Mecca Normal

In the 60s, Jean messes around with 1/4″ reel to reel tape recorder and sings in school choir. In the 70s Jean is a ski instructor — she paints self-portraits in watercolour and takes some acoustic guitar lessons. Graduating from high school, Jean receives scholarship to attend art school. In the early 80s Jean co-owns a 37′ sailboat and travels in Europe for 6 months in a VW van. Jean takes the last name Smith in a marriage ceremony at Vancouver’s Unitarian Church on Oak Street — the church where the name Green Peace was coined years earlier. In the mid 80s Jean starts publishing a zine called Smarten Up! — copies are delivered free to record and book stores every three weeks — the zine turns into the a record label to release the first Mecca Normal LP.

David works on a radical anarchist newspaper called Open Road and designs posters and album covers for punk bands like D.O.A. He plays guitar in a band called The Explosions (they release a 7” and open for Talking Heads in Vancouver).

David Lester,
“I’d just graduated from high school when reports from England started to appear in the music papers — punk rock seemed too bizarre to comprehend. I believe I attended the first punk rock show in Vancouver, Canada. It would have been late ’76 or early ’77 at the Japanese Hall. The musicians still had longish 70s hair and wide-leg pants, but the punk energy was new and very exciting. Hundreds of Vancouver punk shows followed with line-ups including Moral Lepers, The Dishrags, The K-Tels (legally forced to change their name to Young Canadians), the Subhumans, and D.O.A. – who are still playing.

Vancouver was ready for the politically-fuelled punk rock ethic. This region’s radical perspective comes from the very active labor movement of the 1920s and 30s (logging, fishing and longshoring). My grandfather, an immigrant from Scotland, was involved with the Industrial Workers of the World (known as Wobblies); he played a horn in the IWW band, and travelled around the Pacific Northwest organizing unions. In the 60s, the counter-culture flourished as Americans dodging the war in Vietnam arrived in Canada. Political concerns and cultural events were expressed in Vancouver’s underground paper The Georgia Straight.

In the late 70s, when punk rock hit, I was the art director at The Georgia Straight – which was by then turning into a more conventional entertainment paper. I put the PMT (photo mechanical transfer) camera to use in my designs for gig posters.

From 1976 into the 80s I worked on the collectively-run international anarchist newspaper Open Road. My artwork – color portraits of anarchists Mikhail Bakunin, Sacco and Vanzetti, and the anarcha-feminist Emma Goldman — were featured as pull-out posters.