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Up from slaverySlaves on Dope regained, without the chains
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“Okay, we’re doing this again—but it’s so different. I don’t care what happens.” Don’t mistake those last five words from Jason Rockman, singer/lyricist in high-octane Montreal action-rock outfit Slaves on Dope, for an expression of apathy. What he’s getting at is that he, a contented dad and overnight host on CHOM FM, and guitarist/songwriter Kevin Jardine—the core pair of SOD—have, in reuniting, happily traded the working musician’s worries for a less certain but more satisfying path. The final Slaves on Dope show, following years of major label activity and high-profile tour slots (Ozzfest, for starters), was at the end of 2003 at l’Alizé. Jardine, in recent years a producer for hire and leader of metal band the Monarchy, points no fingers in assessing the collapse of Slaves. “It’s just that a lot of things didn’t happen the way we’d hoped they would. The worst part of the whole thing was that the friendship Jason and I had was gone because of the way things happened.” The two only reconnected three years later in an eBay bidding war over an unearthed box of early Slaves CDs (Rockman won by a dollar). The occasional all-night reconciliatory chat led, soon enough, to the band’s revival—on the strict condition that fun, not funds, were its fuel. The songs began to pour out, 19 in one particular month and a half—“We documented everything on YouTube,” says Rockman. A Facebook page got an initial 20 friends. Now they have some 2,700, and plans to please these fans with a new album, capitalizing on the freedoms of digital distribution. “We couldn’t have done it this way 10 years ago,” says Jardine, “and we wouldn’t have wanted to. Having that sense of urgency and all that made for great music and got us where we were. But it creates so much stress. On tour, we’d lose sight of what we were doing because we were so worried about what we were doing. “It’s really nice to just go write tunes, hang out, do this show, finish a record and—with the Internet the way it is, it’s so hard to sell records—just put it out and see what happens. It could do great, it could do nothing, and if it does nothing, I don’t really care.” Don’t mistake those last four words for apathy! WITH THE CATALYST AND WAR CALL |
