News and Features
Joey Shithead: Forever Punk
By Daniel Wood published Mar 1, 2010
Thirty years after founding the legendary band D.O.A., Joe Keithley figures the system still sucks
In their rented van at a rest area high in Manning Park, neither Joe Keithley nor his four companions could find much humour in what had happened the night before. Even the joint they passed around failed to lessen their sense of disbelief. It had been their first commercial gig, June 5, 1977, at Merritt’s Grasslands Motor Inn—and their band’s launch toward rock ’n’ roll fame. They’d been greeted with boos and shouts of “Turn it down!” Keithley, the band’s frontman, just 21, had instead turned the amp to 10.
“Turn it down!” from the beefy audience again. Louder.
“You the management?” taunted Keithley. “You don’t have the balls to accept this music.”
“We’ll have your balls for bookends!” someone yelled, as the band rushed offstage amid a chorus of boos.
Backstage, the hotel manager threw $30 at Keithley and fired them over their protests that they had a signed contract, $500 for four nights. “You get on that stage again,” the manager said, “and they’ll kill you.”
So they’d fled for Manning Park. “This rock ’n’ roll isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” band member Ken Montgomery said. But Keithley wasn’t deterred. If he could ignite a bunch of redneck loggers with his overamped rock ’n’ roll, a whole world of provocation lay ahead!
It wasn’t long from that June day to Keithley’s reincarnation as Joey Shithead, Vancouver punk rocker, pogo meister, mosh-pit survivor, and lightning rod for all things loud and iconoclastic. Within a year, the band too had a new name—D.O.A.—and a growing notoriety for some of the rawest, beer-soaked performances ever seen. Keithley’ssong list came to include titles like “Woke Up Screaming,” “Marijuana Motherfucker,” “Smash the State,” “Let’s Wreck the Party,” “World War 3,” “My Old Man’s a Bum,” and his very first songwriting effort, “Disco Sucks,” with a chorus that goes: “Disco sucks / disco sucks / disco sucks / like shit.” Disco may be long dead, but Joe Keithley is very much alive and well: still angry, still punk, and still rocking at 53.
That Keithley’s songs are performed at Krakatoan volume—with dark, anti-authoritarian lyrics and a lot of airborne spit—means D.O.A. draws crowds where radical idealism and nihilism often collide. The back of his 2003 autobiography, I, Shithead: A Life in Punk, reads “30 COUNTRIES, 212,000 BEERS, 9 RIOTS, 28 PUNCH-UPS, 27 BUSTS, 12 DEAF SOUNDMEN, 9 LIVES” and suggests—even if the facts aren’t perfectly true—the edginess of his performances.
