DOXA 2022: Teresa Alfeld on Doug and the Slugs and Me (an interview )

Teresa Alfeld thus far has three documentaries about Vancouver figures under her belt, including a feature on socialist lawyer and mayoral candidate Harry Rankin, a short on anti-poverty activist and politician Jean Swanson, and - premiering at DOXA on May 15^th - on Doug and the Slugs, Doug and the Slugs and Me. 

But Alfeld did not actually envision herself, early on, as becoming a documentary filmmaker, she explains on a Zoom call.

“My interest in film school was always in narrative, but I was curious about documentary, and it just so happened that a proposal I’d written many years ago about Harry Rankin to the BC Arts Council for a film was one of my first successful funding applications. I always say I fell into documentary.”

You’d never know it. I’ve only previewed three documentaries for DOXA, but Alfeld’s film, Doug and the Slugs and Me, is by far my favourite (best music doc I've seen since Sparks? Probably). Of course, I’ve been listening to Doug and the Slugs since age 12, when I first noticed Cognac & Balogna on the shelf at a Maple Ridge Pay & Save, shortly after its release (I recall being intrigued by the album cover and title from the gitgo). And as an adult, I saw Doug and the Slugs live three times (twice with Doug and no original Slugs, and once with all the original Slugs but no Doug). I interviewed Simon Kendall about one of the band’s post-Doug concerts and got my albums signed backstage at that show by all the members of the band save, obviously, Doug (though I did get his autograph on a 7" I purchased at Neptoon Records, itself a location for some of Alfeld's interviews). I once even had a weird moment with Doug Bennett in a Maple Ridge men’s room, close to the end of his life (I detail the encounter in my obituary from when Bennett passed, at the tragically young age of 52, in 2004, but it's nowhere near the sort of weird men's room moment that Rob Halford describes in Confess, so don't get your hopes up!). 

With that much history with the band, I was predisposed to either love Alfeld’s film, or to find fault with it if she got things wrong. Happy to report that she knocks it out of the park, with tons of stuff I didn’t expect (like Terry David Mulligan having exactly the same assessment of Music for the Hard of Thinking that I do) to Doug himself being tormented, in his journals, by the compromises that began with that record, as the band struggled to break into America and get onto the radio again. There's tons of footage I had not seen, including snippets of the musical Bennett performed in, John Gray's Rock and Roll. Even more surprisingly, there’s also ample music that I flat out did not know about, from the Slugs-without-a-Doug 7” (“Running Around”) to the country album Bennett demo’d, songs from which ended up the Tomcat Records CD Fallen Angel, by Suzanne Gitzi. 

It takes some doing to school me in Doug and the Slugs, but Alfeld makes it look easy.

Teresa Alfeld interviewing John Burton

 

It also doesn't hurt that Alfeld and I share a favourite Doug and the Slugs record. "For me, instantly, Wrap It! is the record," she tells me as I grin and nod. "I love all their albums for different reasons; I love Cognac and Bologna, too, which I feel really captures their live show from the late 70's" - she means the spirit of it; it's not a live album - "but with Wrap It! I feel that all of the guys, Doug, John, Simon, Wally, Steve and Rick, are really pushing their sound and they're trying new things. I mean, 'Alibi,' what's that? It's an incredible track. Or 'Wrong Kind of Right.' But for me, my favourite song, the second I heard it, is 'Partly from Pressure.' It's one of those songs that just gets into your system: the soulful quality of the vocal and the arrangement, the mystifying lyrics that I still can't figure out - although I think they allude to a lot of what was going on for Doug at the time... For me, it's a standout, it's truly one of their most incredible tracks."

Fittingly, the film kicks off with "Dangerous," as performed live on Alan Thicke's talk show, so the first track on Wrap It! is the first music you hear. That song is also the last one you hear at the end of Alfeld's previous feature-length doc, The Rankin File. "All the music [for the Harry Rankin film] is Doug and the Slugs," she tells me. "That's how this all sort of came about - I needed a soundtrack for The Rankin File, which is set in 1980's Vancouver - so ooh, Doug and the Slugs! I started working with Simon, and that's how the idea for the film came about. So I ended that film with 'Dangerous,' and I started Doug and the Slugs and Me with 'Dangerous,' which I thought was kind of fun..."

So is Alfeld seeing this as her area, now – to make films about under-sung Vancouver characters? It’s certainly fertile ground, she agrees. “There’s just so many around us, and they never get their due, especially on the national stage. And so it’s been really fun to get to know all these interesting Vancouverites; I’m certainly starting to see common themes that unite people from the west coast.”

As Alfeld and I discuss in our feature interview for Montecristo, Alfeld – who grew up next to the Bennetts and was friends with Shea Bennett, one of Doug’s daughters – had intended to tell the band’s story “with the usual suspects of archival performances and archival photos.” That was until Bennett’s widow, Nancy Hare, entrusted her with a cache of home movies. She also gave the filmmaker access to Bennett’s journals, which span the 1980’s. Both developments are discussed at length in the Montecristo interview, and considerably enrich the documentary.

The journals more or less span the first ten years of Doug and the Slugs existence, but come to an end in 1989. Does Alfeld know why Bennett stopped journaling?

“I have no clear answer,” Alfeld responds. “The family didn’t say that ‘Doug pronounced in 1989 that he was done writing.’ Or, John [Burton, Slugs’ guitarist] or Simon [Kendall, keyboard player] didn’t tell me that Doug had decided to stop writing. They really just peter off. One of the final entries is specifically about Christmas – about how Christmas had been for the family, and how he’d bought some nice new leather pants for Nancy. And then they just end, and I’m left to come to my own conclusions, and the ones that I’ve come to are that the journaling processes – what Doug calls his ‘science project’ – were done with an inkling that the band was about to take off, and by 1989, it was clear to everyone that Doug and the Slugs weren’t going to make in the States, they weren’t going to have that big breakthrough; they would obviously still have a wonderful career into the 1990’s, but Doug and the Slugs were not going to be his main drive anymore. My sense was that he’d become so much more domestic, a family man, and that he didn’t feel right to continue the journals. “

One aspect of Doug and the Slugs not really covered in the film is Bennett's propensity for teasing and torturing audiences. I remember a Facebook friend – sadly, I’ve forgotten who – who reported seeing Doug and the Slugs as a child, and was standing right up at the front, when Doug, seeing the kid had suspenders on (or some other elasticky thing; the deets of the story have faded since I was told it), reached down into the audience, pulled the suspenders (or whatever it was) out from the kid, and then snapped them back, causing a fair bit of pain – which Bennett chuckled merrily at, leaving my Facebook friend fuming that the singer was “a prick” (I believe  that was the term the guy used – he was still mad about the episode years later!).

I never saw anything like that – but I did witness, both times I caught him, Doug speculating which female patrons of bars he was playing in were wearing “falsies;” him teasing audience members that men with hats in bars are invariably bald underneath them. And there are other stories out there: Simon Kendall, in the above-linked Straight interview, relays one of Doug venturing into the audience while the band vamped behind him so he could, on-mike, poke fun at the contents of an older woman’s purse that he set to rummaging through. So did Alfeld find footage of things like that, and leave it out of the film – fearing, perhaps, that it would lose audience sympathies for Bennett?

Not so much. Alfeld never saw anything on the level of aggression as the suspenders-snap story, and as for any off-colour moments in performance footage, “the honest answer is, I didn’t encounter anything that made me really uncomfortable, that I felt like I needed to hide. Moreso there was just obviously evidence in Doug’s final years that his health was declining, in performance footage that I didn’t think needed to be out there.” 

As for teasing audiences, “I certainly heard stories, too. I think that Doug was always walking a line. But I find that interesting and exciting. I haven’t been privy to anything that crossed a line or made me uncomfortable.”

The film has some very fun footage – especially the stuff at Grandview Lanes, more on which in Montecristo – of Alfeld spending time with the Bennett’s as a child. And she was clearly at one of the Ted Okos-fronted, post-Doug gigs at the Commodore, because there's footage from it in the film (I strained, but couldn't spot myself). But it is unclear if she ever saw Doug himself perform live...?

“I have a very faint recollection of seeing him perform one time at the PNE in Vancouver," Alfeld says. "According to my parents, I would have been five or six, very young. I don’t really remember the show; what I remember was that Shea and I were up at the front of the stage, dancing our little five-year-old asses off, and thinking that we were amazing. That’s what I remember thinking: ‘Wow, we’re the best dancers, how are people even going to pay attention to this band?’”

There will be both streamed and theatrical presentations of Doug and the Slugs and Me starting May 14th, with Alfeld and various Slugs on hand for all three theatrical showings. See the DOXA website (and my Montecristo story!) for more.