EVERY ONCE IN AWHILE in this line of work, you get the chance to talk to someone from one of your all-time favorite bands. Sometimes that opportunity shows up years later after having listened to that band for the majority of your adult life. You’ve been to the shows. You’ve got the records. You’ve traveled cross-country to see them play live. You’ve seen the other bands they play in, live.
Then, one day, you get the chance to talk to them and the question becomes: What are you gonna ask?
When the opportunity came up to talk to John Wright, drummer of the legendary Canadian band NoMeansNo ahead of stop in Bremerton this month with his new band Dead Bob, I passed that question off to a local guy named Jeff who is in an entirely different line of work.
Jeff is a carpenter and general contractor by trade. Originally from the midwest, he’s lived in Bremerton for most of his life. He’s been building stuff and fixing shit in this town for the better part of three decades. He’s also a massive NoMeansNo fan.
He was at the end of a long day in the midst of a long week when I showed up 45 minutes early for the interview with a 12-pack of Rainier and a pack of smokes. We sit at the kitchen counter and talk like old men about the day, about the job, the tired knees, the kids on their cell phones these days. Jeff’s wondering what it was like when John and his brother formed NoMeansNo back in the day. He remembers back when the band toured with two drummers playing simultaneously and wonders why they did that. He says NoMeansNo was one of those bands that people either absolutely loved or didn’t really care for. We talk about their unique and uncategorizable sound, their underground legends status, their hockey-centric alter-ego punk rock band The Hanson Brothers… There’s a moment of silence as we open another beer.
Evidently, John is also a brewer, Jeff says. He starts to tell the story of how he randomly found a six pack of one of John’s beers at a local market when the call comes in and I answer before he can finish his sentence.
“Oh, hey John!” I open the conversation, making the introductions.
“It’s funny, we were just talking about how I bought your beer one time,” Jeff says. “I can’t even remember what it was called, but the way I recognized it was by the guy in a leather jacket, kind of a Ramones-style pose on the label…”
“Ahh,” John thinks back. “The smoked beer was it?”
“I think it was a smoked beer now that you say that,” Jeff replies.
The beer was called Johnny Hanson’s Punk Rauch. It was a 2013 collaboration with a Quebec brewery that ended up running as a seasonal for about six years, John said. But it wasn’t the typical rock band/brewery collab where the brewery makes the beer and puts the band on the label. This beer was actually John’s recipe. He’s been brewing regularly since the early 90s.
“So there you go,” John says. “As a matter of fact, Dead Bob really wouldn’t be happening apart from the fact that I’d gotten to be partners with a pub up here in Canada, up in Powell River… One thing led to another, covid and all the disaster in that industry, and we never made it that far. Had we been successful, I would be brewing professionally instead of playing music again.”
“That was one thing I was going to ask you,” Jeff answers. “What made you want to come back and start playing music and going on tour again?”
“Well… I was out of a job,” John says.
We all laugh.
John and his brother Rob started NoMeansNo back at the beginning of the 1980s punk rock scene in British Columbia. Rob, eight years older, had recently moved back home and brought with him a love for the Ramones. John didn’t really know much about the punk rock thing back then, he said, but he did play drums in the high school band. The punk thing was so new at that point that the brothers didn’t even know any other guitar players. So they formed the band as a two-piece with Rob on bass, John on drums. They self-released their debut album in 1982 before adding guitar player Andy Kerr and signing with the Dead Kennedy’s label Alternative Tentacles in 1983.
The next year, the brothers formed their alter-ego, hockey-centric punk rock band named from the cult classic hockey comedy ‘Slap Shot.’ Jeff had told me the band used to tour from one side of Canada to the other as NoMeansNo and then tour back as The Hanson Brothers.
“Yeah, I think we did that more than once,” John said. “It was perfect. That was back when we had the two drummers in NoMeansNo. We had Ken Kempster. He was the drummer in The Hanson Brothers, so it was very convenient. Canada is kind of a linear tour, you know, going east and coming back home. So it worked out. You could hit all the same rooms going out and coming back. I thought it was quite clever.”
Even after the brothers retired those bands shortly after being inducted into the Western Canadian Hall Of Fame in 2015, John stayed busy with music as musical director for a robot band project out of Berlin called Compressorhead. It was an intensive four year project, he said, creating music that would be played entirely by animatronic robots. That band’s debut album ‘Party Machine’ came out in 2017 and, shortly thereafter, John’s time would be consumed by the brewpub project up in Powell River.
“Fast forward, covid, and suddenly I had time on my hands,” John says. “And I thought, I’m gonna start revisiting these old half-baked songs and demos and stuff and finish them. Just for fun. Just for my own amusement.”
Digitizing and digging into old cassette demos led to writing and recording new music in his home studio which led to the self-produced and self-released eight song Dead Bob EP online in 2023, which led to putting together a full five-piece band and their first tour of the US this year, making their only Seattle-area stop in Bremerton June 8.
“So long story long, as I’ve managed to make it,” John says, “It just kind of fell together. There was no big plan.”
While the title track of the Dead Bob EP ‘Life Like’ is a cover/re-imagining of a NoMeansNo song, John says the intent of the band is not to be a NoMeansNo cover band. To that end, Alternative Tentacles is in the process of re-releasing the entire NoMeansNo back catalogue. The seminal album ‘Wrong’ is up for pre-order now. But Dead Bob is a mix of both old and new songs, John said, most new to the world if not new to him. And they are bringing along a Cincinnati band called Lung on this tour, which is a two-piece featuring a cellist who is also a classically trained opera singer and a drummer. John’s just hoping people will come and check it out.
“Yeah, no,” Jeff says. “I’m guessing they will.” // BILL MAN
DEAD BOB w/ Lung, doors at 8 p.m., June 8, 21+, tickets start at $20 at Tracyton Movie House. Tickets at tracytonmoviehouse.com. more at deadbob.ca
