I recently interviewed Canadian improv-comedy great Colin Mochrie, of Whose Line Is It Anyway? fame, for Montecristo magazine’s website.
I asked Mochrie about his debut appearance on the original British version of the show. Here’s what he had to say:
“On my first show, I sucked,” he says, “so I thought, ‘Well, that’s it. I’ll never be part of that again.’ I was just lucky that my good friend Ryan Stiles had become part of that group and he talked them into giving me another chance, so it worked out from there.”
It worked out so well, in fact, that Mochrie became a regular on the series, appearing in 71 episodes—a record bested only by his fellow Canadian Stiles, who racked up a total of 92. Mochrie figures the show kept them around to ensure that an excess of dry British wit didn’t make Whose Line too highbrow for its own good. “I think the producers wanted some dumber North Americans just to do the goofy stuff,” he says. “Instead of, you know, doing riffs on Ulysses, we’d pretend we were chickens.”
Back in May, I wrote this LinkedIn article to share my thoughts about the impact of AI on the livelihoods of professional writers. (Like me!)
If you haven’t read it, I do encourage you to do so. I promise it’s worth your time. (A promise should not be construed as a guarantee.)
I recently followed that piece up with more musing on artificial intelligence, with the intention of answering the musical question, “Should you get ChatGPT to write your band’s bio?”
Why would ChatGPT lie to me? It does so because, as the term “large language model” implies, its entire job description is to create a convincing simulation of natural language. It is incapable of caring about whether it tells you the truth or spins an epic web of confabulation.
As researchers from the University of Glasgow write of LLMs in their delightfully titled Ethics and Information Technology article “ChatGPT is bullshit”, “Their goal is to provide a normal-seeming response to a prompt, not to convey information that is helpful to their interlocutor.”
In that same article, the authors write of ChatGPT that “if we view it as having intentions (for example, in virtue of how it is designed), then the fact that it is designed to give the impression of concern for truth qualifies it as attempting to mislead the audience about its aims, goals, or agenda.”
I can attest that ChatGPT does indeed seem to be programmed to “give the impression of concern for truth”. When I called it out on the high bullshit quotient of the band bio it wrote me, it tried to convince me that it was sorry. “I apologize for providing inaccurate information in my previous response,” it said.
Wiggedout Music presents the Starling Effect—that’s my band!—at the Painted Ship (2884 West Broadway, Vancouver, BC) on Saturday, August 16, with guests Shimbashi Station and Thomas Van Alstine.
We’re pretty excited about this one for a couple of reasons. The first is that we played at the Painted Ship last September and really enjoyed it. The second is that we were supposed to play with Shimbashi Station at the start of this year, but that show ended up not happening.
Cover charge is $15, and best of all, the venue is all-ages.
I have a very extensive catalogue of old articles that I think are worth revisiting. Here’s one of them, published on this day exactly a decade ago. (This article originally appeared in The Georgia Straight.)
A$AP Rocky does what he wants to do
A$AP Rocky is not an easy man to get on the phone, which is no great surprise. As befits someone on the verge of superstar status, the American rapper has serious demands on his time.
Somehow, though, the Straight manages to get Rocky on the line twice. During the first interview, he’s in Berlin on a European festival tour. For the second—which takes place a full three hours after the scheduled time—he’s in New York City, his hometown, sounding exhausted after an Adidas photo shoot that went longer than expected.
Each time, Rocky comes across as affable and unfailingly polite, but it’s clear he has no time for small talk, which makes establishing a genuine rapport difficult—and the strict time limits placed upon the interviewer don’t help matters. With a bit of prodding, though, the man sometimes known by the lofty title of Lord Pretty Flacko Jodye indulges the Straight by discussing what sort of music he enjoys during his almost nonexistent downtime.
“I listen to classic music sometimes when I’m in the car,” he says. “I might listen to blues. It depends what mood I’m in. I’m open to listening to anything at certain times. I’ve been listening to psychedelic ’60s rock. That shit’s cool.”
That last admission is hardly shocking after exposure to Rocky’s latest studio album, At.Long.Last.A$AP. While it’s not self-consciously retro in any way—Rod Stewart samples notwithstanding—many of the LP’s tracks are delivered in a narcotic haze.
On the spare and screwed “Fine Whine”, for example, the MC’s voice is pitched down and slowed to a codeine-cough-syrup crawl. Consider also the Christmas-light twinkle of “Excuse Me”, with a tunefully reverb-blurred bridge sung by Flacko himself. And then there’s the Kanye West coproduction “Jukebox Joints”, which coasts along on a looped sample from obscure early-’70s Indonesian psych-prog act Rasela, until it switches gears and instead incorporates a Smokey Robinson beat as its backdrop.
There’s a case to be made, in fact, that At.Long.Last.A$AP is itself a psychedelic record.
“I think so, yeah,” Rocky says in reply to that suggestion. “I would agree. I would say it’s a form of psychedelic music, because it does add different dimensions that are definitely trippy. As far as the sequencing of the tracks, of each individual song, it’s like every track seems like it takes you on a maze of, like, three or four different songs in one, but they’re all cohesive.
“It’s hard to describe, and that’s the really dope part about psychedelic music: it’s really something that you don’t describe, it’s more something that you feel and experience.”
For the 26-year-old hip-hop star, who’s one of the major draws at the upcoming Squamish Valley Music Festival, the psychedelic experience goes beyond the sonic sphere. The title of the pupil-dilating rap ballad “L$D” nominally stands for “Love Sex Dreams”, but the lyrics to “Pharsyde” are less ambiguously about acid: “It’s the irony how LSD inspired me to reach the higher me/Used to never give a damn, now I don’t give a fuck entirely.”
On the surface, that seems like nihilism, but the kind of not-giving-a-fuck Rocky refers to is less about apathy than it is about shrugging off self-doubt—and the naysaying of haters—and tuning in to one’s innate talents.
“With most of these psychedelic drugs,” he reflects, “it’s about awareness, right? Enlightenment, to an extent, to some degree. Most people who take it, after they’ve done it, when they try to reiterate everything that happened, they just tell you, basically, ‘It was amazing. I get it now. I get life, I get this, I get that,’ you know? For me, LSD just kind of complemented my initial attitude toward life. It was just like, ‘Fuck it. It doesn’t matter. Do the best you could do, be the best you could be. Fuck everything. Do some dope shit. Just do what you want to do.’ ”
Doing what he wants to do is working out pretty well for A$AP Rocky these days. At.Long.Last.A$AP debuted in Billboard’s No. 1 spot—not just in the rap and R&B categories, but on the overall album chart. (It reached No. 1 in Canada a few weeks later.) His debut studio record, Long.Live.A$AP, achieved the same hat trick.
That 2013 release, however, was a more direct assault on the mainstream, containing the double-platinum single “Fuckin’ Problems”. Built on a dead-simple slamming beat (courtesy of Canadian producer Noah Shebib) and featuring single-entendre me-so-horny verses from Drake and Kendrick Lamar with a hook delivered by 2 Chainz, “Fuckin’ Problems” is an unapologetically populist club banger. There really isn’t anything like it on At.Long.Last.A$AP; although the ScHoolboy Q–featuring “Electric Body” is just as sexually charged, it isn’t aimed at the cheap seats in quite the same way.
“If you really listen to this album and my first mix tape, I think those two are more compatible than the first commercial release, Long.Live.A$AP,” he says. “This album kind of complements the first mix tape, if you ask me. It’s like a final chapter to it, or something like that. I wanted it to grow on people, because it takes some getting used to if you’re not an open-minded person. This is definitely for people with a higher taste level for art, culture, and music just in general.”
In Rocky’s view, there is a clear line between those with “higher” and “lower” tastes, and he knows which ones he’s trying to cultivate as a fan base. Not content with being considered a mere entertainer, he considers himself an artist.
That attitude carries over from his in-studio and on-stage work to his social-media presence, particularly on Instagram. Although some of the images he uploads are confounding when looked at individually—and some just seem to be blank—when you view his entire feed, they invariably combine to create complex collages, some of them quite beautiful. It’s an innovative use of a platform that is too often simply a tool for promoting products. In fact, Rocky sees his activities on Instagram as a push back against online commercialism.
I’m just trying to spread some positivity, because life is real fucked-up. You’ve just got to make the best of this shit, you know what I’m saying?
“What, am I gonna sit here and promote brands all day and shit?” he asks rhetorically. “Nah, fuck that. I got tired of the whole cliché thing of people posting shit just to be like, ‘Na-na-na boo-boo, look what I got; look what you don’t have. Look how much cooler my life is than yours,’ you know?”
In May, the rapper partnered with artist Robert Gallardo to turn his Instagram feed into a “digital installation”. Over the course of 10 hours, it all added up to something, even if it at first appeared to be nothing more than a series of grey squares. This project reportedly cost Rocky more than 100,000 followers, but that apparently didn’t faze him: “If you have a low taste level, you might find it annoying that I post so many posts, you get what I’m saying? But if you have patience, you’ll grow to like my feed and appreciate art, and actually do something artistic with your Instagram. That’s just how I look at it. It’s not like I’m doing something that no one else can do. Anyone can do it. I just want people to do it. And people started doing it, and I like it, man. It’s cool.
“I’m just trying to spread some positivity, because life is real fucked-up,” Rocky says of his online endeavours. “You’ve just got to make the best of this shit, you know what I’m saying?”
If anyone knows just how fucked-up life can be, it’s A$AP Rocky. The man born Rakim Mayers in Harlem in 1988 had what could best be described as a hardscrabble urban upbringing. When he was 12, his father (who died in 2012) was jailed for selling drugs, a path that the younger Mayers seemed destined to follow. When he was 13, his older brother, who had taught him to rap, was shot and killed about a block from where Rocky was born. Moving from one homeless shelter to the next with his mother and kid sister, young Rakim started selling marijuana, graduating to crack by the time he was 15.
A$AP Yams
Things began to change for the better when he met Steven Rodriguez in 2007 and later joined him in the already extant A$AP Mob collective. Tragically, Rodriguez, better known as A$AP Yams, died of an accidental drug overdose in January. He was 26. Although the topic is now implicitly off-limits, Rocky has said recently that his psychedelic experiences—of both the musical and chemical variety—have helped him process that loss. Yams, aka Cozy Boy, was Rocky’s friend and his partner in the A$AP Worldwide label, but he was also much more than that. In many ways he was instrumental in the MC’s rise, working behind the scenes to promote his career and helping him shape the sound of his music, including his first mix tape, 2011’s Live.Love.A$AP. Yams had been working on At.Long.Last.A$AP at the time of his death, and he received a posthumous executive-producer credit for the album.
Rocky is planning to honour his late collaborator’s memory by getting some of his own tracks out into the world. “I’m working on the Cozy Boy album right now, the Cozy Tapes,” he reveals. “It’s A$AP Yams’ album. I’m starting with that, trying to figure out what to do with it. It’s at the beginning stages, so we’ll see.”
As for his own art and what shape it might take next—will it bring him back to the club, or even further down the lysergic rabbit hole?—he refuses to speculate, insisting that it’s too soon to tell. One thing is almost certain, however: by this time next year, it’ll be even harder to get A$AP Rocky on the phone.
For a little while in the early 2010s, I was a regular contributor to the “Sound Check” column of a Canadian magazine called Concrete Skateboarding. This was before the era of “everything must be online, always”, so my contributions ran in the print edition but never made it to the web—until now. Back in 2012 I had the opportunity to interview Kevin Parker of Tame Impala for Concrete. I have always really enjoyed Parker’s music, but this is the one and only time (to date) that I have interviewed him.
Sound Check: Tame Impala
For someone with a reputation as something of a recluse, Kevin Parker is a pretty friendly guy. Or at least that’s the impression the frontman for Australian psychedelic-rock outfit Tame Impala gives when he’s reached on tour in Austria. You could be forgiven, though, for assuming Parker lives a hermetic life. After all, he does live in Perth, Australia, which has been described as the world’s most remote city, and he did name the latest Tame Impala album Lonerism. The previous one, released in 2010, bore the navel-gazing title lnnerspeaker, and its standout track, “Solitude Is Bliss”, contained one of Parker’s most telling lyrical couplets: ”There’s a party in my head/ And no one is invited.”
On the line from Vienna, however, Parker refutes the perception that he’s a loner. “At the moment I’m not alone at all, because I’m on tour with my friends,” he notes, adding with a laugh, “The last time I was alone was when I went to the toilet.”
There may be something to the notion that the musician relishes his moments of isolation, however. Consider the fact that Tame Impala is essentially a one-man creative outlet, with Parker writing all the songs and recording all the parts himself. “Generally it’s just me slowly putting songs together,” he says. “That’s just the way it’s always been. It’s totally a solo project in the studio, but no one seems to consider it that. Everything I’ve read has just been ‘Tame Impala, the band.’ I’m not really put off by that or anything. It’s just the way people see it, because they see a bunch of guys on a stage playing the songs, so they assume it’s a band, but it’s totally not. When we play them live, we all get together and take the song that’s already been recorded and interpret it. We just sort of have fun with it, basically, and that becomes the live version.”
Impressively, Lonerism sounds like the product of a group of people. It’s all Parker, though, and while the Fab Four vocal harmonies and acid-washed guitar licks of songs like “Mind Mischief” and “Apocalypse Dreams” suggest he hasn’t lost his taste for paisley-skies psychedelia, there are plenty of elements that set this LP apart from its predecessor. Foremost among these is Parker’s ample use of keyboards, adding layers of pastel-washed synth tones to tracks like “Why Won’t They Talk to Me?” and “She Just Won’t Believe Me”.
“I was just feeling like looking to other things to get new crazy sounds,” he explains. “I’m always trying to find the craziest sound, you know—the thing that sounds the least like it comes from Earth. It’s really difficult to do that with guitars, because whatever you do with a guitar, it’s usually going to end up sounding like a guitar. It’s going to have that kind of earthy, rock ‘n’ roll feel. But with synthesizers, they just start in a completely different place. It was just really kind of exciting to have this whole new playing field of sounds and emotions.”
As much as Tame Impala’s music makes ideal bliss-out fodder for those who like to indulge in things green and leafy, Parker’s command of melody makes it worthy listening for those who simply want to hear a good tune. Some might hesitate to call it pop, but not Parker, who claims he’s got an entire album’s worth of songs just waiting for his fellow Aussie Kylie Minogue. The man loves hooks, and he doesn’t care who knows it.
“As long as you do something that feels cool, or sounds cool, or gives you some sort of emotion, then nothing’s ever too cheesy, or not cheesy enough,” he says. “It really just depends what you consider to be pop and what you consider not to be pop, which is a totally subjective thing anyway.”
Need an amazing bio, press release, or web copy written for your band or solo project? I’m your guy.
A former Associate Editor at the Georgia Straight (Vancouver’s news and entertainment weekly), I have three decades of professional experience as a music and arts journalist under my belt. In more recent times I have shifted my career focus towards public relations and marketing.
I also have experience running an independent record label, writing all of the promotional materials for several releases that ended up charting on a national level.
Long-running Vancouver indie-rock juggernaut Mother Mother released its 10th album, Nostalgia, earlier this month. With the group spending its summer touring across Europe, it seemed timely to revisit my past interviews with frontman Ryan Guldemond (and the occasional bandmate). Digging through the archives, I discovered that I have actually written about Mother Mother quite a lot over the years, so I have decided to split this blog post into two installments. This is the second.
Ryan Guldemond doesn’t set out to make grand statements, but somehow it keeps happening. Mother Mother’s last album, 2012’s The Sticks, found Guldemond—the band’s singer, guitarist, and songwriter—drawing inspiration from the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and his own rural upbringing to paint a lyrical portrait of someone determined to turn his back on modern urbanism and retreat to the woods.
For the Vancouver act’s major-label debut, the just-released Very Good Bad Thing, Guldemond meditated on the human mind, with an eye on the darkness contained therein. Not that this was necessarily something he was trying to do.
“It’s easy to spin it into some kind of cohesion after the fact because you need to do that in interviews and stuff,” he says on the line from a Red Deer tour stop, “but it wasn’t premeditated as being a conceptual statement on humanity. But it is, and I think that’s the beauty of making songs and creating, is that you’re not supposed to know what it collects into as you’re doing it.”
Very Good Bad Thing doesn’t take long to get down to the business of exploring Guldemond’s obsessions. The need for personal space he explored on The Sticks rears its head again on the new album’s stomping opener, “Get Out the Way”: “I’m not antisocial, I’m just tired of all the people/And I’m fine with rolling solo.”
The narrator of “Reaper Man”, on the other hand, makes no such claims; he knows damn well that he’s antisocial, and he revels in it: “How’d I ever get so indiscreet? How’d I ever get so freakly?/Everybody out there on a leash/But not me.”
“I think you’d have to be pretty lost or closed-off as an individual not to realize that each person is a vehicle for grave flaw and grave sin, in counter to that infinite potential for creativity and beauty,” Guldemond insists. “So that’s what all the songs are about, each and every one. ‘Reaper Man’ just happens to be about a guy championing his own darkness. Because we all have it, you know. Everybody thinks the monstrous thing—and the only reason why it’s determined we’re a monster is if we act on it, but the thought was had. So I guess that’s how I see life, and people.”
Despite the heady subject matter, Very Good Bad Thing features some of Mother Mother’s most pop-leaning material to date. “Modern Love” is not a David Bowie cover but a buzzing electro banger aimed squarely at the dance floor, while “Monkey Tree” is a hook-barbed midtempo crowd-pleaser with a colossal chorus made for rapturous audience sing-alongs.
The band—which also includes keyboardists-vocalists Jasmin Parkin and Molly Guldemond, bassist Jeremy Page, and drummer Ali Siadat—recorded its latest batch of songs in Toronto with producer Gavin Brown. Guldemond has been credited as producer or coproducer on the last few Mother Mother albums, but he says he was happy to hand the reins over to Brown (whose CV includes releases by Metric and the Tragically Hip) because it took some of the pressure off of him.
“When any producer might work with a band with a fastidious leader-type person—or annoying despot character—I think they will find use in that personality, and help elucidate the band’s identity using that person,” Guldemond says of his role in the process. “That will happen, invariably. But, that being said, the lines were clear: I was not producing this record, so I could step away, emotionally, and not have to answer to the hard questions of ‘Where is this record going?’ and ‘Why is it sounding more yellow than purple?’ two months in. Which is what always happens. Everyone freaks out about what’s taking shape.”
To hear the frontman tell it, though, there were considerably fewer in-studio freak-outs this time around. Guldemond says recording gets easier with experience, both in a technical sense and in a spiritual one, if you will.
“That’s the deal: you make more records, you stop spazzing out along the way,” he notes. “It’s a little bit more like clockwork. There’s a naivety in your first record that can birth beautiful creation, whimsy, spontaneity, blah… But it can also just trump productivity: ‘Ah, fuck—why do the vocals sound weird and close and up-front and to the left?’ It’s like ‘Well, because we’re recording it right now in this way, and it’s a part of a production, so shut up and wait till it’s done, you fool.’ ”
Guldemond says that, in working with Brown, he and his bandmates got over what he calls their “sonic megalomania”, or proclivity toward loading the songs with every possible musical idea. “Clarity was a buzzword throughout the whole process,” he says, acknowledging that in taking this approach, Mother Mother streamlined its sound, sacrificing some of its signature eccentricity along the way. Guldemond views the group’s having shed some of its quirks as a positive development.
“I think ‘weird’ can act as a gimmick, when you discover it’s your tendency and it works and you expand upon it purposefully,” he says. “So that’s something to be wary of.”
On its current tour, which ends with a homecoming show at the Orpheum this weekend, Mother Mother has been performing only one song from its 2007 debut album, Touch Up. Guldemond says “Dirty Town” shows just how much the project has evolved from its weirdness-for-its-own-sake beginnings.
“It’s quirky, and it just throws all these brash and brazen idiosyncrasies out there,” he admits. “And that’s so much part of its charm, but it’s just a lot of weight in the realm of eccentricity. It was born out of naivety; it was born out of someone floundering and flailing in the creative landscape. I think it’s beautiful, but it does need to be reined in. And that’s just part of growing up, surrounding how you want to present your sentiments, how you want to truly focus your message. And I suppose there is a lot of that taking place right now, and that will continue to take place, and to take shape.
“Yes,” the sardonically witty frontman concludes, “we will become very boring eventually, because we’ll become so mature in our songwriting.”
Fear not, music fans: if Very Good Bad Thing is evidence of the band’s maturation, Mother Mother is in no danger of becoming boring.
Mother Mother’s Ryan Guldemond comes clean with honest songwriting (2017)
You’d never know it from his on-stage swagger—he looks as comfortable in the spotlight as the natural-born rock star his voice and six-string chops suggest he is—but Ryan Guldemond considers himself an introvert. His apparent bravado masks a long-standing lack of confidence, one that the Mother Mother frontman admits he once tried to obliterate with drugs and booze.
“The people that I look up to and idolize are ones who come in like a juggernaut, and I wasn’t ever able to achieve that by myself, so when I introduced substances, there was this access point to become what I idolized,” Guldemond says when the Straight reaches him by phone at a coffee shop in Ottawa. “And then that persisted for quite a long time, until the jig’s up. And now I realize that there is power in a wider spectrum of personality traits. I’m starting to discover the strength in shyness and introspection, whereas before I admonished it completely.”
Guldemond’s newly found appreciation for his essential nature, and his ability to balance it with the demands of being the face of a successful rock band, didn’t come easily. It required him to take an unflinching look at his life and assess what was making him happy and what was holding him back. His conclusion? The drugs and alcohol had to go.
“I was and had been a very debaucherous person for a long time, which was not working for me, so I decided to make a shift towards cleaner living,” he says. “Not just cleaner, but truer living, which is where the hard part of the transition lies. Because gettin’ healthier, that’s fun. That feels good. But then having to wrassle the truisms that bubble up as a byproduct is a more daunting task.”
One of the hard truths that sobriety dragged into the cold light of day was the impact that Guldemond’s lifestyle had been having on his relationship with his sister Molly, with whom he founded Mother Mother on Quadra Island in 2005. Guldemond notes that their sibling bond was “disintegrating”, which was as damaging to their musical project as it was to them personally.
“She was my greatest critic,” he notes. “Those wily ways really affected her, and it affected us, so it affected the band.”
Guldemond details his descent into dissolution on “Baby Boy”, a standout track from the Vancouver-based act’s new album, No Culture. “Baby Boy” is one of the most honest songs he has ever written, and perhaps the most emotionally wrenching entry in the Mother Mother catalogue to date. “There’s a red light up ahead,” he sings. “I drive my car into it/I’m a little kid with a big death wish/I bite the lips, the lips that kiss.”
His sister then counters his embrace of self-destruction with a heartbreaking word of caution: “Baby boy/Baby brother/We’re losing you to the gutter.”
Guldemond wrote the lyrics, but he says they are an accurate reflection of his sibling’s concerns. “I took the words right out of her mouth, and put them back in,” he says with a trace of wry amusement. “And now she has to sing it every night.”
With that decadent daze now in the rear-view mirror, Guldemond says things between him and his sister have never been better. “We’re really good right now,” he notes. “She’s waiting for me at the other end of this Starbucks, and we just got back from the YMCA. That was something that wouldn’t have happened before—us in our respective corners of the gym, striving towards betterment. So, yeah, we have a whole new lease on our relationship, and the band has a new lease on its vitality.”
In fact, the band—which also includes drummer Ali Siadat, keyboardist-vocalist Jasmin Parkin, and new bassist Mike Young—virtually crackles with life on No Culture, which opens with the riff-driven stomper “Free” and closes with the mostly acoustic fist-in-the-air sing-along “Family”. In between, the quintet makes stops for the alt-R&B-tinted “Mouth of the Devil”, the dreamily yearning power ballad “Letter”, and the insanely infectious modern rocker “The Drugs”.
That last number finds Guldemond addressing an unspecified “you” whose love is both “better than the drugs I used to love” and “deadly like a gun”. The singer seems to be suggesting that the things with which we replace our vices can sometimes deliver dangers of their own.
“It’s painted as a romance, but it’s not specific in my mind,” Guldemond says when he’s asked who or what the “you” in question might be. “It could be anything. It could be love on a more universal and interconnected scale. It could be a lover. Ultimately, I think one needs to find liberation in the self, and that’s how I spin that song when I need to relate to it. Even a romance could be its own form of addiction and dependence.”
Lest you think that the once-debauched rock star is now spreading the gospel of total abstinence, know that Guldemond is no monk. It’s just that these days, he sees the value of moderation and self-control. “I did my year, and then I began reintegrating on a more cautious, and almost sacramental, level,” he says of his relationship with alcohol and drugs. “Before, I was just overusing and indulging and skewing reality with surreality.
“But now, moving forward, should I choose to augment my experience with a guiding external force, I would like to do so with some honour of the substance, whatever it may be, and reflection, and learn something from these experiences. But right now I’m clean. I want this tour to be clear-headed.”
If No Culture exemplifies what a clear-headed Guldemond can achieve, then it seems he’s found the right balance.
IN + OUT
Ryan Guldemond sounds off on the things that enquiring minds want to know.
On sobriety not being an end in itself: “I’ve come out the other side realizing that there is a high out there that can sustain itself and that doesn’t take me down. It’s not easy to find. Or maybe it’s easy to find, but it’s not easy to understand, especially in the grip of sobriety, or the faulty psyche that most people possess. I often like to describe sobriety as a drug of inhibitions and fear. Just because you’re not imbibing or ingesting mind-altering poisons doesn’t mean you’re liberated or free and performing life to your ideals.”
On his evolving songwriting voice: “It’s true that the writing was more sardonic, and that’s because it’s a lot easier to smirk at the troubles within the world than it is at your own personal troubles. We get a little more weepy when we’re dealing with our own crises. So, yeah, the writing naturally took on a more honest and vulnerable flair.”
On revealing more of himself in his lyrics: “I haven’t found comfort in it completely, but I realize that it’s where the good stuff lies.”
Mother Mother prepare for five upcoming shows at Commodore Ballroom (2021)
In their zeal to keep moving forward and growing, artists often dismiss their earliest work as the product of a half-formed sensibility—the new stuff is what really matters. Ryan Guldemond, on the other hand, says he has a “really healthy relationship” with the songs his band Mother Mother wrote and recorded for its 2008 sophomore LP, O My Heart.
When TikTok influencers latched onto some of those songs last year—specifically “Hayloft”, “Arms Tonite”, and “Wrecking Ball”—Mother Mother’s music went viral. That’s one reason why, despite having a new album called Inside to promote, the band will dig deep into its back catalogue for five back-to-back shows at the Commodore from December 2 to 5. Another reason is that Guldemond still really likes the rambunctious chaos of the songs his younger self wrote.
“Those songs came from out of nowhere, and very unlike Inside, I wasn’t thinking of what they meant,” Guldemond tells the Vancouver Guardian in a Zoom interview. “The words were flying out of the sky and through my creative vessel, and coming out as these wildly quirky, courageous, verbose, abstract songs—and none of it was intentional or premeditated. And so those songs, now that I get to reacquaint with them in this way, are reminding me that great art comes from letting go of yourself and connecting to something bigger somehow and letting that energy flow through you.”
Mother Mother’s latest is a very considered piece of art, and that’s not to its detriment. Inside is a concept album about human resilience set against the backdrop of COVID-19. The pandemic kept Guldemond off the stage for nearly two years, and he’s not taking his return to action for granted.
“I think we’ve always been connected to the lucky gift that it is to be in a band and make it work, and play in front of people and have people want to see you,” he says. “But I think this long hiatus has instilled a new perspective, a new sense of gratitude. So we’re really just awoken to that truth now more than ever.”
Long-running Vancouver indie-rock juggernaut Mother Mother released its 10th album, Nostalgia, earlier this month. With the group spending its summer touring across Europe, it seemed timely to revisit my past interviews with frontman Ryan Guldemond (and the occasional bandmate). Digging through the archives, I discovered that I have actually written about Mother Mother quite a lot over the years, so I have decided to split this blog post into two installments. Here’s the first.
Ryan Guldemond is a dropout, and he doesn’t care who knows it. The Mother Mother singer-guitarist abandoned his study of jazz and composition at Vancouver Community College when he figured he’d taken from it all he needed.
“I dropped out just before I was supposed to complete my diploma,” says Guldemond, interviewed at the Georgia Straight office. “This band started to become too consuming. And it seemed like my whole motivation to go to music school was, of course, to get better at the craft, but also to meet people and become affiliated with some sort of music scene in Vancouver, because before that I didn’t really know how one was supposed to do that—apart from answering ads in the Georgia Straight. Which I did.”
If you’ve guessed by now that Guldemond isn’t a born-and-bred Vancouverite, you’re right. The 25-year-old grew up on Quadra Island but moved to the mainland at 19 in pursuit of a girl who wound up breaking his heart. He stuck around and, in 2005, he started a band, recruiting his sister Molly and friend Debra-Jean Creelman as covocalists. The three initially played in town as an acoustic trio called Mother. Eventually they would add more members and double the act’s name—today Mother Mother also includes bassist Jeremy Page and drummer Ali Siadat.
Two years ago, Mother Mother got a significant break when the brass from Toronto’s Last Gang Records (Metric, Crystal Castles) caught the band’s set at a high-profile festival and decided on the spot to offer a four-album contract.
“They saw us at Pop Montreal 2006 and struck up a deal,” Guldemond recalls. “It seemed pretty hasty on their part. I mean, it was nice. There was very little reservation. And it was kind of the only thing going on, so we jumped on it, too. And so far, so good.”
The first fruits of Mother Mother’s Last Gang contract are a re-release of the group’s 2005 indie debut, Mother (since retitled Touch Up), and the new album O My Heart, which came out in September. Produced by Guldemond and Howard Redekopp, the disc showcases a polished alt-pop sound bristling with ingeniously quirky arrangements, metaphor-laden lyrics, and the quintet’s secret weapon: lush, multipart male-female harmonies. Those harmonies, along with Guldemond’s idiosyncratic vocal phrasing, have led more than one critic to invoke the name of the Pixies. It’s a fair comparison, if not always an accurate one. Sure, the broken-face intensity of “O My Heart” (see the video below) and the pumping bass line of “Body of Years” would have fit on Doolittle like missing puzzle pieces. Mother Mother rarely sticks to the loud-soft-loud template that Black Francis and company laid out more than 20 years ago, though, often fleshing things out with strings and keyboards.
To his credit, Guldemond isn’t disingenuous enough to deny that he spent much of his youth studying the Boston band’s catalogue as if it held the key to the very meaning of life. He is wary, however, of hewing too close to anyone else’s formula.
“Definitely a direct influence in the formative days,” he says of the Pixies. “Grew up with them. Definitely still love them. To me, that’s a good band to be likened to. Could be a lot worse, and, in my eyes, it couldn’t get any better.
“I mean, I have a pretty realistic perception of who we are and what we sound like,” Guldemond continues, “and I know when things are becoming dishonest in the writing process, whether it’s purposeful or inadvertent, like ”˜Hey, wait a minute—this is starting to sound like something, very indiscreetly, so let’s think about this.’ But I just look at this band and the sound that defines it; from an outside, objective point of view, I feel it’s something unto itself. So all the comparisons that can and do and have yet to be made…it’s fine. That can happen, and it doesn’t really affect anything.”
Comparisons aside, Mother Mother certainly has all the tools it needs to carve out its own unique niche in the musical landscape. Judging by O My Heart, the still-young act is on its way to becoming one of the most interesting bands in the city, if not the country.
As for Guldemond, he intends to keep learning his craft in whatever fashion he can. “Music is like a never-ending study,” he says. “It’s vast. It’s really one of those fields where the expression ”˜The more you know, the less you know’ really applies. It just goes on and on and on. There’s new corridors and angles and crazy things that relate to things you know but branch off in infinite spirals of craziness. It goes on, so it’s something that I always want to feel like I’m furthering my education of, but I probably would rather not do that through school. School is a bunch of bullshit.”
Spoken like a true, unrepentant dropout.
Mother Mother is beginning to see the light (2011)
Toward the end of a sit-down chat with the Georgia Straight, Mother Mother singer-guitarist Ryan Guldemond and drummer Ali Siadat reveal one of the keys to the Vancouver band’s success to date. Mother Mother, they say, is as much a family as it is a musical act. For Guldemond, this is partially literal—his sister Molly handles synthesizer and shares vocal duties—but his relationships with Siadat and fellow bandmates Jasmin Parkin (keyboards, vocals) and Jeremy Page (bass, horns) are just as crucial when it comes to keeping the whole enterprise rolling.
Interviewed at JJ Bean on Commercial Drive on the inevitable rainy afternoon after a rare Vancouver snowfall, Siadat says that one of the things he likes best about being in a band with Guldemond is “a mutual desire for betterment of one’s craft”.
“That sounds like a euphemism,” his deadpan comrade interjects.
“It wasn’t,” Siadat insists. “I don’t even know what a euphemism is, so it couldn’t have been one.”
He’s only feigning ignorance, surely. After all, the drummer has just given this reporter a crash course on third-century-BC Greek mathematician and physicist Archimedes, who provided part of the inspiration for the title of Mother Mother’s third album, Eureka, set to be released by Last Gang Records on Tuesday (March 15). According to an account by the Roman writer Vitruvius, Archimedes was asked to determine whether an unscrupulous goldsmith had substituted some silver for the gold he had been supplied with in order to make a votive crown for a temple. Archimedes’ light-bulb moment (anachronistically speaking) occurred while he was taking a bath.
Siadat concludes the tale: “He gets into the bathtub and realizes that water gets displaced when you get into it. That led to a series of thoughts in his head that helped him figure out how he would determine whether this crown was totally made of gold. He jumps out of the bathtub and runs down the street naked, screaming ”’Eureka! Eureka!’ Or so the story goes.”
Intersecting lines on the album’s cover—which was designed by Molly Guldemond—are a visual reference to the Ostomachion, a geometric puzzle designed by Archimedes based on a mathematical formula that is too complex to even start explaining in this article. All very heady stuff for an indie-pop record, but not to worry: you don’t need a background in math or Greek history to enjoy the songs. In fact, it might help to forget everything you’ve just read about Archimedes and consider the album’s title on its own terms.
“There’s also the connotation with that word that I feel resonates with the personality of the music on this record,” Guldemond says. “It’s confident. It’s less morose than previous efforts. And eureka kind of suggests inspiration, and I guess that moment of discovery—pouncing on a naked truth and taking it for yourself.”
The overall sound of Eureka is indeed bolder and more aggressive than that of its predecessor, 2008’s O My Heart, but no less carefully crafted. Numbers like the burly rocker “Baby Don’t Dance”, the quirk-funk stomper “Problems”, and even the slow-burning meditation “Born in a Flash” bear hooks that waste little time burrowing themselves into the listener’s brain. More importantly, they don’t sound like anything other than Mother Mother, which means the band shouldn’t have much trouble shaking off the endless Pixies comparisons it garnered with past efforts such as “O My Heart” and “Body of Years”.
“Very often when we were in the formative stages of the album sonically, and in terms of working out the arrangements for the songs and deciding on how we were going to make it sound, we talked about the theme of immediacy, of songs presenting their identity as quickly as possible, as immediately as possible—sonically, lyrically, and otherwise,” notes Siadat.
Guldemond explains that this meant trying not to belabour the songwriting process, but to instead let inspiration guide it. “I think there’s some thought that goes into it, but mostly there’s freedom of thought, or a sense of being free from thought or premeditation, and just allowing the songs to unfold as they wish to, as a separate kind of moving force that you’re just kind of there to oversee or guide,” says the frontman, who is also Mother Mother’s main songwriter.
“Hopefully, you get better at writing the more you do it,” he adds. “I guess some people get worse. There’s something beautiful about the ignorance you possess when you first get into something. You don’t scrutinize it based on your education. You just express it, and it can come out in really perfectly imperfect ways. And then the more you refine it, the more it loses its freshness.”
Don’t think for a second, though, that Mother Mother went into the process of recording with only the foggiest notion of what the end product should sound like.
“This record was pretty sculpted before going into the studio, so there was a sense of confidence going in, and not too much worry or fear about us not finding our way with the shape and the personality of the record,” says Guldemond, who gets his first solo production credit in Eureka’s liner notes. “But once you get in there, things inevitably change and you do reach lots of points where you’re on the wrong track or you’ve totally botched it, but you dig yourself out of those holes and just retrack the guitar or whatever it is that you have to do to reinspire the momentum.”
The leadoff single from Eureka is “The Stand”, a slightly oddball number whose verses follow a question-and-answer format. In the song’s video, Parkin and Molly Guldemond cross-examine Ryan in a stark white shrink’s office straight out of 2001: A Space Odyssey. “Tell me your fears,” they demand, to which he responds: “Okay, it’s everyone here.” “You mean just all of the people?” his interlocutors ask. “Yeah,” he confirms, “and all of their peers.”
“I can hardly stand the sight of it all,” the song’s soaring chorus begins, and Guldemond closes things by announcing “Everybody’s fucked and they don’t even know.” If those sound like the words of someone who is not exactly a people person and who would be at his least comfortable doing something as public as, say, fronting a fast-rising rock band, Guldemond cautions against reading too much into the lyrics.
“I definitely find peace in introversion, but I can dabble in extroversion as well. But the song itself is not autobiographical. I like vodka on ice,” he notes, acknowledging one of the “weaknesses” confessed by the protagonist of “The Stand”, “but as for the rest, as for the real disdainful quality of it, I’m not that bleak in my outlook. But I can definitely relate to it in a big way. It’s easy to be a cynic in this world.”
“We all have a little bit of that in us, really,” Siadat offers. “I think that’s why people identify with that song, even if you don’t look at the world in that way completely all the time. It’s not so black-and-white anyway. Sometimes you’ll see it in a very positive way. Very often, I think people will disdainfully look upon the rest of the people in the world as a confused, almost psychotic bunch.”
If the members of Mother Mother have a rosier point of view than that, it should serve them well in the weeks and months to come. Guldemond says the quintet plans to spend as much time on the road in support of Eureka as it can. The band is slated for a pair of homecoming performances in early May, both shows being part of the Straight Series. Before that, though, Mother Mother’s itinerary takes it across Canada—well, as far east as glamorous Hamilton, Ontario, at any rate—and down to Austin, Texas, to showcase at the South by Southwest festival.
Touring as much as is humanly possible is a notion Guldemond and his bandmates can easily entertain, given that they no longer rely on day jobs to cover the rent. “Today that is the case,” he says. “But it’s a day-by-day thing. It’s still no luxury ride.” In other words, music does pay the bills, but the key to that, Guldemond says, is “just keeping the bills modest”.
As for Siadat, he has no plans to put down his drumsticks and start reading the Employment Paper cover to cover, even in the highly unlikely event that Mother Mother should implode. “Why would I do anything outside of music?” he says. “When your expertise leads you to a certain place, it kind of feels like, ”’Okay, if this band didn’t work out, and this wasn’t here as a source of income, then create something new.’ ”
That shouldn’t be necessary, so long as Mother Mother’s family dynamic stays intact. Which brings us back to the matter of the bandmates’ mutual admiration. “I like Ali because he’s wise and he’s a nice guy,” Guldemond states. “He’s a great drummer and he’s a best friend. And he’s not selfish. I can’t be in a band with selfish people.”
Mother Mother has no room for solipsists—not when the band is kicking off its latest tour by hauling itself and all of its gear to Buffalo, New York. That’s a lot of time in a van with the same four people for company. Not that Guldemond is bitching about logistics. “We can’t complain,” the singer says. “It’s truly a privileged existence that we live.”
Really? But surely it doesn’t feel that way on day four of a five-day drive, your belly full of greasy truck-stop hash browns and gas-station coffee. “Sometimes it feels like it more than ever, all cozy and tucked away in the bench seat of a van, deep in a good book,” Guldemond insists. “It’s pretty all right.”
You’ve got to give Ryan Guldemond points for brutal honesty. Or, at the very least, for serious self-deprecation. “I’m not very smart,” the Mother Mother frontman says at one point during a telephone interview with the Georgia Straight. In the next breath, however, Guldemond notes that the writings of 19th-century transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson helped inspire Mother Mother’s latest album, The Sticks, an assertion that undercuts his claim of weak-mindedness.
Where Guldemond earns credit for his candour is in his willingness to admit that there was no grand design behind The Sticks. Apart from agreeing that it didn’t want to create a carbon copy of last year’s Eureka, the Vancouver band entered Mushroom Studios with very little idea about how it wanted its new record to sound.
“We didn’t mess around too much with forecast or premeditation,” says Guldemond, reached on the road in Edmonton. “It was just, ‘Let’s go hole up in Mushroom for five weeks and make a really dynamic record. If there was something focal going in, it was the idea of dynamics and how much we appreciate dynamics—in music, in life, in everything.
“We wanted it to be big and ambitious but also have those really quiet, nuanced moments, which I think it does,” the singer and guitarist continues. “The last record was more of a juggernaut of one energy, and one intention, and even one sonic texture. And with The Sticks, we really wanted to kind of bounce around and dip and peak.”
That’s a pretty accurate description of how the album unfolds, from the neon-flashbang pop-rock single “Let’s Fall in Love” to the beach-fire acoustic sing-along “Dread in My Heart” to the wide-open-spaces closer “To the Wild”. Guldemond and his bandmates—singer-keyboardist Molly Guldemond, keyboardist-vocalist Jasmin Parkin, drummer Ali Siadat, and bassist Jeremy Page—take the listener on an eclectic ride.
“It just felt like the correct approach for us at this chapter of our lives—just to pick songs for their individual merits, and not for their supposed cohesion with other songs,” Guldemond explains. “The whole idea of cohesion wasn’t overly appealing this time around. It didn’t make sense. What made sense was to pick the best songs even if they weren’t so akin to other songs on the record—sonically speaking, that is. Lyrically, it’s definitely the most thematic thus far out of all our records. So maybe that cohesion makes up for the sonic diversity.”
The theme, as laid out in songs such as “The Sticks” and “Bit by Bit”, is a little bit Walden and a little bit Into the Wild, with Guldemond plotting his escape from the city and building a cabin in the woods, far away from traffic jams and smartphones. But don’t expect the singer to pull up stakes and fritter away the rest of his days in a shack on Quadra Island, where he grew up. He’s also not likely to leave a trail of ashes in his wake, as suggested in “To the Wild”: “Gonna take that old apartment/Set that place on fire/Gonna leave the world at large and/Run back to the wild.” Still, Guldemond says his lyrics reflect concerns that are very close to his heart.
“I could definitely root up some weighty opinions about the state of the modern time and urban societies’ dependencies on their man-made things,” he says, “so it was less fictitious, and less detached. Because that’s usually how I feel with much of the sentiment behind Mother Mother’s music. But with this, there was a bit more of a personal touch on the whole thing.”
Detached might be too strong a word; Guldemond’s tendency to take the outside observer’s point of view serves him well on “Let’s Fall in Love”, which winks knowingly in the direction of Cole Porter while offering the sage (and impossible-to-follow) advice that romantic entanglements are best avoided.
It’s one of the band’s catchiest songs, and it seems destined to become a fan favourite at future Mother Mother shows. At the moment, though, Guldemond reports that crowd response is strongest for selections from 2008’s O My Heart, which was Mother Mother’s second LP and its ticket to a wider audience.
“Those old songs from O My Heart never fail to incite much enthusiasm—like ‘Wrecking Ball’ and ‘Hayloft’, especially,” Guldemond notes. “ ‘Hayloft’ is fun because we always disguise the intro, or the drop of the beat, and inch towards it, and people are like, ‘What is going on?’ And then it surfaces and, every time, everyone goes wild. It’s almost comical at this point, because it’s such an easy little trick with our own fans. I mean, it’s a wholesome trick. It’s very sweet and funny.”
Hey! My band has a show coming up. We are super excited about this one. We have been wanting to play at Vancouver’s Fox Cabaret for a long time, and we will finally get the chance on July 18, thanks to Star Collector. Pretty cool that the Bad Beats are also on the bill. Get there early, because we’re up first, at 7:30 p.m.
Click here to get all the details and to purchase tickets.
Those outside of Vancouver may not know the history of the Fox, which started as an adult cinema in 1983. This was long after the so-called “Golden Age of Porn” and right around the start of the VHS era, which seems like an inauspicious time to open such an establishment.
Nonetheless, the Fox Cinema somehow survived for 30 years before being shut down, thoroughly sanitized, and reopened as a live-entertainment venue in 2014.
Inspired by the recent release of Something Better Change, Scott Crawford’s documentary about D.O.A.’s Joe Keithley and his evolution from punk rocker to politician, I dug through the Georgia Straight archives and unearthed all the times I have interviewed Keithley over the years.
D.O.A. on a rampage again (2005)
This article originally appeared in The Georgia Straight.Randy Rampage died in 2018.
Randy Rampage is back in the D.O.A. fold—again. The long-running punk-rock band’s founding bassist joined D.O.A. on-stage for an eight-song set at the WISE Hall on February 19. The occasion? The long-awaited CD release of 1978’s legendary Vancouver Complication LP, which documents the early days of the city’s punk scene. (Sales of the CD to date, combined with proceeds from the WISE Hall gig, have raised $5,000 for the Vancouver Food Bank.)
“He came out to one practice so we knew what the heck we were doing,” D.O.A.’s Joe Keithley told the Straight. “I just thought we’d do it for old time’s sake, and it went so well that people said, ‘When you guys were playing it was like a bomb went off.’ In a good way. It just went really well. I always knew that Randy had a lot of charisma and is great on-stage and stuff like that. He’s always been one of my best friends, so this is a good thing.”
After he initially left D.O.A. in the early ’80s, Rampage made a name for himself in the heavy-metal world with his band Annihilator. He never lost touch with the D.O.A. camp, though. He performed with the group during its marathon 20th-anniversary gig in 1998, for example (along with almost everyone else who had passed through the D.O.A. ranks up to that point). A few years later, he even rejoined the group.
“He was actually back in the band in 2001,” Keithley said. “We didn’t do a lot of shows around here, but we went to Europe and had a big tour over there, and had a great tour of Japan and recorded an album called Win the Battle. That was the last thing we recorded with him. This time, things are going good. We’re not in any big rush to do a bunch of shows. Probably a lot more next year than this year, we’ll try and do a bunch of festivals. This fall we might do some recording, and we’re working on a couple of live DVDs and some documentary-type stuff.
“So, not a lot of shows, but if something comes along that we like, then we’ll go. We figure we’ve been at this so long that we can pick and choose what we want to do. We don’t have to get out there and play every single dog-and-pony town to let people know who we are. People know who we are, and they either like it or they want to throw tomatoes at us.”
D.O.A.’s punk veterans won’t give up the fight (2007)
For a guy whose long-time slogan is the blunt Talk–Action=O, it’s no surprise that, almost three decades into D.O.A.’s career, the band’s leader, Joe “Shithead” Keithley, shows no signs of slowing down. D.O.A. continues to flip the bird to conformity, and Keithley keeps himself active by running Sudden Death Records and its newly minted subsidiary, JSK Media.
“Everything is kind of clicking along,” he says. “I’ve got to work my ass off at the record company. And when we go out on the road, I double up as the road manager, promo guy, and driver. I do everything. Which is fine. It keeps you busy, and that’s what you’ve got to do. We don’t have anybody with a whole ton of bucks backing us. We’ve just got to get to that town and go and play for people and show them that we’re still one of the best bands in the country.”
D.O.A. will prove that to local fans with a pair of shows on Saturday (February 10). The pioneering hardcore unit is between records at the moment (with plans to have one out next year in time for its 30th anniversary), but when Shithead and company heard that Vancouver’s first punk band was coming out of retirement, it didn’t take much arm-twisting for them to spring into action. “We weren’t really planning on a show, but then Carola [Goetze] from the JEM Gallery said, ”’Hey, do you want to play a show with the Furies?’” Keithley says. “I thought, ”’That’s a great fuckin’ idea.’ This is actually a return to real punk rock.”
If you’re gonna play punk rock, you’ve got to have conviction, and when things are fucked up, you’ve got to call it like it is.
Ah, yes: the ongoing shit-storm over what constitutes the genuine article and what is merely borrowing its symbols with no regard to their significance. As buoyed as he is to see younger acts such as Anti-Flag and Rise Against carry the agit-prop torch, Keithley seems to have little use for the spike-haired pop stars whose faces end up plastered on the locker doors of Warped Tour teens.
“If you’re gonna play punk rock, you’ve got to have conviction, and when things are fucked up, you’ve got to call it like it is,” he asserts. “The thing that I don’t think people understand about punk rock today is that you may have a loud, obnoxious band with a really loud guitar and play really fast, but if it says nothing, and you’re still only singing about cars and girls, then it’s really like pop music dressed up in a really loud suit. It doesn’t matter how loud and angst-ridden they seem to be on stage, if it’s really saying nothing or contributing nothing to people thinking, then it’s doing fuck-all. It’s just serving the same needs that pop music always has done forever and always will do for people.”
A desire to see wrongs righted is what has kept D.O.A. in the punk-rock business for so long. Well, that and an undying love for bashing out its anthems for an always-eager cult following. “The thing about D.O.A.—to me, why it still makes sense to do it—is we’ve still remained progressive politically and done new albums and new material,” Keithley says. “While D.O.A. has a certain nostalgic air, to me it’s not like a nostalgia band, because we’ve kept moving forward. And also, we really realize between the three of us that if you’re gonna get up there and play for people, it doesn’t matter how old you are. I mean, we’re not kids anymore. That’s fuckin’ obvious, right? Anyone would guess that. But if you don’t get up there and just totally give ’er shit while you’re playing, then you shouldn’t be up there playing.”
D.O.A.’s on-stage electricity received a fresh jolt recently with the return of original bassist Randy Rampage, who last joined Keithley and drummer the Great Baldini on 2002’s Win the Battle before returning to his day job as a longshoreman. “He’s just nuts,” Keithley says of Rampage. “He’s still a crazy man on stage. He’s got that energy, which I think is really important, that the band can get that across.”
Keithley himself has no lack of energy; in addition to his D.O.A. duties and his label-honcho status, he’s an occasional solo artist, with a new CD, Band of Rebels, in the works for a planned June release. As one of the scene’s elder statesmen, the Burnaby resident has also become a go-to guy for those seeking punk-rock expertise; hence his presence in the documentary American Hardcore, and his participation in a UBC lecture series called Rock’n’Resistance. Such is Keithley’s status that, in honour of the band’s 25th anniversary, then-mayor Larry Campbell declared December 21, 2003, to be D.O.A. Day in Vancouver.
He’s still an unapologetic shit-disturber, but it’s evident that the veteran anti-authoritarian is turning into something akin to (gasp!) a respected authority figure. “I never envisioned anything like that,” a clearly bemused Keithley says. “It’s a little bit bizarre, for sure, and it takes some getting used to, and I don’t know if I’m still totally used to it. I have walked down the streets of Vancouver and had policemen go, ‘Hey, Joe!’ And I kind of turn around like, ‘Okay, should I run for it or not?’ Then they say, ‘How ya doin’? I saw you a long time ago at a show.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, okay.’ That’s kind of a funny thing. When we started, I couldn’t see that we would last, like, five years.”
Joe Keithley and the rest of D.O.A. still have rebel spirit (2018)
Given that it took place 40 years ago, D.O.A.’s first public performance is remarkably vivid in frontman Joe Keithley’s memory. On February 20, 1978, Keithley stepped on-stage at Vancouver’s Japanese Hall alongside his bandmates Randy Rampage (bass), Chuck Biscuits (drums), and, um, Harry Homo (more about him later) to bash through a set of hard-charging punk-rock tunes on borrowed gear.
Well, part of a set, at any rate.
“We only knew about three songs, plus half of another,” Keithley says, calling the Straight from his Burnaby home. “We played those, to a not really great reception from the audience, who were looking at us like ‘Who the hell are these guys?’ When we finished that, because they were so short, we said, ‘Well, let’s play them again.’ So we started playing again.
“At that point, the guys from the Generators—or whoever’s gear it was, I can’t remember—got up on-stage, and we got into a bit of a wrestling match, with them trying to push us off the stage. So I remember jumping off the stage at the Japanese Hall with my guitar, and I thought it was a triumphant moment.”
For him, maybe. Not so much for Harry. D.O.A.’s first gig ended up being his last, and he has since become a mere footnote, albeit a colorful one, in Vancouver punk history.
“He came along and saw us practicing, and he said, ‘Hey, you guys are pretty good. I’ll be the singer, you be the band. We’ll start a band called D.O.A. and we’ll make a million bucks,’” Keithley recalls. “And Randy, Chuck, and I went, ‘This guy’s pretty smart. He’s got some good ideas. A million dollars? You’re kidding, right?’”
Sadly, what the would-be rock star had in the enthusiasm department, he lacked in rhythm. “Harry was a super guy, but he didn’t have any sense of timing,” Keithley says. “We were showing him ‘This is where you start the verse, this is where you start the chorus.’ He was great on-stage, kind of a wild, crazy persona, but he just had no sense of timing.”
Keithley, of course, stepped into the role of D.O.A. singer-guitarist, and, aside from a couple of short hiatuses, he’s been there ever since. And while it’s not his sole focus—the always politically minded hardcore pioneer is vying to unseat Derek Corrigan and become mayor of Burnaby in October’s civic election—D.O.A. has kept Keithley pretty busy in its 40th year.
It was the freedom of expression and the chance to question authority that I thought was really vital and alive about punk rock, and that’s what drew me to it.
In April, D.O.A. (which currently includes drummer Paddy Duddy and bassist Mike Hodsall) released a new album, the raw and scathing Fight Back. The trio followed that up with the first leg of a North American tour, which will resume this month after a hometown show that also happens to be the inaugural Fight Back Festival.
That event, which takes place at the Rickshaw Theatre, will feature performances by other local music-scene veterans including Roots Roundup, Ford Pier, and David M. of No Fun, as well as an exhibition of photos by Bev Davies, whose camera documented the early days of D.O.A., Subhumans, Pointed Sticks, and other iconic acts. The festival’s message, according to its founder, is that standing up against racism, sexism, and corporate greed is more important than ever in a time when the extreme right seems to have waded into the political mainstream.
In some ways, the current climate is an echo of the era that gave birth to punk and convinced a young Keithley, who had already done some work with Greenpeace and was studying to become a civil-rights lawyer, to get even more involved in progressive causes.
“As the ’80s went along, you had real right-wing zealots like Ronald Reagan, and of course Margaret Thatcher was prominent, and Helmut Kohl in Germany and of course our very own B.S.–ing Brian Mulroney,” he says. “That is punk rock. Those people were probably the biggest influence on punk rock, not Johnny Rotten, not Jello Biafra or Henry Rollins or anybody like that. It was a reaction to the times.”
The rebel spirit that drove D.O.A. in the ’70s and ’80s is still very much alive in Keithley today, and he makes it very clear that he has no regrets about spending the past four decades fighting the good fight in the punk-rock trenches.
“It was the freedom of expression and the chance to question authority that I thought was really vital and alive about punk rock, and that’s what drew me to it,” he says. “I never would have suspected that I would spend my entire adult life involved in punk rock. I would have told you you were crazy if you had suggested that to me at the time—and I think most people would have agreed on the spot!”
John Lucas 