Entertainment Features

Craig Northey: ODDS Man Out

Craig Northey: ODDS Man Out

By David DeRocco  (April 19)

If you were listening to highly addictive, aurally infectious, cleverly written and accessible Canadian rock in the 90s, chances are you were a fan of Odds.  From power-pop parodies like “Heterosexual Man” to seductive sing-a-longs like “Wendy Under the Stars,” Odds were the band listened to by kids too happy to fall victim to the explosion of monotonous grunge.  

From the release of his band's ’92 debut Neopolitan, frontman Craig Northey and his bandmates were ever-present on alternative radio, and on club stages across the country. Now Northey’s on the road as part of the TransCanada Highwaymen initiative, featuring 90s contemporaries Steven Page, Moe Berg and Chris Murphy. In promotion of their April 19th show at FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre, Northey took the time to talk with GoBeWeekly about those halcyon days of the 90s, his time with Warren Zevon and more.

GoBeWeekly:  I’ve spoken to Moe, Chris and Steven during your visits to Niagara over the past 10 months,  which makes you last man standing. They all said mean things about you by the way.

CRAIG:  Then I’ll get them back now.

GoBeWeekly: With Odds, do you recall having any sense of competition with Moe, Chris and Steven and their bands during the 90s?

Craig: I don’t know if there was a sense of competition. It’s such a small circle. Its more you just like them. I  just liked their music. I think Moe came before us all in a way, sort of blazing the trail. We all really kind of just looked up to them. I think you feel a sense of competition when you don’t like the music and you can’t understand why they’re successful and you’re not. So with those guys, no.

GoBeWeekly: You were certainly in a competition to carve out your share of the 35 percent CanCon that rock radio felt was all the Canadian music they needed to play.

Craig: It’s a tiny maple flavoured pie isn’t it. I think you always feel there’s room there, whether you’re there for only a couple days on the charts. I think for us, and probably for those guys, you really didn’t think you fit in. Like, you knew that you weren’t going to be on the radio anyway, but you worked at it as if the world was going to change. So you just kind of played music and hoped that at some point people were going to wise up and say, ‘hey that kind of music should be on the radio.’  

GoBeWeekly:  It was a great decade for Canadian rock, certainly in terms of variety delivered by bands like ODDS. Do you get a sense that that kind of environment is over in Canadian rock, or it the scene still as vibrant as it was then?

Craig: No, I think that the way people consume or listen to music has changed slightly and the whole music business has changed.  It was interesting that at that time there was all these gatekeepers in a way; record companies, radio stations, etc, and they just decided who got to have their turn next. And I think we all came from some sort of grassroots kind of thing, Steven and Sloan. Sloan definitely kept their pie to themselves, tried to have an independent record company. And the Ladies made a grassroots tape that by fluke became successful, cassette tape. Pursuit came out of the punk rock thing as we kind of did, out of post punk I supposed you’d call it, a DIY ethos. You know, do it yourself, take your own photo, put up your own posters. And I think in a lot of ways it’s come back around to that with the internet. And I think that exciting time you speak of in the 90s,  we didn’t really know it was an exciting time at all. (laughing) I just think what happened with those old-fashioned gatekeepers in the Canadian music business, they just kind of followed what happened in the rest of the world. And they’d just put out something that happened six months earlier in another part of the world. Then all of a sudden, it became a little morel liberal. And there became this idea that hey, we could export what we had to say. We could export what we do. It wasn’t that everyone became imitative. I don’t think any of us realized that was going on; it was just, hey, we just got another $500 to play a gig!

GoBeWeekly:  You kind of started off betting against the odds of success, even naming the band with that sentiment in mind. But do you remember a point during that period where you felt, ‘wow, I’m king of the heap, I can’t believe this is happening?’ 

Craig: Oh sure, back then it was getting a record deal, and I’m not even sure that’s part of the way people think anymore. That was the only way back then to get any kind of notice, was to get out there and have someone blow a bunch of money on you so you could get your cassette and your CD out there. It was the only way. We jumped through a lot of hoops and elaborate measures to go to Los Angeles a lot and get noticed, because no one in Canada was really paying attention. Nobody gave a shit. We kind of did it backwards. I think when we finally signed that deal and we were off on the road in some smelly van again but for longer and for less, the excitement of signing it was great. It meant that we had the potential to actually do something with this, that someone was going to pay attention. Then we found out how hard that was. That was one significant moment for us.

GoBeWeekly: In the song “Fingerprints” there’s the lyric “there might be the good old days if the right things are forgotten.” What are the things from that time period that are best forgotten?

Craig:  It’s funny, for this show we’re developing, there’s an A/V component. And Jim Milan, the director who sort of helped put this together with Steven and Chris and I, he asked for these historical resources. And I had just kind of thrown a bunch of stuff in boxes in a crawl space. And as time went on I just hauled it to the next place and the next place. Yesterday I started going into the crawlspace and hauling out these rat-shit boxes full of papers and whatever. And you know that feeling that you get when you watch too much TV for too long, and your face is hot and your synapses are burnt out even though you’ve  not really done anything taxing? I’ve  had enough of the past past right now. It smells bad and it’s dirty and dusty and you pull something out you wrote on a piece of paper, a sort of note-to-self from back then, and you go ‘oh my god, I wrote that? I actually said that to somebody?’ Thank Christ there was no electronic documenting of any of that. I can just throw it away now.

GoBeWeekly:  You mean you didn’t find any hidden gems amidst the refuse?  

Craig: I did find some gems. But I have been also dismantling a lot of VHS tapes for the plastic. It just seems so horrible that I have to throw it away, so I have to pull out my screwdriver and take them all apart to recycle them. But there’s lots that I’m glad kind of disappeared. And it disappeared because it wasn’t any good. And then of course there’s all the band turmoil and those kind of things. But whenever I look back at that it was sure a lot of fun. There was some horrible heartbreak at certain points, but I think that goes the same for anyone doing anything they like in any field.

GoBeWeekly:  I’ve got an old iPod with 10,000 songs on it, and I was at the gym the other day and an ODDS song, “Trees,” randomly came up.  And you know how you listen to a song a million times but you don’t really listen? I was listening as the lyric hit, and the opening line “We all know she’s not alone but that doesn’t mean she’s not lonely.” And I stopped what I was doing and started thinking about the lyric, and what inspired it. I listened to the whole song, and it took my thoughts to many places. And it made me think, when you wrote, did you agonize over lyrics? Were you always looking for deeper metaphors, or were you just trying to write a good song?

Craig: I don’t think I ever agonized. I think that I kind of realized if something came out I’d spot a little piece in it that was interesting or good or it felt like something that I meant to say, you know when you read it and it comes back that has resonance and images of what you want to say. And I’d collect the pieces in books and sort of tie together a lot of those pieces. In a way I didn’t really distill; I just combined a lot of things that I liked. And other times it all came out in one kind of piece; you change words more to fit the idea of the song more than I’d ever change them to be more poetic or accurate. Since that time I think I’ve been challenged to do what you’re saying, to distill.

GoBeWeekly:  I want to do a bit of Rorschach Test on you with some ODDS songs. Just give me a quick response when I say the song title and what it makes you think of.  Let’s start with King of the Heap.

Craig:  Cold. I remember singing it, we did it in a giant warehouse space to get the reverb we wanted that was beside the studio. And it was not heated. Nobody had any mercy on me if I didn’t get I right, I had to stay in the giant cold warehouse.

GoBeWeekly:  Heterosexual Man. Who was the inspiration for that?

Craig: That’s all Steven Drake really. That’s his tune. What it reminds me of is having to carefully frame it as a parody song.

GoBeWeekly: Wendy Under The Stars. I remember the AC station we had in our building accidentally playing the unedited version of that song. Quite the scandal here in conservative St. Catharines.

Craig: That’s a frequent elder statesman DJ story about that tune. It’s become urban myth like crocodiles coming up through the toilets. I think it did happen a number of times as we would hear from different DJs in different towns. That was a song written by Steven from his own personal experience, written for a band called the Nerve Tubes that he was in before the ODDs. And I remember going to see them and thinking what a great band and also what a great song. It was so evocative and from the mouth of a 17 year old. I remembered it. When I was eventually in a band with him I said, ‘I saw you play this song and I bet you I could sing the whole song right now.’ So I sang the chorus, and I’d only heard the song once. So we thought it must be pretty good so let’s record it.

GoBeWeekly:  Here’s one of favourites, “Mercy To Go.”  I always like the line “As I mature I learn to speak my mind; on the other hand I learn to be patient and let it ride.”  Is that true today for you.

Craig: (laughing) yes, I still stand by that. Strange, there’s not a lot I still stand by, but that one I’ll stand by. I’ll stand by waffling and not making a decision, sure.

GoBeWeekly:  I wanted to ask you about the time you spent with Warren Zevon. I was a huge fan and Stand In The Fire is still one of my favourite live albums. You had the pleasure of working and touring with him. What was your take away?

Craig:  For the Stand In the Fire story, I remember saying the same thing to him, that Stand In The Fire was one of the great live albums, and he just kind of laughed and said, ‘live album? I overdubbed almost everything on that thing.” He and (Jon) Landau sat there, it was a classic 70s live album like KISS: ALIVE. There’s a lot of crowd sounds. He was a great mentor a lovely guy and he gave us our first big Rock’n’Roll experience with like a tour bus, traveling with him. We picked his brain and drove him crazy but got a lot of knowledge out of him, he was a good friend.

GoBeWeekly: What was his sense of his own place in the music industry?  I look at him and guys like John Hiatt who wrote amazing songs but never really had huge commercial success. Was he a happy guy?

Craig: I wouldn’t call him a happy guy. I think he had lots to think about. But he had lots of fun, we had lots of fun together.  Because there was an age difference we could kind of point out what was great about him to him and remind him to ask and tell him to just appreciate it. In terms of the question you’re asking, if he understood his place in the world, I think he respected it, I think so. All of his peers and the great songwriters of his time really liked him and liked to talk to him and hang out with him. I think that meant a lot to him, to be respected by his peers as an artist. As far as his audience went, I went up to him one day and said ‘you shouldn’t complain about your lot because look all these places, people keep showing up, they’re all full, they understand where you’re music is coming from.’ And he said “CraigyWeggs, I just want millions of teenage girls to like me for one week so I can buy a house.’

GoBeWeekly: Speaking of peers, you’re travelling with three of them. What’s the best part of touring as part of the Four Horsemen of the Canadian rock apocalypse?

Craig:  It’s all the best part, I don’t know if there’s a downside anywhere, it’s kind of hard to pick. I suppose looking down at the set list and going’ I get to play THAT next.’ We have fun because we’re four, Chris is a multi-instrumentalist with Sloan and gets saddled with the most drumming, we’re kind of switching around and trying to turn four frontmen into a band. So we’re playing someone else on the drums next, someone else on the bass next. It’s fun. I get to do something fun next and play this great song that’s not mine.

GoBeWeekly:  Is there any chance for a musical collaboration in the future? 

Craig: We’re talking about it. I think initially we just thought that, because everyone has other stuff they’re doing, this is a great way to start. Let’s just get together and play the songbook and yack on stage and have fun. And then, wherever it goes from there, it goes from there. Whenever we find the time after carving out time to do this, I’m sure it will happen.

GoBeWeekly:  And in the meantime, what else is happening in your world musically? Is there new solo music in the future.

Craig: Yes, I’m just sort of wrestling with idea of what it is. I think it’s an ODDS record. We’re a half dozen songs into that idea. I have to keep disciplining myself into writing some more.