Big from here

Scoping out the Stills and their
new album, Oceans Will Rise

THE WALRUS AND THE POLAR BEARS: The Stills

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

Scale and scope are often a matter of perspective. Many bands would be paralyzed by an audience of 250,000, like the one Montrealers the Stills played for in Quebec City this past summer. Their actual set, though, was a breeze after an in-the-flesh encounter with the night’s headliner, Paul McCartney. The backstage environment, which co-singer/guitarists Tim Fletcher and Dave Hamelin call “extreeeeemely controlled,” only ratcheted up the tension.

“I guess it is kinda dangerous for a guy like him, especially with all the controversy in Quebec City. I don’t think he takes chances,” Hamelin says, recalling attacks on Sir Paul’s fellow Beatles—John Lennon shot dead in 1980, George Harrison stabbed in his home in ’99, and Ringo Starr’s life threatened by Montreal anti-Semites in 1964 (fun fact: Starr’s a goy).

They did manage to chat with the guy for what, five minutes? Ten? “Time kinda stopped. It was really nerve-wracking. We’ve met a lot of people in our career, and none of them have matched this meeting. This person changed history, music and culture.”

The Stills were so nervous that then playing before a crowd a quarter-million strong was a cakewalk. “At a certain point, you can’t really tell how many people are actually there. It’s not like you’re counting them.”

Let’s just say there were enough to utterly rebuke the pre-show gripes of the Québécois ethnic nationalists, which the Stills call “ridiculous.”

“This is a guy who symbolizes unity and love,” says Fletcher. “It’s an honour, you can’t turn around and spit on that. I think everyone involved felt a little embarrassed.”

The size of a thing also shifts in assessing Oceans Will Rise, the new album from the Stills, on the basis of which McCartney personally okayed their Q.C. booking. The album has its debts to the Stills’ inspirations—Dylan, the Band, a couple of explicit Clash quotes and a subtle nod to Two-Tone ska. The production, however, owes more to maybe U2. To a listener, it’s massive, big enough for the Plains of Abraham, but Hamelin hears it as much more modest. “I don’t think you’re ever conscious of the scope of what you’re making, because it always starts out small, in your room with an acoustic guitar. Every song has an underwhelming beginning.”

“They all start with a spark and yeah, humble beginnings,” adds Fletcher, “but the way we worked on them and arranged them came out of a period of touring, with a lot of drinking and coffee. I don’t know, we felt like we could do anything. We created our own illusions of kicking back against everything.”

The album title, and lyrical riffs on Mayan calendars and drowning polar bears, meteor showers and rivers of blood, suggest an apocalyptic anxiety. Fletcher and Hamelin again insist that the size of things is relative. The songs are personal, not political—“observational,” as Hamelin puts it.

“The fact that these songs have several dimensions you can read into is just the way we write songs, I guess,” says Fletcher. “You’re trying to explain your own internal reality in a way that’s interesting. Most of life is pretty mundane and boring, so when you write songs, you’re trying to do something that you know, years later, will have summed up the interesting bits of that period.”

WITH HOLLERADO AT CABARET DU
MUSÉE JUSTE POUR RIRE ON
SATURDAY, SEPT. 27, 9 P.M., $15