Too Much Trouble: A Very Oral History of Danko Jones

By Stuart Berman

Danko Jones may be a straight-forward rock band, but their story is anything but. They’re a band that has roots in many different music communities — the North American indie-rock scene, the Scandinavian garage-rock scene, the European metal scene — but belong to none of them. They’re the only band that’s toured with both Blonde Redhead and Nickelback, and they’re the only band whose biography could attract a cast of characters that includes Lemmy Kilmister of Motörhead, Elijah Wood, Ralph Macchio, Peaches, Dizzy Reed of Guns N’ Roses, Damian Abraham of Fucked Up, Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys, George Stroumboulopoulous, Alan Cross, Mike Watt and many others.

Too Much Trouble is about more than just Danko Jones’ history — it’s an exploration of the rigid politics that govern both underground and mainstream music, and how a band can succeed without pandering to either.

This is a 15-year saga that goes from college-radio DJ booths to corporate boardrooms, from dingy after-hours boozecans to the biggest festival stages in Europe, marked by encounters with everyone from D.C. riot grrrls to Dublin riot police, from death-metal deities to Hollywood celebrities. And if all this sounds somewhat preposterous, well, as Danko himself would say: this book ain’t boastin’, it’s truthin’.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ECW Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781770903401

Stuart Berman

Stuart Berman is a music journalist who lives in Toronto. Follow Stuart Berman on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/stuberman

Book preview

1988–2001

INTRODUCTION In Cameron Crowe’s 1992 Seattle-scene comedy, Singles, Matt Dillon stars as the dimwitted frontman of an aspiring grunge band with the ridiculous name of Citizen Dick, whose signature song is the ridiculously titled Touch Me, I’m Dick (a satirical nod to Mudhoney’s seminal 1988 single Touch Me I’m Sick). But an interview sequence early in the film reveals the true punchline to this joke of a band: they’re big . . . in Belgium.

Ever since the Beatles turned New York City’s JFK airport into the world’s largest pep rally back in 1964, America has been viewed as the ultimate validator of pop success. Stardom in other countries just isn’t considered to be real stardom, as evinced by the long tradition of British/Canadian/Japanese/Swedish etc. bands who can fill arenas and headline festivals in their home countries (and live quite comfortably as a result), but are willing to revert back to being just another bunch of chumps in a rental van on the interstate hauling ass to the next dive club with the hope of someday cracking an increasingly impenetrable American market.

Toronto trio Danko Jones is one of those bands, but with one crucial distinction—their greatest successes have come not in their native Canada, but overseas. In his hometown, mention of Danko Jones often generates a response query of aren’t they big in Europe or something? as if it were some urban myth. These days, the band’s eponymous frontman is essentially the Keyser Söze of Toronto rock—a figment of popular imagination that no one really believes to be true.

But, back in the late ’90s, the concept of Danko Jones becoming an overground, international success wouldn’t have seemed so unfathomable. If ever there was a candidate to smash through the Toronto indie-rock scene’s glass ceiling and make a name for himself on the global stage, it was Danko Jones, whose brash, bluesy punk–rock ’n’ soul and loud-mouthed, tongue-wagging performances made him a word-of-mouth sensation locally, earning the respect not just of his hometown peers, but of notable American indie- and punk-rock acts like the New Bomb Turks, the Make-Up and Blonde Redhead.

Back in the nascent days of the internet, such cross-border connections didn’t come easy; Canada’s various underground music scenes were largely disconnected from the American indie-rock infrastructure of college radio, alternative media and concert promoters that could transform eccentrics like the Blues Explosion’s Jon Spencer or the Jesus Lizard’s David Yow into freak-scene demi-celebs. Instead, Canadian bands were often confined to their own country, where the major markets are few and far between and touring is a depressingly cost-ineffective pursuit. Danko, smooth talker that he is, had seemingly found a way to circumvent the system, making a name for himself in key American scenes before even releasing so much as a seven-inch single.

But if indie rock’s seemingly egalitarian DIY ethos provided Danko Jones with the inspiration and means to become a self-made rock star, its insular politics—governed by rigidly defined concepts of cool and political correctness—left him cold, and with his long-standing dream of signing to a renowned American indie label like Touch and Go or Sub Pop going unfulfilled, Danko was forced to refocus his efforts back home. He would score a minor Canadian FM-radio hit in 1999 with the single Bounce and sign a major-label licensing deal with Universal Music Canada, but Danko Jones effectively slipped into the void between hipster cool and mainstream acceptance: not popular enough to be a household name, and not sophisticated enough to be a dorm-room one, what with indie rock’s post-millennial shift from post-hardcore sludgefeasts toward elegant, orchestrated soft rock.

JC and Danko in Paris

And then just like that . . . he was gone. Throughout the 2000s, you didn’t hear Danko Jones anymore on the radio in Toronto, on either the left or right sides of the dial. His name rarely appeared in the local weeklies that had once championed him in the late ’90s. And on those sporadic occasions where he deigned to play a show in Toronto, he’d be hard-pressed to fill a 500-person–capacity club. All we were left with back home were rumours: that he was now big in Sweden. And Germany. And Denmark. And Finland. And Norway. And France. And Holland. And, yes, even Belgium.

The proof was staring me right in the eye during an August 2010 train ride from Brussels International Airport to the city centre. On the empty seat next time to me was one of those free daily commuter newspapers filled with 100-word newsbites and Sudokus; inside was a full-page story on a familiar-looking band from Toronto playing Belgium’s massive Pukkelpop Festival that week. I’m not in this country for 20 minutes, and I’ve already found Danko Jones.

Brussels is where the story of this book begins. As someone who had frequented and reported on the band’s early, name-making performances in Toronto during the late ’90s, I would receive occasional dispatches from Danko and his long-time bassist John JC Calabrese on what they had been up to over the years, often in the form of emailed photos: Danko hanging backstage at some European festival with Robert Plant. Danko hanging backstage at some European festival with Kirk Hammett. Danko hanging backstage at some European festival with Lemmy Kilmister. The sight of Danko rubbing shoulders with heavy-metal royalty was absolutely astonishing to me, given that I first knew them as this scrappy garage-punk band—and, especially, given the fact that Danko Jones are greeted with almost total indifference in their hometown, and North America at large.

When the opportunity to write this book came about, it necessitated a trip overseas to see all those whispers and rumours of European stardom turn real. Some friends of mine in Toronto expressed surprise that I was writing a book about Danko Jones, since his low profile back home doesn’t seem to warrant one. At which point I would pull out some iPhone video footage I shot at the 2010 Highfield Festival in Leipzig, Germany, where, prior to a performance of the band’s 2006 single First Date, Danko instructs the over-eager audience to mosh in a more orderly fashion, so as not to scare away the girls in the crowd and turn this show into a sausage party. He asks the audience to run around in a circular formation—just run some laps. And they comply: a crowd of 10,000 people, running around in a massive but orderly human whirlpool. Any band can spark a mosh pit; it takes a very special performer to be able to direct one.

Just two months before that summer 2010 trip to Europe, I had seen Danko Jones play for maybe 200 people at a club in London, Ontario (located two hours west of Toronto); by the end of that European trek, I had seen them play for festival crowds of 15,000. This book is an attempt to reconcile that massive gap: how a band can inspire such intense devotion from fans thousands of miles away—not to mention from some of the most revered names in rock, punk and metal—and yet be ignored, or sometimes even ridiculed, by their peers back home.

In gathering the 70-plus interviews excerpted over the following pages, what’s struck me is not just the breadth of Danko fandom but the intensity of it. Whether you’re in a punk, hardcore, stoner-rock, thrash, black-metal or indie-rock band, there are certain failsafe groups pretty much everyone can agree on. The Stooges. Thin Lizzy. Bon Scott–era AC/DC. The Rolling Stones from 1964 to 1972. The Ramones. Black Flag. Motörhead. And to their many admirers in popular bands who were raised on the aforementioned greats, Danko Jones represent the purest contemporary distillation of those classic influences.

But if, to their fans, the appeal of Danko Jones’ music is simple and obvious, the story behind it is anything but. This is a 15-year saga that goes from college-radio DJ booths to corporate boardrooms, from dingy after-hours boozecans to the biggest festival stages in Europe, marked by encounters with everyone from D.C. riot grrrls to Dublin riot police, from death-metal deities to Hollywood celebrities. And if all this sounds somewhat preposterous, well, as the man himself would say: this book ain’t boastin’, it’s truthin’.

Live onstage, 2009

Contrary to popular legend, Danko Jones was not born a lion or raised a devil child. He was simply an only child, born and raised in Scarborough, an eastern-Toronto borough with a reputation for vibrant multicultural strip malls, sprawling subdivisions and producing an inordinate number of famous funnymen (Mike Myers, John Candy, Jim Carrey).

To compensate for a lack of siblings and playmates, the only child will often resort to creating an imaginary friend. But Danko didn’t have to go to such extreme measures—at a very young age, he had already found the best bunch of fantasy friends a lonely kid could ask for.

DANKO JONES The first band I ever loved was KISS, when I was six years old. I bugged my mom and she finally let me buy a KISS album at the Music World in Fairview Mall. I chose the thickest record I could find, and it was KISS Alive! And, on the back, there was an address for the KISS Army. I sent a letter and got back five 8 x 10 glossies—four individuals and one group shot—and then two notebooks. And that basically made me a fan for life.

I was drawn to them because I was an only child. They wore make-up, so you didn’t know what colour they were, and I used to think they were my brothers; that’s honestly what I thought. As a six-year-old kid, I was pretty lonely and I got really attached to KISS.

My dad threw the record out, because I didn’t stop playing it and my parents started getting worried. When I was old enough to save up my allowance, I never bought records, I bought cassettes, because I knew my dad couldn’t break them over his knee.

Danko’s early embrace of KISS schooled him on all of the essential tools needed to become a rock prodigy: the power of persona, a sexualized swagger and an unyielding quest for the ultimate electric-guitar riff, a fascination that would lead Danko through a preteen pop-metal phase (Van Halen, AC/DC, Mötley Crüe and the like) and then toward the more aggressive attack of early Metallica, Slayer and Washington, D.C., hardcore punk. As a non-white, hard rock–loving teenager attending a midtown Catholic high school (De La Salle College) where the goth-pop likes of Depeche Mode and the Cure reigned supreme among the student body, it was natural that the teenaged Danko particularly identified with the ultimate outsiders of 1980s hardcore.

DANKO JONES I had read about Bad Brains in a metal magazine that was raving about this band of four Rastafarian guys. When I got Rock for Light, I realized all bets were off and I just got into all kinds of music. Because Bad Brains would go from a reggae song, like Rally ’Round Jah Throne or The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth, and then they’d go into Coptic Times or Riot Squad on the same album—that fucked with my sensibilities and everything I had learned up to that point.

Another record I credit for broadening my horizons is Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back—I got into them because they sampled Angel of Death by Slayer on She Watch Channel Zero?! and, on Bring the Noise, Chuck D says, Wax is for Anthrax, a thrash band that I was listening to at the time. And then I saw the video for Night of the Living Bassheads on MuchMusic, and it was just so heavy. That actually prompted me to buy the record—I can’t believe I’m buying this rap record, but hey, let’s take a chance! But the Beastie Boys were on [Public Enemy’s label] Def Jam, too, and the Beastie Boys sampled Led Zeppelin, and Kerry King from Slayer played on Licensed to Ill and Rick Rubin was wearing a Slayer shirt in their video [for (You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party!)]. You just had to jigsaw puzzle everything together at the time. Back then, there was no internet, there was no MySpace, you couldn’t sample songs on iTunes for 40 seconds. You basically had to grope in the dark to figure out which bands were cool and which weren’t. The only antennae you used were your ears.

After graduating from high school in 1991, Danko enrolled in the film studies program at York University, which, unlike Toronto’s other major post-secondary institutions (the University of Toronto and Ryerson University), was located far outside the downtown core, on the northwestern fringe of the city. With popular local concert venues like Lee’s Palace, Sneaky Dee’s, the Rivoli and the pre-gentrified Drake Hotel a good hour-long commute away, York’s music-loving misfits congregated around its campus-radio station, CHRY. Along with Danko, the early ’90s CHRY contingent included future CBC Radio personality Matt Galloway, Sadies guitarist Dallas Good and Stephe Perry, frontman for local hardcore heavies Countdown to Oblivion and a correspondent for notorious American punk zine Maximum Rocknroll.

Compared to Ryerson’s CKLN and the University of Toronto’s CIUT stations—which functioned more like public broadcasters, with seasoned non-student DJs and talk-radio programming—CHRY boasted a small 50-watt signal that could barely be heard downtown. However, its relatively limited reach allowed the station to be more adventurous in its programming, with a particular focus on the grotty American indie rock that was oozing overground in the wake of Nirvana’s mainstream insurrection, on labels like New York’s Matador and Crypt Records, Chicago’s Touch and Go and Minneapolis’ Amphetamine Reptile imprint.

At the time, Canada’s major record-label subsidiaries—all of which are based out of Toronto—were seemingly signing up every local indie-rock band they could find, with the hope of discovering the next Nirvana in their own backyard. But CHRY, despite its geographic remove from the downtown music scene, was a fervent champion of those post-hardcore/noise-rock Toronto bands that even the drunkest A&R rep wouldn’t touch, like the prog-punk powerhouse trio Phleg Camp. The station provided the perfect environment in which Danko could sate his burgeoning musical appetite for all things ugly and heavy.

DANKO JONES I was already starting to get into crazier shit like the Melvins and Dinosaur Jr. and Butthole Surfers; before the whole grunge explosion, I was already onto Nirvana and Tad and Mudhoney. But when I finally reached CHRY in the fall of ’91, everything exploded—I got into the Jesus Lizard and Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and Pussy Galore, which were bands I had only read about. Back then in Toronto, it was hard to find these albums, and I didn’t do mail order. Every single free moment I had between classes I was at the station, listening to records. I’d stay there till late sometimes, until no one was there.

CHRIS ILER (former CHRY DJ, founder of Fans of Bad Productions Records): I used to co-host a radio show called Fast & Bulbous on the Spot at CHRY in Toronto with Stephe Perry. Danko was also a volunteer at CHRY, and he would hang out there like a lot of us, preparing for our shows and basically obsessing over music and devouring the music library. Many of us would later join bands, start zines and labels or promote concerts.

DALLAS GOOD (the Sadies): I think I only hosted one show one time on CHRY. It didn’t go as well as I hoped.

MATT GALLOWAY (former CHRY DJ and NOW magazine music critic; current host of CBC Radio’s Metro Morning): The great thing about CHRY was our music director and station manager at the time, Gary Wright, was a black dude from Birmingham who had the biggest hip-hop collection in the city, but also loved reggae and loved indie rock and loved jazz and folk and blues. He made it very evident that it didn’t matter who you were or what you liked—you could fit in at that station. And the cool thing was people would mix it up: the guys who did the hip-hop show before me would be interested in whatever crazy seven-inches I brought in; the blues guy would be checking out the hip-hop stuff because he was interested in what was being sampled . . . like the university itself, CHRY was a pretty diverse place.

As the [noise-rock] scene was starting to develop in Toronto, there was nowhere else that was really playing that kind of music. But once you established that you were a place where people could actually get airplay, then people were really supportive and bands would come up [from downtown] and do interviews in our studio, and the station would host concerts downtown.

DANKO JONES I was never part of one scene—I tried to soak up as much music as I could possibly could. I’d go see a Killdozer show under the Drake Hotel and then the next week I’d be at some basement show in Hamilton [Ontario, located 40 minutes west of Toronto], watching some straight-edge kids beat the shit out of each other, and everyone’s wearing vegan shoes. But Phleg Camp was a band I definitely gravitated toward locally. I was more into the local metal scene—bands like Malhavoc and Sacrifice—but there was a time when I worshipped Phleg Camp. I thought they were the best band in the world.

However, when it came time to pitch his own show to the CHRY brass, Danko suggested a program concept that would allow him to indulge in a secret, but no less important, formative obsession.

DANKO JONES Comedy is something that’s always been underlying in the band and in my life that I’ve never really talked about. The comedy [obsession] has been there since I was in grade school—I got Robin Williams’ Throbbing Python of Love, Cheech & Chong’s Let’s Make a New Dope Deal and, obviously, Eddie Murphy’s Delirious. And I used to listen to the Sunday Night Funnies on CHUM FM, which introduced me to Steven Wright. I listened to Steven Wright’s I Have a Pony in Grade 7. For a kid who was 12, and whose sense of humour hadn’t fully developed—because you’re still in slapstick world—it forced me to analyze his jokes at an earlier age than I think most do. I didn’t get a lot of the humour when I first heard it, but I wanted to understand why everybody was laughing.

Like, it was easy to get Eddie Murphy because he said fuck and dick, but Steven Wright was different.

And then there was Bobcat Goldthwait and Sam Kinison. And in the ’80s, there was the stand-up explosion—all these people who are huge now, like Ellen DeGeneres and Norm Macdonald, were on these late-night weekend shows, like An Evening at the Improv. To this day, for me, there’s rock ’n’ roll and then there’s comedy. And there’s people who get that comedy is on the same level as rock ’n’ roll and there’s people who don’t. I’ll talk about Nick DiPaolo and Nick Swardson in the same way I’ll talk about Sonic Youth and Slayer. But I never had the balls to be a stand-up comedian—I think it’s the hardest thing.

MATT GALLOWAY I was sitting on the couch in the CHRY production studio with the music director, and Danko showed up and tried to pitch this show. It was like a comedy show—a novelty show but with music. It was so bizarre and so left-field and so unusual—we kind of smiled politely and nodded and almost laughed him out the door. We were terrible authority figures. Good on him for coming and doing that, but he was kind of a no-hoper when he came in initially.

With his comedy hour–hosting dreams cruelly kiboshed, Danko would eventually co-host the tastefully named Seminal Load on Sunday nights from 11 p.m. till 2 a.m.—a thankless time slot, but one that granted him the freedom to kill time however he saw fit, whether it was spinning Kyuss’ Welcome to Sky Valley in its entirety, or conducing hour-long on-air interviews with Detroit psychedelic funksters Big Chief. And the show provided Danko with an outlet through which he could assert his deep-seated love of metal at a time when college radio was ruled by the slack-rock stylings of Pavement and Sebadoh.

DANKO JONES We had a hellish time slot, but it also enabled us to fuck around on the air and play whatever the hell we wanted. I was probably stoned for most of the show.

Danko with Stephe Perry (far left) and Chris Colohan (with microphone) of Countdown to Oblivion

STEPHE PERRY (former CHRY DJ and former member of Countdown to Oblivion and One Blood): Danko and I both did radio shows up at CHRY; in fact, Danko reminded me that I gave him orientation on the broadcast board. My first impression was that he was very quiet. I wasn’t sure if I was any good at orienting him on the station equipment, but a few years later I found out he was