I got to interview Jim Cummins about the early years of Braineater for Big Takeover #96, which is still on a few Chapters stands now. Everyone, I think, ended up happy with the piece. I was a bit bummed that they didn't run anything from Cat Ashbee's visit to Jim's house for his last art show -- she got some great shots -- but it's hard to complain when the competition was photos by Bev of the days when Art Bergmann, Buck Cherry, Dave Gregg and Ian Tiles were in the band, or actual images of Jim's art. It's actually a really good read -- one of the best Vancouver stories I've done, up there with my Art Bergmann and John Armstrong interviews, over the last few issues...
But there were outtakes, and this is one. I, Braineater plays TONIGHT at LanaLou's with the Repossessors and the Scammers. Only 20 bucks! I found an outtake from Jim's early days -- a piece of the puzzle involving the Mt. Lehmann Grease Band.
See you tonight, Jim!
I, Braineater 2025 (at Funkys, by me)
AM: I'm stunned to learn that you’re from Langley. I never realized. I’m from Maple Ridge! I can’t picture you in coveralls.
JIM: During that period, I also had my first shows at
the Brackendale Art Gallery [in Squamish, BC], where I built the big
cement unicorn out front. And Thor Froslev had it then, and he was a great guy,
who got me on board for all that; we did a number of shows there… And then
another thing happened, basically when I was in high school in Langley, where I
met this character named Dan Clark. He was a year older. He said, “Jim, I know
this really cool bunch of guys, and they have this band called the Mount Lehman
Grease Band; they were kind of like a Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet
boogie woogie band, and all they sang was dirty blues songs: “You’re so ugly,
baby/ You make the dogs all whine/ And I don’t know why they allow you on the
street/ It’s cause you’re ugly, the ugliest girl I’ve ever seen/ You got a face
like a monkey and sure do treat me mean!” Dan said, I can book something, and
you’ve got the art, so you make the poster, we’ll get the booking and we’ll
play. And down the street, a few blocks away, was a place called Fernridge
Hall. So Dan gets the hall rented, I do the posters, silkscreens in the back
art room of the school, with all these supplies that looked like they had been
left for the last fifty years. We put them up, we do all that, and I’m not
expecting too much. Dan says, “You take the money at the door.” Okay! And all
of a sudden, truckloads of kids start showing up, like out of a movie scene: a
one-ton truck with a big flatbed on it and thirty kids all just sitting on it,
no seatbelts, no nothin’, y’know, with big gallon jugs of wine and stuff like
this. And they’re coming into the place; some of them are paying – it was a
dollar to see the show; and some of them are telling me to F off. And this hall
was so small, and the next thing you know, we’ve got three hundred kids in
there. It only held about a hundred or so! And Dan the promoter comes up and
goes, “Jim, isn’t this fabulous! Look what’s happening! It’s it great! And I’m
on three hits of acid!” I thought, “Oh, fuckit, I’m not doing the door anymore
if you’re doing that!”
AM: Art Bergmann was on guitar?
JIM: And Dave Mitchell was the singer. Art had his
brother Hans on a big old piano. And Murphy Farrell from Mud Bay Blues Band was
drumming – he was 12 or 13 at the time. There was a guy named Tony on bass—I
don’t remember too much about him. But they played this show. And usually, at
shows out there, there would be a fight, but this show, there are 300 kids
crammed into this thing and not an ounce of trouble. I guess you could call it
“valley punk” – the roughest characters you ever saw, all from 15 to 21, having
the greatest time. And they brought in this big plastic garbage container and
everybody started pouring in all their booze and wine and what they had in
their pockets, and you just get cups and drink this shit. We put on gigs like
that all through halls out there when I was in high school. The last one we had
was out at the Cloverdale Community Centre, 1500 kids. It was out of control,
just amazing. Mitchell was an incredibly great frontman, because he was a weird
combination between, basically, Groucho Marx meets Mick Jagger: bowler cap,
orange, crazy big hair, torn jeans, vest and he had a cane, which he’d taunt
the audience with. Boy, what a show. And Dan Clark was the person Art sang
about, years later, in “The Final Cliché.”
AM: He had a boat…
JIM: And a station wagon, which was my 1954 Chevy
Station Wagon, which I’d sold to him, which he used for that [his suicide].
Which was sad. Dan had had a lot of problems for a long time. When I first met
him, he had no fear “cut-off button,” y’know? A wild man. I loved him, love him
to this day, he was a great guy, always inspiring. But yeah, so… then Dave
Mitchell goes to university, and Art decides to reform the Grease Band, but the
name he wants now, is the Shmorgs. I remember they did a gig out in Aldergrove
or Chilliwack, a big arena like we’d had in Cloverdale, where we’d had 1500
kids, type of thing. 20 kids. Nobody. Could never get an audience. There were
maybe a couple of shows out in Cloverdale where friends showed up that were a
bit better but basically nobody came to see them.
By this time, I’d dropped out of the Brackendale hippie scene, because there was no action there; everybody had gotten long in the tooth. I came to Vancouver and got a little apartment there. And I didn’t really get to go to a real live punk gig/ party thing until Buck Cherry moves into town. He moves down the street, and… it’s a long story, but Buck shows up at my place, and he’s got a bottle of rum, and he goes, “I know where a punk party is! Let’s drink this and go!” So off we went to that and had a great time, met Randy Rampage… That became my inspiration to start painting these big hyper-realistic paintings of punks and stuff like this. And Buck and me got an apartment in the basement of the Manhattan next to the boiler room. Thank God the Freddy Krueger movies weren’t out yet. We couldn’t have handled it – it was literally desperate living. And Buck’s working on his band stuff, going to form the Modernettes, and he says, “Jim, you’ve helped me out so much, you’ve been a great friend; I’m going to help your band out too.” And he says, “What are you going to call it?” Well, I was thinking about the character [Screaming] Lord Sutch, from England, but I didn’t know much about him. In those days you didn’t know much about anything, really. And I said, “I was thinking of calling it Monsuxx.” And he just looks at me deadpan: “No.” [laughs]. He says, “We’re going to be the Braineaters!” “Why the Braineaters?” “Can you imagine what parents are going to think when their kids say, “We’re going to see the Braineaters?”
And Bergmann was around on crazy Farfisa organ, Dave Gregg on guitar, Ian Tiles on drums. And we had a number of shows. We got everybody banned from performing or playing at the Russian Hall for about 40 years. They didn’t start doing anything back there until maybe about ten years ago, with some burlesque show, which is kind of ironic, because I happened to bring in paintings for the show. But… we were just trying to be the most notorious, New York Dolls-type band that you’d ever heard, in a punk rock way. It was tons of fun.
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