It’s late October 2004, and there are only 40 people clustered around the stage at The Casbah in Hamilton, Ontario. Ken Chinn, age 42, belches into his microphone, takes a drink, and spews out a mouthful of obscenities; as far as he is concerned, the sound is perfect, and the band is ready to go. Chinn, aka Mr. Chi Pig, has been the front man for the group SNFU since their formation in 1981, and while there are no more than a few dozen gathered to check out the iconic Canadian punk band, he appears unaffected. Instead of singing to a near empty bar floor, Chi Pig abandons the stage during the first tune, returning only to pull out props from a massive toy chest he has planted in front of the kick drum. He bellows 90 minutes of staccato screams inches from the faces of his fans. Most of them were not around when the band started over two decades earlier, but every one of the leather clad Canadian punks knows the words.
Four years later, SNFU is back on the road. Chi Pig, now 45, is the only remaining remember, and without little objection from fans and critics, declares “SNFU dies when I die.”
While the group never quite had the success that their contemporaries did (the band had numerous tours with the Dead Kennedys and Bad Brains during the ‘80s), the underground following that developed in their early days still exists today. Other than a brief stint on Epitaph Records in the 1990s, SNFU strayed far from the surface of the mainstream. Despite a handful of break ups and over 20 former members, the group is now in the midst of their first cross-Canadian trek in a few years, and is still playing punk anthems that predate myself, this magazine, and probably you.
Even pushing 50, Chi Pig is still renowned in the Canadian punk scene for his sporadic, energetic stage show. His group beat out the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Fugazi for “Best Live Band” in a 1987 poll in Flipside fanzine, and the Pig man still brings home the bacon. The toy chest is just the tip of the iceberg: Chinn disrobes, grinds the floor, climbs the crowd and performs mid-air splits after leaping from PAs and monitors. While it’s not necessarily anything new in 2008, and wasn’t exactly cutting edge 27 years ago, Chinn does it the best. It’s not uncommon to see him expel a snot-rocket stage-side or slap around a fan in the front. Annoying? Perhaps. But you aren’t going to throw a punch at a 45 year old Canadian legend with only a handful of teeth left, are you?
Going on 30, SNFU has done little to change their sound over the years. Even with the seemingly constant rotation of members, much of the band’s catalog stays true to the sound they first captured on their first full length, 1985’s …And No One Else Wanted to Play. While their recordings certainly demonstrate an ascending quality in production, the raw and fast skate-thrash sound that helped charter in the genre is still prevalent years later, most recently on 2004’s In the Meantime and In Between Time. SNFU only releases albums with seven words in the title. It’s kind of their thing.
For the commitment Chi Pig has pledged all of these years, his lyrical content is often far from serious. Two of the group’s biggest hits in the ‘80s were about cannibalism, and subject matter over the years has included disembodiment, G.I. Joe, John Bobbit, bulimia, and naturally, hockey. That’s not to say Chi Pig isn’t sincere about his devotion to preserving the group. While former members have moved on and denounced reunions like the current one, Chi Pig is adamant about keeping the name going. While the rest of the group has come and gone and the band has evolved from teenage skate punks to middle-aged men, Chi Pig, who now hosts a weekly karaoke night in Vancouver, does not see an end for the group anytime soon, even if he is the only remaining member. “Those songs are my life. I’ll fucking play them ‘til I die,” he told Edmonton’s Vue Weekly before a recent homecoming show featuring the most recent incarnation of the group.
With only a handful showing up the last time the group (well, Chi Pig) made it to Ontario in ’04, and with no album and very little publicity this time around, what is keeping the band going? Chi Pig has recruited SNFU alumnus Ken Flemming, one of eight of the group’s bass players, as well as two other Canadian punk lengends, Bryan McCallum and Chad Mareels, to keep the wheels turning, but the scene has come along way since ‘81.
Justin Smith works at Rotate This, a Toronto record store just down the street from The Kathedral, where SNFU will be doing two shows this month. Rotate This specializes in punk, and while Smith’s customers are familiar with the upcoming shows, tickets aren’t exactlyflying off the shelf. “I’m surprised there isn’t more talk going on, really. We’re selling tickets – they aren’t going like crazy, though.” Smith agrees that the group was rather influential within the hardcore scene, but was never too huge in Toronto. “Maybe they were in the mid ‘90s, but right now a lot of the kids who are into stuff like Fucked Up and Career Suicide and some of the other bands from here, well, it’s not really the same crap, per se.”
Sell-out crowd or not, it still just might be worth dusting off the old combat boots and studded belts to make the jaunt across the border for a show or two. Just make sure you learn the words to “Cannibal Café” first, though. You don’t want to insult the Pig man.
SNFU will be playing across Southern Ontario and the Greater Toronto Area from September 18 to the 28. Check out myspace.com/snfuband for more information.
