At one point during our Straight interview, Nick Venditti told me he had heard of studies done about how people’s “pop
cultural preferences, as one gets older, start to calcify around 18 or 19,
so whatever you’re listening to at that time, you don’t deviate much from that,
and that’s certainly true of a lot of friends of mine who never left the
suburbs. Sometimes they’ll patronize me and come down and see a show, but I
know it’s not really their thing; they’ll go back to Pitt Meadows or whatever
and listen to Rock 101.”
Speaking of radio, we segued from there into talking about his borrowing Jam bootlegs off Tim Chan when the two crossed paths at CFUV, on Vancouver Island -- which led to Venditti digressing about the relative quality of Paul Weller demos (especially "That's Entertainment" as it appears on Snap!) versus finished Jam product. Plus at one point, Venditti dropped a reference to two deejays whose show was the inspiration for the name Hüskee Düde -- though I'm not sure that that actually got picked up on my recorder, I couldn't find it. I think they might have been from CJSF?
There wasn't much else by way of outtakes that I wanted to use. There were some acerbic gripes about politics, some salivation over talk of fighter planes and destructive asteroids, and the odd bit of cyncism about life in Vancouver, but almost everything I wanted to use for the feature made its way into the finished piece. (I guess I could have pointed out that the bassist for Whisky Jennings Bryan is apparently Hamm!).
One thing I don't make much of, though, is just how enjoyable Venditti's songwriting is. It's actually mostly quite familiar -- there are elements in most of his songs that remind you of other people, other bands; except they're all top-drawer punk and power pop bands he nods to; they all are played spectacularly well; and they combine more than one touchpoint per song.
Try "No One Gives a..." (sometimes called by its full title) off that 2017 LP. That opening riff is pure Bob Mould-style Hüsker Dü (maybe "Real World?" The ringing of guitars throughout is similar). But as soon as that first lyric kicks in -- I think of the minutemen's dense word-spew and d. boon's gruff voice on the song "Fanatics." That takes me back right to when *I* was a teenager, back in 1984, and both Zen Arcade and Double Nickels came out, within what felt like mere weeks of each other. I had read about them in the same article and got them at the same time, when my father popped into a Seattle record store on my request on the way to Longacres racetrack (thanks, Dad!). Those two bands were the VERY top of my pile for a long time, the two albums I spun most that year. But despite various points of comparison (same year, same label, same review in the Rocket that called my attention to them), they didn't sound very much alike.
So for Nick to fuse the divergent styles of these two bands together is pretty fuckin' cool. I'm suddenly gung-ho to hear MORE of Nick's music, and to see this new incarnation of Gnash Rambler. I'm super glad to have done this Straight article.
But bear in mind, folks, you CANNOT SHARE the Straight article directly on Canadian social media. You can, however, share this! And check out the Gnash Rambler bandcamp here and the Brotherhood of Lost Souls Facebook here. The FB event page is here.
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