Part 2 of the Zellots Story: Vancouver
C=Chris DeVeber: guitar
J=Jane Colligan:bass H=Heather
Haley:vocal G=Greg Moore:drums CN=Conny Nowe:Drums
WW=What Wave
WW: How did the Zellots get together in Vancouver?
C: You remember we (Chris and Jane) sort of had a
falling out, you and I. And we were in
C: Heather had just seen her first DOA show and
remembered in an interview with Georgia Strait “The Volume! It was truly, an
assault on the senses, but I adapted quickly. It was like nothing I’d heard or
seen, so exciting!” in the Vancouver paper. I remember answering the ad and we
(Heather) talked for over an hour on the phone. Then we agreed to meet for
coffee and we talked in the coffee shop for about 6 hours…LOL…and we just hit
it off so well. And we needed a bass player and we had a drummer Conny Nowe.
Conny Nowe: How I met up with Heather (Haley), was I
rented a 4 bedroom house in the east end and I was looking for roommates to
share with and Heather came up through mutual friends. I had always wanted to
play drums and one of my roommates had drums set up in the basement. I'd go to
the basement and practice and play along with tracks on headphones when no one
was home. The punk scene was very present in the U.S. and the U.K. and the
press was well aware of the anti-establishment attitude made popular by bands
such as The Sex Pistols and The Avengers from California, with vocalist
Penelope Houston. The Avengers tune. "The American In Me" said it
all. There were many more bands with a similar attitude of course.
Chris: And we needed a bass player and damnit Jane
needs to be here and I started to write letters back to London to her and
telling her you’ve got to come out to Vancouver. This band needs you and you’ve
got to come out and play. I just said come on out, I don’t care what happened,
you’ve gotta get out here and she didn’t answer and I thought she was still mad
at me. So I sent 2, maybe even 3 letters and I didn’t get any answer so I
figured that she just hated me now. And then I think about maybe a month after
I’d been there, I was just walking in my neighbourhood and I run into Nick
Nygard, who was her boyfriend (also best friends w/Kevin Sims) and I just had a
fit and I went ‘Nick! Nick! where’s Jane’. And he said, ‘she’s here, she’s in
J: um huh… I had gotten your letters, there just
wasn’t time to write back, we just packed up the car and that was that.
C: And they had been living only 3 blocks away,
literally 3 blocks away for about a month. In the entire city of
J: That was bizarre! Really I didn’t know how to get
ahold of you, one of your letters, the addresses that was on it, you’d already
moved again and you weren’t there when I got there. So it was really flukey.
The other thing was that Heather Haley is not your atypical punk either, she
didn’t have a Mohawk, or buzzed off hair, she had long thick red hair down to
her waist. Dyed brilliant red hair. Ya know, there was a certain conformity to
punk rock back at the beginning and she wasn’t….
C: Ya, we did get a little bit of that, we were just
too girly. Like the music came across great, but I think some people thought we
looked just too pretty, their hair was too long that kind of stuff.
J: Well everybody was cutting their hair off, or
shaving it off or spiking it up. Not that we didn’t want to, it would just look
like crap. I couldn’t do that, it wouldn’t have suited me cause I have big
ears.
C: Even before that, we wanted to be known for
playing and not our sexuality. And her (Jane’s) boyfriend Nick used to laugh
about that…’oh ya, that’s why you don’t put any makeup on, you don’t do your
hair before you go on stage’. But you
know what I mean, we were just being ourselves, we didn’t want to be known for
being a female band, but more for being good musicians.
Heather Haley: Most other musicians were very
supportive, but I recall a few condescending sound men, journalists and club
owners.
WW: What was it like back then, being part of what is
now a legendary scene?
Heather: It was a very happy, heady, time, the
excitement palpable; one of the best times of my life, the catalyst to my life
as an artist. Read my novel, The Town
Slut’s Daughter which portrays certain real-life events, like the St.
Valentine’s Day Massacre. I have the
first 10 chapters posted at my blog, One Life:
http://www.heatherhaley.com/onelife
C: That was a fantastic time cause Heather was
interconnected with everybody. She knew DOA really well, she knew The
Subhumans, everybody on the scene and she had a lot of respect from them. I
think The K-Tels even rehearsed in her basement in the same place that we
rehearsed. So we got to know Art Bergmann.
WW: When did you first play in
Heather: It was at the Smiling Buddha (1979) with two other female-centric bands, Perfect Stranger and the Devices.
J: Then DOA right after that, Modernettes played with
us all the time. We played with Braineater…
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Heather: K-Tels, Subhumans, Private School, Devices and more.
WW: Did you ever play with The Dishrags, another all
girl band?
C: Ya, we did. We played at that big house party, the
one where Bob Rock (now a famous producer and recording engineer) asked
us to … he offered to do a single.
J: He was in The Payolas…and I couldn’t believe when
I heard Bob Rock (years later), the big star!!
C: I talked to him at that party and he really liked
us and he wanted to do a single with us.
WW: About recording in
C: Oh ya, a good friend of Heather’s, Peter Draper
was a fabulous guy, he had the equipment and… He was like a Peter Moore
(producer/engineer/masterer/sound guy, who was in London ON in this time period)
out west, he was a really good friend of Heather’s, we did it in the basement.
Heather: Sadly, it’s the only recording we did, the master is lost. It was engineered by my ex-boyfriend Peter Draper, a very talented guitarist who had played with Art Bergmann in his Surrey band, the Schmorgs.
J: He kinda did what Peter Moore did, he hung
a microphone, and it’s the coolest, it’s called ‘Let’s Play House’…what a great
song, what a great recording, it’s raw but you can hear everything. But the
vocals, the sound, it sounds like early 60’s. Just a great sound!! (Ed….3 songs
survived and are on the flexi-disc put out by Supreme Echo)
C: Heather had a fabulous voice and we’ve always,
Jane and I, been good at harmonies. Even in high school, we used to walk down
the street harmonizing together, made up songs and harmonized.
Heather: I always sang, had a good voice but only in
choirs, so I really had no experience as a performer before the Zellots. I
always wrote too.
Supreme Echo released a 3 song flexi of the above
recordings in 2017. Sounds a bit rough as it was salvaged from a cassette copy
that Heather has had since the initial recording, but Supreme Echo was able to
clean it up a bit, and the energy and vitality of the songs really comes
through! Conny wasn’t available to drum at the time of the recording and John
MacAdams of The Modernettes filled in.
All 3 tunes were carried over to the London years of the
band and are probably familiar to many who went to see the Zellots perform live
here in London. There’s a nice insert inside (the record sleeve) with lots of
pics and some of the Vancouver history of the band. The flexi is available via
Supreme Echo and may be available locally at some of our fine record stores.
At the time of this release, Heather appeared on Nardwuar
The Human Serviette’s Radio Show on CITR and did some Vancouver instore
appearances to promo the release, cumulating in a party at What’s Up Hot Dog.
There were also reviews of the release in Exclaim, Georgia Strait and probably
others. Bass player Jane Colligan appeared on CHRW’s Radio What Wave for an
interview and there was some promo at the London Record Show at the time.
Around this time, the band started to change a bit, with the
exit of Conny Nowe and John MacAdams becoming a full time member on the drums.
Conny Nowe: I was fired by Heather Haley from the
band and replaced by John MacAdams from the Modernettes. I went
on to play with Tin Twist, Junco Run, Moral Lepers and then I moved to Toronto
in 1987 and played drums professionally for decades (Laura Repo, The Courage Of
Lassie, Mother Tongue, Random Order, The Horables and more) and still play
drums now as well as guitar and mandolin. (Ed: Conny has had a very impressive
music career since her start in the Zellots and still plays in Swamperella to
this day). So getting fired from the Zellots paved the way for a much more
diverse and fruitful music career for me.
WW: There was just the one recording in
C: As far as we know…oh no, there’s another
possibility. The Rock Against Prisons (
J: Rock against prisons, Rock against racism. That’s
something that wasn’t going on here (
C: One time we were dropping off the money after a
gig or something like that and we weren’t allowed to see where we were going,
we were in a van and didn’t actually have blindfolds on or anything like that.
We were in the back of the van and were told not to look where we were going,
or where it was we were picking up money or dropping off money or something to
people in the anarchist movement. It was secret cause no one’s supposed to know
where they live.
J: Another thing was that RCMP raid on the Smilin’
Buddha (Vancouver club), you would never get something like that in London
Ontario or Toronto.
C: No, what that was, was undercover cops from the
area. They used to go by the bar and they’d see the punk scene happening and
their precinct was only 1 block away. And they were really upset about this
burgeoning punk scene.
J: People hated punk rock! You gotta remember that,
they HATED it!
C: They thought it was going to be another
reincarnation of when everybody flooded out west in the hippy era. They were
freaking out and they had to nip this in the bud. So what they did, they used
to start to come in undercover and bully people and shake people up and try and
provoke them or find anything they could. Or in my case they were asking me if
I was of age or not. But they looked like really rough people.
J: They’d go in, in plain clothes, but this day in
particular was an organized raid. It wasn’t just a coupla cops going in to
bully people. We had a gig that night with DOA, we’d taken our equipment in at
2 o’clock in the afternoon or something and we were just there to hear the
sound check, or do a sound check and suddenly all of these people who had been
in the bar are shouldering the people from the bands. Chris was one of the main
ones they picked on. We were both at the bar together and it’s
C: And I didn’t have ID but I was of age, but I
didn’t have ID on me and I was just explaining that to him and he said ‘get
her’ and they just grabbed me.
J: But at the same time, in little enclaves,
everybody was getting dragged down, punched, hit…
C: And they did this regularly to the point that the
Smilin’ Buddha had to have 2 lawyers on call 24 hours a day…
J: But I’m sure that was the first time it was that
big because everybody was absolutely in shock. The guy from The Modernettes,
John MacAdams, just dragged me out the back door and we sat in a car out in the
back alley with stuff over us until it calmed down. But before that happened, I
followed her (Chris) out the front door and saw her get slammed onto the hood
of a car, while she protested and she was taken to jail.
C: And I was charged with police assault. Can you
believe that?!? Because the more charges they got, the easier it would be to
close the bar down. Like John (McAdams, 2nd drummer after Conny Nowe)
our drummer, tried to stop them, I was basically getting beat up and they had
me against a brick wall and he tried to get in there and say ‘stop, why are you
hurting her, she’s not doing anything’. And they grabbed him and said ‘do you
want to go too? You wanna go too?’ And he kinda backed off. Then they just handcuffed
my hands behind me and just threw me into the back of the paddy wagon with no
way to stop my fall and I went face first into the thing. And I was actually
really happy and relieved when I got into the police station in front of the
desk sergeant. Cause these guys (arresting cops) didn’t even have cop uniforms
on.
J: We weren’t even sure they were really police. So
there’s the difference between
C: No I didn’t see anything like that going on here.
Ever! And that wasn’t too fun and I had to stay a lot longer in Vancouver than
I meant to, they kept bumping up the court date and I really wanted to fight
it. And you (Jane) had left after the band split up, I’m jumping ahead here.
But basically Brad Kunte (real name Kent), that’s his name, his punk rock
handle, he’s from The Avengers in San Francisco, he basically came to one of
our rehearsals and we were all like wow, he’s gonna help us out. What he did
was he took Heather instead
J: He took our singer (to form the 45’s in California).
…(Ed….Heather doesn’t agree with the timing, she remembers it as Chris and Jane
decided to come back to London and the 45’s with Brad and Randy started after
they left).
C: He said ‘I wanna take you to LA’. And he took
Randy Rampage from DOA too. And Heather wishes that she had never made that
decision now and stuck with the band. Hindsight is 20/20 and she goes, ‘oh the
things you do when you’re young.’
WW: So that ended the Zellots then?
C: Basically that was the end of it, because she left
(singer Heather) and we were running out of resources. I wanted to go back
home… Jane left, and I was staying behind because supposedly this court case
was only going to be one more week. Then they bumped it ahead to January, from
October. And I tried to stay as long as I could, but I couldn’t do it and I had
no money and I was just starving basically. I’d show up at friends houses
because they were having supper, and you could smell it downstairs, pretend I
was just dropping by…LOL.. So I came home and just left the charges. I had them
sent to
Continued in Part 3 Zellots Back In London ON
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/2445316272408648559/4938493177067784913
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