The Dears

Lost in the Plot

Lorraine Carpenter

• Publisher: Invisible Publishing
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781926743172
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Rock Music

Over a decade after the release of their first album, The Dears have weathered the indie fringes, the collapse of the music industry as we knew it and the near implosion of the band itself, with their creative vision and gang dynamic intact. The Dears: Lost in the Plot looks at how The Dears survived the fallout, and helped launch the acclaimed mid-aughts music scene in their hometown of Montréal. The Dears: Lost in the Plot is the first book in Invisible Publishing's new Bibliophonic series. The Bibliophonic Series is a catalogue of the ongoing history of contemporary music. Each book is a time capsule, capturing artists and their work as we see them, providing a unique look at some of today's most exciting musicians.

CHAPTER 1

He is just so fanatical

“You’re a teenager, you just wanna fuckin’ bang your head up against the wall. Being a suburban kid, [music] was an escape.”

BORN TO A JAZZ MUSICIAN AND A NURSE, MURRAY LIGHTBURN went to his first gigs as a toddler, sometimes sleeping in the back rooms of nightclubs while his father played on stage. After his parents became born-again Christians, his father putting down the sax to take up the cloth as a Pentecostal minister, Lightburn and his three older brothers were forbidden to see movies or watch TV. Well, most TV. “The rise of TV/celebrity evangelism like PTL, Jimmy Swaggart, Oral Roberts and shit like that is directly responsible for my utterly miserable childhood,” Lightburn says.

Music was his salvation. Hymns, gospel, ’70s R&B and “cheesy” jazz records were on regular rotation, as was the proto-hip hop and ’80s pop brought home by his brothers. When he was 15, his brother Peter, who would become a DJ and house music aficionado, introduced him to what was then called college rock. With one listen to U2 Live at Red Rocks: Under a Blood Red Sky, he was radicalized.

He’d already fiddled with drums, cello and sax, but when he found a guitar with no strings in his parents’ basement, he taught himself to play.

Coming home to the guitar and a new world of music got him through the day at Centennial Regional High School in Greenfield Park; the neighbourhood next to his, Brossard, on Montreal’s South Shore. He drifted from clique to clique, getting along with everyone but fitting in with no one. When he started singing to himself at his locker one day, he attracted the attention of a “preppie jock” who’d once briefly bullied him, until Lightburn shoved him into a wall—then they became friends.

“So he came up to me and said, ‘Hey, you sound like this guy Morrissey—do you ever listen to The Smiths?’” Lightburn said no, and went home that day with a borrowed copy of Hatful of Hollow. “I put on the tape and started freaking out, like, what the fuck is this? It spoke to me a lot—what he was saying was a big deal. It was what music is supposed to do, to me anyway.

“I brought my friend Andrew [White] over and played him this cassette and made him a copy. That was all we listened to for at least a year.”

Lightburn and White learned to play guitar and bass to a number of rock records (including The Cult’s Electric), but The Smiths was the main inspiration for their first band, The Sacred Wunderkind, a moniker lifted from a Smiths song, “These Things Take Time”. With Lightburn on vocals and guitar, White on bass and Brett Watson on drums (he later became an actor, playing Def Leppard’s first drummer in a biopic), they played a handful of shows at long-gone Montreal venues like Station 10. It wasn’t until the dawn of the ’90s, when they got a new drummer, an additional guitarist and new name, Wren, that they began to attract attention. Described as “a four-piece band of angry young men in sharp suits with a mesmerizingly heroic lead singer,” the band tried to reconcile classic pop tropes and math rock rhythms, flirting with unconventional time signatures and other staples of the period’s more angular alternative rock. But it wasn’t built to last.

“We didn’t really know what we were doing. We just put all of our faith and any money we had into this band. We were in complete financial dire straits and it just fell apart.”

But not completely. Lightburn briefly formed a duo with Wren’s drummer John Tod, called Tidal Wave.

“It was really, really weird. It was just instrumental, kind of surfy, kind of garagey, kind of punky, kind of poppy.”

Left out on the sidelines, White wanted in. A new band was in the making, with White on bass, but Lightburn was unsure of what role he himself would play.

“I was thinking of hanging up my vocal chords and just being the guitar player. I wanted to focus on one thing and be good at one thing. So we went about trying to find a singer. We tried a couple of girls and then we tried a couple of dudes, and each audition ended with the person saying, ‘Why aren’t you singing?’”

With Lightburn returning to centre stage, the band sought out another guitarist, eventually settling on Richard MacDonald. Inspired by Lightburn’s latest batch of rich, romantic and relatively accessible tunes, White named the band The Dears.

Meanwhile, across the provincial border in Toronto, Natalia Yanchak was studying at Humberside Collegiate Institute. She describes it as a rival high school to the Etobicoke School of the Arts, where future members of Stars, Metric and Broken Social Scene were enrolled. Kids from the two schools didn’t mix, however, and it was years before Yanchak would meet them.

She had started writing songs on an acoustic guitar with her friends, and was listening to a range of alternative music, mostly British bands introduced to her by her older sister. Though she got “really heavy” into The Smiths and Morrissey as a teenager, she also made time for the likes of Moxy Früvous, The Beastie Boys, Tool, Goldie, The Orb and chess club. A serious Björk phase inspired her to experiment with a four-track.

“I didn’t know musique actuelle existed but there’s a bunch of recordings I have that are very up that alley,” she says.

Yanchak also spent her extra-curricular time producing and distributing zines with her friends, and after meeting the founders of Montreal’s Vice magazine at a zine fair, she joined the ranks of its snarky music critics. It was around this time that she started hanging around Toronto’s underground rock scene, populated by a slightly older crowd, including her first proper boyfriend, Simon Nixon. Together, in the summer of 1995, they moved to Montreal.

By this time, Britpop had taken hold of the United Kingdom and attracted a sizeable cult following in Canada. With his Smiths obsession starting to taper off, Lightburn immersed himself in the influx of new records by young guitar bands. He became so enamoured with the scene that he made a pilgrimage to London to stalk Blur guitarist Graham Coxon, Dears demos in hand, at the musicians’ hangout du jour, The Good Mixer in Camden.

Anglophilia had a mammoth impact on the band’s music, not to mention their increasingly hard drinking habits. Compiled by the band in 2001, Nor the Dahlias exposes The Dears’ baby steps between 1995 and 1998, when Lightburn’s oeuvre was steeped in Blur/Smiths fanaticism.

Crudely recorded and mixed, their first songs, “Everlasting” and “Open Arms”, pack in a compelling croon (and a very Morrissey-esque dollop of buffoonish baritone vibrato), jangly guitar work with ultra-’80s exclamations (and one Coxon-esque crunchy solo), open-heart lyrics, buoyant riffs, rubbery basslines and sunny melodies.

The following pair of songs features improved sound, but weaker content. “Nine Eight Two” has the ring of an awkward Blur/Suede fusion, with Lightburn trying on an ill-fitting nasal whine atop slamming guitars and drums. The soft and sincere ballad “The Way the World Treats You” is superior, but still sounds like the ghost of a Morrissey B-side.

The Dears went into their next session to record an EP, The Future Is Near. Never released as it was intended, two of its four tracks made it to Nor the Dahlias. “Mute Button” could pass for an outtake from Blur’s The Great Escape were it not for Lightburn’s lyrics and vocal delivery on the chorus, which gush flamboyantly with praise and pleas for an object of lovesick affection—even Morrissey has rarely engaged in such vulnerable confessionals. By contrast, “Dear Mr. Pop Star” is cold and clever; warbling ’80s synths hover over the intro before a lightly British-accented Lightburn pipes up in his lower register, eerily echoing Damon Albarn. In what was hopefully a wink to a knowing audience, this absolutely shameless bit of Blur pastiche is a song about obsessive fandom, perhaps written on the long ride home from The Good Mixer.

By this point, the band members’ virtual alcoholism, personal lives and day jobs began to take a toll on both the progression of the project and their friendships. Though MacDonald had been helpful during at least one recording session, scoring studio time through his brother and helping to finish the mix after Lightburn blacked out, his drunken antics were creating a rift.

“At one point, everyone in the band was forced into a position of punching him out—he was just that kinda guy,” Lightburn says. “It’s unfortunate. I still love the guy and we had a lot of really amazing times, though most of them revolved around drinking way too much.”

After the band had played their first gig in Toronto, White and MacDonald got into a punch-up in the stairwell of the Waverly Hotel, spurred by what Lightburn describes as MacDonald’s “retarded” behaviour. White had had enough, and quit the band.

“He was my best friend. It was devastating for him to bail on the project,” Lightburn says.

Wounded but far from defeated, The Dears took on a new bassist, Roberto Arquilla, who was a friend of MacDonald’s and a fellow Britpop fanatic.

“When we were introduced, Murray said, ‘I hear you’re a big Smiths fan’ and I said, ‘Yeah, the biggest,’” recalls Arquilla, “and then Murray said, ‘Those are fightin’ words!’”

Arquilla had seen The Dears play live and was deeply impressed by their music, so much so that he was intimidated by the prospect of joining the band.

“I really liked the musicianship and the creativity within the parts; they were intricate and so well written. That kind of blew my mind.

“I said, well, ‘I’ll give it a shot but I’m not as good as Andrew, so if it’s not working out, please just can me right away.’ I didn’t want the music to suffer.”

Arquilla proved to be an easy fit in the band, getting along particularly well with Tod. But within weeks of his arrival, the friend who’d gotten him in was out.

“Murray and Richard had been out drinking and they went to get a slice of pizza—it must’ve been three or four in the morning. Richard was drunk and when he gets drunk, he starts mouthing off and he can really get under people’s skin. I got a call from Murray at 4, 4:30 a.m. and he said, ‘I just punched Richard in the face and started beating on him.’ He felt he’d hit rock bottom.”

MacDonald was ejected from the band, relieving some of the tension between the three remaining members, if only briefly. Even Tod, who’d been there from the beginning, had “one foot out” due to the demands of his day job, and Lightburn’s apparent downward spiral wasn’t encouraging.

“My entire life at this point was falling apart,” Lightburn admits. “I was in a relationship for a long time that was falling apart, I was broke, I had no job. Everything was just crumbling, crumbling, crumbling. The Dears were hanging by a thread, but I was determined to not let this one thing die.”

Down to one guitarist, the band decided to bring in a keyboardist, briefly taking on The Null Set’s Kieran Macnamara, then Mishima’s Nick “the Prick” Robinson. The latter was only hired for one gig, but it wasn’t long after that show that Lightburn met Yanchak, who was DJing at the St-Laurent blvd. dive Bifteck. He mentioned the encounter to Robinson, who informed Lightburn that she also played keyboards, and recommended her for the band.

“Next thing you know, I was on the phone with Natalia, talking about music,” says Lightburn. He invited her to an upcoming Dears show at another St-Laurent dive, Barfly.

“I wasn’t really optimistic because I was already jaded at that young age,” Yanchak recalls. “I was at CKUT doing the radio show Underground Sounds, which only plays Canadian independent music, so I had a familiarity with the range of stuff that was out there at the time, at least in recorded form.

“But then I really liked them. I actually stayed for the whole show.”

“It was a pretty amazing gig,” says Lightburn. “We kinda kicked ass. So, soon after that, she said, ‘okay, I’m in.’”

During her first two years in Montreal, Yanchak had played keyboards with The Fontonels, featuring Howard Bilerman (who would go on to engineer The Dears’ Orchestral Pop Noir Romantique five years later), and a bubblegum pop band called The Smile Company, with notable locals Eric Digras, Alex MacSween and Jonathan Cummins. (At The Smile Company’s only show, on Valentine’s Day 1997, the band shared the stage with The Null Set, with Lightburn sitting in on guitar. It was the first time, as far as Yanchak knows, that they were in the same room together.) Building on basic piano skills, she had already mastered the Farfisa VIP-500 organ, and toyed with a vintage synth called the ARP Axxe, but The Dears took keys a step further.

“The first rehearsals with the band were very challenging,” says Yanchak. “I had to learn all these songs that had very specific arrangements, and I had to learn how to use this crazy synth that Murray had, a Korg Polysix.”

Even more difficult was the task of raising the band’s profile. Between Yanchak’s gigs at the McGill University radio station and Vice (not to mention the behind-the-scenes work she’d done for her boyfriend’s band, The Paper Route), she certainly knew her way around a press kit. At this stage, The Dears had made few attempts at media coverage, let alone a record deal. Lightburn’s strategy thus far had been to send a demo to one record company (or hand it to one drunk pop star), and when it was rejected, he’d trash the material and write a new batch of songs, as if some omnipotent jury had judged it and deemed it shit. According to Lightburn, Yanchak was able to identify and remedy the band’s business and marketing problems. Without her, he says, they’d still be living hand-to-mouth in a 1 ½ apartment downtown. “No one would have ever heard of The Dears if it weren’t for Natalia.”

The second incarnation of The Dears recorded what was, again, intended to be a four-song EP, entitled Chivalry Is Not Dead. And again, the EP was never released, but two tracks from that session appear on Nor the Dahlias. Judging from “Corduroy Boy” and “She’s Well Aware”, the band’s sound had evolved, but their style hadn’t. The Blur-ish tendencies remained: the injections of winking humour, the gratuitous la-la-las, the mid-Atlantic accent, the bobbing oompah rhythm, the guitar grind, the chiptune synths and the snakes and ladders bass. But the songwriting, derivative as it was, had tightened up considerably, achieving A-side quality, and with the accompanying strings and horns, and Yanchak’s frilly organ backdrop and back-up vocals, a fresh aesthetic was clearly developing.

The introduction of cellist Brigitte Mayes built on the promise of the band’s ear...