‘YOU HOPE PEOPLE LISTEN’
Lowest of the Low back with new music and something new to say after 13 years, writes Tom Murray.
Ron Hawkins has a certain ambivalence about the social media aspect of his job.
Periodically inform fans about the latest doings of his band The Lowest of the Low on Twitter and Facebook? Sure. Inundate them with constant updates even when nothing is actually going on? Hell, no.
“It’s a heinous but necessary thing these days,” Hawkins sighs over the phone from his home in Toronto. “Apparently you’re supposed to post three times a day to stay relevant, but do you remember when we curated what we said, and we sounded like we actually thought about things?”
The singer-songwriter is doing interviews for the tour that will bring them west for a series of record release shows, and he’s musing on how computers and smartphones have changed our lives. Not for the better, in his view. Oddly enough, that fits in with part of the message for the band’s latest offering, Do the Right Now.
The Lowest of the Low’s fourth studio offering after 2004’s under-publicized (at least out West) Sordid Fiction is also something of a winking nod to their now classic debut release, 1991’s Shakespeare My Butt. Written at least partially as an update to that album, Do the Right Now finds Hawkins inhabiting his 25-year-old self on songs like the first single Powerlines, which acts as both a summing up and personal admonition.
After a couple of decades carrying the weight of a beloved band that ended far too early (the Low broke up in 1994 not long after their second album Hallucigenia) and regrouped in fits and starts since, he seems a lot more comfortable tinkering with the band’s legacy.
We spoke with Hawkins, who will be in Alberta for a series of dates along with original drummer Dave Alexander, plus relative newcomers Brian MacMillan (guitar), Dylan Parker (bass), and keyboardist Lawrence Nichols.
Q: It’s been close to 13 years since Lowest of the Low released Sordid Fiction, and you’ve left the band on the back-burner while all of you pursued your own musical projects. What prompted the release of Do the Right Now?
A: About four or five years ago, when (original guitarist) Steve (Stanley) was still in the band, Kim Cooke (founder) of Pheromone Records took Steve to lunch and asked him if I would consider writing a new record. Steve was like, “I dunno, that might be ... weird.” Both Steve and I were doing solo records at the time, but he brought the idea to me and we kicked it around. I thought, does anyone really want to hear a new Lowest of the Low record? The band has its own mythology, and maybe that would chip away at something really awesome.
Q: You didn’t want to mess with the heritage?
A: Well, I look at a band like The Clash. They were the first group I ever bought a ticket for with my own money. I went to see them on the London Calling tour. They had the perfect arc, just like The Beatles; build something with your mates at a young age that’s passionate and amazing, and then you blow out at some point. You never hear them again in that format. To me, that’s the perfect way to do it, that’s how the myth should be. That’s not how it went for Lowest of the Low, but if I had my druthers that’s maybe how it would. But, we work with the tools that we’re given.
Q: So you put the idea off for a while before deciding to do it.
A: Yeah. Steve had left the band by then and I thought that maybe we should put the whole thing to bed. Then time passed, Dylan and Dave were still itching to play, and Dylan gave me the idea of writing Shakespeare 2.0, putting myself in the mindset I had when I was 25. The song Powerlines is kind of central. It’s the history of the band in three verses, with the final one about how you gotta go for it. The line “scrape your pretty practised autograph in the windshield frost” is about how you can pose all you like about how you don’t care if you make it, but at a certain point you need to just own it and admit that you’ve got a lot of things you wanna say, and you hope people listen.