D.O.A. hasn't been to Prince George in more than a decade. They have a crusty history with this city, so co-founder and frontman Joe Keithley can't wait to see what happens next in P.G. The legendary punk band plays The Croft stage on Saturday night.
He remembers well the show on August 24, 1997 when they were the headliners of a hardcore punk show by the Northern Society of Musicians & Artists at their garagey concert hall on 6th Avenue, a place now renovated beyond recognition into a social housing complex. That night, about 300 people showed up for the concert. The place was only legal for about 125. Some of those who couldn't get into the overcrowded place were intoxicated and disorderly out on the street. The police came; so did the fire marshal.
"I remember they turned the P.A. off so nobody could hear anything. We couldn't play," said Keithley. "They agreed to turn it on so we could talk to the crowd and tell them they had to leave. But when they turned it on, we just started playing. They turned it off again, and we convinced them to fire it back up, we would deliver their message for them, but we did it again. As soon as it was back on, we just did another song. They didn't make the same mistake a third time."
It's somewhat remarkable that D.O.A. is still able to return for an encore all these years later. The band is considered internationally to be one of the spearhead names in the hardcore punk world. They built off of The Sex Pistols, The Ramones, The Clash of that first generation to launch the genre, but were very much in the same mouthful as Black Flag (one of D.O.A.'s members even joined Black Flag for a spell) and The Dead Kennedys (TDK frontman Jello Biafra did a collaboration album with D.O.A.).
Put it this way: when Nirvana first performed in Vancouver, they were billed with D.O.A. - and it was Nirvana as the opening act. That's how powerful D.O.A. was in the music industry.
And when they did a tongue-in-cheek cover of the Bachman Turner Overdrive megahit Takin' Care Of Business, composer Randy Bachman joined them on stage and in the official music video.
Almost all of their peers have drifted off into obscurity and even over the mortal cliff, but D.O.A. is still pounding out the live sets and making new albums. The new stuff like Human Bomb is prototypical D.O.A., hitting global affairs and modern conformist culture in the bloody teeth. The new album hasn't been heard yet, it's called Hard Rain Falling, but they are on the launch tour now.
"Pipelines, racism, street gangs, global conflict...maybe they've been talked about before, but we feel the urge to put a fresh musical spin on those topics," said Keithley. "It's about politics, but it's about fun and blistering guitar riffs and pounding drums."
He needed a place to rant, after he got to chew on provincial partisan politics for awhile. He came within five votes of being the NDP candidate in the last election in the riding of Coquitlam-Burke Mountain. Being close, though, sent his aspirations afar.
"I met a lot of great people, helpful people in the NDP but I don't think they were ready for someone who was a free thinker," Keithley said. "They saw I had the lead going on during the nomination so they stepped in and made sure I lost in the end. But I'm a grown fellow and I knew there wasn't going to be a tiddly winks party. It's a tough business. I am going to run again in 2017 but I'll run for the Green Party this time."
This all sounds like pretty white collar stuff for a guy who spent the first 20 years of his career known only as Joey Shithead as his professional moniker.
Don't be fooled, he said. Part of his platform is taking the politics seriously but being a regular human being about it all. He wants to stop the push-away of everyday people from the halls of the Legislature.
"Let's put it this way, when I was in my 20s I knew the world was screwed up so I was singing angry young man songs," said Keithley. "Now that I'm older, I've seen just how screwed up it is, so things have gotten more defined. That's the modus operandi for D.O.A. If you see something wrong with your community, your city, your country, we sing about it, we write about. We make social commentary. It's not the media's fault. There is plenty of opinion out there. But there is such a preponderance of one viewpoint - big music, big business, big government. But we have a soap box so we'll point out what we see as wrong."
Tickets are $20 and includes a show by local punk darlings Far From First who are not going to forget, as they warm up The Croft audience, what happened to Nirvana after they opened for D.O.A. once upon a time.
