Winnipeg vocalist Mitch Funk, a pioneer of Canadian punk rock, dies from cancer at 65
Funk fronted Winnipeg bands Personality Crisis, Honest John in 1980 and 1990s
Mitch Funk, a pioneering Canadian punk-rock vocalist who fronted the Winnipeg band Personality Crisis in the late 1970s and early 1980s, has died, his younger brother Aaron Funk said Wednesday.
The elder Funk died Monday night after a lengthy struggle with cancer. He was 65 years old.
Standing six foot three, Funk was a towering figure in Winnipeg's independent music scene, both literally and figuratively. Personality Crisis, which recorded only one full-length album during its brief existence from 1979 to 1984, was among the first Canadian punk bands to attempt to establish themselves as a touring act, at a time when the genre received no airplay and minimal mainstream attention.
Funk wound up influencing a generation of younger musicians, first as the leader of Personality Crisis and later as the frontperson for Honest John, a Winnipeg rock band that was active in the 1990s.
"He was a legend in the Winnipeg music scene, but to me, he was my beautiful brother," Aaron Funk said Wednesday in an interview at Public Domain, a recently opened Portage Avenue live music venue.
"He was an amazing vocalist, but he was so much more than that. He was a beautiful, kind human being."
Aaron Funk, who records electronic music under the name Venetian Snares, cites his older brother as an influence. Mitch would take him to record stores as a kid and buy him whatever he wanted, he said.
In one instance, that meant an album by '80s pop singer Cyndi Lauper — though Mitch also handed Aaron something by Hüsker Dü, the Minneapolis indie band famous for its immensely loud wall of sound.
"The stuff that stuck with me more was definitely the stuff he turned me on to," said Aaron Funk, whose own music sits at the hard edge of the electronic music spectrum.
Many of Mitch Funk's contemporaries paid tribute to the singer this week.
"Mitch Funk was a true original, and there's never been one like him or will be again," said Jake Moore, who sang in the 1980s Winnipeg punk band Ruggedy Annes.
"His appearance alone was something that would confound people," said Moore, who now directs the University of Saskatchewan's art galleries in Saskatoon.
"On the stage, he was nothing short of electric. He was one of those performers that you couldn't not look at," she said — a "large man" with "more than a passing" resemblance to Frankenstein's monster.
Moore also said Funk respected women in a punk rock scene that was plagued with some predators, decades before the Me Too movement.
"He was someone that I always felt safe with, and that's not true of some other people that masqueraded as much more respectful," Moore said.
'The most intense live music I've ever heard'
Tributes to Funk also poured out this week from younger musicians, many of whom pointed out his kindness as well as his musical legacy.
Jason Tait, a musician and producer best known as the drummer for defunct Winnipeg band The Weakerthans, cited Personality Crisis as a significant influence.
Tait said the first punk rock show he ever saw was the final performance by Personality Crisis, at Pantages Playhouse in 1984.
"They just started playing this really strange instrumental song and then this really tall, lanky guy came out on stage wearing a white woman's gown nightgown, holding a doll, a 'Hugo, Man of a Thousand Faces' doll as a puppet, and he just proceeded to play with his doll on stage, before he touched the microphone at all, for about a minute and a half," Tait said in an interview at his home.
"Then they just kind of went into the most intense live music I've ever heard in my life."
WATCH | Winnipeggers remember pioneering punk Mitch Funk:
Tait credits Personality Crisis and Vancouver's D.O.A. for paving the way for other Canadian independent bands to tour western North America, mainly by developing a network of venues and talent buyers interested in punk and other genres.
"D.O.A. and Personality Crisis kind of carved those roots out through the connections in the early '80s. By the time I was ready to tour, in the late '80s and early '90s, that was well established because of the initial bushwhacking that they did," Tait said.
Along with singing in bands, Mitch Funk spent decades working at St. Boniface Hospital, initially as an orderly and later in deliveries and in laundry services, his brother said.
He also took up painting, creating dozens of artworks during his final decade.
Moore, the art professor and former vocalist, said Mitch Funk was emblematic of a Winnipeg arts and cultural scene that has always had a countercultural edge. She said his legacy is clear, even if it may not be widely known.
"It takes 40 years for community knowledge to kind of be subsumed, and we're at exactly that marker here. It's 40 years since PC broke up," Moore said.
"Do the emerging musicians and radicals, as they figure themselves, even remember who Personality Crisis was? I'm old enough now that I see those stories change, the dates, the names shift, who gets brought up. We see that kind of rewriting of the stories persistently happen."
