of me because it was me. Jr. Gone Wild got told so many times that we should have made it already, or that we lost it, and that this that and the other thing is wrong or broken. It's been so fucking hard just to get it to the point where I'm finally writing it all down. In the end we were constantly rejected by the underground, and the establishment. We were so wild that we didn't belong anywhere. And if you think I mean the word WILD in the physical sense, ,just let me say that I know all about how being physically wild isn't all that hard, and that wasn't what it was about in the first place. If you thought differently then I guess you weren't smart enough to get it.

¹⁹ it's a Howard Johnson now

²⁰ a while before, when Jerry and I had a band with Bob Drysdale on bass and George Kelly on drums, Jerry on guitar and me "singing" called The Tory Dinks {we never did a gig}, I kind of learned the basics of power chords by myself noodling around on that very same guitar

²¹ I've never stuck picks to my stand since. They stay in that dumb pocket we all wonder about on our jeans. Trout started putting them in my mike clip towards the end, though

²² New York City by The Demics was a smash hit with us as well (later, JGW gets introduced to an amazing pisstank named Keith Sutherland. He was the writer and singer of the song New York City. Being drunk and foolish, we decided to go onstage somewhere in Toronto and completely butchered the song. It was one of those potential rock moments that unfortunately went very, very, wrong. So kids, if you're gonna try smartass shit like that, you'd better pull it off, or you'll have to live with it for the rest of your lives...

²³ What To Do Backstage At A Big Rock Show:

From experience I've learned that the best way to conduct yourself backstage is to care less than everybody else that you're there. The more famous the band, the less you should care, that is, if you want to get anywhere in this business.

²⁴ They were a very positive influence, and I can still cite them as one today. I met Alejandro Escovedo (who had co-founded the band, but left soon after the first album and before the tour I saw them on) once and I told him, but Chip and Tony ought to know too. Thanks guys.

²⁵ The Modern Minds split up, Moe made Troc' 59, they split up (it was the last band I saw Bobby Drysdale play with), he made facecrime. Moe was unfortunately in a "synth" phase. He then moved to Toronto and made TPOH, much to my relief.

²⁶ When I started busking in Edmonton, there was no one else doing it on Jasper Ave., and it pretty much stayed that way for nearly three years. Suddenly, around the time the first Fringe Festival came which I crashed and made beaucoup beer money despite Brian Paisley's efforts to get me and my friends to go away, it seemed that every moron with nothing better to do came out and the place was just crawling with Dylan/Kerouac wannabes. Most of them really sucked too. I was out there for a living, not to get my ticket punched. I got mugged one day on 103^rd St., and soon after that decided I was sick of the fashion show, so I actually quit busking and went and got a day job at The Rosebowl working with Kenny Chinn again, of all people. Now busking has mutated into some "impossible to do without a grant" type of thing, so once again the pursuit of more money has killed the romance. I mean, how does electricity work into the spirit of busking? Why does a good juggler on stilts make more money than a brilliant juggler on foot? A guy with a guitar and harmonica isn't enough anymore...

²⁷ She was intrigued by me somehow, and we ended up going out for quite awhile. She was majoring in genetics at the time (she's an MD now), and her cultural interests were incredibly diverse compared to mine and my friends', in fact our first date was a Joan Armatrading concert, which I wouldn't have gone to otherwise. Incidentally, it was a wicked show. She exposed me to some modes of thought that serve me well to this day. We're still friends and stay in touch occasionally.

²⁸ went on to whatever in the guise of BigHouse

²⁹ Almost immediately after the Kens' split up, the general populace decided we weren't so bad after all because of the Inner Space album. Shortly after that, a terrible song of ours "You Know I See Her Everyday" (not on Inner Space), written by Scott Juskiw and myself made it to #1 on CJSR. And people wonder why I'm cynical

³⁰ Al is and has been a high profile film and television arts guy around town since his fiasco with JGW. He shot a couple vids with us. More on him later.

³¹ Tom Billings is an artist friend of mine who looks like a very tall mutant leprechaun. He has flaming red hair. He's a great painter. He can also be an asshole. When he tossed whiskey into Al's face he was in the middle of being possessed by some artistic fervor that was dictating to him somehow that everything around him was wrong. Ask him, I don't know exactly what he was on about. He even ended up dumping the whiskey over the balcony. I love Tom because he helped teach me by example that art is life.

³² An older scenester named Ron had bought a bunch of whiskey barrels for some reason. He sweated them and created a most powerful "thing". One night, a 2L bottle of the stuff killed about half a party in about a half hour. I mean puking, silliness, fights. It's no wonder Tom went nuts on the stuff. Of course Ed, whom you'll certainly hear about later drank a whole bottle and remained unscathed, except that he literally threw me off my porch and into the bushes just like in the movies. We were good friends.

³³ Legendary first Edmonton comp. Album. Everyone around at the time of it's making is on it. Circa 1982, I think

³⁴ The `Kens last gig was also our technical best. We also enjoyed playing it. The other thing that set it apart was that the people there, and there were lots of them, really seemed to enjoy us. It was also our first experience with drinking too much on the job. At the time we didn't know we were breaking up, but I think we were toast within 2 weeks of that show, which was at NAIT. Witnesses include Muck and Bunt of SNFU, who climbed the roof and watched us from the skylight.

³⁵ This is amazing! At JGW's final performance with The Trolls doing The Messiah in Winnipeg, we were picketed by some religious folks, whom we invited indoors for coffee. One of these guys turned out to be HC! He remembered the band. Boy, had he changed!

³⁶ There were drinker's reasons to drink that weekend. Times were weird. I was in women difficulty, but on top of that I went home after the HC gig to discover my room-mate Rob had maliciously and methodically destroyed everything my other room-mate Tim owned. Weird eh? He did it with a claw hammer. Went I walked in, Tim wasn't there, but Rob was finishing up the destruction. He simply looked up, smiled, and asked me how I was doing.

³⁷ Lead vocalist for the amazing Pointed Sticks. He was my singing hero in my 'Kens days.

³⁸ Real name, Jim Algie. He was the bassist for The Malibu Kens in the closest thing we had to a heyday. His band previous to that was The Urban Surfers, whose main accomplishment was playing the first Spartan's Men's Hall gig.

³⁹ 32 oz. draught

⁴⁰ Edmonton's campus radio station. 88.5 on your FM dialÉ

⁴¹ Renee and I went out for three years. We lived together for the last half of that time. We met a fiery end, but we get along nowadays. Most of Too Dumb To Quit was inspired by her (see Bachelor Suite, Don't Let Her Know, etcÉ). In a weird way, she made me famous. Last I heard she was going to marry Mark Belke of SNFU.

⁴² A:Noyes was a high school band that had been around in an unknown fashion for years. The line-up included Rob and Jen Paches, Dave Mockford, Reg Elder, and Cam. They were my favourite Edmonton band while they existed, but their flakey ways couldn't stop them from breaking up, and it certainly couldn't stop them from fucking up royally at their advertised last gig at Spartan's. I mean, I was a true fan! I loved their songs! I was upset they were breaking up! They didn't play any songs at all at their last gig. They just angrily jammed out some God-awful noise for 35 minutes. Boy was I let down. I think I made a decision or two that night regarding respect for the audience.

⁴³ The Mods were part of that wave that happened in Edmonton in the early 80's who these days claim to have started the Edmonton alternative scene. The Mods covered The Who and The Jam and every other obvious song that wasn't nailed down. Don't know if they were a good mod band or a bad one; nothing to compare them to. They had the sixties cover market cornered. They wore suits.

⁴⁴ We were trying to go after a Buffalo Springfield type of thing. We fell a little short of the mark.

⁴⁵ Less Art, More Pop's Too Subtle For You came from those not-so-intense sessions, I believe.

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Any opinions expressed herein are solely those of Mike McDonald, copyright 1996.