Steve Kravac, Mike Usinger, Social Outcasts and Porterhouse Records, AKA Triumph of the Normaloids---a Montecristo expansion pack

(a long OOP CD cover, courtesy Todd McCluskie)

This story began as an assignment for Montecristo Magazine about Porterhouse Records. That article has gone online now -- see here!

I own a good number of Porterhouse releases. In some cases, as with the Young Canadians' Hawaii, I own two copies: the original and the Porterhouse reissue. I'll explain that all presently in an article in Montecristo, I also have two Modernettes records, a Pointed Sticks record, a S.C.U.M. record, two Circle Jerks records, a Dils record, a Personality Crisis record, an ALL record, and, indeed, a Steven Bradley record, all on the Porterhouse imprint (I had the Urge Overkill one but decided to gift it to Keith Morris). 

As I explain in the Montecristo piece, which should appear online around the time I hit "publish" on this, I actually have two copies of the Young Canadians record: the original Quintessence version (minus the "Automan" 7", sadly) and the Porterhouse reissue, pictured above. Even though I had the one before I bought the other, I've kept the Porterhouse specifically for Bev Davies' shot of Art Bergmann lying naked on the beach, included inside (and pictured above). 

Davies remembers the day of the shoot well. “Art phoned and asked if I would take a nude picture on the beach bound with phone cord. And I told him I would take the photograph but I wasn’t going to tie him, he’d have to bring someone else to do that. It just seemed too intimate, because whoever bound him also had to take his clothes away, because otherwise his clothes would have ended up in the picture!”

Davies and Bergmann disagree about who did the final tying (Davies says YC's drummer Barry Taylor, Bergmann says bassist Jim Bescott); otherwise their accounts are in accord.“Art wanted it to be the cover of the album, but it got nixed by the forces that be because it was too risque,” Bev says (“They were scared of it,” is how Art puts it). “Then Art got hold of me a few years later and got a copy of it for a poster, and I said, ‘Oh Art, that was supposed to be my blackmail photo!’”

There are even better reasons to double up on the Modernetttes' A View from the Bottom, if you have the original of that, but you'll have to  read the Montecristo interview for more of that (or find my Big Takeover interview with John Armstrong, which covers some of the same ground. It's a great read; John is as sharp-witted and articulate an interview as he is a writer!). 

Steve Kravac grew up in North Burnaby, playing in a band while in high school with Mike Usinger of the Georgia Straight, among other members (Todd McCluskie and David Thom). That band was called Social Outcasts; there are a few songs of theirs on Youtube, in fact, in that early incarnation: "Eat the Rich," "No Death Like It," "My Brian Hurts"-- a phrase I think Usinger has used when editing pieces of mine--and "Tears of Death." The Social Outcasts online band bio, provided by Todd McCluskie, says "The recording resulted in a self-titled, self-released 4 song cassette EP. The project and band got mentioned in The Georgia Straight, The Vancouver Sun, and local fanzine Idle Thoughts, which called the band “a force to be reckoned with” and singled out the McCluskie/Kravac penned 'My Brain Hurts' as 'fantastic.'"

The bio continues about the afterlife of Social Outcasts, who would release a CD in 2004 and reunite in the 2020s. "Tears of Death" would be reworked as "Day to Night" by a later version of the band, featuring Todd McCluskie and Dave Thom, with Don D'Ercole, an on-and-off member of the band for some time, on lead guitar, Dave Laprise on bass, and Koji Laprise on drums. But Usinger and Kravac were both gone by the summer of 1983, and it's the early years I'm more interested in (this is, after all, an adjunct to an article about Steve Kravac!). 

McCluskie-Kravac-Usinger-Thom, courtesy Steve Kravac

As I say in the Montecristo piece, I believe thee sessions for those 1982 recordings were Kravac's first time in a recording studio, which is a momentous enough occasion that it's getting mentioned both there and here. Mike Usinger remembers it this way: "We did record at the Scissor studio," he writes. (It would later be known as Profile, and become an important Vancouver recording studio, but I don't think it had that name yet). "The night we made the recording you hear on the record, No Exit headlined. They were a really great band. I don’t know how much you know but they were awful that night as they had lost the twins. I think they disbanded afterwards."

What matters in terms of where things would go was Kravac getting a chance to watch Ray Fulber and Scissors frontman Bill Barker at work behind the console. Kravac wasn’t the type to be shy about getting in there and asking questions, according to Mike Usinger: “Steve was fearless about going up to anyone, even as a teenager, when the rest of were, well, introverted social outcasts. We'd be kind of starstruck seeing Ray Fulber of the Scissors walking up the street, but Steve would run up to him and say ‘Your bass playing is amazing.’” (Fulber would later become the bassist for Art Bergmann's band Poisoned).

People who are bummed out that they can't afford the No Exit album (the Discogs "low" is over $700; don't get me started on the high) can console yourself by easily finding the Scissors EP, which shouldn't cost more than $20. It's terrific!

I got to see some of Kravac's social skills in action myself. Kravac and I went to see Russian Tim and the Pavel Bures at the Red Room back when this interview took place, and I offered to introduce him to people. I fast learned: Steve Kravac does not need to be introduced to people. John Wright was in the room that night, in fact, seeing his Dead Bob bandmate Kristy-Lee Audette do her thing (I think all of the members of Dead Bob but Colin were there). Not only was Kravac not shy about talking to him, Wright, it turned out, knew him: "Hey, Steve!"

I shoulda got a photo of them together. Oops.

Usinger, who normally doesn’t talk much about the Social Outcasts, was willing to share other perceptions of Kravac. Continuing on the theme of Kravac's fearlessness, he remarked,“His great gift was being able to talk to people. He got that from his dad, who was super outgoing.”

One time, after Kravac had relocated to Montreal, he came back for Christmas and hung out with Usinger. “I remember we were at a New Year's show for D.O.A. at the New York Theatre and someone onstage grabbed the mike and said, ‘Party at Lux Bob's place. If you know where that is, see you there. If you don't, you can't go.’”

Usinger figured they were out of luck. "I knew no one in the Vancouver scene-was was too introverted, so I didn't know. Steve was like 'Hold on,' runs off, and comes back with the location two minutes later."

Usinger says he and Steve made a brief stop at a house party "where he suddenly knew everyone, and I sat in a corner," then arrived at Lux Bob's. "NoMeansNo is playing. Steve runs up to the stage, starts doing a dance that might charitably be described as screamingly freaky, and Nomeansno goes from the stage, 'Hey everyone, look—it's Steve Kravac from Montreal!!!'"

Kravac was actually musical, too. "Unlike the rest of us, Steve was multi-talented," Usinger remembers. "Even though he didn't come from a musical family, he was already really good on the drums and could also play guitar and bass. The rest of us were starting from zero, learning to DOA and Young Canadians records. 

"He also had tastes that varied from ours. I was a strict West Coast hardcore kid—if it wasn't D.O.A., the Subhumans, Adolescents, Circle Jerks, or Black Flag, I wasn't listening to it. He was a sponge who soaked up all that stuff the first time I brought my records over. But he also loved KISS and the Blues Brothers soundtrack and Visage."

The gigs that Kravac and Usinger played together during those early years were cool from the start. For their first gig, Social Outcasts (“a bunch of normaloid 17-year-olds from Burnaby,” is how Usinger describes them, hence my title) opened for D.O.A. on West Hastings. California punks True Sounds of Liberty ended up dropping off that bill--the band almost always has had trouble at the border--but the gig poster theme would be-recycled for the D.O.A. compilation, Bloodied But Unbowed, the first D.O.A. album to get wide distribution in the U.S.A.

The gig was a baptism of fire, Usinger remembers. “The bouncer, some giant skinhead guy, was a complete asshole, yelling at us to hurry up and load in. Before we've hit a note some punkier-than-thou kid with spiky hair and ripped clothes starts yelling about how to be a true punk rocker you have to live it ‘day by day’ and that Crass rules, and that we don't look like we're living it ‘day by day’. After our first song, he yells, ‘You can play, but you're not living it day by day!’ And he continues to yell like an asshole the whole set. It was low-key kind of awful.”

The punkier-than-thou asshole apparently abused the next band, the Shun, just as badly, lying down in proximity to the stage and pretending to sleep from boredom. Usinger notes with some satisfaction that the guitarist from the Shun seized the moment to kick the guy in the head.

If I've got Mike right, here, and if Mike himself isn't in error, another noteworthy aspect of that gig was that it was the only show where Chuck Biscuits drummed with his brother Dimwit on bass. "He left DOA shortly after, going, 'No one wants to be in a band with their brother.'"

Social Outcasts also shared the stage with the Zero Boys, a formidable, under-appreciated Indiana hardcore band touring their debut album. That gig, at the Smilin’ Buddha, took place June 18th of 1982; the photo by Bev in the Montecristo article is from that gig. Todd McCluskie recalls that their payment for that gig was “a case of warm beer,” most of which got drunk by their entourage.

That early incarnation of Social Outcasts also shared stages with Portland band the Rats, members of whom would later reappear in Dead Moon; UK street punk band the Angelic Upstarts; and, on that same bill, the Fastbacks, whose most famous member, Duff McKagan, was no longer with the band, but whose MVP in terms of Social Outcasts was Kurt Bloch.

Usinger remembers of that gig, "Social Outcasts’ guitarist, Dave Thom, didn’t have his own amp and tried to borrow one. The Angelic Upstarts guy was like, ‘Are you joking? We're on tour and can't be lending out our gear.’ So Kurt from the Fastbacks lent him his amp.”

Kravac still has a framed gig poster for that show; he was “in awe of the Fastbacks, who were such a great band.”

courtesy Steve Kravac

Social Outcasts continued after Kravac, having graduated from high school and feeling ambitious, moved to Montreal. Usinger relates that "the guitar player Dave Thom, who plays with the version that sometimes hits the practice space today, got married and quit. So Len Morgan from Idle Thoughts introduced us to a guy named Jamie"--"Jamie Hendrix, according to this bio; could that really be his birth name?--"who was an really skilled guitar player. He was also punk as fuck--crashing in squats and attending all the parties we never even knew about because we were so uncool. I remember our singer saying to me after we were first introduced and Jamie and his friends walked away, they are probably all going, 'Look at those normaloids.'"

They needed a new drummer, Usinger remembers. "I met some kid in the dish pit at the Owl and the Oarsman in Burnaby who said he could play drums. So we started practicing in the practice rented by Ground Zero featuring Randy Rampage and Brad Kent." But the drummer struggled, and that version of the band "never really clicked," Usinger remembers. "We ended up third on a giant multi-band bill at the Oddfellows Hall off Commmercial that was supposed to be a like a coming out party for young bands. Personality Crisis from Winnipeg and House of Commons from Victoria were also on that bill, above us. We wanted to play early, but both of them told us that they say this show as a coming out showcase for them, and wanted to play early as people would start to leave."

Buy this if you find it. Shouldn't cost too much. 

Usinger remembers the night well. "House of Commons was fucking amazing--like incindiary, and did something that sounded really fresh and new. Like hardcore but with a really GBH type metal edge. They blew us off the stage. It was the only gig of that lineup At the end of the night, bussing back to Burnaby, I was like to the singer, 'This is kind of done.' Jamie must have thought the same things as he never contacted us after that. I'd see him at gigs and he'd kind of pretend he didn't see me. He later died in a small plane crash."

When did Usinger actually start with the Straight? Was it in temporal proximity to being in Social Outcasts? "Nothing to do with that, although Alex Varty had roundly and hilarioulsly shit all over a demo tape that we submitted in '82 when he ran a column called 'Demo Derby.' I tried out for a couple of non-punk bands after the Social Outcasts, and was obviously not thought to be good enough, so I kind of stopped playing. I often wondered, but never really asked Steve why he didn't continue playing music after moving to Montreal and L.A. He was in a band called My Dog Popper for a short while in Montreal, but then seemed to go strictly on the behind the scenes side of things in LA until deciding to make his solo record."

More about the "Steven Bradley" record in the Montecristo piece, but I think Usinger is giving My Dog Popper a bit of the short end of the stick, as they did have a reputation. Try "I Lost My Job to a Guy Named Gino," here. There's also a short, very strange little video called “Eric Gets His Head Cut Off,” which sees a soldier beheaded, with his head then being used as a football; it is all ridiculous, surreal, and no-budget enough that it won’t remotely disturb even the most sensitive readers; it helps explain why they were seen as Canada's answer to the Butthole Surfers.

Within a few years after hhe arrived in Montreal, Kravac was producing some of the best bands on the Montreal punk scene, including the Asexuals, starting with their 1985 LP Contemporary World; the “deeply respected” S.C.U.M, whose debut LP, Born Too Soon…, he would end up reissuing on Porterhouse decades later (he describes them as akin to Black Flag in terms of their rep in Montreal); and the Doughboys, back when Brock Pytel, now of the Vancouver band SLIP~ons was their singer/ drummer.

Note: I still do not have this record, or anything by My Dog Popper, if anyone has copies to part with!


Pytel counts Kravac as a good buddy to this day, and happily shared his impressions of him. “He was constantly in a leather jacket with torn jeans, chucks, and whatever punk rock t-shirt, like most of us, although he also had the dyed-black-dreads look going on." (Kravac confirms this!). "It was striking, because he’s pretty tall and has these piercing blue eyes.”

Kravac loaned Pytel his 22” Zildjian swish cymbal for that album and for the band’s subsequent U.S. tour.

“Steve is a lovely guy, and he was very good at vocal coaching in the recording studio,” Pytel recalls. “There was one point where I was struggling like hell to hit the high notes in a certain song (I think it was "You're Related") and we wound up recording me lying on the floor beside the baby grand piano, with a Neumann microphone hanging over my head about a foot off the floor.”

Sorry, Brock: the story just didn't make the Montecristo edit. But people wanting to read more about Brock Pytel's time in the Doughboys should go here. As for Steve's Kravac's years in Montreal, he also collaborated in a band, Los Gatos, with the late Alex Soria of the Nils, another one of Montreal’s most respected punk bands, but that material has not yet been released as of yet; if it ever sees the light of day, we think we can guess what label it will be on.

One final bunch of outtakes has a bearing on two classic Vancouver albums, the Pointed Sticks' Perfect Youth, which has just been reissued by Porterhouse and is in stores now, and D.O.A.'s Something Better Change. As many people know, the Pointed Sticks were previously on Joe Keithley's label, Sudden Death Records. I had to ask if the split with Sudden Death (and move to Porterhouse) was amicable. I checked in Nick Jones, who said that Joe "was not unhappy or surprised to see us go, just mad because he had to go looking through the disaster area that is his garage to find our records. You could do a whole story just on that garage!” (Actually, it seemed pretty tidy to me, but I can't speak to how well-organized it is; Joe found me an MDC record without much fuss, though).

I believe that Joe did corroborate that he was fine on the Pointed Sticks moving on, and said something nice about Steve Kravac and Porterhouse, but I can't find that email exchange now (it may have gotten purged from my inbox). Just trust me, there's no bad blood.

And Kravac--a man who pays his dues--has a lot of respect for Keithley. “When I heard Something Better Change," he told me in our conversation about his time in Vancouver, "I knew that the old guard was over. And when Hardcore 81 hit, and defined what hardcore music was in North America, and I learned that here’s this guy from my high school that is spearheading an entire movement of music in North America, it blew my mind. That’s why I have so much respect for those who have gone before me and have laid that path. These people worked really hard and made huge sacrifices in their personal lives to create those records, and I don’t think, sometimes, that people think about it that way.”

People with record collectors in their lives looking for Christmas gifts should be advised: you can't really go wrong with Porterhouse releases. They're not limited to Vancouver bands, either; Red Cat, Neptoon, Matterhorn, and probably a few other stores all re-stocked when Kravac was last in town, and currently have equally cool stuff like the Germs' complete anthology (which I also don't have, if you're shopping for gifts for me!). And if you can't find one of their releases (and are reading this in Canada), do look in the upper right hand of the grey banner for links to finding a Canadian store near you that you can find these albums at. I don't want to seem like I'm shilling for Steve, here, but his re-issues truly are top notch.

There's a lot more to the story of Steve Kravac, after he moved south to Los Angeles, but for that, you'll have to go to Montecristo! Thanks for Mike Usinger for his stories and Steve Kravac for his patience!