Canadian punk pioneer Joe “Shithead” Keithley has seen a lot in the past 40 years, from Thai police charging a gig in Bangkok that DOA—who he sings and plays guitar for—was playing to running for the Green Party. And, at 61, Keithley’s still got fire in his soul. Some people mellow with age, but for him, and for the band, that is certainly not the case.
“Not DOA,” he says with a laugh. “We’ve played a lot of festivals in Europe and some bigger things in the UK; you get 6,000 or 12,000 people at a festival and the PA’s working properly, there’s food and there’s beer, and there’s a big audience.”
But shows aren’t always that glamorous, and Keithley loves the diversity of his lifestyle. A gig in Malaysia a few months ago, for example, was on the other end of the spectrum.
“It was a squatted warehouse with a PA that barely worked, a drumset, a bass amp, a guitar amp that barely worked—we borrowed everything,” he says. “I’d say it was one of the most fun shows that I’ve been to in years and years.”
Even at the squat, people were crowdsurfing; Keithley calls that “a healthy portion of chaos.” He hopes that the band’s upcoming show in Victoria will be fun, too.
“Hey, c’mon, Victoria. Wake up!” he says. “Gigs in Victoria can be out of control if you get the right audience, so we’ll see if this is one of those. It’s well organized and people know, so there’s a good chance of having a great vibe to it.”
Keithley says that sometimes when the band is travelling things such as just crossing borders can get dicey.
“Like in Thailand,” he says. “You may or may not be arrested.”
But DOA is a group of fighters, and they stand up for what they believe in, fighting against income equality, sexism, and environmental destruction, to name a few causes that mean a lot to the band. As mentioned above, Keithley’s passions also brought him to politics: he ran in the provincial elections for the Green Party in 1996, 2001, and 2017. Politics didn’t change him, he says, adding that campaigning for change all comes down to consistency and “strength in numbers.”
“What I was attempting to do in that sense, with politics, was to put my vision of what I’ve learnt along the way with DOA into a practical use in the term of provincial politics. It’s a little bit more the other way around,” he says. “Being a political candidate didn’t change me; I was trying to change politics more towards me.”
Keithley’s main focus at the moment is getting DOA’s upcoming record—which doesn’t have a title yet—on the shelves. He was recently in Nelson working hard to get ready for recording sessions for the album, which will be out in late April on his own Sudden Death Records. But even releasing his own music isn’t a guarantee to bring in money these days, and Keithley knows it.
“That’s just been obvious for a while,” he says. “There was transition into downloads and now that’s transitioned into Spotify, which pays really complete fuck-all to the artist. It’s pretty much a rip off.”
It comes down to the aforementioned income equality, which Keithley says affects everything from the environment to families to “people having to rob stores because they got no money to pay for prescriptions when their kid is sick; that kind of injustice. That’s a lot of what our focus is on.”
Surviving, he says, comes down to being resourceful.
“You’ve got to be quick and think on your feet and adapt,” he says. “We seem to be doing okay. I’m carrying along here with my record label and with the band and dabbling in politics part time.”
DOA
Friday, January 26
$16, Logan’s Pub
loganspub.com