One of the neat things you can do with a blog is resurrect old pitches that never went anywhere. When I was cleaning out old files this afternoon, I found this piece, which I wrote on spec for a certain British music magazine that I've had a couple of pieces published in. The editor passed on this one, though.
Every September, my wife and I spend ten days in downtown Toronto at the Toronto International Film Festival. Some years, my wife has to miss the first day or two of the fest due to the vagaries of the academic calendar; in 2000, I flew up from Albuquerque by myself to catch the first couple days of the festival on my own. On the first night of the festival, I saw the movie described below (which, frustratingly, is still unavailable on DVD), after which the filmmaker invited the audience to a live gig by the Nihilist Spasm Band that took place in a small basement pool hall on College Street. On my way over, I stopped in a dollar store to buy a pocket notebook and a pen and I quickly conducted the interview snippets below before and after the set. I wrote most of this in longhand later that night at a Pizza Pizza on Bloor Street in The Annex, then typed it up and sent it to the editor at an internet café in Yorkville the next day between movies. I shot a roll of film too, but I've moved from Albuquerque to Boston in the intervening years, and I don't know which box down in the basement the shots are in. If I ever run across them, I'll post a couple here.
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They look like your father, or possibly your grandfather. They are a graphic designer (retired), a librarian (retired), a high school English teacher (retired), an artist (mostly sculpture), a novelist (non-best selling) and a physician (family practice). One's an amateur herpetologist. Another collects unusual pocketknives. Looking at them, you just know that at least one of them grows tomatoes out back of the house. They're all in their late 50s and early 60s.
They're the Nihilist Spasm Band. And they can kick your band's ass.
Every Monday night since 1965-they can count the number of Mondays they've missed on two hands with fingers to spare-Bill Exley (vocals, rattled saucepan), Art Pratten (homemade instruments including the violin-like Pratt-a-various and a six-foot horn made out of white PVC water pipes), John Boyle (guitar), Murray Favro (guitar), Hugh McIntyre (bass) and John Clement (drums) have gathered in a succession of obscure clubs and galleries in the small city of London, Ontario, to create a music that's not quite like anything you've ever heard before. You can come up with comparisons (elements of White Light/White Heat Velvets, Kill Yr Idols-era Sonic Youth, vintage Ornette Coleman and the art-noise terrorism of Einsturzende Neubauten, topped off with recitations mixing Ken Nordine's Beat-era word jazz, Ivor Cutler's deadpan surrealism and Ishmael Reed's inspired flights of poetic fancy), but you'll never quite nail it.
The difference is that these six guys are not hipsters in any sense of the word. When I mention Nordine, whose records are reissued for a new generation of artsy types every few years, to the garrulous, professorial Exley, he borrows my pen to write down the unfamiliar name for future reference. When the band members talk about Jojo Hiroshige, godfather of the Japanese noise scene and both a disciple and patron of the Nihilist Spasm Band (he's credited their second album, 1978's Volume Two, with first inspiring his interest in noise, and all of their albums since 1994's What About Me? have been issued on his influential Alchemy Records imprint), they're not dropping a cool obscure name, but trading gossipy stories about a friend. When I tell McIntyre, a man mountain the size of a gone-to-seed professional wrestler whose moon face, remarkable long grey beard and crinkly eyes make him look unnervingly like Robert Wyatt, that he has an imposing presence on stage, he draws himself up to his not inconsiderable height and says with a twinkle, "Majestic, thank you! Thurston Moore said I was majestic on stage!"
This sort of thing is what makes the Nihilist Spasm Band different. Other bands might have smack-and-bondage parties in cheap motels. The Nihilist Spasm Band have the Nihilist Family Picnic, a three-decades-plus tradition that takes place every summer in an Ontario park, gathering the band, their wives, children (Pratten, McIntyre and Favro's sons have their own band) and now grandchildren along with friends, fans and co-workers for an afternoon of hot dogs, deviled eggs, ice cream and group activities culminating in a massive game of tug-of-war. It's like a church social, except everyone's wearing red t-shirts with the band's omnipresent symbol, a musical note with a circle-and-slash around it.
Those elements of friendliness and humor are essential to their music. As initially forbidding as a song like "No Canada" can be, it's never merely noise-for-noise's-sake. Although you couldn't really call this either rock and roll or jazz with a straight face, there's a very human pulse to the rumbling interplay that gives the NSB a listener-friendly quality you'll never find in, say, the Boredoms, and at times, there's a surprising delicacy, with open spaces and occasional passages that are downright pretty. If you've ever made it all the way through "Sister Ray" or a full side of anything on ESP-Disk, you're ready for the Nihilist Spasm Band.
Pratten has said, "At the end of the day, we're basically a bar band," and there's that sense of casualness to the group live. They're playing on this muggy September night in a pool hall in the middle of Toronto's college district. No lights, not even a stage, just a pile of amps, instruments and toys in a clear spot on the wooden floor. (Amazingly, two people continue playing pool during the NSB's set, seemingly oblivious to the single loudest band I have ever seen, and I saw My Bloody Valentine once. It's not a coincidence that at least half the band uses hearing aids these days.) Exley, whose recitations usually end a couple of minutes into any given song, wanders off in the middle of an extended bass-drums duet and returns to his mike a couple minutes later holding a pint. He sips at it in between occasional ululations, sounding kind of like a Native American Yoko Ono. Later, he sheepishly apologizes to a couple of people in the audience who had requested a particular song, saying that he can't find it in the manila folder that holds his lyrics and doesn't remember the words off the top of his head.
The gig tonight is a benefit for Zev Asher, the Toronto-based filmmaker whose latest work, What About Me: The Rise of the Nihilist Spasm Band, premiered this week at the Toronto Film Festival. (It's currently on the festival circuit, hopefully culminating in a showing at Sundance in February.) The film, three years in the making, shows the group being interviewed on a cheesy Japanese television variety show (complete with a host in a purple velvet tux…yes, really) and playing live at New York's Knitting Factory and their own No Music Festival, a yearly event the band puts on as a thank you for all the like-minded groups who invite them to similar festivals around the world. There's also historical footage highlighting the band's founder, noted Canadian painter Gary Curnoe, who was killed in a bicycle accident in 1995, and charming, often extremely funny interview segments with the band and their fans, from one of Exley's former literature students to the aforementioned Thurston Moore. Asher, who used to be in the middlingly-known noise band Nimrod, is clearly a longtime fan; in fact, he was first introduced to the band's records as a child by his father, a college friend of McIntyre. He's also a fairly gifted filmmaker, and there's an intimate, diary-like feeling to the film which made it appealing even for those in the film's audience who clearly didn't care for the band's music.
About halfway through the Nihilist Spasm Band's set, a fortyish South Asian man carrying a green plastic bucket two-thirds filled with plastic-wrapped roses comes into the club. He's the neighborhood flower guy, the one who hits all the clubs and restaurants in a neighborhood and asks all the couples if the gentleman would care to buy a rose for the lady. No one in the rapt crowd of about 50 people is interested, so he turns to leave. As he does, he glances at the band for a moment, a look of mild befuddlement on his face as a chanting Exley clangs the lid on his saucepan over and over in front of his microphone and the balding Favro, seated before his amp, back to the audience, looking like a less-prissy Robert Fripp, makes his guitar approximate the sound of a mechanical horse undergoing a prostate exam which involves a yardstick-sized chunk of ice. When I turn around half an hour later to set down my beer, the flower guy's sitting at a table in the back, his forgotten bucket of roses on the seat opposite, cigarette in mouth, half-finished Guinness on the table in front of him. When the song ends, he applauds. Vigorously.
