Part 2: The Rock Years (see, told ya!)

At the tender age of nineteen, having developed my craft to the point where I felt I should leave Chilliwack before the neighbours formed a lynch mob to quell my incessant racket once and for all, I moved to the big city - Vancouver. Life in the fast lane; fast cars, fast women, big bucks and big excitement - yep, you guessed it, I didn't see any of that. I did however play in a few bands, did some touring, worked at various awful jobs, had a few nice girlfriends (not at the same time of course), made some great friends and generally had a blast.

Eventually I decided I should stop having so much fun and become serious about this music thing. I enrolled in the Bachelor of Music program at Douglas College in New Westminster. The real reason was that I was sick and tired of doing crappy jobs and wanted to sponge off a student loan for a while. But that's another story....

The scholastic ambition lasted a good two years. The thing with classical percussion was that it was very good for learning to count bars of rests but not quite as good for actually playing anything. That and the fact that two years of sponging off student loans was growing into a debt that looked decidedly unpleasant on paper. Come to think of it, it didn't look too rosy off paper either.

So, after a period of unemployment, I got a fairly good job delivering teeth for a dental lab. Actually I was delivering dental appliances but I like my version better. And I answered an ad in "The Georgia Straight", Vancouver's artsy paper. To be honest, I don't really remember the wording of the ad although I know there was something in there about a "chaotic pop group". Later, after deciding the ad wasn't rock 'n' roll enough for our image, it mutated into a rather more grandiose version: "Kick-ass double kick drummer wanted for heavy metal band. Must have hair, attitude and spandex". I had none of those things but I placed the call anyway. I met the boys in a downtown pizza place that one of the guitarists worked for. And thus a major turning point in my life occurred: I was the new drummer for "Sister Lovers". Yep, I know what you're thinking. "Wow, the Sister Lovers?!?" That's right kids, a band no one had ever heard of that later went on to be a band that ten or eleven people had heard of. I'm being a bit self-effacing here, to be honest. We had somewhat of a following in Vancouver. In fact, we were doing rather well before it all went pear shaped.

Sister Lovers, named after a Big Star album, consisted of Petey Wheatjeans (guitar, vocals) Kleinz (guitar, vocals, keyboards) J, (bass) et moi, (that would be drums and other noisy bits).

Our first album was a ten song cassette entitled "School Sux". Running the gamut from pop to punk, it was released in early 1993 to rave reviews in the music press. Many of the rave reviews were written by friends of ours, but that's beside the point. Containing SL classics like "Love Graffiti", "Hi Genie", "Gary & the Wolves", and "Nothin' Short of Nothing", a track that later appeared on Vancouver compilation CD "Hum Buzz Thing". Our next major release, on our own "Horrifying Circus Music" label, was "Paula Stop Pretending", a tribute to the late Paula Pierce of the Pandoras. This four song 7", recorded in May 1993 at Fir Street Studios in Vancouver, entered CiTR radio's singles chart at #8 and CFOX's indie chart where it reached #5. Shortly after we recorded a single for Australia's Zero Hour Records' tribute to "Paul Collins and the Beat". Our version of "Dreaming", from The Beat's 1982 "The Kids are the Same" album, was "accidently" leaked to CiTR where it went to #2 on their demo charts.

I should back track a bit here and mention that at some point in there (August 1992, but who's counting) I met my future ex-wife at a gig we played at Vancouver's notorious "Lunatic Fringe" club. It wasn't really notorious, however the resident soundman "Bozo" (because he was the splittin' image of that famous cartoon clown - and that's not a good thing) was well known to the local bands as being a bit of a....err.... how do I put this nicely? I can't. He was a knob. Anyway, after indulging herself in some solo billiards, a very attractive young lady by the name of Kimberley approached us with an unexpected and, I thought, rather original line: "I figured if I played with myself long enough someone would eventually come and join me". Gulp... Kim was there to see her roommate's band who was on the same bill as well as celebrating her 24th birthday. She and I struck up a rapport and the rest, as they say, is unrepeatable in front of a family audience.... Oh, and that's Kim playing the femme fatale voice-over on "Love Graffiti".

So, where was I before I so rudely interrupted myself? Oh yes.... fame and fortune. No, that couldn't have been it - we're talking about me here. Early 1994 saw the release of arguably the most ambitious and controversial project since the "Hindenburg", Germany's infamous intercontinental mass sucide bomb, or 'explodenzielballoonenstein', of 1937. "Video Graffiti", an epic 115 minute "mockumentary" with individual interviews, live footage, the videos we had done for three of our singles, and most importantly, a live animation sequence of J's infamous comic strip "Doubting Thomas" - based very loosely, I might add, on my cat "Thomas". I don't think he was as much a skeptic as he was aloof - a typical cat in other words.

To be continued....