How do you know when you’re too old to rock?
What is it like having a career that doesn’t make sense in middle age?
Is it possible to remain inspired by the majesty of rock?
54-40 has been up and down for 25 years.
“These are all good questions,” the lead singer says.
The eTalk reporter wants to talk to lead singer Neil Osborne about the new 54-40 video. Director Stephen Scott wants 54-40 to mime “Golden Sun,” the second single from the Vancouver outfit’s latest release, Yes to Everything. A Busby Berkeley, 1930s-style chorus of teenage girls–decked out in brightly coloured costumes and blond wigs–just wants to dance. Here at Cherry Beach, east of Toronto’s downtown core, Osborne and the eTalk woman head over to the standard rock-video accessory–a classic car, in this case a 1975 Lincoln Continental–against which leans Osborne’s 14-year-old daughter, Kandle, who will be joining the dancers. She’s about to make her video debut. She sports luxurious naturally blond hair.
It’s 34 C on a late afternoon in early August. Standing near a very soupy-looking Lake Ontario, the other members of the band introduce themselves to the woman with the microphone.
“Hi, I’m Brad. I play bass.”
“Hi, I’m Matt. I play drums.”
“Hi, I’m Dave. I’m the guitarist.”
On cue, Brad Merritt provides a synopsis of the video plot: car breaks down, band drinks tea, band is transported to another world with dancing girls beneath a golden orb–not quite 54-40 down the rabbit hole, but close.
The eTalk reporter asks more questions. How do you guys do it? How do you keep on keeping on? Wow, I mean, you guys are like video veterans. The band explains that videos are fun to do and they enjoy working with directors like Scott. They tell her Dave Genn is the new guy, formerly of the Matthew Good Band.
In the background, “Golden Sun,” another in a long line of catchy 54-40 singles–others include “I Go Blind,” “One Day in Your Life” and “She La”–plays over and over (and over) as the crew sets location sound levels. The song is a loud, buzzing insect invading the immediate environment, its tightly wound, punky-disco guitar torque recalling the agitated rhythms of early Talking Heads. Osborne is irritated by the humidity on the waterfront and grumbles about his “love-hate relationship” with Toronto. Lately, this is what he’s been hearing: “Are you guys still a band?”
That’s what happens when you’re a former “platinum status” act that refuses to just fade away. 54-40 is trying to rebuild its fan base, signing on with True North, the label built by Bernie Finkelstein’s business instincts and Bruce Cockburn’s music. The group is still respected in the industry, still recording and touring new material, still scoring coveted slots like opening for The Rolling Stones at the Saddledome–but rebuilding is no easy task when you’re getting older. “After all this,” says Osborne, whose band just celebrated its 25th anniversary, “we’re still only as good as our last gig, our last single, our last album.”
The eTalk reporter’s queries about long-evity seem glib, almost accusatory. She demands short, snappy answers that will fit into a short, snappy segment on TV. “Oh, we get asked the question all the time, ‘How do you stay together so long?’ ” Osborne says. “We try to read the environment we’re in and respond accordingly, rather than actually answering the question.”
They’ve certainly experienced the feast part of the rock dream–Hootie and the Blowfish covered their song “I Go Blind” and it went Top 5 in America in 1996. Osborne’s wife Geanine Robey describes the change in fortune this way: “I mean, we just couldn’t believe the size of the first royalty cheque!” With 2003′s Goodbye Flatland, they experienced the famine part–the ignominy of releasing an album no one noticed. And so the question lingers: What exactly is left for Osborne to prove? When Coral, his 17-year-old older daughter, watches dad onstage at an upcoming university frosh-week gig, won’t it send an uncomfortable message about going full circle?
Maybe, but his publicist, for one, doesn’t want me to go there. When I tell her I want to talk to the lead singer of 54-40 about getting old, she responds, “Bill, have you lost your mind!?” I do some fast-talking while she calms down. “Well, I’m not sanctioning it,” she says, “but look, why don’t you go down to Cherry Beach and ask Neil yourself?”
At the video shoot, I tell Osborne I don’t really want to talk about Yes to Everything (although we do). I want to talk about getting old, about coping with a career that doesn’t make much sense in middle age, about being a rock dad to a pair of teenage daughters and about whether it’s possible to remain inspired by the majesty of rock. He reflects for a moment or two.
“These are all good questions,” he says.
The morning after the video shoot, Osborne and I hang out at the Bulldog Cafe across from the Gardens, the Toronto Maple Leafs’ old haunt. Ross, the “No. 1 Barista in the Central Canadian Region,” according to the plaque on the wall, serves us a couple of volcanic lattes. Osborne is 45, skinny and healthy-looking. His hair is long, straight and black. He wears a T-shirt, black jeans and Converse All-Stars. He picks up the thread about getting old. “We did a tour of the Maritimes and it was April Wine Weekend on the radio. I had no idea they wrote all those songs.” Now Osborne’s band is becoming the victim of April Wine Syndrome.
Although 54-40 has never stood on the promontory of being “Canada’s rock band,” the band has been in the first-tier for so long it’s moved through generations of listeners–from “Set the Fire” to “Baby Ran” to “One Gun” to “Nice to Luv You” to “Ocean Pearl” to “Love You All” to “Since When.” Like April Wine, the four band members flirt with being anonymous as a living entity, though widely loved for their songs. Lately, a few too many times for comfort, they’ve heard the refrain, “Oh wow, you guys wrote that song? That’s a great song!”
Unlike April Wine, though, 54-40 is not an “oldies” act. The guys record new music and go out and tour it every two years or so. They do it because they know how to do it and they’re pretty good at it. They also do it because it’s easy, although getting to the stage of releasing an 11th studio album is never that easy. They also do it because it’s the path of least resistance.
There are always answers, and here’s another one: 54-40 keep doing it because they can, even in reduced circumstances. Far from being jaded, Osborne says playing music is exactly the thing that gives his life meaning. He thinks the world moves crazy fast these days, all but incomprehensible and invisible to people who stare at cellphones instead of looking at the world. To him, playing rock music is the one thing he can rely on in a world of chaos. “Quite often, it’s the opposite of what you would think is the answer,” he says. “Life’s changing, I’m changing, but I’m still doing music.”
If there’s one thing about Osborne, he does look for answers. He’s been reading the holistic philosophy of Ken Wilber (A Theory of Everything) and even went to visit him in Boulder, Co. Describing the meeting on 54-40′s website, Osborne wrote, “I went to discuss various points along the integral process as they pertain to the arts. There, I befriended (over a couple of Guinness in the hotel lounge) Genpo Roshi. He invited me to a Koan intensive weekend in Salt Lake City. At the end of the weekend he asked, ‘You’ve just had about 30 years of Zen teaching compressed to 72 hours–how do you feel?’ ” Osborne’s answer? “Like writing a song!” As he gets older, he’s realized “playing rock music is grounding for me–this is what I can hold onto.”
Osborne’s grip on a rock-music career stretches all the way back to high school, when he befriended the similarly inclined Merritt. In the late 1970s they were inspired by English punk and American roots rock (and, if truth be told, progressive rock). Visiting London, they wasted time in legendary dives like the 101 Club and basked in the aura of punk also-rans such as TV21. They wanted to inject punk’s energy into the roots-oriented songs they were writing. Eventually the pair settled on the name 54-40 for their band, lifting it from an 1844 U.S. presidential campaign slogan, “54-40 or Fight!” (In the context of a spat with Great Britain, Democratic candidate James K. Polk claimed that the Oregon Territory stretched all the way to the 54th parallel, or Alaska.)
Allen Moy, who engineered their first LP, 1984′s Set the Fire, ensured that acoustic guitars clashed pleasingly with jagged post-punk tension. Moy became their manager and eventually landed them regional attention in California and a major label contract. The band released three albums with varying degrees of success, producing such Canadian pop standards as “I Go Blind,” “Miss You” and “One Day in Your Life.”
In 1991, Sony executives were surprised to hear a “gold status” act had been left unsigned. They pounced and 54-40 became their rock priority. Sure enough, Dear Dear, released a year later, sported hits like “Nice to Luv You” and “She La” and moved the group up a tier to platinum level. The band reached mass Canadian consciousness with the “Ocean Pearl” video in 1995, following it a year later with 54-40′s biggest-selling CD to date, Trusted by Millions.
Then things changed. Osborne, having penned three relentless rock albums in a row–yet fond of Byrds/Buffalo Springfield-style material, not to mention newer variants like Wilco and the No Depression roots movement–felt artistically hemmed in by hard-rock monoculture. The country inflections introduced in 1998 on Since When shocked record company personnel when they first heard the master. Moy says Sony kept asking him, “Aren’t you scared?” about radically altering the 54-40 “brand.” To everyone’s relief, the title tune, a keyboard-driven pop confection, became the band’s most-played radio hit.
But the respite was temporary. Since When turned out to be the first in a line of releases that sold less than its predecessor. Casual Viewin’, the 2000 follow-up, has not yet reached gold status (50,000 copies). As the guys get older (and their original fans get older, too, with jobs, kids and grown-up priorities of their own), it becomes that much more difficult to replenish 54-40′s audience with younger listeners.
The band’s woes mirror the shrinking audience of the music industry as a whole. Faced with falling revenues and the file-sharing plague, companies began to flick away rock acts like so many dead flies. After a 10-year relationship, Sony and the group parted ways in 2002 with a greatest hits collection called Radio Love Songs. After two decades as a major act, 54-40 was once again working at the independent level. Downsizing meant limiting the size of tour crews and learning thrift at the pre-production stage in order to remain viable.
“What is our market now?” Osborne asks. “A little bit of everything we can find. We’re like a scrapyard or a pawnshop or a restaurant with a garden in the back.”
As if to prove the point, during 54-40′s current cross-Canada tour, a lucrative gig dropped off the back of a pick-up truck. The Maple Leafs’ promotions department wanted a major Canadian rock band to headline a tailgate party outside the Air Canada Centre following their home opener on Oct. 8, and 54-40 got the call. It was chilly outside, but the group tried bravely to reheat warm, fuzzy memories of their music. Pounding out one recognizable song after another, they lured hundreds of younger Leaf fans into the cordoned-off party zone.
While music industry downsizing and a change in artistic direction limited 54-40′s options, another threat came from within–one that nearly destroyed them. It’s not something they’re inclined to talk about in such stark terms, but that is the nature of being four Vancouver guys sticking it out through mostly good times for 20 years. When one has problems, the others cover for him. Like the cliche of a family enabling the wayward sibling, 54-40 had a dirty secret, a secret they seemed powerless to do anything about.
Odds are any rock band that lasts as long as 54-40 has a secret back story. The headliners at Pengrowth Saddledome on Oct. 28 know all about this. One of the obscure benefits of being the really old men of rock is they can lay claim to the archetypal casualty story. Way back, in a much earlier time, Brian Jones was The Rolling Stones’ inspirational leader. He was the one with omnivorous instrumental capability–and a prodigious substance intake to match. Eventually, his skills declined to the point where he couldn’t function and, ultimately, he was kicked out of the band. Then he was found dead, under suspicious circumstances, in his swimming pool in 1969.
In 54-40′s case, Phil Comparelli, the band’s original guitarist–similarly richly gifted, the one who “always seemed connected to a higher cosmic realm”–spent a good part of his career slowly poisoning his musical desire. “From my perspective,” Osborne says, “Phil always had an issue with alcohol. But being in the rock ‘n’ roll environment, I suppose we allowed it to happen for years. We would bring it up every once in a while when it seemed like it was getting out of hand.”
Comparelli’s commitment to the band wavered, although with coaxing he would still come through. “The guy was a one-take wonder,” says Osborne. “Never rehearsed, just did it.” It took five years of no-shows at recording sessions for the group to reach the point of calling for a family intervention. It was during this turmoil they found out drugs were the main culprit, not alcohol.
Comparelli made an effort to clean up, which worked for a couple of months and a handful of gigs. His compatriots signalled their support by allowing him to participate in the Goodbye Flatland tour in fall 2003–but their manager wasn’t so sure. Now Moy says he should have trusted his instincts. As the one responsible for handing out per diems to the band members, he could have staggered cheques instead of doling out lump sums to each man prior to the tour. Comparelli showed up at the Vancouver airport the morning they were due to embark, “swatting at flies.” He’d used the advance to buy drugs. He couldn’t help it. A few days later, he was sent home from Montreal. That was the end.
Moy carries a lot of baggage to this day. He remembers seeing Comparelli three or four years ago, thinking, “Jeez, what kind of diet is he on anyway?” Another time, after yet another request for advance money, he asked himself: “Look, how much beer can one guy drink?” Total denial. Moy had been through the anguish of an intervention once before, with another friend. He believed he was savvy enough to know what a bad drug habit looked like. Now he says, “I felt like a complete idiot.”
I try to phone Comparelli at the last number Moy has for him. The line has been disconnected, with no new listing. When I suggest Comparelli haunts 54-40 still, two years later, Moy says yes, that’s a good way to put it. Not because he still contacts the office, which he does, but because he was their brother-in-arms. He lived and breathed the music with them for two decades. He was their poetic soul, the natural who never practised, but could lay down lyrical solos in real time. And now that guy was lost between worlds–not really living, not really dead. “I’m like a parent with Phil,” says Moy. “Every day I hear the phone ring and I wonder, ‘Is this it?’ ”
I talk to friends in Vancouver and they say Neil, Brad and Matt are the nicest guys you’d want to know–level-headed, solid, sincere. Comparelli’s addiction tormented them, but they’re not the kind of guys who’d sit around and moan about their troubles to a reporter in the dressing room. And they’re definitely not the kind of guys inclined to exploit a tragedy for a few cheap headlines.
After a long day of hanging out with them in their hometown, I get back to my writer- friend John’s house in West Van. He’s built a small study just off the kitchen, which is where I’m quartered for my stay. There’s a little bunk bed beside the desk. I climb into it with my laptop, insert Yes to Everything one more time and close my eyes. In my exhausted state, I let the lyrics wash over me. I arrive at the final tune, “On the Road Home,” where Osborne sings, “Sometimes life is a prison/ You just fake getting by/ Bye bye bye my good friend/ You gotta go now,” and it hits me like a mainline. To hell they’ve been–the brotherhood, the enabling, the umpteen chances, the guilt, the angst–and, finally, now, back. “It’s part of the story now,” shrugs Osborne.
Two years into the new 54-40, with bright (relatively) young Dave Genn’s boogie-rock lead guitar and punchy harmonies spurring him on, Osborne still deals with this chapter of the story on a daily basis. The band’s research into addiction led them to believe they had indeed become classic enablers. “We’d say, ‘You can do what you want with your life, all you have to do is show up and be amazing,’ ” Osborne says. Comparelli was family, and like with most families, his addiction was tolerated for the longest time, so long as he didn’t disrespect the music.
Moy tells me, with some urgency, that Comparelli broke their hearts: “You have to understand, for Neil it was like betrayal. It was, ‘How could you?’ ”
It’s a perfect sunny afternoon in late August down at Vancouver harbour. After work, thirtysomething downtown professionals file into the Vancouver Rowing Club to drink wine courtesy of Lindemans, eat gourmet burgers courtesy of celebrity chef Rob Feeney and be party to a “secret” 54-40 gig courtesy of JACK FM.
Upstairs, in the dressing room, the band eats dinner and muses about the best time to go on. It’s not a paying gig, so there’ll be no repercussions for hitting the stage late. They decide to wait in case a few more stragglers show up. To kill time, Moy conducts a quiz.
“Anyone know where Amherstburg is?”
He turns to me. “Uh, up in Haliburton maybe?”
“Not bad, but no.”
More answers. “Huntsville?” Nope. “Prince Edward Island?” Nope. “Ottawa Valley?” Nope. No one has a clue where this latest gig will take the band.
Moy gloats. “I’ll give you a hint–it’s south of Detroit.”
Still no light bulbs turning on.
“OK, we got an offer to play a club in the town of Amherstburg, Ont., which is 30 kilometres south of Windsor.
“We look at all the offers we get,” says Moy. “We probably won’t go, but…”
Meanwhile, the JACK emcee is valiantly pitching another quiz to an indifferent crowd–most are still outside enjoying the warmth, the food, the booze, the yakking, the smokes. To win one of her exclusive JACK package giveaways–including a JACK T-shirt, a JACK sticker and other JACK swag you’ll run into at the next yard sale–you must answer this skill-testing question: What is the collective age of 54-40?
The answer: 169 (Osborne 45, Merritt 45, Johnson 43, Genn 36).
Upstairs, Merritt responds, half-seriously: “When it’s 269 we retire.”
The band eventually takes the stage and lumbers into the first single from Yes to Everything, “Easy to Love.” Osborne’s wife, for one, is curious. Robey hasn’t seen her husband perform in well over a year. “The kids, the dogs…” she says, before pointing out, “Neil’s sacrificed his career an awful lot for his family, you know.”
Suddenly, the JACK audience has a focus. The power in the group’s twin guitar-fuelled anthems remains undiminished. In between tunes, Osborne directs the crowd’s attention to the merchandise table, where his daughter Coral hawks the band’s new CD and T-shirts. His carney act includes a sideways comment about the guess-their-age raffle: “We’re going to beat The Beachcombers! We’re going for the record!”
The group impishly assaults “Radio Luv Song,” the tune about a DJ who “Plays only one song/ Only one song/ All day long.” The message to JACK is: hey, how about a little quid pro quo–we’re playing a free gig, now how about you guys play our new single “Golden Sun” about a million times?
Turns out the ploy works–JACK’s still playing “Golden Sun” almost two months later. It’s not exactly the triumphant comeback after the commercial flop, but Yes to Everything does signal a lost emotion regained. After years of psychic erosion, it’s perfectly OK to be optimistic now. Don’t worry about getting old, it’s all right, just keep going. And, by the way, look up. Here she comes, a little golden sun.
I think back to my conversation with Osborne at the Bulldog Cafe in Toronto. We’re on our second award-winning latte. He’s musing aloud about whether or not it’s OK to lead 54-40 forever. There are a lot of pauses. The big question “Should I hang ‘em up or not?” takes time to answer.
“I’ve known this from Day 1,” says Moy. “Neil’s either writing songs or he’s not. The others wait till he’s ready to go.” After 25 years, Osborne’s stubborn spirit still works for Merritt, who thinks 54-40 won’t descend to oldies-act status so long as they put out new records. “Playing live is always fun,” he says, “but it’s the four guys together in the studio–that creative act–that keeps me going. We don’t do that, we’re done.”
That, of course, is a lot easier said than done. For every successful sexagenarian band like the Rolling Stones, there are thousands of defunct acts, or mere shadows lingering on. There aren’t even many groups from 54-40′s early-’80s cohort recording fresh material and touring in support of it, but Osborne, finally ready to give me an answer, recalls running into one of his contemporaries last April in Regina.
“Blue Rodeo were playing their own tour,” he says. “When you know these guys, I mean, from our generation, you can look them in the eye and think, ‘Well, we were there.’ It’s easy to pick up where you left off, even if you haven’t talked to them in three or four years. In a more vulnerable moment I said to Greg Keelor, ‘You know, it occurred to me in the last year or so, I don’t think I can do anything else.’
“And Greg said, ‘Yeah, it’s nice to know your options are behind you.’
“I thought, ‘Perfect.’ ”
Originally published in Swerve Magazine on Oct.28.05.
