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It takes a true maverick to wear a Hootie and the Blowfish hat.
Ask Brad Merritt, bassist for 54-40, which plays on the Telus Stage in Northlands tonight, capping off a dumbfounding variety of live music featured at Klondike Days this year.
"When I wear my Hootie cap," Merritt says, "I feel it's the most punk rock thing that I could possibly put on. I'm a rebel."
What he says isn't so outrageous. Merritt cites German philosopher Georg Hegel and his famous "thesis, antithesis and synthesis" theory of society (Merritt only went to college for a year, but he did learn that, he says) as it applies to the music business.
He explains, "There's a certain way in which music is presented in order to get played on the radio, to get attention, and that would be the thesis. And whenever you have that, the opposite springs up from the underground as an antithesis of the thesis, and that gains in popularity. What happens then is each of the two entities borrows from the other and creates synthesis, and that becomes the new thesis, from which a new antithesis develops. That's one of the dynamics in society. And it applies to music is a major way. We've been around long enough to see it happen more than once."
And so, Emerson Lake and Palmer gave way to the Sex Pistols, which gave way to Journey, which gave way to Nirvana and the commercialization of grunge. And that's why Hootie and the Blowfish is cool.
Whoa! Hold on here. Before we get into a philosopher's soccer match (I'm sure Nietzsche would have something to say about this), you have to know that Merritt and his crew owe a lot to Hootie and the Blowfish. 54-40 opened for Hootie on the band's Canadian tour last fall. And Hootie covered 54-40's song I Go Blind, making it into an American hit. Royalty cheques are still pouring in.
"I'm actually pleasantly surprised when I do hear one of their songs," Merritt admits. "I would say that in certain ways that I had a dislike of the band ... if you compare it to the new Mudhoney record. But it really was a fresh breath of air in its time."
54-40 isn't just a whiff of fresh air. Like he says, the band's been around long enough to have seen several Hooties come and go. How long, you ask? Would you believe since 1982? That's right - 54-40 is an '80s Canadian band that doesn't sound anything like Loverboy (which also played K-Days, by the way). To give fans a sense of their legacy, the Vancouver veterans have just released The Sound of Truth, including 54-40's first releases (Selection EP, 1982; and Set the Fire, 1984).
"We felt that we have this hardcore fan base in Canada and other countries and we felt that we should give them an opportunity to at least find out what the hell we were doing in the early to mid-1980s," Merritt says. "And I think that the music itself, for the time and even now, is really very, very interesting stuff. In terms of production, you can definitely tell it's from the '80s, but I don't think there's anything wrong with that."
"When we talk about our influences and we mention eight obscure British bands, which are all sort of these post-punk, semi-industrial, angst-ridden kind of stuff, people go, `I don't get that. What does that have to do with Baby Ran and I Go Blind?'
And I understand that, but the thing is, if you get this record, you connect the dots pretty quickly."