Movies of War

1 of 8 2 of 8 Self-referentiality has been second nature for Kitty & the Rooster since they started.The first song on the duo's 2018 debut album, One Gig Hard Drive, is even called “Kitty & the Rooster’s Official Bio”, wherein guitarist Noah Walker and drummer Jodie Ponto trade off vocals, comparing and contrasting the band with various pop-cultural couples. Standouts include “We’re like Barbie and Ken/With nipples and dick” and “Like the Black Keys/With better tits”.They have plenty of songs about their sex lives, like “Sexercise”, “Sexsomnia” or, maybe even the title track off their new LP, Get the Clap, though we steered away from asking just how autobiographical that one is.They even cover the Minimalist Jug Band’s “Lousy Lover”, an anthem for those bad in the sack. And of course they have a song “Paid a Million Dollars (To Live Like You’re Poor)”, about the experience of being renovicted from their former East Vancouver digs, which not only is non-fiction, but, once it was recorded, was weaponized by the band and shared, guerilla-style, with their former landlords, now living in the house which they’d renovicted Kitty & the Rooster out of. The couple dropped off a CD on their doorstep and--this is how we imagine it happening, anyhow--rang their doorbell and ran away. Video of Kitty & The Rooster's Renoviction Revenge We hope they were wearing their rubber animal masks.But Kitty & the Rooster also have plenty of songs about being in a band, and more specifically being in an East Vancouver band And more specifically yet, about being in the East Vancouver band Kitty & the Rooster, including the title track of One Gig Hard Drive. That song is about driving hard to get to one gig, with Walker cribbing the title from someone he heard on the radio, because it fits many, many shows the couple has played.Now, on Get the Clap, there’s a song about Jodie Ponto’s stripped down cocktail drum kit, “Banging on a Cock(tail drum)”. There’s a song about playing in venues with dodgy sound, “Can’t Hear the Words”, which, you might note, was not written about the Waldorf. There’s even a song about what number to call if you saw them accidentally booked, for example, onto the kid’s stage at a festival and want to complain about their “blue” lyrics: it’s “842-NOAH”, which Walker claims in the song is his actual phone number.The Straight had to soften a reference to one such festival from a past feature we did with the band, because someone involved in the fest freaked the fuck out. We’re pretty sure you can still figure out which one we were talking about, though!But most relevantly, for the purposes of this article, we want to talk about songs about the economics of being a working musician, which is also is a common theme in their songwriting, from “Pay to Play” on One Gig Hard Drive to “100 Bucks” on Get the Clap. The latter is about how no matter what gig Walker plays for other people—sitting in on a live show or a studio session—that tends to be the rate people offer. The lyrics, as ever, are a witty summation of what being a professional guitar-slinger is like; it’s worth quoting a bit:“It’s been 10 thousand gigs and 20 years today/Another man in a band called asking me if I could play/Gotta get yourself there, it’s a couple hours away/And there’s 30 songs to learn in just a couple of days/Well I can eat those songs for breakfast like a horse eats hay/So the answer is yes, but how much does it pay?”The chorus sums it all up: “Fred Durst did it all for the nookie/Bryan Adams did it all for love/I did it all, did it all, did it all for $100 bucks.”Walker joins us on Zoom from his East Van digs. (Ponto couldn’t be there). I grouse a bit about my own situation as a freelance writer, and Walker emphasizes. “Some people would be lucky to get 100 bucks. Standup comedians, slam poets, authors like yourself—a lot of people are in the same boat. I couldn’t believe it when I noticed that they’ve started having audiobooks on Spotify. I was like, ‘Oh, authors, what are you doing! That’s not going to go well for you…’”Most strikingly, the song observes that the same rate of pay applies to his father’s generation. Both of his Walker's are musicians, and he consulted them in writing the lyrics, to make sure he got things right.“The band that we’re talking about in the song was called the Chessmen, but it’s not the Chessmen that was here in Vancouver; they were from Hoquiam, in Washington State.”This was in the early 1960s, in what Walker calls “the ‘Louie Louie’ era”, when bands were being spurred on by the example of Tacoma garage rockers the Wailers (aka the Fabulous Wailers—no relation to the reggae band). Walker’s father, Dick, played Telecaster in the band.“I wish he still had that guitar now. It would probably worth about 10 or 20 grand. But he does not.” Another interesting detail emerged from the research Walker did into his parents’ musical history, specifically a gig poster he found of a later band of his father’s, the Sunshine Factory. The gig was in 1968, at a venue called the Wig Wam Inn (and here we must again note, this was not the BC Wig Wam Inn, but the Washington State one).“We were looking at this poster and—I’d always heard that my mom met my dad at the Wig Wam Inn," Walker recalls. "And I was like, ‘And what year did you do that?’ ‘I think it was 1968’. And we had just downloaded this poster off a Facebook group, and we started figuring out the date, because it was a Thanksgiving Day show—a Wednesday night before the US Thanksgiving holiday—and we realized we could figure out what year this poster was from. And then I realized that this is the actual poster for the gig that my mom and dad met at, if you can believe that!”He’s framed it, of course.“That was a really cool thing to find out, and that all came from writing this song.”Then as now, the band members would make 100 bucks apiece at those gigs, Walker says. “But back then, that was so much money for them, they were doing great; they all bought cars and houses and started having kids. And then as long as I’ve been playing, and I’ve been playing for more than 20 years now, and it’s always been, 100 bucks is sort of the standard pay. It’s never changed. But I’ve talked to other people who played in the '60s and in the '70s and it was the same then. That has always been the standard pay, but now a beer costs $10, if you’re playing the Princeton.”It’s better than paying to play, I observe.“That’s true! We don’t do that.” Video of Kitty & The Rooster - Live at The East Van Opry Walker’s parents—his Mom’s name is Eevan—are both still able to “pick up a guitar and play ‘Walk Don’t Run’ start to finish”, and will probably be at the WISE Hall for a Kitty & the Rooster gig this Friday.“They can play all the surf classics on guitar, so I sort of grew up with it.”Walker’s childhood is not entirely germane to what Kitty & the Rooster are doing, though there is a nice parallel between his mom and dad playing surf music together and Walker and Ponto doing the same. But the story of his upbringing is too interesting to resist.“When I was born, my family lived on Haida Gwaii," he shares. "My mom & dad lived in the bush, seven miles away from the nearest road. You had to hike up a beach and across two rivers to get to where they lived, and they lived totally off-grid. After I was born, they moved a little closer to town, and they put on a lot of music shows on Haida Gwaii, and were sort of pillars of the local music scene, when I was really little. And then I grew up after that in Victoria; when they moved to the city, they didn’t play as much.”Walker’s parents’ musical history is pre-internet, but that does not mean that it is forgotten.“I went up to Haida Gwaii myself to play a music festival, and I was at a campfire, and people were singing songs," he shares. "And somebody at the campfire sang one of my dad’s songs, which is all about life on Haida Gwaii! I was like, ‘Wow, I can’t believe you know one of my dad’s songs, did you know him?’ And he was like, ‘No, I never met him!’ So he must have learned it from somebody else who knew my dad. So those songs are still being sung up there, which is totally mind-blowing for me.”His parents come to almost all Kitty & the Rooster and Riviberators shows, and, again, will definitely be at the WISE Hall on Friday, which is both a “10-year bandiversary” gig and an album release party. A host of their friends will join them, starting with Oregon-based Sammy Volkov, supported by Jack Garton, both of whom have toured and played with Walker before.“Sammy has a voice kind of like Roy Orbison," he says. "Not that he sounds exactly like Roy, but it’s that rare of a quality. He’s one of our favourite singers. He’s going to open the night in a duo set with Jack backing him up. Then we’re going to do a Kitty & the Rooster full band extravaganza.”This will be the first time Kitty & the Rooster play with a full backing band, including Joseph Lubinsky-Mast (who like Walker and Garton, frequently plays with Petunia & the Vipers)m, and keyboardist Tom Heukendorff (who used to play with Walker in the band Broken Mirrors). Performing backup vocals will be Jack Garton and Shirley Gnome.The end of the night will involve a supergroup which has never played in Vancouver before, though Walker notes that he’s seen them many times on Vancouver Island.“It’s three headliners, Hank Pine, Shirley Gnome, and Boss Saint B, and then they have a DJ called DJ Optimus Prime," he says. "Individually, all three of them are amazing artists, but we’ve seen them do this at music festivals, and the three of them together is completely a powerhouse, a really inspiring and fun set. That was our dream to get them. So that’s the night!” As for the album launch, despite his long career, Get the Clap will be the first time that Walker has put out a vinyl record, which he pressed in a run of 200.“We’ve never done it before, because it’s a lot of money to shell out up front!”The title track is about songs having a so-called “infectious” beat that you feel compelled to clap along with: “This beat sticks with you like an STD.”While Kitty & the Rooster are always humorous, one of their finest bits of wordplay ever in their recorded history occurs in "Get the Clap", where you’re “gonorreah-lize” that you too have “got the clap.”I gush over the wit of it for a minute.“It’s funny that you would bring up that one specific line," Walker says. "Jodie’s going to be really happy to hear that! The truth is, Jodie and I don’t really fight that much, as a couple, but the biggest spat we ever had was when we were writing the bridge to that song. And we both had come up with our own ways of using the word ‘gonorrhea’, which is hard to fit into a song! But I was pretty proud of the way I did it!”He doesn’t quote his own, unused lyric, but instead continues with: “She really liked hers, and we argued all night, and I think that’s the only time where we ever went to bed angry with each other. But in the end, we ended up with Jodie’s usage—she won the spat. She’s going to be thrilled that you picked up on that line.”The two have a relationship song on the album, “Stay Together for the Digs”, about needing to stay together because it’s the only way they can afford Vancouver rents,“If you’re living with a partner, you wouldn’t want to break up," Walker opines, "because then you’d have to live on your own, and that’s just impossible in Vancouver”. They vary the lyric in the song with “staying together for the gigs”, since a part of their income is tied directly to their musical collaboration. But fear not: it sounds like Ponto and Walker have a pretty healthy relationship, in spite of their occasional cynicism.As for “Can’t Hear the Words”, it does happen that the last time I saw Kitty & the Rooster was at the Waldorf, a venue that has a rep for having fairly, uh, variable sound. Was there are particular gig that inspired that song?“It was not the Waldorf gig!" Walker says. "I was very happy with the way it sounded at the Waldorf, but I’m remembering that when I played that show, I personally went and rented a giant PA from Long & McQuade and set it up in front of the Waldorf PA. But that’s not to say anything bad about the Waldorf, it’s just to illustrate how important it is to me that people can have good sound and really hear the words to the music. Because I think sometimes the average concertgoer, when the sound is bad, they just think the band isn’t good. But it can really effect the impact of a band in a way that I don’t think the average concert goer realizes.”The actual gig that Walker had in mind was quite some time ago, almost as old as the band itself.“We found a way to sing about bad sound and not have it come across as being whingey and hateful and angry," he says. "I’ve been performing in so many bands, for over 20 years now, that there are really a lot of experiences that went into that song, but there is one verse talking about how we had travelled to this town to play a gig. I won’t say where it is, but it wasn’t far from here. And it’s the kind of town where you have to take two ferries to get there."And I can tell right away at a Kitty & the Rooster show if people can hear what the words are, because we’re used to having people laugh at certain points," Walker continues. "There’s just certain lyrics that get a reaction from the audience, good or bad. But we were just totally bombing, and I couldn’t figure it out. So I jumped off the stage, and I realized that the sound person had not turned on the main speakers for our show! We had monitors, so it sounded okay onstage, but he had simply turned off the main speakers. That made me irate! So that’s definitely a big part of at least one verse of that song.”It’s one more aspect of the band’s aforementioned self-referentiality.“We didn’t set out to document what it’s like being in a small, unknown Canadian band," Walker says. "I think it was more coming from a place of write-what-you-know. but now that we’re on our third record, I think, ‘Wow, maybe that’s our thing.’”Kitty and the Rooster play a One Gig Hard Drive record-release show the WISE Hall on Friday (May 1). 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