By Mike Mettler

MM: Tell me how you first connected with Gord and when you guys started
working together.

DAVE: Back in 2000, my friend Dale was at his old recording studio, Gas
Station 1, in Toronto [the new Gas Station is on Toronto Island], and he said, "Man, I’ve got a session coming up. Gord Downie’s going to be
recording." I said, "Well, tell him if he needs a drummer to give me a
call." And Dale did. The next day, I got a call. And I thought that was really funny, because I just said it as a joke. The next thing I knew, I was heading out after Sunday dinner, getting ready to play with those guys.

MM: Didn’t know what you were getting yourself into, did you?

DAVE: No, I had no idea. It was just a lark, a total lark. I’d met Gord once or twice before, when I was playing in another band.

MM: Was that the Canada Day gig [in 1994 at Molson Park]?

DAVE: Yeah, that was when I was in The Rheostatics. We met through that. And then, basically, I didn’t know Gord otherwise. This is kind of a great way to meet great friends: through music.

MM: What was your relationship with Hip music? Were you into it?

DAVE: Well, yeah, you couldn’t live in Canada without being aware of The Hip. It’s kind of like not being aware that it snows in the wintertime. (MM laughs) I think I really got turned on to The Hip by way of Road Apples. At the time, I’d just finished a record with The Rheostatics, and we were going to see Rush play, because we’d done something with Neil Peart.

MM: That’s Whale Music-era we’re talking about, then. "Guns" was the song you did with Neil, right?

DAVE: Right. We did a spoken-word piece on that, and we did a duet on drums, which was really fun. That was a total gas. I couldn’t believe it. These are things dreams are made of.

Neil said, "We’re doing the show, come on out," so I saw The Hip open for Rush [at the December 1993 United Way Benefit at Maple Leaf Gardens]. I wasn’t a huge fan before then, but, man, when I saw them live, it just totally bowled me over. These guys, they took that joint over. Shook the boards beneath everybody’s feet; they were excellent. Kind of won me over as a fan.

MM: What’s your opinion of Gord as a songwriter and an artist? What’s his appeal?

DAVE: Well, the major appeal for me with Gord is that he’s a good man. He’s honest. He’s fiercely loyal, and he’s straight up. There are many people I know in the world who can play music who have technical ability that’s astronomical, but what I mostly care about is honesty and soul, and Gord’s got all that in spades. And he’s really got a lotta love that he puts into his work, and he cares about the people he plays with. And I respect that. Those are the kind of people I like to play with.

MM: It’s interesting how all of you guys really play very well together. It’s such an intuitive group. There’s such a live feel to what you do.

DAVE: The Dinner Is Ruined band, the trio — myself, Dale, and good old Dr.Pee — have been knocking the boards for years together. Basically, I could count the amount of rehearsals we’ve had in 7 years on my hand and one of my feet. A lot of what we do is off the cuff, and we feel really comfortable improvising and working with other people. We call Dr. Pee The Invisible Man. Sometimes it appears that he’s not there because he never really asks questions, but he just hears it and starts playing some fantastic stuff. Then you realize it’s him, and he’s completely assimilated and turned a great
Song into an even better thing.

Dale, he’s pretty fearless. He doesn’t have any technical knowledge on the guitar; you could tell him some chords, and he wouldn’t get them. But if you played him something, he would just get it by ear. He’s going to grab onto a note when you’re playing live or in the studio. And it doesn’t matter if your eyeballs are coming out of your head, or how happy it makes you feel; he’s going to hang on to that thing for dear life. We’re of like minds.

MM: It was great to see how you guys developed over the fourCoke Machine Glow shows that I saw — in fact, you wound up playing at least half of Nudes on that tour.

DAVE: Yeah, it was fun. We recorded most of the songs before the tour, and, geez, I almost wish we’d recorded most of them after the tour because the band had time to flesh them out even more. The tour was really an excellent occasion for all of us; it gave us a chance to stretch out and play on the edge with what we were doing. And everybody was feeling really inspired and positive about just going for it. You can get in a band and become staid,
And be an A-to-B band who just play songs from start to finish every night. Many people do that — do the same jokes, the same cues. Not this band. We were able to take the perimeters of songs and stretch them if we liked, and just improvise every night. That’s what I like.

MM: I remember you guys wandering out into the audience during your set at Fez [in New York City, August 1, 2001], and did your own thing at the end of the set, taking that tuba solo during "Yer Possessed."

DAVE: Oh yeah, that was a great night. We had a good time. When you get to play with friendly, good people, you can make good music. It’s all about intention. If it’s coming from the heart, you’re going to make something good. You can’t fool people. They don’t buy it. That’s the funny thing about bands. They get so worried about polishing, when what people really want is to hear from you.

MM: It’s so true. You can just Pro Tool the sheen onto something. There’s a reason why Neil Young resonates with a lot of people.

DAVE: Totally. You put on [Bob Dylan and The Band’s] The Basement Tapes or [Sly and the Family Stone’s] There’s a Riot Going On, and people get
excited. You can hear bands that play live who aren’t products of worrying about polishing a turd in the studio.

MM: I’m much more interested in hearing things real or live. That makes me think of "Pillform #2," where Gord laughs through the line, "Through these last ten thousand years." That’s a totally honest moment that could have been punched in, or he coulda easily said, "Let’s just go back and redo that."

DAVE: And some of those mixes are board mixes, right? There’s one where I can even hear Julie saying, "Is that it for my vocal?" And somewhere in the middle of a song you hear talking — I love that kind of stuff.

MM: At the end of "We’re Hardcore," Gord says, "Cool," and then somebody else says, "That ought to do it." That’s nice.

DAVE: (laughs) That was so fun to cut that tune. It was just at night. We just whipped into a jam, and Gord just grabbed it by the tail and slung it on the vocal, and everybody was switched around on the guitars. Dale was playing bass, and Dr. Pee just laid it down with the tambourine on the drums. We had such a good time. That was it. That’s rock and roll.

MM: And you got The Woodchoopers involved, right? [The Woodchoppers
Association is an improv-based "inclusive noise orchestra."]

DAVE: Yep. We got a bunch of The Woodchoppers and horn players come out. And it was the same deal. These are good people who know how to give up the goods. We had a really good time laying down the horns.

And that’s another thing about Gord: He’s willing to put his name on the line. Tuba was played with people who play their horn everyday for their living with people who just dabble in it. Because The Woodchoopers are people who come from all strata of existence. Anyway, we had a great time. It was a very positive experience.

MM: I want to get your impressions on some of the other Nudes songs.
"Figment" is a nice punk blast.

DAVE: "Figment" was funny, because when we first started working on the
record, Gord brought that one in and it was kind of a slow, jangling guitar piece. And after he left one day, Dale and I said, "Man, we should play that one like this," and then Dale just cranked up the amp and we picked up the tempo by about 40 beats. And we talked to Gord and said, "If we try it like this. . ." And he said, Yeah!" When we were in the studio cutting that track, there was just such excitement. We did two takes, but that one take — you know, we got into the booth, and that was, "That’s it!"

That take reminds me of things you might hear on [The Rolling Stones’] Exile on Main Street in regard to warts being all over it and funny mixes. I love the way it kicks through, the whole band. And Gord really kicks it through with his vocals.

One thing about all these tunes that’s important to remember: Underneath there, Gord’s playing rhythm — electric, acoustic, or nylon-string guitar — really straight-up parts. And they really glue the rhythm together with the drum kit with the bass as a rhythm section. He’s preparing a foundation for everybody to play off of. That’s very important, because we tried mixing some of them without it to see if we could use tracks to redo vocals, becausethere was bleed into all the mikes and things from the live room with the guitar mikes and the vocal mikes. But it just didn’t work, man. We needed that rhythm. It was essential.

MM: His sense of melody comes through so much on this record.

DAVE: Gord is an unfound jewel in a lot of ways. You work with a lot of
Bands in your life. You can get into a certain way or style or method. And that’s cool. When you take what you know from one thing and move it to another,then you can expand it. The man writes great tunes, and he particularly writes great melodies.

And he’s a great ballad singer, which is really neat. He can really work a melody. The first track, "Into the Night," oh man. That’s such a beautiful melody.

MM: The quality of his voice on there — that 3 a.m. throat-crack thing…

DAVE: It was a last take, and, I believe, the last track we recorded at theBath session. We just tracked it together with the drums and Gord. And later on, Dale laid on all of the accompaniment on top — the keys and guitars. For my money, it’s a totally awesome mix.

MM: And an interesting choice to start the album with a track like that. Gord told me that originally he thought of putting it at the end, and then he thought, "Well, that’s conventional thinking; why not put this first? What’s stopping me?"

DAVE: I like the way the record is sequenced. I think it’s a logical choice, believe it or not, because it’s a good stepping stone from the last record, which is a lot more ballad-based. And the juxtaposition between that and "Figment" is so big that it just bowls you over. I think it’s really smart.

MM: I call it the "punk family album" record.

DAVE: (laughs) There are other tracks that didn’t go on the record that are extremely gnarly. Like there’s a version of "Christmastime in Toronto" that’s like The Pogues, more like we were playing it live. And there’s another version of "11th Fret" that’s like PiL meets Miles Davis. It’s this crazy, crazy tribal thing. It’s really, really neat. I think Gord went for the flow on the record.

MM: I like that it’s a concise record. It has a nice, vinyl-album feel, very economical at 37 minutes.

DAVE: Yeah, yeah, I like it too. The sequence is really on the money, and there’s variety on the record. It’s asymmetrical, and I like that. Coke Machine Glow is a pretty record, and I like that a lot, but this record jumps more off onto what the band is like live. And it includes moments that you wouldn’t expect, because you’re hearing high-rock kind of stuff, then you get these ballads. Extemporaneous expositions that are pretty cool.

MM: When you go from "More Me Less You" to "We’re Hardcore" — I mean, you couldn’t get two more opposite approaches there. But it works nicely.

DAVE: I agree. It’s funny, because "More Me Less You" is one of my favorites on the record. And when I first heard it, I thought, "Man, this song is too long." And then Dale put a couple of things on it, like a little drum improvisation. And that’s funny in itself because Gord said, "Do you want to do some playing on top of it?" while we’re at Bath. So I said, sure, because that’s what I do; I improvise. So I laid a whole bunch of cymbals on the drums. And it’s minimalist, right, like painting with little sounds coming up. Halfway through the track, the assistant engineer walks into the room. And I whisper to him, "Hey, man, what are you doing?" He says, "Oh, I’m just, uh, changing a mike around to get the sound of the bass drum." And I’m like, "Man, I’m doing a take." And he said, "Oh. We thought you were just screwing
your cymbals back onto the stands." (laughs) I started laughing, and he went out of the room, and I finished the take.

MM: I like the cacophony on "Steeplechase" where you guys build it up. . .

DAVE: Ooh, that was fun. Fun, fun. I’ve been doing that since I was a kid. And with Dale, it’s really easy to do. You just picture something in your mind and just play it. There’s even more on tape that didn’t go on the mix. At the end, there’s a huge symphony on the way out of noise. I thought, ok, let’s play the horse race coming around the racetrack from the distance. And Dale sounded like he was foreshadowing some sort of disaster, and then everybody played it like the races.

MM: I liken it to the buildup at the end of [The Beatles’] "A Day in the Life" meeting The Velvet Underground’s "Black Angel’s Death Song" — a nice crash of those two furious moments.

DAVE: Yeah, cool. And then all of the horns in there. I like Jeff Burke, who played the oboe at the end. Perfect. Jeff’s like that. Such an amazing player. You can get him to play everything from Bartok to Led Zeppelin to Frank Zappa to Thelonious Monk on his bassoon. He plays through a pitch transposer. He can lay down anything. He’s super-heavy.

MM: What other instruments did you wind up playing on the record? You
mentioned tuba earlier. . .

DAVE: I play the [Hammond] B-3 bass pedals on "More Me Less You." What else? Lots of singing. Lots of dinkedy-doo with percussion.

MM: I like the choice of putting both "Pillform #2" and "Pillform #1" on there. That was a great call.

DAVE: Right on. Dale pushed for using both "Pillform"s, and that was a great idea. It was essentially the first thing we recorded. It was recorded from the ground up. Basically, Gord had this melodic poem with some chord changes,and he was interested in making a record the way The Dinner Is Ruined make records. And we try all manner of things. On this one, we laid down a strip of a drum track that would suit the intensity of the lyrics, really tribal. And then Gord laid the vocal over, and then Dale laid all the instruments on top, and just [makes boom noise]. (laughs) Dale has a way of seeing depth in sound on mixing and placing instruments that are unconventional, and they create a certain sort of power. And then he took samples of a bagpipe-player friend of ours, manipulated the samples, and made this crazy kind of "Tomorrow Never Knows" solo at the end.

MM: Josh told me he really felt a connection with you the first time you started playing together. I wanted to get the flipside of that, how you feel working with him.

DAVE: I’ve known Josh over the years, playing bills together and hanging out at gigs. Playing with him. . . he’s such a patient person, very encouraging, willing to try anything. And that’s the hallmark of a good musician, in my mind. He’s got the interest in making something better and not hanging on to something just because it was an idea he had.

Particularly on Nudes, when he started playing more bass, man, it was like I had met an old friend I’ve known all my life. It’s so easy to play with him. Recently, we’ve made recordings with other people as a rhythm section and it just feels really comfortable.

Everybody in the band has a sense of humor. The nice thing is that, through music, I’ve made three new friends — Julie, Gord, and Josh. It’s a great way of making friends. That’s why I like playing music. It’s like a passport to meeting people.

MM: You guys will be taking this one out on the road more than last time around.

DAVE: Yeah, I’m looking forward to it. It’s a great thing for Gord to do his thing outside, and bring back more things to The Hip in return. It feeds the whole big machine. I look at it like Neil Young. He goes out with other people, and then he goes back to the Horse [Crazy Horse, that is]. The main thing is to keep it fun. That’s where all the treasure is going to be found.

MM: Dave, I can’t imagine you not being fun on stage. I’ve never seen you not have fun performing.

DAVE: Thanks. That’s a compliment. It’s like going to the temple. No matter how you’re feeling, you try to make it a cathartic, ecstatic moment. Otherwise, you might as well be punching out tires. That’s fine, too, but it’s not for me.

Once you’ve tasted a certain kind of life, it’s hard to go back. To quote hockey player Michel Goulet after playing with and winning with Team Canada, "It’s hard to go back flying with the turkeys when you’ve been soaring with the eagles." (both laugh)

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