Legends In Our Own Minds
My name is Ivan Judd and I began this musical journey over 40 years ago listening to old 78's I'd been given by a girlfriend of my brother's. I was 4 years old. I remember sitting in front of a dilapidated old mono system that sat in the living room of my parents home in Pickering, Ontario. It was big and ugly, but the sounds that emanated from that box fascinated me to say the least; Not that the records themselves were memorable...children's songs...Christmas standards...I remember "Puff The Magic Dragon" the most...that haunting and rather sad tune about growing up and leaving behind our childhood friends and fantasy life.
I never really lost that fascination for music...it only increased. I discovered The Beatles through those early years. My brother, who is almost ten years my senior, played them quite a bit...every song was catchy and memorable ...easy to learn the words.
I discovered Elvis when his 1968 'Comeback Special' aired on TV. I loved the black leather outfit, the attitude, but more than anything, what affected me most was the drumming...especially the rat-a-tat of the snare in "Hound Dog". I wanted to play drums! My parents obliged soon after, presenting me with a snare and cymbal which I spent hours hammering away on. A couple of years later as they saw I was still holding my interest in this noisy pastime, they bought me a full drum kit and I was beyond thrilled!
At the age of 13 I started my first band with some friends in the neighbourhood. We tried our best to imitate Alice Cooper, The Rolling Stones and The Guess Who as well as trying our hand at some impromptu jam sessions. We found someone who was better on drums than me and I switched to bass within that first year. This morphed into a band called Midnight which amazingly lasted 3 years! During that time I took over more of the vocal duties as no one else could carry a tune, much less belt one out (not that I was great, mind you...just the best of a bad bunch). We played some grade school dances and the opening of the local hydro park and by the end we were writing our own tunes.
Later that year I ran into an old friend who had also started a new band that was called Black Diamond. They needed a singer and I spent over three years with them. By now we were doing original songs only (soon to be a trend for the acts I was in). As the punk rock phenomenon hit midway through the life of this band (I was already into the Stooges and the NY Dolls), I tried pushing the band in this direction. We changed our name to Dole Q -- after the British slang for unemployment line -- and our first and only bar gig was in Toronto at The King Of Hearts Club (one of the early T.O. punk venues). They soon tired of this style...wanting to go into what would become the hair metal scene in the 80's...and after a month of this I left.
September 1979:
It was time for a change not only in bands but in my life. I was 20 years old and itching to be out on my own. I got an apartment in Whitby (two towns east of Pickering) and started a nascent punk band called The Morbs with a friend of a friend and his buddies...none of whom could play well but it was a new adventure nonetheless. We rented a storage unit and banged away for a few months but did more partying than anything.
April 1980:
After 8 months of too much partying, not enough rehearsing, and just too much general craziness,I returned to the parental home and regrouped. The remnants of that experiment regrouped as well: Tim James on bass guitar and Ozzy Greeley on drums with yours truly growling away up front. After a month we were joined by Tim's schoolmate Jaimie Vernon on guitar. We had a band! And a direction! And a goal! To take the Toronto scene by storm! The early songs were rough, short and incomplete but we were forging our own sound. We dubbed ourselves The Swindle. Our first show was at a rehearsal room/studio in Scarborough called Synthelight Sound.
Other changes were happening as well. I had met my future wife Sharon in Whitby earlier in the year and as she was pregnant with our son, we needed a home to call our own. In late October we moved into what became known as the Little House On The Prairie...a rundown 1940's shack by the railroad tracks in Pickering which we rented for the very reasonable (in those days) sum of $250 a month! My son Kevin was born in December and if he could remember back that far I'm sure his first memories would be hearing a bunch of crazies in the basement blasting away 2-3 nights a week at their punk dreams. This is probably the reason it was never a big deal to him having a father in a band and having strange people in his home...it's just the way it was.
The house was not hooked up to the town water supply, but had a well hooked up to the house where the pump in the basement would keep us supplied with clean drinking water...in theory! But the well was constantly running dry and the pump frequently broke down and leaked water all over the floor. We set the band up first in the 2nd bedroom and then in the living room until we could build ourselves a sub floor back in the basement. We stole all kinds of wooden skids from various places and Sharon bought us a load of plywood and one problem was solved. We moved a wall and built a second wall, enclosing a good third of the basement off for the band's purposes. My father came over and fixed the pump and we were off!
David Crosby of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young once said if you can remember the '60s you weren't really there...and that about sums up much of my life in the 80's. No drugs but WAY too much alcohol. Much of that time is a blur. Thank goodness Jaimie was always lucid enough then to be able to now fill in the many blanks that I have!
Tim was always the heart and soul of the band though he and I clashed on many issues...politics being one of them. In the early days of the band I was fairly apolitical -- coming from a middle-class family with a nice home in a good neighbourhood didn't give me much to shout about. I was pretty much willfully blind to what was going on in the real world, outside of entertainment and sports. Although Tim could be a major pain in the ass at the time, I really do have to thank him now for opening up my eyes to the larger world.
He was like a helium hybrid of Tom Green and Jackass. He would do anything to get some sort of reaction out of you or anyone else. He was WAY ahead of his time! We still swap 'Tim' stories to this day. And he became an excellent bass player...building on Dennis Dunaway (original Alice Cooper band) riffs and British punk bass lines to create a unique style.
We did one more show as this line-up before Ozzy was unceremoniously relieved of duty, which fell to me, as Jaimie and Tim were his close friends and didn't want to hurt him.
Ozzy was a mad drummer. I mean that in the best way possible. He was like Keith Moon of The Who. You always wondered how the drum kit was going to stay in one piece! As the band's speed crept up towards 'Ramming Speed' (as Jaimie likes to put it), Ozzy kept pace, but could never quite improve his timing. We stayed in touch on and off over the years and even wrote a couple songs together. "Pillars of Time" being the most memorable, which has since made an appearance on Jaimie's 2nd solo album 'Time Enough At Last'.
This is where the revolving door of drummers begins, albeit slowly, at first. What is it with drummers? I tend to think of them as the goalies of music...solitary and kind of enigmatic. But without them the team would have nothing to hold it together or rally around. I tend to believe a band/team can only be as good as the drummer/goalie behind them. We tried out a couple of new drummers at this point...one being a temporary replacement who I'd played with in my previous band...another being a reputed bike gang member who just scared the crap out of us!
We soon settled on another schoolmate of Jaimie and Tim's named Jason Clarke...a solid Rock drummer who, like myself, was a huge Frank Zappa fan. This was a turning point in the band. Jay could play circles around any punk drummer of the time and we soon were playing the old tunes and each and every new song at supersonic speeds, yet tighter than I could ever imagine. We wrote a new tune every week and soon had a repertoire of more than 20 songs each lasting no more than about 2 1/2 minutes!
By the early fall of '81 we were more than ready to roar onto the Toronto punk scene. We made our debut with the new line-up at that legendary bar on Carlton Street in Toronto known as Larry's Hideaway. An old hotel across the street from Maple Leaf Gardens, it had fallen on very hard times. Only hookers, johns and the down and out stayed there for any length of time. The bar was fantastic though...with good sight-lines, a great sound system and a decent size stage. A few parents and friends showed up to lend their support and take lots of pictures and wonder why in the world we'd want to play at such a hole. But we were in our glory!
Soon we started playing almost weekly at one bar or another in Toronto. Our main haunt being the Turning Point on Bloor Streetacross the way from the old Varsity Stadium where I'd seen my very first rock concert (Alice Cooper) nine years previously.
The Turning Point was another dive but I use dive as a reference only in the most positive sense of the word. It was run by a very warm-hearted Scottish couple. As a previous Irish Rovers Pub, it must have been a grand place once upon a time. All these red leatherette booths half filling the place. The stage was a good size but pretty beat up, the sound system passable, the atmosphere menacing, but in a few short months it felt like home.
We played several of the other bars that were accepting this rough-edged music like the Cabana Room on Spadina Avenue and The Beverly Tavern on Queen Street, but I'll always remember The Turning Point as the place where we always felt like we belonged.
I don't think the other bands in the scene knew what to make of us...I was a singer with my 70's afro now grown into an unruly mess...Jaimie, the youngest member of the band who looked anything but threatening...Jay, a large, typical suburban guy of that time... and then there was Tim who went all out in the image department: short spiky hair that changed colour almost weekly, the ripped, dyed and paint splattered clothing, and an old 60's bass guitar. He tried everything he could to get us all to change our ways and look more the part, and in hindsight he was probably right. I can't speak for anyone but myself here but I never saw what the problem was with just being yourself...fuck the image thing! Wasn't this supposed to be what the punk ethos was trying to do away with? Wasn't it all about the music and the attitude and what you had to say? I always have had a certain naivite about many things and I truly thought that punk would take over as the dominant musical form.
As the new year arrived we played and worked on new tunes as much as we could, readying ourselves for our first studio adventure. We recorded "Who Wants Guns" and "Hymn #84" in a tiny recording studio in Ajax called Earthbound Sound with an engineer that was unfamiliar with this musical form...much less Rock music in general. He was more of a jazz/blues man but did a good job nonetheless. We had the pressing done in Ajax, as well, at an old plant that did most of the Canadian versions of the K-Tel line of LP's. As the release date neared, though, it became obvious that the band was in it's death throes. Tim had ventured into the far left politically...something the rest of us were not yet ready for. So when Tim invited me out to the Litton Plant protest(to calll for an end to their manufacturing of guidance systems for the US cruise missile) I turned him down citing family and job responsibilities,but really I think it came down to a fear of arrest! In the end my fears were justified and borne out by the bombing that occurred at the plant. Tim wanted to take the band in a new direction and for a while it seemed like a good idea, but in retrospect was absolutely crazy. We were going to call the band Cambodians On Safari and create a stage show based on Apocalypse Now!
July 1982:
After Tim departed we regrouped with Jay's brother, Nick, joining the band on guitar and adding a second drummer named Paul O'Connor. Now taking on a more hardrock sound yet holding on to our punk edge, the sound of two drummers pounding away in unison was huge! We called ourselves YOUTH IN ASIA, and I think with time we may have developed into something, but following our first and only show in the spring of '83 the band imploded.
I was without a band for the first time in ten years, but had plenty going on in my life without a band. My little family was about to grow larger. We moved into a new home in Ajax that Fall and we acquired our second dog followed by a cat. My three stepdaughters visited and stayed with us roughly twice a month...eventually moving in a year and a half later. So I had more than enough on my plate.
Winter 1985:
I had kept in contact, sporadically, with Tim over the year or so previously. We had patched up/put aside our political differences and he invited me to join his new band. We did a few preliminary rehearsals and everything clicked! Over the course of a few months we had developed a sound that was a kind of melding of early punk edge, hardrock heavy and also a precursor to what would become know as Grunge. All of us had been members of one or another bands on the nascent Queen St./Punk circuit: Tim still on bass, Mike James on lead guitar, Travis Good(son of country icon Bruce Good and now known as the leader of the Sadies) also on lead guitar and a drummer whose name escapes me.
We were a punk rock supergroup of sorts spending the next year playing any bar that would have us: Larry's Hideaway, The Beverly and the infamous Le Quoc Te...a Vietnamese bar in the heart of Kensington Market located across the street from the equally infamous Fort Goof (home of the BUNCHOFUCKINGOOFS). It became our home base as much as the Turning Point had been for Swindled. You entered from street level down a short flight of stairs into the basement of a store above. The ceiling was extremely low, there was no stage, the lighting was only what existed in the bar and the sound system merely passable. The resident drunk would wander in front of the band at a moments notice, the bathrooms had no doors and the stench was palpable from 20 feet away. But like The Turning Point, we could play there practically on a whim. One band who played there on a regular basis was the underrated One Free Fall (later to gain fame as Rusty) who named one of their albums after the bar.
We even took a few road trips, the first being a suburb of Detroit, where after a four hour drive, two hour border hassle, and another 45 minutes of driving and finally finding the bar, sitting through the first 3 bands, enduring lousy American beer and cigarettes, we didn't even get to play! The band that was to let us use their equipment(as we couldn't take anything but guitars across the border) had a change of heart after someone damaged one of their amps. We weren't amused to say the least! After a few of us went fairly ballistic (something to do with flying chairs and fiery language) we became known as the Fuckin' Crazy Canucks! The rest of the night was another drunkin' haze and we limped back home.
Other than the odd gig such as the aforementioned disaster, things generally went well. We were extremely tight, the songs were great, the playing inspired, the jams incredible (this without a doubt was the finest group of musicians I ever had the pleasure of performing with!). We did shows with some great bands opening for DRI, Dayglo Abortions and even the Cowboy Junkies! But we were also lazy, interested only in playing and getting drunk/high. We recorded some demos on 4-track but other than that...nothing.
By this point we had moved our rehearsal headquarters back into my basement. The fall-back position when whatever band I was in either couldn't find or afford a space of our own. As the other band members all lived and worked (or not) in Toronto, I ended up doing a lot of the equipment hauling myself. I was the designated driver when Sharon was working or when she just didn't want to go out that night. Who could blame her? Watching the band was fine...she really enjoyed our music...but watching five guys including her significant other get drunk and/or high every gig must have been tiresome. So...on the night of a show in London, Ontario she begged off.
After I loaded the equipment, I headed out to Toronto, picked up the guys and the party began...of course I couldn't partake in this as I had a long drive ahead. Two hours later we arrived. I had brought along a mickey of rye whiskey for my own purposes and, of course, the obligatory Cola mix which I downed in much too short a time, shared whatever was going around in the washroom (Rum I think) and by the time we went on a couple hours later I was fried. I remember the first song beginning, shouting out the opening lines and then passing out right there...my head bouncing off the nearest table, waking up en-route to Toronto on the floor of the van...I think the drummer was driving. Passing out. Waking again as we arrived and as the guys all left the van I felt refreshed enough to find a weekly party I'd been to before. I can't tell you how I found the place, especially in the state I was in, and not knowing where I was starting out from...but somehow found my way there and proceeded to drink any unattended beer I could find. Waking up in a strange house the next morning with people I barely knew was strange enough, but being severely hung over and with a welt on my forehead to boot...wondering why no one thought to take me to a hospital to check me out for a concussion. As I made my way home I realized a lot of stuff had been left behind...mics, cords and the box I'd made to carry stuff in back in high school. I reflected on the state of the band -- no recording dates in sight, me doing too much of the grunt work and supplying the rehearsal space -- and for what? I was going downhill and I had a young family to think about. No one but the new guitarist called over the next few days to see how I was and my mind was made up. I quit at the end of that week determined to at least cut down on the alcohol consumption and find a project in which I could get back to the studio and do some recording and promote whatever we came up with and do it right this time.
That band became Moving Targetz which had been formed by Jaimie Vernon just after the implosion of YOUTH IN ASIA in 1983. He had built the act into a live and recording mainstay in the Toronto area but had found himself bandless following the release of their second record in 1988. He asked me to join as new vocalist because he was tired of playing, singing, booking gigs and taking care of the business end of his new fledgling Bullseye Records label.
From the summer of 1988 through November 1991 dozens of members came and went but the core of the NEW Moving Targetz was myself, Jaimie and Sharon (whom I'd married in that time). We released several EPs and another full-length album before the industry, and the band members themselves, decided that we weren't going to survive the long hall. We did manage some great times opening shows for the likes of The Kings, Killer Dwarfs, Trooper, and Haywire among others.
On to the issue at hand here:
Cheaper Than Therapy. The name came about when I was in a band called Sulpher...a retro punk band I joined in 1996 after 4 yrs of inactivity following the demise of Moving Targetz. These were teenage friends of my son's. They'd been rehearsing for a couple of months and were pretty good considering their age and experience. They needed a drummer and asked me if I'd like to 'join a teenage punk band'! As I wasn't doing a whole lot at the time, I thought this a great idea and a way to get my lazy ass moving again. We set up my basement (as it had been for every act I was ever involved with) and rehearsed 2-3 nights a week.
We played the few local venues that would have us (The Chameleon in Ajax and the Moon Room in Oshawa among them). It was great to be back in action again! As the line-up changed over the next 2 1/2 years I moved from drums to rhythm guitar and finally back to my familiar spot up front singing again. We recorded a 14 song cassette with Jaimie Vernon producing and released it late in 1997. As I searched for a title I reminded myself just why I was doing this music thing year after year without much success and since I had been suffering from the initial stages of depression, I decided on Cheaper Than Therapy and vowed if I ever got a solo project going, this is what I would name it!
In The fall of 1998, after the remaining members had left the band, I fell into a full fledged depression. I spent the next two years jamming with Charles McDonald and one or two other guys (John and Josh), but as we seemed to be getting nowhere with it (neither recording or playing live), I decided to drop the whole thing and take a final stab at a solo project. There would be no expectations other than to record an album of the best tunes I could write.
January 2001:
I spent five nights a week re-typing old lyrics, expanding on what I'd already done or writing new stuff. I'd begun carrying my little voice recorder around everywhere and once I'd set my mind to doing the album, new ideas were flowing with wonderful regularity. The dam had broken and I was flooded with fresh tunes! The depression I was suffering from had deepened, fueled in part by excessive alcohol consumption, but at least most of my despair was being channeled in a productive way. I kept at it though and by the summer of 2002 I had completed the necessary demos and had Jaimie take them to Brian Gagnon to flesh them out (our producer/engineer from the Moving Targetz days).
I started with the song that had gotten Sharon and I involved with Moving Targetz in the first place, 'Do You Believe'(now retitled 'Hymn For An Agnostic'), which now included a bridge. By the late Fall of that year, the tunes were recorded and the tinkering and mixing took place over the next few months. In the meantime Jaimie helped me assemble a working band. He got a hold of one of the few Targetz drummers to last more than a few months: Duanne Welsh...I called up Charles again for rhythm guitar parts...Jaimie took on the bass duties...and Sharon doing back up vocals. The only thing we lacked was a lead guitarist with experience. But no matter, we would rehearse as much as we could with this line-up until that happened.
With the debut CD, "Terminal Adolescence", out on Bullseye Records, we landed some shows starting with an opening slot for Santers at the Hardball Cafe in Milton and for Goddo a couple of times with Glenn Belcher (from Targetz) temporarily taking on the lead guitar role.
With Glenn in the picture again, there was an expectation for a Targetz reunion, but Jaimie insisted that Cheaper Than Therapy remain on course to promote the new album. Both Duanne and Glenn left after the end of the first year. As a multi-instrumentalist Charles ended up taking over on drums and myself on rhythm guitar duties. We found a local lead guitarist named Bruce giving us a full band...finally. This line-up lasted about 6 months until we had a falling out with Bruce over studio/song issues during the recording of the follow-up CD. Fortunately, my stepdaughter Stephanie took over the drums and Charles moved back to guitar...this time playing lead.
But this would be short-lived and Charles left to be replaced by Stephanie's brother-in-law Clinton.
Stephanie and Clinton both left within a month of each other for personal reasons but Cheaper Than Therapy carried on as a studio project in an effort to get a sophomore release completed. This was fuelled by a request from Montreal B-Movie horror Director SV Bell (Sylvan Bellemare) to supply theme songs to his various direct-to-DVD slasher flicks. Cheaper Than Therapy had already gotten songs placed on the soundtrack to Bell's "The Night They Returned" in 2004, and an order had come to me for a new song to go in his next alien-zombie flick "The Purple Glow". The song 'Abyss' was commissioned and became the theme song. Similarly, his next movie "She Demons Of The Black Sun" gave me inspiration for "Isabelle"...and my first acting role in a movie!!
These tunes and others written during the collapse and re-construction of Cheaper Than Therapy over the last few years has become the impetus to the new CD 'Forbidden'.
And with a new band featuring Dave Thomson on drums and Kelvin Mask on lead guitar we're ready to follow through on our own potential.
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