Street Fighting Men

The Rolling Stones kicked off their Exile on Main Street tour at the Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver on 3 June 1972, with Stevie Wonder opening. It was not the Stones’ best performance, but it was significant for other reasons. For one thing, it was the group’s first North American show since the infamous 1969 concert in Altamont, California where four people died, one of whom was killed by the Hell’s Angels who had been given beer to do security.

The police were not likely looking forward to the Rolling Stones playing Vancouver. The last time they played here was at the Forum in 1966. At that show, the band started 90 minutes late and the crowd was pretty wound up. In a misguided attempt to calm the fans, the cops pulled the plug five minutes into the show. Mick Jagger responded by pointing his finger and then thumbing his nose at police Inspector Bud Errington, to the delight of the crowd. The show eventually resumed, but only lasted half an hour.

Inspector Bud Errington on stage with the Rolling Stones at the Forum, 19 July 1966. Photo: Vancouver Police Museum

Errington later said that “we are specifically concerned about this group reappearing in Vancouver due to their lack of cooperation.” Police ejected 36 people from that concert, fans attempted to crash through police lines, and an officer’s hat was stolen. At the first Stones show in Vancouver just seven months earlier, seven people were arrested for drunkenness and causing a disturbance.

The band wasn’t the problem in 1972. In some ways (but not others), Altamont sobered the Stones. The Sun emphasized how good natured Mick Jagger seemed during the Vancouver show. Keith Richards was reportedly packing a .38 revolver on the tour because of rumours of an assassination plot by the Hells Angels as revenge for the lack of support the Stones showed them in the aftermath of Altamont. Conspicuously absent from the set list was “Sympathy for the Devil.”

The first sign there might be trouble came more than a month before the show when $5000 worth of sound equipment was damaged at Empire Stadium by a youth gang on the morning tickets went on sale for the Rolling Stones. The show sold out, but on the night of the concert scalpers were outside selling real and fake tickets for between $6 (face value) and $20.

"Here Come the Rolling Stones," Georgia Straight cover, June 1972

The mêlée started around 8:45 when people without tickets began pushing against the 100 or so police guarding the doors around the Coliseum. Someone set off firecrackers and the crowd began jeering the police. Then someone threw a bottle that broke the glass above one of the doors. About 200 people took off and ran around the building kicking the doors and shouting at police. When they finished circling the building, a line of about 30 police in riot gear were blocking the main entrance. Bottles began flying and police were smashing them with their riot sticks. Sergeant Stan Ziola was the first police casualty when a bottle broke his sternum.

Rioters lobbed projectiles, police charged, and the rioters retreated. This repeated for an hour and a half. There was very little hand-to-hand skirmishing between police and the 2500-strong crowd outside the Coliseum. Seven officers were on horseback, going from place to place as needed.

Rioters outside the Pacific Coliseum during the Rolling Stones concert, Vancouver Sun, 5 June 1972

By 10:30 the riot was simmering. Around 11:00, a Molotov cocktail exploded at the rear of an RCMP cruiser that was driving past on Renfrew Street. It was followed by another Molotov, and the seven mounted police charged at the crowd, which dispersed between nearby houses.

By the time the 17,000 concert-goers streamed out of the Coliseum at 11:30, it was all over. In the final tally, 31 police were injured and of those thirteen required hospitalization. Thirteen people were arrested that night and another nine rioters were identified and arrested in the days that followed. Most of those charged were young men in their late teens or early twenties, including a 16 year-old boy who assaulted Sgt. Bernie “Whistling” Smith with a chain.

Superintendent Ted Oliver, commander of the 285 officers policing the riot, said “there is no way, ever, that I want to have to ask my men to go into a situation like that again.” He was “proud of every one of those bastards I had working for me. They were cool and they were very, very brave.”

Outside the Coliseum, 3 June 1972. From: The Grape, no. 21, 7-13 June 1972.

Despite the injuries they sustained, the Vancouver police ultimately benefited from the affray. Their handling of the Rolling Stones Riot was praised in the media and was contrasted with their performance the previous year at the Gastown Riot, for which they were roundly criticized for brutality. The Stones Riot was thus an opportunity for the Vancouver Police Department to redeem itself, as well as to argue that it needed more riot gear.

Police suspected that the obviously premeditated riot was orchestrated by the Clark Park Gang. At the time, youth gangs based in city parks were a preoccupation of the city police. Using the alias Ken Bell, Constable Ken Doern had infiltrated the Clark Park Gang and warned his bosses three weeks before the Stones concert to expect trouble, including weapons.

While undercover, Doern was part of a contingent of parents and youth from the Clark Park area that brought grievances of police harassment and increased surveillance of youth to Alderman Harry Rankin. “Police may think they are trying to get at the hard core but have succeeded in antagonizing a great number of kids,” Rankin said. A police spokesman denied they were doing anything differently around Clark Park than anywhere else, but acknowledged that “the East End wants us out and the people in Dunbar want more of us.”

Cop injured at the Rolling Stones Riot. Vancouver Sun, 5 June 1972

Some people suspected that off-duty police officers were moonlighting as vigilantes in order to retaliate for the Rolling Stones Riot. An activist group called the Volunteers was circulating a leaflet describing incidents of harassment and assaults around Clark Park that they claimed were probably committed by members of the police force.

Another target was a house at 1955 Templeton, the headquarters of a revolutionary Marxist group called the Youngbloods, who were suspected of being involved in orchestrating the Rolling Stones Riot. On numerous occasions rocks were thrown at the house. One of the Youngbloods’ slogans was “Today’s Pig is Tomorrow’s Bacon.”

Province, 22 July 1972

A Province newspaper article entitled “Gangs, Glue, and Mao” includes excerpts from an article on the Youngbloods that appeared in the alternative newspaper The Grape in April. It describes a Joe Cocker concert at the Coliseum where the Youngbloods “were on hand to gauge the possibilities of gate-crashing” and to propagandize the crowd that was mulling about outside because they were unable to get tickets. To the Province writer, it sounded like the recipe that was used at the Stones concert.

They mingle with knots of people outside the red doors, showing them the paper, discussing specific articles, glancing behind doors to determine police strength. The Youngbloods have had some success at helping those without tickets to push their way through a weakly-guarded door, notably at the rock-and-roll revival last fall. It’s just the sort of lesson they wish to teach – that if enough people can pool aggressive energies, small victories can be won. But actions like these tread a fine line – balanced by PNE security on one-hand, mood of the people on the other.

According to the Province, activist groups like the Youngbloods were sometimes seen as radical social workers: “They have tried to switch the traditionally tough neighbourhood groups away from the mind-killing effects of glue-sniffing and have tried to lead youths out of the glue cycle with the more benign marijuana or a revolutionary tract.”

Glue-sniffing was thought to be helping fuel the juvenile delinquency problem in 1972. The Vancouver Health Department issued a report early in the year outlining the anti-social behaviour caused by sniffing glue, including property damage, theft, larceny, shoplifting, rape, homicide, erratic driving, and a “general dissolution of inhibitions.”

Cover of the The Grape, 21-27 June 1972, with a cartoon showing police retaliating for the Rolling Stones Riot.

According to Mason Dixon, writing in The Grape, the Youngbloods

regard the youthful ‘lumpen proletariat’ as a strategic key to revolution…Lumpen is a Marxist term taken from German, meaning ‘rags’ as it refers to that impoverished group which is completely outside the economic system of production. It is neither workers nor capitalists, but typically welfare recipients or other marginally or sporadically employed.

By the time the Province article was published in July 1972, the Youngbloods had already disbanded. As for the Clark Park Gang, the police took care of them with a special baseball bat-wielding unit called the “Heavy Squad.”

From its violent beginnings in Vancouver, the Exile on Main Street tour went on to become the most legendary tour in the annals of rock ‘n roll. Violence erupted in several other cities, including a bomb that destroyed a van full of the band’s gear in Montreal. Meanwhile back in Vancouver, City Council voted at an in-camera meeting to deny a permit allowing Led Zeppelin to play here out of fear of more violence.

Gangland Vancouver

North Vancouver, 1958, by Fred Herzog

Vancouver in 1950 had a “grave problem of hoodlumism,” according to the Vancouver Sun. “Gangs of cowardly clowns in zoot suits, tanked full of malevolence and loganberry wine, are defying law and order in the city of Vancouver.” An estimated 10 to 12 neighbourhood-based youth gangs were active in the city, with membership rolls ranging from 20 to 100.

The most notorious gang in 1950 was the North Burnaby Gang from the Hastings and Sperling area, which had around 100 members and was responsible for the spate of violence that inspired the Sun’s profile of gangs. Most of its members sported crew cuts, although some had Mohawks (referred to as “Iroquois” or “Huron” in the paper).

There were other street corner gangs at Nanaimo and Hastings, Main and Twenty-fifth, Commercial Drive (then called “the Drag”), Fraser and Kingsway, and Joyce and Kingsway. An anti-Semitic gang around 16th and Oak was a precursor to fascist gangs that roamed Vancouver in the 1960s.

From the window of Modernize Tailors, a photo showing the "drapes" or "strides" that were the store's bread and butter in the 1950s.

Young hooligans from both sides of town went to Modernize Tailors in Chinatown to buy “strides” – baggy zoot suit pants tapered at the ankle – which by 1950 accounted for 95% of the shop’s business. Ray Culos, a local historian raised in the East End, recalled in a 1970s interview “wearing those outlandish clothes. I had a hat that was right out of the ‘Li’l Abner’ column, great big hat, and a long fingertip white jacket with great black ’strides.’ I had a 36 [inch circumference] at the knee, and 12 or 13 at the ankle!”

"Zoot Suit Yokum" from Al Capp's Li'l Abner, April 1943

Youth gang activity varied and evolved over time. Many were simply tight-knit groups of friends whose teenage hijinks occasionally got out of hand. Culos remembered doing “things that were on the borderline of being wrong, I suppose. But I don’t remember anything so serious that we would be hauled in front of a judge – it was an attitude.”

Some youth gangs, however, were indeed criminal outfits. In the late 1940s for example, a Fagin-type adult mastermind was reportedly recruiting Vancouver youth and training them in auto and auto parts thefts.

The area now known as the Downtown Eastside spawned gangs consisting of “mostly hopheads and minor felons,” according to the Sun in 1950. The Button Gang was one such group that had recently been broken up by police. They were “minor pilferers” based out of a few hotel rooms, but who didn’t get involved in affrays with other gangs.

Gang violence usually involved fisticuffs with other gangs, but switchblades became more common as the ’50s progressed. In one fight, a Beretta was used. Gang warfare typically took place around dance halls catering to youth, such as Happyland at the PNE, Teen Town at the Victoria Drive Community Centre, and the Alma Academy in Point Grey.

Teenagers not involved with gangs could also find themselves caught up in fights, especially if they ventured out of their own neighbourhoods. One fight outside the Blue Danube at Hastings and Victoria in 1955 ended with the death of 19 year-old Buddy Pearson, a celebrated local boxer. Pearson held his own in a fight against two other boys who taunted him about his curly hair, but died later while being driven home by friends. Police concluded that Pearson died from a boxing-related injury “which could have been aggravated by any bump or knock.”

The Province incorrectly reported that Pearson was “believed to have been one of half a dozen youths who became involved in a fight” outside the club, which suggests how easily teens might be lumped into the category of gangster based on little more than the clothes they wore and the places they frequented. Another fight outside the Blue Danube a couple of weeks later escalated into a riot when 300 boys in zoot suits and girls wearing bobby socks rushed out of the dance hall to join the mêlée. The News Herald reported that it began as retaliation for Pearson’s death, and that “at the height of the pitched battle, one youth shouted ‘Lets get the punks that got Pearson.’” According to the Province, however, relatives of those charged said it had nothing to do with Pearson. His sister insists that Buddy was in no way involved in gang activity and points out that young gangsters and non-gangsters alike all wore “strides,” including the girls. No doubt the media fueled the moral panic about youth gangs and juvenile delinquency through its sensational and not-always-accurate coverage of gang and youth activity.

Local boxer Buddy Pearson died after a fight outside a dance hall at Hastings & Victoria. Photo: News-Herald, reprinted in Inside Fighter: Dave Brown's Remarkable Stories of Canadian Boxing by Tom Henry (2001, Harbour Publishing)

Another development in the evolution of youth gangs was the advent of “ramblers,” teenagers with vehicles that allowed “flying squads” to quickly and easily intrude on enemy territory. One night in 1947, three truckloads of East Enders headed to Kerrisdale to retaliate for a brawl the night before outside Happyland. Seven police cars and two paddy wagons arrived at Forty-first and Granville to find a crowd of around 300 spectators blocking the street outside Aristocratic Hamburgers as the two factions were preparing to rumble. After about two hours, a police sergeant was able to persuade the East Enders to retreat to their own turf, but nine Kerrisdale youth were arrested for refusing to disperse.

Street corner gangs gave way to park-based gangs in the 1960s. The Riley Park and the Grandview Park gangs were two notorious ones, but it was the Clark Park Gang that police targeted for special attention with a “Heavy Squad” equipped with baseball bats.

The park gang era reached its climax at the Rolling Stones Riot in 1972 at the Pacific Coliseum. A revolutionary Marxist gang from East Vancouver called Youngblood had, according to the Province, teamed up with the Clark Park Gang to orchestrate the riot. Thousands of fake tickets were printed and sold, creating an angry mob willing to fight its way into the show. The subsequent fracas included not only fisticuffs, but molotov cocktails and a homemade bazooka that shattered the sternum of a police officer with a railway spike. It ended with twenty injured police and two bomb throwers in jail.

Two decades earlier, BC Senator Tom Reid warned that members of troublesome “zoot suit bands” would be “among the first to join any Communist movement in Canada,” and that they should be given the lash when found guilty of any offence as a deterrence. The Rolling Stones Riot was the closest Reid’s fears came to materializing, and the gangs plaguing Vancouver since have been decidedly capitalist.

For more on Vancouver’s youth gang history, see Michael G. Young “The History of Vancouver Youth Gangs: 1900 – 1985″ (PDF)