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Take this gob
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“That’s what people remember about the act, the songs—and the shovel.” Montreal’s E.J. Brulé is being unduly modest. Everything’s memorable about a performer who sticks out no matter what bill he’s on—a musical stand-up comedian, raised on a diet of jazz-rock fusion, who deploys beatboxing and mouth-noise loops, and who came up through the indie punk and garage rock scene of the ’80s. From grimy punk dives to la-di-da Just For Laughs gigs, he recalls, “It was equally alien anywhere I went.” The shovel he clutches like a guitar is more than a mere prop. “I watch all the beatboxers on the Internet, and they all pseudo-scratch. That element of kinesiology, the study of muscle memory—it helps you remember.” Of course, the native of tiny Richmond, QC can remember a time when hip hop beatboxing didn’t exist yet. He wrote his first tune, “My Baby Ran Off With a Carrot,” at age 16, in 1972—“What are the blues? Primal, raw male emotion. Boom. Okay, I’ll write a raw, emotional song.” His fat-lipped face noise had precedents in blues and jazz, but was pretty unique prior to the early ’80s. “The struggle for me had always been whether this was a legitimate art form. That’s why you get that comic attitude. I couldn’t pass it off seriously.” Then folks like the Fat Boys hit the pop-culture radar. “It makes what I do less weird,” Brulé says thankfully. Around that time, 1983 specifically, Brulé relocated to Montreal—“I can be stupid in both official languages,” he says proudly. Based on an impromptu living-room performance, he was offered an opening slot by Dave Javex of early Montreal hardcore band Vomit & the Zits. “The classic punk-rock sense of humour—they tossed me out there to die. They wanted to watch me melt on the stage, with little understanding that the girls were gonna relate to the blues songs. That was my first lesson in what works—coming at people from the wrong direction.” Brulé’s been doing so ever since. An “alternative scatman,” he calls himself. “Unfortunately, it’s a negative definer sometimes. If you don’t get that joke, you’re not going to get any of it. “The attitude is deadpan rock-star modesty. In comedy, you have to deliver your own attitude—but you can only deliver it after a smoking’ hot song.” After winning $1,000 “on a French Gong Show” in 1990, Brulé stepped things up by bringing in live loops of his own sounds—“which put me right on the front edge of techno. But again, I was coming at people from the wrong direction. Even now, the live looping freaks the techno people out. It takes a comedian’s timing.” Brulé’s kept that timing tight over the years, popping up on bills at both established comedy venues and jerry-rigged indie nights. Likewise, comedians Peter Radomski and Michael Lifshitz join him for the live DVD recording he’s putting on this weekend at the show hall of Paradoxe, an audio-visual training school inside the Pointe St-Charles YMCA. But then so are rappers Loe Pesci and, from the venerable Shades of Culture, Orion and D-Shade, as well as beatboxer X-Wam. “My favourite scenes have always been the unlikely coalitions, people you wouldn’t think would be in the same room,” Brulé says, but that’s no surprise from someone whose tastes and talents make him the odd man in wherever he plays. AT PARADOXE (255 ASH) ON |
