Orange Record Label Hates Our Guts

If someone told me even a month ago that one day, I would be single-handedly and directly responsible for ruining seven people’s careers in the entertainment business as far as getting signed to a local, established label goes, I wouldn’t have believed it. I would have maintained that I was 110% committed to doing whatever it took for Soul Plane to take off in search of a better destination while flying the friendliest of skies; I would have been adamant and indignant in my steadfastness as the lead singer of this band and say that my actions should speak louder than my words, that I’ve been nothing but good to the band, that I’ve shown up for every practice and pulled strings beyond most people’s reach to get the band hooked up with shows and recording time, that no one should be questioning my integrity and involvement with the band, etc.

Today, if someone told me that one day, I would be single-handedly and directly responsible for ruining seven people’s careers in the entertainment business as far as getting signed to a local, established label goes, I’d tell them this story:

2 13pm: Dan and I arrive at Conor’s place because I decided to be a lazy son of a bitch and take the day off work – we were supposed to discuss business, as Conor had been talking to a lot of show promoters lately about us in an effort to try to make things happen.

2 18pm: We make our way to Conor’s backyard around a table. He informs Dan and me that he has been able to find a clothing sponsor who might be interested in seeing if there were any cross-promotional marketing opportunities between his company and our band.

2 30pm: The first joint is rolled. We smoke. Conor doesn’t, because he recently grew ovaries.

2 33pm: I am pretty high. We shoot the shit for a little bit, talking about near-future shows that were being planned out for the month.

2 43pm: We resume conversing about the clothing sponsor, and why it’s so important that this happens. I don’t really remember the rest of the conversation because frankly, it doesn’t matter to me. This is why I have a manager – so that I don’t have to worry about the administrative bullshit I never cared about in the first place.

2 45pm: We start dreaming out loud; Conor says that the bestfriend/manager relationship him and I have reminds him of the relationship Eric and Vincent (from the show Entourage) have, and that he had heard that comparison made by several people on different occasions. I wonder if parallels to Will and Grace are to follow, because we’ll fuck each other before we get to fuck girls as hot as the kind Vince and E get to fuck on the show. Plus Vince and E drive Maseratis and Escalades – we still have to think of ways to scam the pizza guy just to get free food.

2 53pm: Conor is firm in his belief that we will one day live that lifestyle. I am firm in my belief that Conor is a moron. Not that I don’t believe in us, no, far from it – I just don’t think there is that much glamour and glitz in the music industry to go around. People don’t even pay for the music they listen to these days, so it’s not like we’re seeing any piece of any pie anytime soon.

3 00pm: We talk about making movies. Dan mentions wanting to do porn. Conor and I remind Dan losing money is not on our list of things to do.

3 10pm: I decide that I am not high enough; I start rolling another joint.

3 13pm: We smoke again. I am now baked to the point where orally forming coherent sentences requires double the amount of effort.

3 25pm: We talk more business and smoke more weed. I am so high I can no longer tell the difference between Dan and Conor. Trust me; this goes somewhere – keep reading.

3 34pm: Dan decides that this would be a good time to phone Orange Record Label owner Aubrey Winfield in an effort to arrange a meeting with him (Aubrey cancelled the last one and has been meaning to rebook for quite some time now). Now, common sense would tell you that calling anyone important when you’re stoned is a bad idea, but with us, common sense is never all that common – Dan dials.

3 35pm: He gets some douchebag receptionist on the line and says, “Hi, my name is Daniel; do you think you could help us out and transfer us directly to Aubrey Winfield? He left a voicemail on my phone the other day, and I’ve been meaning to get back to him, but I haven’t had time until now…”

3 36pm: The Douchebag curtly informs Dan that Aubrey is not in.

3 37pm: Dan diplomatically asks to be transferred to voicemail after having no luck probing this Douchebag for Aubrey’s slated return-time.

3 39pm: After what seems like hundreds of rings, Dan finally gets to Aubrey’s voicemail. Conor and I have been talking amongst ourselves this entire time, and have been keeping quiet, more or less. At Dan’s uttering of something substantial, however, we stop chatting to focus our attention on what Dan is saying as he leaves his message…

3 42pm: “Hey, Aubrey, this is Dan Paiken of Soul Plane; I’m just returning your call – you left me a voicemail message the other day saying that you were looking to set up a meeting time and place with the band, you know, just to chat and sorta find out if we share a common interest in promoting quality Canadian music… so if you could give me a call back at your earliest convenience, I would greatly appreciate it: my cell number is 647…” And the motherfucker just stops talking.

3 43pm: In my head (remember, I am high beyond redemption), I come to one and only one reasonable conclusion here; it was obvious, what else could have happened to make Dan suddenly stop talking like that? Since marijuana makes me completely deaf to any logical thought whatsoever, I immediately yell this reasonable conclusion out at the top of my lungs: HOLY FUCK, CONOR, DAN IS SUCH A FUCKING LOSER THAT EVEN AUBREY’S ANSWERING MACHINE HUNG UP ON HIM!!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAaaaaaaahhhhshit.

3 44pm: Conor’s eyes widen in horror as he realizes what I just did, however unknowingly. Dan is furiously trying to press buttons on his phone so that Aubrey would hear random beeps instead of a recording of me shouting like a firecracker just exploded in my asshole. I realize that I have effectively crossed the Rubicon. I burst out laughing.

3 45pm: “Yui, what the fuck? That was on the fucking recording, you shithead. Aubrey is gonna come back and hear that shit first thing in the morning, you fuck. We’re fucked. Oh my God, I can’t believe this shit.” That was all Dan could manage to squeeze out between fits of laughter, and as for Conor? He was giggling like he smoked more pot than both Dan and me put together.

Whatever, I’m not going to lie; the humour factor made it all worth it. I’m not sorry.

P.S.: I still don’t know why Dan stopped talking in the middle of leaving his phone number, but more importantly, I don’t care. I don’t even think he knows why he stopped talking.

Operation: Countdown To Launch Pt. II

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Operation: Countdown To Launch Pt. I

In retrospect, we probably should not have recorded. No, in fact, it is now nothing short of blatantly obvious that we should have waited at least until after we had performed a second show to get a recording done. I mean, shit – at the time, we had seven songs in our repertoire, ready to be executed at a moment’s notice – but that was all we had. In that regard alone, we should have waited until we had more songs under our belt, so that we could figure ourselves out and find that signature sound and that level of playing comfort that all bands find eventually, but only with time and patience (clearly, we had neither). Had we done it that way, we would have been able to pick and choose among our songs in deciding which to put on the demo, and subsequently, we would have at least had the chance to put our best foot forward in case anyone remotely important was listening. But alas, excitement and ego often shroud foresight and logic, which makes for shitty planning and organization for shitty courses of action.

For some dumbass reason, we wanted the demos to be out before our show at the Reverb on June 1st, the semi-finals showdown of the Band on the Run series. I think our reasoning was as follows: Hey, we never practice so we’re not gonna have any new shit for the Supernova judges to hear, so let’s at least show them that we’ve made some progress in our pathetic music careers and have a demo ready and cut by the show date so that they don’t realize right away that we’re just a bunch of lazy degenerates making music solely for a paycheque in order to avoid becoming 9-5 zombies wondering where the fresh hell our childhoods went, oops too late for that. I still can’t figure out on what grounds we decided that dropping $700 on recording and wasting an entire day playing in a studio and many more subsequent hours on mixing and mastering was better than just practicing for free at Dan’s house that day and coming up with new material, but we did.

So, off we trekked to Velvet Sound Studios, a quaint little place in Mississauga just off the Lakeshore on Hwy 10 (Hurontario St.). The set-up was pretty tight – they had all the huge consoles and monitors you’d find in a professional recording studio. To quote Aaron on the way in: “Yo Yui, you came through big, man. This is perse, I feel so fucking official right now.” Mark McLay, the owner and chief operator there, was very accommodating, and got right down to business. He began by explaining that there were two ways we could do this: Gideon, Aaron, Dan, and Kev would play off the floor and Blythe, Dan and I would record the vocals separately afterwards, or we’d all record individually in different booths, one after the other.

After little debate, we decided we’d play off the floor – there was no way playing in a dim-lit, enclosed room on your own could compare to the dynamics and intensity you could get only by rocking out with the rest of the band. It was also determined that the instrumentals of each song were to be recorded first, and we’d deal with the vocals afterwards. This was fine by me; I’m a one-take wonder on that microphone anyway, so I wasn’t too worried.

I only started worrying when I realized that the instrumentals were taking up a lot more recording time than we had originally allotted for them. This worry turned into genuine horror when it occurred to me that the show we needed these demos cut for was to go down exactly a week that day, which meant that we couldn’t just take our time and not rush – there was no way we could do the vocals another day, for example, and still have all our tracks mixed and mastered at the same time by the deadline date. Our first move was to cut our losses: we had originally planned to record two or three new songs that we were still shaky at playing (outside of our original seven), but judging by the amount of time it took to record one song that we should have been able to play in a diabetic coma by then, those came right off the To-Do List. Even by recording just the seven songs, we were leaving maybe an hour tops for the vocals – everyone kept making mistakes in their playing, people were pointing fingers of blame and in doing so delaying progress even more, and the tension started getting thick as it always does when band members spend too much time in the same room with each other at once. But somehow, some way, Soul Plane’s instrumental section managed to grind their way slowly and steadily over the finish line.

Good thing I smoked enough weed all day to rap properly by the time it was my turn, better thing Blythe paid for the Harmonies-on-Demand package when she ordered cable. Once we got to the vocals, everything seemed to come together. I took two takes MAX per song, and Blythe was harmonizing with her own voice after doing each main take without prior preparation. Dan seemed to know exactly what he was doing, much more so on the mic than on the guitar earlier that day. Finally, by around 8 30pm (we had arrived there around noon) we were ready to pack up, call it a day, and come back for the mixing later on. I immediately phoned Tarik, a studio engineer I used to record with, to get ready to get in touch with his connection to get copies of a demo CD duplicated. During our conversation, Tarik made no guarantees since it was a rush order, but he did remind me of the next big thing that was to be taken care of: the album art.

Once in a while, God’ll throw you a bone, usually after a giant shithurricane tears through your life and destroys your livelihood. After the shithurricane that was recording ruined my life and aged me four decades, I met a guy named Dominic Chenier at my current place of employment. The first day of training, he had shown most of the group of hires his sketchbook – no one could understand why he wasn’t being paid millions to draw cartoons and produce animation instead of $16/hour to answer phones all day. Apparently, he got partial credit for the creation of the character of Mr. Bobo, Mr. Burns’ stuffed bear off the hit TV show The Simpsons, and was part of a board that designed Christian Bale’s costume in Batman Begins. Without a shadow of a doubt, the boy was qualified. I approached him about needing his services (or anyone else’s who could adequately get it done – being picky was a luxury I did not have) for an urgent project: basically, I needed a CD jewel-case cover, and CD jewel-case back cover, and a CD face – due two days from my time of asking. He wasted no time in getting right to work and assured me that it would be easy as hell for him to pull off. As true as the sky is blue, in two days, he had several different versions of rendered artwork for me to pick and choose from. For a minute there, having a demo ready by the 1^st of June actually seemed like it wasn’t just a mirage we were trudging aimlessly towards – that is, until real life fucked us in the ass once again…

…to be continued…

The Wakestock Afterparty Show

Date: July 28^th, 2007
Venue: Lee’s Palace
Series: Island of the AMS Afterparty [Element Skateboards]

“Yo, sorry to tell you this, man, but I just spoke to [camp director], and she’s just not budging about not letting us come back from camp… I don’t think we’ll be able to play the Wakestock show.”

That was a voice message from Gideon I received on my answering machine a grand total of 6 days before the show. I almost lost my shit. Gideon’s tone was one of acceptance, the expression in his voice akin to the whimpering of a wounded animal that had just come to terms with the fact that its final moments were drawing dangerously near. The band was FUHQD, (say, “FUCKED” with an Italian-American accent mixed in with altogether too much oomph), as Kevin would often yell whenever Soul Plane rode through the rough patches of turbulence.

The situation would definitely fit Kevin’s choice of word: Aaron and Gideon, our drummer and bassist, respectively, had signed on long ago to go to this summer camp (way before Soul Plane was even a thought – and let’s not forget their tender ages). Although we knew that their 3-week vacation was inevitable, we didn’t expect their absences to clash with anything important as far as the band was concerned. That is, up until Conor called and told us that he got us a spot opening for Chad Muska and BrassMunk at Lee’s Palace for the Wakestock afterparty – in other words, this was to be the show of our lives, and we were going to be lacking our entire rhythm section.

Despite having gone to unholy lengths (Dan went so far as to offer Soul Plane’s entertainment services to the camp director in exchange for letting Gideon and Aaron go for the one night, sadly to no avail), we knew in our hearts that we would be short a bassist and drummer very soon. In fact, by the night of the 21^st, we had a definite “NO” from their end. We told practice to go fuck itself and adjourned to Conor’s house, where our desperation almost forced us into programming the bass and drum lines of our songs into a computer so that Dan and Kevin could play over them on stage… we were definitely in for some shit.

After we realized that digitalizing our music sounded like teething babies being electrocuted, we almost committed suicide as a band. The next couple days would subsequently beat the shit out of us, both emotionally and physically; we were ready to hold hostages to get replacements (Blythe even called the drummer and bassist from Tongue N’ Groove, the band who played after us at the Elmo show on the 4^th – an effort made again in vain), but for a show of this scale it was simply unreasonable for us to expect anyone to pledge their time and energy.

As fate would have it, two very key players came around to show support. One was a long time family friend, Brian, and the other was one of Conor’s old high school classmates, Arjun. Brian had several years of experience as a drummer, but he had stopped playing to pursue a DJ and production career; my call pleading for his services had effectively forced him out of retirement. He was very gracious about this, as was Arjun, who didn’t even play bass normally, but lead guitar with a band that had been playing together for five years.

We devoted most of the next 72 hours to intense practicing and teaching the newfound members of our band the material. To their credit, they picked up our music like housekeepers – good thing they had talent. In all honesty, their work ethic during this time superceded the original Soul Plane cast and crew. While Blythe, Dan, Kevin, and myself were busy biting each other’s heads off (evidently a product of residual frustration at the lack of preparation time we had leading up to the show), Brian and Arjun were focused like this show actually mattered to them – their professionalism held us together when we needed it most.

The show itself was a relief. Honestly, the best part of the night was when it was all over – it was like the weight of the world had been lifted off my shoulders. The party started picking up 2-3 songs into our set, and by the end of our show, the crowd was drowning us out. The six of us were just glad we were actually playing it, a feat that would have been unthinkable even a week ago that night. Highlights of the Wakestock afterparty included: getting epically shithoused with Conor and somehow ending up in the green room partying with Chad Muska and the BrassMunk. Let me say that these guys are the most down-to-earth people you’ll ever meet – especially Chad, who said he thought I was a “dope fucking rapper, man, definitely something I can work with, man, I gave your lead guitar there my card.” This guy has done production for the guys from Wu-Tang; coming from him, that’s a big deal.

What more can I say? Big ups to Conor for getting us this show, but in the whirlwind of frustration and helplessness, we forgot that music was supposed to be, above all, fun. We took way too much of a business approach to this show, but it’s only fair that we did. Conor had to Ron Artest people’s grandmothers to get us a spot on this dance card, and I refused to let him down, both as a friend and as a business partner – besides, Conor made it quite clear that important people would be at the show, and that these important people would be watching Soul Plane, and that these important people have the power to make us by sponsoring us and giving us shows, or break us by hating and blackballing us because we gave a shitty performance. This meant that not only did we have to pull it off, but that anything less than mint was unacceptable.

What would our excuse even be at that point? Sorry, we fucked up because our drummer and bassist went to camp. If I was Conor and a band I managed came up to me and told me they couldn’t play at a show like the official Wakestock afterparty because some kids went to camp, I would have mailed anthrax to everyone involved in creating this obstacle between me and certain success. So, in that regard, yes, this show could not have been taken any more seriously. But on another level, reflecting back on the days leading up to it, there was so much we could have done to peace out the tensions we built through the turmoil and panic – I guess what I’m trying to say is that it often takes a crisis like this to test the togetherness and the strength in the bonding between the members of a band and in my opinion, we failed the test miserably; despite the fact that we pulled through and played a good set, we have a lot of maturing to do as a band on an emotional and communicative level. But we’re young, and we have time – I just hope I’m not stuck trying to convince myself of this five, seven years from now.

Stay tuned: Hop onboard the Soul Plane August 18^th at the El Mocambo…

Show Reviews Pt. III

Date: July 4^th, 2007
Venue: El Mocambo
Series: Battle of the Bands [Supernova.ca/Redpipe.ca]

I’m not even going to bother writing a review for this show. Not because I’m a lazy bastard – no, not this time: this time, it’s because someone else broke it down real nicely before I even got home from the show. Here’s Ali with a review straight from Supernova headquarters (don’t believe me? Read the review yourself at http://www.supernova.com/shows/1425):

“After the small prelude from the Johnshiltz performance, Soul Plane took the stage. The winners of the night… and they deserved it! By my count, they had the largest crowd attendance and loudest response! What makes this group so special is how diverse the group is and how well they blend it together. When I met the group backstage before their set, I thought they were two entirely different bands, as the group consists of many different musical cultures. They seem like a perfect mix of… Linkin Park, Pearl Jam, Black Eyed Peas, and the Dave Matthews Band… yeah it’s hard to believe you can have a perfect mix of all of those bands! The bassist has his moments, and plays some phat ass bass throughout the night. As for the two guitarists… let me just say this… they remind me of McCready/Gossard, that’s probably the greatest compliment I have ever given anyone! As for the drummer, very strong in the back reminds me of a Taylor Hawkins (circa “You Outta Know”); at times he pounds as hard as John Bonham. The two singers flow really well together. My personal favourite was when the lead yelled at the crowd “CAN YOU FEEL THE BOUNCE?” … “SO BOUNCE!!!!” He said it with so much authority, if you can speak with that much authority for 5 minutes; I suggest you guys cover “Gimmie the Loot”. Get some Biggie up in here, that’s what I’m sayin’, fuckin’ eh!”

That’s right; you heard it from the horse’s mouth: we rocked like retired La-Z-Boy employees. We won a whole bunch of shit that night, with prizes ranging from recording time to a feature show at the Playdium in September.

This set was hilarious: we only did it to get studio time. The name of the game was simple: scam friends and people close to you, because if you sold 40 tickets for the show, then you’d win 4 hours of studio time; 80 tickets, 8 hours, and so on, and so forth. We knew the grand prize courtesy of Redpipe.ca was a long shot, and besides, this was something we did more for our manager Conor than anything else, because his boy JShiltz (from the Smiling Buddha show) was headlining the night and wanted us to jam along with him.

Our intentions were to just play the set and then bounce, and we did just that – well, everyone except Blythe; she stayed to watch the band that went on after us, Tongue N’ Groove, the last band of the night. She was blown away by how well they played and part of her died on the inside as it became clear that the grand prize was no longer in sight (despite having been told as she got off the stage by Supernova staff that we kicked the most ass so far all night). They tallied up the scores and announced the winners of the show to what was left of the crowd: Soul Plane had won, and Blythe was the only one from our band there. Awwwkwurrrrd. I hope she was as gracious in accepting the prize as she was that one time she dropkicked Gideon during practice for using the words “testicles,” “pudding,” and “chainsaw” in the same sentence.

At any rate, she called and screamed into the phone that we had been victorious that night; apparently we had won $500 collectively, 12 hours of recording time at Machinehead Studios, a qualifying spot on the Edge102 Next Big Thing contest, and that feature spot at the Playdium show, all from Redpipe. We thanked her for the news; everyone had sex with each other to celebrate, and then we immediately started scheming on how to best spend the prize money without Blythe’s input.

Date: July 7^th, 2007
Venue: Toronto Night Market, Metro Square
Series: n/a

It looked like aliens had landed in a big-ass section of the parking lot in Metro Square - with lights glowing bright enough to keep people awake in Idaho. It was noisier than most air strikes.

It smelled so much like shit that my eyes started to water, and you know how sometimes something smells so bad, you can taste it on your tongue? Yeah, this event was offensive to pretty much all five senses.

Toronto Night Market – how would one put this eloquently? We were wary about doing this show because Chinese people don’t like anything but their own culture (I am of Chinese origin, I know this is FACT, not just another racist stereotype, so can it, you assholes). Contrary to all appearances and popular beliefs, I am actually quite in touch with my heritage, so I wasn’t too worried about being booed off stage for speaking English – if worse came to worst, I’d hype the crowd up in Cantonese and everyone would immediately stop what they were doing and ask who the awesome dude on stage was, and ladies’ undergarments would fill the air like locusts do at harvest, making me at least partly responsible for any significant increase in global population over the course of the next few years.

Note: most of the really old Chinese guys didn’t have a single fucking clue as to what I was saying in my lyrics, but they stayed, cheered, clapped, yelled, and spat in high spirits anyway because Blythe is hot and they are perverted – oh man, sexual harassment rocks!

Soul Plane would have played an amazing show (Aaron loved the drum set they provided, the stage was nice and spacious) had it not been for the fact that the power generators cut out in the middle of our last song, “Never Say Die.” For some reason, though, my own mic and Aaron’s drums could still be heard through the system, so we rounded off the set in as professional a way as possible: I freestyled eight bars, Aaron filled it out with a drum solo, and we called it a night. I don’t think anyone noticed – the crowd was cheering wildly.

The highlight of the night came after the show; once we stepped off stage, the staff thanked us sincerely for helping them cover up the technical difficulties and glitches, and expressed gratitude towards our enthusiasm for performing despite the show running so late. As I walked out back onto the fairgrounds from backstage, three girls I had never seen before came up to me to congratulate us. I was as receptive as possible, and accommodated their follow-up and autograph requests – the one girl had nothing for me to sign, so she had me sign a napkin she robbed, undoubtedly from one of the hundreds of street vendors stationed around the area.

It was definitely a proud moment in my life, not because these girls made me feel like Usher when they got in my face screaming in excitement, but because it was apparent that the music I was partly responsible for making was reaching across an infinite number of borders and boundaries, language barriers and cultures, and touching people on the other end: these new fans of ours didn’t speak a word of English, they had made all their requests and felicitations in Cantonese and even double-checked to make sure “PLANE” was spelled right in the web URL I gave them because they had heard that the English language sometimes had several different spellings for identical-sounding words.

Once I realized their love for the music was genuine, and that they weren’t just some retarded groupies trying to get at someone who was doing something remotely important, it occurred to me for the first time since being told forever that music was a language on its own, ethnicity and cultural backgrounds notwithstanding. It also occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, I was starting to become proficient in it, to the point of fluent communication…