Trevor: What Went Wrong #3

Turnover (part two)

I was watching an interview with an artist (Thomas Nozkowski) recently and he said something that stuck with me. He said that artists always think what they are working on currently is their best work yet. But that's not always the case. What comes next will not necessarily be better than what came before.

However, this mind set is essential for an artist to keep moving. Although you may keep going back to the same themes, you try to approach from another angle, focus on a different aspect, in hopes of not only making a good work but also discovering a path to lead you on to something unexpected and exciting. It's the only way. Making things leads to making other things.

The same does not apply to being in a band. Being in a band requires two separate things. One is the creative process of writing music, lyrics and arranging them with the band. The other thing is to then repeat the same songs again and again with the aim of playing them as well as you possibly can.

I never got that second thing. I approached it as a visual artist always moving on to the next thing. I wrote songs at a breakneck pace and I always thought that the last song I wrote was the best or at least the most interesting. I think Trevor were active for maybe five years, and during that time we must have performed 60 to 70 songs on stage. there must be another 40 I wrote and recorded that were not introduced to the band or were done in the practice room but not live. Every time we performed there was at least one, but often more, new song that we were playing live for the first time. Exciting for us but maybe not the best for the paying audience.

It's one of my biggest regrets. I wish we had settled on a 15 song set list and just practiced and performed it to perfection. We should have played a constant live schedule and featured the same basic set each time. As it was, if someone ever did see us live more than once they may not have seen a single song twice. Just like in any commercial enterprise that depends on favorable reaction from customers who may drop in at any time, consistency is the key. If you have an off night, physically or emotionally, at least you can offer a competent well rehearsed set.

Unfortunately I was far more enthralled with the creative process and far less dedicated to perfecting what we already had. In the end, making stuff up is way more fun than practicing.

Trevor: What Went Wrong #2

Turnover (part one)

More reasons why my band never went anywhere.

The one constant from our first recording (a four track made in my parents' basement in Arvida that included a song called "I Stand" that stayed in our set list for a while) was that I wrote the songs, played guitar, sang, and my brother Mike played drums. Beyond the natural connections we had being brothers and having more or less the same musical history and taste, we were a good fit because we were always at the same level of competence with our respective instruments. We started just being able to get through a song and ended up being pretty good players in our own way.

For the most part, I gave up the drum arrangement to Mike, unless I had a very specific idea in mind: a break here, ride the floor tom here, a certain feel. Our first bass player, Chantal,  wrote her own bass lines. Her ability was limited much like ours was so mostly she followed what I played and wasn't writing elaborate bass melodies. She actually wrote the only song we ever did that wasn't written be me. It was based on a bass riff that was pretty much "Brand New Love" by Sebadoh but on bass. Nonetheless it was and is a great riff. Unfortunately the song we made from it didn't do it justice. Chantal was friends with the coolest of the cool in the Mtl. scene. She seemed to be playing with us out of a lack of a better offers. It was like she was always looking past us, over our shoulder waiting for someone more interesting to come in the room. I knew her time with Trevor was limited. I don't think she ever invited her cool friends out to see us play, even.

On the positive side, she'd sometimes forget how much cooler than us she was and she could be a really nice person. I think she was going through a lot of stuff at the time that we never discussed so I shouldn't be too hard on her. She introduced me to a lot of great music (Sebadoh, Superchunk, The Muffs, and much more) that really changed my song writing. Also she was down for practicing as often as possible. I was a jobless bum at the time, Mike was going to school (?) maybe, and she was on a similar schedule to me. We rehearsed four or more times a week at a space on Bleury that was occupied by some of the guys who went on to start Hotel2Tango and God Speed...  It was cold and the electricity wasn't grounded. That winter was one of the coldest I have ever lived through in Montreal and the place was frigid. Also the mic shocked my lips every time I sang too close so that I had blisters on my mouth for weeks. But we managed to play a show in less than three months after forming and we didn't embarrass ourselves. Actually I think we were remarkably tight which made up for many other shortcomings. I don't remember how many shows she played with us but we didn't record any songs with her on bass.

Our next bass player, Dave,  was a far, far better musician than we were so I let him have free reign and usually he came up with something cool that I couldn't have come up with in a million years. This was the peak of the band. Some of the songs were maybe not the best I've written but we practiced a lot and played like a well oiled machine, honing our set list (which changed too much, more on that later).

Our first set list was mostly the same as the one we were playing with Chantal but we were a better band at that point. We played a bunch of shows at Station 10, the bottom of the barrel of the handful of live venues in Mtl. at the time. Mostly we played to friends of the other bands who could not have hated us more. We cleared the bar more than once as I remember. We recorded a bit because Dave actually had a 12 track in his apartment. He later went on to have his own studio for a while. He was also playing in, what was becoming, a very successful ska band. He eventually moved on to be with them full time. Couldn't blame him.

Next, my friend Flo came on board after we had taken a hiatus of over a year. She's a pretty strong willed lady so I let her play what she wanted to and was almost always happy with the results. She never played live with us but we did record an 8 song cassette that I think featured some of our best songs. Flo, always had a few hundred other things going on so it was not surprising when she moved in favor of one of them.

The last line up included two girls I had met at art school and necessitated that I write every one's part ,except Mike's. So I came up with bass lines, and keyboard melodies. Pretty crazy! We played live only a few times but we were pretty good. We recorded a four song CD and by this point I had enough control that I guess I can also claim most of the blame for any short comings we had. It was a fun challenge to write all the parts but in the end I think it showed off my limitations as a musician. It would've been nice to have someone else's input at times. One girl enjoyed our time together but couldn't make it a priority. She also had bad stage fright and didn't enjoy playing live. The other I dated for a short time. It didn't end well. That was that. Classic.

All these changes were not conducive to gathering any kind of momentum. With each personnel change the band's sound also underwent a fundamental change. Sometimes the change was necessary to fit the playing of the new member and sometimes was due to my own restlessness. Unfortunately not one bass player was ever the take charge organizer type the we so desperately needed.

Trevor : What Went Wrong #1

Like millions and millions of other middle class white kids who grew up in the eighties, I was in a band. We recorded a few times, committing about 15 or so songs to tape and I have boxes full of cassettes I recorded alone on a four track. I am pretty proud of some songs we did and at least not embarrassed by any of the songs I wrote. We never managed to rise above being extremely marginal in the Montreal music scene of the early nineties. I've been looking into digitizing some old cassettes of music I/ we made before they are lost to the sands of time and it got me thinking about my foray into music making. I thought that being well over ten years removed from it all it might be interesting to write a sort of post-mortem on what I'll call (with great reservation and frantic air-quoting) my music career. 

Our band was called Trevor, which is neither a great name nor a terrible name. Much like, let's say Pavement, it falls well into that blurry zone between brilliant and stupid. If Pavement sucked it would be a pretty stupid band name. They ended up being a very good band so no one really gives the name a seconds thought. It just is. The other day I was talking to my wife about Nirvana, and being younger and Japanese, she wasn't really aware of them. She asked" Is that from Buddhism?" I said yes. She said " That's a stupid name for a band." And she's right.

So in no real order here are some key things that made it so we had absolutely no success, rather than the very minute success we deserved.

The Voice

I am not a very good singer. There are quite a few bands fronted by guys who could be described as "not good singers" but the difference is that they found what was good about their voice and just F***ed the rest. I often sang the wrong notes and could be a bit hard to listen to for the more delicate audience members but I feel confident saying that I had an "interesting" voice. By that I mean a voice with a good tone that conveyed emotion in an engaging and idiosyncratic way. When I had the confidence to let my voice out in the way I thought I should, it was sometimes, at the very least, not dull. Arguably, people may have left in disgust but never out of boredom. I have met many people who have been blessed with good singing voices and the ability to hit the right notes who were not gifted with an idea of how to deliver those notes in an engaging way. They never rose above competent or pleasant. I was not blessed with this ability and even on the best night out rarely did I sing "well", I never rose to the level of competence nor pleasantness. I did have an idea of how to deliver a song, however. I think my shortcomings as a singer (honestly some shows I was just tone deaf and must have been torture to listen too) turned off a lot of spectators.

The biggest problems about my voice arose when we recorded. Whoever was in charge of the the session would always point out which notes went wrong and get me to redo them, punch me in, and ultimately lose the whole feel of the performance. My confidence was easily shaken and the final result would be my usual barely on key singing but with the added downside of a very nervous and tentative performance. The best vocal recordings I ever did were either done in one take straight through or at most cut in half and done in two consecutive takes. I remember my friend Dan sat in on a session once and, after our bass player who was engineering the recording had made me stop and redo a few times, said "That's how he sings! Let him do it. It's what's good about the song." Confidence back, I tore through in one take and it came out quite well.

I'm not sure why I was the singer. My older brother, Mike, and I started the band. He played drums and I played guitar. I wrote the songs which included lyrics and melody. No one else was around and I obviously knew how the songs were supposed to go so… That makes sense but how I remained the singer is another question. I'm pretty sure I always thought that a stand alone singer (who doesn't play an instrument) was not cool, and what kind of person does that anyway? But getting another guitarist/ singer would mean that someone else would surely be writing songs which would cut into my songs and that person would slowly take over the creative direction of the band. Performing my own songs was why I wanted to be in a band (I still don't particularly enjoy playing guitar. It's a means to an end.) so I wasn't interested in sharing. That's probably why we stayed a three piece for most of our existence, even a second guitarist was too much of a threat to grab the reigns. 

I was in a band a few years earlier where I played bass (poorly). It was my first real band and my first major undertaking after moving to the big city. I had formed it (along with Mike) with the idea that I would write the songs. I found a guitarist who didn't have any song writing ambitions. Then we found a singer. The singer brought in a guitarist who started bringing in his songs (which were fucking awful). My brother left the band, a new drummer came in. Next thing I know, it's not my band anymore. I missed a recording session (don't remember why, most likely alcohol related) and got booted from the band. I never forgot. I switched to guitar because bass players can't be band leaders and I swore that would never happen again.