Robert Dayton, Platypus Venom, Thor and NO FUN: the Cold Glitter launch part two (supplement to the Straight)

 "Canned Hanham" (Canned Hamm by Bob Hanham, circa 2016?)

Hi! The following is a supplement to my new Georgia Straight feature interview with Robert Dayton. Because of Facebook regs, neither he nor I can actually SHARE THAT ARTICLE direct on Facebook: but we can share a blog link, so I'm doing a supplement to that piece. START WITH THE STRAIGHT! Click the above link, read the piece, then come back. Robert, David and I will wait for you! 

The hyperlink for THIS ARTICLE is here:

https://alienatedinvancouver.blogspot.com/2025/05/robert-dayton-platypus-venom-thor-and.html 

Photos of the show can be seen here: 

https://alienatedinvancouver.blogspot.com/2025/05/robert-dayton-cold-glitter-booklaunch.html 

At Noize to Go, picture by me

The following is an outtake from my Straight interview with Robert. We pick up at Hunnybunny, with Robert talking about whether a platypus is glam. He would surely have added "venomous" to his descriptors of the platypus, had he realized that they are; I pointed this out to him later. Somehow adding poison to the platypus CV makes it even more glam!

AM: So a platypus is glam. 

RD: A platypus is glam. But people will go, where does Robbie Rox fit in? Listen to that operatic-type voice, that's super-glam to me. But then again, he gets into these Beefheartian time signatures. But then again, he's wearing these custom-made tuxedos. But then again, he's got this bizarre sense of humour. So it's freaky! It's freaky. [See the Straight article: being freaky is also one of Robert's glam qualifiers]. So it's going to go into the book. It's got these super-glam elements. 

AM; Okay. Coming back to Paul Leahy, is there anyone else you couldn't get into the book because they had died...? 

RD: Oh, my goodness, could you show me the book? It's been sad where people have passed since. Like, for the Toronto panel, I'd wanted to get Stanley Frank for the panel, because he was just so lovely to talk to, and boy is it ever glam, if you want to talk glam. But...

[We are interrupted by the arrival of Robert's breakfast sandwich and when we get back to it, Robert has moved on from people who died to just people who he couldn't get in the book -- but who are still alive!].

RD: KTel, there's some people in there I would have loved to talk to... Tim Ray has been a little elusive. It would have been nice... I met him a few times. 

AM: Yeah, he used to be around, but he's dropped off the map...

RD: And there are some bands I didn't need to talk to. I didn't talk to Max Webster. I didn't to talk to Teenage Head -- they've been so well-covered, and the punks own them, you know what I mean? They're glam, but the punks own them. That's fine. It would have been nice to talk to a member or two of Buick MacKane [NOT the Texas band with Alejandro Escovedo, but a Canadian band, named for the same T. Rex song]. But I did talk to a couple of members of Buick MacKane. You know who I'm talking about...?

AM: I don't! I don't know Buick MacKane. There's tons of stuff I don't know in here... I'm not a glam guy! 

RD: I'm mostly talking about Reid Diamond, because he went on to Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet. And then Johnny Lovesin, that was a big one. [Robert appears to have re-introduced the theme of the dead into the conversation]. Johnny only passed a year or two after [he probably said "before" and I typed this wrong?] I started the chapter, so again, it's filling in the blanks with Johnny, and covering him as best as I could, because he's gone. With Fludd, I talked to Greg Godovitz and Ed Pilling, but Ed's brother died... I did get members of the band, great members of the band to talk to, but Brian Pilling died right after the recording of the third Fludd album. There's some pretty glammy stuff going on there. 

AM: I'm more of a Goddo guy! 

RD: The second Goddo album, Who Cares? Super glammy.

AM: That's the one with "Cock On" on it? 

RD: Which refers to Fludd! [There is a whole story to be divined between the lines: The third Fludd album was actually going to be called Cock On, but the label objected; there's also a semi-nude photo proposed for the cover that caused a scandal, alluded to in the lyrics to the Goddo song. I had no idea of any of this; I just like the song "Cock On," and thought it Goddo's most glammy moment]. So yeah, it's pretty damn glammy. The 3rd Fludd, the second Goddo. But he passed on a long time ago, Brian Pilling. I'm trying to think of who else... members of Chikkin were impossible to find, they'd just disappeared off the face of the earth. Justin Paige and Chikkin, those were detective stories! That was having to really find a tenuous thread to finally get most of the story. Justin Paige was elusive: people said he didn't want to talk about his past, he might be in New Orleans... but I found Joey Miller; Joey Miller wrote all the songs! And he was the keyboard player in the band. So Justin sang the songs, and Justin... I described him as a more burly answer to Jobraith, but Justin was straight! Joey is not. And the managers were not, the Franks, who later came up with MAC cosmetics. So we're getting into some exciting territory there, with queer identity politics; so it makes for an exciting chapter in that regard. 

And getting back to Chikkin, they get into a bit of that, too, even down to their band name. But I did find their manager, who's a legend, and the man who coined the band name, and the guy made the front cover and played on the album, but is uncredited... I found out the true stories at least. I got the scoop. I got pretty far. So there's that! It was fun to discover all these facts. 

But it is sad, I have to say -- when we talk about people who passed, there are a few people who have passed since the book came out, or while the book was being readied. [We'd previously talked about Kevin Staples of Rough Trade, who, along with Carol Pope, is interviewed; and of course, we'd talked about Paul Leahy].  A couple of members of Aut'chose are gone. With Danger [sounds like Don J.], Polo [Paul Belmar] got a copy of the book when he was on his deathbed, then he passed on his copy to his brother Pierre, who was at the Montreal book launch and told amazing stories about his brother. And since that panel a couple of weeks ago, another brother has passed. 

AM: It does give an urgency to it. Like, the band Twitch, if it hadn't been for Jason Flower, would be completely forgotten. You look at the cover for that and -- "this was going on in Coquitlam in the 1970s? What?" Had you heard them?

RD: No, I had seen that poster, but... how on earth did Jason hear about them, that's the one question I never got to ask! I'd heard about Ze Whiz Kidz, from Seattle, long before I'd heard about Twitch. And of course I knew about Thor, forever, but when we think about think about that Commodore bill of Twitch, Jon Mikl Thor's Body Rock and Ze Whiz Kidz, without Tomata Du Plenty playing at that time... Twitch, I didn't know anything about. I never thought to ask Jason how he got to know them. 

AM: He digs really deep. Like, he has an Inuit rock band, Northern Haze, that he reissued on Supreme Echo -- one of those guys just died. But how does one find out about an Inuit rock band?! Was he randomly travelling around Nunavut?

RD: You really have to use  your tools as a researcher. When I see people not doing research, and they're like, doing podcasts that they get from a book, I'm going, "Well, what are you offering that's new?" That's what I always ask. What are you bringing to the table that's not already done? Like, maybe another book on Neil Young could have sold. I could have pitched a publisher another book on Neil Young, but what new perspective could I have added? Though I'd love to write a whole book on Trans. Don't get me wrong! A whole book on Trans and cerebral palsy, I would love to write that. I have a mild strain of cerebral palsy in my right side, and in recent years I've come to understand that it's affected my life more than I ever thought it would. So when I listen to Trans and I understand that he's communicating with his son who has cerebral palsy, the album becomes more meaningful.    

AM: Absolutely, it's fascinating. 

RD: And there's Solo Trans, which Hal Ashby did, is okay, but you only really get one Trans song, because that tour, he's doing all this other stuff. There's a Live in Berlin thing, and that's the one to watch. Nils Lofgren is bounding around the stage, and Bruce Palmer is in that. And Bruce Palmer shows up in the book, because of the Mynah Birds, because Bruce Palmer went to LA with Neil Young, and then the Mynah Birds eventually becomes the New Mynah Birds, with Neil Merryweather, who I interviewed for the book... and then he was dead, less than a year after I interviewed him. Bruce Palmer told him to move to LA, and then Bruce Palmer makes a crazy solo album which has tons of Chamberlin on it [an early relative of the Mellotron, with an "eerie warble" to it], which Neil Merryweather also had... both of those guys had played with Rick James... Rick James was on that Bruce Palmer album... Neil Merryweather goes off and makes these Bowie-influenced space rock albums... It's in the book! 

And that Bruce Palmer solo album is a wild album. After Buffalo Springfield, he did that album, and then he had a bar band with Neil  Young, the Mighty Ducks or something, with members of Moby Grape?

AM: The Ducks. 

RD: And then he goes and plays on Trans! His career is really odd. But I'm yammering. But you've got to honour their memories, right? Neil Merryweather just passed after I interviewed him, same as Stanley Frank. I wanted him on the Toronto panel and the person at the Toronto reference library said, "He died last year, here's his obituary." I asked Kevin Staples if he could do it, and he said he'd got health issues. Two weeks later he's dead!

AM: Speaking of  people I associate with Ontario, Frank Soda is at the Vancouver launch? Does he live back here now? 

RD: Yeah! When I interviewed him, I believe it was 2021 at the Blenz on Broadway and Commercial. A lovely man, and he and Thor are going to play a couple of songs. They've redone "Action" [the link is to the Sweet original, note], Thor did the song "Action" on Merv Griffin, and he wanted the Imps; Frank Soda was in the Imps, and he wanted the Imps to be his backing band on Merv, and they said, no, it's got to be the house band, the Mort Lindsey Orchestra. So what they've done is, they've corrected history and recorded the song with Frank Soda as it was meant to be, and they've released a video. And it's going to be a launch for Thor as well, of his covers album. 

AM: Ooh, there's a new Thor album? 

RD: And it will be launched Saturday at the booklaunch...! They're going to be perform, but it's not going to be a full band. And David messaged me last night about doing a couple songs [You may hear the public-performance debut of "Your Music is Garbage," David's new tune]. And there's going to be a reading, and a panel with Thor and Frank Soda, and David M., and Drew Arnott, who a lot of people know from Strange Advance, but he was also in a band called Slam. And there's going to be a few surprises! [This proved to be a Canned Hamm set!!!].

NO FUN interview 2025: 

Yes, folks, I still keep talking to David M., who will be at the launch tonight! I seem to have lost some writing David did about how impressed he was by the sincere, genuinely curious Robert Dayton showed up at his place to ask him questions for Cold Glitter. At that point, basically only myself and Tom Harrison (who was still, I believe, alive and occasionally active) were writing much about David, but Robert was so keen to delve, and ended up writing about NO FUN so well, that David was quite glowing in his praises. His paragraph about him seems not to have survived an accidental computer purge wherein a bunch of files were lost, but we do have the following, on "Mindless Aggression," glam, and Paul Leahy:

AM: So you would agree with Robert about "Mindless Aggression" and it's place on the Vancouver Complication?

DM: It's better than everything else than everything else on Vancouver Complication. It's not just different, but way better. And looking at it that way [as glam], it is like a Slade song or something, with masked vocals and stuff --  "out of the night/ we come to fight." That was six voices; that's why it sounds like that. And it's heavy, but it's pop. So it's a good thing we did it that way! It was [originally] called "Sexist Stomp," and it was meant for a female to sing, complaining about men. But the chorus was the same. 

AM: "Sexist Stomp?"

DM: Yeah, "Sexist Stomp." I have a demo recording of it from back then, but then I thought, who could we get to sing that. Suzie had aged out of that. So I just changed it.

AM: Who was in the band? You wrote it, but...

DM: I wrote it, but me and Jim and Dan played on it, too. Dan played the guitar -- I guess I played some rhythm guitar on it, but he played the good guitar. But that song is on No Fun to Spare; it's a 90-minute cassette, and the songs on the EPs are from that bunch of material, but some of it is on two other albums we recorded at the time. So... I mean, it's good. 

AM: And this all predates Paul.

DM: It predates Paul, although Paul played on something earlier than the 4-tracks, which is the original version of "Be Like Us." And a song of Jim's called "The Imposter."

AM: We've talked about Pink Flamingos as a common ground for you and Paul, but you shared an enthusiasm for glam as well?

DM: Well, yeah, the first time I saw him, he was not glammed up, but he was obviously ready for it. He just needed some makeup and a little bit of hair-work and the clothes, and he was good to go.  

AM: Is there anything to add, glamwise, to the conversation -- any other notable paths of intersection between NO FUN and Glam?

DM: "Do The Girl", which was re-recorded for Snivel, was written in 1975 and was the last track on the first NO FUN album. It was about big bearded guys trying to be in glam rock bands by putting on makeup and pretending to be sort of gay. This wasn't common among young musicians in this area back then, but it did happen a bit and it was always hilarious and pathetic. Toys made an effort to get the visuals right. Glam rock is for young, good looking people. There are no old glam rockers; none of them could sustain that level of artifice. Punk came along in the U.K. and the ugliness was a reaction to the fading of fashionable glam rock and the rise of unfashionable pub rock, a new fashion statement. Ugliness replaced prettiness, but that was the new aesthetic. Glam and punk both were a reaction to boredom.

More information here!!!