SPILL FEATURE: A CELEBRATION OF ALL THE PEOPLE WHO BROUGHT US TO THIS POINT – A CONVERSATION WITH DAVE BIDINI OF RHEOSTATICS

A CELEBRATION OF ALL THE PEOPLE WHO BROUGHT US TO THIS POINT

A CONVERSATION WITH DAVE BIDINI OF RHEOSTATICS

The recently released, lucky 13th studio album The Great Lakes Suite from Toronto’s Rheostatics celebrates the band’s 45-year history and knack of surprising the most fervent of fans with their trajectory. The Great Lakes Suite is not only a celebration of these storied bodies of water that bring so much life and joy to so many, but also honours the legacy of the Rheostatics, their long-time members, idols, influences, and friends.

This new record features longtime members Dave Bidini, Dave Clark, Don Kerr, Tim Vesely, along with newer additions Kevin Hearn (Barenaked Ladies) and Hugh Marsh, with guitarist Alex Lifeson (Rush) joining in. Additional collaborators include a myriad of talent featuring Tanya Tagaq (Inuk throat singer, songwriter, novelist), Laurie Anderson (musician and filmmaker), Chief R. Stacey LaForme (poet and storyteller), Anne Carson (poet and essayist), Liz Howard (poet), Kendel Carson (fiddler and singer), Maiah Wynne (singer-songwriter), and the late, great, Gord Downie (singer-songwriter, poet and activist).

Dave Bidini honourably took time from his hectic schedule recently to discuss The Great Lakes Suite with Spill Magazine, touching on the album, the band, and bodies of water.

Rheostatics have a long-time musical kinship with lakes and oceans, and seem to always be buoyed by water, from band members Martin Tielli and Dave Clark and their previous band Water Tower, to covering Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” live and on record, to two albums dedicated to whale music. Investigate the band’s library further and you’ll find album covers featuring whales, fish, canoes, with songs about water. It’s something that can’t be ignored, especially with the newest album dedicated to the Great Lakes.

‘It’s a concept record, it’s a double vinyl entity too, which is really cool. Some concept albums have a linear story throughout, it’s not that at all. But it’s leaping off the same kind of theme and inspiration. I love concept albums and there aren’t enough of them. I’m happy to be filed that way, for sure. I think the album is meant to be listened as a whole, in some cases you don’t know where one track begins and another ends. I’m really proud of the flow of the record.’

‘We did Music Inspired by the Group of Seven (1996). Kevin and I talked a long time about what we would do next as a largely instrumental-based work. I think the Great Lakes for us, at least those of us who live where we do, share an impression of those water bodies. I think geo-politically it’s one of the things that ties North America together in a lot of ways. As a symbol it seemed kind of mighty enough to want to use as a leaping off point. We often have had a lot of water themes in our music. We did the soundtrack to Whale Music, there’s a lot of that that runs through the work anyway, so it just seemed like a natural place to go. Sometimes you just need an excuse to bring everybody together to work. We didn’t look at pictures of the Great Lakes or anything like that. Our sense of them are kind of inculcated in us, you know, really from childhood often. That’s how we orbited the theme. We have to protect those things that are really important, like the railroad, they’re important to our national sense to who we are.’

‘We recorded a version of that [“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”] for Melville which was our second record, and we learned that because we went to Thunder Bay to perform, we wanted to do a Lake Superior song.’

Special guests abound on The Great Lakes Suite while a long-time Rheostatics member Martin Tielli takes a music break (while contributing album artwork), with Rush legend and Rheostatics influence Alex Lifeson giving a helping hand. The addition of so many interesting singers, poets, musicians and storytellers makes this an especially unique release representing the current iteration of the band. Additionally, taking the tour across Canada in 2026 and performing in all of the Great Lakes cities are ideally on the docket over the next few years.

‘He [Martin Tielli] was the one who suggested we actually talk to Alex [Lifeson]. He was like “I can’t do it, why don’t you get Alex to play guitar”. It seemed kind of like an absurd idea, but it fit perfectly because a lot of Martin’s textures. You know we’ve all been inspired by Rush and certainly inspired by Alex’s guitar playing. So, in that harmonic space there’s a lot of similarities to his playing to which kind of fit naturally in what we do. Also, because there’s not a lot of singing on the record, not that we needed permission from him or him from us, but we would never make a song-based record without him. This record lives enough in the abstract, I think, that we could do it. We’ve kind of put it [the next album]) in Martin’s hands, because he’s not part of this one we’ve gone to him and asked him what he would like to do. One of the things we’ve thought of, although it’s really super early days, is we have miles and miles and miles of tape of stuff that we’ve recorded that has never been released that we might want to use as kind of a leaping-off point to potentially create new music. That’s something that we might try to do. So we’ll see.’

‘We had Tanya Tagaq perform with us and that was really one of the great thrills of my musical life to play with her. To create a work with her and play along to what she does, which is very free, so it was very freeing to do that. A lot of the record has spoken word elements, so often we were sort of playing to people’s spoken word compositions.  Anne Carson is one of the great writers of our universe and it was great to create some soundscapes behind her. Kevin (Hearn) recorded Laurie Anderson on the third track “Homes,” so I wasn’t around for that session, I would’ve loved to have been in the room when that was happening. Every guest we have ended up being a real treat. For a band as veteran as ours it was nice to have new elements, new voices to play off of, new approaches and new ideas. Working with them and playing to them, as opposed to just sitting around staring at each other trying to determine who was going to start first. Instrumentally, all of the music we were all together at the same time. Pat [Hearn, Kevin’s father] has performed with us in the past, we had him at one of our Massey Hall shows. He read a poem by Charles Bukowski at our show, so he’s always great to have around.’

THE GREAT LAKES SUITE ALBUM REVIEW

‘One of the hopes, I think, is when we take this project to other cities is to have people in those cities join us as part of the quote-unquote collective, I think. Donna Grantis is somebody I really like a lot, she’s played with Prince and she’s in Toronto. Kevin Breit is another great guitar player. We had a jam with Michael Ray from the Sun Ra Arkestra, that was incredible. It’s like a universe of great people out there and hopefully potentially the project will draw some of them to us.’

The Tragically Hip’s late Gord Downie makes a special, stunning appearance through a recording from 2015, of his spoken-word poetry, in “The Drop Off.” accompanied by the mesmerizing music of the Rheostatics. Notably, “The “Drop-Off” is also a song title by The Tragically Hip from the 2006 album World Container, with hints of, but different lyrics. The Rheostatics have a long history with The Tragically Hip and Gord Downie, touring with them during The Hip’s Another Roadside Attraction festival in 1995 and then as the opening band for them during The Hip’s Trouble at the Henhouse album support tour, resulting in the Rheostatics being name-dropped by Gord Downie on their 1997 live album Live Between Us. The Rheostatics also covered The Tragically Hip’s song “Bobcaygeon” for The Strombo Show’s 2017 tribute episode honouring Gord Downie and his band. The bands also have a certain mutual affection for Toronto’s small, intimate and historical venue, the Horseshoe Tavern, referenced in the lyrics of “Bobcaygeon,” and with both bands performing there extensively for decades.

‘I saw him, I was at that event at the Lake Ontario Water Keeper gala event [in 2015] when he told that story. I loved the story and it always kind of stayed with me. So, when were thinking about a Great Lakes themed work to work with I remembered that. I talked to the organizer Mark Mattson of the Lake Ontario Waterkeeper, and I was like “You wouldn’t happen to have the sound file, I love that recording.” and they recorded everything. So, they sent it to us and we played to it. We spent a couple of hours at least on that one piece and took a lot of different approaches to it. Some of the approaches we had were more frenetic, kind of a speedier, quicker pace, other stuff was more languid and eventually after we’d done a bunch of work on it, we decided on the one we used on the record.’

As a follow-up to 2019s excellent pop/folk/rock album Here Come the Wolves, The Great Lakes Suite is a much different animal. As Dave touched on, it’s much less a “singing” album with the creativity level and outside the box structure of the songs taking the record to altogether another level. This unique album is the product of a band that is less concerned about commercial sales and more focused on the moment, enjoying the creative fruits of their labour with friends new and old. Which is a fitting place for a band with the stature of the Rheostatics to venture into.

‘We did three nights at the Horseshoe in 2022, maybe 2023, and each night was dedicated to a different record that was in our repertoire, they were great nights. We celebrated the work that we’d done in the past, but I think as working artists it’s important to challenge yourself and to move forward and to create new things. It’s an album that really doesn’t demand you listen to it, which is really counterintuitive in our age of entertainment where you’re told to have something within the first 30 seconds that grabs listeners or else they’ll flick to the next Instagram whatever, or if you’re listening on the platforms go, to the next song. We’re not interested in that whatsoever, we’re interested in trying to do something new and something non-linear and something abstract and something just different so that we can be in a fresh place, till new soil, and go to another place to see what it’s like. Because we’re 40, 50 years on as musicians, I think we feel confident and comfortable going into those places. It can come with its own sense of terror, honestly, especially when it comes to improvising which most of this record was, but I just think you owe it to yourself as an artist, with the ability to make music, to explore new things.’

‘Having been around since 1980, every time you make a record it is really a celebration of all the people who brought us to this point. It’s one of the reasons we had this listening party at Paradise Theatre in Toronto where we had 200 people out and we wanted to just let the people who know us and love us the most hear it for the first time. It’s been such a victory lap for us in a lot of ways. We recorded it pretty fast too, you know, we really went in the studio without any preconceptions and just played. Everybody was right into it, Alex as much as the rest of us. Having him perform with us, being the natural leader that he is, being a hero of ours, that was also a wonderful thing to be able to pull out after 45 years. “Look, we’re playing with one of the people that had us form bands in the very first place.” So, it was cool to tie that together.’

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Photo Credit: Chris Wahl