Golden Calgarians - New Desperados b/w Minutes to Heaven (picture sleeve)

Tracks

Side 1

		Track Name	Length
	1	New Desperados	03:07

Side 2

		Track Name	Length
	1	Minutes to Heaven

Photos

Videos

No Video

Information/Write-up

The Golden Calgarians began taking shape in northwest Calgary in the late 1970s, when Queen Elizabeth High School classmates Geoff “Jeff” Smith and a charismatic, sharp-tongued singer known simply as Bruno formed a band called The Remains. The name was a teenage nod to the Ramones, their earliest heroes, but the group quickly grew beyond punk imitation. By 1980 they had abandoned their morbid moniker, adopted the name The Golden Calgarians, and settled into the combination of humour, fuzz-blasted guitar, and prairie suburban absurdism that defined them for the next half-decade.

The earliest recordings capture a band inventing its own corner of Calgary culture. “Chicken on the Way,” sometimes regarded as the great lost CalgCon anthem, was written by founding guitarist Scott Fawcett and recorded around 1980, likely in the CJSW studios. Bassist Dave DeGrood, drummer Jeff Smith, and Bruno handled the performance, with Smith voicing parts of the song’s skit section. The track circulated not on vinyl or cassette but on campus-radio playlists and homemade tapes, becoming a minor legend before vanishing back into the station archives. Its survival today is partly thanks to CJSW DJ Ken Kittlitz, who captured it on a mix tape of his favourite local tracks in 1986 and kept that cassette for decades.

The band’s early years were already filtering into Calgary’s cultural life. A memorable anecdote published in Local Motion described a downtown delivery worker chanting “We are the Golden Calgarians” during morning elevator rides—evidence that the group’s name had begun to seep into the city’s imagination even before their wider recognition.

By the time they recorded their debut LP, It’s Fun to Be Alive, in 1981, Fawcett had departed and guitarist Doug Smith had joined, completing the lineup that most Calgarians remember: Bruno up front, Doug Smith on guitar, Dave DeGrood on bass, and Jeff Smith behind the kit. They were a relentless live act, playing anywhere in the city that would have them and touring widely across Canada. Their debut album showed a band experimenting with new wave angles and post-punk jolts, but nothing softened their basic identity—loud, strange, funny, and impossible to mistake for anyone else.

A detailed article in Local Motion traced the band’s evolution during these years: the self-financed release of 1,100 copies of their debut LP, each mailed individually to stations across Canada; the surprising devotion from the University of Alberta, which kept the album in its Top 4 throughout 1982; and the unexpected volume of fan mail from the United States, including letters from New Jersey, San Francisco, New York, Kansas, Los Angeles, and Chicago. The band was also covered in the respected independent-music magazine OP, which had a worldwide circulation of fourteen thousand and brought further attention to their work.

The same article documented the band’s internal turbulence—four guitarists passed through the lineup in quick succession before they settled on Mike “Memorex” Joy, while Geoff Smith spent a period in Europe on sabbatical. Despite this instability, the band continued writing, rehearsing, and recording, culminating in a five-song tape they produced in 1983–84 that they regarded as their strongest work to date.

Their reputation grew steadily through the early 1980s, and by 1984 the group hit its stride with Savage Love, an album that finally captured the punch, fuzz, and irreverent swagger of their shows. The opening track, “Vladivostok Rock,” became one of the defining underground Prairie rock songs of the era, with Doug Smith firing off thick fuzz-guitar lines over DeGrood and Jeff Smith’s caveman thump while Bruno delivered a Cold War cartoon about CIA handlers, KGB gigs, and apocalyptic rock-and-roll diplomacy. The album’s mixture of garage-rock grind, punk-bred confidence, suburban surrealism, and Cold War paranoia felt both ridiculous and strangely prophetic, and it won them a cult following far beyond their hometown. They were described in print as “raunchy and loud” and “tight and passionate,” and a 1986 Calgary magazine profile noted that Montreal in particular took to them enthusiastically. The same piece memorably singled out Bruno—then twenty-five—as the group’s “raunch component,” a frontman whose good looks and charisma extended into his parallel life as a nude model at the Alberta College of Art.

The band expanded and contracted throughout the decade as new players drifted in for tours, recordings, or short bursts of creative chaos. Among those associated with the project over the years were Dan “Cool Hands” Hayes, Menno “Moneybags” Klassen, Troy “Thumbpick” Gigelli, Mike “Memorex” Joy, Tim Campbell—whose guitar was said to “communicate in the language of any sentient being”—and Scott “The Founding Father” Fawcett, whose early songwriting and attitude helped set the band’s tone. Through every permutation, Bruno, Doug Smith, DeGrood, and Jeff Smith remained the gravitational core, the four musicians most identified with the Calgarians’ sound and spirit.

Despite their popularity on the local circuit and their constant presence on CJSW playlists, the Golden Calgarians never attracted the attention of the Canadian music industry. Their records remained self-released, their fan base remained grassroots, and their reputation travelled mostly by word-of-mouth, live shows, and the efforts of college-radio DJs who recognized them as one of Calgary’s most original exports. They never reunited after their mid-80s run, and their music has never been reissued. Much of their catalogue survives only through tapes made by fans, former DJs, and band members themselves—an underground legacy carried across decades one dubbed cassette at a time.

Looking back, the Golden Calgarians stand as one of the great cult bands of the Prairie underground: fiercely local, proudly self-made, and completely uninterested in tailoring their sound for industry expectations. They wrote about what they knew—fast food joints, Cold War absurdity, romantic misfires, suburban boredom—and played with the conviction of people who believed rock and roll could still save something, even if that something was only the night itself. Their mix of garage grit, deadpan humour, and wide-open Calgary attitude made them one of the most distinctive voices in the city’s musical history. For those who heard them live, caught them on CJSW, or tracked down the surviving tapes, the Golden Calgarians were nothing less than a Prairie original: the most popular band almost nobody ever heard of, and one that remains due for rediscovery.
-Robert Williston

Bruno: vocals
Brad Spaz: guitar
David Degrood: bass
Rob Hayter: drums

Written by the Golden Calgarians
Produced by the Golden Calgarians
Engineered by Gabriel Boucher
Recorded at Smooth Rock Studios, Calgary, Alberta

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