This Interview Is Broken

06/16/09 10:14am

by Matt Littlefair (CHARTattack)

Music biographies are usually a post-mortem exercise — either the band has ceased to exist or they've ceased to exist in the world of creative relevance (like The Rolling Stones, U2 or the Backstreet Boys).

So when news emerged of a book chronicling the inception and growth of Broken Social Scene, a lot of people asked if this signaled the demise of a truly groundbreaking musical act and Toronto institution. They've been prone to declaring their obsolescence on more than one occasion, so it seemed plausible.

Fear not. As Stuart Berman, the author of This Book Is Broken, says, the band are in fact a "going concern," which means we thankfully haven't heard the end of Broken Social Scene just yet.

Berman, a long-time friend of the band, took what seemed like a daunting task — wrangling a group whose membership is, we'll say, "fluid," and composed a history of both Broken Social Scene and the community they helped foster.

Berman, an accomplished music journalist and editor at Eye Magazine, caught up with CHARTattack on a sunny Sunday afternoon and was a little worse for wear after a respectable Saturday night. Here is what he had to say, unedited and in full.

This Book Is Broken will be feted this Wednesday (June 17) at The Courthouse as part of Arts & Crafts/NXNE showcase.

CHARTattack: Given that you're friends with all these guys, what kinds of challenges did that present while you were putting the book together?
Stuart Berman: I think it was trying to balance being a friend versus being a reporter as well. I think the book touches on it.

You know, it hasn't been a totally smooth happy ride all the time. For the most part, it's been a happy success story, but there were personal issues that arose along the way and you have to gauge how comfortable people are talking about stuff. Some people are very comfortable and open about it, and some people chose not to [be].

Even though it's sort of this post-Twitter era where everyone's lives are on display 24/7, when it comes down to it people had reservations about putting their life in a book as a permanent record. Because the other thing is, as much as there have been the odd internal issue over the course of time, things tend to work themselves out, which is a testament to the fact that these people have been friends for the better part of 10 or 20 years in some cases. They find a way to deal with it.

While it seems like drama at some point in the story, give it six months or a year and it'll work itself out. It's just a question of how personal people want to get. I'm not Kitty Kelley writing an expose on Frank Sinatra's sex life or whatever. These are my friends, they have lives, I'm not going to play the role of ambulance chaser and try and sensationalize their lives and they aren't the kind of people that want that. They want their music to be heard and loved by a lot of people, but they're not so much into the celebrity aspect of being a musician.

What's the response been like from the band?
For the most part, it's very positive. Like I was saying, some people do feel weird about their lives being canonized. Particularly because they're at a point in their career when they're a going concern, they're not necessarily interested in looking back. They still feel like they have a lot of records left to be made.

A lot of people asked me when I contacted them about the book, "Really?! What? Now?" I've been saying it seems like a long time ago. So much has happened to the band and the culture at large that 2002 seems like this quaint, bygone era. For the most part, people really love it as a sort of time capsule of their lives at that moment. They feel like it's a really well put together document both visually and orally, but there is that sort of hesitation to close the chapter on something that they feel is still being written.

At one point towards the end of the book, Kevin Drew says that when you tell a story, it inevitably involves somebody else so he doesn't do that for that very reason. Was that something you ran up against when you were putting this together because, like you said, they're so private and don't ascribe to this "celebrity" aspect of their music?
Kevin said that at a time when some personal issues were coming to the fore and he didn't want to you know... And they've never liked to do the traditional thing in terms of what a singer-songwriter does. You know, put their feeling literally into song. You can sense the emotion behind it but they don't like to spell it out for you and say, like, "My baby left me. Woe is me."

Justin Peroff had a quote recently where he said that as a band they know what they don't want to do more than they want to do. They have pretty sensitive bullshit detectors because they've all been making music for so long, but yeah, I think it's out of respect for other people in the band. They don't want to say something in the press in the heat of the moment that they're going to be held to for the rest of their lives. Because they're friends they know how to work through their issues, but it's something they want to do privately rather than in the press or through blogs.

Like Kevin just did his first blog post on the Broken Social Scene site. A lot of it was a post against Twitter and people losing touch with themselves even though we have more ways than ever to stay in touch it's a sort of disconnecting feeling. He's a bit of Luddite; he barely uses email. He's the kind of guy who if he wants to talk to you, he calls you.

How does that work, because at this point he's doing mostly A&R stuff at Arts & Crafts right?
Yeah, and it's sort of an old fashioned role. You go down to the club to see a band, go see them again and again over the course of six months and that's how you know a band's got it. It's not just going onto a band's MySpace and listening to their four demos and going, "Ah, they kind of sound like Crystal Castles. Let's do this."

You stopped writing about the band for all intents and purposes almost five years ago now. What spurred you to do this now?
When you're writing for a local weekly regularly, because the people that read those papers tend to be really involved in the scene and very aware of who is getting press and how much press, I didn't want Eye to turn into the BSS newswire, even though people think we became that anyway.

It's just by virtue of the fact that everyone in the band is putting out tons of records all the time. It's sort of a double-edged sword. It's like you can write about a band, they get popular and then stop writing about them and people accuse you of, "Oh, you're abandoning them. They're not good enough for you anymore," or you can keep covering a band as they evolve and it becomes, "Oh, that's all you write about."

If you look back at the sort of stuff I was reading while I was growing up, certain publications became identified with certain bands. If you read Creem Magazine in the '70s it would be all about Iggy Pop and Lou Reed. NME being a weekly paper, they sort of track their bands and they overdo it a lot of the time, but at least they make it seem like something you should care about and get interested in.

I felt like my time at Eye as Music Editor, those were the bands that we became identified with, as they were getting bigger. On a personal note, I realize that I wasn't going to be able to be objective, not that I ever really was with these guys. Just for the sake of not repeating ourselves all the time, I deferred.

The last thing I wrote about BSS in Eye was in 2003 and then I did a feature in Magnet in, like, 2005, but I figured that was in America so that was different. And then the book idea came up around 2007 and by that point enough had happened, the story had evolved enough that I felt like I could revisit it.

Was it your idea or the band and you as group?
It was actually Cam Drew, Kevin's Brother. He works in publishing and has a relationship with House Of Anansi and through conversations they had, House Of Anansi decided they'd be interested in a book about BSS, but there was no idea what form it would take. So Cam, Kevin and I had meetings, because Cam approached me and asked if I'd be interested in taking this on. So we had meetings, but we had no idea what this book was going to be.

Kevin was very adamant from the start that it be as much about the community as the band. Kevin is the one who is most sensitive to the idea of canonizing their history and sort of making this a permanent record. So he was really adamant — and he's been adamant in every interview he's done since 2001 — that the community is what inspires him and that's what he feeds off of and that's what made the band what it is.

So we went through various iterations, all sort of scrap-booky and very visual. And then I realized that I've always liked oral histories as documenting a specific scene, and this was as good an opportunity as any to do that. Originally, it was going to be a straight oral history, but then Anansi thought that because there were so many people involved, a lot of narrative strands to tie together, that I should write introductions to each chapter to set the scene for all of those who haven't followed it all the way through [laughing].

You've just sort of touched on this, but the book ends up focussing as much on what you termed the "post-indie" scene. Was that always what you intended? Is it even possible to separate the business model that A&C developed from the story of the band [BSS]?
No, I don't think you can look at one without the other. I mean Broken Social Scene existed before Arts & Crafts started, but they became a very different band once it started. The thing that people always remark about Broken Social Scene is the fact that they have so many other artists that have their own careers, a lot of that was facilitated by A&C. They became a home base for a lot of those bands.

In terms of the post-indie idea, I was just trying to compare the idea of being an indie band 15 years ago as opposed to now. A&C has never been very dogmatic about their indieness; if anything it's an entrepreneurial enterprise. "Alright, we want to sell our records. Why shouldn't we have control over that? Why shouldn't we strike the best deals for our artists?"

So as opposed to being like the "fuck you" major label system, because Jeffrey [Remedios, CEO and co-founder of A&C] was a product of that system, and he'll always credit the major label system with what he knows today, it's just that major labels have lost touch with artist development.

So Arts & Crafts, I think, have aspirations to be a major label in the sense of reach and making music accessible to lots of people, but they're very much rooted in artist development and they realize that without the artist they don't have a company, so it's in their best interest to gradually build these careers over long periods of time.

That's the real problem with the music industry right now, is that there is no artist development happening at the major label level. The reason why the music industry is as big as it is is because people have been buying Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd records for 30 years. Those catalogue sales help boost the bottom line, but they're not creating artists that will have future catalogue sales. Now the album comes out, it sells whatever it sells and no one is going to discover it in 20 years and keep buying it over and over again.

Photo by David Leyes

Given that you're drawing from something not necessarily chaotic, but like you said, with so many different narrative strands, was that a challenge to bring it all together.
Nah, I had a rough outline beforehand. I always wanted to go back to the '90s and set the scene because that's where I felt the story really began. If hHead had become global alternative rock superstars there wouldn't be a Broken Social Scene, so you have to chronicle those ups and downs.

Everybody came to this band for different reasons, on different trajectories in their career, so I kind of did have to step back and figure out "where did everybody come from?" Even though I've known these people for more than 10 years, I didn't know everybody's back story and how they came into the fold.

From Brendan, you have more of the macro Canadian alternative rock experience in the '90s and with Kevin you have this more of, someone who grew up listening to indie rock in the '90s and was inspired to make music himself. And then there's the whole history of the ESA [Etobicoke School For The Arts where Kevin Drew, Emily Haines and Amy Millan met] and how all of those people came together. And of course you can't talk about BSS without talking about K.C. Accidental.

So I had little MS word files of all different chapters and sometimes chapters got moved into one and others got pulled apart. I think the original version was 13 chapters and now it's 11.

Did the band vet what you wrote before you submitted it to the publisher?
Kevin and Brendan were granted a read and their suggested edits were pretty minimal. There were only a small handful of quotes that they felt they wouldn't be happy going to press with.

They're only two people in a group of 20, so most people have different opinions of each other. They do feel like it's their job as the band leaders to act in a sort of camp counselor kind of role, make sure all the children are getting along with each other and no one's feeling are going to get hurt. They took out a few lines that they thought might be read the wrong way. They're looking out for everybody.

It would have been impossible to get this book done passing it around to every single person, though that did happen. They did a big Mexican retreat last year and apparently the book got passed around. Fortunately, my inbox wasn't filled with too many suggestions. You know, there were suggestions from other people in the band, like, "can we take that part out" and I had to be like, "nah, there's a reason that I put that in."

Especially in an oral history, it's important that the quotes link in some sort of logical way. There were a few moments where the quote had to be taken out and I had to jump, instead of it flowing into the next quote.

What do you think the future holds for BSS at this point?
They're actually recording right now, so that's a positive. I think they need to get back to being Broken Social Scene.

There's been this period in the last four years where everyone is doing their own thing. I think they needed that because that period from 2003 to 2005 was so life-changing for them on so many levels that I think the last few years have given them the opportunity to step back and exhale.

Then Kev and Brendan releasing their solo records and even though they toured them as Broken Social Scene records, it's still in the public's mind a side-project rather than a Broken Social Scene record.

So they're recording right now as Broken Social Scene?
Yeah, with John McEntire from Tortoise. So I mean, who knows what will come of that? They're not the kind of band that goes into a studio and says, "OK, 15 songs, and these are the 12 that are gonna make it." Just like when you hang out with them, someone will be sitting on the couch noodling away on a guitar in the corner and someone else will say, "Oh, I like that," and jump on the piano. They're always creating in their own subtle way.

When you read the book you almost get the sense that it couldn't exist if it weren't written by a friend because it seems like such a close knit group of people.
It's interesting reading their interviews as they go out and do press. I think when you get into that promotional cycle and you're doing 10 interviews a day, inevitably you're going to get asked the same questions and you sort of go into auto-pilot, so I think this was a healthy exercise because it wasn't about promoting their new record.

I was able to get them for long periods of time and talk about stuff that they probably haven't talked about in a long, long time. Even someone like Andrew Whiteman, and he was initially one of the more skeptical people, in terms of like "Why is there a book?" and at the time he was focusing on Apostle [Of Hustle, Whiteman's other band], he'd kind of taken a year off from the band, so his mind wasn't on Broken Social Scene. We talked for like an hour and a half and I was like, "Well I'm done" and he said "Really? That was so much fun!" Even the ones who were skeptical at first really opened up.

You have to know the time to step back and be proud of what you've done and look back at your accomplishments because you're always looking towards the next thing. And I think this was an opportunity for them to do that and say, "Yeah, we did pretty good" considering where this came from.

I feel like the book starts really slowly narratively, it's kind of drifty and that was kind of the vibe in Toronto at that time. No one was doing anything together. It was very just kind of gradually snowballed and snowballed.

What about the photographic submissions? Were they hard to get a hold of, because they seem really personal.
Justin Peroff was entrusted with the task of compiling the photos because he does all of their album artwork as well, so he's the visual, aesthetic director of the band. So that was his task, but he was on tour a lot at the time. So he was trying to email people and it became this sort of wild goose chase at times.

I had to drive out to Amy Milan's mom's place out in Scarborough to get all the early stuff of Amy and Emily [Haines]. That all came from the Milan family archives, much to Emily's dismay.

Musicians can be a bit hard to get a hold of at the best of times, so then when you're asking, "Hey, can I get those old school photos..." [laughing]. And Kevin's stuff was in storage half the time because he was moving around a lot back then.

I actually finished the book in April or March of '08, edits, everything done and at that point they decided to focus on visuals and they realized they did not have nearly enough time to make their June deadline because they wanted to put it out that fall so they just automatically backed it up and were like, "Fuck it, this is coming out in the spring of '09" and gave us six months and it turned out we need it. Because I wanted to document this pre-internet era of music history in Toronto which you don't see a lot of documentation of.

From 2002 on, everybody has a million photos of this band on their camera phones, but before that there wasn't really that much going around. People weren't documenting their lives on the internet the way they are now. Even just finding a simple photo of hHead was a bit of a challenge.

Was it difficult to find photo's from the Ted's [Wrecking Yard, the now defunct College Street bar where Broken Social Scene's earliest live performance/jams took place] era?
Actually, no. They were fortunate in that they had a lot of friends who were photographers and filmmakers.

A few years ago, Stephen Chung, who is interviewed in the book, he shot all those Ted's shows, he's got them in the studio recording You Forgot It In People, hundreds of hours of that stuff. Even before this book project, there was a plan to do a documentary, but that fizzled. It was a combination of the band's hesitation to cap their story.