Today, in honour of the man's 57th birthday and his new 3CD set Orphans, I present a 1999 conversation I had with Tom Waits.
But first, the hastily assembled review I wrote for Exclaim in this month's issue, three days after getting the album:
TOM WAITS
Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards
"Forgive me, baby, but I always take the long way home." Because this is Tom Waits, said journey through three discs of the oddest and the soddest will mean the sky is always the colour of lead, the moon is always a coffee stain, and tilapia fish cakes and fried black swan are always on the menu.
The only real surprise here is this 56-song collection's consistent excellence, considering some of the filler that's padded every album of his post-1999 comeback. Sure, he has his formulas, but underneath his signature arrangements—which continue to delight, 25 years after Swordfishtrombones and his marriage to Kathleen Brennan—are undeniably great songs that he can obviously spit out whenever he wants to.
The most startling thing here is the somewhat new song "Road to Peace," which marks the first time Waits has ever consciously written a political song set in the present, one that names names (including Ariel Sharon, which makes it at least a year old). Here, he dissects the ongoing Israeli crisis by focusing on one suicide bomber and the army's retaliation. For a story that repeats itself every week, Waits gives it the gravitas it deserves, refusing to let the horrific details become blasé. Yet as with any blatantly topical song, the writing is somewhat clunky, redeemed by the Socratic conclusion: "If God is great/ if God is good/ why can't he change the hearts of men?/ Maybe God himself is lost and needs help/ out on the road to peace."
The discs are divided in a rough thematic fashion. The Brawlers and the Bawlers are self-explanatory, but the Bastards disc is where we get the side of Waits that's usually relegated to one or two tracks per album: the spoken word pieces and other detritus that's usually too weird for fairweather fans. There we find a hilarious tale of the bizarro babe who gave him his first kiss, a reading of a poignant Bukowski anecdote, the most depressing bedtime tale ever, and a hilarious piece about the more vicious behaviour of insects.
These collected secrets confirm Waits's status as the most consistent songwriter and performer of at least the last quarter century, casting a downright towering presence over the rest of his generation. "Through the wind, through the rain of a cold dark night—that's where I'll be" We always know where he is, though how he leads us there is never a given. (Anti/Epitaph) –Michael Barclay
The following interview was also conducted for Exclaim. The year was 1999; no one had heard or seen Waits in six years. No albums, no films, nothing. He resurfaced on the Anti label (a subsidiary of punk stalwart Epitaph, and if my memory serves me correctly, the label was actually launched with Waits's comeback); the album was Mule Variations, which became the biggest selling album of his career.
Interviews were scarce; I think I only saw two or three others; the only other Cdn one was a short piece in Toronto's Now Magazine. He was playing the trickster with all of them, refusing to give a straight answer and recycling a lot of non-sequiturs instead. At the risk of looking like a completely vain asshole reliving a past glory, I'll suggest that this is the only interview at that time that got him out of that mode and captured some candid moments. (A later Magnet interview was more enlightening.)
As you can see, however, it was on a severe southbound train for the first ten minutes or so. I was shitting bricks; I've never been so nervous for an interview, before or since. Because of that, I was determined to turn the interview around. I wasn't going to hang up on Tom Waits just because he insisted on pulling my leg. I was going to play his game.
So without further ado (and a quick nod to brother TJ O'Malley for suggesting this), here's the man himself.
Tom Waits
February 24, 1999
Locale: his home in…
Where you phoning from? Are you in California?
Say what?
Are you in California?
No, I'm on the phone! (laughs)
Fair enough then.
Alright.
One of the many things I was wondering was how long you've lived in your current place, out of the city.
Are you from the census bureau?
I can't reveal that information.
Is this a deposition?
Could be.
Are you a cop?
Sometimes.
Are you in real estate?
Only occasionally.
Are you doing some kind of survey on people who live in California?
No, just Ontario.
Where do you live?
I live in Ontario, a small town just west of Toronto.
OK.
I wanted to ask you about your current rural setting, and whether it's conducive to letting your imagination run wild or wilder.
Gee, I don't know. (pause) You want my address and phone number, in other words.
No, not really.
I'm not talkin'.
You can keep that to yourself then.
I'll keep that to myself, yeah.
Do you...
I get a lot of weird mail. I don't want any more mail.
Who's sending you mail, Scientologists?
Yeah, they come to the door!
But you're not going to be roped in.
(long pause). So. Where do you want to start?
I was listening to your new record the other day...
Oh yeah.
And I was wondering about the track "What's He Building In There." At first I thought it might be about the Unabomber, and then I figured it was about your own neighbours. Would that be true?
Gee, I don't know.
Or is it about either of those.
You mean I only have two choices? It's either the Unabomber or my neighbours? It's like a multiple choice except I have only two choices there.
What else would you add to that list, then?
It's about the Battle of Hastings. Or it's about Jaqueline Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis. They were on a boat together, and they were wondering about somebody that was on the adjacent boat.
And there was a lot of low moaning [a line from the song].
(soft laugh) I don't know. This wondering about each other--we all do that, don't we? Don't you wonder about your neighbours?
Yeah, mostly just their dogs.
OK, well that's enough to go on. You consider the kind of car they drive, and the house they live in, and the sounds that come from it. We know very little about each other but based on what we do know, we usually build some kind of portrait of who they are. And I guess we all do feel like we have a right to know what folks are up to.
I noticed that you slipped the Mr. Stitcha character into that song.
Yeah, I did put Mr. Stitcha in there.
He's a character from your past, isn't he?
He's my old neighbour.
What was your relationship like with him?
He used to throw things at us, because we used to skateboard past his house. And then he finally had a heart attack and his wife blamed it on us. It was sad. May he rest in peace.
In terms of your own profile, many other artists cite your career as the ideal balance between creativity, anonymity, and success.
Oh, I didn't know that.
I hear it come up quite a bit.
What about fashion?
Fashion somehow didn't make the list.
(laughs) Gee, I didn't make the grade in the most important area. I'm insulted.
You've got the clothes but not the face, isn't that the line [from 'Big in Japan]?
(laughs).
But in terms of your celebrity profile, you're fairly anonymous in terms of your personal life, or say, where you live.
Oh, that's good.
Does that help you inhabit characters in your songs, or help your audience believe you when you're singing in character?
All of the above. I don't know. Most people are more interested in something that's interesting, not the way things really are. I don't know what people know about me. Some of it's true, some of it's not. Just like everything you know about everybody else. Most of us are more interested in a good story.
You tell enough interesting stories that maybe people don't feel they have to know about where you live, how many kids you have, how old you are, or anything. It's a public persona that exists unto itself. Are you comfortable with that?
(laughs loudly) Am I comfortable with it? I don't know who you're talking about! Who knows what about what? I don't know what you're talking about. I'm still in elementary school, I'm in my late '60s, I have twelve children and I live in Tempe. Everybody knows that.
That's all we need to know then. I found a quote of yours once that said, "I always wanted to live inside songs and never come back." Is that still true?
I hate direct questions.
What do you hate about them?
They're so direct.
OK, how can I make that one more abstract?
I'll tell you what. I'll just give you some answers that don't necessarily correspond to anything, and you can just throw them in wherever you feel like it.
Alrighty then. Or you could give me an answer and then I'll ask you a question about it.
OK. The United States uses 70 million tons of cement every year, approximately one fifth of the cement used throughout the entire world annually. Think about it. 70 million tons of concrete.
So my question is, how do you relate your own creative output to the cement output of the United States?
I just answered that!
I know, but that's how this is going to work. You give me the answer and then I'll ask you the question, alright?
OK, then let's go to the answers first. Is it my turn again?
It's your turn again, and then I'll ask you a question. But you can't say 'I just answered that,' 'coz that's the rules of the game, then, right?
OK. Each year approximately 250,000 American husbands are physcially attacked and beaten by their wives.
How do you feel about modern gender relations?
(big laugh) Please make sure that your answer is in the form of a question. (pause) Are we up again?
Or I could start asking you regular questions again.
Alright. And I'll keep giving you irregular answers. I've been doing too many of these. I'm getting silly.
OK. You've always had bluesy elements in your songs, but this album strikes me as your bluesiest since Heartattack and Vine. Judging by other aging, prolific songwriters like Dylan and Van Morrison for example, do you think it's natural for people to turn to the blues later in their career?
Particularly if they're aging and prolific? (laughs) Or balding and short.
No, I didn't say balding and short. But with great fashion.
Or bulging and acne-ridden. Particularly if they're obscure and extremely tall.
And live in the country. Is that just the songs you had this time around, or did something else draw you to bluesier material?
At some point in your life you're going to listen to Skip James, Leadbelly, Mississipi Sam Chapman, Tom Shaw. You're going to come across these folks and they're going to change how you hear things, because they're seminal. They are the river that runs through it. That's what happens, I guess. It's our true indigenous music that evolved here.
Is there something about the directness of it as well? As opposed to, say, Kurt Weill, which you explored in the last couple of decades?
Well, the weird thing about Kurt Weill is that after I made a few records in the '80s, people started to tell me that I was sounding like this guy, or that I must be listening to this guy. So I figured I should probably go out and listen to him, because I'd never heard of him before. So I did listen, and then I though, 'Oh, I hear that.' For me, I have a lot of diverse influences. Most of us do. I like everything from Elmer Bernstein to seven inch singles of Throbbing Pink Jesus. How do you put that all together? Who's this new guy I found; he did a version of 'Sitting On Top of the World,' that just killed me. But it was a Japanese import, and the liner notes were all in Japanese. I know nothing about it. Maybe you do (pause)--Cryin' Sam Collins. It's a killer version; I'll play a little bit of this for you.
[He goes to his record player and plays two verses of the song over the receiever, during which I wonder if he'll come back to the phone]
He's got that high voice, it sounds like he's crying. It's easy to understand how he got his name. But like I said, I don't know anything about him. Isn't that nice?
That's gorgeous.
Maybe you can ask some of your readership if they have any information on Cryin' Sam Collins, because I certainly don't. Sounds to me like he's from Mississippi, that's what I would determine from his accent.
What year do you figure it is?
Probably the early '30s.
I wanted to ask you if sounds are as important as songs for you.
Always.
I read that for one of your records that part of your writing process was just going somewhere with a tape recorder and writing songs that way, and then coming back and constructing sounds around them.
The surface of a song is important to me, but you can't get away from the fact that you still have to write a song. You can't just rely on the texture or the technique you use to record it. I do like to experiment with all that. What's interesting about recording, particularly if you're working with great engineers--we worked with (??), who's a Canadian, I'm not sure whether he's from Ottawa or Montreal, and Jaquire King was the other fellow that worked on the record. If you stop by the side of the road and drag something out of the ditch, throw it in the truck and bring it down to the studio, these guys will circle it like it's a moon rock. They'll mic it, hit it with a hammer, and find out the most expeditious way to approach it. Move it around to different parts of the room. They don't make value judgements. They're more like scientists. That's what I like about engineers is they get very subjective about the whole issue of sound. I like the whole process. But you don't really know when you're going in what you're looking for. Sometimes you find it while you're there.
"Filipino Box Spring Hog" in particular seems to be this mettalic, swampy blues jam with a turntable thrown in there.
Oh yeah, there's some scratching on there.
I don't know who plays what. I just have an advance tape without any notes.
Oh, even better, so you don't know anything! So when I tell you it's all based on the Battle of Hastings, you'll just have to take that down.
I'll have to take your word for it.
That's probably good. Maybe we shouldn't have put any credits on the record at all. Or any lyrics.
You produced a record for your friend Chuck E. Weiss recently. Is that the first time you've sat in the producer's chair?
To be honest with you, I didn't really produce that in the traditional sense.
You were just there.
I was there for some of it, and some of it I wasn't there for. My wife and I financed the record, put up the initial investment so he could go into the studio.
So you executive produced it.
Yeah. I guess that is what you would call us. We were the executive branch of the recording process.
Would you ever consider producing anyone else?
Gee, I don't know.
I was wondering what it sound like if you produced a record for Prince, for example.
Sure, I'd love to get in there with Prince. (laughs)
What would you do with him?
Make him sound just like me! That's what most producers do. (seriously) I had an offer to produce The Neville Brothers, but the timing was off. I would have loved to have done that.
Wow. That probably would have sounded better than their new record.
I haven't heard their new record.
I heard it the other day.
Keith Richards gave me a recording of Aaron Neville singing "Jesus Loves Me," recorded on a crummy little tape recorder in an alley, and it just broke my heart. A lot of it is context, and concept. A lot of people need a director--it's like a documentary. You wait for events to take place, and then you shape them and then relate them to the world around you. You can't do that yourself sometimes, because you're too close to your music. Morphine wanted me to produce some songs for them. But it takes a lot of time. It's a really delicate thing, because you don't want to end up with them hatin' you. It's like you're taking pictures of them and they don't like the pictures.
You're bossing them around and you're in charge of the whole thing.
Yeah, and they're talkin' back and you're yellin' at them. I don't know how that would work. It's different when you're arguing with yourself.
Who usually wins?
I do, always. My better half.
I wanted to ask you about the "Chocolate Jesus" song. What are some of the other advantages that edible religious icons have over traditional ones?
My father-in-law has been trying to get me interested in Testamints, they're these Christian lozenges. They're little cough drops that have a cross on one side and on the other side there's some scripture from the Bible. If you can't make it to church, you're supposed to take one of these lozenges. They're almost like an hour in church.
Are they like communion, blessed by a priest?
Yeah, they are. A Judas priest. They come in different flavours. Wintergreen. Fruit flavours. All that.
Cinammon?
Oh, of course. They're just like Reids. They're individually wrapped for freshness. And they've all been passed with flying colours by flavour management.
Are they working for you?
Oh yeah. I'm workin' on one right now. But the Jesus thing was just taking it to the next logical level. Who knows, you know? It's a much more direct form of worship.
More internal. You've often talked about sin in various capacities...
About what?
Sin, in general. Would you agree?
That I've discussed the topic of sin in the past? Yeah, OK.
Considering recent political events in your country [this was in the middle of the Monica Lewinsky scandal], do you think the public are more comfortable with their sinful side now? Is there more honest discourse?
I don't know, that whole tabloid thing. We've got a president that's more human, and we're ready for that, we're mature enough. We've all been teenagers for the last year and a half, watching our parents sprout horns and become real people. I don't know, it's a tough one. No question there was some form of abuse of power. I don't think anything's happened in terms of legislation in the last year, at all. Everyone's just been glued to the TV. Which I guess is a new thing now, these massive, documented, spontaneous, media events that we all get tied into. They're like dramas that we can't ignore, and they almost seem like they can be created, because they've got an audience for them. Somebody said, 'What's going to happen next?' And somebody else said, 'Well, whatever's good for TV. That's what's going to happen next.' They could start a war and start covering it...
During ratings week.
Yeah, because you can get a lot of people watching. And they have all the things that great stories have. And if they don't, we can supply them. It is pretty bizarre. I don't have a TV, so that doesn't change anything! (laughs) It just makes me less aware, I guess. I know what's going on anyway, I read the newspaper.
The character of the Eyeball Kid on the record--not having a TV, I'm not sure if you've seen the Jerry Springer show or not, but I'm wondering if the Eyeball Kid's parents--if they were alive today--would put him on a show like that?
(laughs) Jerry Springer show, that's pretty good.
Everyone seems to be fascinated with freaks these days--emotional, physical or otherwise. A friend of mine was watching The World's Most Disturbing Medical Videos the other day on television.
It was on TV?
Yeah, a big special. They showed human ears growing out of rats and stuff.
Human ears? I've never seen those.
You've sung quite a bit about people who are considered freaks, either physical freaks or societal freaks, or emotional freaks.
Most of us, in some form or another, are fascinated with anything that makes us different. Most of us from time to time have felt that way and can relate on a certain level, whether it's internal or external. At one point Barnum and Bailey were displaying Sarah Bernhardt's leg, it was touring the U.S.
Just the leg?
Just the leg!
What was the attraction?
I don't know, I guess it was about six bucks. And at the time, I guess Sarah Bernhardt was doing Shakespeare in a saloon. At one point, someone remarked that her leg was making more money than she was. That really depressed her.
That's gotta suck.
That's gotta hurt! (laughs) I don't know. Obviously I'm making light of something--and I hope it's not at anybody's expense, because there are people with physical deformities and I'm not poking fun at that at all. I'm just taking the idea of show business to a ridiculous place. It's really more autobiographical than anything else.
I noticed you narrated a documentary on Guy Maddin recently, and I was wondering what initially attracted you to his work. Actually, I'd also like to know how you saw his work, because as someone who lives in Canada, I can't find his films anywhere [this has since become easier since The Saddest Music in the World; in 1999 he was still very much underground].
Someone sent me Tales From Gimli Hospital, which they thought I would enjoy, and I did. Then I saw Careful, and I also loved that. There's something ambiguous about the time they're being shot. It's kind of half carnival, half fairy tale, like Grimms, and then there's a '20s thing going on--is it an old movie? New movie? I can relate to the fact that he's trying to find a place that is of no time. He's scavenging from time, Frankensteining these different things. I can relate to that. He wanted me to be in one of those pictures, but it didn't work out. He ended up with Shelley Duvall and Frank Gorshin. What was the name of that?
Twilight of the Ice Nymphs.
Right. I think most of us when we watch films, we know so much about the lives of the actors, and we're sitting with so much information that it's difficult to vanish into a story. That's why it's always nice to watch a film from the '20s, where you don't know who these people are, who they're married to, somebody got caught with someone else's wife...
The setting is removed from your reality. Or even modern independent films, like a Jim Jarmusch movie, you don't know who most of the people in Mystery Train are, so you can attach your own interpretation to them.
Exactly. I like that. They seem to allow me to do that when I watch those pictures, so I find myself able to drift. They seem more whimsical that way, and I feel less obligated to watch them with some kind of--it divorces me from all that.
That's something that you do in your music as well; it is rather timeless. I have a tape version of your new album, and a pretty crappy tape player. I'm guessing that it sounds better now than it will when I get the actual CD.
Oh, you think it sounds better now? (laughs) You're probably right!
It sounds like a pretty anti-digital record.
I don't know. It's going to be on CD, and they're doing vinyl as well. A lot of the stuff is really lo-fi. Overall, it's an overall sound because there was a continuity to how it was recorded. Some of the stuff was recorded outside, like "Chocolate Jesus." And another one called "Buzz Flutterjohn" that didn't make it on the record. We did 25 songs, and only 16 are on the record.
Are you going to do anything with the other ones?
The orphanage.
Marianne Faithfull or someone else will adopt them, no doubt [she recorded an unreleased song of his called "Strange Weather"].
Who knows?
I really like the 'Papa's Got a Brand New Bag' groove on 'Big in Japan.' You’d probably have a big dance hit on your hands there, if somebody remixes that.
What, you think somebody needs to remix it?
Maybe, someone throws an 808 underneath it.
808, yeah right. The radio stations condense everything anyway, everything's so compressed. I don't know, what's a dance hit? I'm out of it.
You're on a new label now. Were there issues before with what you were allowed to put out and what you wanted to put out? Do you have more freedom now?
My contract ran out with Island, and I was in between trains, and they needed a parental figure over there at Epitaph. It's a good place to be for me. I could do anything over there, really, and they would celebrate it and get behind it. That's rare. Those kind of situations are rare. I could do can-can's and torch songs and Indian ragas and Cuban stuff and midget wrestling, and they'd say, 'Great!' I'd say, 'And I only one to play one gig, in Buenos Aires in a place that holds four people.' They'd say, 'We love it! When do you want to start?'
Kathleen and I felt more at home there. Plus, they're musicians there. Brett Gurewitz is a musician, he started in a band called Bad Religion, and he's a real classy guy. Great engineer, good musician. Andy Caulkins is also a great piano player, he's about 6'9, hands like baseball gloves, and he's still gigging, playing in blues clubs. When I'm in the studio and they come over to visit, it's feels a little more disarming. They're really savvy business-wise. They're forward-thinking; they're not part of the plantation system. They respect artists, and they pay them. I really think they are the way things should be.
What does the term punk rock mean to you, if anything? Does it relate to your contrarian nature, or is it just a style of music?
Eventually, all these things become ingredients. Everyone can't wait to take something and bury it so they can dig it up later. Everything seems to go through that process. It's all a big Salvation Army of style. And it's all still available at all times for everyone to enjoy on whatever level as a main course or as an appetizer. Punk rock is more about the posture and the politics and the attitude, and being as iconoclastic as you possibly can. There's a band on the label, NOFX, who were getting played on the radio, and they were livid.
Why?
They said, 'We'll get our lawyers down here. Get that record off the radio!' And they did, they got it off the air.
Would you do the same thing?
I don't know, it's not my thing. I kinda like hearing myself on the radio. It's happened once or twice, and I liked it. I've been trying for 25 years to get on the radio in some form or another, so I'm a bit of a different challenge. But I salute it. I salute diversity and standing up for what you believe in, living your life the way you want to live it. It's a good place for me to be. I don't know what it means, except that they're trying to branch out a little bit. If you're only selling napkins and tablewear, you're going to have to diversify at a certain point.
An interesting thing about this album is that there's the noisy stuff like 'Filipino Box Spring Hog,' and then right after that there's a song that could be off of Closing Time, a beautiful piano ballad. Even with your most beautiful songs, there's an edge to them. Do you have a natural inclination to subvert the naturally beautiful, perhaps to make something better?
You mean, drop something or break something in the middle of a quiet song? I don't do that! You know? Or rip the tape out of the machine. When I was going to dances, when I was a teenager, the band would play an uptempo thing and then after that you get all sweaty and then they play a nice ballad and you go over and ask that pretty little gal to dance.
While you're looking all sweaty.
Yeah, right. Songs are usually faster than your heart rate or they're slower than your heart rate.
In terms of writing love songs, is it still a challenge to write something new after a long career or 20 years of marriage? How do you find new ways to write?
There's some love songs on the record. It's still something I like writing about. I collaborated with my wife; most of the songs we wrote together.
It's also the first time you used the name Kathleen in one of your songs, isn't it? [on "Filipino Box Spring Hog"]
Yeah. She said, 'Gee, thanks a lot! You finally stick me in a song, and I'm sitting in a bar in my bra. And you're there with the dog tied to the stool.' It's a nice family portrait. I had to do some explaining, but she got a kick out of it. She used to be an anchorwoman at a TV station in Florida. She's an opera buff. You can see that influence on the record, opera.
Do you still learn things from each other, then?
(stutters, finding words) She's an excellent pianist, and she was a hairdresser for Yma Sumac for a while. Got fired. Really broke her heart.
I hear Yma's a bit tough.
Yma's really rough. She used to fly her in when she was on the road. But this is all very confidential. She was an elevator operator at the Taft Hotel, that's where we met.
You wouldn't want that to get out.
Well, I couldn't get out, that's how we met. The door wouldn't open. I said, 'What do we need an elevator operator for, if we can't get the G-damn door open here!' So we had time to get acquainted. She played organ on a cruise ship from L.A. to Ensenada, had a little night club act for a while. She's done a lot of things. Chimney sweep, bug collector, she's done it all.
Big resume.
Big resume, yep. She could either have been a nun, or marry me. And I won!
Congratulations!
Yeah. So we like writing together. It's a family thing. We have more fun with the record before it comes out. Then everybody hears it. Until then, it's like a family record that only we've heard.
Then it's like publishing your family photos.
On some level it is. But then again it's not really. It's like if you're grabbing a bite to eat for yourself versus inviting seven people over for dinner.
But do you cook any better or worse?
I burn it for large groups.
I understand you plan to do some shows, or a small eight-city tour. Do you know what's going to happen?
I don't know where we're going. We're trying to figure it out. There are a lot of headaches on the road. You have to travel with your own coffee, a hot plate.
Sleeping bag.
Yeah, it gets complicated (laughs). Pup tent. Fishing poles. There's a lot of things to think about when you're touring.
So you'd want to do it in the summer, probably.
We are going out in the summer, yeah. With that in mind. Insect repellent.
There's only one other thing I wanted to ask you about, as someone who's played accordion for the last ten years.
Oh you have?
I heard that as a teenager you left a soul band to play accordion in a polka band. Was that the beginning of the path of your career? Did the accordion lead you wayward? Or upward, as the case may be?
(big laugh) Well, you know what they say: Use an accordion, go to jail. That's what they say down here, anyway. This is where the accordion festival is every year.
Really? Where is that?
I'm not tellin'! You're the accordion player, you should know. Where the accordion festival?
I figured it would be near New Orleans for some strange reason.
Well, you're wrong.
There was one in Toronto a couple of years ago, called The Big Squeeze.
OK, yeah. We have our own Big Squeeze down here. And then, of course, there's the Banana Slug Festival every year as well.
I don't think I want to know what that involves.
Banana slugs. They're these large--they're slugs, they're 12 inches long and they come out after a rain and you can cook with them.
Really.
Yeah. It's hard to imagine.
Does that coincide with the Big Squeeze? Accordions and slugs?
No, they're in different seasons. So you play accordion?
I do.
That's great. It's an internationl instrument, what's your style?
I play in an eclectic rock band, so I'm not playing strictly zydeco or Celtic or Mexican.
But you play the left hand and all that?
My left hand isn't that strong, actually.
You don't use the buttons?
Well, there's a bass player in the band. Whenever I want to threaten him I tell him that I'll start working on my left hand.
If you want to threaten your bass player, tell him you're going to get rid of him and hire an accordion player.
But I am the accordion player. [I’m completely oblivious to the fact that he’s roasting me.]
Oh, I see. Then tell him you're going to get rid of the accordion player and hire a bass player. Get rid of both of you.
The gentleman who played with you in Big Time, what's he doing? William Schimell?
No, William Schimmel played on the Frank's Wild Years record. The guy in the Big Time picture was Willy Schwartz. He's married for the third time, and I think he went into motel management. That's where all accordion players wind up.
Well, I thank you for your time [it's been almost an hour, much to my shock]. I've exhausted everything I wanted to ask you about.
Really? I hope you had a chance to ask some direct questions and get some direct answers.
I got a few.
What about 'Where you been for the last six years?' That's what everybody wants to know.
OK, where you been for the last six years?
Breaking in other people's shoes.
The shoes things again! Do you have new shoes, or are you just breaking in other people's?
I don't wear my own anymore.
Whose are you breaking in? Pennywise's?
They send them in, I wear them for six weeks and I send them back.
So they avoid the blisters. So you're the blister guy, are you?
Yeah. That's what we're called.
Blister guys.
Yeah!
That sounds like a band name: Tom Waits and the Blister Guys.
(laughs). But that's, uh, anyway, what was the question?
The question you asked me to ask you was, 'Where you been for the last six years?'
Traffic school. The other popular answer is, 'working on my ice sculptures.'
That's a little difficult in California. You should come to the Quebec City Carnival.
Oh I see, you've got the weather up there. Who's good up there? Who you been listening to? Who should I listen to? I don't get out much. Give me some groups.
[This was the last question I’d ever expect him to ask me—not that I even expected him to ask me any questions. I quickly scanned my desk.] I was just listening to a songwriter named Kyp Harness, who's awesome. No one knows who he is, but he writes great songs.
Toronto guy.
Uh, what else… There's so much, really.
What about that group, The Mean Old Man Next Door? They have a new record called Tijuana Moon.
Missed that one.
It's a good one. (starts singing title track)
Must've been a big hit.
(laughs) Yeah, big hit! Huuuge!
But we've never heard of them in Canada? Weird. I wasn't ready for that question--there's so many great artists up here that I don't even think of as Canadian. Like if I asked you who was the best American artist today is.
Do you like Sparklehorse?
I'm just starting to discover them.
I like some of that Tricky. Old stuff, new stuff, you know. That's the amazing thing about recording, you can listen to everything. You can listen to stuff that's 100 years old.
And still learn stuff from it.
Yeah. Then you play something from two days ago, feel the same thing. Have a battle with the past. The past can have a dialogue with you. It's pretty amazing. Mule Variations is kind of our take on the Goldberg Variations.
Oh, like Glenn Gould.
Yeah! (laughs) Just like Glenn Gould. We're shaking hands with Glenn Gould here.
32 Short Films About Tom Waits. Have you seen that movie?
No, I haven't. Heard about it. Someone told me I should see it. Anyway, so how did this go?
Well, I was pretty nervous before, but I think all is well.
OK.
This is one of the few Canadian interviews you're doing, I understand.
I think so.
So you don't know if you'll make it up here for your pup tent tour, eh? Because it is warm here in the summer, you know.
Primus, those guys travel with fishing poles.
I don't doubt that.
They fish everywhere they go. They tour the best fishing spots, and subsequently, as a byproduct, they also do gigs in the area.
See, I don't remember the Primus northern Ontario tour. If that was true, they would have toured in northern Ontario, would they not?
Yeah, I guess they have been. Have they?
I don't know, I don't think they've played Sudbury yet.
I used to play in those places with Zappa, years ago. He played all over Canada, and I was the opening act.
Was that in '75, '76?
'74, '75, yeah. He was using me as a rectal thermometer for the audience.
How did that feel?
Well, gee, it was a little rough.
I can't picture your material from that time going over that well.
Oh, it didn't go over.
Maybe Beefheart might have been a better combination.
Of course. It was a complete mismatch. We had the same manager, and he said, "Aaaargh! Go out with Frank!"
"To Canada!"
"Frank will treat you right! Go to Canada with Frank! In fact, go meet Frank in Canada! At a hockey arena!" You know? Oh, man.
Can I tell you my favourite Frank Zappa story?
Go ahead.
He was playing this theme park north of Toronto, Canada's Wonderland. I forget who opened for him, no doubt another rectal thermometer...
They were abused.
So he comes out with his band to cheers, and they proceed to play Nerf football on stage for over half an hour. Everybody starts booing, people getting really upset, and all these people started to leave--about half the audience. Frank stops, looks around, goes up to the mic, and says, 'Now that all the assholes have left, let's rock and roll.' And apparently he played the best show Toronto had ever seen him play.
(big laugh) Oh, that's wild!
Did he ever do that with you? A bit of pick-up on stage?
Let's see, who was in the band in those days. Ruth Underwood, Chester Thompson, Bruce Fowler, those guys. Napoleon, George Duke. Diverse group. Strange. After my cruel set, after the bleeding had stopped, I came back in the middle of his show and he would play "Ol' 55" and I'd tell a story. I had fun, some nights. But I had to have Frank on stage to keep them from hurting me.
Where were the roughest crowds on that tour?
Detroit. But everywhere was rough. They were Frank's people, you know? They didn't want to hear anybody. And they thought that whoever was coming out before Frank, Frank had designed it that way and wanted them to hurt them: pelt them, throw things at them and abuse them. And the chant: 'We! Want! Frank!' Or 'You suck!' was also a big favourite.
I understand you played Waterloo, Ontario once, that's right near where I am.
Oh yeah. I remember that. I don't remember everything about that night. But I've had some good gigs in Canada. We'll come back there sometime.
The last time you were here you played three nights at Massey Hall in Toronto, for Frank's Wild Years.
Oh yeah, that was a long time ago.
Well, thanks very much again for your time.
OK, good talking to you!
-end-
Thursday, December 07, 2006
Tuesday, December 05, 2006
December housecleaning
No interview today, but some reviews from the last month that have appeared in various publications.
Some other thoughts first:
The Liberal party held its leadership convention on the weekend, where Stephane Dion--who was tied for third place going in--leapfrogged over the main contenders to take the prize. He made climate change and environmental sustainability the key issue of his campaign, which is remarkable, considering that during the English-language leaders debate in January 2006 (the election that brought Conservative Stephen Harper to power in a minority government, in case my American readers are already lost) the environment wasn't even one of the ten topics of discussion.
What happened? Either this is the effect of new movie star Al Gore on the mainstream, or the new Liberal party establishment rallying around Dion and kingmaker Gerard Kennedy are ready to redefine the national discourse in ways that the old boys who got behind frontrunners Ignatieff and Rae are not.
Dion's speech to the convention was prefaced by an introduction from newly-elected MP Glen Pearson, who won a by-election in London, Ontario where Green Party leader Elizabeth May came in second--the Green's largest electoral standing in Canadian history. Pearson talked about how Dion ignited people in his riding when he came to speak, but also made a strange statement to the effect of: "When I debated my opponents, I could take on the Conservatives, no problem. I could take on the NDP, no problem. But [and this part I remember verbatim] I did not lay a finger on Elizabeth May!" Before he sounded too much like a defensive Catholic priest, he went on to point out that the Green Party platform and Dion's platform were extremely compatible, and that the environment was indeed the primary issue of the 21st century, etc.
How will this play out in a real election campaign? The Liberals have enough trouble splitting the left vote with the NDP--a party Dion attacked in his acceptance speech (ironically enough, in the same sentence he was praising leadership opponent and former NDP premier of Ontario Bob Rae). But how will this election play out if Dion's Liberals "refuse to lay a finger" on the Green Party? Is there already a coalition in the works?
Overheard: After ex-PM Jean Chretien's speech to the convention (his first partisan appearance since leaving office), whoever was DJing the event played Madonna's "Hung Up": a modern disco song based on a riff from the 70s (the last time the Liberals had an inspiring leader) with the lyric "Every little thing you say or do/ I'm hung up on you." Interesting selection, to say the least, scoring a speech by a former leader. But that doesn't beat playing The Cure's "Let's Go to Bed" a few minutes later to pump up the crowd awaiting the results of the final ballot: "I don't care if you don't/ and I don't feel it if you don't/ and I don't want it if you don't/ and I won't say it if you don't say it first." Wow, inspiring words to hear at a leadership convention. At least no one played INXS's "New Sensation," played ad nauseum at the Conservative convention that nominated Harper.
Best moment of political drama: I missed Kennedy's dramatic walk over to the Dion camp. But while waiting an excruciating 40 minutes past the expected announcement of the final ballot results (intended between 5 and 5.30PM, the Liberals deliberately stalled the announcement until 6PM to make the news hour), the CTV feed spent a good ten minutes focused on Michael Ignatieff sitting with his wife, his once-estranged brother and other supporters. Everyone obviously expected an announcement within seconds, so the commentators stopped their nattering. Instead, we got to watch an extremely uncomfortable man--one who was considered a shoo-in for the win, one who uprooted his international academic life to come home to Canada for this job, one who only a few hours ago looked like he could pull it off--sit and wait, in full glare of the spotlight, trying to look sanguine and aloof, even though he must have been told the results beforehand. It was a fascinating piece of candid political theatre, and kudos to the CTV team for running it without commentary... unlike the CBC, who spent most of that 40 minutes talking inexplicably about Trudeau and the '68 leadership convention.
Final thought before we get to some boring CD reviews: The fact that Dion is yet another Liberal leader from Quebec is considered his major electoral weakness, one preyed upon by most of the letter-writers in today's Globe and Mail. Yes, his English is shaky (shakier than Harper's French?) and his acceptance speech was less than inspiring (he fared much better on CBC call-in show Cross Country Checkup the next day). He's not a man for dog-and-pony shows. But if nothing else, this former academic--the first Liberal leader since Trudeau with no ties to Bay Street--is a man of ideas (much like policy wonk Harper), and it is his ideas on which he should be judged.
Geography still plays a huge role in post-Civil War America when it comes to presidential tickets and the north-south divide. But this country seems all too quick to bury a candidate's chances based on their home province, as if someone more than 300km away couldn't possibly understand the complexities of our regional specificities. It will be interesting to see what role Kennedy takes in all of this; as has been suggested, the two of them could form a Macdonald/Cartier alliance, playing to each linguistic constituency on their own turf and building a national team, not one based on one leader's centralized concentration of power.
Yes, my degree is in Canadian history and politics.
Here's some reviews from the last month, some from Eye Weekly in Toronto, and considerably more mainstream fare from the K-W Record.
From Eye's Record Guide, November 23, 2006
SWAN LAKE
Beast Moans
(Jagjaguwar)
three stars
The ghostly groans and beastly moans emanating from the depths of Swan Lake are likely to put off any fairweather fans of father bands Destroyer, Sunset Rubdown and Frog Eyes—wait a minute, do Frog Eyes have any fairweather fans? Here, Dan Bejar, Spencer Krug and Carey Mercer retreat into a murky fog where disintegrating keyboards drape themselves over acoustic guitars, and distant percussion colours the mirage of melodies that reward the patient. Traces of their day jobs are apparent, but the focus on texture here gives them a tabula rasa to start anew. Closing track “Shooting Rockets” may be more of a séance than a song, but otherwise they remain ever so slightly on this side of the spirit world. –Michael Barclay
THE SADIES
Tales From Rat Fink
(Outside)
four stars
Just in case you thought the Sadies couldn't make a record without a massive guest list or copious amounts of psychedelics, here they whip out 26 tightly wound instrumentals that take full advantage of their Morricone moments and summers of surf rock past. The Ron Mann documentary of the same name focuses on hot rod car designer Ed Roth, whose heyday was the 50s and early 60s; the Sadies' soundtrack doesn't sound a day older than '65, before the younger Good Brothers were even alive. In some ways, this sounds like a more mature update of 1998's Precious Moments. Now that they've released a career-defining live album and begun recording in the UK with Gary Louris, Rat Fink might even put a cap on that era. –Michael Barclay
FLASHLIGHT BROWN
Blue
(Union 2112/Warner)
Four stars
No, these venerable Toronto underdogs are not giving Joni Mitchell's masterpiece a 35th anniversary tribute. They are, however, doing the equally impossible by not only making a pop-punk album worthy of redeeming the entire tired genre, but surviving a huge major label clusterfuck in the process. On their first album of original material in five years, they're raging without any musical sign of resignation, even if singer Matt Hughes is "sick of all the loud music" and laments, "I want to feel like I did when the chaos was real." The healthy sense of self-deprecation is balanced by multiple killer hooks, making this much more than the mid-life crisis of a sardonic punk—perhaps even a totally unexpected career resurrection. –Michael
Barclay
ALUMINUM
s/t
(XL)
Three stars
File this next to Nouvelle Vague for cover projects that defy the novelty factor and showcase the ingenuity of reinvention. "Orchestral versions of White Stripes songs"— those five words pretty much sum up this classical rock album, and Richard Ashcroft is likely already scrounging it for sample material. Don't mistake this for muzak: arranger Joby Talbot works minor miracles with even the sketchiest of Jack White's songs, colouring the more repetitious choices ("Why Can't You Be Nicer to Me") with plenty of flourish, and wisely picking four tracks from the band's best collection De Stijl. Oh, and a gamelan and harp help "Hardest Button to Button" totally kick major ass. In case you think this is all ridiculous, wait for the accompanying ballet. I'm not even kidding. –Michael Barclay
from the K-W Record, a mainstream daily newspaper west of Toronto:
Nov 9
Charlotte Gainsbourg – 5.55 (Warner)
There's a new Sean Lennon album out that, more than anything, proves that talent is not genetic. And on the surface, this album by the daughter of Serge Gainsbourg might also prove that to be true—depending on your tolerance for cooing French romantics. Her voice is whisper thin and practically transparent; one has to wonder if she sings that way because she wants to—to suit the dreamy, weightless material—or, like Paris Hilton, if she has to.
But if nothing else, this progeny of French pop royalty has impeccable taste in collaborators. She handed over complete songwriting duties to her the band Air and Jarvis Cocker of Pulp, which turns out to be a brilliant move. Cocker shares her father's perverse sense of humour, which gives us a soothing song about a fiery plane crash, and an icy new wave song about the sexually intimate nature of surgery. Air set it all to music with their most captivating melodies since their classic debut album Moon Safari; if you lost track of them after that, you haven't missed much until now.
5.55 the album is much better than Gainsbourg herself; she's little more than a vehicle for the songs, but such is their hypnotic spell that it rarely matters.
John Legend – Once Again (Sony/BMG)
If I had a dollar for every time a new artist was touted as being the next Marvin Gaye, I'd be sharing stock tips with Jay-Z. For all the promises made by the neo-soul movement of the last ten years, much of it merely makes gestural nods to the spirit and sound while falling prey to all the usual pitfalls of modern R&B: second-rate material, showboating vocalists, and style over substance. Not here, however.
On his second album, John Legend establishes himself as much more than a Kanye West protégé, more than a sideman to Lauryn Hill and Alicia Keys, more than an upstart with beginner's luck and three Grammys under his belt. Once Again is leaps and bounds ahead of his 2004 debut Get Lifted, with snappin' soul tunes and swoony, string-drenched ballads that stave off the syrup.
With the help of all-star producers Will.I.Am (Black-Eyed Peas), West, Craig Street (Cassandra Wilson) and Rafael Saadiq, it's the songwriting here that separates Legend from the countless others who only know how to wear the suits. He's also a perfect piano accompanist, whose arrangements help conjure apparitions of 70s soul and piano pop; the cover image of Legend playing a grand piano on a New York City street also helps.
Finally, and obviously, there's the voice, which is earnest without ever being cloying, and is convincing enough to make the featherweight lovers' lyrics sound deeper than they actually are.
If he keeps this up, he'll certainly have earned his stage name.
from K-W Record, November 30
Jerry Lee Lewis – Last Man Standing: The Duets (Shangri-La/Koch)
If he's the last man standing, why does he need all these other dudes propping him up? And no mistake, they are all dudes—not many women want to be left alone in a studio with Jerry Lee.
This comeback album was five years in the making, and it pairs up Jerry Lee with 21 other rock'n'roll legends, most of whom take vocal turns with him. It's undeniably invigorating to hear him rip through Led Zeppelin's Rock and Roll (with Jimmy Page on guitar), CCR's Travelin' Band (with John Fogerty), and Springsteen's Pink Cadillac (with the Boss man himself), all featuring the piano pyrotechnics we all want to hear. Most amusing is his "duet" with Little Richard on I Saw Her Standing There, which would be one for the history books if only Jerry Lee let his archrival near the piano—or even near the microphone for more than the occasional holler.
For the most part, however, he focuses on the country music that's been the focus of his last 30 years. Robbie Robertson's Twilight is a highlight (thankfully Robertson doesn't sing), as is That Kind of Fool with Keith Richards and Kris Kristofferson's The Pilgrim. The latter, about a "walking contradiction" and famously quoted in Taxi Driver, may well have been written about Jerry Lee himself.
While his voice is drenched in Sun Studio-style reverb for the rockers, the other tracks betray the fact that his 71-year old voice just isn't what it used to be, and neither are the voices of most of his equally aged duet partners, which just makes the whole affair sound like a bunch of non-descript old guys getting together with a shit-hot piano player.
from K-W Record, October 26
The Tragically Hip – World ContainerTM (Universal)
Maybe they felt their ass getting kicked by the next generation of CanRockers. Maybe they took a long hard look at their lacklustre recent work after issuing last year's box set and hits compilation. Maybe producer Bob Rock hooked them up with Metallica's therapist and
opened new doors of communication.
Who knows? Who cares? The short of it is that World ContainerTM sounds like The Tragically Hip are willing to put up a fight and resist the irrelevance that's been nipping at their heels for most of this decade. There were some definite steps out of their slump on 2004's In Between Evolution, but now they've gone back to the drawing board.
Gord Downie is no longer relying on guitar riffs to conjure his melodies for him, and ends up writing some of his poppiest melodies ever, especially the toy-piano-driven single In View. Guitarists Bobby Baker and Paul Langlois have finally realised that The Hip have long ceased to be a decent jam band, and have quit noodling themselves into the netherworld; here they sound tight and focused and exploring different textures to their playing. Bob Rock's production errs on the side of stadium-size drum sounds, yet he also leaves enough sonic space for every guitar track to ring out loud and clear. Downie's vocal performances sound like he's hungry again—or maybe he's overwhelmed by the oceanic setting of Rock's Hawaii studio, as aquatic themes dominate several songs here.
Fortunately, the album is front-loaded with future hits, like the surprising The Lonely End of the Rink, with its reggae-tinged verses adding an extra twist to standard rock chorus. (Maybe they took notes on how to pull off this tricky feat with subtlety when the Joel Plaskett Experience opened their last tour.)
World ContainerTM dips considerably in the second half, especially when Downie sounds like a grumpy grandpa shooing the whippersnappers off his lawn on The Kids Don't Get It. But he's rescued by the rousing Family Band, a shout-out to struggling young bands on their first tour ("what's gripping the city ain't hitting the town") set to an anthemic avalanche of guitars that may well have been borrowed from Broken Social Scene.
If this country's recent rock success stories threatened to unleash a classic Canadian cultural amnesia, one of our finest bands has finally returned to remind us why we once loved them so—fully, completely.
Greg Keelor – Aphrodite Rose (Warner)
To date, Greg Keelor's solo records away from Blue Rodeo have been either hushed lullabies or hazy psychedelia. This time out, he goes back to his favourite paisley-tinged country records of the 60s, with big Byrdsian harmonies, ringing Rickenbackers, pointed political lyrics, trippy jazz-folk, and back-to-the-garden spirituality ("wild flowers are proof enough of a higher power").
Recorded on his farm, it's all captured on a gloriously warm one-inch analog tape machine, which really does make a difference when it comes to capturing what made those 60s records sound so good—including plenty of hard panning into left and right speakers. Keelor sounds
completely comfortable playing all of the instruments himself, with occasional favours called in from the Sadies and Sarah McLachlan, but this isn't just a vanity experiment: he also conjures up his best set of songs in over five years.
At a time when a new generation is turning on to the psychedelic properties of folk music, Keelor kicks back and teaches us old school style.
Jim Cuddy Band – The Light That Guides You Home (Warner)
Keelor's lifelong partner in crime doesn't fare as well on his second solo album. Once again, despite the fact that employs most of Blue Rodeo as his backing band, Cuddy proves that he does his best work when egged on by the creative tension wrought by his partnership with Keelor. Any Blue Rodeo fan will find plenty of pleasantly recognizable signposts here, but only the honkytonkin' Oh Susanna duet Married Again, the pan-Canadian love letter Countrywide Soul, and the rocking Stagger In leave any impact. When faced with a total creative carte blanche, it's still baffling why anyone would put out a solo album that sounds almost exactly like their day job.
from K-W Record, Nov 2
Los Lobos – The Town and the City (Hollywood/Universal)
For fans who have followed them for the better part of their 27-year career, Los Lobos have been locked into a pattern of blowing us away on every second record—as recently as their 25th anniversary album The Ride, which boasted plenty of guest stars, reinvented older material, and a solid set of new songs.
But as this album illustrates, the lulls are getting lower, and there's very little on The Town and the City that suggests they're doing anything but phoning this in. The fact that it's comprised primarily of plodding mid-tempo songs isn't the problem, so much as the fact that the venerable masters sound as bored as we are. The only real life to be found here is found on Cesar Rosas's Latino numbers, though even those sound like leftovers from previous albums.
The only surprise to be found here is the fact that it's taken this long for their neighbour, the famed graphic novelist Jaime Hernandez, this long to illustrate one of their albums.
from Exclaim, December 2006
AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH
directed by Davis Guggenheim
This hit film was shocking to many North Americans, and buried deep in the movie is a funny little statistic that explains why. Al Gore describes how even though every peer-reviewed science journal unequivocally believes in global warming, mainstream media coverage continuously treats it like a questionable theroy—usually by soliciting opinions of scientists on the payroll of oil companies. Gore briefly compares them to the doctors trotted out in the 60s to defend cigarettes, but doesn't push the issue. And nor should he, lest the potential converts to his cause think he's one of those wacko conspiracy theorists that actually believes that Florida 2000 was an unfair fight. But the film's producers are happy to expand on that thought—and others—during their informative commentary, which acts as an excellent supplement to the information in the film itself. Director Guggenheim is less enlightening on the issues, but provides a textbook example of someone who doesn't consider themselves an environmentalist, yet was totally swayed by the strength of Gore's presentation on global warming. He also explains how hard it was to convince Gore to include glimpses into the former vice-president's own life struggles, which explains Gore's passion for delivering this message, while also breaking up the density of information and drawing the audience closer to its subject. Guggenheim laments at how hard it was to trim down Gore's two-hour lecture into less than 90 minutes to make an effective film. If that's true, why not include more extended scenes as DVD extras? Gore does appear in a featurette with a bare minimum of this material, as well as an update on some facts and case studies cited in the original film. Rest assured, there's no wasteful plastic packaging on this DVD: not only is it made from 100 post-consumer recycled material, but apparently it was powered by Native Energy. After hearing him talk the talk, it's good to know he's walking the walk. Also: short making-of featurette, Melissa Etheridge music video. (Paramount) –Michael Barclay
-end-
Some other thoughts first:
The Liberal party held its leadership convention on the weekend, where Stephane Dion--who was tied for third place going in--leapfrogged over the main contenders to take the prize. He made climate change and environmental sustainability the key issue of his campaign, which is remarkable, considering that during the English-language leaders debate in January 2006 (the election that brought Conservative Stephen Harper to power in a minority government, in case my American readers are already lost) the environment wasn't even one of the ten topics of discussion.
What happened? Either this is the effect of new movie star Al Gore on the mainstream, or the new Liberal party establishment rallying around Dion and kingmaker Gerard Kennedy are ready to redefine the national discourse in ways that the old boys who got behind frontrunners Ignatieff and Rae are not.
Dion's speech to the convention was prefaced by an introduction from newly-elected MP Glen Pearson, who won a by-election in London, Ontario where Green Party leader Elizabeth May came in second--the Green's largest electoral standing in Canadian history. Pearson talked about how Dion ignited people in his riding when he came to speak, but also made a strange statement to the effect of: "When I debated my opponents, I could take on the Conservatives, no problem. I could take on the NDP, no problem. But [and this part I remember verbatim] I did not lay a finger on Elizabeth May!" Before he sounded too much like a defensive Catholic priest, he went on to point out that the Green Party platform and Dion's platform were extremely compatible, and that the environment was indeed the primary issue of the 21st century, etc.
How will this play out in a real election campaign? The Liberals have enough trouble splitting the left vote with the NDP--a party Dion attacked in his acceptance speech (ironically enough, in the same sentence he was praising leadership opponent and former NDP premier of Ontario Bob Rae). But how will this election play out if Dion's Liberals "refuse to lay a finger" on the Green Party? Is there already a coalition in the works?
Overheard: After ex-PM Jean Chretien's speech to the convention (his first partisan appearance since leaving office), whoever was DJing the event played Madonna's "Hung Up": a modern disco song based on a riff from the 70s (the last time the Liberals had an inspiring leader) with the lyric "Every little thing you say or do/ I'm hung up on you." Interesting selection, to say the least, scoring a speech by a former leader. But that doesn't beat playing The Cure's "Let's Go to Bed" a few minutes later to pump up the crowd awaiting the results of the final ballot: "I don't care if you don't/ and I don't feel it if you don't/ and I don't want it if you don't/ and I won't say it if you don't say it first." Wow, inspiring words to hear at a leadership convention. At least no one played INXS's "New Sensation," played ad nauseum at the Conservative convention that nominated Harper.
Best moment of political drama: I missed Kennedy's dramatic walk over to the Dion camp. But while waiting an excruciating 40 minutes past the expected announcement of the final ballot results (intended between 5 and 5.30PM, the Liberals deliberately stalled the announcement until 6PM to make the news hour), the CTV feed spent a good ten minutes focused on Michael Ignatieff sitting with his wife, his once-estranged brother and other supporters. Everyone obviously expected an announcement within seconds, so the commentators stopped their nattering. Instead, we got to watch an extremely uncomfortable man--one who was considered a shoo-in for the win, one who uprooted his international academic life to come home to Canada for this job, one who only a few hours ago looked like he could pull it off--sit and wait, in full glare of the spotlight, trying to look sanguine and aloof, even though he must have been told the results beforehand. It was a fascinating piece of candid political theatre, and kudos to the CTV team for running it without commentary... unlike the CBC, who spent most of that 40 minutes talking inexplicably about Trudeau and the '68 leadership convention.
Final thought before we get to some boring CD reviews: The fact that Dion is yet another Liberal leader from Quebec is considered his major electoral weakness, one preyed upon by most of the letter-writers in today's Globe and Mail. Yes, his English is shaky (shakier than Harper's French?) and his acceptance speech was less than inspiring (he fared much better on CBC call-in show Cross Country Checkup the next day). He's not a man for dog-and-pony shows. But if nothing else, this former academic--the first Liberal leader since Trudeau with no ties to Bay Street--is a man of ideas (much like policy wonk Harper), and it is his ideas on which he should be judged.
Geography still plays a huge role in post-Civil War America when it comes to presidential tickets and the north-south divide. But this country seems all too quick to bury a candidate's chances based on their home province, as if someone more than 300km away couldn't possibly understand the complexities of our regional specificities. It will be interesting to see what role Kennedy takes in all of this; as has been suggested, the two of them could form a Macdonald/Cartier alliance, playing to each linguistic constituency on their own turf and building a national team, not one based on one leader's centralized concentration of power.
Yes, my degree is in Canadian history and politics.
Here's some reviews from the last month, some from Eye Weekly in Toronto, and considerably more mainstream fare from the K-W Record.
From Eye's Record Guide, November 23, 2006
SWAN LAKE
Beast Moans
(Jagjaguwar)
three stars
The ghostly groans and beastly moans emanating from the depths of Swan Lake are likely to put off any fairweather fans of father bands Destroyer, Sunset Rubdown and Frog Eyes—wait a minute, do Frog Eyes have any fairweather fans? Here, Dan Bejar, Spencer Krug and Carey Mercer retreat into a murky fog where disintegrating keyboards drape themselves over acoustic guitars, and distant percussion colours the mirage of melodies that reward the patient. Traces of their day jobs are apparent, but the focus on texture here gives them a tabula rasa to start anew. Closing track “Shooting Rockets” may be more of a séance than a song, but otherwise they remain ever so slightly on this side of the spirit world. –Michael Barclay
THE SADIES
Tales From Rat Fink
(Outside)
four stars
Just in case you thought the Sadies couldn't make a record without a massive guest list or copious amounts of psychedelics, here they whip out 26 tightly wound instrumentals that take full advantage of their Morricone moments and summers of surf rock past. The Ron Mann documentary of the same name focuses on hot rod car designer Ed Roth, whose heyday was the 50s and early 60s; the Sadies' soundtrack doesn't sound a day older than '65, before the younger Good Brothers were even alive. In some ways, this sounds like a more mature update of 1998's Precious Moments. Now that they've released a career-defining live album and begun recording in the UK with Gary Louris, Rat Fink might even put a cap on that era. –Michael Barclay
FLASHLIGHT BROWN
Blue
(Union 2112/Warner)
Four stars
No, these venerable Toronto underdogs are not giving Joni Mitchell's masterpiece a 35th anniversary tribute. They are, however, doing the equally impossible by not only making a pop-punk album worthy of redeeming the entire tired genre, but surviving a huge major label clusterfuck in the process. On their first album of original material in five years, they're raging without any musical sign of resignation, even if singer Matt Hughes is "sick of all the loud music" and laments, "I want to feel like I did when the chaos was real." The healthy sense of self-deprecation is balanced by multiple killer hooks, making this much more than the mid-life crisis of a sardonic punk—perhaps even a totally unexpected career resurrection. –Michael
Barclay
ALUMINUM
s/t
(XL)
Three stars
File this next to Nouvelle Vague for cover projects that defy the novelty factor and showcase the ingenuity of reinvention. "Orchestral versions of White Stripes songs"— those five words pretty much sum up this classical rock album, and Richard Ashcroft is likely already scrounging it for sample material. Don't mistake this for muzak: arranger Joby Talbot works minor miracles with even the sketchiest of Jack White's songs, colouring the more repetitious choices ("Why Can't You Be Nicer to Me") with plenty of flourish, and wisely picking four tracks from the band's best collection De Stijl. Oh, and a gamelan and harp help "Hardest Button to Button" totally kick major ass. In case you think this is all ridiculous, wait for the accompanying ballet. I'm not even kidding. –Michael Barclay
from the K-W Record, a mainstream daily newspaper west of Toronto:
Nov 9
Charlotte Gainsbourg – 5.55 (Warner)
There's a new Sean Lennon album out that, more than anything, proves that talent is not genetic. And on the surface, this album by the daughter of Serge Gainsbourg might also prove that to be true—depending on your tolerance for cooing French romantics. Her voice is whisper thin and practically transparent; one has to wonder if she sings that way because she wants to—to suit the dreamy, weightless material—or, like Paris Hilton, if she has to.
But if nothing else, this progeny of French pop royalty has impeccable taste in collaborators. She handed over complete songwriting duties to her the band Air and Jarvis Cocker of Pulp, which turns out to be a brilliant move. Cocker shares her father's perverse sense of humour, which gives us a soothing song about a fiery plane crash, and an icy new wave song about the sexually intimate nature of surgery. Air set it all to music with their most captivating melodies since their classic debut album Moon Safari; if you lost track of them after that, you haven't missed much until now.
5.55 the album is much better than Gainsbourg herself; she's little more than a vehicle for the songs, but such is their hypnotic spell that it rarely matters.
John Legend – Once Again (Sony/BMG)
If I had a dollar for every time a new artist was touted as being the next Marvin Gaye, I'd be sharing stock tips with Jay-Z. For all the promises made by the neo-soul movement of the last ten years, much of it merely makes gestural nods to the spirit and sound while falling prey to all the usual pitfalls of modern R&B: second-rate material, showboating vocalists, and style over substance. Not here, however.
On his second album, John Legend establishes himself as much more than a Kanye West protégé, more than a sideman to Lauryn Hill and Alicia Keys, more than an upstart with beginner's luck and three Grammys under his belt. Once Again is leaps and bounds ahead of his 2004 debut Get Lifted, with snappin' soul tunes and swoony, string-drenched ballads that stave off the syrup.
With the help of all-star producers Will.I.Am (Black-Eyed Peas), West, Craig Street (Cassandra Wilson) and Rafael Saadiq, it's the songwriting here that separates Legend from the countless others who only know how to wear the suits. He's also a perfect piano accompanist, whose arrangements help conjure apparitions of 70s soul and piano pop; the cover image of Legend playing a grand piano on a New York City street also helps.
Finally, and obviously, there's the voice, which is earnest without ever being cloying, and is convincing enough to make the featherweight lovers' lyrics sound deeper than they actually are.
If he keeps this up, he'll certainly have earned his stage name.
from K-W Record, November 30
Jerry Lee Lewis – Last Man Standing: The Duets (Shangri-La/Koch)
If he's the last man standing, why does he need all these other dudes propping him up? And no mistake, they are all dudes—not many women want to be left alone in a studio with Jerry Lee.
This comeback album was five years in the making, and it pairs up Jerry Lee with 21 other rock'n'roll legends, most of whom take vocal turns with him. It's undeniably invigorating to hear him rip through Led Zeppelin's Rock and Roll (with Jimmy Page on guitar), CCR's Travelin' Band (with John Fogerty), and Springsteen's Pink Cadillac (with the Boss man himself), all featuring the piano pyrotechnics we all want to hear. Most amusing is his "duet" with Little Richard on I Saw Her Standing There, which would be one for the history books if only Jerry Lee let his archrival near the piano—or even near the microphone for more than the occasional holler.
For the most part, however, he focuses on the country music that's been the focus of his last 30 years. Robbie Robertson's Twilight is a highlight (thankfully Robertson doesn't sing), as is That Kind of Fool with Keith Richards and Kris Kristofferson's The Pilgrim. The latter, about a "walking contradiction" and famously quoted in Taxi Driver, may well have been written about Jerry Lee himself.
While his voice is drenched in Sun Studio-style reverb for the rockers, the other tracks betray the fact that his 71-year old voice just isn't what it used to be, and neither are the voices of most of his equally aged duet partners, which just makes the whole affair sound like a bunch of non-descript old guys getting together with a shit-hot piano player.
from K-W Record, October 26
The Tragically Hip – World ContainerTM (Universal)
Maybe they felt their ass getting kicked by the next generation of CanRockers. Maybe they took a long hard look at their lacklustre recent work after issuing last year's box set and hits compilation. Maybe producer Bob Rock hooked them up with Metallica's therapist and
opened new doors of communication.
Who knows? Who cares? The short of it is that World ContainerTM sounds like The Tragically Hip are willing to put up a fight and resist the irrelevance that's been nipping at their heels for most of this decade. There were some definite steps out of their slump on 2004's In Between Evolution, but now they've gone back to the drawing board.
Gord Downie is no longer relying on guitar riffs to conjure his melodies for him, and ends up writing some of his poppiest melodies ever, especially the toy-piano-driven single In View. Guitarists Bobby Baker and Paul Langlois have finally realised that The Hip have long ceased to be a decent jam band, and have quit noodling themselves into the netherworld; here they sound tight and focused and exploring different textures to their playing. Bob Rock's production errs on the side of stadium-size drum sounds, yet he also leaves enough sonic space for every guitar track to ring out loud and clear. Downie's vocal performances sound like he's hungry again—or maybe he's overwhelmed by the oceanic setting of Rock's Hawaii studio, as aquatic themes dominate several songs here.
Fortunately, the album is front-loaded with future hits, like the surprising The Lonely End of the Rink, with its reggae-tinged verses adding an extra twist to standard rock chorus. (Maybe they took notes on how to pull off this tricky feat with subtlety when the Joel Plaskett Experience opened their last tour.)
World ContainerTM dips considerably in the second half, especially when Downie sounds like a grumpy grandpa shooing the whippersnappers off his lawn on The Kids Don't Get It. But he's rescued by the rousing Family Band, a shout-out to struggling young bands on their first tour ("what's gripping the city ain't hitting the town") set to an anthemic avalanche of guitars that may well have been borrowed from Broken Social Scene.
If this country's recent rock success stories threatened to unleash a classic Canadian cultural amnesia, one of our finest bands has finally returned to remind us why we once loved them so—fully, completely.
Greg Keelor – Aphrodite Rose (Warner)
To date, Greg Keelor's solo records away from Blue Rodeo have been either hushed lullabies or hazy psychedelia. This time out, he goes back to his favourite paisley-tinged country records of the 60s, with big Byrdsian harmonies, ringing Rickenbackers, pointed political lyrics, trippy jazz-folk, and back-to-the-garden spirituality ("wild flowers are proof enough of a higher power").
Recorded on his farm, it's all captured on a gloriously warm one-inch analog tape machine, which really does make a difference when it comes to capturing what made those 60s records sound so good—including plenty of hard panning into left and right speakers. Keelor sounds
completely comfortable playing all of the instruments himself, with occasional favours called in from the Sadies and Sarah McLachlan, but this isn't just a vanity experiment: he also conjures up his best set of songs in over five years.
At a time when a new generation is turning on to the psychedelic properties of folk music, Keelor kicks back and teaches us old school style.
Jim Cuddy Band – The Light That Guides You Home (Warner)
Keelor's lifelong partner in crime doesn't fare as well on his second solo album. Once again, despite the fact that employs most of Blue Rodeo as his backing band, Cuddy proves that he does his best work when egged on by the creative tension wrought by his partnership with Keelor. Any Blue Rodeo fan will find plenty of pleasantly recognizable signposts here, but only the honkytonkin' Oh Susanna duet Married Again, the pan-Canadian love letter Countrywide Soul, and the rocking Stagger In leave any impact. When faced with a total creative carte blanche, it's still baffling why anyone would put out a solo album that sounds almost exactly like their day job.
from K-W Record, Nov 2
Los Lobos – The Town and the City (Hollywood/Universal)
For fans who have followed them for the better part of their 27-year career, Los Lobos have been locked into a pattern of blowing us away on every second record—as recently as their 25th anniversary album The Ride, which boasted plenty of guest stars, reinvented older material, and a solid set of new songs.
But as this album illustrates, the lulls are getting lower, and there's very little on The Town and the City that suggests they're doing anything but phoning this in. The fact that it's comprised primarily of plodding mid-tempo songs isn't the problem, so much as the fact that the venerable masters sound as bored as we are. The only real life to be found here is found on Cesar Rosas's Latino numbers, though even those sound like leftovers from previous albums.
The only surprise to be found here is the fact that it's taken this long for their neighbour, the famed graphic novelist Jaime Hernandez, this long to illustrate one of their albums.
from Exclaim, December 2006
AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH
directed by Davis Guggenheim
This hit film was shocking to many North Americans, and buried deep in the movie is a funny little statistic that explains why. Al Gore describes how even though every peer-reviewed science journal unequivocally believes in global warming, mainstream media coverage continuously treats it like a questionable theroy—usually by soliciting opinions of scientists on the payroll of oil companies. Gore briefly compares them to the doctors trotted out in the 60s to defend cigarettes, but doesn't push the issue. And nor should he, lest the potential converts to his cause think he's one of those wacko conspiracy theorists that actually believes that Florida 2000 was an unfair fight. But the film's producers are happy to expand on that thought—and others—during their informative commentary, which acts as an excellent supplement to the information in the film itself. Director Guggenheim is less enlightening on the issues, but provides a textbook example of someone who doesn't consider themselves an environmentalist, yet was totally swayed by the strength of Gore's presentation on global warming. He also explains how hard it was to convince Gore to include glimpses into the former vice-president's own life struggles, which explains Gore's passion for delivering this message, while also breaking up the density of information and drawing the audience closer to its subject. Guggenheim laments at how hard it was to trim down Gore's two-hour lecture into less than 90 minutes to make an effective film. If that's true, why not include more extended scenes as DVD extras? Gore does appear in a featurette with a bare minimum of this material, as well as an update on some facts and case studies cited in the original film. Rest assured, there's no wasteful plastic packaging on this DVD: not only is it made from 100 post-consumer recycled material, but apparently it was powered by Native Energy. After hearing him talk the talk, it's good to know he's walking the walk. Also: short making-of featurette, Melissa Etheridge music video. (Paramount) –Michael Barclay
-end-
Monday, December 04, 2006
Dave Bidini: hockey-rotica troubadour
More today from Dave Bidini, founder of the Rheostatics and author. I updated the last post with links to Rheos material for those unfamiliar with the band.
In addition to his musical pursuits, Bidini has been a journalist since his teenage years writing for the much-lamented late Toronto rock journal Nerve in the 80s. (Not the erotica website, though as we'll see, he might have a place there soon as well.) He was a pop culture columnist for the Toronto Star for most of the mid-90s, and these days contributes to Toro magazine, among others. He published his first book in 1998; On a Cold Road was part Rheos memoir, part oral history of 70s CanRock working class heroes. It's a vital time capsule of Canadian music writing (a painfully short bibliography file, to be sure), and delves into the lost period between the first golden age (Neil Young, Guess Who, Joni Mitchell, et al) and the current explosion (everyone even your non-Canadian friends knows and loves).
Since then Bidini has focused on sports writing, his other love. A true Canadian, he's a hockey nut, which is the focus of 2000's globetrotting Tropic of Hockey and 2005's Best Game You Can Name; the latter is about the Exclaim Hockey League, with oral history interludes from NHL'ers, in a format similar to On a Cold Road. In between was a book about Italian baseball, called, naturally, Baseballissimo. His latest release, The Five Hole Stories, launches the seemingly improbably literary genre of hockey erotica--he'll explain in the interview.
I can't claim to have read his last two books: partially because sports writing really isn't my thing, no matter how well it's done, and partially because I've spent much of the last two years catching up on my canon reading (thanks to the Kill Rock Stars book club Books I Shoulda Read) and avoiding the CanLit and contemporary focus that dominated my fiction reading habits for the last 15 years.
And I've actually yet to dive into Five Hole, despite its brevity and the fact that it's short stories. (This is because I already have too many open books right now: Kafka's The Trial, Paris 1919, Seymour Hersh's The Dark Side of Camelot, Jose Saramago's Seeing, Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, and my long overdue dive into the Lemony Snicket series. Needless to say, my reading habits have serious ADD right now.)
In fact, I wasn't aware that Five Hole Stories was coming out the week I did this interview; it was conducted to promote a gig he had in Guelph, not the book. He arrived at our meeting with a copy, so my questions on that topic are obviously blind.
In addition to talking about the new book, we discuss his upcoming project Around the World in 80 Gigs. Part of this involves his trip to China last year. It was a trip the soon-to-be-defunct Rheostatics were supposed to make; instead, Bidini went over there with his old friend, singer/songwriter/all-around-good-guy Alun Pigguns.
Dave Bidini is reading at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto tomorrow night, December 5, with comedy troupe the Imponderables (who helped make this hilarious commercial for indie store Zunior.com, recommended for anyone who either loves or hates any band from Montreal with "wolf" in their name.)
Dave Bidini
October 19, 2006
locale: Café Faema, Dupont/Christie, Toronto
I recognize some of these titles from years ago. How many are older stories?
They were all lying around. It’s always daunting with fiction, because you want stuff to stew as long as possible. I also knew that because it’s erotic hockey, it’s not like I would have to worry about it measuring up against the last erotic hockey collection. I felt that on the strength of the idea alone, I could throw this together and not be too self-conscious about it.
What precedent, if any, is there for this?
I did find a website from this woman in Alabama who writes BDSM sex stories about hockey, but there’s no BDSM here (in my book). I was going to send her stuff, but that could be opening a terrible can of worms.
Even sports fiction—I’m not conscious of a large subgenre.
W.P. Kinsella, Quarrington—Canadians, really. Not a lot, though, it’s still fairly small. Quarrington in his last book, Galveston, wanted to write the world’s longest sex scene. I think it’s around three pages long. But part of this was to try to do him one better.
I’m sure Anais Nin wrote longer sex scenes than three pages.
I guess. But he ultimately abandoned the idea.
The obvious sound bite question is, why hockey erotica? What strikes you as erotic about hockey?
The idea is to come at sports writing from a different angle. A lot of the subject matter in here—when you’re sitting around talking hockey with guys, that’s always the most interesting stuff. It’s all off the record, but those are the stories you remember when you come away from the table. I just felt like it was time to bring those stories above the table and acknowledge the fact that there is an enormous subculture of sex in hockey culture, hockey life and the hockey community. We’ve been around hockey for hundreds of years in this country. Surely in the 21st century, we’re mature enough: the game has matured, the community has matured to the point where we can talk about these things and address them and relate sex to hockey players’ lives, their culture and their community. As opposed to whispering these legendary stories under our breath for fear of people being shocked to no end.
When you talk about sexuality and hockey, are you talking about off-ice puck bunny stories, or on-ice sexual tension?
Everything. It’s all in there. Inner team, out of team. Again, the sexual element looms large in some stories and smaller in others. Some people have asked me how much of it is rooted in truth, which is a weird question for fiction…
But a common question these days [post-James Frey].
Yes. I remember [70s rocker/radio DJ Bob] Segarini telling me about a club called the Moustache across the road from the Montreal Forum. They would do week-long sets there, and whenever the game would end at the Forum, the players would come over to the Moustache to party. He remembers their first set ending around 11.30 and going upstairs and seeing Bobby Hull horseshoed by 20 young French Canadian blondes, rolling a big hash joint. That image always stayed with me, and there’s an unnamed Blackhawks star from the early 70s in one story here. He’s in a scoring slump, and he goes to see his favourite prostitute—concubine, really, to resolve his issues.
If I were to think about eroticisation and sports, hockey would be last on the list. I would think of the slow grace of baseball, the homoeroticism of football, and wrestling is obviously very sexual. With hockey, you have a lot of armor on, it’s cold…
Ah, but those goons disrobe when they fight, don’t they? Grapes [Don Cherry] is always saying, “Two beautiful guys!” He’s always showing a clip of the Probert/McSorley fight, where they knock heads gently at the end and wink at each other. Some of them blow kisses at each other. One of the things that struck me about Russia was seeing players kiss after they score.
Is there something about being bundled up in a cold climate that adds to sexual mystique?
Margaret Atwood would write about lovers underneath the covers in the winter in a cabin. It’s the same thing in hockey, where you’re in this cold place and the players are brought together, and the heat generates sexuality in a northern context. There’s also that brawn vs. grace thing that happens in hockey, too. I don’t know how that relates to sex…
Then there is the ballet element to hockey, the very graceful dance.
Exactly.
Part of the reason I’ve never related to soccer is that it seems very jerky, whereas hockey is very fluid.
Until I started to play soccer when I was in Italy for the baseball book [Baseballisimo], I was never really able to appreciate soccer and the foot ballet. Until you actually try to do it, you don’t realise how light you have to be on your feet. I remember the revelation coming after playing for an hour, and in the last five minutes of that hour players would still be able to deek through the other team and put the ball in the top corner of the net. Meanwhile, I’d be having a heart attack on the sidelines. To be that good while that tired, that was the real insight for me about soccer, how amazing the players are at that level.
They’re running a marathon.
Totally, it’s unreal.
Whereas using skates is practically cheating. Can you explain in a nutshell the concept of the Five Hole?
Do you know what the Five Hole is?
No, I don’t.
Okay, so a goaltender has five holes, five weak spots. Top left (shoulder), top right, bottom left, bottom right, and the five hole is (whistles) between the legs. In hockey terminology, they say, “the five hole takes it away” or “through the five hole.” “That goalie’s weakness is his five hole.” It seemed like an obvious metaphor.
That’s very emasculating, if your weakness is your five hole.
Exactly.
What’s the relation with the One Yellow Rabbit theatre project in Calgary?
It will happen January 4-6 and then tour nationally—unless it sucks.
I thought you did this already, no?
No. The Rheos were out there last January for a week at the High Performance Rodeo. They’ve been around for 25 years doing alternative theatre, and this is the 20th year they’ve done this theatre festival. It’s a great time and they really wanted to work with us in a larger context. I had sent them a play I had written kind of like [Neil Simon’s] The Sunshine Boys, but it’s two old rock slobs. We were talking about doing that, and then I mentioned I had these erotic hockey stories, and they said, ‘that’s the ticket. We want to do that. Send us the stories and we’ll adapt them.’ So me, [fellow Rheo] Martin [Tielli], Ford [Pier] and Selina [Martin] have been writing the music. It’s going to be a full-on theatrical extravaganza.
Is there a thread through it, or are you adapting each individual story?
We’re figuring out now how that will work. The dramaturgy will kick in when I go out there in November to crack it and put it together. But right now it is five stand-alone vignettes tied together thematically.
There was a snippet of something on your website, what was that?
The spoken word thing? That will be a monologue delivered by one of the actors, I think in a Ziggy Stardust goalie pose. That monologue is the last story in the book. We’ve been in the studio trying to figure out how these literary concepts can be applied theatrically and musically. It’s not unlike Group of Seven in that you get paintings that you have to set to music.
In terms of other projects, I knew about your rock’n’roll trip to China, but I didn’t know you had gone to Finland and Russia recently too. Is this part of a new book?
That’s the Around the World in 80 Gigs book. I’m supposed to deliver that in the spring and it will be out next fall, but I don’t know. I might wait a little longer. It depends on how many other countries I can get to. I’ve done about 50 gigs now. I have to make sure I get to enough countries that it feels pan-global.
Is that to rock’n’roll what the Hockey Nomad was to hockey? [Hockey Nomad is the TV documentary adaptation of Tropic of Hockey]
In a way. Not really, though, because obviously music in these places is not exotic the way hockey would be. It is the same thrust: going to these places to find rock’n’roll stories that are new to us and hopefully will illuminate the context of rock’n’roll in these places and finding local heroes. It is the same spirit, but the conceit is less about finding surprises.
One of them still is a Communist regime, and one of them is the former Soviet state. How subversive is rock’n’roll there?
Suprisingly, there’s a big history of rock’n’roll in Russia—largely suppressed, of course. But it’s been around. China was just… extraordinary. We were in towns where they’d never had a rock band play, never. People were bewildered. We’d try to get them to clap on the 2 and 4—not that I’m a big clapper guy, but you find yourself doing that stuff anyways. But you’d try and get them to clap on the beat, and instead you’d just get (starts clapping) applause, right? Then you get them to do the hands-over-their-heads waving thing, and they’d be watching their hands [instead of you]. And you’d walk out to play and there’d be a kid in the front row eating a turtle. It was awesome.
Then we were in Changsha in Hunan province, which is kind of like the Hamilton of China—mind you, there are a lot of Hamiltons in China. Pretty down and dirty place, especially after coming from Shanghai, which is almost like L.A. The kids in Shanghai all had bad teeth and were all ugly and all loved Motorhead. There’s only one Motorhead album sanctioned in China, but this one kid was boasting that he had seven Motorhead albums that his uncle in Birmingham, Alabama had sent him. Another kid asked us if we wanted to go smoke some pot. It was nice to find rock’n’roll in the poor northern provinces, where it’s a more of an underground phenomenon than in the northern cities.
We played this old amusement park. I asked them the night before if there were any opening bands, and they said, ‘Oh yeah, two local opening bands.’ We were supposed to go on at 2PM. I said, ‘Oh, I’d love to meet them and interview them.’ They said, ‘Great, we’ll pick you up at 8.30.’ ‘8.30?’ ‘Yeah, they’re going on at 9 in the morning. There will be four hours, and then you guys go on. We thought we’d put the Hunanese bands on in the morning so as to not discredit your performance.’ Because rock’n’roll musicians there are considered failures, real societal pariahs. If you’re over 21 and you’re still in a band, you’re a loser.
How does that relate to other artists? Is that purely a rock’n’roll thing?
Literature and poetry have long traditions in China, unless you’re any kind of honest journalist, and then they throw you in jail.
Is this a post-Cultural Revolution thing, about the respectability—or lack of—for musicians?
That’s part of it, for sure. I’d liken it to being a baseball player in America in the 1910’s. It’s not honest work. ‘What are you doing?’ That’s the sense I got. But it’s a regional thing. In Beijing, there was a band there who were like the Donnas, a hard-driving girl rock band. They had five songs that were not banned from radio play necessarily, but the government had come down strongly, saying that they found these five songs to be not appropriate. The band had this big outdoor show a week before we got there, and they started their set with those five songs and the kids went crazy. In Beijing, things are changing and rock’n’roll is becoming empowered. In Russia, you find this rising youth culture, but there are also way more cops and soldiers on the street than ever before. In China it’s the same thing, they’re moving and moving, and at one point they’re going to find out what’s behind door number three, you know?
It’s interesting, because in North America, rock’n’roll is the least rebellious thing you can do. There’s a prescribed package that comes with it, a model you’re supposed to follow. And in the internet age, I’d just assumed that package has been franchised everywhere and it was a given—in the same way that my generation inherited the rulebook from the boomers or even the punks ten years before us.
It’s refreshing that there’s still a frontier for rock’n’roll in parts of the world. I remember being at this Blackalicious show at the Opera House a week before I went to China. There were four bouncers sitting on top of the speakers, and any time a kid in the audience lit a cigarette, they came down on them.
I was there last week for TV on the Radio, same thing.
Right. In China, there’s the Red Guard in Tianamen Square, and it was interesting to compare the two. What’s the microcosmic police state? Is it the fucking Opera House with these goons smashing kids with their flashlights, or is it China, where the security guards are having a smoke? I remember at the end of our show at Sujo, everybody was sitting on these white bucket chairs. It was almost like a convocation rather than a show. Before our last song, Andy, the promoter, gets up and says, ‘Everybody can come to the front of the stage now!’ Everybody got up. I told Andy afterwards, ‘You know, storming the stage when you’ve actually kind solicited it…’
Which happens at the ACC or Massey Hall all the time: “Everybody, you can dance now!”
Right. So they all came to the front and we played our last song. At one point a cop came bursting through the crowd, and I thought, ‘Uh-oh, someone’s going to get in trouble.’ Instead, he was waving ten yuan because he wanted to buy an Al Piggins CD. Now, this is not to say that there aren’t people in prisons getting the shit beaten out of them. But in a rock’n’roll environment, it was interesting to see this difference.
-end-
Friday, December 01, 2006
Dave Bidini: post-Rheostatics
The one band that's meant the most to me in my adult life has been the Rheostatics, mostly because their discography between 1990 and 1995 (Melville, Whale Music, Introducing Happiness) inspired me to play in a band, to become a better writer, to document this country's living musical history, yadda yadda. I've seen them dozens of times, often several nights in a row during their annual Green Sprouts Music Week in Toronto, a week-(or more)-long residency at a Toronto club (starting at Ultrasound, the last several have been at the Horseshoe).
For a history of the band that I wrote five years ago, go here.
I'm an unabashed fan, so much so that I'll admit here that the single biggest thrill I've ever had as a performer was not only opening two of their Green Sprouts shows with my band at the time, but sitting in on keyboards with them both nights for a couple of songs. Some people dream of jamming with the Rolling Stones at Madison Square Gardens or something equally pie-in-the-sky. For me, playing with the Rheos at the Horseshoe was as big as it will ever get: and I don't mean that in a typically lowered Canadian expectations fashion. As I said before, they mean more to me than any other band; I know their albums more intimately than any other; I've had to replace several of their CDs due to excessive wear and tear (or envious roommates).
That said, as Lester Bangs pointed out, heroes exist in part to let you down, and this love affair has been on-again/off-again from the beginning. I've been just as critical as I have been gushing effusively (okay, maybe more of the latter), but I always come back for more with open ears. And they've surprised me and pulled me back in on several occasions when I thought it was over.
This time, however, it likely is over. Earlier this year, founding bassist Tim Vesely announced his departure after a whopping 27 years. The band already had a show booked at Toronto's venerable venue Massey Hall for March 2007, which they are turning into a farewell gig... of sorts.
Dave Bidini is the other founding member of the Rheostatics. These days he's also an accomplished author with roughly five books under his belt (depending how you count them), including his new book of short stories, The Five Hole Stories (more on that later). This interview is a two-parter; Monday's post will focus on his writing.
This conversation was conducted for the Kitchener-Waterloo Record in advance of a solo show/reading he had in Guelph. Bidini is the last Rheostatic to do solo musical pursuits.
Further links for the uninitiated:
streaming samples from 1992 classic Whale Music
streaming samples from 1998 album Double Live from zunior.com
video for "Shaved Head," from Whale Music
video for "Stolen Car," from 1997's Night Lines Session
bizarre commercial for indie store Zunior.com featuring Rheos singer Martin Tielli
With previous books, you did book tours in bookstores. Why do you want to take it to clubs? Do you feel more comfortable there?
For a history of the band that I wrote five years ago, go here.
I'm an unabashed fan, so much so that I'll admit here that the single biggest thrill I've ever had as a performer was not only opening two of their Green Sprouts shows with my band at the time, but sitting in on keyboards with them both nights for a couple of songs. Some people dream of jamming with the Rolling Stones at Madison Square Gardens or something equally pie-in-the-sky. For me, playing with the Rheos at the Horseshoe was as big as it will ever get: and I don't mean that in a typically lowered Canadian expectations fashion. As I said before, they mean more to me than any other band; I know their albums more intimately than any other; I've had to replace several of their CDs due to excessive wear and tear (or envious roommates).
That said, as Lester Bangs pointed out, heroes exist in part to let you down, and this love affair has been on-again/off-again from the beginning. I've been just as critical as I have been gushing effusively (okay, maybe more of the latter), but I always come back for more with open ears. And they've surprised me and pulled me back in on several occasions when I thought it was over.
This time, however, it likely is over. Earlier this year, founding bassist Tim Vesely announced his departure after a whopping 27 years. The band already had a show booked at Toronto's venerable venue Massey Hall for March 2007, which they are turning into a farewell gig... of sorts.
Dave Bidini is the other founding member of the Rheostatics. These days he's also an accomplished author with roughly five books under his belt (depending how you count them), including his new book of short stories, The Five Hole Stories (more on that later). This interview is a two-parter; Monday's post will focus on his writing.
This conversation was conducted for the Kitchener-Waterloo Record in advance of a solo show/reading he had in Guelph. Bidini is the last Rheostatic to do solo musical pursuits.
Further links for the uninitiated:
streaming samples from 1992 classic Whale Music
streaming samples from 1998 album Double Live from zunior.com
video for "Shaved Head," from Whale Music
video for "Stolen Car," from 1997's Night Lines Session
bizarre commercial for indie store Zunior.com featuring Rheos singer Martin Tielli
Dave Bidini
October 19, 2006
With previous books, you did book tours in bookstores. Why do you want to take it to clubs? Do you feel more comfortable there?
The clubs will pay you, which is kind of good. In Calgary I’ll be in a bookstore. Wherever makes sense. I’ll read a bit from Five Hole, play a song, read from other stuff, play some more. Some Rheos stuff, some new stuff.
Before the events of the last year, was it on your agenda to perform solo more frequently? Was a solo album ever a concern?
Probably if we had kept going and doing our thing, I never would have. It seemed when I was reading, I did a book tour out west for The Best Game You Can Name and I brought my guitar and played a bit. It’s something that just happened and made sense. But musically it’s a challenge, which is good.
Is it liberating? Do you find yourself doing things you might not have done with the Rheos, or were the Rheos always the type of band where you felt you could do anything?
It’s true. That’s why the concept of solo is not unique, because all the guys in the band would do something where the rest of us would clear the stage. It’s terrifying and liberating. When it’s great, it’s the best, and when it’s not, it’s the absolute worst. There’s no middle ground whatsoever. You’re naked, and you’re either waving it around or you’re hiding it.
When Martin and Tim did solo records, how did you feel about those? Did you understand why they had to do those other than just escaping democracy for a bit?
I think they did it for different reasons. I didn’t think there needed to be more competitiveness, necessarily. I thought that if I did that, it would make it even more quietly competitive. And beyond writing the books and having the band, taking on another project would have muddled things logistically, even worse. It would have been harder for the band to exist. Ultimately, it didn’t matter one way or another! (laughs)
I’m curious about your writing recently. Your songs on [the most recent Rheos album] 2067, and the song on your website with Dave Merritt, there’s a lot of meta-writing, “rock about rock.” That element has always been there in your work, but it seems to dominate lately. Why is that?
Those songs just come way too easy. I recorded a bunch of stuff with [one-time Rheo drummer] Don [Kerr] and the Scribbled Out Man guys, and we have four more days coming up in November. I think that song is the only one about music.
Was Tim's departure something you expected? Did you see it coming?
You envision a break-up in your brain whenever you have a bad night. Any musician would be lying if they told you they didn’t. When you have a bad night, you think to yourself, ‘Well, this is what it’s like. It’s so bad that there’s no other option.’ But the next night you’ll have a great gig. And that was the thing about the Rheos. We’d have a terrible night, but we’d always have a great show the night after.
When it all came to pass, the thing that I regret the most is that there was a lot of writing on the wall that I didn’t really recognize. Maybe I was too busy to see it. Maybe I wasn’t so emotionally involved or connected to Tim as I should have been. For the last record, he recorded all his vocals at home. And part of the process of recording is being with friends, and making them laugh, and trying to out-do each other. But he went home and did it all himself, which further compartmentalized the band in retrospect. I think 2067 is great; it works well. But in that sense it was a surprise, in that I should have seen it coming.
It happened in a hotel room in Edmonton, in the morning. I was rooming with him, and he was looking out the window and I remember seeing an odd look on his face and thinking, ‘Wow, he’s really into this sunrise.’ It was a beautiful day. Then he said what he said. I spent the first couple of minutes trying to talk him out of it. Then I realised that when you’ve played with a guy for 27 years, it’s not like I’m going to say, ‘You’re bailing on us.’ When [drummer Dave] Clark [1981-1994] left, the only thing I could say to him was that we had all this exciting stuff lined up. With Tim, we had the Chinese tour, the record was going to come out in England. Now that I’m on the other side of it I realised that all those things were still possible. I realised that after 27 years of basically being good at being a professional musician, I didn’t necessarily need the band to realise all those musical ideas and dreams.
It would be great if he was still around to do it, but he also has to follow his own path. Having played together for 27 years, you can look at it two ways: 27 years is enough and you never want to play with each other again; at the same time, it was 27 pretty good years, so does that really mean there will never be another time? Saying never in rock’n’roll is tough enough anyway. The Massey Hall thing was too great an opportunity to pass up. If we had said no to Massey Hall and broke up in the parking lot of some shitty bar, it would have felt pretty dumb. Planning your own funeral and sending off the ships is a good opportunity.
Have you ever witnessed another band’s self-conscious last show?
Probably. I just can’t think right now. Not sure. I remember with 2067 when it came out, I felt really good about it and I think the fans really liked it and there were some new fans, but I felt we might catch more of a buzz from it. But because of the nature of Canadian music, it’s so busy and so crowded and alive and vibrant—it’s a little harder. You find that with a lot of bands that are our age, you have to get a little lucky. It doesn’t matter how good or bad your record is, you have to somehow catch that frequency to be noticed. It’s frustrating for a lot of bands and musicians our age. In that sense, it feels like the right time to bow out. I’ve seen a lot of this scene that has been fostered and planted and there’s fruit on the trees, so it’s good to slide back and say…
The kids are alright?
Yeah.
The last five years have been so incredible and in many ways eclipsing the period of time I wrote about, but at the same time do you see evidence of a typically Canadian cultural amnesia that comes with that?
I would have said that had I not just gone out with my dad on the weekend, and we stopped at a gas bar just west of Kingston. I looked out the window and my dad was pumping gas and talking to a bunch of guys with hoodies who were clearly a band. They were young, maybe 21 years old. So I got out of the car and said, ‘Hey, you guys in a band?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘I’m in a band too.’ And they were so flipped out and so excited.
I think we do have this sort of precious status where I think young musicians are aware of what we did and what our contribution was. And we never did corporate gigs, we never sold our songs to beer companies, we always remained steadfast to our ideologies. That’s a currency that I’m really proud of. I can’t help but compare ourselves to our peers. For us, it was always about discovery. Bands are aware of that and appreciate that. The amnesia might exist, but it’s not like we were widely acknowledged and then forgotten. We were always kind of forgotten, which is okay. It’s not a bad position to be in.
I can think of so many career highs for the Rheostatics, and at so many different levels: the overall career arc, the independence, the major label period, the stadium tour, art projects, etc. Again, this might be a typically self-deprecating Canadian question, but are there any regrets about those years?
Probably just the ‘Claire’ video. That’d be the only one!
I actually meant not things you did, but things you would have liked the band to do.
No, I don’t think so. No, because it’s all about art and music. There would be no regrets there. There are details, but they create no marks on the greater beast. Martin said the other day, ‘We were always this jalopy.’ People talk about whether the band has broken up or not, and will this be the last show. But it’s not like this was ever a conventional band. Something unconventional can come out of it and be just as real and valid, because it’s always been this clunky thing that just kept going for some reason.
It’s not like it was a full-time band for most of the last ten years.
Exactly. With this One Yellow Rabbit thing, we can call it Rheos or not, we can put out a record and do festival stuff—in that sense, it’s good in a way.
Any decisions as to what it will be called?
Don’t know, no. We’re going to do this thing and then see what happens.
Do you have any concrete plans for the Massey Hall show? I was thinking the other day how daunting it is to play a venue that has a curfew, a finite amount of time that you have to do. Considering how many wonderful and sprawling things I’ve seen at Green Sprouts shows, often going well past last call, I’m trying to imagine how you will focus any or all of that into a three-hour show.
I know. It could end up being a very mediocre, large-scale deal. That’s the hard thing about a last show. You want it to be mint. But who knows? Maybe it would be more typically us if it was just lumpy, half-memorable, half-forgettable thing. We will be bringing some guests in.
Last I heard, the floor was sold out.
I think we’ve sold about 1200 tickets. We’re looking at a sell-out, fingers crossed, but it looks pretty good. Which is great. The feedback I’ve got from people is, ‘Hey, you’re playing Massey Hall, that’s great! No Fall Nationals this year?’ ‘Uh, no, actually, it’s our last show.’ ‘Last show?’ I think there’s a large percentage of people who are going because it’s our last show, but there are also a lot of people who are really into seeing us at this place. Which makes me think—what a goof! Again, it doesn’t make me regret that this thing is over, but maybe this Massey Hall gig could be a step to something greater. You never know, really.
Any overall theories on the current CanRock Rennaisance? Are we better businessmen, better musicians? Or is the world simply more curious about us?
Nah, I think it’s the natural progression and evolution of art. Even bands that don’t get the big headlines. The Elliot Brood record, Ambassador, I didn’t hear that record until a couple of months ago, and it was one of those, ‘What is this?’ And inevitably whenever I have that reaction, it’s a Canadian band. Or a band like the Dears, their last record I think is brilliant. It’s so crowded now that even great bands aren’t getting the banners. I think it’s evolutionary and a lack of self-consciousness. It’s just as complicated as all those other Canadian complications in art, in terms of ‘what’s the sound, what’s the voice.’ It is what it is, which is very freeing to a lot of people.
When I reflect on the period that I wrote about [in this book, which had a chapter on the Rheostatics], there are similar stories that appear all through the book, the same mistakes people made. No matter how indie they were, a lot of them really wanted a major label deal, that was the goal—that and touring from Halifax to Vancouver. A lot of people had blinkers on, as if those two things were the only thing that would make you succesful, and the mainstream was the only end game. Now people don’t believe that at all, and conversely they’ve become way more successful—nationally and internationally—than anyone from that period.
That’s the mudslide that is the industry right now, too. And even the ethereal-ness of it too: what is the fucking record industry? It was a lot easier to figure out back then, because you’d play the Rivoli and there would be eight A&R people at the back of the room. Now I can’t even tell you who those people are or what their motivations are. It’s probably simpler for the musicians now, but more complicated for the industry because they don’t even know what they are themselves. It’s interesting, you’re right, how not having a major label is actually a band’s strength. It’s beautiful. And the industry only has themselves to blame.
As someone who has mentored a lot of young artists and taken them on tour, do you find it harder to impart elderly wisdom when everything has changed?
Yeah, but the elderly wisdom was always: write a good song, play a good show, be true to yourself. All the stuff Joey Ramone told me. There’s no rulebook, no formula. It’s always about following your nose and learning for yourself what the right decisions are.
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