Hamilton’s Bridgeworks and Toronto’s Horseshoe Tavern will host Junkhouse reunion concerts this weekend.Heather Pollock/Supplied
Straight out of Hamilton, the shaggy-haired alt-rock band Junkhouse rode high in the 1990s, with radio hits Shine, Be Someone and Out of My Head and their accompanying videos in rotation on MuchMusic. But if their breakthrough debut album, Strays, was a reference to vagrant animals, the band members were the dogs that caught the car and had no idea what to do next.
“I say this with all the love in my heart, but we really were a bunch of knuckleheads,” says Junkhouse songwriter and frontman Tom Wilson. “We weren’t equipped for the fame, and by the time we achieved it the band was already falling apart.”
Junkhouse broke up in 1998. For Wilson, the experience was a crash course in how to navigate the music business. He went on to forge a career that includes the formation of his own band, Lee Harvey Osmond, and membership in the roots-rock supergroup Blackie and the Rodeo King.
In 2017, Wilson published a memoir, Beautiful Scars, which addressed the late-in-life discovery of his Mohawk heritage. This summer he was appointed as a Companion of the Order of Canada. His latest album, with son Thompson Wilson, is the ambient work TEHOHÁHAKE For Exhibit.
In advance of a Junkhouse reunion concerts at Hamilton’s Bridgeworks and Toronto’s Horseshoe Tavern this weekend, Wilson spoke about knowing his business, knowing uber producer Daniel Lanois and knowing where to get a sandwich after midnight.
'Fame wasn’t the problem with Junkhouse, it was the intensity of the work,' says Wilson.Supplied
Starting out: “You need to know who’s buying – who’s actually interested in you. And you have to figure out the trick of corralling people, so that the show promoter is happy. You have to be able to drive away from the gig with just enough money in your pocket to go to Rabba for a falafel and hopefully to put enough gas in your car to get back home. I remember Alex Lifeson of Rush talking in a documentary about the band getting a station wagon – it was a big deal, and now they had it. These kinds of steps and these kinds of revelations of what you need in order to get from point A to point B, you need to figure out.”
Get a friend like Daniel Lanois: “Junkhouse started because Daniel Lanois asked me to to come to New Orleans. He could see that I need to get out of Dodge – Hamilton was strangling me. I went to New Orleans and suddenly people were interested in my opinion. Malcolm Burn was there producing the first Crash Vegas record. Daniel was working on Bob Dylan’s Oh Mercy. And they’d say, ‘What do you think of this, Tom?’ It gave me a bit of confidence.”
Know your business: “You have to learn how to talk to people, even if it’s not your thing. It’s important to know what’s going on in your business. If you don’t, you’re going to be asking the question, ‘Why am I doing this?’ And you never want to be asking that question, ever. There’s always a reason why. If you investigate your situation, you actually know why you’re doing it. So, when the bass player asks, ‘Why are we doing this?’ you can tell them to shut their mouth.”
Advice to anyone opening a concert for Bob Dylan: “Be prepared to get your feelings hurt.”
Preparing for the worst is easy; preparing for the best is hard: “Fame wasn’t the problem with Junkhouse, it was the intensity of the work. We always had time for the work, but we would be playing in Peterborough [Ontario] and we’d get a call, ‘Listen, you gotta go to Scotland for two days to play a castle with Oasis and Jeff Buckley. We weren’t thinking anything like that would happen. Once, I was in my hotel room in Leuven, Belgium, and Out of My Head was on the TV, on MTV Europe. And Rolling Stone magazine wanted to talk to us. All of a sudden, all these things we fantasized about as young men were happening. But along with that came the free everything: Women, drugs, booze and silliness. It’s easy to play the rock star; it’s actually much harder to be a successful musician.”
Take inspiration from the best: Besides the Canadian folk music of Willie P. Bennett, there were three records that made complete sense to me: The Trinity Session by Cowboy Junkies, Folk Singer by Muddy Waters, and Kind of Blue by Miles Davis. I’ve never been the kind of genius to make Kind of Blue. I don’t think I’ll ever be thoughtful enough to be able to make The Trinity Session. And you know I’ll never be Muddy Waters. But I could take what I learned from those albums. Their creativity created the moments that they stepped into.”