Cancer is one malevolent disease: if it doesn’t end your life, odds are it will change it forever. But with Ronfest, a benefit concert for his family to be held at the Fox Cabaret on December 20, a noted Los Angeles-to-Vancouver punk transplant, Ron Reyes, is discovering how valuable it is to have a community to support you when sickness comes calling.
A few months back, Dianne Reyes, Ron’s wife, just thought she had a UTI, the former Black Flag lead singer explains, but her doctors recommended that she get an ultrasound just in case. “Which is odd, because they normally wouldn’t do that,” Ron says. “When they got the results back, they were shocked to find numerous tumours and growths in and around her abdomen. They performed further scans and found more stuff throughout her torso. That’s when we got the diagnosis that she’s got lymphoma.”
Ron is making a delivery as he details the perfect storm of misfortune that has hit his family this summer. He lost his job of 32 years shortly after his wife’s diagnosis—the company went bankrupt, and Ron was lucky to even get a record of employment. With benefits running out, he’s had to find another gig to pay the bills, which means, as Ron and Dianne’s daughter Lavinnia puts it on a GoFundMe page, “he’s often away from my mom during a time he wishes to be more present with her.”
Dianne was fast-tracked into treatment and has now been through four out of a planned six rounds of chemo, after which, if it’s working, she becomes a candidate for stem-cell therapy. But the “harsh reality” is that, even if both treatments work, mantle cell lymphoma is considered incurable. “They told us from the outset that the best they can hope for is to ‘manage’ it. Whatever treatments are done will only buy her time,” Ron says.
How much time? “At this point, nobody’s quantified what that means. To be honest, I’d rather not know until we have to. The idea of saying, ‘This is how much time you have’ scares the fuck out of me. I’m driven to tears, thinking about that.”
Ron and Dianne Reyes in 2010. Photo by Bev. Davies.
The managing process itself is also “pretty harsh,” he continues. Chemo leaves her sick and depleted for weeks at a time and will climax in a very aggressive treatment administered over the course of a month-long hospital stay. She’ll have no immune system by the time they introduce stem cells, harvested from her own bone marrow. “If it looks like that’s taken hold,” Ron says, “they send her home for outpatient care, where she’s pretty much needing round-the-clock care for, I believe, two to three months.”
The Reyeses are optimistic that more integrative methods might help. “Dianne has always taken holistic medicine. There’s a ton of folks out there who have alternative approaches to this, that are unfortunately not covered by medical for one reason or the other, so it’s going to come out of our pockets. But depending on who you talk to, some of these treatments are even more successful than the approved medical treatments. We’re researching that. The idea is that it is possible to combine these treatments for better results and possibly a cure.”
Luckily, as they struggle through all this, the Reyeses have a community to rally behind them: Vancouver punks, who, contrary to the media image of punk rockers, are one of the most supportive, pro-social communities you can belong to.
Ron Reyes and I first spoke at a show of photographs by Bev Davies, Play It Loud!, at Chapel Arts in Vancouver in 2009. When Bev introduced me, I began on exactly the wrong foot, blurting out, “You’re Chavo?”
A pall fell over his face: “I don’t like that name,” he explained.
Understand, I had no idea of the name’s history. Punks like Wimpy Roy, Gerry Useless, Joey Shithead, Zippy Pinhead, and Tony Balony have long taken self-deprecating and ridiculous stage names. It seemed maybe a bit edgy for someone to self-appellate as “Kid Pedophile”—a loose translation of “Chavo Pederast,” the credit on the back of Black Flag’s Jealous Again EP—but I had no idea it had been foisted on Ron without his knowledge.
Ron was Black Flag’s lead vocalist between the Keith Morris and Dez Cadena years, most famously appearing on Jealous Again. Rock journalist Michael Azerrad, in the Black Flag chapter of Our Band Could Be Your Life, describes Ron on that EP as “conjuring up a different species of temper tantrum for each track.”
Ron performing with Black Flag. Photo by Bev. Davies.
Despite his fairly brief tenure in the band, Ron’s roar is memorable and is also immortalized in Penelope Spheeris’s 1981 documentary about Los Angeles punk, The Decline of Western Civilization. He toured with the tempestuous hardcore band to Vancouver, playing the Smilin’ Buddha twice—including for a show just before his 20th birthday in 1980. He quit shortly thereafter, and his irked bandmates, releasing Jealous Again after Ron’s split, decided to stick him with the most unwholesome handle they could dream up, of which Ron knew nothing until the album was released. “I bought the EP at A&A on Granville,” he says, “thinking it was with a new singer. When I got home and played it, I realized it was me!”
Amazingly, after a reunion with Black Flag founder and guitarist Greg Ginn at Ron’s 50th-birthday bash in 2010—part of which can be seen on YouTube—Ron would reenlist, touring with the band in 2013 and recording an LP, What The…, before that relationship went south again. Ron was ejected midshow in Australia and replaced with skateboarder Mike Vallely. The reactivated Black Flag has continued to tour since and will be playing Vancouver in January, but Ron will most definitely not be there.
While he has played in and with various bands besides Black Flag, including Crash Bang Crunch Pop and the Vancouver-based Piggy, his main source of income since settling in Vancouver has been printing. But punk rock—and specifically Vancouver punk rock—was an essential element in that career, as was the contribution of local musician/artist/printer Jim Cummins, best known as I, Braineater.
Cummins’s history with Ron Reyes weaves through the 1980s and ’90s, beginning at a Black Flag show. “I don’t remember if it was the first or second show,” Ron says. “I know that we played with Rabid, Bludgeoned Pigs, Insex, and the Dishrags. But one of the shows, we also played with the Braineaters,” as the band was then known. “When I first saw the Braineaters, it was a trio, Jim and Trevor and Ivo, and I fell in love with them. They were way more avant-garde than your typical punk band,” reminding Ron of one of his favourite L.A. bands, The Screamers.
The head Braineater was also impressed with Ron, who he says was “like this crazy monkey boy, climbing the speaker columns: ‘Wow, this guy’s amazing.’” Cummins invited him to play and record with a new iteration of the Braineaters with multi-instrumentalist Steve Laviolette and Vancouver soundman Chris Crud.
Ron performing with Jim Cummins. Photo by Bev. Davies.
It proved a fruitful match: this incarnation would eventually record a seven-inch single (“School Girl/ Hyde Park”) and get a high-profile 1984 slot at the Commodore, opening for flamboyant German new waver Nina Hagen.
But working with Cummins posed unique challenges. As he tells it, “I remember one night [we decided], if you’re going to be a real Braineater, you’ve got to bleach your hair, and we’re going to give you a mohawk, and we’re going to cut your hair with broken beer bottle glass, because that’s cool. So he went along with that, but unfortunately, we didn’t have enough bleach to get him blond, so it turned out like a rooster with a really scratched scalp, with a mohawk in Day-Glo orange. We all had hangovers the next day.”
Later, in the 1990s, when Cummins had his studio on Beatty Street, he hired Ron as an apprentice/helper in his silkscreening studio. “I don’t know if I was legal or not, but he offered me work printing and cutting stuff out on his bandsaw,” says Ron, who also screen-printed T-shirts for Vancouver punks Subhumans and D.O.A., as well as for touring bands like Winnipeg punks Personality Crisis, when they came to town.
“Jim Cummins taught me how to do that,” Ron says. “Actually, I was doing it before, but he fine-tuned me. And I’ve been printing ever since. I’ve worked at screen-printing shops and digital printing shops since I was 18 years old.”
Dave Bowes, the current bassist for I, Braineater, and the organizer of Ronfest tipped me to ask Cummins the story of “Ron, KISS, and the bandsaw.” Cummins obliged bemusedly. “Ron would come over every day, and we’d have doughnuts and coffee and get to work. In the back room, I had a bandsaw, and his job was cutting out something or other I had going on,” Cummins explains, “and he used to like to work with his headphones on. Then one day, I’m up front, and I hear this blood-curdling scream from the back, and my brain just goes to one thing: he’s lopped off a finger. I run back there, and he’s still screaming, and I grab him—‘What, what happened?’ And he pulls his headphones off: ‘Whaaat?’ ‘You’re fine, why were you screaming?’ And he goes: ‘I’m singing along with KISS.’”
Ron laughs when he hears the story. “He thought that I got hurt, but it was just me rockin’ out. Anyone who’s had the misfortune of living with me knows that I can be a little bit hard to handle. I like my music loud.”
Though his history with I, Braineater runs deepest, Ron and Dianne have crossed paths with all the other artists playing December 20. Betty Bathory, the frontperson for Daddy Issues—known for that project as Holly Holy—was a habitué of Iron Road Studios, where Ron’s band Piggy had a practice space. An earlier incarnation of Daddy Issues shared a bill with Ron’s short-lived New York Dolls tribute act, The Blow-Up Dolls. And Bathory and Ron sang together at the first Bowie Ball, in 2016, with the band The Vampire Bats.
“When I heard he was doing ‘Five Years,’” Bathory recalls, “I told him it was my favourite Bowie song, so he asked me to sing it with him. I did. It was an honour.”
Bathory has a flair for the theatrical, and he dressed for the occasion with short blond hair and a white shirt and vest, emulating Bowie’s Thin White Duke persona. While Ron draws the line at Bathory’s transgressive, horror-themed burlesque, under the name Bloody Betty (“It’s a little bit out of my comfort zone, honestly,” he says with a chuckle), he was blown away by her voice and performance at the Bowie Ball. “I was absolutely floored by this girl’s talent. I had thought she was all-show-and-no-go, but holy cow, she had pipes on her, and determination, and a professional attitude that really blew me away.”
The third act on the Ronfest roster will be Art Bergmann, whom Ron first encountered when he was a young man staying at the Hacienda, a Vancouver punk house immortalized in song by Los Popularos, some of whom lived there. Also known as Los Radicos Popularos, the band was a local supergroup consisting of Bergmann and members of Modernettes, Active Dog, and The Pointed Sticks. “To me those guys were, like, rock royalty,” Ron confesses, saying he found interacting with them intimidating. “I was just this Puerto Rican refugee from the United States. I know that a lot of people care, and love me, but I had trouble fitting in.”
Later on, Ron and some others, including Vancouver record dealers Phil Saintsbury and Dale Wiese, “had a place on Hastings Street, a weird kind of warehouse where everybody had their separate rooms. Art lived in one of those rooms as well. And again, I was the kinda loud American who would play Van Halen and AC/DC, and punk rock too…. One day I decided to paint a big mural on the wall, and I thought I would paint a big Budweiser label. And these guys came home to me with all this Tremclad blue and red paint… I don’t think they were very impressed. But I always loved what Art was doing, whether it was the Young Canadians or—I saw Los Popularos a couple of times. I was very honoured and surprised to see his name on the bill.”
For his part, Bergmann can remember that Ron “silkscreened all night sometimes,” creating what he describes as “smelly memories,” and that “he played Mötley Crüe too much.” Still, he’s happy to lend his voice to Reyes’s cause.
Both the Reyeses are also fans of The Enigmas—a band that seldom plays, fronted by the Real McKenzies’ Paul McKenzie, getting back together specifically to headline Ronfest. Among other points of intersection, The Enigmas played at Ron and Dianne’s wedding party, and Ron and Enigmas bassist Brian Olinek once got caught in a Carling O’Keefe Liberation Army run together, stealing beer from a Vancouver brewery, a caper that resulted in Ron’s getting kicked out of the country for a while.
Ron onstage with Black Flag during a brief reunion in 2013. Photo by Bev. Davies.
Fittingly, it was music—and a striking coincidence—that brought Ron and Dianne together. They crossed paths in Vancouver in the 1980s. Then Ron returned to Los Angeles for a time, where he started a band called Funhouse, which had Duff McKagan play with them, “just at the time when he was starting with Guns N’ Roses.” With Funhouse, Ron made a demo tape of songs, which he sent to his friend Mike Jak, a member of the Jaks skate team and a former bandmember of Ron’s, with the request that he “please, please, please” not play the tape for anybody else.
Unbeknownst to Ron, Mike Jak connected around this time with the Toronto punk band Bunchofuckingoofs, who have ties with Jaks. Dianne had relocated to Toronto and must have crossed paths with Jaks there, because, it turns out, Mike Jak did not heed Ron’s request.
Ron learned this “a year or so later” when he brought the band, rechristened Crash Bang Crunch Pop, to play a gig at a Vancouver punk house at 1st and Commercial. He was looking for female backup singers, and someone suggested Dianne, because “she knows all your lyrics.” Ron responded, “Uh, no, that’s impossible. We haven’t made a record yet. But thanks.” Whereupon he discovered the truth, that people had been listening to the tape in Toronto all year. “They told me, ‘It’s a big hit—they play it at all the parties. All the Jaks love it.’ These rough-and-tumble, basically bikers-on-skateboards were listening to my silly little love songs and pop songs. And Dianne just fell in love with that music.”
The story becomes “really romantic,” Reyes explains, as one of the songs on the tape was called “California.” He says, “Dianne was planning a trip to Europe, but she heard this song and fell in love with it and decided to go to California instead. And on her way from Toronto to California, she stopped in Vancouver at the same exact time where my band was coming to Vancouver, looking for singers. So she pops her head in and goes ‘Yeah, I know all your songs, and I’m going to California because of this song of yours.’”
Dianne joined the band onstage that night, with Ron marvelling at the bizarre confluence of events and perhaps sensing an invisible hand moving behind the scenes. From that gig onward, “we started hanging out, and I fell in love and so did she, and 37 years and four kids later, we’re still together.”
Both Ron and Dianne hope to be at Ronfest, if she feels up to it. Ron emphasizes that he now has “terrible anxiety about performing” and will not be singing, which he hopes everyone will respect and understand. In addition to Ronfest, the family has launched a GoFundMe campaign. “One of the things we’re suffering from is the loss of Dianne’s income—that’s a big blow to us. And any alternative treatments that we will embark on are not covered by any kind of health care.”
People who cannot make it to Ronfest are encouraged to contribute to GoFundMe. Exuberant American or not, Ron Reyes is one of the sweetest people on the Vancouver punk scene, and it’s touching to see people getting out in support of him—or as he puts it, “God bless all you fuckin’ punk rockers, and other people too, who are chipping in. We’re really feeling the love.”
Ronfest will be held at the Fox Cabaret on December 20. Note that it will be an early show, with doors at 6 p.m. Read more on the Facebook event page.
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