FFWD Weekly
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| Music by Mary-Lynn McEwen The Smalls Album Release Party When four farm boys hooked up in a big city called Edmonton, they may not have known much about underground music, punk rock and the scene, but they already had some valuable life lessons in place to guide them on their journey through the underbelly of infamy. Honesty, perseverance, family, loyalty – these things are not abundant for most surfers riding the swells of rock and roll. Yet The Smalls have managed to work their grassroots values into almost everything they do in a way that is not corny, but charming. Drummer Terry Johnson, who admits he hadn’t heard of SNFU or the underground club scene when he moved from just outside Grand Prairie to Edmonton at age 20, is both laid-back and jubilant over the phone the day following the band’s home town album release show, attended by 1,000 devotees. After four dry years with no new releases, few shows, legal hassles and even a dead horse thrown in for bad measure, the sold-out gig and 14 tracks that comprise My Dear Little Angle have given him reason to smile. He is able to by-pass the negative person he claims he usually is and reflect fondly on the band’s nine-year stint. The quartet’s sense of loyalty is apparent in the fact that all the original members have hung together through trying times. "A lot of bands have the songwriting team or the front man and guitar player who basically run the show and all the other members are expendable in that way, but with our band, it’s a pretty equal thing between all four of us. That’s part of what’s kept us together for so long, that whole mentality of keeping going with the same people. You’ve got to take each other’s shit. "If any one of our members would have quit, none of us even would have talked about trying to keep going on. No member of our band is expendable." Rounded out by songwriter/bassist Corby Lund, guitarist Dug Bevans and singer Mike Campbell, The Smalls have put out four albums, with 1995’s Waste and Tragedy signaling the start of what was to be a four-year hiatus, although the band didn’t know it at the time. "It took us a long time to get (in the studio to record My Dear Little Angle), but once we did, it went really well. We were worried about having enough songs, but we had more than enough. It felt good after all that Cargo bullshit and stuff." The stuff to which he refers was a major hassle with the band’s label. After being purchased by two hucksters who’d just been convicted of fraud in Ireland, Cargo failed to promote The Smalls’ records, withheld funds and didn’t provide music stores with the product. Cargo eventually declared bankruptcy and the band had to go to court to get their master tapes back. The band lost $30,000, Johnson figures. He cannot put an emotional price tag on the ordeal. In the midst of all this, Lund’s parents hid from him the fact that his childhood horse had died on their Taber farm, hoping to spare him any more stress and pain. When Lund found out, the grief gave rise to the song "Ride On Through (My Saddle Horse Has Died)," which is symbolic of The Smalls’ ability to find fertility in adversity. The song was so representative of the band that it ended up on Grimskunk’s Inhale Fig. 2 compilation. "We had the worst luck of any band. I don’t think it can get much worse than that was. It made it really tough for a long time because we weren’t playing a lot because we didn’t have a new album out, no money coming in." This was the point where the families the band had left behind in Taber, Leduc, and Grand Prairie rallied round their prodigies. "Our parents are pretty good about that; they’ll still lend the band money from time to time because every time we’ve said we’d pay them back we’ve been pretty good about it." Paying one’s debts is right up the honest street The Smalls were raised on. "When you live in a small town, you can’t hide. You can’t go around lying to everybody because it’s gonna catch up with you, right? So that’s where the honesty aspect comes up – no point lying about it because you’re just gonna have to pay for it later. You might as well be straight-up even if you’re going to hurt somebody’s feelings," Johnson figures. All in all, things are going so much better now for The Smalls that even an ex-farm boy has a minute to sit back and daydream a little. "The big rock ’n’ roll dream, playing big huge shows, coliseums or whatever, has always been part of what I’ve thought about. But going a few steps up the ladder, playing in the States or something, that would be good, too." Although Johnson knows that such a dream might never become reality, he’s not about to give up on it. "We’re all pretty pessimistic and we’re not counting on any of our rock and roll dreams coming true, but we’ve been at it so long we can’t just give up on it now. We could get all feeling bad about ourselves and think of all the bad shit that’s happened and quit tomorrow, but then we woulda wasted nine years, ’cause who knows what’s gonna happen next, right?" |
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