#thebigcitynightsband

[thebigcitynightsband]

We’re back

Thanks to our friend Ryan Combden, I have a full audio recording set up for the first time since 2017.

New music, and old music, coming very soon.

[hauntedhotelstuff-blog]

The Big City Nights Band - Minor Carpentry & I Had A Dream I Mattered LPs

[thebigcitynightsband]

Time Out Of Mind and the TV Guide

Bob Dylan released a record in 1997 called Time Out Of Mind, his first album of new material in seven years, the longest gap of his career in which he released no new songs. He released some old ones, mind you, on 1992′s Good As I Been To You and the following year’s World Gone Wrong, but both albums were lo-fi affairs, consisting only of old American standards and folk songs. Dylan’s version of “Froggie Went A Courtin” is the best thing on those two records, intimate and strange and haunted, with Dylan’s idiosyncratic picking style on full display. You can hear it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8c8kO5RQIQo

I used to be obsessed with Bob Dylan in high school, but was I more into his process and image than his music itself, which I found a little boring in an album context. Even back in 2001, long before the internet destroyed my attention span, I had a hard time sitting through entire Dylan albums. Blonde on Blonde, for example, one of his alleged masterpieces, consists of little more than blues dirges featuring a dutiful but dull backing band. Not much happening on that record for me, though I do like the deep cut “Achilles Last Stand,” and of course “Just Like A Woman” is one of the greatest songs ever written.

Dylan’s early stuff is just guy-with-guitar music, not the best thing for a young boy obsessed with the mix tape aesthetic. I made a shitload of mixtapes back in high school, most of them for my/our friend Emon, but some for myself, and I loved to put a blasting punk song right after a slow syrupy ballad. The jarring aspect of it, the audio equivalent of a smash cut, always gave me a thrill. I always preferred my Dylan songs sandwiched between Oasis and The Offspring, so a whole record of him strumming and warbling didn’t hold my interest. I feel the same way even now.

But I loved the idea of Dylan, the idea of a fiercely individualistic artist releasing albums at a furious pace, following the dictates of the muse, not the mass. I loved Dylan’s imagery of the American highway, augmented by my simultaneous obsession with Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, a book that has lit fire in the hearts of millions of young men who close the book and want to run out into the world and travel and drink and write bad poems while sitting on fence posts at dawn in Missouri, and I started writing songs about being a hitchhiker, songs about drinking coffee in diners at 6AM in small towns on the great plains, offbeat characters smoking in pool halls, sullen men sitting at the bar, gambling away their grocery money. To my embarrassment, one of these songs was actually called “Morning Cigarette.” I couldn’t just describe the lives of the lower classes, no, I had to align myself with them, insincerely I might add, and so I declared a smoking habit I had not yet acquired, claimed kilometres and miles I hadn’t yet earned, and described places I’d never been to and still may never go, sylvan beaches where blue water laps at the shore, where the highway finally ends and gives way to sand. All of this at the altar of the great American highway. REM’s Fables of the Reconstruction had some great highway and railroad imagery, especially “Driver 8″ and “Green Grow The Rushes.” I’ve mentioned REM’s “Leave” on here before, their greatest song, on an album recorded while the band was on tour and so has that rushing, disoriented, slightly seasick but gleeful feeling of constant highway travel, the thrum of the road beneath you as you rocket through the inky night. But REM came years after Dylan, so while I loved road imagery in literature inherited from the abovementioned Kerouac and Sam Shephard’s Motel Chronicles, Bob Dylan was the first musician I’d encountered who dealt in that kind of daylight.

I still love that highway stuff, though no longer to the exclusion of other modes of experience. The old excitement still comes back once in a while. Just a few years ago I came across a novel that captured the raw gritty reality of the road so vividly that I wanted to stick my thumb out again and see how far it would take me, a book called Angels by Denis Johnson, which features a ne’er do well drunk named Bill Houston who robs hardware stores and a desperate woman named Jamie Mays who is trying to escape her abusive husband by shuttling between states on Interstate Greyhounds, donating blood plasma to make her meals, carrying her silently suffering children along like sentient totebags. Eventually the woman and the bank robber cross paths (on a Greyhound, natch) and Bill takes Jamie down to Texas, splurging on booze and motels on the way like a sailor on shore leave, at one point trying to bribe a bus driver to take them to Philadelphia just so his Jamie and the kids can see the Liberty Bell. A drunken whim, needless to say. When the bus driver refuses, Bill Houston throws his bundle of cash to the floor and sets it aflame. Bill and Jamie and the kids are kicked off the bus for this stunt, and as they watch the bus pull way into the deep blue evening, the man mutters “this shit just keeps on happening til you’re dead.”

I think about that character a lot, Bill Houston. Here’s another great line: “It was all right to be who he was, but others would probably think it was terrible. A couple of times in the past he'd reached this absolute zero of the truth, and without fear or bitterness he realized now that somewhere inside it there was a move he could make to change his life, to become another person, but he'd never be able to guess what it was.” 

I feel that way sometimes. On the edge of a great change within me but still tethered to the past, to my lonely self and all the bad decisions and deep depressions I’m prone to. Reminds me of a great line from a Reigning Sound song I love, “we could be who we wanna be/if we weren’t who we are.”

But back to Dylan. Here’s something I find interesting. In one his biggest songs, “Like A Rolling Stone,” he sings “when you ain’t got nothin/you got nothin to lose.” A great line, right? A writer’s line. As Randy Bachman once said, “when you’re looking for a great line, you’d step over your own mother.” Meaning it doesn’t matter how wrong or offensive or mean-spirited the sentiment, if it sounds good, if it pulls the emotional freight of the song, you put it in. “When you ain’t got nothin/you got nothin to lose.” Hard to dispute the conviction young Dylan sang/sneered it with. But the line is ultimately rejected, or amended, by Dylan himself, on a song from Time Out Of Mind. Thirty one years after “Like A Rolling Stone,” the song that made him famous, his voice now ravaged by time and cigarettes, peering out from the liner notes like a bored sage finished with dispensing wisdom and free to just say what’s really on his mind, to the chagrin of friends and family, Dylan sings: “when you think that you've lost everything/you find out you can always lose a little more.”

Now, that’s really pessimistic and sad, I’ll admit. But it’s more true. It’s way truer. Young Dylan sang a line that suggested freedom from constriction, youthful abandon, and cheerfully fucking off to somewhere else on the map. But the elder Dylan sings a wisdom earned, the bare fact that things could always be worse. Losing everything isn’t always a fresh, clean, starting point for people. It can hurt. Sure, Fight Club told a generation of kids that it was silly to love a sofa, and it is. But it’s not silly to love a photo album lost to fire. Or a guitar that’s played three hundred shows stolen from one’s attic by the undiscerning hand of a burglar. Sentimental stuff matters, what burns never returns, and things could always be worse. That’s why I’m so interested in Dylan referencing one of his most famous lines and directly contradicting it. But as pessimistic as the latter line is, there is a hopeful message elsewhere in the song, one that demonstrates a kind of consistency of purpose for Dylan, a message found right smack in the title. Dylan released “Knockin On Heaven’s Door” in 1973, and the song from Time Out Of Mind that I’m talking about is called “Trying To Get To Heaven.”

So Dylan might have been more jaded in 1997, but he was still searching for salvation (his early-80s foray into Christian rock notwithstanding). And that is a positive thing, without a doubt. The reason Dylan went so long without releasing new music in the 1990s is that he’d lost his confidence. 1990′s Under the Red Sky received such vicious reviews that even a seasoned veteran of dismissive reports like Dylan was shocked at their recreational cruelty. One reviewer posited that Dylan must have lost his sanity to have released such a horrible record. And it is a bad record. And so, in a move that other artists really should emulate more often, Dylan decided to shut the fuck up until he had something to say. The two folk albums of ‘92 and ‘93 were released more out of contractual obligation than any feeling of artistic responsibility to his fans or the larger public. 

So nobody thought Dylan would come back with worthwhile music, much less one of his all-time great albums, an album that actually yielded a standard, something no other Dylan album has done, with the song “Make You Feel My Love,” which truly is beautiful. Worthy of Sinatra and sung with care. (And Dylan loves Sinatra, as evidenced by his decision to release a triple album of Sinatra covers this year.)

In tenth grade my girlfriend at the time gave me a biography of Dylan that contained interviews from his early years up to Oh Mercy and, best of all, his complete discography. Man, I poured over that discography section. I loved the idea of releasing albums, each one different in vibe. I wanted to do it so badly. In class I did little else but write out fake albums with fake songs on them. I fronted a phantom band called Drainage and we released an album a year all the way up to 2030. I loved the idea of assembling a set of songs, then figuring out which one should go first, a monumental decision, as the first song sets the tone for the subsequent record. The last song is important too - though less so in the mp3 era, and was even declining in importance in the mixtape era - but the lead-off track is unimpeachable. I mean, Nirvana’s “Something In The Way” is a great closer, but “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was born to be a track one. I’m proud of our track one, “Born to Bar Band,” and I think it still holds up over the years, ten of ‘em by now. And it’s not just a okay song, it’s kind of a mission statement. A declaration of intent and a defense mechanism. You can’t tell us our band sucks if we admit it in the first song on our first album. We know we suck. We know we won’t ever be famous. We’ll play bars til we’re forty, we’ll release album til we’re ninety if we live that long. You can count on it. We will never stop releasing albums because I’ve never lost the thrill of writing and recording and mixing and assembling an album and then finding a fitting little image for the front cover. And all of this excitement and obsession started, for me, with Bob Dylan.

So even though I barely listen to him now, I’m still very fond of Bob Dylan. I returned to him a few summers ago when I had a brief but intense flirtation with his 80s oddity/odyssey “Caribbean Wind,” a hallucinatory masterpiece that Dylan was never satisfied with and so never released, inexplicably choosing to afflict us with wretched albums like Knocked Out Loaded and Under the Red Sky, which is the sonic equivalent of a man with a bazooka choosing to fight a street battle using only his pinky toes. Why the hell would Dylan lead with such weak appendages when he had such a powerful weapon in his arsenal? Perversity? Perfectionism? Who knows. You can hear “Caribbean Wind” here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQIpNPyOPW4 Remember though, this is older Dylan, sad and solemn, singing about “the pain of rejection and the pain of infidelity.” No protest stuff, just pain. 

Speaking of pain, the last season of True Detective had a great line about it’s nature. I forget which character is talking, because they’re all surrogate mouthpieces for Nic Pizzolato - the head writer and creator - but he or she is saying something about pain, expressing wonder that pain never seems to reach a hard limit, a final terminus, a point where “more pain” is no longer possible. Peak pain. But Ray, the archetypal-grizzled-cop-with-a drinking-problem-who-is-prone-to-violence, just shrugs a worldly hungover shrug and mutters a reply: Pain is inexhaustible. It’s only people who get exhausted. Damn. That’s a good one eh? Worthy of Dylan, and almost as bleak as revisiting a famous lyric and editing it through the lens of living thirty-one additional years. Given my unfortunate propensity to ramble and digress, I could probably go on a fifteen page rant about True Detective right now but I’ll just concede that it is a great show, even if it’s the same old song in some ways, it remains yet another mammoth entry in the canon of American highway imagery and storytelling, the first season showing the swamps of Louisiana in such gothic haze, and the second showing the endless intertwining highways of California, where the car is king, with such detached bitterness, that you just want to hire a P.I. to track down Pizzolato and give him a nice big hug.

You can probably tell that I’m sad and tired today. I thought I’d fixed a big problem but I didn’t, and I have 48 hours to get $500 to my landlord. It’s so annoying. This May 19 at 3AMI will be receiving $2200. But I can’t make my landlord wait that long, so I gotta hustle. I’m trying to take on writing/editing gigs but exams just ended last week and most students are done. This is usually vacation week for tutors, the week they’re all finally done and get to go to Jamaica, and here I am begging for work on Kijiji and Craigslist. Bagh.

“I’m only a man and I do what I can,” as Grimes would sing. I worked thirteen hours today, a bizarro shift hosting the Canadian Media Council across the entire building from 6am-7pm, in which we served breakfast, lunch, dinner, and had a post-dinner reception, with an insane amount of setting up tables, carrying bus bins from the sixth floor to the second and back up again, forgetting to bring something down and having to go back up, or down, again and again and again, all day. I felt like I was dreaming or something. The terrace has been set up and wedding season is in full swing now, so I’ll be working about six days a week until mid-December. I’ll still keep an ear and an eye out for other opportunities in the meantime, as it never hurts to try to move on up instead of laterally, but I’m in a secure spot again. I’ve been at O&B eight months now, and most of the tasks are starting to feel like second nature to me, like making crazy cocktails with maple syrup whiskey and orange slices and club soda and lemon juice and pineapple juice and making 100 of them in 10 minutes:

We have a show in Brampton May 22. Can you dig it? Venue TBD. Or TBA. Whichever you prefer. Hey! That just reminded me of something. An involuntary memory, like Proust wrote about. Remember the old cable package back in the early 90s? Back before Teletoon and the History Channel when we had about 45 channels and only five of them were any good? Yeah? Remember Channel 5 that just showed the TV guide? It was a lot like the guide you see now, except that you couldn’t scroll through it, it scrolled at its own pace, showing five channels for five seconds, then moving on. I used to watch Channel 5 when nothing else was on, just to watch something, sort of how later on I’d stare at CP24 for so long that I’d inadvertently memorize the headlines. Man Hit By Bus at Dixie and Courtney Park. Vaughan Woman Accidentally Shoots Dog In Snout. Two Dead After Bank Robbery Goes Wrong. Stuff like that.

Anyway, if Channel 5 didn’t have the pertinent info from a given station, they would put “To Be Announced” instead of putting a question mark (which would have made them seem stupid, like “uhh, we don’t know what’s on that channel at that time. Sorry?”) or leaving it blank (again, stupid). So they put “To Be Announced” - not the acronym TBA - in the spot, and I used to think that it was a TV show. I thought that there was a wildly popular show called To Be Announced that seemed to be on a shitload of channels that I’d somehow never seen. I’d try to watch To Be Announced and it’d be some soap opera. Other times it’d be the Simpsons, which was just fine with me, yet still confusing. Later on, when I learned that “To Be Announced” was adult shorthand for “the show airing at this time on this channel will be announced later,” I remained confused. It never was actually announced, in the proper sense of the word. So now, getting more specific/pathetic in my gullibility, I’d stare at Channel 5 for hours, waiting for it to cut to a talk-show like thing, a cheering crowd and an “Applause!” sign and a man with a microphone cheerily announcing the shows that would be shown on each respective channel. 

ANNOUNCER: And on Channel Four at 7:30, it’s Wheel of Fortune! How great. For people who like that show, that is. Of course on Channel Five it’s us, the whole scrolling TV guide deal, or this specific show, the announcing show, which we should probably call To Be Announced so that certain suburban kids don’t get confused. And on Channel Nine at 7:30 we’ve got Baking With Pretzels (and Brenda Bunson) which sound just...god-fucking-awful if I can be deadly serious for a second...I mean, talk about declining standards on televison, eh people? Who is this Bunson bitch? I’ve never heard of her. CROWD: hisses and boos ANNOUNCER: Shut the fuck up! Seriously, why does Brenda Bunson get a show on Channel Nine when I’m stuck down here announcing her shitty show? I’ve got ideas! Good one! Why can’t I be on real TV? Huh?  MAN OFFSCREEN: inaudible mumbling ANNOUNCER: What? Fired? Are you fucking kidding me? Why?! MAN OFFSCREEN: more inaudible mumbling ANNOUNCER: For swearing in front of viewers?! Todd, we’re Channel Five! We don’t have viewers!!! Except for some gay kid from Brampton who imagines this is all actually happening!! MAN OFFSCREEN: slightly angrier inaudible mumbling ANNOUNCER: Homophobic remarks!? (throws microphone at man offscreen) MAN OFFSCREEN: *surprised grunt of pain* ANNOUNCER: Aw, suck a dick, Todd! Fuck you! And you! (points at camera...stomps away...door slams...car drives away....car smashes into other car...sirens approach....ambulance arrives...ambulance drives off...ambulance smashes into a train...helicopter arrives...helicopter explodes...)

And so on, into the night. Sorry, Channel Five was so boring that I used to imagine it was better, usually involving some kind a tragic Trebek figure screaming at the audience and studio execs, bitter and humiliated and getting fired at the end of every episode, only to be replaced by another man who will eventually be driven insane from the tedium of the job and also go insane in a slightly different, televisionally inappropriate manner.

What does this have to do with Dylan, you ask? Nothing, I reply.

Except one time I was watching Channel Five and it said Big Time on at 9PM on Showtime. I checked it out and it was a Tom Waits concert. I’d never heard of Tom Waitssi I checked it out and was enthralled. He’d definitely been schooled by the Beat writers and Dylan’s lonesome traveler thing. So from Waits I went backward and checked out his influences, one of whom was Bob Dylan. So I guess you could say they’re connected. If it hadn’t been for Channel Five and it’s maddening scrolling TV Guide (if you blinked or didn’t read fast enough you had to wait a few minutes for them to tell you what was on the channel whose program you wanted to know about), I never would have gotten into Bob Dylan, and subsequently never would have become obsessed with making albums, and subsequently never would have formed The Big City Nights with the sole intention of making recordings, and making a lot of them, if not for Channel Five. I owe all our songs to that channel. Our prolificacy too.  Hell, our first day as a band, albeit with a different lineup, we recorded eight songs (though only three of them made the For Shame EP), which is nuts considering Mitch hadn’t heard them before, though James broke this record twice over in December 2015 when he recorded drums for 17 songs he hadn’t heard until that day, ans he did it in three hours. That’s pro-prolific. I mean, professionally prolific. All along, this was supposed to be a prolific project. And it is. Thanks to Channel Five and Bob Dylan. When you think you’ve written enough songs/You find that you can write a little more.

Coming soon: Bands I’ve Been In Vol. 13103843: Pretty In Pink (w/ James and Carey) and why recording with that band was the worst experience ever that directly led to the creation of BCN

My Morning Jacket, Elk City, in a Bands I Love post

the QOTSA/Kyuss thing maybe.

Bands I’ve Been In Vol. 32742347: The Circus (a bit of a cheat because I was only in the band for a few months and participated more from the sidelines, but a hugely important band in my development as a person of interest...LAWL)

That’s the news, lose yer blues.

[thebigcitynightsband]

Top photo from Carey and Spencer’s basement, me trying to mix “Former Building” back in April 2014. Bottom photo from today, me trying to mix “Salvage Your Dolly,” a new song from Better Days Are A Toenail Away, the upcoming double or triple album from Beecy Yen (BCN). Sorry, I’m big on wordplay when I’m bored. My old email address for Little Ghost Recording Co (LGRC) was el_gee_are_see@hotmail.com, which I thought terrifically clever at the time.

In REAL ACTUAL NEWS, probably our biggest news announcement since an actual record label released one of our records, we have recruited a second guitar player and back up vocalist. James and I know him very well from our days in Insipid and also a virtually unknown and very short-lived folk rock project from 2006 called The Rolled Back whose five-song EP, called Manslaughter by Locomotion, was so terrible that my own record label declined to give it our stamp of approval. Although The Rolled Back was hilariously good fun - we were a band for one day only, in which we formed the band, named it on the drive to the space, practiced, recorded the record, released the record, then broke up - we were pretty controversial, since Jamie recorded a song about a friend of me and James who he detested in which he made several strong but unsubstantiated claims about the size, or lack thereof, of the song’s target’s penis. It caused quite the kerfuffle on social media, and the band broke up at the height of our infamy. The EP is locked away in the fireproof vaults at Little Ghost Recording Co’s office headquarters, the location of which I cannot reveal for fear of delirious bootleggers breaking in and attempting to steal the priceless master files. I’m not worried that said bootleggers would actually get their hands on the files, oh no. I’m more worried about the safe killing them because it’s booby trapped with a spring loaded bomb. Should the bomb fail to kill the burglar(s), there is also a man eating tiger that I have been leasing since 2006 at the fantastically frugal rate of $500 a day, that has been trained to pounce from a hidden compartment in the wall and chew the interloper to death.

So that’s what happened with The Rolled Back. RIP The Rolled Back, March 21 2006-March 21 2006. After our breakup, our new member entered semi-retirement from music, emerging periodically when occasions called for it, such as our autumn 2010 show at the Brampton Rugby Club, an event held for charity, where he grabbed his Telecaster and treated the audience to several drunken covers, one of them possibly by Dire Straits. He then collaborated with us four years later with “Murray Had A Birthday,” a song that will be on our upcoming behemoth of a record. So it’s only fitting that he will be joining us just in time to add some guitar tracks to the record, and just in time for our imminent world domination. We’ll start small with some laudatory blog reviews. Then we’ll hit up the Oscars and demand to play or else our new member will beat everyone to death with a spruce 2x4.  Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to The Big City Nights Band...

The sultan of suck....

The bard of Brampton and Burlington (given his recent house purchase)...

The man with the plan from the street with beat...

Mr. Jamie Jackson.

Things will never be the same.

That’s the (real actual) news, lose yer blues.

See you soon.

[thebigcitynightsband]

no news

Hello and Greetings.

Nothing has changed. Everything has changed. It is the best of times, it is the worst of times. There is a rich white guy running the country below us, there is a rich guy running the country we live in. The Toronto Maple Leafs are struggling to clinch a playoff spot, while the Blue Jays are playing in the Grapefruit League, getting ready for their season down in Florida. Okay, so maybe some things have changed.

We are sitting on anywhere from 25-50 songs, some of them already recorded except for vocals, as with Better Days Are A Toenail Away and Heck ‘Em All. There are others that haven’t been recorded or even fleshed out. I wrote a new song last night that sounds like a mix between “Guy I Know” and Led Zeppelin’s “No Quarter.” I demoed it so I wouldn’t forget it.

What Are We Doing?

Nothing. Nothing at all. I haven’t seen James since last May and I haven’t seen Ryan since November, when he dropped off my mixer downtown Brampton while I was visiting a friend.

I have no idea how to fix this situation at the moment. I work most Fridays and Saturdays. I have at least two Sundays off a week, but I can’t always get to Brampton and the guys don’t always want to come down here to jam at the Rehearsal Factory.

I have been enrolled in a drug rehabilitation program for the past long while, a program that involves group meetings and individual counselling with an addictions counsellor. The type of treatment involved would likely cost its participants thousands of dollars per year, given the expertise and intensity of the doctors involved, but for me and for others, it costs considerably less than that, about a hundred dollars a month. That’s the financial cost. The social cost is a bit heavier: I have to submit a urine test every single day.

What this means is I have to be at Bloor and Lansdowne once a day, every day, to submit a sample or I will be kicked out of the program. There are no second chances, there are no doctor’s notes for illness. You simply cannot miss a single day. Period. The fact that I have been doing this for months now should demonstrate my devotion to the program and how seriously I’m taking it, but just in case it doesn’t, I’ll say it here: I am taking this program very very seriously. It has given me back my life.  On weekdays this requirement isn’t too onerous, seeing as the clinic is open from 8am to 5pm. Since I work in the service industry and my work day usually begins between 2 and 4 pm, it’s not too difficult for me to get up a half hour earlier than I normally would and head over to pee in a cup. It’s a small price to pay for a program that has helped me so much. On weekends, though, it’s a lot harder, because the window of time I have to be at the clinic is seriously shortened. On Saturdays I have a four hour window, from 8am-noon. Not bad. On Sundays, I have a 90-minute window. If I am not there between 10am and 11:30am, I lose my spot in the program. Which I don’t want to do given that this program has essentially given me my fucking life back. I cannot understate the extent to which this program has helped me. It literally saves peoples lives.

But if I were to go to Brampton on a Saturday evening to play music, and then stay over there, I would be completely dependent on transit to get me back to Toronto before the clinic closes at 11:30am. This would likely entail getting up at 8am in Brampton, since transit takes so goddamnn long and I’d be taking three different types: Brampton Transit, GO Transit, and TTC. Things can get a little shifty there.

Best case scenario would be to go to Brampton on a Sunday morning after hitting the clinic, since I could crash there and then take my time getting back to Toronto the next day, since the clinic doesn’t close on Mondays until 5pm. But both James and Ryan work on Mondays, and Ryan has family obligations, and James usually doesn’t like to do stuff on Sunday afternoons cuz he has to get up so early the next day, so I’m not sure we’d be able to get too much done on a Sunday afternoon, especially since the earliest I could be in Brampton is around 12:30 or 1pm, depending on when the GO bus leaves Union station.

So it would make the most logistical sense for me to go to Brampton on a Sunday when both Ryan and James have a Monday off, like on May 24 weekend, unless Ryan’s going camping that weekend, which he usually does, so…

I dunno. Hopefully I can get a Saturday off soon and we can jam at Bathurst and Richmond for a few hours and work on some new material. We’ll worry about recording whenever the hell I can get to Brampton, which depends on my work schedule.

What Am I Doing?

I’ve been working a shitload of hours lately as a server/bartender for an events company, meaning I work a lot of weddings and corporate gatherings. With wedding season just around the corner and my home venue opening the outdoor terrace midway through April, I’ll be working even more soon; six days a week from mid-April to mid-December, without a break. Finding a way to shoehorn some recording into my schedule during that time will be a challenge, but I’ll try my best. I will.

A few days before last Christmas I joined my friends Mark Hornich and Michael Schooley in Hamilton to play some music. I’d been hanging out with Mark every other week or so last summer, writing songs on acoustic guitars, for a project that we’ve been trying to put together since at least 2011.

Since that first jam in Hamilton, me, Mark and Michael have met up every other week, sometimes once a month but usually more often, at various spaces across the city, sometimes Paul’s Boutique, sometimes the Richmond-Bathurst rehearsal spaces, to play our songs, of which we now have six, complete with vocal melodies and lyrics and everything.

We’ve challenged ourselves to be show-ready by May, and we’ve hit our target early. As far as I’m concerned we could play a show next weekend without making fools of ourselves, though another two jams wouldn’t hurt either. Mark played in one of my favourite local bands of all-time, Crop Failure, and Michael played in an excellent instrumental band from Kitchener-Waterloo called New Wings, that my old band Sleep for the Nightlife played with once in Waterloo in a café next door to a movie theatre downtown. I actually taped some of that set and uploaded it to YouTube a few years ago, and I’ve played a lot of shows with Crop Failure with old bands like GIANTS and Sleep for the Nightlife, and The Big City Nights Band have played with C.F. a couple times too, so there’s a lot of overlap here in terms of the scene and shows played together. We all come from the same scene, and we’re all old enough to know that we don’t need to try to conquer the world or “make it big” or anything like that. We’ll be content with playing a few decent shows here and there, and making a good EP or LP that might catch a few people’s ears. That’s about the extent of our ambitions right now. The tentative band name for this project right now is Traffic Yeller, though none of us are sure if the name is permanent. While is does connote a certain energy and anger, none of us are totally sure if it describes us properly. So we’ll see. Either way, we’ll continue to make music together this year and will hopefully play a show sometime soon. If we get one booked, I’ll letcha all know.

In the meantime, I’m obviously going to try to finish some Big City Nights recordings this year and put out some records. As I’ve said before, we have enough material to release at least two albums, maybe even three or four. No, we don’t see each other as much as we used to, and we don’t play anywhere near as many shows as we used to, but we’ll try our best to match the output we somehow tallied in both 2010 and 2012, years that saw us release four full-length recordings, all of which I still stand behind, from records I did mostly myself like Gimme Gardens and Dancing Days, to albums we all contributed equally to like Yawns Beyond, Oscillation Drills, Popular Favourites, Might Minutes, and Under the Overpass.

I’d like to document the recording of our upcoming records, if possible, as it’s always fun to go back and watch videos like the making of Oscillation Drills or Yawns Beyond or West Bestern. So I’ll try to make sure someone has their camera phone running at all times whenever we get together next. And it’s also about time we update our default photo on the bandcamp, which was taken by Jessica Fisher in summer 2010. So I’ll try to organize a photo shoot asap, but it’s not at the forefront of my worries. The music comes first, naturally. So if a new photo should appear, rest assured that we’ve taken care of the audio aspect and have some new recordings on the way.

No shows booked at the moment but we’ll be trying to get something going soon, some shows with the Flying Museum Band to celebrate the tenth anniversaries of our respective first albums. Our tenth anniversary is actually around this time…as I recall the album coming out in either March or April 2007 and playing our goodbye show @ All Stars in Bramalea that May. So I’ll have to go back and get some exact dates. Born to Bar Band is a solid effort, even though it’s a little difficult for me to listen to now, since my vocals were so rough on that record. Our live staple, “Catch You,” for example, has been played at almost every show we’ve ever done, so that when I hear the version on B2BB I barely recognize it.

No shows, no new music. Overall, taking the last ten years into account, this is uncharacteristic of the Big City Nights Band. But I know all too well that, in the  past few years, this has become the norm. Not a whole lot of shakin’ goin’ on. I’m working hard on my problems and have been staying on top of things in the past long while So it’s about time I focused some energy on this long-neglected band, my favourite band that I’ve ever played in. I’m tired of old memories, I want to make some new ones.

And when we do finally get around to making those new ones, you’ll be the first to know.

That’s the news, or lack thereof, lose yer blues.

[thebigcitynightsband]

Gone Songs

Stroker’s v. Shoeless Joe’s Like most rock bands, we’ve record music in various states of inebriation, from smashed to sober and back again. We don’t need booze, but we’ve always played better when we’ve loosened up. A few beers each and, for Ryan, a furnace blast of strong weed in the lungs, gets us in a good place and we play better. Any more than a few, though, and things can go quickly wrong. In September 2007 we played a show at Stroker’s, a dank old pool hall downtown Brampton where one of the regulars actually has a hook for a hand. I used to go there with my Dad to play pool when I was a kid. I’m not sure what the legality of my being there was, as I was eleven or twelve and in a bar, but maybe it’s legal if you have an adult accompanying you? It’s not like my Dad would drink on these outings or anything, we’d just go to Stroker’s when we felt like playing pool and he was too lazy to drive out to Diamond Jim’s, which was a great hangar of a pool hall out near the airport. I’m guessing it’s gone now because places like that always leave. Bob Sharky’s is gone, possibly for once distributing impossibly real looking five dollar bills that acted as vouchers for a drink special but which likely more than a few clever crackheads slipped to their dealers while grabbing rock out on Tullamore Road. Brampton has lost other pool halls whose names I can’t remember - one was on Steeles Ave across from the Latin Quarter - but Stroker’s was still around last I checked in November 2016, which pleased and comforted me. I love old pool halls. I’ll play pool anywhere, cuz I love the game, but it’s more fun in a place like Stroker’s than say, Shoeless Joe’s where squeaky clean tables have red felt and cartoonishly large pockets. I went to Shoeless Joe’s in Guelph a few years ago and noticed that it doesn’t even pretend to have good food. The menu is so rote and routine, slapped together by some moron with no creativity, the same shit every other bar sells: bland french fries, dry club sandwiches, salty onion rings. They don’t even give the head honcho the title of “chef.” At Shoeless Joe’s, he’s the “kitchen manager”. I guess that makes sense though. When you don’t even cut your own fries or even slice your own onions (everything arrives pre-prepared...they use a microwave), you can’t even call yourself a cook, much less a chef. So the quality of the food was similar to the quality of the pool tables. Which is to say atrocious. And that try hard name. Shoeless Joe’s? Talk about trying to get some dive credentials, eh? Funny how Stroker’s, in comparison, sounds almost gentle. Even regal. Not Hitters or Ball Smackers, but Stroker’s. Considering the fact that Shoeless Joe’s turns away shoeless patrons with extreme prejudice, they should probably change their name to something else. I’ve only ever been to the location in Guelph and I hope to never go there again. But Guelph ain’t all bad. Once you get away from the franchises on the outer fringes you can find some real classic dives, such as Tony’s Place:

Anecdote Describing How Much I Love Shooting Pool

I took a first date to Tony’s Place years ago. We went in and I ordered a set of Boston balls, which I love ordering because it’s a way of gauging whether the counterman/counterwoman knows his/her stuff (Boston balls are the regular ones, alternating between solid and striped and a black 8-ball). They knew their stuff and gave me the right balls and we took a few turns and then she - my date that is, who I’d pretty much forgotten about, so immersed was I in the game - put down her cue and tried to kiss me and caress my neck. Rather than reciprocate, I kept playing. Not only were my concerns frugal (we were less than five minutes into the game and I’d paid for an hour. If she didn’t want to play at all, why suggest a pool hall? And it had been her suggestion, not mine). So I ignored my date and bounced the balls around, getting my money’s worth, even showing her an old trick shot that I’d use at parties except a) I don’t go to parties anymore and b) even if I did, I don’t associate with persons who have pool tables in their homes. My ilk is of lower stock. The only time me and my friends have pool in the house is when a pipe breaks and floods the basement. The point of this anecdote is this: I love pool. That I chose Boston balls over the baser pulses of my own should be a clear indication of my ferocious fondness for the sport.

A Brief History of How I Feel About Billiards Ever feel nostalgia for an era you never saw, except through television and movies and magazines? Midnight in Paris is all about that, with Owen Wilson wistfully wishing he was Hemingway. He loves the people and places of the 1920s. For me, it’s the people in old pool halls and the way they offer up themselves as strong and sentient  glimpses of the past. A living echo inside a room, undisturbed by time and passed over by the plague of Netflix and chill. I have untold thousands of false and fragmentary “memories” absorbed through osmosis by watching movies and TV. Pool halls where the bad characters were forever killing time (like the gang of ruthless older kids in Stand By Me), trading dialogue and pushing the plot forward. So for me, pool halls always carry a whiff of danger and excitement: gangsters muttering amongst themselves, barmaids crossing the floor in clacking heels to bring them Budweiser, cigarettes glowing in crimped silver ashtrays, the sharp smack of a clean break - indelible in its unmistakability, like a camera snapping or a pop can being opened, it sounds like itself and nothing else - followed by the rolling thud of balls, falling and settling into pockets, men cursing their luck in hushed tones and tapping their cues off the toes of their black boots, ten kinds of whiskey behind the bar, one for each mood you’re in over the course of a given evening, the comforting hum of the ice machine, beer in bottles sweating condensation, framed posters of Minnesota Fats holding a cue and earning his nickname, young hustlers prowling the floor looking for suckers while old men linger over cups of coffee and skim the newspaper and recall other, older times...perhaps the pool halls of their youth...everybody basking in the genial vibe, always genial even when the air is thick with the threat of envious violence over a game or a woman.  Forget the no smoking sign, this is a memory and my memories belong to me. It’s the old days and everybody smoked and the haze gathers over the tables in a grey halo above the green oblong lampshades running the length of each table, blue smoke gathering as the evening lengthens, getting thicker as the stakes grow higher... The Mouth From Montreal I forgot one thing: the competitiveness. As much as I love to play, I always hated to lose. In Grade Nine, when I was attending BCSS, I’d sell my bus ticket every day to James for a dollar so I could play pool. And I hated to lose back then. In January 2016 I was in Olon, Ecuador one weekend playing pool at Ojas, my favourite local bar. There was an informal sort of doubles tournament going on, and I was playing with my friend Wayne. Wayne was a shy man, given to long bouts of saying nothing at all, but he was cool as clay. One older gentleman from Guayaquil was out on vacation and played as well as his meek hands would let him. He was terrible, but terrifically friendly, and he pocketed a few balls. Wayne let the man win because his wife was watching (Wayne’s wife was watching too, but she knew what her husband was up to). It was a nice time and everybody was enjoying themselves. We were playing winner continues and I felt a little bad that our white asses were colonizing the table, not leaving and letting the people play, but winner continues had been agreed upon in English and Spanish, so I don’t think anybody got mad at us. We ordered more drinks and played on. Then an arrogant prick from Montreal waltzed in, speaking fast and trying to top every anecdote and just being a fucking asshole. He broke the balls like a jerk too, lunging forward after hitting the white ball, as if trying to get the balls to move better by creating wind.  There was a lot of wind coming off the guy as he ordered himself more to drink (never offering to stand any else a round, naturally) and offered tales of vague sexual conquests until, realizing nobody cared, switched tactics and regaled us with stories about saving naive surfing tourists from the fatal violence of the Pacific. Despite hailing from Montreal, or so he claimed, my gut told me he was lying, I felt no national solidarity. None whatsoever. I did not like the man.  And I wanted to beat him, but he had us on the ropes. We had four balls at different corners and Mr. Loudmouth had one left before a brief honeymoon with the eight ball and a bragging victory. Except Wayne didn’t like him either. And Wayne, who was usually as expressionless as a blank wall, had started to glower at the man. He even gave a huff of impatience during one of the dude’s taller tales. But I was off my usually decent game that night, having had one too many Cuba Libre’s. I couldn’t find my rhythm. I couldn’t sink a thing. I was forlorn at the prospect of losing the table to this utter shithead who, having won, would never leave. Indeed it wasn’t just losing the game, it was losing the table and, by extension, the evening. But we won. Wayne clicked into overdrive and put the game away, playing with a finesse and ferocity I hadn’t seen from him before. He was so good, in fact, that I suspected he’d been letting me beat him all week. But that didn’t matter now, for we had beaten the loudmouth. I don’t know how and I don’t care how, but Wayne saved the day. We beat the mouth from Montreal. He shook our hands and promptly left the bar, a scenario I expected with the same certainty as him staying if he’d won.

But there’s another, more important reason that I’m glad Wayne won. He was born in Montreal himself and grew up there, so it was important to him to beat a guy from his hometown. But that’s still not the reason. I knew I’d miss Wayne when I shook hands goodbye with him, leaving Ecuador for home in early February, but I didn’t think I’d never see him again. After all, we’d grown tight and the man lived in Oakville. But a few days after I landed, Wayne suffered a stroke while walking along the beach in Olon. He slipped into a coma and eventually died. He regained consciousness once, very shortly after the attack and, confused by the commotion - medical personnel looming, a stranger fanning him - he asked his wife what happened. She gave him an abridged version of events and Wayne actually apologized for causing such a fuss. That was Wayne. A good friends. And another man who came alive in the pool hall. I never saw him more excited, more animated, than in that old pool hall. Ten Years Gone So yeah, it was a big deal for me that we were playing Stroker’s, one of my old billiard haunts. I hadn’t been there in ten years and I was nervous for the show, so I bought a magnum of white wine at the LCBO in Union Station (gone now too...and why? Nobody needs alcohol more than a stressed out commuter). I was going to sip it and share it with the guys but I somehow polished the whole thing off on the bus ride to Brampton. Fortunately, the guys had brought my gear for me, or maybe we borrowed some, as I was in no condition to carry anything, even myself, when I staggered off the bus downtown and practically fell into Stroker’s. We set our amps and drums up in the front, between the bar and the window, and a crowd formed around us in a circle. We opened with “Born to Bar Band” which went smoothly enough, following up with “Horseshoes,” which was still fresh at the time. Then I drunkenly and dictatorially decided that it would be a fine idea for us to do a rendition of the Tragically Hip’s “Poets,” despite the fact that Ryan didn’t know it and James hadn’t heard it in a really long time. Actually, I’m not even sure if Ryan was at that show. It may have been Emon. I was so drunk that I don’t even know who, if anyone, played bass. And I don’t remember how “Poets” came off but I do remember jumping into the drum set soon after, a kit belonging to Steve Sandhu of Hormoans, who are excellent and who played a set in my Bathurst living room in 2012. Sandhu was/is infamous for his live antics, which include throwing microphones and smashing stands and also jumping into drum kits mid-song, so he wasn’t mad at me, though James sorta was. After our set I took a ride to Carey and Spencer’s in the back of Roper’s new Subaru. I remember him blasting Matthew Good’s “Odette” on the way and really liking it. The rest of that night is, as Lou Reed would say, “unavailable to me.” 

It’s fair to say that I let the band down that night. Ryan did something similar a few years later, so at least I’m not alone in my idiocy. If we’re lost...we are lost together. TBCN played a show at Track’s one year, I think 2010, that happened to fall on Ryan’s birthday weekend and he got demonically and seraphically hammered. Not Danny at Stroker’s hammered, but still hammered. He was fine for our first set, im fact he was excellent, but during the second I remember hearing the bass drop out mid-song and looking over at him and his right hand was resting on his bass, not playing a note. His face wore a blissful expression. he was pretty much asleep, perhaps dreaming of playing a show with his band. But yeah, he was cronked out. Ryan lived forty steps from Track’s at the time and still had to be helped home. He wrote a sheepish apology to James and I the next day and we of course forgave him because we weren’t even mad in the first place. Like my Stroker’s debacle, everybody was more perplexed than anything else. I did it, and Ryan did it, which brings us to James. James hasn’t yet played/ruined a show due to drunkeness but it’s fair to say that Ryan and I will forgive him immediately if it ever happens. He has been holding a Get Out of Jail Free card for seven years, or ten this September if you’re counting from the first offense. Anyway, that’s it for pool halls. For those of you still curious, yes, I did have sex with the girl I took to Tony’s Place and then ignored in order to shoot billiards.

5. Gone Songs

Just as we have some shows that we played drunk, we have many recordings in which drunk was the fourth member of the band, tripping us gleefully and singing along and knocking microphones to the ground. So in light of my recent clarity, having quit drugs and sworn off alcohol (though I am smoking weed every other day or so, dispensaries peddling quality bud presently popping up on every corner of the city, like the proliferation of Starbucks locations in the 1990s), I have compiled a top ten list of Songs Recorded While Not Sober. Ironically enough, our drinking anthem “Hey Thirsty!” was not recorded drunk. I had a beer or two, as did Russell, Jake, and Ryan Taylor, but we were by no means drunk. The same cannot be said for the following entries in the Big City Nights catalog, songs I’ll call our “Gone Songs.” 10. “Some People Say”

We recorded this one sitting down, a choice made for us by our fourth member drunk. Wait, can it be called a choice if we had to sit down? That’s an interesting philosophical question someone should address sometime. Either way, it was late at night (or early in the morning, depending on your perspective), and standing was proving rather difficult. Before tracking “Some People Say” we’d tried four or five times to lay down a live rendition of “The Hard Way,” a song we ended up recording for Heck ‘Em All (coming soon in 2017!) at Yogi’s Meatlocker in Ottawa in September 2013. I was playing guitar and singing, Ryan was playing bass and singing, and James was playing tambourine and singing. So not only would the track be unusable if one of us fucked up the lyrics or the vocal phrasing, it’d be useless if one of us fucked up our instruments, which one of us did repeatedly until “The Hard Way” became “The Impossible Take” and we decided to sing vocals for “Some People Say” instead. Click on the hyperlinked numbered song title above to hear the glorious results. Could’ve sounded worse.

09. “Millions”

This one was really fun to sing, despite the cryptic lyrics. “If I die with ___, if I die with ____,” it just goes on and on with the death thing. But there’s a triumph somewhere in there, especially when the band kicks in and the guitar solo hits high and hard. It’s not a coincidence though, that the best part of the song is when we stop singing. Andrea and Sam were particularly off key that night, as you can hear, but alas, the Nights didn’t fare much better. I only have one photo of the Exile sessions, taken either by James from beside his kit or by Reena. Can’t remember.

08. “Tranquility Man” As if “Millions” weren’t enough, I decided to add a drunken downer recorded in a gin-soaked haze in the basement of the shittiest apartment I ever lived in, and that’s saying something. This is a song about being afraid of losing things due to drinking. Not easy listening.

07. “Devil Can’t Help” And this song is about actually losing everything, rather than fearing that outcome. Recorded drunk and alone on Christmas 2012. I bought myself a brick of goat cheese and a case of Corona.

06. “Everybody Got A Beef With Me”

We were so drunk that we were writing lyrics up to ten seconds before singing them. “Foreign Girls” was done under similar circumstances but earlier that same night, so this one takes the cake-flavoured vodka cake.

05. The Fog 

We did the vocals at Peel Industries, my Dad’s old warehouse on Torbram near Derry Road, same place we did “Hockey Night in Canada” and “Horseshoes.” We actually wrote “Horseshoes” there too, then went to the bar. It’s a song about togetherness, feeling alive, and friendship. How could we not drink to this one? I only wish we’d added harmonies but we didn’t have the skill nor the sobriety back then. 04. “Be Mine This X-Mas”

Emon had it together enough to offer to lay down a bassline after vocal tracking and nailing it in two takes (he missed the bridge in an otherwise flawless first take). Those high castrato notes in the final chorus are done by Andrew Fisher, and the giggling reaction is his sister and my then-gf, Jessica. As Jessica once said, giggling was pretty much her trademark. You can hear her laughing somewhere in at least five Big City Nights songs. I don’t have any photos of the session itself, and I realize that these pics are getting pretty Danny-centric, but I have to go with what I have. This is a picture of me the next day, hungover and trying to mix the song. I finished it in the afternoon and we put it up on MySpace that night, so the song was written, recorded, and released in a single weekend. Ah, for the boundless energy of my youth.

03. “Like A Song”

Might Minutes was an absolute blast to record, my favourite by a long shot. Not only was it one long party filled with friends and barbecues and jamming, it was one long productive party. I wonder if now we could party for a week and nag out a nineteen songer. We did the vocals for “Canadian Cigarettes,” “Lump In My Throat” and “Fuck Edwin” in the basement of the house I grew up in on Fairglen Avenue in Brampton (same place and time that me, James and Russell sang the Flower City Three’s rendition of 54-40′s “Casual Viewin’”), but most of MM was done in Carey and Spencer’s basement, where we made the bulk of our best music in the early years. This is one of my all-time favourite songs of ours, so I’m cherrypicking it from the long drunkthon that characterized the album’s recording. In case you haven’t seen it yet, we even made a silly video for it, which Ryan says he can’t watch because the buttons on my wallet carved a disgustingly long scratch across the hood of his truck when I slid across it.

02. “Do the Do” James playing some unscheduled drumming at the end to the sound of Winfrow giggling should give it away. We were really drunk when we sang this one in my bedroom of the Bathurst house. I did a few headstands to get the blood flowing to my vocal cords and fell backwards into a bookshelf. We were excited about having our first album on a record label and having fun and this was just a great night. We went out after and watched the Leafs, who promptly lost to the Canucks.

01. “Born to Bar Band”

Yep, after all these years, ten of ‘em by my count, the first song on our first record still takes the number one slot. Ryan shouting “Ohhh! No you didn’t!” was in reaction to Eric Lister cracking a fresh beer, putting it down, promptly forgetting it was a fresh beer and tapping a long ash right into the hole. He drank the polluted beer anyway, perhaps to teach himself a lesson, and even through Ryan may have polluted the vocal take by yelling and laughing during it, the moment captured the spirit of what the song was about so we left it in. We sing what we wanna sing. Doomed to obscurity. Born to Bar Band.

That’s the list. Thanks for reading and, hopefully, listening. More to come, as ever. This year’s gonna be a good one for The Big City Nights, with at least two good albums coming down the pipeline, and possibly four. More music is coming and we can’t wait to share it with you.

I literally can’t wait actually, so here's a very rough mix of "Cadillac (On My Ass)" from our long-delayed studio album Heck 'Em All, out spring/summer 2017. It's not mastered yet, so CRANK the volume:

https://soundcloud.com/the-big-city-nights/cadillac-roughmix

[thebigcitynightsband]

ALMOST AWAKE

We knew from day one that we’d never see fame or anything remotely like it with this endeavor, but in the words of Robert Pollard, “we began making records anyway, just to have them.” That’s right. Just to have them. Lord knows we have nothing else. Doomed to obscurity. Born to bar band.

That’s our old MySpace bio, written in 2007 and remaining unchanged for our entire tenure on MySpace, from Tom to Murdoch.

I’ve talked about how much I miss MySpace on this blog before ( “Her Geography” was originally called “MySpace Memories”), but I suspect that I miss that particular time in my life, not MySpace itself.

I’ve also written about internet nostalgia before and how strange it feels. The architecture of the internet makes the experience of being online feel seamless from day to day because the changes are small and rarely jarring. A feature added here, another feature deleted there. A new interface, a new button. Small novelties are revealed in comfortable increments. But small changes add up to big ones over time, and although the pace of this accumulation might seem glacial, often I glance up at my computer screen and think about how fucking different the internet was ten years ago.

But, as you know if you’ve followed this band for any length of time, my tendency to look back with wistful longing is not reserved for the internet. Nostalgia is the defining condition of my life.

Back in 2011 me and my friend Russell released an album called Brampton Comes Alive under the moniker The Flower City 3, a band we’d been trying to start since I emailed about it in 2006. We tried to enlist Ryan Hacker and make an album about Brampton, but Hacker was less enthusiastic about the idea. Russell and I saw it as a challenge, writing song about Brampton, but Hacker saw it as a constraint. So we told people that Brampton was the third member of the group and made an album. I’m really happy with the finished product, even if the second half gets a little depressing, care of a tune called “Never Gonna Be Back Home” that I wrote. We did the vocals in a room I stayed in briefly on Cecil with a testy roommate who hated noise, so we only had one take to do the song before he came home and told us to stop recording, and I was happy that I got the screams right in the chorus. You can hear the song here: https://theflowercity3.bandcamp.com/track/never-gonna-be-back-home-2 For the packaging, we got Russell’s brother Luke to drive around Brampton and take photos. We chose one of Shopper’s World for the front cover, but the physical record had a booklet with five or six other photographs. The lone review we got for the record, by a blog called iheartmusic, was savage. He said it was the worst record he’d ever heard, which hurt a little, but I was glad that we made it. It was a nostalgic collection of song, to be sure, our mission statement being: this album is dedicated to Brampton, not as it is, or even as it was, but as we remember it, echoing the old maxim that what happens isn’t as significant as how you remember it. 

I thought that finishing and releasing that Flower City 3 record would finally cure me of my nostalgia, but it didn’t. I became more and more introspective, to the point where most of BCN songs are about the loss of friendship or the loss of youth. I don’t just want the band to be a self-therapy vehicle for me, but it’s hard to fight what comes naturally. Metal bands write about ancient medieval battles or zombies climbing mountains. Punk bands write about pizza and girls. And The Big City Nights Band writes songs about nostalgia and friendship. So here we are, with a new record that serves as a callback to the past.

We have an old song on Deep Space Bistro called “Almost Awake,” an off-kilter, shoegazey kind of thing, with a lot of delay on the guitar. The song was recorded in late spring 2008 around the same time I was finishing up the final mixes for A Steamroller Named Desire. I was with Jessica at the time, and I remember meeting her somewhere in Chinatown to grab food. She'd taken the bus down from Brampton while I'd spent the day recording the song. We brought the food back to my attic bedroom and ate while I played her the mix. I tried to get her to sing on it, but she wasn't comfortable with it. Previously she'd been excited to sing on songs, and we did a lot of recording together. Her voice can be found on "Be Mine This Xmas," "Hockey Night In Canada," "Greensong," "Canadian Baseball," "I'm A Skymaker," "Until They Smile," "Between Important Syllables," "Jawbreakers," "Summer Sports," "Carry Me Ontario," "Happy Man," and probably a few more I'm forgetting. But she wasn't down with singing on this one, and it was a turning point in our relationship. After that afternoon, it was much harder to get her to sing on my songs. She was struggling with depression and malaise at the time. She dropped out of school and spent most days in bed watching The Office. We moved in together in September 2009 in an attempt to salvage the relationship but it didn't last long. We broke the lease and went our separate ways in June 2010, a few days before the band released Might Minutes.

Almost Awake is our twenty-first album, meaning our discography could now legally drink at a bar in the States if it were a sentient being. The idea sparks one's imagination. If our discography were a person, it’d be an older man, NOT a gentleman but a bellowing boor lurching down the sidewalk, trying to make friends with people who have their headphones on. Friendly enough, and not a bully, but a guy who has a surplus of things he wants to say and a deficit of sympathetic ears. Enthusiastic, to be sure, yet caustic and poorly dressed to boot. He stands upwind while smoking at the bus stop. He's maddeningly inconsistent to employer and friend alike: no one knows which version of him will show up, the slick professional or the shambling, drug-addicted hustler. Always interesting though not always inviting interest. Loving but not loved. Fetid, not feted. Musical garbage. Gasoline rainbows. Yesterday's slice of pizza. Tomorrow's heartburn. A pile of newspapers in a language lost to the world. Twenty one albums of shambolic, mono, sometimes beautiful, sometimes acerbic, rock 'n roll from the metaphorical garage.

Almost Awake has some rock n roll on it, especially the first half, but it’s got plenty of balladry too. As an album it can stand on its own, but it might need assistance walking. It's helper and brother is High Hopes, our other record that came out in 2016. The two records are bookends that mine similar sonic and lyrical territory. I've been battling a drug problem for a few years now and finally starting to get the upper hand, though there have been falterings here and there. I write a lot of songs regardless, on drugs or off them, drunk or sober. A recurring lyrical themes of the early albums was friendship. I wrote a lot of songs about my friends. 

"Born to Bar Band" is about my friends who were in bands, working all day and week so they could play music at night and on weekends, hence the line "days seem long waiting to sing our songs." "Murray Street" is about Emon. We had a fight summer 2006, so I wrote a song about it. It's not Shakespeare, obviously. I preferred to put it bluntly back then: "Please don't not call me your friend." "Wedding Day" is about a friend of mine who had gotten engaged to another friend of mine. They started acted differently, didn't come out as much, which was fine and understandable, except that when they DID come out, they were awkward and kinda rude to us. It was as if they thought we were all immature losers and they were better than us because they had decided to do something adult while we were still playing in bands and drinking in bars. So I wrote a song about how I was mad about it."Why I Didn't Hate Summer 2003" is another friendship one. "Tell your friends this summer I'm just stuck working.""She Dreams Of Airports" was about my friend M___. Any song on Born to Bar Band that isn't about friendship or hanging out with friends is about love and/or relationship problems. "Bicycle Man," "Waiting," "Mathematics," "Don't Tell Me" and "Don't Fuck With Me," written about my ex-gf D____, "Run Home" and "Big Ears" about my gf at the time, N_____. "Leave Your Man" was directed toward a girl I really liked at the time. "Soda Song" is also about her. 

Later on, starting with Might Minutes I'd say, and in FULL swing by the time we got to Under the Overpass and Gimme Gardens, our songs were about nostalgia, and this nostalgia was brought on by the dissolution of many of my friendships. I'm not saying my friendships had ALL crumbled by 2010, but there had been a fundamental change to each one of them, I still don't know why, that started to drive wedges between me and my friends. These wedges were creating distance between us, inches that grew to canyons, until eventually some people disappeared altogether from each other's lives. Me coming to terms with this has not yet happened. I'm still upset over it, and I still think about it all the time, which is pathetic because I'm 31 years old. I should be married with children by now, instead of living with my parent and yearning for my lost youth.

Ember Nights

Taken from a collection of demos written last summer. The title was "Memba Thenz" for a while but I changed it to something less silly. An ember night could be any night in September, November, or December, take your pick, or a night that burns and glows, which is more poetic I guess. The song, lyrically, is about coming to the end of a long period of debauchery, and your brain is dead and your nerves are shot. The lyric is deliberately dumb, “mind like a DOA,” to match the brain deadness of the subject or something. I dunno. I like the line so I kept it. I like the lead guitar lines too and Kuehn drummed the song well. Love that tapping on the top of the bass drum, which James does sometimes too, often to great effect, as in "In The Street."

Two Packs A Day Also from last summer. This one turned out a LOT faster and punkier than I expected. The vocal is not strong at all, but it has a charm to it. There's a friendship vibe to this one, a territorial one, as in things are like this “round our way."

Summers End Wrote this one last April. Again, turned out way different during the tracking of the drums, so we went with it. There is a vocal melody but, as with "1985," I really liked how punchy and strong it sounds without any singing, so I left it alone. I still might get Ryan to sing on it and put a version with vocals on the next record. We'll see. More & More Mortified Recorded this one with Courtney on vocals. A sad song about dashed expectations and getting older. I love the blend of our voices. My mother loves this song and made me play it for my sister and her boyfriend on Christmas Eve, which was awkward, but my Mom said she still had the song in her head three days later, which is a good sign. When your Mom, who has previously not expressed much interest in your band, has a hook in her head three days after hearing a song, it gives you more confidence in said song. There’s a bit of Twin Peaks vibe.

No Window My first bedroom in Toronto was in a basement and it was windowless. I felt trapped and encumbered. No window = no escape, obviously, but also nothing to look at. Some Glum Alumni

Another song about days gone by. Before Instagram, nobody had photos of the truly good times, because everyone was having too much fun to take photos. In The Dark This is a really old cover of a Paddington song, recorded in Orangeville in 2005 in my Dad's basement. That was the first iteration of Little Ghost Recording Co and I was just learning how to record. I could barely play the drums but I got through this song okay. If it were any longer I surely would have faltered and made mistakes. The drumming as it is, is really tight-fisted on the hi-hat, which was how I played back then. I'm a much better drummer now than I was then, but still not very good. The Paddington album this song is on is called These Monsters That You've Been Chasing, which is a fantastic title. You can hear the (superior) Paddington version, which is a prom date waltz, at the following ancient MySpace page: https://myspace.com/paddingtonband/music/songs Paddington was a cool band I played in for four or five months back in 2004. The bass player Jordan hated me. A year later, frustrated at the glacial pace with which Andrew preferred to rehearse, record, and organize live dates, he organized a coup. Although he claimed that he left the band, along with Lindsay Gibb, the singer/keyboard player and the drummer whose name I forgot, what they really did was kick Andrew out of his own band and reform under the name Bedtime, Sleepyhead, which is BS if you ask me. Lindsay never cared for me much either. I didn't speak much at Paddington practices because the other members had known each other for years and had all the accrued inside jokes and experiences that come with close contact, but anytime I did try to speak or contribute to a conversation, Lindsay would wait a beat and then go: "...well, anyway..." then continue speaking as if I'd never said anything. After a while I stopped speaking entirely. I left the band unceremoniously in July or August 2004. Like The Beekeeper’s Society, another coed indie band with a polite approach to songcraft that I once played in, I never played on any recordings, so my time in those bands is lost to the ages. High Hopes A full band, electric version of the title track of our last record. I prefer the other version, but this one has its moments, particularly the break down when the bass goes for a walk and the whole band smashes back in on the A chord, those three hits, then back in. The harmonies are off kilter, but I didn't have much time to do them, so I just hoped for the best. People & Places I was digging through old demos last year, demos I'd done in autumn 2013 while living at my Dad's in Guelph and attending the University of Waterloo. I found so many forgotten gems in that pile of songs. and this was one of them. Others include "Cocations," which has already been recorded sans vocals and will be on our upcoming double album, and "Throwing Copper," which will also be on Keep It Beautiful. Sad Shitty Supermarket Holds Senior Citizen Day Again, in keeping with the theme of the album, a song about getting older and having one's expectations dashed. One & Only A love song to drugs. Western Sweepstakes This was going to be a demo, part of the collection of songs I did in autumn 2013, but I liked the song enough to dress it up with synth strings and harmonies, the usual BCN fare. I tried to record this one with Ryan Mills when James and Ryan had taken a short break during the Chords for the Bored sessions, but it didn't come out very good, so I kept that song off that album. I knew I was going to use this version on an album eventually, it was just a matter of finding the right fit.

Make It Mine A reviewer of our first album described "She Dreams of Airports" as a "hobo strum" which has "enough brio about it to win you over." He also said the song had a great title. "She Dreams of Airports" was written in a feverish afternoon during a Neutral Milk Hotel phase, so I was trying to ape Jeff Mangum by strumming loudly on an acoustic and trying to jam as many words into the song as I could, using the specific topic of travel. But the whole “hobo strum” thing wasn’t true...I wrote the song in the comfort of the basement of my Dad’s house in Orangeville. “Make it Mine,” however, was written while I was busking at the northwest corner of Queen and University last April, a transient month spent mostly on the street, trying to get enough money to get by. I’d usually make at least $20 if I played for three or four hours. I’d get bored doing CCR and Oasis though, and write my own stuff. I wrote this one on the spot, which is probably why the lyrics are so repetitive. I couldn’t write them down so they had to be basic. There’s another version on High Hopes but it’s not much better. Both version fail to get the essence of the song, which is an authentic “hobo strum,” not an ersatz one like “She Dreams of Airports.” I’d like to try it out with the full band someday soon. One Last Rodeo A song about doing drugs one last time. And doing them again the next day, just one last time. And the next day, one last time, the cycle continuing for months until you're barely alive. Drug users call the last night the "last rodeo," depressingly enough. Big City Nights Radio Report #1 A bunch of demos sewn together and presented as a radio station. A radio station I'd put on my presets, indubitably. Look for more BCN Radio Reports in the future, $2 and #3 and so on. Why not, eh? Some of these songs will be on our upcoming double album, Keep It Beautiful.

[thebigcitynightsband]

Almost Awake

The Big City Nights Band - Almost Awake LP (LG60) (click link to stream album)

It’s 6:39AM on December 31 2016 and I’m going the fuck to bed. I’ll post a track by track explanation soontime. In the meantime, hope you have a listen, and hope you like it. Yes, there is a BCN song called “Almost Awake” from Deep Space Bistro, and yes, it kicks ass. Sort of. Kind of a lo-fi shoegaze thing. This album is half punk, half drum machine folk. Can you dig it?

[thebigcitynightsband]

time is a scarce resource

Well, it’s November and we still don’t have our big record done, the one with more songs than Complete Lung Champions and more hooks than a twenty round boxing match. I’m trying to get some consecutive days off so I can get to Brampton and do some recording, but we lost some gear, which we’re currently looking for, and recording right now would require a lot of gear rental, plus the stars aligning and the three of us having time off work at the same time.

The big album, Keep It Beautiful, is the primary focus, after which a furious ten-songer recorded in early Sept, called Better Days Are A Toenail Away, will be worked on. And yes, after that, Heck Em All, along with yet another ten-songer that will go to places we haven’t yet gone, in terms of song structure and guitar work. That record is called You’ve Come A Long Way, Maybe, and will feature a killer title track.

But yeah, right now we’re just trying to get some time to work on the record. When/if we finally do, you’ll be the first to know. We will have another album out this year, maybe two, but probably not three or four, as I first predicted.

Next year is the ten-year anniversary of our debut album Born to Bar Band, which we’ll be playing in its entirety at shows in Brampton (probably Tracks, maybe Ellen’s) and Toronto (probably Hawaii Bar), with our friends The Flying Museum Band, who will also be celebrating the ten-year anniversary of their first record, Pray For The Flying Museum Band.

It’s November now, and we’re running out of time, the scarcest resource I know. Cold is coming (and so has football!), so wear a scarf and stay warm this winter.

[thebigcitynightsband]

You’ve Come A Long Way, Maybe

We’re making a new record with the insane goal of having it completed before the end of 2015. It’s called You’ve Come A Long Way, Maybe, and it’s going to have a shitload of songs. Way more than our current leader in song totals, Complete Lung Champions, which is now almost seven years old.

I was listening to Yo La Tengo’s I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass as we were making CLC, and we were trying to make a similarly schizophrenic mix-tape type record, and to that end I think we succeeded. If you played most people “Evil,” “Sunshine City,” and “Gigantic Onion,” one after the other, almost none of them would guess that it came from the same band, much less the same album, and I’m proud of that.

The record’s not flawless, of course, there’s a fairly monochrome middle section, where all the songs came from the same sessions and used the same microphone techniques. “Hecka Reckanize” up to “My Pet Archie” all sort of blur together.

I like the weird ones on there though. At the time it seemed unusual for us to start an album with a song as tranquil as “Build A Rocket,” and songs like “If It Feels Right” and “Great Morning Truck” definitely fly the freak flag. They are weird, off-beat numbers, and I want to explore that kind of sound more on this upcoming record.

Right now, there are 28 songs sitting in a folder on my desktop, ready to be used for the new album. Almost all of them are old, or recently recorded alternate versions. For example, we have a thirty-second instrumental called “Her Geography Revisited,” which is exactly what it sounds like. There’s an acoustic version of “One Big Hole,” (similar to the ending of the song that ended up on Chords for the Bored), and acoustic versions of “Feelin Fine” and “Tuning Song”

We’re also going to be putting “Hey Thirsty!” on the album because it’s a good song and deserves to be part of our discography proper. We’ve sat on it for six years now, so perhaps it’s time it saw the light.

I had a bad year in 2015. I wasn’t taking care of myself mentally or physically which resulted in a pretty profound depression, and watching my friends drift further and further away didn’t help either. I used to spend every weekend with my friends, and many weeknights, whereas now I’m lucky if they respond to my messages within three days. This difference is deeply felt and it’s something I’m trying to come to terms with. I know that you can’t be a kid forever but I didn’t realize just how sharply my contact with my friends would decline as I approached, and this year finally reached, thirty years old.

So this album is a first for us, in that it has a conceptual framework, which is to say, it’s a concept album of sorts about dependence and addiction and its aftermath. So the title is both a riff on the Fatboy Slim record and an acknowledgement of the fact that, even when you think you’ve made a lot of progress, you might not be as far along as you want to be. Hence the maybe. The album will be divided into a stage about partying, a stage about being hungover and depressed, and a stage about trying to move on from a way of life you’ve been stuck in for ten years or more.

A song like “Hey Thirsty!” fits well within that framework because it’s a song about alcoholism written in 2008, and it’s good to know that I was aware of my behavior as far back as back then. The chorus: haven’t you noticed how thirsty you are? Don’t wait outside my house cuz I’m at the bar. Forget you once said you needed my hand on yours oh I know the bottle had mine right from the start.

Jake Foley and Russell Holley from the Flying Museum Band helped us out on that recording, and the song is drummed by Spencer, because back then James couldn’t do the Johnny Cash train drumbeat, though he’s more than capable of doing so now.

Speaking of drums, we’ll be tracking them for three hours this coming Sunday at 3 PM, and I’m very excited. James knows eight of the songs I want to record but he hasn’t even heard the other eight yet, but he always learns things quickly and usually ends up liking what he did in the first place. At first he didn’t like his drums on the song “Oscillation Drills” because we’d tracked it so hastily and wanted to rerecord them. We set a date to do it but before it came he texted me saying he’d grown to like what he did and that we should keep it. I’m glad we did, cuz it’s a cool little song and has a lot more emotional freight than most of the pop punk fare its surrounded by on that album (though “Hell Song” is pretty heavy too, as is “Only Laughter”).

As you probably have gleaned by following this blog, I’m absolutely obsessed with making albums. It’s my favourite thing to do, from the planning stage to the posting stage. I love figuring out which song should sit where on an album, love identifying the track one (usually I know what it’s going to be well before we even record the album, like on Born to Bar Band and Chords for the Bored though this wasn’t the case on Your Mom Remains the Same or Complete Lung Champions).

This time I know. It’s a song called “Expert Advice” and it’s a killer opener. It’s my favourite song we’ve done in a long time and I can’t wait for people to hear it We’re going to try to make a video for it as we make the record, and a video could be out as early as Christmas, if we end up finishing that particular song Sunday, which is my goal. It’ll just be compiled from footage of us recording the song and hanging out, which is my favourite kind of video anyway.

Two songs in particular are going to set the tone of the album, a song called “Guy I Know,” which is kind of a Built to Spill thing, and a tune called “Cocations,” which will be a hazy, gauzy, rocky affair. Along with another new tune called “If It Kills You,” which reminds me of “World Find You,” the first ten songs on the record are all going to be songs we record this Sunday.

I know I say this every time but this is going to be a special album. I’m going to Ecuador to teach English for six weeks in January, I fly out on the 5th, and I want to finish the album so I can listen to it on the beach. I want an epic album, a return to our old ways in some parts, with short songs that fade out quickly alongside bigger “hit single” type songs. I want a big, brash, loud record that will stand among our best work.

So yeah, keep an eye on this blog or our Facebook page for updates. Heck Em All is still 85% finished but it’s on the back burner right now as we work on this record.

You’ve Come A Long Way, Maybe.

Diggit.

[thebigcitynightsband]

Hate songs

That recent interview we did about our songs got me thinking. We actually have a lot of songs I don’t like, I just couldn’t think of all of them on the spot. So welcome to our new feature, Hate Song, styled after the excellent A/V Club series in which celebrities pick a song and discuss why they hate it. 

So, to wit: “Bored Chords” is a pretty bad song. First of all, I took the chorus from an older (and in my opinion better) song called “Longer and Goners” off Gimme Gardens but it doesn’t sound very good in “Bored Chords.” Also, the tempo is too slow and the title proves quite apt by the end of the tune, where we peter out without a cue, bored to death by the pointless riff and just kinda falling apart, unable to continue the shitty song for a moment longer. It’s actually kinda funny how the song falls apart, but it’s telling that my favourite part of the song is when it stops.

[thebigcitynightsband]

A Pair of Interviews

I tried to get us some press for the best-of, and while no reviewers seem to want to touch the album with a ten-foot pole (seriously, no one wants to review us, which is a mixed blessing), we’ve got two interviews in one week.

Here’s an interview we did with a blog called Haunted Hotels in which we discuss how we met, how we write songs, and which songs we love and hate the most: http://hauntedhotelstuff.tumblr.com/post/126384644792/the-big-city-nights-band-minor-carpentry-i-had

And here’s another one we did with a blog called The Tinderbox run by my friend Sam Decter, a musician in his own right who makes some awesomely badass tunes. The interview is here: http://boxesofboom.blogspot.ca/2015/08/reflecting-on-decade-of-big-city-nights.html

Currently trying to get an interview with the Brampton Guardian, our hometown paper. I'll let you know how that goes in the coming weeks.

That's the news, lose yr blues.

[thebigcitynightsband]

MYSPACE MEMORIES

I like to remember things. I am a compulsive rememberer. I try to document my experiences so that I can go back and relive them on cold winter nights, nights when the world seems cruel and arbitrary. I like to go back and hurl myself into the loving arms of The Way Things Used To Be.

And because I nostalgize (is that a word? It should be, like contemporize or authorize) pretty much everything, I sometimes miss the Myspace era. I’m sure I hated it at the time, for its interminable upload wait times, for its rigidity concerning the number of songs one could upload, for its atrocious design and for the determined assaults of foreign spam in the comments section.

But I miss it now. Of course I miss it now. 

I miss dreaming up catchy or clever sentences for the tagline that used to perch beside the profile pic (a feature that was the undeniable progenitor to the tweet, with its emphasis on brevity and its restricted character count). 

I miss the enforced hierarchy of the Top 8 function. When you got mad at someone you could remove their band from your favoured eight, which taught them not to fuck with you.

I even miss how one could only upload just three songs (our first EP, For Shame, had three tracks because of that rule. We recorded it with the Myspace format in mind and I’m sure thousands of bands did the same, like how artists wrote to the vinyl format in the 70s or to the cassette format in the 80s or to the CD format in the 90s). 

Then sometime in 2007 Myspace began letting bands upload four songs, which seemed almost impossibly generous at the time (I think this was around the same time Top 8 became Top 16 but I’m probably wrong). How lavish of Myspace Tom and his faceless boardroom associates. How considerate.

“No problem dudes. And rock on.”

Then in 2009 they allowed us to upload six songs so we recorded a six track EP called Sumer Sports. Things were just getting better and better.

Except they weren’t. We began hearing whispers about other websites. Places with names like Soundcloud and Bandcamp. Even YouTube began to seem like a viable option for us to stream music from, and they’d been correspondingly benevolent with bandwidth. You could put your whole damn album up there all of a sudden. I even took a halfhearted stab at making us a CBC Radio 3 profile with the dim hope we’d get some airplay next to titans like Wolf Parade and Metric (ha! it was never gonna happen, but back then I still nursed the sick delusion that we’d one day have the band for a career).

So Myspace stopped being cool for bands. Individuals had long ago jumped ship to Facebook, which created confusion, as nobody now can agree on when Myspace was no longer the default place for a band to go, though general consensus is that it happened sometime between summer 2009 and fall 2010.

So by the time Myspace let bands upload ten tracks, or maybe it was even twenty, we didn’t really care anymore. It was far too late. The decline of Myspace is similar to the career trajectory of Dany Heatley. Everyone knew the comedown was approaching, but no one predicted it to happen with such shocking suddeness.

So we migrated to Bandcamp as a vehicle to release our records. I still remember the exhilaration I felt when I saw that we could upload every single song from all our records, along with album art, lyrics, and recording information. By October 2010 all of our songs were on there. To this day they still are. We signed up for Bandcamp half a decade ago, and so have been using it regularly far longer than we used Myspace for, yet I feel no affection for it. It has no personality whatsoever. I know that some bands make their background black or something, which does harken back to Myspace a bit, but Bandcamp has never had nor will have the zany personality of Myspace. Bandcamp is dour and austere, like a library archive in Russia or something, whereas Myspace is a loveable alcoholic who can’t stop getting hideous tattoos but you like him or her anyway. Which is why I love the former for housing all of our records in one place for free but also why I love and miss the latter.

For our intents and purposes, Myspace was totally useless by the end of 2010. It wasn’t that the it didn’t work or something; the music player was actually better than it had ever been. But Myspace had a stigma now. You couldn’t link to it or you’d look like a Luddite, which was too bad, because conducting the logistical operations of being in a band seemed a little easier back in the Myspace years. It was easier to network with other bands. It was easier to advertise your allegiances through the aforementioned top 8, or 16, or 32 or whatever, and was great for exhibiting bands that you endorsed. When you found a band that you admired, you could check out all the other bands in their top friends to find some similar sounds. I’m sure there exists now some kind of algorithm application that performs the same task, but what about booking gigs out of town? Arranging tours was much easier on Myspace. When you sent a message to a band you would know if they had read it. Because it said so. I know that the Facebook “seen” notification ostensibly does the same thing, but bands now tend to not read messages from people they don’t recognize unopened. Also, nowadays bands keep their music on Soundcloud or Bandcamp or YouTube or Instagram but communicate with their fans via Facebook or Tumblr, so that what was once a one stop shop in Myspace has become a fragmented cloud of urls, auto-plays, YouTube “videos” accompanied by a single still photo, and endless rows of clickable blue thumbs.

But wanna know what I miss the most? Show flyers. 

Show flyers were great. I loved ‘em. They haven’t disappeared or anything, but they’re definitely less common now. And even the ones that do get made are just uploaded to a Facebook event page as a jpg. Nobody actually makes flyers anymore. My old band Reverse Mount Rushmore made and posted show flyers around town for a 2009 gig we played at the Horseshoe. Even back then it seemed hopelessly quaint.

Of course even back then there were some uncreative promoters who just posted show details on message boards, the sole and extremely half-assed attempt at ornamentation being using CAPS LOCK for the band names. I did it too though, so I can’t bitch too much. My show posts back then tended to look like this:

Friday April 8th 2005 @ Friend’s (formerly Amigo’s)

THE CIRCUS PADDINGTON WHITE AFTER LABORDAY

Doors: 8 PM  $5 19+

Not much to look at, is it?

So tonight I found three old show flyers from the Myspace era of the band:

That’s a lot better than lazily typing out band names in caps and stating the show time, eh? Ah, the lost art of show flyers. And the Myspace era. I miss them both very much. And they seem inextricable in my memory.

And guess what else I found, since we’re sailing on a nostalgia trip tonight? The website for my old record label, Permanent Records, on the Wayback Machine, a website that archives old websites so you can browse them long after they’re gone. Here’s a snapshot of the “news” section from March 6 2005:

Needless to say, we never got those Circus t-shirts. Jesus. What the hell was I thinking with white Impact font on a green background? Might as well have asked visitors to stare directly at the sun. They probably spent twenty minutes blinking after leaving our site. And here’s another interesting find - the “staff” section of the website. The label’s staff consisted of me, Aurora, and Diana, my girlfriend at the time:

Needless to say, I signed Permanent Records up for Myspace, rendering the above website obsolete, but it’s fun and funny to go back and gawk at it and judge it harshly.

Permanent Records put out one record by James’ old band The Circus. We went out to Brockville and made a record over a summer weekend. Perm Rec released it the following winter, sold all copies at the release show (which recouped recording expenses), and then shut down forever. At the time I was frustrated that Permanent Records (or “Perm Rec” as I tried to get people to call it) didn’t have “legitimate” releases, ones with bar codes and shrink wrap and jewel cases. The Circus EP came in plain white envelopes crudely stapled together, with the title hand-stamped on the front. Here’s our old friend Steff holding a copy (I think we thought that having a pretty girl hold the record would boost sales. Must have worked.):

There’s no big point to this rambling post. These are just my Myspace memories. Cool that the Wayback Machine exists so we can go back every once in a while and revel in them. Browse our old band pages and listen to ancient songs from bygone eras. Cool that there’s a permanent record of Permanent Records.  

[thebigcitynightsband]

Go Fund Us

We've started a "Go Fund Me" page for our upcoming Best Of compliation, but we're not asking for donations. We're basically using it as a pre-order application to fund the release. Anyone who donates anything will get a copy of the record. And even if we get zero dollars, we're still releasing the damn thing, we promise. We fully admit that crowdsource funding is pretty tacky, but this is the first time we've EVER charged money for a release (and it'll be the last until the 20 year anniversary, to be released on 180 gram vinyl). Here's the page: http://www.gofundme.com/wb3t3ubg

[thebigcitynightsband]

Video for “Barses Larded!”

[thebigcitynightsband]

CHORDS FOR THE BORED

Our 17th album is available for streaming and pay-what-you-can-including-nothing download right here: https://thebigcitynightsband.bandcamp.com/album/chords-for-the-bored

Here’s the songs:

01 Welland Nights

Wrote this one in James’ old place right after getting home from a disastrous month-long trip to Montreal. Just about boredom and small towns. I’ve never actually been to Welland, but I like the name. Vaguely British.

02 Barses Larded!

A break-up song. One of our strongest choruses in a while. The verses are kind of annoying and remind me of “My M.O.” because the vocals are robotic and the song is in the same key, but I think Barses is a bit more memorable of a tune.

03 Goin Outside

Another “tear in your beer” ballad about sadness and regret. I’m sensing a theme here...

04 Lottery Man

Went over to Ryan’s apartment in summer 2013 and we knocked this one out in half an hour, lyrics included. We even did a demo on his laptop. I wonder if he still has it. We tried to record this song in Ottawa in September 2013 and it turned out awful. I’m really glad we got it this time. I used Brent’s octave pedal for the guitar lead, and it sorta sounds like Jamaican steel drums.

05 Neon Knee

Another one written at James old house after Montreal. The name is obviously taken from a common hockey collision, the dreaded knee-on-knee hit. Took the chorus from an old song I love, “Electric Guitar Face”.

06 Don’t Hang Me

I wanted to write a song with a Ladyhawk vibe. We rehearsed this one a lot. Last September we demoed a bunch of songs on James’ cell phone, and he wrote the chorus/refrain. I want to do more collaborative writing like that. Very happy with how this one turned out, from the chunky F palm mutes to the five wah tracks. Live fadeout too! We learned how to do them years ago, from “God is in the Radio” by QOTSA. Some random woman called Ryan accidentally and left a message, so we put it in the song because it’s funny.

07 Brampton Mall Dreams

The best part of being in a band with people for so long is how you can speak in code. For the drum vibe, all I said to James was “Harvest,” which he immediately understood, which is awesome. We recorded this one earlier in the year on the podcast under the name “The Name of the World” which is the title of a Denis Johnson book I freakin love. Sad tune. Ryan’s vocal is phenomenal, and I love the vocal harmonies in the chorus. That’s Courtney doing the high ones at the end. Title references “Teenage Mall Dreams” from Yawns Beyond because we want all our records to have some kind of inner continuity. Another reason why all so many of our front covers have a similar vibe.

08 Pie Guy, Eh?

Back in 2009 I was living with Spencer and came home from Price Chopper with a pie. Spencer said “pie guy, eh?” and I laughed for an hour. A very short song. Reminds me of “Long Distance King” but that might be because of its length. Again, written right after I got home from Montreal. That was a fertile week, writing-wise.

09 Bored Chordz

The title track, sort of. It’s not good enough to be a title track, so we shortened it. A decent entry though. It initially had an Ataris vibe and was a lot more anthemic but I prefer this tempo. Slacker vibe. I dig the synth trills. Chorus stolen from an older song called “Longers & Goners” from Gimme Gardens.

10 Wrong Together

Was trying to write a “Lost Together” for The Big City Nights. The gang harmonies remind me of our older stuff, Born to Bar Band era, though we are much better singers nowadays. We even did a fade-out, just like old times. We used to do fade-outs on so many songs...particularly on Complete Lung Champions, which has five of them. I remember talking about “Lost Between Houses” with Ryan and he said “I like that it has an ending. There are so many fade outs on that album.” He was right. Anyway. The return of the glorious face out.

11 One Big Hole

I liked the demo a lot and was afraid it wouldn’t sound good with the full band. I was wrong. I love how it goes from full band to acoustic strum. Sounds awesome. That’s James on acoustic guitar. Ryan sang this one beautifully, though I had to duck him in the second verse when he sang “sheets” instead of “streets”. ;)

12 Daylight Hours

Again, I loved the demo of this and was afraid it wouldn’t turn out well with a full band. Wrong again. We killed it. Speeds up a little but who cares? Definitely an anomaly on the record as it doesn’t sound like any of the other songs on there, but that’s what makes it so cool. Dreamy vibe. And a blatant ripoff of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams.”

13 Secret Sandcastles

Again, code words for the vibe. I said to the guys “Ragged Glory” and they knew exactly what we were going for. Another live fade out because they’re so fun. Not the strongest song, but it sounds great. Ryan plays harmonica (all harmonica on the album is Ryan because he’s much better at it than I am. I haven’t done harmonica on a BCN song in ages cuz I don’t have to).

We recorded these songs live off the floor with Ryan Mills on February 7th. We tracked 13 full-band songs and one solo electric song but I scrapped the latter. Considering we only had two hours to track the songs, I’m amazed and happy that all 13 made it onto the album. usually you have to shitcan something. At least, we do. But we didn’t this time, except the solo song because I already have a version recorded and it’s way better. It’ll be on the next album which is called So Far Gone.

That’s that. Another album in the can. We have two more on the way, plus the hits package in July, then hopefully Deep Space Bistro 2: Into the Bistro. Not counting the hits albums, because they won’t feature any new material, we wanna make it a five album year. Shouldn’t be too hard. Break our record of 4 set in 2010 and again in 2012. Can we do it? You’ll see. 

And so will we.

That’s the news, lose yer blues.