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thebigcitynightsband · 8 years ago

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GUY I KNOW

I’ve been spending the last three weeks recording a new album with a project called Stumblr, which is essentially myself and David Contin from the Flying Museum Band, as well as a few other part-timers. My friend Kirsten Webb lent her voice to 4 tunes, including a classic called “Transnational Love Song,” which we banged out in 3 or 4 attempts, and I’m proud of it. I’m proud of the whole record, actually. I cant begin to describe how fun it was to record music again. Unfortunately, the last two BCN full lengths have been kinda dour affairs. I compiled High Hopes after a summer of demoing and recording alone in my Mum’s condo, where I stayed from May 1 to August 1 last summer, and I recorded the drums for Almost Awake last September with Mike Kuehn behind the kit, doing overdubs in late December when I had a few days off work and a working laptop.

I borrowed the same laptop to do this Stumblr record, starting with the drum tracks. Then I borrowed my friend Joe’s guitar amp, an incredible piece of equipment really, a Fender DeVille that I just love. I’m buying it off him this September, in fact. It’s the best sounding amplifier I’ve ever had the privilege of playing through. I used Joe’s Telecaster for both rhythm and lead and fuck does it sound good. But Twig needed the guitar for a show I got disinvited from - Twig being the band of ragtag Kensingtonites I joined a few months ago and played two gigs with, one at Stop Drop & Roll (formerly Rancho Relaxo) and one at Cherry Cola’s. I missed a few practices last week, however, and Twig decided I wasn’t ready to play their show last Saturday. (I respectfully disagreed, considering myself just fine to play the gig, but they weren’t confident and pulled the plug on me. So I’m not sure if I’m in that band anymore, but we’ll see. Point is, they needed Joe’s Telecaster back for the show last Saturday, so I hurriedly finished guitar overdubs last week before giving it back, before turning my attention to bass and vocals. I borrowed David Contin’s bass and finished up much quicker than I expected. It took longer to do the vocals because it always takes longer to do the vocals, especially when you’re a shitty singer. Yesterday I realized we were missing just TWO lead guitar parts and borrowed Sam from Twig’s Jackson, a metal guitar with a whammy bar missing the D string, which is typical me. Recording an album on a borrowed laptop through a borrowed amp with a borrowed guitar missing a crucial string. We got what we needed though, and said goodbye to the tracking phase right around 130AM last night. I brought Sam back his Jackson (heh...Sam Jackson...funny) and came home to mix but I was too tired and fell straight asleep.

I was tired because I got up early to record some Big City Nights stuff. One of the reasons we haven’t been able to push forward with our mammoth, 30-song opus Keep It Beautiful is because Ryan hasn’t been able to record his bass parts. He’s got a family now and has been too damn busy. I loaned him my mixer last year for a good five months but he wasn’t able to get anything done, so I took it back in December and decided to do it myself. I gave it a shot in December, with a bass borrowed from Mark (Crop Failure, Scrapheat, Lobot, and another nameless band with me and Michael from New Wings on drums), but I couldn’t get it to sound good. I was going directly into the mixer, which was okay for a song like “Summers End” because those drum tracks with Kuehn produced a very tight, boxed-in, claustrophobic drum sound. A thin sounding bass coming directly through a mixer isn’t a big deal if it’s joining a song that already sounds that way, and all the songs on Almost Awake have that sonic quality. But the drums we did back in December 2015 for Keep It Beautiful are much better recorded. We used four mics, one for the kick drum, one for the snare, and two ambient mics pulling double duty: they were meant to capture the cymbals/toms, but also the room itself. And there’s more dynamic range on those songs too. “Fighting Ways” is a soft, pretty, countryish tune that floats pleasantly past one’s ears, like a sonic river. It’s fairly consistent throughout, and I’m not just making a tongue-in-cheek joke about the song lacking a chorus and having just one slight change at the mark. But “Guy I Know” goes from super quiet in the beginning to a very loud chorus, complete with James building on the snare. That kind of sound can’t be stunted by a shitty, direct-in bass. So between December 2015 and this week I was waiting for an opportunity to get the bass sound tha album deserves, thinking that at some point Ryan and I would find a mutual window of free time and get it done, but that never happened and I just didn’t want to wait anymore. Tomorrow I have to return the laptop I borrowed and I didn’t want to wait another 6 months to get a chance at recording this record, which really does contain some of our best songs ever. It’s time we reminded people we’re alive and can still write songs. Though they’re not bad, High Hopes and Almost Awake are fairly lackluster releases. There’s a few good songs here and there but...something’s missing. And I wish I could say those records are uncharacteristic, but they’re not. At least, not compared to our recent output. Since 2014 we’ve released five albums that are kinda half-assed when weighed against our earlier output. Business Days, West Bestern, So Far Gone, and the two I just mentioned are all okay on their own. Off the top of my head, I’m really fond of “College Days,” and I think “Fire Away” is excellent, but those albums are mops for the floor when compared with some of our truly great work like Might Minutes (still my fav), Carry Me Ontario, Yawns Beyond, Oscillation Drills, etc.

But this record, Keep It Beautiful, will be worthy of that pantheon. I promise. Chords for the Bored, ostensibly our “return to form,” just doesn’t cut it, but this one will. Which is why I ran David Contin’s bass through Joe’s Fender Deville all day yesterday, nine hours straight of bass recording which killed my fingers...ask any guitar player who switches to bass for an hour or so...your callouses just aren’t strong enough for those strings...my fingers are killing me today.

But it was worth it. The record is done, bass-wise. I finished bass for every single song, recording alternate takes for each one, sometimes multiple alternate takes, so that come mix time I’ll have a plethora of takes to choose from and pick the one that best fits the song, as well as the best performance. Some songs have over five potential takes to choose from, so I’ll have my work cut out for me when it’s time to mix.

Anyway, “Guy I Know,” is now completely finished. Bass is done, and I mastered the song last night using LANDR software. Like “Fighting Ways” and “Laundry Days” and “Bird of Bees” and “Murray Had A Birthday,” the song is finished and mastered and will not be returned to. We don’t have any other KIB songs with vocals done though, so it may be some time before I can say this again, but here it is. You can listen to the new Big City Nights song here: https://thebigcitynightsband.bandcamp.com/track/guy-i-know-2

If you’re curious, you can hear a mess of Stumblr songs here (I recommend “Transnational Love Song” and “Sincerely”): https://soundcloud.com/user-895154951

After finishing Keep It Beautiful, which WILL happen this year, Ryan and I will focus on finally singing the vocals for Heck ‘Em All, which has taken a hilariously long amount of time. If it doesn’t come out til next year, we’ll have taken half a decade to finish it. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, but one never knows anymore.

This band used to be a hyperprolific entity that released multiple albums a year and played at least one show per month. Now? We’re not that. We haven’t played a show since May 28 2016 and we haven’t played a show as a proper trio since Jan 2 2016, as Ryan couldn’t make the May show last year so Stefan stood in his stead (Ryan was cool with it or we wouldn’t have done it...originally we were going to play acoustic until Stefan volunteered).

So yeah, we don’t play out much anymore and we don’t release much music anymore. And that which we do release isn’t as good as it used to be. Also, we don’t really talk anymore. Or hang out. I haven’t been able to get ahold of anyone lately.

So the focus now is to finish the two records we’ve had on the back burner for too long now. After that, who knows. The future of the band is up in the air. Although I once considered the band mine, because I started it and write most of the songs, I don’t feel that way anymore. I might release records under the BCN name that Ryan and James haven’t played on, as with Gimme Gardens or High Hopes or Almost Awake, but it wouldn’t feel right to keep going without them. Those guys. plus myself, are The Big City Nights Band. No one else could take their place. So I’ll try to get a conversation going soon regarding where they’d like to go and/or what they’d like to do with The Big City Nights, and we’ll go from there.

In the meantime I’m going to be playing and recording with Dave under the Stumblr moniker. Our first record will be out next week. It’s called Use Your Confusion. And we’ll be starting to record our second immediately. It will be called Better Days Are A Toenail Away.

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thebigcitynightsband · 8 years ago

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ROSTER REMEMBRANCE PT 1

Over the galloping years we’ve had a number of people in and out of the band. It is BCN policy to induct into our ranks whoever is in the room at the time of recording, though this open policy is only activated during vocal sessions. Singing vocals with BCN is a fantastically good time. One of my fondest memories is doing “Born to Bar Band” with Ryan Taylor (who’d formally joined the group just six weeks prior to the recording of that song) and Eric Lister (who I’d known for years through a mutual friend). But I’ll get into the specifics later. Suffice it to say that our inclusive policy has created a veritable roster of secondary members over time, a number probably approaching forty. Having just got back home from working a very long wedding, with the sun coming up and the birds coming out, I am currently smoking today’s last cigarette and will attempt to come up with a comprehensive list off the top of my head of everyone who has ever sung with us. I’ll use our records as a way of triggering the memories.

1. Brandon Fleet (”Mathematics,” “Desperate Man,” “Did Someone Make A Fool Out of You?” “Waiting”) 2. Mitch Syrnyk (Drums: “Mathematics,” “I’m That Guy,” “Why I Didn’t Hate Summer 2003,” “Catch You,” “Leave Your Man,” “The Fog,” “Carry Me Ontario,” “Into the Empire”) 3. Sam Catalfamo (”I’m That Guy”) 4. Eric Lister (”Born to Bar Band,” “Don’t Fuck With Me,” “Lost Between Houses,” “Supper Story,” “Hold Our Hearts”) 5. Mike Kuehn (Vocals ”Murray Street,” “Run Home,” “The Great Distance,” “Let’s Go To Hell,” “Weird Weather” Drums: “Let’s Go To Hell,” “Weird Weather,” “Evil,” “Sunshine City,” “One Of Those Years,” “I’m A Skymaker,” “Skeleton Man” Bass: “That Evil Beat” Piano/Keyboard: “Murray Street,” “I’m A Skymaker,” “The Great Distance”) 6. Melissa Bula (”Don’t Fuck With Me,” “Hockey Night In Canada” LYB version) 7. Spencer Linton (”Born to Bar Band (Reprise)” Drums: “Shamrock Shock,” “Haystack Song,” “Time Forgot To Change My Heart” ) 8. Carey Linton (”Born to Bar Band (Reprise),” “Everybody Got A Beef With Me,” “In The Street,” “Grandpa Bizness,” “Doin Drugs” Drums: “Miss Me Baby”) 9. Mike Winfrow (”Born to Bar Band (Reprise)” “Be Mine This Xmas,” “Do The Do”) 10. Amanda Deon (”Hockey Night In Canada” - LYB version) 11. Mike Mikocic (”Horseshoes,” “My Momma Poppa”) 12. Brentertainment (”Gonna Have A Lotta Fun,” “Hey Emon”) 13. Paul Norrish (”Hey Emon”) 14. Jessica Fisher (”Canadian Baseball,” “Greensong,” “I’m A Skymaker”) 15. Ricardo Elbandito (”Hey Emon”) 16. Omri Horowitz (”Hockey Night In Canada,” “My Private Radio,” “Evil”) 17. Sam ____ (Drums: “My Private Radio”) 18. Mike ____ (Drums: “Reena”) 19. Darcy McMann (”Make Tracks”) 20. Russell Holley (”Hey Thirsty!”) 21. Jake Foley (”Hey Thirsty!”) 22. Ryan Hacker (”Carry Me Ontario”) 23. Stefan Kupych (”Into the Empire,” “Four Wasted Years”) 24. Reena Masrani/Taylor (”The Sleeper,” “World Finds You,” “Your Love,” “Chicken Bones,” “Time Forgot To Change My Heart,” “The Sloan In Everyone”) 25. Geoff Nantes (”Make Mine Marvel!”) 26. Paulina Portyrala (”Lost Polaroids,” “Like A Lifetime,” “Millions”) 27. Jamie Harvey (”Longers & Goners,” “Hurts To Wait,” “Heart Still Sings”) 28. David Contin (”Hell Song,” “In The Street,” “In The Morning”) 29. Courtney Vanderploeg (”Brampton Mall Dreams,” “More & More Mortified, “Time Forgot To Change My Heart”) 30. Dave Thacker (”Chicken Bones”) 31. Andrew Emon (Vocals: “Be Mine This Xmas,” “Come Back 2 Me” Bass: “Be Mine This Xmas,” “Catch You,” TL version, “I’m That Guy,” “Terror to Know,” Exile version, “Karth Prooks,” 32. Andrea Plouffe (”Come Back 2 Me,” “Millions”) 33. Sam Duguid (”Millions”) 34. Jamie Jackson (”Murray Had A Birthday”) 35. Bianca Roy (”Everybody Got A Beef With Me”)

All delightful people, all of ‘em, save for Brentertainment, who was a bit of a hassle. He got hammered and walked off into the night and we never saw him again. I hope he found his way back alright from that industrial park out by Torbram and Derry Road. Not exactly a pulsing hub of civilization out there, though I believe there’s a 24-hr Petro Canada. Maybe he got a job there as a grease monkey in the auto garage out back and never left the area, spent his first few weeks there sleeping in a burlap sack in the back of a 1987 Chevrolet Daytona that a customer brought in back in ‘98 and never came back to claim. Or maybe he walked all the way home, which was near Kennedy and Queen, if I recall. We’d run into him at the Beer Store there, the one across from where The Traveling Musician used to be, and he’d mentioned that he lived nearby. That’s a hell of a walk though. Maybe I’ll ask around. Try to find him. A little missing persons project. I know that he knew Steve Sandhu, who plays in Hormoans. And Steve’s longterm girlfriend Sandra works at the Royal Bank right near my place. That’s only three degrees of separation.

It’s settled. I’ll ask Sandra next time I see her. I have to go to the bank tomorrow anyway to take out some cash to do laundry. So I might as well pop my head in and see if she’s there. If she is, I’ll ask her to text Steve re: Brentertainment. I will solve this mysterious matter once and for all. if I find anything out, you’ll be the first to know.

Oh, in other news, I’m starting a new record tomorrow. Depending on where it goes and who ends up playing on it, it may or may not be a Big City Nights release. I’ll be playing drums on most of the songs, but I’ve done that a few times before, most notably on Gimme Gardens which I drummed almost all of, but it still felt like a BCN record so I called it one. This new one a highly personal record though, a stack of 12-16 songs I smashed together last month, all about some of the shit I went through over the past few years. It’s not a “concept album” or anything, as I’m not crazy about those, but it does have a deliberate lyrical arc. It feels different than a regular BCN record to me, which is why I’m leaning toward using a different name. We’ll see. I have a few days off this week and will be working on vocals for the BCN record too. Either way, there will be something out soon under the Big City Nights name. Whether it’s the stuff I’m going to start tracking tomorrow or the Yogi Ottawa album or the big long double album we teased least year with “Fighting Ways” and “Laundry Days,” I’m not sure. But I’m never sure.

I’m not even sure where that Brentertainment guy got to.

That’s the news, I gotta snooze, lose yer blooze.

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thebigcitynightsband · 8 years ago

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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

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thebigcitynightsband · 8 years ago

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new song, recorded today. i’m rusty.

#gasolinedreamz

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thebigcitynightsband · 8 years ago

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Bus King/Busking/Night Moves

That’s a photo of me and my ex-gf. I just found it last week in my bag that Jamie brought to me from Burlington, thanks Jamie bro. Happier times, man. We’re still friends but we don’t see each other much. That’s a repeating pattern with me. Me and a gal will break up, declare an intention to stay friends, and then I be their friend while they work hard at vanishing from my life and into the arms of some dude who hates me cuz I’m still her friend. Happened with Jessica, happened with Courtney. Next time I’ll just do the sudden severance. Seems to work for other people.

Well, fuck. I’ve been struggling a little bit lately. Still sober, still pissing in a cup every day. My hours got cut at work for a few weeks but they’re back up to full-time next week, where they’ll remain until mid-December. I’m trying to save my apartment, need to find a roommate to take over the lease, which requires first and last, which I don’t have but I’m trying to acquire somehow.

A few days ago I went busking for the first time in about a year. Queen and University is my corner, northwest side. I like it there because you get a lot of 905ers coming out of Osgoode Station to go explore Queen West, people who don’t ordinarily see buskers, so they’re generous. I can only play for about three hours on an acoustic before my fingers start to hurt too much to play chords, and you average about six bucks an hour. I write a lot of songs that way. “Make It Mine” off the new album was written while busking last year and I came up with a few new ones the other day. It was a good day, actually. I woke up broke and without food and ended the day with a full belly and a pack of cigarettes and an Arizona Iced Tea. I felt content. So I’m gonna go back out there tomorrow. And probably the next day too.

My laptop died and I almost lost the record, but I was able to extract the files after a few days of feeling numb and worried. I really like our upcoming album, the songs have kept me good company over the past year, and the thought of losing the whole damn thing, save for “Fighting Ways” which is finished, and a handful of others, was a little scary. It’s not gone though. Sweet relief. BCN songs are like cockroaches. They find a way. Cue “Long Distance King” in your head as you read that last line...”we’ll find a waaaaay, we’ll fiiind a waaaaay.” Glory days. Before everything went to shit.

Hey, know what’s a great record? Break Up Break Down by Reigning Sound. Listen to the quavering, breathless delivery from Greg Cartwright on this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fWcZKZR3jg

Another great one off that record is called “Want You,” a really sad, pretty ballad. I’d like to make an album of Memphis ballads some day, in the vein of Break Up Break Down. We’ll call it Fuck Up Fuck Off or something.

I set up my keyboard tonight with a mind to do some overdubs tomorrow. I’ve been avoiding doing keyboard overdubs on the album forever because I’m a terrible keyboard player and it takes a really long time to get a single coherent take and I don’t have the patience that I used to. I finished “Night Needles” from A Steamroller Named Desire in a single evening, and that song has probably the most piano of any BCN song. I doubt I could do the same thing now. I’m older now and runnin against the wind, as Bob Seger would sing. Has sung, whatever. Running Against the Wind. I love that song. “Wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then” is a great line eh? Legend has it Seger wanted to cut that line but the producer told him how great it was, which it is. Oftentimes artists can’t recognize their own greatness. Years ago, when I was sixteen or so, I was trying to put together a set of acoustic covers in my bedroom. I remember doing “Leave It Alone” by Moist, which is pretty embarrassing now, but also “Against the Wind” and an acoustic version of the Smashing Pumpkin’s “Ava Adore,” which I was surprised to find has a very similar chord progression as “Against the Wind.” I mean, those two songs sound nothing alike, yet they’re very alike, chord-wise.

ANYWAY I’m rambling. Just finished an assignment for a client (I do people’s homework for them as a side hustle. Forty bucks here, sixty bucks there, it all goes into the giant hole I dug for myself the past few years.) I owe money to one guy who actually chased me this past January, up near Dovercourt and Hallam. I had to jump a couple fences but I got away. He’ll get paid soon enough. They all do.

I’m working on it man. Pushing against the tide. Runnin against the wind.

One last thing about that Bob Seger song: I’ve always thought that part where he yells “let the cowboys ride!” at the end of the song was stupid. Why couldn’t he have taken that part out? It’s so obvious that he was out of ideas and just mustered up the best open field imagery he could in the moment. Let the cowboys ride? Given the greatness that comes before that line, I can’t dismiss the song, even if it’s not as good as the immortal “Night Moves.”

A quick word about “Night Moves” before I go. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mRFWQoXq4c I honestly think it’s one of the greatest all-time vocal performances. There are three distinct parts in the song that always give me shivers. The first is that irresistible “summertime summertime” part @ 2:19. The second comes in that great breakdown, when the title changes from a sexual innuendo to a somber, forlorn musing on the passage of time and how time can move slower when you’re bored, faster when you’re absorbed and excited. Ain’t it funny how the night moves...when you just don’t seem to haaaaaaaave as much to lo-o-se. It’s that “have” that always gets me...just the way Seger gives it the perfect amount of witsfulness and gravelly gravity. Fuckin killer. Singing is always a fine balance between technical proficiency and emotional delivery, but on that line Seger’s 99% heart, 1% technique, and it still sounds incredible. To me, at least.

The last part is in the final minor descending refrain @ 5:04, even though it’s just Bob doing a bunch of “ooooohooohoohhhs.” It wouldn’t be as good if that vocal came over the main riff, but it doesn’t. It comes over the same chord progression as the chorus, that sad lilting minor key descent. Every time, man. Every time.

I’ve been trying to cover “Night Moves” since 2007. I don’t think I’ve ever got past the first chorus. I just can’t sell it. Those aren’t my memories, they’re Bob Seger’s. I never existed in the 1950s America he’s singing about in the song, the America of taking your sweetheart to the drive-in, cruising the strip, going to diners and pushing coins into jukeboxes. That wasn’t my adolescence. So it’s a tough one to sing. You have to know when you’re beaten. That’s part of growing up.

I don’t talk to my Dad anymore. He hates my guts and so does his girlfriend. It doesn’t bother me except for when I hear certain songs...songs like “Night Moves” or “Walking On The Moon” by The Police...first time I ever heard my father sing on the way to Owen Sound for a hockey tournament I was playing...it was the chorus, that “no way, chasing your cares away” part, and we had sunflower seeds and that was the night I fell in love with highways and movement and travel and all that Kerouac stuff I’d get obsessed with later, all those fuckin notebooks I filled with eager scrawling about road trips I hadn’t yet taken. I lost all those notebooks somehow, can’t remember maybe I tossed them all on purpose, kind of a year zero event. Too much in those notebooks was lines from existing songs. I remember one time going through an old notebook and seeing “the sea is foaming like a bottle of beer” and thinking I’d written it...nope...it was a Weezer song. I’d just scrawled out that one line hammered one night, drunk at 17, back when it was actually exciting to get drunk and not a sad chore like it later became.

I’m going busking tomorrow. I might not be able to do “Night Moves” but I can bust out “Against the Wind.” I ain’t licked yet. It ain’t over. I’m older now and still runnin against the wind. Let the cowboys ride or whatever.

Edit, PS: That was a really dramatic fuckin post. I’m sorry. For some much-needed levity, here’s a picture of me from last week. Some friends visited while I was in bed, and I came out to say hello still holding my book. PPS: Hey, know another great Bob Seger song? “Still the Same,” especially those ghostly backing vocals in the second verse. Check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjDpKeiYxOU PPPS: Hey, know another song that has cool ghostly additional instrumental in the second verse? Bruce Springsteen’s “Downbound Train.” It’s not his greatest song and I don’t like Bruce’s overdone “blue collar accent,” the dumb slurring he likes to do in order to sound more like a mechanic making $20 000 a year, but that beautiful synth organ that comes in on the second verse is just heartwrenching, listen for it @ 0:49: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nc_mv46NwT4 The organ has a pretty sweet solo for one-bar starting at 1:21. If I could get that organ tone, I wouldn’t put off doing keyboard overdubs, lemme tell ya son, I tell ya what.

#goleafsgo

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thebigcitynightsband · 8 years ago

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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 [email protected], 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 #betterdaysareatoenailaway #brampton #burlington #therolledback #mansalughterbylocomotion

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thebigcitynightsband · 8 years ago

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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.

#brampton #thebigcitynightsband

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thebigcitynightsband · 8 years ago

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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.

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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 #gonesongs

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thebigcitynightsband · 9 years ago

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BETTER DAYS ARE A TOENAIL AWAY

The double album.

It’s a daunting endeavor. There has to be a reason beyond “well, we had a shitload of songs, so uh...” But you also don’t want to get too highfalutin about it. Say what you will, but I’ve never listened to The Wall from front to back. I have, however, listened to Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness from start to finish on hundreds of occasions. Billy Corgan had told the music press that his album would be “The Wall for Generation X.”

Jim DeRogatis, music critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, took exception to Corgan’s confidence. Having always had a bit of a grudge against Billy, referring to him sarcastically as “The Great Pumpkin,” he made the following gripe in Rolling Stone when he reviewed the Pumpkin’s magnum opus:

“We don't need no education/We don't need no thought control" seems deeper, more universal and more entertaining — heck, a lot more inspiring — than "Living makes me sick/So sick I wish I'd die."

DeRogatis has a point, but it’s not a very fair one. The Pink Floyd lyric he cites is a major recurring line from that song. It’s very deliberately anthemic, and Roger Waters knew this, and hired a children’s choir to sing it with him in the studio. (Well, maybe he didn’t hire the kids, but he probably paid their parents. This was the 1970s, back when people actually paid for music, and Pink Floyd had sold millions and millions of albums. Somebody got paid for those kids to sing on that damn song, or we’d have heard of a class action lawsuit filed by said children, now older adults, long before now.)

My point is that DeRogatis picked a very memorable Pink Floyd lyric taken from a highly visible single, but cherrypicked an obscure line from a non-single from Mellon Collie, despite the fact that the album had seven singles and anthemic lines galore.

Here’s a thought. I’m going to do the same thing right now, just google “The Wall” lyrics, and scroll down until I find something silly. Be right back.

Okay, here we are. A couplet from Pink Floyd, ladies and gentlemen, in all their brilliant brilliance:

Ooooo I need a dirty woman. Ooooo I need a dirty girl.

So yeah. That’s not very good. And mildly pedophilic. Just goes to show you that when you cherrypick random lines from a band’s lyric sheets, you’re apt to stumble across some silly doggerel. This is rock n’ roll, after all, not Shakespeare. And although Billy Corgan has written some truly wonderful lyrics in his day, “Tonight Tonight” being a personal favourite of mine, which I borrowed from a little bit when writing the words to “The Fog,” lifting the second half of the following couplet: “and the embers never fade in a city by the lake/the place where you were born.”

This is all to say that it’s hard to write good lyrics, and even harder to write good lyrics for a double album.

We have a line from our newest effort, Almost Awake, which I think is pretty damn poetic:

bitter but beautiful terror will move her and say goodbye to the blank white beaches of memory

That’s not bad, that whole “blank white beaches of memory” thing. Sometimes, when the moon is bright blue, I can manage not to make an ass of myself and those who surround me, such as bandmates, my City Night bretheren.

We were going to call the double album Keep It Beautiful, but I’m not crazy about that idea anymore. First of all, we already have a reference to Ontario with Carry Me Ontario. Second of all, while it might be better than Yours to Discover, it’s simply not a very interesting phrase. The last few albums titles have been phrases that attempted to describe either the music therein or the feeling the music was supposed to give you. This time I want to go with a line from one of the songs that sums up the idea, the theme of the record. Since this one is about, once again, friendship, nostalgia, denial, hope, and the pursuit of happiness, we’re going to call it Better Days Are A Toenail Away.

We have a ton of instrumentals finished already, well over 25, and the album looks like it’s going to have 30 to 35 songs on it, well over our current high water mark of 26 on Complete Lung Champions.

There will be a few repeats, naturally. I’d love to do a full band version of “White Pines On The Plain” with the guys, or maybe “Make It Mine.” There will be two versions of “Ocean City,” one with James on drums and one with a drum machine that sounds like it would fit on Deep Space Bistro 2: Into the Bistro, our long-delayed but upcoming sequel. There will also be two versions of “Basement Nights” bookending the record. The first take will have vocals, the second take and last song on the album will be instrumental because I fucking love how the instruments sound and the vocals take away from them a little bit. The reverb tails on those verse guitar leads are just so fucking delicious. And that lower guitar with the crunchy distortion...I just love it.

You can hear the instrumental version of “Basement Nights” by clicking on the link: https://soundcloud.com/the-big-city-nights/going-like-leaving

It’s unmastered but that’s the version that will close our upcoming double album.

So yeah, keep an eye out eh? If the three of us ever have the same day off work again, we will try to get together and make some damn music. If this should ever happen, you’ll be the first to know. My hope is to have the record out before summer, since it’s such a summertime album, especially breezy tunes like “If It Kills You” and “Expert Advice.” Admittedly, “Faces & Interfaces” has an autumn vibe to it, ditto for “Fighting Ways,” but ultimately the album is emerald green and warm and sunny. Better Days Are A Toenail Away. Can you dig it? Just wait til you see the front cover. Just wait til you hear the music.

#betterdaysareatoenailaway #thebigcitynights #doublealbum #toronto #brampton

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thebigcitynightsband · 9 years ago

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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 #almostawake #keepitbeautiful #nostalgia

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thebigcitynightsband · 9 years ago

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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 #almostawake

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thebigcitynightsband · 9 years ago

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BANDS I’VE BEEN IN VOL 3: THICK JAMES & THE BITCHES (Fall 2005 - Fall 2007)

Thick James & the Bitches began in late autumn 2005 as an offshoot of the Big City Nights. I was jamming with James and Emon every weekend at my Dad’s place in Orangeville and putting together what would become the second BCN EP, Teenage Lust. But we were also jamming on different sounding material; harder, more riff-oriented stuff that didn’t really fit under the BCN moniker. It was also very collaborative. James brought a song called “Hard to Remember” whose title proved apt, which had a really difficult strumming pattern that took a while to uh…remember. Emon brought a riff so good and catchy that we opened almost every show we ever played with it, a song called “How Emon Got His Groove Back.”

One of the reasons we wanted to start a separate band had to do with our musical tastes. We all got really into that first Black Mountain record (even if none of us could get through the whole thing…“Heart of Snow” killed the momentum…one of us always pressing the stop button once it came on. I have the same complaint with the insanely long “Bright Lights” - 19 minutes long – on Black Mountain’s second album, destroying any chance that record had of being flawless. But that doesn’t change the fact that the first half of Black Mountain’s self-titled album is fucking immortal. Same goes for In the Future.)

We were also getting really into Dead Meadow, Nebula, Dungen (James fell for them the hardest. I think he even went to see them by himself one time at the Horseshoe. Going to shows alone is a pretty isolating experience, so you have to really like a band to do it), Drunk Horse, Baby Woodrose, a local band called Apostrophe, Fu Manchu, Atomic Bitchwax, ZZ Top, etc etc.

In the fall of 2005 we began playing shows regularly at Heads or Tails under the name Thick James & the Bitches. Heads or Tails was a basement venue in Etobicoke, close to Pretty Mike’s house, and we played shows there almost every weekend for about half a year. We also played a great show at Degrassi House, a long gone venue in Toronto’s East End (the owner drank like a fish and probably drank the place out of business). The crowd was fantastic and Pretty Mike joined us onstage for a rendition of “Foxy Lady.” Here’s a pic from that gig:

The band name was an homage to the classic Rick James skit on Chappelle’s Show. For about a year or two you couldn’t go anywhere without hearing somebody shout “I’m Rick James, bitch,” so we figured everyone would get the joke, even if now, eleven years later, it requires explanation.

We started making a record under the TB&TB’s name, an EP called Twelve Bar Booze, which you can listen to some of by clicking this hyperlinked sentence. The online version is missing two tracks; “Down With The Thickness” and “Love Song.” I no longer have a copy of the original record, but Emon probably has it, somebody should call him. “Handjob Shoppe” and “El Presidente” were recorded way after our May 2006 tour, sometime in autumn of that year, and they were slated to go on a second album called Sauceome we never ended up making. Twelve Bar Booze had some good songs but I learned a valuable lesson recording it: It is extremely difficult to make heavy music sound good with lo-fi equipment. TBCN’s songs have always been chord and vocal melody based, and there’s always a certain charm to lo-fi recordings in that idiom. For example, one of my favourite recordings of all time is “Game of Pricks” by Guided by Voices, which was recorded in one take in a single afternoon and the band didn’t even bother adding bass to it. But if you try that approach with heavier music, it sounds thin and shitty. There’s no way around it. The coda to “How Emon Got His Groove Back” sounded kinda decent, with its ZZ Top-meets-Ted-Nugent lead riff (written by James) and pinch harmonic leads, but a lot of songs on the album ended up sounding pretty flat. Not surprisingly, one of the better cuts was a flamenco-inspired tune that probably could have passed for a Big City Nights instrumental called “The Great Delicious Meal,” to which we added some dialogue samples from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a movie we were absolutely obsessed with at the time. “You took too much man, you took too much, too much.”

So we decided that the best way to present the material would be live, and we booked a cross-Canada tour. But most of the songs on the record had two distinct guitar parts, so we asked Johnny Lane to join the band. We’d been playing a lot of shows with him in towns that end with “ton” – Bolton, Brampton, Alton (where we played a memorable party for a motocross video launch in which Emon was accused of stealing a bong. The video was really lame, with guys going over jumps and taking one hand off the handlebar for a split second while midair, but the show was really fun). Johnny Lane got us that show and a few others that fall and we even jammed with him a few times, thinking we were getting him to join our band but it turned out he was auditioning us for his band. We liked his songs (even if his lyrics were a little dumb. Sample line: “rock and roll is the only thing groovin”), but we didn’t have the time to join forces with him, and the feeling was mutual. Johnny was the guitar tech for Jeff Martin of The Tea Party fame and worked a lot and didn’t have time for a second band. He was wary of us anyway, having followed us to an afterparty at Laura Prosser’s house one night and getting smacked in the forehead with a bottle by some asshole jock who took exception to his long, flowing rock star mane. So we enlisted a guy with a long flowing rock star mane who’d follow us anywhere, especially to parties: Carey Linton. James was initially reluctant, but I won him over and asked Carey if he wanted to go on tour. Carey said yes and the two of us bought matching brown fedoras to celebrate. Here’s a picture of Carey taken the same night he agreed to join the band. I think he was excited to go on tour or something.

The week before we left we played a show at Raxx, one of our old watering holes, long gone now, which went fairly well. We covered Desert Sessions’ “(Cake) Who Shit On The?” and Thrush Hermit’s “Violent Dreams” with Beej on vocals. We also recorded a new song a few days later, the last one added to the record, called “Mexican Donuts” featuring an absolutely blistering guitar solo from Carey (when he got home from Thunder Bay he could shred. He’d been practicing a lot up there in that frozen wasteland). Here are some photos from the Raxx show:

Things were looking up for the Bitches. We had an EP out and a tour booked. So we borrowed a lawn gnome from the front garden of a person whose name I won’t mention. The idea was to take pictures of the lawn gnome all over Canada, then put the lawn gnome back in the yard we got it from, with an envelope tucked under it’s chin. The owner of the gnome would open the envelope and see a bunch of photos of the gnome travelling across Canada and his or her mind would be blown. That was our plan, and we took the responsibility very seriously, even though we stole the whole idea from the video for “Anti-Pop” by the Matthew Good Band. So one morning in mid-May 2006, after a long Sunday night of road hockey and Molson Canadian, we piled into my van, a 1996 Plymouth Voyager (which had already endured a cross-Canada trip three summers earlier when I took it to Victoria and back after graduating high school), and headed north so that we could head west after getting those pesky Great Lakes out of the way.

The first show of the tour was in Thunder Bay, but we stopped in Sault Ste Marie the first night to cut the drive in half. In Thunder Bay I admitted to the guys that we didn’t actually have a show booked (I’d tried but failed to land one, and having done it twice I can safely say that booking a tour across Canada as an independent band is more difficult than pretty much anything else). But I was fairly confident that if we walked around town and asked live music venues if we could play, one of them would surely say yes.

The manager of the first place told us to go fuck ourselves. The manager at the second place, The Apollo, said absolutely. Her name was Sheila and she was a sweetheart. We piled our gear into the venue and met the only other band playing that night, an acoustic duo from Vancouver who were also boyfriend and girlfriend. I don’t remember what they were called but they had a song called “The Drive” and the dude member jammed with us on a song. Nobody came to the show: we played to each other but it was really fun. Sheila poured us all shots of something called a Coat Hanger which we all imbibed gratefully. Then afterward we slept for free in one of the many vacant bedrooms in the apartments upstairs. Waking up the next morning, I pissed out the window standing on Carey’s sleeping bag while he slept, my piss stream arcing over his head and out the window. There was a brief panic when we couldn’t find my wallet, and we retraced our steps from the previous night, without luck, only to find it in the bed I had slept in. I must have been still drunk. Here’s a photo of the window I urinated from:

Our next show was in Saskatoon. We took a few photos at the Manitoba border on the way, Carey dutifully remembering the bring the gnome.

After the photo shoot we drove across the prairies into a violently beautiful thunderstorm. The sky was pink and streaked with lightning, and there was a strange metallic smell in the air. We stopped to piss at a travel stop and the strange electricity in the atmosphere, coupled with the bright pink sky, made it feel like we were on another planet. We drove on, me at the wheel, James riding shotgun, listening to Baby Woodrose while Carey and Emon snored in the back. I couldn’t shake the otherworldly feeling and I surrendered to it and drove deeper into the Canadian night. When the Baby Woodrose album ran its course we put on Dead Meadow and now, whenever I hear the haunting strains of “At Her Open Door” I am transported back to that eerie night, an indelible night, one of the great nights of my life even though nothing happened (which is to say that everything happened). Our twenties were still in front of us, with all the love and hurt they would contain yet to happen. We were on tour in a band and we felt alive. We were driving toward the unreachable mirage that spurs everyone on, the horizon we never get to, our impossible futures.

We got to Saskatoon early and walked around until the sun went down. Here’s a photo of Carey with an, ahem, lady of the night:

Later, at the venue, we asked the violinist from a folk duo that played first if she wanted to jam with us on “Hard to Remember.” She acceded, leaving her violin on the stage, which she then had to gather, with a look of apologetic embarrassment yet determination, so that she and her friends could leave the venue while we were still playing.

Yep, it happens everywhere, even if you’re on tour, we learned that night. It doesn’t matter if you’ve driven five hundred kilometres or five; an indifferent audience is an indifferent audience. We made a few fans that night, one of whom we traded CDs with – some singer songwriter guy, recently married, who played a song called “Spirit Level” that night about his new duties as a homeowner. He’d bought some tools to help with upkeep, one of which was a level, hence the song. His liner notes said “No thanks to: The internet” and listed his website right beneath it. Carey laughed at that. He was downtrodden after the show: he was feeling the humiliation of the violinist leaving so blatantly. It had bothered me too, but I was trying to shake it off. Emon seemed fine, content to nap in the van and drink beer with us at the shows, and James was just happy to play too.

We started playing rock paper scissors to pass the time and Emon and I almost got in a fist fight over whether playing with three people simultaneously makes sense or not. Emon said it did; I said it didn’t. And so started a bitter argument that lasted the whole tour.

After the show we crashed with my friend Amanda, who had coincidentally taken piano lessons with James when she was a kid. Small world. She smoked a ton of weed with her boyfriend Jeremy.

The day after the show we hung out at Amanda’s for another day and started drinking early. I got so drunk that the day is blurry to me, and I threw up that night, something I almost never did from alcohol. I found out why. I woke up the next day extremely sick; the worst flu I’ve ever had. I was a complete write-off. I couldn’t drive, I couldn’t walk, I could barely swallow. The boys took turns driving while I suffered in the back seat, and took us to Moose Jaw. I missed the photo op at the Alberta border, too sick to move, and I missed the walk the boys took around Moose Jaw.

I had to ask Emon to carry my amp into the venue for me, as I was too weak, and Carey and I played a two-guitar set, drums not being allowed in the venue, which I felt bad about. Some guy walked in halfway through our set and demanded to play with us. “I don’t know if you guys can keep up,” he said arrogantly, but then ripped into some extremely fast chicken picking, and started yelling his angry drunk folk songs. He was great actually, but alienated the crowd, and we were asked to pack up and leave. The guy said he was a trucker and gave us his CD, which was called Banned From the Bar. His project name was Bad Road. I had that CD for years…all the way up to 2010, until I lost it in one of the many moves I undertook while living as a student in Toronto. The front cover was a photo of the guy in mid fist-pump with himself, having a one man party alone in his little kitchen. I wonder about that guy sometimes, Bad Road, and what road he’s on now, driving his truck and shouting about beer. Here’s Carey and me playing the coffee shop in Moose Jaw.

The next show was at The Stetson in Calgary. We got a flat tire on the way and the tow truck driver was mean to us. We were running low on money already and Carey phoned home to ask for some, because Spencer, being Spencer, had neglected to pick up Carey’s paycheque and deposit it for him, like Carey had asked him to. They worked for the same company, so it wasn’t like Carey was asking Spencer to go out of his way, but Ritchie - Carey’s Dad - was still angry that we were so low on funds already and called us, most memorably, a “van of assholes.” “So what’s going on?” he demanded. “Are they making you pay for everything? You and your van of assholes driving around the country?” We laughed at that one for a while. And here’s a picture of our asshole spare tire for our asshole van.

The Calgary show was an actual gig that people actually came to. Carey broke a string during the first song and had to restring while we played something he didn’t know, can’t remember what because he knew a lot of songs by then. I had to chastise him gently when he played “The Great Delicious Meal” with an E chord, and not an E minor, which changes the entire feel of the song. I was less mad about the mistake than the implications. “Have you been playing it like that this whole time?” I asked. His expression said maybe. Now that I was mad about. We sold a few CDs and got paid a bit of money and the owner bought us a pitcher of beer, which miserable me couldn’t drink because I was so sick. My sister Laurel let us crash at her condo and I ran upstairs when we got there to shit my guts out. The guys stayed up watching TV and I begged them to turn it down a bit just so I could fall asleep. Even deathly ill, I remain an insomniac, and I can’t sleep through any kind of noise at all, unless it’s a drone like a fan or raining or static. Snoring or people talking or dialogue on TV? I won’t sleep a wink. My brain just won’t let me do it.

But I fell asleep that night and woke the next day feeling much better. We didn’t have a show but we scammed one the Thunder Bay way, at a venue called the 17th, oddly enough on 17th Avenue in Calgary. The other band was a Beatles cover band who graciously let us play, though knowing now what musicians are like, I bet they were fuming at us as we got onstage, just furious with us. We kicked ass that night, easily the best show of the tour, and there was a decent crowd as my sister had brought out every single one of her friends, including an old drunk businessman who insisted he’d buy us three plane tickets to Mexico and get his “friend” to film a music video for us on a beach somewhere. “Thanks for the offer,” I told him, knowing it was bullshit. “But we have four members.” “Three tickets,” he bellowed drunkenly. Then he toddled off to eat some magic mushrooms and came back even drunker as the Beatles cover band was getting ready for their second set. They played noticeably better the second time, Carey noted and mentioned to me, probably spurred to greater heights by us. I’m not bragging; we really did play well that night.

I was finally better and the next day we went to Lake Louise and Drumheller to take in the sights.

We crashed in some motel where Carey forgot his fedora, which I felt bad about since he’d ran into traffic in Saskatoon to rescue my hat which had blown off, then we made the legendarily beautiful drive into and through British Columbia (listening to Tool’s Lateralus twice in the mountains). We stopped overnight in Kamloops on the way and went to a bar where I talked to the bartender about Brett Lindros and where a nice old man talked to me about his favourite Rolling Stones album. “Other people like other albums,” he said quietly. “But I like an album called Flowers. You give it a listen sometime and see whatcha think.”He was quiet and dignified, and he drank one pint and went home to his quiet, dignified life, but I’ve thought about him over the years, where he is and what he’s doing and if he’s happy. The next day we got back on the Coquihalla, a highway that starts in Kamloops and runs through the Rocky Mountains all the way to Hope, BC, a biker town with attitude and an old west feel.

Here’s us climbing a mountain in Merrit, BC.

Nobody was at the venue in Vancouver when we got there. Nobody was in the venue, not a soundguy, not a janitor, nobody. Then the bartender showed up but he had no information for us regarding the show that night. All he did was shrug until he got sick of my questions and walked away. There was a lineup of disheveled heroin addicts outside, so we got out of the neighbourhood and hit an A&W. When we went back to the venue, an hour after the show was supposed to have started, and there was still nobody there, we called it quits and got a way-too-expensive hotel room, motels (the cheaper cousin of hotels) being impossible to find in any metro area.

James and I came up with a cool tongue twister. Say it fast ten times: Don’t tell Shane hotel chain.

We hung out for a bit in the van beforehand, and Carey accidentally knocked a cup onto himself, the same cup we’d been spitting sunflower seeds into all day that was full of saliva and goo. “Oh, that’s so gross,” he shuddered.

Carey put up with a lot of gross shit on that tour, usually involving bodily fluids. Earlier, in Ontario, he’d been driving and I had to piss. We didn’t want to stop so I stood up in the shotgun seat and started pissing out the window. Carey took this inopportune moment to check the sideview mirror and got a glimpse of my spraying penis and screamed in disgust. After that we decided to stop the van for all piss stops. Carey was still driving the next time someone had to piss, I think it was Emon, but we all got out to relieve ourselves. Carey, possibly still traumatized by seeing my stuff, left the car in drive, and it started moving down the highway shoulder, driverless, while we all stood there pissing into the weeds. Carey screamed again and I ran after the rogue van, getting into it and pulling it over safely before resuming pissing and yelling at Carey for being irresponsible. I was mad at the time but I now treasure this memory.

We drove back east the next day, with one show booked on the way home at the Tracey James Steakhouse in Yorkton, Sask. On our way there we stopped at my sister’s in Calgary again to crash, but we didn’t explore the city that night –we just hung out on her balcony and sipped lager. I was quite well by this point and wanted to party but the other guys had been partying hard while I was sick and just wanted a quiet night in. The next day we did Calgary to Yorkton in one straight drive. On the way a strange thing happened, another memory I treasure. James and I were up front, listening to “Got Me Under Pressure” by ZZ Top. We were doing the hand dance, which is basically just flicking your pointer finger in time to the beat. James had his right hand outside the window. Somewhere in Saskatchewan, a wasp smacked into his fingernail and landed dead on his belt buckle. A million to one shot. It was so cool. In Yorkton we got to the venue way too early, so we drove to a park to nap for a while. Carey and Emon were fine, having slept all night in the back, but James and I hadn’t slept a wink and were tired. James slept on the grass while I sat uncomfortably on a post.

Finally the venue opened and we brought out gear in. Figuring there would be a rural crowd, we wrote out a setlist heavy on covers, wracking our brains for Tragically Hip songs. Then the promoter showed up and told us we couldn’t play because he couldn’t afford to pay us. We told him we’d play for free, but for some reason he wasn’t cool with that, probably because the place only had three or four regulars and he didn’t want them to get mad at the noise and leave. So another show was cancelled, our second in a row, but at least this time we got something out of it. We were treated to some delicious dry ribs and a frosty tall thick glass of Molson Canadian. It was delicious so we stuck around and drank all night. A man came over to us and struck up a conversation, telling us he’d just worked fifty-five days in a row. He worked for CN. He said his son was a standup comedian in Vancouver but hadn’t been returning his calls lately. He said his wife had recently left him and got really quiet for a while then stared at me with watery eyes. “I would love to have sex with her one more time,” he said wistfully. He offered us a place to crash but we already had one. Amanda and Jeremy had driven up from Saskatoon to see us, and they took us to a back road where we smoked weed off hot knives (James didn’t partake, sticking to his trusty beer. James never smoked weed, and I rarely did, and got so high I had to go outside…the van was so crowded and smoky that night). Here’s a photo:

We stayed at Amanda’s mother’s house in the suburbs, having a few beers when we got home with Amanda and her cute friend, pictured above, who we all thought someone else would hit on, so nobody hit on her and she went home frustrated. Emon and I got in a big fight again over rock paper scissors, and went to bed angry. The next day I woke up with Emon’s middle finger in my face. (That was a running joke on that tour. If you woke up before someone else, you stuck your middle finger in their face so that when they woke up, the first thing they saw that day was a fuck you.) He was kidding though. We were cool.

As we packed up our stuff in the driveway, the man from the night before pulled up and said he’d been driving all over looking for us. He just wanted to say goodbye.

I wonder about guys like that, sad lonely men who don’t have anybody, like Bad Road from Moose Jaw or the old man who liked Flowers from Kelowna or the railroad man from Yorkton, Saskatchewan. I wonder where they are and what they’re doing and if they remember us. I wonder if I’ll end up like them, lonely and ghostly, haunting the bars of the Canadian night, clinging to youthful people and talking to them desperately as if they’ll feel young and cool again by proxy, just because they’re sitting with us.

James and I always attract these guys, in every bar we go to, the older dude who looks like he’s seen some rock n roll shows in his day and worked more than a few construction gigs or warehouse jobs. A guy who liked to party maybe a bit too much, and kept working for the weekend throughout his 20s and 30s, not paying attention to promotions at work or self-improvement, to wake up one day and realize he’s forty years old and all his friends are married or in AA and he has nothing left but Survivor or American Idol and a six pack with his Swanson’s frozen dinner.

Life moves too fast. It’s like when you have a cigarette during a great conversation and you go to take a second drag and realize you’re holding a butt with a dying cherry. Life can be so sad sometimes. Things end. Things end and then you miss them.

The tour was over, so we said goodbye to Amanda and Jeremy and Amanda’s cute friend and the lonely railroad man and drove on into the Great Canadian Night.

There was another wallet scare when I left mine at a gas station, but we got it back. Carey bought a naughty magazine from a store in Sault Ste. Marie and when the lady cashier told him to “have a good night” he smiled and replied, “Oh, I will.”

We arrived in Brampton 33 hours after leaving Yorkton, having driven almost non-stop all the way, save for a quick break at a diner in Dryden where James was so tired he put salt in his coffee, instead of sugar, and drank it anyway. Here’s a photo taken on Emon’s lawn when we dropped him off at the end of the tour. Note my tired highway eyes:

It was only after we dropped off Emon that we realized he’d snagged Carey’s porno mag. Maybe that’s why he looks so excited in our end-of-tour photo.

I dropped the other guys and drove another forty minutes home to Orangeville, listening to “Long Day” by Nebula. I couldn’t sleep that night.

The tour had been successful emotionally and spiritually, if not financially. There was nowhere to go from there. Our momentum kinda died. We became more interested in going to shows, now that we were of age. We went to a lot of shows together. We met Brant Bjork, Fu Manchu, and John Garcia all within the same year:

We still played music though. Me and James had started working on a thirty minute song. James had seen a band from Guelph called Advert Eyes and liked their name, so we rechristened the band Engine Ears and worked on the song faithfully for months and months. Emon had a job working the night shift at Kuehne + Nagel though, and couldn’t jam, so often it was just me and James in the room, hashing it out. It started with a strong riff that James had written, then went into a Goatsnake-type breakdown, then into a pretty little Dead Meadow-style bridge. Every time we added a part we used a stopwatch to record how much longer the song had gotten. Here’s a photo of James and me from these rehearsals:

The longest we got the half hour song’s length was fourteen minutes, but then my life went to shit. I got a DUI on February 17 2007, and it changed everything. I could no longer drive gear around or drive the band to shows. Emon and James didn’t have their licenses yet, and Carey was back in Windsor, finishing his last year of University. So we couldn’t play shows anymore. I lost my job because I couldn’t drive in, but Aurora’s mom was nice enough to give me more hours at the Water Station…seven days a week. I also didn’t have a stable place to live…and I was couch surfing. Sometimes I’d sleep in the back of the store, laying down a piece of cardboard and throwing a sheet on it. I had a blanket and pillow back there too. I’d sleep til 9:57, wake up, brush my teeth, then walk out front to open the door. It remains the shortest commute to work I’ve ever had, by far.

I was disappointed in myself. One unseasonably warm day in March I put a “Back in 15 Mins” sign on the door and went out back to sit on the embankment in the park, staring at Fletcher’s Creek, the little waterway that swerves through Brampton, always between Main and McLaughlin, and that ran behind the house I grew up in on Fairglen. I got to thinking about my life and where it was going (and where it wasn’t) and decided to make a change. A warm wind was blowing, whispers of summer, and I decided to head West. The Bitches were done at this point, but The Big City Nights were still going strong, though James was no longer drumming in the band at this point. We played a goodbye show at All Stars in Bramalea and a lot of people came out. Brandon Fleet played rhythm guitar and Mike Kuehn played drums. Then, for the last song, James Chernoff came onstage and got behind the kit and we played a great rendition of “Like a Hurricane,” a staple of our live sets, and an emotional goodbye. At the time, I wasn’t sure if I would be coming back.

I did come back though, and TJ&TB’s played again as Engine Ears at the Cameron house in October 2007, where the half hour song made its live debut (though it had been shaved to ten minutes by this point, which sort of ruined the title, “A Half Hour of an Hour”).

We played one reunion show at Good Time Café in December 2009, a show that was to have a set from The Circus, but Carey got drunk and decided he didn’t want to do it at the last minute. The Big City Nights were playing our hometown release show for Carry Me Ontario, and The Flying Museum Band played a set as well, but the show wasn’t particularly well attended. Emon was there though, and we played the old songs one last time, “How Emon Got His Groove Back,” “The Great Delcious Meal,” and “Handjob Shoppe,” which lived on for a while when The Harold Wartooth decided they liked it so much they added it to their live set, albeit in abbreviated form.

It was an anti-climactic ending to the band. We weren’t a side project by any means. We were a full-fledged band, but school (Carey) and work (Emon) and criminal stupidity (me, Danny) got in the way and we just kinda fizzled out.

And yes, we did put the gnome back with a certain envelope containing certain photos taped to his chest. We never did give that gnome a name. We wanted to, but like a lot of things in Thick James & The Bitches, we just never got around to it.

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thebigcitynightsband · 9 years ago

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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 #keepitbeautiful #heckemall #betterdaysareatoenailaway #youvecomealongwaymaybe #completelungchampions #recording #brampton

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thebigcitynightsband · 9 years ago

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news

We’ve got a show coming up, late May in Toronto with The Flying Museum Band and The Spooky Scarecrows. We’ve played with FMB a bunch of times and love them, but we’ve also done three or four with the Spooky Scarecrows, and like them a lot. Show details coming soon.

I did a remix (or “de-mix” as I prefer to call it, since I took their pristine tracks and dumped my usual lo-fi filters all over everything) of The Dearly Bereft’s “Laura Palmer,” the first song on their album Funeral Music. You can hear the remix here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fu8hjOD6LMI And you can hear the original rendition here: https://thedearlybereft.bandcamp.com/track/laura-palmer

We still have two albums in the can, possibly three. A few years ago, the summer of 2012 to be precise, we recorded songs every weekend with the intention of making a big album called Thinkerton (the title a silly homage to Weezer’s Pinkerton). Instead, we spread the material across two albums, Oscillation Drills and Popular Favourites, taking those summer recordings for the latter and augmenting them with a bunch of acoustic songs like “Gone As It Is,” “Some People Say,” “Only Laughter,” and “Billions” (one of my fav songs of ours, ever) and I’m thinking of doing the same thing this time. Originally this lo-fi record was going to have about 35 songs....easily dwarfing our longest record to date, Complete Lung Champions, which has 26 tunes.

But it might be a better idea to split them up and try to find a common thread for both. We recently put out a four song EP featuring songs that will be on that record. “Fighting Ways” is a really cool song, I think, and I like “Laundry Days” too. “Bird of Bees” and “Murray Had A Birthday” are both decent but not major centerpieces. Since we have some new songs, it might be cool to put one album out this May featuring 12 or 14 of the best songs we have from these lo-fi sessions, then do a few acoustic recordings and put out the rest in June or July. The big album was originally going to be called You’ve Come A Long Way, Maybe and I still like the title so we’ll probably keep it, but it probably won’t be a double album.

So I’m thinking You’ve Come A Long Way, Maybe will be out in a month or so, with songs like “Guy I Know” and “Fighting Ways” and “If It Kills You.” It will be a good one, I promise, followed quickly by another good one similar to Popular Favourites.

At some point we WILL be finishing the long-delayed Heck ‘Em All, which has been on the back burner since September 2013. We’ve released FIVE albums, plus the best-of collection since then, which is nuts. It’s just a matter of doing vocals and finding a way to mix them into the record. James mixed the tracks and they sound fabulous but also really loud, so we’ll have to sing well and compress the vox properly if we want it to sound decent. The album will be wholly comprised of studio tracks, something we’ve never done before, as even Yawns Beyond had half lo-fi songs. I think there will be 10 or 11 songs on there, since we’ll have to jettison “Lottery Man” because it turned out sounding horrible and we already have a rendition on Chords for the Bored. which didn’t turn out the way I wanted it to, though I do like the guitar that sounds like a Jamaican steel drum.

I’ve been working a lot lately while still looking for a new job, and I’m not sure whether I’ll be in Brampton or Toronto this summer. We also have to take into account that our rad bass player Ryan will be a father very soon, probably sometime in May, so it might be difficult to work around his schedule. Of course, this is understandable, as nothing is more important than family, and if the guy has to miss a few vocal sessions here and there to attend to his baby, that’s totally cool. We’re very excited for him and Reena and wish them every happiness.

So right now, as I see it, our release schedule this year will be as follows:

May: You’ve Come A Long Way, Maybe 12-14 songs, all lo-fi, and will probably be our strongest set of songs since Chords for the Bored. Tracklist not finalized yet, but it’ll probably look like this:

01 Fighting Ways 02 Guy I Know 03 Basement Nights 04 Hibernation 05 Expert Advice 06 Cocations 07 Ride The Rocket 08 How To Build A House You Won’t Hate 09 If It Kills You 10 Monday Song 11 Time Passed Endeavours 12 Ocean City 13 Bird of Bees 14 Sad Shitty Supermarket Holds Senior Citizen Day

June: as yet untitled second lo-fi record All the songs that don’t make YCALWB will end up on this one, along with 4 or 5 acoustic tracks, titles like “Credit Cards,” “Cabbage Days,” and “All Your Bramptons.” “Cabbage Days” has been sitting around for almost 3 years now and I’m really eager to get it recorded properly and out there in the world. Tentative track listing:

01 Nervous Man (a very old song from 2011 finally recorded last December) 02 Ocean City (Aborted Deep Space Bistro 2 version) 03 Throwing Copper 04 Laundry Days 05 Murray Had A Birthday 06 More and More Mortified 07 Sittin Down 08 Faces & Interfaces 09 Phanta 10 Credit Cards 11 Happy Faces (recorded summer 2013, the title track for an aborted record that ended up becoming Your Mom Remains The Same) 12 All Your Bramptons 13 Her Geography Revisited 14 Warm Water sonic (sequel to “Northline” from West Bestern) 15 Like A Tower 16 Hey Thirsty! (from the Summer Sports EP) 17 Coughing People (from the Summer Sports EP) 18 Travel Information 19 Basement Nights (No Brocals) 20 Old Sour Tooth 21 Halogen Lights (a really old song from 2009 that ended up on an EP called New Farmers, only 5 copies ever made...I don’t know who has them and I don’t have a copy or the masters....only this song and “Industrial Park” (Deep Space Bistro) survived. That EP also had the acoustic demo of “Sunshine City”) 22 Cabbage Days 23 Western Sweepstakes 24 Pizza Years (recorded 2011...showed up on the Spaghetti Songs EP) 25 Easy Street (recorded 2011...never released) 26 Western Sweepstakes 27 In The Dark (Paddington cover...a band I played in briefly in 2004)

July: Heck ‘Em All. Yes, finally. Here’s the songs: 01 Cadillac Problems 02 One In Love 03 Heck ‘Em All 04 American Baseball 05 The Going Rate 06 Come Back 2 Me 07 Come Back 2 Me Pt II 08 Leave Yr Man (not the same song as the “Leave Your Man” from Born to Bar Band and also the “Leave Your Man” EP from 2006_ 09 Brampton Calling 10 Yello Fello 11 The Hard Way That’s a lot of music, I admit. The tracklisting on the 27-track album might be trimmed a little bit, as there’s no reason to put so many songs on there just to top the track count of Complete Lung Champions. Though I love long albums, I don’t want to make once just for its own sake. The songs have to justify themselves. So we’ll see. If we record more acoustic songs this summer, they will probably end up replacing a few of the songs that are on there now. So yeah, once my work situation figures itself out we will get back to recording music. In the meantime, hang tight. It’s gonna be another three album year. And who knows, if we end up making the sequel to Deep Space Bistro, there’s no reason why it won’t be out by the end of 2016...which will match our four album output from 2010 and 2012. Four albums a year used to be a lot easier to do. We must be getting old.

That’s the news, lose yer blues.

#news #newalbums

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