I dream in music reviews. Do you?
The Reason are holding a press conference in a Super 8 motel room. It is a pretty big Super 8 motel room, a suite with a kitchenette, and a dried floral arrangement beside the TV. The TV is an old Radio Shack special, with knobs, and one of those cable boxes with the buttons that pop like old car am radios, and the whole works are bolted to the dresser they sit on. There is also a dried floral arrangement on top of the mini fridge, and one under the lamp on the little between beds table containing the Gideon Bible. It seems to be an inordinate number of dried floral arrangements, I half think that the band requested them, but half think they didn’t/wouldn’t dare.
My brother and I, and a couple of friends managed to snag spots on one of the two king-sized beds with the yellow-brown stained burlap bed spread. Our bed has the larger of the stains. Our stain is about the size of a 45-gallon drum lid that has blown out of the back of a pick up truck on a gravel county road and a grader ran it over, making it a little misshapen. I like to think of it as coffee, but everyone knows motel bed spreads with misshapen 45-gallon drum lid sized stains are never coffee.
The rest of the members of the press are lounging on the other bed or standing around the room with their cameras and tape recorders and boom mikes. There are a pile of them crowded into the corner with the kitchenette so you can hardly tell it is a kitchenette at all, were it not for the dried floral arrangement topped mini fridge that is separating the guy from CP and the guy from AP.
The Reason are sitting at a table on the opposite side of the room. There are only three of them here for the press conference. The others (there are actually 5 members) are inconspicuously absent. The whole scene looks a lot like the press conference scene in La Dolce Vita. Except, rather than a gorgeous blonde starlet in a 5-star Roman hotel, it is three regular looking marginal Canadian rock stars in a yellow-brown Super 8 motel room, probably in Hamilton or Oshawa or Sudbury or Mariposa.
The Reason are dressed in the standard Much Music/MTV rock band fare: faded jeans, lame band t-shirts of bands that broke up 25 years ago, only to reunite to make enough drug money to break up again and now their t-shirts are sold at roadside souvenir stands in Nathan Phillips Square and in malls everywhere—Black Sabbath, Black Flag, Black-Eyed Peas, etc. Trucker caps, do not forget the trucker caps, slightly jaunty. Dyed black hair. Face piercings: lips, eyes, noses, brows. Tattoos shooting out from t-shirtsleeves and neck holes. This could be a Hedley press conference, or Simple Plan, or Sum 41, or Billy Talent. You get the picture.
There is a great deal of din. The press isn’t paying attention. The guy from the Star, Morley Callaghan, is asleep on the other bed. Margaret Atwood has the CP and the AP guy in stitches. It is a pleasure to see them get along and come together in mutual admiration of post-apocalyptic feminist fiction. My brother and I, and a couple of friends, are just hanging out, exchanging lame jokes about lame bands. The band speaks and no one notices. The band speaks only in lyrics. Upbeat lyrics of overwhelming teenaged angst (gasp!).
At some point during the press conference I noticed that the band had taken their shirts off. I am not sure why, but they did. Revealing more tribal looking tattoos and tattoos of Chinese characters for perseverance or tenacity or courage or blah blah blah. No one notices.
After more lyrics (“if every question wasn’t questionable/we would ask these questions”) a stunning blonde wearing a cute grey sweater entered the room. The air left is sucked out of the room with her arrival. Even Margaret Atwood stopped hamming it up for a moment. It is Grace Kelly. She is dating the drummer, or lead singer, or bass player. They make out for a bit and then she leaves. With out saying a word. The band returns to talking about their forthcoming record with lyrics. “I lie and float in shallow water/thinking to myself is it just me/or is there is an alligator in the water/that’s biting off my head each time I speak/I feel so uneasy/I’m not entirely sure what all this is for...”
Then I wake up laughing. Grace Kelly, that is silly.
In the real world The Reason have a new record, Things Couldn’t Be Better on Smallman Records (Moneen, Comeback Kid, et al.) produced by Juno winner Gavin Brown (Billy Talent, Three Days Grace, et al.). The record will do well. The kids will come out to their shows. Much Music is already playing the video for their first single “This is Just the Beginning” in medium rotation. Rock radio throughout southern Ontario will likely follow suit to meet their CanCon requirements. Kids in suburban basements scrawling angsty emo poetry in black notebooks with black pens will play the record loud and feel better about how shitty their life is.
The thing that piqued my…well…I am not really sure what…something like disinterested interest, if you catch my drift, was the bands one-sheet. One-sheets are one sheet of hyperbolic praise penned by some eager unpaid intern at the record label to convince pre-release press, critics and overzealous fans to say nice things about the band in articles, reviews, and on buses loudly to friends for all to overhear. The key to a good one-sheet is over-statement—gross, indecent, outlandish, outrageous overstatement. And The Reason’s one-sheet is awe-inspiring.
“Anything that began during a late summer at a Southern Ontario cottage is bound to turn out well,” it opens. It was in this cottage the band “sequestered” themselves and “the songs on this album are the best [they]’ve ever written, and while hey [sic] are a departure from [their] older music, it was inevitable.” The Band had Big Pink, The Doors the desert, The Beatles Abbey Road, Leonard Cohen Hydra, The Reason have their grandpa’s cottage outside Hamilton.
Then comes the money shot, The Reason’s new album is “described by producer Gavin Brown as the Police meets Modest Mouse and by others as The Clash meets the Cure.” Really? Why hold back? Why not Elvis meets The Beatles? Or Mozart meets Beethoven? Or Zeus meets John Denver? Or God meets Jandek? Or Jesus meets Bob Dylan?
I guess it is possible, I guess the Police could meet Modest Mouse, and the Clash could meet the Cure. But in this context the meetings would take place in a mall food court in a Toronto suburb and Billy Talent, Simple Plan, Three Days Grace, Sum 41, Hedley, Jimmy Eat World, All American Rejects, My Chemical Romance, etc., etc., etc., blah, blah, blah, are all there talking loudly about tattoos, vintage band t-shirts, and girls. And it is all being taped for Much Music Video Flow. If this is your bag then you will be delighted. If not, you might want to hang out with Sting and Isaac over by the Arby’s.
Dreams do come true!
