Dead Bob proves that punk is still alive and kicking
For those who were around the nascent Vancouver Island-based punk scene of the 1980s and 1990s, there are few bands as iconic or as long-running as NoMeansNo.
Started in a Victoria basement by brothers John and Rob Wright in 1979, the band released 12 full-length records, toured for decades, found a strong following in Europe and was inducted into the Western Canadian Music Hall of Fame before officially retiring in 2016.
Throughout the years, drummer John Wright has been busy with other musical endeavours, including The Hanson Brothers, and a post-NoMeansNo project that involved writing an album for a Berlin-based band called Compressorhead — who performed with robots.
However this spring — to the joy of NoMeansNo fans — Wright emerged from relative obscurity to announce he had formed a new band called Dead Bob, and released Life Like, a full album of new music.
Now at the age of 62, Wright has formed a band and will tour the album to Nanaimo with a gig at the Terminal Bar on Nov. 25 at 9 p.m. before moving on to shows in Victoria, Vancouver, Robert’s Creek and Powell River.
I sat down with Wright to hear about what the Vancouver Island and West Coast punk rock scene was like in the 1970s and 1980s, how this new album came into being, what it’s like living in the remote village of Lund (pop. 287) and what it feels like to hit the road again after a long hiatus.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Julie Chadwick: So were you up late last night playing music?
John Wright: Not last night, but it was the first three shows of this whole project over the weekend [in Kamloops, Nelson and Kelowna] and then Sunday was about a 12 hour drive home. I suppose my voice is a little bit scratchy because it’s the first time singing like that in about 10 years or so.
JC: So how was the reception? Did people seem pretty excited?
JW: Oh, yeah. Very excited folks (laughs). The show had been moved from Vernon to Kelowna, and we were on the floor in this place where there was no stage. But apparently, there was some fellow behind me weeping. So the crowd was very, very excited, which is great, it’s very gratifying.
JC: What kind of audience ages are you seeing at the shows?
JW: We’re playing in bars so not super young but I’m kind of curious. We’ll see how this goes in terms of what age group and what the crowds are like, because I don’t really have any desire to be a punk rock nostalgia act.
Dead Bob is, of course, born out of NoMeansNo and that’s where I come from, that’s my pedigree, my reputation, which is all awesome. And not to disregard that, but at the same time, it’s new music. It’s a new thing. And I wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t new music and a new project for myself. That said, we still throw in some NoMeansNo songs in there because 90 per cent of these audiences are because they’re NoMeansNo fans.
We play to the punk rock crowd, and what inspired us to be a band back in 1979 was all the punk rock music coming out in the States and England and Canada. My first show was D.O.A., it was a big inspiration to play.
We were certainly not into the strict genre, we were all over the place musically. But it was all very intense and very loud. And non-commercial. The punk rock crowd in Victoria was a total mixed bag, it was really — anything goes. That’s what I really liked as well, it was very inclusive in that respect. There wasn’t a rock and roll hierarchy, which was always incredibly ridiculous.
JC: Was it inclusive and diverse in terms of sound? And do you think that was because it was a smaller scene, so it kind of had to be more accepting?
JW: Oh, yeah, it was. When I say inclusive, it was also, paradoxically, exclusive. In the sense that it was very small and like, ‘Hey, we know a secret and no one else knows about it.’ Punk rock was kind of like that.
Victoria was a small insular town, always has been, always will be, the center of the universe. It’s what drove me out of there actually, the idea that the whole world revolves around Victoria. But like a lot of small towns, it produced really good music, because it was DIY as well.
It’s not just a group of people getting into diverse music, you had to create your own scene, because nightclubs weren’t ever going to have you play. So in that sense, it developed a community of people. Punk rock is kind of like that.
A friend of mine Jason Schreurs just wrote a book, Scream Therapy. He’s from the Island and he hits the nail on the head, that punk rock is more than just a new style of music, it was born out of this community.
It became political, and is fairly lefty, but there’s the aspect that the people who put on the shows are just as important as the people who were playing in the shows. And people coming to the shows were the ones that everyone knew. The show only happens because people come, as a community and it grew and evolved out of that.
I think hip-hop is kind of the same way, though in some ways it became far more commercial. Punk rock did a little bit as well — grunge kind of changed things and it became more like pop music — but that communal feeling still remains. People look out for each other.
JC: One of the things [CBC music host] Grant Lawrence said, when he recently did a bit of a retrospective on you, was that this new album takes a bunch of the different genres that you’ve explored over the years and kind of mashes them all together. Would you say that that’s accurate?
JW: Yeah, for sure. This project was born out of just a whole pile of back catalogue of songs and ideas, half-finished, in various forms and stages of completion.
After retiring it wasn’t like I didn’t write or think about music or do musical stuff. I was, and with COVID, like a lot of people, I suddenly had a lot of time on my hands and [decided] to revisit some of these songs I’ve been working on over the years.
I had a place to put my drum set up where I live, which hadn’t happened for three years, so I started recording live drums to a lot of demos and songs. It was just kind of a vanity project to fill my time, so it started falling together that way. I was pleased with what was coming up, and started finishing the songs.
I became more engaged in getting an album together, and decided that Bob was going to be a good name and thought, I’ll just make an announcement: ‘Hey, I recorded an album and I’m going to put it out on Bandcamp.’ And Facebook lit up. It was like, ‘Holy shit, people are excited.’ So that’s what I did, and it was released on April 21.
JC: So is there a reason you didn’t bring your brother Rob into the project? You guys often collaborate.
JW: My brother’s 100 per cent retired, he doesn’t play music anymore and takes no interest in it. Actually, he recently picked up a guitar and was teaching himself how to fingerpick, listening to a lot of John Fahey. But music is in his past, and he has a young family, he’s gonna turn seventy and his daughter’s like, 11 (laughs).
JC: When it comes to continuing to write new material, where does your creativity come from, is it part of living in a remote community like Lund?
JW: To some degree, that plays a part I think. Just because I didn’t play in NoMeansNo for 10 years, it wasn’t as though I wanted to retire and get out of music. It was more like, okay, this project has come to an end. And then I immediately got involved with [animatronic robot band] Compressorhead, and started to write a lot of music.
What happened is, I had a marriage that dissolved in 2013. I had two children, and they were getting to be teenagers, and I found myself unable to afford to live in Vancouver, and have room for two kids. So I made that decision to move out of the Lower Mainland and come up to Lund, and found myself living alone for the first time in my life. I’ve never lived in my own place, so I had a lot of time on my hands and I just started to write. Some of the stuff that’s on the album like One of You, for instance, was written at that time.
Shortly thereafter I was contacted by the robots, which I worked on for the next three years. So there was a huge creative burst, and it was partly being out in a beautiful, somewhat isolated place by myself. But also the circumstances of my life put me in that position. And then I guess COVID really was another little burst where I felt the same way.
JC: How is it for you, touring again?
JW: At 62, it’s getting a little late in the game to be a touring musician. I just did this weekend and it’s like, holy fuck, okay, I remember this — no sleep. Oh and guess what, there’s no monitors so I can’t hear a thing. So I know what this grind is. I’m extremely familiar with this world, and there is no fucking way in hell I would do this if I was starting from square one (laughs).
But I’m not — and I’ve got a built-in audience out there that’s waiting to hear it. It’s not huge, but it’s there. I have all this old network of people who are excited to work with me and get things rolling again, so I’m not starting from scratch by any stretch. It’s not taking over from where NoMeanNo left off, when you’re starting a band you’ve got to be out there and you’ve got to be something, you’ve gotta be great.
But so far so good. People are super stoked, and like I said earlier, it’s obviously born out of NoMeansNo but the whole sound is different. The lineup is different, these are different new songs, which I think are strong and stand up on their own. The next album’s already done and I’ve got a third one already sketched out.
JC: No way, that’s amazing.
JW: I just had so much music. And now I’m working with other prolific, great songwriters, so we haven’t even begun to see what, organically, we can do together.
