Jim Guthrie

Who Needs What

Andrew Hood

• Publisher: Invisible Publishing
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781926743592
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Biographies

Jim Guthrie: Who Needs What tells the story of a musician whose twenty-year career has been spent either at the forefront of Canada's indie rock renaissance or in the background of some of the most popular indie games, films, and ad campaigns of the past decade. Through interviews with Jim, his collaborators, and fans, this book explores how a self-described "Seabiscuit" earned a cult following and became a major influence to musicians at home and abroad—all without really having to leave his basement.

CHAPTER 1

How We Get Old

“Where’s Jim?”

“Outside being useless.”

– from River’s Edge

(as quoted in “River’s Edge” from Victim of Lo-Fi)

When I bug Aaron Riches for his memories of the young James Edward Guthrie he met at Waverley Drive PS, he laughs: “Jim had the exact same haircut as he does now. He really looked the same. Jim hasn’t changed. I think he was born how he is.

“Of course…” Aaron tempers his amusement some. “Everyone grows.”

Three quarters of what would become Royal City met at this time, at Waverley. Both Aaron and Jim are Guelph-born. Simon Osborne, bassist for that band and player on most of Jim’s albums, moved from Ottawa in Grade 7.

Simon was into skateboarding and made friends that way after relocating. Through a skating friend he heard about this “cool guy from across the street” who had a Vision Psycho Stick5 and could do kickflips. “So I met Jim,” he remembers, “and he could do the kickflips that were described. And I thought Jim seemed pretty awesome, too.”

The earliest first Jimpression comes from Steve McCuen, childhood chum and collaborator on a hard-to-place project, Mandrills.6 In “Rap Song 2000,” Steve rhymes his memories of first meeting Jim: “I can remember being back in grade 3 / It’s in September—’82—it’s where I first met Guthrie… He sold his Mite-Y-Mite bike to my younger brother Mike / and told us how to ghost ride the damn bike.”

“I just remember getting huge laughs,” Jim recalls when I ask him about ghost riding, a trick where you leave a moving bike and it continues independent of you. “You did that and everyone’d be on the grass. If you could make a bunch of kids laugh by having skill enough to jump off your bike in such a way that it coasts silently… I was one of those kids who had, like, no confidence, but who had hand-eye coordination.

“And I could throw a rock,” he goes on, “Like, really far. Or straight up in the air and everyone would be like, ‘Holy shit!’ You couldn’t even see it anymore. And it would take 30 seconds to hit the ground. I remember moments like that. Just doing little things that gained immediate [attention].

“Even still… I went to the cottage with a few people [recently] and I pulled out the ol’ rock throwin’ arm, and I still had it. I always attributed it to a good, stout frame. And I have these whippy, elasticy arms. I think there’s a real kind of physics there. I think if you got somebody to measure my body, they’d be like, ‘This is optimal. These are the dimensions you’d use to build one of those David and Goliath slingshots.’

“I made one of those [slingshots], too. When I was younger I used to be really crafty and self-reliant. But the whole while I was trying to choke down a stutter.”

Two years older than Jim, Stephen Evans met Jim on the block. “He was about 12 or 13,” he says. “I think I remember him stammering a lot and being quite shy, but he was also very athletic. He was built like a little gymnast. He was an amazing skateboarder and he was an amazing breakdancer. Well, not an amazing breakdancer, but he spent time learning that stuff. He could moonwalk. I didn’t know anybody who could moonwalk.

“He moves so beautifully, this little man.”

But Stephen stresses that Jim was never a show-off. “I think he just liked devoting himself to learning something and seeing if he could pull it off.”

Jim’s character, like his music, is a unique balance of reservation and razzmatazz. He’s never been someone to trumpet a project, but the work itself, and his dedication to it, has always had such a visible aplomb that drawing attention is inevitable.

To hear it from Jim’s friends, the guy stood out in adolescence; to hear it from Jim, it was the opposite. “When I was younger,” he says, “I didn’t like being the centre of attention because normally, when I was the centre of attention, I was stuttering in front of a class. So I sort of learned being the centre of attention doesn’t always feel good.

“I used to think of myself as a bit of a Seabiscuit,”7 he says. “In as much as Seabiscuit is sort of a lame horse that nobody wanted. I wasn’t super book smart when I was younger, and I had that stutter, and when I was born my legs were all kinda twisted and turned in. I had to wear casts on my legs for the first little bit of my life. I was always just sorta short and runty. Now that’s all in the past, and I guess it was a big deal at the time. Now, when I put [those issues] under a microscope, they all seem like big little things, a great deal of who I was when I was younger.

“But I learned a lot from those early struggles and it sort of showed me how to adapt and reinvent myself over the years.”

Split grades separated Jim and Steve McCuen for most of elementary school, but they met up again in junior high. They were still into MAD magazine, but by the eighth grade were also getting into The Watchmen and Frank Miller’s revamping of the DC Comics mainstays. The tone of MAD and the grittiness of this new wave in the mainstream made for an easy transition to underground comics. If they could find him, they were reading Crumb.

It was a confluence of the comics and hip hop that helped them shake their early musical interests—for Jim, Howard Jones; for Steve, Phil Collins. “By ’89, De La Soul had dropped Three Feet High and Rising,” Steve says. “We were hip hop. We loved it. But then by ’91, Sonic Youth was singing with Public Enemy,8 and we were like, ‘Sonic Youth might be cool.’ When [hip hop] started getting all dolla dolla bills and bitches and hos, we sort of said, ‘Okay, let’s differentiate ourselves from this misogyny and become alternative.’”

While the coming ‘alternative’ influences of bands like Sebadoh, Pavement, Ween, They Might Be Giants, and, later, The Sea and Cake, and Tortoise, would shape much of Jim’s work throughout the 90s, Jim’s post-millennium love of licks and movement towards a more polished production is anchored by a parallel influence of classic rock. “Jim was into Queen before it...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: How We Get Old
• Chapter 2: The Royal City Home Rock Eruption
• Chapter 3: The Royal City All-Stars
• Chapter 4: An Obvious Sense
• Chapter 5: I Don't Wanna Be A Rock Star
• Chapter 6: An Experimental Cure for Acute Soul-Sickness
• About the Author