‘Now or Nowhere’ for Montreal’s The Damn Truth
MONTREAL — Lee-la Baum and Tom Shemer from The Damn Truth still remember the exact moment when the phone rang and they learned that legendary producer Bob Rock had agreed to work with them on their album.
They were sitting at Burger de Ville in Montreal West when they got the call from their manager, Ralph Alfonso, saying Rock had agreed to produce “Now or Nowhere.” The album, The Damn Truth’s third full-length disc, was released last Friday.
“Tom jumps out of his chair, runs out the door, and I can hear a scream outside,” said Baum, who handles the Joplin-esque lead vocals in the hard-rocking outfit. “It was an amazing moment.”
“When I was a kid, when I was really young, I only knew about two producers,” said Shemer, the band’s guitarist. “I didn’t know what a producer was or what the job of a producer was. It was George Martin because of The Beatles and I knew Bob Rock because of ‘The Black Album’ (by Metallica). When I was growing up, ‘The Black Album’ (actually a self-titled Metallica album from 1991) was the biggest album in the world. When we were sitting in the van (on the road) trying to figure out producers, his name kept coming up ’cause of what he did with Aerosmith, what he did with Mötley Crüe, with Bon Jovi. All those bands.”
They also had a connection to him because their manager, Alfonso, had managed the Canadian band Payolas, which was co-founded by Rock. Alfonso told them, “You can’t just send Rock any songs; they have to be your best songs.” He added: “And you only have one shot. If he doesn’t like it, that’s it.” So, they sent Rock their best songs, and 12 hours later, he called to invite them to come record with him at his studio in Vancouver.
In the end, Rock produced six of the nine tracks on the album. Those were recorded in the fall of 2019, and the band planned to return to the West Coast the following spring, but the pandemic put the kibosh on that plan.
“We wanted to do a ’60s Zeppelin-inspired record,” said Baum. “He’d listen to us do a take, and then he’d run into the room and energize us.”
Rock is best known for big mainstream guitar-based hard rock records, and that’s exactly what “Now or Nowhere” is, with echoes of Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, Led Zeppelin, Guns N’ Roses, Bon Jovi and, yes, Metallica’s Black Album.
The Damn Truth’s album would be considered mainstream if it had come out in Rock’s heyday — and rock’s heyday for that matter — in the late ’80s or early ’90s. But the quartet, which also includes bassist PY Letellier and drummer Dave Traina, are happily out of step with today’s pop world. They’re an old-school rock band, all about a tough, tight rhythm section, meaty power chords and intense bluesy vocals. Their music doesn’t sound nostalgic, but it also doesn’t live in a world that includes Justin Bieber.