Have Not Been the Same: Some party

Downie and myself at Hillside Festival, Guelph

Later this week, Have Not Been the Same, the 10th anniversary revision/reissue, should be on bookstore shelves across the country. The launch party is Friday, June 10 at Lee’s Palace in Toronto, featuring Weeping Tile, King Cobb Steelie and Kevin Kane of the Grapes of Wrath (tickets available from Soundscapes, Rotate This and Ticketmaster).

Between now and the date of the launch party, Radio Free Canuckistan will provide a series of insights into the origin of the book, what went into the reissue, and everything you never knew you wanted to know about the project.

(photo by Carolyn Mill, taken at Hillside 2010)

I owe Gord Downie an apology.

The Tragically Hip frontman was one the most generous interview subjects in the book—once we finally got an interview with him and bassist Gord Sinclair, which wasn’t easy and took a several-pronged lobbying attempt. (Thank you, Chris Brown). Jason Schneider and I decided to tag-team the interview, even though the Hip are clearly Jason’s territory: he owned every bootleg recording and had travelled great distances to see them over the years, and he was the one writing the chapter about them.

For whatever reason, the only time we were able to get to speak to them was at a tour stop in Syracuse, New York. Downie was intrigued by the approach of the book, and that our questions seemed to be as much about his peers—the smaller acts that he had long championed and invited to open for the Hip—as it was about his own band. On stage that night, he introduced “Ahead by a Century” by calling it “Have Not Been the Same,” a reference that of course only two people in the upstate New York audience understood—and we were thrilled.

When it came time to ask someone famous to contribute a forward to a book written by three nobodies, Downie’s name was at the top of our list. Amazingly, he agreed. Much to the concern of the publisher, however, he decided to do so in the form of a poem.

A weird move, sure. But anyone who’s spent time with Downie, either verbally or in correspondence, will know that direct communication is not his strong point. He’s a poet by nature. He’s the same off-stage as he is on, in a way—those free-associative ramblings in the middle of and in between songs are really the way he thinks in everyday life. His wheels are constantly turning; his words are meticulously chosen, consciously working on several levels at once. As I got to know him—which was not much at all, really—the idea of him writing some linear essay about his experiences in Canadian music seemed ridiculous. So a poem it was, and a fine one it was that suited the occasion .

Having Downie’s name on the front cover of our book was, of course, a huge coup. And it should have been enough. But then he went and hired some of our favourite musicians for his solo band, musicians who represented the scope of our book in many ways. Wouldn’t it be great if they all played our launch party?

And so we invited Julie Doiron and Dinner is Ruined, who were four-fifths of Gord Downie's Country of Miracles, to play our party at Lee’s Palace on September 29, 2001. We had other reasons to invite them: I was a big fan of Dinner is Ruined, featuring my favourite drummer in the world, Dave Clark; Doiron, of the late, great Eric’s Trip, represented the East Coast for the evening. Chris Brown and Kate Fenner—dear friends of mine, who Downie had asked to join the Hip on their most recent tour—had already volunteered to drive up from New York City just for the occasion. One of Downie’s personal heroes, Ian Blurton of Change of Heart, was also playing that night with his new band Blurtonia. How could he refuse?

Downie didn’t show, it turns out. I can’t blame him; I’m sure most people expected him to be there, and the very private rock star probably preferred to stay home with his family and avoid being mobbed.

And so I’d like to now publicly apologize to him for indirectly trying to trick him into playing our book launch.

As it turns out, we did have a secret special guest that night.

I discovered that my friend Carolyn Mark from Victoria happened to be in Toronto that week, and she agreed to play. (Her 2000 album Party Girl was one of my favourites at the time, and which featured plenty of CanRock Renaissance heroes like Sarah Harmer, Ian Blurton and Shadowy Men’s Brian Connelly). Mark pointed out that her good friend Neko Case was also going to be in Toronto the night of our launch, before a tour stop at the Horseshoe.

All I had to do was ask: Neko instantly agreed to be on the bill as well, as long as her name wasn’t advertised (so as not to take away from her Horseshoe show). It was a perfect fit: Neko not only got her start on Mint Records, which is discussed in the book, but she had just released an EP of Canadian covers of people like the Inbreds’ Mike O’Neill, Neil Young and Lisa Marr of Cub. Of course, she was amazing and generous and funny, onstage and off, as she always is, and I got to introduce her to my dad (who was a bit star-struck; he’s a huge fan of her 1997 debut, The Virginian).

At the time, there were actually some people upset that the secret guest was Neko Case, and not someone more famous, I suppose. Hopefully they’ve bought a few of her records since and realize how lucky they were to see her, especially when she covered Destroyer’s “No Ceasefires.” (Why she—or the New Pornographers—has yet to record that is beyond me.)

The surprise star of the night for many (not for me, an old fan) was Chris Brown and Kate Fenner. I’ve seen them probably a hundred times in almost every situation (from a tiny bar to Massey Hall), but that night they were electrifying. Their lyrics, which I had always found inspiring, took on extra resonance in those weeks after 9/11. They covered The Band’s “Tears of Rage” and The Tragically Hip’s “Scared.” They had the entire unruly, talkative audience suddenly captive. I’ve felt eternally in debt to them for their performance that evening.

The rest of the bill? Blurtonia was loud and proud and the ideal act to rile up a bill that consisted mostly of singer/songwriters. Carolyn Mark played what I think is one of the best Canadian songs of the 2000s, her own “Edmonton.” Dinner is Ruined provided some comic relief when they started riffing on my favourite negative review of the book, which had run in that week’s Now Magazine: “Ho-fucking-hum” (as it turns out, that makes a great chorus of a song). Michele Gould of Lava Hay introduced a new project. John Critchley of 13 Engines delivered what I believe was one of his last high-profile solo shows before he became an in-demand producer. Groovy Religion brought the spirit of Elvis Mondays to the event, and that band’s bassist John Borra represented the Handsome Ned tradition of Queen St. country music with his own band, featuring original Blue Rodeo drummer Cleave Anderson. (I also owe John Borra a public apology for scheduling the two acts he plays in as the evening’s bookends, making it a marathon for him.)

In many ways, it was a perfect bill, with many of our heroes from Victoria to Moncton sharing a stage together, from mid-’80s Queen St. lifers to late-’90s West Coast women who would help shape the coming decade. I don’t know what Downie was doing that night, but he could rest easy knowing that his peers were carrying the weight, that neither somebody’s book launch—nor the country’s culture in general—needs to depend on any one superstar to show up in order to be a success.

Have Not Been the Same: Weeping Tile

Later this week, Have Not Been the Same, the 10th anniversary revision/reissue, should be on bookstore shelves across the country. The launch party is Friday, June 10 at Lee’s Palace in Toronto, featuring Weeping Tile, King Cobb Steelie and Kevin Kane of the Grapes of Wrath (tickets available from Soundscapes, Rotate This and Ticketmaster).

Between now and the date of the launch party, Radio Free Canuckistan will provide a series of insights into the origin of the book, what went into the reissue, and everything you never knew you wanted to know about the project.

(photo of Weeping Tile at Wolfe Island Festival 2007 by Frank Yang, Chromewaves)

They say that rock’n’roll is the fountain of youth. Of course it is: at the ripe old age of 39 I wouldn’t still have good friends under the age of 25 unless we both somehow bonded over music.

One such friend, however—though she’s been a fantastic supporter and promoter of live music in Toronto and Montreal for the past five years—gave me blank stares when I told her who was playing my book launch.While dispiriting, that underscores part of the reason why I wanted to have this book in print again. It also proved to me that perhaps some introductions are in order.

Unlike the launch of the first edition in 2001, (which I’ll reminisce about in a later post), we wanted to keep our bill to three bands, ideally reunions of bands from the book to make the night more of an event. Each of the three co-authors got to pick an artist; several had to decline for various reasons, some never got back to us, and some we didn’t get a chance to ask (no hard feelings?) before we landed on the current line-up, which we’re incredibly proud to present.

Today, we’ll look at our headliner (note: they’re playing the middle slot, however, so don’t be late!).

Everyone knows and loves Sarah Harmer for her work in the past 12 years as an award-winning singer/songwriter, composer of intergenerational Canadian classics tailor-made for cottage campfires and homesick expatriates, team player and best bud to people like the Weakerthans, Holy Fuck, Feist, Neko Case, and hundreds more. After her 2005 acoustic album I’m A Mountain, she retreated for several years to focus on environmental lobbying, returning in 2010 with the album Oh Little Fire.

What people might not know or remember is that Harmer first emerged playing electric guitar and fronting Weeping Tile, a rock band that was part Breeders, part Neil Young, and 100% awesome, a band who could convincingly cover both the Replacements and the Beastie Boys (“Sabotage,” anyway). They released two albums on Warner, as well as 1994 EP featuring an early version of her 2000 smash solo hit “Basement Apt.” The band split up amicably in 1998; Harmer went solo and the rest of the band formed Luther Wright and the Wrongs. Since then there have been occasional reunions in Kingston (usually a Christmas benefit show for the Salvation Army), but only one Toronto appearance—which was over 10 years ago. The upcoming book launch show features the 1995 line-up of the band, with sister Mary Harmer on bass alongside Wright and drummer Cam Giroux.

When Harmer’s solo career took off in 2000, I was a bit incredulous. Not because the album You Were Here wasn’t amazing: every track on it was a classic, and the word of mouth was so strong thousands of fans knew every word of those songs when she played on the mainstage of the Hillside festival before it got re-released by a major label.

No, I was shocked because how could all of these people not see before what a huge talent Harmer was from day one? It’s all right there on the first EP (actually a self-released cassette that Warner re-released); every song on there perfectly captures twentysomething angst living in a small, picturesque university town somewhere along the 401. Her voice is a stunning gift, like that of her friends Feist or Neko Case; though none of those three women sound alike, they’re all capable of captivating you with their first note. Listen to the original “Basement Apt.” vocal, the way her voice crackles on the line “below street level / barely alive”—you know she feels that hurt, that ache. As Harmer matured as an artist, she got more professional and better in many ways, but there’s an honesty and an urgency to her Weeping Tile material that still strikes a raw nerve. I love everything she’s ever done, but those records still kick me in the gut.

Gord Downie, who was close friends with several of Harmer’s older siblings when The Tragically Hip was just beginning, recalls hearing a 16-year-old Sarah play for him by the family’s pool near Burlington, Ontario. “Maybe I knew four chords, but she already knew five,” Downie once told me. “After doing 600 gigs that week, I would sing with her in a ragged voice, and she had the voice of a bird. I sensed she had this look on her face like, ‘Jesus, if you can do it, I certainly can.’ But I had nothing to teach her, let's put it that way.” A year later, she was asked to join a rootsy band called the Saddletramps. At Queen’s University in Kingston, she formed Weeping Tile, a band where she was the only consistent member.

By 1998, Weeping Tile was a victim of changing tides in the industry—they hit their stride as the boom was going bust. On her own, Harmer started from scratch the old-fashioned way: playing house shows, selling her albums through mail order from her farmhouse outside Kingston, and winning a whole new audience with just her guitar and her songs. She started out with an album of back-porch, old-timey covers recorded with a friend for her father (Songs For Clem), followed by You Were Here, a more concerted—but not compromised—pop bid that proved wildly successful, going platinum in Canada and even making a fan out of David Letterman.

Harmer was an icon to many I knew—especially female musicians—for who she was as much as for her songs themselves. Most women in rock then were solo artists; few fronted a real band. Most women, as the stereotype goes, opted for softer music; even in the grunge era, few strapped on electric guitars and let loose (there’s a definite PJ Harvey influence on some songs from 1997’s Valentino). Harmer wasn’t a glam girl, nor was she grungy; she was your sister, your friend, the modest performer who shows up at the open mic night and blows everyone away. There were no pretensions there—“unshaven, of course I am”—because there didn’t need to be, with talents and charisma as natural as Harmer’s.

No wonder everyone started lining up to work with her: around the turn of the decade, she seemed to be singing on everybody’s album, especially those who came before her in the CanRock Renaissance and saw a kindred spirit: Rheostatics, Blue Rodeo, Skydiggers, Weakerthans, Neko Case, and a dozen more. In both Weeping Tile and on her own, Harmer wrote with a distinctively Canadian voice, very much a product of the CanRock Renaissance she grew up in.

All of which is why I’m ecstatic that Weeping Tile are playing the book launch for Have Not Been the Same’s 10th anniversary.

Have Not Been the Same: The birth of the book

Later this week, Have Not Been the Same, the 10^th anniversary revision/reissue, should be on bookstore shelves across the country. The launch party is Friday, June 10 at Lee’s Palace in Toronto, featuring Weeping Tile, King Cobb Steelie and Kevin Kane of the Grapes of Wrath (tickets available from Soundscapes, Rotate This and Ticketmaster).

Between now and the date of the launch party, Radio Free Canuckistan will provide a series of insights into the origin of the book, what went into the reissue, and everything you never knew you wanted to know about the project.

Chapter two: The birth of the book

They say that the music you loved between the ages of 13 and 23 is the music you will love for the rest of your life. That music is the soundtrack to the most tumultuous time of your life, a time of upheaval, a time that leaves vivid memories that haunt you for the rest of your life.

I was 13 in 1985; 23 in 1995. My co-author Jason Schneider is the same age; Ian Jack is a couple of years younger. Obviously the music in this book is the music of our youth, and as such it has a mythic mystery about it that resonates with us in ways that very little else has had since. All three of us seek out all sorts of new music and love it deeply, but in many ways the artists in this book are the ones that define us.

From 1993 to 1999, I was the music editor (among other things) at Id Magazine, an alt-weekly out of Guelph, Ontario, that also served Kitchener-Waterloo, Hamilton, London, St. Catharines and Windsor—basically all the university towns west of Toronto. Jason and Ian were both music writers; Jason also covered news, literature and just about anything else. We had each thought of writing a book about Canadian music individually; I proposed we do it together.

Each of us had artists that specifically inspired us to do this. We each loved one of the big mainstream bands of the period: for Jason, it was The Tragically Hip, for Ian it was Sloan, for me it was Blue Rodeo. And we each had an underdog band that we felt never got proper due from mainstream Canada: for Jason it was Change of Heart, for Ian it was Men Without Hats (who did have a huge single, admittedly), for me it was the Rheostatics.

We had a lot of support from friends, peers and our subject matter, but we also met with some quizzical looks. “Are you sure you have enough material to fill a book?” asked one older music writer, whose name honestly escapes me now. (The end result was over 700 pages long.) “What’s so good about the ’80s?” I was asked by Hugh Marsh, the brilliant violinist extraordinaire for Mary Margaret O’Hara and Bruce Cockburn (though if you’ve heard his overproduced solo albums from that period, you might wonder the same question). CFNY DJ Dave Bookman declined an interview, telling me that he felt it was too soon to reflect on the period (“No one has died yet”). Bob Wiseman thought that our thesis had something to do with proving that Blue Rodeo was a punk rock band, and refused to be interviewed (10 years later, I finally convinced him otherwise and got an interview for the new edition).

Part of the inspiration for writing the book was realizing that no one else would. There is no glory to being a music writer in Canada: you could probably count the ones over 40 on one hand. As Gord Downie mused to us, most music writers “catch the first plane to Cannes as soon as they can”—referring to the legions who turn their back on rock’n’roll to become film critics (who always seem to get more space in newspapers and magazines than music writers). After Id Magazine went under in 1999, the three of us didn’t have full-time gigs, we didn’t have families, and we had no plans to morph into film critics. We had lots of time to dive deep into this project.

Until then, all Canadian music books were about boomer heroes or punk rockers. Canadian music history seemed to have ended in 1980 (this is still largely true). The Canadian publishing market being what it was and is, would there ever be a book written just about The Tragically Hip? About Sloan? As it turns out, no, not even 10 years later. Certainly, no one would ever write a book about only Eric’s Trip or the Nils or Mary Margaret O’Hara or Art Bergmann—though you could.

Dave Bidini wrote eloquently about his own experiences in the Rheostatics on several occasions, notably in 1998’s On a Cold Road. There was later a book about the Barenaked Ladies. There was a good book about k.d. lang, written by an American, but we wanted to focus on her country career. Daniel Lanois and Joey “Shithead” Keithley wrote autobiographies. There was a book about Sarah McLachlan that was one of the worst music books any of us had ever read in our lives. Nettwerk Records published a book about itself that only its staff could love. As far as we could tell, no one was going to connect all those threads together, along with lesser-known artists that we considered just as important.

People often ask us what it’s like writing a book with two other people. It’s a lot like being in a band: you play drums, you play guitar, I’ll play bass and we’ll write songs together. Writing a book, you all agree on the outline, you’re each assigned certain chapters, and 90% of the time you’re working on your own. You then edit each others’ work, share resources, offer suggestions and try to agree on a style guide.

The most contentious part of the book was the outline: deciding what acts were in, which ones were out, which got only a cursory mention. We knew we weren’t going to write an encyclopaedia. We wanted to tell a story. Our goal was not to mention every single act of the era, and in fact there are many artists we like that are mentioned nowhere in the book, because they didn’t fit into the thematic framework we settled on. When deciding on the artists, it was important to us that they had a national impact: that they either toured the country or were visible on MuchMusic and elsewhere in the media. Few, if any, regional artists are given ample space in the book. (I can only think of two, and yes, they’re both Torontonian: A Neon Rome and Handsome Ned, and they both have fantastic stories.)

Too many Canadian projects, historical or otherwise, go to great pains to include “everyone”—and too many of them suffer because of it. We knew we were focusing primarily on English Canadian rock’n’roll. Quebec’s distinct society and entirely separate star system were beyond our understanding (and, we assumed, that of our audience). Canadian hip-hop was too nascent during that time frame; its real impact didn’t really kick in until much later. There is a great book to be written about Canadian hip-hop, one that will no doubt touch on some of the same cultural and industry themes in our book, and I pray that it will be written soon (someone whose writing I greatly respect promises me it will be). We were primarily rock kids: our impressions of folk music, reggae, jazz, avant-garde music and other genres were filtered through rock’n’roll conduits.

Somehow we managed to convince a publisher, ECW Press, to commit to the project in December 1999. When I got the news, I had taken a temp job at Columbia House, of all places, the discount mail-order music club that was dying a slow death. (I was writing copy like: “The Best of Meat Loaf: Big man! Big hits!”). Ian took a year off after finishing teachers college to devote to the project. Jason and I juggled freelance work. The three of us spent the next 18 months working full-time researching and writing the book, with the help of two extremely patient and helpful and enthusiastic editors, Michael Holmes and Jennifer Hale. Though their eyebrows raised higher and higher when they saw the word count rising, they remained committed to the project and let us have free reign, for which we are eternally grateful.

Not that there wasn’t room for improvement—which is in part why there’s a 10^th anniversary edition. More on that later.

Have Not Been the Same: My story

Later this week, Have Not Been the Same, the 10^th anniversary revision/reissue, should be on bookstore shelves across the country. The launch party is Friday, June 10 at Lee’s Palace in Toronto, featuring Weeping Tile, King Cobb Steelie and Kevin Kane of the Grapes of Wrath (tickets available from Soundscapes, Rotate This and Ticketmaster).

Between now and the date of the launch party, Radio Free Canuckistan will provide a series of insights into the origin of the book, what went into the reissue, and everything you never knew you wanted to know about the project.

Chapter one: Living my life in the tower of song.

In Peter Guralnick’s biography of Elvis Presley, Last Train to Memphis, he writes about how Memphis DJs were dismissive of early Elvis recordings. After all, how good could this guy possibly be when he lives just up the street?

There is a romance to art made outside of your experience, especially growing up in a cultural colony like Canada was in the ’70s, obsessed with the American and British influences that have shaped our country since its inception.

But as a kid, I was always fascinated instead by Canadian culture—maybe in part because everyone always seemed so defensive about it, if they weren’t being outright dismissive. “That guy’s Canadian, you know,” would be the inevitable adjunct to a mention of anyone famous who happened to be born here. Stories in the Toronto Star and Maclean’s would go out of their way to mention any remote connection that Cultural Icon X had to Canada (his sister-in-law grew up in Vancouver!).

Canadian culture was painfully insecure about its own worth, which, as someone who always sympathized with underdogs, made it fascinating to me.

For anyone born in the ’70s, however, Canadians ruled the world for kids: Dennis Lee poems, records by Raffi and Sharon Lois & Bram (Bram played at my elementary school when I was in Grade 1), the Kids of Degrassi Street and Anne of Green Gables on television.

By the time I was a pre-teen glued to my radio, I was curious about all the Canadian acts I was hearing—especially hearing them after 10 p.m., all grouped together, for reasons I later realized was radio’s way of fulfilling their CanCon requirements to make way for more foreign hits during prime hours. But while I loved many of those acts (Martha and the Muffins, Payolas, Blue Peter, Rough Trade), they didn’t seem to register with any of my friends.

As a Scarborough boy, that all changed with Gowan. I grew up literally around the corner from him; he had gone to my elementary school (St. Barbara’s) and still went to my church (St. Thomas More) when he became a massive star of the video age (CITY-TV’s after-school show Toronto Rocks played “A Criminal Mind” about three times a week). Everyone I knew loved Strange Animal. Both boys and girls in my Grade 9 classes styled their hair like him. The fact he had Peter Gabriel’s band on his album was a big deal. His smirk was irresistible and cheeky for 14-year-olds like me. His live show—my first rock concert ever, at the Ontario Place Forum in June 1985—was incredible, especially when he leapt off the top of his grand piano.

Unlike those Memphis DJs and their attitude toward Elvis, I was thrilled that the guy who lived up the street turned out to be a rock star. Of course, it turned out that Gowan was only ever a rock star in Canada; the rest of the world didn’t care. That illustrated a narrative I saw played out all too often in my adolescence: on many levels, if you were successful only in Canada, you weren’t perceived as being truly successful. There was something suspicious about you, like maybe you only ever made it because of CanCon rules or sympathy or because your uncle owns a few radio stations.

Who cares? I found Canadiana exotic in its own way, like secrets that not even most Canadians seemed to know about, never mind the rest of the world. And though many of those acts were certainly derivative, many were unique: no one else on the pop charts sounded like Rough Trade, for example, and Carole Pope was far more explicit and daring and subversive than Madonna.

(Our women in particular presented a diversity of images simply not found elsewhere: gutsy belters like the ladies in Toronto and the Headpins, artsy weirdos like Jane Siberry and Dalbello, genre-bending feminist bands like the Parachute Club, even metal chicks like Lee Aaron. What did the rest of the world offer at that point in terms of strong women in pop music, other than Pat Benatar, Kate Bush and Cyndi Lauper? But I digress.)

In Grade 9, my speech for English class was about Canadian music and how great it is and how it doesn’t get enough respect. Ah, prophecy.

During high school, most of my favourite concert experiences were at the Ontario Place Forum, an outdoor summer venue with a rotating (!) in-the-round stage, which held about 10,000 people (2,500 seated, the rest on the lawn)—which was about as intimate an all-ages venue got at that time. It was also cheap; if I recall, tickets were usually included in the $5 park admission price (this changed later on). Between 1985 and 1995, it was there that I saw the Spoons, Doug and the Slugs, David Wilcox, Bruce Cockburn, Crash Vegas, Grapes of Wrath, 54.40, The Tragically Hip, Skydiggers, Spirit of the West, Rock and Hyde, Blue Rodeo, Sarah McLachlan, and, shortly before the venue closed in 1995, a CFNY event featuring Lowest of the Low, Rheostatics, Shadowy Men, Change of Heart, 13 Engines and many others. I loved all sorts of music from all around the world, but the shows I saw at the Forum made Canadian music come alive for me every summer, gave me an immense sense of national pride watching these acts perform before adoring audiences, and are a huge part of why I ended up co-writing this book.

The first bar show I ever attended was a Deja Voodoo BBQ at the Siboney Club in Kensington Market. I was 16 and had grown a beard for this express purpose. I went alone; my friends either a) didn’t have beards or b) didn’t know or care about the freak show of garage bands from across the country that comprised the Og Records roster, as heard on the It Came From Canada compilations and on CBC Radio’s Brave New Waves, of which I was a devout listener.

I thought this was going to be a huge show that I’d have to get there super-early for. I showed up at 6 p.m. The doors weren’t even open. No one else was there except bands schlepping gear. I came back an hour later, was one of the first people admitted into the club, and slowly sipped what I considered to be an overpriced glass of Coke for about an hour before the first band started. I struck up an awkward conversation with Deja Voodoo’s Gerard Van Herk, asking him something about Brave New Waves’ Brent Bambury—my first rock star encounter. I can’t remember who played which of the two BBQs I saw at the Siboney (1988, 1989), but I saw Deja Voodoo (obviously), the Gruesomes, Shadowy Men, UIC, E.J. Brulé, Jerry Jerry, the Ten Commandments and other Og staples up close, closer than I’d ever been to the blood and sweat of rock’n’roll. I was hooked.

I moved to Guelph in 1990 to attend university there. Why Guelph? Honestly, because it was close to Toronto and I could come home and not miss any concerts there. Also, I’d read about the Albion Hotel being a popular spot for all the Queen Street musicians to play. At the student newspaper, the campus radio station and an alt-weekly serving southwestern Ontario (Id Magazine), I almost exclusively covered Canadian artists.

People like the Rheostatics and Bob Wiseman and King Cobb Steelie became heroes of mine, broadening my mind, challenging my perceptions of both music and the industry, and I hold their recordings dear to me to this day. I’m hard pressed to think of many ’90s acts, other than Bjork, whom I cherish the way I do those three artists in particular. They were very much underdogs in the broader sense: beloved by many, but completely obscure to most.

It felt like an intensely creative time, a time that was rewriting the rules, a time that existed in a whole other universe than the “alternative” scene sweeping the States or the Madchester scene in the U.K. Who was going to document it in anything more than an ephemeral manner? Who was going to stand up and say that these were fascinating artists making classic albums? Canada was full of secret histories already; this one shouldn’t slip by.

By the end of the ’90s, I knew that I had to write a book. Two friends of mine had a similar idea, and here we are.

May '11 reviews

The following reviews appeared in the Kitchener-Waterloo Record and Guelph Mercury.

Austra – Feel It Break (Paper Bag)

Toronto singer Katie Stelmanis has been an opera student, a feminist punk (Galaxy), a member of a folkie choir (Bruce Peninsula) and a solo artist struggling to navigate harsh electronic sounds with her songwriting vision.

Now that she’s emerged on the international stage leading the band Austra, Stelmanis delivers a fully formed, confident album wrapped up in ’80s goth and new wave. Her aesthetic doesn’t succumb to cheap irony or a fashion statement: Stelmanis is deadly serious, and except for the piano heard on closing track “The Beast,” she constructs an entirely artificial, evocative soundscape for her haunting songs. As an opera kid, she doesn’t hesitate to unleash her full vocal power; she’s a much more dynamic and less shrill singer than she was on her 2008 solo album she released under her own name.

Even though there’s no escaping the onslaught of synths, the input of percussionist Maya Postepski and bassist Dorian Wolf (formerly of Spiral Beach) animates the music beyond the icy exterior, especially on the surefire single “Beat and the Pulse,” and at times Stelmanis even sounds playful with her vocal arrangements. The lyrics are best avoided (“Sign! The! Consent forms!”; “I want your blood / I want to eat my hair”), but with a voice like Stelmanis’s and the sound world she creates around it, they’re barely noticeable. (May 26)

Download: “Lose It,” “Beat and the Pulse,” “Spellwork”

Beastie Boys – Hot Sauce Committee Part Two (EMI)

Once a hip-hop group plateaus, rarely, if ever, do they step back on their game. So after a decade that included a spinning-wheels hip-hop album, a lacklustre instrumental album, Adam Yauch’s battle with cancer, and a two-year-old scrapped release date for an album called Hot Sauce Committee Part One, there was little reason to expect that they’d come back swinging with an album that’s easily their best since the 1992 classic Check Your Head.

As on that album, the Beasties sound hungry here: they’ve got something to prove, and there’s no time to mess around. No two tracks here sound alike. When they strap on their punk rock guitars (“Lee Majors Come Again”), they sound like bratty 20-year-olds again. When they detour into Jamaican rock steady with singer Santigold (“Don’t Play No Game That I Can’t Win”), they’re confident and capable genre jumpers who feel right at home in a new suit. When they drop an instrumental track (“Multilateral Nuclear Disarmament”), their funk sounds futuristic rather than retro. When they get wiggy on “Tadlock’s Glasses,” they take their abstract psychedelic hip-hop to places that their many previous journeys into abstract psychedelic hip-hop—and there have been quite a few, making a genre they have almost entirely to themselves—had yet to go.

The Beasties aren’t revisiting past glories, nor are they trying to play catch-up with acts more than half their age. Instead, they openly cop to their grandpa status and rap about sipping Persecco, while musically they borrow from the best and invent the rest, solidifying their status as iconoclasts. (May 5)

Download: “Make Some Noise,” “Don’t Play No Game That I Can’t Win,” “Multilateral Nuclear Disarmament”

The Cars – Move Like This (Universal)

The worst thing you can say about the new album by the Cars—the first album in 23 years by the new wave pop band of the late ’70s—is that it sounds too much like the Cars. To name but one example, “Sad Song” has the same guitar sound, the same handclaps, the same drum beat, the same synthesizer, and the same laconic vocals as many of their greatest hits from the first three albums. The ballad “Soon” is as good, if not better, than their mid-’80s smash hit “Drive.”

Singer Ric Ocasek might be in his mid-60s, but he still sounds like a disaffected young punk. The songs he crafted for this comeback are a distillation of every hit he’s ever written—or even produced, for that matter, as fans of Weezer will attest (Ocasek produced that band’s “blue” and “green” self-titled albums). Getting these Cars on the road again, it’s obvious what an influence they’ve had on every kind of power pop in the last 30 years—even on artists as different as No Doubt (which Ocasek also produced) and LCD Soundsystem (which he did not), as the opening track "Blue Tip" illustrates.

Ocasek throws everything he has into 10 concise pop songs that easily rival the group’s classic 1978 debut. There are no attempts to update their sound or do something different. Why should there be? Everyone loves vintage Cars. (May 12)

Download: “Blue Tip,” “Soon,” “Sad Song”

Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi – Rome (EMI)

Perhaps it’s fitting that for an album posing as a soundtrack to a non-existent film, appearances are everything. Here we have a superstar American producer, Danger Mouse (Broken Bells, Gnarls Barkley), teaming up with an Italian film composer, Daniele Luppi, along with A-list cameos from Jack White and Norah Jones, all setting up camp in the same studio in Rome where master composer Ennio Morricone recorded many of his greatest scores.

That all looks good on paper, and Rome sounds fantastic from a purely aesthetic standpoint: the production is impeccable, the orchestration and use of choral voices is delicate and lovely. But compared to what is trying to be achieved here, the music on Rome doesn’t really measure up to its points of inspiration or even, say, a half-decent record by Air, or Beck doing one of his homages to Serge Gainsbourg’s Ballade de Melodie Nelson.

Jones and White provide pleasant distractions, offering a few anchor moments to an album that otherwise fades easily into the background (which, arguably, a great soundtrack should do anyway). White is clearly having some fun with the role-playing—especially when his lyrics for “The Rose With the Broken Neck” contain so many non-sequitur metaphors that one wonders if he was intentionally trying to write English lyrics like an ESL Italian writer might.

Rome might make me want to go out and rent a Fellini movie or buy a Morricone record or book a plane ticket—or maybe just savour a fine espresso—but I’m not sure I need to hear it again. (May 26)

Download: “Theme of ‘Rome,’ ” “The Rose With the Broken Neck,” “Problem Queen”

Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues (Sub Pop)

If you fell in love with Fleet Foxes’ flawless debut, Helplessness Blues offers mostly diminishing returns. Bandleader Robin Pecknold has been quoted extensively talking about how laborious the writing and recording was, in part because the band’s unexpected popularity kept skyrocketing and delaying the process. As a result, the songs often sound second-guessed and overcooked, not the naturally flowing magic that was so present the first time around. The only time they sound like they’re stretching out a bit is when free jazz saxophones start skronking in “Blue-Spotted Tail”; it’s a nice touch, if not a bit bewildering. It’s a quick distraction from the fact that as lovely as those harmonies are, they can’t carry an album on their own. (May 12)

Download: “Helplessness Blues,” “Montezuma,” “Lorelei”

Gorillaz – The Fall (EMI)

Damon Albarn doesn’t do anything small—or does he?

Most Gorillaz albums involve all sorts of stunt casting of superstars, and their 2010 arena tour featured upwards of 30 people on stage, from hip-hop MCs to African musicians to two members of The Clash to a full New Orleans brass band. Yet this album, released online last Christmas and getting a physical release now, finds Albarn alone in his hotel room or in the back of the tour bus, with only his tablet computer and some synthesizers. Most tracks were made in one day, each at a different tour stop, and the album unfolds in the order of recording during the month of October 2010.

And so the most popular project among Albarn’s many tangential pursuits—Gorillaz have sold millions of albums and scored several Grammys—delivers a low-key, downtempo, 2 a.m. album that sounds like Albarn’s personal post-adrenalin dreamstate as he cruises the highways of North America. It’s a consistently weird, disembodied experience. But that consistency works in its favour, whereas the three previous Gorillaz albums suffered from too many ideas competing to make a pastiche of pop music based in the kind of borderless utopia that Albarn promotes outside the band with his impeccably curated record label, Honest Jon’s.

The Fall is content to exist in its own world, a Zooropean vision of America filtered through an entirely digital lens. The gospel-tinged trip-hop track “Revolving Doors” is the closest Albarn gets to a pop song here; everything else is a fleeting snippet of a synth squiggle, a disembodied country song, or eerily robotic Muzak. The one acoustic song, featuring just legendary soul singer Bobby Womack and an acoustic guitar, somehow fits in seamlessly, despite its apparent incongruity—the kind of trick that Gorillaz keep trying on all their other albums, yet for the first time there’s nothing here that sounds remotely self-conscious.

The Fall is what it is, and it’s a lovely, curious little thing. (May 5)

Download: “Revolving Doors,” “Little Pink Plastic Bags,” “Bobby in Phoenix”

Man Man – Life Fantastic (Anti)

“If you gotta smash some plates to relax, do it, do it, do it!”

The members of Man Man (yes, they’re all men) no doubt take their own advice, judging by the joyous delerium of their live show, which finds frontman Honus Honus leaping off his seat to pound on his piano, while his bandmates assault various percussion instruments. It’s a cathartic experience for band and audience alike, though it would be a stretch to call it relaxing.

On past albums, like the excellent 2006 release Six Demon Bag, Man Man were manic, with their more violent tendencies tempered by tango, Balkan and cabaret influences. It could get a bit cartoonish; 2008’s Rabbit Habits—their first release on a high-profile label—started to sound like a parody of themselves.

Which is why Life Fantastic sounds so glorious: it takes all the madness and kitchen-sink approach of their early albums and brings it down several notches. Producer Mike Mogis (Bright Eyes) helps them focus and find the beauty that’s always lurked on the edge of their rough and raw approach. But if some of their edges have softened somewhat, Man Man remains a unique and powerful band brimming with personality and originality. Clarinets, marimbas, banjos, string sections and the insanely inventive drumming of the man known only as Pow Pow all collide and coalesce in unexpected arrangements that, even in their occasional dissonance, never hit a wrong note. With a new Man Man album this good to behold, life is fantastic indeed. (May 12)

Download: “Shameless,” “Piranhas Club,” “Dark Arts”

Moby – Destroyed (EMI)

His mainstream success now a distant memory, Moby’s albums have become more personal and intimate; 2009’s lovely Wait For Me was a surprisingly strong return to form after years of pandering. Likewise, Destroyed is Moby’s ode to what Bruce Springsteen calls “the wee, wee hours” when the rest of the world sleeps, where those doomed to be awake find themselves witnessing a disembodied, alienating and occasionally magical vision of the world. The soundtrack to that existence, in Moby’s hands, is full of ghostly synths, vocoders and beats that sound pillowy even at accelerated tempos.

But it also sounds like Moby dusted off some tracks he found from 1993; he’s done all of this before, and better—and so have dozens of innovative new producers working similar territory who are biting at his heels (2010 albums by Pantha du Prince and Trentemoller spring immediately to mind). The vocal tracks try too hard to tie together his insomnia theme far too literally, whether it’s Moby himself singing or one of the four female vocalists here.

If he’s trying to replicate the monotonous experience of homogenous hotel rooms around the world: mission accomplished. Why he thought anyone would want to experience that in their own carefully curated home—or anywhere else but one of those hotels—is anyone’s guess. (May 26)

Download: “Be the One,” “Rockets,” “Lie Down in Darkness”

Sam Roberts Band– Collider (Secret Brain/Universal)

Sam Roberts is a mensch among Canadian musicians: all-around good guy, a good-looking guy at that, and creator of some of the breeziest CanRock singles of the last decade. And initial news of this, his fourth album, sounded promising: his band decamped to Chicago to work with producer Brian Deck, known for his inventive work with Iron & Wine, Modest Mouse and Califone. First single “The Last Crusade,” which features a punchy horn section, suggested that Roberts had been listening to some vintage West African funk that had crept into his sound in a supple and subtle way.

But there is no serious reinvention here; sadly, there’s not much inventiveness at all. Even at his weakest moments, Roberts can usually deliver decent pop songs, but over half of the tracks here fall flat. Then again, that’s about the usual ratio for Roberts—even his smash hit debut album didn’t contain more than an EP’s worth of solid material. Whenever Roberts is ripe enough for a greatest hits album, it will no doubt be his defining artistic statement, and several tracks here may well be on it; until then, minor tweaks of his sound can’t carry a full album. (May 26)

Download: “The Last Crusade,” “Without a Map,” “Streets of Heaven”

J. Rocc – Some Cold Rock Stuff (Stones Throw)

Before DJ Shadow’s 1998 classic Endtroducing, turntablist albums were mostly showboating affairs stuffed with scratch-happy pyrotechnics—like Yngwie Malmsteen albums for hip-hop heads. Endtroducing was the game-changer, a cinematic masterpiece. Since then—what? Some Kid Koala albums that are easier to respect than to love, and a grossly underrated avant-garde tour-de-force by Toronto’s Insideamind, 2008’s Scatterpopia. That’s why this debut solo album by J. Rocc sounds like such a breath of fresh air.

J. Rocc came up in the ’90s as part of the Beat Junkies, a turntablist crew who helped keep the art alive, but as a solo artist he’s less interested in showing off scratch technique or elaborate construction. Instead, Some Cold Rock Stuff is an original hip-hop blend of Bollywood funk, Brazilian tropicalia, jazz, disco, downtempo and anything else he wants to throw into the mix, all the while sounding refreshing and original. He’s neither a retro throwback nor a forward-thinking futurist; instead, he’s a craftsman, a master instrumentalist creating a well-rounded album for every mood and taste. (May 5)

Download: “Don’t Sell Your Dream (Tonight),” “Party,” “Play This (Also)”

Raphael Saddiq – Stone Rollin’ (Sony)

At this year’s Grammy Awards, a tribute to the late great soul singer Solomon Burke was led by Raphael Saddiq, a wickedly talented singer, guitarist, songwriter and producer whose career has evolved from ’80s teen idol in Tony Toni Tone to a hip-hop hybrid in Lucy Pearl to a retro soul man. Unfortunately, the Grammy organizers not only didn’t introduce Saddiq by name, they relegated him to second banana status while Mick Jagger strutted out and made it all about himself instead.

But never mind the Rolling Stone; focus instead on Stone Rollin’. Saddiq opens his latest solo album with “Heart Attack,” a garage-y rave-up that sounds like a hybrid of Sly Stone and CCR, and the rest of the album is just as raw and refreshing. Saddiq is normally a slick guy; this sounds like he’s loosened up considerably, turned up his guitar amps, and whipped a band into shape to knock out one live take after another in the studio.

Though Stax-era soul music is the prime inspiration here, Saddiq dips back deeper to ’50s rock’n’roll and Chicago blues. His voice—and what a voice it is—is laced with a tiny bit of distortion here, and he’s more than happy to grunt, snort and whoop it up everywhere he can; this a side of the usually smooth Saddiq that we haven’t heard before. Stone Rollin’ is not all rough and tumble, though; there are some string sections and softer moments that make this more than just a lost weekend in the garage.

Raphael Saddiq may be one of the last great soul men alive. And because he’s at least 20 years younger than the soul greats of the ’60s, he may hold that title for a long, long time. (May 19)

Download: “Heart Attack,” “Daydreams,” “Stone Rollin’”

Sloan – The Double Cross (Murder)

When celebrating your 20^th anniversary, the last thing you want is people wondering: are they still around? Or worse: why are they still around? Sloan provide definitive answers to both by coming out swinging on their tenth album.

For a band that has always prided itself on being a four-way democracy, there have always been albums where someone isn’t pulling their weight. This is not one of them: every member brings their best game to the table, not just individually—they’ve had a tendency to retreat to their silos in the past—but together, as on the Chris Murphy/Andrew Scott song “She’s Slowing Down Again,” or the way some songs cross-pollinate, inserting a chorus of one into the coda of another. Jay Ferguson, the most consistent Sloan songwriter of the last decade, once again scores the album’s sweetest spots, and Patrick Pentland’s rockers sound much more inspired here than he has lately.

If anniversaries are a moment for self-examination, this band’s 20th proved to be a rallying point to give them a raison d’etre. There’s no point sitting around and waiting for radio royalties and festival paycheques to roll in, and so The Double Cross sounds like they’re proving something to themselves as much as their fairweather fans. There isn’t a wasted moment in any of these 12 songs: it’s the sound of a band that is still very much alive and fighting, not resting on a recorded legacy but continuing to make it. (May 12)

Download: “Shadow of Love,” “Unkind,” “Green Gardens Cold Montreal”

Socalled – Sleepover (Dare to Care)

Josh Dolgin, aka Socalled, has always been more talented than his music—a novelty mix of klezmer and hip-hop and jazz—would suggest. Which is why it’s such a joyous relief that he finally has an album that fulfills all of his potential as a songwriter, a keyboardist and, most importantly, as a producer, a conduit capable of building bridges between disparate communities. Sometimes it’s silly—which was the primary problem with previous Socalled recordings—but generally Dolgin creates an inclusive party where anything and everything happens. “Work With What You Got” is an inspirational pop song featuring hip-hop pioneer Roxanne Shante, calypso king The Mighty Sparrow, sawing cellos, Serbian brass master Boban Markovic, a children’s chorus, jazz piano and country singer Katie Moore—which is followed immediately by a straight-up Canadiana folk rendition of Peggy Seeger’s “Springhill Mine Disaster.”

Amid all the guest stars—which include James Brown’s trombone player Fred Wesley, Algerian pop star Enrico Macias, Warren Spicer of Plants and Animals, Gonzales, house music pioneer Derrick Carter, and dozens more—it’s Katie Moore whose star shines the brightest here. Though her solo material outside of Socalled situates her in folkie mode, Dolgin puts her to work on disco, funk and torch songs, where she conveys a haunting intimacy even when she’s belting it out. Her ballad showcase, the downtempo torch song “Told Me So,” is an absolute show-stopper.

If earlier Socalled albums seemed a bit forced, a bit too self-conscious, Dolgin’s playful curiosity pays off here with an album that’s as exciting and culturally diverse as his hometown of Montreal: it’s the sound of a St. Laurent street party come to life. (May 19)

Download: “UNLVD,” “Told Me So,” “Richi”

Amon Tobin – ISAM (Ninja Tune)

Amon Tobin built his reputation in electronic music on jazzy samples sliced and diced microscopically and refitted for the dance floor. But on his eighth album, there is neither dancing nor jazz to be found. Continuing to develop the sound world heard on his intriguing 2007 album Foley Room, ISAM sounds more like film composer Ennio Morricone scoring a spooky video game with field recordings of aquatic insects. There’s something creeping around every corner of this album. Tobin toys with tension and release, rarely ever falling into a metronomical meter. Sure, that means that most of ISAM sounds like your iPod is melting before your ears, but digital deconstruction rarely tastes this delicious. (May 5)

Download: “Journeyman,” “Lost & Found,” “Bedtime Stories”

Chad Van Gaalen – Diaper Island (Flemish Eye)

Sometimes you have to judge an album by its title, and this is one of the most disappointing releases of 2011. This Calgary singer/songwriter is one of the most fascinating figures to emerge from the Canadian underground in the last 10 years, and his last album, 2009’s Soft Airplane, was a perfect marriage of his fractured folk, grungy guitars, broken electronics, and fragile kitchen-sink arrangements. At his best, Van Gaalen’s work sounds like a simple three-chord song is the only thing keeping everything in his world from falling apart, that his warbling falsetto is the only light leading you through sonic and emotional wreckage.

Here, however, it just sounds like wreckage, period. There’s a fine line between making your music sound effortless and sounding like you couldn’t be bothered. On Diaper Island, Van Gaalen dumps material that sounds unfinished and half-baked. Or a little too baked, as the case may be—this sounds very much like a stoner slacker party that you’re not invited to.

Certainly there are minor moments of invention: small sonic treats and strange sounds that Van Gaalen conjures out of seemingly nothing on this characteristically lo-fi recording. He’s also more upbeat than usual, with a few tracks recalling the punk side of Eric’s Trip. But it’s largely devoid of Van Gaalen’s usual charm, and the songwriting largely just sounds lazy.

Van Gaalen is a great artist who’s not the type to bow to anyone’s expectations, and more power to him—but in a career of hits and misses, this one is definitely off target. (May 19)

Download: “Sara,” “Do Not Fear,” “Replace Me”

Doc soup

I've filed a few reviews of documentaries on DVD for Exclaim! magazine in the past month:

- The Oscar-winning takedown on the financial crisis: Inside Job

- The NFB profile of Canada's best known eco-terrorist, Wiebo Ludwig: Wiebo's War

- Spike Lee's second documentary about post-Katrina New Orleans, which comes across like a real-life cross between The Wire and Treme: If God is Willing and Da Creek Don't Rise

TuneYards live

TuneYards

May 12, 2011

Horseshoe Tavern, Toronto

A friend of mine, who I saw for a fleeting second at the end of last night’s TuneYards show, just emailed me to ask me what I thought. My response, verbatim, was: “FUCKING HELL YEAH OMIGOD OMIGOD OMIGOD YEAH BABY YEAH WOOOOOOOOOOOO!” What follows is an only slightly more measured response.

TuneYards is Merrill Garbus.

Merrill Garbus, on the other hand, is Nina Simone, Joni Mitchell, Miriam Makeba, Bjork, Owen Pallett, Terminator X and Ani DiFranco all rolled up into one. And despite that roll call, Merrill Garbus sounds like nobody else you’ve ever heard in your life. Not even all those other yodelling ukulele players who are into African music. (There must be a few out there somewhere.)

I’d seen her previous band, Sister Suvi, on two occasions, and it was a curious, creative combo that only hinted at what Garbus would later do. I’ve spent a lot of time with the two TuneYards records, 2009’s BirdBrains and 2011’s Whokill, and loved them both; the latter in particular is flawless, joyous and viscerally exciting (and you need to own it immediately). Yet all that still didn’t prepare me for what Garbus does live these days.

I’ve seen performers use loop pedals before—who hasn’t? The list of people who use them inventively is increasingly rare; too often, it’s a crutch for a solo performer who can’t afford to bring a band on the road with them. We’ve all seen people painstaking create their symphonies of sound one or two bars at a time. Colour me impressed—once.

Garbus, on the other hand, creates massive, yodelling choirs while seemingly sustaining a single note; it appears as if she’s looping one or two seconds at a time while you don’t even notice. The same approach applies to her drumming, which is not just a couple of floor toms and a snare in front of her, but the click of drumsticks and the clank of hitting the mic stand. And yet despite all this careful construction, she’s still very much fronting a live band—a bassist and two horn players, each amazing and perfectly complementary—who stop and start on cue, wait for pregnant pauses and follow her wherever she goes when the pedals are turned off and it’s just her and her ukulele.

But the technique is for the academic chin-strokers at the back of the venue (or the front row, which is really the only place you could properly see the not-so-towering Garbus at work). Garbus’s appeal is far from technical. It’s animal, primal, sexual, all about release. It’s all id. That was evident from every corner of the venue, whether you could see her hands at work or not.

Just as refreshing as her performance was seeing the sold-out audience dive right in with her. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard the Horseshoe roar like it did last night, and not just at the end of songs, but at every astounding trick Garbus pulled out of her hat mid-song—like the stratospheric high notes she hits at the end of the pseudo-R&B jam “Powa,” the kind that could even make Prince jealous.

The look on her own face suggested she was as lost in the music as the rest of us: holy crap, is this happening? Though fully in control and bristling with the necessary confidence to pull this all off, she still looks like she’s discovering all of this for the first time, with open-eyed awe and joy and humility, surrendering to greater forces than we understand. Of course, unlike the rest of us schleps, Garbus is no naïf: she’s somehow capable of controlling the gods and commanding them to dance both for and with us. How does she do it? Who cares? The world is a better place with Merrill Garbus in it.

In other words: FUCKING HELL YEAH OMIGOD OMIGOD OMIGOD YEAH BABY YEAH WOOOOOOOOOOOO!