“There’s two different ways to look at it, Billy just wants the models and limousines and I’m happy with hookers and taxi cabs.”
It’s a line that sounds like it could come from the mouth of Ricky from Trailer Park Boys, however Joe Dick predates the character. Hardcore Logo is a 1996 mockumentary flick that chronicles an aging punk band as they reunite for one final tour. It was directed by Bruce MacDonald and based on the novel of the same name published by Micheal Turner in 1993.
McDonald came to prominence along with several other Ontario-based filmmakers in what would become known as the Toronto New Wave (1981-1996), a loosely connected group of artists that rejected both Hollywood and the traditional Canadian filmmaking conventions of the time.
The film stars The Headstones’ frontman Hugh Dillon as Joe Dick, the band’s leader and primary songwriter. Several members of Hardcore Logo can been seen wearing The Headstone’s famous H with a snake emblem ring in the movie as an homage Dillon’s real life musical contribution.
One can’t help but wonder if the band in the movie is a nod to D.O.A., a punk band formed in Vancouver in 1978 and fronted by one Joey Shithead. D.O.A. are considered by many to be the founders of the Hardcore Punk genre and they toured all across the country until breaking up in 1990. They did reunite however in 1992, just a theory.
The band is backed by guitarist Billy Tallent (Callum Keith Rennie) and bass player John Oxenberger (John Pyper-Ferguson) who suffers from schizophrenia and far more so after he loses his medication during the first leg of the tour. Sitting in at the drum kit is Pipefitter (Bernie Coulson) who serves as the film’s main comic relief.
A camera crew follows the band along their trials and tribulations and the group tends to welcome the attention for the most part. As a band, they are rife with problems from their lack of funds to creative differences and the general toll life on the road is taking on this latest iterations of themselves. However there is a tough love that roots its soft head every so often, anchored in their years of togetherness.
The initial reason for the band’s reunification is to play an anti-gun benefit concert in support of their biggest musical influence, Bucky Haight, who’d recently lost one, or maybe even both his legs at the hands of some vicious gunman. It is later revealed halfway through the tour that singer Joe Dick concocted the story as a means to bring the group together again, knowing that money alone wouldn’t be enough.
Bucky is enraged that Dick would use him in such a way and forces a heavy acid trip upon both the band and their camera crew which leads to a very bizarre and audibly queasy sojourn through the depths of their subconscious, foreshadowing their not so distant future.
Despite the many hardships and personal confrontations they endure on the six-city tour from Vancouver to Edmonton, they manage to complete the gigs with the type of legendary performances that brought them their initial fame a decade earlier.
The film has style, originality and phenomenal acting. The acting is so good that the friend I was watching it with turned to me about half way through the film and said, “Wait, I thought this was a documentary.”
It will make many Canadians nostalgic for the 90’s and long for the vast open land of the nation’s West. Hardcore Logo blends a certain inventive editing by Reginald Harkema with the cocksure directing style of Bruce Dickinson in a way that still feels fresh today.
There is something compelling about this interesting look at the rock n’ roll/band on the road type of genre because it doesn’t deal with their rise and fall. There are no cliche scenes of their first big local gig being attended by the sleazy suit who represents the record label that gives them their big break. Followed by the band being forced to turn their back on their old manager, the one who genuinely cared about their art but lacked the connections to take them places. There is no dramatic rift over the way the press favours one over the other, nor the sad montage of the drugs getting the best of them.
In Hardcore Logo, they are band that has done all that already off camera, and now must reunite out of necessity. They are a band that reached only marginal success at their height and now know no other trade. Brothers, bonded by their malfunctions.
In a sense, if there is such a genre, it could be called a band’s band story, the way comedy aficionados refer to a comedian’s comedian. Telling a story far more common than glamorous, capturing the average while glorifying the grit in the process.