The Stars of Stage and Screen…Song #55/250 AND Who’s Punk?! What’s the Score?!…Song #19/21: Who the Hell Do You Think You Are? by Hard Core Logo from the Original Soundtrack to the Film Hard Core Logo.

Today we have a crossover edition where we find the world of Canadian punk rock merging with the world of Canadian cinema in the form of the fictional story of a punk band called Hard Core Logo. The film of the same name was directed by Canadian director Bruce McDonald and was part of a trilogy of “road” movies that he produced during the 1980s/90s. Hard Core Logo tells the tale of a punk rock band from Vancouver who are on the verge of breaking up. The reason that the band finds itself in this state of affairs is because their lead guitarist, a handsome young man named Billy Tallent, is being wooed by a major American record label to leave the band and join a supergroup in the U.S. In a desperate effort to keep the band together and to remind Billy as to why Hard Core Logo is where he belongs, the lead singer of the band, Joe Dick, gathers the band together one last time for a benefit concert that necessitates a road trip across the Prairies. The movie follows the band as they pile into a milk truck and head out on the road. Hard Core Logo is a movie that true punk fans always point to as being one of the most authentic depictions of life on the road for punk bands that still possesses that DIY punk mentality. Part of the reason that this film rings so true for so many, even though it is a fictionalized “mockumentary”, is that the subcurrent of remaining true to one’s punk roots and resisting the siren song of the major labels plays out as the movie’s plot line unfolds. If there is one ongoing battle within the punk rock community it is that: purity of vision versus compromised integrity. Ironically enough, I have a weird semi-connection to this movie that helps make it appear very real for me, too. It all has to do with finding yourself on a milk truck.

I was fortunate enough to grow up in a place and at a time when home milk delivery was still a thing. For those who have no idea what I am talking about, in my hometown of Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, we used to have milk delivered to our house the same way that the mailman delivers mail or the newspaper carrier comes to your door with the newspaper. Today’s version of this, I suppose, would be the delivery vans from Amazon or UPS. In fact, the milk trucks of my day were a lot like the UPS vans that you see in your neighbourhood now. The exception being that many were refrigerated. In any case, a couple of times a week the milkman (and it was always a man) would come to your house to bring you your milk. Initially, the milk was delivered in bottles. What my mother would do is wash the milk bottle when it was empty and place it back out on the front step. When the milk man arrived, he would see one or two empty bottles and would automatically replace them with one or two full bottles. It would then be up to me or my sister or our mother to get those milk bottles out of the sun and into the fridge before they spoiled in the heat. In order to pay for this service, we would buy ten or twenty tokens at a time from the milkman. If we put out two empties for the milkman to collect, we would leave two tokens in a cup beside them to “pay” for the new milk we wanted. It was a service that went on for almost the entire length of my childhood. Being the neighbourhood milkman was a respected job to hold. This brings me to my tenuous connection with the movie Hard Core Logo.    

When I was in Grade 6 I had a teacher named Violet Dick. That is not a word of a lie. She was 100 years old, if she was a day. I never had an older teacher than her all through my years as a student. I was twelve years old in grade six. In our classroom, all of the desks were two-seaters, meaning that each desk was about five feet wide and two people sat together and shared the desk space. For most of my time in Grade 6, I sat with good friends of mine named John and Jimmy and Edward. We were all good kids and got our work done and never caused any real trouble. However, I have a memory of there being another boy in that class named Donald M. or something like that. Donald turned sixteen the year I was in the same class as a twelve year old, with all of my other twelve year old friends. That someone like Donald could be sixteen years old and still in Grade 6 is a damning indictment of the education system of the day because it clearly failed this young man. As you can imagine, Donald seemed worldly to someone like me. He started wearing a leather jacket and, at one point, grew a cookie duster moustache. But the thing that I remember most about Donald M. is that he didn’t like Miss Dick and she didn’t like him in equal measure. Donald wanted to be anywhere other than where he was most days. More than anything, he couldn’t wait until the day he turned sixteen so that he could leave school and no one would be able to stop him. The day that happened is a day I will never forget. It was the beginning of the week…a Monday or a Tuesday. Miss Dick stopped our regular class work and announced that Donald wished to address the class. That was unusual. Sheepishly, he rose and gave a speech in which he told us that he was now sixteen years old and was leaving the classroom for good. He said that he had gotten a job as a milkman’s assistant and would be going to work instead of school. He said that he would be earning twenty dollars a week and that the offer was just too good to let pass. Miss Dick was, no doubt, just as happy to see Donald head out through the door one last time as Donald was to leave. To give Donald a proper goodbye we had an ice cream party on the Friday that ended that week. Donald left before the school day ended. I never saw him again. But I have thought about him a lot over the years. His situation was one of the reasons that I ended up becoming a school teacher. It seemed wrong to me then and it remains so now that someone so young could have the odds stacked so highly against him? I often wonder if he felt the same way? All that I know is that he set out to discover the path to his future at a time when home milk delivery was in its dying days. If his assistant milkman position ended shortly thereafter, what did he do next? What does one do when your options are so limited and the way forward may seem difficult to see? It is not impossible to carve out a successful life for yourself with a Grade 5 education but it is not always an easy task, either. I hope that Donald’s life turned out ok but I don’t know that it did.

This brings me back to Hard Core Logo.  One of the underlying emotions that runs all throughout this movie is that the young guitarist, Billy Tallent, is leaving the band behind by heading out for the bright lights and big money of L.A.  Billy Tallent is handsome and young and can really play the guitar. His future looks bright. But as for the rest of his bandmates in Hard Core Logo, the band is all that they have. There are no big paycheques waiting for them. None of them are magazine cover worthy. They are just a bunch of guys playing music in as big a band as they are likely to ever be involved in and now it is all seemingly coming to an end. The film may be about a punk band on the road but in reality it is a character study that examines the social dynamics within a group of those who have options in life and those whose options appear to be limited. It is exactly this type of case study that played out for real in punk bands all throughout the history of the genre. Do you stay true to your small town roots or do you head for where you think the grass is greener and leave those who supported you behind? There are many moments in Hard Core Logo when it is made to seem that being a member of that band is where the real glory can be found. The guys have lots of laughs, they end up in some sticky situations that help create brotherly bonds that are hard to let go of and they put on some great shows. But when the music fades and the lights go down and the crowds all wander home and there is nothing left but your own thoughts and a guitar case to lug and dirty laundry to carry, that glory loses a bit of its shine, even for the guys who don’t have a record deal and a photo shoot awaiting them. Sometimes the sum of our lives comes to fruition only after the thousands of life choices that we make along the way are taken into account. What do you do when it seems there is nowhere else to go? I will not spoil the movie by telling you how it all turned out. You can watch the trailer for this film, as well as the video for the song “Who the Hell Do You Think You Are?” and not have the answer revealed, either. That is a good thing because the way in which Hard Core Logo ends is one of the things that defines this film and elevates it into the upper echelon of movies made in this country. 

As for the song “Who the Hell Do You Think You Are?”, knowing the storyline of the film, it is easy to see how this song is directed by the rest of the band toward Billy Tallent. But the scene in which it is played is worth discussing. There are many who speculate that the band Hard Core Logo is actually based upon the real Canadian punk band from Vancouver known as D.O.A. For example, in the Hard Core Logo band, the lead singer is named Joe Dick. In D.O.A., the real life lead singer was named Joe Keithley or Joey Sh*thead, as he was known on stage. In any case, D.O.A. was one of the bands, along with American groups like Black Flag and the Dead Kennedys, that are considered to have started the subgenre known as hardcore punk. So, because D.O.A. were considered a hardcore band, the fictional version of them shown in the movie were named Hard Core, as well. (Hard Core Logo, that is). To further cement the connection between the movie and the real world of west coast hardcore punk rock, the lead singer of the band Black Flag for their most successful days was a man named Henry Rollins. Rollins has gone on to become a respected music historian and political commentator and, sometime, actor. Among the many things that Rollins has done is to write a book about what it was like to travel on the road as a member of Black Flag. His book is called Get in the Van!  Many of the tales he tells about the social dynamic of being in a small budget band, travelling from town to town, arguing/laughing as they drove became the same sort of stories depicted in the movie Hard Core Logo. Director Bruce McDonald has stated that the band in his movie is not directly based upon Vancouver’s D.O.A. but just the same it is obvious that he has taken snippets from the histories of many west coast bands and stitched them together to tell his story. That he has drawn his information and inspiration from such legendary and respected hardcore bands is one of the reasons that the script for Hard Core Logo rings so truthfully for so many punk fans. It is also why the movie ends as it does, which is in keeping with the very core principles of hardcore punk rock. 

The scene shown in the song video that I will link to below was taken from a real concert at a real venue known as The Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver. According to McDonald, the show that night at the Commodore was billed as a reunion of Vancouver punk royalty with people such as Joey Sh*thead and Art Bergmann performing. The fans who bought tickets did not know that a movie was being filmed. So when a band named Hard Core Logo was announced as the next band, the audience assumed it was all real and reacted accordingly as you will see from the video. The actors who played the members of the band all stated that it was a thrill to play before 2,000 excited fans. What further helped give the scene (and the entire movie) an air of authenticity was the fact that the man playing singer Joe Dick was a real singer named Hugh Dillon. He is the lead singer of Canadian rock band The Headstones. Dillon knew his way around a stage and can sing with a degree of professionalism. While Dillon was not an actor prior to Hard Core Logo, he brought something crucial to the movie and that was an understanding of what being in a band means to those who perform each night on stages large and small. It was this intimate knowledge of what was at stake for those being left behind by Billy Tallent’s decision to leave for Hollywood that helped give the film a degree of poignancy that you just can’t manufacture. Again, without revealing the ending, this sense of personal experience played a part in why the movie ends as it does when Billy Tallent leaves and the band runs out of options. 

Finally, I will end by talking a bit about the legacy that Hard Core Logo leaves behind. First of all, it does a respectful job in honouring the legacy of those musicians who played important roles in the formative years of hardcore punk rock on the west coast of North America. Because Bruce McDonald had treated their punk heroes with respect and honoured their memories and contributions, punk fans have honoured and respected this movie by referring to it as one of the best punk rock movies of all time. You respect us and we will respect you. That is how the ethics and politics of the punk rock genre work. Secondly, the critical success of Hard Core Logo helped to solidify Bruce McDonald’s reputation as a film director of note in Canada and around the world. By extension, having a good movie such as this be produced in Canada became a feather in the cap of the Canadian film industry, too. Finally, if you are a follower of the Canadian rock scene, especially over the past two decades or so, you will be aware that one of Canada’s most successful current rock bands goes by the name Billy Talent. This band name was inspired directly from the movie character in Hard Core Logo. Billy Talent, the band, have sold over 3 million albums over the course of their career and have won seven Juno Awards. 

I am a big believer in the importance of having options in life. The more options you can create for yourself, the more freedom you have to live the kind of life you wish to live. I live what I would describe as a successful life. I have a warm roof over my head, food in the fridge, a family that loves me, friends who stand by me, I have my health and while I am not rich, I am debt free. I believe very firmly that a lot of this success was made possible because of life choices I made right from my childhood onward. Sometimes you don’t fully appreciate the exact moment when an important life choice is being made but I firmly and distinctly remember that day in Grade 6 when I watched my classmate quit school in order to become a milkman’s helper. If Donald had a smorgasbord of life choices available to him and opted for this one because it made him happy then that is one thing. But it is another thing entirely to make important decisions like that based on what appears to be the lesser of two evils. In that case, you are defining your life because of negative options. That is no way to go forward. I hope that Donald ended up ok in his life. He never did anything bad to me while we were together so I have no reason to wish him ill. If anyone from back home knows how his story turned out, I would be happy to learn that. Feel free to let me know. 

Billy Talent, the band, could have chosen any name for themselves in the world but they opted to give a tip of the hat to the one character in the film Hard Core Logo who had the world at his feet. By emulating his vast potential, the band named Billy Talent created a philosophical direction for themselves and have enjoyed a successful music career ever since. For me, I began charting a direction for my own life that day in Miss Dick’s Grade 6 classroom. To be honest, I don’t remember that much about my time with Miss Dick as far as inspirational school work goes but the day that Donald M. spoke up in class remains one of the most impactful lessons I have ever received in my life. I carry it with me to this day. I have tried my best as a father to engrain that lesson in the minds and hearts of my young daughters, too. Work hard. Take care of your business. Set yourself up for success by giving yourself the widest array of options in life as possible. If you do, you stand a good chance of having a happy life. We all want a happy life, right?

The link to the video for the trailer for the film Hard Core Logo can be found here.

The link to the video for the song “Who the Hell Do You Think You Are?” as sung by Hard Core Logo in the film Hard Core Logo can be found here. ***There is no lyrics version available.

The link to the official website for the band Billy Talent can be found here.

The link to the official website for the band D.O.A. can be found here.

The link to the official website for The Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver can be found here.

The link to the official website for Henry Rollins and his book Get in the Van about life on the road with hardcore punk band Black Flag can be found here.

Finally, the title for the punk part of this post, Who’s Punk?! What’s the Score?! comes from a song called “Boxcar” by a terrific punk band called Jawbreaker. Please do me a favour and visit their website and show these guys a little love. The link to their official website can be found here.

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