Year End Review and the Coast Percusssion Syndrome

2018 was a busy year for the band. At the beginning of the year we were really out gigging as Bag Of Snakes but as we covered more and more material from The Rebel Wheel catalog it became fairly obvious that we were quickly becoming the next iteration of THAT band. My Aunt (who is in hospital right now) told me that "Snakes" is an unpleasant word with bad connotations and my very good friend Rachel actually shuddered when I told her our name. So. Bag Of Snakes is no longer a band, it is instead just another album in the ever-growing Rebel Wheel canon (albeit a more hard-rock "angular garage-band" album than usual).

There have been lots of high moments this year. It was a delight to watch my friend Tara develop as a seasoned and confidant performer (she was already a strong song-writer but even that aspect of her career has developed too). Watching her become more and more at ease with the stage and allowing me to be part of that growth was a real privilege for me. Local song-writer and leader of The PepTides, Claude Marquis drafted me into his band for his first solo show featuring his "folky" tunes. The show was a great success and we have re-kindled a very strong working relationship.

Another PepTide front-person, Dee Dee Butters, also decided to start her own solo career and I was honoured and delighted to be asked to join her in her jazz gigs. We play as a duo, or sometimes as a a trio with PepTides, Rebel Wheel bassist Andrew Burns.

I also have been doing a lot of solo gigs myself, mostly jazz guitar "chord solos", where I might play any number of standards or originals playing the melody in four part harmony, usually with contrasting motion bass lines. It is a challenge but is immensely fun as well.

But it wasn't all lavender and jazz. I went on perhaps the single worst road-tour of my life in the spring. The much touted "East Coast Mini Tour" was a disaster from the get-go. In retrospect I should never have climbed into the car when the "driving force" of the project arrived an hour early and over-the-top-surly at 5am. We all scurried about in a panic so that when we left (an hour ahead of schedule and grumpily impatient), it ended up I had forgotten my wallet. I noticed about 100 miles in and spoke up, thinking that we still had plenty of time to turn around and fetch it. The driving force bluntly refused so I was looking at a ten day tour with no money of my own. As another friend of mine said, I should have gotten out of the car right then and there, but as I was the "band" for both artists I felt duty-bound to stay.

I am not going to detail each and every abuse I endured along the way, but the gigs were done against a back-drop of escalating tension and many whispered conferences and dirty looks. It all came to a crashing halt in Halifax when I was onstage enduring abuse hurled at me from the driving force who had perched herself at the bar (much to the bar-tenders dismay). It all got messy: she was booted out and everything went due south. I originally detailed EVERY abuse that night when I first posted this, now I will leave it at it being the lowest point in my entire career.

Of course it all worked out but now I know EXACTLY why Rachel shuddered and my aunt warned me when I told them my band was called Bag Of Snakes. When you actually meet a true snake it is a totally disgusting experience.

Simple machines. The concept fascinates me. The idea that there are simple physical mechanisms that can use leverage to multiply force is intriguing to me. The actual physics of "mechanical advantage" are more complicated than I care to explain (or could do justice to truthfully), but the product of levers and pulleys multiplying the magnitude of a force by any factor is very revealing of man's ingenuity in transforming his world. The idea that several simple machines in conjunction create a compound machine (think bicycle with its wheels and levers and pulleys) inspired my musical design for the new Rebel Wheel album, "Simple Machines" (that and i just love the sound of the term).

The idea here was to create a series of motives that would operate like simple machines, from which we would build longer form compositions (as opposed to say writing a series of pieces called "Screw" "pulley" "lever" or "wedge" say, all of which tend to evoke sexual connotations for me). Coming up with motives was easy, simply because of the visual aspect of a guitar neck and of how notes look on paper. If you visualize a root, a b5 and a m7th (say C, F# and Bb) as a shape on guitar it kind of looks like a wedge. If you think of a series of tri-tones stacked up (C, F#, C, F#) it looks like an inclined plane both on a guitar neck and on paper. If you take a pattern like C to C8va, to A (down a m3) to Bb (down a ma7) to F (up m6) to F# (up semitone) to C# (down a 4th) to D (up a semitone) and put it in motion, it looks like a screw. You get the idea: the actual note patterns are visual more than aural.

These then became the building blocks for the music (which is still being written) and as is always the case, these motives serve more like spring-boards for further machinations rather than hard and fast musical statements. In other words the simple machine cells can be altered traditionally (with techniques like retrograde, inversion, retrograde inversion, expansion, contraction, transposition etc. etc.) or freely.

This is always the fun part for me: taking small cells and fucking about with them. I myself am a simple machine.

What a Bag of Snakes (or how The Rebel Wheel was re-born)

It has been a long time since our last blog in this series of Rebel Wheel Broadcasts. Usually when someone starts out with "it's has been a long time" they add, "and a lot has happened". Of course it has. The one thing anyone can count on is stuff happening. The longer the time, the more "a lot" enters into the sentence.

In my case, divorce, a series of deaths in the family, several heart-breaks and a lengthy detour down a folk-rock rabbit hole that started so well and ended so terribly is the bulk of what happened to me. Through it all though The Rebel Wheel kept on ticking, albeit in a kind of off-the-radar way as far as the prog-rock community was concerned.

I was also able to finish my 4th Symphony, my 5th string quartet, a whole series of electro-acoustic compositions, a batch of TV work and some hard rocking proggy stuff. Right now I am finishing my master's and am writing a large scale percussion piece using several techniques derived from my study of Bartok's technique of poly modal-chromaticism.

Since Whore's Breakfast (the band's first all-digital release) I have relied heavily on the splendid "bandcamp" site to distribute my music.It has worked a charm. I released four more albums for the Rebel Wheel in succession, all of which were either albums that had been released under other titles (Filth Therapy, Bag Of Snakes) or compilation albums of released tracks (5 Epics) or unreleased ones (3rd Wheel). These all basically helped me keep my hand in the game (foot in the door, head in the clouds).

Last year I wanted to do some hard rock after a disastrous tour to the East Coast with a certifiable sociopathic, megalomaniacal, loud-mouth, red-neck boor. A year of doing gigs with this person pretty much soured any taste I had for doing any work with posers. I should have known better. No matter. The good part was I immediately jumped into a hard-rock odd-metered aesthetic and after writing and recording for a few weeks came up with a new project called Bag Of Snakes. I released it on bandcamp and Cd Baby and it did well right out of the gates. It was only when a reviewer said that it sounded like Stone Temple Pilots meets Rush, did I realize I had basically written the perfect successor to Whore's Breakfast (the two compilation albums and Filth Therapy notwithstanding).

While touring the album with Alex Wickham and Andrew Burns it occurred to me that I also had a new Rebel Wheel unit on my hands so I very gleefully re-formed the band with them and swallowed The Bag of Snakes into the Rebel Wheel canon. Six months later we are writing, recording and rehearsing new material for the 2019 release of "Simple machines" which will be the 9th Rebel Wheel album and the 8th iteration of the band. Here is the Bag of Snakes unit before we decided we were really The Rebel Wheel