The new heartland rock

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/06/2003 (8380 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

PRECISELY 1,400 kilometres southeast of Winnipeg, you’ll find a dilapidated Main Street with empty storefronts, Chicago-style warehouse architecture and few pedestrians.

The inner-city population is dwindling as residents flee to the ‘burbs, leading the mayor to hold free street parties downtown.

Welcome to Toledo, Ohio, an industrial town at the centre of a metropolitan area of 415,000 people. Ten years ago, there were about 15,000 more souls living in this rust-belt centre, whose economy peaked during the railway boom of the early 20th century.

Outside a two-room bungalow of a bar called Frankie’s, where Frank Sinatra once performed, three recent high-school graduates are talking about Winnipeg.

It’s not because Toledo is so much like our city, which it is.

It’s because of a rock band with a talent for writing songs which resonate in the psyches of kids in small towns, fading cities and out-of-the-way centres across the slowly emptying North American heartland.

“I’ve never been to Winnipeg, but I can imagine it from what The Weakerthans are saying,” says Andy Worth, who drove 350 kilometres from Chicago with two friends to see the Winnipeg quartet play Frankie’s late last month.

“Good lyrics are something you don’t find very often. A lot of rock bands don’t seem to care what they say, and that doesn’t interest me.

“It’s nice to see bands with something to say are finally getting their due.”

WHAT THE HECK IS A WEAKERTHAN?

Although not a household name like Remy Shand or Chantal Kreviazuk, The Weakerthans are the most critically acclaimed recording act to emerge from Winnipeg since The Guess Who.

Since forming in 1997, the quartet has recorded two albums of surprisingly literary punk-pop and folk-inflected indie rock, Fallow and the follow-up Left and Leaving, both released by left-leaning Winnipeg record label G7 Welcoming Committee.

Those first two albums, whose lyrics referenced Winnipeg landmarks such as the burned-down Leland Hotel, a North Kildonan Salisbury House and Albert Street hole-in-the-wall Wellingtons, have sold a combined total of 70,000 records and earned the group almost embarrassingly positive reviews and a far-flung cult following.

Now the band sits on the cusp of a possible commercial breakthrough.

In August, Epitaph Records — the Southern California label which helped launch the careers of The Offspring, Rancid, NOFX and Bad Religion — will release the Winnipeg band’s third and possibly most accessible album, Reconstruction Site.

This may be a mixed blessing to an indie band which maintains a close relationship with the bookish, clean-cut fans who relate to the band’s ordinary-shmo appeal.

The quartet, which has been living out of rented cube vans and Motel 6 rooms for much of the past five years, would welcome larger concert crowds and greater album sales. For one thing, they’d be able to afford a guitar tech and a road manager.

But greater notoriety and a slightly more comfortable road existence may arrive at the expense of what makes this band so appealing: An almost fetishistic commitment to the notion that musicians are no more important or interesting than other ordinary people, a philosophy first promulgated by down-to-earth ’80s indie-rock bands such as Minutemen, Fugazi and Beat Happening.

“You can’t forge a real connection by charging straight into the music-industry machine,” says John K. Samson, The Weakerthans’ reed-thin lyricist, singer and rhythm guitarist, who played bass for political punk trio Propagandhi in the early ’90s before departing to run a book-publishing company (the equally left-leaning Arbeiter Ring) and write more of his own songs.

“I’ve never trusted a band that didn’t play The Albert. In a way, we’re still playing The Albert.”

Samson isn’t kidding. In late May and early June, after The Weakerthans completed post-production work on Reconstruction Site, the band embarked on a two-week tour of small clubs in smaller cities in the U.S. industrial heartland.

The goal was to make some money and kill time before the disc comes out on Aug. 26. The Free Press tagged along for 790 kilometres of the route, from Ann Arbor, Mich., through Toledo, Covington, Ky. and finally Pittsburgh.

In every city, the band played to the same kind of fans: Polite, almost nerdy indie-rock kids who view the geeky/charismatic Samson as one of their own, a Middle American everyman with all the enigmatic attraction of an Axl Rose or Kurt Cobain — but none of the self-hatred or misplaced fury.

DAY ONE: ANN ARBOR

No van is an island.

A half-hour west of Detroit sits Ann Arbor, a college town that’s home to the University of Michigan (“Go Wolverines!”), an unusual liberal streak (’60s radical group the Black Panthers used to live here) and an impressive rock ‘n’ roll legacy.

This bedroom community was the early stomping ground for The MC5, Alice Cooper and Bob Seger. When The Weakerthans load their gear into a club called The Blind Pig, they walk past a shrine erected to Nirvana, which played the pub-like room before Nevermind exploded in 1991.

There are two other bands on the bill: San Francisco’s One Line Drawing and Minneapolis group called Motion City Soundtrack, which has also just signed to Epitaph.

Both groups accompany The Weakerthans throughout most of this mini-tour. As members of Motion City, the youngest band on the bill, load in their shiny, new equipment, Samson marvels at the volume of their gear.

“Our philosophy is, if you can’t fit your stuff into the back of a van, you can’t take it. Also, if you can’t lift a piece of gear yourself, you can’t take it.”

The Weakerthans travel in two cube vans — a rental from Toronto and an almost identical vehicle owned by their merchandise guy (that is, T-shirt, CD and vinyl hawker) Pete Wagner. Along with the merch, the Portland, Ore. resident sells political books distributed by anarchist publishing house AK Press during The Weakerthans’ shows.

Also along for the jaunt is Winnipeg sound technician Cam Loeppky, whose been doing sound for the band ever since he was called up on a minute’s notice (“Are you doing anything for the next week?”) to go on tour back in 1998.

Along with Wolseley-raised guitarist Stephen Carroll, who pulls double duty as the band’s road manager, drummer and St. Norbert product Jason Tait and Regina-born bassist John Sutton, the total road contingent is six, three per vehicle.

They avoid conflict on long tours by renting three hotel rooms each night, making sure people who ride in the same van together get to sleep in a room with somebody else.

Touring, more or less, is all about boredom: Waiting for a drive to be over. Waiting for a venue to open. Waiting to set up gear. Waiting for a sound check. Waiting to perform, then reloading the van and driving again, to the next town and the next.

“I’ve started to get the feeling it’s the towns that are travelling. You just sit in the van and wait for them to come to you,” offers Samson.

“It’s depressing — I’ll be in a town for nine hours and spend most of it sleeping. After a few days in, there’s nothing you can do about your life back home.

“Your entire day revolves around one hour, when you play.”

As it turns out, The Blind Pig is sold out, which is welcome news at the beginning of the tour.

But thanks to use of a multinational concert promoter — Clear Channel, the only option for Ann Arbor — the overhead is high. After all expenses are deducted, The Weakerthans’ share of the roughly $4,000 U.S. gross (400 patrons times $10) is about $1,300 U.S.

A small but annoying nuisance in these calculations is the contract rider, which stipulates what food and drink the venue is supposed to provide for the band. The Weakerthans, all of whom but Tait are vegetarians, typically ask for chips, salsa, hummus, pita, fruit, raw veggies, micro-brewery beer and a bottle of red wine.

At The Blind Pig, the promoter says this spread, in addition to $10 meal allowances for each musician in all three bands, is approaching the hospitality budget’s $300 limit.

“It’s like this all over the States. They try to nickel-and-dime you. It’s tiring,” says reluctant road manager Carroll, who spends much of his time on tour taking cellphone calls and typing into a wireless Palm Pilot.

In Europe, venues usually give bands an elaborate feast as well as a place to stay. In Canada, they get some food and a room.

In the U.S., they’re on their own for accommodations, which forces Carroll to constantly worry about the following night’s arrangements. As the band member carrying the most responsibilities, he becomes stressed to the point of being unable to fall asleep at night.

Opening night goes smoothly. After some initial technical difficulties, The Weakerthans tear through a 75-minute set.

In the middle of the show, Samson invites Ann Arbor’s all-American college kids to check out Portland Pete’s assortment of literature, much of which “explains the bad foreign policy exhibited by your strange, theocratic police state.”

The room goes relatively silent. Finally, bassist Sutton — the most spontaneous and gregarious member of the band — seizes the moment and shouts, “And marijuana is legal in Canada now!”

The crowd cheers, proving certain types of politics are more collegial than others.

DAY TWO: TOLEDO

One great city.

At the end of every tour stop, The Weakerthans head to a hotel on the edge of town in order to get the jump on the next day’s travel. But with Toledo only 70 kilometres from Ann Arbor, there’s no rush to make the destination.

So the band stops for coffee and hunts for a washroom.

“One of the larger issues of touring is finding a place to crap,” says Samson, matter-of-factly. True enough, most nightclub toilets resemble the infamous “worst toilet in Scotland” from Trainspotting.

During a European tour, bathroom-phobic sound man Loeppky once went weeks without a bowel movement. Apparently, stomach cramps are preferable to using public washrooms in Germany.

After a few minutes on the Interstate, the band stops to peruse a thrift shop, scarf down brunch at restaurant franchise Applebee’s (“It’s a known commodity. They have veggie burgers,” Carroll explains) and head into a Best Buy outlet to purchase a set of two-way radios, a CD converter for the rental van and a new CD player for Pete’s vehicle.

The massive U.S. electronics chain, which is about to open a Winnipeg store near Polo Park, sports a healthy selection of albums Winnipeg recording artists.

There’s a big stack of Kreviazuk’s latest album, plus titles by Shand, Crash Test Dummies and The Guess Who, whose double-live Running Back Thru Canada is tagged with an import sticker price of $30 U.S.

Toledo itself turns out to be a revelation, and not just because it’s the mythical home of M*A*S*H’s cross-dressing clerk, Cpl. Klinger.

Once a major Great Lakes shipping port and glass manufacturing centre, the city has an urban-doughnut problem on par with that of Winnipeg.

On Main Street sits Frankie’s, where the slogan is “One of the nation’s great venues for emerging talent.” Across the street lies a recently abandoned supermarket, already speckled with graffiti.

As it turns out, many of the kids who begin to mill around outside Frankie’s are not from Toledo. There are fans from Chicago, Dayton, Cleveland, Cincinnati and Columbus, all located several hours away.

Most got into the Winnipeg band by hearing a snippet of the band on a compilation CD. Others got turned on by college radio or followed Samson’s career after he left Propagandhi.

“I try to get down here whenever somebody big comes through. We rarely get big shows coming here,” says Mike Anthony, who lives in nearby Monroe, Mich. and runs an all-music website deceptively called toledosluts.com.

Upon request — and possibly inspired by Toledo — Samson alters the regular set list and plays One Great City, a folkish song from Reconstruction Site that was inspired by the lyricist’s disappointment with Mayor Glen Murray as well as the cheesy signs adorning the outskirts of our city.

Every verse of the song ends with a character muttering, “I hate Winnipeg.” There’s also an even more inflammatory line: “The Guess Who suck, the Jets were lousy anyway.”

Already, One Great City has proven to be one of the most popular tracks from the forthcoming recording, inspiring questions about the band’s intent, MP3 exchanges across the Internet and many requests at live shows.

“We’ve had a huge reaction,” Samson says, downplaying the suggestion he wrote the track to counter the notion his band waves the flag too often for Winnipeg.

Instead, he says he was trying to express the day-to-day frustrations people feel in any out-of-the-way town.

“The characters in the song are the ones who are saying those things, not me. Personally, I love The Guess Who.”

True enough, you can find several nods to Winnipeg’s greatest rock band throughout Reconstruction Site, such as Carroll’s use of a Garnet Herzog amplifier, originally built for Randy Bachman.

In Toledo, no one takes offence. But the show still ends with a bang.

As The Weakerthans prepare to pack up their gear, a gunshot is fired two blocks down Main Street, where a noisy argument had been brewing outside a dance bar called Club Access.

The crowd runs away before a police wagon rolls up.

“It happens all the time,” says the bouncer at Frankie’s.

DAY THREE: COVINGTON, KY.

Videos thrill the college radio stars.

For most working bands, the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle is nothing more than a nostalgic, ’70s-inspired myth.

Sure, most bands drink a bit and smoke a little marijuana, especially to wind down after a gig. But non-stop partying is impossible to handle when every waking moment is taken up with the quest to be somewhere else.

“I think people have heard too many stories from the early ’80s and Mötley Crüe and from the ’70s with Led Zeppelin,” offers bassist Sutton, the only unattached member of the band.

After each show, his bandmates reach for their cellphones and call their girlfriends back in Canada.

“I’ve never been in a situation where people were partying all the time. I’ve always played in punk bands and people’s basements,” offers Sutton, whose previous musical projects include pioneering Winnipeg indie-rock trio Red Fisher.

“I realized a long time ago (touring) was all about community — meeting people and finding out there are communities in other cities that are a lot like everywhere else.”

Hedonism doesn’t factor in… unless you count video games.

When The Weakerthans roll up to Jillian’s, the venue of the night in the Cincinnati suburb of Covington, Ky., they find themselves in some kind of adult version of Rucker’s.

The club is a five-storey entertainment complex built inside a former Bavarian brewery originally erected in 1911. There’s a dance club on the fourth floor, a tropical-theme bar on the third, a rock room on the second level and an immense expanse of video games on the main floor.

For a bunch of bored musicians, this is irresistible. Every band member at the show gets a card granting unlimited access to the vids.

Jason Tait, the quietest member of the group, turns out to be a natural with a sniper rifle.

“I have a different personality. I have to adjust to being on tour,” says the Toronto resident. “After two or three weeks, I just shut down. I don’t talk to anybody.

“When I get home, I have to play with as many people as possible just to get the creative juices flowing again.”

Eventually, every Weakerthan except Samson, who curls up with a history of the Oxford English Dictionary, indulges in the video games before the show.

The gig itself is surreal: An almost ascetic, socialist rock band playing a veritable shrine to capitalist excess. Yet the fans who ventured in from places like Louisville, Ky., St. Louis and, in one case, London, England, aren’t the least bit put off by the venue.

“If you think this is weird, you haven’t toured much,” says Larry Livermore, a part-time journalist and full-time rock ‘n’ roll fan who once wrote a 14-page article on The Weakerthans for the magazine Punk Planet.

As a kid, Livermore attended Woodstock. He went on to embrace punk rock, create the indie label Lookout Records and discover Green Day.

He’s since retired to the U.K. on the proceeds from the punk-pop trio’s back catalogue. Now, he follows The Weakerthans around whenever he gets the chance.

“This next album is going to make them huge,” he whispers, although everyone in the band knows how much he admires the little band from “WIN-KNEE-peg.”

And what happens if Larry’s right? What happens to that intimate connection with the polite cult following of indie-rock kids if Reconstruction Site turns out to be another God Shuffled His Feet, never mind another Nevermind?

“A lot of people ask us that,” says Samson. “But no one asks what happens if it bombs.”

DAY FOUR: PITTSBURGH

This place is history.

It’s rainy and grey on the edge of the Appalachian foothills between Columbus, Ohio and the border of West Virginia. Samson, Tait and Carroll are listening to a traditional-sounding folk record by a singer who goes by the name Bonnie Prince Charlie.

The day’s destination is Pittsburgh, one of only two major U.S. metropolitan areas to see a decline in population between the 1990 and 2000 U.S. censuses (the other: Buffalo-Niagara, N.Y.).

Pittsburgh’s urban woes have been compared to those of Winnipeg, but unlike Toledo, the resemblance isn’t obvious. There are 2.4 million people in the Pittsburgh area, spread over a lushly forested series of hills and valleys whicch more closely resembles Montreal.

The rain is still coming when The Weakerthans convoy rolls into an old neighbourhood called Oakland, east of downtown.

Tonight’s venue, Club Laga, isn’t visible from the street. It’s located three storeys up a medium-rise building which used to house a Jewish community centre, complete with its own bowling alley and swimming pool.

“This used to be the tallest building in Oakland. The elevator is a copy of the one in the Eiffel Tower,” says Geoff Jones, Club Laga’s resident sound technician, sounding precisely the same as a Winnipegger describing the historical wonders of The Exchange District.

“And right across the street is the Algonquin Hotel, where Marie Curie used to stay.” He might as well have said the Windsor Hotel and Charlie Chaplin.

History appears to take on a heightened importance in slow-growth communities such as Winnipeg (which grew by three per cent during the ’90s) or Pittsburgh (which actually shrunk by two per cent), where the future is more uncertain and difficult to contemplate.

But Club Laga — whose high ceilings and caged-off, licensed area allow the room to resemble an actual rock club more than any other venue so far — is also the first place where some of the fans are just here for The Weakerthans’ music, not the message.

“I like Left and Leaving because nothing sounds like it,” enthuses 16-year-old Leeanna Ninness, from the nearby suburb of Monongahela, a name that references Pennsylvania’s distant aboriginal past.

When The Weakerthans finally take the stage — after a Pittsburgh band called Black Tie Revue, tour regulars Motion City Soundtrack and a Louisville, Ky. quartet called Denali — they find their set abbreviated in order to make room for a hip-hop show.

To add insult to injury, the club mistakenly pays the band $300 US less than its guaranteed fee. That leads Sutton — who’s responsible for settling with promoters each night — to spend the next hour on the phone with the group’s booking agent.

Such is the glamorous life of a rock band: Drive, wait, unload, wait, play, load, wait, haggle over money, drive, drink or smoke a little, sleep, wait, drive.

If you form a connection with an audience, then great. If you put on a good show, then great.

If your songs resonate in the psyches of kids in nowhere towns across the continent, that’s really great.

Just make sure you do it again the next day. And the day after that.

And the day after that.

bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca