Who Fought the Law?

"Rock 'n Roll is just.....lawyers" - Stiv Bators, CFNY-FM radio interview 1980

I actually had no idea that Stiv said that. I only just now read it on David Quinton Steinberg's myspace blog.



David, as readers of this blog know, was the Teenager from Toronto who stepped up to the plate, replacing Johnny Blitz in the Dead Boys for their last go-round before Stiv morphed that unit into the Stiv Bators Band... the band I refer to as the Disconnected Band, after the album they recorded with Stiv.



I don't know if David knew at the time that he was interested in anything beyond playing rock n roll... would there be some growing up? A career not on stage? Twenty-eight years after these photos were taken, David, no longer a teenager, is one of Canada's most well-respected lawyers. And not just any kind of lawyer... he's one of the most well-respected entertainment lawyers in the biz.



Its not difficult for me to imagine the wide-eyed teenager pictured above as a power broker in the film business... a rock star version of a lawyer. Guess what? So is former Runaway, Jackie Fox. And one of the smartest people I ever met ever... Lisa Fancher, of Frontier Records and an early LA punk rock scene maker, she's another hot shot business woman who knows her way around the contract. So is the man LA punk rockers knew as "Hal Negro." His professional peers know him as Marty Goldberg.



Punk rock was merely a parallel universe to the mainstream world: we had our own media (fanzines and magazines, record labels,) and some entrepreneurs took seriously "doing it yourself" and started their own distribution companies (such as Jello Biafra's Alternative Tentacles). Henry Rollins has a book publishing imprint. We do play and do business with our own... we are separate but not equal... some of us are better... and some of us are the best!


Three of Thee Best Punk Rockers ever - David Quinton, Dee Dee Ramone and Stiv Bators