SOUNDTRACK: RHEOSTATICS-Live at the Bathurst Street Theatre, Toronto ON, April 4, 1997 (1997).
This concert is free as a download on the Rheostatics Live website. According to the on-stage banter, the band had just finished a string of live dates with the Inbreds that were recorded for their amazing Double Live album. They even say that this night’s show is also being recorded for the disc. And the set list is pretty amazing.
Which is why this show is such a disappointment. Part of the problem is obviously the quality of the recording, and you can’t fault anyone for that…a bootleg is a bootleg after all. But the band makes some really odd flubs and some of the songs seem really lackluster. This is all the more surprising because the band seems in really good spirits –making jokes with each other and with the crowd (they make someone take off a Mr. Bean T-shirt!).
The biggest gaff comes in “King of the Past” where (I think Dave) begins the chorus a measure early (yipes!). “Fan Letter to Michael Jackson” for some reason removes the loud rocking “Michael!” and “Jackson!” sections and replaces them with whispers. It’s an interesting change, but the intensity is completely lost. Something is also missing from “Sweet Rich Beautiful Mine,” there’s no oomph to it. And, my favorite song “Claire” sounds off to me (I think it’s the recording though).
On the plus side, “My First Rock Concert” is great and well-received. Dave introduces it as if it was the first time they’ve played it, which is very exciting. The end of the show picks things up and the band sounds better. In fact the last two songs are really great (and you can really hear Neil Young’s influence on the guitar). I’m willing to blame some of my disappointment on the sound quality…it’s missing a fullness that you really need to appreciate the band, but this is not an A+ show. They played another show the following night there (also available online).
Heh, I just learned that they used a number of recordings from this show on Double Live. They used “Torque, Torque,” “Claire,” “Bread Meat Peas & Rice” and “Feed Yourself.” Listening back, “Torque” and “Peas” sound great in the set and “Jesus Was Once a Teenager, Too” is a fun, light version. “Claire” still sounds funny to me (even on Double Live), but it’s definitely worse on this bootleg. The mixing is so much better on Double Live (of course!), that it really accentuates the guitar solo and backing vocals much more.
[READ: February 1, 2011] Shampoo Planet
On the inside cover of my copy of Shampoo Planet, I scribbled my name and “December 1992.” I was in a phase of putting my name on all my books (which is kind of cool looking back, but really rather silly). This is Douglas Coupland’s second book, and I remember being very excited when it came out.
I’m sure I read it then, but upon re-reading it (admittedly almost twenty years later), I didn’t remember anything from it. Does that mean I didn’t read it, or that the book was just ephemeral? Well, in some ways it is ephemeral, because it’s such a document of its time. It also seems to me that either Coupland is (or was) unique in his writing style, or that very few writers dealt with 90’s culture as directly as he did. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of another writer who approached 90s culture in the same way
In many ways, this book is all about dealing with the wealth of the 90s, when money was everywhere and people felt free to experiment with their lives. And, yes reading this now the story feels so light and free and I wish that I had the problems that these kids deal with. I also wondered if anyone could write a story like this now, with youth culture being so very different.
The inside front and back cover are (different) periodic tables that he has personalized with 103 elements of the 90s. (Lu=Moon, A=Ambition, Dd=The Dead). This is the only nod to unconventional book tropes here (where Gen X had all of those definitions that he footnoted). In fact, the novel is fairly straightforward and conventional.
The main character, Tyler, is a twenty year old who cares more for his hair (he has a vast array of products–my favorite observation: “always better to buy well-advertised products–preferably those products endorsed by a celebrity” (133)). He was raised in a hippie commune off on Vancouver Island (the only real nod to Canada in the book), but when his parents divorced, his mother Jasmine took the kids to Lancaster, a suburb of Seattle. And, as seems to happen, the children of hippies became proto-yuppies.
This is partly because the hippie dream has evaporated, but also because of the other people that she encounters. Her second husband, Dan, is an angry alcoholic who has just left her (the book opens with her waking up to the word D-I-V-O-R-C-E mirror written on her forehead (he wrote the R backwards)).
Tyler’s siblings include Daisy, a 90s hippie who grows her hair into dreads (along with her boyfriend who does likewise). They are both unemployed and uninterested in being employed. There’s also a younger brother Mark, and I have to say I never quite understood just how old he was supposed to be. He seems to be young enough that he needs looking after and yet he also creates a fairly fully realized comic book which Tyler enjoys. It’s a little vague.
Anyhow, the story mostly focuses on Tyler. As the story opens, Tyler is just getting back from Europe, where he went for the summer. He bummed around, he made one friend (named Kiwi) and met a young woman, Stephanie. Of course, she was a Euro-fling so he never told his long term girlfriend Anna-Louise about her.
He and Anna-Louise have a fun, if not superficial, relationship (they speak to each other in Telethon-ese: “You are fabulous. Truly fabulous. Stop being so fabulous. Just stop it” (28). And they love irony: they want to find hotels that are “Marge”: “sad 1950s-ish diner-type places where the waitresses are named Marge” (31).
And just so we know they don’t live in vacuum, we meet their friends as well: Skye, Pony, Harmony, Davidson, Leslie, Mei-Lin and Gaïa. (They each get varying degrees of attention, but honestly not enough).
The real plot of the story, such as it is, comes when Stephanie (unexpectedly) visits Tyler. Anna-Louise quickly learns about their European fling and dumps Tyler. Stephanie’s jaunt in the U.S. winds up being a lot longer than anticipated, and she eventually convinces him to move with her to California so they can both become actors. Tyler agrees, even though really what he wants to do is work for Bechtol, a petrochemical weapons producer which is diversifying its properties somewhat and which offers security and a pension. (Jasmine is horrified by this).
But the crazy thing is that there is a ton more going on in this story. We visit the Vancouver Island commune (scary hilarious), Tyler gets to meet the head of Bechtol (his personal hero), and, of course, there’s lots of story set in Europe (see Jim Morrison’s grave!) and Hollywood (where Tyler finds an innovative way to make money).
The story is funny and engaging. The first half or so is really enjoyable; it’s light and breezy. It drags a bit in the middle (once Stephanie comes, actually). I missed his family and friends once Tyler and Stephanie go on their big road trip. In fact, the whole character of Stephanie bothers me. When she and Tyler tool around looking at things that he finds funny (like Marge locations), I simply do not believe that she would enjoy or be amused by the sort of irony that Tyler and his U.S. friends do. I feel like her European upbringing (which is contrasted to many different aspects of Tyler’s life) would prohibit her from finding the joy in Marge culture. Of course, by the end of the story, Tyler realizes Stephanie couldn’t have enjoyed this culture (she’s a user, which is kind of obvious from the start), so maybe that’s the point. But it rings false for too long for me.
There’s also a moment at the end where Tyler’s bottled rage comes to the surface and I feel like it’s too much. (Actually it reminds me of a scene in A Christmas Story). Tyler seems to be in control too much to let loose as much as her does.
But aside from those lapses into unbelievability, it’s an enjoyable, quick read. And as a time capsule of the early 90s it’s a very interesting picture. It’s a fun look at a life that many of us sorely miss. And even if the characters are superficial, there is still profundity in the story itself. It’s easy to see why he was embraced by so many readers.
One of the funniest things about the story comes from reading it now. Tyler is pretty high tech (his room is a modernist escape pad with a big stereo system etc) and yet because it’s 1992, they take Polaroids of each other and use pay phones and answering machines and are trying to figure out the future name of the DiscMan. It’s hard to believe we were so primitive in the 90s.
There’s an interesting article in The Guardian which, more than half way down, talks about all of his novels up until then (2003). DC dismisses Shampoo somewhat (calling it contrived) and also dismisses All Families are Psychotic and Miss Wyoming as experiments that didn’t work. Huh.
I Just Read About That... 
Funny–my daughter has been carrying a copy of Life After God around the house because she likes the baby on the cover, and I picked it up and commented on how silly it was that I’d written my name and the date on the title page (especially as it was a first edition). About half an hour later I read your piece.
Coupland writes well and very simply, but even then there was a feeling that the work was topical, like a fiction version of Dilbert, or something, that it may not survive the years. I know I read them up to Microserfs and liked some more than others (thought Life After God was a little too much like All I Really Wanted to Know I Learnt in Kindergarten), but then I got a couple I didn’t bother to read.
Afterwards, in the words of another great surfer of the very Zeitgeist he himself helped create, I left.
I think we may have both picked up the habit from a certain professor. I was going to do Life After God next, but put it off for Polaroids (coming soon).
His later books are less zeitgeisty.