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How Low can you go?
Punk rock veterans recall band breakup and the depths of addiction
John Kendle
Ten-and-a-half years ago the Lowest of the Low played a
show in Winnipeg at the Junkyard, supporting their just-released
album Hallucigenia.
It was a blinder, too — singer/guitarist Ron Hawkins
had green paint in his hair and the hundred or so people
in attendance had a well-lubricated good time, pogoing,
pseudo-slamming and singing along to the likes of Beer,
Graffiti, Walls…, Penodono’s Hand and Life Imitates
Art, LOTL’s ode to veteran Vancouver punk Art Bergmann.
In the dressing room after the gig, Hawkins, guitarist Stephen
Stanley, bassist John Arnott and drummer Dylan Alexander
were gracious and welcoming — but there was palpable
tension in the air as well. At the time I thought that might
have been due to the squalor of the old Portage Village
Inn or the fact I was hammered and ranting and making them
uncomfortable.
Turns out it was neither. As Hawkins recalls, the members
of the band were barely speaking to each other after a year
or more of creative tension, substance abuse and ego clashes.
They broke up shortly afterward.
“We were pretty sick people and pretty sick of each
other,” says Hawkins, sitting on his balcony in Toronto.
“We were way too medicated to really sit and talk
to each other.
“Addiction and abuse is really insidious and can really
sneak up on you, to the point that we became people that
we really weren’t either before or after that period.
“Some of us might have died or overdosed or gone to
jail. Personally I feel that I just snuck through to the
end of the tunnel,” he continues.
“But we’re happily all back in control of our
lives now.”
They’re also back together and just released a new
album, Sordid Fiction, which is, thankfully, not some lame
recording cobbled together to support a money-grubbing tour.
No, the new disc crackles and bubbles with the same energy
and wry, slice-of-life tales that populated Hallucigenia
and its predecessor, Shakespeare My Butt (which sold 10,000
copies as an indie release in 1991).
Stanley and Hawkins are singing and writing as they once
did, and producer Ian Blurton has give the tunes both the
crunch and the space they require.
The Clash-esque punkers initially regrouped in 2000 for
a reunion tour that yielded a live album. Buoyed by that
success, the band talked about working together permanently.
Hawkins, who released four albums while the group was apart,
says he wanted to be sure LOTL would be as good as he remembered.
“We could perpetually go out on the hamster wheel
and do our old songs, like we did for one-and-a-half years,
or we could say ‘Let’s give it a go’ and
dip our toe in the pool and see if we can get it back together,”
he says. “Our egos are more in check, so it’s
just 1994 again — minus all the choking each other.”
The newly constituted group features Hawkins, Stanley and
Alexander with new bassist Dylan Parker and multi-instrumentalist
Lawrence Nichols. The songs, by both Hawkins and Stanley,
are poetic yet reality based — a style that is the
result of years and years of writing for Hawkins.
“I was in a punk band called Popular Front in the
’80s that was a real Marxist punk rock band that wrote
about politics with a big P.
“But there’s only so far down that sort of thing
can emotionally resonate for people,” he says.
“I began to write more journalistically, to tell stories
in microcosm that still resonate in an abstract way.
“That felt more like art to me, in that it resonated
more in my heart and in my soul.”
For more info see our What’s
Up entertainment listings.
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