Came and Went: The Accidental Oral History of Thrush Hermit’s ‘Sweet Homewrecker’

Earlier this year, I interviewed members of Thrush Hermit, the late, great ’90s rock band from Halifax, Nova Scotia that I idolized in my teenage years. The piece was published by Vice as an oral history of their second album, 1999’s Clayton Park, to coincide with its long overdue vinyl/digital reissue. (You can read it here.) Because of space, I was forced to cut the preamble I had planned as a lead-in to the story. To be honest, that was a smart move by my editor. However, I was left with a few thousand words, which when I compiled them made an additional oral history of 1997’s Sweet Homewrecker, Thrush Hermit’s always overlooked and quite underrated debut album.

So here it is, another oral history. I’m not sure anyone really asked for it, but I couldn’t bring myself to just leave all of these words on the cutting room floor. The consensus has always been that Clayton Park is the superior album, according to the critics, fans and the band members themselves. But I’ve always been partial to Sweet Homewrecker. Maybe it had to do with timing (1997 was the year I became legal in Ontario, graduated high school, began university and travelled to the UK for festival season) or maybe it was the songs, but I always felt that not only was it my favourite album of theirs, but it also had the better story behind it.

The men that you adore are knocking on your door…

One year after the release of The Great Pacific Ocean, their popular second EP for Sloan’s murderecords, Thrush Hermit were courted by a number of major labels seeking to capitalize on the still-lucrative alternative music scene.

Angie Fenwick Gibb [manager, 1993 to 1998]: In the wake of Nirvana signing with Geffen, being on an American major label was what just about every musician strived for in the ’90s. The time leading up to actually signing a deal was pretty exciting. The A&R person we really wanted to sign with was Randy Kaye [who passed away in 2006]. Randy was arguably one of the coolest, most legit dudes in the industry. When we met, he was A&R for the legendary L.A. label, Slash Records. He was insanely in love the Hermit and would have been an amazing team member. Initially we talked about signing to Slash and were courted by the label’s founder and novel-esque character Bob Biggs. Slash wasn’t able to provide the level of financial support the band needed though. Randy’s cachet in the industry had also taken off around the same time and he found himself involved his own bidding war, having several labels vying to hire him away from Slash.

Ian McGettigan [vocals/bass]: Our publishing guy Clyde Lieberman was just trying to get us the best deal. Everyone was being patient with us because we were so obstinate about doing everything right. Clyde was this super-connected guy who had signed Wu-Tang and Beck — only massive hit makers. He loved us and during the big search for the next Seattle, he sent this guy Joe Fleischer, who was the senior editor of HITS Magazine, which was really influential in the pre-internet days of telling people who was hot and who was buzzing. Joe really put a spin on the hype, and made us his pet project, ratcheting things up for us. And with this lawyer we had, Ken Anderson, they made a bidding war out of nothing. It was kind of smoke and mirrors, to be honest. It was Slash Records from L.A., who were a cool punk label but offering one-tenth of what Elektra was offering, and RCA was involved, but no one was really putting a hard offer on the table.

Fenwick Gibb: Randy really wanted to take the Hermit with him to his new major label home-to-be, Warner. He and I even discussed making Thrush Hermit part of his signing deal. However, negotiations were delayed over and over. Clyde was getting pressure from his boss at BMG to make the band take a deal. Finally, time just ran out on our multi-year love affair with Randy and we couldn’t make the musical marriage happen. Elektra was the next best option, as Elektra releases were also supported by Warner Canada. Elektra really wanted to win the bidding war and was very assertive in making us an opening offer that we felt was too financially impactful to pass up.

Rob Benvie [vocals/guitar]: Before we signed to Elektra we had a few major labels that were really into us. That was a time when guitar bands were being signed and Halifax had loads of them, so Capitol was interested in us, and Everclear were signed to that label. So they brought Art [Alexakis] from Everclear to Halifax, I guess as a way to seduce us to sign with them. I remember sitting down to have a drink with Art, and he was such a fucking clichéd rock star, really wound up and bragging how he was sober and off heroin. He really wanted to impress us with his music industry know-how and all of the equipment that he owned, and explained how he had this vision of us signing to Capitol, and him taking our band and producing us and having us follow in Everclear’s footsteps where we achieve everything his band achieved. It was kind of nauseating. He seemed like a hair metaller who changed with the times to become a grunge dude. I mean, I have no idea whether that’s true or not. But at the time we just kind of laughed and sneered at him.

McGettigan: I can distinctly remember walking by the Delta Hotel with [Art], giving me gentle hints that I needed to get an Ernie Ball Stingray bass and an expensive bass rig. He wasn’t a bad person, but it was the ’90s when credibility was paramount. He represented the slick, major label world. I think he would have been a competent producer, but he said we should re-record a lot of our songs and we were like, “Absolutely not.”

Fenwick Gibb: As their manager, I felt signing to a label that was supported in Canada by Warner was really important. To me, Warner Canada was the real prize. Kim Cooke, Steve Jordan and John Poitier were the kind of team members we cultivated, people who had long-term vision, and held the view that music was an artistic expression, rather than strictly commerce. However, we wanted to sign directly to a US major label because it was the best shot a Canadian band had to break the US market. The band had signed an excellent development deal with Clyde Lieberman at BMG Music Publishing USA a couple of years previous so, naturally, BMG wanted them on a US label. Because of BMG’s backing, we actually had the clout to get a US major label deal, which is not something that’s easy to do by any stretch. It would have been foolish not to go for it.

Joel Plaskett [vocals/guitar]: We were signed by this A&R guy named Darren Johnson, who wasn’t super high up in the ranks of the label. But his boss was Seymour Stein, who came to Halifax to meet with us at the Five Fishermen when we signed with Elektra. That was cool because he had all of these stories about having lunch with Brian Wilson, and he’d signed Madonna and Ramones. He’s just old-school, New York record business, so it was fascinating to hear him talk.

Benvie: The main things I remember is that we went to the Five Fishermen and for almost the whole night Seymour had a blob of mashed potatoes on his nose. No one said anything. I guess we were all too reverent to say anything. He kept talking about Canada and saying how great the songwriting here was, but instead of listing the usual suspects he said, “The greatest songwriters in Canada right now? Barenaked Ladies.” He told us how Jerry Lee Lewis was working on an album, and Seymour was pitching him Barenaked Ladies songs and that Jerry Lee Lewis should perform the songs of Barenaked Ladies. That was a little staggering to us.

Fenwick Gibb: By the time we were ready to sign, we had a crack team behind the band. The final contract certainly reflected that. Thrush Hermit’s entertainment lawyer, Ken Anderson [whose clients included Ben Folds, Will Smith and Beastie Boys], was known for his excellent negotiation skills. That is the reason I chose him over another high profile New York entertainment lawyer who worked with several Canadian bands. At the time, I caught some flak from the industry over that decision, but considering how well the band made out with the close to $100k payout from Ken’s “golden parachute” clause when Elektra dropped the band, I think we got the last laugh.

Easley does it…

Now signed to Elektra, Thrush Hermit began searching for someone whose name did not rhyme with Fart Malexakis to produce their major label debut. Both the label and band members had different ideas in mind.

Benvie: There was a list and hilariously enough I found it a few years ago. Elektra came up with some big names like Butch Vig, Ric Ocasek, and maybe Gil Norton, thinking we could be like Weezer. These were producers with track records of turning rock bands into pop acts. I don’t know if they would have coughed up the dough for any of those guys but they were really into Butch Vig at the time. By then Butch was already passé in our minds, because we were so indie. I mean, he was already doing Garbage. We loved Nirvana, but more In Utero than anything. We actually recorded with Steve Albini too, so we weren’t really into making something polished. We wanted to do something with more of a vibe. We also suggested Tom Rothrock and Rob Schnapf, who we recorded a single for and released on their label Bong Load. But we went with Doug because we were really into Pavement’s Wowee Zowee, the Grifters, and Sonic Youth, who he had recorded around that time. Elektra was kind of indifferent to us, so they didn’t really put up much of a fight, as I recall, likely because they were already thinking that signing us was a bad idea.

McGettigan: The A&R guy wanted Stephen Street, but I didn’t like those records at all. They let us go with Doug Easley, who wasn’t even basically a producer. We knew enough about what we were doing.

Plaskett: What it all boils down to is that we were not really into being produced. Even working with Doug, it wasn’t like he tore the songs apart and rebuilt them. Doug is kind of a soft-spoken, extremely cool guy who was interested in facilitating the recording. It wasn’t he was like the type of producer who dramatically shifts the form or feel of a song by suggesting key changes or instrumentation. It’s not like Doug didn’t have ideas, but that was not how he worked. We had pretty elaborate demos already done on four-tracks, and we tended to just develop them down there. Almost to our detriment, because we weren’t experimenting like we should have in Memphis. What we wanted to do there, I think we were one record too young to do that, because there was a lot of pressure being a major label album. So we didn’t really break script from what we had rehearsed. We had dug into our own ideas, and less open to other ideas than we could have been.

We packed up all our belongings…

With all of their gear loaded into the van, Thrush Hermit drove down to Memphis, Tennessee, the home of the blues, Stax Records and Big Star. Co-produced by Doug Easley and the band, the album was recorded at Easley Recording Studio in May 1996, and then mastered at the legendary Ardent Studios.

Benvie: I have great memories of hanging out in Memphis with Easley. The building he was working in was, and still is by my standards, a top-notch studio. We were used to recording in closets, so it was pretty amazing.

Fenwick Gibb: Recording with Doug Easley was a great experience, but it wasn’t what I’d call relaxing. I haven’t been to Memphis recently, but back then, it was a pretty tough city. One of the guys who worked on the record casually mentioned being shot in the leg for a six-pack he was carrying… a bit shocking to a bunch of Haligonians. Add to that a notion of having your worked scrutinized by the label, on top of living together in a small two-bedroom hotel room, and you get a pretty accurate picture of the less-than-chill vibe. That’s not to say they didn’t have fun recording in Memphis. Some of the Hermit’s most legendary stories came out of the time they spent there.

McGettigan: It was a pretty scrappy neighbourhood. We would go to the big Kroegers grocery store down the street to get microwave burritos. There were no white people in this area at all. I remember the Carvel ice cream guy had an all-white suit on with a white bowtie, but then a glock on his hip. That was the first time I’d ever seen anything like that. But it was pretty fun. We had rehearsed the shit out of everything and done a million demos. Doug was great at recording, and still is, but it was soft production. I’m sure Art from Everclear would have been telling us all what to do, which may have made it a tighter record, like thematically.

Cliff Gibb [drums]: What I remember most about recording was how fun it was hanging out with those guys in Memphis, eating Payne’s BBQ candy meat, and checking out the “I love fat karate Elvis” graffiti outside Graceland.

Benvie: It was the classic thing where it was such a long time to make a record. We were down there for six weeks staying at a hotel and working every day in his studio. It was such a long time to spend on a record, where a certain fatigue kicks in and you just get sick of your bandmates. But Easley was amazing, the studio was amazing and the actual recording process was really fun. The whole major label thing, we weren’t really feeling pressure from because we never thought we’d be big stars, but they certainly were a voice in the decisions being made. It was certainly clear that they didn’t know what to make of us. Up until then we had been doing our own thing and were never really questioned about anything.

Twice as tired of this ugly situation…

Although fans enjoyed having three vocalists and songwriters in the band, Elektra felt differently. The label let it be known that they were angling for Joel to become the face and voice of Thrush Hermit, which left Rob, who up until that point split the singing and songwriting with Joel, out in the cold.

Benvie: I was writing half the songs and I think they were confused by our multiple songwriter/singer/frontman concept. I think they wanted to steer us more towards the conventional one singer format. So, I had a little grief over that.

Plaskett: Our A&R guy Darren came down, and he had opinions on some stuff. There was definitely a push from the label side to spin me as the lead singer. I’m not saying that it wasn’t implied by some people, but Rob was the most prolific person in the band. He always had a ton of ideas, and a new tape of demos on him every week. For me, what was great about Thrush Hermit is we had these different personalities, but at the same time it wasn’t without its dynamics.

Fenwick Gibb: It’s true Rob wasn’t as consistent a singer as Joel back then, but man, Rob really hit it out of the park on some tracks. Rob’s greatest strength is as a writer and Joel relied on Rob a lot when it came to writing. Any band is a balance, and they were no exception. Constructive criticism isn’t easy for anyone to hear, but Rob took on the challenge and improved his singing a lot. I couldn’t tell you how many conversations I had over the years with Clyde, their agents, and countless other folks in the industry about Joel’s star power. Everyone wanted to see Joel come fully into his own on stage. However, those closest to the band sensed that Thrush Hermit likely wouldn’t survive such a move.

Plaskett: We were coming out of a scene where everything was a democracy: us, Sloan, Jale, the Super Friendz, Plum Tree, we all had multiple singers and songwriters. That is what set Halifax apart from other cities at the time. And yeah, that was cool, but it made it harder for a major label to sell, and so that dynamic showed up, I guess on Sweet Homewrecker and carried into Clayton Park a little bit, where we changed and focused more on my songs, but maybe to the detriment of band solidarity because it was our last record [laughs]. So it was what it was. I was probably getting more forceful in my desire to front a band. I was writing a lot as well, so there was stuff at play.

Benvie: I would say everyone was comfortable about that but me. Those things are hard to think about now because I don’t remember how much of a gripe I had or how much of it was me being insecure, but that was certainly a thing. Sweet Homewrecker ended up being a long record and we had many songs written and lined up for it, so we had all of these songs to sift through. That’s what an A&R person does, they help you choose the songs that will go on your record. [Johnson] was certainly choosing songs that I hadn’t written. Yeah, I got my back up about it.

McGettigan: It wasn’t really blatant. It just made more sense. When you’re putting $400,000 US into a record, you need to make a star. And I’m sure the record label was thinking, “We’ve got this cute tall guy…” I’m sure they just thought, “How are we gonna sell this record in Des Moines?” You have to make it easy for them.

In North Dakota we can only waste our time…

In the major market cities, Thrush Hermit were able to draw a decent crowd, but in order to sell Sweet Homewrecker the band had to tour every major city in every state. While they certainly made the most out of the opportunity to see America, the band played to mostly empty bars.

Gibb: Touring the US was really hard, but admittedly, we were pretty spoiled by how well we’d been treated touring in Canada before signing to Elektra. We were also super cheap when it came to spending money on the road, so we kinda made it harder on ourselves than perhaps it had to be. I wouldn’t trade those days, though. Some stellar stories came out of the Hermit and friends on those US tours — hardship & friendship, hardcore DIY van repair.

Benvie: In some ways those were my favourite memories of being in Thrush Hermit because we were young, like 22, and pretty unshackled, touring the States endlessly. We opened for some good bands, like Urge Overkill, Guided By Voices, and the Toadies, who weren’t our cup of tea, but turned out to be really nice guys. But there was also a string of shit bands with one-word names. We had next to no money but we were able to stay on the road and see the country. Even playing to nobody is fun when you’re with your best friends playing gigs in Oklahoma City or Seattle or Texas for the first time. Certainly there were moments where we were thinking, “Why the hell am I doing this?” Cliff was a few years older so he was further along trying to get his life together.

Plaskett: There was some tour support. We had a school bus. We were getting some money. We got money when we signed, so we had enough to live through the Sweet Homewrecker days. Canada wasn’t bad. It just didn’t feel like it had built beyond where we already were. Some markets may have dipped a little. I remember thinking, “Oh, we didn’t get as many people as we did last time,” or “This was our fourth time playing this place. We aren’t getting any bigger.” Because we were signed to an American label, it wasn’t like we had a support system in Canada either.

Fenwick Gibb: I wish the Sweet Homewrecker tour hadn’t been so brutal for them, though. Their booking agency, William Morris, was relying too heavily on getting label support to promote the tour. Their agent felt terrible that the shows went so poorly. In hindsight, I wish we had rethought that relationship once I started getting signals that Elektra wasn’t going to do as promised. An indie agent could have done a much better job for them at that point.

Sean Palmerston [publicist, 1998 to 1999]: I remember the guys telling me they were put on a tour with Fuel in the US and they started off in the Midwest where nobody knew who the hell Thrush Hermit was. I think that may have broken their spirit to some degree.

McGettigan: There were a lot of Midwestern shows where we would just go off and be ridiculous. That’s where we developed the whole classic rock sound and stage show. A lot of shows it didn’t fucking matter at all, so we just did whatever we wanted to do. As opposed to a Canadian tour, where we had this real audience, so we had to do what was more expected of us. But we did quite a bit of touring where there was nobody there so we just kicked it. We would fucking go berserk, and there would only be the sound guy and he’d say, “That was incredible!”

Plaskett: We had hopes, but it didn’t really grab radio at any degree. We had dates lined up in the States where we were playing with bands we weren’t fans of. Like we ended up doing a handful of dates in Middle America with Chalk Farm, who weren’t a good fit. They were just an American college rock band. I don’t have a strong opinion of their music, but I remember feeling, “This isn’t really our audience.” There weren’t obvious singles in a ’90s context on Sweet Homewrecker. I think we were leading with either “Skip the Life” or “North Dakota.” We were coming from a different place. We weren’t from a scene in the US, so there wasn’t anything to attach us to from a touring point of few. We made some fans, but we weren’t reaching many people. I think we were a bit discouraged by how that record did, so I think we all kinda wanted to get dropped, to be honest.

Strange to be involved…

Thrush Hermit’s major label existence lasted all of two years. Once the band had finished touring Sweet Homewrecker, to no one’s surprise they were dropped by Elektra. Luckily they parted ways with a significant sum of money in their pockets, money they would use to pay for their next album.

Plaskett: There were Warner people repping us, but our A&R person was in New York. By that point we already had good buzz and a bump in Canada from Smart Bomb and The Great Pacific Ocean, as well as touring with Sloan. We took a long time to sign with Elektra and get that record, so by the time it came out in 1997 that Halifax scene was maybe still strong, but the glow around it had worn off. And then Sloan had moved on by that point. The style of music was changing a bit too. DJs were becoming more popular and our kind of music was plateauing. And so [Sweet Homewrecker] didn’t have the same momentum that we had for those first two EPs, and we were touring it in the States to mostly nobody.

Benvie: The rationale for it wasn’t a rationale that made sense for us. People would say to us, “If you want to get on the radio, do this. If you want to sound like Better Than Ezra, do this.” And we were like, “Why do we want to be on the radio? The radio sucks! Why would we want to be like these terrible bands that nobody remember in two years?” The argument was always being made that if we wanted our band to be popular we needed to make the band easier to understand. And our response was that all of our favourite bands were weird and not clean and polished and packaged. They were a little ramshackle. We didn’t want to be the last Replacements album, we wanted to be the second Replacements album. On the other hand, they were tossing money at us and there was this glimmer of hope that we could be popular, so that was tempting. So there was always this push and pull where we’d ask, “How do we stay true to this identity of the band while also playing the major label game?” We were trying to find a happy medium between what they wanted us to be and just being ourselves.

McGettigan: I think labels at the time were just throwing so much money and product at the wall and whatever sticks they keep going with it. It was immediate that we knew they weren’t going to do anything with our album. And I don’t blame them at all. We did have songs that the label was hyped on that could have done well, but we were like, “Yeah, but we’re beyond that now.” It was kinda too bad for them. In the end though we had a small salary for like four years or something. And when we finally got to Clayton Park that money was just drying up. Then we’d be thrown out back into the real world and have to support ourselves in terms of touring and record sales.

Fenwick Gibb: I had started to see that we were going to have problems before the album had even come out. The band had a lot of fans at Elektra, but unfortunately not enough of them had enough power to make a difference. The American industry is extremely ego driven also and I think the band were being punished for not giving in to the will of the label enough. They also got caught on the wrong side of a particularly political time at the label. Perhaps the biggest bummer was that Elektra tied the hands of Warner Canada so that they weren’t able to be of much help in Canada either. Steve Jordan and John Poirier did as much as possible and I’ll always be grateful to them. Overall, I think Elektra was a good experience for the band, though. It gave them the chance to record with Doug Easley, upgrade their gear, support themselves financially, and independently finance the recording of their magnum opus, Clayton Park.

Palmerston: I think the problem with Sweet Homewrecker is that they signed with Elektra in the US and not Warner in Canada. From what I’ve always gathered with Canadian bands, is if they don’t sign with the Canadian label they’re made less a priority on the home front. Sweet Homewrecker is a very good record. I think it might have too many songs on it, but it just didn’t get the push at home that it really deserved. It was kinda of thrown out to the public and Warner just felt like, “Well, the fans will buy it.”

Gibb: To be fair, there were some pretty cool people at Elektra who loved the band and worked hard, but with no obvious hits like Joel writes now. Sweet Homewrecker was a bit of a tough sell for them.

Benvie: By the end we were fine with it. We knew it wasn’t working out and our support at Elektra was next to non-existent. There was a period after where we were in limbo. We weren’t allowed to do anything because our contractual situation was uncertain. But we had a really good lawyer. We were still working on music and touring on our own dime, but the end result was that we got a payday.

Plaskett: What was happening at Elektra at the time was that there was almost like two presidents. Seymour had come over from Sire, and then there was a woman named Sylvia Rhone who had signed Third Eye Blind and Busta Rhymes, really big stuff that was happening for the label. And if I remember correctly, there was maybe a split between Seymour’s bands and Sylvia’s bands that we were caught in the midst of. We were certainly not a priority as far as where they put their resources. I don’t blame anybody because our band was definitely challenging. We weren’t responding to the pressures because we didn’t want to to be told how to present our band. So we just took our money, bought a neon “Rock and Roll” sign and a half-sized school bus and toured around and did our thing. And then when we realized this major label thing wasn’t happening in the States we were kinda hoping we’d get dropped because then they would have to buy us out because we signed for two records. I think the deal was actually six albums deep, so they could’ve had us for six. But if they wanted to get rid of us after one album they had to pay us. We can thank Ken Anderson, who represented Beastie Boys. When he did our deal he put that in the contract, which worked out great because when they dropped us they had to give us something like $60,000 US, which was a lot of money. This was the tail end of the ’90s, so when we signed we also got some money. So that money went to supporting us while we were making Clayton Park and also pay for some of Clayton Park.

Fenwick Gibb: If the band had wanted to stay on Elektra, I’m 100 percent confident that our team would have been able to make that happen. By 1997, we were well-versed in what it takes to create buzz at a label. I also had a lot of industry heavy hitters behind the band who would have gone to bat for them with Elektra. When I first found out Darren got fired, I had the fear that Elektra wouldn’t exercise the option to buy them out. I spent the next week cringing before picking up any phone calls from the (212) area code, dreading that the voice on the other end would be Sylvia Rhone calling to say they were assigning the band to another A&R rep. When the call came instead from the band’s lawyer saying Elektra was taking the buyout clause, I hung up the phone with a triumphant, “woohoo!”. Freedom tasted pretty sweet, let me tell you.

Benvie: Sweet Homewrecker ended up being a long record and we had many songs written and lined up for it, so we had all of these songs to sift through. Doug was used to dealing with bands that were drunk and fucked up, and so we go in and we’ve got our act together. We were really tight and I think a lot of the time he didn’t know what to do with us. If it was up to him, I think he would’ve let us get weird and do whatever we wanted, but I feel like in some ways we were enforcing more of a polished sound on him.

Plaskett: I think the record sounds cool and it was a good reflection of who we were as a band. It wasn’t so produced that it didn’t sound like us. It just doesn’t have any surprises because we didn’t make up anything on the spot .In many respects, the thing that was most discouraging about Sweet Homewrecker was that we had no access to it or control over it. It’s a piece of music that will be forever owned by someone else because that’s Elektra’s record. We could never buy it back, although I don’t think it’d be worth anything [laughs].