The Last Gang in Town Page 6

  Crowd problems and disorder marred the Vancouver Sea Festival in 1970.

  SOURCE: The Province

  The riots even made the national news; the Montreal Gazette reported that on multiple evenings, after the evening program ended and crowds were dispersing, fights broke out with “people gathered at English Bay beach, who were flooding nearby streets, smashing windows, setting fire to garbage cans, rocking passing transit buses and private automobiles, and pelting them with rocks.”30

  Meanwhile, The Province assured its readers that the disorder was “not being created by the neighbourhood residents, or by American draft dodgers, or the thousands of students who wound up in Vancouver during their summer tour of Canada. “Instead/the troublemakers have been punks—most of them Canadian and almost all of them residents of Vancouver … They aren’t an organized gang or political conspiracy, but rather loosely knit bands of elder delinquents who’ve decided the only way to get their jollies on a hot summer night is to go down to the beach and throw a few rocks at the cops.”31

  VPD surveillance photographers captured photos of the Gastown rioters as they were arrested, August 7,1971.

  PHOTO: Vancouver Police Museum, P00281

  Mayor Tom Campbell was no less candid in his opinion: “There are about 200 punks who are making a bad name for the 100,000 good kids in this city. When some people take to beating up the police, or throwing rocks at them and breaking windows, they’re nothing but punks. And it’s the punks I’m out to get rid of,” he said.32

  Vancouver’s counterculture didn’t entirely escape blame for the trouble—in fact, everyone from youth gangs to hippies to a local Marxist-Leninist group called the Vancouver Liberation Front, whom the police had surveilled, were named as culprits. Mouse Williamson admits that his gang was also involved in the Sea Festival disruptions. “One of those nights [in English Bay] started with us, [when] one of our guys and a bunch of West End guys got into a fight, and we all jumped in—it turned into a real battle royal. The mounted police came in on their horses in the middle of it.”

  Gastown was the site of the next battle a year later. Mayor Campbell had pointed the finger at the area as the “soft drug capital of Canada”33 and aggressively promoted a cleanup. Gastown was then unlike the strip of upscale bars, eateries, and shops it is today. In 1971 the district was just beginning to undergo a period of renewal after years as a semi-industrial area of warehouses; old buildings were being renovated, boutiques were opening, and the area was taking on life again. A year earlier, the drinking age had been lowered from twenty-one to nineteen in BC, and Gastown became a more attractive haunt for young people, especially university students and hippies from the Kitsilano neighbourhood who socialized in the local beer parlours or worked in Gastown during the day. But in 1971, arrests for possession and trafficking of marijuana and hash were suddenly outnumbering arrests for heroin, and so Gastown came under increasing scrutiny from Vancouver police.34

  On August 7, 1971, after weeks of police crackdowns—named Operation Dustpan—on marijuana dealing and smoking in Gastown, a peaceful protest was organized by two writers from The Georgia Straight. The city considered it a demonstration for the legalization of marijuana. The protest took on a circus-like atmosphere as 2,000 hippies, squatters, stoners, and curiosity-seeking regular citizens of all ages descended on Water Street and the surrounding avenues. “We went down for the smoke-in,” recalls Mac Ryan, who was there along with Rick Stuart and Albert Hill. “There were people giving away joints, and [we saw] a guy with a massive joint a few feet long. It was a good atmosphere; everybody was relaxed and having a good time.”

  Riot squad police on horseback held back at first. But the crowd was vocal as cheers of “Fuck Campbell! Fuck Campbell” were hoarsely bellowed in an insistent rhythm. Perhaps sensing that the mood of the crowd was shifting, Ryan and Hill climbed up to a balcony ledge above the door of the Hotel Europe at Powell and Carrall streets where they began to yell, “We’re taking over. Clark Park’s in charge! Clark Park! Clark Park!,” cheering and hollering with the enthusiasm of a state delegation waving their banners on the floor of a political convention. “All the hippies were clapping for us,” Ryan recalls. “I felt like a bit of a celebrity.”

  Bradley Bennett, Mark Owens, and Dennis Magnus, 1970s.

  PHOTO: Courtesy of Bradley Bennett

  Minutes later, when the glass window of a storefront was shattered, the police ordered everyone to leave the street within two minutes. When the order was ignored (or perhaps not even heard above the din of the crowd), police officials ordered four mounted officers to disperse the throng, followed by police in riot gear, which caused the demonstration to explode. The resulting chaos left Water Street blood-spattered and full of broken glass. Twelve citizens were hospitalized, seventy-nine arrested, and thirty-eight people were charged with various offences.35 The delegation from Clark Park managed to escape amid all the confusion.

  Not in attendance that evening was Bradley Bennett. “I was in juvie that night,” he explains. “They arrested a lot of people that night—they ran out of cells and woke us up at two in the morning to put another guy in each of our rooms.”

  Later, the inquiry into the riot would rule that the police overreacted against the protest, though this was quietly disputed for years by many of the members of the police department who were there that night. Either way, the VPD would make sure that the next time the police riot squad was deployed, they would be better prepared.

  Mark Owens was born in 1954 and raised in East Vancouver. He had known Mac Ryan from around the neighbourhood, but didn’t come into contact with other members of the Clark Park gang until 1968, after he’d served time in Brannen Lake jail. Upon release, he found himself drafted into the scene at Clark Park. “There were a lot of gang fights with bats,” Owen recalls. “Sometimes the fights were over girls. But my cousin hung around Riley Park, so it was always a little weird for me, as I knew those Riley Park gang guys too.”

  “Along with Roger and Gerry, Mark was a real animal, a wild guy back then,” says Bradley Bennett. “We once got into a fight over a girl, and he hit me pretty badly by swinging a heavy belt buckle against my head. I needed to get stitches, but he came with me to the hospital and we made up afterward and became friends.”

  The Rock and Roll Revival at the Pacific Coliseum in 1971 descended into chaos before Chuck Berry or Bill Haley even took the stage.

  PHOTO: Courtesy of Neptoon Records

  A talented musician, Owens was later a drummer in a local rock band, Circus Mind. Some friends thought he even bore a resemblance to Chuck Berry, and when Berry himself came to town, Owens and a number of other Clark Parkers, including Wayne Angelucci, Gerry Gavin, Mouse Williamson, and Gary Blackburn, all decided to go to the concert.

  “It’s a real live Rock and Roll Revival on Saturday November 20, 8:30 p.m. at the Pacific Coliseum!” announced legendary Vancouver radio DJ Red Robinson in an advertisement that aired in the weeks prior to the concert, which was to feature not only Berry but an all-star lineup including Bill Haley and the Comets, the Shirelles, Bo Diddley, the Dovells, and Gary U.S. Bonds. On the day of the show, an audience of an estimated 11,000 entered the Coliseum without incident.

  Doug MacNichol, then just sixteen years old, was a student from Vancouver Technical Secondary School. “It wasn’t like today where there are pat-downs or they search you to see if you’re bringing in alcohol. There was none of that. It was pretty loose that way,” he says. The lack of strict security at the entrances meant many people easily smuggled in their own bottles of alcohol. But the concert itself started well. The sounds of doo-wop and classic rock ’n’ roll almost time-warped the Coliseum back to the late 1950s and early ’60s when the groups performing were first popular. Both the initial opening acts—Bonds and the Dovells—were well received.

  Perhaps too well. As the concert had been sold with reserved seating, eager rock ’n’ roll fans, already feeling the Old Style pilsner in their
veins, left their seats to dance in the open area in front of the stage. The mood of the crowd was not yet problematic. But just before Bo Diddley’s set, the first signs of trouble appeared when an emcee stepped onto the stage to announce over the PA that the fire marshal would cancel the show if the floor in front of the stage wasn’t cleared, and asked that people return to their seats. Some but not all of the audience moved away from the area when Diddley kicked off his set, leaving a crowd up front that wasn’t particularly interested in being told what to do.

  “They were really enthusiastic,” Diddley would say the following day in an interview with the Vancouver Sun. “But then the stage started wobbling, and I began to get kind of worried, so I stopped and asked for the lights to be put on. There were guys down in front of me pulling apart the stage, while others were shouting for the show to go on. I said to myself, ‘This thing is going to go. It’s time I got my hat.’”36 Cutting short his set, Diddley left the stage. The approximately 400 audience members in front had now stopped dancing, and scuffles began to break out. The mood of the audience as a whole was becoming increasingly edgy and aggressive.

  Again, an emcee came out to admonish the crowd to move back, and announced a fifteen-minute break. Hundreds of audience members began to head for the exits or move to the concourse to inquire about refunds. Those who remained in the audience thought the show would continue, but it would not. As a precaution, the performers who were still scheduled to play were ushered to a bus parked behind the Coliseum and given the chance to depart before the cancellation was officially announced to the crowd. Once the announcement was made, rumours quickly circulated that Berry was never in the building to begin with, and the fact that the headliner of the show wasn’t going to play only angered those in the audience even further.

  Describing the incident, a Vancouver Sun reporter wrote: “When a man came to the microphone to tell the crowd that Chuck Berry would not perform because of harassment by the audience, some in the crowd got unruly.” The music reviewer from The Georgia Straight, meanwhile, reported on the incident with far more colour and period slang: “[The emcee], one of the most bad vibing, bullshit ridden twits I have ever come across … a natty little capitalist in a beige sports jacket, in no uncertain terms told the crowd, ‘This is my show, this is my stage, and you’re fucking it up!’” The reporter went on to say that “there was a feeling of inevitable violence … and the fatal words were finally uttered from the stage, ‘There are a bunch of cops out back and if you don’t leave they’ll come and move you out.’”37

  There were about twenty members of the Clark Park gang in the audience. They decided that it was time for them to make their mark. “All we had heard was that Chuck Berry refused to go on because we were sitting too close to the stage,” says Wayne Angelucci. “So we got up on stage, people started throwing bottles, and the whole place went nuts.” As a joke, Angelucci picked up one of the band’s guitars that had been left there and pretended to play it. Another member of the audience followed his lead and started to mimic playing the piano. Stagehands, too afraid to step on stage while bottles were being thrown, abandoned their positions in the wings and took cover.

  The stage was now being torn apart by angry people below it, and several East Enders followed Angelucci’s lead, grabbing musical instruments and pretending to play them. The Coliseum dissolved into pandemonium as more people on the floor, as well as those in the stands, suddenly starting to throw the beer bottles they’d snuck into the concert. “I looked up and saw all these bottles coming [at me], so I hid behind the tower of PA speakers,” remembers Angelucci. “They struck the tower so hard, the speakers moved back.”

  Rob Thacker, another Clark Parker on the stage, was thrown off by a stagehand. He was cut in the chest by shards of glass on the floor at the same moment that someone else threw a bottle at Angelucci and struck him squarely in the head. “When we saw that, we all jumped up on stage and started kicking the shit out of the guy who threw it,” recalls Mouse Williamson. “But we were getting hit by the bottles that people were throwing onto the stage, so we threw some equipment—like microphones and anything else that wasn’t bolted down—out into the crowd.” Staggering for a moment after the bottle smashed into his head, Angelucci looked up as the blood flowed freely from the cut. “There were so many bottles flying in the air, they looked like swarm of locusts or birds passing overhead or something, so I jumped back down.”

  Sixteen-year-old Doug MacNichol was still on the floor watching the chaos ensue. “All hell broke loose,” he recalls. “It seemed like there were no cops in the building or any presence of authority. It was the strangest thing. Even the ushers in the Coliseum must have realized that it was now going to be the Wild West, and they got out of there as well. Bottles were being thrown, not just on the floor where I was, but from the upper seats as well. A woman standing near me got hit in the head with a bottle.”

  Those being hit with bottles crawled over seats, breaking the backs of chairs to get out of the crowd and to safety. People yelled and shoved each other as they ran to the exits. The few brave stagehands who hadn’t abandoned the stage were desperately trying to move expensive musical instruments or amplifiers that still sat on stage and hadn’t been stolen. (“Word had it that one of the guitars ended up in the woodworking shop at Vancouver Technical [school] for ‘repairs,’” notes MacNichol.)

  A previously unseen sense of Good Samaritanism suddenly came over Angelucci and Williamson who came to the aid of a stagehand rolling a piano to safety, only to look at each other and wonder why they were helping. They both let go of the piano, which rolled and pinned the stagehand against the wall while the Clark Parkers returned to the fighting.

  A large mobile condiment truck on the concourse near the hot dog stand was pushed down a flight of stairs. And whether because they felt the concert had been a rip-off or they felt the joy of drunkenly running amok and smashing anything in the Coliseum they could, audience members began to trash the restrooms and shatter the Plexiglas panels that were part of the ice rink. Meanwhile, a CBC TV news cameraman arrived, dispatched to cover the chaos as soon as word had reached the newsroom over the police scanners that a riot was breaking out inside the Coliseum.

  Mark Owens was concerned about how to escape. “I had warrants out on me, so I thought I better get the hell out of there, but police were suddenly at all the exits,” he says. “I finally made it out, and the last thing I saw was Angelucci still on stage with a bloodied towel on his head.” The rest of the Clark Park gang fled the building, evading police in the confusion. It was midnight before stoned concert stragglers who had passed out in the aisles and ushers who had hidden in offices for safety were finally cleared from the building.

  The next day, CBC television’s evening news would begin its broadcast with the Coliseum incident as their lead story: “The future of rock concerts at the PNE grounds has been left in doubt by the outbreak of destruction last night at the Pacific Coliseum. Part of a crowd of 11,000 began throwing bottles and smashing musical equipment during a show billed as a rock and roll revival.”38 Noting that an undetermined number of injuries and arrests had been made, CBC’s reporter continued: “Broken bottles and glass were everywhere, and estimates of the damage amounts to $20,000,” adding lastly that, “Mayor Campbell has remarked that he personally favours a ban on further rock concerts.”

  The broadcast didn’t include all of the film footage caught by the CBC cameraman from the night before. Vivid images of the battle would show dozens of police who had arrived around the perimeter of the Coliseum concourse surveying rows of smashed floor seats, shattered Plexiglas boards, washroom mirrors and sinks, and the broken glass doors of the Coliseum. One shot showed audience members trying to assist stagehands dragging gear and equipment to safety.

  However, of all the images televised to tens of thousands of homes across the Lower Mainland during that evening’s newscast, one scene stood out: three men on stage hollering taunts and violently
launching bottles back into the audience. They were Wayne Angelucci, Mouse Williamson, and Gerry Gavin. The Clark Parkers had arrived.

  A demonstration at the opening of the Georgia Viaduct in January 1972.

  PHOTO: George Diack, Vancouver Sun

  Demonstrators kicked and spat at the windows and even jumped on the hood of the car of Mayor Tom Campbell’s motorcade as it passed in January 1972.

  PHOTO: Ross Kenward, The Province

  27 Michael Kluckner, Vancouver Remembered (Vancouver, BC: Whitecap Books, 2006), 87.

  28 “Pinkos—Vancouver Mayor Raps Opposition To Bridge,” Ottawa Citizen, February 9, 1972, 10.

  29 CBC Digital Archives, http://www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/vancouver-politicians-averse-to-hippies

  30 “Youths in Vancouver Protest Festival Ban,” Montreal Gazette, July 16, 1970, 21.

  31 “Punk Gangs Take Over English Bay,” The Province, July 16, 1970, 1.

  32 Ibid.

  33 Larry Campbell, Dominque Clément, and Gregory S. Keale, eds., Debating Dissent: Canada and the Sixties (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 122.

  34 Joe Swan, A Century of Service: The Vancouver Police 1886–1986 (Vancouver, BC: Vancouver Police Historical Society and Centennial Museum, 1986), 112.