Me Mom & Morgentaler • Deja Voodoo • Mado Lamotte • Ellen Gabriel • Francine Pelletier • Ivan • Michael Pintard and amuna baraka-clarke • Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick • Pascale Bussières • Steve Galluccio • Michel Tremblay • James DiSalvio • Nicole Brossard • Édouard Lock • Mack Mackenzie • David Fennario • John Kastner • GrimSkunk • Cecil Seaskull • Gros Michel • Ian Stephens • Great Antonio • Harry Mayerovitch • Robin Spry • François Gourd • The Gruesomes • Tiga • Five poor neighbourhoods

Sludge report

Gerard Van Herk of Montreal’s lo-fi originals, Deja Voodoo, looks back at the caveman days of local indie rock

by CHRIS BARRY

Gerard Van Herk, along with his partner in “sludge-a-billy,” Tony Dewald, were the hepcats behind Deja Voodoo, a two-man local sound sensation comprised of Gerard’s four-string electric guitar and Tony’s incessant percussive hammering. In the 1980s, Deja Voodoo were one of the more visible bands in town, regularly filling the Spectrum with their wacky multi-band Voodoo BBQs, and, via their independent label Og, providing a warm, loving home to scores of similarly-minded local and Canadian acts. They first appeared on the cover of the Mirror in 1985 as the focus of a story by Brendan Kelly on the magnificence of the local music scene. The Mirror managed to track Van Herk down in the always-stimulating hamlet of Ottawa, where he has been labouring as a Linguistics professor at the University of Ottawa for the past year.

Mirror: Do you remember what was going down with Deja Voodoo in ’86?

Gerard Van Herk: I guess we had a record out on Midnight then. We’d had our album on Og, Cemetery, then we did this one for Midnight, and later we went back to doing them on Og again. Deja Voodoo had been around for a while then, since 1981, and we were starting to tour Canada a lot, but we were still mostly local. I mean, we still had our day jobs making sandwiches and stuff. But a year later we were able to quit our day jobs and do it full time. We went to Europe for the first time and had started to tour by bus around then and—

M: Oh yeah, that’s right, didn’t you guys used to travel in a ’62 Valiant or something?

GVH: An Edsel, a ’59 Edsel.

M: Where did you ever find an Edsel?

GVH: Just a classified ad in the paper. We went out to some guy’s basement garage and he just had it sitting there. He claimed he had bought it from an old lady who had only driven it to church on Sundays.

M: How much did you pay for it?

GVH: $950—and then about 6,000 bucks in repairs. We were slogging through this snowstorm, somewhere north of Lake Superior, and I mean we were really slogging—I mean, at one point, a wolf walked across the highway in front of us. Didn’t even run, just walked. And then this Greyhound bus went straight through, right past us (makes sound of bus plowing by), just barrelling through the snow, it sure wasn’t gonna slow down because there was a foot of snow on the road, and we thought, “That’s what we should be doing.” So that’s what we did and finally gave up the Edsel. But yeah, in ’86 we had started doing a lot of stuff with Og, we’d put out the first It Came From Canada compilation and that was starting to do well.

M: Who was on that again?

GVH: Ray Condo, Calamity Jane from Ottawa, Gruesomes, Terminal Sunglasses…

Shaggy Og stories

M: What inspired you kids to take on all that extra responsibility of running a label? Was it a labour of love or more of a strict commercial endeavour?

GVH: Nothing was really a commercial endeavour. No, we did it because we were touring and people were always telling us about bands in different towns saying, “You’ve gotta check these guys out,” and bands started opening for us and stuff, and when we really liked them we’d say, “Yeah, let’s do something!” Og was basically just the two of us. Well, and whoever else we could rope in—friends, family, girlfriends or whatever—at any given time.

M: How many records did Og end up doing?

GVH: 29.

M: Who were some of the acts?

GVH: We did the first Jerry Jerry album, the Terminal Sunglasses. I think there are five It Came From Canada records, five Deja Voodoo albums, three Gruesomes albums. Two Dick van Dykes from Hamilton, UIC, Captain Crunch & Let’s Do Lunch, Screamback Team—

M: That’s okay, I get the idea. Why did you let it go?

GVH: Because the label took more time than the band did. A band takes time in the obvious sense because you’re on the road or whatever, but a label takes 20 to 30 hours a week because you’re answering mail, you’re answering the phone and doing all the crap. There was no way we could do it full time once the band stopped paying the bills because, basically, the band made money and our label didn’t. And as it became more full time, it became more work and I was married by that point and we were gonna start a family and, I mean, really, Deja Voodoo was a pretty basic musical kind of thing. It wasn’t like we were going to (adopts freaky science person voice) expand into new directions, you know?

M: No, I suppose not.

GVH: But the main reason we closed Og was because we split up. We’d always said from the beginning that when we hit 30 years old, we’d wrap it up and that’s what we did. There was a lot of weird stuff with distribution—we had a large distributor go bankrupt on us around that time and that certainly didn’t help.

M: Do you remember what kind of numbers those Og records did?

GVH: Oh, a good record for us would have sold about 3,000 or 4,000 copies. Most of the bands you were hearing on Brave New Waves were selling 800, 900 copies.

Voodoo brew

M: Do you think you might ever find yourself back in Montreal?

GVH: Well, I work in academia—I end up where they hire me. I still think of myself as a Montrealer in some ways. I grew up in Chambly.

M: Do the kids you teach in Linguistics ever go, like, “Gerard Van fuckin’ Herk from Deja fuckin’ Voodoo! I can’t Mcfuckin’ believe it!”

GVH: Yes, yes, surprisingly enough, it happens a few times a year. I teach a lot of older students [Early African-American English], so some actually remember seeing the band. It’s one of those weird situations where the people who liked us tended to like us a lot, so they still remember the band years on.

M: What’s Tony doing now?

GVH: Tony is a brewmaster. He makes beer for a living at a blues and pork restaurant in Vancouver called Dix. He makes really good beer.

M: Do you play music anymore?

GVH: Rarely, but I’ll be doing something in New York later this month, actually. It’s just me and a secret mystery drummer who I’m not allowed to name who’ll be doing some Voodoo tunes just because I happen to be in New York for a Linguistics conference anyway. It’ll be at Otto’s Shrunken Head Lounge in the East Village. I’ll present my paper on Habituality and Circumscription of Variable Contexts, and then I’ll run down the street and go (half-singing) nana, nana, nana… (starts laughing)