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Still on track

Mack Mackenzie has a new band, NDN Boy, and a DVD reissue of Three O’Clock Train’s Wig Wam Beach on the way

by CHRIS BARRY

“Is that why you’re doing a story on me, ’cuz I haven’t kicked off yet, like Alex and Piggy?” asks Mack Mackenzie over the phone from his new home in Vancouver, B.C., in obvious reference to his onetime peers, the late Alex Soria of the Nils and the inimitable Piggy of Voivod fame.

When informed that, no, we were in fact hunting him down to comment on his 1996 Mirror cover story by Chris Yurkiw, he relaxes a bit, cops to actually just kidding with his mortality quip, and rifles through his clouded, early-morning brain to try and recall just what Mack Mackenzie, the criminally overlooked songwriter/musician of 1980s alt-country sensations Three O’Clock Train, was doing all those years ago.

“Oh yeah, ’96,” he mutters, “I think that’s when I put out my solo record on Justin Time records, right? Hardly the peak of my career though, you’d have to go back to 1986 and the Train’s Wig Wam Beach and Muscle In records for that.”

Still, with a little gentle prodding, Mackenzie’s memory quickly springs into action and he offers up the goods on his life in the mid-’90s. “Yeah, I had just broken my neck before making that album,” he recalls. “I’d been teaching my nephew and his friends how to stand on their heads and one of them pushed me over and my neck just broke.

“I couldn’t use my right arm after that because of paralysis so I couldn’t really play guitar, you know? But one day I went into the studio and saw Cecil Seaskull form Nerdy Girl playing guitar and, like, she wasn’t a great guitar player or anything but she had this strumming thing down—all down strokes, ching, ching, ching, like that, you know? And then I heard her sing, and her voice, it was just great.

“So it inspired me to go out and buy an acoustic guitar and that same day I wrote my song, ‘[I’m Not Your] Indian Boy,’ which in the end I had Cecil sing on. And that was it. I went in to Justin Time, played them the song and within the space of a month I got a record deal and made a solo album [Mack Mackenzie]. I don’t know how well it sold, but it’s still in print, you know.”

These days Mackenzie, who has been out west for close to three years, is playing in a new outfit called NDN Boy (get it?) with another former Montrealer, Kelly of the Northern Vultures, on drums. “We played at the Corona last year, you weren’t there?” he asks, knowing full well I wasn’t and that I should feel guilty about it. “It was sold out and everything. Ha, that’s what happens when you only play once a year. The year before I left I’d done 12 shows in a row at Zeke’s Gallery, and uh, it was a slightly different situation.”

Fans of Mack and his work can look forward to a DVD re-issue of Three O’Clock Train’s Wig Wam Beach album next spring with bonus tracks, some old television appearances and “much, much more.

“It’ll be celebrating the 20th anniversary of its original release and it should be coming out on Universal.” Stay tuned.