SOUNDTRACK FOR THE NIGHT

BEFORE HE PRODUCES a record for an artist, Gordie Johnson likes to spend a day with them, drinking red wine and espresso, listening to records, trading stories about the musicians they’ve played with. In late 2006, fresh on the heels of the Make a Little Noise EP and tasked with a full-length follow-up, Johnson went to Dartmouth for his ritual. “In the end, the record usually ends up sounding like everything that happens that first day — including the red wine and the coffee and the scratchy records,” he says. He and Joel Plaskett listened to Bruce Springsteen, and Richard and Linda Thompson, and the wine started to kick in. After a while, they reached a “euphoric state,” Johnson says, and realized most of the songs Plaskett had lined up were parts of the same story. Then one of them — Johnson can’t remember which — uttered two words that changed the whole direction of the project: “rock opera.”

It was, at first, a half-hearted joke. “We were laughing to the point of spitting wine through our noses,” Johnson says. But Plaskett pulled out his laptop and started rearranging his song ideas. “Well, what if you put the songs in this order? This order?” he asked the producer. “Does the story make sense?”

It did. If Twice Removed is an allegory for Halifax’s isolation from the rest of the world, then the record they conceived that day — Ashtray Rock — is about life removed a step further, about 20 minutes west of downtown. On the surface, it’s literally a rock opera about a rock — one tucked in a clearing in the woods of Clayton Park, where teenagers go to escape the boredom of a suburb on the edge of an already far-flung city. But Ashtray Rock isn’t about how that’s a bad thing. It’s about recognizing what shapes you and finding meaning in it, no matter what city or what clearing or what band you’re in. The story isn’t autobiography, but the pieces are: the band, the rock in the woods, the mystery girl from out west, the romance of sharing music. When those pieces came together, they formed Plaskett’s most personal, most cohesive, and most relatable record to date.

AS HE WAS writing the songs that showed up on the Make a Little Noise EP, Plaskett found himself riffing on a theme. With “A Million Dollars,” he’d channelled an us-against-the-world sentiment that showed up, to a similar extent, in “Make a Little Noise.” “I was really into that romantic world of music and the feeling you could have with somebody else and your records,” he says. He’d also demoed a song called “Soundtrack for the Night” that toyed with the same themes, but he wasn’t satisfied with it by the time he got to Scarborough. As he got ready to follow up the EP, though, words — and a narrative — started to come together: “A story about dudes driving around in a car listening to music.”

On paper, that premise is frighteningly banal, but it served as a crucial framing device for his own past. As much as the story of Thrush Hermit was defined on tour and in the studio, a huge chunk of the band’s early course was charted on long, aimless drives around Halifax as they waited for something to happen. Formative experiences like that helped shape Plaskett and the friendships that filled his younger days.

Other elements of his personal history started rolling into the story, too. “We had a band. It broke up. And running parallel to that band was my relationship with my wife, Rebecca, who I wouldn’t have met if I wasn’t playing music. Even though a girl didn’t split up the band — that isn’t the case — I fictionalized a version of how we get older, and I put it into the framework of the last year of high school, ’cause everybody there knows their lives are gonna change.” It’s during these final high school days that you realize you can’t have everything all the time, he says. “Once you start a relationship, your relationship with somebody else changes, especially if the relationships are intense enough. And all that is glued together by music, because so many of the great people in my life, I’ve met because of it.”

Plaskett had a framework, but if he was going to go through with a full-fledged rock opera, he needed a setting. He’d already borrowed storylines from familiar places to beef up the story at hand. Here, too, he took a page from an old friend: Rob Benvie.

Thrush Hermit in Clayton Park, with Rob Benvie in the foreground, and his mom’s Ford Tempo back right. In the early days, the band would spend endless hours driving around the city in that car.
[© Bill Plaskett]

“When you’re a teenager, you spend all your time walking around your neighbourhood,” Benvie says. “You avoid adults, and maybe get into some tomfoolery.” In the late ’80s, a pair of his friends stumbled upon a small clearing in the woods near a reservoir in Clayton Park. They called it Ashtray, for the crevice between two rocks where they’d throw their cigarette butts. Over time, the lexicon warped, and Ashtray Rock fell into parlance, too. Plaskett called it by that name as early as 1998, when he mentioned the place on the Thrush Hermit rarity “Tired and True.” It became a “cliché suburban hangout spot,” Benvie says — just far enough into the woods to avoid adults, just close enough to home, just proximate enough to a McDonald’s.

It was the perfect place to smoke and drink, if that was something you did. Plaskett didn’t; he was more comfortable as sober observer — a role he relishes even today, preferring, usually, to soak in the moment rather than soak in booze. It was Benvie, who occasionally ran with another circle of friends, who was more prone to spending teenaged weekends drinking and smoking in those woods. But as Plaskett mulled the idea of a high school–centric rock opera, it became clear that Ashtray was the perfect setting. It was technically in suburban Halifax, but it could have been anywhere — the city, the country, wherever kids wanna make noise.

And so Plaskett began to build a story around those feelings and memories. In the contexts of high school and heartbreak, he was able to find a place for unreleased songs stretching far back into his career. He’d demoed “Nothing More to Say” as an acoustic number with Bob Hoag in Arizona. “Drunk Teenagers,” originally demoed in 2003 and set on the road halfway to Thunder Bay, was molded into an introduction to Ashtray Rock, both the record and a place: no matter how far you feel from the rest of the world, there are like-minded kids out there who want to do the same things. He’d originally recorded “The Glorious Life” in 1995 with Thrush Hermit, having written the once-speedy song after dropping off Kraatz at the airport from the “French Inhale” video shoot. “Ashtray Rock,” the song, is an adaptation of “When You Failed English,” a Thrush Hermit demo from the same era, originally full of Sloan-inspired localisms, including the numbers of the buses Plaskett & Co. would take to get downtown. The Hermit had fooled around on “Snowed In,” too, and Plaskett did a rough demo for it with the Emergency in 2003.

Plaskett and Gordie Johnson recording Ashtray Rock in 2006.
[© Dave Marsh]

The Emergency returned to Phase One in Scarborough to record the album in late 2006. Three-quarters of the songs were fully written and practised before they had arrived, affording them time in the studio to play with the music’s heaviness — a Gordie Johnson specialty — and tempo. The Globe and Mail described the record’s sound as “Elvis Costello transplanted into a Canadian garage band,” but the songs that follow harness a far wider range of influences. After opening with a snippet of “Soundtrack for the Night,” Plaskett indulges in what Johnson lovingly calls a “great moment in guilty guitar binging,” using his Gibson RD and a phase shifter to push the studio speakers like they’re Marshall cabinets. “Drunk Teenagers” takes musical cues from “The Interpreter,” a 1977 psych-rock song from reclusive Austin musician Roky Erickson. The double groove of “Snowed In/Cruisin’” could be two separate Stones songs, if Tom Petty took the mic halfway through. “Penny for Your Thoughts” references early Motown and rock ’n’ roll, nodding to Rebecca Kraatz’s preferred tastes in music. And on “The Instrumental,” Kraatz’s own voice is beamed in from the Mullet in Halifax, reading a fictional postcard while Gordie Johnson pays tribute to one of her favourite songs, Santo & Johnny’s “Sleepwalk,” on lap steel. As the song’s breakdown comes to a close, Dave Marsh channels his best Keith Moon, hammering out the record’s climax.

Marsh and new Emergency bassist Chris Pennell recorded their parts in less than a week, leaving Plaskett and Johnson behind to tie up the record. “Fashionable People” emerged after the rest of the band left, and sounds distinctly different from the rest of the record — in part because it borrows far more inspiration from Jurassic 5’s “Quality Control” than anything on classic-rock radio. He tried to push his ode to hip-hop even further by inviting Tone-Lōc to rap the third verse — but, unfortunately, his invitation went unheeded.

Plaskett went to great lengths to build the Ashtray Rock universe, singing from three different perspectives and getting Kraatz to illustrate a companion comic for the liner notes, as well as a matching album cover. The story’s threads are pulled from everywhere, but the final narrative channels the excitement — and fragility — of playing music with your friends as a teenager. It takes listeners along the journey of two young bandmate protagonists — setting the scene, vomit and all, at an Ashtray Rock party, recalled from the nostalgic perspective of late autumn. Both bandmates fall in love with a mystery girl from out west, breaking up their band — and friendship — in the process. But in the midst of a wicked winter, the girl moves away, leaving both bickering bandmates behind. Reality sets in, maybe a little too late, as the bandmates realize that maybe they needed each other more than they needed her.

One recurring character in Ashtray Rock is, in fact, a real person: Dave Boyd, a metalhead who unsuccessfully ran for president of Clayton Park Junior High on the promise that he’d put a swimming pool beneath the floor of the school’s gym. Plaskett transplanted Boyd into the record’s fictional high school, turning him into a booze hookup. The campaign promise is there, too, bolstered by basketball and pool sounds recorded by McGettigan to run over the record’s introduction. The final, hidden outro is a lament for the long-lost metalhead. Plaskett found Boyd’s personality so brilliantly absurd that he even got Kraatz to recreate his junior-high yearbook photo for the back cover of the record, including the original caption: “Keep Metal Strong.” [14] Boyd may be tertiary to the grander storyline, but his presence is a reminder of a constant in the Plaskett universe: you can always find reason to crack a grin, even after heartbreak.

MOST OF ASHTRAY ROCK’S borrowed stories can be traced back in some way to Benvie and McGettigan, and it’s littered with inside jokes only they would get. In spite of their role in the narrative collage, though, Benvie and McGettigan have never really talked to Plaskett — or each other — about the record. “It’s personal,” McGettigan says with a laugh. “It’s hard for me to lay out my exact take on it. It’s different reflections on what Joel and I, Rob and I, Joel and Rob went through.” While McGettigan suggests the kids on the album’s cover might be Plaskett and Benvie, there are no salacious secrets about the history of Thrush Hermit to be gained from the record. Did a girl break up the band? Nope — everything a working band deals with except girls did. Did they chase after the same girls as teenagers? Well, maybe. “That’s quintessentially high school,” Plaskett says, chuckling, but even if it had happened, he insists it played little to no role in the Hermit’s history. “You need to exaggerate to make good music. Most of it didn’t happen. A record happened. It’s fiction. But the inspiration is true. Even though I’m making plenty of music now that Rob and Ian couldn’t care less about, their aesthetic and the sense of humour I had with those guys definitely informs my writing to this day.” He points to the Hermit’s other chief storyteller, Benvie, for comparison: “There are things in his last book, Maintenance, where I’m reading and going, ‘That’s in there for me and Ian.’ Even if he’s not consciously doing it, we’re the only guys who are gonna know that reference.”

It’s less autobiographical narrative than autobiographical collage — an homage to the people, places, and moments in Plaskett’s youth that shaped who he is today. The female protagonist’s taste in music, for instance, is exactly the same as Kraatz’s. And even when Plaskett bends the truth, there’s still some to be found. After all, he didn’t actually like Thrush Hermit’s first two records on cassette — he can’t stand Nobody Famous, because the (reasonably) high quality of the recordings plays up the band’s confused direction and technical imperfections. But the cassettes’ contents aren’t what matters — it’s the memory of making them, including the part where the band had to walk miles home from dubbing them in Burnside. “Part of what I love about music is it’s a connection to a time in your life,” Plaskett says. “So if you choose to document something, even if it’s not the greatest song, the memory attached to it can be awesome. And that’s more important than the song. Because if you keep that as the barometer for which you do things — ‘This will be fun, this song, I just have to do it even though no one’s gonna get it’ — then eventually, if there’s joy in that, somebody’s gonna find it. They might not get everything you do, because there were things you did just for yourself that didn’t strike them. But that entry point is gonna be there for people.”

PLASKETT AND JOHNSON were absolutely giddy when they presented Ashtray Rock to the business team. For the second full-length in a row, Plaskett had thrown them a curveball. “We just felt like kids getting away with something,” Johnson says, “like we were great graffiti artists, and our great masterwork was illegal and ill-advised.” The record was sprawling and complex — the opposite of a natural follow-up to “Nowhere with You.” And its title was also more than a little confusing. Johnson remembers Sheri Jones standing with arms folded, questioning Plaskett: “How married are we to the title? Is it some kind of dance? Is it an actual rock?” Jones had grown up in west Halifax, too, and remembered escaping to the same woods as a teenager a few years before Plaskett and his friends did. Still, she says, “I thought it was ridiculous name.” She and MapleMusic’s Kim Cooke decided to let Plaskett follow his instincts. “Over time,” Cooke says, “we got used to Joel doing this.”

Ashtray Rock, released in 2007, served as the entry point for Plaskett’s biggest audience yet, outselling even La De Da. While he lost the Best Songwriting Juno in 2008, “Fashionable People” went on to win the Billboard World Songwriting Contest. Writing in Exclaim!, former Halifax scenester Allison Outhit called the record “heartfelt and exuberant,” “neither cynical nor earnest,” and “an all-Canadian roman à clef.” The National Post drew the obvious Springsteen parallel, with Ashtray Rock bringing Plaskett “closer than he’s ever been to the icon who managed to romanticize a far less romantic place than Nova Scotia.” Others called the album “absorbing, charming, entertaining, and moving” and “funny, smart, and heartbreaking.”

Plaskett managed to tell a story that could resonate with any listener — and while Ashtray Rock could have been set anywhere, the fact that it lives and breathes Halifax helps make it a crucial addition to both his own body of work and to the legacy of great Canadian east coast music. The record marked the next step in the evolution of his post-Hermit career. He’d announced he was home on Khyber, called out the defectors with Truthfully, wrote Halifax a love letter on La De Da; here, he proclaimed his home’s place in CanCon history.

The free-and-easy last days of high school, before the perils of adulthood, are universal within a certain socio-economic slice of North America. But for the many Plaskett fans who hail from Nova Scotia and the other Atlantic provinces, there’s an added depth to Ashtray Rock because of the album’s inextricable ties to geography. “This album just feels like home,” wrote Halifax music critic Ryan McNutt. “No matter what path Ashtray Rock takes him on, Joel will always be Halifax’s reliably brilliant talent; a reassuring thought, no less.” For many, those last carefree teenage days are the last days spent on the east coast — at home — as the choices of adulthood force them to head west. By weaving loud-and-proud Halifax-isms into a classic story of high-school heartbreak, there’s a relatability in the details that’s absent from other Canadiana. The record is a booming announcement from a place where many voices go unheard: no matter where you’re from, you still have a story to tell. You can still write the soundtrack for the night no matter how far removed you are from the rest of the world.

FOLLOWING THE RECORD, the Emergency’s world got a little bigger. They took on a road manager, Stephen “Snickers” Smith, and added a familiar fourth member on keys and guitar: Peter Elkas. He meshed well with the band, having played a handful of shows with them as early as 2005. The first incarnation of his Peter Elkas Band had even opened for the Emergency on a fateful 2003 tour where everyone in both bands got sick as dogs, leaving Plaskett and Marsh face down in their soup in Quebec on the way home from Kingston, Ontario’s Grad Club. It took some time getting into a new routine with five people instead of three — frustrating Marsh, in particular — but it was a necessary adjustment. They embarked on a 2007 Canadian tour, eventually visiting the U.S. and even Australia again.

They ended the album cycle with a tour de force: six nights at Toronto’s Horseshoe Tavern, to celebrate the storied venue’s 60th anniversary. The band played an album a night, doing Ashtray Rock twice for good measure, to enthusiastic crowds. “It started off as just one night, and it grew into this great idea,” says Horseshoe co-owner Jeff Cohen, who pitched the idea to Plaskett. “It was fun and exhausting,” Plaskett says, “’cause we had to learn so much of the catalogue. It was good for the band, actually, to go back — really good for Chris, ’cause he didn’t know a lot of that earlier material. But some of it was hard.”

They equipped the residency with special guests — including Ian McGettigan, Rob Benvie, Bill Plaskett, Gordie Johnson, the Tragically Hip’s Gord Downie, Sarah Harmer, Andrew Scott, and Tara S’Appart — and kept Elkas in tow to flush out the sound. Plaskett was used to providing the soundtrack for one night, but not six nights, and the residency forced him to reflect on the sheer size of his catalogue: “I’ve been going out and doing shows and there’s not even a song from Khyber in them, let alone In Need of Medical Attention. It’s hard for me to touch on all the records at this point, unless I want to play for three hours.”

Marsh calls it “an honour” to follow in the footsteps of artists like Stompin’ Tom Connors, who once played the Horseshoe for 25 nights straight. “It’s only what I can imagine the Band went through in The Last Waltz,” he says. “Not comparing ourselves to the Band, of course. It was just as exciting to be involved in it as actually doing it.”

The Last Waltz, coincidentally, first came out as a triple record.

(14) — Boyd has since run unsuccessfully for other political offices in Halifax. Now an occasional vlogger, he apparently accepted his role on the record with glee. Search the internet hard enough, and you can find a video of Boyd hiking to the actual Ashtray Rock.