SNUBBED
SWEET HOMEWRECKER WAS finally released in February 1997, and the Hermit set out to tour the U.S. What followed was a series of events that left them — to borrow a word from Sloan — underwhelmed. Just days after Elektra released “North Dakota” as a single, the band got a call from the label on their clunky bag phone somewhere along some U.S. highway. It was bad news: the single, and the album, weren’t going to get any label support.
Cliff Fenwick Gibb remembers it being Darren Johnson on the call, but Johnson thinks the label would have gone over his head to break the news. No matter the messenger, it sent the Hermit into a rut they spent a long time digging out of. With no promotion and lacklustre distribution behind Homewrecker’s release, the tour floundered. Their shows were virtually empty. “We played all over the place,” Cliff remembers, “but it’d be like playing during lunch hour at some sports pub.”
Long tours often meant trouble for the Hermit’s vehicles. Cliff Fenwick Gibb was usually called upon to solve the problem.
[© Joel Plaskett]
The record, Johnson says, “didn’t fit into any neat box.” There was no narrative, grand or grassroots, for Elektra to exploit. Without a clear radio-pop hit, the marketing and promotions teams shied away from Sweet Homewrecker. Geography, too, came into play. The Hermit lacked the notoriety that their alternative Atlantic Canadian predecessors had, like being anointed by Sub Pop; there was neither a familiar narrative nor place of origin for the U.S. media and major-label machine to attach to the band. To leverage indie success in the pre-blog age, Johnson says, “you really had to be talked about in a handful of magazines, and that just wasn’t going on.”
Within Elektra, turmoil was lurking by the time of Sweet Homewrecker’s release: Seymour Stein, Thrush Hermit’s champion in theory, was on his way out, while Johnson, their champion in practice, wielded next to no power at the company. The label’s dollars and energy were being spent elsewhere. Third Eye Blind, among other bands, got an Elektra deal at the same time as Thrush Hermit and spent 1997 riding the high of radio-friendly hits like “Semi-Charmed Life.” Johnson, whose recruiting efforts for Elektra skewed away from that kind of prefab pop, is still frustrated about Homewrecker’s fate. [8] “The problem with Sweet Homewrecker,” he says, “is that it’s too good of an album — for people whose whole life is built on appealing to the masses — to really take the time to appreciate and understand.”
Because they were signed to a U.S. label, Canada was just a footnote for the Elektra-planned album cycle, and they returned to smaller shows at home, too. Homewrecker got a bit, but not much, national press; in a very quick blurb, the Toronto Star hailed its “sense of honest fun and big guitar-riffing bubbles.” The Hermit felt cut adrift, says Benvie. “Bands that we were friends with back home, who were more focused on Canada, just kind of seemed to be getting more done while we were beating our heads against the wall.” Steve Jordan, who did A&R for Warner Music Canada at the time and later founded the Polaris Music Prize, remembers the band playing to a half-empty Horseshoe Tavern after Homewrecker’s release. Jordan campaigned for his label — technically Elektra’s Canadian counterpart — to grab a stake in the Hermit deal, but he got no traction. “If an artist was signed directly to a U.S. label,” Jordan says, “especially if it was something developing, it was less likely to have that kind of push behind it in its home territory.”
The label upheaval that left Sweet Homewrecker stagnant and the band playing to half-filled rooms only got worse as 1997 rolled along. In quick succession, Elektra dropped the Hermit and fired Darren Johnson — likely, Johnson says, because neither party was delivering hits. In the previous decade, major labels had been willing to invest in artists for the longer term, letting those whose first records weren’t smash hits, such as U2, develop over time. By the mid-’90s, that was done; majors were hungry for alternative hits in the wake of Nirvana, and their patience was thin. Behind the scenes, too, changes were happening that would soon burst the alt-rock bubble. In 1996, the United States deregulated its radio industry, leading to the amalgamation of huge station chains that cared more about boosting ratings than careful sonic curation. The alternative sound that grunge brought to the fore didn’t bring in as many listeners as pop, shifting industry priorities. So it was becoming increasingly common for labels to give up on alternative bands before giving them a chance to show their potential; just a year after Elektra cut ties with Thrush Hermit, in fact, they dropped the Austin, Texas, band Spoon, who’d later sign with Merge and become one of the most enduring indie bands of the early 20th century.
After Johnson was sacked, no one in the Hermit ever heard from him again. Angie Fenwick Gibb heard he’d been escorted out of the building; he hadn’t been, but he kept a distance from the bands he signed to make a clean break from the music industry. “I just followed their career from afar after that,” he says. He’s now an intellectual property lawyer in New York.
“When the news came, we weren’t really very broken up about it,” Angie says. The label, she thought, wasn’t doing anything the band couldn’t do on its own. Luckily, their lawyer — Ken Anderson, whose roster of clients also included the Beastie Boys — had negotiated a five-figure buyout clause. “If Elektra wanted to dump the band, they had to pay us,” Angie says, “so we took the money and ran.”
On the road, the Hermit started refocusing their efforts — sometimes abandoning them altogether. Four months after Homewrecker came out, the band set up for a gig in Norman, Oklahoma, and decided not to bother loading their neon rock & roll sign into the club. “We were bored out of our skulls, and the shows had been sucking,” Plaskett says. In front of a tiny crowd, the band mostly played B-sides and new songs, largely without a care. After the show, he says, Tyson Meade of the alt-rock band Chainsaw Kittens came up and said hello. Regret set in. “I remember it dawning on us that these guys are musicians, and maybe we should be playing to impress them,” Plaskett says. Then Meade introduced him to some of his friends in the audience. One of them, it turned out, was the Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne. The regret deepened. “Of all the bands in the U.S. who would appreciate a neon rock & roll sign,” Plaskett says, “those were the guys we didn’t set it up for.”
Later, at Flashbacks Nite Club in Kelowna, British Columbia, the Hermit was in the middle of playing the new song “We Are Being Reduced” when the show’s promoter approached the stage with a request for something more upbeat, hoping to bring the 30-odd people at the back of the room closer to the front: “Pick it up, we’re dying in here.” As if that wasn’t insulting enough, after the show, someone from the audience came over as the Hermit loaded their gear into the school bus and asked politely if they were the band. “Yeah,” one of them said. The man changed gears: “Well, you fuckin’ sucked.” The compounding insults stuck in Plaskett’s mind. A few years later, he decided to pay Kelowna back the best way he could — through song, on La De Da’s “I Love This Town.” In it, he explicitly, though sarcastically, references Kelowna as the only town he hates — even though Kraatz’s family is from there. “That song,” he says, “gets me heat in my family.”
The band fell into some odd habits while touring Homewrecker. Plaskett spent the entire tour in uniform, alternating between all-green and all-blue utility shirt-and-pants combos that looked like a gas station attendant’s outfit, sealed with a gold “JOEL” beltbuckle given to him by Kraatz. They’d let McGettigan scream his way through “Jailhouse Rock” onstage. And to squeeze some fun out of the sparsely attended shows, the Hermit began to fill their concerts with shredding and jamming, moving away from Homewrecker’s conservatism. “We would go berserk,” McGettigan says, even “when there would just be the sound man there” — but living up to their long-haired, classic rock–loving stereotypes, the sound guys always loved it. The band, Plaskett especially, started rediscovering their own classic- and riff-rock roots, spending time on the road listening to Black Sabbath and Cactus. “We were finally having fun again after stuff that was really scripted,” Plaskett says. “It was getting more sprawling.”
DURING DOWNTIME IN Halifax, the Hermit kept jamming. “We had awhile there where we were paralyzed and couldn’t release anything or do anything, but we were still practising all the time,” Benvie says. They also started trying new things, some of which were more creative than others. Everyone in the band — except for Plaskett — invested in a “nice little scoot”: a ’78 Pontiac Phoenix for McGettigan to drive in a stock car race. On the advice of Kraatz’s father, Plaskett instead went out west and bought a car of his own: a green ’69 Pontiac Parisienne. McGettigan began using the Hermit’s rehearsal space to record other local bands, including a side project he and Benvie joined called Rick of the Skins. Plaskett fell in with a different crowd of musicians, too, including Charles Austin and Drew Yamada of the Super Friendz, “Miniature” Tim Stewart from Bubaiskull, and Andrew Glencross; he began drumming with them in 1998 in the avant-rock band Neuseiland.
Plaskett also started to fool around with a pedal steel guitar he’d bought in Memphis and was trying his hand at recording songs on his own. He and Kraatz were still dating long-distance — while she’d tried to move to Halifax twice, it was hard to find work in the city. Still, she was largely responsible for widening Plaskett’s musical palette beyond the realm of rock. “Her musical tastes are great and not affected by any trends,” he says. She turned Plaskett on to music from the ’50s, much of which leaned toward country: Lefty Frizzell, George Jones, Bo Diddley, the Delmore Brothers. “Every once in a while she hears something modern and likes it, and it has nothing to do with whether it’s hip or cool — she doesn’t pay attention to any of that.”
Armed with these old-school influences — and some more contemporary ones, including Vic Chesnutt — Plaskett began writing songs that wouldn’t fit anywhere in Thrush Hermit’s catalogue. By 1998, he’d recorded an album’s worth of such material. The songs were distinctly moodier than Thrush Hermit’s — where the occasional vague heartbreak of the band’s early output was expressed through outward-looking nostalgia, these tracks turned that sadness inwards. Cobbled together, Plaskett admits, these first solo songs made for “kind of a depressing record.”
The collection’s mood was fuelled by the death of his grandfather, Dr. Robert MacDonald, in 1996. Plaskett’s mother, Sharon MacDonald, believes he inherited much of his positive, forward-thinking personality from Dr. MacDonald, whom he called Pa. Plaskett left a tour a few days early to be there for the funeral, where he was struck by a phrase someone used to eulogize his grandfather: “A gentle man of God.” His death was tough on Plaskett during an already tough year, thanks to all the uncertainty that came from signing with Elektra. It influenced much of the material, from the recurring doctor character and the words from the eulogy, which appear in “Goodbye, Doctor,” to the title Plaskett later gave the album: In Need of Medical Attention. To voice the fictional doctor on the record, Plaskett turned to another older man he respected: Al Tuck, his friend and mentor. Tuck, a prolific songwriter whose catalogue runs deep but is not as widely known as Plaskett’s, jokes that the guest spot continues to pay: “If I’m out in B.C. doing a show with no publicity, and the only two people who show up are there because they know me as the doctor on Joel’s album, that’s a practical favour, really.”
After wrapping up recording, Plaskett mixed the songs with Rick White, of Eric’s Trip and Elevator, in Moncton. Kraatz, who moved to Halifax for good later in 1998, supplied the artwork. It would be a year before Medical Attention came out, though. Thrush Hermit, as always, took precedence for Plaskett. Angie recalls meeting him for lunch after she heard the recordings. “I remember saying, ‘This is something I could really do something with — what do you want to do with it?’” she says. His response? “Nothing. I’m in Thrush Hermit. And that’s the direction that I’ll keep going in.”
IT TOOK A while for the Hermit to work out the terms of their buyout with Elektra, so they just kept on practising. By the summer of ’98, they’d cleared the paperwork and worked out enough new tracks to fill an album. After everything that had happened with Elektra, they decided to finance it themselves. “We had nothing to lose at that point, in a way,” McGettigan says. “We weren’t going to try to make a really big, American statement. But we still had enough money that we could afford to do whatever we wanted to do.”
Plaskett at Gas Station studio during the recording of Clayton Park.
[From Joel Plaskett’s archives]
The Hermit went to Gas Station Recording in Toronto’s Liberty Village to make the record with producer Dale Morningstar. For a month, they stayed at McGettigan’s mother’s house north of the city, driving in every day in a motorhome they’d bought from Sloan to take on tour. They recorded a track a day for two weeks, overdubbed for another week, and mixed for a fourth. Morningstar took a liking to the Nova Scotian boys as they bonded over early ’70s Stones and other classic rock cuts. He’d only ever heard the Hermit once before — on the demos they’d sent him — and came to the sessions without any expectation of what they’d be like. “I was really struck by how Joel and the other guys had their act together,” he says. “They let me do my thing, but they had a really good vision for the album.” At night, the band would drive the motorhome around the then-industrial neighbourhood, sometimes with Morningstar and McGettigan lying on the roof. They also offered the vehicle as part of their payment for the sessions; Morningstar politely declined.
The record became Clayton Park. On it, the Hermit’s guitar fuzz is back, but it’s more “Communication Breakdown” than Dinosaur Jr. The album is a return to the Hermit’s roots — literally, in its name, and sonically, in its reverence for the classic rock the members were raised on. One writer called it a “balls-out rock ’n’ roll extravaganza.” The Toronto Star loved it, calling it deserving of a Juno, though its critic worried the record was a few years (or decades) behind the riff-rock zeitgeist. More than 15 years after its release, it can be safely said that the record was a few years ahead of its time, too, as artists like Jack White and the Black Keys have since ushered in a new era of classic-rock revival. After an album spent waffling over label expectations, it was a bold statement about who they were and where they were from. “It’s the record on which Joel said, ‘I’m a Canadian, I’m from eastern Canada, and I’m damn proud of it,’” says Clyde Lieberman, who upholds Clayton Park as the Hermit’s best work.
The major-label pressure to produce a frontman was gone, but Plaskett by then had undeniably emerged as bandleader. The Hermit cut 11 songs for the final record, but only two Benvie songs appear — “Headin’ South” and “Western Dreamz.” McGettigan, the Harrison to their lopsided Lennon-McCartney, squeezed in a single song, “(Oh Man) What to Do.” They also recorded a cover of Budgie’s “Nude Disintegrating Parachutist Woman” that wound up on the cutting-room floor.
Lyrically, Plaskett toys with themes many of his songs are known for today — leaving and travelling — while trading Sweet Homewrecker’s American-heavy references for Canadiana. He watches someone walk away in “Before You Leave,” but hits the road on his own in “The Day We Hit the Coast.” The most dramatic travelling song here, though, is Benvie’s. It may be Plaskett singing about wilted realities of allegedly greener pastures at the start of “Western Dreamz,” but they’re his bandmate’s words. Understandably, he still cites Benvie as a chief lyrical influence.
The Hermit’s slump over the previous few years had been especially tough for Cliff, who was closer to his 30s than the rest of the band. To pass time on the road, he’d been reading computer programming books for fun. He’d never gone to school for it, however, and didn’t think he’d be able to turn programming into a job. But as they were recording Clayton Park, a legitimate opportunity came up at a local telecom company — and he flew to Halifax for an interview. To his surprise, he was offered the job shortly after flying back to Toronto to finish the record. He decided he couldn’t turn down the opportunity. “I still loved playing every single night, but I had enough of the touring, and being away from my wife,” he says. Cliff told the band he had to quit when the record was done. They were devastated. “That was a real blow,” McGettigan says. They weren’t just losing a beloved bandmate; they were losing him after making the record they’d always wanted to make with him.
But they didn’t have time to mope. Too excited about the album to slow down, the Hermit immediately started looking for a new drummer. They settled on Halifax mainstay Benn Ross, who’d previously played with the Super Friendz’s Matt Murphy and had actually replaced Cliff in a previous band called Weasel Faced Judge. “We had to really put him through the ringer,” Benvie says. “Not only did we have to learn this new album, but he had to learn all our old songs, and we’re one of those bands who like to write a different set list every night.”
Plaskett, Benvie, McGettigan, and new Thrush Hermit drummer Benn Ross.
[© Ingram Barss]
Ross expected he’d just be filling in for a few gigs, but he was welcomed as an official member. “It was a pleasure to play with a band who had experience playing bigger shows, and they had their stuff organized compared to a lot of folks locally at the time,” he says. But he was an introverted guy and had a hard time fitting in with the three original Hermit members, who’d by then been friends for more than a decade. “They all had the same sense of humour and social energy, so I just kept to myself and focused on playing.”
At the same time, Angie Fenwick Gibb’s health had been in decline, and she started working from home — both managing Thrush Hermit and running the Halifax Pop Explosion festival, then called Halifax on Music. After a while, she couldn’t keep up and had to hand back the Hermit’s reins. She and the band were heartbroken — but, again, the Hermit had to focus their energy on the road ahead. Left with another huge hole to fill, they tapped murderecords managing director Colin Mackenzie, who also happened to be McGettigan’s roommate, to take the wheel in Angie’s stead. The band had lost some blood, but they managed to bandage their wounds. At least for a little while.
WITH A NEW record in the can, rumours spread that Thrush Hermit would spend the summer of 1998 in L.A. meeting “important people.” There were talks of courting another label, but the band didn’t want to make another slickly produced album when they were happy recording in their own jam space. Instead, the members went their separate ways for a while and let Clayton Park go unreleased for the time being. “It felt like there was a real change coming,” McGettigan says. He and Benvie took a trip to Europe in the fall of ’98, leaving Plaskett behind. Plaskett had plenty to do on his own, though. He finally left Clayton Park — the place — moving in with Kraatz downtown. And with a few months until Clayton Park — the record — was coming out, he began rehearsing his Medical Attention songs with a five-piece band, including Neuseiland bandmates Charles Austin and Andrew Glencross, Tracy Stevens, and veteran Halifax drummer Dave Marsh.
Once 1999 kicked off, the Hermit got back into the swing of things. Before Angie left the band, she’d struck a deal with Hamilton indie label Sonic Unyon to release Clayton Park, and it came out that spring to much acclaim. With a renewed focus on Canada, the band started drawing bigger audiences as they began touring, though sometimes this was due to strange pairings on concert bills — like a show in Saint John, New Brunswick, with Alanis Morissette and Crash Test Dummies. The band’s aesthetic for the record, they decreed, was “decidedly au naturale,” and they grew out their hair and showcased the jams and winding solos that had long made up their live shows. Plaskett, whose songs were the face of the album, also became the face of the band in concert. He took centre stage and, for the first time, would occasionally ditch his guitar, going full frontman for tracks like “From the Back of the Film.” This freed him up to play around onstage; he’d carry lighting rigs to blast the crowd or bring audience members onstage for a mock game of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire during “Film.”
The new approach pushed the rest of the band to the side, and it left fellow songwriter Benvie worried about his place in the Hermit. “Joel really stepped up and really wanted to be the leader,” he says. “Which, at the time, I was freaked out by, because he had a really strong vision, and I didn’t really know what I wanted to do.” Plaskett’s dominance on Clayton Park was frustrating enough, but as the band prepped material for what would have been its follow-up, the creative dynamic shifted even further out of Benvie’s favour.
“I was resenting Joel a little bit. But it sort of made sense, for an outside observer. Joel’s a very charismatic showman, and his songs were more accessible and commercial, and we’d made some videos where he was the star, and he looked really great. I’m not sure Ian had so much angst about it, but I personally was like, I don’t know where I fit in this band anymore. And it just hit me, like, Why couldn’t you leave the band? Even though we’d grown up together, maybe it’d just ended.
“So I quit.”
THRUSH HERMIT’S SPLIT was amicable, but certainly unpleasant. “It wasn’t like we were at each other’s throats, but I think Rob was unhappy. It was an awkward time,” Plaskett says. He talked things over with McGettigan — who had long served as the comic foil whenever tensions rose between his bandmates — and they agreed that there was no Thrush Hermit without Benvie. The band, they realized, was over.
A host of other factors were at play, too. The band’s Elektra buyout money was drying up. And they were still only playing for a few hundred people a night — a respectable number but not enough to pay the bills forever. With Clayton Park, the band had “done its statement,” McGettigan says. “There was no common ground left, in a way.” Looking back, Angie Fenwick Gibb thinks the dominoes may have started to fall once she and Cliff left. “I feel pretty strongly that there’s a certain magic between these four guys — between the five of us, or the six of us including Clyde. When you start to break apart those pieces, sometimes you just can’t make the whole be what it needs to be anymore. And there’s no way to foresee that before it actually happens.”
The original five-piece Emergency at the CMJ festival in New York: Tracy Stevens, Plaskett, Dave Marsh, Andrew Glencross, and Charles Austin.
[From Joel Plaskett’s archives]
The Hermit announced their split on September 21, 1999. The breakup announcement coincided with the release of In Need of Medical Attention on Minneapolis’s No Alternative Records. Not to be confused with the Halifax-based No Records, No Alternative was run by Kim Randall, now a music supervisor in Los Angeles, who’d met the band when they toured through the Twin Cities. By eschewing the Hermit’s regular business connections and releasing with No Alternative, Plaskett was able to distribute and market his solo music as its own product — a move entirely beneficial in wake of the band’s breakup. Though the close timing of Medical Attention’s release and the Hermit’s breakup was pure chance, a new album needs tour support, and it was quickly followed by Plaskett’s first solo shows with the five-piece backing band. They performed just a handful of times, including at a Barrington Street deli that September and a pair in New York for the CMJ music festival. The Canadian press didn’t pay much attention to the record upon its release; the only mention Medical Attention received in the Toronto Star, for instance, was in a passing comment made by Plaskett’s mother in a story about a lecture she gave on Nova Scotian textile history. (“I’m quite fond of it,” she said.) There was at least some ink in the international music press, though. The British magazine New Musical Express went to one CMJ show, calling Plaskett “a star,” comparing his banter to Wayne Coyne and likening his songs to Big Star’s.
His solo career showed promise right out of the gate, but, just like his time in Thrush Hermit, there were complications. Years of constant touring had taken its toll on Plaskett. The frail frontman would catch colds on the road all the time, sometimes singing through throat infections — even though he largely shunned the hard-partying rock ’n’ roll lifestyle, barely drinking and never smoking. That fall, his health caught up with him. Feeling run down, he got some bloodwork done to see what was up. When a month passed with no answer — “they screwed up,” Plaskett says — he visited his doctor again.
The results had come in. “Your white count’s really low,” Plaskett recalls the doctor saying.
“What do you mean really low?”
“Well, really low. It could be leukemia, but we have to get to the bottom of why it’s low.”
This was an unexpected response. “Well, I’m about to go on tour.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t recommend that,” the doctor said. “If your count is still this low — mind you these results are a few weeks old — if you catch a cold, it could get worse. You could die.”
That never happened, clearly, but the conversation illustrated the risks regular touring were putting on Plaskett’s well-being. Further examinations were ordered, including a bone marrow test that meant a painful marrow extraction from the hip. His white blood-cell count at the time was fluctuating, he says, “but we never really got to the bottom of it.” He eventually stopped eating wheat — his mother is celiac, but he’d never been diagnosed — which dramatically improved his immune system. But right then, slowing down was his first priority. [9]
He called the rest of the band, who were about to leave for the Front Man War Tour with their friends in the Local Rabbits and the Flashing Lights, Matt Murphy’s new band. Making matters worse, it was supposed to double as their farewell tour. “It was really weird, because it kinda came out of nowhere for everyone,” Plaskett says. “And Rob, I remember, was really angry. I think he just wanted the thing to end.”
The Hermit bailed on the full tour, instead playing just a handful of dates in December, with stops across Ontario and Quebec. Interviewed before the Toronto stop, Plaskett said he wanted the band to be remembered as “Thinkers. We sometimes overthought things, but we were always thinking, and sometimes the thinking worked against us, and sometimes it worked for us, but I think a lot of bands just don’t think.” They were just a little cult band, he said — not that big, just doing stuff for fun. Then, after a long pause: “I hope we’re remembered by someone.”
BY THE END of 1999, most of the bands who sparked the east-coast pop explosion had burned out. Mike Campbell, host of MuchMusic’s east-coast showcase MuchEast, watched so many of his favourite bands break up that he’d regularly host “wake” episodes from a graveyard, complete with band T-shirts over tombstones. The lure of labels brought in an injection of cash that gave more opportunities to the local music scene than ever before, but in the long term, the deals bands were offered were rarely lucrative. It was also a scene that, in its isolation, was built on bands playing for each other. “Everybody was happy to just play for their peers,” Peter Rowan says. The pressure to do more than that — without much potential to earn more — took its toll on the city and the region, and a scene that might have flourished in isolation instead collapsed in on itself.
“Once you start touring, suddenly you realize, huh, this isn’t exactly what I want to do,” says Colin Mackenzie, who was murderecords’ managing director. The Hardship Post lost their drummer and toured as a two-piece to the surprise and despair of fans, breaking up soon after. Eric’s Trip, whose music was often fuelled by the relationship of members Julie Doiron and Rick White, slowly lost momentum after that relationship ended — though both of them went on to prolific recording careers of their own, and they remained friendly, keeping the doors open for the occasional reunion. Two of Jale’s members left, and while former Jellyfishbaby Mike Belitsky was enlisted to flesh out the band, it was dropped by Sub Pop in 1997, along with much of the label’s Canadian roster. The Super Friendz broke up in 1997, and guitarist Matt Murphy headed to Ontario, eventually forming the Flashing Lights. Cool Blue Halo split in the middle of a major-label bidding war in 1998. Plumtree, the band behind the comic-inspiring song “Scott Pilgrim” and one of the last of the “New Seattle” acts to hang on, broke up by mid-2000 as its members scattered around the world.
The Trews, who’d formed in Antigonish, Nova Scotia in the late ’90s, left for Ontario in 2001 rather than try to make it in Halifax first. “There was still a lot of that ’90s hangover left,” says guitarist John Angus MacDonald. The east coast went through a transition period, but there was a sense the scene was clinging to the past. “The afterglow of the heyday still had Halifax captured, and we didn’t fit that trend at all.”
It was a “crazy arc,” says Super Friendz bassist Charles Austin. “People were getting signed, getting a lot of money, and then getting dropped, and just ending up with nothing. The thing about all those Halifax bands — with the exception of Sloan — was when they ended, it was basically like you didn’t have anything to show for five years of your life. Other than hey, you were in that cool band. You were right back where you started. So at the end of that, there’s a bit of a hangover where people have to start again.”
Like Sloan and Thrush Hermit, many east-coast bands were structured democratically, with everyone contributing to songwriting and decision-making. Colin Mackenzie calls this “a curse and a blessing.” Having multiple songwriters, he says, created problems for each band as the members figured out which direction to go in. This was a recurring problem in the heady days of indie rock in the ’80s and ’90s, and it certainly wasn’t restricted to the Maritimes. Jon Fine, the former member of Bitch Magnet and Coptic Light, chronicled the struggles of early American indie in the 2015 book Your Band Sucks, calling democratic bands “in practice, a huge pain, because anyone could veto anything, and did. Bands don’t really work when they’re communal endeavours. They require leaders.” But Mackenzie also thinks this kind of structure helped pop explosion bands find their sound. “That’s what made the scene the way it was — that sound of artists harmonizing, and multiple singer-songwriters, that kind of thing.” Democracy is still a struggle for Sloan. “It’s hard to keep a band together, let me tell you,” says Chris Murphy. “Our band is only together because certain people are bending over backwards to keep other people happy.” And when their bands ended, many musicians from that era stopped bending over backwards to keep the scene alive at home, too. “People are always leaving Halifax, but it felt like a lot of people were leaving around then,” says Plumtree’s Carla Gillis, who now lives in Toronto. “Everyone was kind of floating around figuring out what to do next.”
But it put Halifax, and other east-coast cities like Moncton, on the map. Label interest may have plateaued after a while, Greg Clark says, but all the label and media interest helped his city in the long-term. Finally, he says, “being from Halifax was something people would be interested in checking out.” To Peter Rowan, the scene they built up was proof that current, relevant music could be made in a region with a “narrow vision” that would rather celebrate cultural history than acknowledge its present successes.
Thrush Hermit had built up plenty of successes before they broke up. They were a full-time band for seven years and had two full-lengths, two EPs, and a stack of singles as trophies to show for it. “Their dream was to make a living and not bend, and they were real artists in that respect,” Clyde Lieberman says. “At the point where they would have had to change, they decided not to change. They’d rather go up in a ball of flames than become something they didn’t want to be.” Plaskett wouldn’t trade the Thrush Hermit experience for anything. “From the age of 13, we were playing music together, until the age of 25. And we had record deals, and there was exciting stuff going on. We went to California, New York, had all these experiences — nobody had been to these places, and we went and did all this together for the first time. It felt like we were in the Who.”
The Hermit played their final show on December 11, 1999, at Halifax’s Marquee Club. With his shaggy hair and clipped bangs, Plaskett channelled the image of a young Rod Stewart as the band burned through their set list. If an imbalanced democracy brought the band to its end, it wasn’t entirely visible as the vest-clad Plaskett and Benvie, in a red leather jacket, traded lick after lick on their Gibsons through songs like “Oh My Soul” and “(Oh Man) What to Do.” In a tribute to Mike Campbell — who filmed the proceedings — the band played his favourite song, “From the Back of the Film,” twice, since he’d always complained that the two-minute tune was too short. The ruthlessly shaggy Benn Ross kept time in the back, and McGettigan, in a sleeveless turtleneck, was just as excitable as ever as he sang on “Oh Man.” And even though he’d long been sequestered to stage right, Benvie used the song to come to the front of the stage, past the monitors, to shred that song’s final notes. But that was it. After seven years of bad luck and bad timing, Thrush Hermit came to an end in the final days of the 20th century.
The members went their separate ways. Benvie soon published his first book, Safety of War, and relocated to Montreal, where he shared an apartment with Peter Elkas, went to university, and joined the Dears. McGettigan kicked around Halifax for a while, recording bands and working on film shoots, eventually getting lured away to Toronto. As for Plaskett, he couldn’t think of a more fitting time than the end of the millennium to close a chapter in his life — and to open a new one. Music was all he knew, and he still had some to make. So that New Year’s Eve, he got into his Parisienne, drove to Cape Breton, and started building himself a new band.
(8) — While at Elektra, he also worked with a Chicago post-hardcore band named Trenchmouth, whose drummer was Fred Armisen — a future star of Saturday Night Live and Portlandia.
9 — In Need of Medical Attention came out just as Plaskett announced he was sick, but the album name was a pure — if eerie — coincidence.