Jason Lamb and the as-yet-untitled book about Nomeansno
A couple of years ago, I saw a message on F******K asking for help in transcribing interviews for a book project for the Canadian band, Nomeansno. I'd just finished the first year of my degree and decided I was just standing under a streetlight wishing I had a cigarette, so I could lend a hand. At the end of my hand-lending, I'd transcribed something like seventeen interviews - with the infamous, the famous, and the not-so-famous - and at least one interview with each member of the band themselves. It was a privilege to do some shit-work on Jason’s book, as that particular band has meant a lot to me since first I first heard them on the Oops, Wrong Stereotype compilation album about a hundred years ago. The underlying vision that Nomeansno conjure is one that I find hard to separate from the person that I believe I am. The critical tone that Rob Wright and Andy Kerr spit in the lyrics of their songs (whose titles I often never remember) often stand in stark contrast to the dynamics of the music (that I can air-mimic with total confidence). This seems to embody my own sense of humour, my own perception of optimistic futility. Many have seen them play more times than I did...*
There is a lot of talk about the forthcoming book, but what about you, Jason, what got you involved with punk rock, in the first instance? Was there was a specific moment when you realised that punk was something you felt at home with? JL): I was never really a full-on punk rocker. I never got the mohawk or the spiked jacket. I was a jack-of-all-trades person I guess, but my introduction to it? I’m 50 now, so it was the early eighties. I had just started junior high school – thirteen, fourteen years old. Punk was already a ‘thing’ by then, and I’d heard the Sex Pistols and The Clash, and none of it really resonated particularly. It was just this weird music that I knew about. The first thing I heard that really stood out for me? Somebody had a cassette tape of the Dead Kennedys ‘In God We Trust, Inc.’ EP. I remember listening to it on a Walkman, and that was the first time I thought ‘what is this?! I really like this anger and the things they’re talking about. They are saying “fuck off” in the lyrics, I can’t believe it!’ That really appealed to me. I didn’t immediately jump out and start buying all kinds of punk records but that was the first memory that I have of really being impressed by it and appealing to me on some level. Probably the second thing I ever heard would be a local band called the Dayglo Abortions. They had an album called ‘Feed Us A Foetus.' That was really the turning point as far as what was happening in my backyard. This is a Victoria BC band and then I started exploring it more. I'd already been a bit of a record collector – even at that young age, if I had some money, I would go and buy records – so I started to buy that type of stuff. I think Dead Kennedys 'In God We Trust …' was the first thing I bought, punk-wise. I loved the cover of it. From there I started getting into it more and more. I bought 'Never Mind The Bollocks' and I started to read up on the history of it all. As far as going to see shows, I don't think I saw a live punk show until I was fifteen –'86 and that was the Dayglo Abortions – it was an all-ages show at a movie theatre called the Roxy Theatre, which still exists here, and for a while they did punk shows. They didn't last long because the place got trashed all the time but that would have been the first show I saw. A multi-band bill, it was the Dayglo Abortions, Red Tide, Mission of Christ – who were more of a metal, crossover band, as were the Dayglo's a bit. Nomeansno came pretty much around that same time because they were local of course, I had heard of them. Somebody played me the song 'Dad,' and I thought 'what is this, this is amazing!' I remember seeing the 'Sex Mad' album in a record store and being really impressed with the cover. I remember almost buying it but not buying it for some reason. I finally went to see Nomeansno. I honestly don’t remember what the venue was, the very first time I saw Nomeansno, but I would have been sixteen or seventeen. Right around the ‘Sex Mad’ time. I bought ‘Small Parts Isolated and Destroyed’ right when it came out. I was a fan by then. Since then, I like all kinds of different genres of music. I didn’t pigeon-hole myself into being a quote-unquote ‘punk.’ At school, I was a bit nerdy, but I got along with all the different factions. The high school I went to had all of those things – we had the punks, we had the metal-heads, we had the jocks and the preppies and stuff, but the divisions weren’t really that bad, everybody got along most of the time, and went to the same shows. Probably because it was a smaller town. I just dived in and started seeing shows whenever I could, whenever I was allowed to go out. Nomeansno became my favourite band, and pretty quickly favourite local band at first and I started to realise they were one of the best bands anywhere, never mind just [in Victoria.] The song 'Dad' is a pretty dark song to hear as the first exposure to Nomeansno. We've come to the conclusion that people have a really personal connection to them. I know that I certainly do. Have you managed to put your finger on why that might be? Why do they speak to people so much? There is a lot about Nomeansno that mirrors how I see the world, and I don’t know if I thought that before them or if I think that because of them … JL): Yeah. I know exactly what you're saying. It's hard to put it into words. In the book, I need to touch on that, unpack that and explain it, but I haven't quite tackled that yet. I think it comes down to Rob Wright's lyric writing, and how he views the world in a very deep way. He's the guy that reads philosophy. He doesn't just pretend he knows the stuff. He really knows it and he has a way of taking all these intense philosophical books that for the laymen are often a hard read, and he puts them into a much more digestible form. Unlike bands that rail against Reagan and Thatcher, or the oil companies or whatever the 'thing' of the day is to get angry about. He sings about a much more universal thing, human politics, right? I think everybody can relate to that. I think what people really appreciate – at least I do – is that they talk about these intense subjects. 'Dad' to me is a shining example of this. It's a really heavy-duty song about sexual abuse and incest, but at the end has a little wink of humour, you know? When Andy says "I'm seriously considering leaving home" it's like – oh my god, did they just do that?! There's always this cynical wink of 'hey when all is said and done, it's just life. You don't need to take it that seriously …' They manage to wade through really difficult topics and then give it a lift at the end which means you can survive the experience. Not surviving the song, but possibly of … JL): Going through the experience, absolutely. Maybe there is a strange optimism with their music, even though the surface seems very dark and apocalyptic in some ways – they sing a lot about death, and sin, and lies, and these heavy subjects that are pervasive for everybody – but there is this undercurrent of optimism, that everything is going to be okay but there is a power in diving into the dark because that is how you get to the light on the other side. I just heard Rob’s laughter when you said that. JL): I don’t know, - if he was on the line with us - that he would agree with anything I just said, but I think he probably would. They speak in a general way that is accessible for many people. I think what you said about taking difficult subjects and making them understandable for the layperson is quite interesting. There is a literary quality to the lyrics – the delivery really – and knowing that Rob is really influenced by James Joyce and other literary figures who had the ability to make you feel stuff rather than just read it off the page. You just feel something… JL): I get a little worried sometimes if I’m smart enough to be writing this book, do you know what I mean? I don’t consume all of that stuff. I haven’t read James Joyce’s books; I haven’t read Heidegger’s theses on mankind and the world and all that stuff. My philosophy is Nomeansno! I get that stuff from that. The way that Rob provides that stuff for people means he’s the one who has really dived into that stuff. It must be a little intimidating but being on the outside gives us a perspective that is as valid as any other, but I take your point that an understanding of the roots of what they might have been talking about might be important. JL): One of the things that is really great and speak to the power of Rob's lyrics and their music is a story from Laurie Mercer, who was their manager for most of their career. He told me a story about doing a show in Belfast, around '88 or '89. It was the Andy days. They were playing and there was a kid who couldn't have been more than a nineteen or twenty-year-old kid, who was horribly disfigured in his face. It was apparent to Laurie that this guy had been the victim of a bomb blast. This is not that long after the troubles. It wasn't something he'd been born with, he had this horrible injury on his face. He was right up front, and the band was playing 'Victory.' This kid was weeping and having this religious experience. He had his arms up and he was weeping with joy, having this deep experience, singing at the top of his lungs, you know, 'defeat, not victory …' and all that. Laurie [knew] this music was really important to some people. I thought that spoke with a lot of volume. It’s a sort of transcendental experience when you’re in the crowd and you know the words – you feel the draw of the music. I can relate to that...
How
did you get involved with the radio station? JL): I was born and raised in Victoria, but I moved to
Vancouver in my early twenties where I was waiting tables for a living. Then I
started doing stand-up comedy which has always been a passion of mine. I’ve
always loved comedy, always wanted to try it out. I finally did, and I got
pretty good at it. I was part of the Vancouver comedy scene in the late ‘90s. I
did tours in the comedy clubs, but it got to a point where I thought, ‘maybe
I’m not going to be a famous comedian full-time, because it is so hard to do
and I don’t want to be waiting tables for the rest of my life, so I need to do
something else’ – as a back-up plan. So, I went back to school, and I got my
diploma in broadcast journalism at a technical school called BCIT in Vancouver.
It was a two-year program. From there, I got a job as a reporter at a radio
station in a town called Kelowna, BC. My wife and I moved there. I worked there
for a couple of years just as a reporter. We had a kid there, but we didn't
want to live in Kelowna because it was a shithole (laughs). We needed to get
back to Vancouver ideally, or maybe even Victoria. I began firing off resume's
and the first interview that I got was in Victoria. I came back here and got a
job at a radio station called The Q! – again as a reporter. There are two radio
stations in this building. There's The Q! and The Zone. The Zone needed someone
to fill in on their morning show with Dylan, the main host. I did that a few
times and me and Dylan had this rapport. They fired his other partner because
she was … not very … useful … and I took over her job. That was thirteen years
ago. Me and Dylan have been the morning show at The Zone ever since. It's
really great because I now can be a comedian again, on the radio. I'm the goofy
co-host. I still read the news a few times every morning, and it's opened up
all kinds of stuff. It's been the greatest job ever because we have all
this access to live shows, people and interviews. It's how I got interested in
interviewing people. About three years in – 2011 – I pitched the idea of having
a punk rock show. It started off just online, but they promoted it on the
radio. I could play a bunch of punk music. I did that for a few years, and then
they ended up putting it on the radio on Friday nights. They give me an hour of
commercial-free, un-censored airtime for my punk show, which is unheard of for
a mainstream commercial radio station. The morning show is a straight-up
show for the listening public who are driving to work in their cars? JL):
Exactly. That’s my bread and butter, my main job, the one that pays the
bills. We’re not your typical wacky-goofy-stupid toilet humour morning show. We
have our moments, but we pride ourselves on being real people talking about
real things. We make it entertaining and funny for people. We are a popular
station, the #1 station in Victoria generally – us and our sister station, The
Q, go back and forth being the two top stations in Victoria. It’s been really
fun. It’s nice when you can mix business with pleasure. So many people work
in jobs that they hate. JL): I am really lucky. Of course, I still
find ways to complain about things. I have to get up at 04:30 in the morning
every day – that's not so much fun – but I wouldn't trade it for anything, it's
been a great job You said do interviews for the punk show as well? JL):
we started doing that right away. The purpose of the show was an outlet for
me to play the music that I like, but also to support local bands. I always try
to play local Victoria bands whenever I can. I always liked interviewing
people. I started doing it as much as I could. I got pretty good at it and
started to do cool things with The Punk Show – it got a little bit of traction
and people were paying attention to it. I would get media passes to festivals,
so I would go to Punk Rock Bowling down in Las Vegas, Rebellion Fest over there
in Blackpool. It has snowballed over the years. I’ve done hundreds and hundreds
of interviews for the Punk Show. Are there any particular standouts for you
from the radio program, rather than the Nomeansno interviews? JL): Yeah, for sure. One of my favourites was
Rodney Anonymous, the singer for the Dead Milkmen from Philadelphia. They are
goofy, humour-based punk rock, but skilled musicians. He's a really interesting
guy, I've interviewed him more than once. The same with Keith Morris, he was
awesome. Other standout interviews from festivals: there's a band called Jaya
The Cat, kind of a reggae-punk band, The Cyanide Pills were really cool.
There's so many I'd have to think about it a bit more. I've interviewed some
big names, but they weren't always my favourite interviews, Henry Rollins on
the phone was actually pretty good. I know a little of the story but why are
you doing a Nomeansno book? Why does the world need it? JL): I have
no fucking idea! I don't know what the hell I was thinking! Okay, they were my
favourite local band and favourite punk band in general. I went to see them a
million times, here, in Vancouver, in Kelowna, whenever I could get a chance to
see them. Through The Punk Show, I managed to get an interview with John Wright
on the phone, which was great. I got another interview with him a little bit
later, and then I interviewed Tom Holliston on the phone. Then, when they were
coming to Victoria to be inducted into the Western Canadian Music Hall of Fame
– in 2015, right near the end of their career – their publicist, Melanie Kaye
(who I had become friends with through the Punk Show, and who has always been
amazing at getting me interviews with people – I promote her bands and she gets
me cool interviews) was representing Nomeansno as their PR lady, and she said
do I want to interview them when they come to Victoria for this award. I'm like
… fucking … of course, I do! Rob wasn't doing interviews at all by that point.
He would just let John and Tom take the reins on that, so I interviewed them
backstage a couple hours before the big award show. So, I had this connection
to them. They didn't know me, but I had met them a few times. Going back
a couple of years now, I just started thinking about how I had always wanted to
write a book and what should I write about? Well, Nomeansno deserves a proper
book, a visual anthology, that tells the real story. That has never existed.
There was a book called Going Nowhere, that Mark Black did back in 2012
which was good for what it was, but it's very small without a single
photograph. It's a fan story. I thought, there are enough fans out there that
would want to see this – I know I would – so maybe I should take this on as a
project. I got a hold of Melanie again and said 'I am going to write up a
proposal. Could you forward it to John and Rob? I put together a little
proposal and she said she could email it to John, 'but don't hold your breath.'
I said yeah, I know. I knew what they were like, right? Private guys, not
really into this nostalgia thing, and she said, 'they may not even respond at
all. They might say 'no. Don't get your hopes up.' It was a risk.
JL): A total risk. This is last February [2020], a year and a half
ago. To my complete surprise, two or three weeks later, I got an email from
John Wright saying, 'Melanie sent your proposal and we think it's cool. If you
want to talk to me anytime. I talked to my brother Rob. He said he would do an
interview with you. You can get a hold of Tom and yeah – why not?' I couldn't
believe it. I wasn't going to do it if they said no. I wasn't going to write a
book about Nomeansno without their authorisation. First of all, as a fan I
wouldn't want to upset them – I wouldn't want to do something they wouldn't
want to be done – and also, I knew that if they said no, it would completely
cut out 90% of the people I wanted to talk to because a lot of their friends
and tour managers wouldn't take part in this unless the Wright brothers
were okay with it. It was really crazy because at the beginning I was like,
once I got the go-ahead from them I started to have thoughts about them about
how participation is going to happen here, am I going to get one twenty-minute
interview with Rob Wright and that's going to be it? How much access are they
going to give me? It could be very little, but then I had these fantasies like,
'what if they not only do an interview with me but also open up their archives
of things and I could see their stuff...?' All of that stuff has come true, x10.
It's been crazy. That's the long answer but the reason I wanted to do it is
that I thought it should exist, I wanted to see a book about Nomeansno, proper,
and so I thought I would take it on. My timing was really good, accidentally.
I've caught them all at a moment of sentimentality and, of course, Covid hit
weeks after them saying yes. That was odd too because it meant that everybody
was home, and bored, and lonely. So, I spent 2020 interviewing people. It just
kept getting bigger and bigger, and it got to the point I had to talk to
everybody. If I am going to do this, I had better do it right. I visited them
in the summer of last year. I was terrified of Rob Wright, having not known
him. I still remember picking up the phone the first time, just to introduce
myself, and I was so nervous, I really was. I thought, 'he's going to be such
an intense guy,' but he's actually – and you've heard his interviews he's just
such a nice, funny, laid back, dude. He is generous with his words, and that
makes all the difference … JL): Andy Kerr was the other mystery to
me. I had never met Andy. I saw Nomeansno with Andy a few times before he left
the band, but I didn’t know much about him. I knew he lived overseas, so he was
also a wild card for me. I didn’t know if he’d even want to take part in this
at all. I didn’t know if he was going to be nice to me. I reached out to him on
F******k and now we are like buddies. It’s crazy, I talk to him all the time. I
still haven’t even met him, [except] through Z**m – seen him, talked to him
many times – but, with Covid, I haven’t been able to get over to Amsterdam. So,
all four of them are fully participating in it. It’s pretty wild. With it
being on PM Press, have you talked about what it is going to look like, can you
say anything about your schedule, when you hope to deliver the manuscript? JL):
I'm still putting it all together – the text, the manuscript – and I have
been collecting literally thousands of photographs and posters. I'm going to
give the manuscript to PM Press in the fall, which could push into winter
depending on how much I can get done in the next few months, but I am getting
there. That is doable, but then it's going to be close to a year before it
comes out. When I give the manuscript to PM, they partner me with a copyeditor
and we go through the whole thing, make changes, cut things down, fill in the
gaps and all that. They also put me in touch with their graphics team to work
on the layout and fonts, and all the photographs. That takes six or seven
months to do. Then they will officially announce that there's a Nomeansno book
coming, probably around Christmas time. Then, in the spring – if everything
goes according to plan – there will be an opportunity to do a pre-order (maybe
closer to the summertime at this point). The way PM Press works, they use
Kickstarter to get an idea of how many copies they need to produce. It also
enables them to do special editions, limited packages, and things like that. So,
there are all these possibilities, but we don't know what it's going to look
like yet, it’s a little bit too early for that. There will likely be a
limited run of hardcover editions, maybe signed by the Wright brothers – we’ll
see how much we can do with that – and there could be some packages where it
comes with a poster, that type of thing. The book itself will be in people’s
hands later next year. I don’t want to give a date, of course, but I am
thinking the fall of 2022, maybe later fall. I know you were at one point
quite inspired by the look of the recent Poly Styrene book ‘Dayglo!’- do you
still imagine it looking that way? JL): Kind of. I can tell you the
size will be 9x11, the size of a standard piece of paper; full colour
throughout, so it's not going to have ten pages of photographs and the rest is
all text – it won't be like that. There will be photographs on every page, some
full-page stuff. As far as page numbers, I don't know, maybe 350-400, something
like that. I love the Poly Styrene book, I'd like it to be somewhat along those
lines. I like how it is clean and sharp. My book will be a lot more text-heavy,
there's a lot more content. There is another book about the band Dead Moon that
I really like, it's called Off The Grid – I love the style of it. That’s
another inspirational one for me. Before we started the interview we were
talking about the size of the project – and we can make this the last question
- did you imagine what a large undertaking the book project might be? JL):
I definitely did not understand how big of a project this was going to be. It
has been at times a little overwhelming. I think that's because Nomeansno has
always been a little bit mysterious about who they are and what they are about,
but when you dive into it, it's a thirty-five-year career with a band that did
probably 25-2800 shows – all over the world – with hundreds of bands, dozens of
different tour managers, road crew's and merch people, and then partners and
wives. It's a big story. The amount of stuff that's out there, that they
produced as far all the interviews they did, the promotional material, the gig
posters – I still see stuff now, a year and a half later that I have never seen
before. That happens weekly. 'They shared a bill with that band? I had
no idea!’ It’s an almost endless well of information. The story is really
interesting. They never hid it from anybody but I guess nobody ever really
wanted to find out before. The question was ‘did I know how big a project it
would be’ and the answer is no, not at all. When the book comes out, I’m going
to be using maybe 2% of the stuff that I have, so I have to figure out what to
do about that. For me personally, part of the mystique of Nomeansno was held
by the fact that they didn’t reveal who they were, or who was in the
band. It seemed they became a little bit more public after Dance of the Headless
Bourgeoisie … JL): Well, I have a question for you, as a fan. This
is something I have thought about quite a bit. Do you think there will be a
sense of disappointment to learn all of the actual stories, or do you think
people will appreciate it? I think – and I might be basing this on doing
those transcripts for you – that you are right, the story is really
interesting, and I think it demands a knowledge of who they are, as people. The
mystique is a historical fact that isn’t necessarily needed right now. When I
was growing up, that mystery that surrounded what they were saying, all the
messages that were coming to me from the packaging, from the production, from
the songs themselves, was really important. Will it be disappointing?
No, it’s a grand reveal. JL): I will say too that one thing I am not
going to be doing in this book – and some people might be upset by it – but
John and Rob are pretty adamant that their music and their lyrics are open to
interpretations. They are for the listener to decide what they mean. I’m not
having deep conversations with Rob about what he meant, because he doesn’t
really want to talk about that. To him, it’s not important what he thinks
it means. Have you listened to that podcast that Michelle and Matthew, and
Jordan? The Nomeansno Thing podcast? They take two Nomeansno songs and
they face them against each other, and they unpack the song as best they can.
It’s pretty good. I don’t agree with everything they say, but they are
doing that. I'm going to be talking about a lot of the music, some interesting,
quirky stories about recordings, and what some of it means I guess, but it's
not going to be diving in song-by-song, unpacking the meaning, because
Nomeansno doesn't want that. That would disappoint those guys if I did that.
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