My kingdom for a steel horse

>> Rock Plaza Central’s Chris Eaton on building an equine army and bringing sexy back

HORSE PLAY: Rock Plaza Central

by LORRAINE CARPENTER

Less than a minute into the Mirror’s conversation with Chris Eaton, the lead singer, songwriter and guitarist in Toronto’s Rock Plaza Central, he’s complaining about the amount of “business” he’s had to attend to. He’s hardly bitter—throughout the nearly hour-long interview, he sounds as gleeful as a pig in shit—yet he can’t help bemoaning what he sarcastically refers to as “all the exciting things about being in a band,” the things that a manager or label employee would normally do. His seven-piece orchestral folk band is independent, with distribution throughout North America, and even though this 11-year-old labour of love is starting to resemble a “real job,” Eaton is reluctant to relinquish control.

“There’s just something really strange about admitting that it’s gone to a different level that we can’t handle it anymore,” he says. “So we’re resisting that.”

A decade ago, Eaton was about as far from the pages of Rolling Stone as possible. From Sackville, New Brunswick, he embarked on a nation-wide solo tour in 1997, partly to play his music, partly to see the country. But before long, he realized that his booking agent in Edmonton had only “theoretically” organized his tour. Some sympathetic club managers allowed him to open their scheduled shows, but only paid him a pittance.

“When I finally got to Edmonton, I said, ‘Oh God, I’m just so poor.’ Luckily, this [agent] was really notorious for having screwed over every band in town, so there was a benefit show where all these musicians came together to buy me a plane ticket home.”

Angel dust

A couple of years later, a frustrated girlfriend convinced Eaton to put his artistic aspirations aside—he’d also been an amateur novelist since the age of 13—and latch onto something more lucrative. But as soon as that relationship ended, he produced an album and a novel, and met someone new.

“There were three or four months that were very awesome in my life,” he says, thinking back to 2003. “I became engaged, and about two days later, found out the book was gonna be published, and then a month or so later, met the people in this band, and then a month after that, recorded the first album, and everything since then has been amazing.”

The novel was The Inactivist (followed in 2005 by The Grammar Architect, both published by Insomniac Press) and the album was The World Was Hell to Us, a record about an epic war “between angels and humans, good and evil,” reads the band’s bio, implying that the angels are the good guys. Are We Not Horses is a sequel, about the existential quandary of the robotic horses built by the humans to defeat the angels. With no flesh-and-blood horses left, the robots believe they’re real until the humans reveal the truth, leading the horses to question whether they’d fought for the right side.

The narrative was less influenced by popular tales of “robot angst,” like Westworld, than by John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids, a post-apocalyptic novel involving the alienation of people with minor mutations, largely at the hands of Christian fundamentalists. Not surprisingly, Eaton also drew from present-day politics, from the racism of holy warring to waging battles with blinders on to the confusion over who the “bad guys” are.

“My father likes to think about ‘Anthem for the Already Defeated’ as being about the American military,” he adds. “But there’s an element of the song that’s also about not giving up hope.”

The twerk pays off

Perseverance has certainly benefited Eaton, who’s taken Rock Plaza Central from near-destitution in Edmonton to the tip of buzz-seeking, blog-reading tongues everywhere. Of course, if anyone had told him in the late ’90s that he’d end up covering a song by a former member of N’ Sync, he may have fallen into a deep depression. But times have changed, so when the Web zine Cokemachineglow commissioned a cover, Rock Plaza Central chose “SexyBack.”

“There are some interesting things going on in that song, but what it’s missing is any sort of melody whatsoever, which meant we could have fun with it and add another element. Once we got into it, stylistically, it became something that might have fit on the album,” he says, linking S&M lyrics about being whipped to the plight of his robot horses. Eaton insists that, unlike Alanis Morissette’s cover of “My Humps” (and Peaches’ subsequent “My Dumps”), the goal was not to ridicule the original song, and he resisted changing even the most awkward lyrics.

“The only line that was hard to sing was, ‘Let me see what you’re twerking with,’ which is an expression I’d never heard before. But I looked it up.”

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