’90s band Rusty never sleeps
Toronto group back one more time with punchy new album
Why, you might very well ask, is Rusty just now getting around to hosting an album-release show for an album that came out seven months ago?
Because it’ll be fun, that’s why. And also because … well … why the hell not now? It took 20 years to get another album out of Rusty in the first place. Were you really getting that im
patient? If Rusty was going to strike while the iron was hot, Rusty probably would have “struck” awhile back — like maybe, say, when it coulda got some real (if limited) juice out of its first reunion gigs for the North by Northeast festival back in June of 2011.
Which brings us back to the Toronto quartet’s album release show at the Velvet Underground this Friday, Jan. 18, and to the subject of fun.
Rusty is a band again these days when Rusty wants to be a band again, only because Rusty enjoys being a band again from time to time. There is no careerism involved. Even less so than there was when CFNY and MuchMusic got behind the still brand-spankin’-new group’s eponymous 1994 debut EP — and the single “Wake Me,” in particular — so quickly off the draw that the band was soon the subject of a major-label bidding war. And wound up with a fluke hit on its hands (in Canada, anyway) in the form of its grunge-era-appropriate first album, Fluke. No one’s crackin’ the whip.
The Toronto(-ish) band didn’t even start demo-ing tunes for what would become its fourth LP, Dogs of Canada, until 2015, four years after that original reunion — negotiated by guitarist Scott McCullough’s old Doughboys bandmate John Kastner, who was then booking NXNE and has a demonstrated knack for luring old punk rockers like the Stooges and OFF! out to the festivals he’s working — and a full three years before the crowdfunded comeback tirade eventually surfaced on the sly last June.
“From 2000 to 2011, we never even really considered it,” says singer Ken MacNeil, a Nova Scotia expat who moved to Toronto with his old band, One Free Fall, during the ’90s, but now lives in Sudbury with his family. “Like, people would ask, ’cause me and Scotty were still friends, so we’d see each other and we’d hang out. … There were lots of reasons I did it, but one of the main reasons was my kids started to get older and, just through some conversations, I realized that they didn’t really know I was in a band,” he says.
“So when my oldest son got to be 5 or 6, it just seemed like it would be fun to play a show. And then suddenly John managed to get us a gig for North by Northeast. And, for me, it was just that doing it again was way funner than I thought it was going to be. I was always ‘No, I don’t want to do that. I’ve got a different life now.’
“But then we did it and I just loved it so much. And I had so much fun it kinda breathed the life back into it, and I think Scotty would agree.”
Rusty didn’t part on bad terms or anything. As McCullough puts it bluntly, for the most part, the band simply wasn’t making any money anymore.
Fluke did well enough in Canada on the back of singles such as “Groovy Dead,” “California” and the still-blistering “Misogyny” — the latter, which cribbed liberally from Toronto director Bruce LaBruce’s film Hustler
White in the video. But its stateside release on Atlantic Re- cords’ short-lived “alternative” imprint TAG didn’t exactly light up the charts. Two subsequent Rusty albums, 1997’s decidedly mellower and more melodic Sophomoric and 1998’s garage-y/Stones-y Out of Their
Heads saw diminishing returns, to the point that its Canadian label stopped sending the cheques and being a full-time band just wasn’t sustainable.
“I’ve played in enough bands to know some bands are hard. Even the Doughboys, that was a very fractious mother’ band,” McCullough says.
“When things were tough, people didn’t get along. And Rusty was always kind of the opposite of that. We all got along pretty well and we’re still pretty easygoing. We always remained friends and there were never any big band tensions and stuff, so all that emotional garbage never really happened with us.”
“There’s lot of giggling,” MacNeil affirms. “A lot of laughing, a lot of inside jokes. And quite honestly, not being in a band for that many years, that’s sort of the part you miss. One of the funnest things about being in a band — and I always say it, but it’s true — is that kind of ‘us against the world,’ cliquey, inside-joke, clubhouse kind of thing. I always hear athletes say that, but it’s kind of the same thing … Maybe you get into your normal life that you love and everything, but then you go back to that for a weekend and it’s fun.”
Making Dogs of Canada last year was “not quite as fun,” McCullough quips, but he and the rest of the band — drummer John Lalley and bassist John P. Sutton, the ex-Weakerthan who stepped in after those first reunion gigs for NXNE to replace original bassist Jimmy Moore, who now lives in the U.K. — concurred with MacNeil’s assessment that recording a new album “was the one step we kinda needed to make” to legitimize the reunion. Otherwise, McCullough says, they would have run the risk of becoming “a tribute band.”
Fortunately, Dogs of Canada, currently available via the band’s website, proves there was some gas left in the Rusty tank. Produced with bruising splendour by Ian Blurton, its closest sonic kin in the catalogue is probably Fluke, but this one tends more toward ageless — and age-defying — full-bore punk than the band did even during its earliest days. It would appear that being spared the distractions of relying on Rusty for a living allows for extra energy onstage and in the studio in middle age, rather than the opposite.
This is why the band’s not going to mess with a good thing too much.
“I think we’ll play. We’re not gonna play full-time, but we kinda consider anything people offer us,” MacNeil says. “I certainly am not interested in being in a full-time rock band right now, because I’m busy doing other things. But we’ll see what happens, you know what I mean?
“The other thing I always think is ‘How lucky are we?’ We decide to play and we go to Toronto and play and tons of people come out and support it, y’know? We’re not the Rolling Stones, but we’re very lucky. We play once a year and all of our old fans come out and support us and we’re lucky. It makes it funner. It’s not like ‘Let’s reform our high school band’ and we have to go play the Holiday Inn to, like, six people. Which people still do, right? Because it’s fun.”