SPILL FEATURE: TO BE OR NOT TO BE: FROM POPULAR FRONT TO LOW TIMES APLENTY – A CONVERSATION WITH RON HAWKINS OF LOWEST OF THE LOW

TO BE OR NOT TO BE: FROM POPULAR FRONT TO LOW TIMES APLENTY

A CONVERSATION WITH RON HAWKINS OF LOWEST OF THE LOW

2026 marks the 35th anniversary of the heralded indie release Shakespeare My Butt… from Toronto’s Lowest of the Low. To honour the occasion, the legendary band has blessed us with a 35th anniversary edition through Sonic Envy Records. Lead singer and primary songwriter, Ron Hawkins, who has been in the mix since the band’s inception, sat down and spoke to Spill Magazine to discuss.

Included in the double vinyl, 17-track Shakespeare My Butt… package is the bonus EP Limbo Town Revisited, featuring three previously unreleased songs and two 1991 demos. Unreleased titles “Another Year In Limbotown,” “Righteous,” and “Marrow and Bone,” were all written in 1990 and are newly recorded by the current and longest iteration of the band but failed to make the cut onto the album back in 1991. The raw demos on the EP are fan favourites “Eternal Fatalist” and “Salesmen, Cheats and Liars”.

‘I wrote “Another Year in Limbotown” because it actually was toward the end of a band we had called Popular Front, which was me, David [Alexander] and Stephen Stanley. We were pretty much ready to pack it in, we were really spinning our wheels, and we felt like we were kind of in limbo. So, I wrote that song about that and it took a name change [to Lowest of the Low] and I started writing slightly different and suddenly it took off. It was a real cautionary tale for people who are hanging on the verge of packing it in, to maybe take a breath and really look at it and see if it’s the right thing to pack it in because things can change on a dime. I think they’re [three unreleased songs] just going to live on the 35th anniversary release of Shakespeare. I listen to them and I can hear the writing style that is similar to Shakespeare. Maybe it’s not the same as I write now, it’s how things evolve. I heard somebody asking Dylan about that, you know, the early Greenwich Village years and he was saying I” couldn’t write like that now if I wanted to because I’m just not in the same place.” How much that affects the art coming out, of course, like the input affects the output.’

The 35th anniversary edition vinyl utilizes the same master version as the original record which had only initially been released on CD and tape formats in 1991. A vinyl version of Shakespeare My Butt… was never originally released, as was the case with many musical releases at the time, with the emergence and popularity of the versatile CD format. Shakespeare My Butt… contained a whopping 17 songs on the CD version, which is a hefty haul of content in any musical era.

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‘Having the benefit of two new players in the band that weren’t there in the day, it’s interesting to hear them go like, holy shit, why didn’t they make it on the record? They’re great songs, you know, so it’s interesting. I think the process of choosing was literally that those three songs were maybe 6 months older, and in those days we were so young we felt like 6 months, you know, come on, we can’t put those on they’re old. So we waited for 35 years instead. I think we were also fighting technology in 1991, which is, I’m pretty sure 17 was kind of all we could get on a cd, running time wise. We also released a cassette and in order to release the cassette, we had to leave two songs off (“Letter From Bilbao,” “Kinda’ The Lonely One”). So there were a bunch of people who bought the cassette and had no idea there were two other songs until they got a cd.’

‘I think vinyl was kind of on it’s way out and I remember I broke up with my girlfriend at the time in 1990 and I sold all my vinyl because I moved into this little punk rock apartment with a bunch of guys and didn’t have room. I sold all my vinyl thinking it was never coming back. There was a minute where we were just gonna make cassettes, and then we decided to roll the dice and make cds, not knowing that, you know, now vinyl’s back and now I’ve purchased London Calling in every possible format you can buy.’

The initial Shakespeare My Butt… release was produced under the independent label Page Publications, a label founded by Victor Page, the father of Steven Page of Barenaked Ladies. The Lowest of the Low link to Barenaked Ladies didn’t stop there. In 1991, both Barenaked Ladies and LOTL were gaining followers and airplay, both exploding on the scene at the same time in Canada. Two bands with distinctively different influences and rock ‘n’ roll attitudes, at the time.

‘They’re very, very nice guys and we sort of feel bad about our piss and vinegary attitude back in the day. They asked us to do an entire tour with them and we turned them down. Then later that year, I saw Steven Page on the Junos with the Lowest of the Low t-shirt on and I was like, ‘Oh, okay’. Then that year we also turned down a tour with Bryan Adams because it’s not the kind of music we make, we don’t really listen to it. It doesn’t make sense with our crowd. I mean, now we would go, well it’s a lot of butts in the seats and maybe those are potential fans. But back then we were still pretty punk rock and pretty much like fuck that, we don’t really jive musically with them. We went out with the Cadillac Tramps and The Jazz Butcher and people like that, who had smaller audiences. We were maybe not as good to ourselves as businessmen, but we felt really good about it artistically.’

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A kind of unique feature of a band who has been producing music for decades is the distinct demographic of the fanbase and the potential for a wide age-range of followers. Not to mention the ever-growing music catalogue that tends to change in style, to a degree, in conjunction with natural changes to lyrics and music which typically occur as a band matures and progresses over a long period of time.

‘I think our audience is split between people who could care less if we made any more new records because they really love Shakespeare, and then half who are hanging on every new release. Because we’ve been doing pretty much a record every year and a half. It’s been pretty prolific and pretty steady. We’re getting tons of 18-19 year old kids coming out, which I can only imagine are kids of the original fans and their friends. That’s been great because that’s a thing that’s hard to do, to bridge another generation. The band that’s opening for us on this tour, Kingdom of Birds, they’re incredible. Three young women and their sound is sort of like Pixies, Sleater-Kinney, like very ‘90s and very rock and roll. They’re just super cool and our crowd has been absolutely loving them. I think there’s a great future for rock and roll.’

Shakespeare My Butt… was listed by Bob Mersereau as the 84th best Canadian album of all-time in his excellent 2007 book The Top 100 Canadian Albums and repeatedly as a top 10 album in other polls of the best Canadian albums of all-time. These are pretty serious accolades considering the plethora of top Canadian artists that have graced the music industry over decades. It’s an impressive debut album release for a band nucleus that was so very close to calling it quits. There’s also the danger of Shakespeare overshadowing all subsequent releases, as can be the case for bands who come out of the gate, in their relative youth, with what could be arguably considered their best material.

‘It’s been a renewed love affair. It’s been very interesting and kind of exciting to come back to it and think to myself ‘Oh I fucking really like this record’, because I had a period when the band broke up [1994]. I had another band called The Rusty Nails that I started and for a period, people were yelling Low songs out at me. I was in sort of a pissy, like, you know I’m not a fucking jukebox kind of phase. I’m over that because now they’re all just songs in the repertoire. There’s some cool stuff, like in “Rosy and Grey,” there’s a line ‘read Henry Miller and wander around…’. Henry Miller is a very problematic writer. There’s lots of great things about Henry Miller that I like, but there’s lots of very problematic things and a lot of it is misogyny and sort of rape culture that’s in his writing. I was able to change that to Chanel Miller, and Chanel wrote a book called Know My Name. It’s about a woman who was sexually assaulted by a guy named Brock Turner, and she wrote a book about it, which is weirdly funny and cathartic to read. so I’ve been able to switch it out, you know, ‘read Chanel Miller and wander around…’. Not only does it fit because the name fits, but it’s also kind of cool because I feel like it sort of redeems the horrible parts about Henry Miller. There’s some weird meta stuff going on for me that maybe the audience might not catch. The cool thing about it is I’ll see every night in a big crowd, like at The Danforth, I’ll see three or four people, usually women, who will kind of smile and catch it. It’s important for a person who’s been in the business for 40 years to hold on as long as you can to the playful aspects of it. Try to feel like you’re 16 for as long as you can. Well, I think I just quoted John Cougar by accident.’

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Background Photo Credit: Robert Ciolfi