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Dreadlock holiday

Living in L.A. with a Star Trek character, touring Europe with a Lemonhead, life is good for former Doughboy John Kastner

by CHRIS BARRY

Back in the day—the 1980s, that is—those in the know knew him as the enterprising teenage underdog who’d yelped for local “hardcore” stalwarts the Asexuals. A kid whose almost comically relentless drive and self-promo skills were instrumental in not only establishing a notable international following for his own band, but in helping to shape Montreal’s modest indie scene into, well, at least something approximating an actual music scene.

But when John Kastner first graced the cover of the Mirror in 1992 (interviewed by Richard Bird), it was no longer as the perpetually struggling indie heartthrob we’d all been rooting for, but as head honcho of the city’s then-most-happenin’ band, the Doughboys, who were right on the verge of releasing their major-label debut, Crush, on A&M records.

“That was like a new beginning for the Doughboys,” Kastner says today from his hillside home in Silver Lake, California, just up the strip from Hollywood in one of L.A.’s coolest ’hoods.

“We’d just come off five years solid on the road, just working, working and working. You see, we’d made the mistake of signing with Enigma in 1988, and while all record deals are bad business deals, we’d signed a really bad one. They barely gave us any money to record, and even though our stuff sold well around the world, they never, ever, paid us a cent. Even worse,” Kastner recalls with a vaguely disturbing lack of bitterness, “is that we had to take our advance from A&M and give them 10 grand just so they’d let us out of our contract. Ten grand! Seriously, that was more money than they’d given us to record two full albums and an EP combined! So yeah, to be free of them and suddenly on a label that not only had money but really wanted to make it happen, well, for sure, we saw 1992 as good times.”

Riding the wave

Within a few short months of the record’s release, the Doughboys, sporting a fresh new line-up. It featured the unique guitar stylings of intellectually simple yet criminally handsome Toronto import Jonathan Cummins, and had become one of the top rock ’n’ roll bands in the country—their shitty old van replaced with a shiny new tour bus, suddenly finding themselves playing to audiences numbering in the thousands in support of their soon-to-be gold LP.

“We were just part of a wave, you know?” the dreadlocked dynamo offers up modestly. “Everybody was listening to Nirvana and Soundgarden anyway, and, you know, we’d toured the world with all those Sub Pop bands at one time or another. The same people had been putting out our records, so I suppose we were just, like, the Canadian band representing at that time.”

And represent they did—for a few short years, at least. Kastner says life for the post-Crush Doughboys just kept getting better and better, until, inevitably, as with most rock ’n’ roll careers, “in ’95 or ’96, everything suddenly turned to shit. It got so bad so quickly it just broke up the band.” The Doughboys: 1987-1996. End of story. RIP.

The high life

Forever the busy beaver, for the past eight years Kastner has been living the high life in sunny Los Angeles, sharing a home with his wife, actress Nicole deBoer—aka the sultry, bone-raising star of TV’s The Dead Zone and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine—and their two dogs, Addy and Maya. At any given moment, he’s likely to have at least a dozen projects in the works, not the least recently being his debut solo record, Have You Seen Lucky?, due out later this fall, and the reformation of his ongoing band, All Systems Go, who are currently gearing up to record their third album. He’s also composed a number of film and TV soundtracks, earning a small fortune and a ton of accolades for his work on Phil the Alien, Universal Soldier, “and that Jim Henson thing, B.R.A.T.S of the Lost Nebula.

“And I never stopped touring, you know,” he adds. “Just not in Canada so much. But I’m touring Australia and New Zealand later this month. I was out in Europe for most of last winter with Evan Dando, doing my acoustic thing, in a couple of weeks I’m doing a bunch of East Coast dates supporting the Lemonheads. Let me see, what else have I been up to? Um, I’ve started writing a new soundtrack for Rob [Phil the Alien] Stefaniuk, I’ve been working on a new band with William Reid [the Jesus and Mary Chain], um, I’ve got this other little thing I did last year called Bram with Evan and Nikki Sudden that’s gonna be coming out in the…”

And so on and so forth. With no further ado, let’s just say John Kastner is alive and very well in Los Angeles.

Asked if he’s ever considered abandoning it all to come back home and live in Montreal, Kastner doesn’t hesitate for a second. “I would absolutely love to live in Montreal again. But what the hell would I do there? Although if I had a ton of money and didn’t have to worry about it, I’d buy a house in Montreal in a heartbeat.”

For more 411 on the life and times of John Kastner, go to his spankin’ new Web site, the address being (get this for bizarre) www.johnkastner.com.