Argh Fuck Kill: The Story of the DayGlo Abortions (5 page)

One night, a friend picked up Murray and Brian as they stumbled home drunk from a party. The friend, also intoxicated, lost control of the vehicle which hit the base of a construction crane, sending it crashing to the street. The car then spun around and plunged nose-first through a steel fence into the basement of a building under construction. When Murray regained consciousness, he tried to get out of the car and saw that a piece of steel rebar had penetrated the seat, missing his reproductive organs by inches. “We weren’t wearing seat belts, of course, and Brian ended up under the dashboard. The whole car was pierced all over with rebar,” says Murray, recalling the close brush with death. Other than a small cut on Brian’s head the teenagers were uninjured.

Music became more important to young Murray, and he continued to play his electric guitar. Aware that he could only learn so much on his own, the teenager took several guitar lessons from a “hippie blues guy” who showed him how to play “Truckin‘” by the Grateful Dead. More importantly, Murray learned how to play the standard blues progression from the older man. Not just that, but instead of sticking to rhythm, he began to learn lead guitar. Then Murray’s sister Saskia bought her brother a Mahavishnu Orchestra music book, which would open wide the world of music. The book not only contained all the band’s music, but the first page also featured a diagram of the seven modes explaining how Western music works. Murray looked at the picture and thought to himself,
is that all it is?
From that book, the young guitarist learned how to play the scales on every part of the neck, and soon had it down. All he needed now was practice.

Around that time, Murray met an older male named Ben Henry who would become a musical guru of sorts. While trying to score pot, Acton encountered several musicians jamming in a basement. Without waiting for an invite, the teenager picked up a guitar and began to play something by The Mahavishnu Orchestra. The other players, dumbfounded that such a young boy knew such complex music, encouraged him to sit in with them. “Nobody knew how to play that shit,” Murray recalls. He was on his way.

The youth began to jam with the accomplished musicians. One of the players was the first person in Canada to earn a Doctorate of Music on the guitar, and the drummer said he had played on Stevie Wonder’s
Superstition.
Never mind that Wonder himself did the drum tracks; a drummer would have to be good just to make that claim. Under this advanced tutelage, Murray played bass and learned quickly. “I was afraid to even try any lead guitar in front of those guys,” the DayGlo Abortion admits.

Ben Henry, who wanted to further inspire Murray, sold him a 1962 Fender Telecaster for $300. “Ben comes by to play it once in a while. He’s a bit of a hobo these days and likes his crack, but he’s still a good guy.” Trevor Hagen claims that Ben also offered the instrument to him, but Murray had first dibs. “I would have gladly bought that guitar,” Trevor says regretfully. Murray still has the valuable instrument, and it is not for sale.

One day, Brian told Murray about a strange man who had picked him up hitchhiking. The guy had taken Brian to his house and smoked him up, which seemed very suspicious. There were chickenhawks around that liked to ply young boys with drugs and booze before abusing them sexually, causing Murray to worry that his friend had been victimized by a pedophile. Enraged, he and Brian set off to inflict serious pain on the man. “It was my intention to scope the place out, and maybe bash the guy’s fucking head in with a baseball bat or something,” recalls the guitarist. Instead, to Murray’s great surprise, his intended victim eventually became a mentor and close confidante.

The middle-aged man gladly welcomed Murray and Brian into his house and offered them wine. Acton soon found himself arguing passionately on a number of subjects, but the host, whose name was Robin Sharpe, easily dominated the conversation and skillfully deflected Murray’s clumsy broadsides. The young guitarist had never met an adult who spoke with such knowledge and frankness on a seemingly endless variety of topics. “Robin was smart, he was interesting, and he was a genuine free-thinker,” Murray recalls. “This guy was
way
outside the box.” Acton wanted desperately to get away from normal thinking, so he and Brian became friends with Robin. Murray says that Robin never hit on the boys, claiming they were “too incredibly straight and boring.” Such a statement is unconvincing, and it seems more likely that Robin didn’t want to ruin the friendship by making a pass he knew would be rejected. As his friendship with Ben Henry suggests, Murray probably felt a connection with older males simply because most kids his age weren’t intelligent enough.

The relationship between Murray, Brian, and Robin Sharpe went deeper than friendship, and Robin actually became Brian Whitehead’s foster dad until Brian was of legal age. Brian kept running into problems at his group home, so Robin filed the necessary paperwork to become the teenager’s legal guardian. “Brian got caught with a roach, so they put him in a harsh survival program called Outward Bound. They were really tough on him,” remembers Murray, sympathetically. Later, when Robin came into some money, he created a tax shelter by investing some of it in the DayGlo Abortions. Robin was a patron of the punk rock arts.

In 1995, under circumstances similar to the DayGlo Abortions’ obscenity case of 1988, Robin himself would be charged with distributing and manufacturing obscene material. Though he was also arrested with photos of naked children, the manufacturing and distributing charge stemmed from a collection of erotic poetry that he wrote and published himself. Robin defended the case all the way to the Supreme Court, where he was finally acquitted of the charges related to the written material. However, he was eventually found guilty of two counts of possessing pornographic pictures of children. Murray claims that the photos in question were of his girls. “Robin has a massive collection of photographs of all kinds, and they weren’t pornographic,” says Acton. Anyway, when Robin received four months of house arrest, the Crown built another case against the seventy-one-year old man for indecent assault, a charge that sent him to prison for two years. “Robin wasn’t prepared for such intense hatred,” say Murray, shaking his head. The media, for reasons unknown, decided to ignore Robin’s association with the DayGlos. Perhaps it is just as well.

But all that was in the future and, for now, life was much simpler. In 1977, soon after he bought the ’62 Telecaster, Acton and several friends formed their first real band. Brian Whitehead handled vocal duties, while seventeen-year-old Murray and a youth named Stewart Lockhart played guitars. Ed Cliff sat behind the skins, and left-handed Steven Andres played bass. Though Murray says that Brian was a natural on the drums, he lacked confidence in his abilities and felt it would be easier to sing. While it seems odd that anyone too shy to play the drums would be bold enough to lead a band, this was just the tip of the enigmatic iceberg that would eventually be known as Jesus Bonehead. The drummer is legendary in his hometown not just for his storied career, but for his brusque manner and volatile temper as well.

Stewart and Ed lived close to Brian’s foster home, making it easy for the youths to meet for practice. From its conception, the band played few covers, with Murray being the primary songwriter. At first, the group rehearsed at Murray’s house, but they bounced around when he moved out. The band lost a good spot at the recreation centre when they arrived completely messed up on MMDA. The social worker who secured the location was not impressed, even though Acton rolled on the carpet and flailed at his guitar until the little amp caught fire. Despite having no permanent practice pad, the band landed its first and only gig. Airborne was ready to make its debut performance.

Murray recalls the show—which a social worker arranged at the Union Hall on Esquimalt Road—with wry chagrin. (Dee Dee & the Dishrags would play Victoria’s first punk show at the hall later that same year). The social worker wanted to encourage the youths to do something constructive rather than indulge in typical teenage pastimes such as drugs or crime. “We had a couple of UFO-ish sounding tunes that the crowd could wrap their heads around, but then we started playing this weird five-four bass-and-drums thing with heavy guitar over top. At first, the song was kinda funky and people were dancing, but then it went really weird. Some guy tried to punch another guy but missed and hit a girl in the face.” Then, of course, a bloody free-for-all ensued, with all sides joining in. The group loaded their gear to the sound of police sirens, shouting voices, and smashing glass—a soundtrack that would become very familiar over the years. “Needless to say, they didn’t ask us back,” remembers the guitarist. Murray’s musical career was off to an auspicious start.

On Christmas morning of
’77,
when Murray was still seventeen years old, he had a serious accident that affects him to this day. At this point, Acton was living with Stephen Andres and, while walking to his mom and dad’s house for supper, he paused to smoke a joint before scaling a rock cliff near Fleming Beach in Esquimalt. After finishing the reefer, Murray rested awhile atop the precipice before getting up to leave. Like all teenagers, Murray thought he was indestructible, and immune to such petty things as gravity. Unfortunately, while jumping from one ledge to another, Murray’s foot slipped on a mossy rock, and he did a perfect cartwheel before falling thirty-five feet to make a three-point landing on both feet and his right hand. “My ankle was just a piece of mush at the end of my leg. It was really nasty,” remembers the singer, wincing at the memory. “The impact completely pulverized the bones in my foot.” Murray did not have Christmas dinner at home that year.

Acton’s recovery was slow and painful and, after struggling on his own for weeks, the injured youth moved back with his parents. He spent three months in a wheelchair, and another seven on crutches, blitzed out of his mind on Demerol. The upside of the accident was that Murray played guitar almost non-stop while trapped in a wheelchair, and was a much better musician by the time he could walk again. This was just the first of many injuries the singer would endure over the years, but none would have such a positive impact on his skills as a guitarist. He had nothing better to do in that wheelchair.

While Murray was still on crutches, Airborne was given the opportunity to perform live on public access TV. The band now featured a slightly different lineup, and had become even more experimental. Murray refers to their sound as being “tripped out jazz fusion gone prog rock.” Clearly, Airborne was not aiming for the radio waves. The taping went off without any major hitches, and at least four or five people in TV Land must have seen the performance. Somewhere out there, a tape of this show apparently exists. “I would love to see that,” laughs Acton. Few would have thought that the longhaired boy with the cast on his foot would go on to release nine albums and tour the world.

Airborne was not destined to last, and the band began to unravel as Murray and the other guitarist Stewart Lockhart slowly drifted apart. “He was a good guitar player, but kinda straight,” recalls Acton of his former bandmate. “Stewart didn’t like my ideas at all, which were very sociopathic. In fact, I don’t know if anyone ever understood where I was coming from.” History will show that the band broke up due to the usual “musical differences,” however shopworn that term may be. RIP Airborne, just one gig old.

But Acton was not yet finished with music. As the youth looked around for another band, a fundamental shift began to occur. As a serious musician, Acton believed critics who claimed that punk rockers couldn’t play their instruments. “I was quite convinced that the Sex Pistols were going to stink,” says Murray. But then, when the fledgling guitarist finally heard
Never Mind the Bollocks,
he was shocked at the level of musicianship, and by the quality of the recording. “I just loved the attitude—it was so over-the-top,” Acton recalls. If the critics had lied about the Sex Pistols, then perhaps they had misrepresented punk rock in general. Not only did Murray like the fast, angry music, but the nasty lyrics also appealed to him. Suddenly, punk rock was beginning to look like the future, and a noisy, speedy future at that.

At this point, Murray and Brian had become bored of their rock albums and were playing them at 45 RPM just for kicks. Clearly, the boys needed something new—something fast. Rock music was undergoing a dramatic shift, and the days of plodding prog dinosaurs such as Prism and Yes were numbered. One day, while listening to CiTR radio in Vancouver, Murray Acton heard the Dead Kennedys and completely abandoned his vague notion of starting another prog rock/jazz fusion group. The youth could scarcely believe the intricate yet powerful guitar lines and the insane falsetto snarls of Jello Biafra. “The DKs were playing tricky-ass stuff—they weren’t shitty at all,” says Murray. This was a revelation on par with his discovery of Frank Zappa but, while it was unrealistic to even dream of aping Zappa, punk rock seemed more accessible. Why not meld The Mahavishnu Orchestra’s diminished minor weirdness and Zappa’s offbeat humour with the fury and velocity of the Dead Kennedys to create a unique punk rock band? As much as punk appealed to Acton on a musical level, there was an even simpler reason for his involvement: he loved the idea of telling everyone to fuck off under the guise of artistic expression. Now he could tell the world exactly how he felt and get away with it.

With the demise of Airborne in late 1978, there was nothing left for Acton but to find another band. As it turns out, Trevor claims that it was he who brought the new group together, and it all started when Hagen’s girlfriend received seven thousand dollars from a car accident settlement. Feeling generous, and more than a little drunk, the young woman bought Trevor a bass guitar. Inspired, the fledgling bassist plugged the instrument into an amplifier and plunked away for several weeks before calling Murray. Trevor still played guitar, but decided to move to bass after seeing how fast Murray learned. Acton had progressed tremendously since being laid up with his busted ankle. The bass only had four strings, so Trevor felt he could keep up with Murray if he switched instruments. How hard could that be?