"No matter what, no matter where": an interview with Bob Bryden

Have you ever seen Almost Famous? In it, Cameron Crowe's character is told to never make friends with the band he's interviewing.

I can't say it's advice I've put into practice in my own life, and Bob Bryden is one example. I first met him when I interviewed him about his experiences in the Hamilton music scene, but that's only one layer of his life story. Bob's history includes psych-prog cult bands Christmas and Reign Ghost; work helping youth and families; and performing gospel tunes in jails, coffee shops, and old folks homes, and much, much more.

One of the great things about becoming friends with people you already see as interesting is that the conversation can just keep going. It doesn't end when you hit the "stop" button on the tape recorder. Bob's the kind of person that always leaves me with something to think about after we've talked. During our most recent hangout, the seed he planted was from a sign he found in a  walkway garden New York City: "Keep it wild. Keep on the path."

For some reason, it got me to thinking about an interview I did with Bob back in 2007 for Hamilton's H Magazine. The article I was working on was to support Bob's solo album Polaroid Verite, a record that heavily references everyone's favourite Steel City, Hamilton, and one street in particular, James Street North. The conversation skewed a lot towards the influence our geography has on us personally, and creatively.

When I started reading through the interview, it synched up with a lot of other things I've recently been thinking about and talking about. A big one is that everyday life is part of the creative process. So often we talk about creative process as if it's something separate from the rest of our time, something to schedule and set aside and turn on and off. When you start to do that you forget that just getting out there and living your life is the most important thing you can do. That's what will help you shape your projects the most.

When I re-read the interview, I found that it not only taps into a tough but fascinating time in one musician's life, but I also found it to read like a live-off-floor creative manifesto.

I wanted to share it all with you. Hopefully Bob won't mind.

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Liz Worth: Can you ever truly leave a place that you’ve lived in?

Bob Bryden: I was born in Ottawa, lived in Ottawa till I was twelve, then spent ten years in Oshawa, then a few years in Toronto and traveling around. I spent a year in Vancouver, ten years in Hamilton, ten years in Burlington. I’ve done Ontario – can I please leave now?

It’s convoluted. It’s conflicted because it’s love/hate with the places you’re from – in my case it’s places. I mean, I think it produces – I would never recommend people be transient when they have children, really, because I don’t know where I’m from, which has worked for me and against me all my life. I feel like there are times when I love all of these places and there are times when I say, "I hate all of these places, get me out of here."

But I think it’s limitation, and I’m really trying to break out of some limiations. With the new CD and with everything I plan to do from this point, I really do want to be a citizen of the world. I think I’ve made a world-class product so I want to take it there. I don’t want to be negative or diss the places that have been supportive, obviously not. What was the question again?

LW: Can you ever leave a place?

BB: No – my answer would be no, never. And the people who say they can or do are in denial, because wherever they are, someone’s going to walk down the street from wherever they are. I do think it’s very important to be reconciled with your past, but escape it? Never.

I mean, that’s part of what I’m doing and why I’m doing everything I’m doing right now is because there was a time when I denied it, a time when I denied whole sections of it.

I’m back, and I feel really good about that.

Those periods of denying who you are is really, really complex because I think most of us struggle with who we are. And I think if we’re healthy we come up with some definitions and then we try to live those definitions out.

"It’s one thing to romanticize hell, to live in a rock n’ roll fantasy of hell. It’s another thing to feel like you're really there."

LW: So why did you choose to go back to James Street in Hamilton for Polaroid Verite?

BB: I had originally chosen two images for the album's front and back cover. They were very light.

I submitted these images to my production team. These guys say no – and to qualify their position, these are people who have put in as much time on the project as I have. They have a vested interest on many levels – creatively and even financially, let alone the time. So they said no.

I said, "okay, fine, but there’s some light stuff on this album, isn’t there?" And they’re saying, and this is another quote – "even when you’re light, you’re intense," which is a complete contradiction in terms. Even when I’m light, I’m intense – okay.

I said, "okay, you want intense, let’s go for intense." So then I rounded up Kyle Weir. I just love this guy. He’s just wonderful. He’s the darling of the Hamilton scene photography-wise. Everything he does is for love. He’s a maniacal photographer.

Anyway, I tell Kyle, "you know what we’ll do? We’ll go to James Street North." Just over half the album is written about and inspired  by James Street North. Well, it turns out that we get there on a cold winter night – really cold. It was in December. We’re under duress technically because his camera can’t stay out very long. He’s got to get his camera back in the car. We do this commando raid on James Street North from Wilson Street up to Barton, which is right where I used to live.

So we get out and we only have about three or four minutes at a time. So we choose our targets, we choose where we’re going to be and what we’re going to do, and we get out there in the darkness of James Street, in the alleys and then right out in front, just right outside the door of the place where I used to live above a store. It used to be a stereo store. I don’t know what it is now, a pool hall and something else.

Anyway, we get out, we start snapping away, taking pictures, runnig here, running there, back in the car, run in, run out. A little while into this process Kyle says to me, "I don’t know what came over you. I just don’t know what came over you. Once you got into the flow of being there, something just took over. You just seemed to have a whole different persona or something." So I said, "oh, I know what came over me – James Street came over me and I was remembering."

I was feeling it again.

See, now it’s Jamesville. They’ve cleaned it up. They’ve literally done a renovation of the street. It’s all very pretty now. There are art galleries. Well, back when I was doing my James Street crawl it was not from one art exhibit to another. It was from one degradation to another. It was awaful there in a sense. I mean and I was doing the whole Bohemian thing.

I wasn’t totally morose about it, because there was the bohemian element, but it was a rough neighbourhood, a seriously rough neighbourhood. Cut to the chase – the pictures are a reflection of what the street was to me and the epxeirence there, and that’s why it looked so severe. It was a severe time. You just listen to "Leopard Skin Cadillac" and there you have it. That's one of those songs that writes itself in the morning.

"My standard rap at the time was, 'I don’t know how I got from the pinnacle to here, but here I am'."

All of the lyrics [on Polaroid Verite] relate to events. Three doors down from me, on the other side of the street, somebody barricaded someone into their apartment above a store and set it on fire and the person inside died. That was in the headlines.

If I kept my window open in the summer - you know there’s those lines "about girl shuffles, moanin’, drunks on her heels, wheezin’ and groanin’, that’s how it feels." People were being chased down the street. And this is probably like every day on Broadview or every day on the Danforth [weird aside: this interview was done in 2007, the year I moved to Kensington Market and was still a die-hard westender. I now live in the east end neighbourhood Bob mentions in this interview] but for me at the time, I was a middle class kid and the whole thing was, how did I get to this place? How did I get from the stage at Massey Hall and having Jazz and Pop magazine – this was a really high profile magazine – saying my band was the next Led Zeppelin to being where I am?

So my standard rap at the time was, "I don’t know how I got from the pinnacle to here, but here I am." It was pretty rough. I don’t have romantic things to say about James Street.

And then rumour was that it had the highest homicide rate in Canada at the time I lived here. Rough neighbourhood, rough times, rough song for me.

Ironically there is a lighter song on the album that’s also a James Street Song that’s called "Say Sleep Tight To Me." If you look at the words there’s some deep stuff in there, conceptually. It talks about parents who eat their children before they get old, that’s pretty heavy. There’s a lot of stuff about abuse and things in there, but it’s also from a real life experience. There was a friend, a girl, who would call me and literally say "sleep tight" to me. She knew what I was going through and she’d call me.

It’s one thing to romanctize hell, to live in a rock n’ roll fantasy of hell. It’s another thing to feel like you're really there. Anyway, "Say Sleep Tight to Me" is a real experience because it used to cheer me up.



LW: Did you come out of James Street a different person?

BB: Most definitely. It’s easy to be brave from a distance. I still don’t consider myself street savvy, to be honest with you. I still consider myself a displaced middle class kid going "life sure is messed up – when you get downtown." (Laughs)

Anything you do in your life that wakes you up, smartens you up, makes you a little tougher...I’ve found out in the last few years that I’m nowhere near as tough as I thought I would be. Next to James Street the hardest thing I’ve had to do is a have normal job – semi-normal.

Changed me, yeah. You know, thank you for your first question – can you ever leave. Definitely not. The more I go on, the more I realize you can’t leave. You can never leave. I just believe you can build upon, you can add upon. But I do believe you can restore foundations. If you’ve been damaged and the foundation’s faulty, I think you can go back and restore it. But leave? No. It’s always there. James Street is always there.

It seems to me other people can move on. I don’t. It’s all there, all the time, but it’s right here. It’s that close to the surface, whatever it was.

Mind you, I don’t go out of my way to forget it, either.

LW: So how much would you say geography influences art?

BB: That’s really cool – how does geography influence art?

Everything is about where you’re located and how that interacts with your sensitivity. So what is an artist? A person who notices things.

I always qualify that because I deal with a lot of people who aren’t artists and don’t get any of it. It’s not always fun to be the one who notices things. It’s no fun being the one who notices things, and then the biggie is that people around you definitely don’t like it when somebody notices things. They don’t like it when somebody’s noticing the ills of a situation, the toxic ills in a situation or a person or a family or whatever.

So yeah, people don’t like what you’re noticing and then you’re anathema, you’re outcast. What was the whole `60s about? Noticing things. What was the `70s about? Noticing things. Every revolution is about somebody notices something and doesn’t like what they see and decides they’re gonna do something about it, no matter how shallow or how deep. When I say shallow that’s the fashion realm. When I say deep it’s the sociological and spiritual change that’s affected. It’s a war. You tend to go to war with your environment.

Art reacts against and interacts with its geography. The geography of James Street, it is a phase to me, ’83 to’87, so it wasn’t my whole life, although I'm not exaggerating when I say I probably had 50 songs from that street. There are songs that aren’t on this new album that I would love to do someday.

"An artist is going to produce no matter what, no matter where."

LW: Would you do the whole thing over again?

Now you bring up a heavy concept. It’s a concept I’m labouring over these days, and that’s the concept of regret. I saw another album by another artist somewhere that was called No Regrets and I just look at that and I go, "you gotta be kidding."

I think anyone without regret is either an absolute jerk with no feelings or totally in denial. Your conscience is this functioning, flowing mechanism within you that somehow operates within your brain and your emotions that tells you right and wrong and all that kind of stuff.

I am riddled with regrets. I don’t let them destroy my life. I don’t let them cripple me from moving forward. That would be stupid. I have tons of regrets. I regret tons of choices I made, decisions I made: "that was stupid, what was I thinking?"

It’s not so much would I – it’s completely hypothetical because I can’t. I can’t change any of that.

You talk about geography, the artist. If he or she is a real artist, he or she is going to produce no matter what, no matter where. So I’m really glad for what I produced on James Street. I think it was probably one of the dumbest decisions of my life to go live there, and I was probably living in a poverty mentality.

Now that’s a whole other issue, to have a poverty mentality. It’s one thing to be born into poverty, it’s another to be dragged into it. I was dragged into it. What person doesn’t look at some choices and say, "I wish I hadn’t done that?" Well, yeah. I think if Polaroid Verite were to become a hit album and pave the way for five more albums like it, I would say, "I loved James Street. Let’s go back to James Street and live it again and this time bring the entourage."

No, it doesn’t happen. I don’t regret any of the art. To me life is a songwriting lesson, so anything that helps that is good.

And it’s there, I can’t deny that. I was glad to get out of James Street. I was glad when that phase ended, and you know what? I don’t really know.

"A real artist is going to produce no matter what, no matter where."

If being an artist is partially about geography but probably more so about your sensitivity level, you can create anywhere. You can create anything anywhere. I can get as much inspiration out of a look on the street. A fleeting image on the street can create a whole song. I don’t have to live there. I’m glad I did, though. I can’t change it and I’m glad for what I created out of it, but I think I can write songs about those kinds of things without experiencing them to the same extent.

LW: What do you think of the gentrification happening in the James Street neighbourhood?

BB: A big part of me rests in Hamilton, but I don’t know. I have a song called "Bow Tie Charlie" and Bow Tie Charlie was an actual person who lived in the dumpster in the lane beside my house.

There was an alley beside my apartment and then right beside the alley was Christ Church Cathedral, this massive Anglican cathedral where the rich people would come on Sunday mornings. I don’t think anybody in the neighbourhood went to the church, which is insane. This church would fill up on Sunday mornings and I’d just go, "where do you people come from? You’re not from the neighbourhood."

Meanwhile, right in the alley, next to the church Bow Tie Charlie lives in the dumpster. There’s the rub. There’s the problem.

I think I gave Bow Tie Charlie some money sometimes. So dichotomy, schism, conflict, conflicted, paradox, Hamilton – very, very strange place.

In a good way.

Bob Bryden can be found at http://www.bobbryden.com/