I spent most of the eighties riding the 401 playing rock and roll in punk bars, fern bars, draft rooms and tobacco-country hotels. I was still a joker, a fuck-up, but now I was a joker and a fuck-up with a daughter and a girlfriend. I had been working, delivering construction materials to sites in high-rise office towers and performing demolitions, then driving to the dump where the ground at my feet breathed, raising and lowering me like I was standing on the old dance floor at the Commodore Ballroom. It teeter-tottered the entire truck of garbage and blew toxic waste through little holes in the earth, puffs of stinking smoke and dust five or six feet high. It was very sci-fi. I dropped out of music except for a few bar gigs I did with an acoustic guitar and sometimes my best friend Ray Farrugia on a snare drum, just a way to make an extra fifty bucks here and there.
Growing up, I knew Ray Farrugia by reputation only as a scrapper and shit disturber up on the East Mountain. I used to see him from a safe distance downtown. He was skinny as hell with purple-tinted coke-bottle glasses and a giant head of black hair halfway down his back. I’d see him flying out of storefronts, walking out into traffic on King Street like he owned the road. Fearless. He was running around making the fur fly, picking up chicks, selling drugs or possibly stolen goods, getting out of moving cars like he didn’t have time for them to come to a complete stop. In the early eighties, when I finally met Ray Farrugia, or Ray Curse as everyone called him from his time in the punk band Slander, we became instant best friends. We pooled our madness to form a bond of survival that has lasted ever since.
One night in 1989 I ran into Dan Lanois at a local artists’ romp in a studio space above the old United Cigar Store at King and James. The party was hosted by Denise Lisson, who had arranged for lots of booze and records and great lighting, but Lanois walked in with guitars and some drumsticks and decided to give the local artists some unpretentious, down-home music to add to the evening’s fare. I joined Tim Gibbons and Dave Rave and Lanois for a little kitchen table party in the middle of the room. It was a moment that made me want to leave my job at Pollock Interiors and play music again.
Dan Lanois had become record producer Daniel Lanois and left town, and was now responsible for massively popular records by Peter Gabriel and U2. Lanois was always a fashionable outsider. He and his brother, Bob, had killer wheels and a fancy house that hung off the side of Hamilton Mountain, overlooking the city and beyond. It was at that house on the brow and at their Grant Avenue Studio that Brian Eno and Lanois gave birth to ambient music. But Hamilton was nowhere near big enough for the Lanois brothers. I remember Bob standing on the front porch of Grant Avenue with a cigar in his mouth, pointing a make-believe rifle into the night sky and telling me to aim high. He practised what he preached, and so did Dan.
That night at the United Cigar Store, I felt the unity of the moment and the commitment to making something happen, and it was Lanois who created that feeling among us. We dropped our drunken egos and became all about the music and doing the most with the moment. We each took lead on a few songs. I did an old Florida Razors song, “Italian Sunglasses,” and the Carl Perkins classic “Matchbox.” Tim and Dave did a few old Shakers numbers, and Lanois sang a couple of tracks off his new album Acadie, “Jolie Louise” and “Under a Stormy Sky.” I loved “Under a Stormy Sky.” It told the story of Dan’s mom, Jill, migrating from Quebec to Hamilton in the sixties, a reference to my hometown I knew would be heard around the world.
After our little concert, we were hanging around in a tiny closet area in the back drinking beer. Tim and Dave were asking about the place Dan was setting up in an old French general’s house on Esplanade Street in New Orleans. I could imagine the smell of the food and the sounds of the accents and bands playing in the bars of the French Quarter. “Wow—that must be amazing, Dan,” I said.
He turned, looked me in the eye and said, “Then you’ll have to come down, Tom.” I was knocked over. I didn’t say a word, just looked back at him as he continued talking to Tim. But I knew in that instant what I was going to do.
The kitchen table approach let all the elements I love about music come to the surface. It was natural and unrehearsed, and the songs cut through the grease that drips out of the radio speakers. Music without ego that travels on the wings of tones, blues and greens. I found what I was looking for. I listened to and loved records like Muddy Waters’s Folk Singer, Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, the Cowboy Junkies’ The Trinity Session and Daniel Lanois’s Acadie. I wanted to communicate in the language used on these records.
Later that year I got on a plane in Buffalo and flew down to New Orleans. I arrived unannounced at the Lanois house and the home of Kingsway Studios, on the edge of the French Quarter. I walked through the side door and my life opened up for me. I knew right away this place wasn’t for me, but I did want to lasso the creative energy that was there.
The kitchen was the centre of the house. A long table running through it seemed like the meeting place for both inhabitants and visitors alike. Two sets of servants’ stairs ran up the back of the house, a rude memory of where I was and what had gone on here over the years. Originally it had been two French townhouses, but the wall that separated them was brought down either by demolition or erosion, and the house was now one grand, mirrored image staring back into itself. A broken, high-pitched hum was ever present. It had a life of its own. A ghost, or time trails, captured forever within the walls of the house. Or maybe Lanois had dragged the buzzy Hamilton guitar sound down with him.
Malcolm Burn, another Canadian-born music producer, took me up a massive stairway that led to the identical left and right layouts of the bedrooms and inner servant passages routed behind the main walls, and showed me a bedroom where I could sleep. There was a worldly kindness I had not experienced before. It came by way of experience and travel and sticking to the task. A guy showing up unannounced from Canada didn’t bother anyone.
Lanois and Malcolm called us “canoes”: Canadians who had set their course for the old mansion in the French Quarter. This was a place where art came first, and I was welcome to join in on whatever was being born here. The whole city had a musical pulse. Marching drums and gunshots and singers’ voices time-travelling up and down the corridors of the French Quarter. The madness on the streets never stopped. It was all tits and bar shots, slipping and slumming over the cobblestones.
Meanwhile the walls inside the Kingsway were whispering, and the hum never stopped. I lay low, listening, trying to hear beyond the crowds outside, beyond the swaying dresses, vomit and booze. Lanois was starting rehearsals for his upcoming tour. He had assembled a fantastic rhythm section—Daryl Johnston and Ronald Jones—to join Malcolm Burn and himself. He twisted the arrangements and brought them to the edge of the stage, giving the songs new life. I loved how Dylan did that, keeping the listener guessing, questioning what they were hearing, throwing out art instead of repetition. Lanois asked me for some suggestions for covers for his show, songs that represented Canada. I thought Hank Snow’s “I’m Moving On” was a good idea, and a little Willie P. Bennett. He settled on the old Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman number “Little Sister.” He said it reminded him of Hamilton and the bands that roamed the bars there. Teenage Head, the Trouble Boys, Dave Rave—these were the musicians that laid “Little Sister” at Lanois’s feet.
As usual, Lanois wanted his own take on the song, and one night after the band went home, he asked me to help him rewrite a few verses. He wanted his version to burn a brand into the side of the classic rock-and-roll song. I thought that was interesting and bold, and I happily wrote a few verses without thinking much of it. But what that little request did was instill the confidence in me that I could write something that could make contact with listeners outside the borders of Hamilton.
Sometimes all a guy needs is a little push in the right direction. The lyrics I wrote were a good trade for me. Lanois got his own version of “Little Sister,” and I got to go home knowing that what I had was worth something.
Back in Hamilton, Ray thought I needed a band that put the spotlight on my song writing. He was thinking the same way I was, so we started hanging around my kitchen table on Barnesdale after Sandy and Madeline had gone to bed, and we played the songs I’d been working on from my time in New Orleans. We liked what we were doing. Enough that we went out looking for players to join in. We called ourselves Junkhouse. First we found guitarist Dan Achen or Dan O as we called him. Back in the early eighties, Dan O had skipped out of his hometown, Regina, to dodge a huge drug bust. He got tipped off and knew it was going down. Someone was going to be left holding the bag, and it wasn’t going to be him. He was young. He was the devil that would stay on the loose. Dan O was a live wire, making it all up as he went along—sometimes genius, sometimes stinking the joint out. But that’s what I loved about him and his playing. Other musicians mocked him. When he, Ray and I were putting together Junkhouse, there was always some asshole in the crowd who thought I needed to be told to get rid of Dan O. But I never considered losing him. Ever.
New band members would come and go, mostly bass players. Some would complain about Dan O. Some were embarrassed to be seen on stage with us. But I knew there was something missing in their playing. There was no chance in the notes, no moral in the hymn, and most of all, no desperation.
Russell Wilson was the last piece of the Junkhouse puzzle. A living, breathing monster. A bass-playing giant with all the humour and rage of a cartoon genie, and the intensity we needed to push our limits. He took us from being just another band to being a wandering gang of wild men. We met Russell when we were playing at a bar up on the East Mountain that was owned by the Hells Angels. Russell was the bouncer. That’s right, the bouncer.
There’s an innocence that comes with growing up in Hamilton. That innocence is often mistaken for ignorance. We don’t rely on other people’s words to define who we are. We don’t rely on movies and books to define our character because we’re born with plenty of that. We’re angels and devils and hard-nosed, blue-collar survivors.
I’m not worldly. I’m a home-towner. And I was in a band of outsiders.
We took it up the road to Toronto and landed on Queen Street, where we thought it might find an audience, but instead of finding ears we found empty rooms, night after night, and fast-tongued critics of our dreamy, acid-trip vibes. Basically, they hated us.
We kept going, refusing to give in. We knew what we were doing was good. But as time went on we got increasingly frustrated. We started drinking harder at the gigs, taking pills, turning up our amps, speeding up the tempos. Then we started getting into fights on stage. Sometimes we fought with the soundman or the club owner, sometimes with the audience. It was like some kind of Steeltown performance art, and the louder we got and the drunker we got, the more people started to come and check us out.
Soon we were playing every song on ten and smashing guitars and kicking over amps and basically causing shit, which was our natural state anyway. We strayed far away from our kitchen table, but we had record companies and the media knocking at our front door.
The little Junkhouse concept was put on the sidelines, and I found myself in a rock-and-roll band again. There was no sense in turning back.