The Last Gang in Town Read online

35 Michael Barnholden, Reading the Riot Act: A Brief History of Riots in Vancouver (Vancouver, BC: Anvil Press, 2005), 92.

  36 “Rampaging Coliseum Crowd Sends Rock Stars Fleeing,” Vancouver Sun, November 21, 1971, 2.

  37 Rick McGrath, “Rock and Roll Rip-off,” The Georgia Straight, November 25, 1971, 5, 11.

  38 CBC Television News, Untitled film strip, dated November 21, 1971. (Vancouver, BC: CBC Vancouver Archives).

  SIX: EXILE ON RENFREW STREET

  On a cold Sunday in January of 1972, Mayor Tom Campbell celebrated the opening of the Georgia Viaduct by driving across it in a gleaming black limousine. The newly constructed overpass had been one of the most controversial of the proposals that Campbell championed during his tenure as mayor. Its construction raised consternation from the start; it was to be the first phase of a new highway through the city that when completed would result in the partial destruction of the East Vancouver areas of Chinatown, Gastown, and Strathcona.

  Escorting the limousine were members of the Vancouver police motorcycle squad, and media were on hand to record the motorcade. The mayor’s vehicle approached the western end of the viaduct to find a crowd of demonstrators. The car came to a halt for a moment while police did their best to attempt some measure of crowd control. Demonstrators kicked the limousine, spat at the windows, and even jumped on the hood before the car surged forward and passed through.

  Vancouver historian Michael Kluckner, who was present that day as one of the demonstrators in the crowd, wrote in his book Vancouver Remembered: “Eventually the motorcade made it through. That night all the newscasts decried the protest as the work of thugs, agitators and troublemakers.”39 The confrontation on the viaduct might have served as a parable for the rest of 1972—city hall and the police, with the general public on their side, were not going to let the lunatics take over the asylum.

  This would be remembered as a violent year in police quarters: homicides in Vancouver reached an all-time high of twenty-three, and there was an increase in the number of people arrested for firearms use. A wave of heavily armed bank holdups hit the city, and prostitution was becoming a more serious issue, with a total of 435 charges laid, including some against male prostitutes. Drugs were still an issue, with 222 people charged with trafficking heroin and 348 arrested for “soft-drug” use, which included marijuana and LSD.40

  In April 1972, the Rolling Stones would stun local rock music fans by announcing that their Exile on Main Street tour would begin in Vancouver with a concert at the Pacific Coliseum on June 3. By ’72, with the Beatles disbanded, the Stones had the pinnacle of rock ’n’ roll all to themselves—and they could live up to their designation as “the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band.”

  At the Infinity Fair at the Pacific National Exhibition, some exhibitors illicitly sold marijuana and hash to concertgoers.

  SOURCE: Courtesy of Neptoon Records

  The announcement nearly overshadowed the city itself. Vancouver was then a smaller and less internationally prominent place than it is now, and the Pacific Coliseum was hardly Madison Square Garden or Shea Stadium. The fact that a world-renowned rock group like the Rolling Stones would pick a hockey arena on the western edge of Canada to kick off their tour was wholly unexpected. The band hadn’t played live in North America for three years, and Vancouver would be their first show since the infamous 1969 concert at Altamont, California, where an audience member had been stabbed to death by Hells Angels acting as concert “security.” The band were already locally considered mad, bad, and dangerous to know from their previous appearance in Vancouver in 1966, when police interrupted their set in an attempt to control the unruly audience. In the lingering wake of the previous year’s Gastown riot and the chaos at the Rock and Roll Revival just months earlier, civic anxiety about the coming Stones concert was quick to build.

  Many concertgoers complained that tickets for the 1972 Rolling Stones concert in Vancouver were exorbitantly priced.

  SOURCE: Courtesy of Vince Ricci

  “After the Gastown riot, it felt like there had been months of total silence,” recalls East Ender Al Walker. “I had about ten friends whose older brothers had their heads bashed in at Gastown. So it felt like everybody was laying low—nobody was hanging out. Even the park scene was really quiet. So when the Stones concert was announced—that was a big event in itself, the first big event in town for months—a lot of people talked about it almost like it was a dare: ‘Are you going to go?’”

  Fourteen-year-old Nicholas Jones of North Vancouver decided that nothing was going to keep him away. When the tickets went on sale about a month before the show, Jones and his friends camped out overnight at the Empire Stadium box office, where tickets were being sold, to be as close to the front of the line as possible. The ticket price was exorbitantly higher than the then-going rate for a rock concert ticket—six dollars, a full dollar and fifty cents more than the best seats at the Rock and Roll revival. “I don’t think anybody believed that the Rolling Stones were really going to be opening the tour here,” says Jones. “In those days, you never even got to see them on TV. The only chance to see them was live. It was a huge deal that they were coming to Vancouver, much less starting their tour here.”

  There were others who were excited about the show for different reasons. In January, a group of political activists made up of disgruntled Georgia Straight writers made news when they founded an offshoot of the newspaper called The Georgia Grape. Some of those associated with The Grape were also involved with an East Vancouver Marxist-Leninist gang called the Youngbloods. When the concert was announced, the Youngbloods, impressed with the growing reputation of the Clark Park gang after the havoc they caused at the Rock and Roll Revival, decided to try and ally them to their own cause. With the promise of a few free cases of beer, the Clark Park gang was invited to the Youngbloods’ headquarters at a residential home on Templeton Street in East Vancouver.

  Mouse Williamson remembers the meeting. “There was an older guy named Alex who was some kind of communist or anarchist involved with The Grape in some way,” he says. “He’d photographed a few of us for the newspaper, holding our fists up in the air in solidarity. He and a couple of his friends tried to insinuate themselves into our gang and get us all riled up, but we had no idea what he was talking about. He wanted the Clark Parkers to help them as muscle. He kept going on about ‘power to the people,’ and was big on ‘liberation’—we didn’t even know what the fucking word meant. We didn’t give a shit about politics.”

  “They had all these smoke bombs, and they wanted to cause a distraction,” remembers Mac Ryan, who was also present at the meeting. “They had a big battle plan: When the doors opened, we’re going to toss [the bombs] and then [others] were going to … crash the gates. We thought, ‘What the fuck—what are these guys on about?’”

  Williamson, Ryan, and the other gang members on hand didn’t like the Youngbloods’ style. The political agenda was foreign to them, and the Clark Parkers didn’t want to invite that much heat on themselves. Nevertheless, they let the reciting of manifestos and political speeches go on until the free beer and weed had run out, then made their excuses and left. Mac Ryan was particularly unimpressed. “They wanted us to break into the concert, but we realized later they had a separate agenda that wasn’t to get into the show for free—they just wanted us to fight the cops.”

  When the day of the concert arrived, Stevie Wonder—who was opening for the Rolling Stones—decided to do some shopping in Vancouver. He visited an expensive clothing store that sold the kind of full-length mink coats considered chic in the early ’70s. As Wonder and his handler tried on some coats, they were profiled as shoplifters by store security who failed to recognize the musician. The embarrassed store manager apologized, and though the outcome of the incident is unknown, one might imagine Wonder being offered the coats not only with an apology but a considerable discount.

  While Stevie Wonder was downtown trying on mink coats, in Clark Par
k Gary Blackburn was also being profiled as he sat on the grass relaxing and chatting with a friend before heading to the Coliseum. Unlike Wonder, however, Blackburn would receive neither an apology nor a discount.

  “My friend asked me to watch his coat. So I put it underneath me and sat on it,” Blackburn says. “I knew he sold drugs, but I didn’t think anything of holding his coat. Well, about five minutes after he left, these two cops came right up to me in the park like they’d been watching me and asked if the coat was mine. I said, ‘Excuse me?’ And they asked again, ‘Is that your jacket?’ I told them it wasn’t mine. They went right through the pockets and pulled out this little tin, the kind cough lozenges are sold in. They opened it up, and inside was a bunch of hash, some MDA, and a syringe—the works. I didn’t know anything was in there, and again I told them it wasn’t mine, but I wasn’t going to say whose it was, so they told me I was under arrest.”

  The concert was just hours away, and Blackburn couldn’t believe his bad luck. He insisted to the police that the jacket wasn’t his, and that he had plans to go to the Rolling Stones concert. The police unexpectedly assured him that they simply had to take him down to the station and book him; he’d be released in time to attend the show.

  Feeling more optimistic about his situation despite the arrest, Blackburn was taken to the Main Street police station. But when he arrived at the booking desk, the deal had changed and he was told that he could expect to spend the night in jail. “I said that the officer who picked me up had promised to let me go after they booked me, and the guy just laughed and shook his head, saying, ‘It’s not up to them.’ So I got taken upstairs to the jail cells. I couldn’t believe it.”

  While Blackburn was being booked at the station around three in the afternoon, Rolling Stones fans had begun to show up outside the Coliseum plaza. John Armstrong, a fifteen-year-old student from the suburbs in White Rock who later became known as the Modernettes’ lead singer Buck Cherry, had taken the hour-long bus ride into Vancouver to attend the show. “I was beside myself,” he says. “This might have been the first or second concert I’d ever been to. The Stones were gods then, and I was just a huge fan. I had two tickets, and I wanted to take a girl in the hope I got laid, but my cousin Dennis had come to visit from out of town, and my Mom told me, ‘If you don’t take your cousin, you’re not going at all.’ The show wasn’t even a big deal to him,” he says. With his cousin Dennis in tow, Armstrong arrived to see a curious scene in front of the Coliseum. “White Rock was kind of a hippie haven of people back then,” he says. “They smoked clay pipes, made dream catchers, and looked like they’d stepped out of a Tolkien novel. So I’d seen hippies before. But the hippies at the Stones’ show that day looked really ill and dirty, like they’d all discovered red wine and speed.” Armstrong and his cousin, eager to get in line, walked past these unhealthy-looking hippies, and though he noticed a few police officers hanging about, there wasn’t a large police presence or any sense of menace in the crowd. There was certainly nothing that gave him any indication of what would transpire later.

  By dusk, crowds outside the Pacific Coliseum were beginning to get unruly, and the VPD riot squad prepared for the worst—they’d been tipped that the Clark Park gang was going to crash the concert.

  PHOTO: The Grape, June 7–13, 1972

  From the opposite end of the city, sixteen-year-old Nick Jones had also arrived early from North Vancouver with his friends. As they entered the Coliseum, they encountered the Infinity Fair—a week-long, youth-related crafts fair, now part of the pre-show event inside the arena. There, vendors were selling all manner of tie-dyed fabrics and incense, and booths featuring Hare Krishnas and alternative press publishers sold or gave away their literature. “Those vendors were also selling lots of weed on the sly too,” Jones recalls. “I was excited that we were going to see the Rolling Stones, but we were pretty baked by the time the show started.” This residual effect hit not only Jones and friends but apparently much of the rest of the audience as well. Sitting in front of Jeani Read, then The Province music critic, Jones noticed that she had passed out. “She wrote a bad review of the show in the newspaper the next day, and we always wondered how she wrote it when she wasn’t even awake for the show.”

  Bradley Bennett was there too, and he wanted to make sure he wasn’t going to miss a thing—especially after having missed the Rock and Roll Revival. But while thousands of dutiful Rolling Stones fans had lined up overnight a month earlier to purchase tickets, Bennett, along with Clark Park member Paul Melo, showed up at eight p.m. with an altogether different strategy. “Our plan was to find somebody who was scalping tickets, beat him up, and just steal his tickets,” he states candidly. Although it was a sold-out show, there were a surprising amount of scalpers at various corners of the plaza, holding tickets going for upwards of twenty dollars apiece.

  “We found a scalper who was a hippie, but he wanted to do the deal by some bushes because there was a lot of security walking around. Melo was fucking with him, trying to negotiate a lower price, and I said the price was too high considering the show had already started.” As the scalper got impatient and increasingly frustrated at haggling over the price, he rudely told them that he was going to take his business elsewhere, and pushed past them. Melo threw him to the ground and kicked him in the stomach, and Bennett seized the tickets right out of his hand. Leaving the scalper curled up on the ground groaning in pain, they were off to see the show.

  “Then we’re in the lineup and Melo is in front of me. He shows his ticket and gets through the gate. Then I hear somebody yell, ‘Wait! Wait!’ It turns out the scalper we’d beaten up was selling fake tickets, so this big security guard grabbed me by the back of the neck and my ass and tossed me out. Melo was already through the turnstiles and into the Coliseum, but I got kicked out before I got in.”

  By nine p.m., when Stevie Wonder’s opening set had ended, there were still some 2,000 people outside the Coliseum. A number of Clark Parkers, including Mouse Williamson, had not made it in either. “Usually at concerts, we’d get one guy to go in who had a ticket, he’d find an exit door to open, and fifty of us would rush in,” he says. “Or we’d just rush the turnstiles and jump over them.”

  Keith Richards and Mick Jagger on stage at the Pacific Coliseum on June 3, 1972.

  PHOTO: Dan Scott, Vancouver Sun

  But Williamson and the other Clark Parkers were outnumbered by the fans crowding the doors, along with hundreds more would-be gate-crashers, curiosity seekers, those left out due to counterfeit tickets, and others who just wanted to get close enough to an open door to hear the music.

  While Williamson had spent much of the afternoon drinking heavily, Kurt Langmann, an eighteen-year-old from Langley, had driven into town with friends to see if he could purchase a scalped ticket. He quickly realized that it was a lost cause when he saw the hundreds of people shut out of the arena. “It was starting to get ugly. Some were inciting us to just try to rush the gates and crash our way in.”

  As the mood of the crowd began to change, and with nightfall setting in, police moved uniformed officers to the nearby Pacific Showmart building behind the Coliseum where, unbeknownst to concertgoers, they’d set up a command centre with helmets, shields, and batons at the ready. What had been a low-key police presence overseeing basic crowd control earlier in the day now quickly redeployed on the plaza in increased numbers—and full riot squad gear. The police had even invited members of the press to attend. It was almost as if they had been tipped off that a riot was going to happen from the beginning.

  As fans who were legitimate ticket holders were still entering the Coliseum, someone on the plaza threw what appeared to be a home-made smoke-bomb, followed by a bottle that struck one of the glass entrance doors. “Suddenly there were rocks flying,” wrote Kurt Langmann in a 2011 article for the Aldergrove Star newspaper. “This was our cue to get out of Dodge, or Vancouver to be more accurate … We were all country kids, used to working on the farms, and co
nsidered ourselves ‘jocks’ who liked to work out at the boxing club … We had teen bravado, were full of testosterone, and afraid of no one. However, this was no ‘sport’ unfolding before our eyes, this was pure insanity.”41

  Eighteen-year-old Sandi Barr had also hoped to find scalped tickets. She and her boyfriend were on the plaza when the chaos began. “We saw two drunk guys pick up another guy who was loaded and start to use him to batter the glass door head-first,” she says. “The guy was laughing as they rammed his head against it. I was shocked. I hadn’t seen anything like this. Then I felt something whiz past my right ear. I looked to the ground and saw that it was a big boulder somebody had thrown. I said/That’s it. Let’s get out of here.’”

  Constable Grant MacDonald, who had been involved in the “Operation Dustpan” cleanup of Gastown, was off-duty on the night of the Gastown riot, but found himself right in the middle of this one. (He told me that he didn’t even like the Rolling Stones; Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett were more his musical cup of tea.) MacDonald had been on the scene since earlier in the day and noticed the mood of the crowd getting worse, especially as the sun went down. He was among the first officers in the riot line, as the crowd began to taunt police and the first bottles were thrown. “You could see our bosses going through this new manual about when we could engage,” he says. “You have to understand that the department had just gone through the Gastown riot and in the wake of the inquiry afterwards, they laid out rules that measured the levels of progression of crowd violence that police could respond to. So we were held back for what seemed like an hour, even when the bottles started flying.”

  As author Michael Barnholden notes in his book Reading the Riot Act, Vancouver has a “rich history of rioting,” from anti-Asian riots in the early 1900s to labour riots in the ’30s to sports-event related riots in more recent years. Vancouverites love to riot in good weather—nearly all of the riots have taken place during the city’s pleasant and mostly rain-free months of May to September. But not all riots are demonstrations of class war. The Rolling Stones riot in Vancouver is given brief attention by Barnholden, and the Rock and Roll Revival melee is not mentioned at all. On that warm night outside the Coliseum, a heady brew of alcohol, mob mentality, anti-police sentiment, and male machismo were dangerously confined. It was a golden age of casual violence, when the idea of getting drunk and into a fight was an average and perfectly acceptable activity for a Saturday night. And never has a Vancouver riot had such a fitting soundtrack.