Elliott Lefko 2000

Today's Eye Weekly has a moderately in-depth story I wrote about independent promoters in Toronto.

The crux of the argument is that while the U.S. is largely dominated by Clear Channel subsidiary Live Nation--which acquired many of the country's largest indie promoters as well as main rival House of Blues--Toronto (and by extension, Canada) has a thriving indie promoter scene with no fear of a monopoly taking over any time soon. And those promoters are responsible for increasingly bigger shows, including this week's Arcade Fire gig at Massey Hall, and this September's V-Fest.

One of the people I interviewed for the piece was Elliott Lefko, who started as one of the city's most successful indie promoters in the 80s before being hired by MCA Concerts (later Universal Concerts, then House of Blues) in the early 90s. He's a giant in Toronto concert history, and more than one of my other sources credited his 2001 flight to L.A. as opening up the indie promoter scene in Toronto, and loosening House of Blues' grip on the market. Lefko now works for Goldenvoice, the company that puts on Coachella--who, not uncoincidentally, usually has quite a few Canucks on the roster.

I first spoke with Lefko in 2000 while researching Have Not Been the Same. Most of the book focused on interviews with artists, with very few industry voices. But there are few people with more experience in both the underground and the mainstream in Toronto/Canadian rock history between the years 85-95, and Mr. Lefko was a great help.

It's funny, of course, to see how many of his memories are based on how much money certain artists cost, and whether or not he was able to eat that night. But his was/is a high risk business, and he took chances on a lot of artists--especially Canadian ones.

At the beginning of this conversation, I don't think he understood what it was I wanted to talk about, but after that, he required little more than name prompting to embark on long tangents for the rest of our hour-long conversation, which stopped abruptly when I ran out of tape.

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Elliott Lefko
June 6 2000
Locale: squatting awkwardly on the floor of the hallway of Universal Concerts’ office in the Molson Ampitheatre

When did you start promoting?
I started off being a journalist and a publicist. I was working for my friend Ron Mann, who did the film Poetry in Motion, and so I was doing publicity for him. I got involved in bringing some of the writers to town: Jim Carroll, Ed Sanders. I liked the performance aspect of it. Then I started doing Cdn writers, trying to put a bit more bite into poetry performance, because I thought it was definitely happening, as you can see from watching the movie.

After that, working with Jim Carroll and Groovy Relgion, and doing shows, I liked doing rock more than poetry. I was presented with some theme weeks down at the Bamboo [pivotal reggae club on Queen St. W], they were doing a ‘white roots week’ where it was cowboy stuff instead of reggae, so I got to program that. Then I brought the Del-Lords in. I’m really good at finding things. So presented with the challenge of finding cowboy bands, which nobody liked, so I found the Del-Lords, Kinky Friedmann, the Texas Jewboys, stuff like that. I had a really good time, so I started doing more theme weeks down there, with girl band week, surf band week. It was lots of fun.

When I went down to New York to find some of these bands, I ran into this whole scene where things were happening. Bands like the Replacements, Green on Red, True Believers. All the agents in New York were working on this kind of stuff, it was a beehive of activity for tons of great bands. They said, ‘we need help bringing in these bands,’ and I was more than happy to do it. I started working at RPM [now the Guvernment] doing indie Wednesdays and bridging Cdn bands like A Neon Rome and bands like that with the best of the young American bands, and having success at it. I brought in British bands too, like the Jazz Butcher.

I really grew to love that, and my niche was the American stuff. There were other promoters in town who were bringing in the more corporate stuff and more British stuff. My thing was more young American bands. I had this friend in Buffalo, these Buffalo kids used to come up to Toronto a lot, and we’d go down there for some shows.

There was this girl Cindy Hersh, and she gave me this tape one time with one side of Buffalo bands and Seattle bands on the other side. The Seattle bands were The Fluid, Mudhoney, Soundgarden, Nirvana, everybody. I thought, fuck, there’s all these great bands out there I can bring in, and nobody knew about it at the time. I found out who booked them. At the time I was at the Apocalypse Club, and I was able to bring them in for $100. Phone up Niranva. $100. ‘Yeah, we’ll get there somehow.’ They couldn’t make it that time; they got lost in a snowstorm. But Fluid came up, Tad came up, Mudhoney, they all came up for really cheap prices and the kids came out.

I remember doing Soundgarden for the first time there. It was $1000 for Soundgarden. They all came in, they were so quiet, they sat on the bus at the end of the show, very nice and well behaved. At the time Chris Cornell had great long hair at the time so girls wanted to fuck him and the guys wanted to be him. It was like our version of Black Sabbath. It was beautiful, there was this great energy and uncharted territory.

Were you booking local people on the Bamboo series, or mostly New York people? Shadowy Men?
Shadowy Men were there and they were very helpful in playing those kinds of gigs. It was funny because at the time in Toronto there was – and still is – a band called Bunchofuckingoofs. There was a girl I met and we had a fun idea to form a band called Bunchofuckingsmurfs, with a little kid in the band, and it was really funny. We put this band on stage, and the owner came out and started freaking out: ‘you have a kid on stage!’ but it was really fun. It was funny, because Bunchofuckingoofs went crazy, they thought we were making fun of them. I said, ‘Isn’t this what you’re all about? You can’t take a joke?’ There was also the Dundrells from Toronto. There were some really great country bands, too. Prairie Oyster was there, Handsome Ned. It was a cross-pollination.

Where did you see Handsome Ned and what role did he play in bringing roots music to Queen St.?
I loved country music. I don’t know why, but I did. I would go down and see him on Queen St., at the Cameron, and he also had a show at CKLN. He was the nicest guy. I had a poetry show there that I did with Chris Twomey, and I’d see him all the time. He was a real sweet guy. Always willing to help, always wanted to talk. Whenever I wanted to do something, he was there. ‘No problem.’ He was involved, I didn’t have to ask. Blue Rodeo was in its infancy at the time, and they’d be the opening act for some of these weeks, and down at RPM, too. Handsome Ned was the star. I would do shows with him, and he’d be just such a sweet guy. I really like working with him.

Did you see how he influenced different people?
Yeah. (pauses). I guess I did.

That was around the time Blue Rodeo started.
Yeah, he did some shows with Blue Rodeo. (stammering). He was a very sweet guy and I was very sad when he died. When I heard about it, I walked down to the Cameron House. We’d have parties after the shows with the True Believers, Alejandro Escovedo and some of those people, and Ned would be with us. We’d have a lot of fun together. I don’t really see that sense of community now that we had then, where everybody would have a really good time together after the shows.

Was there something about his songwriting that set him apart?
He was a really great songwriter, a really great voice. He had a lot of presence on stage, which is the hardest thing to get. You couldn’t stand behind him (Ned) at a gig, because he’d be wearing his giant cowboy hat. A very sweet guy. I remember riding home from his funeral with Greg [Keelor] from Blue Rodeo, in this really old beat up car. I remember listening to the radio and feeling really sad about it. At the time, Blue Rodeo really wanted to play a lot. There weren’t very popular yet, but they certainly were afterwards.

Did you know Blue Rodeo’s early incarnations?
They had went down to New York and then moved back here, so I started to work with them a lot. They would do anything at the time. If you needed them to do a show, there was no problem to get them to play. They opened some really great bills.

Were there turning points in their evolution that you saw?
When they put out the first record, they had a really good manager at the time, John Caton, who subsequently had some heart problems and had to retire. When he was with them and Outskirts came out, Jim [Cuddy] had experience with video, so they were able to put out a really good video right away. It touched a nerve with a lot of people. The images were very clear. There was one song about Kennedy in a hotel room getting shot, and also “A Good Year for the Roses.” It seemed to touch a lot of people. Really good music, really good words, really good looking guys on stage. There was a time when the Queen St. thing was exploding, and they stepped out of that and into people’s homes, through their stereos.

In the beginning it seemed to be more of an adult thing, and then their audience grew.
The Cowboy Junkies, one of their first gigs was at the Bamboo for one of the country weeks. Michael Timmins gave me a tape with a couple of songs on it, and then they did a show there. Greg [Jim, actually] took those pictures on their record. Michael would lean over his guitar, and she [Margo] was very cheerful. They haven’t changed that much, in a way; they’re still the same band. Success came to them, left them, came back again, etc., but the band has stayed consistent. From the beginning, if you listen to their early music, it was that drugged-out kind of music then that they’re still playing now, with this graceful voice on top of it. The thing I liked about the Cowboy Junkies was they were able to go into the United States and tour, unlike a lot of other bands. They would go into a van. They saw themselves – maybe not an American band, but they never saw themselves as a Canadian band. Never did. That’s why they were successful.

Even before the first record.
Right away, they were touring. They got into the station wagon and toured. These other bands like Green on Red would play all over the world, and that’s what the Junkies were. They realised they wanted to fit on the same map. Even if they were only making 50 cents and sleeping on people’s floors. A lot of the other Canadian bands didn’t do that: they were scared to do that, or didn’t want to do that. That was a good thing about the Junkies.

Another guy was Jeff Healey. I knew him through this friend of mine Joe Rockman, who I grew up with, the bassist. He told me he was playing with this blind guitar guy. I was putting on a show with Dr. John, and I got Jeff Healey to be the back-up band for Dr. John. They hit it off like crazy, getting to play together on stage. They were his band. It showed a bit that he could rise above the level of just playing Grossman’s. Later they did get to see some success.

The Cowboy Junkies seemed an oddball choice for mainstream success. A lot of Canadian companies thought their records were demos.
Sure, if you look in terms of Canadian music and what was going on then, Haywire and the pop music that was coming out of Canada at the time. It was the furthest thing from it. But there was a different strata that was going on there. At the time I couldn’t even buy bands off of Canadian agents, they would laugh at me. But American agents were taking me seriously. The comparative thing with the Junkies was that they were appealing to things that were going on universally, rather than in Canada. Eventually A&R people would come and see them and think they’re really good. Or if they played at Maxwell’s, a place like that in Hoboken, then people would look at them as being a creative, interesting voice. To Michael Timmins’ credit, he didn’t really care. He was going to do it, and if people didn’t come, they didn’t come; if people came, then people came. That’s great.

Was there a point when that attitude changed in the industry?
Perhaps with people like Pursuit of Happiness, when they had some success. Or Chalk Circle. Those kinds of bands would play RPM on Wednesday nights, one of the many bands who would give me tapes. Eventually, they had good videos and got signed – maybe in the Pursuit of Happiness’s case because they made a really good video. At that point the A&R people saw that there was something happening here that they could work with. Still, to this day, though, people can’t really go out on a limb and sign a weird, eccentric Canadian band and think that that’s going to make money. They want more commercial stuff.

As a result, you saw Zulu Records and Og Records and other independents putting out stuff and having a little bit of success; Mint later on. Part of the problem in Canada is that when you leave out a couple of urban centres, people don’t care what’s going on in modern music. Our friends in Montreal and Saskatoon and Winnipeg and Calgary and in Vancouver, you hear this stuff on Brave New Waves, but try to sell a show with the Apples in Stereo outside an urban centre, and not many people are going to come and see it.

There was a lot of stuff going on in Montreal. I know you were a big Gruesomes supporter.
I really liked the Gruesomes. There were certain things in Canada that I would hear about that I thought were a combination of artistic – I thought they were really good – and money; I’d think, this is how I’ll make some money and eat that day.

The Gruesomes were fantastic. When I first found them, it was for one of the things at the Bamboo. I brought them to Toronto. They had really long hair, and all they wanted to do was eat cereal and candy. John Davis’s younger brother Eric must have been about 15 or 16; he got to the Bamboo gig and he didn’t have any drumsticks! He was about to go on stage, and I had to run down to the Horseshoe and get him some drumsticks. The guys at the Bamboo were howling on me: “What is this?” And yet the band would pack them in. People loved it, it was really good.

I’d do combinations like them and the Chesterfield Kings; at the time the Chesterfield Kings were so good, and the Gruesomes just rocked their heads off. They didn’t care about anything. They were really great on stage, so easy to work with, and fun, and people would come out. It was a pleasure for me.

Other bands at the time were the Asexuals. I’d heard the records, and it was as good in my mind as the Replacements. Another band was The Nils. Again, you couldn’t believe how good those records sounded. When they’d play Toronto, I’d offer them $2000 for a show and they’d make it easily, we’d all make a lot of money. Or the Doughboys. The first or second time we did the Doughboys, we did a free show, and it was just packed. There was this big fat doorman at the Silver Dollar who was taking money from people just to get into a free show. It became a carnival atmosphere. People really wanted to see this stuff, the shows would sell, and things were working. The bands were great, made great music. Later on, they became such a great band. Jerry Jerry was also a great band.

A lot of the credit at the time went to Lee’s Palace. Mr. Lee and Craig Morrison. I would do shows all over town, wherever there was a stage. But the best place was always Lee’s Palace. I quickly realized that places would come and go, but that place would always be there. There was one point where I had no money – I’d been fired from the Silver Dollar or the Apocalypse or some place like that. Mr. Lee called me and took me out for lunch, and said ‘Do shows here. We’ll give you money. Don’t worry about stuff like that. You’ll be okay.’ I felt so good. There were all these nights when I’d sit in their leaky basement counting my money and feeling really thankful that I had a place to go and a place for the bands to go.

There was another band in Toronto I used to make money off of called Rare Air, with bagpipes. Amazing band, really good. I used to promote their shows in Toronto, and I’d make $100 and I could eat that day. It was so much fun. Then the Vancouver connection was with bands like Slow. I brought them into Toronto because I’d seen their video, and it was really amazing. It was around the Expo thing, all the hype. I brought them in for a show with Soul Asylum, and then the next night they did their own gig. They were so good, so incredible, but so fucked up.

On drugs or in general?
Not on drugs, no. They were the kind of guys who could walk down the street and get into an accident because they stepped on the wrong thing. They were funny guys. To get to Toronto they spent all their money, so they had no money to go back home again.

So they slept in their van, parked in front of my apartment on St. George for three weeks or something. My friend across the street was like, ‘Hey, is that Slow?’ And he’d invite them in to listen to music at his place. Tom was sleeping in the van, and the inner linings of the top of the van went into his mouth while he was sleeping and he had to go to the hospital because he was swallowing fibreglass. Ziggy got into a fight at a club in Hamilton and broke his arm. Chris and the other guy got into a fight with Bunchofuckinggoofs and hurt himself.

Steven Hamm, we were invited to a party up north for this guy who really liked the song and wanted to impress his girlfriend, so he took us to his parents place. He went into the Jacuzzi when everyone else was downstairs, and he flooded the Jacuzzi, and there was water everywhere. They were that type of band: everything would happen to them, but once they got on stage, they were so good.

I recently saw Tom Anselmi, and the guy still looks like – if there’s a rock star in Canada, it’s that kid. He looks and dresses the part. It’s a bit of a shame that band never achieved the success that was due, because of all the problems they had and the guy was a prima donna. It’s only now that he’s able to act halfway normal, and be nice to people. He was such an asshole to people for so long that people wanted to bury him. When I see him now, I think, that guy’s a star.

Did you see Circle C? [the band that formed out of the ashes of Slow]
I got to work with them a little bit. I booked them when I first started working with MCA Concerts, and he sent me this t-shirt with the Circle C logo based on the Chanel thing. It was one of these Spinal Tap things, where they got the wrong dimensions, and it was too little [he holds his fingers three cm apart]. We had all these t-shirts we couldn’t do anything with. When I heard A Neon Rome’s record or the Circle C record, I thought these were grandiose, beautiful records that deserved their place in the whole thing of Canadian rock. But those records never really did anything. I loved the Circle C record, but they weren’t able to do it live at the time. Maybe their story will come out one day.

A Neon Rome.
Those guys were almost the house band down at RPM when I was doing shows there. They were very popular at the time. They were a great band live, they’d go off and do these long songs. One day I was sitting somewhere and I saw their record, which was put out by New Rose Records in France, who put out Replacements records, and I said, ‘I really, really want to put this record out.’ So I formed a record company called Rightside Records and I put the record out in Canada. I loved that record. I thought, how can anybody not put out a record like this, such a beautiful record, beautiful cover? What a great record! But the singer at one point stopped talking [literally: he took a vow of silence]. You wonder why a band like that never got signed or nothing ever happened with them, because they were incredible live.

I’ve heard they were also dangerous live, hurting people in the audience.
I believe that they were to a certain extent, and they also were dangerous to themselves, too, at the time. From wherever they came from in Toronto, they knew that they were making sophisticated, universal music that was coming out at the time. I don’t know from what place inside of them it came from, but it was amazing. It’s incredible. Nowadays, you have guys like John Borra, who’s still one of the nicest guys around, playing really excellent music. He eventually became part of the lineage from Handsome Ned, in terms of cowboy stuff. But at the time he was doing psychedelic music.

Ian Blurton [Change of Heart, C'mon] was their drummer for a short period of time.
I remember Change of Heart always being around. There was a scene at the Beverley, and they would play there with bands like Vital Sines, Breeding Ground. That guy probably started when he was 16 years old or something. He always put out really great records, did really good live. If you’re going to have scene people who you recognize as the Toronto music scene, there’s Ian Blurton, Handsome Ned, Jim Cuddy. Faces to the music, those were the guys. Ian Blurton, you wonder how the guy ate for all these years, because there was never any money coming in, but he’d always be playing gigs.

There seemed to be a glass ceiling for that band.
There certainly was. They were the quintessential traveling-across-Canada-in-a-van-for-$100 band, back and forth, they did it so many times. And tried to probably go to the United States. He never had the attitude; or, he never had attitude, really. That was the good thing about him; he just wanted to play.

How did people find out about those Montreal bands that drew so well? Where did people find out about them? CKLN? BNW? Nerve?
I think it was a combination of all of those things. And once they did a gig, they were really good. If they were shit, it wouldn’t matter, they’d be come and gone. But they were all really good bands. They came out of their circle; Foufounes Electrique was a really great club at one point. There was a really great scene going on with people in Ottawa like Eugene Haslam, and in Hamilton there were guys doing shows, and in Kitchener and London, James McLean was there. And Suffer Machine was coming out of there. Disappointed a Few People were an amazing band at the time, too. There was a whole scene where bands could come in and do ten gigs in a row and do very well.

L’Etranger [early 80s Clash-y new wave band with Andrew Cash and Charles Angus]. Was that before you started booking?
A little bit before, so I wasn’t involved with them very much. I worked with Andy Cash a lot after that. When he signed a deal with Island, that was a little bit of a milestone, for someone plugging away for a long time, had really good songs, had a really good personality on stage, and got recognized by a major record label. It’s funny, because Island recognized him, an independent in its own way. When he got his deal and his songs were getting some radio airplay, “Time and Place,” that was a really good thing going on there. He was a guy who always wore his heart on his sleeve and was political, but always was a face that you could recognize Toronto rock by.

Rheostatics.
I used to work with Dave [Bidini] at the Excalibur when I was a writer at York University, and he was too. He told me he had a band, and I did some shows with those guys. (pauses) There are some guys who are the good guys of Canadian rock. I’d look at Bidini as being one of those types of people. And all the people with him, like Dave Clark and all those guys in the group. They made you feel so good whether you were in the audience or wherever.

On stage, or professionally?
Professionally, for me. Sometimes it was not so much the music. For some people it was the music, and with others it was being associated with really great people, and for me the Rheos were more like that. They never had a bad word for people, they always had a smile for people. They were always going out of their way to help other people. The way Don Kerr or Dale Morningstar [owners of Gas Station studio] are now. That’s what those guys were like then. Bidini loves Canadian rock, like Max Webster and stuff like that. He sees them as the older brothers, like Led Zeppelin would be England. He treated them with respect. Rush, and people like that, he loved those bands. They would help him, and then he would help out the littler bands. That was the nice thing going on, a sense of community.

Barenaked Ladies. Was that a fluke of time and place?
Yvonne used to book them at Ultrasound and do really well with it. At one point I became aware of them and decided I had to get involved. They had really good songs, just excellent, excellent songs. Their father would sell the tapes out of the back of his car and do really well.

Jane Siberry paved a lot of roads for non-commercial music that did really well.
I really loved her. I first saw her when she was doing her folk stuff. I thought she was really beautiful and very talented and very poetic. I started to work with her when I was taking musicians and getting them to do poetry and spoken word and performances, and she fit into that well. She was very into the whole Laurie Anderson thing, and wanted to evolve out of that. She appealed to people and worked really hard to get her own thing going.

She was really smart. She had her band, she was the leader of her band, she put up her posters all over the place, and she worked her way up the ladder one rung at a time. From a little club to a bigger club. She had both things, which was the best thing about her: she had a firm understanding of what it takes to be successful and all the hard work she had to put into it, and she and Bob Blumer went into the United States early, and worked hard to get the level of recognition going. Subsequently, 20 years later, she can still go to places like New York and Los Angeles where she has a following, because she worked it back then.

She took a lot of chances, too, and sometimes she’d miss the mark. But because she did that, she stayed ahead of the game and didn’t get lost, whereas so many other people just got lost and became clichés afterwards. She never did become a cliché. Even now.

Why do you think her music became so accepted, beyond just her hard work?
People like her and, say, John Critchley [of 13 Engines], they have a very broad sense of what’s going on in the world. They look at you when you talk to them, but they don’t look at you totally in the eye. You can see that the wheels are always moving in their head. They’re always thinking about how they can change things, how to do something different from what everyone else is trying to do. With her, she always knew how to change things and make things different. She was never going to let anybody tie her down. It all came from within her. And she was an artist, too. That’s how her head worked, like Joni Mitchell. They were always going to change. I don’t think she even thinks about it; I think it just happens.

Mary Margaret O’Hara.
Again, there’s somebody to an extreme, though. She’ll be so popular that Michael Stipe announced her from the stage here.

And that’s 12 years later.
Yeah. People are still knocked out by her. With her, though, it’s her beauty and her fault that she can’t understand the mechanisms of commerciality. She won’t go down that road. In a way it’s artistically really good, because she’s able to put out a record like she did, and play with the Glass Orchestra or whatever she does, an evening of love songs, and then you won’t see her again. That’s the positive. The fault is that if she’d learn to take a step towards the centre of the road, she could be huge. But she won’t, or she can’t, or she doesn’t know how, or whatever it is.

Did you see the Go Deo Chorus? [O’Hara’s first band]
Yeah. There was this place in Toronto called the Blue Angel, where Ultrasound was, and it was kind of this white elephant of a place. She’d play there, and she also had her way of writing, and she did the logos for the Rivoli and posters for people. She would do those kinds of gigs. Very much a Queen St. diva at the time.

You mentioned Critchley, and there was another band who went to the States right away.
Critchley realized what was going on with Husker Du and the Replacements and all these bands, and he went down to Minneapolis to record and play in the States. He was doing something which a lot of people failed to do, which was just go down there and knock on some doors and eventually they would open. But they were hard.

I remember trying to get gigs for the Gruesomes in the United States, and there was nothing happening, nobody wanted to know. One time this girl sent us a letter saying she wanted to invite the Gruesomes down to New York to play and we drove down there, did the gig, and afterwards she had no money to pay us. That kind of stuff. For a Cdn band, it was very difficult, and difficult to draw across Canada because it was so huge. There were daunting tasks. You could sit down with Ian Blurton and he could probably list a million reasons why things never happen and why it’s so difficult.

Were you managing the Gruesomes?
I just booked them and was friends with them. I never did any managing, I was always just friends with people. There was this band, Rang Tango, at the time when Blue Rodeo was starting. They were such a big band in Toronto at the time, and she was so good, they were making great music and packing houses. That was the one time I went to someone and said, can I manage you? I guess they looked at me and said, ‘you’re too scruffy’ or ‘you’re not enough of a businessman’ or ‘we think we can do better.’ They said no. That sort of frightened me after that; I didn’t want to put myself on the line for people and ask their permission to work with them. I know I’m good and I know I can make money off of what I was doing, so I went back to that. I never managed everybody after that.

They got signed to a deal and then fired the band, is that what happened?
They got signed to a deal and got a lawyer to manage them. It was ridiculous. They’d be playing the Silver Dollar and this lawyer would be running around backstage, telling everybody what to do. And everything was fine beforehand. Then the record company said, ‘we want to sign you but fire the band.’ She had to make this hard decision. She made the wrong decision. It would be like saying to Blue Rodeo, ‘Fire that fat bass player! Fire that postman drummer! You don’t need all that stuff, just use your two beautiful singers.’ But that’s why bands are bands, it’s that intangible quality, and it also keeps the lead singer’s head down to a reasonable level, by having everybody in the band, and having band meetings and band practices. That’s what was wrong in her case. She made a lot of moves, but she’s paid everything back in spades in subsequent years. She realizes she made a mistake, and if she could take it back she would. Again, she’s one of the nicest people in Cdn rock.

The east coast explosion in ’91 with Sloan.
People were going out to the east coast and coming back and saying, ‘there’s this amazing band called Sloan down there.’ I brought them to Toronto to do gigs. They were not unlike the Gruesomes in that, um, they were totally naïve in the way they were. They were making really fresh music, really good music. They did very well when they played gigs. And then Eric’s Trip, they came down to open for Sonic Youth at the Concert Hall. Again, that started rolling. They were really good, they draw people, and all the other bands followed suit coming out of there. For a while there, there were a whole lot of really good bands coming out of there.

I seem to remember some Toronto snobbery towards those bands at the time. Or was it all hyped up too much?
I think those bands were really great bands. They had a lot of confidence. Because they came from so far away, they travelled 15-20 hours to get here, they built up a bit of protection around themselves and self-confidence. They did very well.

Edgefests.
The shining moment for me was when Dave Bookman and I booked an Edgefest at the Ampitheatre. I had done a few of them, and things went well and people came out. Lowest of the Low, Violent Femmes, the Rheos. One time [1995] we just wanted to do a show, it was the show with no fat, we called it; we didn’t want any bad bands on the show. We had so many great bands, 40 bands or whatever. Bookman’s girlfriend at the time did a poster and a t-shirt. There was only one bad band we had on the show, that we were forced to put on. What were their names—a funky bass player from Toronto, I forget.

But every other band was amazing. From Montreal there was Merlin, from the east coast there was Thursh Hermit—the Steve Miller set! [Thrush Hermit’s entire set that day was spent covering Steve Miller’s Greatest Hits album.] That was such a beautiful moment. To have the sense of irony that they had, and for the biggest moment in front of their biggest crowd, instead of going for it and playing a set to do that, that’s when you realize you have a sense of community here and a band with a guy like Joel [Plaskett], a superstar singer like that who said, ‘You know, I don’t care if I sell a million records. This is my moment and I’m going to enjoy it.’ And for him to make the audience enjoy it that much, everybody understood the joke at that point.

No bad bands on it, really good bands, people came out that day, about 4000 people. Bands like Cub and Pluto from out west, bands of every single kind, and Sloan was doing sort of their farewell gig at that time. That’s when you saw, there are 40 amazing bands in Canada doing really good and who can take their place with anything. A lot of credit goes to Dave Bookman, too, for thinking of the whole thing, and helping a lot of bands along. And Sloan for leading the charge with all these bands.

Any other highlight moments for you like that? Seminal shows or bands?
Well you know, all the marijuana smoked clouds my mind a lot. I really liked the Lowest of the Low. When you see a band like that achieve the commercial thing too, with people lining up to see them, that was exciting to see. [Lefko coaxed them out of retirement a year after this conversation, for three shows at the Kool Haus that sold out instantly. It was his last hurrah in Toronto before moving to L.A.]

Doing my first show at Massey Hall with Grapes of Wrath, and having John Critchley's 13 Engines open. Doing shows at the Concert Hall with Skinny Puppy, or Sarah McLachlan at the Diamond Club. Having giant line-ups and doing really well with those things.


-end-

Northern Wishes: Rheostatics p2

More excerpts today from the Rheostatics chapter in Have Not Been the Same. (see here for explanation.)

Last night's Starlight show had an awkward, tentative feel to it--due in no small part to the fact that Martin Tielli was rendered mute by a terrible case of laryngitis. In short, the decidedly unsentimental set felt not at all like starting a victory lap for ending a storied career, but instead very much like the opening night of their annual week-long club stint, the Fall Nationals, and diehard fans will know what I mean. More on all this at a later date, but here's the set list (not in order), which also continued many unusual and unlikely choices.

Fat (opening song); Me and Stupid; Here Comes the Image; Marginalized; Ozzie; Little Bird; Feed Yourself; Four Little Songs (with guest keyboardist Ford Pier taking a hilarious turn at one of them); Soul Glue; Claire (with Paul Macleod and Danny Michel on backing vocals); Horses (with Six Shooter/Gun Street Girl Caitlin Veitch on lead vocals); When Winter Comes; RDA (final encore closer); Clouds (first encore opener, Tim solo); Legal Age Life.

Martin songs as sung by others--he could barely speak, never mind sing:
Selina Martin: Rain Rain Rain; Dopefiends and Boozehounds
Paul Macleod: Fishtailin’; Record Body Count/Aliens
Jennifer Foster: Take Me In Your Hand

Corrections are welcome.

Now back to our story...

In 1987, the Rheostatics were finalizing their shift to roots music before recording Greatest Hits. “That’s when we shucked where we had been and went to where we were at,” says Dave Clark, citing The Band and Fairport Convention as new influences. “Dave [Bidini] was discovering acoustic guitar. He and Martin [Tielli] egged each other on, and everyone kept upping the ante.”

This new productivity inspired them to traverse the country they’d already started to sing about in songs like “Canadian Dream,” a [Tim] Vesely composition about his eye-opening travels with L’Etranger. Vesely set up a Rheostatics tour with the help of Sandy Pandya, Andrew Cash’s future wife and manager who was then based in Regina, and Jay Scott in Vancouver. Scott was organizing a festival of independent music for that summer, which featured Deja Voodoo, DOA, October Crisis, and a ragtag team from Toronto that included 13 Engines, UIC, Suffer Machine, Pigfarm, and the Bookmen. “There was a massive traffic jam heading towards Vancouver,” says Dave Clark. “The whole thing was a meeting of the minds, and we were so high on the idea of being away from home.”

The band had tartan jackets made up for the occasion, and hit the road – for two and a half months. There were no more than three gigs a week, and they spent most of the time camping and hanging out with new friends and acquaintances. “It was triumphant when we played in Vancouver, because all these bands were from all over and it was like a competition, even though it was a festival,” recalls Bidini. “We won a lot of hearts when we went in there. Some people who had never heard our music before were singing our music.”

Tielli, who is the youngest member of the band and was 19 at the time, remembers the experience with a considerably more mixed reaction. “The first tour across Canada was a mind rake,” he says, “starting with Thunder Bay, which was a place of debauchery that I’d never seen or experienced before, and I was right in the middle of it. The first tour was a socializing experience for me. It basically fucked me up for ten years. Just hanging out with so many new people all the time, drinking with them and losing control, wonderful things like that. It’s one thing to go to India or Italy or whatever, but to go across Canada is to meet a lot of people that you do actually understand. That was my first time meeting so many people my age, and hearing what they had to say, and being very impressed by them. Really nice people who had similar ideas as me, who had done amazing things. Also falling in love, and gross sexual encounters. But that was only in Thunder Bay, may I stress. And really hating other people, guys who thought they were cool, people who thought they were hipper than hip, everything I was against.” Tielli was inspired by the Prairies and the scenery in general, which would creep into material he would pen for the Melville album, which was all written when the Rheostatics returned from the tour.

Dave Clark had started to recite some of his nonsensical poetry during sets, partly to fill time left void by technical difficulties. “Martin had the shittiest gear in town and he always had to tune it, after almost every song, sometimes after half a song,” says Clark. “His gear wouldn’t work, and he’d be backstage hammering these effects boxes back together, that were just crap. While he was doing that, I would jump upstage and it would be this free improv thing. And that would stretch into our music; then we started forsaking set lists and segueing songs one after another.”

There was one other important thing the band would discover: rock and roll. On the way home, their vehicle had broken down, and they hitched a ride back with 13 Engines. The two bands would also share gigs, combining the dates that they had booked separately before they left. Tielli began covering John Critchley’s song “Indian Arrow” in the Rheos’ set. “[13 Engines] were more straightforward with their sound and we were more eclectic, but it meshed well,” says Clark. “It was inspiring to hear a band chunk it out on a couple of chords and really make it happen. We became the best of friends, and Tim was never the same after that.”

Tim Vesely in particular was a huge 13 Engines fan, ever since their days as the Ikons. Dave Clark would later move into the 13 Engines communal house on Bathurst Street. “They lived like the Replacements, it was pretty wild,” says Clark. “The one woman who lived in the house used to rake all our junk into the centre of the room every Saturday morning and scream at the top of her lungs. It was pretty evil.”

When they returned to Toronto, Greatest Hits was released to a rather tepid reaction, with the exception of Nerve magazine, where Bidini was penning rock journalism, and David Wisdom, the host of CBC’s Night Lines. Wisdom had heard about a band who had a song about a hockey player and asked a Vancouver record clerk who it was. “I found Greatest Hits on LP, it had just come out,” says Wisdom. “I thought every song was really, really good. I liked the sound right away. There was something funny about it, but at the core it was something serious. It wasn’t trivial. It sounded like people who really cared about what they were doing. It also sounded really Canadian to me, rather than aping any English or American sound. And despite the fact that the guys were pretty young, there was something a little older about them. They weren’t posers at all. I read that through the music before I ever talked to them.”

Bidini recalls, “He sent us a postcard back and said, ‘You’re the greatest band in Canada.’ I was blown away, thinking, from that [album]? Wisdom was the first guy to come out and say ‘these guys are special,’ and that’s a beautiful thing. It was pretty nice getting a postcard from a CBC DJ when nobody else would even take your calls.”

The next step for the Rheostatics would be a eight-gig, 28-day tour of Ireland in October, 1988, set up on a handshake by an acquaintance from Bidini’s Trinity days. Although there were highlights of the trip, the biggest lesson, says Vesely, was that the band “learned how much we hated each other. It came to a head over there. We were probably dreaming more than we should have been, in terms of going over there and doing anything. It was ambitious. It put a bit of stress on it. We always did it for fun, and didn’t really expect anything to come of it other than a good time. By then, we’d been doing it for a few years, and then we thought that was it for the band.”

“I was still wrestling with the idealisms I had before I joined,” says Tielli, who initiated the break-up. “I wasn’t particularly into being a silly band, and things were really silly. I didn’t like hosers.”

“Martin didn’t know what he wanted to do,” says Bidini. “He was unsure about the whole rock’n’roll thing. The ‘87 tour took a bit of a toll on him, because he had only ever been in his basement, really. We were a little older, and we came into rock’n’roll knowing what was part of the package, but I don’t think he did, really.”

The band played one gig without Tielli, an invitation to play a Brave New Waves anniversary show in Montreal that they felt they couldn’t refuse. Tielli tried to start another band, to no avail. “I realized that it would have to be good, and I would have to be totally in control, writing all the parts – and I wasn’t ready for that,” he says. “I couldn’t find a situation that was as good [as the Rheos], great players and intuitive. We had already developed this way of working together that was really efficient and instant.”

Instead, he went back to school and finished his high school diploma. Vesely did some travelling, and Clark went on the road with Pigfarm. Bidini did some work as a researcher and fill-in host for Brave New Waves. After a year’s break, Tim Vesely brought the band back together when he and Tielli had started hanging out again. Vesely had some fiction published in an Erindale College anthology of student writing, and his professor asked if the Rheostatics would play the launch party at the Rivoli.

“It totally made sense,” says Tielli. “I don’t think we ever even talked about it. We just played the gig, and it was a blast.” Dave Clark recalls, “I told Dave that I would never get on stage with Martin again. But I did. We got together and jammed and it was way better, like we were never apart. We did need the breather. For Dave, Tim and I, we were basically each other’s family since we were post-pubescent. I saw more of them than anybody I know, and vice-versa. It was very invigorating.”

“People appreciated us playing,” says Vesely. “People like [Toronto music critic] Howard Druckman saying, ‘I’m really glad you guys got back together’ made us feel really good. We recorded a demo in two days, which was Melville.”

The Melville sessions, in December 1989, were buoyed by the band’s newfound enthusiasm and a host of new material. Once again, it was a dramatic departure from the band’s past. There were two distinctively new features. One was Tielli’s use of the Steinberger guitar, which allowed him to become far more dramatic and evocative, giving the band new soundscape possibilities. The other was Clark’s drumming style, which avoided obvious beat placements and, together with Vesely’s bass, transformed what should have been simple three or four-chord folk songs into complex grooves that were complementary rather than sounding prog.

“I started looking at music and rhythm differently,” says Clark. “I didn’t feel that the drummer was responsible for holding down the groove for the whole band, and the band agreed – it was everybody’s responsibility. Shifting simple grooves around, colouration and modulating times was the way to go about doing things. It didn’t come out as some sort of mathematical thing; it was going with my gut.”

The band steered away from conventional arrangements, and workshopped songs until they found their natural surroundings. “We’d play them any way we felt we could until we hit on something,” says Clark. “Sometimes it happened in a second, sometimes only after we played it a bunch of times. I read about the Beatles, how they would try a song in every different feel they could think of, and that’s what we did. I like musicians who can take something simple, add one or two things to it that change the song completely.”

The band called on Michael Phillip Wojewoda to produce the sessions. Wojewoda had started his career working at The Music Gallery, the hub of experimental music in Toronto. He was hired there through the recommendation of John Oswald, the future pioneer of the sound-art known as “plunderphonics,” who had dated Wojewoda’s sister. “It was a great place to have your first experiences, because the music wasn’t just some blues band,” says Wojewoda. “It was some guy stripping to his waist, rubbing his body with oil, and setting his cello on fire. And the better part of it is, that if I don’t record it well, no one’s the wiser!”

When he was called to work on Melville, Wojewoda had honed his craft with the likes of Change of Heart, the Shuffle Demons, the Doughboys and the Plastercene Replicas. But Melville was an album that didn’t sound like any other. He says, “Every band has a critical mass, if they have it at all,” he says. “It’s a combination of people and players. I started getting connected to what they were all about dynamically when they did that cover of [Gordon Lightfoot’s] ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,’ which I absolutely insisted that they did for Melville,” Wojewoda continues, referring to one of two closing tracks that were recorded after the initial session. “It had that improvising, soundscaping quality that they do so well. People were struck by the exotic combination of elements, especially the tracks that mixed the prog rock with folk, on tracks like ‘It’ and ‘Christopher.’ The understanding of dynamics is something I learned from them, and then applied to other projects. Especially Martin, and not just volume dynamics.”

The mood in the studio was enthusiastic, which spread to anyone who happened to eavesdrop on the proceedings. “Gaggles of other people would drop by during a playback,” recalls Wojewoda. “They’d stand there and listen, and just say ‘wow.’ Whether you think you’re making ‘Stairway to Heaven’ or not, and whether or not it’s going to be critically accepted or have commercial value, you can tell if it’s good.”

David Wisdom was even more taken with Melville than he was with Greatest Hits. “It still moves me deeply, that record,” he says. “Melville is one of the great Canadian albums. I put it up there with music by The Band and Neil Young, their very best work.” Years later, when the band released an album of material they recorded for a Night Lines session, Wisdom would pen the liner notes, with this to say: “They’ve got that high, lonesome sound that makes me feel sad and joyous, a fleeting speck in the universe and part of something eternal, all at the same time. Since I’ve started listening to the Rheostatics, I have become a Canadian citizen, and as I swore my allegiance to the Big Dominion, that song of theirs, ‘Northern Wish,’ was running through my head.”

The singing and songwriting balance was tipped in Tielli’s favour on Melville: Vesely wrote and sang one track; Bidini wrote four songs, two of them sung and partially co-written by Tielli (“Northern Wish,” “Saskatchewan”); and half of the songs were written solely by Tielli, who had written furiously during the band’s hiatus. In fact, most of his songs on both Melville and Whale Music were written while he was working an overnight job that would provide direct inspiration for one of his greatest narratives, “Self-Serve Gas Station.” “I’d get maybe six or seven customers a night,” recalls Tielli. “I set up a four-track, and I had no choice other than to sing. I would write about incredibly inane things, and eventually you go from the inane to the insane and everything in between. I wrote about 60 songs or so.”

Tielli claims most of the songs that would become Rheostatics standards were conceived during one two-week period, when he let a homeless kid sleep in the gas station. “I got fired from that job because they thought I was gay,” he laughs. One night, he went in for his shift and the girl working before him was having a birthday party at work. “There was a bunch of these little rocker chicks hanging around. I was sitting there looking at my itinerary. The following morning my friend was coming to photograph me for the [University of Toronto student paper] Varsity, playing my sitar in the gas station. I had written down ‘7 a.m. Dave’s coming by.’ And just above or below that I had written ‘bring vaseline,’” which Tielli used to help lubricate his hands for the sitar he was still learning how to play. “The girls said, ‘Let me see what you’re writing!’ They read this, and my face dropped. I said, ‘No, I have dry hands!’ I wasn’t convincing enough, and they fired me, supposedly because I didn’t show up for a day.”

The influence of the band’s suburban upbringing would echo through many of their greatest songs. Along with the then-unusual practice of explicitly Canadian lyrics, the Rheostatics also stood out for unashamedly coming from Etobicoke, not Toronto. The suburbs were something you were supposed to leave behind when you moved downtown, but it informed the Rheos’ approach and solidified their reputation as existing outside of “downtown cool.”

“I never liked living in the suburbs,” says Tielli, “and I would have hated it more living in the city. But it’s not a matter of choosing what to write about; it was a matter of writing what I knew. A lot of it on my part would have been: ‘What the fuck am I doing in this wasteland?’ Which wasn’t that bad of a wasteland; it’s more of a wasteland now than when I was a kid. ‘What am I doing here and how do I get out to the country’ was my concern for most of my youth. People would say, ‘Why do you write about this stuff? Cut out this Canadian shit.’”

Shortly after recording Melville, Bidini enlisted them into Save the Rails, a musical caravan weekend tour protesting cutbacks to Via rail service by the federal Tories. Bidini had a wedding in Columbus, Ohio, however, and had neglected to tell his bandmates about the tour. “The first thing I heard about it,” Dave Clark says, “was when I read in the newspaper that we were playing.” Also on the tour was the Skydiggers, Stephen Steve & Big Smoke, Pat Temple’s High Lonesome Players, the Cajun Ramblers, Positively Stompin’, and the Grievous Angels, with tour organizer Chuck Angus. “It was a whole bunch of folkies, and I don’t think we ever rocked as hard as we did,” says Tielli, who would later pen the lyric: “I can’t stop writing punk rock/ because I’m stuck in a ghetto of folkies.”

There were three dates in Cochrane, Timmins and Kapuskasking, and Dave Clark recalls the tour as being “a proud and ignoble moment.” “We were pretty extreme,” laughs Tielli. “Naked in the snow in Kapuskasking in February and things like that.” The booze-fuelled Rheostatics were the bad boys of the tour who got into trouble with Angus, but it was there they met violinist Dave Allen and pedal steel guitarist Lewis Melville. Both were playing in Pat Temple’s band, and both would shape the band’s sound over the next two years.

Lewis Melville would have a particular impact on the band, which is why they eventually decided to name their recently-completed album after him. Melville had been playing rock, soul, country, bluegrass and experimental music around the province since the late ‘60s, and lived in Guelph, where he worked as a biology lab technician. In 1993, he and his friend Dave Teichroeb would start the indie label DROG (Dave’s Records of Guelph), which launched with the re-release of Greatest Hits and would continue to have a long association with the Rheostatics. A quiet, unassuming man, Melville holds deep convictions about making music outside of the worlds of commerce and artifice. With little prompting, he’s always more than willing to share these beliefs at length with younger musicians.

Dave Clark recalls, “When we started playing Guelph, it became a real bastion of support for what we did, because we could come out of town and have these special moments playing at the Albion Hotel. There was a certain team effort; everyone felt like they were going for it together. Our sets started getting longer and longer until we could just play for hours. The audiences were playful, and great listeners. Then Lew started sitting in and that started stretching out our minds a bit more. Lew had great textural ideas, and he’d say, ‘Come record at my house!’ We made all these great recordings, some of which we went on to re-record for albums, but some of them eclipse what was done on albums. Others never appeared but were great songs.”

In Toronto, audiences were realizing that this was a new chapter for the band, full of infinite possibilities. Yvonne Matsell had just started booking a new Queen Street. club called Ultrasound, where a few years later she would book the band for week-long stints dubbed Green Sprouts Music Week. The club’s soundman was Gary Stokes, who would later tour with the band and record their Double Live album. Matsell recalls, “The first time I booked them, which was in 1990, Gary Stokes and I both kind of looked at each other oddly. The way the Rheostatics are to new people – nobody gets it, I think. Gary turned to me as if to say, ‘What have you done?’ The next time, the light bulb went on over both our heads. It just sunk in. But the first couple of times, it was like, “What is this?” Now I hardly ever miss a show in town.”

-end of part two-