Guilty of Everything: 21st Anniversary Edition

Review By George Grinnell

September 9, 2025

BC Studies no. 227 Autumn 2025  | p. 208-209

Memoirs of punk are rarely works of art. They don’t need to be. The promise of eyewitness accounts and the capacity to organize the chaos of one’s salad days is usually enough. John Armstrong provides exactly what one would expect from a founding figure of punk in the lower mainland of BC in the 1970s. Guilty of Everything has been substantially expanded for this anniversary edition and includes stories of tours to points east and south, accounts of sabotage and revenge against promoters, sexual exploits, and petty crime, all set to the gnawing hunger for food that that even fame could not abate for musicians living in poverty. But what is really special is how genuinely artful and well written the book is. Guilty of Everything is once again a significant addition to the now burgeoning archive of published memoirs and firsthand accounts of punk that it helped establish and especially notable because it achieves a level of sophistication few attain.

It is less and less of a commonplace to say that punk died with the end of its first wave. Punk continues to this day to provide a space for cultural innovation and self-expression worldwide and memoirs are, perhaps surprisingly for something once thought of as a youth subculture, cementing themselves as a key facet of punk cultural production alongside zines, fashion, records, and concerts. Retrospective writing about punk is a booming genre that is shaping how participants and scholars in the present understand punk, its legacies, and possible futures.

Punk in Canada remains an under-analyzed phenomenon despite the surge in academic research on punk globally and this makes Armstrong’s memoir an especially important work. Where Sam Sutherland surveys the various manifestations of first wave punk across Canada in Perfect Youth: The Birth of Canadian Punk, Armstrong offers a story that is distinct to the Vancouver scene and ought to be read alongside I, Shithead by Joe Keithley for the way it reflects on the origins of punk and the contributions of the Modernettes, DOA, Subhumans, Pointed Sticks, the Young Canadians, and Los Popularos. Typical perhaps of Western Canada, Armstrong shows that punk in BC is often more firmly connected to activities along the western coast of the United States than with scenes in Toronto or Montreal. More significantly, Guilty of Everything is compellingly attentive to how deeply integrated punk is within mainstream economic realities despite its promise of rebellion and the creation of legitimate alternative cultural networks. Where punk memoirs are almost always attuned to the social complications involved in championing a genre that challenges mainstream aesthetics, Guilty of Everything is especially notable for its focus on the financial realities of being a touring musician in the punk scene. Perhaps for related reasons, it also offers a deeply thoughtful depiction of the romance between cultural rebellion and minor crime.

For those interested in the social and cultural life of BC, Armstrong’s memoir situates punk in Vancouver alongside queer culture, the unhoused and hustler cultures of the Downtown Eastside, Little Mountain recording studio, and the earliest days of the opioid epidemic. Indeed, one of the most powerful effects of the narrative is how it so richly and fully it humanizes people who are aggressively dismissed by a world that is too often uninterested in the creative talent of people who amplify both joy and suffering, especially when their creative practice does not align with existing financial imperatives.