59. you take tomorrow

Teenage Head, Crash’n’Burn, 1977 / photo by Ross Taylor

John Balogh: Unfortunately, when I started to book hotels and bigger venues, some of the bands were already vaporizing because the of the lack of momentum or nucleus behind them. Simply Saucer was one of them.

At the end, when it was free flowing and coming to a point when it was starting to be commercially melded, and steered in a direction where guys like Jack Morrow took control, then bands were getting paid. I can remember those bands getting paid five, ten grand a night. Now I’m sure the bands never saw any of that because the agent was probably fifteen per cent and the manager’s end would have been twenty-five per cent, so there’s thirty-five sucked up into the world. And then there would have been some pariah wart like me as the promoter who would have wanted at least ten per cent to do it. So out of ten grand, which sounds like a lot of money to a blue collar worker even today, it’s not a lot of money. Because by the time you pay sound and lights and roadies and trucks and food, you know what? Out of ten grand there’s probably fifteen hundred or two grand left. It’s eaten up by costs to get you there, and create the illusion if you will.

I think it’s credible to those days that those nucleus guys were half asshole, half human being. The guys like Jack Morrow. Probably if you talked to Gordie he’d have mixed feelings about that guy, from half asshole to half human being. The guy had some great attributes but was a thief. You can’t really forgive one from the other.

He needed to have some humanizing skills. That’s what should be offered in the music business; some lessons in humanistics, if you will. Because I find a lot of the guys at the top, they inherit this disease. It’s called Shit On Everybody. And they seem to forget that everybody starts at the bottom and works their way up. There’s only two people in the world that don’t. One of them’s a ditch digger.

Paul Kobak: I told you what kind of hustlers Jack and John [Brower] were. See, Jack was just waiting for my contract to expire in 1979, and when it did he locked up the band with an iron-clad contract, and things just weren’t the same from there on. He wanted to get rid of me because I was too close to the band. Trouble is, the band wasn’t listening to me. I really wanted for Teenage Head to go the concert route instead of playing bars, because that’ll just knock you out and then you don’t get creative and write songs anymore.

I just wasn’t able to do enough on my own. I was too much of a rookie and didn’t have the old-boy connections that these guys did. I thought it would be a great blend. It’s just that no one could get along with each other.

I went to a lawyer, who unfortunately wasn’t a music lawyer, and he just drafted something up on a couple of sheets of paper and that was in the middle of ’77. So my contract ran out in the middle of ’79. But Jack by that time had already steered me on to doing stuff with other bands. I was helping to manage the Mods, the Secrets; I was being called on by a number of bands periodically just for advice, I guess. The Viletones, Steve Leckie asked me to manage them. The Androids, there was a bunch of them.

I don’t think there’s much more you can say, really. The scene was just starting to open up, and that’s why I felt that the timing was right to do something like that. On the one hand, I was already being edged out with Teenage Head by Jack and I don’t know, I could yell at the guys in the band, but what’s the use? They became indifferent and just too wrapped up in their own situations and they didn’t pay attention to what was happening. And I found out later Jack was badmouthing me about this and that and the other thing to them, so that didn’t help my ego much either.

Stewart Pollock: They used to call him Buckle Flaps and Cash Kobak. He had all kinds of names. Frank was just so abusive to him – “Come on you fat fuck, give me some fuckin’ money.” “Kobak, go get some fuckin’ beer.” He’d just order him around and abuse him.

Stephen Mahon: From what I remember, Jack tried to keep Paul around. He knew we had a bond with him. But Paul wasn’t going to be second fiddle to anyone, that’s the impression I got.

At the same time, I remember him being excited because of John Brower’s history. He had put on shows and things like that, and he knew that for a new band it was important to make connections like that. But I guess he didn’t realize where it would lead to.

Gordie Lewis: Our management people got rid of Paul, which happens in the music business. Every band, I’d say every single band that has any success at all, has somebody that was there in the beginning, they’ve moved up the ladder, organized management has come in, and it’s just the cutthroat way of the business. It’s, “See ya later, no longer need ya.” And it’s cruel, but you know, it happens. All the time.

And we were no different, and that’s what happened to Paul. I remember saying – I could see what was going on – I said, “Paul, really, you’re not our manager anymore, these guys are, and you’re the one who introduced us to these guys and they’re pretty strong guys. You can obviously see that they’re motivated; they’re moving. You can be something in the band, like be somebody else, whatever.”

He didn’t want to. He wanted to be, “I’m the manager of the band.” But there was no way; it was not gonna happen. At that point I just shrugged my shoulders and said, “I can’t help it anymore because I want to keep on moving forward and I can’t stay here. None of us can. We’ve got to keep going.”

That’s not one of the most pleasant things. I’ve got to live with that. It’s unfortunate, but Paul couldn’t do it anymore. He couldn’t take us to the next level. He just didn’t have the ability to progress.

Dave Rave: Rock ’n’ roll takes casualties; you have to do something to make it, and unfortunately there are winners and losers. I think eventually maybe it does even out, maybe not, but you don’t know. You just want to go, “Okay, right now somebody’s going to help us out, let’s go, we’ll do it.” And meanwhile the other guy is thinking something else; he’s got his view of it and it doesn’t fall in with your view. Then other people start stepping in and going, “Leave this guy behind, I’ll take you here.” And you go, “Okay,” not thinking that maybe you hurt that guy badly.

You’re just thinking, Oh good, we want to keep going.

I don’t think it’s done maliciously. It appears to be, but I think it’s just we’re all dumb. Everybody’s dumb, and everybody wants to move forward. It’s the grand prize. I think that’s just business in the long run.

Paul Kobak: I believed in them. But, I don’t know, they lost it. They became oblivious to me. I don’t know how to explain that better. Jack, if you ever sat down with the guy, you’d be pretty amazed. He’s got the gift of gab, better than I do. Well, had. He’s dead now.

You know, I never made a penny from them, 1977–80. In fact, by December 1979 I’d relinquished my store to my cousin, as I’d accrued twenty-five thousand dollars in debt with my main distributor, Records On Wheels. In 1980 I had a briefcase jammed with receipts totalling thirty thousand dollars attributable solely to Teenage Head. Gary Cormier suggested a good lawyer to me. I paid the two hundred and fifty dollars for the visit, showed him my contract and receipts but when he looked me in the eyes and asked, “Do you really want to go ahead and sue these guys?” I thought about it and said no. I’m not sure what I was thinking. Probably just all the time and energy we shared together for “the cause.” I felt like a woman who didn’t want to take her husband to court.

It was always, “Give me the money this week.” Gord was really bad for that. Nick was no slouch. Frankie, he just wanted to make sure he always had lots of money in his pockets so he could get drunk every day, which I think he still does. I taught him everything he knows.

Stewart Pollock: Frank was the one that everybody liked. As loud and as arrogant as he was, and as rude as he could be, people really liked Frank. Everybody wanted to be his buddy, and Frank loved it. Everybody he knew that came around, “Got any blow? Got any money? Buy me a couple of beers,” he’d lay into them right away and set the tone right from the beginning of the relationship – “You’re paying for everything. It doesn’t matter if I’ve got money in my pocket or not, you’re paying for it.”

Paul Kobak: “Taken advantage of” – everybody that knows has reflected that expression on me at one time or another. “Oh, you used to manage Teenage Head. They did a number on you, didn’t they?” It was semi-common knowledge. Semi. It’s not something I agree with, but I don’t know, it’s got to be attributed to my own foolishness.

I fucked up. I trusted them. I’ve been shafted by enough people throughout the years, but usually it’s at the very initial stages. I figure okay, I’ve known this person for a little while.

What’s he need? Two hundred bucks? Five hundred bucks to get some kind of thing happening? And meanwhile, he’s talking about projects down the road that we’re talking fifteen, a hundred thousand bucks about. So you figure out by that point how for real the person is. You cut them some slack. If they don’t pay you back or do things timely as per agreed, then you know that you could have lost a heck of a lot more with them down the road than you just did.

John Balogh: The other thing you have to remember about the bands is no matter how talented you thought they were, the thing that projected them to the next level was a nucleus of people behind them: Their management company.

Teenage Head were a great example. Their manager was an asshole: Jack Morrow. Everybody in that band would tell you that. He robbed them blind, but you know what? As a manager went, man, he was an in-your-face, sixty-five-year-old man who was dealing with a bunch of young punks, who kept them in order, and would go out and rob the places of as much money as he could.

I know, because I was a promoter. I would hire the band. That fuckin’ guy would be at the door with me two hours before the band showed up. He’d make you empty all your pockets so you didn’t have a dime in your pocket, so at the end of the night when he frisked you, if there was any money in there you stole it from the door. That’s how tight that guy was. And you know what? For many years I saw Gordie’s brother come up and go “Oh, I’m Gord’s brother,” and the guy would go, “Good. Fuckin’ pay here and get the ten bucks back off of Gord.” And he would. The brother would have to pay.

Gail Manning: He knew how to put the machinery in place to get the backers, to get the money, to get things done to dangle a band in front of a record label and get a deal. He was really great, I thought.

Paul Kobak: Once he had gotten his own management contract and I got left out in the cold, I remember Gary Cormier verbally berating me about that.

I mean, as manager, mine was for ten per cent, his was for twenty. So he’d take twenty per cent right off the top. That’s how he paid his rent and his car bills and everything. But it’s not like he never told the band what he was doing. And it’s not like he probably didn’t remind them that, “Is that your signature right there? Uh-uh. Well, this is what it says.” I spoiled them by never referring to my contract.

Stewart Pollock: Teenage Head had great riders. It was booze galore. It was a full page: Two bottles of Jack Daniels, two boxes of Blue, two boxes of Heineken, a bottle of Kahlua, two bottles of vodka. It was an incredible amount of booze they gave us every night.

I think the manager really wanted it that way because it basically kept the band pickled, and they didn’t ask about the money and they didn’t ask about all the other business parts of things. Just keep them on the road and keep them drunk.

Paul Kobak: I would like to say I would have dropped out sooner from Teenage Head to save my record store from all the incurred debts. But at the same token, I learned so much invaluable experience dealing with people and working with all these other bands as well that that’s a really tough one. I wouldn’t know where to draw the line on that.

Gordie Lewis: We never said thank you to Paul Kobak. That’s one of the things you lose control of, and certain things you just don’t think of. But yeah, Paul Kobak really helped us out in the beginning.

Paul Kobak: They went as far as striking my name off the album credits after the first pressing of their first LP.