Punks were in the basement

By Dan Hilborn
Published Feb. 16, 2005


There was a time last year when Chris Cutress was walking down the hallways of Vancouver's CBC headquarters, when a group of young coworkers started pointing and whispering.

"That's him. ... That's the guy," the group of teens and early 20- somethings said, before one of their number came up and popped the question that was on all their minds.

"Are you the guy who did the Vancouver Complication album?"

"Yeah," replied Cutress cautiously.

"Wow," said the young man, who was roughly the same age that Cutress was back in 1979 when the lifelong Burnaby resident was one of the leading players in the punk rock music explosion that swept across the world.

Vancouver Complication. For those who lived through the Lower Mainland's punk rock music explosion of the late '70s and early '80s - and this reporter was one - even the name brings back memories of some of the most infamous bands in the city's history.

DOA, The Pointed Stick, The K-Tels (later known as The Young Canadians), Active Dog, UJ3RK5, {e}, The Dishrags and Private School were among the many bands that made the trip to Royal Oak Avenue to record their music in the basement of the little bungalow where Cutress lived with his mother.

The record proved to be one of the most influential pieces of music ever to come out of the Lower Mainland. And the record is being rereleased this spring as a compact disc on the Sudden Death label owned by another Burnaby punk rock icon, Joey Keithley of DOA fame.

"We were trying to capture the independent music scene on a single record," Cutress said last week. "We didn't think it was that radical an idea, but that's how the album got its title, from all the complications that arose after we started."

The first complication was finding the money to make the project happen. A first fundraising concert ended up going broke, forcing a second event to take place at O'Hara's nightclub.

Then Cutress had to work out a schedule that would allow him to keep his new job at the CBC. That necessitated all the bands to do their recording on weekends, starting on Saturday morning.

Unfortunately, some of the punk rockers were not very good at getting up at a reasonable hour, and one band, Rabid, was dropped from the project when they missed three scheduled recording times.

Another complication was simple logistics. The Cutress home had several small rooms in the basement, and the recording equipment and cables stretched from one end to the other. The bands, with all their instruments and microphones, had the confines of a 10-foot-by-12-foot converted bedroom as a studio. Cutress and his recording crew had another equally tiny space for their equipment and, of course, his mother still entertained company upstairs throughout much of the recording.

Cutress distinctly remembers one rather amusing episode during DOA's recording session, when one of his mother's friends cornered lead singer Joey Keithley and offered him some musical advice.

"She said 'Your music is very nice, but ...' - I think it was kind of tongue-in-cheek - 'why such a horrible name? You should name yourselves the Bluebirds.'"

Cutress admits he was never a true punk rocker and the record reflected his mixed tastes - some of the songs are more like new wave than punk, while others delve into the range of techno-pop, and even experimental electronic music.

"I think the record opened my eyes to the different kinds of music out there," he said. "I made a lot of friends through that project, and it opened a few doors."

Cutress also confesses that despite the fact the original record sold 4,000 copies, he never made any money off it. "I guess it cost me about $1,000," he said. "And if you counted all the studio time we gave away for free, it could be as much as $10,000."

These days, Cutress does the engineering on much of the music that is recorded at the CBC studios downtown, and he does keep an editing station at his new home in Burnaby, where he lives with his wife and young daughter.

But this Friday night, Feb. 18, Cutress and whole bunch of his friends will be getting together to remember the past and celebrate the release of the 25th anniversary edition of Vancouver Complication when their CD release party is held at the WISE hall, 1882 Adanac St., Vancouver.

And oh yeah, there is one last complication. The 25th anniversary is in fact a year late.