Guilty of Everything

by John Auber Armstrong

Cultural Writing. Memoir. Music. 1978: the first shock of punk hits Vancouver, and John Armstrong is at the center of the maelstrom. As Buck Cherry, lead singer/ guitarist for the Modernettes, Armstrong met and made music with I Braineater, Joey Shithead, Dimwit, Chuck Biscuits, Mary Jo Kopechne, Art Bergmann, and other punk luminaries. His account of drug-addled, booze-soaked days and nights with Los Popularos, DOA, the Subhumans, and the Modernettes brings this anarchic era to life. "It's a fluke of history that someone who writes as well as John Armstrong would have been at the very heart of the original Vancouver punk scene. Little did they know that Armstrong, aka Buck Cherry, would be their recording angel, but he was and here it all is: from White Rock to the back of the Smilin' Buddha and beyond. Very few recollections of a life lived in rock are this honest, or this funny"--William Gibson.

Genres: Music, Biography

107 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

I was born and raised in Little Italy on the East Side of Vancouver. In my teens we moved to the small town of White Rock on the US border and I met Art Bergmann, which led to 15 years of playing music for a living and generally acting in a shameful and often legally actionable manner.

I retired from the stage in my early 30s and began writing. For 15 years I was a reporter and columnist for the Vancouver Sun, covering crime, politics, theatre, books, music, and science.

In 2001 I left the paper to write full-time and have published four books since, with six more in varying stages of pre-publication.

Guilty of Everything, a memoir of the Vancouver punk scene, is still in pre-production as a feature film, forever.

In 2017 i published A Series of Dogs, a remembrance of the dogs in my life,

Coming sometime in the next year or two are The Circle of St. George, a fantasy set in WW2 Britain.

Mob Rule, an alt-history satire, and Sugar, a dystopian- future drug novel.

Schadenfreude, in which alien tourists come to Earth to witness our atrocities and horrors. (Yeah, that will shoot to the top of the charts ...... but what are you gonna do? You write what you write, and you see what happens.)

Currently finishing up Plague House: The Haunting of Fairacres, a supernatural story based on true events, and a final non-fiction book - The back Nine: A Gentleman's Guide to Growing Old.

Modernettes have an album coming out this year called New maps of Hell - yes, a nod to the great Kingsley Amis

Reviews

[Chris Eng · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here are some things I enjoy:
1) Stories about punks.
2) Recountings of Vancouver's history.
3) Amusing rock 'n' roll road stories.

Guilty of Everything contains all three. Written by John Armstrong (a.k.a. Buck Cherry, the lead singer/guitar player for the Modernettes), it is quite possibly my favourite punk memoir/historical account I've read. It doesn't cover a wide range of ground and doesn't attempt to codify the entire punk movement into a cohesive and easy to understand form, but Armstrong's not trying to and that's that's not the point. He told the story of some of the formative years of the Vancouver punk scene as he experienced it and created a thoroughly entertaining tale of a bygone era in the process.

[Rich · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Series of Dogs resonated with me more, but this was still a stellar memoir of a period of time when an attitude made you punk. In Canada.

All about the Vancouver punk scene, touring down into California, giving Iggy Pop the clap, and making sure to never meet your rock heroes. It also dispels my theory that loud vibrations, like those made from amps, dissolve smells caused by gas. I wish I had known this before doing what I did at all those shows. Apologies to anyone who stood behind me...

[Will George · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having missed all the fun but knowing about some of these bands after the fact, Armstrong‘s writing makes me almost feel like I was there. A short but hilarious, candid oral history of the dawning of punk in Vancouver BC. An official soundtrack is needed!

[Maxwell Amberfordstinskin · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite book about music since Lester Bangs wrote some shit.

[Andrea Demers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Funny. Bleak. Could have been longer! True to punk style - get er done

[Jeannette · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked up this book because of the song "Barbra" (yes, that's how it's spelled) by the Modernettes, a Vancouver early punk band. The song and video are great, but the reminiscences by the lead singer on life & the early punk scene in White Rock and Vancouver are interesting but not that deep. He spends more time writing about Johnny Thunders heroin addiction than he does his own, which he glazes over in a couple of sentences. But if this book finally gets made into a movie with Jay Baruchel I'm totally going to see it. Barely 3 stars.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really good history of early Vancouver punk. Lots of good stories involving the Subhumans, Pointed Sticks, DOA and the Modernettes,

[Tracy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fast read, well written, mostly sad, a little bit funny. Glad I bought it. Nice to recognize old names, places and bands from the west coast.