In 2010, Montreal indie rock royalty the Dears assembled a new lineup and began playing the songs that would eventually comprise their 2011 album, Degeneration Street. The brand new lineup played their first three shows at a club they’d never played before, Mexico City’s Pasaguero. And how’s this for ballsy: they recorded them.
The result is Live at Pasaguero, an album that is a document of what real bands go through every day. It’s not slick or polished. It’s a gritty, sometimes sloppy, record of a band feeling out new members and new songs.
The three shows in Mexico also became the centrepiece of Never Destroy Us, a documentary about the band’s nearly 20-year journey, that will air nationally on CBC TV on Saturday, Dec. 1, at noon ET (9 a.m. PT).
Check out the album before its digital release on Nov. 27, and read our Q&A with Dears frontman and proud new father, Murray Lightburn.
LISTENLive at Pasaguero (streaming until Nov. 27)
The Dears
Tracklist
You just brought a baby into the world, and you’re bringing something else into the world. There’s this live album of the Dears, Live at Pasaguero. Tell me about that.
What can I tell you? It’s a gigantic mess. It is what it is. It’s a band who is getting to know each other onstage. But there’s something kind of beautiful about it, I think. We felt it was only fair to share it primarily with our closest patrons. But it’s not a big deal to share it with people who are standing on the sidelines. We thought that maybe people would “get it” in context.
I mean, it’s a pretty ballsy move to put out anything live by a band. And the Dears philosophy generally, even when we’re making records, we don’t really do a lot of polishing of things. Like a lot of live albums that you hear by bigger bands and what have you, they’re gonna re-record plenty of stuff. “Oh, those vocals are off key? Let’s just re-record them.” Or “That guitar is out of tune, let’s just re-record it.” And you can get away with that, I guess, but we don’t really take that approach. It’s pretty much our own bootleg, released by us.
I guess, in a way, it’s more of a sentimental release. It’s like the live pre-production of Degeneration Street, and that was a really beautiful time for the band, and a beautiful time for us, not only internally but with that communal period of sharing this music that we hadn’t even been in the studio to record — that we had spent an entire Canadian winter indoors in me and [Dears keyboardist and Lightburn's wife] Natalia’s living room, hashing out and mulching up and through. And I guess it’s a totally selfish release.
How far before Degeneration Street was the live album recorded?
Oh my God, it was almost a year before we released the album. So a lot of water had passed under the bridge from the time we played those shows in Mexico to the release of the album in February of the next year. We had gone through so many things, and we had done a couple of other residencies — one in Toronto, one in New York City, one in Montreal as well. It was an experimental time for us.
It’s funny. The first five or six songs on the live recording turned out to be the first five or six songs on Degeneration Street.
Yeah, I think six or seven songs from Degeneration Street are on that live recording. Here is the dilemma that we had. We were almost going to put out the entire hour-and-a-half concert, but it’s 2012, nobody even listens to a four-minute song. So it was a really tough call to put this together, even though there was a part of us that wanted to just put the whole thing out like “double live recording.”
But in the end we just thought, let’s just keep it tight and we’ll make some other recordings available down the line. Because, you know, recordings never really go bad; in fact they age like a fine wine [laughs].
And that’s kind of the essence of what the Dears is all about. This willingness to take extreme chances but also the result that we hope for is this bringing together of a bunch of people in the end. Some of the older songs like “Lost in the Plot” and “Hate Then Love,” they all went through this process. Those songs are all grown up, whereas the first half of the record, these are noobs — absolute, brand new, baby songs.
Not to come back to that, but I’m experiencing a newborn right now. We have a seven-year-old daughter and the juxtaposition between the two relationships, it’s insane. In a weird way, this record kind of represents exactly that. You have these old songs that we all know so well, even though we had never played them together as a band, we were all very familiar with that material that you can hear that comfortableness within. Then you hear this relationship of clumsiness but delicateness and fragileness of these new songs all in one listen.
I reckon that some people are gonna scrutinize it in a different kind of way, but for me, contextually, it’s a completely selfish release and I love it.
You mention it’s a brand new band.
At that time, yeah. But it’s not really a brand new band. That’s why it’s related to the doc. Have you had a chance to view the doc?
Yeah. It’s funny. You watch the doc and it’ll say [Dears guitarist] “Rob Benvie” and it’ll give the dates that he’s in the band, and they’re decades apart.
It’s hilarious. Absolutely, and the little inter-relationships between Benvie and [Dears guitarist Patrick] Krief who were never in the band at the same time, but one kind of succeeded the other. And that relationship is also really interesting, I find, to be in a band with, but also seeing it in the doc and hearing it on record. And then you’ve got this completely brand new guy who’s gotta carry this albatross around his neck, which is the drums. I think it’s an interesting enough story to tell. It was actually really easy to put it all together because, as a band, we all know what the story is.
And you were saying it’s a bit of a mess. The recording starts off with a semi-sound check. You’re talking about your monitors.
Yeah, and that’s entirely intentional. It kinda sets the tone for what you’re gonna hear. It’s a shit show [laughs]. We were there for three days and not one day were we able to get anything right. In the monitors, out on the speakers, onstage, stuff was breaking every day.
We had spent an entire day sound checking and checking all of these connections in this tiny club in Mexico City, and halfway through the show, the batteries on my in-ear pack died. So there’s this 20-minute interlude while this guy, Goose, goes and gets batteries for my pack. Maybe it should have been my responsibility but I think I had some bigger fish to fry. Why somebody didn’t fill it with new batteries before the show, I don’t know, but that’s how it was going down.
But yet we’re still delivering a concert. And that’s kinda the reality of what 99 per cent of bands out there are doing and what they’re going through. It’s not like — sure, you go to see a Coldplay show or even a Metric show or whatever, and everything goes seamlessly and the audience doesn’t know what the f--k is going on behind the scenes; they have no clue.
There were no freak-outs. It was just really great fun and everybody was there to hear music, and as long as they got to hear the music that’s really all that mattered. It was tough but it was still massive amounts of fun.
Are there any positive or negative standout moments on the recording that stick out to you?
I know that for me, vocally, across the board, I struggled. You can hear it. I sort of pride myself on being a decent singer, but I really, really struggled in that concert. And you can hear it. At times I sound like I’m being strangled.
The altitude in Mexico City. In '68, when they were having the Olympics there, those long distance runners were training because of the altitude. I have the same problem in Denver. The altitude of the city changes how you sing, and it’s a bit more of a challenge. But at the same time, a bad workman blames his tools, right? Not to mention we hadn’t played any shows. The show that’s on there is the actual third show that that band had ever played together. You stand that next to countless bands’ third shows, and I’d say it holds its own [laughs].
But most bands don’t record their third shows.
Yeah, that’s the thing. I think we took a gamble by recording it and filming it and it was an event. It was definitely a pivotal event in our career, and it was interesting to document, even though we didn’t know it was gonna wind up becoming part of this documentary. I think we just filmed it for safe keeping just in case. And it turned out, when they approached us to make this thing, we were like, “Well, we have all this stuff. All we need is a couple of bucks to finish it off, and Bob’s your uncle.”
Related:
5 for 20: Rob Benvie of the Dears and Camouflage Nights
Must listen: new ethereal pop from The Dears' Patrick Krief
The Dears at Hillside Festival circa 2007: Concerts from the Radio 3 Vaults