On Sunday November 9, 2014 The Rebel Spell were playing a pair of shows in Hamilton, Ontario. They’d made almost this tradition of playing a trio of shows; Kitchener-Waterloo on Friday, Toronto on Saturday, and a matinee at This Ain’t Hollywood in Hamilton on the Sunday, with people following them from city to city all weekend.
After their matinee show on Sunday, they were playing a benefit show for an anarchist social space in Hamilton called The Tower at a house not far from the bar, along with Make No Gains. Before The Rebel Spell’s set I sat down with Todd Serious in the band’s van to do an interview for a zine I’m currently in the middle of working on.
News of Todd’s death has hit a lot of people very hard, myself included. He was such an incredibly smart, kind, and passionate person whose words were enough to motivate you to become a better person and try and help build a better world. He was someone who I am truly proud to have known.
Reading over this interview has made dealing with this loss so much easier for me, so I figured that it would probably help others cope as well. What follows is the complete, unedited transcription of my talk with Todd Serious.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Me: So you’ve been on tour for a few weeks now
Todd: Eternity.
Me: Probably seems like it.
I heard you just went to the Maritimes for the first time. How’d that treat you?
Todd: Halifax was amazing; we had a really great time there. The show was good, we met a whole bunch of cool people, and yeah, we even had a day off just to hang out and do stuff, it was great.
Me: You’re on tour right now for a new album called Last Run which you did a crowdfunding campaign to raise money for, was it the recording or production, or release?
Todd: Basically, it was how much money would we have, how much do we spend. All the money that we got from that went into… I mean the one thing about crowdfunding is that people are pre-ordering things at kind of a higher price, but you know, you’re still paying for mailouts, mailing records is ridiculously expensive, and printing the t-shirts and that stuff. The rest of the money, which was still pretty significant, went into the recording and part of the vinyl pressing. It really helped. We’re in enough debt and that was a big boost. It was almost $12,000…
Me: Total cost $12,000, or you raised that much?
Todd: We raised $12,000; we probably spent about $20,000 to put the record and this tour together. It’s crazy what it ends up costing now.
Me: Well there are such fewer places to press records now, so that alone makes the cost jump.
Todd: Yeah, like pressing 1000 records is the most efficient price point, it’s like five grand. That’s a lot of money.
Me: I was also noticing tonight you had cassette tapes as well, which you don’t really see a whole lot of bands doing now, aside from really tiny bands that can’t afford or don’t know how to do anything aside from that.
Todd: A handful of people had been asking about it. I got a call a few weeks ago from John Dimarco who owns Rubber Factory Records out of Toronto. He does all kinds of strange cool projects. Pretty cool to check out, he did this Leatherface tribute a few years ago that was pretty notable. He’s put out a bunch of neat records for people. He’s helped us out for years, like he’s been distroing our stuff for years.
Anyway, he calls me and just says “Hey do you want to put out tapes? I’ll pay for them, I’ll give you half of them, and we’ll each sell them.” And I was like, sure! We’re not doing anything and we’ve got tapes. So great, we’ve got tapes. And yeah, some people want tapes so we’ve got tapes!
Me: Yeah, may as well!
A few weeks ago there was an article on the website ActiveHistory.ca on your song The Tsilhqot’in War, which I found kind of interesting because this article about your song which is sort of a mini punk history lesson. You’ve always had this theme of looking at history in a lot of your songs, like Rebels Sing, December 8th, 1980, I Am a Rifle!, you’ve got a whole bunch of references there. I was kind of curious about your interest in history and punk and politics and how it all sort of wraps in together.
Todd: Well I mean history and politics are pretty intertwined, and you know I like to think there’s supposed to be some politics in punk, so that kind of connects it all. The Tsilhqot’in War, it’s historically relevant right now because of the recent Supreme Court decision regarding that area.
Me: What was the decision?
Todd: I’m hardly an expert on it, but basically, for 20 years or more the people of that area have been pushing their case through all of the levels of courts in Canada. Which, you understand they had to do before the United Nations would look at their land claim, of being an independent nation on unceded territory, and so on. And the Supreme Court finally made a decision heavily in their favour, although like any giant legal documents there’s probably lots of tricks. And that’s an area where, I love to spend lots of time in the mountains, and it’s close to where I grew up. It was kind of a poignant story as far as Canadian history goes. I wanted to write a song with Jeff Andrew too and he does a lot of historical stuff, so I was looking for something that he could get in on and it was just a perfect fit. I refer to the Tsilhqot’in in I Am a Rifle, it’s just something I’m interested in.
Me: It seems like all over Canada there are all these stories of Native land claim issues that get sort of glossed over in the news and whatnot. And to a lot of people who don’t or aren’t willing to take the time to understand the entire issue it just seems like “oh why are these people upset?” Like around here in Caledonia, they were trying to develop suburbs in Native territory, and all of the coverage around here was “why are these people upset that we want to build on this land?”
Todd: Yeah, I’ve been checking into some of that stuff too.
Another historical sort of thing I was looking into was the eviction of Kitsilano, which is a region of Vancouver which was a large reserve for a long time, and then the city just came in and just moved everybody. As if the first relocation wasn’t enough. There were these stories all over the place like Kitsilano. BC’s full of them, and BC’s a little unique because of the lack of a treaty process there, so it’s something that’s becoming really relevant right now, as well as the clashes with the oil companies and the pipeline projects as well as the recent Polley Mine disaster, it’s just all this industry versus the environment and Indian people who use that land traditionally, and now a lot of settler activists are getting involved, so there’s some real strength there and maybe getting a chance at stopping things there.
Me: You’re on tour right now for an album titled Last Run, and I’ve been hearing some people a little concerned about the title of the album. Like, “Is this the Last Run of The Rebel Spell?”, which I found funny considering the content of the song “The Last Run.”
Todd: From the first look, if you just saw the title of the album, then you’d think that. If you heard the song, like I had a friend who saw the album tonight who hadn’t heard the song, and he was like “what’s going on?”
I started writing that song; it was one that we’d worked on for quite a while. I was interested in the wolf culls that were going on. I had this heart-wrenching image burned into my brain of these monsters shooting wolves from helicopters, and that was sort of that last run thing that came to. And also just that the wolf is being pushed to extinction because it’s being scapegoated for damage that the tar sands projects and deforestation by people has done. It’s because the caribou herds are declining, oh we’ll blame the wolves, when we’ve just poisoned the river and destroyed the forests, of course the caribou are gone. We’ll blame the wolves, we’ll just shoot the wolves, and it’ll take the blame off of what’s really going on. So by the time we’ve finished the song, it’s just this rant about environmental destruction. I just can’t see that path going anywhere but into the ground.
Me: Yeah, eventually it’s going to get to the point where the damage caused by the tar sands and deforestation and the oil industry, eventually there’s going to be nothing that they can scapegoat it for, and it’ll be terrifying and confusing to see what’s going to happen after that.
Todd: I’m old enough that at one point I thought “I’ll be gone before all this happens”, and now, the next fifteen years is going to be crazy. Within the next thirty years there’s going to be some major changes. Like, catastrophic stuff. I mean, it’s happened in other places all around the world already.
Me: But now it’s affecting white people, so it’s this disaster. Like this whole ebola crisis in Africa, it’s been such a problem, but now that North America has their attention towards it, suddenly there’s all this effort to combat this horrible, horrible disease.
Todd: It was really bizarre, I was on Facebook yesterday, and as soon as I logged in there was this pop-up window from Facebook that was like “Do you want to donate right now”. I’ve never seen anything like that on that website before. “Do you want to donate right now to help stop ebola in Africa”. And I was like, really? I mean, it’s a horrible way to die, but really? There are so many things going on, there are so many people dying in Africa right now, and you’re just jumping on this bandwagon for such the wrong reason.
Me: Anyway, let’s get this on a cheerier note right now, haha. I’ve been noticing the last couple years you’ve done, what was it, two years of Europe?
Todd: Yeah, we’ve done two; we’re booking the third one right now. We’ve done the West Coast of the US a bunch. We’ve been down the East Coast once. We’ve toured a lot of the US a little bit, but mostly we’ve just toured Canada.
Me: I was kind of curious to see what the experience of touring in Europe where geographically everything’s so close together, where in Canada you can probably go days without stopping in a town or playing a show.
Todd: Yeah. If it wasn’t so expensive to get to Europe… It’s good; I guess it stops them from being overrun with crappy bands from North America. When we first went to Europe we’d do our drive for the day and it’s like “what are we going to do with the rest of our day? We’re there! It only took 45 minutes! We’re in another humongous city” It’s great. And they take care of you so well. I wish we hadn’t spent so much time in the US, I wish we’d started going to Europe years ago.
Me: How are your songs received over there? Because, just going through a lot of the themes and the references that you make, a lot of it is to Canadian or North American politics or world affairs.
Todd: Some of it is, but I’m sure John Lennon is known worldwide. Some of the stuff resonates in Europe anyway, as the colonial mothership for one, there’s interest in that way. And of course, that is definitely a part of our songs, but I don’t know if that’s necessarily what appeals to most people about them. And they’re willing to get in kind of backwards from there. They’re more interested in the music. Especially across the language barrier, playing places like Germany, Belgium, France, wherever. I think the lyrical content is a little less important there, simply because it’s not their first language. But the people seem to appreciate the music, so I’m happy.
Me: So you’ve got this new record out and you’re in the middle of a tour; anything big planned for the future, or is it just recuperating after, what, 30-something dates?
Todd: Yeah it was over 30 shows, which is a long tour for us, for Canada anyway. But that was because we made the trip all the way to Halifax this time.
Nope. Get home, get recovered, finish booking Europe, and off we go. I think February 13th is supposed to be the first date. We’re starting in Amsterdam.
Me: Well, good luck!
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
That’s me straining to sing along with The Rebel Spell at their last show at This Ain’t Hollywood, November 9, 2014
After we talked we went inside of the house where The Rebel Spell played an absolutely incredible set at one of the most densely packed house shows I’ve ever seen in my life. By the end of the second song both Todd and their guitarist Erin were crowdsurfing while playing. At one point I was knocked over and fractured my thumb, which took over 6 weeks to heal. But knowing that I’d gone and messed up my hand at a Rebel Spell show made it a mark of pride. Before heading back to Waterloo I went around and said goodbye to everyone in the band. Hugs went around and I wished them luck on the rest of the tour.
That was the last time I spoke to Todd.
I first saw The Rebel Spell in a house show in November 2007 and I last saw them in a house show in 2014. For those seven years the only time when I wasn’t eagerly awaiting the next time the Rebel Spell were in town was when I was at one of their shows.
Todd may be gone, but he’s still with us in our memories and his voice still stays as powerful as ever on The Rebel Spell’s recordings.
No Productivity 