By Steve Newton
A few days ago the current wave of Canadian patriotism brought on by American threats of annexation and economic destruction encouraged me to post 10 interviews with classic Canuck-rock bands that I’ve done since becoming a freelance scribbler back in ’82.
I collected interviews I’d done with members of Rush, the Tragically Hip, the Guess Who, Triumph, Saga, Odds, Streetheart, the Payola$, Queen City Kids, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
Here’s ten more that just came to mind.
RED RIDER Tom Cochrane, 1983
Red Rider plays the Commodore Ballroom Tuesday, April 19. I spoke to the group’s lead vocalist and songwriter Tom Cochrane over the phone from Toronto last Monday.
I understand your group had a bus accident in the Rocky Mountains not long ago.
Well we lost a wheel going through the mountains, and the bus kind of slipped off to the side of the cliff, but our bus driver regained control of it.
Were you fearing for your life?
I was asleep [laughs]. It was about three in the morning. It woke me up, but sort of after the fact. Some of the other guys were up in the lounge, and they were slightly petrified, but I had passed out with a John Irving novel on top of me.
Which authors have influenced the lyric style you use in Red Rider?
This album is named after Pablo Neruda, and I’d say that he probably influenced the main body of it. He’s a Chilean poet. The album wasn’t directly based on his work, but a lot of the moods and textures, and some of the ideals on the album have strong parallels with his work. I used him as a metaphor for the character that’s stumbling his way through the album.
There’s an overall theme, which is the survival of the individual at times when everything in society is undermining that individuality. It’s about standing up for your beliefs in spite of the odds. I think that in the computer age, and the age where there’s the threat of nuclear war continually hanging over our heads like a dark cloud, that it’s easy to get beaten down and I think one of the things rock and roll has always stood for is survival of the individual and freedom of thought. A lot of those themes are explored in this record.
I used Neruda as a metaphor for that because Pablo Neruda was chastised for being the sort of individual who wrote what he felt he had to write. He got expelled from his homeland for his beliefs.
Where did the idea for “Power (Strength in Numbers)” come from?
The idea behind that was spawned when I was witness to a jumper at Toronto City Hall about a year ago January. There were people chanting “Jump!” and a lot of people looking indifferent–and I became really depressed and repulsed by the whole thing. I thought about the whole crowd dynamic and the fact that there was a lot of excitement generated by this sort of thing, and that people really liked to court this kind of tragedy.
What about “Napoleon Sheds His Skin”? That’s kind of a strange title.
That is, once again, a metaphor. Napoleon is a metaphor for power and how power corrupts. That song is basically about the pressure, the elixir of power and the fact that we’re all drawn to power in different ways. It’s a corrupting force and an erosionary force, and it undermines all the good in mankind.
In the end of that particular song the character has been captured. It’s about an incident that actually happened in Latin America. He was captured by the forces that were in power in that particular country, and in the end he found himself in jail, realizing that he really didn’t want a lot of the things that he had gotten involved in and the power that he was striving for. All he wanted was to be with his loved one and his family.
And I could relate very strongly to [Dire Straits’] Love Over Gold album, when it came out, because of that. We explored some of the same themes that they did. It’s funny that the albums should parallel and be released at relatively the same time.
Did your first album, Don’t Fight It, have the themes of power as well, or was it more just a collection of fun tunes?
Most of the songs that have gained attention for the band have been the songs that have been somewhat thematic, and there’s a few songs on Don’t Fight It that perhaps lack the depth of a “Lunatic Fringe” or a “Napoleon Sheds his Skin”. “White Hot” got most of the attention, and that was one of our more left-field songs.
We began to realize during As Far as Siam that we were one of the lucky bands in that we could do the kind of material that we wanted to do and indulge ourselves, and that people were still responding to it. That was the secret to our success. “White Hot” and “Lunatic Fringe” were the songs that we thought were least likely to get any airplay, but we really wanted to have those songs on record. So we got them on record, and they turned out to be the songs that got the lion’s share of the attention. They were never the songs that we thought would be the singles.
Do you think there’s too much “wham, bam, thank you ma’am” in rock and roll today?
Well I have said that haven’t I [laughs]. I think there’s a lot of junk, a lot of crap out there, and I’m tired of journalists and writers trying to justify a lot of it and trying to place a lot of it on pedestals. I think there’s a lot of material out there that doesn’t deserve to be on record–it’s a lot of trendy bullshit. And I think a lot of the press and a lot of the radio reaction to things is based primarily on fashion and on trendiness rather than on substance.
I think that bands like ours tend to get overshadowed by a lot of this junk. It comes and goes so quickly that two months down the line you can barely remember the names of some of these bands and artists.
I don’t understand why some very intelligent people in press and in radio seem to respond to this kind of thing. Maybe it’s because they don’t feel it’s a threat to them. They like to think that they’re above it, but as soon as anything comes along that challenges their own intellect it scares them.
But there is a lot of good music too. There’s a lot of really relevant new music and it is going through an exciting period right now.
Where did you find the cover art for the Neruda album?
It was a collaborative effort between myself, [keyboardist] Steve Sexton and the designer Hugh Syme. It was just an idea that I had, and I was really determined that the artwork should tie in with the feel of the music, and the whole theme of the album.
It’s sort of an image of a man disintegrating.
Yeah, a lot of people call him The Nuked Man. He’s still standing in a very proud pose, and yet he is disintegrating. He’s almost like a jazz figurine–the kind of thing you’d see etched on a shield of the Mika Indians or something.
Living in Toronto, and having your management in Vancouver, do you find any differences between the music scenes on the East and West coasts?
I find the attitude is much better in Vancouver–and I’m not saying that because I’m talking to a Vancouver paper–I truly believe that. I think there’s much better interaction between musicians, and a much more active musical community in terms of sharing ideas in Vancouver. Toronto is much more competitive and more cutthroat that way.
It’s very common to slip down to the Savoy and find people from Chilliwack playing with people from Loverboy, or Bryan Adams jamming with people from Chilliwack. That sort of thing goes on all the time. I find that it’s exciting and fun and a real good opportunity to share ideas and stimulate each other.
BLUE RODEO Jim Cuddy, 1991
For the past two years, the presenter of the Juno award for Canadian Band of the Year has ripped open a sealed envelope and seen the same two words: Blue Rodeo. The powers that be at the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences have twice seen fit to bestow their top prize on five roots-rockers from Toronto, and who knows—if nominated again, they just might make it three-for-three come March 3.
But, in the meantime, don’t expect Blue Rodeo’s Jim Cuddy to lose any sleep over the prospect.
“Awards are really weird,” says the 35-year-old tunesmith, who co-writes the band’s prize-winning songs with fellow singer/guitarist Greg Keelor. “You can’t say you don’t like ’em, and you can’t say you like ’em. It’s nice to get a pat on the back, but it’s not the best thing that happens all year. I mean, it was a big surprise last year, ’cause we thought Jeff Healey was gonna win. There’s lots of deserving bands.”
Whether or not Blue Rodeo can make it a hat-trick remains to be seen, but if they do, Cuddy and his mates will be in a real bind to find room on their mantels for new Junos. They’ve cleaned up at a number of awards shows.
“The one year that ‘Try’ was a big hit, we won ’em all,” says Cuddy. “We won Casbys and Toronto Music Awards and country awards. It was kind of our first flush of success, so it got a bit absurd for us.”
Vancouverites will have a pre-Juno opportunity to see just how deserving the 1991 version of Blue Rodeo is when the band hits town for a show at the Orpheum on Saturday (February 16). This time around, on the band’s 50-date Canadian tour, it’s playing soft-seat theatres as opposed to nightclubs, which could tick off a large contingent of its boogie ’n’ brew fans.
The last time Blue Rodeo was here—apart from the 1989 New Year’s Eve show at the Trade and Convention Centre—the band ripped up the Commodore for two sold-out nights.
“We would gladly do the Commodore again,” says Cuddy, “because it and the Spectrum are the two best clubs in Canada. But the soft-seaters give us a little more freedom to do some different stuff.”
While local fans will have to bite the bullet and abide by the Orpheum’s no-dancing/no-boozing-in-the-seats policy, they’ll still be able to reap the sonic rewards of Blue Rodeo’s rockin’ sound as exemplified by tunes like “Till I Am Myself Again”, the first video/single from the new Casino album.
Cuddy describes Casino as more compact and aggressive than the previous Diamond Mine and Outskirts discs.
“Your first record is not such a conscious effort,” he says. “You just kind of do it and the producer has a lot to do with the sound. Our later records were more like expressions of what we want records to sound like. On Diamond Mine, what we were going for was ‘vibe’: spaciousness and mood, and the playing was all subservient to that.
“But with Casino, we wanted to make a real pop record—condensed, distilled, and intact. Diamond Mine was kind of dreamy, and this is, you know, very awake.”
Blue Rodeo has utilized different producers on each of its albums: Terry Brown on Outskirts, Malcolm Burn on Diamond Mine, and now Dwight Yoakam knob-twiddler Pete Anderson on Casino. Cuddy says he’s most happy with the diverse results that Burn and Anderson came up with.
“They make very different records, but they’re both fantastic producers. Malcolm’s more like a roll-up-your-sleeves, jump-in-the-muck guy—he’ll try anything. We were recording and mixing all at the same time, and if mixes didn’t go well we’d add bongos or this or that. It was like a huge musical adventure. The Pete Anderson record is really a straight-forward, in-your-face record—that’s just the way Pete is.”
While many bands prefer to pass on a producer and make records on their own, Cuddy confirms that Blue Rodeo isn’t one of them. He feels the producer’s role is essential to getting the most from a group.
“A lot of bands need producers to keep them from exposing their weaknesses, or indulging a lot of things they don’t do well. A lot of things that you do do well you just think are obvious, and you don’t want to pay attention to them.
“And a producer should also make your records sound good. I don’t think that we’re as capable of making it sound good as Pete and the people that Pete works with [engineers/mixers Judy Clapp and Peter Doell].”
For the first time in its career, Blue Rodeo looked outside the bounds of its Toronto home base for a suitable location to record and found it in L.A.’s Capitol Studios, the same place where Frank Sinatra cut “My Way” and the Beach Boys laid down their hits. The studio was also the site for the remastering of all the Beatles records in America.
“The Capitol studios have a definite sound,” says Cuddy. “The room we recorded in was about as high tech as the ’50s spaceship in Lost in Space, but the boards have a very warm sound. In contrast, we mixed in a room with all the toys, so our studio work was a combination of really old stuff—old compressors, old mikes—and new.”
But it wasn’t just the sound and history of the California studios that made the band decide to snub Hogtown in favour of a U.S.-made album.
“Toronto has gotten ridiculously expensive,” points out Cuddy, “and there are a lot of jingles being done here. There are studios that are good enough, but they don’t want to block out all the time. They say, ‘Well, you can stay to 5:00,’ or ‘You can come at 7:00’—you can’t make a record that way.”
Cuddy and Keelor also took a different approach to writing the material for Casino than they have on previous efforts.
“The way we write is that we get as much of the tune done as we can separately, and then come together. And while the last album was kind of like a duo/solo record, on this record we really merged. We just said, ‘Let’s make everything duets, and do a lot of backgrounds, and make the songs sound more alike.’ So this one was more fun; we were much more unified.”
While frontmen Cuddy and Keelor are the focal points of the Blue Rodeo stage show, the rest of the band—keyboardist Bobby Wiseman, bassist Bazil Donovan, and drummer Mark French—are responsible for spicing up the band’s tasty musical broth.
“We are not great guitarists,” Cuddy says of himself and Keelor. “Greg only began playing when he was 20, so in terms of the ‘muso’ guitar world, he started when he was ancient. But Bobby is definitely a musician, and whenever we make a record, the producers say, ‘Bazil’s the best musician in the band.’ And Mark is somebody who has devoted his life to playing the drums, and he knows them inside out.
“There were a lot of times Pete joked that he had to leave the room because he couldn’t stand the way we were playing guitar,” laughs Cuddy. “To him, there’s only one way to play the guitar, but to us, there’s also an expressive way to play, and that’s what we like.
“Neil Young plays guitar the way we’d like to—it’s not doctored in order to create an impression that’s anything other than ‘This is what it will sound like when these five guys play live.’ We use the honest approach, warts and all.”
THE NORTHERN PIKES Jay Semko, 1988
The percentage of rock ‘n’ roll bands that make it big–or even to the point of just being able to put records out and tour–has never been high enough to make a career in rock a likely one. And if you’re from some place like Saskatoon, the chances of ever hitting the big time would seem smaller yet.
But that doesn’t mean it isn’t possible. A case in point: the Northern Pikes, currently working their way into the minds of Canadian rock fans via the infectious pop/rock tunes on their new album, Secrets of the Alibi. Like fellow Saskatchewan native Colin James, the Northern Pikes have nabbed a record deal with the heavyweight Virgin label, and they’re currently winging their way across North America on a tour that brings them to the 86 Street Music Hall this Wednesday (November 23).
According to bassist/vocalist/main songwriter Jay Semko, who talked to me from San Francisco last week, being from Saskatoon hasn’t really hindered the band’s fight for success.
“We used to look at it as a real detriment coming from there,” says Semko, “just because you feel like you’re so far away from the mainstream of music and everything. But in a way it was good because there was sort of an interwoven thing with all the musicians around Saskatoon getting to know each other. I mean Merl [vocalist/guitarist Merl Bryck] and I have been together since 1979.
“And even though we were isolated, we were lucky because we didn’t have to directly compete with whatever trends were happening at whatever time–which a lot of bands have to do if they’re in a big city. We were able to develop a little more on our own.”
The band has certainly come up with a sound of its own on Secrets of the Alibi. As accessible and commercially potent as tunes like “Place That’s Insane” and “Wait For Me” are, they aren’t the sort that make you think of any other band right off. Like last year’s “Things I Do For Money”, from Big Blue Sky, they’re immediately likeable little pop-rock gems that should stand the test of time.
Bryan Potvin’s tasty lead guitar bits and Don Schmid’s bang-on drumming help give the Northern Pikes’ material the edge that puts it ahead of the pack. The new album is particularly impressive, and Semko says it was recorded a little differently than the first.
“When we went in to do Big Blue Sky we’d been negotiating the record deal for almost three months, and we hadn’t really played all that much live, so it was all done in the usual ’80s layering style of recording everything separately and then overdubbing. When we went in to do Alibi we had been on the road from June ’86 till March ’88, so we had a lot more confidence and felt like we were a lot tighter. We recorded the whole album live off the floor and did overdubs on top of that.
“Also, when you’re recording your first album it’s like the greatest hits of your whole career, whereas your second album is basically a lot of newer material. I think that worked in our favour because we’d grown a little bit.”
Although Jay Semko had previously played with Merl Bryck in a band called the Idols, it wasn’t until he ran into Bryan Potvin at the University of Saskatchewan that the Northern Pikes started to take shape.
“We were both pretty fed up with the music scene because we’d tried numerous bands before that never really worked out. But school wasn’t really workin’ out either, so we thought, ‘Well what are we doing?’ Let’s play some music!’ We got a bunch of our pals together, hopped in a school bus, and away we went.”
The road has been the only real home for Semko and his mates ever since, but he says that they thrive on it–unlike many musicians who just grin and bear it. The group has made the most of opening for bands like the Alerm (who they backed up at 86 Street earlier this year) and Robert Palmer, who they were playing with last week.
“Every time you tour as an opening act you learn things,” says Semko. “There’s certain things you can pick up watching the headliners, because they must have done something right to get to the position they’re in.”
Semko and his bandmates sure learned something when they open for David Bowie at Toronto’s CNE stadium last year. They quickly discovered how to get scared spitless.
“That was one of the scariest bigs because there were 50,000 people there. We were pretty nervous when we first got onstage, but after you’re up there for four or five minutes you realize that the audience size is the only thing that’s changed–the stage isn’t a whole lot bigger or anything like that. It’s just a case of getting up there an playing.”
The Northern Pikes will be doing just that this Wednesday at 86 Street. Nothing fancy–just hard-nosed prairie pop-rock player with urgency and bite.
BIG SUGAR Gordie Johnson, 1998
During a recent interview with famed local rock producer Bruce Fairbairn, I asked him if he’d heard any current albums that had blown him away, production-wise. It only took him a couple of seconds to come up with Heated, the latest CD from Toronto blues-rockers Big Sugar.
That disc was helmed by the band’s guitarist-vocalist, Gordie Johnson, and when he calls from a Saskatchewan tour stop, I relay Fairbairn’s opinion. Even though he’s a little burned-out after an early-morning flight from St. John’s, Newfoundland—where he indulged in “a few sips” the night before with the party-prone members of Great Big Sea—he brightens considerably at the news.
“Oh really?” he replies, “and he was referring to our new record? Wow! I’m flattered as hell. Oh my god!”
Judging by his reaction, Johnson takes his control-room duties seriously, and isn’t about to slough off a compliment from someone of Fairbairn’s stature. His appreciation of producers is also evident in the liner notes to Heated, which include a special thanks to famed producer Eddie Kramer (Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Kiss): “King Eddie, your sound and wisdom have and will provide inspiration always. Love G.”
“I loved his work for years,” reports Johnson, “and he was very kind to me. He had dinner with me once, and he flew into Toronto to hang out with us for a weekend, just to kind of look over our shoulders and say, ‘Lads, you’re doin’ a good job.’ Which, when you get a vote of confidence like that from someone like Eddie, well… I was pretty blown away with that.”
Judging by the top-level enthusiasm for Heated’s sonic qualities, Johnson has a promising future at the recording console. He actually caught the production bug a long time ago.
“Even as a kid I used to listen to records and go, ‘Wow, how do they do that?’ Like, not how do they play it—I know how they play it—but how do they make it sound like that! I was always curious to know.”
Johnson, a Gemini, fairly revels in the split-personality lifestyle of rowdy rocker/meticulous producer.
“I get to put on both hats,” he says. “I get to be a guitar player who sleeps all day, rocks all night, drives too fast, smokes big cigars, and drinks a lot of Guinness. When I am recording, I’m up at 7 o’clock, I do my exercises, eat my breakfast, and I go to the studio and we work for 15 hours uninterrupted. It’s pure science. How do you change the path of an electron so that it pushes a paper speaker just right? That’s science, and if you forget that, then you’re lost.”
Johnson has produced all of Big Sugar’s albums, with the exception of its self-titled 1992 debut, which was decidedly rooted in the worlds of blues and jazz. Following the release of Big Sugar, it wasn’t long before the transition to a heavier, rock-based sound began.
“Probably about 15 minutes after that album came out,” says Johnson with a laugh. “The larger the places we played, the more amplification we brought, and the better crowd response we got. It’s just more fun to play loud and get more electrified.”
The voltage meter gets cranked up to fine effect on Heated, whether on the stylin’ first single, “The Scene”; the gritty “Round and Round (For CJ)”; or the soaring cover of Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s 1973 Canuck-rock classic, “Let It Ride”.
“That’s just a song I remember from when I was a little kid,” notes Johnson. “I think that was the first conscious notion that I had that that was an electric guitar. When I heard it I was like, ‘Wow, that’s an electric guitar, Mom, I want to get me one of them.’ ”
Johnson is joined on the feedback-laden “Let It Ride” by guest guitarist-vocalist Warren Haynes, formerly with the Allman Brothers, whose current band, Gov’t Mule, opens for Big Sugar at the Rage on Monday and Tuesday (November 16 and 17).
Haynes—chosen best slide guitarist two years running by Guitar Player magazine—leads a southern-tinged power trio that kills in concert, but Johnson isn’t concerned about being upstaged by his formidable opening act.
“It’s not exactly the Olympics of guitar-playing,” he points out, “so I don’t worry about that. And I’ve never hired opening acts that were lesser bands than us, just to make ourselves look better. If that’s what you’ve gotta do to make yourself look good, then you’re basically shagged anyway. I think there’s room on the stage for enough good music as people can stand.”
Johnson wasn’t competing for a gold medal when he recorded Heated, either, but that didn’t stop him from going all out during the lead-guitar parts. According to Big Sugar’s bio, his solos on three tunes were done in a single take—even though he broke strings at the midway point in each solo.
“It just seems like haphazard things like that happen in the studio,” says Johnson, “and sometimes they make for better music. Having the limitations of five strings can be inspiring sometimes.”
HEADSTONES Hugh Dillon, 1994
Some hard-rock bands just don’t do justice to the tunes they cover. Great White had a huge hit with its 1989 rendition of Ian Hunter’s classic “Once Bitten Twice Shy”, but the revamped version sucked, for lack of a better word. The mighty Megadeth tried but couldn’t match the Sex Pistols’ cynical intensity on a remake of “Anarchy in the U.K.”.
And what about Mötley Crüe’s lily-livered take on Brownsville Station’s “Smokin’ in the Boys Room”? Gimme a break!
But once in a while a band will come up with an effective interpretation of someone else’s tune, as the Headstones did recently with the Traveling Wilburys’ “Tweeter and the Monkey Man”. The Toronto-based quartet’s cranked-up version of that 1988 gem is a highlight on its debut release, Picture of Health, and could be the tune to tear the roof off the Town Pump when the band plays there on Friday (January 21), backed by the Morganfields and Sex With Nixon.
“We had to talk to the Wilburys’ lawyers and Dylan’s lawyers, and it took a little doing,” says Headstones vocalist-harpist Hugh Dillon, calling from the road en route to Thunder Bay. “But there were characters in the piece that I felt I knew, so it had some kind of innate fascination for me. Actually, I heard the tune in a record store one rainy September, when things weren’t lookin’ too good for me, and I just loved the song.”
There’s no mention of the tune in question in the Headstones’ bio, however. That four-page promotional piece tends to expand more on the band’s inherent rowdiness, noting that club owners have written letters “complaining of kicked-in dressing rooms and flailing objects”.
“That was a little while ago,” says Dillon. “That happened once or twice, but things have changed. There were a few clubs we played in Ontario—we were playing gigs with bands like Honeymoon Suite, bands that we had no business playing with, really—and we just didn’t give a shit.
“We were kind of a punk band at the time—still are, to a certain degree, although I wouldn’t use that word—and some club owners were just… I mean, if we’re treated like shit, that’s the way it goes.”
With the Headstones’ formerly destructive tendencies now in check, Dillon and cohorts are riding a promising rock ’n’ roll wave that has gained velocity from a direct signing to MCA Records Canada.
“Initially, I started putting some money away instead of blowing it on drinking and drugs,” says Dillon. “I managed to save up enough to make a decent-sounding demo tape, and it’s the same old rock ’n’ roll story—it got into the right hands of the right people at the right time.”
Now the Headstones are rockin’ on the same label as their old pals from Kingston, the Tragically Hip.
“It’s just a funny coincidence,” says Dillon. “I’ve known [Hip vocalist] Gord Downie since I was 17—I played at his wedding. We all kinda went to high school and then ended up playin’ in bands for MCA.”
“Workin’ for MCA”—now there’s a great old Lynyrd Skynyrd song that nobody’s covered yet, as far as I know. But don’t expect the Headstones to tackle the tune any time soon. They’re concentrating on getting their own material heard these days, like a thousand other new bands.
“It just depends on the city,” says Dillon of the struggle for airplay and recognition. “Certain cities it’s overwhelming; other cities not so big. But everybody’s happy and we get to make more records, and we’re presently working on an American deal, so things are looking good.”
JUNKHOUSE Tom Wilson, 1995
If you happened to see the Beatles Anthology series on the tube last week, you’re probably aware that the Fab Four quit touring in 1966 and became just a recording act. That move worked out alright for them—but it probably wouldn’t suit Hamilton, Ontario, rockers Junkhouse. They’d go stir-crazy in a minute.
“I like to work, number one,” says lead vocalist and main songwriter Tom Wilson, calling from a tour stop in Sydney, Nova Scotia. “I’m a guy from Hamilton who never thought he would see outside of Ontario, let alone travel the world like I’ve had a chance to, so the fact that I’ve been to Australia and will be going again in February is mind-boggling to me. The fact that I’ve been to Europe four times—like really, I never thought I’d be in fucking Europe in my life, man.
“And there’s equal excitement about travelling Canada,” he adds. “The first time we toured Canada we toured with the Waltons, and travelling in a van and seeing my country was beautiful. I loved it.”
Although still a relatively new act, Junkhouse has already logged thousands of miles on the Canadian concert circuit, and its members will add a few more when they travel here to act as openers for Spirit of the West’s three-night stand at the Commodore, which runs Wednesday to Friday (December 6 to 8).
Since the release of the band’s Strays debut in ’93, Wilson and his mates have seen more of this fine country than most people see in their lifetimes, so it’s no surprise that he sounds slightly pained when asked about the Canada-busting threat posed by the recent Quebec referendum.
“Whatever,” he groans. “You know, it’s like the Plains of Abraham—it’s been goin’ on and on and on. My mother’s from Quebec, I’m French-Canadian and Indian and Irish, and I have no prejudice against fuckin’ Quebec or the French. I think that what they offer this country is absolutely astounding as far as culture goes, but if you wanna go, see ya later, you know what I mean?
“If I’m livin’ with a woman and she doesn’t want to live with me anymore and she doesn’t love me, it’s like, ‘Okay, go. But you’re not takin’ my CDs, you’re not takin’ the fuckin’ cutlery that my mom bought for me, you’re not takin’ my Jimi Hendrix posters that I had since high school. Now get the fuck outta here.’ ”
Tom Wilson doesn’t mince words. He likes to get his views out into the open, and his straightforward commentary on the Quebec question is delivered with the same no-frills approach that his band takes to its gritty brand of guitar rock. It’s that straight-up style that first attracted rock fans to Junkhouse two years ago and caused Strays to fly out of Canadian record stores. But Wilson claims he wasn’t surprised by the debut disc’s strong sales.
“It’s not like something that I threw out in the water and couldn’t believe that it floated,” he points out. “There were plenty of people in this industry that would have been happy to see Junkhouse fall flat on its face, and the fact of the matter was that we had to go out and win over people. We’re in a business of communication, obviously, and we don’t take anything for granted, so it wasn’t like, ‘Oh, our record’s out, it’s gonna sell a lotta copies, let’s go fuckin’ have a beer and smoke a joint.’ It was like, ‘We gotta go out there and work.’ And that’s still our attitude.
“We appreciate that we’ve almost sold a hundred thousand albums in Canada,” he says, “but the thing is that I know how we did it. We aren’t a bunch of really sparklin’, good-lookin’ little 18-year-old snotty-nosed kids; it’s not like you just stick our heads on an album cover and people run to buy it. We have to work hard for what we have.”
Junkhouse built on that work ethic with its strapping sophomore release, Birthday Boy, the making of which took the band to Charlie Sexton’s rehearsal space in Austin, Texas, then up to a studio in Toronto, and finally back down to Daniel Lanois’s studio in New Orleans for completion. Produced by Malcolm Burn, who also helmed Strays, it takes its title from Wilson’s idea that everybody gets their day in the sun.
“I didn’t want to put a theme together for this record,” he says. “I’m not that pretentious—like Alan Parsons or something—but I think we’re all kinda the ‘birthday boy’. Everybody gets to be the underdog on the playground, you know—we’ve all been the person with the big nose or the flat chest or overweight or had pimples, something that people could pick on us about.
“For every kid who walks out with a rainbow of colour in his eyes, there’s always some teacher or some asshole who’s gonna get a big black paintbrush and just take a lot of that colour out of their life. But everybody has their day, you know, and I think that’s what this record’s about.”
Birthday Boy kicks off with a stompin’ track titled “Chunk (Port Dover)”, in which Wilson sings about drinking his first beer at a Crowbar show one summer. That was also the day he dropped his first hit of LSD.
“There was nothin’ like doin’ your first acid trip with your first beer,” reveals Wilson with a cackle. “It was wild. And Canadian music was one of the first things that turned me on, too, because it was accessible. The Guess Who played in my hometown, Gordon Lightfoot played in my hometown, Murray McLauchlan played in my hometown. Lighthouse. So they were the things I went to see, you know, all those great bands.”
Wilson actually hooked up with McLauchlan to pen the most poignant track on Birthday Boy, “Burned Out Car”, which is made especially moving by a vocal duet between Wilson and the inimitable Sarah McLachlan. Junkhouse didn’t have to flash big session dollars in the local superstar’s face to get her interested in the project, though.
“Before anybody was accepting of Junkhouse at radio or TV or anything, it was actually our peers that embraced us,” says Wilson. “There was people like Blue Rodeo and the Odds and Sarah McLachlan. She used to come and see us at the Town Pump, so we knew she kinda liked us, and we’ve been fans of hers for years.
“So it wasn’t just ‘Let’s get Sarah McLachlan on this record.’ We didn’t want a keyboard, we didn’t want another fucking guitar solo, we wanted something really different and unique, and Sarah McLachlan brought this angelic quality to the song that nobody—I mean nobody—could bring to it.”
Junkhouse’s connection to the Vancouver music scene can also be seen in the comical video for the Odds’ “Eat My Brain”, in which the bikerish Wilson and his scruffy cohorts are seen chasing the hapless Odds around in a pickup truck, seeking revenge for stolen gasoline. The local jokers end up escaping the grimy clutches of Junkhouse with the help of a well-tossed Molotov cocktail.
“It was the same thing as Sarah comin’ to work with us,” says Wilson of the Odds clip. “They just called, and it’s like, ‘Yeah, sure, I like you guys.’ And it’s funny, because when we were all up for Junos—it was like the Waltons and ourselves and the Odds—they asked all the bands independently, ‘Well, what do you think about winning the Juno?’ and without any kind of coaxing we said, ‘We don’t care as long as the Odds win, because they’re the best fuckin’ band in Canada.’ And the Waltons said, ‘We don’t care as long as Junkhouse wins.’ ”
So which band ended up having to lug home the most-promising-band award that none professed to want?
“The Waltons. Bastards! A-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”
JR. GONE WILD Mike McDonald, 1993
On the back cover of the latest Jr. Gone Wild release is a black and white photograph that captures the essence of the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle. It shows a stage floor with all its trappings: the base of a microphone stand, snaking guitar cords, a dirty ashtray, a couple of empty beer bottles, a half-empty beer glass, a broken beer mug, a shot glass, and a stage monitor with a set list taped to it.
The item that really provides a look of authenticity, however, is a square white napkin bearing a scribbled message obviously intended for a band member: “THE POLICE WANTS TO STOP THE GIG!! TOO MUCH NOISE!! NEIGHBOURS.”
“That’s real,” says Jr. Gone Wild leader Mike McDonald, on the phone from the Edmonton office of Stony Plain Records. “You notice it’s sort of broken English? Well, that’s from our very last gig in Europe. We were playing this little tiny bar in Belgium, and it was packed with people, and we were just playing every song we knew. We weren’t even aware of how long we were up there for, but the police shut it down. That was the actual note the guy handed to me.”
Jr. Gone Wild spent six weeks in Europe, an experience—the incident with the napkin notwithstanding—McDonald describes as “sorta hellish”.
“It was like touring Canada for the first time. Nobody knew who we were so we had to start from scratch. I mean, financially, it was a disaster, so that’s what we’re doing in ’93—paying for our trip to Europe.
“But it was worth doing, because we were getting kinda spoiled out in Western Canada. Our heads were gettin’ kinda big, and it brought us down a few notches, which is what we needed. We were in Europe just prior to recording Pull the Goalie, and the last thing I wanted was the band going with huge heads into a recording situation, ’cause that would have betrayed the integrity of the music, I thought.”
Integrity, as Pull the Goalie shows, is one of Jr. Gone Wild’s most evident qualities. The recording is a genuine slice of free-spirited country-rock, a punks-on-the-prairie hoedown that’s a sterling follow-up to the 1990 Canadian classic, Too Dumb to Quit. The two recordings, however, were made quite differently.
“Too Dumb to Quit was essentially live off the floor,” says McDonald, “and with Pull the Goalie we multi-tracked; we did it piece by piece. But the major difference was, Too Dumb to Quit was recorded in a studio situation, and with Pull the Goalie we rented a big house and built our own studio, essentially. So Pull the Goalie was 100 percent our atmosphere.”
Pull the Goalie was recorded on the shores of Ontario’s Lake Simcoe, in a a massive mansion once owned by baked-goods mogul Mr. “You Make Good Cookies” Christie. “It’s sorta run down now,” says McDonald, “but you could see how it used to be one of those F. Scott Fitzgerald, Great Gatsby-type mansions.”
McDonald’s favourite product of the Pull the Goalie sessions is a rockin’ two-step tune called “Just the Other Day”, which he claims is the best song he’s ever written. Another standout track is “Rhythm of the Rain”, a song written by McDonald’s younger brother, who committed suicide a few years ago.
“He wrote a million great tunes,” says McDonald, “so we still got those kickin’ around. Fortunately, he recorded them. It’s just a shitty recording, but there’s enough sound quality there to pick out what the song is. And there’s reams and reams of paper with all his lyrics on ’em, so…his work ain’t lost. Actually, we learned another one of his songs just last night, so you’ll probably hear that one in Vancouver.”
The road to Lotusland—which brings Jr. Gone Wild to the Town Pump next Friday and Saturday (March 5 and 6)—is one the band has travelled many times during its nine-year history. That route is the inspiration for another well-crafted Pull the Goalie tune, “1,000 Miles to Go”.
“It was Juno week a coupla years ago,” recalls McDonald, “and we were on our way to Vancouver to play the big Commodore thing with Leslie Spit Treeo and Darby Mills—you know, the big, pay-to-play, stupid Juno schmooze bullshit thing—and just four miles east of Jasper, four trucks piled up on the highway. We came zippin’ around the corner and they were all over the road, so we had no choice but to drive into it. We wrote off our van, but we made the gig anyway.”
The band’s most nightmarish journey, however, is described in another Pull the Goalie track, “March into Jerusalem”, written by one-named bassist Dove. Its lyrics tell the tale of the night when McDonald lost his brother and Dove lost a close friend.
“We were playing the night my brother killed himself, and when we found out, we had to drive home. We set a land-speed record, actually; we made it from Winnipeg to Edmonton in 12 hours, which is pretty dangerous and pretty amazing.”
Pull the Goalie is a testament to McDonald’s will to survive as a person and a musician, and to keep Jr. Gone Wild alive as a band. Over the years there have been battles and personnel changes, but none big enough to silence the captain of the ship.
“Some people think I get outta line,” says McDonald, “but whatever needs to be done, I make sure it gets done, and I don’t mince words. I hurt people’s feelings sometimes, unintentionally, but if it gets things done, then the ends justify the means, I suppose. Survival of the unit is my priority.”
And survival is one thing that McDonald cannot take for granted, especially when he remembers yet another narrowly averted highway tragedy. This time the band, travelling through Saskatchewan one night, nearly drove into a speeding train.
“The bells and lights weren’t goin’ off,” he says, “and we came around the corner in the middle of the night and there was just something there. We stopped a foot and a half away from it.”
Sounds as if there might be some higher power watching out for Jr. Gone Wild, even if it has not yet showered the band with riches and worldwide fame. “Yeah, well, I think God’s a Jr. Gone Wild fan,” says McDonald. “He just likes to see us work hard, that’s all.”
54-40 Neil Osborne, 2000
When it came to choosing a title for their latest album, Casual Viewin’, local guitar-rockers 54•40 didn’t follow previous procedures and look to their ideals (Fight For Love) or early gigging days (Smilin’ Buddha Cabaret). For their ninth studio album, they simply culled a lyric from Genesis’s 1974 concept album, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, although it’s not as if vocalist Neil Osborne has had the line—“Marshall McLuhan casual viewin’ head buried in the sand”—on his mind for a quarter-century.
“Uh, I didn’t get the album till ’76,” he says with a laugh, lounging on a couch in the offices of his band’s management, Divine Industries, “but it was my favourite album for ages. I loved that album, and so did Brad [Merritt, 54•40’s bassist]—that and Selling England by the Pound. We were complete Genesis freaks for a long time after high school, and we tried to play it for the other two guys in the band, but they were going, ‘I can’t handle it.’ If you listen to it now, it is a little hard to take, but then they’re playin’ Alice Cooper, and beyond a couple of the hits, I’m like ‘What is this?’ So it was kinda funny, two elements of the band: Alice Cooper and Genesis.”
The cover of Casual Viewin’ is a photograph of the band—Osborne, Merritt, drummer Matt Johnson, and guitarist Phil Comparelli—sitting on the roof of the Hôtel de Paris in Casablanca. The four of them felt that, instead of spending a lot of cash on “some ‘hot’ video director’s freaked-out fantasy”, as Osborne puts it, they should see a bit of the world and shoot some footage of their own.
So—along with photographer Jeremy Benning, director Marc Lostracco, and producer Bruno Louza—they headed out to Thailand, Morocco, and Kenya, where they garnered enough footage to make half a dozen music videos.
“What we wanted to do was tour to get a slice of the world,” explains Osborne. “We wanted to go to India too, and that was the primary target, but it was too hot, and it was the rainy season, so they advised against it. So Morocco took India’s place.”
Morocco turned out to be quite the adventure. After customs officers confiscated their expensive digital cameras, they were shadowed by Moroccan undercover cops. “I was really freaked out,” admits Osborne, “and Matt called the embassy to see what was goin’ on. They were just, I guess, keepin’ an eye on us, but it was a bit weird, because you start having visions of Midnight Express or whatever, where somebody’s planted something on you and all of a sudden you’re thrown in jail.”
Although the members of 54•40 are wary of the risk involved in travelling to exotic locales, they’ve never shunned the opportunity to take their music far and wide. Sometimes they even go the extra mile, as when they embarked on a two-week tour of the USSR in 1989. They haven’t been back since.
“I certainly wouldn’t want to go back there with all the stories about the Mafia and the violence,” notes Osborne, “but it was pretty freaky [even] when we were there. Things were starting to get pretty loose, and you couldn’t make any phone calls once you’re in there. And I remember some guys from Azerbaijan or one of those places offered us diamonds to get on the train and go there and play for three weeks.
“It was like, ‘They’ll be there when you get there,’” he adds with a laugh. “Sure they will. So it was kinda the thing where we wondered if we’d ever get to leave the country, whereas on this trip there was always an Internet café or something to make you feel a little more rooted.”
Although 54•40 doesn’t flinch at the idea of jetting off to distant countries to play concerts or make videos, it’s never had big plans to conquer the lucrative market that begins just 35 kilometres south of here. The band, which consistently sells out three- and four-night runs at the Commodore Ballroom, is extremely popular in Vancouver and has always sold well throughout Canada, with five platinum albums to its credit.
But like that other Canuck guitar-rock band that’s been famously shunned by the U.S., these guys have had a hard time making inroads over the border.
“On a much smaller scale, it’s similar to the Tragically Hip’s situation,” says Osborne. “I mean, we were originally signed in the States, did three albums for Warner Bros., and then they dropped us. Without any muscle or support, it’s very costly to go down there, and we don’t have deep-enough pockets to stay there for a long time. So we go down to the border towns, and play New York and Los Angeles, just so they know we exist.”
It’s a shame that there’s no American distributor for Casual Viewin’ at this point, because the Yanks would surely get a kick out of the engaging pop-rock featured on what Osborne calls “the band’s feel-good groove record”. He produced it along with Johnson, and previously coproduced 1989’s Fight For Love with Dave Ogilvie.
“Every record we do, we’re pretty much involved in the production,” he stresses. “The definition of ‘producer’ is very [vague]… It can be whatever it wants to be, or what the producer wants. Some producers, like Don Smith, just say ‘Play, and I’ll record it.’ And somehow it works great.”
Smith helped make things work well on the popular 54•40 discs Smilin’ Buddha Cabaret and Dear Dear, which spawned such cool ’90s tracks as “She La”, “Assoholic”, and “Nice to Luv You”. But the band’s had a pretty firm hold on Vancouver’s rock ’n’ roll heart ever since its self-titled CD of 1985, which included the perennial faves “Baby Ran” and “I Go Blind”. And manager Allen Moy has been with the band from day one. Osborne believes that such undying loyalty has been essential to his group’s continued success.
“I mean, [Tragically Hip manager] Jake Gold’s company is called Management Trust, and I think that’s the key word: trust. Brad and I used to watch [Moy’s first band] Female Hands, before he was in the Popular Front—which was actually on the cover of the Georgia Straight once. He grew up with us, and so to have that much shared experience, he’s like the fifth member of the band.”
KICK AXE Larry Gillstrom, 1983
“If people can look at a band,” says Kick Axe guitarist Larry Gillstrom, “and see that everybody’s coming from the same direction and are together on it, then I think they can relate to it a lot better. At least that’s what we noticed when we saw Judas Priest.”
For the members of Vancouver’s premiere heavy metal band, Kick Axe, the Judas Priest concert at the Pacific Coliseum last November was–in more ways than one–a heavy experience. The mean, aggressive attitude and leather ‘n’ chains image of the masters of British raunch rubbed off strongly on Gillstrom and his cohorts.
“We all went to the concert,” he says, “and when we came back from it Charlie said, ‘But I don’t want to be like that.’ But all the rest of us wanted to be like that.”
Charlie is the group’s former singer Charlie McNary, who has since gone on to form another band, Vicious Rumours, with guitarist Scott Reid and bassist Dave Rymer, the players who took Brian MacLeod and Ab Bryant’s places on the last Headpins tour.
“Charlie was a good singer,” says Gillstrom, “and he helped us to get to a good level in the club scene as far as Top 40 goes. But he was still stuck on the Top 40 thing; he wasn’t willing to go on the way we wanted to go. We argued for a while, then we told him that were going to look for someone else who wants to go in our direction.
“So with the assistance of Sam Feldman, and The Agency in Toronto and a few agencies in the United States, we managed to get a lot of replies from a lot of singers. George sent his tape to us, and it was all basically Scorpions, Judas Priest, and Ozzy Osbourne that he was singing. So we figured he sounded like the right guy.”
George Widule, 21, from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, became the new lead singer for Kick Axe three months ago. With his flowing mane of golden hair and patented rock posings, he helps heat up the stage when Kick Axe churns into high gear. It’s no wonder he doesn’t wear any shoes or socks.
As soon as Widule joined the group, which also includes Vic Langen on bass, Ray Harvey on guitar, and Larry’s brother Brian Gillstrom on drums, they set right out on tour, traveling across the prairies to Winnipeg and then working their way back to Vancouver.
“When we made it back to Vancouver,” says guitarist Gillstrom, “we started in Gators, which was a hard thing to do because heavy metal goes over there like a lead balloon. You’ll often run into what we call a preppy situation, where the people aren’t there to listen to the band–they only want to hear songs they know so they can dance. And you can go on forever pleasing those people, but it’s not doing you any good.
“We’ve got the feeling that if you can make heavy metal work in Vancouver–probably the hardest place to do it–then you make it work anywhere.”
Maybe you can make heavy metal work anywhere, because Kick Axe have established quite a following among Vancouver’s hard-rock fanatics. And now that the’ve found a new, more unified direction, there’s no telling how far they’ll go.
According to Gillstrom, groups like Kick Axe have a hand up on other bands because their fans, mostly young, are more devoted and emphatic about what they like.
“There are two sides, ” he says, “to what young people like these days. There’s the techno-pop side, which is getting very sophisticated, and then there’s the heavy metal side. Everything in between is more for the older types, but the younger people go one way or the other, and they’re very distinct on which way they go.”
Because the members of Kick Axe realize that heavy metal is mostly a younger person’s music, and that the age limit at clubs ban a large portion of would-be fans from ever seeing the band, they will be performing an all-ages concert at the Roxy Theatre on Sunday, April 24.
And considering the band’s current enthusiasm, it should prove to be quite a show.
Says Gillstrom, “The best thing about what we’re doing now is that everybody in the band is enjoying it, and we’re not doing it just as a job anymore. When it was Top 40 it was like work a lot of times, but now every song that I play, I want to play!”
VOIVOD Denis Bélanger, 1993
I remember, back in the mid-’70s, picking up a secondhand copy of Grand Funk’s Shinin’ On. It wasn’t a very good album—I think it included the band’s hit remake of “Locomotion”, which I still can’t stand—but it had a 3-D cover, and when you viewed it through those little blue-and-red glasses, the effect was pretty cool.
The music even sounded a little better, somehow, when you were gawking at that nifty cover.
Going on 20 years later, and I’m still getting a kick out of 3-D cover art, thanks to The Outer Limits, the latest release by Québécois prog-metal band Voivod. Ten drawings by drummer Michel Langevin have been given the 3-D treatment, all of them depicting aliens, robots, and strange, otherworldly scenes.
The band has been heavily influenced by Vancouver author William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer, James Gleick’s Chaos: Making a New Science, old flying-saucer films, and sci-fi pulp magazines.
“The whole album is like a tribute to the old science fiction,” says vocalist Denis Bélanger, calling from Montreal just minutes before departing on the tour that brings Voivod to the Town Pump on Wednesday (September 1). “But we called it The Outer Limits because we’ve all been influenced by that TV show, especially. It’s like some bands like to sing about sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll; we would rather sing about extraterrestrials.”
The focal point of The Outer Limits is the 17 1/2-minute “Jack Luminous”, a tale about a U.S. president who is digitally created from bytes and pieces of computer animation. He is the consummate political puppet, impossible to destroy, until a radical hacker introduces a virus into the system.
But high-tech and sci-fi aren’t the only lyrical sources that Voivod taps to create its ambitious brand of progressive cyber-rock. “Le Pont Noir (The Black Bridge)” is actually based on a folktale told by lumberjacks in Quebec.
“It’s an old Quebec legend,” says Bélanger, “but of course I modified a lot of things with that. The real story was that there was a bridge that was made by the devil. There were people that were riding in a canoe, and they wanted to see their family, but it was winter and they couldn’t get any further, so they made a pact with the devil and the canoe started to fly. Stuff like that.”
Voivod gets the majority of its song ideas from the dream-fuelled imagination of drummer Langevin, and with those far-out concepts has been challenging the capacities of prog-rock lovers for more than 10 years now. But it hasn’t been easy to get the mainstream audience to swallow the group’s atypical rock ’n’ roll pill.
“I think people are more ready now for our stuff,” says Bélanger, “ ’cause we’ve been told that we were 10 years [ahead of our time], and it’s been 10 years, so here we are now. And I think the Seattle scene, bands like Nirvana, really opened doors. People are more open-minded and ready to listen to some other stuff than what they usually hear.
“And I think we got the real good stuff now,” he adds, “the stuff that we’re doing now is still adventurous, and it’s still not really traditional. I think people can swallow that. They’re ready for us, and we just want to go there and play.”
To hear the full audio of my archival interviews with members of Red Rider, Blue Rodeo, the Northern Pikes, Big Sugar, Headstones, Junkhouse, Jr. Gone Wild, and Voivod subscribe to my Patreon page, where you can eavesdrop on over 500 of my uncut, one-on-one conversations with rockers since 1982.