Interview - Total Trash

TOTAL TRASH were formed from a band called NOISE and the break up of BORED STIFF. Forget what you’ve heard they sound like neither. Inspired by BAD CHOICE, URBAN BLIGHT, and traditional Boston hardcore, Alican writes existential lessons to these hardcore numbers. Now that they have a bass player that they can rely on in Lautaro the band is playing out more often. This interview took place live at CIUT on Sunday February 27h, 2011.
What is the song “Gregor Samsa” about?
Alican (A): I wrote it shortly after I read “the Metaphorsis” by Franz Kafka, which is about a guy who wakes up in the morning and he has been morphed into a huge insect creature and the story tells of his family abandoning him. It is about the alienation through that experience. I thought it would be a good thing to write a hardcore song about because that’s what hardcore is.
It is in essence. There is many themes about alienation. Can you guys introduce yourselves and tell us how you contribute to TOTAL TRASH?
Andy (An): I’m Andy. I play guitar.
Alicon (A): I’m Alican and I play drums according to Now Magazine or I do vocals.
Lautaro (L): I’m Lautaro and I play the bass.
Spencer (S): I’m Spencer and I am the real drummer.
Lautaro, I understand you are not the first bass player.
L: Oh no. There has been
….a string of them.
An: Lautaro is our fourth bass player.
How come you guys have such a hard time keeping bass players?
A: It’s tough.
An: They are always the difficult one. No that’s not true.
Who has been in the line up in terms of bass players. Who was your original bass player?
A: Cab.
And who is Cab?
A: Cab is the singer of WRATH RIOT. He knew Spencer and he played bass for us for about a half a year and then we went through a whole bunch of names and we finally had some material and then we got into recording and realized he couldn’t play the songs very well. So we got Connor, which is bass player number two.
Connor was in SNAKEPIT.
A: Connor was around but he didn’t have a lot of time for the band and we needed someone who could stay committed. So it was a mutual thing. And then Mike came in.
Mike the Mosher?
A: Mike the Mosher.
And how did Mike fair? I guess not well enough to stick around. What happened to Mike?
A: Basically, everything was going good. We played three shows. I was telling Hamtar for the longest time that we needed a bass player in TOTAL TRASH when Connor was around because we needed to find a new guy and Hamtaro didn’t think he would have enough time because he is in Grade 12 and he wants to go to school next year and get good marks. So Hamtaro told me he had time and he was down to play bass. We wanted to hand the torch down to him because he is younger than us. We told Mike. Mike did the same thing for my old band, NOISE. He was a true inspiration. We saw BAD CHOICE from the first show on.
So Mike was in BAD CHOICE. What about the rest of you. Have you played in previous bands prior to TOTAL TRASH?
An: I was in BORED STIFF. You knew about that one.
A: They had a “Panic Attack”.
An: We were on a “Losing Streak”.
Okay we can quote song titles all night. What about the rest of you. Were you in any bands before?
S: When I was living in Kingston I was jamming with some guys back there. We had a few songs but we never played any gigs.
A: And me and Spencer also played in NOISE. He was on drums and I was on guitar and vocals. We were just a shitty ska punk band and then I got into hardcore. I had been listening to that for a while and I got into the hardcore scene. So we recorded a hardcore demo which was alright and then our bass player moved to Ottawa. It was around the same time that BORED STIFF was breaking up. We messaged Andy and so NOISE and one quarter of BORED STIFF ended up turning into TOTAL TRASH.
L: I used to play with somebody. I’m not sure you could call it a band. We used to jam in my friend’s basement.
That is where you get the bug. If you like it and have fun you go the next step.
L: It wasn’t really a hardcore band though it was just pop music.
How did they find out that you played bass?
L: I met Alican in his last year at high school. We went to the same high school.
A: We were the two high school communists so we just hit it up.
L: He took me to FUCKED UP which was my first show last year and after that I really got into hardcore. So he invited me to play bass for TOTAL TRASH.
What opiates are you referring to in a song by the same name?
A: That is a reference to Karl Marx. Religion is the opium of the masses. So it is about religion. That song I wrote recently. I don’t even have all the lyrics for it. What I wanted the song to focus on is how I don’t believe in collective faith. We live in such an individualized world and I don’t believe that collective religion can exist. I don’t think it is possible for two people to share the same morals or values.
So are you leaving the door open for individual faith?
A: Pretty much. I am just against organized religion in general.
For the Marxian principle or for some other reason?
A: Lots of reasons and not just the Marxian principle.
Yes there is many. How long have TOTAL TRASH been together for? When did you guys originally start?
An: Come September it will be two years.
Where does the name TOTAL TRASH come from?
An: A SONIC YOUTH song.
I don’t know the song. Can you tell me how does it pertain to the band?
An: I just always thought it was a really great song. That is essentially where it comes from.
Do you inject a meaning behind the name?
An: Maybe. I think a lot of our songs point out things that are not right. A collective pointing out of things that are not right.
Sometimes I see you guys using TOTAL THRASH, making fun of yourselves.
An: We have a bunch of alter egos for the band.
A: TOTAL CASH is the hip hop group. TOTAL THRASH is the metal band. There was TOTAL ZUUL which was a really embarrassing incident. Then there was TOTAL GHOUL which was our death rock band.
And did you actually write songs for each of those bands?
A: No, except for TOTAL ZUUL which only played one show which should never be mentioned.
An: For about three minutes.
But I did hear something about TOTAL ZUUL. Tell me more about them.
A: We were playing a show at the house of everlasting super joy and two hours before the show we realized that Spencer was in the hospital with food poisoning.
An: I am on my way downtown and I get a text message from Spencer saying “I can’t come to the show tonight.”
A: So I decide that I am going to take over on guitar but I was not in any state to be playing guitar. Plus I couldn’t even properly play the songs.
An: I was going to play drums, but I was in no state to be playing drums.
No state because you were sick too.
An: No we were just drunk.
A: Then Connor showed up and he was sober which was a problem.
An: Connor is the least sober person.
A: And everything was out of tune. Mike took over on vocals for us and he didn’t know any of the words. So he just yelled stuff like “We are Total Zuul. Don’t fuck with us”. Then he started attacking the audience. This happened for about two and a half songs.
An: One and a half. We played “Gregor Samsa” and then we tried to play “Socially Fucked’ and then we tried to play it again and it wasn’t working.
I was thinking the song “Gregor Samsa” works really well as an intro because you mention the band name at that part.
A: I think you mentioned before that this was an homage to BAD CHOICE for the song on their demo. He says this is B.C.T.O. This has been a long time coming. I just thought that it was awesome so I wanted to do something equally bad ass like that.
And it worked great in the Studio 3 session because it opened up the show for us. So where did you come up with the idea to do that?
A: It started with the beat. These guys were playing it and I was just doing the BAD CHOICE thing. It was just a joke and then it turned into a part about us.
Then it became a fixture to the song. It works well. What is the song “No York” about?
A: Toronto. Basically Toronto’s old name is York. And Toronto aspires to be this amazing metropolitan world class city.
It has New York envy for sure.
A: It is basically saying this is no New York. It is just Toronto. It is what it is.
Actually that is an awesome thought. And you guys were in New York just last week.
A: Yes we were. New York. No York. We should do a split.
Who do you consider influences on the band?
An: I would like to say different parts of Boston hardcore. More pertaining towards the JERRY’s KIDS.
The bass in your sound reminds me more of the SSD / DYS thing.
An: I also hear some DOA. Maybe because one of the old NOISE songs sounds just like “Fucked Up Ronnie”. The more full guitar sound reminds me of DOA. I want to say L.A. punk like the GERMS. And then some things that are outside of hardcore.
A: Some noise rock and stuff.
I understand the drummer has a standard drum beat.
An: The S-Beat.
What is the S-Beat?
S: They just started calling it that because I always play the same beat. Apparently it comes from the D-Beat.
An: It is a play on the D-Beat standard of drumming. There is only one Spencer and there is only one S Beat.
A: And there is only one DISCHARGE.
The S-Beat works really well. Who cares. It works.
An: That is just another thing that has worked it’s way into our sound.
If you had to describe TOTAL TRASH’s sound to somebody who would you say you sound like?
An: Some dudes who play music.
For someone who knows hardcore what kind of identifiers would you use?
An: Again I would say something leaning towards Boston hardcore but also working outside of the box of hardcore.
A: I think Andy described us well once when he said JERRY’s KIDS meets SONIC YOUTH or something, but I think a better description would be Hilary Duff’s version of “Hanna Montana” but that is just me.
Yeah that is you. I don’t hear that. Did you guys go see BROKEN last night? They do a JERRY’s KIDS cover.
An: What song do they cover?
It is not “Build me a Bomb” because we were talking about SPAZM 151’s cover of that song.
An: We were actually talking about doing that song.
Well someone else does it if you are trying to be unique.
An: We have done covers before that other people do.
But one you did recently was a JOY DIVISION song. I have heard of JOY DIVISION being covered but never “Wilderness”.
An: I listened to it and I realized one day that if this was played as a hardcore song it would be really cool. With the driving floor tom and the bass line is wicked.
A: But we fucked it up so bad.
An: No it sounds cool.
I think it sounded great.
A: I wasn’t a fan.
Are you fishing for a compliment here or something?
A: No. I don’t like it.
You seemed a little uncomfortable with the lyrics.
A: Because I just started doing the lyrics in the morning.
But Andy did some good back ups for you. That filled it in a bit. The guitar in there reminds me of GANG OF FOUR. If you collectively had to pull together five punk releases that influence or drive the TOTAL TRASH sound who would they be?
A: BAD CHOICE because that is how I got into the scene and it is cool stuff and it is hard and it is good.
An: I am going to put in “Is This My World? by JERRY’S KIDS.
A: SONIC YOUTH because of our name.
An: It is hard to pick a SONIC YOUTH record.
L: I think we have an old hardcore sound like SSD and NEGATIVE FX.
An: I would like to say “Get It Away” by SSD too. That record has a little bit more rough kind of feel.
A: “Party in the USA” just like the single. Crucial.
An: That is staying on the list.
You guys get criticized for being AGNOSTIC FRONT haters. How did you get this reputation?
An: This is not all of us. This is Spencer.
Dude. I approve. That’s a good thing.
A: How?
When I was a kid I got punched in the stomach by some skinhead at an AGNOSTIC FRONT show. Then I watched them as their white power friends starting writing white power graffiti all over the club and they singled handedly ruined the one scene space that they had in Buffalo. And I saw them rip off drum equipment from one of the opening bands that loved them. That band became ONE LIFE CREW. So a lot of crappy things happened at one show. I was convinced after that. I didn’t need to see anything else. I don’t even need to read the lyrics to “Public Assistance’.
S: I actually don’t hate AGNOSTIC FRONT.
What happened?
An: It was Spoiler and Hoagie from the OMEGAS that made up this entire thing. We were talking to them about a show we did where we did a cover of “Victim in Pain” and Spencer played the drums really weird on it. They determined that Spencer was an AGNOSTIC FRONT hater.
They thought you were ruining the song or something.
S: I thought I was doing a good job.
An: No.
S: I might have just been lazy that night. I remember you complaining about that and then I heard the recording and it did sound a bit off.
Have you not done the song since?
A: We have.
An: The last time we did it was the last show we played with Connor.
A: I remember being really pissed off and we were rocking out to AGNOSTIC FRONT and none of the hipsters would sing along. Hands crossed. Too cool. Grow down a bit.
Are there any other songs that you cover?
A: “Boiling Point”.
S: “Feel Like a Man” by NEGATIVE FX.
An: We haven’t done that at a show yet. Eventually in the future we will.
Is that a new cover that you are doing?
An: Yeah. Prior to doing this session I wanted to do two covers. The NEGATIVE FX cover would have been awesome and the JOY DIVISION cover came out of nowhere.
So you haven’t played this NEAGTIVE FX song much. This is a new cover that you are doing. I wanted to ask you how many shows you guys have played so far.
A: Ten or eleven.
What was your first show?
An: January 22nd, 2010.
Who did you play with?
A: CAREER SUICIDE.
An: USELESS EATERS, URBAN BLIGHT, SCHOOL JERKS.
Where was that show at?
An: That was at the Poor Alex.
In this week’s Now Magazine, in response to the issues raised about the difficulty of sustaining all ages venues Alican is quoted as saying “Things just always mess up. House shows or shows in someone’s space can be really difficult because often people become frustrated if things get destroyed.” You sound like you are referring to some specific examples.
A: There has been a lot of venues that Toronto has gone through from house shows being broken up by police to all sorts of stuff screwing up. Rancho Relaxo is no longer doing shows. After RIVAL MOB, the owner got angry.
What happened?
L: A speaker fell. One of the speaker’s from the ceiling.
A: Too many frat boys.
An: People were just flying all over the place. I heard something about poor bar sales too.
A: There was also the house of everlasting superjoy which was a cool loft space.
Where was that at?
A: It was near Lansdowne. Just south of Bloor. It’s on Sterling.
What is the song “Violence” about?
A: It is about urban blight destruction. I got the name from Allen Ginsberg’s poem by the same name.
Is it about crappy urban planning?
A: It’s not a rant. There is no message.
TOTAL TRASH has some difficulty playing shows. Can you tell me about that? There have been at least three shows that you were supposed to play that you didn’t. What has gone on?
A: It started with TOTAL ZUUL. Over the summer we were supposed to be playing two shows.
The TOTAL ZUUL show was because Spencer got sick and you still tried to play against the odds.
A: And then we tried to play the Bridge Over Trouble Waters over the summer twice. The first time the generator failed. The second time we were supposed to play with SCHOOL JERKS and it took until 2:30am to get the first part of the equipment in. By that time everyone was really tired and really drunk and didn’t want to play a show.
L: I actually stayed that night until almost 3:00am. There was hope and the SCHOOL JERKS kept telling us they were going to play.
So that happened twice. Something happened with a show and TROOPS OF TOMORROW that involved Spencer losing a beer. What was the story?
S: It is kind of a funny story because half of TROOPS OF TOMORROW are straight edge. I know there singer is. I don’t know who else is. Right up by the stage there is a ledge and I was leaning up against it. The singer comes up to me and starts leaning on me. I didn’t know what he was doing, but then he just grabs my beer and pours it out.
A: He was being a real macho asshole that night. He came up on stage and said “I have been edge for four years. If you break edge you are a fuckin’ pussy.” He was just being vulgar and macho. The rest of the band was super nice.
S: Later one of the guys in the band came up and asked if the singer had thrown out my beer. He gave me another beer. Then the guitar player who is really hot gave me her phone number. That was a bonus.
An: I didn’t see the incident. I was talking to Ben about guitars. I wish I had seen it just to see Spencer’s reaction.
Are they from here?
A: No. DC.
An: We did an ‘86 MENTALITY cover twice. We did “Blood Red Violence”. They seemed to enjoy it. Being that ‘86 MENTALITY were from DC.
“Socially Fucked.” What is that about?
An: I wrote it about feeling over the edge. I get really stressed out all the time. It’s about feeling like you are at your wit’s end.
So it is not about awkwardness or anything like that?
An: Maybe a little bit now that I think about it.
When I think of socially fucked I think of not being able to function and being socially ostracized. Not fitting in.
An: It is kind of about that. It is mentally not feeling like you are right.
In some ways I think it is a rallying cry for punks. We can all relate to this sentiment. And sometimes we would label the assholes among us that.
An: Yes. The beer pourers.
Can you tell me about the demo? The 5 song demo.
A: It’s a cassette tape. Jonah recorded it. Mike the Mosher had actually given a copy of our NOISE tape to Jonah and Jonah actually thought it was alright.
How did he record it?
A: It was super lo fi. We had one digital four track mic. We used that to do all the instruments and then I brought it home and when my parents went out I yelled at my Mac Book for an hour. We got some vocals on it and me mixing it was with garage band and that was it. Somehow Jonah thought it was okay and he said he could record us. I almost had a heart attack. Eventually we got together and recorded the few songs we had written with the new band. We got it done in three sessions.
An: We brought Connor into the band while we were recording the demo and we were showing him the bass lines. We would practice for an hour and then we would record the bass tracks that we had just practiced.
When did you record this?
A: December 3rd, 2009 through to January.
Well URBAN BLIGHT were the same because Jonah was in and out of town. They would get him for a little bit and then he is gone.
An: We were fortunate not to have him for a couple of weeks. We were able to do the initial session in which the guitars and drums were all done and half the vocals. The only thing left to do was the rest of the vocals and the bass.
The bed tracks minus the bass and the vocals.
An: He started losing his voice during recording.
It happens, especially because you are used to screaming really loud. I think of the practice setting you have to scream over top of amps right? Usually with practice you don’t have to scream as many times. In a recording session you have to do it a few more times and your voice gives. It happened to me both times I was in bands. So how many songs did you record?
An: We did record six but we only released five.
A: There is “the Argument”.
An: We didn’t have a name for the song but Jonah dubbed it “the Argument” on his first collection of rough mixes he sent us.
Why because you were having an argument?
A: We had a song called “the Confusing song” and then there was “the Confusing song, Part 2”, which was “Sanitize me” which we don’t do anymore. We called it “The Confusing Song” because we didn’t have a name for it and Jonah just decided to call it “The Argument” because no one actually knew what the “The Confusing Song” was. Everyone had a different idea of what “The Confusing Song” was.
An: We got into a heated debate about it. Spencer and I were yelling at each other.
Was there a reason why you guys left it off? You just didn’t like it? Or was it too confusing?
A: We needed to change some things up and I hadn’t recorded vocals for it.
S: And the timing was off on a lot of it.
Was it a newer song? Was that why the timing was off?
A: Sort of.
An: You guys wrote that with NOISE before me.
So it wasn’t a newer song.
A: It was because we never actually did it with NOISE.
What is “Sanitize Me” about?
A: That’s about sitting in line waiting to go to a health care clinic and just rotting away in people’s diseases. It is an ultra sanitary environment but at the same time it is crawling with bacteria and it is a pretty gross place that seems so clean.
You often hear stories of people dying in hospitals.
An: It’s about swine flu.
A: It’s about SARS. We are putting out a 7” actually.
L: I don’t actually hate the song. I learned it but no one has practiced it.
So why aren’t you playing it anymore?
An: It was written as a filler song to begin with.
A: It seems too poppy. It just seems too happy.
Poppy? It is played with a lot of energy and you are spitting out the lyrics very quickly. I love how fast it is played. I think it has great pace to it. I understand that when you were recording the demo you were listening in on the headphones and trying to circle pit while listening. Is this a common experience?
An: We were just moshing around while Connor was recording the bass tracks so the only thing playing in the room was Connor playing bass. We were goofing around. Jonah thought it was pretty entertaining.
A: I don’t even remember that. You just bedroom mosh when you hear music.
Alican, I saw you bedroom moshing while we were recording. It is like second nature to you. So I am wondering if bedroom moshing is the standard at which a TOTAL TRASH song makes the grade or not.
A: Basically. I sit in my room and listen to it and if I can’t mosh to it I throw it out of the set.
L: I bedroom mosh to TOTAL TRASH all the time.
A: What a loser.
You guys can’t deny that you do it either. You have been caught on this show doing it.
A: I bedroom mosh so hard to “More Reality” on a weekly basis.
S: My dog bedroom moshes harder than everyone. The whole time we are practicing she chases her tail.
A: I just remember being tripped out because we would go down to your basement and we start playing this skanky ska music and all of a sudden his dog starts spinning around. I am trying to figure out what is happening.
The dog is leading the charge. She got the pit going.
A: His dog is a living circle pit.
S: We need to make a video of that. She does it while she is eating too. She takes one bite and then spins around until her face hits the bowl again and then she goes in for more food. She won’t eat her dogfood without doing that. She is hilarious.
Dogs love their tails.
L: Dogs love hardcore.
Who writes the lyrics? It sounds like Andy and Alican take turns.
An: Mostly Alican.
A: Andy writes most of the guitar stuff. I write most of the vocals.
S: Andy will bring in a guitar riff and I will play around with it. Then we all agree with it.
An: We tell Lautaro to make his bass go distorted.
Lautaro, your bass sound reminds me of URBAN BLIGHT’s sound.
L: They are a big influence on me. They were one of the first bands I started listening to.
It’s a good influence. Let me ask you about the lyrics because that’s where I started with this. What are some of the things you sing about? We have talked about quite a few songs that you have done but is there a running theme to some of it?
A: Not really. One of the principle things I want to cover with the lyrics is existentialism and that’s what “No Freedom” is off the demo.
Are you studying that in school?
A: I did this project for a writing course that I took last year and that is also where the “Metamorphosis” comes from?
I don’t know what existentialism is. You have to break it down for me.
A: It is basically this philosophy that entails that there is no meaning to anything in the world and that people have to create meaning for themselves. I think that’s what the punk scene really is. Especially hardcore. Hardcore is always the somebodys. It’s not just the street punk from the McCorner. It’s not just the guys guzzling beers and squeegeeing your cars. It’s the clean white kid who comes out of the suburbs and he is pissed off. So he lives this Johnny Be Good Lifestyle by day but by night he goes apeshit with his friends. He is pissed off. Everyone has these altering personas, but at the end of the day you have this way of seeing things and that is hardcore.
Okay so that is the filter you are running through.
A: Yeah, for the most part.
What would be your favourite TOTAL TRASH song from a lyrical standpoint?
A: I don’t know to be honest. I hate most of the lyrics I write.
So there is nothing you like more over the other?
A: “No York” is fun just because it is straight to the point.
After you explained it to me, I loved the connotation behind it.
A: I think “Gregor Samsa” is alright.
Andy, have you written more than one song?
An: I have.
Do you have a favourite song from a lyrical standpoint?
An: Not really. It is hard to pick. Most of my lyrics as I wrote them are in the process of being written. It is even like that when I wrote music. I may write half a riff but then I will need some inspiration to fill in the rest of it. My lyrics are more like that.
What about Lautaro and Spencer?
S: I would say “Socially Fucked” because that’s the only one I know what the lyrics are.
Let me ask you about the song “Freedom”. What is it about?
A: That is another book reference. That was the other book I did for my existentialism thing. That was Jean Paul Satre’s “The Wall”. That is about a Republican during the Spanish Civil War and the Fascists take him in and they are about to shoot him via firing squad and they ask him the location of his friend one of the leaders and he makes up this random place and the soldiers end up finding him there and killing his best friend. Then he is crippled with fear and terror but they let him go.
Does it have a real day application?
A: It just seemed like something brutal to write into a song. This guy awaiting death and then realizes that his best friend is being killed instead of him. It just seemed like something cool to turn into a song.
It reminds me of that experiment they used to do for psychology where you could either push the button and hurt somebody or you would take the pain yourself and people more opted to push the button. The person wasn’t actually getting pain they were just told to scream when the light came on.
A: There is no application or at least I didn’t come up with one.
One of you was telling me that this song has been recorded for a single.
An: Yes. This song and “No Freedom” were both recorded for a single.
So they almost cancel each other out.
An: It is kind of an aesthetic thing that we did there. And they are both long songs.
A: It is sort of an homage to classic Toronto hardcore. Like FUCKED UP “Pasaran / No Pasaran”. “One Snake / Two Snakes”. HAZ WAS “Pay / Don’t Pay”. “More Reality / Less Reality”.
When is this single coming out?
An: We have no idea.
Who is putting it out?
A: Buzz Records is putting it out but they are out of budget for vinyl right now so it looks like it might take up to a year.
Who is Buzz Records?
A: A local label that just sort of started. They do mostly indie / noise rock kind of stuff.
How did they pick you guys?
A: I guess because we are on the noisier spectrum of Toronto hardcore. In “Freedom” we do some more experimental things and they like that.
An: Well those guys like the punk stuff in Toronto too so they probably heard us through some of the punk bands. It might also work if we did a split release with the band to get it out sooner.
What are your thoughts on the Toronto scene at the moment?
An: It’s good. Things got quiet for a while prior to when we first started playing shows. But new bands are getting together.
A: DIRECT APPROACH.
An: It is weird to see an even younger generation of kids getting into hardcore. The scene expands.
How do you think I feel? So who are some of the bands that you are digging right now?
A: DIRECT APPROACH is the newest one. PURITY CONTROL is one before.
An: I have no issues with anybody. I like everybody.
This is almost a shout out question. You can’t cheat like that. You have to name names.
S: URBAN BLIGHT.
A: The new MOLESTED YOUTH 7” rules. BURNING LOVE rules. CAREER SUICIDE doesn’t play shows enough but they rule. I feel like this summer is going to be interesting for Toronto music because it has been so long since there has been a decent all ages place. I am hoping it will be an opportunity for DIY spaces to open up. I feel like the bar thing destroys the point of shows. You don’t have the community feel anymore.
Do you really think that there is a lack of spaces? There are some places that will do shows that kids could get in at.
A: There is hardly any for hardcore. They are doing all ages shows at the Hard Luck Bar which rules. Parts & Labour did some. I think Siesta Nouveaux started charging more for the space.
L: Rancho Relaxo used to do shows.
A: But they weren’t all ages you could just get in.
Yeah but that’s what it was like when I was a kid. I was 15 going to these bars and you just tried to look older. People wouldn’t really ask. You just didn’t offer. What are the plans for TOTAL TRASH in the next little bit aside from the single?
A: We want to do some kind of an American tour. We have a lot of good friends in Chicago and we want to go visit them.
An: We just want to hit up everywhere that we possibly can.
A: We are supposed to be putting out a 7” on Deranged hopefully. Gord messaged us and told us he liked the demo. He told me to contact him when we record more stuff.
Maybe you can ask Gord to split finance the single.
An: That is not a bad idea at all.
It is all ready to go right?
An: I need to finish the artwork.
A: Sebastian from DIRECT APPROACH did some beautiful artwork on the cover that is going to look really good.
What does it look like?
An: Some dudes getting shot.
A: It is “The Barricade” by Monet and instead of that it is soldiers shooting at civilians. He did a different version where it is the G20 riot police shooting at civilians.
An: The civilians resemble us. It is Mike the Mosher on the cover with us. I have had the art sitting at my house for so long.
How can people get in touch with you?
A: Myspace, e-mail, or just talk to us. We are nice guys. We all have phone numbers.
What about if people are reading this outside of the Toronto area.
A: Visit our myspace page and send us a message.
Do you guys have a blog?
An: noyorknoyork.blogspot.com. It is more detailed than our myspace page.
A: So if you want to learn more about our feelings you can go on to our blog.

Interview: Snakepit

Snakepit are a new local band with a self-released CD out. The band features former members of EVERYBODY’S ENEMY, TOTAL TRASH, IN TIME and BORED STIFF. We did an interview live on air on Sunday July 25th, 2010. Interview by Stephe Perry.

Introduce yourselves and tell us what you do in the band.
D’Arcy (D): I’m D’Arcy. My voice probably sounds familiar because I co-host this show but I do vocals in the band.
Connor (C): I’m Connor and I do bass.
Koty (K): I’m Koty. I play guitar.
And who is missing out of this mix?
C: Rob is our drummer, he had to work.
Were you guys in any previous bands prior to SNAKEPIT? Or maybe you currently moonlight in other bands?

K: I was in a band called EVERYBODY’S ENEMY in Japan. I was in the band for six years. I was the guitarist.

And EVERYBODY’S ENEMY has had a couple of releases out right?
K: Two albums and lots of compilations.
What about the rest of you?
C: I haven’t been in many bands. I was in a band called the VACCINES when I was 14. We got to open for GANG GREEN when they came through.
That was alright. They were actually okay then.
C: They played “Alcohol” four times.
It’s a good song.
C: Since then, I was in a band called HANG YOUR HEROES.
D: You are in TOTAL TRASH.
C: Oh yeah. TOTAL TRASH is with Andy who used to play in BORED STIFF with D’Arcy, and Alican and Spencer. It is a great band.
I am glad it didn’t slip your mind. And D’Arcy maybe you can tell us how many bands you have been kicked out of? Just kidding. I know you were in BORED STIFF.
D: I have been in a couple of bands when I was 14 or 15 that aren’t really worth mentioning. They played one or two shows before splitting up, but in terms of the hardcore punk world I sang for BORED STIFF. That was almost a year ago since we broke up. Then me and Connor started a couple of bands, but they never really amounted to much. Then I played guitar for BLACK FAXES who are still together and are still a wicked band. They already had a guitar player and I was the second guitar player and they were fine with just one but I played a small tour which was about four or five shows with them. And around the same time I also sang for another punk band called MINIMUM WAGE, formerly known as BIRTH DEFECT and we opened up for UNRULED when they were here. They were pretty awesome but no longer play. Splitting my time between SNAKEPIT and then, and both bands being fairly similar it was kind of weird to front both so right now, I have just got the one band.
And Koty, I wanted to ask you about how you came to Canada? And then how did you come to find the punk scene?
K: I just checked the EYE Weekly magazine and found out about a show.
What was one of the first shows that you went to see?
K: I think it was NEGATIVE APPROACH. It was a great show.
How did you guys come to meet each other?
D: We were both at IRON AGE at the Poor Alex and then Isabelle from PICKED ON tapped me on the shoulder and said this guy is looking for a band and that he just moved here from Japan. This was at the time when me and Connor had been jamming with a couple of projects and couldn’t get anything going.
C: We did that for a while and it never took off.
D: And people kept dropping off and being added on and we couldn’t get a solid thing going and then when Koty spoke to us and we were like ‘fine we will just start our own band’. Then we started looking for a drummer. But, Koty, when did you move to Canada?
K: End of August. I was able to get a VISA so I came.
Was there a reason why you wanted to come here?
K: To start up a band!
Mission accomplished.
D: Before Canada, you were living in Australia. You left EVERYBODY’S ENEMY and then you moved to Australia for a year and then went back to Japan, saved money, then came here with your guitar.
I wanted to ask you what the idea of the band was when you first started?
C: We wanted to do something fast and heavy and mix a lot of our influences.
D: Yeah. Me and Connor were open to a lot of ideas. When we were jamming we tried a whole bunch of different styles of music. We had jammed with a whole bunch of different people. There was a D-Beat band and there was a punk band and then ultimately him and I were just happy to do anything. We worked pretty well together. No matter what if Connor finds somebody he will get me to sing and if I find somebody I will get him to play bass. So when we met Koty we knew that Koty would be the captain of this ship. He is leading us in whatever direction. We have been able to incorporate all of our influences and stuff but ultimately it comes down to Koty’s guitar playing sound. When it came out of the amp the first time we heard it, it was different. It had it’s own unique sound and that was the SNAKEPIT sound. Since then we have been trying to incorporate a lot of different things but ultimately it is CAREER SUICIDE and a lot of Japanese influences. There was no set path it was just like lets make this a wicked band. Koty led us there. He is our main influence.
I agree with what you are saying and I don’t want to take away from Connor and Rob who also play excellently, but I do agree that there is a unique sound in Koty’s guitar. I have an idea of what it sounds like but I am curious to know what you hear. When I listen to it I think of the FEEDERZ and DEAD KENNEDYS without the emphasis on surf. I like that better because I would love to hear what the DEAD KENNEDYS would sound like without the surf end. You also play solos and they are really trebly and high end and the gnash chords so that there is a grit sound. I love how it sounds . Is that the idea? Am I missing the point?
C: No. I always have that same feeling from his tone. Koty will spend so much time trying to find a tone at the beginning of every show.
Koty, who are your influences?
K: I love rock and I love heavy metal and I have been inspired by that music. My sound comes from that.
Are there bands from Japan that you draw influences from?
K: Many bands. EVERYBODY’S ENEMY, LIP CREAM, VIVISICK, and many local bands.
You were telling me that LIP CREAM are doing a reunion show.
K: Yeah.
There seems to be a fascination in North America with LIP CREAM. What about the rest of you guys? Who do you credit as influences?
C: I am a huge BLACK FLAG nerd. I like Dukowski.
D: Probably my favourite vocalist is Chris Colohon who is now in BURNING LOVE and was in the CURSED and the SWARM and LEFT FOR DEAD. He has these really great primal and guttural tortured screams. They are really emotional. That is what I try to carry across in my vocal performances. Be as emotional as possible. Instead of just screaming the words be able to have feeling behind it. But our band doesn’t sound anything like CURSED or BURNING LOVE. We are a lot closer to a band like the SCHOOL JERKS or something. It is sort of a blend of both. Incorporate the lighter punk sound but my voice is a little bit deeper than that. I think it creates a unique sound.
If you had to limit your collection to five punk releases as a band what would they be? This is a reflection of your sound. If you were trying to describe your band to somebody who has never heard you.
C: First I would say CAREER SUICIDE just because it is the fast rock 'n' roll sound.
D: Being a local band that Connor and I grew up seeing every single one of their shows -They are a big influence.
K: I Like NEGATIVE APPROACH.
D: Yeah the fast elements.
K: VITAMIN X. METALLICA.
D: Kody loves metal. Not so much in our sound.
K: DS-13.
D: You were saying before in the zine that we sound like DS-13.
Yes. I said that.
D: I would say VIOLENT ARREST for me.
The reason why I said DS-13 is because one of your songs reminded me of a MINOR THREAT song.
D: That is an obvious one. Connor and I are MINOR THREAT fans.
Have you played many shows yet? If so who have you played with?
C: The last show we did was in Oshawa with a couple of local bands.
D: We played with DRIVE CHIMES and THEIR DECLINE IS OURS.
That’s one show. Last week we announced five or six.
C: The first couple of shows were not in venues. We played two kitchens, a basement, a ballet studio. The first show we did we played after the OMEGAS at Rancho. I took a stage dive and hit the floor and my whole face was swollen up. It was ridiculous. It was a fun show. I whipped an orange into the crowd.
D: And Rob Ferraz was there taking pictures. DEATH IN CUSTODY played that show with SICK ERROR, BAD SKIN, BIRTH DEFECT.
C: The next show was with BOTTOM FEEDER. That was at another house.
D: We played with the CHRONIC at the BroHaus. Then we played the Ballet Studio third.
Was there a show with a band from Montreal that tried to bogart the show?
D: It was our very first show and I forget who that was. Then we played Turdfest. My friend Danielle threw that at the Ballet Studio - That was great! Actually, that was the first show I ever played with MINIMUM WAGE too, We played with a bunch of great weird noise bands and the promoter Danielle’s band JOHN MILNER YOU’RE SO BOSS who were awesome. We played with INDUCED LABOUR, another female fronted noisey weird band. I think in total we have played eight shows now. We were supposed to play with LIBYANS at Siesta, but they couldn’t cross the border.
C: We just played with LAST LAUGH and KILLS AND THRILLS at Siesta. Both those bands were really, really good.
D: KILL AND THRILLS did “Ace of Spades”. And sometimes when a band pulls out a really famous song like that it is such a drag, but it was great. They nailed it. It was awesome.
How long has SNAKEPIT been together for?
C: We started jamming in November.
D: I met Koty on Thanksgiving weekend 2009 and we started jamming. Our first practice was around January 2010. We had a hard time finding a drummer at first. Then we found ....
Rob: I was eating with Ed and we were at Sadie’s Dinner and Rob was washing dishes and I talked to him because I remembered he played in IN TIME. That was in November. Then we played our first show in March.
So you also have a recording that you have done. A 7 song CD self-release, which has got incredible packaging. Can you tell us about when that was recorded? I am impressed with how quickly you guys have moved.
D: I think we are impressed with ourselves. Things are moving really fast.
C: We have been hustling. That recording we did with Jonah from FUCKED UP/CAREER SUICIDE. We did that in March, recorded before our first show, because we were trying to get CDs ready for our first show.
Well going into a studio often helps get the songs down so you must have been raging. You had been practicing in a studio for hours and hours on end. Punk bands don’t get the luxury to do lots of practicing.
C: I find that this band records fast. It is usually done in one take.
Except for when you recorded in Studio 3.
D: We did that 7 song EP in three days at the FUCKED UP / CAREER SUICIDE / ENDLESS BLOCKADE jam space with Jonah Falco.
How many did you make of this?
D: We made 25 copies and then we did another 50 later on. My brother did the layout.
How did this come together?
D: I was looking for a unique way of packaging the CD just so that it was more of a memorable release. When you buy a record, there is more to it. There is something to look at. There is a lyric sheet. It’s worth more for your money. You appreciate it a lot more than just a blank burned CD. So I wanted something like that, so I found this really nice way of making the cover. It was a you tube video for a homemade CD case. I copied the idea and changed it a little bit.
It is a self-contained piece.
D: It is one piece of paper and you put the CD in the middle of it and it folds around the paper and comes open on the other side.
It kind of opens like a flower.
D: Exactly. So we had the lyrics on the inside and the credits and the songs titles on the outside. Ryan Walker from RAH is a professional photographer and he is amazing and he did some promo shots for us. We put those on the outside cover. The artwork was done by Zukk Ozakai, drummer for the band ASPIRIN, who is Kody’s friend from Japan.
That is the artwork we see in full colour on your myspace site.
K: Yes.
It is black and white on the CD but it looks even more amazing on the site with full colour.
D: Yep. We did that, my brother put it together and it was 7 songs, 15 minutes. And actually now it is supposed to be pressed as a 7”. It will be out in a couple of weeks time.
Did you print the cover because they look like they are printed? And how did you cut those?
D: We hand cut those. That was a laborious process. I went to Staples and got that done.
It’s a bit like punk origami.
D: Yeah. Now it is coming out as a 7” on How Much Art Can You Take who did the HERPES 7” and a couple of other wicked records. It is a small label out of Dayton, Ohio. James from DAMAGES/VERMIN RITES runs it. He is also in a couple of other bands. The packaging will be in full colour. There is even a back cover to go with the front cover. Zukk also drew it. It is us hanging.
C: It was going to be people hanging from a pit of snakes and then D’Arcy had this idea that all the people hanging would look like us. I was like ‘that sounds stupid’. Then he did it and it turned out cool. It is tough to get their likeness but he did it. He is really good!
D: So the front we have got this guy fighting snakes in full brilliant colour, on the back is all of us hanging from rope dangling towards this pit of snakes who are about to eat us.
C: Koty is cutting his stomach with a samurai sword.
K: Traditional society in Japan.
D: He doesn’t want to die dishonourably.
K: I cry in the picture but we don’t cry!
C: Snakes never cry!
BORED STIFF reminded me a lot of SSD so it is appropriate that this comes out on a label called How Much Art. I don’t think that should be lost. I saw another connection to another label, No Contracts Just Trust.
C: That is Tory from the CHRONIC. He is a good buddy of ours. We have played shows with him. It’s his label.
D: He is putting out our full length.
Do you have a full length’s worth of material?
D: We are working on it.
You had seven songs on the CD and you recorded ten songs tonight. That is three more songs.
D: The original demo was never intended to be pressed as a 7”. That was a lucky fluke that he wanted to do that for us. Then we are doing a compilation with Chris Colohon’s label High Anxiety 416 with all the other Toronto bands on that.
C: Who else is on that?
D: TOTAL TRASH.
C: We recorded one, and MOLESTED YOUTH is on it.
D: SCHOOL JERKS.
C: INEPSY is on it. This is a Montreal / Toronto comp.
D: The OMEGAS are on it.
C: It is pretty stacked.
D: URBAN BLIGHT is on it. SLOBS are on it. NAUGHTY GIRLS. There is an unreleased BAD CHOICE song on it.
Do you know the name of the comp?
D: City Limits.
Will it be on vinyl?
D: Yep. LP. One side is all Toronto bands. One side is all Montreal bands. Check out the High Anxiety blog - http://www.highanxiety416.blogspot.com/.
I was going to ask you about song titles. You have some interesting song titles, like “Hipsterectomy”, which is a favourite of mine.
C: We are a big fan of puns.
You have a song called “Hogtown Blues”. “Snakes Never Sleep”. “Kill John Mayer”. Some interesting song titles so tell us about some of your songs.
D: “Hogtown Blues” of course Hogtown being Toronto. The song is all about living in Toronto and the things I hate about Toronto. The lyrics mention everything from the smell and the dirt and how shitty it is. The chorus is “piss, puke, blood and cum, rats, shit and yuppie scum”. The other half of the chorus is “One more condo, one more mall, hopeless, endless urban sprawl”. I mention that there is more Tim Horton’s than high schools. The “Hogtown Blues” is everything from gentrification to everything being dirty and smelly. I have lived here my whole life. You get sick of it, as much as it is home and you love it. “Kill John Mayer” is directly influenced by a Bill Hicks comedy routine. Bill Hicks is an amazing comedian. He has this bit where he goes “if you are going to kill somebody have some fuckin’ taste about it.” He said all the good men in the world were murdered, like Martin Luther King, Jr., Jesus Christ and John Lennon and yet WHAM and NEW KIDS ON THE BLOCK still exist. How come no one kills those assholes?
C: You would have to rank Bill Hicks and Indiana Jones up there with all our musical influences.
D: And “Ghostbusters”! Those are big external influences.” So “Kill John Mayer” was directly related to that.
That sample on the CD with the guy talking to his girlfriend about the records, was that from “Diner”?
D: Yes it is!
It’s good you use samples. It reminds me of the way SPAZZ used to do intros to their songs.
D: There might be a sample on the album.
C: They are going to be shorter!
D: They are not going to be on the 7”. That one that Rob is talking about from “Diner” is more than half the track! If you are watching a progress bar on a digital player, more than 3/4s of the song is the sample and the song is less than a minute! But the song is about Siesta Nouveaux and going to shows. The first line is “Saturday night in the pit. Loud as hell and smells like piss.” The whole thing is about going to shows and being a part of hardcore and how that is sort of my favourite thing to do. There is nothing I like better than being at a show and hanging with my friends and playing these songs. It is just about how much I like records and hardcore.
What is your favourite song from a lyrical standpoint and why do you like it?
D: Probably “Records”.
Just because it expresses your love for hardcore I suppose.
D: That song was written specifically with Siesta Nouveaux in mind. When we played our fourth show there and we played that song it was Saturday night. It was a cool moment because …
…you were living it.
D: Yeah. Other songs are about the economy collapsing and peak oil and what will happen when that industry collapses and we’ll be in a stone age and stuff. There is “Hipsterectomy” and “Kill John Mayer”, which is about how much I hate popular music and how I can’t stand people trying to actively be cool instead of being themselves. “Records” is my favourite song because its simple and it is the most true feeling of any of the songs. You can say Toronto sucks but it is also home. The other things are terrible but I am not directly connected to them. But “Records”, this is our life. This song is about being in a mosh pit, it’s about having fun with your friends. When people hear these songs that’s where you are. It is Saturday night and you are in the pit. It is loud as hell and smells like piss. “‘Out of tune but I don’t mind / I’ve seen the same band twenty times”. That’s why it is my favourite song.
What about the rest of you. Do you have a favourite song from a lyrical standpoint?
C: I like “Crossing the Rubicon”. I think you did a good job with that one.
Do you know what the song is about?
C: From what I gather it is about being broke and alone. I like it because it is different.
Is that the one where you start speaking at the beginning?
C: Yeah.
D: It is real slow. It is completely different from all the other songs. That one is also super honest. “Didn’t eat today didn’t sleep last night.” That came to mind because I went “Where am I right now, and what is going onto me right now?”. Well, I hadn’t eaten that day and I hadn’t slept the night before...so, alright, start there and go forward!
K: My favourite is “Records” which is the same as D’Arcy because the lyrics are totally his life. It is his experience. It really cheers me up.
It is an expression of our life and mostly we don’t get to see our life of punk or hardcore is not represented in mainstream media or any kind of media. It is absent.
C: Or falsely represented.
D: Those punk hooligans wrecking everything!
So to have an honest expression of it is refreshing.
D: Not that I won’t write another 50 songs like this but there is a ton of songs about how much the world sucks. The other six songs on that recording are all about that. I haven’t heard a song about how awesome a moshpit is in a long time. Lets write a song about that. That’s where you are when you hear the song anyways. There is nothing better to sing about.
I wanted to ask you about the band’s plans for the next little while. What do you have coming up? There is some bigger plans in the future but also I think the band might expire soon.
D: The band will be together forever.
Tell us what your plans are for the next little bit because you are going to be going to the States this week.
K: Hopefully.
With or without a drummer. Maybe you need a drummer.
C: We need a temporary one week drummer. If you want to come to the States and have a lot of fun.
D: Rob, who is not here tonight, is stuck at work next week. We have all these shows planned and now we don’t have a drummer.
Maybe he should call in sick. Ed said maybe his grandmother just died.
D: Friday we are supposed to play Chicago. Saturday we are playing in Dekalb, Illinois. Sunday and Monday shows have been cancelled. We are still trying to scramble for a show in Michigan. The rest of the week is all confirmed and ready to go. Tuesday we are playing in Indiannapolis at the Hooserdome. It is a brand new venue. It is the first show they are having there. There is a vegan potluck. We are playing with INDIANNAPOLIS FOREVER and RELIGIOUS POLICE. Wednesday we are playing in Pittsburgh at the Mousetrap. Should be awesome. Search on google. There is wicked pictures of shows on there. Thursday we are playing in New Brunswick, New Jersey with GDP. It will be there tape release. Friday night we are playing in Brooklyn at the Stolen Sleeves house with five other bands who I can’t remember right now. Some of them are crusty and D-Beat heavy. It will be a good mix. And then Saturday we are driving home and playing in Welland. The venue is up in the air. It is the Hardcore Olympics summer fest. Every good band from the area is playing. BURINING LOVE and COLISEUM are on it. RAH’s first show in a long time. DESPERATE TIMES are playing. CAN’T STAND is playing. Shane who plays in SOUND ASLEEP had the show booked at his high school, but it has fallen through for some reason.
We have also talked about the records that you have coming out so we don’t need to go over that.
D: After tour we come back and play Toronto at the Smiling Buddha and the Bovine Sex Club with BLACK FAXES and LOATHESOME. After that we are finishing our album. The 7” will be out at the end of August. Then we will work on the LP. That is about half way finished now. That will be out on No Contracts Just Trust. We will have a record release show for that. Then in November…
K: …you are coming to Japan.
D: And who are we playing with in Japan?
K: November 20th we are playing with DAMMIT HONEY. They are planning the event. This show is in Tokyo at a place called the Flat. November 21st I am organizing the show. I have invited some great bands like VIVISICK and DEEP SLAUGHTER. They are amazing. GRIND SHAFT, EVERYBODY’S ENEMY, HORSE AND DEER, and someone else who the drummer used to play in Toronto about 8 years ago with the ENDLESS BLOCKADE.
I remember meeting him. He recorded on one of their EPs.
K: We might play in Nagoya on the 22nd and the 23rd in Osaka. I am asking a band called CxAxPx. No shows on the 24th or 25th. On the 26th we might play with TOTAL FURY, but we are not sure. On the 27th is A.O.W.. On the 28th I asked EVERYBODY’S ENEMY to do a show. AGGRESSIVE DOGS have been around for 25 years and they might be playing.
That’s a pretty big deal. That’s a lot of dates. You better save up your money because you are going to find sick records over there and then you are going to cry when you can’t afford them.
D: American tour Friday. When the 7” comes out we will do a party here. We will play some local shows. Work on the LP. Do an LP show before we go in October. Then we will play Japan. I don’t know what is happening after that!
I just wanted to get some of the details down about the Japanese tour because that is a pretty big deal. I don’t know too many bands from here who have gone to Japan.
C: It is an opportunity that you can’t say no to. How many bands have a guy from Japan who walks in and just starts playing guitar?
The ENDLESS BLOCKADE had a drummer and I don’t think they went to Japan. It doesn’t happen even if you got members from Japan.
D: We say it a lot but we also get compared a lot to CAREER SUICIDE because we are fast and fun and they went to Japan. I have their Japan tour T-shirt that they sold here in Canada. And Jonah recorded us. To have this connection to CAREER SUICICDE and then to go to Japan just like they did is kind of cool too. That is the only other band I can think of that went there from here.
What is the best way for people to get in touch with the band?
C: Myspace. We put up a blog today.
D: We just started a new blog that people can follow and read. It is going to be more personal an interactive and open then the facebook or the myspace page. The blog will be our main thing. It is snakesneversleep.tumblr.com. So if you already have a tumblr blog you can follow us. Everything we post will show up in your feed. We will be writing a tour diary of every show we play next week. Every night from Dekalb to New York City. We will post up pictures. The myspace page is myspace.com/snakepithardcore. We have a facebook account that if you search snakepit you should find it.

Interview: Martha and the Muffins

I grew up listening to “Echo Beach” on mainstream radio. They were a band that I had claimed as part of the punk scene back then because I knew enough from shows like the New Music that they were from this scene. But they wrote songs catchy enough to break out of the underground. With the release of their new album “Delicate” I have been hearing Martha Johnson and Mark Gane back on the radio again. The CBC had been giving them some short stints on the radio. It always bothered me that the CBC never went and covered the OCA or punk roots of the band. So I wrote the band and asked them if they would mind doing an interview that would look at their roots and they agreed. Henry Martinuk is a punk archivist who happened to go to the same high school as the band. In fact, he started a band with Mark’s younger brother and used an old Martha and the Muffins name for his band’s name. Who better to talk about the origins of the band than Henry. Here is a transcript from a conversation that took place on Equalizing-X-Distort between Henry and Martha and Mark on May 16th, 2010.


Before we go into the deep dark distant past I should mention that you really do have a new album out that was just released in February.
Mark: We do. It is called “Delicate”.
Martha: It took about four years to make. We are quite happy with it. We did a couple of live shows in Feburary when it was released and it went very well at the Music Gallery.
Are there any more plans for touring or playing live?
Martha: We have a couple of things up our sleeve but nothing definite. We are taking it slow getting back into the groove of playing.
Great. Well I know a lot of people who would like to see you. It is kind of a bizarre time now because there are a lot of older groups …. groups that were your contemporaries in ’77 – ’78 and they are touring again. For example next Saturday the VIBRATORS are playing. They have most of the original members playing. And in June we are going to be lucky enough to get the DIODES again. And opening up for the DIODES are going to be JOHNNY AND THE G-RAYS. Another great Toronto band. And one of the bands that I know John MacLeod, the main vocalist for the G RAYS has always told me that he is one of the people of the Thornhill sound.
Martha: John and I go way back.
Very exciting. As much as there was substantial punk bands in Toronto there was a lot of diversity in the scene as well. That was certainly reflected in your band, MARTHA AND THE MUFFINS, as well as JOHNNY AND THE G-RAYS, the CAD, and a lot of bands like the DISHES that preceeded us. They were there in ’75. There was a lot of interesting music being made at that time. Mark you are actually from Etobicoke not Thornhill. As great as Thornhill is there is a lot of great musicians from all over the place including a little high school that I went to coincidentally called Etobicoke Collegiate Institute.
Mark: And of course we have a secret handshake that only Etobicokians know. Obviously we can’t show that on the air, but we are doing it right now.
Martha: I will turn away.
Mark: You can’t look Martha because you are from Thornhill. I have seen you and John MacLeod do it actually. It’s a whole different thing. I was sneaking a look.
Martha: We just do it mentally.
Mark: So you were faking it were you then?
Martha: John and I are having mental communication right now and all the other OH THOSE PANTS people.
OH THOSE PANTS. That is a really important reference. So lets talk about OH THOSE PANTS and the wonderful stage theatrics of OH THOSE PANTS.
Martha: Well I was the only girl in the band and I played my acetone organ. That was one of the only reasons why I was asked to be in the band because I had an acetone organ, which Steven Davey convinced me to play. He is another Thornhill person. OH THOSE PANTS used to get paid in beer. Most of the people in that band went to OCA before there was a D on the end of it. It was just a party band really. We would have a theme every night like wrestling or the beach.
Mark: I remember seeing them at OCA when they opened with “I’m in with the In Crowd” and Eddie McGlauglin and Robert Lusk came out in tennis shorts bouncing tennis balls. I thought this is totally cool and totally weird. I want to be in a band like that.
Martha: It was really fun to be in that band. They had a lot of stage presence those two, who were the lead singers.
A lot of those songs that OH THOSE PANTS do are available on youtube. Owen Burgess, guitarist for the CADS and OH THOSE PANTS let me know that there was links there. So if people want to check out the mayhem that was going on at OCA, which was a pretty wild place in the 70’s as opposed to know which seems more staid and boring.
Mark: I have to agree and because I am an alumni. The biggest mistake they made was to become a university. We have a lot of universities. What we need and continue to need is an art college. But that could be a whole other discussion.
Well there has to be a place for experimentation especially in art. It is an absolute must.
Martha: One of the drummers in OH THOSE PANTS, his name was Experi Mental.
That was Chris Gerry. Right.
Martha: I am digressing I’m sure but I wanted to tell you some of their names. Lord Lusk was another. I was Cerri Soulage. I got it off of a Jell-o package. Wild Cherry for those who don’t speak French.
Let’s talk about the early 70’s. I remember it quite well unfortunately and the awful dinosaur bands that were stomping around. The situation was pretty dire here in Toronto. It had stagnated a lot. There were numerous bar bands and numerous bars to go into and no all ages shows that’s for sure. I got most of my music fixes through high school dances and that sort of stuff. The fortunate thing is we did have a lot of good local bands come through my high school and that gave me an opportunity because I couldn’t get into the clubs to. The music was pretty formulaic.
Martha: There was still some okay stuff like MCKENNA MENDELSON MAINLINE. I saw them at the Masonic Temple.
Mark: I saw them at Etobicoke Collegiate. They were a blues band, but they had this weird edge.
Martha: And they had a fifty foot penis. That was one of their songs.
Mark: But Mike McKenna played a Les Paul and when I saw it I thought that is the kind of guitar I want.
Martha: And you did.
Mark: I finally found one. It was left handed but it had what Frank Zappa called that sweathog sound. I thought it looked really cool because it didn’t look like a Stratocaster.
Martha: There were a lot of 60’s bands in the Yorkville scene that were quite interesting.
There were but that was the 60’s and by the 70’s …coincidentally enough Mike McKenna is still playing and he does tiny little clubs here in Toronto. It is kind of disheartening but that is the life of a musician. No matter how good you are you are still going to be winding up playing a club later. He is an amazing musician. He plays with great musicians including Luke Gibson. He also played with people like Keith MacKaye who was in Kensington Market. If anyone would like to see a really great blues band. Solid musicianship. Just terrific. There are a lot of great Toronto musicians still making a career out of it.
Martha: ROUGH TRADE came out around that time. John MacLeod introduced me to their music. It was pretty out there for that time.
Mark: They were pioneers that way.
So besides Toronto bands what kind of bands were you listening to back in the 70’s before you started a band?
Martha: After the Beatles there was the Beach Boys. I had an older sister so I started out with all the Bobby stuff when I was really young. The Beatles formulated my whole interest in music. And Motown. Wilson Pickett.
I do remember you doing a wonderful version of “Day Tripper”.
Martha: The Beatles had a big influence on me. In the 70’s I was listening to Roxy Music and David Bowie.
Mark: For me it was all those influences as well. I was and still am a huge King Krimson fan. Bowie and Roxy Music were huge influences. In the early days of the band we saw a want ad for a Wurlitzer electric piano and of course that was their sound so I bought it for $400 and between the acetone organ and the Wurly that was our sound. I loved the sound of the Wurly.
Martha: We did a rendition of “Additions of You”.
Mark: Well you had to. You had the Wurly. You had to do that.
Martha: Then we ended up opening for them on a tour that we did in 1980. We didn’t get to meet Bryan Ferry unfortunately. He was ill.
How was doing the vocals then?
Martha: He managed to do it but he had kidney stones.
Mark: They had to cut that tour short.
Martha: We only did London and Glasgow.
Mark: He was lurking around. You got glimpses of him. You know how he has that characteristic bent when his is singing. I always think he had kidney stones because he is always bent over when he is singing.
Mystery solved.
Mark: It is part of his sound.
Martha: It is funny because recently I sent him a song from our new album because I heard he was looking for songs and I was a bit late because he had finished making the album, but maybe he will remember it for the future.
You played “Daytripper” at the Beverley Tavern. Can you tell us about that recording?
Mark: It was in 1978. We were a bit rough there, but we scarcely knew what we were doing. I think at that time we didn’t have enough songs of our own, so we used to do “Daytripper”.
Martha: “My Day is Empty without You”.
Mark: A great Supremes song.
Martha: “Additions of You”.
Mark: A Roxy Music cover.
Martha: “Motor Bikin”.
“Cartoon Party”.
Mark: You would be the only person who …that was an original. That was David Miller’s song.
I barely remember that, but I do remember you announcing that.
Mark: I think you are the only person in the world that would mention that song.
Well I went to the Beverley a lot. The Beverley was a great place to go because it was at the end of my high school days and it was ideal. There was no cover. There was always great bands playing. Very cheap beer and just a great atmosphere.
Martha: Nice waiters too.
The waiters were unique. They had a bleak view of life.
Martha: You must have known them better than I did. I remember when we used to play there we would always have a backdrop. There was posters we would put up and then our two M’s. Martha Ladly and I used to get into the same sweater with a big M on it to do that song “My World is empty without you Chuck”. “Daytripper” was the song that we would invite somebody from the audience to come up and play the tambourine.
Mark: I think it was more like Steven Davey insisted he come up and play tambourine. I think we were forced to invite him.
Martha: I remember the entrance to the Beverley, when we weren’t playing and we would go see somebody like the DISHES or the CADS, you would come up the stairs and there was this doorway and everyone would turn to see who was coming in. There would be the crowd from OCA who had been there all day long including the teachers and actors. They would be there the whole day and the whole evening.
Mark: The entrance was such that you couldn’t really escape entering or leaving without being noticed.
I have a fond memory of going up to the Beverley and walking in and I knew every person there. It was bizarre.
Martha: It was like a club, but not an exclusive club.
But a great place to see bands and bands would have two or three dates in a row. It was a relaxed place to play. It was a good atmosphere all the way around.
Martha: But the stairs were hell to get your equipment up there. I remember lugging stuff up there.
Mark: Of course you didn’t carry the acetone up there, did you?
Martha: No. But I did carry things up.
Mark: But you’re right. It was like a living room. It was almost like the OCA living room plus everybody else that was attracted to it.
Martha: It was like Carl Finkle’s basement, where we had weekend bands. The first weekend band I was in was called Marzipan. It was an extension of all that for me.
I moved out to Etobicoke in ’75. There was one thing that was a culture shock for me. There was nobody on the streets and everybody was in their basements. That’s what I find out hanging out with people from high school. There was always a basement party going on. Almost everyday we would gather in people’s basements. It became a natural sort of thing. Going to the Beverley tavern felt comfortable because it was somebody’s basement transported up to the second floor on Queen Street West.
Mark: It was very basement like.
It was. The paneling had the cheap Canadiana.
Martha: It was musty smelling. Always a hockey game on in the back.
True Canadiana. One of the bands that were influential was the DISHES. The DISHES had an incredible sense of style. Very new wave. Very arts oriented. I think they were influenced by Roxy Music and the bands that came out of England. The DISHES were wonderful to see live and it amazes me that they didn’t become something more famous.
Martha: Yeah. They had some good songs. I went to high school with many of these folks.
I was hoping to get the DISHES to reform for a one off gig for the second year of Illuminato. I was doing associate producing with Martin Robertson, who by the way just passed away. A really great producer. Martin will be sadly missed. Martin worked with Kate Bush and David Bowie in England.
Martha: That is where we first met him.
He had a vision at the first Illuminato. He ran a coffee house that Kensington Market played at. A lot of the bands that were playing the coffee houses in Yorkville and I wanted to get the DISHES because so many people hadn’t seen them and I thought we could entice them to play but they absolutely were not interested. The singer, Murray, had no interest in playing music which is a shame. But there is a broadcast of the DISHES at the time recorded by TVO and one of these days maybe TVO will have the sense to play it again because it was a good half hour of the DISHES at their best. An intriguing band with lots of influences all over the place. Interesting subject material. Because they were from Toronto they had songs like “Fred Victor Mission” and a lot of references to Toronto. That was one of the most substantial things that came out of the song writing in the 70’s. I remember not being able to relate to the bands that I was listening to and that might have been part of the problem. I was listening to bands like Yes and had such hyperbole. Totally unrelatable to a teenager who was not interested in metaphysics in their lyrics. It never made any sense.
Martha: Well song writing can be tricky. I think in the early days of the song writing in the band Mark wrote more songs than I did. A lot of that was due to the fact that he had a tape recorder before I did. And neither of us read or wrote music. I am not putting your writing down. You wrote wonderful songs. I just couldn’t remember what I had written. I would just play it on the organ and then it was gone and I had a young healthy memory then.
Let’s talk about one of the songs that actually started the evening’s night “Suburban Dream”. Do you want to talk about the imagery there because I thought that was very evocative.
Mark: I think that might have been the second song I ever wrote for the band. Basically it was a recollection of every time my friend Chris Linky and I would go for long walks after dinner through the streets of the suburbs. We would often smoke dope and walk around and basically it is a recollection of all those things that were going on. I will probably get murdered for this, but I was never a hockey fan. It was about being a disaffected teenager walking around. You grew up in the suburbs and it acknowledged that you were a white kid in the middle class suburbs, but you were an outsider because you didn’t like hockey. “Hockey night is such a bore since the old man bought a brand new car” and all that stuff. It was about swimming pools and the problems that the parents were having with their kids. Even though it wasn’t necessarily real in terms of real life experience, it was a snapshot of what it was like to be a teenager in the suburbs and not buying into the mid-70’s lifestyle. You were in it but you weren’t buying into it.
Martha: I remember “Paint By Number Heart” was one of the first songs I wrote. I was hanging around with all these OCA people because I didn’t go to OCA. I went to York University and took theatre and psychology at Centennial College. It is funny because all the men in my life thought I had written a song about them, but the one person I did write the song about didn’t get it. I am not naming any names now either.
Mark: Who would that be? What band was that person in?
“Paint by Number Heart” was certainly a great track. Really lively. You guys really did kick ass. Live it was just terrific.
Martha: It is quite punky. I think somebody could cover that song now. I think it is still relevant. It is about artistic moods and temperament.
Mark: We have a recording of it from the Electric Ballroom in London in 1980 and is indicative of the early band. It is very out of control or scarcely in control. They were recorded live on the Virgin Mobile.
Martha: The thing I remember about that place was they had a light meter on the side and if it got too loud the power would cut out.
Mark: And why that was is because it was a Victorian era movie theatre, hence the name. Electricity was just coming in and they had a Ballroom and it was in a neighbourhood. They have very strict laws in London about noise levels. There was a big thermometer looking thing on the wall with all these calibrations. When the band was playing you would see the light going up. And they said if you play too loud it will go over the top and then all the power is off.
Martha: So we had to watch Andy.
Mark: Andy was always the loudest thing. Our sax player.
Martha: When he did his solos the whole band would retreat to the other side of the room.
Mark: You would hear your ear drums fluttering in their sockets. It was weird and squeaky. It was a great show and it was also taped on an early video camera by a young Tim Pope who wound up being a well known video director for DURAN DURAN and huge bands like that. But at the time he was this shy guy who was hired by Virgin to hang around and tape their bands.
Martha: It was an interesting time for us. We were touring and making albums. We made two albums in the same year. Richard Branson was around doing his practical jokes. He had a party for us and the success of “Echo Beach” on his barge, which he repeatedly banged into the sides of the canal.
Mark: Everyone was down below and Richard is up there steering going “hee hee hee” and then going “bang”. Nobody really knew what was going on.
Martha: There were drinks flying in the air.
Mark: As it would happen, one of the radio pluggers, the guys that were hired to promote songs with BBC and Capitol Radio, he was a great guy but as I recall he was suffering form some major brain tumour. So he is on the upper deck half drunk reeling around and just as Richard hit the wall again I remember turning around just to see him go head first through the hatch of the barge. And everybody knew he had this thing. And you know how you see things half way so its hallucinogenic. You don’t see him coming down he is halfway through the hatch. Hits his head on the deck below and he gets up and goes “Woah” and everybody thought that was going to kill him. But he got up continued on for the duration of the evening.
Martha: He didn’t inspire “Walking into Walls”.
Mark: You know what, now that you mention it it might have. That was another song we wrote.
Martha: You never know. Subliminally.
I do want to talk about some of the other clubs here in Toronto. During your early days before you were whisked off to England. You did play a lot. The Horseshoe Tavern and the Edge. That was through the Garys. The Garys were instrumental in promoting bands in Toronto. They did bring in the best bands and they did support a lot of great bands here in Toronto. The scene wouldn’t have been as interesting or as exciting or as accessible if it weren’t for Gary Topp and Gary Cormier.
Martha: They were great guys.
How did the Garys support you guys?
Mark: They were very supportive of us as they were for all sorts of bands. The Toronto scene would have been much the poorer without them. And on a long term basis they introduced all these interesting artists to people who might not have ever seen them under other circumstances. I remember seeing SUN RA at the Horseshoe and all these interesting bands at the Edge. It was the diversity that they promoted. It wasn’t just one kind of music. They had all sorts of people come in.
That’s what I do remember about them. The Garys brought in tons of great groups but they also brought in the early punk and new wave scene here. They were responsible for bringing in the RAMONES to the New Yorker. The TALKING HEADS who played OCA and the DIODES opened that show which was an interesting story in it’s own right.
Martha: Do you remember the DISHES, DIODES, and the DONCASTERS show at OCA? I was in the DONCASTERS. The POLICE came in and the B52’s. We played with the B-52’s at the Music Hall.
Mark: And they were really nice, too. It is always neat when you have a headliner that are a nice band.
Martha: They are not always.
So lets talk about the not so nice people.
Martha: To be fair sometimes it is the crew but the band should have a handle on their crew. I remember a double bill we did in Washington with SIMPLE MINDS. They gave us two feet on the stage to play on.
Mark: Their drummer had some stadium sized drum riser. The interesting thing about that show was that we had a huge fan base in Washington and back then it was a matter of whether College radio played you. A lot of it wasn’t getting on the mainstream radio. We used to tour on both coasts of the States. You would play certain places and generally speaking in America you would get great audiences even if they didn’t know you that well. Then you would hit these pockets where they must have been promoting and we were late getting to Washington. The local promoter organized a signing at a local record store. We were two or three hours late and there was a line up around the block. We were stunned. With SIMPLE MINDS whether it was them or their crew and this was during the “Dance Park” era so we had our forth album out and they were going on like they were a big band and I remember Jocelyne, our bass player, was in tears and I said we are just going to go out there and blow them away and we did. It was one of those shows where half the audience was there to see us and they left after us. They are a great band and they sound great but that was not a good experience. It could go both ways. The B-52s were great. We recently played with a French band called NOUVELLE VAGUE. We played “Echo Beach” with them in February.
Bands should realize that when you are going up in your career, eventually you will go down. You should always be nice to your opening groups.
Mark: You should for all the right reasons and you are right Henry that the music days is a very up and down thing. You can be playing some huge venue one year and a few years later nobody cares.
Martha: I remember some of the double bills that I saw. I saw GENESIS open for LOU REED. The opening band wound up being a bigger band later on. You never know where you are going to be.
Let’s talk about the new recording “Delicate”. It is an interesting return to form. It’s a very solid album. And it’s available where?
Mark: We have an on-line store. You can get it on I-tunes. Outside Music distributes it in Canada. You should be able to get it at HMV or CD Baby. I think zoonier.com has it. You can download it or buy it from a number of places either physically or virtually. We started working on a bunch of websites. It is real hard work because you have to maintain them all.
Martha: We never do music anymore.
Mark: We don’t write songs anymore. We just maintain our websites.
Martha: We should be like housewives in the 50’s. You have a baking day, you have an ironing day. We should have a writing day.
Mark: It makes a lot of sense.
Martha: And the computer just takes us so much amount of time. Nobody is actually living. Everyone is just watching.
Let’s talk about one particular track on “Delicate”. Your choice on any particular track. Let’s talk about the creation on that track or some insights. I can think of one track. Well actually one of the songs is “Love began with Eve”.
Martha: I came up with the title. Our daughter’s name is “Eve”. She is 17 she was very young when I came up with that title. Mark ended up writing the lyrics to the whole thing. I think it is a lovely gift for a father to give to his daughter.
Mark: The lyrics were written shortly after she was born. They were written more as a poem. She is 17 and for years, the bulk of that time, I kept trying to find….well first of all it stayed in a folder with other poems for years, but then after when we were looking for things for the new album I got out all my lyrics and I thought this could be a good song, but for years I kept trying to find the right music and nothing would work. Once we did this thing at the Drake and we tried this spoken word thing with a back drop and it was sort of okay and one day I was just playing around with these guitar pedals and did this choppy kind of sound and out of nowhere these chords came and I thought wow, finally, this is it. But it took literally a decade and a half before the words got together with the music.
Mark: You and Leo did a great job with this song and Eve sings on it as well.
Martha: There is a song that used to be called “Call of the Wild” that is now called “Mess”, that is one of my favourites. When we played live at the Music Gallery we had a new version of it that was heavy and sexy. I love it a lot.
The video is great and that is on your website as well.
Martha: We plan on doing some more viral videos and putting them up on our website now that I have my flip camera.
Mark: We have a myspace page and a facebook page and an official website and a youtube channel.
Martha: And we never write songs anymore. No we do.
Mark: You do.
Mark: I have been writing with some other people. With Hill who has been playing in our band and Owen Burgess and a couple of other people. Mark and I have been pretty exclusive all these years with the writing.
Mark: You are just sick of me now.
Martha: I thought it would be interesting and I wanted to write songs for other people. I want to write hit pop songs and make a lot of money. I don’t want to be old and poor.
Mark: Well good luck.
Well I’m glad to hear you have a retirement plan.
Mark: Well it is a plan anyway.
Martha: That’s the thing about this business. There is no pension.
Well folks capitalism is dying quickly so start writing songs and then you will have …
Mark: … a socialist utopia.
Martha: We will have songs, our fans and a pension. We have some really loyal fans. People who have stuck with us over all these years. People have been asking when this new record will be out so we hope we have made some people happy.
I know you are well remembered all over the world. There is still people covering your stuff, which is intriguing to see pop up on youtube and see someone’s interpretation of you.
Martha: Well the “Echo Beach” thing has been what has kept us going over all these years. There has been so many covers of it and it has been used in films. It is just really a song that never dies. It is really in the hearts of many people.
“Echo Bleach”. I don’t seem to recall it. (jokingly).
Mark: It’s because you are too young Henry.
Martha: It’s funny when I think back to when Mark wrote the song it was the third song you wrote.
Mark: Yeah, there was “Insect Love”, “Suburban Dream” and “Echo Beach”.
Martha: My first song was called “Baby, please come home”. It wasn’t very good. I won’t sing it.
Well you did have a lot of great songs and one of the interesting things I have found especially in the media that was prevalent in the late 70’s was their ignorance and hostility to new music that was coming out at the time. It wasn’t only to hardcore bands like the VILETONES or more straight ahead rock ‘n roll bands like TEENAGE HEAD or the CURSE and it is interesting to see these bands reforming. There is a second life to all this stuff. I wanted to talk about your experiences with the early albums as well. You did have experience with Daniel Lanois who was pretty unknown at the time.
Mark: Yeah he had quite a good reputation around Hamilton and he had done lots of local bands and he did the first Rafi kids album.
Martha: He had worked with a lot of the big singers too like Sylvia Tyson and Ian Thomas.
Mark: We met him through his younger sister Jocelyne, which was when our original bass player Carl Finkle was in the band, was waitressing with this young woman and thought this was intriguing. Lets try her out. And apparently Jocelyne was so nervous coming over for her first tryout that she never showed up. She phoned later saying “I don’t know what got into me. I was scared.” I think she went back to Dan or her other brother and they said you really should go because this band is reasonably well known and it could be a big opportunity. She did eventually try out and she did become our bass player. She said I have these older brothers that run a studio in Hamilton. Bob and Dan. At this time we were writing the music for “This is the Ice Age”, our third album and Virgin wanted us to do our demo. We thought lets try this guy out. We went and did this demo with Dan and we really liked working with him and we asked him to co-produce the third album.
Martha: Virgin wanted to reduce our budget for the third album because they didn’t know who this guy was.
Mark: They said if you are going to use an unknown person you are going to get 10,000 pounds less and we said “Does that mean you will leave us alone?” We took it. We said “Great. We are going to do it in Hamilton. You won’t be able to come down to the studio everyday and say, “Mark we want to hear another “Echo Beach””. So they left us alone and that was a major breakthrough for us because having taken experimental music at OCA through my friend Chris Lenky, I had a thorough knowledge and people like Steve Reich and I had done a lot of music like that at OCA so I think “Ice Age” was the first album where I could take all that stuff and apply those principles to an album.
Martha: Dan was very open to it all.
Mark: Without having the engineer go “Oh my God, Mark wants to do another weird noise.” Dan was totally cool with that. I think it was a new thing working in that kind of music, but he was totally open to it. He wasn’t rolling his eyes or anything.
Martha: It was pre-Brian Eno.
Mark: He came into the studio one day and said “Mark, we got this guy named Eno coming into the studio and Bob wants to know whether we should cash the cheque first because we don’t know anything about the guy.” My jaw just dropped. “You mean Brain Eno from Roxy Music. He’s coming to Hamilton. This is incredible.” He said” so it’s okay?’ And I said “Yeah, I think you’ll be okay.”
Martha: And he was okay. He did pretty well.
Mark: We used to go in there and they would be working together. Eno is a really funny guy. He has a great sense of humour.
Martha: He always had a theme.
Mark: …when they were doing those ambient records.
Martha: They would be into pipe smoking or they would be into the stock market or wearing military shirts.
Mark: Often I think, because they did “On Land” at Grand Avenue, but you would walk in there and they would be sitting there with these epilep shirts or reading the stock market smoking pipes and I would go “so what do they do that is so ambient.” That’s what goes into making the record.
Martha: His brother Roger was in on a lot of this too. Roger Eno.
I did want to talk about your third album because I think that was a maturing of the band in a lot of ways. The instrumentation was solid throughout the whole album. Not that the first two weren’t really solid as well, but I thin the third one was really intriguing in a lot of ways. The dimensions that you had in song writing on “This is the Ice Age” really showed the development of you as song writers.
Martha: Some of people’s favourite songs are on that album like “Swimming”.
“Swimming” is a great song and a fantastic metaphor, but the song “One Day in Paris” has a lovely vocal. It demonstrates the scope of the band at the time and I think it’s a delicate song. Back in the bad old days before the internet and being able to record yourself at home due to lack of technology a lot of people in the record business were subject to some pretty questionable practices. A lot of people were not lawyers per se and so they had bad experiences. You had some trying times in your career. Do you want to talk a little about that without getting sued?
Mark: You touched on the contractual arrangements back then. Basically it was pretty exploitive. When we signed our contract with Virgin we were very young and in our twenties. We didn’t have a very experienced lawyer. He was based here in Toronto and we should have got a UK lawyer.
Martha: We had no manager either.
Mark: We signed a typical contract where the record company goes we are going to do this, this and this for you and in return we are going to take about 92% of the profits and we are going to give you 8%, but you are never going to get the 8% until you pay off all your recording costs, your touring costs, and your video costs with that 8%. They are getting their 92% and they are going to get your 8% until you pay off your debt, which is never because you are constantly making records and you are constantly going on tour and making videos. For a lot of bands and ones that you perceive to be very successful a lot of them have never paid off their debts at all so they never make any money. We didn’t realize the consequences of that until we started getting our royalty cheques. All this money came in but it has wings.
Martha: That was the cross-collateralization.
Mark: That is where they took your publishing royalties, which by law you are supposed to get, but they had this clause that said “if you are signed to the same company as a publisher we will take those publishing royalties as well and apply them to your debts. It is now considered thoroughly and morally unethical. Nobody in their right mind would sign a cross-collateralization deal now, but it wasn’t that unusual back then.
Martha: Or giveaway their copyright on songs forever. Virgin or EMI now own the copyright to “Echo Beach” now and all the other songs but “Echo Beach” is the one that makes them money. We did eventually pay off the debt and we do get royalties now.
Mark: Richard Branson made his millions off the backs off those sorts of contracts. If you talk to anyone who signed to Virgin during that era they will all say the same thing.
Martha: XTC, SIMPLE MINDS, OMD
Mark: There is not a lot of love there.
Martha: It seems so cruel to me that the people who actually create this music, I mean there is nothing without the people who write the music and they are so poorly treated and undervalued.
This was typical of the time. A lot of the early Black artists who were making the music back in the 50s were ripped off tremendously.
Martha: They were given a Cadillac.
Mark: It was even worse. I don’t think they saw any accounting. If you read the biographies of some of those artists they didn’t even get accounting sheets. They said we are going to get you some money to buy a car. “Hey isn’t that great?” I think one of the most shocking things I discovered when we entered into the “Music Biz” was that it was a business. When you started meeting all the people in the record companies higher up, I’m not talking about the people you work with everyday because lot of them did love what they were doing, but the higher up people it was just a business. They might as well have been selling pantyhose or something. That was what shocked me. I was naïve. I thought they were in the music business they must really like this and you get into these conversations and all they cared about was whether they were going to make enough money and whether they were going to write another “Echo Beach” so that they could continue to make money.
Martha: The music was referred to as product. You sold units.
Mark: We love your new product. We have sold so many units. What is this boxes of Kleenex?
It was essential for a band who wanted any kind of recognition or a hit single there was no other way to do it. This is eons before the internet, before technology allowed you to record at home. Al this stuff was necessary. There was no studios where you could go in as a young band and record with just a couple of thousand dollars. It was all big money. There was no other way to get your music out there. If you wanted to continue on and grow as a band this is what you had to do.
Mark: Thank God for the internet. I guess younger bands don’t realize just how much things have changed.
You kids today.
Mark: Now you listen to me. But really you have completely connected with your audience in the most direct way. There is nobody telling you what to say or what not to say. It is just you and them. That is an extremely valuable thing. Like cell phones and all that stuff I think it is completely taken for granted. It wasn’t that long ago that it wasn’t like that at all.
Well speaking of not that long ago one of the things that was really disturbing to me was that the media had a real latch on women and rock. I remember an article in the Toronto Star with incredibly sexist attitudes taking the examples of the two Marthas in MARTHA AND THE MUFFINS and maybe some other bands like the CURSE and the B-GIRLS and trying to develop this story based on this tenuous idea.
Mark: Isn’t that whacky? Women and rock.
Martha: It was a new era for women in the music industry. They were no longer the pretty person up front.
There was enough of that still going on though.
Martha: There was lots but there was room for other things. There was room for the B-52s and CAROL POPE and myself.
Mark: And also in visual art. There was the whole immersion of video art. People like Lisa Steele and New York people like Laurie Anderson and Colin Campbell were doing gender bending things and through that exploring what it was like to be a women at that time. When you think about the kind of comments that were being made about women at that time it was this condescending attitude and insulting.
Martha: I compared it to dogs in show business.
Mark: How novel. They were more intent on the novelty of it then looking at the ideas behind what everyone was saying.
Martha: I am going to take the conversation into a very strange turn here. I heard something on the radio this morning. It does tie in. Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson are doing a concert and they played a little excerpt on the radio and it was silence because only dogs can hear it. It was high frequencies for dogs.
Mark: So it is all about dogs and show business.
I wanted to talk about the absolute strength of women in the music business. One of the great bands in Toronto was the CURSE. Such an intriguing mixture of women. Such strong women and always a good show to see. One of the horrible things to happen to Toronto was the murder of a shoe shine boy named Emmanuel Jacques. It was quite disturbing. The immediacy of punk was to write a song about it. Their first single was on an independent label was “Shoeshine Boy” ….. Definitions of punk and new wave were media initiated and a lot of bands at the time were just playing their music without worrying about the label. One of the bands at the time was the GOVERNMENT. A disperate band with a great sound. Not really punk or new wave but they had their own sound. The great thing about the movement or what was happening at the time was that there was an extreme tolerance for all kinds of music so you could listen to the DISHES, you could listen to the VILETONES, you could listen to the POLES, you could listen to the CURSE or the B-GIRLS and enjoy the music without any kind of categorization.
Mark: Well that is the interesting things about the early days of any musical thing is that it gets codified after a while. But when the music is being made initially the people don’t really know what they are doing. It was like that when country music started, when the blues started. You know you read accounts of what white people thought when they first heard blues music and they talk of this unearthly sound that was coming from these string instruments with broken bottles and stuff. And you can only imagine what it would be like to have heard that stuff first time around because it wasn’t like classical music at all, but it had no name. Now you go and learn how to play the blues or rock school. There are rock schools. But in the early days of a musical movement there are no names and you are right that it was a very diverse scene in Toronto and how would you classify the GOVERNMENT?
How can people get in touch with you guys? How can people find out about shows you are doing or any background on what you on any back story on Martha and the Muffins?
Mark: www.marthaandthemuffins.com and we have a myspace site too which is www.myspace.com/marthaandthemuffins or facebook.com/marthaandthemuffins and we have a youtube channel as well.
Martha: We did some things for Ox TV recently as well. You might find something on their website.