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Montreal journeyman Chris Burns played his first gig when he was 15 years old, back in 1982. Today, aged 57, he is more active than ever. Burns' frenetic and squealing rogue guitar work can be heard in a vast and varied catalogue of records and soundtracks spanning over 40 years and some 50 releases by artists such as Terminal Sunglasses, American Devices, Nutsak, Crackpot, The Ratchet Orchestra, and most recently, Tha Retail Simps. Instead of thinking of him as a sideman or collaborator, how about calling him a guitarist's guitarist? We caught up with Burns through email to learn all about his many musical adventures navigating the Montreal scene and the fearlessness that ranges far and wide across Kablooey!, the upcoming album he has coming out with his Going Concerns, out August 17th on Celluloid Lunch Records.
Paperface Zine: First, tell me what you've been up to lately. What have you been listening to, reading, or spending a lot of time doing?
Chris Burns: Lately, I've mostly been practicing for my upcoming album launch. I'll be doing a few tunes by myself to start the evening before my Going Concerns join me and I'm sorta freaking out about that. I don't do solo sets very often (mostly because I find them terrifying) so it's not something I have in working shape and ready to perform at the drop of a hat.
The last thing I listened to (watched, as well) was a clip from a recent Willie Nelson concert. They were doing "Help Me Make it Through the Night"—not my favorite and this wasn't a great version. He wasn't singing much (just coming in with harmonies here and there) and he seemed a little short of breath but then he took one of his fantastically singular guitar solos on that beat-up classical guitar of his and I was moved to tears. The fact that he's 91 years old, had recently missed a bunch of gigs due to health-related reasons but was up there still playing with such spirit was inspiring. I'm reading Respect Yourself: Stax and the Soul Explosion by Robert Gordon which I highly recommend. The story of Stax Records is remarkable and he lays the narrative out nicely but I'm also finding it compelling because he does a great job of setting the historical socio-political context of the times. Makes you appreciate just how special the label, the musicians and the music were (and remain).
PZ: Tell our readers a little about your background. What was it like growing up in Dorval in Montreal, Québec and what records and fanzines did you find yourself clinging towards early on?
CB: Dorval is a suburb of Montreal, probably best known for being home to its international airport. We were right in line with runway number nine. The planes' take-off and landing patterns over the house would be so close they'd completely obscure whatever sky you could see overhead. When landing, they would fly over so near you'd worry the wheels being lowered were going to rip off on the roof (or rip the roof off). The windows rattled each time until, eventually, they cracked. When I return there today, I wonder how the planes didn't rattle me until I also eventually cracked but, at the time, it didn't faze me much; it was all I knew. The far-away sound of something ominous approaching, building in intensity and volume until reaching a climactic, deafening roar that obliterates all other sounds before eventually fading off back into the distance is something that features in some of my music and is even more prevalent in many of my guitar solos. Not so much the fading back off into a safe landing, however. I guess all of my musical airline flights are crashes; most likely due to the pilots always being drunk. On the bright side, many of the in-flight films are pretty funny.
PZ: You've been described as a Robert Quine meets Glenn Mercer type due to your freewheeling approach to the guitar. How did you get involved with playing music? I read you played your first punk gig at the age of 15!
CB: I've heard the Quine comparison before, but I think this is the first time I've seen the "meets Glenn Mercer" bit. Both The Feelies and Voidoids were huge for me (still are) so I'm sure there are bits of both of them in my playing. I think of their approaches as being somewhat disparate; Quine probably never played a solo the same way twice whereas Mercer seems to have very precise guitar lines worked out almost like vocal melodies—especially on those first couple of albums. He does wig out here and there, though, particularly live. When I started, all of my playing was preconceived, even the solos. I still write tunes with specific guitar parts but nearly all of my soloing is improvised these days. When I play with Tha Retail Simps, I'm pretty much just winging it the whole way through. I try to listen and react in the moment and then Joe will give me a look that tells me it's time for me to go bonks. In the Ratchet Orchestra, which has comprised as many as 30 musicians, most everyone has charts to follow, but a select few of us are what the composer Nicolas Caloia calls "wild cards" in the band. Occasionally, there will be some specific things he'll ask me to play but mostly I'm given free rein. It's WAY more refrained and restrained than something like Tha Retail Simps, though. A lot of the time I don't even play at all.
PZ: What do you recall from your time playing in your first band Terminal Sunglasses? How do you remember those early days? I read one of your older sisters was sorta responsible for getting you involved with the band.
CB: As you mentioned, I was still a teenager when I was in the Terminals. The other members were all about ten years older than me which I never really thought about at the time but, in retrospect, it kind of blows me away. When I was in my twenties, I don't think I would have considered having a member of my band who was too young to play in bars (legally). I remember them saying they'd gone through a bunch of people before me, none of whom worked out, so I guess they must have been pretty desperate! It's a little weird, but I remember a lot of those early years of being in a band more vividly than I recall the rehearsal I just had last night. I guess it's because I was so young and everything I was experiencing was brand new. It was also pretty heady stuff, especially for a kid still in high school; hearing yourself on the radio, reading reviews of shows and the album in newspapers and magazines (a review in Spin felt particularly like a big deal), getting recognized on the street from people having seen your video on television, getting hit on by men and women who may or may not have realized that they would have been committing a crime if they were to have had sex with me, going from playing small dingy bars in front of older and sometimes scary people to culminating in a church basement for an all ages matinée followed by what ended up being the band's final performance later that evening in front of several hundred people, many of them intoxicated and about a dozen of whom stormed the stage and created no shortage of pandemonium). I started as the bassist for Terminal Sunglasses. I didn't own one, but the guy who was essentially the leader of the band had one and a Roland Cube amp. I used to schmuck them both on the subway and bus back to the suburbs so I could practice and try to figure out how to play bass. So I was clearly committed but, at the same time, I didn't take it very seriously. Especially once I switched to guitar and became the "front person." I tended to focus more on working out bits for the between-song banter (we used to have goofy contests and give out prizes) than improving my singing or guitar techniques. I thought of it all as just being something fun and slightly wacky to do for a spell. I thought I was more or less done with it by the time I started pursuing studies at university. I was without a band for probably less than a year before realizing I was miserable and needed to have that back in my life. I'm four months shy of turning 58 years old now and hope to keep playing for as long as Willie Nelson.
PZ: After Terminal Sunglasses disbanded, what exactly was your involvement in American Devices?
CB: I was concurrently in the Devices and the Terminals at first, playing bass for both. I probably dropped out of Devices around the same time as TS disbanded. In the early '90s (after I'd started up a few bands of my own), I went back to Devices but this time as a third guitarist. The last handful of times I gigged with them I was filling in on drums. So, it's a band that I've had some pretty intense periods with on and off for about 30 years. It's always been one of my all-time favorite bands, not just in Montreal, but in the entire musical universe. I consider myself very fortunate to have been in and out and around its orbit.
PZ: For readers unfamiliar, what can you tell them about some of your more obscure bands including Slaphappy 5, Bubblegum Army, Brownie Points, and later Crackpot and Nutsak?
CB: Chronologically—Brownie Points was the first. It was post-Terminal Sunglasses/first tenure in American Devices. It was just a one-off, though. We mostly played covers but I had started writing some of my own tunes (Sunglasses had been collaborative and, while I came up with the majority of the lyrics, my musical contributions were far less substantive and I never wrote anything for Devices) that we also incorporated in the set and this provided the impetus for me to come up with more and form a proper band, which lead to Bubblegum Army. BGA lasted from 1986 to 1988, first as a four piece then as a trio. We gigged a bunch around town and recorded a few demos but I don't think we ever played elsewhere and never put out a record (although one of the tunes, "What's the Frequency?" got released a few years ago on a flexi disc that came with an issue of the fantastic Celluloid Lunch fanzine). Slaphappy 5 was a band I was in for the better part of the nineties, with my brother Michael on bass and my good friend Jackie Gallant on drums (she had also been the drummer for BGA). We released one cassette and had another album in the can, but it never found a home and then we broke up. That band played a shit ton of gigs in town and a handful elsewhere, including opening for Dark Carnival (with The Stooges' Ron Ashton), Meat Puppets, Giant Sand, The Grifters, Boss Hog, Congo Norvell (one of Kid Congo Powers’ bands), Come and what was possibly our most prestigious slot opening for the then recently re-united Television. Somewhere in the mid-nineties, while I was still in Slaphappy, guitarist Sam Shalabi persuaded me to form an improv guitar duo with him (The Crib Death of the Uncool). Prior to that, my experience with improvising consisted essentially of just jamming on riffs, but he kicked my ass and opened my mind and led me into the world of completely free improv/spontaneous composition/experimental sound sculpting. I continue to be fairly active in that artsy-fartsiness and have him to thank (blame?) for it. Also around that time, Sam had started having sessions with an amazing rhythm section (bassist André Asselin and drummer Howard Chackowicz) and he invited me to join them. This turned into the mighty Nutsak, a band that still exists to this day (just played the recent edition of the Suoni Per Il Popolo festival). We released a 7" and a CD about 15 years ago and we're about to start working on new material to hopefully finally put out something else. Crackpot was a band I formed a couple of years after the demise of Slaphappy 5. We also gigged like crazy (including fun opening slots for Frank Black, The Bell Rays, godspeed! you black emperor!, Mike Watt, The Fleshtones) released a CD and also had an album in the can that never got a final mix before calling it quits in 2006. I still play many of the songs I wrote from that period, a few of which I recorded with my Going Concerns that will be on the forthcoming Kablooey! LP. Though he is not in the current live line-up, Crackpot drummer extraordinaire Will Glass was able to come down from NYC to play drums on the album for me. The other members of Crackpot were my brother Michael and Simon Fazakerley both of whom not only played wonderful stuff on my songs but also contributed great tunes of their own for Crackpot which were always a treat for me to add my guitwangbox to.
PZ: How long did you work on Kablooey!? What can you tell me about the material written for it? Is it mostly new material or did you also revisit some older unfinished tracks?
CB: Kablooey! was a ridiculously long, laborious and frustrating process and I won't bore you with all the gory details. The pandemic forcing lockdown just as we were set to record the first time around wasn't even the biggest hurdle of the whole ordeal. Here are some of the stats that give an idea of what went into the birth of Kablooey!: Exactly ten years and two weeks from my first practice with the initial lineup I'd put together to work on my shtuff to the release of the first single today. It involved ten drummers, eight guitarists, four bassists, two saxophonists, one trumpeter, one violinist, and one mono-bongosero. 14 different rehearsal spaces were used. The record itself cost me a total of $8,292.35 (CLR paid for the actual pressing, which will be paid back from sales). It's a 50-50 mix of old reworked material and new—or at least new at the time (the album was recorded almost three years ago).
PZ: What are some of your fondest memories working on the record with Thierry Amar at Hotel 2 Tango Studios, Halloween weekend 2021 alongside the Going Concerns band that includes Joe Chamandy, Kate Erickson, and Will Glass?
CB: The recording was a rather stressful experience and I wasn't even sure we were going to be able to pull it all off in just the three days I had booked. As I mentioned, Will Glass doesn't live in the same city as the band, so getting in rehearsal time wasn't easy. He came up at some point and he and I spent an afternoon going over the material one-on-one (he was familiar with the old stuff, but it had been a while, and the other half was all brand new to him) and then we had one rehearsal with Joe and Kate. If memory serves, he came back a couple of weeks later, we squeezed in another full band practice and then we were in the studio the next morning. Amazingly, we managed to get the bed tracks for all ten tunes down, added all the vocals and a fairly extensive amount of overdubs (including some guest musicians) in the three days. Another thing that was not helping was that I had had a vasectomy a couple of days before the sessions and, despite the meds, was occasionally in a considerable amount of pain (was toying with calling the album "The Dick Doc Done Me Wrong"). But my Going Concerns truly rose to the occasion and Thierry was amazing to work with the entire time. Once the third day wrapped, I was as relieved as I was elated.
I should also mention that the current live lineup has the fantastic Zakary Slax (Feeling Figures, Tha Retail Simps) on the drums and he is rocking me and the other GCs like nobody's business!
PZ: Today we're premiering the album's lead single "Things Overheard (From People Talking Loudly On Their Phones)." What's the story behind the song and its accompanying music video?
CB: Lyrically, the song is literally what the title states. I always find it somewhat surprising when people exhibit zero discretion when talking on the phone in a public setting (though not as annoying as people who are listening to music, watching videos or playing games without headphones or earbuds). At some point, I started jotting down some of the snippets of conversations I'd hear walking around or taking public transit. After I'd accumulated a bunch, I picked some of the choice ones and strew them together to fit the tune. The opening lyric is "I think I just saw Aphrodite Salas's massive sinkhole." Aphrodite Salas is a local news reporter and I guess she had done a piece on one of the many underground water pipe mishaps Montreal has experienced, but I think it might be funnier/weirder if the listener doesn't know that (although I guess I just ruined that for you and your readers). The repetitive riff/groove motif was directly inspired by The Fall. I'm a longtime huge fan of that band and all its incarnations but I don't think my tune ended up sounding much like any of their music. The song starts with just my guitar and two guitar overdubs (one slide and one fried, I've labelled them) by special guest Sam Shalabi which I'm very happy about. In a way, there's a Crib Death of the Uncool cameo on the Going Concerns album. The video does not correlate to the song's subject matter whatsoever. Several years ago, I noticed that the laptop I had at the time had a camera built in that I hadn't been aware of. This was also around the same time that I noticed my advancing years were finally starting to make me get a little thin on top. I began a ritual of taking daily photos of various angles of my head to chronicle my journey into baldness. After a couple of years of being fairly diligent with this ridiculous project, I noticed my compooto also had a program that allowed me to make a slide show and put it to music. For fun, I took an instrumental version of a tune I wrote for Nutsak ("Last Train to Nutsak, New Jersey"), edited a slideshow clip to accompany it and called it "Male Pattern Hair Loss." It turned out pretty well, but I never did anything with it other than show it to my girlfriend. When Celluloid Lunch Records head honcho Joe Chamandy told me it would be a good idea to make a video for the single, I returned to that idea and reconfigured the pics to make them match the new tune. "Things Overheard" is a couple of minutes longer than the Nuttoon I originally used, though, and I got pretty tired of looking at my stoopid mug. I must admit, I got a little lazy with the synching at some point but left it at that to finally just be done with it. I guess it visually goes back to the initial Fall inspiration, in that it's essentially just one repetitive riff.
PZ: Let's dive into some of the other songs here. I really dig the opening cut "My Monkey's On Fire." What can you tell readers about this one?
CB: I can assure you that no actual monkeys were harmed during the process of recording the song, although I must have bruised the ego of the monkey I hired to play tambourine. His timing was all over the place so I had to fire him and just got Will to do it, instead. It wasn't a total waste of time and bananas, however, as I learned a valuable lesson: make sure you hold proper auditions and never just let any old rando ape in the studio.
PZ: My favorite song from the new album is "8 Days A Freak"—I think it really captures the funny, idiosyncratic side of the album. What were the inspirations behind this one?
CB: I've been told that there's some band called The Bugs or The Crickets or something along those lines. Apparently, they had a bit of a hit with a song called "8 Days a Week" but I knew nothing about that and the similarity of the titles is purely coincidental. I was somewhat shooting for a Neil Young and Crazy Horse vibe but, again, I don't think it turned out sounding much like them. Musically, I think it's probably one of the most straightforward tunes I've ever written (although I couldn't help myself and it gets a little wonky towards the end). I liked the idea of juxtaposing a song that talks about feeling like a freak set to fairly straight, non-freaky music.
PZ: What can you tell me about "Perennial Doubts."
CB: That song was written about a month or so before it was recorded and the band hadn't even totally figured out how to play it yet when we landed in the studio. Many of the songs we did were several years old and I really wanted to be sure to also have something in there that was as new and freshly baked as possible. Lyrically, it's pretty clearly written in full on COVID pandemic times. Everything was so fucked up, no one knew what the hell was going on or how things might end up and, at the time, it just felt wrong for me to not address that in some way. Of course, now it's nearly three years later and it's not as topical. Things are still completely messed up in this world, of course, but I probably wouldn't feel weird, tone-deaf or shallow releasing an album that doesn’t touch upon such dark matters. Regardless, I'm still glad it’s included. I think it's a raw, honest snapshot of the moment it sprung from. Plus, I got to rip out a cathartic wah-wah-laden guitar solo at the end that expressed my total frustration, anger and pain better than I could ever put into actual words.
PZ: Aside from the new album, what else is on the horizon for you and your Going Concerns? Can we expect any shows down the line?
CB: We're launching the album here in Montreal this coming Saturday, August 10th at one of my favorite bars in the city, Le Cheval Blanc. There's a potential local opening slot for a touring band in the works and I'm trying to rustle up some out-of-town shows to support the album, but nothing is confirmed, yet. If you or any of your readers wanna book us somewhere or have us come play in your backyard or living room, we're game!
PZ: Thank you for taking your time. Any advice or last words you'd like to share with our readers?
CB: Thanks for your time, Joe, and thanks for the thoughtful questions. Thanks also to anyone who took the time to read all of this. As to parting advice: try to be kind to one another, keep an open mind about things you might not initially fully understand and don't eat drugs you find on the floor. Oh, and please buy Kablooey! for yourself and everyone you've ever known.
Kablooey! is out August 17th on Celluloid Lunch Records.