Music, musings and miscellanea

First off, this story about Johnny Thunders is one hundred percent true. In fact, there are pictures from the show and a conversation about this very story in the new last year’s “Nardwaur the Human Serviette vs. Bev Davies 2007 Punk Rock Calendar” (which you should all buy). Second, Carey Ott’s (the guy mentioned at the end of the profile) CD came out on tuesday  last year.  It’s really good and you should also buy it too (plus i got a shout out in the thank yous in the liner notes).

Boom, THAP Boom Boom THAP, Boom Boom Boom THAP … “LET’S GO!”

It’s 1964 and Gary Taylor is hammering out the beat on his drums. His band the Classics are the house band on the appropriately titled Let’s Go, the Vancouver segment of Music Hop, the Canadian Broadcast Corporation’s American Bandstand rip. As house band the Classics, a crack group of musicians, learned the latest tunes on the Top 40 to back up musicians appearing on the program or cover other artists hits for the kids watching at home.

For Taylor, the Classics offered him his first opportunity to help out other bands on their paths to either stardom, or the spaces between the footnotes of rock and roll history. It’s a role Gary relished and continues to play in his career.

Fast forward 40 years or so and Talyor no longer sits behind a drum kit. Instead he spends his time behind a large dark desk under a single light suspended from the low ceiling in his basement apartment in Coquitlam, British Columbia. A drum kit is one of the few things that can’t be found amongst the organized clutter that makes up Taylor’s office and home. Surrounded by stacks of papers, unopened cds, and remnants and relics from his club days, he sits, almost always, slightly reclined in his desk chair, his laptop computer in his, well, lap. He answers the phone abruptly, using short, curt phrases:
“GT here…hold on a minute (he quickly disposes of whoever is on the other line)…what’s going on my man?”

Music has been a constant for this tall imposing man whose built physique and energy level make people half his age jealous. He was inspired by the sports heroes he read about in Sports Illustrated as a young boy growing up with three brothers in Vancouver. Only a limp when he walks, the result of years spent playing various sports, betrays his 65 years.

He’s spent four plus decades in the music industry, as a musician, club owner and now artist’s manager. He’s clawed to the top and he’s fallen hard to the bottom, but it’s the fast paced back slapping/stabbing nature of the industry and his ability to bob and weave his way through for the glory of both his clients and himself that motivates him.

A more reasonable person, a more (but not completely) sane person, would argue that there are far more stable ways to run a career in the music business than Taylor has. In the late 1970s and early 1980s he ran Gary Taylor’s Rock Room on Hornby Street in downtown Vancouver. The main floor hosted touring international acts and up and coming locals while the downstairs had strippers (Wilt Chamberlain famously put in an appearance in the downstairs portion of the bar). He managed blues legend Long John Baldry after he was institutionalized for mental health problems. In the late 1980s he moved to Madison, Wisconsin and ran The Paramount, the city’s premier live music venue until violence in the club forced its closure. Now he manages small undiscovered artists in the Chicago and Nashville areas

Taylor remembers the time proto-punk legend and professional fuck-up Johnny Thunders was booked to play a pair of shows at the club in 1981. He had been detained at the US-Canada border after failing to display anything more substantial than a New York City library card for ID. Taylor made the 45-minute drive from the Rock Room down Highway 99, through what were then rural suburbs to the border crossing. He used what he calls “the GT charm” to convince customs officials to let the ex-New York Dolls guitarist into the country. Once back in town Taylor dropped Thunders at a hotel. When he returned several hours later he found Thunders lying in the hotel room bath tub with a needle puncturing his arm, blood spilling out onto his clothes and a journalist sitting next to him outside of the tub desperately trying to extract an interview from this shambolic mess of a man.

Why would Taylor put himself through antics like this? Because he thrives off the chase and believes in the artists and musicians he deals with (although, in the case of Thunders, the thought of telling an angry room of punk rockers that their hero would not be putting in an appearance was almost certainly a motivating factor as well). He thrives of the creative energies his clients feed him.

“Every time they write a new song it’s like a new baby,” he says.

His latest father-to-be, Carey Ott, gives birth to his debut solo album next Tuesday, January 23. Like many births it’s the culmination of a ten-year relationship between the two. Taylor began managing Ott’s old band Torben Floor in 1997.

So at 65, with most of his generation looking towards retirement, will this latest milestone be the end for Taylor? Hardly. He’s got a stable of artists in the waiting room, all ready to drop their next baby.

So I had a great day at the usually crappy local record stores in town last week. I found the Pixies “Surfer Rosa” and “Doolittle” used on vinyl. Tres cool I know. But the weirdest thing was that when I went to take the “Surfer Rosa” record out of its sleeve, a piece of loose paper fell out with an uncredited, hand written review of the record from when it was originally released in 1988. Here it is in its entirety (typos are the writer’s):

Pixies – Surfer Rosa

The Pixies have created this new type of experimental – hillbilly – metal – disco – rock music. This is there second record and it becomes foggier and foggier of the point of each record.

“Come on Pilgrim,” the 1st record from this Boston-based band, was a collection of songs that had both little point and little credibility. The only possible advantages to it is that the album clocked a short 35 min., and the hope the the second album would be better.

It isn’t. Surfer Rosa is one of the most pointless and boring experimental albums of late. The songs are uninteresting, the themes are non-existant, the lyrics are incomprehensible, and the musicianship is nil. At the very least, this band is not together at all. I shudder at the thought of them live.

This album could have been so good for them. They have created this exciting musical style, but ruin it by their own self-indulgence into their inventions.

I’ll think you’ll find that one spin through “Surfer Rosa” will not deserve another. Let’s hope that the third album is either bettter or not created.

So there you go. “Surfer Rosa” is, apparently a piece of shit. Who knew?

“I think we really have the Beatles to blame for that.”

There’s something you don’t hear every day. The Beatles are many things: influential, lauded, a cash-money machine—but rarely the subject of blame. To A.A. Wallace, lead singer and mastermind behind Halifax’s Sleepless Nights, it really is the Fab Four’s fault.

“It all comes from the way the Beatles were marketed in North America,” Wallace continues. “There was the cute one, the serious one, the stupid one…”

When Wallace started Sleepless Nights in 2003, he wanted to create a band that—in its structure—defied that marketing impulse. No matter who came and went from the group, everyone knew they were replaceable.

“The one problem that always seemed to happen was, when someone would leave they would feel you were slighting them or dissing them by continuing to play the material you had played when they were in the group,” he says. “They felt like they had some ownership over that, regardless of whether they had actually written the songs or not.”

The problem comes from attitudes in indie rock, according to Wallace. When a member of a band leaves, so goes part of a band’s identity. “That comes from marketing characters” within bands and not bands as single, unified entities, he says.

Even once-successful acts like the recently reformed Smashing Pumpkins catch flak when members leave or are excluded from reunions. This stands in stark contrast to metal bands in the ’80s, such as Iron Maiden, Judas Priest and Black Sabbath. These bands not only switched members, they replaced lead singers. “Even the Ramones. They’re all characters,” says Wallace. “They even changed their fucking names.”

Sleepless Nights have been home to more than 20 musicians over their five-year lifespan, Wallace estimates. The movement has been the result of differing priorities: For some band members jobs and school took precedence over music. “I don’t want to have a job or a degree. I just want to play in a rock-and-roll band.”

The revolving door of personnel and contributors has garnered Sleepless Nights frequent comparisons to Broken Social Scene, something Wallace understands but is quick to dismiss, pointing out that the groups started out at the same time but were unaware of each other. Because he’s remained the one constant, different rules perhaps apply to him. Wallace calls the shots, making Sleepless Nights less collaborative than Broken Social Scene.

“I personally wrote and arranged everything, except one song, that we’ve ever done,” he says. “Not that I feel like I own the material—people do contribute—but the thing is, the song will still exist whether they’re there or not.” For the group’s new record, Turn Into Vapour, the music took an unexpected pop turn. The album is tight, catchy and loud. “It’s being pegged as being a very upbeat kind of record but the content’s not at all.” Wallace says this came from touring the band’s last release, the Hands Up EP, and from the band wanting people to stop talking and pay attention during their sets. “Now we’re probably the loudest band in Halifax,” he says proudly.

The Sleepless Nights founder never writes with a concept or destination point, rather he puts out albums when he has enough material. Having a backyard studio helps speed the process—the next Sleepless Nights record is already completed. “We just have to wait to put it out because you can’t put out that many records at once,” Wallace says.

Despite his prolific output, he says he’s almost completely stopped listening to modern music and is, instead, looking to the past for new sounds. But what he really wants to do with his own work is to mash entire musical ideas and experiences into one mega-project, one burst of sound.

“I really want to do everything as one [big project] but it just doesn’t work right now. I wanna just make this one record that’s like ‘the album,’” he says, “but that’s a ways off yet. I don’t know how and I don’t know if anyone would like it.”

This story originally appeared in the February 28, 2008 issue of The Coast.

It’s often said you can’t judge a book by its cover. When it comes to music, you can’t judge a band from its album cover. Take Protest the Hero’s new record Fortress—in the foreground is a female goddess, arrows piercing out from her shoulder armour, her long flowing hair blowing out from under a helmet adorned with antlers. In the background, two symmetrical rams’ heads face away from each other while a glowing sun illuminates the entire scene. Most people would assume it’s some sort of punk or metal record, filled with crunching riffs and screaming vocals—and they’d be right.

Still, Rody Walker, Protest the Hero’s lead singer, defies the stereotype of the dark metal mind or the spit-and-venom-spewing punk. “I’m a big fan of Trek of all kinds,” says Walker from the band’s tour bus. Admitting the sci-fi series’ role as a tour time-killer, he says, “I feel like a real dork…”

TV habits aside, Walker and company (guitarists Luke Hoskin and Tim Millar, bassist Arif Mirabdolbaghi and drummer Moe Carlson) are like so many of Canada’s best punk and metal bands these days (think Billy Talent from Streetsville) in that they hail from suburban Ontario—in Protest the Hero’s case, Whitby.

Shortly after forming, and while still in high school in 2003, Protest the Hero released a debut EP, A Calculated Use of Sound. The band came to Halifax immediately after grad and gained a reputation for kinetic live performances and the hard political stances they took in their lyrics. The band’s debut full-length, Keiza, was released in 2005 on Underground Operations Records and soon caught the ear of Rich Egan, owner of mega-indie Vagrant Records, which released the album stateside.

The group has largely stopped writing about politics, lately favouring more literary-inspired concept records. Walker says the time he and his fellow band members spend on the road takes their attention away from global events. “We don’t have the right to preach a uniform political message,” he says. The singer also acknowledges the maturation of the band’s worldview following A Calculated Use of Sound. “There’s a common saying,” Walker begins, “when you’re 16 you’re a communist, at 20 you’re a liberal and at 45 you’re a conservative.”

When it came time to record Fortress last summer, Walker says there was “no plan…strictly action” in the studio. But he concedes there was some structure to the recording sessions. The starting point was the same as before—the dense lyrical concepts bass player and chief lyricist Mirabdolbaghi created. Once he penned the rough lyrics, the whole band wrote music around them. Walker came up with the (often screamed) melodies. Following this, the lyrics were reworked before the song was finished.

A new twist to the template came when Vadim Pruzhanov, of English power metal band Dragonforce, provided keyboards for the song “Limb from Limb.” The track inspired the band to start, according to Walker, “picking around with some synths” in the studio. Everyone felt the keyboards created an underlying fullness to the record and decided to include them on many of Fortress‘s tracks.

While many aspects of the band have evolved over the past few years, Walker’s onstage interactions with his fans have remained constant. He’s become well known for fostering an antagonistic relationship with audiences. During a gig in Utah, opening for Christian metal band As Cities Burn, Walker repeatedly told the crowd the headliners were in the back slaughtering goats as sacrifices to their heathen gods. The singer says it was his way of coming to terms with “the obligatory nature of the record industry.” He says that he can’t bring himself to do the typical “hello St. Louis” rock star thing, so he toys with the audience instead. “I’d rather have an entire audience mad at me.” But even Walker admits he can go too far. The last time Protest the Hero played Fredericton, for example, Walker took exception with the way some of the crowd was dressed and verbally abused them for it. And while he knows it was, perhaps, an error of judgement, if he has any regret he isn’t showing it. “Hey. Shit happens when you party naked.”

This story originally appeared in the February 14, 2008 issue of The Coast.

Holy Fuck are an unorthodox band. There’s the name, the lack of lyrics, the improvised studio sessions and the revolving-door rhythm section (which has included members from stylistically divergent groups like Blue Rodeo and Wintersleep). And somehow, the band, playing Saturday at the Marquee, even found themselves touring as underground rapper Beans’s backing band.

Though it seems an odd fit, Holy Fuck mastermind Brian Borcherdt was thrilled by the opportunity. “The eight-year-old in me was really excited,” he says. “The first style of music that I ever got excited about was rap and breakdancing. I was a shitty little breakdancer.” As kids, Borcherdt and his brother would visit their grandparents in Delaware, where Friday nights they would listen to a hip-hop radio show broadcasting out of Philadelphia. “We’d stay up late with our cassettes armed and ready in the ghetto blaster,” he says. Hip-hop was still mostly an underground movement at the time, and despite the Borcherdt brothers’ fervour for the genre, back home in Nova Scotia, other kids in school didn’t share that passion. “All the kids in school would tease us and make fun of us, but we were like, Just you wait.’”

Bortcherdt had aspirations to make rap records, but as he got older, he began to find the entire rap game a bit daunting—”I didn’t think I was cool enough for it”—and began to move towards the more rock-oriented sound that would characterize his earliest musical projects. After a stint in By Divine Right, Borcherdt took up the Holy Fuck moniker and began playing shows on his own. He was soon joined by Graham Walsh, who would become the only other consistent member of the band. “It’s a bit of a blessing and a hindrance at the same time,” says Borcherdt of Holy Fuck’s ever-changing rhythm section. “We get into that situation simply because the people we’ve been lucky to work with are in other bands.” Borcherdt says that if Holy Fuck demanded its players be exclusive to the band, he never would have had the opportunity to play with so many talented people. “These people are all really exciting to work with and every time we play with them they bring something new to it.

“I really don’t see how people could be satisfied doing one single thing,” he says. “It’s kind of like, You can only play one board game.’ Man, I got stuck with Boggle for the rest of my life? I want to play Scrabble!” Holy Fuck spent three years on the road, establishing themselves, then promoting their self-released, self-titled debut. Early in 2007 they released a new EP—Borcherdt describes it as a demo intended to attract label support. It did, and this fall, the group put out its sophmore effort, LP, on Young Turks. “That’s really exciting,” says Borcherdt. “It’s the first thing I’ve ever done that has been supported outside of my own means.”

The record consists of greatest hits from studio, radio and live recordings from the past year. “We still didn’t sit down and make an album proper,” where the band goes into a studio and comes out with a record a week later. “We still haven’t had that opportunity and I’d like to,” says Borcherdt. The band worked with different musicians and producers, including Mr. Final Fantasy, Owen Pallett. After he wowed them with an onstage collaboration, the band invited him to cut their song “Lovely Allen” in a studio. The resulting track sounds like the most premeditated thing the band has ever done. Not so, says Borcherdt. Pallet works incredibly quickly and the whole thing was done in a day. “It gives the illusion because it has more of a pop style or melody,” he says. Though they’ve come to it in a rather haphazard fashion, Holy Fuck are now well respected in Canada and abroad, fitting “somewhere in line between weird German experimental music and breakdancing.” The new record recently hit number one on CBC Radio 3. So, would an eight-year old Borcherdt be happy? “All I need is to fly the Millennium Falcon and I’m done.”

This story originally appeared in the January 17 issue of the Coast.