Wayne Kennedy

After an extended absence from music, Port Hope punk Wayne Kennedy is going deep for a complex and emotional album about life as a young and wild punk. It’s an album somewhere between folk and punk, between the past and the present, between wild party and raw emotional confession.

Since about 2008, Wayne Kennedy has been a force in the area’s punk scene. He helped resurrect Lindsay’s live music scene with Vacant Music, and he’s also fronted two bands of his own, The Red District and then Television Warfare. But this new album is the first we’ve heard from Kennedy in almost two years (read more about that in our interview with him), and he’s taking things in a dramatic new direction.

He’s ditched the band, ditched the electric for an acoustic guitar, and ditched the bedroom recording studio, presenting an album professionally recorded/produced by Dave Baksh (Sum 41, Black Cat Attack) and mixed/mastered by Mark Rand (Cross Dog).

But don’t let the solo acoustic thing fool you. This album has an angry streak that’s straight punk. Almost all that warm, organic, woody resonance that you’d normally associate with an acoustic guitar has been ripped out of the mix, for a sound dominated by the harsh, metallic thunk of guitar pick hitting string. Kennedy attacks his instrument with a relentless barrage of strumming, never using one note when there’s space for five. It’s an intense and technically impressive sound. Kennedy’s also got classic punk vocals, all grimy snarls and yelling – something like the way people sing at two in the morning in the middle of a particularly wild party.

And yet, this is also unmistakably folk-singer-songwriter album – intimate, raw, and highly personal. There’s a reason the album is simply titled Wayne Kennedy. Kennedy’s the only player in most songs, and his lyrics get into some surprisingly deep introspective territory about love, loss, memory, and insecurity.

This is especially true in the album’s second half (“Old Dogs”, “Late Nights,” and “F.T.R.D”). At first, these songs feel like a continuation of Kennedy’s last band, Television Warfare: stories of young punks, of drinking, fighting, rebellion, and friends. Lyrics like “Late nights in the car with the radio / We were kids screaming, ‘we don’t know where to go’” perfectly capture that distinct joy/terror of being “young, dumb, and seventeen.”

But then, you start to notice something: it’s all told in the past tense.

If Television Warfare was the diary of a young punk, this album is more like a memoir, a wistful nostalgia product for lost childhoods and the don’t-give-a-shit badasses we used to be. “Old Dogs” is a literal memorial for a punk comrade who’s since died, and “F.T.R.D” (short for “Fuck The Red District”), despite its posturing title, is a sweet memorial for Kennedy’s first band. “Those were the days,” sings Kennedy, “two young kids and a choice to make,” and behind him, we hear the sad sounds of a violin (the only time another instrument joins Kennedy).

Even when Kennedy does cover more traditional punk territory, there’s a sense of loss in it. “Suburban Machine Guns” is a fuck-the-man anthem, but it’s also about how society steps on people’s childhoods and pressures people into conformity, and “Holy Water” presents a deeply conflicted take on drinking, religion, and fathers. In fact, the only time the album doesn’t sound conflicted is “One of a Kind,” which is basically a cute, schmaltzy love song about a girl who takes your breath away – something like “I’m A Believer” as sung by Anti-Flag.

All this may make the album sound like a bit of a downer – and it’s really not. Even as Kennedy sings about sad, serious things, he does so with a joyous, unbridled energy. The reminiscences of fun past really do feel fun, and, for the most part, the album plays like a great party album, full of memorable riffs, bouncy refrains, and singalong-ready “whoa-oh-oh-oh”s.

This is particularly true when Kennedy is joined by a rambunctious choir of former bandmates and music friends, who are in for gang back-up vocals. They sound like they’re having a ball in the recording booth. This may be an album about how great everything was in the past, but from the sound of things, the present’s not too bad either.



Wayne Kennedy’s debut EP is available for purchase on Bandcamp. - Gabe Pollock, Electric City Live Peterborough

The $2 Punk Shows are back! Back in 2013, these monthly events brought together overstuffed bills of up-and-coming artists from across the punk spectrum. The shows soon went away, and along with them went their promoter, Wayne Kennedy, and his band, Television Warfare.

Now, Kennedy and $2 Punk are back. When I sat down with Wayne last month, he was a ball of energy, passionate and excitable, clearly thrilled (and maybe a bit terrified) about once again sharing the music he loves with the world.

“I want it to be like the 1980s hardcore scene, with bands like Black Flag,” he told me. “That’s my favourite time in punk, where they’re playing these clubs with a fucking spray-painted banner outside and 2 or 3 bucks at the door. It’s so fucking cool, so DIY. All you need is a bit of duct tape and a fucking glue stick, and you can put this together! That’s the essence.”

That’s been Wayne’s philosophy since his early days, back in 2008, pleading with the Lindsay Parks and Rec department to let him host punk shows at the Armouries. “We called it Vacant Music,” he tells me. “The idea being that, at the time, there was no music in Lindsay.”

Vacant Music, which at its height was putting on multiple shows every month and had their own indie label, led to Kennedy joining two bands (The Red District, then Television Warfare), and that led to the $2 Punk Shows.

“That was such a happy accident,” Kennedy recalls. In February of 2013, a production delay left Television Warfare with a week to go before their album release show, and no album to release. “I didn’t want to cancel on Dave [Tobey, owner of The Spill]. So I said, ‘Dave, $2 Punk Show. That’s what we’ll do.’”

The show was packed, and a new monthly event was born.

“I was thinking about how to describe the shows,” Kennedy tells me, “and I think I would say it’s the world’s worst business plan.”

He assures me that all bands at least get gas money – but it’ll never be a big payday. “It’s a stepping stone,” says Kennedy. “I don’t want to book the bands that have a guarantee. I want the bands that want the exposure, that are kind of new and are thirsty for the crowds. Then obviously, when they get a bit more established, they won’t play a $2 show anymore.”

The low cover, combined with the all-ages policy, also lets Kennedy open these shows to as wide an audience as possible. “What I love about The Spill is, it’s such a positive artistic place. You can do whatever you want there, and someone is gonna like it. At 6 o’clock, before the $2 punk show, there could be a fuckin ukulele jam – it’s happened! And then some of them stick around! And they fuckin go nuts!”

Unfortunately, after seven months of $2 Punk, Kennedy decided to take a bit of a break from music. It was a full year before he picked up the guitar again and started writing.

This whole year has been kind of figuring myself out and getting back into it,” he says. “I’ve put a little more out there personally.”

And what he’s come out with is a dramatically new sound: an upcoming solo acoustic punk album, released under his own name and professionally produced, thanks to Black Cat Attack’s Dave Brownsound and Cross Dog’s Mark Rand. “There’s still a punk edge to everything I do – it’s kind of fast and kind of hard – but it’s just me. Playing acoustic is fuckin scary! It’s very personal, no matter what you’re singing about.”

With a return to music came the obvious next step. “I just kind of put it out there: what would you say if the $2 punk shows came back? And Dave [Tobey] wrote me right back, and all he said was, ‘Sounds good. Do you still have the banner?’”

Kennedy hopes these $2 Punk Shows will be “bigger and better” than before. “Peterborough has been such an amazing place for me,” he says. “It’s a DIY town, you know? The music scene is so creative and so independent and so cool. So this time around, I wanted these shows to give something to the community.”

That means booking more local bands, and it also means adding a charity element to show. All $2 punk shows will also be food drives for local charity Food Not Bombs.

And it also means upping the ambition: there will be twelve $2 Punk Shows in 2015, one the second Friday of every month. And then there’s the new album. And its album release show. And more shows to promote.

“I’m excited for 2015,” Wayne says with a grin. “It’s gonna be nuts. I hope I live through it.” - Gabe Pollock, Electric City Live Peterborough

Full EP stream on dyingscene.com - Jonathan Lyte, DyingScene.com