Music Beat
Just say yes to checking out Nomeansno drummer John Wright’s new solo project Dead Bob which comes to the Slice, Saturday, March 16.
The project was never intended to be a solo project at all. After NoMeansNo decided to call it quits after John’s brother Rob Wright decided to retire, John Wright decided to focus on his other passion, brewing beer and running a pub. When that closed down during Covid, Wright decided to go through his musical archives and listen to some old songs, completed and recorded some of them sand released his debut solo album “Life Like,” named after an old Nomeansno song, which Wright also rerecorded for the project.
“Well it started out a solo project. Nomeansno kind of tossed in the towel around 2015 or so officially, somewhere in there. My brother retired and I moved up the Sunshine Coast here in British Colombia and got involved with some other things,” said Wright during a Feb. 23 interview on his 62nd birthday.
Dead Bob has benefitted from a few fortunate circumstances.
Jason Lamb and Paul Prescott have just released a new book about Nomeansno called “ From Obscurity To Oblivion.” And Alternative Tentacles in in the process of rereleasing all of NoMeansNo’s old albums.
“It’s just very fortunate that Nomeansno, that Alternative Tentacles is now in full swing rereleasing all of Nomeansno’s back catalogue. They started out with a seven inch single but then they decided to start by rereleasing a full length album Wrong , which was our most popular album and the most obvious choice. So that’s getting going. And then my friend Jason Lamb wrote a book about No
meansno called From Obscurity to Oblivion and that just came out. And it’s been doing really well So Dead Bob got together and we played nine shows in British Columbia last November, December. So with all the stuff with Nomeansno cropping up now, everything is happening at once. A bunch of irons are hot right at the moment,” he said.
“It’s kind of interesting, having really put music away for so many years and not really expecting to be back at it ” said Wright, who just turned 62 on the day of the interview. I just turned 62 and I’m heading to Winnipeg in March. Kind of just diving right into it and of course, we’ll be coming through Lethbridge on our way home,” said Wright, who has been busy with several projects since Nomeansno called it quits.
“I did a record with A Band of Robots called Compressorhead. They had that launched in 2017. That was an amazing project. But I got involved with a pub up here in Powell River and that kind of consumed me for a few years., But it didn't survive unfortunately. I was hoping to be a professional brewer. Because that’s the other thing I do besides pounding on drums. But with Covid everything slowed down like it did for everyone and I started to revisit a lot of old songs and a lot of old demos , stuff I’d written myself. Just a whole backlog of material, in varying stages of completion so I took the time I had and started replacing loops and programmed drums with real drums and tried to make them into real songs,” he said.
“And I was enjoying what I was hearing and so I just kept doing it and when the pub was coming to an end last year, 2023 we had to close and I pretty much had a record and just wanted to put out a self released album of myself . I’m mostly doing everything on the record, but I had some help from some friends,” he said.
The album features his son Aiden Wright, Byron Slack (Invasives) Slack’s partner Kristy Lee Audette (Rong), Ford Pier (Ford Pier and the Vengeance Trio, DOA, Roots Round up, Junior Gone Wild, Rheostatics), Selina Martin added vocals and there are two old collaborations with his brother Rob.
Other than his brother, most of those friends are part of the live incarnation of Dead Bob.
“I got it done. There was really no plan on being Dead Bob really up until that point. But then it’s kind of like well I’m out of a job, so maybe I should see if I can’t put this together and make a band out of it which I did,” he chuckled, adding he enlisted Ford, Byron, Kristy and his partner from the pub, bassist Colin MacRae, who played in an old Victoria math rock band Pigment Vehicle, who were active on the Victoria scene from 1988 until the late ’90s.
“He really wanted to play again. He’s a great bass player. He lives up here and we’re friends of course, so he so he joined up. He picked up his bass after about 25 years and we started to make a band to play it all live. So it was kind of unplanned, but it sort of unfolded,” he continued.
