The House of Lords Back in the Days of Glam Rock

I'm reading a drop fucking dead awesome book at the moment: Treat Me Like Dirt by Liz Worth, an oral history of Toronto's punk scene in the late '70s. And near the beginning there's a tiny little bit about the House of Lords — the hair salon on Yonge Street south of Bloor — as told by Margaret Barnes-DelColle (who ran New Rose, Toronto's first punk store):

"I worked at these stores on Yonge Street... at the time it was the whole glam rock thing happening with David Bowie. Everybody was wearing satin pants and bright colours and lots of makeup; the guys were wearing lots of makeup and shag haircuts.

"There was that hair salon on Yonge Street called House of Lords. On a Saturday — nowadays you can't even imagine it — but imagine a hair salon having a lineup outside of people wanting to get a shag haircut. I lived thirty minutes outside the city and yet I took a bus into town to go stand in line at House of Lords to get a shag haircut. So there was that whole glam rock thing that everybody was really into."

And there was some pretty famous hair coming out of that building, too. The House of Lords website boasts that they've trimmed the locks of The Rolling Stones, Alice Cooper, Rod Stewart and David Lee Roth.

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Photos via the House of Lords website.

You can buy Treat Me Like Dirt here or borrow it here.

A Ten Minute Video About Toronto's '70s Punk Scene

I seem to be spending my Saturday afternoon digging around into some of the history of Toronto's music scenes — a YouTube rabbit hole that has led me to a bunch of punk in particular. And so I thought I'd quickly share this little excerpt from a documentary about punk from 1976-79. These ten minutes are the bit about what was happening in Toronto during that time, when some of New York's biggest bands (like, say, The Ramones) were coming up north to play their first gigs outside the Big Apple in a scene filled with kickass local bands like The Viletones, Diodes, and Teenage Head.

(Ooh and it looks like there's a new movie about the history of punks in these parts from 1976-78 that just wrapped up filming after six and half years. You can learn more about The Last Pogo Jumps Again here.)

An FLQ Poster At St. Clair & Kennedy

Every June, I spend one drunken week covering the North By Northeast music festival. At this year's edition, which happened just a couple of weeks ago, a lot of the bands from Montreal stood out — with the red squares of the Quebec student movement pinned to their chests or guitars. It was kind of an interesting reminder of just how closely tied Toronto and Montreal are. And it was, of course, the first thing I thought of when I came across this poster. It was posted at St. Clair and Kenndy Road by the FLQ during the October Crisis in 1970. (Which you can learn lots more about on Wikipedia here.)