Let me take you back to a simpler time in a simpler place. A backyard barbecue in Canada in the late ‘90s, where the only source of entertainment is the car radio. The DJ hypes up the upcoming Edgefest festival coming to town, and then a song by Vancouver’s Moist comes on, “Resurrection.” Beers are cracked open, and the event is discussed by the partiers.
“Hell yeah, I wouldn’t mind seeing Hole. Courtney Love … That bitch is crazy. I wonder what she’ll get up to. Who else is playing?” Without a cell phone in sight, the individuals had to rely on their memories to construct an answer.
“Emmm, Wide Mouth Molson,” says a beer-gutted man flipping a burger and then taking a swig of his can, “Who else?” A woman takes a long drag of her cigarette, “You mean Wide Mouth Mason, idiot. The beer is Molson, Bruce.”
“Right,” says Bruce. “So who the fuck else!?”
The woman puts her hand on her head, thinking deeply, “That Australian band. The young guys. What are they called? Fuck, they do that song I like …”
The Moist song ends and the DJ cuts in—“Here’s a new one from another band that’ll be here at Edgefest, Silverchair” before the opening chords of “Abuse Me” chime in.
The woman laughs, “Silverchair, that’s it! Fuck, I love this song.” The party-goers continue drinking and discussing the festival, which they couldn’t get their shit together to actually attend.
This was the ‘90s in Canada where, unbeknownst to most listeners, by law, since 1971, there had to be 30% Canadian content on radio and TV music programming, meaning that the major American or international artists were constantly rubbing elbows with the Canadian ones, which in many ways elevated the Canadian artists in the eyes of Canadians, whether they knew of that or not. This kind of forced exposure wasn’t seen as a bad thing, though, as the bands that emerged in Canada in the mid to late ‘90s were on a level that often surpassed groups from the U.S. in terms of songwriting, and often listeners didn’t know who or who wasn’t Canadian unless it was stated by the DJ.
Canada’s answer to MTV, MuchMusic, also treated these artists like major stars, with them often making it to the top place on shows like MuchMusic Countdown. Bands like Our Lady Peace then felt like the biggest artists in the world to Canadian fans when, in reality, they were just big in Canada and modestly successful elsewhere.
Edgefest, which started in 1987 as a one-day festival in Barrie, Ontario, became a touring powerhouse by 1997 and was seen as quite a big deal, feeling like Canada’s version of Lollapalooza, with Canadian groups like Econoline Crush or Matthew Good sharing the stage with bands like Green Day, The Foo Fighters, and Hole—further blurring the lines between the popular bands of Canada and their contemporaries from the U.S.
In addition to Edgefest, during the summertime, Canadian bands would often be booked at city events such as the Calgary Stampede, in which fans could often see these artists for free, with the bands then building a stronger rapport with the locals aside from being already familiar to them via radio and video.
The streak of hit songs by Canadian rock artists in the late 1990s felt as though it would last forever, though, like any good thing, especially in music, the era eventually faded out with bands changing styles, dropping off the radar, breaking up or tastes simply shifting to make way for newer, albeit, safer and blander, artists.
Headstones
Kingston, Ontario’s Headstones always felt like the cool uncles who were into playing cards, doing coke, and working on their cars during the times they weren’t touring or recording. Songs like their cover of “Tweeter and the Monkey Man” and “Smile and Wave” felt like timeless, legitimate Canadian rock staples, and the minute the songs were released and live, the band brought a seasoned, tough attitude with them. Add in the fact that vocalist Hugh Dillon starred in the cult film Hard Core Logo and you get quite a respectable band in Headstones: perfect for the punks, rockers, film snobs and of course the real men working construction that needed some balls in their rock during the work day.
The Gandharvas
“Mom, I want to go to Woodstock ‘94 to see Blind Melon.”
“Do you think money grows on trees, Nick? We have Blind Melon at home, see. The Gandharvas are coming to Klondike Days.”
“What the hell is a Gandharva?”
Well, a Gandharva is celestial musician or performer in Hindu, Buddhist, or Jain mythology. The band were a couple of Canadian kids from London, Ontario, who formerly went by The Droogs. So with this band, we already have a Clockwork Orange reference sitting nicely beside grunge and mysticism. The comparison to Blind Melon is truthful, as songs like “Downtime” do sound like Canada’s version of the grunge band.
For our Gandharvas video sample, let’s look at “First Day of Spring.” This song misleads the listener with a nice title and pretty melodies, though like a dark cloud coming in, juxtaposes the image of a man in a torture chair as singer Paul Jago tells us there’s no way of knowing how long It will last—much like this streak of interesting Canadian artists.
Our Lady Peace
Anyone who was alive and listening to rock radio in Canada in 1997 will distinctly remember the arrival of what would be, I believe, Our Lady Peace’s defining song, “Superman’s Dead.” The moody, post-grunge track featured the Jim Carrey-look-alike Raine Maida’s distinct, Canadian Mike Patton/jungle animal vocals in a rather moody, green-lit, science fiction video featuring future Serial Joe singer Ryan Dennis wearing a dress.
This stage of Our Lady Peace’s career, supporting their album Clumsy, and the era before it, for their Naveed album, featured a lot of genuine bangers with dark themes like the underrated “The Birdman” and their music videos often featured a creepy ventriloquist’s dummy or two under a comforting ‘90s sepia filter. With subsequent albums more fit for mass appeal, the darkness and dummies were left behind.
I Mother Earth
In the mid ’90s, MuchMusic began putting out a series of compilation CDs: Big Shiny Tunes. They featured the biggest Canadian artists mingling with the much bigger American artists all on the same disc, which somewhat distorted the importance of the Canadian artists.
“One More Astronaut” was the opening song on Big Shiny Tunes (which also featured Garbage, Marilyn Manson and No Doubt), and is a fitting introduction to this disc series and really, Canadian alternative rock as a whole. The song is catchy, though lyrically curious and mature. “One More Astronaut” presented a spacey, Smashing Pumpkins-meets-David Bowie feeling in I Mother Earth, lyrics such as “The powdered food and piss bags, never having sex and growing old” were alluring to hear on rock radio.
I Mother Earth’s singer, Edwin, is also one of the more talented and effortlessly cool frontmen in the history of alternative rock. He left the band after the hugely successful Scenery and Fish and crafted a modest solo-career with more straightforward feel-good pop rock songs like “Hang Ten” before reuniting with I Mother Earth in 2016. “One More Astronaut” (with a music video which resembled some of the visual style of “Heart Shaped Box”) wasn’t the band’s only hit- with Edwin looking especially smooth in a latex shirt as the band played in a red-painted men’s washroom in the video for “Raspberry.”
Moist
Enter David Usher—a man with a voice that matches his appearance, that being close to perfection. Moist were one of those bands with songs so damn powerful and iconic that it was assumed the whole world was into them, when again the strange reality was that they were again only really worshiped in Canada.
Songs like “Push” and “Resurrection” (both of which had phenomenal music videos, with “Resurrection” and its shifting rooms being like Megadeth’s “Sweating Bullets”) could stand alongside any post-grunge attempts at greatness, and if we were in another timeline, Moist would be rightfully headlining festivals around the world to this day. Maybe it’s just that people don’t like the name “Moist.”
The Tea Party
Hey, this guy looks like Jim Morrison. And wow, he sounds like him, too. OK, a Canadian Doors ripoff, next …
Wait—If you enjoy The Doors and can get past the comparison, you’ll have a good time at this Tea Party. For example, we have the rocking and hypnotic “Temptation,” the music video of which resembles Nine Inch Nails’ “The Perfect Drug.” Hold up—The Doors and now NIN, too? Yes, the influence of industrial rock bled into Canada as well, most noticeably with The Tea Party and Econoline Crush. If that sounds nice, let’s follow this industrial rock path the band took with their Transmission album—in what looks to be an outtake from Videodrome, silk-shirted vocalist Jeff Martin suspends from the ceiling as an erotic pandemonium takes place around him in the music video for “Babylon.”
Their best material, though, is found on their album The Edges of Twilight, featuring three extraordinary songs, “Sister Awake,” “Fire in the Head” and “The Bazaar.” These songs have an Eastern European flair (most of The Tea Party’s music does), which give the band an exotic quality.
Econoline Crush
Speaking of Nine Inch Nails, if you are in any way a fan of bands or songs that sound like NIN, look no further than Econoline Crush’s early ‘90s fit-for-fetish-clubs (if they were aware of the track) “Wicked.” Then, upgrade to another NIN-esque track, though one which has a lot going for it, from their breakthrough album The Devil You Know, “Home.”
This song and its accompanying video, featuring singer Trevor Hurst hanging onto a rope as a car pulls him along in a storm and the provocative, industrial ‘90s image of naked people with televisions covering their genitals, is something of an unsung classic. The band had bigger hits like with “You Don’t Know What It’s Like” and “Sparkle and Shine” but they certainly don’t feel like “Home.”
Age of Electric
The provocative imagery as seen in The Tea Party’s “Babylon” and Econoline Crush’s “Home” videos continues with Age of Electric’s “Remote Control,” a song that features a lyric that could speak to the relationship between American and Canadian artists, “The difference between us is negative one.” Before the video would air, there would be a viewer discretion warning for the video’s content, which featured nudity among various strange clips. Here, the days of channel surfing from MuchMusic to Showcase or Bravo, stations that would show things like HBO’s Oz, movies like Gummo and original Canadian TV shows like the documentary series Kink are felt, with the band playing for the camera as the omnipotent channel surfer explores the sordid secrets of late-night Canadian TV.
Junkhouse
I recall seeing a five-second clip of Junkhouse’s song “Out of My Head” during a commercial on MuchMusic and thought that the band looked like a backwoods, Canadian version of White Zombie. Well, at least vocalist Tom Wilson resembled Rob Zombie somewhat in the video, with his long, dirty hair and beard getting blown back by some high-powered winds. “Shine” was another radio staple, perfect for those rides home to the girlfriend and her bratty kid after a long day of drinking beer and roofing.
Matthew Good Band
Matthew Good had songs which felt a bit too smart for radio rock, yet the man had enough pop sensibility to make his lyrical content, about everything becoming automatic, X-rated futures, timebombs. apparitions, and being behind symbolic white walls, to work for the everyman. Good utilized catchy, but not completely typical song structures and thus he became a radio rock staple that you wouldn’t feel ashamed about cranking up at the job site, as opposed to the later post-2000s butt rock era of bands that followed. For a long time, Good kept coming out with hit after hit, with his music videos often blending the same themes and motifs, which was extra fulfilling for fans looking to analyze Good’s lore. It seemed he was poised for Canadian rock royalty, and in a way he is now, though ultimately he is more in line with being an unsung hero but still a poster boy for Canadian alternative rock in the late ‘90s.
His video for “Load Me Up” is eternally replay-able. Based on a dream, it features Good and his band running away from a livid-looking group of folks in school uniforms. It ends on a soccer field, in which Good and the group clash. The video does remind me of another music video by another Canadian group, Kittie, for their song “Charlotte.” What did Good do to these students? Nothing Good, I imagine.
Wide Mouth Mason
The Saskatchewan three-piece known as Wide Mouth Mason performed catchy, bluesy, nearly pop rock and were the first group I noticed to be totally multicultural—which isn’t uncommon in Canada. The coming together of a white dude, an Indian dude, and an Asian dude playing catchy rock seemed rather wholesome.
What’s a Wide Mouth Mason? Some guy named Mason with a wide mouth? No, it’s actually a jar with a wide mouth. However, there was a Molson beer entitled “Wide Mouth” which had a bigger guzzling hole than usual. This beer was popular at that time and when “My Old Self” would come on the radio as beers were cracked open, the band would be affectionately called “Wide Mouth Molson.”
Big Wreck
“I love that song!”
“Which one?”
”You know …’That Song!’”
“Tell me the name of it …”
“… by Big Wreck?”
”Oh, duh.”
You would hear this a lot after Big Wreck released their big hit, “That Song,” in the latter half of the 1990s. Big Wreck had a big sound, with singer Ian Thornley having a distinct, big voice that gave the band a stadium-like quality. This was big, loud, Canadian rock before Nickelback made it big. Thornley went on to release a few solo albums featuring more of the same, though look to Big Wreck’s 1997 debut In Loving Memory Of… for quintessential double platinum, yet under-appreciated Canadian rock.
Sloan
“And the joke is when he awoke, his body was covered in Coke fizz.” I still don’t exactly know what that lyric means, but if you live in Canada, even currently, there is a good chance you’ll hear it, as featured in Sloan’s 1998 song “Money City Maniacs” at least once if you’re tuned into any of the local rock radio stations in the country. Sloan proved that even if you look nerdy and hail from Halifax, Nova Scotia, if you have the songwriting chops, you might just make it. Sloan certainly have, and with their nine Juno nominations and 13 albums, all selling rather well, upgraded well enough to relocate to Toronto.
Bif Naked
For Canadian mall goths in high school, Bif Naked was like that hot girl with bangs and tattoos who was a little bit older than you whom you wished to date, but knew she was wiser and smarter and was more knowledgeable than you about what was cool and not cool. Still, you tried chatting her up after class while she smiled, thinking to herself that you were maybe cute but too immature to take seriously as she waited for her boyfriend to pull up in his pickup truck. When he finally did, you could hear Motley Crue from within it, and she would wave goodbye and jump in before it sped off aggressively.
Truthfully, though, seeing the goth/alternative Bif Naked on TV certainly opened the floodgates for the style becoming more normalized, at least when seen on females in Canada. Her appearances on MuchMusic, which usually consisted of a back and forth with VJ Ed the Sock also endeared her to viewers. The name itself, Bif Naked, followed the somewhat provocative nature of Canadian artists, with the word naked possibly meaning that her feelings are completely exposed within the songs. Her song “Spaceman” felt as though it followed along the same trajectory as I Mother Earth, with the lyrical content of Canadian artists seemingly reaching for the stars, or at least beyond borders.
Scratching Post
Every scene has to have at least one one-hit wonder, and London, Ontario’s Scratching Post take the slot here for their song “Bloodflame.” Only it wasn’t really a hit, was it? It’s cute, catchy, rocking, and very fun to sing along to, though I don’t feel it gained much traction aside from amusing MuchMusic watchers during lazy afternoons in 1998. Here it is again for you to discover (or re-discover).
The Odds
“It was the suit that got me the gig. It was the tear that got me the girl.” These are the words of wisdom found in the Odds’ hit, “Someone Who’s Cool.” This song, as well as other Odds Canadian radio staples like “Heterosexual Man” and “Eat My Brain” proved that Canadians could also be kind of weird and nerdy but also rock—sort of like Weezer but actually more lyrically relatable.
The Watchmen
Who watches The Watchmen? Well, I did watch them one time at the Calgary Stampede. They weren’t bad. The band are known for the song “Stereo,” which many listeners would sing the first few lines of: “My life is a stereo. How loud does it go? What songs do I know?” and probably really felt that way, as much of their lives were more or less controlled by the constant broadcast of Canadian rock radio. The Watchmen and this 1998 song certainly spoke to the masses and were perfect for that certain space of time—when all Canadians were united in rock.
Serial Joe
MuchMusic wasn’t the only station promoting new Canadian artists. Let’s channel surf to YTV (Youth Television) and catch up with PJ Fresh Phil as he introduces a video by the new Canadian band Serial Joe. The video for the song “Skidrow” sees some baggy-pantsed nu metal kids at a skate park performing what sounds to be a Limp Bizkit b-side. Their vocalist, Ryan Dennis, who was the kid in Our Lady Peace’s “Superman’s Dead” video has cut his long hair and now sports the latest, late ‘90s spiky style. The song sounds like if Kris Kross attempted nu metal, and is at the very least, a charming effort.
The band would thankfully mature, providing a modest hit with “Mistake” off of the album Face Down, with Todd McFarlane contributing art to their next effort (that’s right, Korn weren’t the only band he did stuff for – don’t forget Serial Joe). They also miraculously played Woodstock ’99, in addition to fellow Canadians Our Lady Peace and The Tragically Hip.
Finger Eleven
Finger Eleven was the final name for the band who were formerly known as the Rainbow Butt Monkeys. It was a ridiculous name, yet the band were still writing serious, heavy alt rock under that guise, taking it as far as releasing an album with an accompanying video. While their success came with the name change and release of the nu-metalish Greyest of Blue Skies in 2000, their 1997 album Tip was more of a heavy alternative rock disc with songs like the title track and “Above” being moody, self-reflective anthems.
Jet Set Satellite
We end this trip down the Canadian late ‘90s rock charts with a band that came out with their debut album in the year 2000, Jet Set Satellite. While not making nearly any impact on the scene, songs like “Baby Cool Your Jets” and “Best Way to Die” rock in their own Johnny come lately way and feel like the end of an era for Canadian alternative rock. Later, bands like Three Days Grace, Default and Nickelback would lead a stylistic change, which thematically, lyrically and often musically, was more simplified and radio ready than the ‘90s bands.
Photo courtesy of Matthew Good Band
