The Nerve March 2007 Page
The Nerve March 2007 Page
The Nerve March 2007 Page
CONTENTS
Volume 8, Number 3, Issue #69
CONTENTS
Features
508 - 825 Granville St., Vancouver, B.C. V6Z 1K9 604.734.1611 www.thenervemagazine.com info@thenervemagazine.com
9 JUSTICE
The Don (a/k/a Editor-In-Chief and Publisher) Bradley C. Damsgaard editor@thenervemagazine.com
It’s French History Month - Michael Mann
8 BLOC PARTY
Wiseguy (a/k/a Music Editor) Adrian Mack mack@thenervemagazine.com
No dance, no punk, all pop! - Will Pedlry
7 THE NEW CREATION
Shotgun (a/k/a Film Editor) Michael Mann mann@thenervemagazine.com
Don’t get Left Behind! - Allan MacInnis
13 ALEX HARVEY
Launderer (a/k/a Book Editor) Devon Cody cody@thenervemagazine.com
A fine Scottish drunk remembered - Ferdy Belland
20 NESARA
The Henchmen (a/k/a Design & Graphics) Dale De Ruiter, Kristy Sutor
Will Christ return in a cloud-shaped UFO? - Adrian Mack
Weapons Cleaner (a/k/a Article Editor) Jon Azpiri Surveillance Team (a/k/a Photographers) Devon Cody, Dale De Ruiter, Miss Toby Marie, Leigh Righton
10 11 11 11 14 15 18
The Muscle (a/k/a Staff Writers) AD MADGRAS, Jason Ainsworth, Cowboy TexAss, Chris Walter, Stephanie Heney, Adam Simpkins, Carl Spackler, David Bertrand, Herman Menervemanana, Ferdy Belland, Dave Von Bentley, Devon Cody, Dale De Ruiter, Derek Bolen, Ethyltron, Johnny Kroll, Andrew Molloy, Boy Howdy, Cameron Gordon, Brock Thiessen, Filmore Mescalito Holmes, Jenna James, Jenny C, Will Pedley Plaster Caster (a/k/a Cover Design) Toby Bannister toby@thenervemagazine.com
Spring Festivals... AND BEYOND! BA Johnston The Next Hundred Years Yukon Carmine Appice Black Time Radical News
Fire Insurance (a/k/a Advertising) Brad Damsgaard, Seasn Mckay advertise@thenervemagazine.com The Kids (a/k/a The Interns) Claudine Ostashek, Samantha Laserson
Sections
The Nerve is published monthly by The Nerve Magazine Ltd. The opinions expressed by the writers and artists do not necessarily reflect those of The Nerve Magazine’s publisher or its editors. The Nerve does not accept responsibility for content in advertisements. The Nerve reserves the right to refuse any advertisement or submission and accepts no responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork. Printed in Canada. All content © Copyright The Nerve Magazine 2007. Est. 1999
PHOTO: GARY T
Out-of-town Connections (a/k/a Distro & Street Team) Toronto: Rosina Tassone, Kerry Goulding Montreal: Douglas Ko Calgary: Mike Taylor Edmonton: Freecloud Records, Bob Prodor Winnipeg: Margo Voncook Regina: Shane Grass Whitehorse: Jordi and Jeremy Jones Victoria/Whistler: Jono Jak, Lindsay
06 22 25 27 19 28 29 31 30
Cheap Shotz Live Reviews Album Reviews DVD Film Books Video Games Crossword Comics The Nerve March 2007 Page
“Come on guys, I’m standing right here.” Michael Mann, Film Editor
Who Gives a Fuck
With Hoss Power of the BossHoss
What album is currently in your stereo? The new Juliette Lewis album Four on the Floor – GREAT! What book are you currently reading or have most recently read? I don´t read a lot at the moment because of too less time. But when I’m on the road again with the band, I´ll keep on reading The Last Templar by Raymond Khoury. I started the book on our autumn tour, 2006. What was the last movie you watched? The Great Escape with Steve McQueen!!! Name one album, book, or movie that you consistently recommend to a friend. Tony Joe White, Best of…, The Simpsons Name one album, book, or movie that you would recommend to an enemy. “Hey! My name´s Rick James, bitch!” What is a recent guilty pleasure? I like beer! What is your biggest pet peeve?
RIP The BC punk community mourns the passing of Jay “Trash” Brown, the charismatic drummer for Alcoholic White Trash and the Hoosegow. The packed memorial at the Cobalt on Feb 16 proved just how many friends he left behind. Many thanks to all those who paid their respects. As Blind Marc from the Shivs said, “He’s probably down there squeezing Anna Nicole Smith’s big ghost ass. - C.Walter
Rick James Name one bad habit you’re extremely proud of. The BossHoss If you could hang out with any one person throughout history, who would it be? Elvis Presley/ “Rick James, bitch!” What is the one thing you want to get done before you die? Meet Elvis Presley. He lives on a secret island together with Jimmy Hendrix, James Dean, Kurt Cobain, John Lee Hooker and Janis Joplin. James Brown joined them recently and Rick James´s gonna be there pretty soon… They´re having a hell of a time there! The BossHoss plays at the Railway Club, Vancouver, March 11 with Marq DeSouza, and the rest of Canada throughout the month.Visit thebosshoss.com for details. And we have swag! T-shirts, CDs, and more.You want some? Write to us at win@thenervemagazine.com and we’ll give you some!
one step closer to living in my van full time. One can only dream! Cheers to all the punks and freaks who’ve supported us.”
Blitzkrieg Pop! Congratulations also to top Canadian punk rock musical band Billy Talent, who have taken Germany by sturm as we can see from this
Wednesday Night Heroes Better than Billy Talent The Nerve would like to congratulate Edmonton’s Wednesday Night Heroes for signing a big, fat, billion dollar record deal with BYO Records. The band’s first album for the label,
Guilty Pleasure, will be released sometime this summer, barring any nuclear winter scenarios that might arise in the meantime. Said Graeme Hero, “Signing with BYO is not only a dream come true to my 15 year-old self, but it’s also
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The Nerve March 2007 Page
the fabled giants of Ultima Thule, Billyheinz Talentgeneghenkrieger ignites the Teutonic soul as if the glorious destiny of Germany herself might burst forth from the Testikel von den prachtvollen gewählten (untranslatable) of das Fatherpants bestriding-dingle the historic Berlin Monitorplatz und fenegenshnegengenegen (untranslatable) und himmel the sword of Longinus as it pierced the side of the Christ, and his blood nourished the ground upon which the Templar massacred in his name the degenerate Gedankeschwein (untranslatable) and the Black Sun will once more Sven Hassel und upon the brow of the der totalenkrieg a world in flame must and will submit to the will of the German people who will never again weather the cruel torments of surrender and the mighty boot of destiny crushes the eweiger feind and all who question her authority, while opening act Alexisonfire provided able support.
RAV Line Protestors Fixing a Hole A new phenomenon is gaining popularity in the South Cambie neighbourhood of Vancouver. Unidentified young people have been dumping refuse into the tunnel being dug for the RAV Line – the train that will eventually transport people between the airport and downtown. In the tunnel, workers have found an old couch, a porta potty, a bowling ball, and a bag of garbage that was apparently tossed from the window of an adjacent apartment building. “[The RAV Line] is bullshit,” said one protestor, a young white male whose name is withheld. “It’ll cost at least four times as much as the fast ferries… Working people all over the city are losing hours of travel time every day.” He went on to furiously rant about the existing train tracks along Arbutus Street, saying they could have been used to run a light rail system most of the way between the airport and downtown. He added finally that local businesses are hurting, and he’s worried about the future of the neighbourhood. The protestors recognize that their acts are a drop in the bucket. They encourage other South Cambie residents to join them until they achieve the impossible goal of refilling the tunnel. Then, they say, the government’s only option will be to repave the road and put things back to normal. - Michael Cook
frontpage article that appeared in Berlin’s daily broadsheet newspaper Das Testikal im Laster for an incredible 30 days in a row. We asked a guy from a secret S&M Club Brad likes to visit to translate the article for us: “Like
Rock and the Zombies’ place within it. They were fresh out of school when their amazing, paranoid, and utterly unique single “She’s Not There” was topping the UK charts in 1965, but the band struggled to capitalize much further on the success. The slyly syncopated “Tell Her No” followed and sold a few copies - and it’s a motherfucker of a song - but the Zombies wouldn’t have another tits-out worldwide smash until “Time of the Season” broke in the US. By then, the Zombies had been laid to rest, Blunstone was working for an Insurance company, and bandmates Rod Argent and Chris White were already prepping their next project, called, for reasons I still haven’t figured out, Argent. Since then, the Zombies’ final album, Oddessey and Oracle, has been endlessly reevaluated and seen for the UK psych/baroque
some movie mayhem! March 4th: LEGION OF IMPACT, Episodes 1-4! Jimi Cuell’s complete live-action video game series, on the big screen for the first time ever! Totally hilarious, totally cheesy, totally insane. Totally. A pastiche of bad 80s editing and notorious macho junk like Street Fighter: The Movie. Bonus: GARTH MARENGHI’S DARKPLACE Episodes 1-6, the brilliant, ridiculous, and embarrassingly astute fake 80s horror hospital drama. Hosted, written, and starring legendary horror author and ‘dream-weaver’ Garth Marenghi as Dr. Rick Dagless M.D. Screened twice on British TV, it’s never played
in North America. Awesome! Other coming attractions: March 11th – ROCK’N’ROLL NIGHTMARE starring Vancouver’s legendary Rock Warrior JON-MIKL THOR battling Puppet Satan and rubber penis demons! March 18th – Violent samurai classics SHOGUN ASSASSIN and LADY SNOWBLOOD! Geysers of spraying blood! Check out myspace.com/bizzarofilmorama for complete listings, details, and updates! We serve BEER and CINEMATIC PERVERSIONS! n
Getting to Know You!
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f you went to high school with a Nerve writer or have a link to their online journal, send it to cheapshotz@ thenervemagazine.com. We promise to protect the anonymity of our sources. This month: Michael Mann
Alert! Alert! Starting in March, BERTRAND’S BIZARRO FILM-O-RAMA, an all-new Sunday night film screening party, will be taking place at THE GAFF GALLERY, 684 E Hastings, in glorious Strathcona,Vancouver! This is a sortof continuation of the Maslianski’s Drive-In screenings of summer 2006... except now the screenings are indoors, The Nerve’s Mr. Bertrand is your host and things are getting weirder!!! Screenings begin at 7:30pm-ish every Sunday night! Bizarro cinema will go on until 11:00pm or so, $5.00 donation per screening. Beer, wine, and food are cheaper... INCREDIBLE VALUE! So wrestle past the junkies and enjoy
Nerve: What can you tell us about Michael’s teenage years? Informant: I remember him being obsessed with Henry Rollins. It actually made me kind of curious about Henry Rollins. Michael Mann disavows all rock music made by white people now. I believe that. What did he listen to back then? I just remember Henry Rollins. And he had pink hair and he was just generally antimainstream. He had pink hair? Yeah. Interesting… Wait, this is anonymous, right? Yes. He seemed more punk rock, in Grade 10, when he was probably about 15, and had pink hair, and wore a lot of leather… He had pink hair and he wore a lot of leather? Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. We are? Was he bullied a lot at school? No, but we were in a kind of alternative, outdoor program. There was no bullying. It was lovey-dovey. It was a nice atmosphere. Was Michael “nice”? Well, he was alternative. It felt like he didn’t want to be there. It was a little too nice for him. It was a really great program and I’m not sure what his problem was. Did he try and destroy the program from the inside? No. I think he would have liked for people to think that he did. My sources indicate that you might have ‘made out’ with Michael at one time - what can you tell us about his ‘technique’?
pop masterpiece that it is. “When the band finished,” Blunstone recalls, “we genuinely felt that we’d had our time, that we’d completed an artistic circle, and the race was run.” An actual career in music was inconceivable to the average spotty UK teen at the time, as Blunstone confirms. “That’s very true, and I think when we started out in the band, most of us thought a career lasted maybe two or three years.” Blunstone would eventually go solo with considerable success in the UK, and Argent did well, but the myth of Oddessey and Oracle was quietly blooming behind the scenes. “That album was never really a hit anywhere, and yet 10 years after the band had split, suddenly there was this huge interest. We were all slightly bemused. Now it sells regularly, year in and year out, in pretty serious numbers around the world.” Well, quality will out. The Zombies were too sophisticated for their time, and too young and
speccy to know what to do about it. Looking back, their best songs are neurotic sounding, offbeat, and musically as ambitious as the era’s other giants. They weren’t Herman’s Hermits, in other words. And now Blunstone and Argent are back together, touring as the Zombies once again, while all the living members are negotiating a 40th Anniversary Oddesey and Oracle performance at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire in London, slated for 2008. Blunstone - easily one of the nicest people I’ve ever interviewed - is giddy. “It’s a wonderful gift to be given. If you can play your music all the way through your whole life? What a great adventure. And I can tell you,
Shameless self-promotion: BERTRAND’S BIZZARO FILMO-RAMA!!!
Record Nerds, Ahoy! n a 1973, former Zombies vocalist Colin Blunstone told the LA Free Press, “When I was 18, I’d really worry about what I’d be doing when I was 27. I didn’t for one-minute think I’d be doing what I’m doing. I thought I’d have a shop, or something like that. I have not the slightest idea what I’ll be doing at 40, and to be honest, I’m glad. I don’t want to know.” Blunstone laughs long and hard when he hears the quote read back to him. “I always used to think big, you see!” “I can’t believe Rod Argent and I are 61,” continues Blunstone, “and I don’t know how far ahead you dare think, you know? But maybe we could still be doing this at 70? Who knows? 75! If we can, we will, let me tell you.” If you ever need proof that History with a capital H is bunk, just consider the History of
LETTERS: WE usually don’t run our letters because there is only so much praise we can handle. If you feel otherwise, well shit, fire up that ‘ol band sticker covered dialup modem 386 and bitchslap@thenervemagazine.com
Oh really! That’s news to me. I could invent something. Yes, please. A 15-year-old, pink-haired, leather-wearing Michael Mann? Well, I remember he broke his leg when he was skimboarding, and he had a cast, so I guess it wouldn’t have been all that gymnastic, his technique. Am I doing a good interview? Michael seems intent on outing people who aren’t even remotely gay - why? Hmm. Why? I think that would be quite amusing for him. And it fits with his anti-mainstream, wannabe-hipster mentality. I haven’t seen him in well over 10 years. To this day, he has beautiful lips. Any comment on that? Oh yes! The Macaulay Culkin lips. I definitely remember his lips. Have you ever seen Michael in a dress? Be honest. I don’t remember. Probably. Michael likes to cause a lot of stupid trouble - is this a new trend? I think that’s characteristic for shit-disturbers, don’t you? Yes. Tell him congratulations from me. He’s come into his own, let’s say. Is he just a sentimental old fluff deep down? Yeah. Cause then he wouldn’t have to work so hard at being a shit-disturber. I told you about his obsession with closeted homosexuality. And you told me that he had pink hair and wore a lot of leather. Right. So… can you connect the dots for us? Mmm. Shit-disturber, nice lips, witty, alternative, likes to challenge people on their sexuality… Not to mention claiming conquests that never actually happened. Case closed. Thank you for your time. Is he still into Henry Rollins? What do you mean by “into”? - Staff we really, really appreciate it.” The Zombies play Richard’s on Richards March 11th. n
CONTENTS
Of Jesus Freaks, Record Collectors, and the Apocalypse By Allan MacInnis
T
y Scammel was an elfin old hippie who specialized in selling psychedelic rock LPs; for years, he was a fixture in the back of the Vancouver Flea Market.Ty died of cancer awhile back, but he’s left a legacy with us – an utterly unique Vancouver band who were snatched back from thrift-store oblivion when he found one of a mere 100 extant copies of their first LP, Troubled (1970), in a bin in 1988 and began to share it with his hipper clientele.The band was the New Creation, a musically eccentric Christian garage band, currently being marketed as “outsider music.”Their new CD, A Unique Disaster, was recorded more than 30 years after Troubled, and is partially dedicated to Ty. I’m delighted that the attentive scavenging of “one of ours” has actually made a mark on the world of popular music – albeit a rather odd one. I hope, wherever you are,Ty, there’s lots of good weed and a turntable – I liked you a lot, man. “The New Creation’s Troubled is just a terrific album, a showcase of raw, inventive musicality,” writes Irwin Chusid, WFMU disc jockey and author of Songs in the Key of Z:The Curious Universe of Outsider Music. “Categorically, it’s – I dunno – ‘60s Garage Godcore? Yet it transcends being a mere period piece. The band’s songwriting is deliriously brilliant, their lyrical perspective haunting. The band’s sincerity is unquestionable, even if its meters are unfathomable. If you don’t like Troubled, you’re a spineless micrococcus.You’re a barnacle beneath the yacht of aesthetic cognition – a Philistine – in every sense of the word – and you deserve to be heaved face-first from the Temple of Analogue Bliss.” The hyperbolic Chusid is one of several outsider music enthusiasts who got behind the 2003 reissue of Troubled, along with outsider music “scout” James Brouwer (whom Ty turned onto the record) and Companion Records’ Will Louviere and Troy Peters, who chose the CD as their label’s first release. “It’s an amazing thing, y’know,” the soft-spoken Chris Towers tells me. Now in his 60s, the retired postal worker cuts an imposing figure, looking like a heavy-set and slightly shaggy Michael Moriarity and wearing a huge colourful sweater that his mother Lorna Towers (also in the band) knitted for him. “We recorded it in 1970, made 100 copies, and mailed them all, except for those given to family members, to Christian ministries all through Canada and the United States. Never heard a word, and then 32 years later, Will
phones up from San Francisco... It was a thrill, such a thrill!” Back in the day, Chris Towers was a fan of Christian rockers such as Larry Norman (who penned my favourite couplet of the genre, “No more LSD for me/ I’ve met the man from Galilee”) as well as secular acts like the Doors, Cream, and the Rolling Stones. He got to talk with Ty at his Mount Pleasant home shortly before he died and give him copies of the CD. “We had tea” – tea tea; trippy as his music sometimes gets, Towers is not a drug user – “and talked over recordings and such. He had a fantastic collection!” In 2004, energized by the rediscovery of their music, Chris and Lorna Towers got the idea of recording again. “Mom and I started drafting songs, hinting at the Last Times. It was Mom’s message, she was really concerned to get something out. And it’s all to do with Armageddon and the Apocalypse and that kind of thing.” They flew original drummer Janet Tiessen out from Toronto in August of 2004; they hadn’t been in touch, and nor had any of the members kept up their instruments. The trio required more than an average amount of help from producer Oliver Conway of Aero Music and the Yale favourites Oliver and the Elements and Incognito. “He was really marvellous,” Chris says. “He was patient, he was a mentor, he taught us things as we went along. He had suggestions for guitar riffs and for adding the keyboards,” which “added another sound and depth to it. He was just marvellous. I can’t thank him enough for the time and the patience he showed us.” The album, which will be distributed locally by Scratch Records, is, Chris warns, “dark. It is really dark – doom and gloom throughout.” At one point, for the song “Jokes and Games” – about contemporary decadence – he uses Greig’s “Norwegian
The Resurrection of the New Creation
Dance Number 2”, which sounds basically like carnival music, as a way of lightening the mood, but for me, it only serves to darken it further. I asked if it was meant as an ironic commentary on people who might regard the New Creation like a circus sideshow, and Towers laughed. Nothing of the sort was intended, he assured me. Another of the peppier numbers, “From the Roman Shores” is probably my favourite song on the disc, with Lorna singing “Cos he’s the Antichrist!” and Chris chiming in with a background “6-6-6” in a bizarrely singalong chorus. It’s catchy enough that you could imagine people clapping time over a campfire, if people sang songs about the Antichrist over campfires. Maybe somewhere they do. I ask Lorna Towers, now in her 80s, to explain a bit about the Antichrist to me. “He’ll be human – just a very suave gentleman at the beginning, and exceedingly brilliant,” she says with conviction. “And he’ll take over. People will have to trust him. They’re going to have to trust somebody! What’s happening here, gridlock all over the place! This place has been decimated, almost, of everything that we love and know... And all of a sudden people will begin realizing that this guy is going to take charge, and they’ll flock to him. And things will get real steamy, when he’s going to demand everything of humanity...” The Antichrist will rise “from the Roman enclave of nations – or whatever Rome has touched,” including England and Germany; “so it’s been decreed in scripture.” (see Daniel 12:11-12 and much of Matthew 24. The New Creation have helpfully annotated their sophomore release with scriptural references). “The thing is, with the CD, we tried to just put it out and not so much make people scared of what’s going to happen, but to know this will happen!” Lorna says. “There’s no point in refuting it. If you go against the word, and suddenly this whole group of people around the world is gone – it will be too late then to start thinking you can be a part of that. Then the wrath of God does descend in the tribulation. If you have not believed, if you have not been moved in this general exodus, it’s too late. It’s hard to tell you about the general exodus because
we don’t really know how it’s done, but we’re talking about God, the creator of the universe. It’s easy for Him!” The authors of the Left Behind series draw on the same pool of beliefs as the (Baptist) Towers. Lorna calls the series “excellent.” “They DO get it right,” she says emphatically. “All the way through.” For those wondering, the US cannot be read as a new Rome – Lorna Towers makes this very clear. Her son is no fan of the way things are going in the United States, though. (He emphatically asks me to print that he is speaking for himself, and not the other band members, in what follows). “I loathe George Bush,” he says, to my delight. “And I’m fearful of the religious right. My neighbour to the one side is a Muslim – we’re the best of friends. My neighbour to the other side is a Sikh – we’re the best of friends. I embrace everything and all, though I still believe our message is so essential and important... but I have no ill will toward anybody, no matter what their faith. Except that I get very agitated listening to George Bush and the coterie he’s got with him in Washington, because I think they’re just destroying more than they’re doing good in this world...You know, the Charter of Rights in this country guarantee everybody the same rights, and they’re getting trampled in both countries, I think.” Chris believes gay marriage is a right, doesn’t like Stephen Harper, and has always voted New Democrat – far more left-liberal views than one might expect, though again, he is speaking just for himself. “Jesus was more of a socialist than he was a capitalist, that’s for sure. I think that’s been lost. To call the United States and to call Canada Christian countries is just... it’s not an abomination... It’s perverse, because there’s nothing Christian about the politics of either country. Money is all.” He believes that the teachings of Jesus, with their “love your neighbour” message, are “special and meaningful today as always.” How does the band feel about the fact that at least some of their fans are drawn by more voyeuristic desires, peering into the strange world of People Who Are Not Like Us? “Well, so be it!” Lorna says. “I’m sure that listeners will pick up something in Troubled and A Unique Disaster, with the intensity that we feel, the truth that we feel – especially when times are a little bit hard and bewildering. But you know, I really just leave it to the Lord...!” Chris agrees: “I guess subliminally the message is there, whether they’re just enjoying it for the offbeat music or whatever.” Towers, still a music fan, has been slowly exploring the world of outsider music – he’s read Chusid’s book, and has listened to the Shaggs, Jandek, and Daniel Johnston, and is working his way through the Companion Records catalogue. “It’s interesting music, you know! The ideas behind what they’re doing, their slant on things... The musicianship doesn’t live up to it sometimes, like ours, but it’s very interesting!” To read the remainder of my interview with Chris Towers, see alienatedinvancouver.blogspot.com.To buy Troubled online or hear samples: http://companionrecords. com.To buy A Unique Disaster, check Scratch or other local record stores soon. It can also be bought online on eBay. Similarities between the name of the seller and the name of the author of this article should not be made much of. n
“The Antichrist will be human – just a very suave gentleman, and exceedingly brilliant. And he’ll take over. And things will get real steamy…”
The Nerve March 2007 Page
It’s Grim on Top
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Bloc Party Bloc Party
By Will Pedley
“
It can be quite disheartening when you see so many bands doing the rounds,” grumbles Matt Tong, the man behind the drum kit of indie-pop rock stars Bloc Party. “Nobody has really learnt any lessons over the last 10 or 20 years, and just the same ideas are being continually regurgitated.” Having grown up as a band in central London and “graduated through the Camden toilet scene,” it’s understandable that even at the age of 27, Tong is already rather world weary and skeptical. “London in particular is a very competitive place for anyone who wants to pursue a career in something creative,” he says. “But we tried to ignore what was going on around us really and just concentrate on becoming the best band we could. There are so many poseurs and scene hijackers, but it was very easy to draw a line between us and what a lot of other bands got up to.” Developing in such a highly strung and superficial environment, Bloc Party quickly had to develop a thick skin. “I think that Kele (Okereke, singer/guitarist) definitely had to toughen up a bit as he’s generally a very sensitive character. He can take constructive criticism, but when you’re dealing with the industry, sometimes some of the things people will say can be quite hurtful, especially when its about something that you really believe in. Luckily, there’s always been this confidence at the core of this band. We always knew that if we just kept our heads down and really worked at it then something good would happen sooner or later. Kele has always been very driven and I think that he has really helped steer the band through some hard times. He never gave up, he got downbeat sometimes, but he never gave up.” Even though they struggled, Matt feels it was an important experience for his band to endure. “I feel somewhat sorry for some of the bands in recent years that have become instantly massive without really having to slog like that,” he states. “Some of the bands just don’t know what it’s like to have their backs against the wall. I think that something we thrived on was being seen as some kind of underdog.” Underdogs they may once have been, but this is definitely not the case any longer. Their first album reached number three in the British album charts (eventually going platinum) and was voted album of the year in 2005 in the pretentious but very influential New Musical Express. Early reports on their new album, A Weekend In The City, suggest even greater success, debuting at number 12 on the US Billboard chart and number two in good ol’ Blightey. You would assume that all of this good fortune would be likely to make anyone pretty happy and positive. Not so in this case. Despite being at the end of another well received tour of the UK, this Limey is seemingly more than willing to reinforce some old national stereotypes of grumpiness. Matt is talking to The Nerve from Sheffield, an old industrial town in the north of England; a place where it’s always grey, overcast and pissing with rain. It’s certainly not the kind of place that is likely to lift your spirits. He continues to reflect glumly on the current situation of music in England. “I’m pretty cynical,” he explains, “because there has been even more of a gold rush mentality this time around, even more so than there was with Britpop. It’s really disheartening picking up NME and seeing at least 15 new bands every week. They all pretty much sound and look the same. In London in particular it’s a bit of an odd situation because being in a band is almost considered the norm. Maybe I’m secretly a bit jealous because 10 years ago, playing music made you a bit of an outsider and I tried hard to find people to play music with. I think a lot of people are throwing themselves headlong into it without really questioning what it is
Looking for a back alley grope? You’re gonna have to get past Bloc Party first. that they’re doing and without questioning what they hope to gain, other than instant kudos or a grope in a back alley round the corner from a venue”. The foursome (completed by Russell Lissack on guitar and Gordon Moakes on bass) have been careful not to get enticed by such meaningless and fleeting (but no less enjoyable) experiences. Despite getting offers from record labels fairly early on they bided their time and kept their heads together. Says Matt, “I think our first offer came through around October/November 2005. I won’t say with whom and for how much it was but if we’d accepted that deal then we’d have definitely had to carry on working and probably record the album by ourselves, and there is no way that we could have made the record that we did like that. But we were getting fairly comfortable at that point that things would probably work out for us. We really devoted a lot of attention to the decision making process of getting the right choice of record label and management. I think it’s two of the most important things a band needs to get right at the start. If you get that fucked up its very hard to recover.” Matt continues to reflect on how this has affected other less level headed musicians. “There are numerous horror stories about bands that took far too much money from the outset and were then expected to justify that and had to make the kind of music that they didn’t necessarily want to make. The rock world is littered with casualties that have been screwed over by their managers. Then there is true talent that never gets the credit or adoration that they deserve because they’ve been unfortunate enough to come into contact with the wrong kinds of people. Sometimes a decision is made and once it’s been made it’s out of their hands. Things can backfire horribly and bands find that they’ve been delivered a set of empty promises.”
“I’m really worried that the industry is going to bring itself to its knees because they’re constantly signing these new acts and none of them have any time to develop. Bands are signed up now and expected to deliver the goods almost instantly, otherwise you don’t hear them a second time around. I think it’s quite notable that a lot of the initial clutches of good new bands have really struggled with their second records.” Fortunately, the guys in Bloc Party were savvy enough to sign to a label that wouldn’t heap such expectations upon them, but that would provide them with enough money to quit their day jobs (It’s alright for some!). Even so, as ever, Matt and his bandmates have always kept a healthy perspective on their situation and maintained a strong work ethic. “You have to remind yourself just how lucky you are to have the opportunity to focus on music full time,” he notes. “Not many people have that opportunity. I think that we somehow unconsciously try to stack the odds up against us just so that we feel we have a reason to continue, because I think that some people can become very decadent with all that free time. But Kele never stops writing.”
Having avoided the many pitfalls that more materialistic and less centered groups succumb to, Bloc Party has been free to produce the second album that they wanted. It is an album that has its heart in pop music although Matt maintains that the group’s sound has always been this way, asserting, “I think that an appreciation and a reappraisal of pop music is central to what we do.You probably didn’t hear it as much on Silent Alarm because of the production, but it was definitely there from the beginning.” Although Matt admits that Bloc Party’s pop-edge is “exaggerated” on A Weekend in the City, he adds, “Russell has always been a very melodious guitar player and he loves pop music, so I think a lot of that aspect of our sound can be attributed to him.” Despite the morose disposition of Matt and his band’s outlook on what is going on around them, they couldn’t be in a stronger position right now. Even so, they’re not likely to get complacent. “We’ve started writing for the next record already, I think the idea is to get into the studio as soon as possible, so I think by the summer we’ll be recording again. It’s good discipline, you know? I think it’s important to keep ideas flowing, it’s so easy to get out of the habit of writing.” And who said rock stars were lazy, eh? n
It’s really disheartening picking up NME and seeing at least 15 new bands every week.They all pretty much sound and look the same
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If you blinked at some point in the late ‘90s you might have missed it, but electronic dance music was cool for about a year. In January 1997, two Frenchmen in robot costumes, Daft Punk, released their groundbreaking debut, Homework. Though a decade old now, Homework hasn’t aged a day and it easily rivals the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack as the most influential dance music album of all time. The album inspired some of the greatest music videos ever made and, consequently, Homework was a crossover hit that got huge airplay and introduced legions of people to dance music.
Then, in March 1998, Madonna released her techno-inspired Ray of Light album, which sold 15 million units worldwide, and it was all downhill from there. Dance music became the soundtrack to bullet-time fight sequences, tapas restaurants and car commercials. Before you knew it, liking dance music became the disgraceful scarlet letter of shame it is today. But not so fast. Something strange has been going on over the past few years. Dance rock bands like Franz Ferdinand and Bloc Party are top of the charts. Even stranger is that full-fledged dance music acts, like LCD Soundsystem, MSTRKRFT and Diplo, are being championed by trendsetters who can’t relate to a single character in the movie Groove and think Carl Cox is a male porn star. One of the labels at the forefront of this resurrection is Ed Banger
By Michael Mann
‘We are Your Friends’ was the second track we did together. We had a common friend with Pedro [Busy P], which was So_Me, the graphic designer. We had dinner at my place and we let him listen to ‘We Are Your Friends’ that we did for a remix contest for the radio. It was the only finished track we had. He was very enthusiastic and two weeks after we were signed on Ed Banger.“ To quote Shinzon, Jean-Luc Picard’s evil clone in Star Trek: Nemesis, “I’m afraid you won’t survive to witness the victory of the echo... over the voice.” That’s certainly the case with Justice’s breakout single. “We are Your Friends” is an electro-funk sing-a-long anthem, which is a remix of defunct band Simian (now called Simian Mobile Disco). The video for the song even went on to win a statue at the MTV Europe video awards. During the director’s acceptance speech, Kanye West ran on stage to declare the outcome bullshit and went on to say his “Touch the Sky” video should have won because it “cost a million dollars, Pamela Anderson was in it. I was jumping across canyons. If I don’t win, the awards show loses credibility. Nothing against you, but hell, man.” Despite that insanity, the song has remained a relatively under the radar hit that is still being discovered by listeners. Augé admits, “it’s really amazing to see that the song is lasting. Especially, for club music, you make a one-summer hit and then it’s gone. I think it’s probably due to the fact that for us, ‘We Are Your Friends’ is more of a pop song than a proper club anthem… I think we at first didn’t really think about doing dance music. We just wanted to do some pop tracks and it just ended up in the clubs. We discovered club music very late.” Being late adopters hasn’t translated into problems finding work. Since “We Are Your Friends,”
Hey Gaspard, come on, have another drink!
JUSTICE
Les Rythmes Digitales Records, a French electro label founded by Daft Punk’s manager Busy P. The stars of this new label are Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay, aka Justice. If you’ve ever read some dude with bangs’ mp3 blog, Justice require little introduction. For the rest of us, Augé explains over the phone from his home in Paris how Justice came about. “I started to do music like three years ago with Xavier. We just met by a common friend. We started doing music and
Justice has remixed the likes of Franz Ferdinand, DFA 1979, Daft Punk and Fatboy Slim, and produced original material. One track in particular, “Waters of Nazareth,” features a very Sunday school sounding organ along with heavy religious imagery on the sleeve. Though both of them are Catholics, Augé claims religious brainwashing isn’t the intent. “[The crosses] came from the organ break in ‘Waters of Nazareth’. We decided to make the sleeve so it fit
the track. It was a whole concept. It’s really strong imagery but maybe it’s offensive to some.” Regardless, Justice has since adopted a cross as their logo. Their most recent offering “Phantom,” the single off of their debut full length which is coming this summer, is also the group’s Daft Punkest sounding offering to date. Though built entirely around a sample from a Goblin track that was featured in Dario Argento’s Tenebrae, Augé claims the intent behind the sample isn’t nerdy horror movie fanboyism. Rather, “We really wanted to bring back emotion in club music. I think the movie soundtracks are really emotional. They really influence the way you see the picture. We really tried to make people feel something when the track is on.” Like a religious experience? “Yeah,” Augé replies. While it’s a little premature to proclaim that this Daft Punk echo will surpass the original sound, the comparisons are inevitable. For Augé. “It’s a burden. We really like their music. But it’s totally a different situation. When Daft Punk released Homework, dance music wasn’t popular at all. Now, it’s totally impossible to think about doing a music revolution. Maybe this is just the aftermath of Daft Punk.“ This aftermath he speaks of has seen attendance to
music tracks. It’s really good to see that we manage to interest the Vice people.” Augé accounts for Justice’s bizarre crossover appeal to fickle hipsters and blindly obedient dance music devotees by saying, “it’s because we have a really pop approach to composing. We are always trying to have a verse and chorus structure in our tracks, even when there’s no vocals. We are totally unable to do a seven-minute club tracks because we get really easily annoyed. So we are trying to
Rum and Tabasco. It’s our only drug.
”
I said... have another DRINK!
shows dropping quicker than a free hit of ecstasy. In fact, Daft Punk is the only outfit from the explosion that’s still as big a draw as it was in its heyday. So who’s coming out to these shows that feature religious dance music, Giallo soundtrack samples and flashing strobe light crosses? “Just monks,” Augé kids. But when pressed whether it’s dudes with glowsticks or dudes with tightjeans, it turns out the answer is both. “The good thing about the Ed Banger shows in general is that we got a really mixed audience.You can have like a 15 year-old indie kid and also the guys more into hip-hop or pure electronic
keep the attention of the listener so they’re always amused or surprised.” Well what is it: live music and cocaine, or DJ sets and ecstasy? It can’t be both at the same time cuz you’ll end up unconscious in the bathroom. Well, Augé has found the synthesis, “Rum and Tabasco. It’s our only drug.” While also likely to have you wind up in the bathroom, it won’t render you unconscious. Though you’ll be praying you were. The Ed Banger Records Tour with DJ sets from Justice, Sebastian, DJ Mehdi, and Busy P comes to Vancouver on March 25 at the Caprice. n
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COMPOSITION: DALE DERUITER
CONTENTS
by Jenny C
F
or two and a half years I did my very best to become an American. I proposed to two men I barely knew (they had great record collections, I thought it was worth a shot), offered to live in a cardboard box in the corner of someone’s dusty rehearsal space and even pledged allegiance to the flag and all its 54 uh… 52 uh, shit… 51 states…(?) Now I know that must sound absolutely insane, and it is, but any true-blue music nerd from the Great White North will tell you that you can only watch your favourite American bands get as close as Seattle or Buffalo before abruptly turning the van around, and AWAY from the Canadian border, so many times before you start to lose it. So I did. I full on lost it… but then I remembered that I kinda like civil liberty, so I went searching for a better solution, preferably one that saw me getting tipsy, wasted and then obliterated for days on end with new friends who wanted to celebrate the finer things in life: cheap roadside tacos, hard-to-find seven inches, and outrageously messy trash-punk. And I found just that when I stumbled upon (and later out of) The Empty Bottle in Chicago, Illinois. The perfectly seedy cavern-in-the-wall played host to the most infamous (and now defunct) trashrock music festival in all of the Midwest, The Chicago Blackout. And it was there, during these nights of debauchery, that it dawned on me… why would I want to live in America when I could just fly there, see all my favourite bands at a festival and then leave?! There’s a just one slight problem to my plan. I don’t know about you, but after shelling out cash for: tickets to the fest, travel costs, records and band T-shirts, booze, food, (not including BBQ “supplies” cause its not a fest unless there’s a wrap-up BBQ), and a place to stay (assuming I couldn’t find anyone on myspace to take me in), there is no way my little bank account is gonna let me do it all again for the next fest, and the one after that…! So looks like it’s time to weigh the options, for both me and you. Which music fest (and by music fest, I mean drunken gathering where trashy-garage-punk is played) is it gonna be for 2007? At 7pm in Austin, Texas, the streets are covered
The Nerve March 2007 Page 10
with screaming drunkards weaving in’n’out of smoky nightclubs and all-night tattoo parlours, the whole city reeks of bluesy rock’n’roll… and that’s just on a quiet Tuesday night on Sixth Street. Imagine that multiplied by five million-bazillion and you’ve got South by Southwest. This is as big as music festivals get, which is why the annual event March 14th-18th is actually called a music conference… Or maybe it’s because all those big-shot A&R guys needed something more legit to tell their wives while they’re out getting wasted searching for the next ArcadeBloc-Fire-Party wrapped in an anonymous blowjob. But if you can get past all that flashy industry stuff, you’ll find yourself quite at home in some of Austin’s grimier venues, the flagship of which is Beerland. It’s in these dirty, beat-up rocknroll clubs that: the Black Lips, Reigning Sound, the Carbonas, Jay Reatard, The Creeteens, LiveFastDie, CPC GangBangs,Viva L’American Death Ray Music, the Goodnight Loving, Marked Men, Reigning Sound and even Vancouver’s own Ladies Night will be playing. The only problem is, they might all be playing at the exact same time! With so many great bands playing almost around the clock at SXSW, it’s impossible not to miss some of your favourites.Your best bet is to be prepared, pick your showcases before hand and don’t forget to factor gallons of beer into the equation. Otherwise you could end-up distracted and miss the Stooges (yes, they’re going to be there too) which means you’ll be the butt of a joke for the ah, well, the better part of… forever. Oh and don’t worry about accommodation, if you haven’t booked a hotel by now, you’re not gonna get one – people don’t actually sleep at
SXSW anyways! That said, if drinking whiskey in the hot, sweaty sun is not quite your thing, maybe you’ll be more at home swigging gin in a big-city back alley? If that’s the case, then you wanna check out the first annual Radio Heartbeat PowerPop Festival in Brooklyn, New York, March 29th – April 1st. Now I know it says PowerPop right there in the title, but you can relax, the powerpop part comes from the fact that Radio Heartbeat is powerpop reissue label putting on the fest. The majority of the bands on the bill seem to be much more garage and punk. There’ll even be a few familiar faces around with two Vancouver bands, the Riff Randels and the Pointed Sticks set to play the fest. Other excitements on the fourday bill include: the Speedies, Nikki Corvette and the Stingrays, the Busy Signals, the Suspicions and Beat Beat Beat. Oh, and the Yum-Yums… not bad, huh? The main shows are being held at Southpaw, a huge venue located in Park Slope, Brooklyn, which use to be a 99 Cent Discount store… but they’ve long since slapped it with paint and turned the lights down low enough to be able to charge you $22 US a night or $80 US for a pass to the whole damn thing. Passes are limited though and will probably be long gone by the time you read this. And unlike Austin, there will be tons of hotels to stay in. But if booking a hotel seems a bit overwhelming (good luck dealing with New York), there’s always once again myspace. And out of your 326 “friends” surely one of them has to live close to Southpaw and willing to take you in, in exchange for drugs and sex. But you’ve only got three weeks to figured it all out, both these fests are fast approaching… Now
And out of your 326 “friends” surely one of them has to live close to Southpaw and willing to take you in, in exchange for drugs and sex.
don’t you start choking in a pool of spontaneity, relax… there’s always Memphis in September. Thrown by one of, if not the finest, rock’n’roll record labels of our time, Goner Fest is billed as four days of rock’n’roll mayhem. That description doesn’t even come close to doing justice to the absolute retardedness that will be unleashed this September 27th-29th. Last year’s bands: the Royal Pendletons, Final Solutions, Angry Angles, the Hipshakes, Leather Uppers, River City Tanlines, and the Boston Chinks, to name of few, cooked up a salty mess of BAR-BQed rock’n’roll sweetness that only hints at what $12 US a night will get you at year IV! I promise the whole greasy adventure will leave you shaking your head… wondering who the hell Elvis is anyways?! Seems to me there’s only one king in Memphis, and that’s Goner Records – their fest is just as legendary. And don’t expect me to offering up any more tips on places to stay, if you haven’t caught on by now, well good luck trying to navigate your way home in a strange city totally blasted off your rock! So that’s it.You’re on your own for the rest. I’ve told you what I know. Well almost…This is important: Make sure if you’re gonna go with someone else to a fest that they’re just as completely obsessed with the bands and music as you are, cause no one wants to be having the time of their life, covered in beer, tears of joy streaming down their face and have their friend lean over and ask, “So who is this again?” It’s the quickest way to ruin a friendship, trust me. Okay, now I’m really done. Time to take your pick… And with so many fests out there, and more cropping up all the time, there’s sure to be one that’s just right for you, even if it’s not one of the ones I covered here (although I can’t imagine the type of person who wouldn’t find lineups like the ones I’ve mentioned totally earth-shattering, but I guess someone has to go to POP Montreal). If you wanna find more out on your own: Radio Heartbeat Powerpop: http://radioheartbeat. net/powerpopfestival/ South By Southwest: http://2007.sxsw.com/ Goner Fest: http://www.goner-records.com/ n
CONTENTS
The Oblique Strategies of Yukon in the studio; a method that has been adopted and tailored in recent months by Vancouver band Yukon, whose own additions include: question exclusivity, play it loose and when creative road blocks hit, jump genres. Since starting in 2005,Yukon has been a continual work in progress, switching from one style to the next, and frequently dropping and picking up members. The only real constant has been its two songwriters, Liam Butler and Jack Jutson, who do whatever necessary to prevent Yukon from Guys, you can take your piss jugs and just frig off. being run-of-the-mill. The two wide-eyed musicians first started By Brock Thiessen as a trio but, with the loss of a founding member, they promptly dropped the rules ive way to your worst impulse. Repetition about membership. “I really like the revolving door is a form of change. Remove specifics and approach to being in a band,” says singer-bassist convert to ambiguities. These are just a few of the aphorisms found in Butler. “I would never want to limit myself to playing the deck of cards devised by Brian Eno and Peter with a distinct group of people.” According to vocalist-guitarist Jutson, this loose Schmidt in 1975, which the pair christened ‘Oblique approach to organization has allowed the band to Strategies’. It was a way of breaking mental deadlock
G
stretch its artistic feelers. It’s an outlook that helps explain the jump from the serene folk rock of debut album Furnaces to Yukon’s new “tropical” sound. Whereas 2005’s Furnaces plays like a cross between Neil Young and the lo-fi style of the Microphones, its latest work comes from much deeper ethnic origins. New songs such as “Miami” pick up cues from a mishmash of world music, such as reggae, and afrobeat, leading some to say Yukon now sounds like
I’d much rather go see a band that’s sloppy and in shambles New Order gone Tropicalia. “It’s almost like Furnaces has become someone else’s album now,” Jutson says. “Modelling ourselves after something like African music just seemed right.” But since Yukon hasn’t stepped into the studio in
more than a year, much of the band’s appeal rests on its erratic live shows, which Butler says thrive on the unexpected. “Spontaneity has an energy that I like more than calculated gestures. I’d much rather go see a band that’s sloppy and in shambles, with a really amazing energy, than a band that’s really good at playing their instruments and sounds all rigid.” On stage,Yukon plans to “make it more sensual” by incorporating marimba, steel drum and a large horn section. “When people see us play I hope they can get into how much fun we are having and get into the mood that we’re in, which is to be really thankful and happy that we can be here playing our music,” Butler says. Also, in the last year, Butler and Jutson have dedicated much of their energy to their young company, Golden Family United, which has been steadily putting on shows in Vancouver for the last several months. The two plan to slow down on the concert promoting however, and use the company as a small CDR label for future Yukon releases and pretty much anyone who wants to join the family. “At first, we’ll probably just make 50 or 100 copies of CDRs until we figure out where we really want to go,” Jutson says. “Then we can press five million copies or something.” n
Settle Down, Ladies! BA Johnston
By Plow
W
hen it comes to the phrase “pay your dues”, one guy comes to mind. B. fucking A. Johnston. This guy is a true road warrior, even though he doesn’t drive. It’s kind of funny how some of the hardest working acts traveling this country are all solo acts. And this one works the hardest. And probably the solo-est. He takes the 36 window coupe everywhere he goes. He is the Stomping Tom of every indie scenester kid’s wet fantasy. Nerve: What exactly do you do onstage every night? BA Johnston: I give 110% and I rock the shit out of shitty towns. What instrument do you play? I play casios, and a guitar, and a walkman. How does your mother feel about you never leaving the nest? And what does father think of all this? My father says that I bring shame onto our family. He really wants me to be a spring and wire salesman like himself. My mother still thinks I will be a lawyer. I
have not the heart to tell her otherwise. What’s it like being a 35 year old virgin? have you ever kissed a girl? Pretty bad. I am so dusty. It’s sad, really.You gotta have hope. Hope that your ship will come in. I’ts hard to keep the confidence up. What’s it like traveling by Greyhound? It’s either great, like when you eat ketchup chips and watch Muppets in Space, or the worse thing ever, like when a fat guy sits beside you. Who would win in a street fight? Robocop or Crocodile Dundee? Robocop is a Robocop. Crocodile Dundee would die the death he deserves. What’s with your obsession with poutine and the Pita Pit? Hot girls making me food are hot. Poutine is my life’s blood. Cheese curds are the best things ever invented. They are my insulin. I heard a rumor (started by me right now) that one of your casio-based tunes “Sleepin’
Poutine is my life’s blood. Cheese curds are my insulin.
with My Walkman” is gonna be on MuchMusic’s Dance Hits 2007 compilation. Anything you’d like to say about this? I miss Erica Ehm. She was hot and mean. It will be on the album. Background vocals by Master T’s keyboards. I love the name of your new disc, Call Me When Old and Fat is the New Young and Sexy. Have you received any calls yet? Sadly, no. My mom called to make me feel better but I felt worse. When are you gonna admit that the Hamilton Tiger Cats suck as bad as the Toronto Argos? Nobody blows like the Argos!! Is it common for you to get into the wrong vehicle at gas stations in small towns in New Brunswick? Shit yeah. I’m just trying to get the fuck outta New Brunswick. How can there be fat vegetarians? Cheese, gravy and french fries. Chip dip doesn’t help much either. n
Hey Next Hundred Years dude, grab a fork!
The Next Hundred Years Bringing Heavy Back
PHOTO: LEIGH RIGHTON
By Will Pedley
Seriously, dude, what the HELL did you eat?
“
If you’re in it for chicks and money at this level, you’re gonna be sorely disappointed”, reflects Joel Cannell, bassist in the Next Hundred Years. His bandmate, guitarist Kyle McLean chips in,
“Especially playing our style of music. We’ve got a lot of dude groupies,” he explains. “And I love every one of them. The little bastards!” They might be joking around but such remarks give an honest reflection of the Vancouver-based band’s attitude. They’re serious about what they do but not necessarily about themselves, and they’re realistic enough about the constraints of the music industry to instead focus on the most important aspect of being in a band; the music. TNHY started life a few years back with Kyle, Joel, and drummer Arden Picton. Sometime later they acquired Zeb Pigott-Duggan, on violin and vocals, which naturally marked a significant turning point in the band’s sound. A fifth and final member, guitarist Jordan Bennee was also added just before they set about recording a self-titled, self-financed debut in December 2005. And what a psychedelic rock behemoth it is. From the taut opener “Machine” to the expansive reaches of closing track “Uma”, it’s a startling and audacious collection of songs which borrow from grunge, stoner and contemporary prog, and which TNHY then somehow forge into their own unique thing.Yet depite such artistic triumphs, TNHY actually went on hiatus during recording in order
to reasses how they all felt about making music together. Says Kyle, “It got to the point where we had to decide, ‘Are we going to do this or are we not going to do this? Are we that band that plays in their garage for their drunken friends, or do we want to actually take a stab at recording an album?’” “So now we just play for our drunken friends at Pub 340 instead,” adds Joel. “We got paid $25 each for that show,” Kyle snaps back. “It was fucking sweet. If we play 40 or 50 Friday nights a week then I’ll be able to quit my job.” “Yeah,” says Joel. “We’ll be rolling in Happy Meals™!” TNHY seem to have an equally healthy view of the oft-chased, much-fabled ‘Record Deal’. “We certainly want bigger and better things but I don’t think there’s much we can do other than write good music,” says Kyle, with a shrug. “That’s all we can control.”
He’s also lucid enough to know that TNHY’s appeal isn’t necessarily immediate. “It seems that our first album is a grower,” Kyle states, “which to me is rad, because all my favorite music is like that. Kyuss did nothing for me the first time I listened to them, Tool as well took me some time to really get into. Then there’s Britney Spears and of course Justin Timberlake.” Really? “He brought sexy back,” Kyle asserts. “The Next Hundred Years were gonna bring sexy back but then he called us and said ‘I’m gonna bring sexy back.You bring the beers, I’ll bring the sexy!’ It was wonderful.” Well, they might not be bringing sexy back, but amongst Vancouver’s plethora of tribute acts and all too self-conscious indie-art-scene-hipsters, The Next Hundred Years certainly have more to offer than just beer. n
If we play 40 or 50 Friday nights a week then I’ll be able to quit my job
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CONTENTS
The Obscure Passions of Tom Holliston and his Show
Business Giants
By Allan MacInnis
“I don’t think my records are even close to breaking Styrofoam, let alone gold.” - Tom Holliston
Y
ou’ve thrilled to his interpretive dancing during his oft-topless renditions of Nomeansno classics such as “Big Dick.” You’ve marvelled at the sheer dexterity with which he burns through left-handed solos for “Two Lips, Two Lungs and One Tongue.” You’ve contemplated the remarkable quantity and consistency of the drool he produces on cue as his alter-ego, the sub-moronic Tommy Hanson, of the Hanson Brothers. But did you realize that, before he hitched his star to those show-stealin’ Wright boys, Tom Holliston was an accomplished singer-songwriter in his own right, and that throughout his tenure in Nomeansno, he has produced a steady stream of brilliant CDs, both as leader of the Show Business Giants and under his own name (with backing bands dubbed his Orphans, Opportunists, and - my fave - his Apologists)? I thought not. It’s past time all you kids in Wrong shirts got wise, for in the case of Mr. Holliston, we are in the presence of... well, a very odd cat, but I dig him, and I’m thrilled he will take the stage at the Anza Club as bandleader on March 17th for a RARE SHOW BUSINESS GIANTS PERFORMANCE! Holliston has his pet themes, often revolving around celebrity and the media. “Genitalia Issue” on my favourite of his solo CDs, the untitled Opportunists disc, takes on supermarket tabloids (“I find them very fearful,” he tells me) and contains the only mention of cock rings that I am aware of in a lyric. “Ace and Joan,” sung with Carolyn Mark, posits a romantic liaison between Kiss guitarist Ace Frehley and Joan Armatrading. The Show Business Giants’1991 I Thought It was a Fig contains revisionist versions of the Love Boat theme and “The Flintstones,” while 1995’s Let’s Have a Talk with the Dead features perhaps the most remarked-upon of the band’s TV-themed tunes, “I Can’t Get Russell Johnson
Off my Mind.” Russell Johnson was the Professor on Gilligan’s Island. Says Holliston, “his autobiography is a great read. He’s a really interesting guy! He has a Purple Heart; he was in the American air force during the Second World War and saw time in New Guinea. He’s been a long, longtime AIDS activist. He said his single most favourite screen role was being able to shoot Ronald Reagan in a film, because he hates Reagan’s guts! If you’re blessed to be in the company of the right people, you can make everybody laugh by saying Russell Johnson, apropos of nothing... and then you think, ‘Okay, let’s write a song about that!’” So unique and recognizable are Holliston’s passions that even the non-Holliston Showbiz Giants tunes bear the bandleader’s quirky mark. John Wright’s “The Other Side of Mr. Sulu” is rife with sideways nostalgia for TV of yore. Ford Pier’s “I’ve Got Gingivitis” (“the first song he ever wrote on a guitar,” Tom informs me) is every bit as strange, funny, and purposefully pointless as Tom’s ode to scabies lotion, “Kwellada.” “Bats,” with lyrics by Rob Wright, is mostly about bats – nothing especially Hollistonian there, but check this couplet: “Girls have hairless thighs/ Men have zippered flies;” compare that with classic Holliston rhymes like, “Four wheel drive is the greatest invention/ it’s like driving around with a penis extension,” or, from “Trophy Wife,” “I’m living in limbo/ Someone send me a bimbo,” and it starts to seem like Holliston is the auteur, the invisible hand, the prime mover of all things SBG.
Tom explains: “I suppose Ford and John write toward the band’s style, which is originally myself and a fellow named Steve Bailey, who used to be in a band called the Neos, years and years and years ago. We couldn’t find anybody else who wasn’t already in a band, so we thought, we’ll just have a band and get different people to play sometimes, and then it sort of developed like that.” (The lineup for the March 17th gig will include John Wright, Scott Henderson, and Ford Pier, and perhaps some out-of-town guests, for whom a guitar will be ready and waiting). “People sort of fit their attitude toward what we were trying to do. I don’t think it’s wilfully obscure, but I’m not very good at writing love songs and stuff like that, and I’m really interested in encyclopaedias and dictionaries and, y’know, arcana and word origins...” Holliston had just finished reading The History of the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, by Simon Winchester, when we spoke. What about Holliston songs like “Big in Real Estate,” “Carrying the Ball for Hair Design,” “Opening Day,” and other non-anthemic slices of daily life? Tom, who confesses a “tendency to speak in very poor analogies” (but whom I secretly suspect can make more sense of Heidegger than I), tells me, “If something great suddenly came out of the ground, the fact would be that the ground would have still been there for quite awhile, y’know? And why not document the ground, rather than the great thing that came out of it, because that’s what everybody else is doing?” The word “ground” is so resonant with meaning that I am momentarily utterly lost. The ground of being? Figure and ground? Or, like, dirt? My mind swims with images of THINGS coming out of the GROUND. Carrots? Holliston helpfully shifts analogies. “I mean, say, okay, you can look across the street, and an hour later, something else is there, and everybody is interested in what this thing is now, but no one was looking there before, and there could have been just as many things going on, or not going on. I’m interested in, and I like to find out about, things that happen before some great result. It doesn’t really matter to me so much what the end result is, it’s like, why did it happen here? I find that a lot more interesting.” He chuckles. “It’s a pretty boring way of looking at things, though... I’m such an utterly subjective person. This is not how the world is, this is how I see the world, and I think those are two very different things. I don’t think my opinion carries very much weight or counts for very much, but that’s just how I see things, and I just, sort of, write about ‘em. I can’t help it!”
A lot of stuff that I do comes out of injokes, like Charlton Heston impersonations, and it really has no bearing on anything.
These are brilliant songs, though – quirky, perceptive little novellas that are vastly fond of their characters. I have to ask: is “Fussin’ with the ‘Tussin” (a tongue-in-cheek country tune from his second solo outing, I Want You to Twist with Me) actually, as it appears to be, about a substance abuser with a fondness for cough syrup? “Well, we’ve both seen guys wandering around with a paper bag in their hand,” Tom confides. “I actually know a guy – a good friend of mine in Toronto – who used to work near Waco, Texas as a television cameraman, and he said he used to be really into Robitussin. ‘Oh yeah?’ ‘Yeah, I was in Waco when that whole FBI debacle went down, and I was really out of it on Robitussin,’ And he said, ‘Y’know, if you ever drink a bottle, Tom, just be sure you don’t get up too fast!’ I thought, well, okay, I don’t know if I will, I don’t have a great deal of interest but thanks for the tip! And then... people write songs about gettin’ high or takin’ a bunch of coke and rockin’ out – or old blues songs about getting pissed. Why not write a song about getting into Robitussin? ...And then Ford Pier and I were driving somewhere and we just got laughing about Robitussin... A lot of stuff that I do comes out of in-jokes, like Charlton Heston impersonations, and it really has no bearing on anything... but then, most things don’t!” The phrase “Fussin’ with the ‘Tussin” is not the argot of syrupheads, note, but Holliston’s own coinage. The full text of my interview with Mr. Holliston, ranging from Tom’s Widney High School t-shirt to the later career of Erik Estrada, will appear on my blog, http://alienatedinvancouver.blopspot.com. Those needing to do research into Tom Holliston and/or the Show Business Giants’ music before the show can order his (self-distributed) solo CDs from www.nomeanswhatever.com or Coolforever, or find them locally at Red Cat Records up on Main, who had four of the five SBG releases in stock when I called (2000’s Self-Aggrandization Keeps Us Going, featuring one of Holliston’s favourite SBG songs, “We Don’t Do TV,” is, at the moment, out of print). Show Business Giants shows have always had a theme – “whether it was the Norwegian royal family or the benefits of a yoghurt diet or fire drills; how to do them properly in different countries.” Asked if this show will be themed, Holliston ponders. “I was thinking geography, but hopefully it won’t be decided ‘til about an hour before the show. It’s nice if you have the theme, like the Maginot line or should men’s heels be lower or higher and then – ‘Okay, away we go!’ And then everybody has to think of something to say!” n
The Nerve March 2007 Page 12
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CONTENTS
Still Sensational, a Quarter-Century Gone
By Ferdy Belland
A
lex Harvey was one of the most enjoyably dynamic rock performers of all time, and is still revered today as one of Scotland’s favourite sons. With a wild and colourful career spanning four decades, Harvey’s work with the Sensational Alex Harvey Band transformed him into one of the most popular and exciting rock artists of the 1970s, and the SAHB’s no-holds-barred approach to wacky rock composition and stage presence blithely crossed all rigid demarcation lines of musical genre - creating an exciting and unique visual and sonic impression that combined art-rock, prog-rock, performance art, musical theatre, drunken obnoxiousness, and rowdy crowd interaction into some bizarre-genius pre-MTV multimedia experience that will not be duplicated. There is nobody alive or dead in the worlds of art and entertainment that could or will - match Alex Harvey in character or in action, onstage or off. Harvey was born in 1935 to a poor but loving family in the Glasgow slum of the Gorbals, a neighbourhood that inspired much of his creative muse. As a child during the Great Depression and World War II, the young Alex ran wild in the streets with unruly hooligans. His formal education didn’t last too long, but Harvey possessed a wry, cunning intellect and spent the rest of his life self-educating himself through endless reading. His musical passions sparked off with Britain’s mid-1950s skiffle boom, and the start of his long-standing presence in Scotland’s pop spotlight hit the on-switch for real after he beat out over 600 rockabilly hopefuls in a radio competition seeking “Scotland’s answer to Tommy Steele.” In the early ‘60s he formed the Alex Harvey Soul Band, a high-powered white-electric R&B unit which furiously gigged for a few years in the notorious Reeperbahn clubs of Hamburg, and gathered as rabid a German fan following as the early Beatles before them, in a raucous storm of strong lager and stronger amphetamines. Unfortunately, the band sputtered to a halt in the UK with the decline of Merseybeat and the rise of hippie psychedelia - but rather than roll over and die creatively, Harvey merely shrugged his shoulders, switched gears overnight, and rolled with the flow of the musical trends that spoke to him, without being a callous charlatan. Harvey’s respectable attributes included his stubbornness, his single-minded determination to succeed, and his remarkable abilitY to improvise, adapt, and amalgamate what would appear to many to be unmatchable music styles into his own peculiar hybrid – and boy, did it ever work like a hot damn. Harvey joined the London cast of the long-running counterculture musical Hair as the stage band’s guitarist and spent the period 1968-1970 dividing his time dabbling between theatre and various obscure London rock bands. All of this collective performance experience would soon mesh together into something very special indeed. The great turning point in Harvey’s music career came in mid-1971 when he convinced flamboyant lead guitarist Alistair “Zal” Cleminson and his bassist partner Chris Glen to ditch their struggling psychprog band Tear Gas and form a new group, which
soon included keyboard wizard Hugh McKenna and his drummer cousin Ted McKenna. When choosing the band’s new name, he obviously wanted a title expressing both humility and equality; thus…the Sensational Alex Harvey Band! To say the SAHB ‘exploded’ upon the UK rock scene is to say the Hindenburg had ‘minor engine problems.’ One of the most consistently successful UK live draws of the 1970s, their no-holds-barred approach to bombastic composition and unruly stage presence combined hard rock, heavy metal, psychedelia, show tunes, pre-war cabaret pop, jump blues, swing jazz, I mean fucking everything… Bedecked in unruly black curls and horrible Shane McGowanesque dental savagery, Harvey would burst onstage through fake brick walls amidst trumpet fanfare and strut and swagger and thrash about, clad either in his trademark yellow-and-black striped T-shirt, or in an Adolf Hitler costume (in which Harvey lectured shocked German fans on the dangers of fascism), or in Al Jolson blackface (in a Glaswegian bid for encouraging racial harmony among shocked US audiences), or dressed as his recurring superhero alter-ego ‘Vambo Marble-Eye’ (who appears in many songs across many SAHB albums), or buck-ass naked with a plastic bag over his head. Eat shit, Alice Cooper! Meanwhile, Zal Cleminson (one of the most criminally unsung British rock guitarists ever) provided a hyper-eccentric audio-visual balance for Harvey, playing brilliant riffs and solos with his face painted in mime/marionette whiteface and dressed in outrageously skintight green-and-yellow spandex jumpsuits. Chris Glen rocked out with an honest-toChrist codpiece and classic pre-Nigel Tufnel lip-pouting facial expressions, and played a damn fine meaty bass while he was at it. Hugh McKenna (the unofficial
musical director of the SAHB) wielded his keyboard array with the groovadelic aplomb of both Jon Lord and Keith Emerson, and Ted McKenna bashed away on the traps and kept the beats rolling. Diverse folks like Frank Zappa, Pete Townshend, and Elton John quickly spoke of their respect and admiration for Alex Harvey; the first Scottish rocker to have his first Top 20 hit (their bombastic version of Tom Jones’ “Delilah”) at the age of 40! Fuck you,Velvet Revolver! There are many mature Vancouverites who vividly remember that fateful night in 1976 when Harvey opened for Jethro Tull at the Pacific Coliseum (the only Vancouver appearance of the SAHB). Far more often than not the SAHB would annihilate the stage and leave nothing for the lethargic headliners they were supporting (such as Yes, who also respected Harvey’s Heroes). As reported in the New Music Express, their first major national appearance at the 1974 Knebworth Festival saw them bury alive the plodding likes of the Allman Brothers, Van Morrison, and the Doobie Brothers. Roger Daltrey handpicked the SAHB as the Who’s opening act on several mid-70s tours. One can only shudder at the barbaric on-and-offstage antics Harvey’s Heroes went into with sanctioned psychopaths like the late Keith Moon. Following the SAHB’s popularity peak in mid-1976, the band’s morale began a slow decline, with band and bandleader distancing themselves. The four SAHB-members recorded the 1977 album Fourplay sans Harvey, displaying a different yet impressive side to their collective composing. Hugh McKenna left the band shortly thereafter (replaced by Tommy Eyre), citing nervous exhaustion and power-struggles with Harvey (most of the SAHB’s original material was co-credited to McKenna), and Cleminson and Harvey’s inner tensions also began to boil. Soon
Harvey would burst onstage clad in an Adolf Hitler costume, or buck-ass naked with a plastic bag over his head.
after the release of their 1978 album Rock Drill, Harvey stunned the band by walking out on them in mid-rehearsal. Cleminson, Glen, and the McKennas continued touring briefly as the Sensational Alex Harvey Band - which, literally, they still were - but neither they nor the fans were fooled. Cleminson formed the short-lived ZAL Band and briefly joined Nazareth before taking a weary, bitter sabbatical from professional music. Ted McKenna and Chris Glen joined the Michael Schenker Group. Hugh McKenna became a respected UK record producer and is known as Britain’s answer to Benmont Tench. Harvey himself formed the New Band and released a decent album (The Mafia Stole My Guitar) in 1979, but many diehard SAHB fans were disappointed and Harvey’s live popularity continued to fade. On the morning of February 4th, 1982, Alex Harvey was in the Belgian port of Zeebrugge, awaiting a ferry to take him back to the UK after completing a four-week European tour with his new band, when he collapsed from a massive heart attack. A second attack at the hospital ended his panoramic life in tragically abrupt manner – only hours away from celebrating his 47th birthday. Regardless of Harvey’s waning has-been status at the time of his passing, his death still shocked and saddened not only his family and his bandmates old and new, but the UK’s music world as a whole also felt the loss – very deeply. The original fans of the SAHB kept their fond memories very much alive through the 1980s and 1990s, and modern generations of rock fans (such as this writer) have found much to love in the SAHB’s music; enough so that when Cleminson, Glen, and the McKennas reformed the SAHB a few years back for what was to be a farewell tour of the UK (with the dubious appointment of Harvey-lookalike Mad Max Maxwell on vocals), the theatres and halls sold out in record time and inspired Clem & Co. to record a new album in 2006 (disingenuously entitled Zalvation). With new Euro-tours in the works for 2007, and a possible return to North America (sparked off by a rabid following based in Cleveland OH which never died), it would seem that Alex Harvey’s Band is still Sensational, indeed. Were he alive today, Alex Harvey would have celebrated his 71st birthday on February 5th… an’ still woulda bin able tae kick Lemmy’s warty arse aroun’ the fookin’ pub! VAMBO STILL ROOLS! Consumer Report: It’s extremely difficult to single out one SAHB album over another, as their amazing musical vocabulary is all over the map, and no two albums are alike.There are umpteen compilations out there, but the SAHB is a bottomless well, and with their CDs all conveniently reissued in 2002 by Mercury Records as double-discs, one might as well collect the entire discography. You’ll never regret it, believe me: Framed (Vertigo 1972); Next (Vertigo 1973); the Impossible Dream (Vertigo 1974); Tomorrow Belongs to Me (Vertigo 1975); Sensational Alex Harvey Band…Live! (Vertigo 1975); the Penthouse Tapes (Vertigo 1976), SAHB Stories (Vertigo 1976), Fourplay (SAHB without Alex, Vertigo 1977), Rock Drill (Vertigo 1978). n
The Nerve March 2007 Page 13
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CONTENTS
Carmine Appice Ultimate Drum Zeus
Hey, stop looking at my magic sticks.
By Phil Oats
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ho can you name that had a hit in the Summer Of Love, that still makes great rock today? Who on their first album had George Harrison tripping his head off over a Beatles cover? Who did Led Zeppelin open for on their first US tour? Whose second album was a history of music concept album that totally bombed? Vanilla Fudge - that’s who! Who was drummer in the great Vanilla Fudge? Who was the drummer in the American Led Zep otherwise known as Cactus? Who co-wrote Rod Stewart’s “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy”? Who made records and toured with Jeff Beck and Ozzy Osbourne? Carmine Appice - that’s who! As of 2007, the original four Vanilla Fudge are back together. So is Cactus! Vanilla Fudge is celebrating its 40th anniversary with a Rhino Records four CD box set this year. Two recent limited edition Rhino Cactus collections immediately sold out. The Fudge is about to release an album of Led Zep interpretations. Carmine also has a smokin’ new collection out called Ultimate Guitar Zeus where you can hear over a dozen different guitar greats on one album. If you dig early ‘70s hard manic boogie swagger then you need some Cactus! Dig the ‘60s? The Fudge had some of the best of that decade’s flair. Heavy and trippy. First, go to Youtube and check out the Fudge on “You Keep Me Hangin On”. Now read this chat with the man responsible: Nerve:You guys are putting out a record, right? Appice: We got a record coming out called Out Through The In Door. It’s Vanilla Fudge do Led Zeppelin. Interesting. When the Fudge did covers they weren’t always heavy songs, they were often lighter songs that you… …Heavied up. I’m trying to imagine what you’d do with their stuff, ‘cause their stuff could be slow and heavy to begin with. It was also not that dissimilar to what the Fudge did. Well that’s right. Like we did “Dazed And Confused” and we put an intro on it and played it similar but the vocals are different, more soulful vocals. We did “Fool In The Rain’ with a salsa as the middle section and soulful vocals with background harmonies, which they never did. “All Of My Love” we totally changed. “Immigrant Song”, we slowed it down and made it
The Nerve March 2007 Page 14
heavier, added some harmonies. We do “Ramble On”, totally changed it. I knew about the Fudge long before I discovered Cactus. I was amazed what a great, overlooked band Cactus was.There was just so many bands at the time, you guys got a bit overlooked in the historical scheme of things. I think Vanilla Fudge got overlooked too! Both bands heavily influenced a lot of people. We influenced Led Zeppelin, we took them on their first tour. We used to go onstage and jam with them, they came and jammed with us, we were really close. They loved the Fudge, loved what we did. They did the long arrangements, had the same kind of dynamics we had, loud then soft then loud then soft, nobody else did that. Cactus influenced people like Van Halen. Jim McCarty is an absolute slayer on those Cactus albums! He was a great guitarist. Still is. When we first came back and played at BB King’s, people were holding up signs; McCarty Rules, McCarty’s #1. The first gig there was unbelievable! The reaction from the audience! And Rusty Day was quite a character.That singer from the Black Crowes modeled his whole career on Rusty, only I don’t think he could touch Rusty’s mojo. Aww, Rusty was unbelievable! His lyrics… this guy was like a machine for lyrics. We used to jam, he used to just jam lyrics, write songs, melodies so easily. Atlantic Records didn’t like his voice, I think that’s why they didn’t put the push behind Cactus like we needed. Songs like “Parchment Farm” became a classic. “Evil” became a classic. I love the wild abandon you guys had, even on studio albums it’s almost always flying right off the bat! We were like a garage band, we had energy. Even now some gigs are Cactus and Vanilla Fudge and it’s hard following Cactus! The energy level is ridiculous.
Vanilla Fudge was considered a psychedelic band. We were looked at as psychedelic symphonic rock. But looking back at it now we were one of the first, if not thee first progressive rock bands. We had all these introductions that prog bands all have, different intros with different time signatures and then the song would start. I guess it was a psychedelic symphonic progressive rock vibe (laughs). But anything we did was in that direction because that’s what we did, nobody told us to. Did you ever play a show on acid? We did. I think it was the show that was recorded (forthcoming Live At Fillmore) that Mark had taken some acid, but it doesn’t sound like it. See, I don’t think the show that’s coming out is the Fillmore. I think it’s mislabeled. And the reason I think that is the night we did play the Fillmore on New Year’s Eve, I remember that was the night somebody spiked our wine with acid and Mark was onstage and he was flippin’ out, sayin’ weird shit. It’s great to hear Rhino is putting out more stuff. Well, they do limited run collector’s items. Like the only Vanilla Fudge album in print is the first album. For some reason Vanilla Fudge got bypassed.You go in the stores, you don’t even see it. It’s not like Hendrix and Cream, our peers at the time, bands we were on the charts with all the time.You go to a record store and you see all their records there. Same thing with the airplay.Vanilla Fudge doesn’t get the airplay on classic rock radio. Maybe “You Keep Me Hangin’ On”. Maybe, that’s not even very frequently. It’s all developed into a 300-song format and Vanilla Fudge isn’t in it. We’re not in the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame anywhere. So we basically got screwed. As far as credibility, we got a lot of fans and a lot of people who know what we’ve done. You have to blame it on The Beat Goes On. (Pause) You are exactly right, bro! Exactly right! (laughs) That album ruined the band. That album destroyed our career. I read the feature on Vanilla Fudge in Classic Rock magazine where you told the story of how you finished recording The Beat Goes On and you played it for some girls and they started crying… ‘cause it was so bad! And it was the second album, which is pretty important, right? Second album and you know what? A month ago when we were at the Long Island Rock Hall Of Fame, and we ran into our producer Shadow Morton, he was being inducted along with Vanilla Fudge, and I said “Hey Shadow, I got to talk to you about something” (laughs). I said “What were you thinking when you wanted to do the second album? All we had to do was release the same shit we did in the first album!” And he goes “Aw, that was my ego, man, I just always had this idea to do this with somebody and so we did it”. I tell him “You know that was the album that ruined our fuckin’ career!” He goes, “I know… I know, I was ego’d out, I was drinkin’, it was just fucked up.” Shoulda been the sixth or seventh album, you know. We already had great stuff in the can… But the next three albums were great. Yeah, but we never picked up the momentum we had and lost after our first album did so well. Even though at one point, when they released “Hangin’ On” again in ’68, it went to #5 which took the first album back up the chart. We had three albums on the chart, two in the top 15. We had to rush the hell outta that third album Renaissance. We wrote and recorded that in 30 days, which was not easy.
Led Zeppelin - they loved the fudge...
You guys were on fire for the Ed Sullivan appearance. I remember going down in the elevator, asking the operator, “How many people watch this show?” And he said, “Oh, about 50 million”. I had butterflies in my stomach. The band at the time was amazing, we were really dynamic, we had a great stage show and we were crazy! The only radio where I hear the Fudge or Cactus is satellite radio, which I listen to every day at work. It’s radio like you always wish it was. We did a live concert with XM in 2003. And we did some at Sirius. For the classic rock buff or just rock buff that’s the best radio to have. They even play new stuff that we release. That’s how I discovered the Ultimate Guitar Zeus album. I went out and bought it after I heard the song with Brian May playing that nasty wah-wah. It’s a nasty fuckin’ sound. That’s some good stuff, I know. That’s some of the best stuff I’ve done. Have you heard anything from the (Pat) Travers/Appice records? Let me tell you, It Takes A Lot Of Balls, that record… every once in a while I take that one out and go: “Holy shit, what a great record! This was a great record”. For me in my career now, I’m at a point where I’m so sick of making really good records and nobody gets to hear ‘em. Ultimate Guitar Zeus has great sound. It never seems to fall into the heavy rock clichés, which is hard to avoid. It’s got great ideas. There’s no filler songs. Every song has its own thing. I had a brilliant co-writer on that. Kelly Keeling is a tremendous talent. Sounds modern without sounding like you’re trying to. What I wanted to do was mix up modern rock of the time with the classic rock jamming vibe, those two elements. And I think we did it. And the players on there don’t always play in the style you expect from them. Like Brian May on the wah-wah. The one with Steve Morse, fuckin’ great solo he did and the sound of that track is… weird. Kelly can sing anything. The track with Ted Nugent; fuckin’ great track. I wouldn’t recognize Ted on that. Other than Brian May, a lot of these guys never played on a lot of great songs. I’m not saying we write the greatest songs but, like, Ted Nugent hasn’t played on a great song in years! And when he plays on that song he sounds great! So, where you callin’ from, somewhere in Canada? From Vancouver, but I’m from Montreal, originally. Nice city.Vanilla Fudge got busted in Montreal. About ’68 or ’69. It’s an episode in the book I’m writing, a bit on all the busts in my life, so that’s one of ‘em. There were four of ‘em. Cactus got busted in Cleveland, Beck Bogert & Appice got busted in Manchester. Which band was rowdier? Oh, Cactus. Much rowdier. Cactus was a just a party band. Get down and party. We did a lot of hotel wrecking. More than that, we used to wreck cars. When we went out on tour with the Faces we were destroying each other’s rental cars. Endless retaliation. One date we played the Poconos festival and we had our own truck. When we went to this gig it was their turn to retaliate, and we had to beg them not to wreck it ‘cause it was ours, not a rental. It was like that Joe Walsh song, “I have accountants/pay for it all” (laughs). Cactus were banned from the Holiday Inn chain. It’s gonna be a good book (laughs). It’s called The International Rock Guide To Hotel Wrecking. Stories about touring behind the Iron Curtain, to meeting Fred Astaire. He and Gregory Peck came to see us when I was with Rod Stewart. I gave Fred a book of mine on rock drumming, he wanted to learn how to play rock drums. He later wrote me a letter thanking me. Or meeting Gregory Peck, he says, “Hi, I’m Gregory Peck.” I’m like, “You don’t have to tell me who you are, you’re Gregory Peck!” n
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Black Time A Strange Case of Lemmy Caution
By Jenny C
S
uddenly the world is Alphaville… and a trenchcoated “outland agent” by the name of Lemmy Caution finds himself in a breathless race against an evil scientist who’s trying to rid the world of love and self-expression… Natasha Von Braun: You’re looking at me very strangely. Lemmy Caution: Yes. Natasha Von Braun: You’re waiting for me to say something to you. Lemmy Caution: Yes. Natasha Von Braun: I don’t know what to say.They’re words I don’t know. I wasn’t taught them. Help me. Lemmy Caution: Impossible. Help yourself; then you’ll be saved. If you don’t, you’re as lost as the dead of Alphaville. Natasha Von Braun: I… love… you. I love you. Come on, how could you not name your alter ego after a guy like that? And hell, while you’re at it, why not create an entire punk band to go along with it. Which is exactly, sorta, more or less, what Lemmy Caution of London, not Alphaville, did when he created Black Time, a beautiful sonic disaster of blistering punk rock. Together since 2004, Black Time recorded an album before they had even played a single show. In fact they hadn’t really played together at all. “There’s a real soul-destroying aspect of being in a 9-5 band where you, like, practice all the time. I didn’t want to do that with Black Time… make it a professional thing,” says front-man/guitarist Caution, speaking from his home in London, England. “I’m in a band and we all wear black” and that’s about it, laughs Caution. Making it pretty clear that the three-piece, who sound something along the lines of Crime or the Hunches, just want to make shitty-sounding music and have a good time… fuck that other stuff like popularity and ambition. “We don’t really have any ambition to get any bigger than we are,” says Caution, clearly content to have both of Black Time’s records out on In the Red (the first album, Blackout, was reissued on In the Red after it’s original pressing on Caution’s own label Concrete Life, “sold out”). Black Time also has a bunch of singles out on various other labels. Worried that I might get the wrong impression he adds, “I’m really knocked out at the amount of people from different parts of the world that have got in touch to express an interest... I mean, I’ve been playing in shitty bands for years and years… and nothing’s ever the gotten attention like this.” So how can it be then that Black Time doesn’t actually play shows all that much? “No one even really knows who we are over here,” says Caution, describing the city’s music scene as, “a NME fantasy world where [bands are] gigging round the rock club circuit five nights a week desperately trying to get ‘signed’.” Why would anyone, “do a 10 hour round trip to play an indie-disco to ten Black Rebel Motorcycle Club fans” – a typical U.K. gig, insists Caution - when they could stay at home, get drunk off whiskey and record snotty punk rock on a fourtrack? They wouldn’t, in this case. Which is why Caution and his bandmates are pretty selective about the shows Black Time plays, choosing to show up if
they get offered something by one of their friends’ bands, or organize their own party, or if they get to go tour some new place… And that’s just what these filthy lo-fiers are about to do. Black Time is finally coming to North America and they’ll be in Vancouver (their only Canadian tour date I’m sorry to report) Sunday March 25th at Pub 340. And I say finally not just because this will be the band’s first appearance this side of the Atlantic, a lot of the “finally” comes from the fact that Black Time’s first ever North American tour should have happened last year but it was cancelled… just a week before their first show. You’d think a man who names himself after a secret agent who convinces a woman who doesn’t even know what love is to fall-head-over-heals for him, could hold it together long enough to get on a plane and play a couple gigs in the U.S. of A…. But not this Caution. This Caution managed to shatter his wrist into gnarled little pieces, cancelling their major tour and confirming that Caution is indeed a ball of contorted-disastrous rock’n’roll-mayhem. “I’m so clumsy… I’m completely uncoordinated… I’ll attempt to do rock’n’roll things on stage, like some awesome rock’n’roll move I’ve seen James Brown do, er, something, and I’ll like trip over my pedals,” laughs Caution, “A bunch of times I jumped into the crowd with my guitar and the lead of my guitar came off and I ended up playing silent guitar in the middle of the crowd and totally embarrassing myself.” But that’s not the plan in North America, Caution assures me. He’s definitely going to work on his cool rock’n’roll moves before he gets here. But it’s not the embarrassment that worries me – it’s the shattering of bones and cancelling of tours that does it. And Caution’s logic that you can’t be in a horrific welding accident (or so the official story goes) twice in one year, is about as reassuring as him telling me, “I’ll just pray to James Brown or
You’re supposed to sing into the mic, not blow it something and we’ll make it alright.” So James Brown willing, Black Time will play the first date of their North American Westcoast tour March 22nd. And they won’t be alone. Augmenting their nasty, angular sound will be the Husbands, the snarly girl-group from San Francisco. “We kinda just thought about bands we liked… I really like their records, so I kinda approached them as a fan…” explains Caution, as to how the upcoming tour came about. “It’s really the only practical way for us to do a tour,” continues Caution, since it would cost Black Time thousands of pounds to ship their gear from the U.K. and rent transportation if they were to tour North America alone. “I don’t really know how much they know about us,” he says. “But they agreed to it.” Caution isn’t the only one who’s happy about the pairing. A record label out of Chicago, Show and Tell Recordings, is putting out a Black Time/Husbands tour split to commemorate
I’ve been playing for years and years but I still have trouble figuring out the third cord
the craziness of this roadshow. Some of which, I’ve been promised, will come from watching Caution attempt to play on the Husbands’ borrowed guitar. “I’m a bit scared to be playing in America [and Vancouver]… I’ve been playing for years and years but I still have trouble figuring out the third chord, like, I still have to stare at my fingers on the fret board,” he confesses. Just imagine how he’ll make out on someone else’s equipment… it’ll sound amazing, with even more of a trashy-raw-vampire-sound! For a band that prides itself on “talent over ability, ideas over proficiency, energy over competence,” I’m pretty excited to see just how disturbingly crude Black Time can get. And watch out for something a little slow and dirty amongst that sweet god-awful racket. It’s a taste of Black Time’s next album, still in progress but shaping up to be what Caution fondly calls “a rock’n’roll funeral march.” No surprise from the darkened mind that makes music to sound like “the undead stumbling through twilight.” Which quite naturally brings Alphaville to mind, once again. As the villainous and depraved Professor Von Braun told Caution’s trench-coated namesake, “Men of your type will soon become extinct.You’ll become something worse than dead.You’ll become a legend.” Black Time and the Husbands are joined by Ladies Night on Sunday March 25th, at Pub340 in Vancouver. n
The Nerve March 2007 Page 15
MARCH 11 MARCH 13 MARCH 14 MARCH 16 MARCH 18
PACIFIC COLISEUM – VANCOUVER REXALL PLACE – EDMONTON PENGROWTH SADDLEDOME – CALGARY BRANDT CENTRE @ IPSCO PLACE – REGINA MTS CENTRE – WINNIPEG TICKETS AT ALL THE USUAL OUTLETS
The Nerve March 2007 Page 16
SUNDAY MARCH 18 PNE FORUM – VANCOUVER TUESDAY MARCH 20 NORTHLANDS AGRICOM – EDMONTON WEDNESDAY MARCH 21 STAMPEDE CORRAL – CALGARY THURSDAY MARCH 22 PRAIRIELAND PARK – SASKATOON FRIDAY & SATURDAY MARCH 23 & 24 BURTON CUMMINGS THEATRE – WINNIPEG
MARCH 25
MARCH 27
WITH SPECIAL GUESTS
ALL AGES
TICKETS ALSO AT SCRATCH AND ZULU
THE PLAZA CLUB
CROATIAN CULTURAL CENTRE
APRIL 23
FRIDAY MARCH 30
FRIDAY MAY 11
WITH SPECIAL GUESTS ATTACK TICKETS ALSO AT ZULU AND SCRATCH
MARCH 27
BADLY DRAWN BOY RICHARD’S ON RICHARDS
IN BLACK
COMMODORE BALLROOM
TICKETS ALSO AT ZULU AND RED CAT
TICKETS ALSO AT SCRAPE
RICHARD’S ON RICHARDS
COMMODORE BALLROOM
MARCH 27
LILY ALLEN COMMODORE BALLROOM
APRIL 9
THE HAUNTED CROATIAN CULTURAL CENTRE
APRIL 20
BLONDE REDHEAD COMMODORE BALLROOM
APRIL 22
KLAXONS RICHARD’S ON RICHARDS
APRIL 24
KAISER CHIEFS COMMODORE BALLROOM
The Nerve March 2007 Page 17
CONTENTS DEEP POLITICS
The Radical News King Hugo I
H
Vivre la Quebec Libre
I
don’t even know where to start about Quebec. Those lazy, greedy, racist reactionaries have spent the first weeks of 2007 making asses of themselves. And I am so fed up. To start with, public works minister Michael Fortier of Montreal stalled a major Canadian Forces contract with Boeing because he wanted the majority of the contract to be spent on the aerospace industry in Quebec. The justification for this is that it makes sense to force Boeing to spend its contract money in the place where most of its competitors are. What a bunch of malarkey. Fortier has no business interfering in a military contract. And as far as I’m concerned he has no business even being a minister. He’s a senator for god’s sake. A senator! A man that no one voted for put a wrench in the works of $3.4 billion contract so he could funnel hundreds of millions of dollars back into his own province. But it gets worse. In early February, Jean Charest requested and will probably receive an additional $1.5 billion in equalization payments for Quebec. This should solidify his win in the next provincial election. And it should help win Quebec ridings for Conservative MPs in the next federal election. And of course, the icing on the cake has been the scandal in Herouxville. It’s made international news that the town council passed a “Code of Life” warning new residents how they ought to behave. The council claims that the details of the code have been misreported. So you can read it for yourself at www.municipalite. herouxville.qc.ca/. I have read it, and it sickens me. The Code of Life begins with the erroneous claim that “these standards come from our municipal laws being Federal or Provincial, and all voted democratically.” I’ll give the council the benefit of assuming that that made sense in French. But I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest there’s no law at any level of government that states, as the Code of Life does, that “at the end of every year we decorate a tree with balls...” A newly published second draft of the code (the one that’s available online now) omits reference to the prohibition of female circumcision. The code argues that “to publish all the laws and standards… would be a tedious task.” But by condescendingly reiterating a select few laws they can help newcom-
ers “identify with [Herouxville] before making their decision to move here [or not].” I hope so sincerely that the people of Herouxville do not, by their omission, mean to condone the practice of female circumcision. I would like to make it clear to Herouxville – just so they know – that I abhor the practice of female circumcision. If Herouxville endorses female circumcision (and there’s no longer any evidence to suggest that they don’t) I am compelled to remind them that female circumcision is illegal. I believe all Canadians should join me in saying that Herouxville’s inferred endorsement of female circumcision turns my stomach. In a recent Globe and Mail article, a Herouxville town counselor insisted that the emails they’ve received are all in support of their code. This appears to be a blatant lie. But in order to alleviate doubt, I encourage readers to write succinct, civilized emails condemning the council’s systemic racism. Write the emails in French if you can manage it because I suspect they simply discard the English ones. The council’s email address is herouxville@ regionmekinac.com. Speaking of the Globe and Mail, their coverage of this story has been contemptible. They’ve run several prominent articles on the town with crass photographs. You might see a middle aged white lady kissing her adopted Haitian son on the cheek above an article describing how the three minorities in Herouxville are treated terribly well. Or you might see a photo of a town counselor rolling her eyes at a Muslim woman who has arrived in Herouxville to protest, right above a story about how the Code of Life was really meant to welcome newcomers and help them assimilate. It’s like we can’t say what’s on our mind about Quebec anymore because we can’t offend their precious, delicate, unique culture. Well, I’ll say it! Just when I thought I couldn’t hate Quebec anymore, they found new ways to push my buttons. Sometimes I swear it’s like they don’t care about the rest of us at all. It’s as if they consider themselves to be a separate nation, and their only tie to English Canada is that they constantly take shitloads of our money. In fact, it’s exactly like that, and we’re a bunch of suckers for not letting them separate. We should be forcing them to separate! Vivre la Quebec Libre!!! n
I hope that the people of Herouxville do not mean to condone the practice of female circumcision
The Nerve March 2007 Page 18
ugo Chavez has been my favourite national leader for a long time. What’s not to love? Chavez called George W Bush the “Emperor of Evil” when the latter called for transparency in Venezuela’s national elections. Chavez was of course referring to Bush’s hypocrisy when it comes to rigging elections. Rightly so. But the really funny thing about that story is how the media covered it as if Chavez was throwing down a gauntlet, even though Bush had already set the precedent for calling people evil with the “Axis of Evil”, and had already put the US Navy and CIA behind a failed coup attempt in Venezuela. Chavez knows that Bush is no champion of democracy, and we know it too. Last year’s Venezuelan national election was probably fudged a bit, but so was the American election in 2000. And I’m willing to let it slide in light of the fact that Chavez is a brilliant and deserving leader. Then Chavez went before the UN General Assembly, said Bush was the devil, and told everyone to read Chomsky, thus launching Hegemony or Survival to the top of the New York Times Bestseller List. In the same speech, he described the UN as “worthless.” That’s the kind of extreme rhetoric I like to hear from a politician. The rest of the world already knew the UN was worthless; an impotent dinosaur. It takes a man like Hugo Chavez to publicly acknowledge it. Perhaps best of all, in 2002, more than 40 years after the Bay of Pigs, Chavez repelled a US-backed coup. The whole thing was a half-hearted fiasco, motivated by America’s fear of Venezuelan trade embargoes that probably weren’t even going to happen in the first place. Bush was scared that Venezuela would restrict the supply of fossil fuels to the US, along with the other OPEC nations that were already instituting sanctions.Venezuela never had a chance to institute those sanctions. Instead, a few years later, they turned around and offered cheap oil and gas to the American poor after Hurricane Katrina. And Chavez isn’t afraid to be best buddies with Castro and Iranian President Ahmednejad. Did you see Chavez standing at Castro’s bedside when he got sick? Both of them wearing matching red tracksuits? It was adorable. I love these guys. Sure they
By Michael Cook
commit human rights abuses, but they’re more than justified in refusing to recognize the moral authority of the United States, the reigning world champions of war crimes, and a country whose president openly admitted he wants to retain the right to torture people. Torture! “I am a socialist,” Chavez once told a journalist, “and I follow the teachings of Jesus Christ, who was the first socialist.” That’s probably the most Christian thing I’ve ever heard a president say. And it stands in stark contrast to the “charismatic” Christian movement that drives American foreign policy, where all actions are motivated by the interests of the wealthy elite but credited to the will of Jesus. I think it’s exciting that so many South American countries are electing socialist presidents. And fortunately for them, the US military is spread too thin to seriously undermine their democracies. For my money, Chavez has been the best of the lot. With all that said, I’m gravely concerned by some of the recent developments in Venezuela. The main opposition party boycotted the last election, giving Chavez total control of the congress. Now the congress has made itself obsolete by passing a bill that allows him to rule by decree for the next 18 months. In these 18 months, Chavez could do some incredible things, such as nationalizing telecommunications and the entire energy industry. But he’s also going to eliminate restrictions on how many terms a president can serve, setting himself up to be president for life. A prime example of the danger presented by a socialist with absolute power is the current food crisis in Venezuela. Chavez placed arbitrary limits on the prices of groceries. Grocers say this has recently forced them to operate at a loss, and they’re going to have to start raising prices. Instead of admitting that he might be wrong, Chavez calls bullshit. He says the capitalist grocer swine are hoarding food to artificially drive up the price of groceries. Any store that refuses to comply with his limits faces a takeover by the federal government. This seems to be a direct attack on the petite bourgeoisie, and borderline totalitarianism. But hey, nobody’s perfect. n
Did you see Chavez standing at Castro’s bedside? Both of them wearing matching red tracksuits? Adorable!
Ok Fidel, one more round of find the cigar and then that’s it.
CONTENTS
Shorter and not as funny as Cheap Shotz
Jesus doesn’t look a day over 1500 Al Gore is a Liar. James Cameron is the Devil So Al Gore took home an Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth, a largely ficticious documentary based entirely on pseudo-science. Well, if you believed anything in that powerpoint presentation that was somehow adapted into a film and were banking on Jesus to fly down and save the world, you’re out of luck. On the same day as the Oscars, James Cameron, claims to have the corpse of Jesus Christ and is making a movie about it. Cameron’s documentary allegedly has something that Gore’s is sorely missing: DNA evidence. What’s the matter Gore? Can’t use any real science to prove your point? So unfortunatlely, if Cameron is able to produce a body, it means Jesus was in fact mortal and won’t be flying down from Heaven to stop global warming. Shitty. Al Gore is a Liar AND a Hypocrite In other news, according to the Nashville Electric Service, Al Gore’s 20- room, 8 bathroom home in Tennessee consumes more electricity every month than most houses use in a whole year.
“300 is Going to Rock” Claims If you place much stock in what movie reviewers from comic book and video game websites say, then the green screen extravaganze that is Frank Miller’s 300 is going to be awesome. IGN.com (The Internet Gaming Network) gives it five stars and gleefully proclaims that “it’s truly difficult to resist making epic proclamations about a filmmaker’s career after watching something like 300” then later in the paragraph says that Dawn of the Dead remaker Zach Snyder “has crafted a one-of-a-kind masterpiece that is unlike any movie audiences have seen, and in so doing he may have sealed his own fate as a possible redeemer of modern moviemaking.” The reviewer then goes on to say that the relationship between a Spartan and his wench provides some of the film’s most profound and lasting emotional underpinnings. Notwithstanding a sex scene that almost surely ranks as one of the hottest and most beautiful in recent memory, theirs is a partnership that reflects mutual understanding and shows the sort of commitment that is to be aspired to in real
life as much as on the silver screen.” So there you have it, the video game reviewers are saying that this the most amazingly epic film of all time with the steamiest sex scene ever made by one of the true visionaries of our time. 300 is Going to Suck If you place much stock in what movie reviewers for movie websites say, the green screen extravaganza that is Frank Miller’s 300 is going to be suck. A Filmbrain.com reviewer writes that, 300 is “the most overtly fascist Hollywood film thing to come out of the North American movie industry since, oh, I dunno, Robocop 2...Remember that scene in David Lynch’s Dune where Sting, at his overacting worst, screams “I will kill him!”? Now imagine a film where every single line is uttered with the same bombastic fervor, whether deserved or not. This is what 300 delivers, and ridiculous doesn’t begin to describe it. With laughable attempts at Shakespearian dialog, this is a film that will appeal only to adolescent fanboys or enthusiasts of greased, half-naked men fighting each other. Forty minutes was all I could manage. 300 might just be the new Showgirls.”
Arabs taking a kid off to be genetically mutated
Here’s What 300 Author Frank Miller Has to Say About Muslims, WW2, and the War in Iraq This is an actual excerpt from an interview Frank Miller did on National Public Radio (NPR) Frank Miller: Let’s finally talk about the enemy. For some reason, nobody seems to be talking about who we’re up against, and the sixth century barbarism that they actually represent. These people saw
Hostel 2. Coming soon and anticipating a PG rating. people’s heads off. They enslave women, they genetically [sic] mutilate their daughters, they do not behave by any cultural norms that are sensible to us. I’m speaking into a microphone that never could have been a product of their culture, and I’m living in a city where 3000 of my neighbors were killed by thieves of airplanes they never could have built...the country that fought Okinawa and Iwo Jima is now spilling precious blood, but so little by comparison, it’s almost ridiculous. And the stakes are as high as they were then. Mostly I hear people say, ‘Why did we attack Iraq?’ for instance. Well, we’re taking on an idea. Nobody questions why after Pearl Harbor we attacked Nazi Germany. It was because we were taking on a form of global fascism, we’re doing the same thing now. NPR: Well, they did declare war on us, but… Frank Miller: Well, so did Iraq. n
The Nerve March 2007 Page 19
CONTENTS
FILM
Waiting for NESARA And waiting, and waiting, and waiting… By Adrian Mack
I
f you hadn’t noticed, the United States of America has finally and forever lost its mind. Some take the view that it’s just the inevitable result of a culture at the end of its rope, after decades of too much too soon, shitty food, celebrities who can’t figure out how to wear underwear, and successive administrations of elite crooks plunging the nation into one pointless war after another, while fleecing the poor of every last penny they never had. That’s one theory. Others see a more directed effort to reduce the average American to drooling idiocy through all manner of sophisticated infowar tactics, not the least of which is the curious relationship between UFO cults - the ne plus ultra of American idiocy - and the government. ‘Conspiracy’ researcher John Judge uncovered the connections between the Heaven’s Gate UFO cult, which committed suicide en masse upon the arrival of the Hale Bopp comet in 1997, and the CIA. It’s one example of a murky nexus of religion, bad sci-fi, and alleged covert mind control programs that has also been investigated by researchers like Jacques Vallee and Martin Cannon, both of whom come to chilling, if tentative conclusions. Filmmakers Zeb and Elisa Haradon don’t offer any theories at all with their extraordinary movie Waiting for NESARA, but they do capture a unique form of Western insanity at its most jaw dropping. The two former Utah residents began documenting the weekly meetings of a classic UFO cult at a KFC in Salt Lake City, in the run-up to the Iraq war. Focusing primarily on group leader Jim and his wife Marjorie, we learn that the group’s particular belief system begins with a piece of legislation called The National Economic Recovery and Stability Act (NESARA), which they claim was signed into law by the Clinton administration, and which promises to rid the world of debt, taxes, and government itself, while simultaneously making all of us very rich… and precipitating the return of Christ in a “comfortable” cloud-shaped spaceship. They further believe that the Bush administration orchestrated 9/11 to squash NESARA, and to guarantee continuity of the “Reptilian Dark Agenda.” The members of the “Open Mind Forum” as they call themselves - some are ‘abductees’ and most are excommunicated Mormons - believe they are among the chosen. As the Iraq war becomes inevitable, and their belief system crumbles, the film observes their tragicomic efforts to adapt. But it’s not all yuks. Waiting for NESARA then puts the Open Mind Forum in a larger context, with a short coda at the end of the film that’s pretty unsettling. Nerve: Was there any angle that emerged that you had to leave behind on the editing room floor?
The Nerve March 2007 Page 20
Haradon:Yeah, we had 80 hours of footage. And it wasn’t right away that I realized the movie was going to be about NESARA, cause they did talk about a lot of other stuff. Our first cut was, like, three hours long. There are a few moments that suggest a larger story. There’s a scene were Jim gets angry and says, “The name calling has to end!” I don’t know if the paranoia comes across as strongly in the final cut, but in an earlier cut, it was almost like McCarthyism. He was saying there’s people in the group who are passing out antiNESARA literature, and they’re working for the “Dark Side”… And he also says that there may even be some shapeshifting reptilians in the group itself. Yeah, and if you watch his eyes closely, you see him look right at me when he says that, so I kinda wondered if that’s what he was getting at. The Group waits for messages about the status of NESARA through a website that belongs to an entity called The Dove of Oneness. And there are other NESARArelated websites, and phone lines you can call, and a whole number of ways for believers to throw their money away. It’s not in the movie, but you and I both know that the Dove of Oneness is actually a person called Shaini Goodwin who has been scamming folks out of their money. But Shaini Goodwin also looks a lot like a fat old lady in a trailer park in
What do you mean, ‘do I want some Kool-aid’? Washington State. Does it seem weird to you that a fat old lady in a trailer park is capable of running such an elaborate, successful, and technically sophisticated con? She is the biggest promoter of it, I think she draws the most traffic, but it’s more of a community of people, and they’re all working kind of independently to do, you know, whatever motivates them. I think she’s conning enough people to make a living. When I say “conning” them, I mean people are sending her donations, thinking it’s to get NESARA passed. If you looked at (the website) yesterday or maybe the day before, she put up a new update where she’s very blatantly asking people for money, and it’s pretty obvious she’s just lying in a very verifiable way - I‘m surprised she’s being so brazen about it - because she’s saying that she needs to get five million dollars to get NESARA announced, and she has the investors lined up and she needs a thousand dollars a week to pay for their hotel. I understand that NESARA is supposed to release the funds some of these people lost in a different scam, called the Omega Program, but Jim says the money is coming from a trust fund that Beloved Ascended Master Saint Germain started 350 years ago. So that’s a weird grey area in there. Yeah, I don’t know if there’s a consistent story that they have. I mean, they keep building on things, then they realize there’s an inconsistency, so then they make up another story to explain the inconsistency. Are you aware of the high number of Mormons recruited by Intelligence agencies? No, I knew that there were an inordinate amount of Mormons in state senates, but I didn’t know about the Intelligence community. Did you get the impression that these people seemed hypnotized or disconnected? Marjorie did sometimes.You know, there was one time when I thought that Jim might have been stoned or drunk or something. He was just kinda spaced out, didn’t know what I was talking about, and Marjorie seemed like that quite a bit.You can see how her eyes dart around. She doesn’t seem to know what’s going on a lot of the time, so, yeah. Sorta. A group member talks about having a “personal UFO” that follows her around. Jim and Marge both claim to have had abduction experiences, and later Jim talks, inexplicably, about “the dizziness, the headaches, and the sleeplessness.” Some researchers propose that UFO cults are descended from MKULTRA. Does that suggest an explanation for what we see happening with some of these people?
I doubt it. I think they’re interpreting things that happened to them on the edge of normal human experiences, but within the normal range. They have a paranoid way of seeing everything. I’ll give you an example. Jim got a piece of spam one time, and the email address looked like his email address. He took that as, ‘How did they get my email address? They must be trying to do something to me, and trying to fool me.’ And it’s just a piece of spam. So they see normal things like that and build stories out of them. They put spins on fairly benign activities (but) I think one of the biggest changes I went through making this movie is realizing that I don’t have as
George Bush in some metaphorical sense is a reptilian. He’s cold blooded. He’s sociopathic. good a grasp on truth as I thought.You mentioned MKULTRA. They did talk about MKULTRA, and that was another one of the large topics we dropped, and I looked that up a little bit afterwards to learn more about it, and got interested in the original 1950s experiments done with LSD, and got a book on that, and it’s pretty well referenced. It’s called Acid Dream. I don’t dispute anything in this book. I believe everything that’s in it, so… it’s really hard to figure out what are the standards for deciding whether something is true or not. They’re sorta fuzzy. Why do I believe that, but not some of the wilder claims? I can’t really say. They manage to fold all the bargain conspiracy stuff into their beliefs; the Illuminati, Bloodlines, Alien technology, Reptilians. But it’s mixed with things like MKULTRA and 9/11, both of which arguably deserve more serious attention. At one point, a Forum member finds a cloud-shaped UFO in a picture she took of some chemtrails. I think that they definitely have points, valid points, but I think of it in more of a metaphorical way. If you did a DNA test on George Bush, I don’t think that you would find that he’s different from any other human. But in some metaphorical sense, he is a reptilian. He’s cold blooded. He’s sociopathic. So when they talk about chemtrails, I don’t think there’s any intentional poisoning going on, but planes are responsible for a lot global warming, so in a sense they’re taking some vague uneasiness they have about this, and putting a story on it. n
reviews IN TICKETS! ENTER eTnOervWemagazine.com
Live21
win@th
Sparklehorse, Of Montreal, the Shins, the Intelligence, No Feeling, Defektors, DOA, the Furies, Rebel Spell, First Reign, Bob Weir and Ratdog, Wavelength Anniversary...
APRIL 9 – CROATIAN CULTURAL CENTRE TICKETS ALSO AT SCRAPE
ALL AGES
Album22
American Flamewhip, Apples in Stereo, Architects, Kim Barlow, the Big Bad, Bella Bombs, the Besnard Lakes, Bloc Party, Mariah Carey, Neko Case, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, the Crackdown, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Deadneck Fury, Julie Doiron, Dom, Peter Elkas, the End, the Fallout, Flashlight Brown, Four Stroke, Chris Garneau, Grass City, the Handshake Murders, the Hipshakes, Hot Live Guys, Husky Rescue, I, Calvin Johnson, Kill the Lights, Low, Mother Mother, Nothington, Radio Moscow, Radon, Stars of Track and Field, Teddybears, Therion, Ultramagnetic MCs, Wheat, Wu-Tang Clan, James Yorkston
dvd25
A Tribute to Brian Wilson: Some of LA’s finest drunks raise an empty glass to the boy genius
Book27
drugs, drugs, drugs, drugs, drugs, drugs, drugs, drugs, drugs, drugs, drugs, drugs, drugs, drugs, drugs, drugs...
games28 Need For Speed: Carbon the next in the franchise.
The Nerve March 2007 Page 21
LIVE REVIEWS show was fine. “Sleeping Lessons” was how they started it and it gets a bit bleary in between. Lots of Springsteen type whoops and peace signs during “New Slang”. Cellphones are the new lighters at shows these days. I’m out. Mack is gonna kill me. This review is twice as long as it should be. - Walt Whitmanstein
and I was completely disenchanted. Maybe I’m just sick of being treated like an afterthought. Maybe I just need to buy shoes that fit. Or maybe I’m just tired. Of Pretension. - Meghan Dean
SPARKLEHORSE
The Intelligence / No Feeling / Defektors Pub340,Vancouver, BC Saturday, February 3, 2007 Saturday night at Pub340 and there’s no piss on the toilet seats in the women’s washroom, none at all – where’s the rock’n’roll in that? It’s still early though, plenty of time for broken glass and spilt whiskey. Things just have to get going... And the “get going” starts right up with a clanging set of mangled perfection from Vancouver darlings, No Feeling. It’s no secret that I love these guys so I spend their set happily bouncing around at the front getting more and more excited for the headliners… Only problem is, before The Intelligence can play I have to get through a whole OTHER set by Defektors, another local band, and I’ve NEVER even heard of ‘em before tonight. So given my state of unruly impatience and apparent lack of adventurousness, Defektors came across as a mediocre take-it-or-leave-it New-NoWave punk band. And just like my description, a little too typical. But I can’t actually say that - Not yet at least! I was way too excited about seeing The Intelligence play; I mean, it was getting hard to concentrate (which had nothing to do with the beer I’m sure, ha) to really “absorb” what Defektors was trying to do. So it’s not totally fair to slam the guys with the scabby-Girl Guide-cookie analogy. Not this time at least. Anyways, it was all a hazy memory (once again nothing to do with the beer, I swear, heh) once the Intelligence hit the stage with their jerky punk-drone in all its sensational rambling weirdness. Classic comparisons would mean the Urinals or the Fall but it was obvious when the Intelligence played “The World is Not a Drag” and “Telephone Wire” that they can fuck stuff up all on their own. What a retardedly great set! And in typical Vancouver form, the last chord was barely outta the guitarist’s amp and half the crowd was already at the door and on their way out. I don’t get it. Even when they seem to enjoy a show, people in this city pull out faster than a one-night-stand faced with a broken condom. Why is that? And what can you do? A whole lotta nothing. So with no encore in sight, I headed to the merch-table, picked up some music, and proceeded to stand on the corner for 45 minutes waiting for my cab to show up. Good ol’ Vancouver. - Jenny C
The Shins
PHOTO: LEIGH RIGHTON
Commodore Ballroom, Vancouver, BC Monday, February 19, 2007 When I heard the Shins were coming to town, I was kinda excited but a month late in getting tickets to a very sold out show at the CBR. So, about an hour before the gig, I decided I would try and get tickets. I subsequently took a mystical journey into the very fiber of humanity. How could I get tix? The line up was huge. Scalpers were charging $150. The answer was Karma. I decided to do five good deeds and line up for a late release of tickets. And I needed two of them. My first good deed was to give a small walking tour of downtown to an ugly fellow from New Zealand. It got strange. While on the bus, I found good deed #2. I interrupted an idiot bus driver’s false directions and led a group of Edmontonians to the Commodore. Then I threw out a cute girl’s garbage for her, gave a bum five bucks, and didn’t make fun of my friend for being on coke. The result? I got the last two tickets for a very good show. Got too drunk though, and Jimi puked in a cab while I yelled, “He’s got a condition!” over and over. He does have a condition though. He can’t burp. Anyway, the
Sparklehorse Richard’s on Richards,Vancouver, BC Thursday, February 15, 2007 Living holed up in the mountains can sure do a number on a guy’s social skills. Or at least this is the impression I got after tonight’s Sparklehorse show. On a Vancouver stage, Mark Linkous - the only real Sparklehorse member - appeared completely out of his element before a filled nightclub. With his eyes to the ground and his feet locked tight, he said little more than “thank you” as he seemed to block the crowd from all consciousness. In fact, he looked so uncomfortable that I almost felt a bit guilty for attending. But, really, what could I expect from a guy who lives on a North Carolina mountaintop with just a hound dog to keep him company? So I did my best to overlook Linkous’ awkwardness and searched for something positive in his show. After all, the last thing I wanted was to dump on the poor hermit. Thankfully, in this quest for a silver lining, I hit upon a few elements worthy of compliment. First, Linkous had himself a nice, full band, which included a drummer whose stick antics repeatedly brought up images of Neil Peart (I couldn’t decide if this was good or bad, actually). Second, he didn’t just play tracks from his latest album and instead touched on each of the four Sparklehorse records, filling his set with old and new favourites such as “Spirit Ditch”, “Hammering the Cramps”, and “Apple Bed.” And last, Linkous and his band made good use of his louder, faster-paced tracks like “Pig,” which, on record, always felt jarring and out of place to me, but in a live setting finally seemed to make sense. However, negativity kept pestering me throughout the evening. It was hard to get over the grossly inappropriate wind machine - yes, the thing Dave Navarro loves so much - that regularly sent air gusting into Linkous’ down-turned face. Also, trying not to feel overly disappointed that neither of the scheduled openers (Jason Lytle and Jesse Sykes) turned up was tough. When the night was said and done, I didn’t harbour any bad feelings toward Linkous and left feeling he is simply not cut out for the stage. I’m glad he came down from his mountain, but from here on in I will only enjoy Sparklehorse in the comfort of my home. - Brock Thiessen
with these really pleased looks on their faces while what’shis-face busted out these look-how-much-I-don’t-care dance moves whenever he felt like it (which wasn’t very often.) Even the quarter-hourly costume changes weren’t enough to keep this clothes-whore’s interest. Not that the show didn’t have some redeeming bits. I mean, his voice really was impressive: so clear and sharp and, yes, pretty. And I actually did genuinely dance a couple times. They’re quite good at coaxing the occasional booty-shake out of ya, I’ll give them that. But by then it was too late. I was hot, I was sore,
THE INTELLIGENCE
DOA, the Furies, Rebel Spell, First Reign
Of Montreal
In spite of this arrogant cock-shit, I did my best to retain an open mind. I mean, it looked like they might be able to redeem themselves: me wearing jeans too tight and shoes that shredded my heels, them kicking things off with “Suffer for Fashion.” Seemed like we’re on the same page. So I gave them a second chance. And what do those glitter-freaks do? Urinate all over it, that’s what. They all just pissed around
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PHOTO: SEAN LAW
Richard’s on Richards,Vancouver, BC Thursday, February 15, 2007 Dear Of Montreal, You are a band. Therefore, you should have bands open for you, not some scattered deejay that plays really confusing, random mixes of top 40 and disco and “indie,” and seems really committed to annoying the fuck out me. And if you don’t have a band open for you, you should have the decency to not make us wait in the stinking heat listening to this crap until 11 pm when you are supposed to be onstage at 10:30 pm. And if by some unholy chance you do this, you should fucking apologize and thank the people who support your “artistic endeavours” for being goddamn saints, and not saunter out in your stripy pants and satin and rouge like you’re so damn clever, only barely alluding to our existence. Love, Get Over Yourselves.
Richard’s on Richards,Vancouver, BC Saturday, February 10, 2007 The afternoon all-ages show could have been called Generations of Punk. From seven-year olds with green hair and DOA T-shirts, to old duffers who were clearly around when punk first started, the difference in ages spanned at least four decades. For me, this was the coolest thing about the show and, as I stood watching DOA tear up the stage, I couldn’t help but feel as if punk had come full circle (no pun intended). There was one kid who couldn’t have been more than four-feet tall in the pit, smashing it up with kids twice his size. Another pint-size punk on a speaker at the side of the stage threw Randy Rampage the goats, his young face twisted in rapture. To the side, the kid’s dad watched proudly, ready to intervene should things get too rough. The main difference between then and now is that there are more girls in the pit, and the kids look more “punk.” Don’t forget: you couldn’t buy your punk gear at the mall back then, and it took very little to make you a prime target of every redneck, cop, jock, or construction worker around. On the stage, DOA looked much the same as they always have: Randy Rampage even had the same leg brace he’s been using since the mid-80s. Joe’s battered Gibson SG looks worse for wear than he does, and if I’m not mistaken, it’s the same one he’s used throughout most of his career. I was impressed at the energy DOA put into the set, and how they played as if they didn’t have to do it all over again later that night. The young punks had a great time knocking each other around in the pit, and they helped their fallen comrades up from the floor without fail. I want the girl who got a bloody nose to know that such an injury is a badge of honour. I broke my foot at the start of a DOA show in ’82, but didn’t go to the hospital until it was over. I wore that cast with pride until I took it off two weeks early. It was good to see Rampage back in the fold; to me, the band never seemed like DOA without him. Now if they only could get Dave Gregg back... The Furies are indeed an old-time punk group, meaning that they aren’t exactly the proficient musicians that many of the new groups are. The singer still reminds me of Paul Westerberg, but without the chops. What the Furies lacked in technical ability, they made up for in enthusiasm, and I give them credit for having the guts to get up on stage after 30 years. The Rebel Spell neatly bridged the gap between young and old, and poured out their hearts and soul as they always do. A friend commented that the ‘Spell didn’t seem quite as energetic as they usually are, and I later learned that this show was their fourth in less than 24 hours. Me, I thought they were as great as ever, and was happy to see Steph behind the drums again. I also noticed that guitarist Erin even had her own little fan club packed up tight against the stage. And why not? She’s proof that a girl can kick out the
LIVE REVIEWS the hecklers. But soon after setting fire to a construction paper heart that the vocalist ripped from the ceiling, a tepid celebration turned to delicious chaos. Too often dubbed as disco thrash pop, Think About Life veered between all three, viciously, in rapid vibrations and seething synths. How has Wavelength come to live for so long on a volunteer budget? Let’s hope it, doesn’t die. - Nadja Sayej
Wavelength 7 Year Anniversary
Bob Weir and Ratdog
Salem’s Loft, Toronto, ON Saturday, February 10, 2007 You missed it.You missed the anniversary of Wavelength Toronto; the weekly indie music night that showcases underground talent every Sunday at Sneaky Dee’s. But the lucky seven celebration was a few steps west in Salem’s Loft, an artists’ collective space, infested with acts from Toronto and Montreal. Starting with Drumheller, a Toronto free-jazz quintet that draws outside the lines with abstract compositions, a jocular hippie talking through their act said,“I believe that is a vintage 1969 toilet plunger the trombonist is using.” And though this is a charming albeit naive statement, it also typifies the indie environment, which is full of people who like to jibberjabber while musicians take the stage. The Winks, a four-piece from Montreal, inspired a more poignant response with a cross-cultural romp falling between gentle fairytale chants and glam. Animal Monster then assaulted the audience with a coffee table packed with Casio keys and mixers; a kind of self-indulgent techno stuck in a Nintendo time warp that got audience members to a) stop talking, and b) start dancing. The Guest Bedroom didn’t disappoint; look past their predictable riffs to find an acerbic singer, brand new bassist, self-involved guitarist, and a drummer with a fervid ability to feed off the audience and then channel into his sticks. Think About Life, from Montreal, started with a quote. “I just want to dedicate this set to a friend who recently died,” said the singer. “Maybe we should think about death.” The crowd disagreed, according to
Commodore Ballroom,Vancouver, BC Sunday, February 18, 2007 My relationship with Weir and the Grateful Dead dates way back to December, 2006, when my yogic uncle gave me Dennis McNally’s A Long Strange Trip:The Inside History of the
THE GUEST BEDROOM
Grateful Dead for Christmas. I’ve bought the first two Dead albums since then, but that’s it. My knowledge of Weir’s career ends abruptly 39 years ago. So it was nice when Ratdog – a six-piece, with two guitars (including Weir), drums, bass, sax, and keys – opened with “The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion)”, the first track on ‘67’s Grateful Dead. Sweet! I actually know this! A perfect party-starting sing-along. After that I didn’t recognize a single Grateful classic – stuff like “China Cat Sunflower”, “Candyman”, “Greatest Story Ever Told”, which were all wonderful. I was surrounded by tie-dyed dudes and groovy chicks waving their arms in ecstasy and giving me knowing looks. I felt like the world’s biggest impostor. And speaking of that... entering that night’s prettymuch-packed Commodore Ballroom, some parka-wearing dude pointed a finger at me, stared deep in my eyes and
yelled, “Freak!” Awesome, cause with my military-issue spiked haircut and well-trimmed goatee, I was probably the straightest cat in the place. But the show! Bob Weir had a great pair of way-aboveknee shorts. His voice was sometimes choppy, singing in spurts, but the band as a whole was a fucking dream. It’s a Dead tradition, I suppose, to have fluid, random setlists. Jam on one thing for a while, Weir waves a hand, nice little segue into something else. There were tons of covers. A couple Dylan’s: “All Along the Watchtower”, “Stuck Inside of Mobile...”. Plus “Me and Bobby McGee”, during which a bouncing balloon dropped near Weir, exploded, and he pretended to duck for cover... his only crowd interaction all night – “Dear Prudence”, Miles Davis’ “Milestones” (!!!), and Harry Belafonte’s “Women are Smarter”, which closed Ratdog’s first of two sets and was the night’s big winner. The floor was buoyant with so much singing and dancing. So, a great show. No complaints about the performance, or the happy-go-lucky beard ‘n’ dreadlocks crowd. Loved it. But my night was canned early on by a pre-show incident: I caught the barman trying to serve me a dodgy pint – a half-filled glass, sitting absent for god-knows how long, which he topped up with a different beer. I refused it. The guy was cool, realized he was caught, poured another pint. End of story? No. Neighbouring bitch bartendress was peeved way beyond reason, proceeding to be a harpy, “It’s all the same shit, buddy!” “Are there any other beer connoisseurs around?” And: “Don’t do that ever again, pal.” So I told her that you can sneak that kind of shit with servers, cause the customers are out of sight and won’t know the difference, but not when I’m watching in plain view, and for fuck’s sake I MAKE MY LIVING AS A BARTENDER AND I KNOW ALL ABOUT BEHIND-THE-BAR CROOKEDNESS, SO DON’T THREATEN ME AND CALL ME AN ASSHOLE WHEN I CATCH YOU PULLING A SLIP,YOU FUCKING SHE-BITCH. I spent the whole concert thinking about how much I wanted to kick that fucking whore right in the cunt, hopefully damaging her uterus beyond any possibility of procreation. That’s when I realized I’m not part of the Love Generation. - Dave Bertrand PHOTO: GARRY TSACONAS (BLOGTO.COM)
jams with the best of them. I’ll try not to go on too much because everyone already knows how much I love this band. In 10 years, the Rebel Spell will be the legends that DOA and the Subhumans are today. I’m not sure why First Reign, a metal band with hard/ soft vocals were on the bill. I got there too late to see them anyways. - Chris Walter
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DVD REVIEWS ALBUMCONTENTS REVIEWS American Flamewhip Fingertight Transistor First, let me take this band to task for calling themselves American Flamewhip. Granted, Canadian Flamewhip doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, but c’mon now! I mean, they’re from Winnipeg for gawdsakes, and you can’t get much more Canadian than that. Okay, with the lecture out of the way, let me say
that Fingertight is a fine CD, with husky female vocals and an abundance of good riffs.You can take those three chords everyone uses and make shit, or in the case of American Flamewhip, you can make good rock music played with passion and energy. We’re not talking about rocket science, but there are far more of the former bands than the latter. Amazingly, even my girlfriend liked this, and she’s punker than a safety pin through the neck. Now I’m sitting here with the volume turned up loud, wondering if that singer looks as sexy as she sounds… - Chris Walter The Apples In Stereo New Magnetic Wonder Simian I’m not quite sure what to make of the long standing Elephant 6 group’s sixth full length, and first not on spinART, but Elijah Wood’s newly formed Simian Records. Their last album was released in 2002 though, so change was pretty much inevitable. With a new drummer and keyboardist in check, chief songwriter Robert Schneider has cashed in most of his Beatles/ Beach Boys psychedelic fuzz leanings for an emphasis on vocoders and effects culled from Jeff Lynne’s ELO playbook. Now I like ELO as much as the next man, and it’s nice to see them try to expand and try something different in the face of minor lineup changes, but I can’t imagine this move is going to sit well with many of their fans. The Beatles > ELO. I’ll prolly buy it anyway, though. Who knows how long it’ll be till the next one and a decent Apples album
will be disappointed, my guarantee. - David Von Bentley
post-rock. - Brock Thiessen
Kim Barlow Champ Jericho Beach Music This is Kim Barlow’s third CD and was recorded in her Yukon hometown during the recent record-breaking cold snap. Rock ‘n’ Roll! With all the small town quirkiness you’d expect to come out of the Yukon, this is fabulously anti-establishment non-conformist folk. Mostly acoustic, featuring guitar, clawhammer banjo and plucked cello (which she bought at a yard sale, extra Rock ‘n’ Roll!) Barlow combines classically trained roots with off the cuff innovation and originality. A true storyteller, she spins yarns that are sometimes nursery rhyme, sometimes black comedy, and occasionally real heartbreak. Like a playful, pre-pubescent Julianna Hatfield singing Jenny Lewis, these songs are geeky, intimate and cute. Champ is in turn joyfully weird, and sorrowful, and dark. Bizarre effects round off the offbeat feel, and you wouldn’t be surprised if Pingu were to appear in a video. She may have Champion the Wonderhorse on the cover of the CD, but she never liked pony camp. - Stephanie Heney
Bloc Party A Weekend In The City VICE/Wichita Somewhat disappointingly, Bloc Party’s second effort has mostly been stripped of the angular punk stylings found on the band’s debut, and replaced with a veneer that at times leaves that weird fuzzy feeling in your mouth that you get when you’ve eaten too much sugar. Even so, the songs are still really strong. Opening track “Song For Clay (Disappear Here)” starts things off with an attention grabbing riff and hooks aplenty. “Hunting For Witches” comes across a bit like some shitty emo type stuff, minus the annoying whiney American accents and pre-packed anguish, but is somehow still
The Big Bad Title Not Supplied by Reviewer,Thank You Independent I actually really liked this album. I don’t know how to describe it. Why the hell do all the bands I like lately have girl singers? Can’t explain it. I really liked this record. Except it was only a few songs. More songs, better. Now, that being said, as much as I liked the record, I did NOT like the band photo that came with it. Not one bit. It has the singer flanked by two very frightened looking men. Actually, I’m kind of scared of her myself. - Ainsworth Bella Bombs Liquid Explosion Independent Okay, folks, here ya got some kick-ass rock ‘n’ roll by four sexy girls straight outta Ottawa. Hmmm… actually, one ain’t so pretty… hey, wait, that’s a guy! More punk than Girlschool, but more rock than the Lunachicks, the Bella Bombs are somewhere in between.Yes, that’s a good thing, you numbskulls. Anyway, I’m always inclined to cut pretty girls a break, but in the case of the Liquid Explosion, it’s the strength of the songs that had me going back for repeated listens. I’m a sucker for girls who know how to rock, and the Bella Bombs will have ya running for a cold shower. Except for that guy. He won’t make you want a cold shower, unless you swing that way or you’re a girl. - Chris Walter The Besnard Lakes … Are the Dark Horse Jagjaguwar When a friend slapped the post-rock label on the Besnard Lakes, I approached with caution.
is still in another dimension compared to the sober, sterile Technicolor assrot of the Killers. Bands shouldn’t be punished for releasing merely solid material after their stellar peak. -Filmore Mescalito Holmes
quite enjoyable. “Waiting For The 7.18” just manages to stay on the right side of cheesy sentimentality despite some very dubious lyrics. “The Prayer” demonstrates these Londoner’s ability to write a truly catchy and fun sounding pop song that isn’t criminally derivative. Only “Where Is Home?” touches upon the more abrasive, ‘80s new wave sound of Silent Alarm. It worries me that I found myself thinking of U2 and other mainstream radio rock bands when I listened to this album, and that this didn’t instantly put me off. Perhaps they’re not the only ones heading into a premature middle-age. Oh dear. - Will Pedley Mariah Carey Trauma Based Mind Control Stanford Research Carey’s new album is a result of a glitch in her programming. Having re-integrated her various personalities during a painful weekend at her handler’s underground laboratory, Carey is now free to sing about her incredible life as a Monarch Sex Slave, UFO abductee, and ‘Targetted Individual’, or ‘Wavie’ as the preferred nomenclature has it. Track seven, “The Voices in My Head Belong to a 42 Year Old CIA Agent Called Murray” is where things really take off, or fall apart, depending on your perspective, as one of the results of Carey’s reintegration is that she can no longer sing, and actually sounds like Tom Petty. - Adman Fagjam Neko Case Live From Austin,TX New West The world was busy in 2003: George W. launched his war on Iraq, “Ahnold” became the governor of California, and Miss Neko Case found herself basking in new levels of celebrity. That year, Case was riding high on the heels of Blacklisted and was invited to play America’s celebrated country showcase, Austin City Limits. Three years later, the performance worked its way onto DVD and now to CD. The purely audio version contains no extra bells or whistles, meaning Case’s stripped-down but striking performance remains untouched. Playing tracks from her mid-period with little more than an acoustic guitar, a pedal steel and some bass for accompaniment - a significant difference from the gush of reverb found on her albums - the concert rests almost entirely on her vocals, and, thankfully, Case has the voice to pull it off. For self-respecting fans, this recording is essential, but whether they need the DVD and the CD is completely up to them. - Brock Thiessen
guy with drugs back then, you know, and these jams certainly find themselves on the fringes of similar space. This is what 1971 thought the edge of time would sound like, which, for Jetsons fans accustomed to retro-futurism, is a small piece of home. - Filmore Mescalito Holmes
quietly waiting with their fingers crossed for the second release, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah churned out a complete piece-of-shit, soaked-in-garbage-juice, career bomb. Seriously, I am trying to listen to it right now and it is so distracting and horribly, horribly (self) produced, that it’s nearly impossible for me to write. It sounds like Velvet Underground outtakes, if VU was still making music today and recording under a freeway in New Jersey with bums for band members and dead rats for instruments. How could they fuck this one up so bad? They had every music snob and record label just begging to be drenched in CYHSY jizz, and they decide to move to Philly and record this turd themselves? Why? I am truly upset here. These guys deserve exactly what they get for this thing: absolutely nothing. At least the new Shins is OK. - Waltergeist The Crackdown vs. Hiroshima Mon Amour Broken Guitars and Trashy Bars Longshot It’s hard to go wrong with a title like this, and Winnipeg’s the Crackdown and Germany’s Hiroshima Mon Amour give us an EP that is both fun-filled and energetic. There are only two kinds of punk rock: the kind that sucks and the kind that doesn’t suck. These bands fall firmly in the latter category. Damn, this review is decidedly short on the word count. Say, have I told you about my cock lately? - Chris Walter Deadneck Fury s/t Independent Good ol’ punk rock from Calgary, full of your usual topics such as beer, beer, and more beer. I applaud their DIY ethics and I am always down with punk rock, but other than a short ska-like breakdown in “End of my Rope”, this CD is fairly run of the mill. There’s nothing wrong with it, but Deadneck Fury doesn’t really stand out among all the other punk bands nowadays. Still, I’d say it’s a good start. And who doesn’t like beer? - Chris Walter Julie Doiron Woke Myself Up Endearing This is Julie Doiron’s seventh solo release since Eric’s Trip broke up, and features founder members Rick White, Mark Gaudet and Chris Thompson. However, not to be confused with an Eric’s Trip reunion, this is still very much a Doiron solo release. Mostly acoustic with moments of plugged-in guitars, this is emotionally candid and reflective folk that wants to be Cat Power so bad yet is lacking the intensity of her or Beth Orton’s pared down subtlety. It is reasonable to describe Doiron’s vocal style in a similar vein: fragile and broken, but the fact that she only has one tone to her voice makes for a really boring listen, and falls the wrong side of cool acoustic lowfi. This kind of folk music makes me think of tofu-loving hippies of no fixed haircut who love nothing more than a Joan Baez album before bedtime, rather than a Chemical Brothers remix opportunity. - Stephanie Heney
Peter Elkas Wall Of Fire Maple Music This is incredibly safe music. Peter Elkas follows a veritable gaggle of unchallenging half-rock artists who have been slowly invading Starbucks since Jack Johnson’s Bushfire Fairytales.Yes, it’s very well produced. The love lyrics ride perfectly over dulcet tones lulled out by an electric guitar, drums, bass, and keyboards all with their amps at five, all played with mechanical, pinpoint precision. Granted, there is something to be said for that.Your mom has to listen to something and, unlike John Mayer or Ron Sexsmith, Peter isn’t on a major label. However, except for more socially aware baby boomers, I don’t think this hyperbolically titled Wall Of Fire holds much appeal. - Filmore Mescalito Holmes The End Elementary Dine Alone/Relapse This is really good... Wow... How often can I say that? Usual I get bands full of closeted homosexuals who circle jerk each other off with blindfolds on. But these guys actually pull off the dark, ambient and heavy thing all at the same time. Taking Jeff Buckley-like vocals and mixing with them with the standard piss shit vocals actually makes for a good combination without sounding too ass-grabbing sensitive. The music is stellar, with the focus on the songwriting over masturbatory riffs and solos. Overall sounding a lot like the Dillinger Escape Plan’s baby after a brief affair with TOOL, Elementary is an impressive effort all the way through. It rocks, it’s heavy, and it’s not too much of anything. Who knew Mississauga, Ontario could produce such upstanding citizens. - David Von Bentley The Fallout The Turning Point Longshot The Turning Point is easily my favourite punk rock CD this month. I had the pleasure of reviewing the Fallout’s What is Past is Prologue CD in 2005, and if anything, this one is even better. Simple but catchy songs, tight arrangements, and solid vocals with lyrics you can hear: what else do need? I could pad the word count here by talking about my cock like David Von Bentley always does, but I’ll keep this review short and sweet. Highly recommended. - Chris Walter Flashlight Brown Blue Union Label You can tell where Flashlight Brown are coming from when they thank the likes of Simple Plan and Billy Talent in the liner notes. Sure enough, Blue starts off with a guitar driven number called “Sicker”, but by the second track, I could actually see the prepubescent fans at the front of the stage making goo goo eyes at the singer while getting all moist in the panties. I can’t fault Flashlight Brown’s ability to write catchy little pop/rock songs, but I need a bit more angst in my rock‘n’roll. Okay, make that a lot more angst. Besides, If I feel a need to listen to nerdy pop/punk, I’ll go with the Weakerthans. - Chris Walter
ALBUM
Architects Nightmares Distort I believe the Dillinger Escape Plan came out with its first EP in 1997. Ever since, there’s been about a million bands of considerably less talent trying to copy that sound. Enter Architects. It sounds exactly like early Dillinger, with better production and shittier skinny white guy screaming. I’m not saying that it doesn’t have potential, and Nightmares does have a few hooks that I dig, but I can’t understand the need for a screamer who has no melodic range. And significantly, the best parts of the record are the melody-soaked riffs. If you want manic and heavy but with a quality singer, check out Miss Machine by Dillinger Escape Plan. If you still can’t get enough, then fine, check out Nightmares by Architects.You
The thought of another dull transmission from that stagnant genre filled me with dread, but after investigating the Montreal band’s second album, I quickly realized they have much more up their sleeves. Sure, the band relies on many of the common moves, such as quiet-to-loud transitions, swelling strings sections and crashing drum patterns, but they always keep things concise - something most post-rock bands ignore. The group also distance themselves further from the genre by including some fine vocal interplay by Jace Lasek and Olga Goreas, the married couple behind the band. Plus, they don’t stick to just one style, and flirt as much with loud stoner jams and Beach Boys harmonies as they do Constellations Records. The result is a hell of an album that leaves me questioning whether something so good could even be considered
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah Some Loud Thunder Independent When the first CYHSY album came out, it really rocked the hell out of the indie/dance world. It had it all: silly lyrics about serious things, dancey boom pa boom pa beats and screechy (not Saved by the Bell Screechy), whiney singing. So with the whole world
Dom Edge Of Time Anthology Dom was a short-lived, extremely progressive Krautrock quartet with members culled from Germany, Poland, and Hungary. They released but one album, Edge Of Time, in the early ‘70s, and then basically faded away. The original four acid jams stick to a hearty diet of ancient, spooky organs emulating early Doctor Who synth sounds, inconsistent guitar feedback and lysergic acoustica, transparent bass, and the odd bongo, flute, or indecipherable sound to change things up, all awash in stereo imaging and ancient reverb. Syd Barrett wasn’t the only
Four-Stroke I Was a Teenage Suicide Bomber Crusty My head is a self-flushing toilet that often purges itself of shit, but the songs here are good enough to cling to the sides. I Was a Teenage Suicide Bomber reminds me of less metallic Alcoholic White Trash, and not just for the subject matter. If you like nasty punk rock with a bad attitude and funny lyrics then MAKE SURE NOT TO BUY THIS! Ha ha, I’m just fuckin’ with ya. Really, Four-Stroke have the riffs to set them apart from most of the crap out there, and in this day of mediocrity, that’s no easy job. Now excuse me, I have to go buy fifty-five gallons of motor oil and a whole lot of fertilizer. - Chris Walter Chris Garneau Music For Tourists Absolutely Kosher Chris Garneau’s debut for AbKo is his album,
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ALBUM REVIEWS make or break. That means, aside from the odd cello or bass kicked in by his pals in the studio, Music For Tourists is the steady sound of a plodding piano and Chris’ truly feminine falsetto (he is gay, though, so he comes by it honestly, unlike Darkness flake Justin Hawkins). At times, when the strings and odd melodica or harmonium pick up, leaving the vocals a little deeper in the mix, you almost feel like you’re in a dusty café in the artsy part of town enjoying a scone and trendy ambiance. However, typically and sadly, it’s all just a bit tedious. Chris plays with complete dispassion, barely clomping out a two key melody per track, and his vocals do not convey the utter torment of Elliott Smith or Cat Power, whom he’s emulating. While it may be kind on the ears, it’s soft on the heart. For fans of Joanna Newsome. - Filmore Mescalito Holmes Grass City Laid to Rest Conflict of Interest From deep in the New Orleans... oops... North Delta swamps comes the shimmering, beastly Grass City, a three-guitar’d monolith of melodic doom sludge; soul-wrenching Southern Rock via Crowbar-patented snail-paced bendy
riffola. Pretty unique for a bunch of Vancouver metal stalwarts – including members of Goatsblood, Huskavarna, Combodia, etc – and it works. Opener “Sun’s Goin’ Down” tempts us with clean strumming before bulldozing the listener into heavenly oblivion. Instant classic “Old Tyme Remedies” deserves to be rock radio’s “Tuesday’s Gone” in 20 years time. “Headin’ Home” is a huge, shit-kickin’ sonuvabitch, while the brief “Laid to Rest”, with its warbled and layered tremelo lines, is a rousing call to arms. “Lady of Sorrow”, the album’s second softy, uses three guitars to majestic effect, but is too speedy for its own good (Grass City is best served SLOW). It’s not all perfectly distinguishable – those weary gruff-lunged laments, creeping, unstoppable bludgeoning grooves can get a bit same-y – but all are true to the cause. Laid to Rest is solid, pleasantly vinyl-length (seven meaty tracks!), profound and worthy, with gorgeous artwork from Goatsblood’s Adam Sorry. Buy it. - Dave Bertrand The Handshake Murders Usurper Goodfellow Stop it! I don’t wanna hear it anymore! Stop with the off-time riffs and the bombastic screams. Please stop it.You really like Meshuggah. I mean you really, really like them. So much so you started a band that apes them off all the way to the jazz fusion solos. The problem is this: Meshuggah is quality manic noise on the highest level. The Handshake Murders Usurper is bargain basement. The other difference is that, unlike Meshuggah, your only influence is Meshuggah. So stop it. We don’t need it. Someone seriously better buy me a drink for listening to this shit. Oh yeah - “Dissector” is by far the best track, and that’s track number one. Looking for a low-grade Meshuggah? Step up to the crotch kicking booth I set up outside The Nerve offices and I’ll give you something better. - David Von Bentley
shitty title, not mine) it’s apparent that Radon is doing something right. Not mind-blowing by any means, but fans of melodic punk, mean harmonica solos and the consistently thriving Florida punk scene may want to take a sniff. - Adam Simpkins
It’s an interesting combination, made even better by an absence of silly outfits or hooker boots. Album opener “The Storm I Ride” (for my money the best track) is a straight up rocker with a KISS-like riff and Lemmy-esque vocals. The rest of the album is a bit more progressive, but never really slows down into the typical black metal borefest we all fear. I was surprised with how good it is. I will look forward to hearing I again. So enjoy I, says I. - David Von Bentley
play guitars, drums, bass in the pursuit of rock and roll.” Which is pretty non-specific when you’re looking for info on a band, but that really is all they say about themselves. Shake Their Hips – the first Hipshake full length release – is guitar trash garage gone wild, how you would imagine the sound if someone were to take the piss out of the thrashy punk music genre. Uber distorted to the point of absurdity, this sounds like the complete works of Mudhoney performed by GG Allin with only 15 minutes to get in every track, and less tunes. To be fair, this trio of British teenagers are to be praised for taking the sheen off clean and marketable chart friendly rock, and taking things back to basics. Rockstar Supernova they are not. Perhaps with some production (just a smidge) and less amphetamines, the Hipshakes could be the saviours of rock ‘n’ roll. - Stephanie Heney Hot Live Guys Robbin’ a Bank Transistor 66 The Hot Live Guys remind me of a more organic version of Calgary’s Von Zippers, which is not a harsh criticism as I quite dig the ‘Zippers. Where the Von Zippers favour the full-blown Marshall/Gibson attack, it sounds as if the Hot Live Guys use a Telecaster for a simple, twangier effect. Traditional skinheads also prefer Telecasters, though the Hot Live Guys do not sound like the Templars. Where am I going with this? Oh, yeah, Robbin’ a Bank is good clean fun, with a little killin’ thrown in for good measure. Two dead cops up. - Chris Walter Husky Rescue Ghost Is Not Real Catskills Okay… so you didn’t listen to Husky Rescue’s 2004 debut Country Falls, despite widespread critical acclaim. Now is your chance to redeem yourself. The Helsinki ambient pop band led by one Marko Nyberg is set to release its highly anticipated follow-up at the perfect time of year for their sound (cool as a winter chill with the hope for spring warmth almost realized) and the worst for sales (Sept/Oct is prime). I seriously hope that won’t detract from the blissful success this album is and subsequently deserves. With Nordic depressive lyricism, loving synths, ethereal country steel slide and indie guitars that often find themselves at the business end of some truly compelling, previously uncharted post-rock flourishes, Ghost Is Not Real is the greatest Finnish export since Teemu Selanne. Though you may have never heard of them before, this album will be on your year-end list for 2007. - Filmore Mescalito Holmes
Calvin Johnson & The Sons Of The Soil s/t K A bizarre and unnecessary set of recordings, CJ & The Sons Of The Soil was a thrown together band composed of K Records don Calvin Johnson and a few of his younger disciples (Jason Anderson, Kyle Field and Adam Forkner) that made a brief tour of the American West in the summer of 2003. Hoping to “modernize the primitive,” the group took old Calvin Johnson and Calvin Johnson-related material and gave it a 2003 polish (oddly, three tracks here are updates from CJ’s dusty 2002 album What Was Me?). A few live tracks are tossed in for good measure, but newer versions of the already great Halo Benders track “Love Travels Faster” and the Dub Narcotic/Jon Spencer jam “Banana Meltdown” are sorry excuses for retreads that should have just been left as is. Why this album is getting released four years later only adds to the mystery. - Adam Simpkins Kill The Lights Buffalo Of Love Maple Music Following a rich tradition (and getting richer all the time) of radio friendly indie dancepunk bands, there ain’t much about this Quebec/Toronto quartet that’s original, per se. However, there is just enough grunge/funk twinge and warm Canadiana here to easily consider Kill The Lights a much more listenable Hot Hot Heat. I’m just not a big fan of this style of rock. It’s always so stale and formulaic. The aforementioned grunge flourishes work much like the Strokes-like intro to Franz Ferdinand’s “Take Me Out”, and ultimately make Kill The Lights out to be more creative than it actually is. Seriously, the album is called Buffalo Of Love… think about it. - Filmore Mescalito Holmes Low Drums and Guns Sub Pop By this point most know what to expect from Low. For 14 years they have consistently filled album after album with little more than crawling tempos and poignant male-female harmonies. And while Low may have some new tricks up their sleeve on Drums and Guns, it’s still really the same old Low. As for these tricks, Alan Sparhawk, Mimi Parker and producer Dave Fridmann have replaced long-time bassist Zak Sally with the soft beating of a drum machine, giving the album a more electronic flavour than previously heard. But like most Low albums, this one has its highs and lows. The high: “Murderer” could be mistaken as a collaboration with M83. The low: one of Sparhawk’s best tracks, “Hatchet,” (previously heard on the Retribution Gospel Choir EP) is butchered by giving it the most awkward pacing imaginable. Overall, those still interested in Low will eat this up, and those who could care less will continue to care less. - Brock Thiessen
to pin into a sub-genre. Anti-pop is the first category that comes to mind, or something else that starts with ‘post-’ or ends in ‘–esque’. They shamelessly mix everything from bluegrass to hip-hop, sometimes in a single track. Hey, something for everyone, right? And a hell of a lot better then power chords and whiny lyrics. - Sam VanSchie Nothington All In BYO This one, by the ex principals of Tsunami Bomb, started off strong, and I like the raspy vocals, but after a few tracks it started to get a bit too earnest and heartfelt. The hooks didn’t seem strong enough and the songs kinda sounded the same. I could be wrong, but Nothington seems to be aiming for mass commercial appeal, and that doesn’t work for me. Despite this lukewarm review, I’m sure that Nothinton will do just fine. Maybe if they suck up to the right people, Epitaph will play it on The Punk Show. - Chris Walter Radio Moscow s/t Alive Thanks to the unprecedented and surprising success of Wolfmother, Radio Moscow should have no trouble roping in fans with its giant riffs and knowing nods to ‘70s blues-infused rock. Masterminded by 22-year old multi-talent Parker Griggs, it’s surprising that this record is a product of someone born in an era of neon bracelets and Duran Duran; instead,
Griggs summons up the soul of Hendrix and licks of Cream-era Clapton. From the swagger of “Luckydutch,” followed by the backwater blues of “Lickskillet,” to the psychedelic haze of “Ordovician Fauna,” the kid can’t be accused of not doing his homework. And while the precocious wunderkind can often leave the authenticity police in a flutter, Griggs successfully pulls it off – leaving no doubt that this prodigy is playing for real. - Adam Simpkins
Stars of Track and Field Centuries Before Love and War Wind-Up This is an album of one great song surrounded by nine reasonable ‘b-side’ tracks that sound, largely, like an attempt to re-produce Coldplay’s “Yellow” with the special effects and samplings well utilized by Snow Patrol. The track in question, “Say Hello”, is extremely similar to a track by Elbow and could possibly explain its greatness and result in a lawsuit. Elsewhere, over-use of digital stylings (the band chose this route when they lost a bass player) and similarities to Radiohead et al overshadow what could be good songwriting. Frequently compared to the Postal Service, Stars of Track and Field are both indie twee and electronica geek and the two don’t gel as well as they can do. However, as a debut this is impressive enough and considering that their new label Wind up is also behind such acts as Creed and Evanescence, the band can expect some heavyweight support. - Stephanie Heney Teddybears Soft Machine Atlantic After the mainstream success of the Scissor Sisters, record companies are now scrambling to get in on some of the sales ‘action’ and flood the market with more quirky camp pop albums, and here is Atlantic’s offering. Teddybears (deliberately the same name as the short-lived Phil Spector outfit) is a duo from Stockholm whose influences include Kraftwerk, Dead Kennedys and Nietzsche, which is odd considering the sound they actually make themselves. More of a Daft Punk/Leftfield blend, this is mostly low-fi dancey, and pockets of familiarity occur due to the fact that quite a few tracks have appeared in adverts. Collaborations include Neneh Cherry, Elephant Man, Annie, and the Soundtrack Of Our Lives’ Ebbot Lundberg, but the winning track (natch) is “Punkrocker”, co-written and featuring Iggy Pop, which, despite all the synths is still quite addictive. The main thing that spoils this album is the ragga ‘stylin’ vocals that frequently appear all too often (care of Mad Cobra), but all in all this is reasonable coffee table dance music. - Stephanie Heney Therion Gothic Kabbalah Nuclear Blast Do chicks dig this bullshit? Do guys? I mean, what’s the deal with the influx of women-led metal bands with operatic vocals? Yeah, I know Evanescence is huge and it has some annoying bitch screaming about her period as if I care. But this shit is different. It’s like you get a hot looking C- grade operatically trained chick and introduce her brand of vocals into a B- grade swedish metal band. I hear it all the time and I don’t get it. Who is buying it? Fat goth girls in Cheetos-stained blouses who are confused about why Jenny with the tight box gets all attention? Or maybe long haired men trying to court the grown up fat goth girls with some wine and a unhealthy dose of Therion? I’ve heard at least seven or eight of these bands in the past year and there’s very little variation. At least that Amy Lee isn’t talented enough to yak out poor operatic vocals to limp my dick. If you happen to know who likes these kinds of bands please e-mail me at destroyeraseimprovemeshuggah@hotmail. com (yes, that’s really my address). Or visit me at myspace.com/davidvonbentley and just tell me. I’m confused. Really I am. Oh yeah, Therion is awful. - David Von Bentley
REVIEWS
The Hipshakes Shake Their Hips Slovenly According to their website, “The Hipshakes
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I Between Two Worlds Nuclear Blast My relationship with I didn’t start off too well. First of all, they’re named after the Roman numeral one, as in one cock, up one’s ass. Then it turns out that I is an all black metal super group consisting of cheesy metalheads from Immortal, Gorgoroth, and Enslaved. So I naturally thought I’d encounter a bunch of middle aged men dressed up with full on corpse make-up and ancient enchanted weapons used to fight off Gargoyles or Semen Spewing Demons. But I did all the hating before hearing a goddamn note of Between Two Worlds (when will I learn?). It turns out these former leather-clad studded codpiece wearers provide some Motorhead like rock with a healthy dose of black metal (minus the skinny keyboardist).
Mother Mother Touch Up Last Gang You have to be in the right state of mind to appreciate Mother Mother. Like, very high. I’d like to know what this Vancouver five-piece was on when they made Touch Up. Their fancyfull lyrics and dizzying harmonies definitely aren’t for the sober. Mother Mother recently signed to Last Gang Records (think Metric), but you might recognize most of the songs on Touch Up from 2005’s harder-to-find, selftitled independent release, or from their many festival gigs last summer. This band is hard
Radon Metric Buttloads of Rock No Idea Not exactly the most prolific band on the circuit, Radon has been around since the early ‘90s – drifting around Gainesville, FL while influencing other local bands like Hot Water Music and Against Me! (their exclamation, not mine). So why haven’t you heard of them? Well, they’re a bit lazy, to be honest. In their 15-plus year existence, the band has barely toured and released only a handful of 7” singles, an album and a compilation of odds and ends. Not to say that if they had been busy, they’d be a household name but judging by the strength of Metric Buttloads of Rock (their
Ultramagnetic MC’s The Best Kept Secret DMAFT Kool Keith has made it crystal clear that those expecting another Critical Beatdown will be
ALBUMCONTENTS REVIEWS sorely disappointed with The Best Kept Secret. Fair enough, since the newest Ultramagnetic MC’s album in 13 years disappoints on all levels. The original crew is indeed back: Keith, Ced Gee, TR Love, and DJ Moe Love, but their once innovative sound and dynamic is long gone – replaced by weak flow, tinny beats, and a serious lack of direction. It’s not a complete washout, though, “Mechanism Nice (Born Twice)” is a pulsing banger, capturing the energy and soul of the group’s heyday, and “Vibrato” closes the album on a relative high – despite some dated references (“Challenge me? Your academic pants hemmed-up like Urkel’s”). It’s hard to believe that these duds are all courtesy of the same guys that gave us “Ego Trippin’” and “Give The Drummer Some.” Maybe this reunion should have just been kept a secret after all. - Adam Simpkins Wheat Everyday I Said a Prayer for Kathy and Made a One Inch Square Empyrean Wheat and turmoil have always been attached at the hip. In the band’s nine years, it has gone through repeated label pains, frequent bouts of hiatus and recurrent member departures. Now after being picked up and tossed out by Sony, Wheat has once again licked its wounds and regrouped as a duo with a new album and label. To diverge from previous attempts at radioready pop (see Per Second), the band takes a step back to a more experimental period, where it relied more on electronic touches than pop hooks (see Hope and Adams). Also, the group drops the air-tight song structures for a looser, bare-bones approach that features more synth lines and erratic drum patterns than it does crisp guitar work. Unfortunately, the record sometimes verges on becoming tasteless indie fodder (see the spoken-word narration of “An Exhausted Fixer”), but for the most part this shift back to the unconventional
goes down nicely. - Brock Thiessen The Winks I’m Ridiculous Independent This overheated garbage from a couple of selfaggrandizing Eastside art-victims now mercifully banished to Montreal is so ill-conceived and unpleasant that my knackers actually fell right off my body as the final track, “Helium Dutch Oven”, came to its ignominious finish. At this point, the only positive feelings I can muster for the two snotty wretches responsible for this mess is reserved solely for the hot air balloon that cellist Tyr Whateverthefuckshescalled habitually wears on stage. At the very least, you can pretend that it’s a big sentient membrane devouring her body and maybe her head too, with time and a little luck. - James Jesus Angleton Wu-Tang Clan & Friends Unreleased Nature Sounds Giving the Wu-Tang Clan a top billing on this collection of unreleased cuts is a bit of a piss-
take. With only a handful of tracks featuring core Wu-Tang members (Ghostface, GZA,
DVDCONTENTS REVIEWS
Raekwon, Masta Killa, et al) the album is mostly devoted to the friends and extended family. Which isn’t to say there aren’t some memorable moments here, it’s just a bit of a deceiving concept (RZA, not Allah Mathematics who curates this album, was the producer responsible for the group’s best output). But still, Mathematics unearths a handful of decent leftovers and remixes, highlighting his decadelong proficiency as a top hip-hop producer. With his penchant for soul sampling on “King Toast Queen” and classic Wu-styled beats (Raekwon’s “Treez’), die-hard WTC fans will get a healthy feeding with this collection. But those looking for shell casings from 36 Chambers or Wu-Tang Forever, may feel a bit short changed. - Adam Simpkins James Yorkston Year of the Leopard Domino There comes a time in every music nerd’s life where the old alphabetical filing system just doesn’t cut it anymore. A to Z hardly compares to a complex system involving categories such as freedom songs, sex jams (not that most music nerds have sex) and sleepy time classics, the grouping where someone would hopefully find James Yorkston’s The Year of the Leopard. The pastoral folk songs of this subdued record set the ideal backdrop for weary bodies looking to call it a day. However, this Scotsman’s album is by no means boring. With often little more than a guitar and a soothing voice, the record’s sparse songs still manage to feel intricate and full. Also,Yorkston provides enough experimentation to win over even the worst music cynics, such as on the album’s one brilliant electronic offering, “Woozy with Cider.” On second thought, The Year of the Leopard could easily fall under the constantrotation category as well. - Brock Thiessen
Various Artists A Tribute To Brian Wilson DVD MusiCares We all love Beach Boys founder Brian Wilson, who is regarded as an artist of genius but psychologically damaged beyond repair. With this disc, MusiCares pays homage to his apparent alter ego as a philanthropic humanitarian who has dedicated much of his time and efforts to various foundations (such as the Carl Wilson Foundation for Cancer Research, named after his younger brother). The evening begins with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, providing probably the most sarcastic performance I’ve ever seen from a group of professional musicians. The juxtaposition of Anthony Kiedis and Flea singing golden oldies is already wrong enough, while Kiedis’ dance moves suggest a man being held at gunpoint, and Flea appears to be asleep. Richie Sambora manages to pick things up with “City Blues”, an obscure number plucked from a recent solo album, and somehow manages to wipe the floor with the Chilis. That’s right - Richie Sambora wipes the floor with Chilis. Even better is former-drunk Howie Dorough from the Back-
street Boys, accosting the microphone in order to pay homage to the MusiCares Foundation, and all it does for poor, helpless, Tinseltownbased multi-millionaires who need a charity to help them “stay sober for two years.” With no small amount of irony, the Boys then perform “When I Grow Up To Be a Man”, and they do it surprisingly well, with fine vocal harmonies reminiscent of a certain other male vocal quintet. Guitar virtuoso Jeff Beck provides the best portion of the concert by far, however, with an almost entirely instrumental version of “Surf’s Up”, followed by “Surfin’ USA” with vocals by Jeff Foskett. Earth, Wind, and Fire wrap up the tribute portion of the night, singing “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on my Shoulder)”, but it’s too tame - they should have done “Wild Honey” or “Darling”, or something. The show ends with the Brian Wilson Band playing the instrumental “Pet Sound”, followed by Brian Wilson himself gracing the stage for “Heroes and Villains,” and “Good Vibrations.” Frankly, there’s something deeply unsettling about a 60-something man with a history of substance abuse, singing about getting good vibrations, especially with such a weird expression of euphoric bliss. The finale includes the entire cast and Brian Wilson - sans Chilis - singing “Fun Fun, Fun” and “Love and Mercy.” Apart from the Jeff Beck portion, this DVD is subpar at best. Although the performances are mostly strong, nobody manages to bring anything new or significant to the material, and so you’re left with a bizarre cross-section of high-level substance abusers which should appeal to absolutely nobody with the exception I suppose of Brian Wilson, Michael McDonald’s wife (yes, he’s in there too) or anybody that is either too drunk or too high to care. Which tends to defeat the point. I would also personally recommend that in the future - all credible performances aside - we should perhaps just leave songs as epically beautiful as these well enough alone. - Samantha Laserson
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CONTENTS
Blood Sports By Eden Robinson Emblem Editions
Blood Sports is a deliciously quick and dirty affair, a blood-and-guts romance novel of sorts. Tom and Paulie are a misfit couple who are attempting to detach themselves from their grimy pasts, which include heroin addiction, in order to raise their daughter Mel. Unfortunately, they have always fell victim to the manipulative ways of Tom’s wild, sociopath cousin Jeremy and can neither shake this man’s grasp, nor the sticky ties that come with it. The book, originally published as a hardcover in fall of 2006 by McClelland & Stewart, sees this wretched couple thrown into a wild conflict of violence, guns, and brutality. Fortunately, the author
somehow manages to largely avoid the clichéd action themes through the use of experimental writing techniques, charmingly desperate characters, and the truly Canadian setting of East Vancouver. The story ranges from the quiet, quirky, white trash moments like when Tom and Paulie wait, with bad hair dos, to have their family portrait taken at the local Wal-Mart, to the sinking feeling of dread that comes as you learn of the couple’s history with Tom’s cousin Jeremy. Robinson uses an odd technique where written breakdowns of home-video footage are interjected as whole chapters. These range from Tom, Jeremy, and Paulie’s adolescent years to more recent ones. They effectively help fill in the blanks of how the three characters are connected. By the time the action portion of the book starts to kick in, you are already fairly attached to the characters, so the temptation to chalk the book up to action cliché is overridden and you’ll want to ride along during the bloody turn of events the ill-fated couple somehow gets wrapped up in. This is Eden Robinson’s third book. Its fast pace is somewhat of a departure from her 2002 novel, Monkey Beach, which focused more on inner-turmoil than external. Robinson’s first book was a collection of short stories called Traplines, which she published shortly after graduating with her masters in creative writing from University of British Columbia. She grew up in Kitamaat, B.C. but spent many years in Vancouver and used that experience as inspiration for this torrid East Van tale. Blood Sports is a fun ride if you dig the whole down-and-out in East Van deal mixed with moments of almost Hollywood-esque action-kitsch. Sometimes the scenarios get a bit too blockbuster, such as when the family is taken hostage and held in a convenient cage-like basement.You start to wonder how such a supposedly low-key couple could wind up in such an extreme situation. Despite these moments, this tale is one you can‘t help but rip through from beginning to end, all the while hoping these poor souls make it through one more of life’s shit-kickings. - Amie Lesyk
Dopefiend By Donald Goines Holloway House
Goines, a black dopefiend from Detroit city, had a strict working schedule. He would write in the morning and devote his afternoons to heroin. Dopefiend, Goines’ first novel, is as harsh a book as you’ll ever want to read, and at times you will find yourself laughing, much the way homicide dicks will laugh at particularly gruesome murder scenes. The book is so over-the-top that you cannot help but chuckle, just to let the pressure off a little. Dig this gem of a line for example: “She had removed her spring coat to allow the water to drip from it, and the abscesses on her arms were oozing pus. The yellowish fluid was running down slowly from the open sores on the backs of her hands and on her forearms.” Now doesn’t that just make ya wanna run out and shoot some dope? And I didn’t have to dig to find that beauty, almost every sentence is enough to make you choke.Yep, Goines is a barrel of laughs and he never lets up. I like the way Goines writes — from front to back, without using a lot of fancy words. His writing is as plain as eggs on a plate and you never have to guess what he means. The story follows a pair of dopefiends, a male and female, as they lie, cheat, and steal their way through life. Given Goines’ bleak tone, it doesn’t take a genius to figure that they don’t live happily ever after. The relentless degradation is a bit hard to take (unless you’re a sick bastard like me), but Dopefiend is unflinching in its realism. Because Goines is very graphic with the drug use, I wouldn’t recommend this book if you’re trying to kick heroin, though he does not paint a pretty picture of the addict lifestyle.You’re not likely to find Goines in Oprah’s
Book of the Month Club, but you never know. Actually, I’m not sure how easy it is to find his books (I ordered my copy of Dopefiend online). Goines published eighteen cheesy, desperate novels before being gunned down in a 1974 Detroit dope deal gone bad. His murder is still unsolved. - Chris Walter
The Yage Letters Redux
by William Burroughs & Allen Ginsberg, edited by Oliver Harris City Lights Publishing Whoever first said “if you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all” never read William Burroughs.You can bet on it. Allegedly written in 1953, The Yage Letters Redux is a patchwork of randomly published correspondence between Burroughs and his contemporary, Allen Ginsberg, as well as the indiscriminate contents of Burroughs’ notebooks from the period. The compilation roughly follows Burroughs as he treks across South America in search of a divine vine known as ayahuasca, natem, or, indeed, yagé – a plant coveted by Amazonian medicine men for its deity-riddled hallucinatory effect. Melding fact and fiction, Burroughs’ task is by no means a simple point A to point B. This style, for which he has become legendary, makes it hard to tell if he actually wants to get to, or if there even is a point B. In the beat generation spirit pioneered by On The Road, The Yage Letters Redux echoes the sentiments of many a happening cat who have made the case that it’s not so much where you’re going, but how you get there. On the road to plant-driven enlightenment, which entails blotchy colours and heavy puking, Burroughs casts his sickly green light on local prostitutes, mystical frauds, and the effect of American abuse and eventual abandonment of the perpetually poor continent. Through his eyes and pen, he produces the sickest, most depraved images in words that soil your soul to its very core, while expressing contempt toward a persistent ominous presence (often seen in the form of filthy law enforcement agents) in an unjust land far from the relative sanctity of San Francisco. Ginsberg actually manages to tell you more about the psycho-spiritual experience of yagé in his one letter than Burroughs does in fifty pages. Of course, Ginsberg’s style is more holistically karmic, whimsically poetical, and basically realistic, while Burroughs focuses his lyrical gift on exaggerating the grotesque paranoia of the human experience, even more so than the finest works of the late
Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. Set back to back, they superbly compliment each other as a brilliant, likeminded contrast. You can thank editor Oliver Harris for making sure we got that Ginsberg letter, as well as several other pieces to this “redux” edition. His entire editing process is explained at length in the introduction – one that actually stretches longer than the letters themselves. Though daunting to read before hand (start the movie!), Harris outlines all the reasons that, while this is not and there possibly never could be a definitive edition, this is the most complete and accurate presentation of these letters that has ever been printed. In the face of his testimony, it’s hard to disagree. Granted, you probably won’t learn everything you want to know about yagé from this book, but that’s the type of thing you should learn first hand anyway. Even Buddha didn’t want you to just take his word for it. If nothing else, this book should inspire you to get out there and explore something. See you in Peru, space monkeys. - Filmore Mescalito Holmes
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CONTENTS NEED FOR SPEED: CARBON
COLUMN
AINSWORTH, AINSWORTH, AINSWORTH
The Man That Matters By Jason Ainsworth
By Dale DeRuiter
Need For Speed: Carbon Raven Software EA Games 2006
If you’re like me you’ve been playing the Need For Speed series for over a decade now. Since the series started focusing on tuners instead of just straight racing cars, my, and perhaps your, obsession got a little deeper. Carbon is the follow up to the very successful Need For Speed: Underground 2, which is responsible for turning me into a gigantic hypocrite. I would openly bash lame shit like the Fast and the Furious and all those dickheads with the loud mufflers on their Civics-then rush home and piss around for hours with the paint job on my Tiburon. Need For Speed: Carbon takes the franchise to another level by adding muscle cars and foreign makes to the mix. Now instead of getting stuck with various Mitsubishis and some shitty 6 year old Skyline, you get to put some bad ass decals all over your 67 Hemi Cuda or even a delightfully pretentious Mercedes. The cars are split up into three different classes. The muscle, foreign and tuner groups all have their own special attributes as in you can’t steer your Chrysler 300
worth shit and your Mazda M3 has no top speed. The best addition to the game has to be the co-driver/teammate feature. Throughout the game you can hire counterparts that race with you and help you screw over the other drivers.You can get drafters, blockers and scouts. I never really used anyone besides the blockers, though, because nothing is sweeter than having someone ram your opponents off the road for you. Although the drafting technique is also enjoyable but only really because you can pretend your Will Ferrell from Talladega Nights using the sling shot maneuver. Oh sweet Jesus that’s some good shit As I mentioned before the most time consuming factor in the game is the customization, which more than makes up for the game’s lack of realistic racing. Besides realistic racing games are lame because you just crash and die that’s what would happen if I drove really fast I would pull a Kelsey Grammer and wrap my fancy new car around a pole and almost die. n
Throughout the game you can hire counterparts that race with you and help you screw over the other drivers.
NEED FOR SPEED: CARBON
S
t.Valentines day is just around the corner, and it brings out the best in men!! God, is it fun. It’s best if you have a girlfriend, wife, or mother, because, then you go to town, uptown. Giving presents to your daughter on Valentines day is creepy, giggle, but okay, I guess. It really depends on what sort of relationship you have with your daughter. Is it good or bad? Pure or impure? Impure?? That’s wrong.
and it’s a disaster and you cannot be sober and you rack up eight thousand dollars on your credit card for alcohol and you cut yourself and make a suicide attempt and only just got over it and realized you were stupid for liking her, try to avoid this in the future.
A lot of guys reading this will have no clue what to do about Valentines Day.You are baffled. Here is help.
-girls will hurt you for fun.
-fuck, all my favorite local bands have girl singers. This is insane.
-Nurses are girls too. 25 things men should do for their girls on Valentine’s Day. -presents. A cake. -buy dinner. Girls spend a fortune on makeup, don’t ask me why. They want to mask the decay, I guess. Repellant. Buy them food. Buy her food.YUM!
-it’s weird how many girls are into anal sex. It’s in all the books. I don’t get it. I don’t even want to talk about it. Anal sex is a beautiful relationship between men only. Passion. -girls shave too much. It’s just hair, for Christ’s sake.
-HIV can be spread from as little as a kiss.
-a fun trick is to leave pregnancy test kits around the house.
-its okay to drink alone.
-sex is boring. Bowling is better.
-don’t interfere with your friend’s ex-girlfriends. Never works. -she loves you. -“pretend” to be gay. Grow up. Stop playing games with the girl. -anal sex is not as much fun as it sounds. Trust me.
-a fun trick is to leave pregnancy test kits around the house.
-the younger the better. Sorry! -she wants to get married and pregnant. My mom did, anyways. -why is it that all the bands in Vancouver I like have girl singers? What’s going on?
-bowling is everything, really. That and the Royal Rumble. -not that big into Wrestlemania this year. Sucks that Triple H is out. (injured) -no matter what you do, she prefers black men. -a fun way to have sex is alone.
-girls like kittens. -I like the fact that the Undertaker won the Royal Rumble this year. He will retire Smackdown champion at his fucking fifteenth Wrestlemania. Bless him. -just stay in the fucking closet.
-girls like being “held”. Hold them. Don’t ask me how. Arms?
-tall girls,
-girls with tattoos are the best girls.
-girls like being scared.
-no secret crushes tonight. It’s her night.
-girls like crying.
-girls are way more into rape then guys are. Baffling. Not my fault.
-wedding belles.
-you are so much happier drunk or on drugs, as is she. -if you spend ten months insanely in love with a girl
That is all. Follow my rules, and you will have no problems. Does anyone know who Steve from Seattle is? He left a message in my sketchbook. I’m baffled. If you know who he is, please email me at ainsworthcheri@hotmail.com. I’m baffled. n
The Nerve March 2007 Page 29 n
THECONTENTS CROSSWORD CONTENTS
By Dan Scum Across 1. Animal’s den 5. Remote Automated Weather Stations 9. 1 of SE7EN 14. Place to apply Soul-Glo 15. ____ Cadabra 16. Go away 17. Debut Nomeansno Record 18. Takin’ a dirt nap 19. Distraught 20. Detective David Mills of SE7EN 22. Pilots a vehicle 23. Snake Pit Boss 24. Occupational Testing Ltd. 25. Type of KillerE 28. What it is ___! 29.Vietnamese soup 32. Zealous 33. Color of 1 of SE7EN 35. Jogged 36. Theme of this puzzle 40. Stock Symbol for Sony 41. Kilns for drying hops 42. Genesis place 43. Off The Record 44. Louse egg 45. Truthful 47. Donkey 48. 9th planet 50. Doe of SE7EN 53. Mills’ partner in SE7EN 57. Chili spice 58. Send UPS 59. Hotels, motels or hostels 60. Pre-owned cars 61. Lawyer’s load 62. Stock Symbol for TiVO Inc. 63. Trick shot in pool 64. Had debts 65. _____-Nitrate Down 1. Sacrificial animal 2. Over yonder 3. Bluetooth Acronym 4. 433-2221 _______ Repairs 5. Type of tire 6. Aids a fugitive
The Nerve March 2007 Page 30
7. 1 of SE7EN 8. Full of Sorrow 9. 1 of SE7EN 10. Reflect away from 11. Simplicity 12. At any time 13. Mills and Lane of SE7EN 21. Stock Symbol for Playboy 22. Big name in winter boots 25. Will on Mad TV 26. Occurrence 27. Matt Foley’s “street” 28. Flower places 29. 1 of SE7EN 30. Strings up 31. Beginning 33. A noble adventure or exploit 34. Squealer 37. Gibberish 38. Donald Duck’s Dame 39. Spanish Miss 45. Like a camel (____ for the very 1st time) 46. Greece’s phone company 47. Those with less than pH7.0 48. Doubter’s expression 49. Alt spelling of Louise 50. This Puzzle’s Creator 51. “Lump” band 52. Calgary resident and PGA pro Steven 54. Division at CERN 55. 1 of SE7EN 56. True Sounds Of Liberty
Last Issue’s Answers
The Nerve March 2007 Page 31
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