by Nathan Stafford
Sophomore release from local exploratory jazz/pop project
El Ángel Exterminador is a CD I can listen to all day long. Ambient, smooth musicianship, laid-back, yet unpredictable song structures, lots of nice, acoustic & stringed instruments, stirring lyrics and punchy delivery, using vocals as an ingredient, not in your face all the time. Not a jam band, but accomplished players set out with a lot of freedom and a cool cohesive vision of what a record is.
This record is definitely suited for long play; it’s atmospheric, interesting, but not overbearing at any time. If you have a keen ear, you’ll want to rewind the song, to hear that little sound or echo you caught out of the corner of your ear. The way everything transitions, you can start at the first track and feel how the album moves along, nearly every song turning into a huge, monstrous musical exploration at the end. Much of the album is instrumental, the lyrics pulling you back in to this world from the offbeat musical world The Beige has created.
You’ll notice a couple of different vocal styles on this record. I was immediately hooked-in during the opener “Road” with its almost Nick Cave or Bill Callahan/The Smog singing style; that mono, slow, half-speaking. Here’s my main critique of the rest of the album: On the later songs, I was missing that vocal. It went to a more straightforward, while aurally pleasing singing style in the middle songs, which certainly connects the listener and shows versatility, but I feel it’s a little middle of the road at times, when compared to the mysterious musical world around it.
There was a definite Cake feel to “Underground is Waiting”, which I really like, but I was craving the vocals I heard in the first song intro. That kind of baited the hook for me, but I kept waiting for it to come back.
As I see it, there are two ways to listen to this record: In a set of headphones, scientifically observing every little echo, every unique keyboard bend, and really getting into the lyrics; or you can put the CD on, go about your busy day doing whatever, while having it play in the background and still manage to pull you out of whatever you’re doing for a second and say, “wow, that’s nice”.
One of those moments happened when I heard the main guitar in the instrumental track “Ponce de León”. It’s so simple, so clean, but a little warped beauty, over spacy bass and drum shots. All the while, there’s something humming and whirring in the background, getting closer and closer, only to fade away into nothing with everything else. Later on, the hooky double bass on “Underground is Waiting” draws you in, and there’s only 6 lines of lyrics in the whole song.
The Beige show that music can have modern production, and still contain that man-made substance, but I suppose it is the modern man we’re talking about here. These guys recorded and self produced everything (Produced by Rick Maddocks & Jon Wood). I want to find out more about field recording, though. It fascinates me.
I first encountered singer-songwriter/author Rick Maddocks of The Beige in March ’09, when I caught another project he’s in called Slowmobile. The music was all created live, using real instruments, with looping and field recordings for good measure. I asked Rick back then about how he goes out and gets those field recordings:
“I spent a week in Havana and recorded as much as I could: echoing voices in a near empty church, a lone trumpeter in a quiet plaza, recorded a flamenco class in the Gran Theatro de Havana; captured a kid on tape singing a dirty little tune after he bummed a smoke on the Malecon.”
It remains a mystery to me, if any of those specific recordings are used on El Ángel Exterminador, but you can hear little murmurs of things, a trace of something here and there, totally distinguishable to the people who made this music, but to the rest of us, it could be any mysterious sound, man-made or other.
The album winds out with the elegant “Este Pais” or “This Country”, and a final composition-bookend, coming in at 7 minutes and 52 seconds, called “FIN”. It’s other-worldly.
This is not an album that’s going to pick you up and make you wanna dance. The press materials I received called it the “Great Canadian feel-not-so-good album”, but if you are looking for some original music to sink your teeth into, or to just distract you for a minute, The Beige are not as bland and neutral as their name might suggest. With intense imagery, theatric or cinematic composition style, and wide range of elements, this album will not disappoint.
*The Beige play a CD Release Party for El Ángel Exterminador on January 23rd at St Paul’s Anglican Church (early show). Tickets at Red Cat Records, Zulu Records, Highlife Music and info@thebeige.ca
Monday, January 18, 2010
Pointed Sticks: Three Lefts Make A Right
Interview With Pointed Sticks Bassist Tony Bardach
By Nathan Stafford
One of Vancouver’s most original, peppiest powerpop/punk bands has just released a new record after a hiatus that lasted far too long. The group was a local staple of the ’78-81 heyday, and the first Canadian act signed to U.K. label, Stiff Records. Sadly, Pointed Sticks disbanded in ’81, and a reunion looked to be out of the question.
Fast-forward to 2006, and a Sudden Death re-issue of Perfect Youth is suddenly selling like hotcakes in Japan! The band is invited by their distributor all expenses paid, for a 3-show reunion tour in Japan. Well, the response was so good, that the guys caught the recording bug again. Here they are, in the flesh, with an entire album of new material and a 2-show CD Release Party Dec 19th at The Rio. Are you ready, Vancouver?
I caught up Tony Bardach prior to the show:
“We’re like a bunch of debs planning the junior prom here,” laughs Tony.
NS: Are you sure this isn’t a lost tape from 1980 or something?
TB: It turned out even better than I’d hoped, really. It sounds so clean and perfect to me. We knew we had good songs, but even good songs can sound kinda crappy if it’s all muddy. I really have to credit Gord (Nicholl) a lot, with engineering and producing the thing, and Nick as well. Also, we were lucky enough to get Mike Fraser to mix it at The Warehouse, so it sounds as good as anything he’s ever done.
NS: How did you hook up with Mike Fraser?
TB: He ran into us at a gig we were playing at The Commodore and he told us he’d mix our record for a case of beer if we made one, so I think that’s about when we decided to actually be serious about making a record.
NS: Your singer, Nick Jones called this album a ‘Natural Progression’. Do you know what he meant by that?
TB: For me, it helps prove that time is not really all that linear, because we were able to pick up right where we left off without any sort of preconception or planning. Being together in the early days of starting a band is really fun, and I guess it really remained like that. We never really made our second album. We packed it in before we had that chance, but maybe that was in us. I think that those particular tunes that might have existed back then are long-since forgotten. I think the new album is more of a reflection of our current experiences and maybe some reflection on the past and how it affects the now.
NS: 3 years ago, the idea of doing this album was inconceivable, but was it playing onstage together again that started the album talks?
TB: Initially, we were kind of shocked that we could actually do it, but then seeing the people in Japan and realizing how aware they were of the music, you know they knew all the lyrics. There were hundreds of people singing the words to our songs that we couldn’t even remember as well as they could! That was really inspiring. After that, Ian had an idea to make a song as a Thank You called ‘My Japanese Fan’, and we made the single. I think Gord had started to write a little bit. He had written ‘Any Time’ and Nick was starting to get interested in writing things again, and I came along with a song, and it just fell together the same way it normally does.
NS: I heard some of these songs were written by mail?
TB: Oh yeah, email was involved, especially in the demos. It took maybe 18 months from when we started writing songs to when we thought about actually releasing a record and probably a year from when we thought about releasing the record to actually getting it out.
NS: Back in the day, you guys were turning out the songs pretty quick though, right?
TB: Yeah, I think so, but we were all together. We weren’t working in different countries and stuff. We probably could have done this much faster if we just sat down and made it, but it might be better for the amount of retrospect we’ve had with the songs before actually recording them.
NS: So is there no real sense of urgency now? Can you guys just go with the flow?
TB: (laughs) Yeah, we have a little bit of luxury that it just doesn’t really matter that much. We don’t have any agenda anymore, whereas in the past, there was an agenda, whether it was implied or inherent. There was some expectation about us being Canada’s Great Hope, and that probably hurt us more than helped us, but it got us a lot of attention and it really put the pressure on. I don’t think any of us liked that. It wasn’t where we were coming from, and it wasn’t why we had started the group.
NS: The pressure got to you eventually.
TB: It started to feel like music business. It started to feel middle of the road. You know, sometimes things just start to feel like the point has been missed, or at least it’s not funny anymore.
NS: How do the new sessions differ from the old? You still managed to get that great live sound. How was it recorded?
TB: Well, we decided how much money we had to spend, and then we looked around to see where we could get the best sounds. We decided we would definitely get the best drum sound at Mushroom, and that was affordable for us. We went in and recorded the thing live, used their drums and their piano, and we took as much from that session as we could/ We then took the stuff over to Gord’s studio Paramount, and did all the overdubs there.
So yeah, it is live. You can definitely hear the room, and some of the bass is even saved from that original track. It’s not really all that different from before, except there’s the luxury of the email happening, and more studios are around. Definitely having the studio has been one of the reasons we’ve been able to do anything, otherwise we’d be sitting around in my living room with Garageband.
NS: On the earlier recordings, was it harder to come up with a decent
TB: I think it really depended on the equipment and the place. We were lucky enough to record at Little Mountain. We had a really early 24-track Neve board, and top of the line stuff. When we were making demos, we’d be on somebody’s 8-track in the basement somewhere. That was the best you could hope for, for most of the bands.
NS: Northern Electric is your label now, the Collective.
TB: We’ve been friends with Richard for some time. Ian and Richard are fairly close, and he’s helping produce some of the stuff for Northern Electric, and we’ve got a lot of confidence in Richard Chapman, and some of my old friends are on that label. Richard’s something of a genius, too.
NS: Did you see the early punk scene as a collective?
TB: It was kind of like a club that had no criteria for joining and no membership fees. That didn’t exist forever, but that was the initial thing, because everybody was trying everything, and everybody was accepting of everybody’s attempt at whatever.
NS: Do you, or did you consider yourselves a punk band?
TB: It really depends on whether you think of punk in terms of the sound of music, or the attitude that initiates the music. As far as I’m concerned, definitely a punk band. We all came from the same large group of people, and we’re exposed to the same stuff, and really what we were doing at first was trying to be the antithesis of where the scene was apparently heading. It was getting quite tough and heavy, the rude boy thing was becoming interesting, and some of the fun, some of the glam & glitz and foolin’ around was really disappearing. We set up this pop band to be teen idols and really, it was just a piss-take on what became the hardcore scene. We dressed up in seersucker suits and gave ourselves funny names.
NS: Your new song, ‘Scrambled Eggs’. What’s the story behind that song?
TB: Scrambled Eggs, to be honest, was not the intended line. It was just a word that fit by meter in the space, and I think that it was chosen as kind of a joke, because I’ve heard that Lennon & McCartney, when they were writing Yesterday, they didn’t have the line, ‘yesterday’. All they had was ‘scrambled eggs’. They weren’t sure how to fill it in, so they just said ‘scrambled eggs’. I came in, having never heard this story or anything and just heard this demo, and the line was ‘scrambled eggs’ and it was supposed to be changed, but that was my favourite thing about the song. I said,
“Yeah! We gotta keep that! Scrambled Eggs!”and they’re going:
“No, that’s not supposed to be the line.”
But I don’t think it matters. It’s just a beautiful image.
NS: Is the image the message?
TB: Yeah, it’s highly visual and suggestive. It’s great. It’s lovely that everybody can have a different take on music, where you can get the lyrics wrong in your mind, and it may mean something entirely different to you than anybody else in the world.
NS: You wrote the song ‘Igor Said’ about a doorman in the downtown east side, right? At the Smilin’ Buddah?
TB: That was really a special place for all of us, because that was our bar. There were other places where the punk bands could play, like hall gigs and things like that, so it wasn’t like it was the only thing around, but it was a small bar, and it was only punk. Pointed Sticks never played there in Pointed Sticks, but we all played there in fuck bands, and it was just always fun.
Before you’d get in there, you’d meet Igor, and in those days, a lot of places would have the little cage, where you pay the cashier, so Igor would stand behind this window, and really all you could see was his chest and some of his gut. He was an enormous guy, and his head would disappear at the top, and all you would hear is, “You got I.D.?” He would hassle people for I.D. and take the money. He’s still around. He works at the Carnegie. He’s a pretty neat guy.
In some ways, that song contains the nod to him, and it’s a nod to the atmosphere and the events of that time. I got The Dishrags to sing on that song, and also Johnny Ferrerria, who played sax with the band does some honkin’ on the baritone.
NS: Did you have any songs left in the can when you guys broke up?
TB: No, not really. We recorded ‘Found Another Boy’. There was a live recording of that, and we did it as a flipside to Japanese Fan, and at that time, we didn’t have any plans for any kind of album. It was just the one little single we were gonna do to say, “Hello. Here’s a single.”
NS: What’s your favourite song?
TB: They change so often. I probably have about 7 or 8 favourites.
NS: Was it hard to get the band back into live-show form?
TB: Working out the old songs was really easy, actually. Other than getting a little bit mixed up about the evolving changes, like when we would flip a verse around and turn it into a chorus, or flip the chords in the verse to use for the solo, shit like that we might forget, but for the most part, we had all the feel and all that together. We were certainly rusty, but it didn’t take long to get the WD out.
NS: You said you don’t consider yourselves a touring band anymore, but will you be hitting the road to promote this new record?
TB: Only if we’re just standing on the corner, trying to sell them. We don’t have any plans to go on a tour. Generally, we just wait for the phone to ring, and if it’s an interesting enough offer, and we’re able to do it time-wise, then we try to do it.
NS: So no 40-date tour?
TB: No, but what a movie that would make! Out there in Japan with our attendants.
NS: Any Spinal Tap moments over in Japan?
TB: Hmmmmm. Not really so much. There was quite a lot of drinking involved. Their system is a bit different over there. The gig ends relatively early and then many people form the gig will then go out to a large restaurant and eat and drink together until 4 o’clock in the morning.
NS: If the expenses were paid, you’d be back in Japan in a heartbeat, wouldn’t you?
TB: Oh definitely! We’d figure out a way to make that happen.
NS: Do you know who shot the Youtube videos of you guys in Japan?
TB: Some of those videos are actually shot by a guy from Toronto named Mike Ramone, who actually flew from Toronto to Tokyo to see us. He figured they would be our only shows. We never could find him to hang out much, we just talked to him a little bit after the show, and then he was off doing his other things.
NS: Expecting a lot of old friends out for your 2 shows on the 19th?
TB: Oh, I hope so. As far as the Rio goes, my big message is: Get to a record store and buy tickets! That’s just about the only way to get tickets, is to buy them at the record store. I’m sure they’ll have them at the door, but it doesn’t hold that many people, but they’re pulling out some more chairs to make some more room up front.
NS: Any Special Guests making appearances at the shows? Will there be saxophone?
TB: Yeah, we are having some visitors. Johnny is definitely making an appearance. We wanted to have a show that was just good bands, a good old fashioned hall gig, where it wasn’t all about the main bands. It was about all of the bands, because everybody has fans, you know? We may get ourselves blown off the stage, but you know, we’re much older than them.
NS: Are you already in talks about the Next record?
TB: Oh yeah! In fact, we’ve already recorded the next 3 records. We’ve got them in the can, and they’re going to be released post-humously. (laughs) No, we were all so excited about this record, that we started joking about our next one, and writing more songs for it, so the jokes will turn into reality, I’m sure. We all like writing songs, and we have a good time playing them with each other.
**The Pointed Sticks: Three Lefts Make A Right Release Party takes place with TWO shows at the Rio Theatre (Broadway & Commercial) on Saturday, Dec 19th. All Ages Show at 2PM with The Evaporators and Pretty Vanilla! Licensed 19+ Show at 8PM with The TVees and Strange Magic!
**Three Lefts Make A Right is now available on CD, vinyl and digital download. Visit your local retailers or www.thepointedsticks.com to get a copy!
By Nathan Stafford
One of Vancouver’s most original, peppiest powerpop/punk bands has just released a new record after a hiatus that lasted far too long. The group was a local staple of the ’78-81 heyday, and the first Canadian act signed to U.K. label, Stiff Records. Sadly, Pointed Sticks disbanded in ’81, and a reunion looked to be out of the question.
Fast-forward to 2006, and a Sudden Death re-issue of Perfect Youth is suddenly selling like hotcakes in Japan! The band is invited by their distributor all expenses paid, for a 3-show reunion tour in Japan. Well, the response was so good, that the guys caught the recording bug again. Here they are, in the flesh, with an entire album of new material and a 2-show CD Release Party Dec 19th at The Rio. Are you ready, Vancouver?
I caught up Tony Bardach prior to the show:
“We’re like a bunch of debs planning the junior prom here,” laughs Tony.
NS: Are you sure this isn’t a lost tape from 1980 or something?
TB: It turned out even better than I’d hoped, really. It sounds so clean and perfect to me. We knew we had good songs, but even good songs can sound kinda crappy if it’s all muddy. I really have to credit Gord (Nicholl) a lot, with engineering and producing the thing, and Nick as well. Also, we were lucky enough to get Mike Fraser to mix it at The Warehouse, so it sounds as good as anything he’s ever done.
NS: How did you hook up with Mike Fraser?
TB: He ran into us at a gig we were playing at The Commodore and he told us he’d mix our record for a case of beer if we made one, so I think that’s about when we decided to actually be serious about making a record.
NS: Your singer, Nick Jones called this album a ‘Natural Progression’. Do you know what he meant by that?
TB: For me, it helps prove that time is not really all that linear, because we were able to pick up right where we left off without any sort of preconception or planning. Being together in the early days of starting a band is really fun, and I guess it really remained like that. We never really made our second album. We packed it in before we had that chance, but maybe that was in us. I think that those particular tunes that might have existed back then are long-since forgotten. I think the new album is more of a reflection of our current experiences and maybe some reflection on the past and how it affects the now.
NS: 3 years ago, the idea of doing this album was inconceivable, but was it playing onstage together again that started the album talks?
TB: Initially, we were kind of shocked that we could actually do it, but then seeing the people in Japan and realizing how aware they were of the music, you know they knew all the lyrics. There were hundreds of people singing the words to our songs that we couldn’t even remember as well as they could! That was really inspiring. After that, Ian had an idea to make a song as a Thank You called ‘My Japanese Fan’, and we made the single. I think Gord had started to write a little bit. He had written ‘Any Time’ and Nick was starting to get interested in writing things again, and I came along with a song, and it just fell together the same way it normally does.
NS: I heard some of these songs were written by mail?
TB: Oh yeah, email was involved, especially in the demos. It took maybe 18 months from when we started writing songs to when we thought about actually releasing a record and probably a year from when we thought about releasing the record to actually getting it out.
NS: Back in the day, you guys were turning out the songs pretty quick though, right?
TB: Yeah, I think so, but we were all together. We weren’t working in different countries and stuff. We probably could have done this much faster if we just sat down and made it, but it might be better for the amount of retrospect we’ve had with the songs before actually recording them.
NS: So is there no real sense of urgency now? Can you guys just go with the flow?
TB: (laughs) Yeah, we have a little bit of luxury that it just doesn’t really matter that much. We don’t have any agenda anymore, whereas in the past, there was an agenda, whether it was implied or inherent. There was some expectation about us being Canada’s Great Hope, and that probably hurt us more than helped us, but it got us a lot of attention and it really put the pressure on. I don’t think any of us liked that. It wasn’t where we were coming from, and it wasn’t why we had started the group.
NS: The pressure got to you eventually.
TB: It started to feel like music business. It started to feel middle of the road. You know, sometimes things just start to feel like the point has been missed, or at least it’s not funny anymore.
NS: How do the new sessions differ from the old? You still managed to get that great live sound. How was it recorded?
TB: Well, we decided how much money we had to spend, and then we looked around to see where we could get the best sounds. We decided we would definitely get the best drum sound at Mushroom, and that was affordable for us. We went in and recorded the thing live, used their drums and their piano, and we took as much from that session as we could/ We then took the stuff over to Gord’s studio Paramount, and did all the overdubs there.
So yeah, it is live. You can definitely hear the room, and some of the bass is even saved from that original track. It’s not really all that different from before, except there’s the luxury of the email happening, and more studios are around. Definitely having the studio has been one of the reasons we’ve been able to do anything, otherwise we’d be sitting around in my living room with Garageband.
NS: On the earlier recordings, was it harder to come up with a decent
TB: I think it really depended on the equipment and the place. We were lucky enough to record at Little Mountain. We had a really early 24-track Neve board, and top of the line stuff. When we were making demos, we’d be on somebody’s 8-track in the basement somewhere. That was the best you could hope for, for most of the bands.
NS: Northern Electric is your label now, the Collective.
TB: We’ve been friends with Richard for some time. Ian and Richard are fairly close, and he’s helping produce some of the stuff for Northern Electric, and we’ve got a lot of confidence in Richard Chapman, and some of my old friends are on that label. Richard’s something of a genius, too.
NS: Did you see the early punk scene as a collective?
TB: It was kind of like a club that had no criteria for joining and no membership fees. That didn’t exist forever, but that was the initial thing, because everybody was trying everything, and everybody was accepting of everybody’s attempt at whatever.
NS: Do you, or did you consider yourselves a punk band?
TB: It really depends on whether you think of punk in terms of the sound of music, or the attitude that initiates the music. As far as I’m concerned, definitely a punk band. We all came from the same large group of people, and we’re exposed to the same stuff, and really what we were doing at first was trying to be the antithesis of where the scene was apparently heading. It was getting quite tough and heavy, the rude boy thing was becoming interesting, and some of the fun, some of the glam & glitz and foolin’ around was really disappearing. We set up this pop band to be teen idols and really, it was just a piss-take on what became the hardcore scene. We dressed up in seersucker suits and gave ourselves funny names.
NS: Your new song, ‘Scrambled Eggs’. What’s the story behind that song?
TB: Scrambled Eggs, to be honest, was not the intended line. It was just a word that fit by meter in the space, and I think that it was chosen as kind of a joke, because I’ve heard that Lennon & McCartney, when they were writing Yesterday, they didn’t have the line, ‘yesterday’. All they had was ‘scrambled eggs’. They weren’t sure how to fill it in, so they just said ‘scrambled eggs’. I came in, having never heard this story or anything and just heard this demo, and the line was ‘scrambled eggs’ and it was supposed to be changed, but that was my favourite thing about the song. I said,
“Yeah! We gotta keep that! Scrambled Eggs!”and they’re going:
“No, that’s not supposed to be the line.”
But I don’t think it matters. It’s just a beautiful image.
NS: Is the image the message?
TB: Yeah, it’s highly visual and suggestive. It’s great. It’s lovely that everybody can have a different take on music, where you can get the lyrics wrong in your mind, and it may mean something entirely different to you than anybody else in the world.
NS: You wrote the song ‘Igor Said’ about a doorman in the downtown east side, right? At the Smilin’ Buddah?
TB: That was really a special place for all of us, because that was our bar. There were other places where the punk bands could play, like hall gigs and things like that, so it wasn’t like it was the only thing around, but it was a small bar, and it was only punk. Pointed Sticks never played there in Pointed Sticks, but we all played there in fuck bands, and it was just always fun.
Before you’d get in there, you’d meet Igor, and in those days, a lot of places would have the little cage, where you pay the cashier, so Igor would stand behind this window, and really all you could see was his chest and some of his gut. He was an enormous guy, and his head would disappear at the top, and all you would hear is, “You got I.D.?” He would hassle people for I.D. and take the money. He’s still around. He works at the Carnegie. He’s a pretty neat guy.
In some ways, that song contains the nod to him, and it’s a nod to the atmosphere and the events of that time. I got The Dishrags to sing on that song, and also Johnny Ferrerria, who played sax with the band does some honkin’ on the baritone.
NS: Did you have any songs left in the can when you guys broke up?
TB: No, not really. We recorded ‘Found Another Boy’. There was a live recording of that, and we did it as a flipside to Japanese Fan, and at that time, we didn’t have any plans for any kind of album. It was just the one little single we were gonna do to say, “Hello. Here’s a single.”
NS: What’s your favourite song?
TB: They change so often. I probably have about 7 or 8 favourites.
NS: Was it hard to get the band back into live-show form?
TB: Working out the old songs was really easy, actually. Other than getting a little bit mixed up about the evolving changes, like when we would flip a verse around and turn it into a chorus, or flip the chords in the verse to use for the solo, shit like that we might forget, but for the most part, we had all the feel and all that together. We were certainly rusty, but it didn’t take long to get the WD out.
NS: You said you don’t consider yourselves a touring band anymore, but will you be hitting the road to promote this new record?
TB: Only if we’re just standing on the corner, trying to sell them. We don’t have any plans to go on a tour. Generally, we just wait for the phone to ring, and if it’s an interesting enough offer, and we’re able to do it time-wise, then we try to do it.
NS: So no 40-date tour?
TB: No, but what a movie that would make! Out there in Japan with our attendants.
NS: Any Spinal Tap moments over in Japan?
TB: Hmmmmm. Not really so much. There was quite a lot of drinking involved. Their system is a bit different over there. The gig ends relatively early and then many people form the gig will then go out to a large restaurant and eat and drink together until 4 o’clock in the morning.
NS: If the expenses were paid, you’d be back in Japan in a heartbeat, wouldn’t you?
TB: Oh definitely! We’d figure out a way to make that happen.
NS: Do you know who shot the Youtube videos of you guys in Japan?
TB: Some of those videos are actually shot by a guy from Toronto named Mike Ramone, who actually flew from Toronto to Tokyo to see us. He figured they would be our only shows. We never could find him to hang out much, we just talked to him a little bit after the show, and then he was off doing his other things.
NS: Expecting a lot of old friends out for your 2 shows on the 19th?
TB: Oh, I hope so. As far as the Rio goes, my big message is: Get to a record store and buy tickets! That’s just about the only way to get tickets, is to buy them at the record store. I’m sure they’ll have them at the door, but it doesn’t hold that many people, but they’re pulling out some more chairs to make some more room up front.
NS: Any Special Guests making appearances at the shows? Will there be saxophone?
TB: Yeah, we are having some visitors. Johnny is definitely making an appearance. We wanted to have a show that was just good bands, a good old fashioned hall gig, where it wasn’t all about the main bands. It was about all of the bands, because everybody has fans, you know? We may get ourselves blown off the stage, but you know, we’re much older than them.
NS: Are you already in talks about the Next record?
TB: Oh yeah! In fact, we’ve already recorded the next 3 records. We’ve got them in the can, and they’re going to be released post-humously. (laughs) No, we were all so excited about this record, that we started joking about our next one, and writing more songs for it, so the jokes will turn into reality, I’m sure. We all like writing songs, and we have a good time playing them with each other.
**The Pointed Sticks: Three Lefts Make A Right Release Party takes place with TWO shows at the Rio Theatre (Broadway & Commercial) on Saturday, Dec 19th. All Ages Show at 2PM with The Evaporators and Pretty Vanilla! Licensed 19+ Show at 8PM with The TVees and Strange Magic!
**Three Lefts Make A Right is now available on CD, vinyl and digital download. Visit your local retailers or www.thepointedsticks.com to get a copy!
Pointed Sticks Day!
by Nathan Stafford
December 19th, 2009 was officially Pointed Sticks Day in East Vancouver.
The release party for the band’s return album on Northern Electric, Three Lefts Make A Right was a buzz event, rockin’ the house with 2 Shows at the fabulous Rio Theatre.
An All-Ager in the afternoon with guests The Evaporators and Pretty Vanilla
and
The Main Event at 9PM with The Strange Magic and The TVees.
*with special guests: The Dishrags Johnny Ferreira
Two great line-ups and a chance to see one of this city’s most exciting live bands, maybe ever! I first heard of them when I bought a re-issue of the Vancouver Complication record. (track #1 “The Marching Song”) but their story is legendary in this city. What can you expect to see live?
It’s 9PM, the Rio lobby is buzzing, with merch flying, drinks flowing, and popcorn popping! It feels like Record Store Day in some way. Stepping inside, I sat down and tuned into The Strange Magic, who are sounding great up there. Todd Simco sat in for several songs, he’s co-producer of their New EP with Kurt Dahle. Good songwriting in this band, coming from all angles. “Star 69”!
Next up, the TVees garaged the place up instantly with some good jangly business and gettin’ all worked up. I think the band is almost as excited to see the Pointed Sticks as they are to play this show! I really liked the tone on the bassist’s Rickenbacker. These guys are a serious party band! Watch out!
Now onto the Big Show. The projector starts up with images on the back wall; early Pointed Sticks photos, videos, and some more recent footage from the Japan Tour. That’s great production value. If you’re having a show in a movie theatre, why not use what you have?
Tony, Nick, Bill, Gord and Ian take the stage to a huge cheer! Everybody in the place is geared for this moment, and we’re whipped right into the madness. People are dancing, singing along, smiling, hugging and having a great time! It’s cool to see that.
“Scrambled Eggs” is still my favourite from Three Lefts, and experiencing those gang vocal harmonies with the tight musicianship of everybody and their expert delivery kicked ass. We’re here to celebrate this album, and the new songs like “Wireless”, “Igor Said” and “She’s Not Alone Anymore” have great energy & feel, just like the classics, “Found Another Boy” “Somebody’s Mom” and songs from Waiting For The Real Thing sounded spectacular. These guys sound so polished, so together, it’s unreal.
The encore featured a very special rendition of “Power Pop Santa” with The Dishrags and Johnny Ferreira, really capturing the moment; friends rocking together for friends.
Encore #2 brought about some pretty huge smiles. The last song was “Out of Luck”. Those keyboards, the guitars, everything was perfectly surmised into an exclamation point. Now the night has ended, but you always crave more. No word on future shows, but if you need me, I’ll be at home spinning the new record till 4AM!
Three Lefts Make A Right is now available where good music is sold. Check out www.thepointedsticks.com too. Pointed Sticks Are Fun!
December 19th, 2009 was officially Pointed Sticks Day in East Vancouver.
The release party for the band’s return album on Northern Electric, Three Lefts Make A Right was a buzz event, rockin’ the house with 2 Shows at the fabulous Rio Theatre.
An All-Ager in the afternoon with guests The Evaporators and Pretty Vanilla
and
The Main Event at 9PM with The Strange Magic and The TVees.
*with special guests: The Dishrags Johnny Ferreira
Two great line-ups and a chance to see one of this city’s most exciting live bands, maybe ever! I first heard of them when I bought a re-issue of the Vancouver Complication record. (track #1 “The Marching Song”) but their story is legendary in this city. What can you expect to see live?
It’s 9PM, the Rio lobby is buzzing, with merch flying, drinks flowing, and popcorn popping! It feels like Record Store Day in some way. Stepping inside, I sat down and tuned into The Strange Magic, who are sounding great up there. Todd Simco sat in for several songs, he’s co-producer of their New EP with Kurt Dahle. Good songwriting in this band, coming from all angles. “Star 69”!
Next up, the TVees garaged the place up instantly with some good jangly business and gettin’ all worked up. I think the band is almost as excited to see the Pointed Sticks as they are to play this show! I really liked the tone on the bassist’s Rickenbacker. These guys are a serious party band! Watch out!
Now onto the Big Show. The projector starts up with images on the back wall; early Pointed Sticks photos, videos, and some more recent footage from the Japan Tour. That’s great production value. If you’re having a show in a movie theatre, why not use what you have?
Tony, Nick, Bill, Gord and Ian take the stage to a huge cheer! Everybody in the place is geared for this moment, and we’re whipped right into the madness. People are dancing, singing along, smiling, hugging and having a great time! It’s cool to see that.
“Scrambled Eggs” is still my favourite from Three Lefts, and experiencing those gang vocal harmonies with the tight musicianship of everybody and their expert delivery kicked ass. We’re here to celebrate this album, and the new songs like “Wireless”, “Igor Said” and “She’s Not Alone Anymore” have great energy & feel, just like the classics, “Found Another Boy” “Somebody’s Mom” and songs from Waiting For The Real Thing sounded spectacular. These guys sound so polished, so together, it’s unreal.
The encore featured a very special rendition of “Power Pop Santa” with The Dishrags and Johnny Ferreira, really capturing the moment; friends rocking together for friends.
Encore #2 brought about some pretty huge smiles. The last song was “Out of Luck”. Those keyboards, the guitars, everything was perfectly surmised into an exclamation point. Now the night has ended, but you always crave more. No word on future shows, but if you need me, I’ll be at home spinning the new record till 4AM!
Three Lefts Make A Right is now available where good music is sold. Check out www.thepointedsticks.com too. Pointed Sticks Are Fun!
Collapsing Opposites' Ryan McCormick
by Nathan Stafford
Local audio-art ensemble Collapsing Opposites is about to release a new album called ‘In Time’. The group’s sounds have evolved and grown since 2002’s ‘Demonstration’, but there has always been a strong visual element to the music. With ‘In Time’, the group’s first vinyl full-length, there’s a lot to sink one’s teeth into.
Here is the back-and-forth I had with Ryan, 2 weeks prior to the release of ‘In Time’:
Says Ryan: There is a strong visual / multimedia presence with this group; our audio art affects our visual art and our visual art affects our audio art. Our last album 'Inside Chance' was closely connected with an art installation I did called The Game of Life - the art show came after the album, but it was based on some of the same ideas and took them in different directions than the music could. More recently, at the same time as we were working on our new album 'In Time,' we were involved with an art project called Whose Museum, and ideas from the album and the museum became intertwined. Our forthcoming video for the song 'Diamond Mind' as well as the cover art for 'In Time' contain references to both the songs and the museum.
NS: Did Chriss-a-riffic play on this record? He’s played with you before, correct?
RM: Chris plays the Rhodes keyboard in the choruses of our song Diamond Mind. I believe I first met Chris at the Pic Pub in 2003, but got to know him a lot better during the 4 years we were bandmates in They Shoot Horses, Don't They?. He is certainly one of our best friends, and we have worked with him a lot before. He was actually a member of our band briefly last year, as he came on tour across Canada with us, playing keyboard in Collapsing Opposites as well as doing his own Bible Belts set. Bible Belts and Collapsing Opposites released a split seven-inch record last year. We currently practice in Chris's garage - a place called The Shed.
NS: The new record has 2 sides: Songs About Living, and Songs About Rock. Could you explain those titles?
RM: What we have here, essentially, are the two primary archetypes of temporal existence: that which is living, and that which is dead.
On one side, there is the time that passes by in one's life, transitioning from birth to infancy to childhood to adolescence to young adulthood to middle age to the golden years to death. It includes such milestones as work, relationships, money, politics, sex, knowledge, and purpose.
On the other side, we have a much longer vision of time, where rocks slowly crumble into dust and join back together with a larger rock such as Earth. From time to time a rock becomes so massive that it ignites and becomes what we call a star, such as The Sun. Planets change, stars supernova, but matter cannot be created or destroyed. This is known as the First Law of Thermodynamics.
The two sides of this record explore these two aspects of time - the living and the rock. Of course we are ultimately interested in reaching a synthesis, and we hope that by providing some suggestive thoughts on the topic of time, our listeners will be able to formulate their own conclusions.
NS: Fascinating stuff. Hey, I really like the intro on the song ‘No One’. You play this ambient-noise stuff for almost 2 minutes, and then it gets really rockin’. Was it written that way, or did it just come out in the studio?
RM: We knew we wanted a long drawn-out intro, but no, we hadn't written anything out on paper. In the studio we sort of jammed on the song for about twenty minutes - as I recall, we actually played the rocking part first and then devolved into more abstract noise-y stuff. At home, we edited it and moved some pieces around and picked the best parts to use as our bed tracks. Keyboards and vocals were overdubbed later.
NS: So you’ve decided to release this album on vinyl. You’ve also released your music on cassette in the past. Why vinyl at this stage?
RM: We are very interested in using media with two sides. We know that truth is multi-faceted and it is an overly-simplistic view to say that there are only two sides to every issue, but the human mind is limited in capacity and it is often helpful to think in terms of the binary - even if there are several intersecting binaries operating at once. Two-sided media like records and tapes add a new layer of meaning to a work and an artist can use it to their advantage in reinforcing a binary concept. In our cassette it was 'Music' and 'Words', and in this new record it's 'Songs About Living' and 'Songs About Rock.'
NS: You’re going totally DIY with the distro of this record. What are the benefits and drawbacks of releasing this record yourself?
RM: This is a question I could talk a lot about, but for now I'll just say that it's incredibly liberating to think of a band or album as an art project rather than a career and to think of music as a community rather than an industry.
NS: Speaking of community, you are giving away your earlier recordings for free over at your website. How come?
RM: What we've been doing is making the recordings available for free after the physical copies have all been sold. Usually by the time that happens we have moved on to new things and don't want to spend money and time re-printing old stuff - but we also don't want it to be lost forever. It costs us nothing to put it online, so we do that. I would recommend it to anyone who sells out of a recording and doesn't plan on making any more. Why let your work get lost forever?
NS: Will you be hitting the road to promote ‘In Time’?
RM: We are doing a short Northwest US tour in February, and are planning a much longer cross-Canada and European tour for May-July. I'm sure there will be various Vancouver shows scattered in and amongst the tours, but we haven't got anything specific set up yet.
NS: Anything else you’d like to add?
RM: We've been heavily involved with a non-profit organization called the Safe Amplification Site Society - this is very relevant to the Vancouver music communities and I bet many of your readers would be interested. They can find out more at www.safeamp.org
NS: When is the new record available?
RM: The release party is Jan 29 at Little Mountain Gallery. We may have copies available sooner - possibly before xmas - but we don't have an exact date yet. If anyone wants to buy a copy before the release party they can email ryan@collapsingopposites.com to make the arrangements.
NS: And they can find out more about tour dates, music and Collapsing Opposites news over at www.collapsingopposites.com
Thanks for your time, Ryan! Best of luck with the new release!
Local audio-art ensemble Collapsing Opposites is about to release a new album called ‘In Time’. The group’s sounds have evolved and grown since 2002’s ‘Demonstration’, but there has always been a strong visual element to the music. With ‘In Time’, the group’s first vinyl full-length, there’s a lot to sink one’s teeth into.
Here is the back-and-forth I had with Ryan, 2 weeks prior to the release of ‘In Time’:
Says Ryan: There is a strong visual / multimedia presence with this group; our audio art affects our visual art and our visual art affects our audio art. Our last album 'Inside Chance' was closely connected with an art installation I did called The Game of Life - the art show came after the album, but it was based on some of the same ideas and took them in different directions than the music could. More recently, at the same time as we were working on our new album 'In Time,' we were involved with an art project called Whose Museum, and ideas from the album and the museum became intertwined. Our forthcoming video for the song 'Diamond Mind' as well as the cover art for 'In Time' contain references to both the songs and the museum.
NS: Did Chriss-a-riffic play on this record? He’s played with you before, correct?
RM: Chris plays the Rhodes keyboard in the choruses of our song Diamond Mind. I believe I first met Chris at the Pic Pub in 2003, but got to know him a lot better during the 4 years we were bandmates in They Shoot Horses, Don't They?. He is certainly one of our best friends, and we have worked with him a lot before. He was actually a member of our band briefly last year, as he came on tour across Canada with us, playing keyboard in Collapsing Opposites as well as doing his own Bible Belts set. Bible Belts and Collapsing Opposites released a split seven-inch record last year. We currently practice in Chris's garage - a place called The Shed.
NS: The new record has 2 sides: Songs About Living, and Songs About Rock. Could you explain those titles?
RM: What we have here, essentially, are the two primary archetypes of temporal existence: that which is living, and that which is dead.
On one side, there is the time that passes by in one's life, transitioning from birth to infancy to childhood to adolescence to young adulthood to middle age to the golden years to death. It includes such milestones as work, relationships, money, politics, sex, knowledge, and purpose.
On the other side, we have a much longer vision of time, where rocks slowly crumble into dust and join back together with a larger rock such as Earth. From time to time a rock becomes so massive that it ignites and becomes what we call a star, such as The Sun. Planets change, stars supernova, but matter cannot be created or destroyed. This is known as the First Law of Thermodynamics.
The two sides of this record explore these two aspects of time - the living and the rock. Of course we are ultimately interested in reaching a synthesis, and we hope that by providing some suggestive thoughts on the topic of time, our listeners will be able to formulate their own conclusions.
NS: Fascinating stuff. Hey, I really like the intro on the song ‘No One’. You play this ambient-noise stuff for almost 2 minutes, and then it gets really rockin’. Was it written that way, or did it just come out in the studio?
RM: We knew we wanted a long drawn-out intro, but no, we hadn't written anything out on paper. In the studio we sort of jammed on the song for about twenty minutes - as I recall, we actually played the rocking part first and then devolved into more abstract noise-y stuff. At home, we edited it and moved some pieces around and picked the best parts to use as our bed tracks. Keyboards and vocals were overdubbed later.
NS: So you’ve decided to release this album on vinyl. You’ve also released your music on cassette in the past. Why vinyl at this stage?
RM: We are very interested in using media with two sides. We know that truth is multi-faceted and it is an overly-simplistic view to say that there are only two sides to every issue, but the human mind is limited in capacity and it is often helpful to think in terms of the binary - even if there are several intersecting binaries operating at once. Two-sided media like records and tapes add a new layer of meaning to a work and an artist can use it to their advantage in reinforcing a binary concept. In our cassette it was 'Music' and 'Words', and in this new record it's 'Songs About Living' and 'Songs About Rock.'
NS: You’re going totally DIY with the distro of this record. What are the benefits and drawbacks of releasing this record yourself?
RM: This is a question I could talk a lot about, but for now I'll just say that it's incredibly liberating to think of a band or album as an art project rather than a career and to think of music as a community rather than an industry.
NS: Speaking of community, you are giving away your earlier recordings for free over at your website. How come?
RM: What we've been doing is making the recordings available for free after the physical copies have all been sold. Usually by the time that happens we have moved on to new things and don't want to spend money and time re-printing old stuff - but we also don't want it to be lost forever. It costs us nothing to put it online, so we do that. I would recommend it to anyone who sells out of a recording and doesn't plan on making any more. Why let your work get lost forever?
NS: Will you be hitting the road to promote ‘In Time’?
RM: We are doing a short Northwest US tour in February, and are planning a much longer cross-Canada and European tour for May-July. I'm sure there will be various Vancouver shows scattered in and amongst the tours, but we haven't got anything specific set up yet.
NS: Anything else you’d like to add?
RM: We've been heavily involved with a non-profit organization called the Safe Amplification Site Society - this is very relevant to the Vancouver music communities and I bet many of your readers would be interested. They can find out more at www.safeamp.org
NS: When is the new record available?
RM: The release party is Jan 29 at Little Mountain Gallery. We may have copies available sooner - possibly before xmas - but we don't have an exact date yet. If anyone wants to buy a copy before the release party they can email ryan@collapsingopposites.com to make the arrangements.
NS: And they can find out more about tour dates, music and Collapsing Opposites news over at www.collapsingopposites.com
Thanks for your time, Ryan! Best of luck with the new release!
CJ Leon’s Street Corner Gothic
*Free Download at myspace.com/cjleonspoken
Writer & Composer Clinton John Leon has a new album out, and it’s filed under the new-to-me genre of Gothic Jazz. Emotive, simplistic, effective, and impractical, with lyrics that’ll make you give your head a shake at times. So sad, but funny and sincere in its dark originality. There is humour in bleakness.
With song titles like “Hot Stalker”, “Whore Babylon Blues” and “Dying Too Slowly”, you can’t expect party rockers on this album. I found a touch of Tom Waits in some of the tracks; especially in the way CJ describes his seedy scenes and characters. There was no Waitsian Growl to be found, although I think he could probably pull it off.
Listening to the track “My Music” gave me a glimpse into CJ’s life. He sings, “Nobody gives a damn about my music, but I don’t really have a choice. If I don’t write, and I don’t sing it, I can’t sleep, and get hemorrhoids.” Seriously, that’s gotta suck.
This album left me wondering, who is this CJ Leon? By googling him, I found out he has released quite a large amount of material. 3 CDs of music and spoken word, along with books, an industrial noise project that intrigues me, and a slew of videos. The more I listen & watch, the more mysterious he seems to be. Another hidden gem presents itself in this crazy city.
Diagnosis: Street Corner Gothic isn’t going to be everybody’s cup of tea right off the top; it’s not music you’d listen to all the time. I’m going to recommend this album for fans of strange, vaudevillian-type music, or anyone who wants to escape into someone else’s skin; into his extremely dark sense of humour; into his dream world. This guy is a seriously skilled spoken word artist with some extremely well written pieces. Either way, you can’t go wrong with a free album download.
His youtube videos are entertaining to watch, a sequence of vignettes describing the brutal urban truth of poverty and drug addiction, for example. There’s lot’s more out there from one of the quirkiest, most interesting multi-format artists I’ve encountered in a long time. I’d like to see some live beat poetry from this guy in a club downtown or something. Hey Skinny!
Writer & Composer Clinton John Leon has a new album out, and it’s filed under the new-to-me genre of Gothic Jazz. Emotive, simplistic, effective, and impractical, with lyrics that’ll make you give your head a shake at times. So sad, but funny and sincere in its dark originality. There is humour in bleakness.
With song titles like “Hot Stalker”, “Whore Babylon Blues” and “Dying Too Slowly”, you can’t expect party rockers on this album. I found a touch of Tom Waits in some of the tracks; especially in the way CJ describes his seedy scenes and characters. There was no Waitsian Growl to be found, although I think he could probably pull it off.
Listening to the track “My Music” gave me a glimpse into CJ’s life. He sings, “Nobody gives a damn about my music, but I don’t really have a choice. If I don’t write, and I don’t sing it, I can’t sleep, and get hemorrhoids.” Seriously, that’s gotta suck.
This album left me wondering, who is this CJ Leon? By googling him, I found out he has released quite a large amount of material. 3 CDs of music and spoken word, along with books, an industrial noise project that intrigues me, and a slew of videos. The more I listen & watch, the more mysterious he seems to be. Another hidden gem presents itself in this crazy city.
Diagnosis: Street Corner Gothic isn’t going to be everybody’s cup of tea right off the top; it’s not music you’d listen to all the time. I’m going to recommend this album for fans of strange, vaudevillian-type music, or anyone who wants to escape into someone else’s skin; into his extremely dark sense of humour; into his dream world. This guy is a seriously skilled spoken word artist with some extremely well written pieces. Either way, you can’t go wrong with a free album download.
His youtube videos are entertaining to watch, a sequence of vignettes describing the brutal urban truth of poverty and drug addiction, for example. There’s lot’s more out there from one of the quirkiest, most interesting multi-format artists I’ve encountered in a long time. I’d like to see some live beat poetry from this guy in a club downtown or something. Hey Skinny!
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Interview with Paul Pigat aka Cousin Harley...
Interview with Cousin Harley Front Man and Solo Artist, Paul Pigat
by Nathan Stafford
We’re gearing up for the Nov 14th CD Release Party for ‘Boxcar Campfire’, the new acoustic solo album from Paul Pigat, who is otherwise known as the front man of local Rockabilly/Western Swing act Cousin Harley. I spoke with Paul on the phone less than a week before the big show!
NS: Paul, you’re about to release your 1st solo album, and I’ve been listening to it for the last 3 or 4 days now. I really like the songwriting, and I love the stripped-down bare production style. How did the idea for this album first come about?
PP: Well, I’ve been doing this music for quite a long time, but I started playing it live about 6 years ago, and I guess I found myself on the road with Neko Case, playing upright bass for her, and the opening act couldn’t do the tour; we were touring the U.K. She asked myself, Kelly Hogan and Jon Rauhouse to do a Songwriters-In-The-Round for the opening set. I started performing it there, and the response was really good, so I thought maybe it’s time to actually record this stuff.
NS: That was the impetus for it.
PP: Yeah, that was the get-up-and-go to actually record the record. As I said, I’d been playing that music for quite a long time, and we had a little house gig at Perkowski’s on Commercial Drive, and I saw it through 3 different names as it changed ownership, but it was basically our Sunday night get-together. I never really thought that I was going to do a record with it until that tour.
NS: So, you’ve been writing these songs over a 6-year period?
PP: Let me just pull that up and see what’s on that. I finished the record like 6 months ago, and I’m one of those guys that once it’s done, I just walk away from it for a while. Yeah, these are sort of over the last 6 years I would say. A lot of them are a little more recent than that though.
NS: As I’m listening to the record, I notice a lot of ups and downs. “Papa Come Quick” is a mover and a shaker, and then you’ve got the slower “Nowhere Town”. Was that intentional to have it like a roller coaster, or is that just the way it came out?
PP: That’s kind of the way it came out. I play live a lot, and I’m a live musician mostly, so I try to run my records to feel like the way I would normally run a set. You can’t do a set of all depressing stuff, or your audience is completely wiped out by the end of the set. You’ve got to throw the occasional “Up” tune and a fun little number.
NS: So, you were looking for a live-feel.
PP: Yeah, it’s got an ebb-and-flow to it, and I think the goofy songs like “Sweet Tooth” kind of balance out the darker side of “Dig Me A Hole” and stuff. There’s a balance to it all.
NS: “Corn Liquor” is another great track. Is that autobiographical?
PP: Yes. I played The Wild Oats and Notes Festival in Tofield, Alberta, and it’s a really strange little festival, because you can’t apply to play this festival. He only hand picks bands. It’s this crazy farmer who goes out one year and checks out all the bands at all the festivals that everybody goes to, and then he throws a festival every second year and he invites all his favourite bands out. I think this was the first time I’ve done it. I’m doing it for the 3rd time next year, and you know, we had a great set, lots of good times, and the stage is this converted Quonset hut. He always gets us to close his festival, we’re the closing act, and there’s of course a large amount of free beer for the band. I made my way through that, and I met a fellow that, it wasn’t corn liquor he gave me, it was a bottle of home-made tequila, and I learned my lesson that you shouldn’t open a bottle of home-made tequila at 4:00 in the morning. It’s not the time to start.
NS: Oh, man.
PP: The reason I called it Corn Liquor is, are you familiar with Carolyn Mark?
NS: Yeah.
PP: Carolyn Mark and I are very old friends, and Carolyn was doing the festival as well. Carolyn is of course infatuated with corn, and that was one of the few times I’ve ever drank her under the table, so I was very proud of myself.
NS: Well, you got a song out of it, anyway.
PP: I got a good song out of it. I was pretty happy about that, but I had a massive hangover. There’s nothing worse. Of course you sleep in tents at this festival, so there’s nothing worse than being beaten on by sun at 8 o’clock in the morning, and you’re just completely de-hydrated, and you have to get to the airport and get on a plane. It was horrid.
NS: Well, I’ve been listening to the new record as I said, and then I went back and listened to some of your Cousin Harley material, and it’s quite different. For fans who have heard both, where do you think they will make the connection? You’ve still got the Paul Pigat stamp on it, but do you think that people will necessarily know, if they just heard one song from each, that it was the same guy?
PP: I think that the guitar playing, I mean I’m pretty distinct as a guitar player, so I think most people will hear that. I think they both carry a thread of that traditional country sound, because that’s always been something that, even though I’ve tried to deny it for many years, it seems to be what I do, that sort of rootsy, country, rockabilly thing. I actually think that boxcar is almost an extension of Cousin Harley in a way, it’s just the mellower, sit down and listen version.
NS: Who do you see this album appealing to?
PP: This is for the people that Cousin Harley would be too loud for.
NS: I see. Again, going back to the live show, you’ve got a big one coming up on Nov 14th, and I saw that you had some really great musicians lined up for it: Jesse Zubot, Tommy Babin and Chris Nordquist. Is that going to change the sound of the songs?
PP: No, it’s going to retain its quality. Kind of the point of this stuff is that it’s loose and in the moment, and basically everything except for the mandolin and of course the drums and bass, I play on the record. I play all the banjos, I play all the dobros, all the steel guitars, and I play all the guitars on it, so that’s impossible to do live.
NS: You need a little help from your friends on that one.
PP: Exactly. When I’m performing this, and as I say I’ve been doing this for a while here in Van, I’ll just basically surround myself with a bunch of different musicians, musicians of course that I know, that are friends of mine, and also who I trust to have big ears, and will add stuff to the song. This stuff, some people called it ‘Porch Music’, and if it’s too slick, it won’t work. With Jesse Zubot and Tommy Babin and Chris Nordquist, although Tommy has been doing this stuff with me for quite a long time, it’s going to have a really cool, loose feel. They’re all different players, except for Tommy, that were on the record, but they’re all fantastic guys, and they’re going to hear exactly what they want to do. I also want to hear what they can bring to it, and it’s always interesting for me when I’m on stage and I hear something completely new from somebody, and it helps me find new things, because I basically try to improvise as much as possible, even with this stuff.
NS: So then, every live experience is going to be different each time, depending on who you have onboard.
PP: Absolutely.
NS: Do you see a live album in your future for this project?
PP: For this project, I wish we had been able to record that band that I did the U.K. with, with Neko’s band; Paul Rigby on bass, Jon Rauhouse on steel guitar and banjo, and Barry was on the record as well, but that moment, that one tour had a certain vibe to it that was really spooky music, especially with Jon Rauhouse playing banjo. I think if I found the right group of people and the right opportunity, I would be more than happy to do a live recording of this, and have sort of a revolving band, where you could have 15 different players over the course of the live recording. That would be fun.
NS: Sort of like a “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” kind of thing.
PP: Exactly, but I’m also into small ensembles. A quartet is generally the biggest band I tend to front. I like the open spaces of not having too many people onstage, so we have to figure out a way to get everybody to revolve.
NS: I heard you’re a bit of a collector. How many instruments do you own?
PP: I have no idea… It’s somewhere around 30. Between mandolins, banjos, guitars, steel guitars, erhus, upright basses.
NS: And of course amps too, right?
PP: Lots of amps. I’ve actually just started thinning out the amp herd. I sold a couple of amps in the last few weeks. Amps are just big and heavy. I’d love to have all the great amps, I’d love to have a Vox AC30, but they just take up too much space, and there’s really not much space left in my apartment.
NS: Too much to carry around too, right?
PP: Yeah, as I get older, my amps get smaller.
NS: Isn’t that why you quit playing drums originally, because it was too much to carry around?
PP: Wow, you did some research! My original interest in music was to become a drummer, and my brother convinced me that, “You don’t want to play the drums, look at all the stuff you gotta carry around!” Not realizing that when I was gigging, when I was 12 or 13, I was gigging with about a 1971 Super Reverb, which is a pretty large amp for a 12 year old to be carrying around. I might have been better off with the drums!
NS: Gigging at 12! I couldn’t believe that. What sort of shows were you playing then? You were in garage bands before that, right?
PP: I ended up meeting one of my best friends when I went to Junior High School, and he and I were both very large for our age, him even bigger than I was, and I remember our first gig was at a mall, but our second gig was at a roadhouse bar that was just up the street from me in Toronto. Toronto had Roadhouse bars, but not anymore. We had a house gig there, we played once every two weeks for a couple of years and that got me going. I’d say I probably did that until I was about 15, and then I took a year off, I kind of got bored with it all, and then I went to a school of the arts for a while, and one of the guys that I was teaching guitar to there convinced me to go down to Grossman’s, which was the cornerstone of Toronto’s Blues scene, and I went down once and never stopped gigging after that.
NS: At what point did you transition from playing other people’s music to wanting to compose your own music?
PP: That was pretty much when Cousin Harley started. I’ve always written my own stuff, because I do a lot of fingerstyle guitar as well, but never lyrical music, never wordy kind of stuff. Cousin Harley kind of got me started on that, and I was sort of hanging around with Carolyn Mark and Tolan McNeil and all these great songwriters I really respected, and I figured, “Well, I’ll give it a shot.”
NS: Did you come from a musical background? Were your parents involved in music at all?
PP: No. In fact, I can’t remember any music in my house, other than my brother’s record collection. My parents never listened to music, there were no musical instruments in the house whatsoever. My brother did have a great classic rock, early heavy metal and new-wave record collection.
NS: Early heavy metal, as in Judas Priest?
PP: More like Black Sabbath. Sabbath and Mountain, and stuff like that. I started listening to all of that stuff, and then every once in a while, I would pull out a BB King record or something, and then pull out a Madness record. It was a pretty interesting collection, which is strange, because he doesn’t really listen to music anymore. It’s a drag, because he had such great taste as a kid.
NS: From Black Sabbath to Madness. You had a lot of influences. Danny Gatton was a big influence for you, right?
PP: Oh, huge influence for me, yeah. Not so much on the boxcar stuff, but for everything else, he’s always been the guy. There are other guys as well, like there’s Tal Farlow and Les Paul and Charlie Christian, but the first time I heard Danny Gatton play, I knew that I was going to follow that route of guitar playing.
NS: I like your baritone on this record. When did you start singing?
PP: I became a singer because I had to when I moved out West. There were no gigs for me. I never had that experience before, where I was looking for work. I always had enough gigs to make a living, but I moved to Victoria, so I had to make my own gigs. I started sort of a swing band, and I started getting into the crooning stuff, and a little more of the Cabaret stuff. I think there’s a bit of a Cabaret element to Boxcar as well. I don’t know if it’s audible, but I hear it as certain Cabaret tunes, and of course the Blues has always been there.
NS: You never really got into jazz though, did you?
PP: I’ve always loved jazz, and I had a jazz trio for quite a long time, but it’s swing jazz. Because I’m classically trained, I perceive music in a different way than jazz musicians. I have a theory degree, and the way classical musicians approach harmony and theory is very different from the way jazz musicians do. It’s always been a goal of mine to completely understand jazz guitar, but there may be a jazz record one day. I would hope so.
NS: You did play at the Vancouver Jazz Festival though, didn’t you?
PP: I did play the Jazz Fest. That was really fun! I didn’t realize that when they asked me to do the show, because it was Jesse Cahill, who is my drummer in Cousin Harley, he invited me down to sing this song for this tribute to Jimmy Smith, and I know that he’s got a band called The Nightcrawlers that’s an organ band quartet, so I figured that it was just going to be, you know I’d show up to the Cellar, and there would just be an organ quartet. I had no idea that there was going to be a 16-piece Big Band. It was awesome! I got to do the big outdoor show with them the next day, and it was really fun. I love playing with Bill Coon, you know I don’t get a chance to do that very often, and Bill is a fantastic guitar player. We got to trade a few things back and forth, and it was nice to play with that many horns behind you.
NS: Congratulations on your Gretsch Guitars endorsement!
PP: Thank you.
NS: That’s huge! Has that been in the works for a while, or did that some from Viva Las Vegas?
PP: It’s all from Las Vegas. I went to Vegas, and the guys from the Gretsch Appreciation Society, which does the Gretsch Discussion Pages, who aren’t really affiliated with Gretsch Guitars, they’re just fans, asked me if I would do an interview for them, because a lot of them have bought my instructional DVDs. They said, “Meet us at the Gretsch booth”, and Tim, the person from the Gretsch Pages introduced me to Joe Carducci, and Joe is one of the bigwigs for Gretsch. He asked me if I would like to play their guitar for the festival, and I already have a lot of nice guitars, but I really wanted to play their amp. I knew their amp was going to be good, so I said, “Yeah, I’d be more than happy to play your guitar if I can use your amps as well.” I didn’t think I was going to use the guitar for the whole set, and then I ended up using it for the whole set, because I just fell in love with it when I was onstage. I got offstage, and they asked me where they could send this rig, because they wanted to give it to me, and then we had a meeting the next day, and we talked a little bit about the endorsement deal, and if they wanted a clinicnian, and Gretsch really hadn’t decided if they were going to have a clinician. They just told me they would contact me, and then a month later, they flew me down to Scottsdale, Arizona to meet all the guys at Fender, and then I was their clinician. It’s a great gig.
NS: So, your DVDs led them to discover you in a way?
PP: In a way. I don’t think the guys at Gretsch really knew about my DVDs at all. It was basically that show. I just got on the stage and Cousin Harley played the set that we would normally do, and they just loved it. It was recorded, and filmed, and we did an interview for them and all that stuff, but it was basically out of that 70-minute show that sealed that deal.
NS: So now you’re travelling around North America doing clinics and workshops, keeping busy with that.
PP: Yeah, I hope to do a lot more! They’re fun.
NS: What do you enjoy most about doing clinics?
PP: Well, I get to meet a lot of people that I sort of met through the Internet. My email address is actually quite easy to find. I get people from all over the world emailing me about my DVD and stuff like that, so this is an opportunity for these people to finally come out and I get to meet them face-to-face, so that’s really great. Also, I’m a guitar gear head, and I’m in music stores all the time.
NS: Sort of like a kid in a candy store.
PP: Oh yeah, I could have spent everything I made ten times over on this last tour. (laughs) I have a problem.
NS: To get ready for teaching, you must have had a good teacher that showed you the ropes, not just with guitar playing, but also someone who showed you how to teach.
PP: Absolutely. I had a great teacher. I’ve had many great teachers all through High School and all that stuff, but my University professor Eli Kassner really got me started on figuring out how to teach properly, because I studied with him for 4 years in university, and he offered me a job in my second year of university to teach at his studio. I had already been teaching a little bit at that point, because I taught the younger students at the School of the Arts as well, but I really didn’t understand how to teach then, and just being able to study with Eli, and hang around with the people that hung around with Eli. I’ve sat down and had tea and crumpets with John Williams, because Eli was pretty well known in the classical music scene. He taught Liona Boyd, and he studied with Segovia, so he was hooked in.
I got to meet a lot of great people through Eli, and Eli was always the cat in the University who was completely open-minded. You wouldn’t expect it. He’s an older man, he’s in his late-80’s now, so I met him when he was about 55 and he loved that I played the Blues. I think I’d been a student for 3 months and he asked me to play for his 65th birthday party, and it was Ed Bickert, Liona Boyd, Lighthouse, and my blues band. We were terrible! You’ve got guys like Ed Bickert onstage, probably the best Canadian jazz guitar player of all time, and then I’m trying to hack my way through a Chicago electric blues kind of thing. It was pretty funny, but Eli always loved it. He’d throw these parties, and whenever there was a classical guitar player touring from another country, he would always throw a party for them, and all of his students would be invited, and 9 times out of 10, he would have the guitar player do a recital, and there was always this old beat-up Telecaster sitting in the corner and he would insist that I jam a Blues tune with him. It’s really strange when you’re trying to jam a Blues tune with a Cuban Classical guitar player.
NS: That’s interesting.
PP: Yeah, but he was an awesome cat still is an awesome cat, and he really taught me, first of all how to understand music, and how to teach it.
NS: How to share it.
PP: Yeah, he was really good. He was always supportive. The teachers that crack the whip are not usually very good teachers in my opinion. I’m more of a constant encouragement kind of guy.
NS: I was just listening to “Boxcar Campfire” before we spoke, and there are some really strong songs on there, but what I think it needs is exposure. Exposure is the key, so what are you going to do to expose this music, and what do you think is the biggest hurdle that you face, as far as exposure?
PP: Well, the biggest hurdle is that not many people know who I am. Cousin Harley has a certain reputation in certain scenes, and we’ve got sales in Holland and what not, but Cousin Harley is its own entity. The DVDs have done really well, so my name is out there for that, but people only see me as this rockabilly guitar player. That’s going to be a big hurdle, is to get the singer/songwriter thing going on, and getting people to listen to this side of the playing, although there’s still some fine guitar playing on it, but to sort of open up that group of people, the Folk Society people and have them listen to it, since I have no pedigree in that kind of genre, I think that’s the biggest hurdle. The nice thing about Boxcar is that I could tour it relentlessly if I want to, because the hardest thing about touring when you’re in my circumstance is that everybody I play with, we’re all professional musicians, so we all have to play in at least 4 or 5 bands. Coordinating tours can be extremely difficult, however with Boxcar, I could tour that record by myself.
NS: It’s really flexible.
PP: There are some tricky bits to the record, it’s not as straightforward as some may see upon first listen, there are strange bars and 2/4’s thrown into it, but it’s all charted out, should I go to a city and I want a bass player. If I know a bass player who’s living there, I can just say, “Come out to the show. Here are the charts. Let’s go.” That keeps it fresh!
NS: So, Nov 14th is the big Day. Your CD Release Party at St James Hall, but what are your plans after the CD Release? I see you have a couple of gigs with Cousin Harley, in Prince George Dec 4th and here in Vancouver Dec 5th, but what’s next after that? More solo shows?
PP: I’ve got a few more solo shows that’ll probably be just little places on Commercial Drive. Right now, the thing on the plate that we’re working on is actually a lot of Cousin Harley stuff, because we’re going down to the NAAM Show in Anaheim for Gretsch, and they’re flying the whole band down for that one, so that will be really good. I think February I’m going to take off, and I might even get out of town, because I don’t think I want to be here for the antics of the Olympics, but then in March, I’m going to be in the Netherlands with the Sojourners. Kathy, my manager, just got back from Denmark at the WOMEX conference, and there is some interest in the Netherlands with Boxcar, so maybe we’ll try to do a little ground work while we’re there. There’s also the potential for an Australian tour with Cousin Harley as well, so I think I’m just going to try to do as many Boxcar shows as I can, just in-between other stuff. I’ve got to make a living.
NS: I think we’ve covered a lot of ground here, but is there anything else you’d like to add to readers of The Skinny?
PP: I just hope that they come out to the show, and it’s going to be really fun, and the lineup of players, with Chris Nordquist and Jesse Zubot and Tommy Babin, they’re just such fantastic players, and they’ve all got their own specific voice. I’m really excited about what’s going to happen there that night! If you want to hear some good acoustic music, it will be a great night for it.
NS: Finally, if they were to make a movie about your life, what would be the one scene that everybody would still be talking about the next day?
PP: Oh, that’s a good question. I’m not sure that scene has been written yet.
If you’d like to check out the latest scene in Paul Pigat’s life story, you can come down to St James Hall on Nov 14th for a night of great acoustic music. If you can’t make it, you can pick up Paul’s new record ‘Boxcar Campfire’ at such fine local establishments as Red Cat Records, or through www.paulpigat.com
by Nathan Stafford
We’re gearing up for the Nov 14th CD Release Party for ‘Boxcar Campfire’, the new acoustic solo album from Paul Pigat, who is otherwise known as the front man of local Rockabilly/Western Swing act Cousin Harley. I spoke with Paul on the phone less than a week before the big show!
NS: Paul, you’re about to release your 1st solo album, and I’ve been listening to it for the last 3 or 4 days now. I really like the songwriting, and I love the stripped-down bare production style. How did the idea for this album first come about?
PP: Well, I’ve been doing this music for quite a long time, but I started playing it live about 6 years ago, and I guess I found myself on the road with Neko Case, playing upright bass for her, and the opening act couldn’t do the tour; we were touring the U.K. She asked myself, Kelly Hogan and Jon Rauhouse to do a Songwriters-In-The-Round for the opening set. I started performing it there, and the response was really good, so I thought maybe it’s time to actually record this stuff.
NS: That was the impetus for it.
PP: Yeah, that was the get-up-and-go to actually record the record. As I said, I’d been playing that music for quite a long time, and we had a little house gig at Perkowski’s on Commercial Drive, and I saw it through 3 different names as it changed ownership, but it was basically our Sunday night get-together. I never really thought that I was going to do a record with it until that tour.
NS: So, you’ve been writing these songs over a 6-year period?
PP: Let me just pull that up and see what’s on that. I finished the record like 6 months ago, and I’m one of those guys that once it’s done, I just walk away from it for a while. Yeah, these are sort of over the last 6 years I would say. A lot of them are a little more recent than that though.
NS: As I’m listening to the record, I notice a lot of ups and downs. “Papa Come Quick” is a mover and a shaker, and then you’ve got the slower “Nowhere Town”. Was that intentional to have it like a roller coaster, or is that just the way it came out?
PP: That’s kind of the way it came out. I play live a lot, and I’m a live musician mostly, so I try to run my records to feel like the way I would normally run a set. You can’t do a set of all depressing stuff, or your audience is completely wiped out by the end of the set. You’ve got to throw the occasional “Up” tune and a fun little number.
NS: So, you were looking for a live-feel.
PP: Yeah, it’s got an ebb-and-flow to it, and I think the goofy songs like “Sweet Tooth” kind of balance out the darker side of “Dig Me A Hole” and stuff. There’s a balance to it all.
NS: “Corn Liquor” is another great track. Is that autobiographical?
PP: Yes. I played The Wild Oats and Notes Festival in Tofield, Alberta, and it’s a really strange little festival, because you can’t apply to play this festival. He only hand picks bands. It’s this crazy farmer who goes out one year and checks out all the bands at all the festivals that everybody goes to, and then he throws a festival every second year and he invites all his favourite bands out. I think this was the first time I’ve done it. I’m doing it for the 3rd time next year, and you know, we had a great set, lots of good times, and the stage is this converted Quonset hut. He always gets us to close his festival, we’re the closing act, and there’s of course a large amount of free beer for the band. I made my way through that, and I met a fellow that, it wasn’t corn liquor he gave me, it was a bottle of home-made tequila, and I learned my lesson that you shouldn’t open a bottle of home-made tequila at 4:00 in the morning. It’s not the time to start.
NS: Oh, man.
PP: The reason I called it Corn Liquor is, are you familiar with Carolyn Mark?
NS: Yeah.
PP: Carolyn Mark and I are very old friends, and Carolyn was doing the festival as well. Carolyn is of course infatuated with corn, and that was one of the few times I’ve ever drank her under the table, so I was very proud of myself.
NS: Well, you got a song out of it, anyway.
PP: I got a good song out of it. I was pretty happy about that, but I had a massive hangover. There’s nothing worse. Of course you sleep in tents at this festival, so there’s nothing worse than being beaten on by sun at 8 o’clock in the morning, and you’re just completely de-hydrated, and you have to get to the airport and get on a plane. It was horrid.
NS: Well, I’ve been listening to the new record as I said, and then I went back and listened to some of your Cousin Harley material, and it’s quite different. For fans who have heard both, where do you think they will make the connection? You’ve still got the Paul Pigat stamp on it, but do you think that people will necessarily know, if they just heard one song from each, that it was the same guy?
PP: I think that the guitar playing, I mean I’m pretty distinct as a guitar player, so I think most people will hear that. I think they both carry a thread of that traditional country sound, because that’s always been something that, even though I’ve tried to deny it for many years, it seems to be what I do, that sort of rootsy, country, rockabilly thing. I actually think that boxcar is almost an extension of Cousin Harley in a way, it’s just the mellower, sit down and listen version.
NS: Who do you see this album appealing to?
PP: This is for the people that Cousin Harley would be too loud for.
NS: I see. Again, going back to the live show, you’ve got a big one coming up on Nov 14th, and I saw that you had some really great musicians lined up for it: Jesse Zubot, Tommy Babin and Chris Nordquist. Is that going to change the sound of the songs?
PP: No, it’s going to retain its quality. Kind of the point of this stuff is that it’s loose and in the moment, and basically everything except for the mandolin and of course the drums and bass, I play on the record. I play all the banjos, I play all the dobros, all the steel guitars, and I play all the guitars on it, so that’s impossible to do live.
NS: You need a little help from your friends on that one.
PP: Exactly. When I’m performing this, and as I say I’ve been doing this for a while here in Van, I’ll just basically surround myself with a bunch of different musicians, musicians of course that I know, that are friends of mine, and also who I trust to have big ears, and will add stuff to the song. This stuff, some people called it ‘Porch Music’, and if it’s too slick, it won’t work. With Jesse Zubot and Tommy Babin and Chris Nordquist, although Tommy has been doing this stuff with me for quite a long time, it’s going to have a really cool, loose feel. They’re all different players, except for Tommy, that were on the record, but they’re all fantastic guys, and they’re going to hear exactly what they want to do. I also want to hear what they can bring to it, and it’s always interesting for me when I’m on stage and I hear something completely new from somebody, and it helps me find new things, because I basically try to improvise as much as possible, even with this stuff.
NS: So then, every live experience is going to be different each time, depending on who you have onboard.
PP: Absolutely.
NS: Do you see a live album in your future for this project?
PP: For this project, I wish we had been able to record that band that I did the U.K. with, with Neko’s band; Paul Rigby on bass, Jon Rauhouse on steel guitar and banjo, and Barry was on the record as well, but that moment, that one tour had a certain vibe to it that was really spooky music, especially with Jon Rauhouse playing banjo. I think if I found the right group of people and the right opportunity, I would be more than happy to do a live recording of this, and have sort of a revolving band, where you could have 15 different players over the course of the live recording. That would be fun.
NS: Sort of like a “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” kind of thing.
PP: Exactly, but I’m also into small ensembles. A quartet is generally the biggest band I tend to front. I like the open spaces of not having too many people onstage, so we have to figure out a way to get everybody to revolve.
NS: I heard you’re a bit of a collector. How many instruments do you own?
PP: I have no idea… It’s somewhere around 30. Between mandolins, banjos, guitars, steel guitars, erhus, upright basses.
NS: And of course amps too, right?
PP: Lots of amps. I’ve actually just started thinning out the amp herd. I sold a couple of amps in the last few weeks. Amps are just big and heavy. I’d love to have all the great amps, I’d love to have a Vox AC30, but they just take up too much space, and there’s really not much space left in my apartment.
NS: Too much to carry around too, right?
PP: Yeah, as I get older, my amps get smaller.
NS: Isn’t that why you quit playing drums originally, because it was too much to carry around?
PP: Wow, you did some research! My original interest in music was to become a drummer, and my brother convinced me that, “You don’t want to play the drums, look at all the stuff you gotta carry around!” Not realizing that when I was gigging, when I was 12 or 13, I was gigging with about a 1971 Super Reverb, which is a pretty large amp for a 12 year old to be carrying around. I might have been better off with the drums!
NS: Gigging at 12! I couldn’t believe that. What sort of shows were you playing then? You were in garage bands before that, right?
PP: I ended up meeting one of my best friends when I went to Junior High School, and he and I were both very large for our age, him even bigger than I was, and I remember our first gig was at a mall, but our second gig was at a roadhouse bar that was just up the street from me in Toronto. Toronto had Roadhouse bars, but not anymore. We had a house gig there, we played once every two weeks for a couple of years and that got me going. I’d say I probably did that until I was about 15, and then I took a year off, I kind of got bored with it all, and then I went to a school of the arts for a while, and one of the guys that I was teaching guitar to there convinced me to go down to Grossman’s, which was the cornerstone of Toronto’s Blues scene, and I went down once and never stopped gigging after that.
NS: At what point did you transition from playing other people’s music to wanting to compose your own music?
PP: That was pretty much when Cousin Harley started. I’ve always written my own stuff, because I do a lot of fingerstyle guitar as well, but never lyrical music, never wordy kind of stuff. Cousin Harley kind of got me started on that, and I was sort of hanging around with Carolyn Mark and Tolan McNeil and all these great songwriters I really respected, and I figured, “Well, I’ll give it a shot.”
NS: Did you come from a musical background? Were your parents involved in music at all?
PP: No. In fact, I can’t remember any music in my house, other than my brother’s record collection. My parents never listened to music, there were no musical instruments in the house whatsoever. My brother did have a great classic rock, early heavy metal and new-wave record collection.
NS: Early heavy metal, as in Judas Priest?
PP: More like Black Sabbath. Sabbath and Mountain, and stuff like that. I started listening to all of that stuff, and then every once in a while, I would pull out a BB King record or something, and then pull out a Madness record. It was a pretty interesting collection, which is strange, because he doesn’t really listen to music anymore. It’s a drag, because he had such great taste as a kid.
NS: From Black Sabbath to Madness. You had a lot of influences. Danny Gatton was a big influence for you, right?
PP: Oh, huge influence for me, yeah. Not so much on the boxcar stuff, but for everything else, he’s always been the guy. There are other guys as well, like there’s Tal Farlow and Les Paul and Charlie Christian, but the first time I heard Danny Gatton play, I knew that I was going to follow that route of guitar playing.
NS: I like your baritone on this record. When did you start singing?
PP: I became a singer because I had to when I moved out West. There were no gigs for me. I never had that experience before, where I was looking for work. I always had enough gigs to make a living, but I moved to Victoria, so I had to make my own gigs. I started sort of a swing band, and I started getting into the crooning stuff, and a little more of the Cabaret stuff. I think there’s a bit of a Cabaret element to Boxcar as well. I don’t know if it’s audible, but I hear it as certain Cabaret tunes, and of course the Blues has always been there.
NS: You never really got into jazz though, did you?
PP: I’ve always loved jazz, and I had a jazz trio for quite a long time, but it’s swing jazz. Because I’m classically trained, I perceive music in a different way than jazz musicians. I have a theory degree, and the way classical musicians approach harmony and theory is very different from the way jazz musicians do. It’s always been a goal of mine to completely understand jazz guitar, but there may be a jazz record one day. I would hope so.
NS: You did play at the Vancouver Jazz Festival though, didn’t you?
PP: I did play the Jazz Fest. That was really fun! I didn’t realize that when they asked me to do the show, because it was Jesse Cahill, who is my drummer in Cousin Harley, he invited me down to sing this song for this tribute to Jimmy Smith, and I know that he’s got a band called The Nightcrawlers that’s an organ band quartet, so I figured that it was just going to be, you know I’d show up to the Cellar, and there would just be an organ quartet. I had no idea that there was going to be a 16-piece Big Band. It was awesome! I got to do the big outdoor show with them the next day, and it was really fun. I love playing with Bill Coon, you know I don’t get a chance to do that very often, and Bill is a fantastic guitar player. We got to trade a few things back and forth, and it was nice to play with that many horns behind you.
NS: Congratulations on your Gretsch Guitars endorsement!
PP: Thank you.
NS: That’s huge! Has that been in the works for a while, or did that some from Viva Las Vegas?
PP: It’s all from Las Vegas. I went to Vegas, and the guys from the Gretsch Appreciation Society, which does the Gretsch Discussion Pages, who aren’t really affiliated with Gretsch Guitars, they’re just fans, asked me if I would do an interview for them, because a lot of them have bought my instructional DVDs. They said, “Meet us at the Gretsch booth”, and Tim, the person from the Gretsch Pages introduced me to Joe Carducci, and Joe is one of the bigwigs for Gretsch. He asked me if I would like to play their guitar for the festival, and I already have a lot of nice guitars, but I really wanted to play their amp. I knew their amp was going to be good, so I said, “Yeah, I’d be more than happy to play your guitar if I can use your amps as well.” I didn’t think I was going to use the guitar for the whole set, and then I ended up using it for the whole set, because I just fell in love with it when I was onstage. I got offstage, and they asked me where they could send this rig, because they wanted to give it to me, and then we had a meeting the next day, and we talked a little bit about the endorsement deal, and if they wanted a clinicnian, and Gretsch really hadn’t decided if they were going to have a clinician. They just told me they would contact me, and then a month later, they flew me down to Scottsdale, Arizona to meet all the guys at Fender, and then I was their clinician. It’s a great gig.
NS: So, your DVDs led them to discover you in a way?
PP: In a way. I don’t think the guys at Gretsch really knew about my DVDs at all. It was basically that show. I just got on the stage and Cousin Harley played the set that we would normally do, and they just loved it. It was recorded, and filmed, and we did an interview for them and all that stuff, but it was basically out of that 70-minute show that sealed that deal.
NS: So now you’re travelling around North America doing clinics and workshops, keeping busy with that.
PP: Yeah, I hope to do a lot more! They’re fun.
NS: What do you enjoy most about doing clinics?
PP: Well, I get to meet a lot of people that I sort of met through the Internet. My email address is actually quite easy to find. I get people from all over the world emailing me about my DVD and stuff like that, so this is an opportunity for these people to finally come out and I get to meet them face-to-face, so that’s really great. Also, I’m a guitar gear head, and I’m in music stores all the time.
NS: Sort of like a kid in a candy store.
PP: Oh yeah, I could have spent everything I made ten times over on this last tour. (laughs) I have a problem.
NS: To get ready for teaching, you must have had a good teacher that showed you the ropes, not just with guitar playing, but also someone who showed you how to teach.
PP: Absolutely. I had a great teacher. I’ve had many great teachers all through High School and all that stuff, but my University professor Eli Kassner really got me started on figuring out how to teach properly, because I studied with him for 4 years in university, and he offered me a job in my second year of university to teach at his studio. I had already been teaching a little bit at that point, because I taught the younger students at the School of the Arts as well, but I really didn’t understand how to teach then, and just being able to study with Eli, and hang around with the people that hung around with Eli. I’ve sat down and had tea and crumpets with John Williams, because Eli was pretty well known in the classical music scene. He taught Liona Boyd, and he studied with Segovia, so he was hooked in.
I got to meet a lot of great people through Eli, and Eli was always the cat in the University who was completely open-minded. You wouldn’t expect it. He’s an older man, he’s in his late-80’s now, so I met him when he was about 55 and he loved that I played the Blues. I think I’d been a student for 3 months and he asked me to play for his 65th birthday party, and it was Ed Bickert, Liona Boyd, Lighthouse, and my blues band. We were terrible! You’ve got guys like Ed Bickert onstage, probably the best Canadian jazz guitar player of all time, and then I’m trying to hack my way through a Chicago electric blues kind of thing. It was pretty funny, but Eli always loved it. He’d throw these parties, and whenever there was a classical guitar player touring from another country, he would always throw a party for them, and all of his students would be invited, and 9 times out of 10, he would have the guitar player do a recital, and there was always this old beat-up Telecaster sitting in the corner and he would insist that I jam a Blues tune with him. It’s really strange when you’re trying to jam a Blues tune with a Cuban Classical guitar player.
NS: That’s interesting.
PP: Yeah, but he was an awesome cat still is an awesome cat, and he really taught me, first of all how to understand music, and how to teach it.
NS: How to share it.
PP: Yeah, he was really good. He was always supportive. The teachers that crack the whip are not usually very good teachers in my opinion. I’m more of a constant encouragement kind of guy.
NS: I was just listening to “Boxcar Campfire” before we spoke, and there are some really strong songs on there, but what I think it needs is exposure. Exposure is the key, so what are you going to do to expose this music, and what do you think is the biggest hurdle that you face, as far as exposure?
PP: Well, the biggest hurdle is that not many people know who I am. Cousin Harley has a certain reputation in certain scenes, and we’ve got sales in Holland and what not, but Cousin Harley is its own entity. The DVDs have done really well, so my name is out there for that, but people only see me as this rockabilly guitar player. That’s going to be a big hurdle, is to get the singer/songwriter thing going on, and getting people to listen to this side of the playing, although there’s still some fine guitar playing on it, but to sort of open up that group of people, the Folk Society people and have them listen to it, since I have no pedigree in that kind of genre, I think that’s the biggest hurdle. The nice thing about Boxcar is that I could tour it relentlessly if I want to, because the hardest thing about touring when you’re in my circumstance is that everybody I play with, we’re all professional musicians, so we all have to play in at least 4 or 5 bands. Coordinating tours can be extremely difficult, however with Boxcar, I could tour that record by myself.
NS: It’s really flexible.
PP: There are some tricky bits to the record, it’s not as straightforward as some may see upon first listen, there are strange bars and 2/4’s thrown into it, but it’s all charted out, should I go to a city and I want a bass player. If I know a bass player who’s living there, I can just say, “Come out to the show. Here are the charts. Let’s go.” That keeps it fresh!
NS: So, Nov 14th is the big Day. Your CD Release Party at St James Hall, but what are your plans after the CD Release? I see you have a couple of gigs with Cousin Harley, in Prince George Dec 4th and here in Vancouver Dec 5th, but what’s next after that? More solo shows?
PP: I’ve got a few more solo shows that’ll probably be just little places on Commercial Drive. Right now, the thing on the plate that we’re working on is actually a lot of Cousin Harley stuff, because we’re going down to the NAAM Show in Anaheim for Gretsch, and they’re flying the whole band down for that one, so that will be really good. I think February I’m going to take off, and I might even get out of town, because I don’t think I want to be here for the antics of the Olympics, but then in March, I’m going to be in the Netherlands with the Sojourners. Kathy, my manager, just got back from Denmark at the WOMEX conference, and there is some interest in the Netherlands with Boxcar, so maybe we’ll try to do a little ground work while we’re there. There’s also the potential for an Australian tour with Cousin Harley as well, so I think I’m just going to try to do as many Boxcar shows as I can, just in-between other stuff. I’ve got to make a living.
NS: I think we’ve covered a lot of ground here, but is there anything else you’d like to add to readers of The Skinny?
PP: I just hope that they come out to the show, and it’s going to be really fun, and the lineup of players, with Chris Nordquist and Jesse Zubot and Tommy Babin, they’re just such fantastic players, and they’ve all got their own specific voice. I’m really excited about what’s going to happen there that night! If you want to hear some good acoustic music, it will be a great night for it.
NS: Finally, if they were to make a movie about your life, what would be the one scene that everybody would still be talking about the next day?
PP: Oh, that’s a good question. I’m not sure that scene has been written yet.
If you’d like to check out the latest scene in Paul Pigat’s life story, you can come down to St James Hall on Nov 14th for a night of great acoustic music. If you can’t make it, you can pick up Paul’s new record ‘Boxcar Campfire’ at such fine local establishments as Red Cat Records, or through www.paulpigat.com
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Shonen Knife!
Live Review by Nathan Stafford
It’s a Big Fun Party Tonite! With Osaka, Japan’s #1 Super Group Shonen Knife in town for the first time since ‘07, the rock & roll is here to stay! Who cares that it’s Sunday? Who cares that it’s raining? Who cares that it’s cold outside? It’s nice and hott inside the Biltmore!
The night belongs to “Boy Knife”, but all 3 bands on the bill are amazing. We’re talking Apollo Ghosts, The Strange Magic and of course, a certain all-girl pop/punk trio that was releasing records when I was still in kindergarten.
Arriving early was a good idea, as I caught Apollo Ghosts dishing out some pretty cool minimalist rock, and a disco-Sasquatch number. I misunderstood that one too, but I still loved it. Local sextet The Strange Magic spilled its potion on the dancefloor next, giving everything & more that you’d expect from a big exploratory pop/rock ensemble. The crowd was eating up Kayoko’s eastern-themed pop stylings for some reason. Okay, I like where this thing is going.
And Now…. From across the Pacific…. They’ve been rocking your hearts for nearly 30 Years… It’s Shonen Knife!
Konnichiwa! Hitting the stage in their pastel super-hero outfits and devil-horns held proudly high, the lovely ladies otherwise known as The Osaka Ramones are here for one thing, and one thing only: “Banana Chips”!
“We are so short. You are so tall!” remarked guitarist/singer and sole original member Naoko Yamano. “We’ll make it up with our jumping!”
And they did! The whole crowd was jumping in fact, bopping and screaming along to catchy, straight-ahead winners ‘I Wanna Eat Choco Bars’, ‘BBQ Party’ and the biggest bang of the night, ‘Ramones Forever’.
What a performance! You wouldn’t believe how intense Shonen Knife is onstage! Slashing guitars, ba-booming bass, and a drummer who defies all laws of size & strength. Seriously, the talk of the town was this little drummer girl named Etsuko. She looked about 12-years-old, wore a big ol’ beautiful smile the whole time, and hit the skins so hard, I thought the kit was gonna fall apart on a blast beat! Bassist Ritsuko was feeding off the front row, and did a great job singing ‘Johnny Johnny Johnny’. Oh yeah!!!
Historically speaking, Shonen Knife hold a unique place in the Rock & Roll scriptures, winning over heavyweight fans like Red Kross, Sonic Youth, and their 1991 European tourmates, Nirvana. 15 albums, 6 EPs, tons of compilations and singles later, Shonen Knife still brings out droves and droves of dedicated, loving fans.
“Big! Big! Big! Cat!” How can you not sing along to those lyrics? There are 3 members of Shonen Knife, and there are 3 sides to a pyramid, so ‘Pyramid Power’ seems like a logical way to wrap up the set, I guess. You gotta love a band that pulls out the rock poses, jumping up and down, and saluting the fans right till the finish line. The End! That can’t be it though, can it? After a 45-second departure, the biggest little power trio from the east took the stage again, grabbing a souvenir photo op with the audience first.
“Everybody is so handsome and beautiful!”
Aww, geez. Thanks Naoko. One more song? Puh-leeeease?
Okay, okay. The chants of “Shonen Knife! Shonen Knife!” finally gave way to one more round of big, brash power chords and girly 3-part harmonies. ‘Antonio Baka Guy’ gave the crowd its ultimate satisfaction. True to form, the Shonen Knife trio stuck around afterwards to shake hands, high-five, and sign autographs for every waiting fan. The lineup nearly stretched out the door! There wasn’t a frowny-face in the house.
Shonen Knife continues along its North American tour, hitting Bellingham and Portland before a big Halloween show in California! The newest record “Super Group” is available through Good Charamel Records or on iTunes. The record is great, but you gotta see them live. If you missed out this time I hope the Candy Rock Fun won’t elude you again! Peace, Love and Shonen Knife!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)