Movies of War

1 of 8 2 of 8 Get the best of Vancouver in your inbox, every Tuesday and Thursday. Sign up for our free newsletter. Jim Cummins presses play and a masterpiece blasts out of his car stereo. Titled "The Bridge", the song is a piece of Gothy punk romanticism off his forthcoming, as-yet-untitled new album. Prominent is a slippery, supple bassline that is so good I do a double-take: wait a sec, that’s Dave Bowes on bass?Truth is, I have had a hard time making the transition from thinking of Bowes as a bon vivant, promoter and Bowie Ball organizer to musician, but, yep, Cummins confirms, that’s Bowes.“Dave played the melody on bass through the whole song,” he tells the Straight. “I wrote the melody and Dave all of a sudden went, ‘I got it down’. I went, ‘Whaaat?’ And he goes like this’.”Cummins takes hands off the wheel to mime playing the bassline, guiding the car with his knee for a second.“I went, ‘Holy bloody shit, that’s fuckin’ great!”“It’s a hell of a bassline,” I agree. “I know, I wrote it,” Cummins says (false modesty is not among his vices). “But he played it."As he says this, he tilts his head to acknowledge that he’s impressed.We’re on the road between Commercial Drive station and Zulu Records, to put a John Otway gig poster in the window.Cummins’ band, I, Braineater, which dates back to Vancouver punk scenes fabled first wave, will be debuting its new four-piece incarnation at the Otway show. In addition to Bowes on bass, the lineup will feature drummer Mike Ferns, and recent enlistee Rod Bruno who has played with bands ranging from Lick the Pole to Trailerhawk. Cummins grumbles at a badly-driven Tesla that cuts us off (“I’m doin’ an interview and blastin’ music and I can still drive better than you!”). He changes lanes, cranking the car CD player. I feel like I have never heard I, Braineater this loud before, even in concert. “This record is designed to be volume”, he says.It’s a great way to hear the new record, especially with Cummins singing along from the driver’s seat.Cummins tells me no one outside I, Braineater’s close circle has heard "The Bridge" before. It’s a love song that evokes classic killer-couple-on-the-run flicks like Gun Crazy and They Live by Night, film noir classics about misunderstood young lovers who escape their oppressive circumstances and end up criminalized, doomed, but temporarily free. I, Braineater, creating art live on-stage at the Cultch during a '80s-era Young Canadians gig at the Cultch. Bev Davies. In the lyrics, Cummins pledges his love to the object of his affections (“You are the girl, I’m in love with you so/ You are the one and I want you to know”), and offers her a means of escape (“There is a way out of this town/ There is a bridge they never burned down.”).It wasn’t until after he had written the lyric that he realized where the inspiration for the song came from.“I was in, like, Grade 6," he recalls. "There was this girl who sat in front of me, and we were flirting, but you know how kids flirt when they’re in Grade 6—it’s more whack-you-on-the-head kind of stuff. We never got around to gettin’ kissing or anything. But we had this eye for each other. I really liked her, but there was something wrong with her, and then one day she was taken away because she had some mental instability, and I never saw her again. But I never forgot about her either.”It didn’t start as a song about any one person, he explains.“I tried to write a song about being stuck in a horrible town with really miserable people, who just don’t understand you in any way.” They’re the people who, in the lyrics of the song, cannot see 'How dreamers dream and wish to be.' And you’re trying to tell a girl you love her, and if she’ll come with you, you know a way to get out of town, to escape—‘Come with me and we will be free.’”So is it Langley that he’s talking about escaping? (Cummins, improbably, is a Fraser Valley boy).“Nah, it’s somewhere else," he says, "but I won’t say where.”Cummins wrote pages of lyrics trying to get the song right, trying to figure out what was driving the images.“Then when I remembered it was something to do with her, I just started crying.”I observe that he’s a romantic at heart.“Yeah! Sometimes a little bit of a rough romantic, sometimes a bit of a jam-tart sweetheart romantic," he confirms. "I just try to keep it as true as I can…”Musically, "The Bridge" has the reverb-ensconced shimmer of Faith-era Cure and the mysterious dark undercurrents and pace of Bauhaus. But it’s nonetheless very recognizably the work of the man who recorded I Here, Where You (his spidery 1983 debut LP, recorded entirely solo, with drum machines and synths and a guitar).That was followed by Artist Poet Thief, a stripped-down, raucous, garage-y affair from 1985 with just Cummins and drummer Andy Graffiti (Wasted Lives, Private School). The record is currently being prepared for its first-ever digital release. Video of I, Braineater - Artist Poet Thief (1985) Artist Poet Thief has Dave “Rave” Ogilive given equal credit with Cummins and Graffiti on the back cover.“He was the engineer on that one, and he’d just gotten out of the recording studio with Skinny Puppy," Cummins recalls. "He was the one who made Skinny Puppy work! He’s a great guy. We had two evenings to make the album, and that was one evening to play and one evening to mix. We’d gone into Mushroom after hours to get a rate I could afford, and it still wasn’t very cheap, right? Two nights, with the tape, cost $2,000.”The current album cost about the same to record, but this time they had two whole days in the studio: a luxury, by comparison.It’s hard to believe that Cummins has not had an album since 1985, some 40 years ago. Even more unfathomable is that it's been 47 years since he released his first record, The Braineaters, a five-song eponymous EP self-released in Warhol-like silkscreened manila envelope, making the record as much an art project as a musical one. For trivia fans the lineup on that record—which has fetched over $200 on Discogs—featured future Vancouver punk scene icons like the Modernettes' Buck Cherry and the Young Canadians' Art Bergmann.That was followed a year later by a 10-inch flexidisc, Planet X, which now runs $500 on Discogs, if you can find one for sale. Video of The Braineaters - The Braineaters EP (1979) FULL EP It’s not like he’s been inactive in recent decades, even though there wasn't much in the way of new music. When he wasn't writing songs and performing he was producing art in the '80s and into the '90s, working out of a studio on Beatty Street in Vancouver. These were the days of Blockhead t-shirts and Skinny Puppy album covers, when Cummins was an established, independent art-star. ““By the time I was in the studio downtown, on Beatty Street, by 1990, I was working trying to make it big," he says. "And then I kind of fell into the obscura of partying. But I kept having shows here and there, staying afloat somewhat.”He made a few attempts at getting back to music, but luck wasn’t with him. “It seemed like every time I brought a piece of gear, a month later, it broke.”There were a few false starts, a few one-off performances, a few incarnations of the band that did not last very long. And health issues were also a factor, first his own, and then his parents’.“I partied so much that I became a very big boy, and I didn’t like that. So I stayed away from the parties and started walking the SeaWall—and then running the Sea Wall.”He lost 80 pounds by such means—he’s a man of great willpower.“And then basically I realized, ‘Mom and Dad aren’t going to last much longer’, and I had to go into being a 24-hour, 7-day-a-week male nurse for them. That went on for a few years, and my personal life fell apart, and… somehow we got to here.”There’s a lot Cummins is leaving out, but still, time has gone by quickly. “I think when you’re a teenager or you’re 20, one year seems like ten, and then when you get older, 10 years seem like one," he opines. "But I’ve kind of found my voice again, with Dave and Mike saying the songs are great. And with the all-star Rod Bruno coming on board, it’s like, ‘Holy shit!’”Another first I’m treated to during our drive to Zulu, where we put a poster in the window, is that Cummins gives me a metal pin with the I, Braineater skull-and-crossbones logo on it. Outside the band, only myself and a friend of Cummins who repairs gear for him, Curt Palme, have copies, which are being made to sell at his upcoming show, opening for Brit rock legend John Otway at the Fox. (Go here for the story). Video of Jim Cummins: I, Braineater A born raconteur, Cummins tells me the whole story of why Palme got a pin: he’s been repairing a vintage Altec 1220 mixer (“a beautiful beast from another time”) that Cummins was recently reunited with. He figures onetime Braineaters Ron Reyes (Black Flag, Piggy), and the late Steve LaViolette simply forgot the mixer and its case after a biker gig they played in the Fraser Valley, back in the 1980s. He’d assumed it was lost forever. Decades later, he stumbled across it on Facebook marketplace.“I went, ‘That’s my mixer!’”The pins are gorgeous, heavy, and, at nearly two inches across, are likely larger than the largest button in your punk rock button collection. Credit for them goes to Braineater drummer Ferns“He gets these ideas late at night on the internet, and he found this site where you can get these really great metal pins," Cummins shares. "And he doesn’t ask; he just goes ahead and orders them, right? All of a sudden, it’s like, ‘I’ve got these pins all made up and you can’t sell them til showtime!’ They’re actually metal and enameled, and they’re better than anything I would have thought of. That’s one of the reasons why everybody’s gotta come to the Otway show; they can’t get this without going to the show. We’ve also got t-shirts and hoodies done through Kent Peterson, known for his work with Skull Skates.”Cummins is wearing his own merch. He’s brilliant, that way—a self-managing, self-promoting independent with little use for galleries or managers or labels. To him, it’s just lazy to give people a cut for your stuff if you can do it yourself.However, he’s also very collaborative when it’s called for, and gives credit where it’s due. The upcoming album, for instance, was recorded with Jesse Gander at Rain City Recorders, the same studio where Otway will be recording while in town.“Jesse’s amazing," he raves. "Jesse did the recording last summer, did all the mixing, did all the tweaking and said, ‘This is great.’ I listened and went ‘Wow, it is.’”Besides a smattering of originals, the album includes reworkings of Braineaters classics like “Modern Man” “Funtime” and “Edge”, which greatly benefit from the added bass (there’s no bass on Artist Poet Thief). The opening track, “Comeon” also originally appeared on that prior album; it’s a racetrack song, Cummins insists, inspired by Cummins’ father’s profession as a horse trainer.For at least part of Cummins’ childhood, he served as a groom in his father’s stables in Langley.“People ask me if I was born in a barn, and I go, ‘Basically, yeah!’”He invites me to imagine, as "Comeon" blasts from his speakers, the gamblers shouting at Exhibition Park, “Come on!”, tickets held high in clenched fists. Video of I, Braineater - Sacred Cow Truth be told, the image would never have come to mind from the lyrics alone. But “Comeon” has nothing on “Sacred Cow”, one of the best known I, Braineater tunes, which is musically indebted to “I Wanna Be Your Dog”. I’d been meaning to ask Cummins about it, since I really never had much idea what the song was about: “Moses was right/Gotta kill the cow” seems rather Old Testament and anti-materialism, but there’s also a verse about how “You are now the sacred cow” and a plea for said cow to “teach me how”. What could such images add up to?“Whatever you’re thinking about, it’s not really about that”, Cummins says. “This is a song for my old friend who is long gone, Dan Clark.”Clark, or his suicide, is more overtly the subject of Art Bergmann’s “The Final Cliché”, and I’ve heard about him more than once, from both men, but Cummins is right: I’d never have guessed he informed “Sacred Cow”.Some of the story Cummins has told me before. Clark and Cummins went to Langley Secondary together, and Clark was instrumental in setting Cummins more or less on the trajectory he is still following today.“Dan was a great force, too smart for this world”, Cummins tells me. By now we're midway back to Burnaby, where he’s going to drop me off at home. “And he told me this story once that if ever a flying saucer were to land, the first thing he would do would be to make sure he got on it. What ‘Sacred Cow’ is about is driving your super-fast hot greaser car, and you see this flying saucer landing way off in the distance, and you know you’ve got to meet up, and it all becomes the race to the flying saucer in your hot car, almost like something out of the film Vanishing Point, y’know? It’s all tied up in that, and in Dan’s leaving this earth.”So what is, exactly, the cow, then?“In religion, it’s idolizing the wrong thing, you know?" he says. "But the sacred cow could also be the car, because you’re going to destroy the car to go fast enough to get there in time. And it doesn’t matter if he breaks everything. And that was like Dan, too—he was the guy who was working to destroy his ego. He’d already destroyed his connection with his family. And he destroyed his vehicles every time he had them. He had this energy to just go faster, to destroy, but also to create.”In fact, Clark bought a car off Cummins back in the day.“It was a 1954 Chevy station wagon, which would actually be the car he killed himself in," he shares. "It’s convoluted, it’s hard to explain. I think the video will make it make more sense, when I get that done. Everybody thinks the song is this-or-that, but it’s really about Dan and his confusion about life, his smartness, his insights, but also his diabolical destructive tendencies, you know? It’s an ode to Dan. I still remember him like yesterday.” Video of I Braineater - Wrong World There are new songs that take in lost and absent friends, too, like “Fall on the Floor” (“for all the pretty boys on the scene who have fallen by the wayside”, Cummins says).And besides “The Bridge” —my new favourite I, Braineater tune—there’s a much more whimsical one called “Bunny” that I rather love. One lyric in that goes, “Star girl and star boy, look at them dance/The monsters are here, better pull up your pants.”I put it point blank to him: does he have the slightest idea what his lyrics are about while he’s writing them?“No, you know, it’s like painting a lot of the time," Cummins admits. "I’m kind of a radio, and I’m trying to catch what’s in the air, receiving.”For “Bunny” he was aiming somewhere between Marc Bolan and Bob Dylan, he explains.“So that’s why the lyrics are a little more fanciful.”Even on the more playful tunes on the album, the sound on the recordings is extraordinarily dark and deep, recorded on pure baritone bass and baritone guitar, with Ferns playing drums on a cocktail kit.The guitar on the album is all Cummins; Bruno wasn’t involved in these sessions, but will be in the next, which should sound quite different.“We’ve now switched back to E-tuning instead of D-tuning, and back to regular guitar and regular basses, and Mike has switched back to real big drum kit,” Cummins notes. Video of I Braineater Edge The new version of I, Braineaster already begun writing new songs, like “Bang My Head (Til it Bled)”, but that’s the stuff of a later story.So there’s a new album which will head to the pressing plant as soon as Cummins comes up with a name for the release and makes some final mastering tweaks. Another full-length is percolating, and there are also reissues afoot, starting, as mentioned, with Artist Poet Thief. It’s a lot on Cummins' plate, but he’s got a lot of catching up to do: a lot has changed since he last released a record.“The last time I did a record, Imperial was alive and well, you just go down there with your recording and go, ‘Here it is’.”(The Imperial Record Company, once Vancouver’s one-stop-shopping pressing plant, folded in 1988).“They’d make the lacquers there, they’d make the pressings there, but that’s all gone, so now it’s kind of spread out.”Burnaby-based Clampdown, where the new album will be pressed, outsources to various places, getting the lacquers made in the US, the stampers made elsewhere. Things have changed, and there’s a longer wait to get records made, too, but Cummins shrugs it off.“It’s not that it’s mysterious," he ruminates. "It’s just the way of doing things now.”He’ll be letting Bruno handle putting things up on streaming sites and for digital download.“I look at all that stuff like this as you put all that out there, and you let it go," Cummins says. "It’s just a form of advertisement. I don’t expect to get anything back from it; I would only get upset if some movie was to use a song without coming to me. Then I’d have a meltdown and sue. But as far as everybody listening to it goes, the only thing you can make money on is your record and your merchandise. And that we completely control that."He continues with, "Because my experience with everyone I’ve dealt with, respectively, is that they do not do a very good job of repaying, right down to galleries and what they sold and stuff. If I've learned from the lessons from the past, it's 'I keep control, you pay us, and then you get the stuff.' Because the other way has never done well.”I, Braineater opens for John Otway at the Fox Cabaret on March 21. For tickets, go here. Join the discussion Facebook comments not loading? Please check your browser settings to ensure that it is not blocking Facebook from running on straight.com