Too Much Trouble : A Very Oral History of Danko Jones [1 ed.] 9781770903395, 9781770411357

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S T U ART BERMAN N

TOO MUCH TROUBLE

STUART BERMAN

Copyright © Stuart Berman, 2012 Published by ECW Press 2120 Queen Street East, Suite 200, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4E 1E2 416-694-3348 / [email protected] All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Berman, Stuart Too much trouble : a very oral history of Danko Jones / Stuart Berman. ISBN 978-1-77041-135-7 Also issued as 978-1-77090-339-5 (PDF); 978-1-77090-340-1 (ePUB) 1. Danko Jones (Musical group). 2. Jones, Danko. 3. Rock musicians—Canada—Biography. I. Title. ML421.D187B52 2012782.42166092’2C2012-905361-9 Editor for the press: Jennifer Knoch Cover and Type: Ingrid Paulson The publication of Too Much Trouble has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada, and by the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities, and the contribution of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit. The marketing of this book was made possible with the support of the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

CONTENTS

FOREWORD BY ERIC DAVIDSON / 07 INTRODUCTION / 08 1 MY MAMA MADE ME FOR ONE THING . . . / 13 2 WHEN I GET UP ON STAGE, YOU CAN’T TAKE YOUR EYES OFF ME / 35 3 CITY BY CITY, NIGHT AFTER NIGHT / 63 4 IF YOU WANT TO GET RICHER, CALL UP DICK SWITZER / 83 5 GET OUTTA TOWN / 115 6 HOME TO HELL / 141 7 OUT OF STEP LIKE MINOR THREAT, BABY / 165 8 NOTHING COMES EASY BUT IT’S WORTH THE FIGHT / 187 9 EYE ON THE PRIZE / 217 10 THE TOP OF THE MOUNTAIN / 235 EPILOGUE / 264 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS / 270 CREDITS / 271

FOREWORD

When New Bomb Turks first played with Danko Jones in 1996—at Toronto’s long-time house of boozy mirth, Lee’s Palace—I was told before the show that the singer (Danko Jones, that is) also did stand-up comedy, had a funk side project and some other persona non rocka. So, being a lil’ cynical shit, I was expecting the worst. But when Danko Jones hit the stage, it was like the second coming of the Didjits gone glam, with minute traces of angular Dischord Records angst, and decked out in matching suits, right at the moment when every alt-genre’s thrift store “look” was getting tiresome. And Danko was a gaze magnet. Like a young, clean-coifed Jimi Hendrix on a trucker-speed kick (and displaying nearly as sick’n’sped guitar chops), he added a giant pimp hat and fur jacket and oozed charisma and talent to where one could actually smell the A&R drool in the air. I remember going up to Danko after that first Lee’s Palace gig and making the mistake that others had made about me, Rick Sims, Blag Jesus, and other punk-sprung singer kooks—that he would be this hopped-up jabberjaw, or worse a cocky dick. Instead, he was huddled in the corner like someone just dumped a bucket of ice on him and he was patiently waiting for the chill to subside, steam rising off him. We warmly chatted about faux fur coats, sharkskin suits and such. A finer charmer you’d be hard-pressed to find in the world of beer suds–soaked trash-rock backstages. Eric Davidson, singer of New Bomb Turks, author of We Never Learn: The Gunk Punk Undergut, 1988–2001

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INTRODUCTION

TOO MUCH TROUBLE A VERY OR AL HISTORY OF DANKO JONES

In Cameron Crowe’s 1992 Seattle-scene comedy, Singles, Matt Dillon stars as the dimwitted frontman of an aspiring grunge band with the ridiculous name of Citizen Dick, whose signature song is the ridiculously titled “Touch Me, I’m Dick” (a satirical nod to Mudhoney’s seminal 1988 single “Touch Me I’m Sick”). But an interview sequence early in the film reveals the true punchline to this joke of a band: they’re big...in Belgium. Ever since the Beatles turned New York City’s JFK airport into the world’s largest pep rally back in 1964, America has been viewed as the ultimate validator of pop success. Stardom in other countries just isn’t considered to be “real” stardom, as evinced by the long tradition of British/Canadian/Japanese/Swedish etc. bands who can fill arenas and headline festivals in their home countries (and live quite comfortably as a result), but are willing to revert back to being just another bunch of chumps in a rental van on the interstate hauling ass to the next dive club with the hope of someday cracking an increasingly impenetrable American market. Toronto trio Danko Jones is one of those bands, but with one crucial distinction—their greatest successes have come not in their native Canada, but overseas. In his hometown, mention of Danko Jones often generates a response query of “aren’t they big in Europe or something?” as if it were some urban myth. These days, the band’s eponymous frontman is essentially the Keyser Söze of Toronto rock—a figment of popular imagination that no one really believes to be true. But, back in the late ’90s, the concept of Danko Jones becoming an overground, international success wouldn’t have seemed so unfathomable. If ever there was a candidate to smash through the Toronto indie-rock scene’s glass ceiling and make a name for himself on the global stage, it was Danko Jones, whose brash, bluesy punk–rock ’n’ soul and loud-mouthed, tongue-wagging performances made him a word-of-mouth sensation locally, earning the respect not just of his hometown peers, but of notable American indie- and punk-rock acts like the New Bomb Turks, the Make-Up and Blonde Redhead.

Back in the nascent days of the internet, such cross-border connections didn’t come easy; Canada’s various underground music scenes were largely disconnected from the American indie-rock infrastructure of college radio, alternative media and concert promoters that could transform eccentrics like the Blues Explosion’s Jon Spencer or the Jesus Lizard’s David Yow into freak-scene demi-celebs. Instead, Canadian bands were often confined to their own country, where the major markets are few and far between and touring is a depressingly cost-ineffective pursuit. Danko, smooth talker that he is, had seemingly found a way to circumvent the system, making a name for himself in key American scenes before even releasing so much as a seven-inch single. But if indie rock’s seemingly egalitarian DIY ethos provided Danko Jones with the inspiration and means to become a self-made rock star, its insular politics— governed by rigidly defined concepts of cool and political correctness—left him cold, and with his long-standing dream of signing to a renowned American indie label like Touch and Go or Sub Pop going unfulfilled, Danko was forced to refocus his efforts back home. He would score a minor Canadian FM-radio hit in 1999 with the single “Bounce” and sign a major-label licensing deal with Universal Music Canada, but Danko Jones effectively slipped into the void between hipster cool and mainstream acceptance: not popular enough to be a household name, and not sophisticated enough to be a dorm-room one, what with indie rock’s post-millennial shift from post-hardcore sludgefeasts toward elegant, orchestrated soft rock. And then just like that...he was gone. Throughout the 2000s, you didn’t hear Danko Jones anymore on the radio in Toronto, on either the left or right sides of the dial. His name rarely appeared in the local weeklies that had once championed him in the late ’90s. And on those sporadic occasions where he deigned to play a show in Toronto, he’d be hard-pressed to fill a 500-person–capacity club. All we were left with back home were rumours: that he was now big JC and Danko in Paris in Sweden. And Germany. And Denmark. And Finland. And Norway. And France. And Holland. And, yes, even Belgium. The proof was staring me right in the eye during an August 2010 train ride from Brussels International Airport to the city centre. On the empty seat next time to me was one of those free daily commuter newspapers filled with 100-word newsbites and Sudokus; inside was a full-page story on a familiar-looking band from Toronto playing Belgium’s massive Pukkelpop Festival that week. I’m not in this country for 20 minutes, and I’ve already found Danko Jones.

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TOO MUCH TROUBLE

Brussels is where the story of this book begins. As someone who had frequented and reported on the band’s early, name-making performances in Toronto during the late ’90s, I would receive occasional dispatches from Danko and his long-time bassist John “JC” Calabrese on what they had been up to over the years, often in the form of emailed photos: Danko hanging backstage at some European festival with Robert Plant. Danko hanging backstage at some European festival with Kirk Hammett. Danko hanging backstage at some European festival with Lemmy Kilmister. The sight of Danko rubbing shoulders with heavymetal royalty was absolutely astonishing to me, given that I first knew them as this scrappy garage-punk band—and, especially, given the fact that Danko Jones are greeted with almost total indifference in their hometown, and North America at large. When the opportunity to write this book came about, it necessitated a trip overseas to see all those whispers and rumours of European stardom turn real. Some friends of mine in Toronto expressed surprise that I was writing a book about Danko Jones, since his low profile back home doesn’t seem to warrant one. At which point I would pull out some iPhone video footage I shot at the 2010 Highfield Festival in Leipzig, Germany, where, prior to a performance of the band’s 2006 single “First Date,” Danko instructs the overeager audience to mosh in a more orderly fashion, so as not to scare away the girls in the crowd and “turn this show into a sausage party.” He asks the audience to run around in a circular formation—“just run some laps.” And they comply: a crowd of 10,000 people, running around in a massive but orderly human whirlpool. Any band can spark a mosh pit; it takes a very special performer to be able to direct one. Just two months before that summer 2010 trip to Europe, I had seen Danko Jones play for maybe 200 people at a club in London, Ontario (located two hours west of Toronto); by the end of that European trek, I had seen them play for festival crowds of 15,000. This book is an attempt to reconcile that massive gap: how a band can inspire such intense devotion from fans thousands of miles away—not to mention from some of the most revered names in rock, punk and metal—and yet be ignored, or sometimes even ridiculed, by their peers back home. In gathering the 70-plus interviews excerpted over the following pages, what’s struck me is not just the breadth of Danko fandom but the intensity of it. Whether you’re in a punk, hardcore, stoner-rock, thrash, black-metal or indie-rock band, there are certain failsafe groups pretty much everyone can agree on. The Stooges. Thin Lizzy. Bon Scott– era AC/DC. The Rolling Stones from 1964 to 1972. The Ramones. Black Flag. Motörhead. And to their many admirers in popular bands who were raised on the aforementioned greats, Danko Jones represent the purest contemporary distillation of those classic influences. But if, to their fans, the appeal of Danko Jones’ music is simple and obvious, the story behind it is anything but. This is a 15-year saga that goes from college-radio DJ booths to corporate boardrooms, from dingy after-hours boozecans to the biggest festival stages in Europe, marked by encounters with everyone from D.C. riot grrrls to Dublin riot police, from death-metal deities to Hollywood celebrities. And if all this sounds somewhat preposterous, well, as the man himself would say: this book ain’t boastin’, it’s truthin’.

A VERY OR AL HISTORY OF DANKO JONES Live onstage, 2009

1. 13 13

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ontrary to popular legend, Danko Jones was not born a lion or raised a devil child. He was o ssimply an only child, born and raised in Scarborough, an eastern-Toronto borough with a reputation re for vibrant multicultural strip malls, sprawling subdivisions and producing an inordinate number of famous funnymen (Mike Myers, John Candy, Jim Carrey). To compensate for a lack of siblings and playmates, the only child will often resort to creating an imaginary friend. But Danko didn’t have to go to such extreme measures— at a very young age, he had already found the best bunch of fantasy friends a lonely kid could ask for.

TOO MUCH TROUBLE A VERY OR AL HISTORY OF DANKO JONES

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Top: Michael Cari Cari on the drums at the infamous Laundry Mat show, 1996 Above: Danko Jones’ second show ever, in Ottawa with the Spaceshits, 1996

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Opening up for Jawbox and Dismemberment Plan, 1996

3.

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he geographic sprawl of Canada—with major cities often separated by 10-hour drives— h m ma makes touring the country undesirable even during the warm-weather months. And as Danko Jones’ experience in Penetanguishene illustrates, there’s not much in the way of lucrative secondary-market gigs to help a young band top up their gas-money fund. So Danko Jones’ approach to organically developing their regional fanbase in Canada was to not bother at all. Inspired by their overwhelmingly positive experiences with the New Bomb Turks, Danko and JC started contacting other revered American indie acts for shows. Rather than wait for a local promoter to bring their favourite bands to Toronto, Danko and JC simply offered to book the gigs themselves...with the hope that those bands would return the favour when Danko Jones booked U.S. dates.

TOO MUCH TROUBLE A VERY OR AL HISTORY OF DANKO JONES

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Recording in NYC at the Funhouse in 1997

64 65

Hanging out with Ian Svenonius in D.C.

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TOO MUCH TROUBLE A VERY OR AL HISTORY OF DANKO JONES

Having failed to charm their way onto the Touch and Go roster, Danko Jones had little choice but to bring it back home, issuing a seven-inch single and debut self-titled EP— recorded mostly by Jerry Teel of New York garage-punks the Chrome Cranks—through renowned Hamilton, Ontario–based indie label Sonic Unyon, the launching pad for mid-’90s Canadian indie-rock leading lights like Hayden and Treble Charger. Given the intense degree of anticipation building in Toronto for a Danko Jones record—and the fact that the band had recorded some 20 songs over 1996 and ’97—the five-song, 10-minute disc felt a little on the slight side. And true to their contrarian nature—and much to Sonic Unyon’s chagrin—the band insisted on making their first official releases limited-edition items: 500 copies of the vinyl single, and 2,000 copies of the CD EP. But the raw, off-the-floor recordings did an admirable job of giving listeners across Canada and beyond a fleeting glimpse of the band’s onstage ferocity.

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$QG,ZDVOLNHqPXVLFDOO\@RXU tried shopping their music to major labels IULHQGVKLSZDVERUQRXWRIRXUPXWXDOUHVSHFW to no avail. Releasing the new Danko Jones EP, My Love Is Bold, was a similarly altruistic IRU5LFKDUG6ZLW]HU gesture on Switzer’s part. Bionic would go on to pay tribute to their Sound King ,QHYHUKDGWRDSSURDFK labelmates in a 2002 song titled “A Political Song for Danko Jones to Sing,” joining the DEDQGDQGVD\q:K\GRQpW\RXSXWRXWD Smugglers’ “Danko Jones’ Pants” in the UHFRUGRQP\ODEHO"r,QHYHU\VLQJOHFDVHLW mini-canon of songs about Danko Jones.

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ith any break-up, one party often comes out looking better than the other and, in the ca of a band getting rid of its drummer, usually it’s the band that valiantly solders on to cas case success (think of Nirvana post–Chad Channing or, of course, the Beatles post–Pete Best) while the dejected drummer recedes into a lifetime of session-work servitude. However, in the Danko Jones/Gavin Brown split, the script seemed to have flipped. After getting ousted from Danko Jones, Brown threw himself into increasingly lucrative production work and soon established himself as one of Canada’s most in-demand studio savants. Over the subsequent decade, he would lend his golden (and platinum) touch to megaselling albums by Three Days Grace, Billy Talent and Metric, among others.

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Live at the Roskilde Festival, 2002

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154 155

When it came time to record Born a Lion’s follow-up, We Sweat Blood, Danko Jones asked themselves a rhetorical question: should they make a record to please an apathetic, undefined Canadian audience that never really understood them in the first place, or the European enthusiasts who embraced them with open, heavily tattooed arms? That’s not to suggest We Sweat Blood—recorded in ABBA’s legendary Polar Studios in Stockholm and released in October 2003—was some premediated, In Utero–style anti-pop gesture; the album boasted no lack of fist-pump anthemic choruses (“I Love Living in the City”), excitable garage-rock rave-ups (“I Want You”) and cheeky Aerosmith quotes (“Heartbreak’s a Blessing”). But the overall energy was darker and more manic (as symbolized by the cover shot, a concert pic of Danko’s bloody hand striking his guitar), while Matt DeMatteo’s production scraped away the surface slickness of Born a Lion to expose the frayed nerves that incite Danko’s done-me-wrong narratives. And never before had Danko indulged his metal mania as flagrantly as on the bloodlusty “Home to Hell” and “The Cross.” Needless to say, Danko’s Universal Music Canada minders were less than thrilled about funding and promoting an album intended to please a European audience that was beyond their reach. Essentially, the album’s doomed fate—and the band’s disintegrating relationship with Universal—was spelled out in the opening lines of “The Cross,” when Danko growls, “I love the smell of burning bridges/Can’t help but bite the hand that feeds me.”

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156 157

Even before submitting We Sweat Blood to Universal, Danko was already sensing a disconnect between the band and the label. Strangely enough, Danko’s disillusionment with the label stems from the spring 2003 outbreak of SARS—the lethal and contagious respiratory ailment that resulted in several deaths and widespread quarantines across Toronto. Among those ordered to stay indoors by public-health officials: Danko Jones.

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At the height of the SARS outbreak, the World Health Organization issued a warning advising travellers to avoid Toronto; once the disease was contained after several weeks, the city was faced with a severely depressed tourist industry. To help boost morale and Toronto’s international profile, the city hosted a massive outdoor concert dubbed “SARSstock”; the event attracted almost a half-million people and featured the Rolling Stones, AC/DC, Justin Timberlake and Universal Music Canada’s latest great rock hope Sam Roberts, among others. Given the SARS scare in Danko’s family, he was hoping Universal would use its influence to get his band added to the concert line-up. The call never came.

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To their credit, Universal’s lukewarm response to We Sweat Blood didn’t dissuade the label from devising novel new marketing strategies. The lead single, “I Want You,” was cross-promoted with the Canadianmade Ryan Reynolds heist flick Foolproof, which represented a noble attempt at a domestically produced, American-style popcorn thriller to counter the popular perception of Canadian cinema as a dour, art-house medium. “I Want You” played over Foolproof’s closing credits and the song’s video was intercut with scenes from the film.

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As if the band’s stock at Universal couldn’t fall any lower, Danko effectively wrote his own pink slip from the label in February 2004, when, at the height of the postNapster major-label war on downloading, Danko came out in support of free onlinemusic acquisition in a nationally televised debate with Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) president Brian Robertson.

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7.

D

anko Jones’ aborted Universal mission is a tale as old as indie rock itself. It’s just that their an fa failed major-label stint happened to play out at a time when Canadian indie rock, for the first fi time ever, was becoming an internationally recognized exemplar of hipster cool. The media-hype machinations that had popularized the music scenes in Seattle, Austin and Chapel Hill during the ’80s and ’90s were now anointing Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver the new thriving epicentres of indie rock. Bands like Broken Social Scene, Arcade Fire and the New Pornographers were forging a new Canadian musical aesthetic defined by multiheaded collectives, anthemic group choruses, orchestral grandeur, textural density and heart-on-sleeve emotionalism. It’s a community that Danko Jones once had ties to—Danko was once a roommate of and occasional musical collaborator with Broken Social Scene’s Brendan Canning—but, by the mid-2000s, the band’s riff-rock raunch could not have been more of out of step with prevailing Canadian indie-scene fashion.

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Without the humour element in rock ’n’ roll, rock ’n’ roll is not very fun.

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Damian Abraham and Danko at SXSW

176 177

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“Whoa—there’s 15,000 people here really loving Danko.”

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On top of becoming an in-demand touring act overseas, Danko was turning into something of a multidisciplinary threat, embarking on a European spoken-word tour that gave fans a peek behind his larger-than-life persona to reveal the recordcollector geek that’s always been lurking underneath. The title of the ensuing live album, The Magical World of Rock, would later be repurposed for a Danko-hosted radio show, broadcast out of Sweden and syndicated to outlets worldwide. Danko’s peculiar musings on rock ’n’ roll also led to guest-columnist gigs at several European music magazines.

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178 179

DANKO JONES ,KDGIXQGRLQJWKDW

Danko Jones would eventually fulfill their original dream of signing to a well>VSRNHQZRUG@WRXU,pGORYHWRGRLWDJDLQ established U.S. independent record label, :KDW,OHDUQHGZDVWKDW,VKRXOGpYHGRQH though their new American benefactors didn’t exactly have the same undergroundPRUHVKRZVEHIRUHUHFRUGLQJWKHDOEXP, cool cachet as a Touch and Go or Crypt VKRXOGpYHGRQHDERXWȨȥVKRZVEHFDXVH Records. Razor & Tie is a New York–based label best known for its roster of folk and E\WKHWLPH,ʣQLVKHGWKHWRXUWRVXSSRUW world-music artists, and its successful string WKHDOEXPWKRVHVKRZVZHUHSHUIHFW, of novelty Kidz Bop compilations. But the DQWLFLSDWHGHYHU\WKLQJ,NQHZZKHUH label was beginning to sign more rock acts, and its ties to Sony Music afforded Danko HYHU\WKLQJZDVJRLQJ,I,ZHUHWRGRLWDJDLQ Jones with their most stable U.S. distribution ,pGGRDPRQWKRIVKRZV,UHDOL]HKRZKDUG to date. In 2005, Razor & Tie released a LWLVWRGRDQG,JDLQHGPRUHUHVSHFWIRU-HOOR repackaged version of We Sweat Blood that was padded out with key tracks from Born DQG+HQU\EHFDXVHRILW a Lion; the strategy helped make “Lovercall” and “Forget My Name” two of the mostadded tracks in the Active Rock Radio But while his celebrity was on the ascent format that year. in Europe, back in North America, Danko Jones was essentially starting from scratch.

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but then I think he realized it was just all about sex,

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However, being something of an anomaly on Razor & Tie’s large, eclectic roster provided Danko Jones with few like-minded labelmates with whom to tour and establish the sort of community ties that guided them through their initial 1996–98 U.S. touring blitz and their breakthrough success in Scandinavia. The band’s mid-decade U.S. experience was defined by tours with a random assortment of bands, ranging from Nordic garage gods Turbonegro and Swedish mod revivalists Mando Diao to Canadian arena-rockers Our Lady Peace and L.A. Celt-punk armada Flogging Molly.

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Given Danko and JC’s long-standing friendship and loyalties, any drummer in Danko Jones is going to feel like the odd man out. But by the end of the band’s 2005 touring cycle, the growing disconnect between the founding duo and their drummer had turned Damon into a veritable pariah.

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The gruelling, get-in-the-van ethic required to make inroads into the largest touring market in the world would exact a considerable toll on the band. While Danko and JC preferred to temper the day-in, dayout grind of touring by heading straight back to the hotel after the show for a good night’s sleep, Damon was more eager to indulge in late-night revelry.

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Hanging out with Troy and Darren Sanders and Brent Hinds of Mastodon

Not coincidentally, around the same time Danko was taking flak from his friends in the Toronto indie-rock scene for touring with Nickelback, Danko had taken up hipsterbaiting as a part-time hobby of sorts. Over the course of 2006 and 2007, attentive readers of Canada’s urban weeklies—NOW and Eye Weekly in Toronto, the Georgia Straight in Vancouver, the Montreal Mirror—will have noticed a series of snarky, dismissive letters to the editor submitted by one Duane Yow. The letters were usually written in response to fawning reviews or profiles of popular Canadian indie-rock acts. (From a July 2007 missive to Eye Weekly: “Canadian indie rock eerily resembles L.A.’s Sunset Strip circa 1983, except the hairspray and make-up have been replaced with peach-fuzz facial hair and cardigans bought at Value Village, but strangely with the androgyny still intact.”)

Of course, any Jesus Lizard fan could tell you that Duane Yow is an alias assembled from the names of the band’s guitarist, Duane Denison, and singer, David Yow—and knowing Danko’s love of the Lizard and growing disdain for critically approved Canadian indie rock, it wasn’t too difficult for those close to the band to determine Duane Yow’s real identity. But if Danko never officially fessed up to Yow’s letter-writing rampage, he was no less eager to engage in public, on-therecord media warfare. After celebrated Toronto rapper k-os lashed out at NOW magazine on his MySpace blog for giving his 2006 album, Atlantis: Hymns for Disco, a middling review, Danko wrote a letter to NOW (under his own name) in defense of the review and went so far as to call k-os “an arrogant prick”; k-os countered with a cryptic MySpace post in which he joked about starting a band called “Stanko Jones.” (k-os did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this book.)

190 191

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However, those who dish it out inevitably have to take it, too: at a 2006 gig in Zurich opened by gypsy carnival barkers Gogol Bordello, that band’s lead singer, Eugene Hütz, set the stage for Danko by derisively announcing, “Coming up next is an AC/DC cover band.” But Danko welcomes such hostility—to someone raised on equal doses of punk rock and stand-up comedy, the greatest insult is to be greeted with mere indifference.

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Top: Onstage with Death Angel Above: Live onstage in Tilburg at the 013, 2006

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194 195

Ironically, Sleep Is the Enemy came stacked with the potential radio singles that the Universal Music Canada brass were hoping to hear on We Sweat Blood: the “Teenage Kicks”–style groove and smooth falsetto chorus of “Don’t Fall in Love”; the massive AC/DC-worthy anthem “First Date” (whose vampire-themed video would go on to rack up over two million hits on YouTube) and the call-and-response rager “Invisible,” a duet with John Garcia, former frontman for stonerrock titans and all-time Danko fave Kyuss.

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Did Danko Jones give me the exact same feeling that I got when I first put on “September” by Earth, Wind & Fire back in 1978? No—it was amplified by 150 times. I immediately fell in love.

On tour with John Garcia in Norway, 2006

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Danko Jones are simply the most intense power trio that I’ve seen since witnessing Motörhead on the No Sleep ’Til Hammersmith tour in 1981.

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Martin Ain and Danko in Zurich, 2009

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Every time I’m driving while listening to his albums, I look down and I’m doing 90 miles per hour. It always makes me want to roll the windows down, crank it up and put the hammer down.

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If you really dissect what he’s done, it’s combine four genres of music and put it together into his own sound.

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It’s a pose-down with Opeth, 2006

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LWpVOLNHWRVORJLWRXWRQWKHURDG Perhaps the most surprising indicator of Danko Jones’ newfound renown came in the summer of 2006, when the Raconteurs— fronted by garage-rock superstar Jack White and fellow Detroit-scene veteran Brendan Benson—started covering the signature Danko Jones track “Samuel Sin” in concert. It was an unexpected tip of the fedora from a group of artists who, like Danko Jones, had slogged it out on the late ’90s American indie circuit but had since left the insular scenesterism behind to pursue loftier ambitions.

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As a three-piece, when you stand in front of 2,500 people, you’ve got to rock—that’s it, there’s no second chance. He went beyond. It was fantastic.

Danko and Jerry Only of the Misfits

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214 215

9.

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he h e Danko Jones story up to this point is essentially one of turning chance meetings into opp o opportunity, whether it was piggybacking on the New Bomb Turks for their maiden U.S. voyage in 1996 or hooking up with Bad Taste Records in Sweden through the Almighty Trigger Happy’s Al Nolan in 2000. The story of the band’s divisive 2008 album, Never Too Loud, was born of similarly fortuitous circumstances. When he first started the band, Danko claimed that one of his goals was to play a show with San Diego soul-punk revue Rocket From the Crypt, a dream he never got to realize before that band’s 2005 dissolution (an event Danko would commemorate on the B-side “RIP RFTC”). However, an unlikely encounter with former RFTC drummer Atom Willard—when he was playing with blink-182 offshoot Angels & Airwaves—would yield a sweet consolation prize: the keys to Foo Fighters figurehead Dave Grohl’s 606 recording studio in Los Angeles.

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Ever since Danko Jones first stepped into Toronto’s Hallam Studios in 1996, the question has persisted: how do you capture the band’s raw-powered live performance on record? Never Too Loud presented a heretofore unexplored option: don’t even bother trying. Never Too Loud is a consummate L.A. album: a big, slickly produced set of open-sunroof radio blasters that sees Danko Jones venture out of their comfort zone on a number of occasions, indulging in everything from AutoTuned alt-metal epics (“Forest for the Trees”) to sentimental power-pop (“Ravenous,” “City Streets”), while the acoustic, campfire-style serenade “Take Me Home” counts as the biggest headscratcher in the band’s catalogue since “If I Were You” on My Love Is Bold. Even those long-time fans and critics who had stuck with the band through their evolution from garage-punk thrashers to hard-rock heavies couldn’t help but flinch at the album’s extra layers of gloss and shimmer.

220 221

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Top left: JC on the “Take Me Home” video set Bottom left: JC working in between takes Right: Danko + Terror hoodie + acoustic guitar

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The Danko/Motörhead alliance would strengthen over the course of several shared festival bills through the mid-2000s. And, soon enough, Danko wasn’t just hanging out with his favourite band on a regular basis, but fronting them on occasion, too.

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Live at Hellfest

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Left: Danko on Harry Street in Dublin by the Phil Lynott statue Above: Philomena Lynott and Danko in Dublin

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As if the invitation to join Lemmy onstage wasn’t indication enough of Danko Jones’ ascendancy into the hard-rock establishment, the Dublin stop on the 2008 Motörhead tour saw Danko embark on another hallowed rite of passage for every budding rock star: a visit to the grave of late Thin Lizzy great Phil Lynott with a personal escort from Lynott’s 81-year-old mother Philomena, the proverbial grand dame of U.K. rock.

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Ultimately, for Danko, the Motörhead tours represented something greater than just an opportunity to live out a teenage fantasy every night. Because Motörhead are more than just a great rock band—they’re a model of how to survive for decades and nurture a loyal fanbase without the support of traditional industry tools like radio, video channels or the music press. And the dedication of Motörhead’s long-serving Road Crew exemplifies how, when it comes to keeping the show on the road, loyalty and mutual respect are more important than cushy tour buses.

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