Cuff the Duke reunites for all the right reasons
Oshawa-made band realized there were fans out there waiting for them to reconnect
As quietly as it temporarily suspended operations a few years ago, Cuff the Duke has returned to active status in recent months without making a big fuss about it.
The Oshawa-born roots’n’roll outfit didn’t necessarily plan on taking such an extended break once roadwork wrapped up in support of 2012’s Union, but that break lasted long enough that no one involved was entirely sure whether they still had a band.
After reissuing its self-titled 2005 breakthrough album on vinyl last year and playing a few, scattered dates last summer — and realizing there are fans out there who’ve never given up hope, however — Cuff the Duke is now setting up shop at the Rivoli for a pair of shows this Friday and Saturday to keep itself limber whilst, as frontman Wayne Petti reports, “slowly picking away” at a seventh album that might very well surface sometime this year.
This is good news all around. From the moment the Dukes emerged from the ’burbs as the children on the old Three Gut Records roster with 2002’s
Life Stories for Minimum Wage — their labelmates the Constantines were pretty young at the time, but Cuff the Duke made even the Cons look grizzled — they’ve always been a rippin’ live band, capable of turning on a dime from Blue Rodeo-esque jangle to eruptive psych-outs. And it’s been through playing live again, Petti says, that he and bandmates Paul Lowman, A.J. Johnson, François Turenne and Thom Hammerton “reconnected” last summer and realized, “y’know, it’s fun to be in a band.”
The Star spoke with Petti — who formed the underappreciated noisepop outfit Grey Lands and started a second career managing Jennifer Castle and Dan Edmonds for the National’s Hamilton-based management firm Straight & Narrow during his time away from Cuff the Duke — about this reunion that’s not really a reunion. Here’s a condensed version of the chat. So what’s up with the Duke? Is this a full reactivation?
We’re easing back in and trying to figure out how that works now for us. It’s weird because, for years, we were always in the cycle: you make a record, you promote the record, you tour and then you record some more and you put out the next record. And as soon as we got out of that cycle and everyone started doing different things, it was just sort of like, “How do we jump back in again?” We’ve recorded some songs — the beginnings, the early phases of a record — and we’re writing new stuff and trying to figure out, like, what the future looks like for us and how we want to make it work because I think we don’t want it to be exactly like it was before, being constantly, necessarily always on the road and stuff like that. Everyone’s lives are different now.
We’re friends and I often wondered whether Cuff the Duke had officially ceased to be a thing.
I always thought it was weird for bands to “break up” officially — outside of, like, the Beatles, where zillions of people cared. Other than that, why do you need to break up? We just sort of stopped doing what we were doing for a little while because it wasn’t working for everyone’s lives. But when we got back together this past summer to play some shows it was so much fun and I think, for us, it became a little bit like we were almost nostalgic in it, too. The set we were playing, for instance, there were definitely songs in it that we’d stopped playing for a little while because we were sick of them — that classic band thing. But this summer we were playing all the songs that our fans wanted to hear and they were also the most enjoyable for us to play, for that same reason.
I can totally see how a band can get to that “We’re never gonna play ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ again” point. But sometimes at those shows even I’ll be, like, “Oh, come on, please play just one” by the end. At least people who are always sort of centred on the present such as Sonic Youth and Neil Young will throw you a bone.
Neil Young will play all his new stuff, but then he always comes out and gives you, like, a handful. He’ll give you something. But it’s the same thing with all bands: you get in this weird headspace about “Well, we’ve progressed so much from that record.” And no one gives a s---. There’s a great Tom Petty quote in the ballpark of what we’re talking about: “No one cares about how records are made or how you feel about them. They just care whether they like them or not.” Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, those dudes just played the hits. I saw them a bunch of times and he opened with “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” once. Who the f--- does that?
Well, at least you guys didn’t walk away from Cuff the Duke with nothing left to say.
It was nice to just walk away, as opposed to letting it crash and burn. It was like, “Let’s just step back for awhile.” Especially for Paul and me, who had been in it from the get-go. He and I basically finished high school and then we were in Cuff the Duke, and then all of a sudden it started to kinda roll along and we were, like, “OK, so this is the ride we’re on.” So it was good to get to our mid-30s and go, “Y’know, maybe we could do something else, briefly.” Try other things. See how that all goes.
Do you find that your experience as a working musician made it easier to slide into the job of manager?
I think there’s a comfort with other musicians knowing that, y’know, when I’m presenting opportunities a lot of the time I fully understand what sort of sacrifices you have to make personally and what it’s like to be out on the road for four months when you have a kid or whatever, that kinda stuff … that’s the nice thing about the realization I, personally, came to during that break from Cuff the Duke: it’s OK to find other things to do. And then when we get back to playing music it’s totally for the right reasons and it’s a lot more fun. We’re not making decisions based on “Well, we’ve got a van to pay for …” It’s just for the pure enjoyment of playing with your friends and making music and entertaining people. And we’re superlucky enough to be playing the Rivoli — which isn’t a giant club, by any means — now and to still sell all those tickets in advance. It’s a nice feeling.
“When we got back together this past summer to play some shows it was so much fun.” WAYNE PETTI CUFF THE DUKE FRONTMAN