  Tragically Hip guitarist and solo performer, Rob Baker poses outside local Toronto bar Feb 23/11. He is promoting his new side project band, Stripper's Union. (Mark O'Neill/QMI Agency) |
Tragically Hip guitarist Rob Baker was feeling creatively juiced early last year when the Kingston, Ont., rockers got off the road from a nine-month tour.
Thus The Deuce, the second album from Baker's blues-inflected power-pop side band Stripper's Union, with Vancouver-based Odds vocalist-guitarist Craig Northey, bassist Doug Elliott and drummer Pat Steward, was born and released earlier this week.
"I was feeling really creative and it was hard to slip back into family life, and chores and daily responsibilities, and getting up at this time and going to bed at this time," he said, while relaxing in a Toronto bar recently.
"I'd been on tour where when the sun comes up, it's time to go to bed. And for the first month at home, that's what I was doing. The house would be quiet, everyone's asleep, I'd slip down to my basement studio and plug away 'cause I had those nice hours where the whole world's asleep."
The Deuce follows solo offerings from The Hip's other guitarist Paul Langlois last December and frontman Gord Downie last summer.
"Gord already had sort of a leg up; he was determined that he was going to do a record or had already recorded a lot of a record and was getting ready to go out and I just thought, 'I'm looking at a year of sitting around, growing moss and getting fat or I can keep exercising my creative muscles and I just chose to do that," said Baker.
"The guys in Stripper's Union -- Craig, Pat and Doug -- are such good friends. I feel like they're my brothers in a way that I feel like the guys in The Hip are my brothers and I knew I wasn't going to be seeing those brothers for a while."
Logistically, writing and recording with three other band members who live in Vancouver wasn't as hard as it sounds.
Baker, who hopes to have some Canadian club dates with Stripper's Union in late April, said he took advantage of whenever Northey was nearby and vice versa.
The two musicians wrote the lyrics for the first three songs for The Deuce in a Smith Falls, Ont., motel the day after the last federal election when Northey was there.
"I felt really good about that," said Baker. "That's what happens whenever the two of us get together, stuff tumbles out, and feels easy and natural so I went back and said, 'OK, we've got a start on three,' I'll assemble a bunch of other ideas and in the beginning of April I went out to Vancouver and spent a week just holed up in a hotel room there and I worked at Craig's studio with him."
As fate would have it, Baker was later standing beside Mark Monahan of the Ottawa Bluesfest while both were at a show at a Kingston bar and Monahan asked if Stripper's Union would be up for making an appearance.
That offer got the three Vancouver band members to the Hip's Bathhouse Studio in Kingston and The Deuce was recorded in seven days.
"With The Hip, it's very much about the five of us and everyone getting their stamp on the music. With Stripper's Union it's much more, I'm writing the music and then Craig writes the lyrics, I would say with assistance from me, and then we bring in these players that Craig has great shorthand with through a series of arched eyebrows and looks out of the corners of their eye that tell each other what they're doing."
Still, the difference between a Stripper's Union album and a Hip album isn't as big as you might think.
"It's all pretty close," said Baker. "The Hip always stem from a sort of garagely, early English R&B thing and then it grew outwards from that and I think with the Stripper's Union guys the common ground is more Stax Volt R&B sound. We love the horns, we love the B3 (organ). And Craig is very much a power-pop guy. I'm a bit more of a blues rock country (guy)." And I think he's a very clever lyricist."
And when members of The Hip come back together after time away working on their side projects, Baker said they're better for it.
"Everyone comes back to the Hip invigorated," he said. "One of these things about these little projects, I'm sure people will say it's a vanity project or their moonlighting or whatever. For me it's an absolutely necessary creative outlet."
Baker explains Stripper’s Union name
Ever wonder how Stripper's Union -- the side band by Tragically Hip guitarist Rob Baker, The Odds' singer-guitarist Craig Northey and two others from the latter group -- got its name?
"We were commenting on how we had both come up through this club system where you have to be finished your soundcheck by 11 a.m. because the strippers come on at 11:30 a.m. to get the lunch crowd," explained Baker. "And then they would dance until 7:30 p.m. or 8 p.m. and then the bands would start at 9 p.m. And they'd put you up in the second floor of whatever place you were playing and the strippers would be in a bunch of rooms and the band would be in a bunch of rooms and they'd eat Chinese food and you'd eat pizza, and somehow it seemed like we were in the same line of work almost. So Stripper's Union just kind of fell out of that and the first album is called Local 518, which was the Kingston musician's union."
But for Stripper's Union's just-released second album, The Deuce, Baker's sense of humour came into play.
"There's a scatological reference 'cause I had said, 'This record is going to be the s--t.' Someone said, 'We should call it The Deuce, Number Two!' "
