When Montreal residents Kevin Jardine and Jason Rockman decided to relaunch their band Slaves on Dope in 2011, it was with a different mindset, one based more on creative fulfillment and fun, rather than more cold, calculating, commercial considerations.
And that attitude is abundantly in evidence on their brand new album, Horse, released earlier this month.
“Since we came back in 2012 with the Over the Influence album, we have been basically a DIY band – we’ve been doing everything ourselves. And it just started a few years earlier in 2009 when Kevin and I started talked again and we said let’s get this thing going again, let’s get back to writing some music. But we came back to it from a very different perspective. We weren’t doing it for the same reasons we used to do it. We each came back to this because we just had a love for music,” Rockman said.
“And it felt good; it felt like fun again. And I think that’s the problem with music for a lot of people. It you’re approaching it from a point of view where you want to make it as a rock star, you’d better really have realistic expectations, because the days of the 1970s, 1980s and even 1990s excess are over. And the money just isn’t there any more. If you want to approach it from a business point of view and you want to make a living, you can. But you’ve got to entirely devote 100 per cent of your energy to it. And I think we’ve kind of outgrown that.
“We love making records. Kevin has got his own studio [Uplift Recording Studio] so we are able to create and we love creating. We love the whole process of setting up a record and writing and producing stuff. I love all that. But as for getting out there on the road and being out there for six months and hammering it out to try and break-even – I just don’t have it in me any more. It’s definitely a younger person’s game, to a certain degree. It’s not that we don’t have a passion for it any more. When we get on stage we will still play as hard as we used to. It’s just we’re more realistic now and really pick and choose our battles.”
As musicians and songwriters, for Horse, Rockman believes he and Jardine are as good as they have ever been as a creative unit.
“I think we’re a lot more seasoned. We know what we’re doing a bit more. When you’re approaching 25 years working at a craft, you’d like to think you get better at it. Some people I have talked to that have followed the band for a long time said it’s probably the best stuff we’ve ever done. And it’s surprising because every time we put out a record I always believe it’s a pretty good record and it’s the best that we could do at the time, but I think with Horse we succeeded in raising the bar on this one. I think it’s because we took our time and didn’t rush. We really worked on our harmonies and melodies and song structure. We just put our best foot forward,” Rockman explained.
“We worked in chunks. We didn’t work days and days in a row. We took time away. We took time to let the songs marinate and I just think we came up with our best work. And I am happy with the reaction because a lot of people were saying, ‘wow this isn’t the Slaves on Dope we expected. We thought you guys might just dial it in to be able to go on the road.’ No, we wanted to make the best record we could.”
The band has an interesting and unique history. Born from the same Canadian alternative rock firmament that also produced bands such as Moist, I Mother Earth, The Headstones, The Tea Party, Econoline Crush, Our Lady Peace, Big Sugar and others, they never reached the same level of critical, popular or commercial success as their Canuck contemporaries. Instead, Slaves on Dope made its mark south of the border not long after producing and releasing their independent album One Good Turn Deserves Another.
“We didn’t like some of the deals we were being offered in Canada. We had kind of a punk attitude and didn’t want other people writing with us or telling us what direction we should go in and I think we may have burned some bridges and kind of killed our own momentum here. And I sometimes wonder how different my life had been had I gone a different way when we hit that big fork in the road. But different doesn’t mean better, because a few years later we went to Los Angeles and got signed by Sharon Osbourne,” said Rockman.
“When we moved to L.A. everything fell into place and I really attribute that to all the hard work we had done criss-crossing Canada working our asses off, opening for the likes of Moist and I Mother Earth and Our Lady Peace. So when we moved to California, we were ready, we were battle tested. Yes, we were a small fish in a big pond but the thing about L.A. is there are a lot of people who are just hanging out and they don’t have the work ethic that Canadians have. So when we got there the impact was immediate.
“I also think maybe the name had something to do with why we didn’t catch on in Canada. I think it was too much maybe. But it wasn’t a problem in the States. Within three months of relocating we were offered deals by all kinds of people. We had SlipKnot’s former manager who was working at Epic Records at the time. He wanted to manage us and he wanted to sign us. We had the guy from Columbia who signed Train want to sign us and we were actually in the 11th hour and about to seal the deal with him when Sharon came to see us. She said, ‘listen, I want you to be the first band on our new label, and I want to give you guys the Ozzfest tour.’ We thought, well do we go with some guy from Sony that we don’t know, or do we go with Ozzy Osborne’s wife? And that’s what we did.”
The album Inches from the Mainline was released in 2000 on Ozzy and Sharon’s Divine Recordings and distributed through EMI, but that deal only lasted a couple of years when Divine and EMI parted ways, leaving Slaves on Dope with a host of wonderful touring experiences, a modicum of commercial success in the U.S. but who were now musical orphans. Signing with the small Bieler Bros. Records label, Rockman, Jardine and then bandmates Frank Salvaggio and Rob Urbani released the album Metafour in 2003. The band dissolved a year later, but not before tours that saw them share stages with the likes of Ozzy, Pantera, Disturbed, Fear Factory, Godsmack, Linkin Park and other top hard rock/metal acts of the day.
“I quit music in 2004 when I had my son. I said I wasn’t going to have this scenario where dad was on the road all the time, because the only way I knew how to tour was 10 months a year. So I got to step away from music and really try other stuff. I worked at a Sunglass Hut, I worked for a transport company as a dispatcher and then I hit my stride in media and broadcasting. I do radio and am a spokesperson for a couple of Comic-Cons and I worked for Heavy Montreal, but all these fit in with who I am and aren’t that far from the guy from Slaves on Dope.”
And since 2011 he is back being the guy from Slaves on Dope, who continues to be effusive in his excitement at the entire process of recording Horse – including some of the amazing guests who appear on the album.
Perhaps the most curious, but also the most noteworthy is Darryl McDaniels – the legendary DMC portion of hip hop icons Run DMC, who appears on the track Script Writer.
“We got these guys through relationships and just being more confident in our approach to asking someone to do something. We didn’t have a label trying to orchestrate something just for marketing purposes. It wasn’t like that. It was all really happy accidents in a way. I asked Darryl to be on a radio show I was doing here in Montreal called On the Record for the all-talk CJAD. He was one of the guests and when I reached out to him he immediately said yes but that he wanted to actually come to Montreal to do the show. The person that put us in touch told him that I was in a band and suggested I talk to Darryl about music because he is actually really into rock music,” Rockman said.
“I told him I was in Slaves on Dope and that we were working on a new album so he said, ‘cool, send me a song.’ I sent him some stuff and he said it was good and that he would love to collaborate with us. And we were like, ‘are you kidding me?’ I asked Kevin if we had anything for the record that we could make room for him to be on and he suggested Script Writer because it had a nice long musical bridge that we didn’t really have anything on at the time. I sent it to Darryl and he wrote this awesome long verse. He came into the studio and we split some of the verse and then we used part of it on the end of the song like an outro. It just worked, man. It was great.
“And it was interesting because he came to Montreal earlier this year and he was with us on the eve of the Grammys and RUN DMC was set to get a lifetime achievement award. It wasn’t going to be given out on the show, but RUN was there in the front row during the show. People asked DMC when he was here why he wasn’t there in the front row too and he said ‘it’s more important for me to be in Montreal creating new music with Slaves on Dope than to be at the Grammys.’ And then we ended up collaborating on more music together which we have coming up later next year. It’s crazy how it all happened and I am even going down to New York City to do some press with him about him being on the record. F*** me, my 13-year-old self is high fiving everybody right now.”
Also appearing on the album are Mastodon’s Bill Kelliher on the track Interplanetary Mission, H.R. of Bad Brains on Liquid Sunshine and Lee-la Baum of The Damn Truth on Codependency.
And as per the band’s somewhat anarchic and punk attitude – which hasn’t really abated to any great degree since Slaves on Dope formed in 1993, all the song titles on Horse (including the album title itself) are drug references to some extent. But none of the titles necessarily have anything to do with the lyrics or meaning of the songs.
“We kind of leave things open to interpretation. There’s some correlation with the title and to drugs although it’s kind of hidden. We always try to be a little clever. Even on the last record we tried to do it a bit. We tried to have some songs that were a little ‘out there’ and the titles were a little off. I have always liked song titles that have nothing to do with the lyrics. Be we’ve never had the guts to go and do a whole record like that. But this time we were like ‘f*** it, who cares?’ And I love it,” Rockman explained.
Horse was released earlier this month through The ILS Group (through its partnership with Universal Music Group) worldwide, and Rockman said he and Jardine hope to hit the road as much as possible in 2017.
“We’re definitely going to play in 2017 more than we have in a while. We want to go out and support this record and we also have plans for videos for the record, which are so much fun to make. I think that’s one thing we’ve really enjoyed is when we were done making the music, we go and create these visuals to go along with it. We were also talking the other day about live streaming and doing Facebook Live more from the jam room, where maybe we would tell people at 9 o’clock we’re going live and then play for 45 minutes or so,” he said.
“The things is, I believe we have a good story and we have done a lot of interesting things but we know we’ve got a lot of legwork to do in Canada and we went to get out as much as we can and try to get good people helping us to spread the word. It’s coming, slowly, but it’s coming.”
For more information on Slaves on Dope and the new album Horse, visit http://www.slavesondope.com.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, ON, who has been writing about music and musicians for a quarter of a century. Besides his journalistic endeavours, he now works as a communications and marketing specialist. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com
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