Joe Dick's Favourite Records (According to Billy Tallent)

Chapter 1: The Dicks - Dicks Hate The Police

Billy is pretty sure Joe only bought the single because of the band name.

Or maybe it hadn't just been the name he liked, but the hammers and sickles and red stars and other assorted commie paraphernalia on the record sleeve. Joe's dad had been some big trade union guy, before he got sick and died, and Joe stuck with his dad's socialist politics out of blind loyalty to John Mulgrew as well as Joe Strummer.

No matter why Joe bought the record, he quickly became obsessed with the band, with the song. He played Dicks Hate The Police so much that it's burnt into Billy's brain, even now, almost 20 years later. Sometimes he wakes up in the morning with that opening guitar riff stuck in his head.

Joe even made a tape of the record so he could play it on the tour bus. Which he did. From Vancouver to Halifax, from Halifax to New York, from New York to Detroit, over and over and over.

In the end, Billy snapped and threw the tape out the window somewhere on the border between Ontario and Michigan. Billy was a lot less patient in those days.

Maybe he could have ignored it, if Joe hadn't always insisted on singing along and jumping around at the back of the tour bus while Billy or Pipe or John tried to drive, making a fool of himself, making Billy's teeth itch.

Billy can still see Joe, standing right at the back, his fat head blocking the rearview mirror, howling along: MOMMY MOMMY MOMMY LOOK AT YOUR SON, YOU MIGHT HAVE LOVED ME BUT NOW I GOT A GUN....

Even on the thousandth listen, Joe hadn't lost his pure, childlike enthusiasm for that song, even though it was about becoming a monster. And something about the delight in Joe's eyes made Billy rip the cassette out of the tape deck and throw it on the floor and jump up and down on top of it until it was broken.

It all got kind of ugly after that. Pipe pulled Joe off Billy, then John made Billy get back in the driver's seat and keep going despite his bloody nose.

Thank God they were only a couple hours away from Detroit, and they had a gig at the Greystone the next day. If they'd had a day off, the band might have broken up then and there.

At the end of the tour, Billy bought Joe a copy of the new Dicks album to say sorry for trashing his tape. That was probably the last time Billy ever apologized to Joe for anything.

Chapter 2: Kirsty MacColl - They Don't Know

They Don't Know was a piece of appalling sentimental trash by Kirsty MacColl, a record Joe brought home from England in 1979.

Joe's trip to England was a whole story in itself. He got injured at work, won big compensation from the workplace safety commission, then blew most of the compensation money on a plane ticket to London. He was gone without even stopping to tell Billy.

Joe came home two months later with stories about seeing the Specials and Dexys Midnight Runners and Crass and Adam and the Ants, and meeting Johnny Rotten in the toilets at the Roxy, although Billy was pretty sure he was lying about that bit. Joe'd thrown out half the stuff in his suitcase to make room for stacks of records and zines and clothes from the King's Road.

And he can remember that Joe was embarrassed he had that Kirsty MacColl record, and claimed he only bought it cause of the Stiff Records label on the logo.

It's funny - Billy can remember that, but he doesn't even remember what city he had breakfast in yesterday.

Joe liked the record, though. Billy remembers.

It was back in 1980, after they'd gotten the band back together, found John and Pipe, after they'd played a bunch of gigs in Vancouver and recorded their first single. It cost $1000 to have the singles pressed and put into paper sleeves with their artwork on it. It cost $500 to just get the singles pressed. So they'd gone for the cheapo option and had a party at Joe's where everyone had helped to fold and staple the sleeves.

It was 2am, and they'd run out of booze by 1am, so pretty much everyone else had gone home or onto another party. Billy hadn't left though. Which nobody seemed surprised by, because Joe was his best friend.

Joe hadn't left either, but that wasn't very surprising because it was his apartment. Also he was probably too drunk to walk anywhere.

It was 2am, or a little bit later. Billy was lying on Joe's couch trying to sleep. The lights were still on, because Joe was still awake. Maybe speeding on something, maybe just not feeling tired yet because he'd probably only woken up at noon anyway.

"Lights," Billy mumbled.

Joe turned out the lights. But then he turned on the record player, because Joe wanted to listen to Motorhead.

Billy rolled over on the couch and tried not to feel too homicidal. After a few minutes, he gave up on trying to sleep and opened his eyes.

It was so dark in the living room now that everything looked blue and grey: still, he could make out some basic shapes.

Joe was sitting next to the record player. He'd taken Motorhead off, but put something else on, and the record was already spinning: Billy could see it as well as, just faintly, hear it.

As Joe lit a cigarette, Billy saw a brief flash of his face. Joe was looking down at the boxes and boxes of Hard Cores Logo singles as the record started.

You've been around for such a long time now / maybe I could leave you but I don't know how....

Billy couldn't really see Joe's face, but he thought he looked sad. Maybe he was, if that was what he thought love was like.

I get a feeling when I look at you/ Wherever you go now, I want to be there too...

I thought I was following you, Billy thought to himself, and oh, shit.

No, I don't listen to the guys that say / that you're bad for me and I should turn you away / 'Cause they don't know about us, and they've never heard of love

So never let it be said that Joe didn't know it was going to be a disaster. He just didn't know how to do anything else.

Chapter 3: Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers - Born To Lose

Born to Lose was a B-side, and trust a contrary fucker like Joe Dick to love the flipside of a record better. Trust a contrary fucker like Joe to love a song called Born to Lose.

Even Billy can admit that Johnny Thunders makes being born to lose sound pretty fun. Born to lose...baby I'm born to lose, he croons, and it kind of sounds like a come-on, like a challenge, like an invitation. Why worry, when the worst has already happened? When losing feels this good?

Johnny Thunders died a few years back, in a motel room in New Orleans. Overdose. No feelgood factor there, precious little romance.

That was one thing you could say for Joe - he never got into heroin, even when the scene was awash in it. Slow suicide was not his style.

After everything ended in Edmonton, Ed Festus swooped in. He organized Joe's funeral, settled his debts, put his affairs in order. Billy suspects that Ed also took the opportunity to get into Joe's accounts and grab control over his publishing and his royalties, which were about to be worth a hell of a lot more now that he's dead than they ever were when he was alive. But Billy can't prove anything, and after about thirty seconds of being furiously angry with Ed, Billy realized that he didn't give a shit.

If Joe wanted his legacy taken better care of, he shouldn't have shot himself in the head. At least not without making a will first.

Ed asked them all for help with the funeral service. John had some dumb poem he wanted to read. Pipe just wanted to know if they'd be serving food after the funeral, and what kind. Billy said that they should play Born To Lose as they carry the coffin out, and John said that they couldn't do that because Joe's sister the born-again Christian will be there and it'll just upset her, and Billy screamed But it was his favourite song! and threw an ashtray at John's head.

He missed.

Born to Lose wasn't even Joe's favourite song. Top 10, maybe. Reflecting on it later, Billy thinks that maybe he just wanted an excuse to be mad at someone other than himself.

Billy left for rehab pretty soon after that. He didn't go to Joe's funeral. He heard later, though, that it was extremely well-catered.

Chapter 4

Chapter Notes

See the end of the chapter for notes

Over the years, Joe had told a lot of different interviewers that he had a lot of different favourite songs.

Usually, he named whatever single Hard Core Logo had just released, because according to Joe every record they cut was the best thing they'd ever done until the next one, and there was nothing wrong with thinking your own music was the best music in the world. Joe god bless him, believed his own bullshit a lot of the time.

Maybe he'd grudgingly acknowledge a Vancouver punk "classic", something by DOA or the Dishrags. Then he'd always tell a story about how this band or that band were total assholes who'd looked down their noses at them for being suburbanites, and stiffed HCL for door money too. Billy sat through Joe's little interview routine a million times: he knew the drill. He probably could have given his answers for him.

Joe still hasn't worked out that nobody outside of Vancouver gave a shit that they were from Vancouver.

Sometimes Joe would talk about really obscure punk records, the kind of two-bit records by two-bit bands that turned up on Killed By Death compilation albums. Joe genuinely loved that shit: he not-so-secretly wished that he too had been in some gimcrack provincial punk band that broke up after a year because their drummer got in a motorcycle accident. The Feederz. The Eat. The Snivelling Shits, Satan's Rats. The Epileptics, who were really the same band as Flux of Pink Indians, just like the Fatal Microbes were basically the same band as Rubella Ballet, and Billy hated Joe for making him learn all this shit but he hasn't been able to forget it yet.

He's pretty sure, though, that as much as Joe treasured 1970s Were Made In Hong Kong, it still wasn't his real favorite song.

Joe was not a bitter man in his heart of hearts. He was angry, sure, but Joe's dirty secret was that he was an idealist, a romantic. Punk cynicism didn't stick to him — at least, not when it came to music.

Maybe Joe was just born in the wrong place and at the wrong time. He would have been better off if he didn't have to play punk rock and talk about Vancouver.

Some time during his millionth awkward US press tour, Billy had worked out that people didn't want their punk rock to be from Canada. New York was cool. London was cool. Best of all, there was punk from war-torn places like Belfast, where bombs went off all the time and the punks probably ate cops for breakfast. Canada, though? Canada was not cool.

It didn't matter that downtown Vancouver was as tough a place to live as downtown Detroit, or Akron, or Glasgow, or any of these other decaying industrial cities where punk bands mushroomed. Vancouver was in Canada. They drink tea there and they think they're British. No way.

Sure, Canadians could be successful in the US. Sometimes really successful, like Neil Young and Robbie Robertson and all those guys. But they hadn't got to where they were by talking about Canada all the time. They were all born in Canada in the 1940s, but then they went down to California and pretended they were born in America in the 1840s. Well, except for Joni Mitchell, but Joni Mitchell was unique, like some sort of mutant escaped from a government lab.

Joe would have been better off living back then. He never got over the sixties, even though he was about ten years old when they ended. Joe, god fucking help him, believed in rock and roll as a means of redemption.

Poor Joe. He never learned the first thing punks were meant to learn, which was that none of this meant anything.

°°°

Billy went back to LA. He got his car back at the airport, paid the crazy fee for three weeks of parking. Billy put his bag in the back seat, got in the driver's seat. He turned the engine on, flicked on the radio without thinking, pulled out of the parking space. He drove down ramp after ramp until he was finally outside in what passes for LA sunshine and fresh air.

He put his sunglasses on.

They were putting Joe's body in the ground about now, back in Edmonton.

He rolled the windows down.

There was nothing but ads on the radio. Then a smooth-as-shit voice burbling about late nights on KWEST radio. Billy flicked the radio back off and drove down the freeway.

He turned the radio back on after a couple minutes. It's better than being alone.

For requests, call 86750551.

Joe wrote a letter to a fanzine in Saskatchewan once — Billy had read it, because he was over at Joe's and there was a copy of the zine sitting in an envelope on Joe's coffee table (Joe had insisted that having a coffee table did not make him a yuppie, because it was just a normal kitchen table that had the bottom half of its legs sawn off).

The zine was run by two high school kids. They had asked him to write about his influences and Joe had written about how much he loved rock and roll in the early 70s — Iggy, Bowie, Bolan, Lou Reed. His music magazines looked like rags once he'd cut out all the pictures to put on his wall and admire. He'd written something about how they'd all died or gone straight in the end. Joe'd all but admitted that he was queer, almost daring them to ask him straight out, a dare they had been too chicken or too clueless to take on.

Joe had written about the impossible dream of personal liberation through popular music. A dream that was clearly absurd, but so tempting it could seduced otherwise intelligent men and women, especially if they were emotionally weak. It was a dream that taunted you, tantalized you; a dream that was just in front of you, but was always out of reach again by the time it looked like you might be getting close. "Face front you got the future, shining like a piece of gold, but I swear as we get closer, it looks more like a lump of coal."

It was the best thing Joe ever wrote in his life. It beat the shit out of anything you might find in the Literary Review, it made you think that if the band broke up then maybe Joe could cut it as a novelist. And it was probably only read by about 30 people.

Joe would have liked that, found it romantic. Billy thought it was infuriating. That was the difference between the two of them.

We're with you into the night and through to the morning.

Joe liked the Velvet Underground. Not the early shit though, the stuff that was cool to like: he liked the sellout shit. God only knew why: he never talked about it. Which probably meant that it was important to him.

Thinking about that special someone? Call now. The request line is still open.

"Loaded". Billy only knew that Joe liked that album because he used to play it all the time. When he had a bad week and didn't even want to get out of bed, he'd play it over and over.

Weather is calm. Temperatures moderate, with a slight nip in the air. After all, it's almost December, folks.

Billy kept driving, and driving.

Just as he was turning into Santa Monica Boulevard, he suddenly decided to pull over, skidding to a halt next to a bank of payphones. He turned the keys in the ignition, got out of the car, and phoned in a request.

Billy got back in the car. He's headed for Sunset Boulevard.

This is KWEST Radio Los Angeles, and we just got a request. This is from Billy, for Joe, and it's the Velvet Underground with "Sweet Jane".

He drove on in silence.

Anyone who ever had a heart / They wouldn't turn around and break it / And anyone who ever played a part / They wouldn't turn around and hate it

- The Velvet Underground, "Sweet Jane", 1970.

The old sound was alcoholic. The tradition was finally broken. The music is sex and drugs and happy. And happy is the joke the music understands best. Ultrasonic sounds on records to cause frontal lobotomies. Hey, don't be afraid. You'd better take drugs and learn to love PLASTIC. All different kinds of plastic — pliable, rigid, colored, colorful, no attachment plastic.

- Lou Reed, quoted in "Please Kill Me" by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain.

Plastic lungs, plastic hearts, plastic cups were just the start!

1970s have been made in Hong Kong!

Plastic crap, plastic crap that keeps going wrong!

- The Epileptics, "1970s Were Made In Hong Kong" EP, 1980.

Chapter End Notes

I used a quote from "All The Young Punks" by the Clash (Give 'Em Enough Rope, 1978).
All the bands named are real, even the Snivelling Shits. The Epileptics changed their name for a while after the British Epilepsy Foundation wrote them a letter to complain.