Chapter Fifteen: Jazz Punk is my Tangent.

The Sarcastic Mannequins were obscure, Canadian, Clash-loving punks but since they weren’t three chord bashers they do break one of the promises of my mission statement. They’d like that. They used to hand out lyric sheets before their shows just to make sure that even the inattentive could be offended by their words. As well the (remaining) dogmatic punk punters were probably enraged by their forays into ragas, ska, spy, and tricky, jazzy instrumental sections. Never wanky (and usually catchy) the Mannequins would have been a good opener for NoMeansNo but with less “Kill Everyone Now” and more “Everything Pisses Me Off”.

The Sarcastic Mannequins (Beez on bass/vocals, Bradford Lambert on drums Andrew Shyman on guitar/vocals) played a tight, blistering set on a Tuesday in October of 1989 at the U of M’s pub. The assembled crowd wasn’t - so they let us hang out backstage and showered me with quotes (I was reviewing the show for the university paper). Their demo tape (still their peak) was a disconcerting yet fun jazz-punk fusion and though this album came a bit too late in their career (less propulsive) it too gave CBC Radio’s late night bizzarro programs more wild content in the dullest era of modern musical history.

Yeah, I dropped the name of the Bad Brains and my band (see ch 14) into the review. Shamless. The band members kept in touch for while and Beez was always friendly – even when I hinted that they should’ve tacked the demo onto the CD. He went on man the bass for the most-excellent Smugglers and plays in a band called the Beauticians.

This album will not be everyone’s cup of meat (hey what here is?) but to those who get it – you’ll return to it for those WTF moments spread throughout the album and if you just download for a quick look-hear don’t stop till you hit their reloaded version of Sandanista’s “Charlie Don’t Surf”.

Download

Chapter Fourteen: Og n' Me

I’ve been in a band. So has everyone, right? Well, no. Lots of people have no musical talent. I don’t mean the way failed musicians deride the playing of Ramones or Meg White - I mean people who by universal standards have no place on the performance stage. Such untalented music lovers work in record stores, write music criticism or manage bands. I did those sorts of things later. My band (Jane Fonda and the Hondas) was a two-piece (a sorta cross between They Might Be Giants and The Shaggs) who my, vastly more talented partner (later a member of the socialist-punk band The Strike), described as, “Sludgeabilly with extra sludge”.

“Sludgeabilly” was Gerald Van Herk’s self-description of his band, Deja Voodoo, a Canadian two-piece psychobilly-swamp-punk band that sounded like the Cramps with a denser, leaner, cruder taste for pre-rock blues. Fifteen years later that sound could get you on the front of Rolling Stone but in the cultural vacuum that was the late 1980’s almost no could hear Deja Voodoo scream. They toured the country by Greyhound and started one of the most diverse yet cohesive indie labels of all-time: Og Records. Og pilloried the vacuousness of the nineteen-eighties by pushing bands bands who were a hundred different shades of anachronistic: Western-Swing, gospel-punk, garage rock, country blues, psychedelic, 77 punk, lounge-jazz, faux girl-group and cow-punk and I’ve just begun. It was the vinyl era and the five-volume 'It Came From Canada' series (the icfucks as Gerald called them) sent me on a nationalistic music bender, which I never regretted.

They also inspired me to form a band and perform one earth-shattering show for fourteen close personal friends, thirteen of whom were still close personal friends after we finished. We performed two songs; a butchered cover of Billy Bragg's ‘Strange Things Happen’ and an original called ‘Socialized Hairdressing’ and then we served pizza. Don’t count it against Gerald it’s not really his fault.

The Dik Van Dykes worshipped one of the all-time great neglected bands (The Rezillos) and hence they were the Og band I loved the most. Musical comedy is a Canadian Weakness but The Diks pulled it off with scads of aplomb. The songs are hummable, if mangled, and the lyrics will return a thousand joys - even if you never understand them all.

Download

Deja Voodoo was an acquired taste which seeing their flailing live concerts finally imparted me with. (Their live introductions were spot-on, “This is a song about my girlfriend. It’s called My Girlfriend. “This is a song about Saskatchewan – it’s called Big Pile of Mud.) This is their most distinctive album – enjoy.

Download

My Dog Popper was not an Og-affiiliated band that I listened to a lot but two considerable music guys (Mike Koop of a million Winnipeg bands including Kicker and Winston of Nuclear Armed Hogs blog) requested it – so here it be. Sorry for the lack of cover art (it is is one album well-served by its cover) and the dodgy sound quality.

Download

Chapter Two: Death Metal is my Jazz

“I hate music,” Art Bergman once sang with viscous irony. In the song of same title Bergman attacks the charts, the disco beat, rock n’ roll and melody itself before twisting everything around. Suddenly in the middle of the narrative Bergman declares his love for all those things before asserting, “You would buy almost anything” and then finally returning to that hate for the big ending. In this pounding smear of a song, Bergman encapsulates the continuously shifting dichotomy of the music obsessive. “Hate.” “Love.” “Oooh look - something shiny.” “Hate.” “Love.” Repeat ad nauseum. For a man who once named his band the K-Tels* (a Canadian label whose heavily TV advertised compilations blenderized every genre of 70’s pop into cornucopia of garish trash) you know Art loved it all all along.

However, years later Bergman appeared to disavow his scrawny punk tunes dismissing (likely obnoxious) audience requests by saying, “It ain’t 1977 anymore.” While, like Iggy Pop, Art Bergman almost can’t help but be Punk (whether playing acoustic or under the egregious synth-driven production of Bob Rock and his ilk) in this stage pronouncement Bergman seemed to be dismissing the sounds and ideas of the past.

It’s a common trope to prove one’s ongoing march to maturity by proclaiming to have shed certain musical styles – often a variation of simple, loud rock music. It’ s such patent bullshit. You cannot prove you’ve broadened your palette by claiming your tastes are ‘eclectic’ (Most. Pretentious. Word. Ever.), disowning music you once enjoyed or buying a Miles Davis album. I mean no disrespect for the fearsome legacy of jazz – but jazz supremacists do prattle so. For instance one of these ‘serious’ jazz fans (of whom Richard Ford nails when he says, approximately, “Those forty-something single men who drive around in a convertible with the top down listening to progressive jazz who feel their life is under control – when in fact they have nothing to control.”) said to a musician friend of mine, “When you’re older you have to start liking jazz”, to which my friend (thirty-something fan of Angel Witch and a zillion other bands with so-morbid-its-comic names) grimly replied, “Death metal is my jazz.”

(Cue Bruce Springsteen croaking “Oooh – Grooowing Up!”)

Well I still love that Beatles album my parents draft-dodging friend left behind (Hey Jude, thanks for asking) the folk revival album my parents bought (Pete Fuckin’ Seeger – yeah!) that Rezillos album (bought on a hunch) – plus a batch of predictable radio hits from all over the place. When taste grows up it should expand not contract. My favourite album right now? The Queers ‘Munki Brain’. Juvenile? Stop asking so many damn questions and go listen to the last song on the album, ‘Brian Wilson’. That song is a high water mark in – well... everything. Thanks Joe Queer (who said something to the effect of “why can’t I like the Shirelles and Black Flag at the same time?”) you’ve made me sing along and you trumped Art Bergman by writing a song called “I Hate Everything.”

* Winnipeg’s Phillip Kives, owner of the K-Tel company threatened to sue the band – it was okay Bergman changed their name to the Young Canadians, later forming the short-lived Poisoned who would surely have been sued by Brett Michaels.

http://www.suddendeath.com/bands_youngcanadians.html

Chapter One: Modified Nostalgia