Press Releases regarding May 1999 Fredericton Fiasco
Archived text copy
Interview with Ra McGuire for TVNB Fredericton, NB, May 3, 1999 by Gary Boole
Archived text copy
"On the bus" - The Vancouver Province, January 5, 1999 by Tom Harrison
Archived text copy
Interview
with Ra McGuire by seen.com
Archived text copy
On a Cold
Road - Tales of Adventure in Canadian Rock (McLelland
& Stewart) by Dave Bedini; ISBN 0771014562
Archived text copy of Ra McGuire excerpts
May 3rd, 1999 FREDERICTON (CP) -- They were there for a good
time, not a long time, especially given the fact the drinks weren't free. The Canadian
rock band Trooper walked out on a gig in New Brunswick on Monday, apparently because their
drinks weren't complimentary. A Fredericton bar, the Dock, had booked the band, which had
hits in the 1970s and '80s. Trooper has been playing the bar circuit for the last few
years. The province's new liquor regulations say bars can't give away booze. A minimum
price of $1.50 must be charged. Larry Chippin, the owner of the pub, says he offered to
charge the band and then reimburse them after the show.
The group walked out, apparently in a huff.
RANK 3 OF 25, PAGE 1 OF 2, DB CP99
May 5, 1999 18.42 EST
Entertainment and culture
MUSIC-Trooper-Drinks
code:3
INDEX: Entertainment
Trooper says band walked over pay
COLD BROOK, N.S. (CP) Trooper is prepared to raise a little hell over reports the band
walked out on a New Brunswick gig this week because they weren't going to get free drinks.
"We're not rich enough to be that arrogant," said Ra McGuire, lead singer for
the Canadian rock band that had a string of hits in the 1970s and '80s. "We walked
out because the owner refused to pay us," McGuire said Wednesday from a motel in Nova
Scotia's Annapolis Valley. Trooper was to perform at a Fredericton bar Monday night. It
was to be the band's first appearance on a tour of the Maritime's bar circuit. Although
their contract stipulated the band would get free drinks, New Brunswick's new liquor
regulations say bars can't give away booze. Pub owner Larry Chippin said he offered to
charge the band for the drinks, then reimburse them after the show, but they walked out.
McGuire said the band has outlined its position on the Trooper Internet Web site
(trooper.bc.ca.) The controversy has generated about 200 e-mail replies -- some
from musicians supporting the band's stance, others from fans who question the story.
"What's really embarrassing and hurtful is that this band is known across the country
for playing bars and being a lot of fun," said McGuire. "There's never any
attitude ever, so to see a thing that basically made us look like a bunch of arrogant
alcoholics walking away from their fans and a bunch of money is very odd for us."
End of document.
Interview
with Ra McGuire
Fredericton, NB May 3 1999
by Gary Boole for TVNB
WITH THE GROWING POPULARITY OF CLASSIC ROCK, DO YOU FIND THERE ARE MORE YOUNGER PEOPLE COMING OUT TO THE SHOWS NOW?
That may be the reason, it's really odd relative to when I was nineteen. I sure didn't want to hear a band that was as old as our band is, relative to that age group. The odd thing is often at least half the audience is between nineteen and twenty something.
DO THEY KNOW ALL THE SONGS ?
They know at least the four real important ones and kinda suffer though the rest (laughing).
I UNDERSTAND YOU ARE TRYING TO GET A REMASTERED DOUBLE CD SET RELEASED OF SOME OF THE BANDS BEST MATERIAL. WHAT'S THE LATEST ON THAT?
It's not really us trying to do it. It's all in the hands of our original record company. They bought up all the licensing from all the other labels that our songs are on. They have the cover art, they have everything ready. It's an amazingly cool package, but the contract they sent us said that it was going to come out in July 1998 so..? (shrugging his shoulders)
DO YOU STILL WRITE ANY NEW MATERIAL?
Yea their odd songs. There had been a long period of Smitty (Brian Smith) and I not writing. My partner's son was killed in a motorcycle accident quite a few years ago and he hasn't done anything musical since so I've taken to writing these very odd songs. But as a group we haven't sat down and said lets make an album. The carrot part of it disapates after you have made ten albums. It's a more musical process when I get around to doing it. All the guys in the band writes and are recording their own records right now with exception of my partner. There is a lot of musical stuff going on but their isn't a big push to do a Trooper album.
I ONCE READ WHERE YOU STATED YOU PREFER PLAYING IN CLUBS AS COMPARED TO THE BIG ARENAS, IS THAT STILL TRUE?
What I prefer is playing to a bunch of people who are just going for it. Most of the shows we do are like that, so it ain't so much a question of big or small as excitement level, and a lot of what we did in the big coliseums, because the stages were so big and there was such expitations to work with the lights and staging. There would be little X 's all over the stage where you had to remember to be at a certain time. You had this big barrage of lights that have been planned to come on you . So mostly you were kind of walking through the light show for the sake of the light man rather than having any fun. It was great to see eveyone screaming and clapping ,but this is rediculus, every night we do whatever we want and that's a whole lot more fun.
DID IT SURPRISE YOU WHEN THINGS STARTED TO GET REALLY BIG FOR THE BAND IN THE MID TO LATE SEVENTIES?
Everybodys perception is always that at some moment you realize something happened, then you actually realize what happens. It grinds on so slowly and what you really have is a sense of responsibility that is suddenly upon you. A gold record isn't a reward, it's kind of menacing. It's up on your wall while your trying to write the next record and its going, "ok asshole try and top this". Anything good that was happening, by the time we were doing it we sort of rehearsed for it. When we finally played the Vancouver Pacific Coliseum with our parents in the VIP box and its was sold out. That's the only time I felt like the Elvis movie. Elvis gets to go up sing one song, everyone goes crazy, then grabs Ann Margaret and takes off. We had to do the whole show, but it was still a key moment, but nothing ever took us by surprise. It was always a slow build and none of it was like "Oh boy Wow!" except maybe that one show. There is a real sense of freedom now to what we do that we kind of bought with all the sucess. there is a lot of places we can go with little responsibility and have a whole lot of fun and we get paid for it.
WITH THE ADVANCMENTS IN TECHNOLOGY IN RECENT YEARS, HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT PEOPLE DOWNLOANDING YOUR MUSIC FROM THE INTERNET FOR FREE?
We have a whole wack of mp3's on our website and I'm fine with it. I'm torn between being a artist and being a fan which I have always been. Im happy to be able to get a mp3 whenever I can. I think it is a really good idea for the system to change in some way. I have absolutely no idea how its going to change in a way that anyone is going to make any money from it. I love the whole digital idea that you can make anything into ones and zeros. That is just going to explode unless the government or big business say, "alright you pay ten cents a minute when you go to this place or twenty cents a minute when you go to that place". But as everybody probably knows, the internet community sees censorship as just a glitch and works around it and carries on, so if they put some kind of coding in mp3s so they don't work, they will just come out with mp4s. I think it a riot. I spend most of my freetime online.
HOW MUCH INPUT DO YOU HAVE INTO THE WEBSITE?
I did alot of it. Its been a colaboration for years now. It's tons of fun.
DO YOU DO MANY OF THE SUMMER ROCK FESTIVALS. I READ THE PROMOTOR DIDN'T PAY YOU FOR ONE LAST SUMMER THAT THE BAND DID IN ALBERTA?
That's our summer. He is doing it again, he moved from Calgary to Edmonton and told the people in Edmonton he is sharing the experience with them. I think he got kicked right the hell out of Calgary. I know he owned the Alberta Government a whole bunch of money and made the company bankrupt and moved the whole thing over to another company he had so he could do it again this year. He didn't pay us and didn't tell us till we finished our set. We came off stage and was told, "ok you can go now". I don't know what's going on but we won't be doing that one this year. We are doing alot of them. We did a lot last year too. This is our time. We kind of stay in a cave until the summer come and then we bring it with us.
TOWARDS THE END OF THE SEVENTIES AFTER DOING THE ALBUM THEN TOUR THING FOR SO LONG DID YOU FIND YOURSELVES JUST GETTING TIRED AND BURNT OUT FROM ALL OF IT?
I suppose that is what happened. We were lucky, there is a lot of bands that get ten mintes. We had a good long eight- nine year run there. Then there is bands like Flock of Seagulls that have eight or nine minutes. I guess we got to the point where we kind of shot ourselves in the foot. We wanted to make cool records instead of commerical ones. When we were making the commerical records they were just ones we made. It's funny after you start getting really famous and having some sucess, that's when people start knocking the things that make you sucessful. Suddenly we were characterized as being this hit machine, like we put together some kind of equation in the basement. I really wish that were the case as I'd whip a few of them out and sell them to somebody. We just wrote songs and crossed our fingers. At somepoint we said, "people don't think we're cool so lets try to make a record to sound like Elvis Costello", so I think in a way we kind of "deeped" ourselves, so it was a combination of getting tired and getting weird. It happened about the same time and everyone was getting tense. The players wanted songwriting credits because me and Smitty were making more money than they were, so it was all the enevitable predicable bull shit.
ARE YOU GLAD YOU MISSED HAVING TO MAKE VIDEOS FOR EVERY SINGLE YOU RELEASED?
We made two or three. They were like twenty grand so you ran around trying to do everything cheaply. I don't know, that's a whole other art form. If I had to do it I'd start thinking about it and could tell you whether I thought it was a good idea or not. We just kind of went and did what the directors told us to do and that's pretty boring and stupid!
HOW DID IT FEEL TO BE THE FIRST ARTIST TO HAVE A DIAMOND ALBUM IN CANADA?
Great! Hot Shots was the first album to sell that many copies by a Canadian Artist, including Anne Murray or anybody like that. That is interesting, it's something alot of people don't know. And still and all they can't take that away from us.
WHAT DOES THE NEAR FUTURE HOLD FOR THE BAND?
The touring thing has gotten silly. We are working all the time. There has been alot of high profile TV stuff going on last little while. There is more of that coming up. As you get older time seems to compress and years go by. It keeps us busy often. I got lots of plans but I don't seem to get to them. Maybe my eleven your old boy has a alot to do with that. Maybe I'll be producing his album in a couple of years.
ON THE BUS
The Vancouver Province, January 5, 1999
by Tom Harrison
Ra McGuire of Trooper managed to be two places at once on New Year's Eve. Trooper was the band asked by This Hour Has 22 minutes to usher in 1999 by performing its evergreen call to party, Raise a Little Hell. The cast, especially Rick Mercer, are big Trooper fans and so it was off to Halifax to tape the CBC special.
On the big night, however, the band
was raising a little Hell in Saskatoon*.
*[webmaster correction: they played in Regina, Saskatchewan - not Saskatoon]
For both trips, Ra dug into his
roadbag to play some of his current favourite discs, which include:
1. Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach: Painted From Memory
"I'm still getting deep into that because it's a deep record."
2. Lucinda Williams: Car Wheels on a Gravel Road
"A favourite around the house, too."
3. Burt Bacharach: One Amazing Night
"Proof of what a good songwriter he is, and, as a songwriter, I'm interested in how
many ways a good song can be interpreted."
4. Burt Bacha-rach:
"The three-CD box set on Rhino."
5. King's X: Tapehead
"This is the best King's X since Dogman and I'm all excited about seeing the band at
the Starfish Room. I'm sure it's going to be the best show of the year."
Interview
with Ra McGuire
seen.com
KARLA - According to your website bio www.trooper.bc.ca, you have purchased some digital recording gear. Does this mean that the band will be doing some "homegrown" recordings of themselves and enter the Independent World of Music Making?
RA McGUIRE - We kinda already did that in 1990 with the "Last of the Gypsies" album. It was self produced, self financed and released on our own label (Great Pacific Records). That album became a gold record!!! Our last album, "Ten" was done pretty much the same way, although Warner Music, who distributed "Gypsies" played a larger role in the funding ... There’s so many ways to go about putting a record out these day - It’s not something that we worry about. The hard part is finding the time to write the songs!!!
KARLA - New Songs?? Where is the songwriting going with the themes? Universal thoughts, environmental issues, politics??? Will there be a new millenium focus?
RA McGUIRE - Uh, geese ... I guess the new songs will spring from the same place they always have. If there has been a theme running through the lyrical content, this is hard ‘cause I wrote them, maybe it’s one of Hope. (Actually a music critic once told me that this was the theme of much of our music - I didn’t completely buy into that at the time, but it makes more sense to me now!) You might notice that our lyrics have swung wide of traditional rock and pop themes. There’s very little (if any) sex, not much posturing and only one or two out and out love songs.
KARLA - How do you like being a lounge & roadhouse bar band again? Fun?
RA McGUIRE - Tons!
KARLA - Repetitive?
RA McGUIRE - I suppose, but every night we’re playing for different people so it keeps it from being tedious.
KARLA - Do you feel more in touch with fans and the marketplace?
RA McGUIRE - Definitely more in touch with fans ... although it has been a long time since we thought of it as a marketplace!
KARLA - Are you doing any reading? Literature? Influences?
RA McGUIRE - I read constantly. Fave authors: Rupert Thompson, David Adams Richards, Russel Hoban, Iain Banks. I am also a big graphic novel fan of the Sandman series, Allan Moore -reading Transmetroplitan right now - a great new series.
KARLA - How do you like being a part of the Global Village and the web culture?
RA McGUIRE - I’m so involved with digitally related activities that it cuts in on my time for making music and writing words!!! - (although I have been making music with computers for about five years (:-) )
On a Cold Road - Tales of Adventure in Canadian
Rock
(McLelland & Stewart) by Dave Bedini
excerpts of Ra McGuire quotes
pg. 39 - Writers like Keith Sharp would look for your weakest moment and try to get the ugliest thing coming out of your mouth. Once this CBC guy, right before the interview, asked if I wanted to talk about [keyboard player] Frank Ludwig quitting the band. I said, "Actually, if you're giving me the option, no." We get halfway through the interview, the recorder's running, and he says, "Before this interview started, you said that you didn't want to talk about Frank Ludwig leaving the band..." I looked at him and said, "You fucking asshole." He was scrambling to turn off the machine. There was this other asshole from Vancouver named Alexander Varty. I reviewed his band because my friend, Tom Harrison, was in it, and since Tom was a music writer, he figured that it would be a hoot if I did some record reviews. They were awful, but I tried the best I could. Not long after, Varty interviewed me himself, and when he printed it in the paper, he put in these clever retorts after my answers which he hadn't said during the course of our conversation, all this snarky shit. He'd led me on to say stuff that he could make fun of later."
pg. 71 - Believe it or not, the most impressive kid's concert I ever went to was Vanilla Fudge opening for Jimi Hendrix, who just sucked. He was really bad. He just stood there and was rude. He played one song, and then he said, "Now I'll play ya some bubblegum shit," and proceeded to play a half-assed, half-length version of "Purple Haze" before fucking off. Vanilla Fudge, on the other hand, were so strong and emotional. I remember the bass player the best. Every time he whacked his bass, it was though someone had pushed him backwards. He was getting thrown all over the stage by the power of his playing. I loved that his performance was keyed to the actual music, more than just waving his arms or dancing. He seemed to connect with his instrument in a very visceral way.
pg.81 - There was a place in the middle of Saskatchewan, near Melville, called Barn 22. The guy who did the shows lived in the downstairs of the barn, and upstairs, there was a floor and windows without glass. It was only open in the summer. Kids came and parked their cars in fields that went on for miles. It was a rock show. You could probably hear the music ten miles away. Some of the greatest rock moments of my life were in that place. Everyone was just pissed and sweating, and afterwards, the kids just went to sleep in their cars. It was a place where everybody could just go and be. It was perfect.
pg. 87 - We did an amazing two-date thing on the Queen
Charlotte Islands. It coincided with the arrival of Loos Taas, Haida for
"wave eater," which was the canoe that Bill Reid carved. This was the day of the
first Haida crossing from Vancouver to Haida Gwaii [the Quenn Charlottes] in a hundred
years. There were media on-site from all over the world, plus all the ancestral chiefs,
with all the pomp and circumstance. We were hired to play the community centre after the
potlatch and we did two shows. We did one for the kids - maybe fifty of them - and one for
the grown-ups. That gig was both remote and awesome.
We also played an amazing gig up near James Bay, a place called Gessasabi. It was a dry
reserve, and they checked your car for alcohol when you went in. We spent three days
there, and we travelled around with the Cree warriors. The reserve was near all those
Hydro-Québec developments, and they were involved in political action. We were taken out
in canoes to the island that the tribe had been relocated from; we were shown the homes
that they had lived in. Those are amazing experiences that no tourist could buy for a
million bucks. We were Trooper and these guys wanted to take us into their lives.
pg. 134 - Goddo [Greg Godovitz of "Fludd" and "Goddo"] came into our dressing room with a fire extinguisher and proceeded to get that white shit all over everything, thinking that it was really hilarious. Later that night he ended up with a French-Canadian girl in the lobby of the hotel; he was wearing a silk dressing gown and a bandanna around his head with what looked like a switchblade stuck in the band. There was a banquet going on and they were sitting on the floor against the wall and I was just sort of hanging, curious about what was going to transpire. The hotel called the cops to eject Greg from the lobby. A cop came and stood over him, at which point he reached up and pulled out his switchblade. He hit the little button on the handle and a comb popped out. Greg said, "Do you have any idea who I think I am?" [webmaster note: this inspired the song "Legend"]
pg. 141 - We had the pleasure of meeting some amateur groupies in Portland, Oregon, when we were still an amateur band. They were practising being groupies on us in the bars, and when we went to play the Starwood Club in Los Angeles, they had graduated to being professional groupies. It was very impressive. We had this shiny, metallic cloth on our pants, fairly tight, and these women were insistent that we not go on stage in a non-erect state. So they rubbed each of us until there was more impressive activity.
pg. 142 - In many cases, the groupies were your good friends. They vibrated at the same frequency, they understood what you were up to and shared in your life in the way their male counterparts in the audience couldn't. The guys were awestruck, but the women were more likely to just drop into the groove with you. They wanted to experience things with you, rather than watch it. They'd take you in their cars to the cool places, introduce you to their culture. That was important to us all.
pg. 204 - The whole issue of Can Con is bullshit. Either you're a good band or you're not a good band. If you're marginal, the rule helps and that's really cool. Those who created it had their hearts in the right place, and I think it's important that somebody's watching out for Canadian artists in that way. But, as for whether it hurts people's careers, that's a separate issue.
pg. 244 - I once saw Robbie Bachman get knocked off his drum stool by a alcohol bottle. Hit him right in the head. We never had anything serious fly at us, just lots of bras, panties, flowers, notes. The things that get to me are the really sad ones, people who are in their last days of cancer and who want to meet you. One show, a woman came up to the front of the stage with an envelope and a bag. I was in the middle of introducing a song and she was standing right in front of me, so I had to react to her. I made fun of her. Later I talked to her backstage. Her daughter had recently died in a car accident. The woman had brought with her a bound collection of the songs her daughter had written. She thought that by presenting Trooper with it, in some way her dead daughter would achieve the dream of stardom.
pg. 272 - Our defining show was at the Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver. It was sold-out. Mom and Dad and the neighbors and cousins were in the VIP box. As we were walking on stage, Sam Feldman, our manager, stopped me and said,"Look, you've earned this. You should try to enjoy it." That was an awesome piece of advice. He made me realize that this was something important. I should enjoy it rather than just give, give, give. I decided I'd take a little bit. It started something that I've done ever since. I used to walk out to the middle of the stage and start shouting the lyrics to "Summertime Blues," but this time, I walked up to my mike and just stood there. I held my arms out, as if to say, "Give it to me." There was the spill of the stage lights, the lighters in the crowd. I soaked all the love in.