Sometimes where you end up has nothing to do with where you started.

Meet Gerard Van Herk, post-doctoral fellow and instructor at the University of Ottawa. A respected member of the faculty, the tall, distinguished-looking gentleman has lectured far and wide on matters related to linguistics. But sometimes his past catches up with him, as it did at a conference in Chicago.

"I got to the room," Van Herk says, "and there was a phone call from some guy who said, 'Are you the same Gerard from Deja Voodoo?' "

He is. And while he pleads ignorance when it comes to matters of music --"I've vaguely heard of Avril Lavigne" -- his place in the pantheon of Canadian indie artists is secure. That's due in part to the influence of guitarist/vocalist Van Herk and drummer Tony Dewald's "sludgeabilly" band on the direction of punk rock.

But also, with some of the most interesting new Canadian music coming from artist-driven labels such as MapleMusic (whose co-founder Andy Maize is in town tonight with his Skydiggers for a Barrymore's show), Van Herk can look with pride at the legacy of his and Dewald's little-label-that-could, Og Records.

"We were putting out a cassette and it turned out to be a whole lot cheaper to buy 500 or 600 cassettes at once, so we went looking for other people that we liked," Van Herk says of Og's origins some 20 years ago. "It just sort of grew from there."

DAWN OF GRUNGE

By the time Og closed its doors at the dawn of the grunge and so-called "alternative" revolution, the Montreal-based label had released sought-after albums by The Gruesomes, UIC and others, in addition to leaving us with five eclectic compilations under the heading, It Came From Canada.

Og gave Canadians a taste of the obscure (My Dog Popper, Dead Cats) as well as the soon-to-be-famous (Cowboy Junkies, Furnaceface forerunners Fluid Waffle). And there hasn't been a label like it since.

"That was one of the advantages of having your own taste-driven label," Van Herk says. "You just put together a bunch of stuff that you like and presumably a lot of people out there share enough of your tastes to go along with it. You don't have to sit and say, 'Oh, does this appeal to the 18 to 24, left-handed rap-fan demographic?' "

But if Og broke new ground for the Canadian indie scene, pop music is only now catching up to the weird and wonderful world inhabited by Deja Voodoo. They weren't the first guitar-drums duo -- Marc Bolan's original Tyrannosaurus Rex comes to mind -- but their incoherent mix of The Cramps, The Kingsmen, The Sonics and "the episode of The Incredible Hulk where he marries Mariette Hartley and she dies" seemed to come from another dimension.

MONTREAL START

"When we started off in Montreal," Van Herk claims, "the big issue wasn't, 'Where's your bass player?' It was, 'Where's your synthesizer?' "

(Alas, those times are returning.)

"We had tried to do a band with more people and it hadn't really worked out, and we did figure out that we could make enough noise with the two of us.

"If Tony didn't spend a lot of time hitting symbols we would have bottom all the time; if I only had the four fat strings we would have a sort of bassline happening all the time. I've heard other people play with just guitar and drums playing with a full drumkit and with a full six strings and it sounds very thin and tinny. But then again, we sounded like we were playing in your basement with the door closed. So it all evens out."

The label folded with the demise of the band and the phasing out of vinyl. There are no Og CDs, and Van Herk claims the tapes are in no condition to see release. There have been no Deja Voodoo reunions either because, as Van Herk puts it, "the reason for not continuing is an equally good reason for not getting back to it."

That reason involved encroaching age (the band was together for a decade) and a desire to turn to something more respectable. Dewald is now a brewmaster and "international man of mystery," according to Van Herk. And the academic is proud he and his former bandmate opted to mature rather than go the way of, say, The Cramps.

"Those guys were scarily past it even in our later years," Van Herk says. "I remember we were doing a show with them once in Montreal and we were setting up our soundcheck when they came to the door. We opened the door and didn't recognize them -- we thought they were just horribly scary old people."

So have Deja Voodoo managed to avoid becoming scary old people?

"Well, the scary old people you can't help," Van Herk concedes. "The inflicting it on other people with a guitar, you can."