Interview with John Wright of NoMeansNo
The great thing about phone interviews is you can conduct them anywhere. You can be in a park, in a bar, or at home not wearing pants. There’s just something liberating conducting an interview without any pants on. You feel in control. It’s too bad job interviews can’t be done like this. Well Tuesday morning I did just that, I woke up free from my normal constraints of an evening of too much drink and not enough sleep, brewed a pot of coffee, and called John Wright, drummer from iconic Canadian band NoMeansNo. We talked vinyl, Europe, and wine making. Here is the transcript.
Dean Belder -You guys are playing at the Biltmore on the First of July, and I’m excited to get out and see the show I’ve been trying to get out and see you guys live for a while.
John Wright – Yeah, Yeah, well we don’t play locally really more than anywhere else, it’s not like we are playing any extra shows in Vancouver really.
DB – I was first introduced to you guys when I was living in Edmonton, and there were a couple shows you played, 96 or 97 that I wanted to get out too, just had conflicts and couldn’t make it.
JW – oh yeah, I mean we’ve been playing in Edmonton since our very first forays from Victoria when we were living in Victoria in the early 80s, and a trip to Alberta was one of our first getting out on the road experiences, so that’s back in ‘84 I think we went out to Alberta for the first time.
DB – And you guys just recently got back from Europe?
JW - Yes we did. You know of course we tour over there very regularly, its definitely where we have our most shows and most of our success is in Europe, and has been over the years, I mean we have always of course enjoyed good shows in Canada and the states, but Canada is not a big place and Europe is massive and lots of people, and places to go and play so there is always lots of work to go and do over there. So yeah we went for another jaunt around sort of central and western Europe, cause we have released a new EP, we’ve been doing a little recording, and have a bunch of new songs, so we have some new stuff to play. We decided to do a limited edition EP that we just sell at the shows, we’ll release it through our regular distribution, “Southern” in Europe basically later this year, of course it’s available online, e-music that sort of thing, but we thought we would do a vinyl, it seems to be all people are interested in buying, you still sell CD's at shows, but you know CD's don’t really sell much at all in shops and whatnot, so we thought this time we would just do a vinyl, and then we made some flash drives that include the stuff digitally, so that was a different tact for us this time.
DB – Yeah vinyl is starting to take off again.
JW – Yeah taking off relatively speaking of course, you know we’re not talking tens of thousands of pieces of vinyl being sold, but you know when vinyl basically outsells CD's at shows, people get their music digitally, they download it whether they pay for it or not is hard to say, but when they want to own a piece of the band it’s a t-shirt or people are very interested in vinyl. I think one of the reasons is it’s kind of a classic thing and the vinyl nowadays is great, the actual quality of the vinyl and the pressings are really, really good, the sound quality is really, really good, so people who enjoy that are interested in that, and like the big cover and that sort of thing the art work, it’s definitely experiencing a resurgence.
DB – It’s that art object, and wired magazine a couple of years ago said the death of CD could be attributed to the vinyl record.
JW – Yeah, It doesn’t end up as a broken jewel case at the bottom of the car. CD’s don’t have much aesthetic value really.
DB – And people are downloading more
JW – The only argument I have is most stuff people download is such crappy files they get the cheapest thing, cause they don’t understand the cheapest thing is cheap because it’s the smallest file. My son has his iPod, and every now and then I’ll hear something from his iPod and when you put it up against a CD of the same thing, it’s like night and day, those little tiny mp3 files sound like crap you have a lot of people listening to very crappy sounding music, from a technical point of view, but how many crappy cassettes did I listen to. It’s not a big deal, especially now, music is so I don’t know I can only judge by my fourteen year old son, he listens to absolutely everything, there’s no discrimination, you know when I was listening to punk rock that’s all I listened to, I couldn’t stand classic rock, or disco, or pop, I was very particular about what I thought was good music. The kids they just don’t discriminate, they’ll listen to Eric Clapton, and the white stripes, you know all over the place, the Ramone's first album and Airborne, it’s kind of funny that way, they’ll just listen to everything.
DB – What are you listening to these days, anything your interested in?
JW – not particularly, I’ve never been a record collector, I just listen to what other people put on the stereo, what my kids are listening to is basically what I listen to in the car. I listen to a lot of electronic music, only because my brother has completely immersed himself in this genre, and in fact one of the new songs on the EP has been assembled through loops, although they’re all loops we created ourselves, kind of an interesting way to put together a song in the studio, we’d never done that before, of course since we’ve gone to play it live it’s quite different live, it’s organic from beginning to end, but it was quite fun to do that, it’s not a new thing, certainly all this music my brother has been listening to that’s probably the newest and strangest things I’ve been hearing lately. We just toured with a couple local bands, the Pack A.D. and Evasive, I guess we’ve been doing shows with them for awhile, but you know they’re great, great bands, just fantastic, nice people, really good shows, and fun for us to have good opening bands like that that really put on a good show and people don’t know them especially if they come to Europe with us, it makes for a good show.
DB – It’s great seeing the live shows, getting out, you often see something different than what’s on the album, and you get more of a jam, a spontaneous feel to it.
JW – I don’t go out to see bands hardly at all, when I was in my 20’s and stuff I would go and do more stuff like that, but in my mid 30’s I had kids and you know when I’m not rehearsing and touring playing music I’m at home with my family, just looking after kids and going to soccer games and all that regular mundane stuff so that occupies my time personally.
DB - In an interview you gave in the 80’s or 90’s while on tour in music you discussed the difference in support for the music between Canada and Europe, that they were much more supportive of music in Europe, do you still find that today?
JW – It’s more the same now, during the 80’s there was quite a lot of youth centers and government sponsored, city sponsored youth centers, and squatted places, there were a lot of those for bands to play, and there are still youth centre type operations, but the squats have become fewer and farther between, and music has gravitated towards the commercial clubs, normal privately run clubs, but back in those days, there were places for bands to play that wouldn’t be instantly shut down by the city or the police, and kids 15, 16, 17 year old kids were allowed to come in, they weren’t prohibited to entering they were open to everybody, and in Europe it didn’t occur to someone that I can’t go see a band because I’m not old enough, there was no such thing as all ages and drinking it was just a show. There was more opportunity to reach everyone, and you had a lot of volunteer based organizations, people that took far more politically active view of the music and the scene and responded by organizing as an answer to really commercially controlled music. That’s kind of faded over the years, it still exists to some degree, but it’s not the quite the same, and in North America you were just up against it, it was so hard to put on a show, if you wanted kids out you couldn’t have liquor, clubs were you know whatever’s popular in the day, they’re just running a business, they’re not there to support musical styles, most of them had no idea, they didn’t have their fingers on the pulse, there certainly were good clubs out there, and things happen, and a lot of the good music of the 80s came out of North America. Back then there was a little more of a ground swell of organization that made it possible for bands to get shows and make some money, its pretty hard to be a band if you can just never make any money and your driving 8-10 hours in North America between shows and it’s a much tougher slog. So in some respects North American bands would go over there and they are a little more worn, a little more savvy in that respect and they could see how great the scene was there, so of course North American bands started taking advantage and a lot of them traveling over there and Europe had a great opportunity to have tons of great music, we might see a band once every two years, but they’d have every band, east, west coast didn’t matter, people were flocking over there, it did eventually sort of inundate the scene and it became watered down, and after the 18th crappy American hardcore band they saw, maybe not everything that comes out of North America is amazing. So eventually it just ran it’s course, but we had established ourselves and established a crowd, and we had set ourselves up, we went at a good, time we started at a good time over there.
DB - I thought it would be a good question to retouch on.
JW – We now really rely on the audience that we created and not a scene, we’ve never really been part of any scene but we’re associated with punk rock and Canadian alternative for sure, and it was through alternative tentacles our label at that time that people were curious about us and came out, but it was basically through doing show after show and playing, and putting on good shows and getting people coming back, now we sort of enjoy the fruits of that labor we get good crowds because people come out time and time again.
DB – You’ve mostly been independent through your careers, do you find there are any drawbacks to this?
JW – We’ve never had any concerted publicity in that kind of thing, which maybe we could have been more popular, sold more records, but at the same time then you have a lot of stresses that come along with that, a lot of expectations along with that, a lot of people that begin to gravitate towards you looking for money and it can be difficult for a band, we sort of rode blind and were successful at doing that remaining with alternative tentacles, which was an organized label which got our stuff out there, not great but it got it out, they were good people it wasn’t a business arrangement, but we had the support when we toured our records were there, people could at least find them, so were able to skirt around the industry, and take advantage of this independent support we had without having to really start wrestling with the beast, dealing with major labels or anything like that.
DB - When you were starting did you have any aspirations to work with a major label?
JW – No we never really had aspirations, there were some in the late 80’s early 90’s when nirvana started to break, there was some Warner brothers and Atlantic were phoning, asking about the band, but we never really pursued it, we were happy with alternative tentacles, we realized they are going to woo you if they think there is money, but we knew we weren’t some marketable, teenage pop band, punk band, whatever band, it just wasn’t us, it’s just music, it’s not particularly accessible, it can be, but it’s not necessarily. Well you’re going to have to write different songs, the last album didn’t sell well, this is what happens, bands get caught, contractually obliged, record labels expect record sales, so some bands are perfectly fine with that, they want to make good music, and they want it to sell, take a look at a band like green day, it’s a perfect example, how they were just this young punk rock band doing this pop punk, and it was perfect pop music and they didn’t have to change anything, they just get into the machine, and I don’t have anything against that at all, they make great pop punk records. We would never fit that mold, we would never fit the mold that the record label wants, despite how much they say they love you, it just comes down to selling records and if your not you either change or you get tossed to the back burner and then your stuck your stuck with a contract, and it’s very difficult sometimes.
DB – I ask because I think more and more bands are pushing for independence in their music, and the rewards I think are a little more obvious to independence than the drawbacks.
JW – It’s nice to be in control of your own destiny so to speak, but it’s also not the path to fame and wealth and riches, so bands really need to understand and decide what they want to do.
DB – I got into arts because it’s something I love doing, and most artists are the same it’s not about the money.
JW - Oh yeah. Of course it’s the love of doing art and that sort of thing is where you draw your inspiration, but like I said earlier it’s tough to be a band if you don’t make any money, you cant just be on the road scrapping by constantly especially when you get older, and you don’t want to be sleeping on someone’s couch all the time right, eventually I think in any art unless it’s just completely a hobby and you have lots of time to spend and focus on that along with some other form of career and job eventually you need to support yourself, it’s very difficult to be an artist without some kind of support, it might not be financial, it might be a spouse or an organization that helps you, but that’s the tough part, is being able to get along with your life and still be able to approach your art for its aesthetic value.
DB – Coming from art school we were always told the process is important to creation. When you guys are working on stuff do you have a specific process that you go through?
JW - No Not really, I play piano and I get ideas for songs, and my brother will get ideas for songs, he writes most of the text and what not, sometimes it’s quite fully formed other times it’s not, and we start here’s some parts, try playing this and you start jamming songs out, like I said some are more formed than others and more arranged than others sometimes it’s very rough and you start working those details out as a group, I guess there’s a process, we haven’t changed much over the years the way we’ve written songs, I think now it’s a little different my brother has pro-tools and all into loops and doing his own electronic music, but then he turns around what does he write for the band, Jubilation, a total pop-punk song, what comes out comes out and I think we’ve always tried to be creative obviously, you don’t want to get into repeating yourselves over and over, I think all our albums have a new bent to them to some degree, but at the same time we’ve always relied on the energy and the intensity the emotion of the music and that’s sort of what central.
DB – I like how you guys change from album to album, being pop-punky on All Roads, yet more drawn out and story driven on the new Ep.
JW – Yeah all roads we wanted to write a bunch of short songs, a more tuneful record, one the previous album was sort of drawn out, it was a listening album, not a party album, a little more challenging in that respect so Ausfart was an attempt to be a little more accessible a little more loose and fun. The new songs definitely have a different character, which is like I said what we like to do, what I like to do, what I like listening for when we are doing new music, how can we give a new character, a new atmosphere to songs, but you know central is sort of the emotion and imagery that’s conjured.
DB – Yeah I got a chance to listen to the new EP and really enjoyed what I heard
JW – Yeah thank you. We’ve been getting the odd sort of “oh it’s sounding very electronic”, oh that’s odd how did you guess, which I don’t really get, it’s very organic sounding to me, the one song, something dark against something light, there are a lot of loops and that’s the one they’re pointing to, but that song has been going over great live, it’s been fun, it’s always a little nervous when you lay in a bunch of new songs into your set that people aren’t familiar with and you hope that of course everyone enjoys them, and so far the new songs have been doing very well live.
DB – One last question, what is the best thing that’s happened to you in the last week?
JW – This week, what is the best thing to happen to me this week? I’m very much into beer and wine making and it was very nice to bottle a batch of valpolicella ripasso, that we made and it tasted great out of the secondary, but we got that bottled up and won’t know for a year how that’s going to turn out. I enjoy very much when you taste your beer and your wine that your making and it’s like MMM I love this it turned out great. I’ve been making beer for about twenty years, and my girlfriend and I just started making wine this year, thought we’d start getting into it, bought some literature, and eventually would be nice to grow some grapes, get a place where we can plant some, I like to make things from scratch where I can.
DB – That’s sounds good, I would like that myself, to have a place and grow some grapes, but I don’t have a very good track record with growing my own plants.
JW – I’m not the farmer, I rely on someone else to do that, but I would be very happy to turn whatever it is into a good meal or a batch of wine if it’s possible.
DB – Thanks very much John We’ll see you at the show and I hope to get many great photos.
JW – Thanks very much for calling, I hope you enjoy yourself.
NoMeansNo is playing at the Biltmore Cabaret on Canada Day, opening is Slim Cessna’s Auto Club, and Hermetic. Tickets appear to be sold out online and at Red Cat but if you are lucky may still be available through Zulu, Scrape, and Scratch.
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Originally appeared on Vanmusic.ca