On the Musicians of Red Cat - a few outtakes and behind-the-scenes stories

My new Montecristo story is out, on the musicians of Red Cat Records. It's the fourth story that I have done for the magazine that focuses on Vancouver's independent record stores. My Clash story from a couple of years ago had Zulu Records woven into it, including interviews with Grant McDonagh; part two of my Cave story (part one here) had fairly long interviews with Rob Frith of Neptoon, including a photograph of him as a younger man (and both parts took advantage of his wonderful trove of memorabilia); and a story I did just before I set out on a year of surgery recovery (still ongoing) dug back into the glory days of Vancouver's Record Row, mostly centering on Collector's RPM.  I don't know that I have an Audiopile story in me (sorry, guys!), and Metrotown's Sunrise Records (managed by a former staff member at Red Cat!) is probably too much of a chain store for Montecristo (tho' Ty, said former Red Cat staffer, does a bang-up job curating it; it's the only Sunrise that doesn't feel like a typical "mall record store" and probably the record store I shop at most frequently, these days, because it's a ten minute walk from my apartment). There aren't any other record stores I regularly shop at, unless you count thrift stores. (I do sometimes hit Hooked on Phono for punk and metal reissues that have sold out elsewhere, and encourage other people to do the same, but, like, I think that's been a matter of two visits this year. And I used to poke in at Redrum Records New West every few weeks, but the building they are in is getting demolished, so they shut their doors for good on August 15th, and while I have gone out to their White Rock location when an album I was looking for turned up on their searchable website, I'm trying NOT to shop for records these days, so...). 

Anyhow, Red-Cat-wise, I ended up with a few outtakes! These are presented below, like a parallel, less well-written article for your reading pleasure, with a Red Cat photo that Montecristo did not use, where you can get a sense of the colours people were wearing when Gord went down to take pictures, a mere six days ago. (How did he manage to get far enough across the street that you can see the whole store, but still have his shadow in it?! Was he standing on something? It's actually a little weird!). 

Note: ironically, given that Dave and Ford were the "stars" of my interviews, I used almost everything Luke, Nen, James, and Penny gave me, since there was a lot less of it; so what follows is all from Ford and Dave... 

Oh, and also note that Dave namechecked one of Pier's favourite Canadian bands the Rheostatics as an ideal touring partner for the Buttless Chaps - the best fit, musically - but most of that quote got used in the Montecristo piece so the rest of it is kinda unusable now. Finally, he tells me that he's booked some studio time for February, so he'll be back at making music soon enough...

Red Cat staff and store, by Gordon E. McCaw, not to be reused without permission

The Musicians of Red Cat Records: Alternate Take (to be read after you've read part one).

by Allan MacInnis

Ford Pier goes way back with Red Cat owner Dave Gowans, including the odd appearance on albums by the Buttless Chaps, Gowans’ old band. “I was a fan the first time I heard the Buttless Chaps and I saw them often,” Pier explains via email. “We had many mutual friends in Victoria, and I first met Dave and Lasse [Lutick, Buttless Chaps’ guitarist and former Red Cat co-owner] sometime around when they were recording Death Scenes at Scott Henderson’s studio [circa 2001], before they all moved over to Vancouver and parked themselves at the Sugar Refinery, years prior to them buying Red Cat.”

Besides his guest appearances on Chaps' records, Pier tells me, "I also played keyboards with Dave’s post-Chaps band Cloudsplitter for a couple of shows. I sometimes played drums with Amy Honey, who was one of the original owners, and Gregory Macdonald, who used to work at the store and is now in Sloan, played in Carolyn Mark’s band at the same time as me. I don’t remember anybody else working at Red Cat that I played with regularly. My bands have shared bills with Penny’s bands several times, of course, all over B.C. and Alberta."

As a touring musician, Pier has been on the road for weeks at a time since he began his employ at Red Cat in 2008, setting up tours himself, for the most part. "I book all my own field work" is how he puts it, adding that he is "always happy to have help when it’s offered, or to have someone else’s touring schedule I can latch onto - and this has the advantage that I can request the exact period I need off well in advance and not have things sprung on me. Certainly, I've made it a priority to book absences from the store during periods when we weren't going to be super busy getting ready for big sales like Record Store Day or whatever, or when those of us with families and school schedules to think about weren't going to be needing vacation time."

Ford's recommendation - when I was shopping for Buttless Chaps records at Red Cat, in the name of research - was to pick up Love This Time, which I did. I also grabbed Where Night Holds Light, because I had seen and liked the odd little video that the band did for the title track.

Asked about that video, Dave explained that it was filmed “right behind Lasse’s house in Northern BC”–near Grassy Plains—and that was where we would go to write music. Torben [Wilson], the drummer, was from there as well – they grew up as kids together. So we decided to go up and film the video there."

At one point during the filming, Gowans was on the back of a snowmobile, zipping across a frozen lake, and “we broke through the ice. [The driver] just started laughing as it was sinking; and he gunned the snowmobile, and it came out. I was freaking out, and he was like, ‘Ah, it happens all the time.' Because people are different up there, they’re so in tune with the wild—bears and wolves and, y’know, falling into freezing water. I was not!”

What exactly was going on, narratively, in the video? I had a hard time making sense of it. "I think the whole idea was that I go through this door, I’m lost, and I just basically find community and safety, and when I go back through I’ve understood that the whole meaning of existence is to have friends and family around you.”

Dave liked that I appreciated the friendly vibe at Red Cat, which has always been my favourite thing about shopping there; the staff are very welcoming. “That’s important to hear,” Gowans says. As a record shopper, he explained, “it always made a difference when people were nice. And we’ve managed to have a bunch of people who work here who have been here a long time. They work really hard, but they like coming to work. It’s a small staff, and I think going through COVID and the stress of being a retail store during that time, we’ve managed to stick together."

Ford also chimed in on the concept of "friendly-happy," as he put it. "There’s a mode that’s been established, and incompatible attitudes will tend to get weeded out or altered. Anyone who’s stayed at the store for long has done so because they’re a good fit personality-wise." Here's hoping that my article does nothing to disrupt the feeling.

But really, what I wanted more than to write the history of Red Cat was to find out how the hell the Buttless Chaps got their name - a question I bet Dave hasn't had to explain in a few years, at least. Sadly, his story ended up not making the cut for the Montecristo piece, when word counts became a factor, because it took us too far afield from the story, and because it could be glossed over with the observation that it started as a joke (true, but there's a lot left out). 

It started when they found out that their original name, Trailer Park, was taken, Gowans explained to me during our backroom chat. “We were sitting in a place called the Cherry Bank Hotel in Victoria, and we were, like, ‘What are we going to call the band?’ And there was a picture on the wall of a guy in buttless chaps and a cow skull with pool balls in its eye sockets, and I was like – jokingly – ‘I dunno, we could call ourselves the Buttless Chaps?'”

His bandmates laughed, and they had a temporary name.

“Then [Victoria singer/ songwriter] Carolyn Mark said, ‘Hey, do you want to open for my band the Fixin’s?’ And we had played her open stage as the Buttless Chaps, but we said, ‘We’re going to change the name,’ and she said, ‘Well, you can’t play if you change the name– because I like the name!’ Then Monday Magazine wrote a really nice review about us… it just sort of stuck, and it became this icebreaker when we got onstage: ‘Hey, we’re the Buttless Chaps!’”