>> Can the best band in Canada be best only in Canada? Could the best rock group of 1998 have been the best rock group of 1973? And if a tree falls on your U.S. record label, do you still exist? Yes! Yes! Yes! It's Sloan! Sloan! Sloan!

by CHRIS YURKIW

Have you ever heard of cockney rhyming?" Sloan's Chris Murphy asks me, preferring to be the interviewer than the interviewee. I've heard that MuchMusic, after many attempts, has given up trying to ask Murphy questions and just lets him be the host:

No, I haven't.

"When they say stuff like 'Dog and bone,' and it means 'telephone'?"

A kind of slang?

"Yeah, but it's like 'telephone,' and then 'dog and bone,' and then just 'dog.' So they say, 'I'm on the dog.' It's like a code. To escape the cops or whatever."

Uh-huh.

"A new cockney one is the 'Gary Glitter is the babysitter.' So the 'babysitter' becomes the 'Gary.'

I get it.

"You heard the recent Gary Glitter story?"

Did he come out, too?

"No, he got busted for kiddie porn on the Internet."

Right. Gary Glitter is the babysitter.

***

The last time I saw Sloan wasn't in performance but in the smoky media room down in the bowels of Copps Coliseum, in Hamilton, at the 1997 Juno Awards. The band had just picked up the prize for Best Alternative Album for their sort-of comeback record, One Chord to Another, and were milling about the usual suspect crowd of industry flacks, TV hacks and caterers. I'd met some of the Sloans before--accosted Chris Murphy on Queen Street West at Toronto's North By Nothing Exciting conference, chatted with Jay Ferguson in the old Piranha Studio in the Southam Building on Bleury while he was producing the debut album of our own Local Rabbits.

But this time the four members of Sloan looked different: they really looked like rock stars. Understated, but definitely rock stars, with their unkempt mop tops and wide-waled turtlenecks (just like the '60s Brit Invaders whose music Sloan tap), even Murphy's gold wire-frame glasses, which look like they're the same pair he's been wearing since 14.

Geeky, sure, but not a contrived "geek chic" like that of, say, Weezer, a band that was a lot easier for the David Geffen Company to market than Sloan back in 1994. That was when our heroes from Halifax delivered their second but non-grunge album to the "major alternative" label, no longer wanting to bury their pop songs in that bandwagon of distortion, or bury their character as a group made up of four (count 'em) singers and songwriters. Geffen responded by, well, burying the album, and that only increased the tension within a quartet of competing creative-types.

Nineteen ninety-five was the year of The Great Sloan Breakup Rumour, and the band did little to clear up contradicting stories. But by year's end they were back in the studio and back on their self-owned label, Murderecords, having mysteriously wriggled out of their contract with Geffen. At the time they said that they wanted to do at least one more album "for posterity," but that was the album that won the Juno and went on to go gold in Canada. So Sloan have stuck around, which is good news for the young girls who stalk them and the old rock critics who chalk them up as not only the best band in Canada but also the best-loved. But that's the old Sloan story.

***

Right now, bassist Chris Murphy and guitarist Patrick Pentland are in Montreal on the proverbial promo tour, telling the story behind their fourth album, Navy Blues, and looking none too like rock stars in baggy-bum jeans and sweatshirts. By chance, Murphy walks into the hotel elevator I'm riding up to the interview suite, and I accost him once again. "Chris Murphy!" I say as he shuffles into the lift, and before he can tell if I'm a friend or foe he's got his hand extended but face expressionless. Unfazed. Deadpan. He might not look it today, but he is a rock star.

As fate would have it I end up being paired with Murphy while Pentland chats to another journalist, and I'm glad about it. Sloan is indeed a sum that's much greater than its four equal parts, but if I had to pick the most representative character I'd vote for Murphy--and not just because more of his songs make it onto Sloan albums than Pentland's or Ferguson's or drummer Andrew Scott's. He and Jay Ferguson go back the furthest, to high school and a pre-Sloan band called Kearney Lake Road. He was the one Geffen wanted to assume the role of band leader. And Murphy's the kind of guy who'll pick up and run with the playing and writing trends of the others, like Ferguson's learning of the piano, or Pentland's bent for '70s hard rock, which gives Navy Blues its distinction from other Sloan records.

Murphy calls himself "the communicator" of the band and rightly so, because even an innocuous bit of banter from him about stuff like cockney rhyming and Gary Glitter is filled with clues to what makes the Sloanly planet turn:

1) The band's last two--arguably three--albums have mined the pop and rock music of Glitter's era. Not glam but other glorious stuff from the Vietnam decade of 1965-75: late Beatles rock, early Bee Gees orch-pop, Badfinger and Big Star power pop and then deeper into '70s rock with Thin Lizzy, AC/DC and Kiss on Navy Blues.

2) Sloan have always been into kids as well. Not sexually but spiritually: their first EP was called Peppermint, I like to call their debut "bubblegrunge," and Ferguson once called a song "Snowsuit Sound"--after the sound a snowsuit makes when you walk in it. It all makes great sense: Sloan are smitten with both where rock music was and where they were in 1973.

3) The band love language too--word play, puns, oh-so-clever phrases. They haven't let up since their lexicon-lapping, buzz-bomb single of 1992, "Underwhelmed," and it's a talent that, incredibly, all four of them share.

***

"I'd like to go on the record as saying that I intend to go platinum with this album," says Murphy, in his element as the articulate court jester and now feeding me quotable quotes. But he's not joking: Sloan's last album, One Chord to Another, sold over 80,000 indie copies in Canada (an independent album is considered a hit in this country at 5,000 sold), so the 20,000 more needed to reach platinum with Navy Blues is certainly feasible. And a band can make good scratch selling indie albums--four or five times as much than if you're signed to a major.

"Selling that many is directly because we are hooked up with a major, Universal [for distribution and marketing]," says Murphy. "Murder has no sales team capable of selling more than 1,000 records, so we're swimming with the sharks, we're walking a line, but I think we do it in a good way.

"We're definitely in a situation where, not like nothing can hurt us, but we're in control of our own destiny enough that nobody's gonna drop us, because we own our own record label. When we were on Geffen we were afraid of what they might think--afraid that they wouldn't like our record. And in fact they didn't like our second record. And then we released One Chord to Another [in the States] through a label called The Enclave [via Virgin], but they went under. So this time..."

This time Sloan are on a roll, have some momentum--but that's just in Canada. They haven't had an album released in the U.K. since their '92 debut. And the States... well, the States has been a problem for any Canadian "alternative" artist--let alone Sloan, who've had two U.S. majors let them go. Think about it: no Canadian alt act has ever really made it big in the States--and I'm sorry, but Alanis Morissette, Crash Test Dummies or Sarah McLachlan do not qualify. But Sloan are smart enough not to obsess about success in the U.S., right?

"Yeah, but at one point we had a different attitude. It was like, 'We don't want to be a big band in Canada and nothing in the States,' and the Tragically Hip was our blueprint for what we didn't want to be. But now, the Tragically Hip is a blueprint for what I wanna be. I think they're a rare example of a group whose newer stuff I like better than their older stuff. And I think they have a real strong fan base because they did it all themselves. They toured a lot and they didn't open for anybody, which I think is pretty cool."

But how about Sloan? Is their new stuff better than their older stuff? Their earlier take on grunge was something a little new under the sun, but a song from Navy Blues like Ferguson's "I Wanna Thank You," which sounds like a brighter version of "Eleanor Rigby"? Or Pentland's "Money City Maniacs," which begins with a siren à la Kiss's "Firehouse" and then kicks into a one-note AC/DC bass line and four-chord Angus Young slash? There's even another Pentland number called "Iggy & Angus"!

"We're always going to get the retro tag," says Murphy, "but I think that rock 'n' roll is a retro thing. Rock music is over. It continues with preservationists, almost like jazz. I guess it moves forward. I guess Zooropa is important or something, but I don't listen to it. I listen to the Rolling Stones."

"A lot of people say, 'I really like this new record. It's so cheesy. I love it. I laughed the whole way through it.' And it's like, 'Well, keep laughing you fuckin' jerk.' 'Cause we like it. We like rock music."

All hail.

Sloan play the EdgeFest this Tuesday, June 30 with Green Day, Foo Fighters, The Killjoys, The Inbreds and many others. Parc des Îles, Île Ste-Hélène. Rain or shine. Tickets 790-1245