Chris Walter

In 1982, five brave but foolish young men traded the safety and boredom of suburbia for a brutal regimen of greasy food, endless touring, shaky gear, dingy bars, too much booze, and violent fans. While SNFU did not immediately seem like obvious candidates for punk rock stardom, they quickly rose up to take not just Edmonton, Alberta, but the entire world by storm. By combining the flamboyant stage antics and political lyricism of singer Chi Pig with...

This third and final part to the I Was a Punk Before You Were a Punk trilogy begins in a Winnipeg jail cell in 1984 and ends twenty-years later in Vancouver. This firsthand account of the punk lifestyle is brutally honest, devastatingly funny, and at times, emotionally chilling. Although not for the weak of heart, the candid narrative and unflinching prose make this book very readable and hard to put down. There is no peace, love, and anarchy for...

When a group of misfits opens a punk boozecan on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, they fully expect to sit back and drink beer with no worries. Life is ideal, and there are no problems with local gangbangers or outlaw motorcycle club members. Well, almost none. "I'd forgotten about the quality of the clientele we will attract. At four or five in the morning, most of our guests will be drunken longshoremen, coked-up biker wannabes, wasted skaters, gangbangers...

Imagine if your favourite punk band signed to a major label and released a hit record… Success can be a double-edged sword, and Triple Negative is feeling the pressure. Will they soar with the eagles or will they plunge into a desperate quagmire of hard drugs and even harder women like so many bands before them? The young musicians soon learn that fame is the least of their worries-that their main problem is singer Richie Dagger, who seems intent...

The year is 1981 and the dangerous phenomenon known as hardcore punk rock has arrived in Winnipeg with a bang. The new bands, with names like Personality Crisis, The Unwanted, and the Stretch Marks, are an aggressive and rowdy bunch who vow to smash things up at all cost. What could possibly be better than punk rock? Why faster punk rock, of course. Take a beer-soaked and nihilistic journey-back to the time when danger drove a Trans-Am, and a day...

A Rock Band that Moonlights as Jewelry Thieves? The members of Sabotage are fun-loving thrill-seekers with expensive tastes. Unable to sell enough records or concerts tickets to cover hotel damages and keep their tour buses on the road, they turn to crime. Everything is grand until a careless accident puts a third-rate detective and his rookie partner on their tail. While it would seem simple enough to stay two steps ahead of them, the incompetent...

Drunks, punks, junkies, and whores: these are Chris Walter's people and he portrays them with empathy and humour. The characters in this collection of short stories have much in common with each other, but more than anything else, they are real enough to stumble over and piss on your shoe. So laugh when you can, cry if you want, but when you close your eyes, these flawed yet enduringly human characters will still be with you.

Populated with unforgettable characters such as a corpselike hitman plagued with OCD, a death metal bassist in serious need of anger management, and an extremely unlucky drug addict, Chase the Dragon is so wickedly entertaining that adjectives such as "crazed, "outrageous," and "savage," fail to do it justice. From start to finish, Chase the Dragon is fast-paced and darkly humourous-a story about bad luck, a story about fate, a shitkicking, backslapping,...

YOU'LL HATE THIS BOOK because it may or may not include your high school band that played one gymnasium show back in '95. But these hair-raising tales of battles lost and won might grab your attention anyway, even if the ruffians telling those stories sometimes disagree on the details. Recalling tours from hell, illicit substances consumed, sexual acts consummated, and countless halls trashed, the narrators take us for an exciting stumble down memory...

"In the first book ever published on Indigenous quantitative methodologies, Maggie Walter and Chris Andersen open up a major new approach to research across the disciplines and applied fields. While qualitative methods have been rigorously critiqued and reformulated, the population statistics relied on by virtually all research on Indigenous peoples continue to be taken for granted as straightforward, transparent numbers. This book dismantles that...