Teenage Head - Biography
By Oliver Hall
Sometimes called the “Canadian Ramones,” Hamilton, Ontario’s Teenage Head was one of the first North American punk bands. While Teenage Head does not particularly sound like the Ramones, both bands created original punk styles from the wild, trebly AM radio sound of 50s and 60s rock music. Teenage Head came to an end with the 2008 death of singer Frankie Venom.
Four students at Westdale High School in Hamilton formed Teenage Head in 1975, taking their name from the title of a Flamin’ Groovies album. Singer Frankie Venom, guitarist Gord Lewis, bassist Steve Marshall and drummer Nick Stipanitz were particularly inspired by the New York Dolls performance they saw in Toronto that year.
Frankie Venom glares out from the black-and-white cover of Teenage Head’s indelible first single “Picture My Face” (1978 Interglobal/Epic), whose two perfect punk songs appear on the band’s debut LP Teenage Head (1979 Interglobal/Epic). The rockabilly influence is far more pronounced on Frantic City (Attic 1980), which includes covers of Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Wild One” and Eddie Cochran’s “Somethin’ Else” ornamented with piano and wailing sax.
1980 was the year of Headmania in Canada: Frantic City went platinum, and over a thousand ticketholders were turned away from the band’s June 2, 1980 show at the Ontario Place Forum in Toronto, which ended in a riot. The band was scheduled to begin a tour of the United States in the late summer, but Gord Lewis was seriously injured in a car accident on the way home from an Ontario show and the tour had to be cancelled.
After the good-time Some Kinda Fun (1982 Attic), Teenage Head finally procured a deal with a major label in the United States. The result was the disastrous Tornado EP (MCA 1983), on which the label scrubbed the band’s sound clean and then set to work on its name: the Tornado artwork credited the band as “Teenage Heads” at MCA’s insistence. The association with MCA was mercifully brief.
The live album Endless Party (1984 Ready) reproduces Teenage Head’s hometown show on New Year’s Eve 1983. Venom and Stipanitz quit after recording the band’s fourth studio album Trouble in the Jungle (1985 Warpt). Lewis and Marshall recruited Dave Rave of the Shakers as their new frontman and Mark Lockerbie on drums. Rave had contributed either guitar or backup vocals to each of Teenage Head’s studio albums and had released their last of these on his own Warpt label. The Rave-fronted Teenage Head recorded the 12-inch single Can’t Stop Shakin’ (1987 Warpt) and the album Electric Guitar (1988 Warpt).
Rave moved to New York in 1988 to pursue a solo career, leaving Teenage Head without a singer or a label. Frankie Venom returned, but fans had to wait over a decade for the band’s next album Head Disorder (1996 Loud Rock). In March 2003, Venom, Lewis and Marshall entered a Hamilton studio with Ramones producer Daniel Rey and drummer Marky Ramone to re-record some of their hits, heard on the album Teenage Head with Marky Ramone (2008 Sonic Unyon).
Frankie Venom died at a hospital in Hamilton on October 15, 2008, one month after being diagnosed with throat cancer. On November 16, Teenage Head won seven “Hammies” at the Hamilton Music Awards, including a lifetime achievement award.