A Beer with Breakfast
an interview with Jack Breakfast
just after the release of his Rock And Roll Album
2001I thought it might make this more interestingly legitimate to write the intro before I interview Jack Breakfast, before I meet him at all.
At this point, I've only heard the record he sent us and read about him. He's a one man band, plays everything. He writes piano-based pop tunes in a style that can be compared with Pavement and the Rheostatics, sings in a voice that is sort of like David Byrne's. These descriptions are good, they're true, but like any comparative reviews, they capture the image in pretty broad strokes.
He sings about Toronto, and his neighbourhood at Eglinton West Station. He wears his heart on his sleeve and covers the resulting vulnerability in easy (as in gentle) humour: he finishes a heartbroken letter to "dollface" with a cry of "See ya later, sweet, sweet alligator." I can't think of a comparison for Breakfast's really interesting tone, except maybe Jonathan Richman recently. Totally engaging, friendly and sad.
Check out the cover of his album; that's the tone of the record: the kind of warmth that comes from being covered in snow.
His singing is highly stylized in a manner that seems genuine, like Tom Waits'; he chirps and grunts and whispers in a wholly honest and effective voice. It's engaging, and makes the album seem quite live, although the arrangement must have been something interesting: the subtle touches in the production are many. This style is evident on his first CD, the 18 minute, nine song Jack Breakfast (1998, Troubled Cat Records), but it is Rock and Roll Album (2001, Troubled Cat Records) that deserves and has received favourable reviews and press all over the place since its release.
I'm not going to write a review of the record beyond that, except to say that if you're only going to give Rock and Roll Album a quick chance, sit down and listen to "Sad Sunday" all the way through. I'm betting that after that, you'll move on to the whole album, and then the first record, and then, whenever it comes in the mail, his book. Jack Breakfast has some original greatness.
Having said that, here's the interview, which took place on a Thursday, late in November 2001.
I met with Jack Breakfast at the Diplomatico on yuppified College Street. We sucked back a quick coffee (me) and scotch (Jack), and then walked around for a bit, hitting a bank machine and picking up cigarettes. I knew I was in for an enjoyable interview when Jack asked the variety store lady if he could have the pack "with the kids on it.""They're hard to find," he smirked, "and look at these kids." The two kids, under the warning about second hand smoke, are really petulant looking, with their arms folded tightly and their faces smug and scolding. I tried out a mean joke, saying that the kids were so ugly as to actually deserve cancer. He laughed. I relaxed. How bad could the interview be if he was prepared to laugh at a cancer joke?
As we headed to a not-very-College-Street pub, Jack asked me about my day-job (teacher, middle school). After I talked about that for a while, I let him know that I was fairly unsure about how to make a proper interview happen. The format in good interviews - a single question followed by a long, articulate monologue - was nice to read, but seemed an awkward way to actually converse.
He suggested we just talk, because he was curious to know about me, and Bad MonkeyX, too. I suggested that afterwards, perhaps I could just re-chunk it and make it look like an interview. We laughed about interviews that asked rock stars about their opinions on world issues. Then, as soon as we were seated, we talked about the war in Afghanistan.
I pull out my copy of Helms Alee, Jack's chapbook of short, untitled stories. He thanks me for buying it, and I tell him that I want to ask my wife to read a couple of the stories, which are witty and whimsical and full of exclamation marks. He asks me about her, and I rave on and on. Then I remember that the interview is supposed to be about Jack. I have to remind myself of this all night.
Jack Breakfast: This is really the first interview?
Bad MonkeyX: Yes.
Jack: How exciting! What an honour, I say.
Bmx: Cheers.
Jack: I give you free reign to just make stuff up.
Bmx: All right, regarding the war in Afghanistan, Jack is… Jack: Say I'm totally pro. Put a lot of racial stuff. Use the word "towelheads." Bmx: I think, not counting all the awfulness, that this is a really funny war. I love it that the Taliban are complaining on TV about the bombings. I guess it's a good thing for the world that people are upset that people are dying in a war. The next step will be to go, "Well, I guess we shouldn't have those anymore." Jack: What amazes me is, when you look at Bin Laden, he has a sort of a sweet face. He seems like a sweetheart, he looks a lot younger than he is. He's in his 50s, but he looks like he's in his 30s. Bmx: Thirties with a good beard. Jack: He looks like a good person. If he asked me for money on the street, I'd probably give it to him. Bmx: "Just don't buy any weapons with it." Jack: No.
We order. He loves his beer. I love my beer. He loves Steve Martin's book Cruel Shoes, and I get all excited and tell him that I had considered photocopying him a page from that book, because his stories reminded me of it. It sounds like a lie, but it's true.Bmx: Are you married?
Jack: I have a girlfriend. Bmx: Long term? Jack: Seven months, which is the longest for me. She's great and I'm really happy. We went to the liquor store together, which was a real treat. I - I like to drink a little bit. It's a little hobby. Anyway, I was really excited. I was with this girl, and all this booze, and it was… just a great setting. I had gone to a casino, which is another hobby, and I had won. And I wanted to buy a bottle of this really great Scotch, and she wouldn't let me. She said I should spend it on the studio, cause it was the price of a half-day in the studio. Bmx: That's all right advice, really. You could go out and have a glass of that scotch– Jack: That's the amazing thing: your tastebuds are numb after the first drink, so you could drink swill after that. Bmx: My brother recently had his picture taken with a monkey at the Singapore Zoo - you reminded me of this with the liquor store thing - and the monkey was being held– Jack: I'd do that. If it was under 20 bucks, I'd do it. Bmx: Of course. The monkey trainer was a beautiful woman with big brown eyes, and he said sitting there with this beautiful girl and a monkey was a transcendent moment, one of the best things that had ever happened to him.
We order some beers from the friendly waitress, and Jack is flirty, in a Jimmy Stewart kind of way. There's something about Mr. Breakfast that is inherently old fashioned - something that hints that he would have, in another time, been exactly the same person, writing tunes for jazz singers and trying to make the odd dollar writing film scripts for Hollywood. I can imagine him a melancholy drunk, and I cannot imagine him at a rave on E. He's got a gentleness and a light sadness about him, and we talk about this, the beauty of sadness, the clarity of that emotion. He asks me if I think the album (Rock and Roll) is overly sad.
Jack: Can I tell you something I'm excited about? Bmx: Of course. Jack: I - you know eBay? I was on eBay - I browse around there, because my other job is buying and selling old books, children's books, and eBay is a great place to sell because there's all these collectors there that'll buy, sometimes for silly amounts of money. I feel sort of guilty about it because you'll buy a book - you can go to some bookstore in Markham where the guy doesn't know what he has, and buy it for a dollar and sell it for a hundred. I feel so awful. Bmx: Do you? Jack: Yeah, but I guess it's "capitalism." Anyway, I was on eBay, browsing around, and there was an old book of postcards from the 1920s, an artist's rendering of nighttime scenes from Coney Island. I went there last time I was in New York, and it's a magical place. It's all decrepit, and not to sound too flaky but it's like there are ghosts walking around. Now it's just weird old people, possibly in the witness protection program, hanging out on the boardwalk, and there are all the old roller coasters overgrown with moss; it's amazing. But anyway, these postcards just look like the most wonderful place, this little dream at night. I'm gonna make one of them the cover of my next CD. It'll be perfect: there's this beautiful old Ferris wheel, all these happy couples holding hands, a full moon in the sky. Bmx: I love the cover, by the way, of Rock and Roll Album. It's such a warm picture, considering that it's an industrial looking area and it's covered in deep snow. Jack: It's Eglinton West Station. I have a spot staked out, and I've taken about a hundred pictures of it, in all seasons. I have a bit of an obsession with subways and trains. I love it that there are trains in the city, you can take them every day. They're not real trains or anything, but… Streetcars are especially romantic. You look at pictures of Toronto from 80 years ago and they're taking streetcars then, too. They're nice and archaic.
Bmx: I thought it was inherently sad, yeah, but in a nice way. It doesn't hit you over the head, and when it might, you lighten things up with a joke. I get Fondly Looking Back on Sad Things or something.And then there is a break in the recording. I don't know why, but there's a loud noise on the tape, after which I know we've travelled in time because the background music is Duran Duran, halfway through "Hungry Like the Wolf." The music playing all night was the music of my youth, not Duran Duran per se, but lots of early 80s stuff: "Lunatic Fringe," "New Song," "Only the Lonely" by the Motels. Elvis Costello, Violent Femmes, Talking Heads.Jack: Okay, good. Because my girlfriend'll say, "It's so sad!" And I say, "It's not that sad." I'm not that sad.
Bmx: There's a lot of youth on the record.
Jack: I think a lot of that is looking back on the … high school experience I never had. Because I was just sitting in a corner. I didn't have any of that nice high school stuff, you know, I was this weird kid and– Bmx: That's in the book: "While you were smoking behind the portables and pulling down the little girls' sweatpants, I was locked in here in the dark with my black keys and my white keys and my little dreams big enough to swallow you whole." There's a thing for people like you, and me, where you want to be famous for revenge. So people go, "You?!" Jack: "Hey, wasn't that that guy…?" Bmx: "You were, like, nobody!" Jack: Yeah. Bmx: Do you have that? Jack: The closest thing to that that ever happened was with the girl I took to the prom, which was a disaster. She only went with me because she'd tried to get a better date and he'd bailed out on her. Bmx: Ow. Jack: So she went with me. Ahh, anyway, she lives in a small town in northern Ontario now. And she gets the Toronto Star, and she saw an article about me. And she said, "Oh my god, that's the guy I went to prom with!" So she emailed me and got in touch. She came to see me play last week. It was good. I was sort of envious - well, I was happy for her - she's a mother of two and everything. But at the same time I think she was sort of envious of what I was doing. Something different, I guess. Bmx: Something public. Jack: Yeah, I guess, on a real small scale.
We are talking, it becomes clear, about bands, and I've already asked the question, "Who do you love? What are your desert island albums?" I may have missed one, but when the tape resumes, Jack has just returned from the loo, and he volunteers this:
Thinking back, I know what I'm missing on the tape: he laughed about the title of his album, saying, "I don't even really like rock and roll. It's not a rock album. I didn't listen to any rock and roll as a kid - I was really into classical music. I sit down now and I try to play some of the music I could play when I was twelve... I can't. It's bad I guess..."Jack: Here's a pick: this would have to go on the island with me. Gram Parsons had two songs on two albums that I'd die for: one is "A Song for You," and the other is called "$1000 Wedding." There's different ways to write songs, of course: some people tell stories, others use poetic imagery, and Gram Parsons used both, a great combination, and it's so nice. I'd also bring the Bob Dylan album, New Morning. It has two of the the sweetest songs I've ever heard. One's called "Winterlude" and the other's called "Sign on the Window." A lot of my favourite albums may not be great albums, but they have two songs that I think are great. I'd die for them.
Big Star's Third record, two songs on that: "Kanga-Roo" and "Stroke It Noel." [He ponders and I drink.] One of the best live shows I've ever seen was Lyle Lovett at Convocation Hall. I went alone, I had some girl on my mind, I sat in the balcony, the music just washed over me and made everything all right. He was so cool.
He praised the Velvet Underground, two live albums in particular. He loves them. And I asked him whether he is part of any scene in Toronto. While he seems to have a lot of friends who play in bands, and occasionally accompany him in live shows, he says that Toronto doesn't seem to have scenes, that it just has a whole lot of bands. His girlfriend, Shannon, who gave him the good advice about buying scotch, is the drummer for Boygina. "I can't tell my mom what she does, simply because I can't say that word to my mother," he laughs.
We also spent some time talking about the state of radio currently, and from there went on to discussing the marketing side of music, the business side. I asked him whether or not, were he offered a major label deal, he'd take it. His answer was a quick and positive No. "I don't expect to ever make a dime doing this," he said. I was heartened by this, but wondered later if this conversation had happened a million times between young interviewers and young musicians, if this was where the "selling out" battle had always started. But if there was ever a time in which musicians had more options than just starving or selling, it's now. Jack's albums have both been independently produced and both are pretty widely available. Just before we met, I checked if it was for sale in Soundscapes, a great shop on College, and it was. And you can buy one here. And there's another, apparently, a collaboration between Jack and his songwriter friend Steven Fogel, called New Onion. He's promised to send it along, and we'll review it here when it comes.
Bmx: What's it like to change your name? How permanent is that? Do you think Sting's wife calls him Sting? Jack: God, I hope not. Bmx: What do your friends call you? Jack: David. The only time I introduce myself as Jack is in a musical context. Do you want to know where it comes from? Bmx: Tell. Jack: When my dad was probably about my age, he had some friends who were going to be sued. I don't know what for, but the only chance they had was to get somebody to impersonate a doctor, and to appear before a judge to testify for some reason. Very illegal. And my dad was sort of a punk, and so he did it, and he came up with the name Jack Breakfast. Bmx: Does he like it that you're Jack Breakfast? Jack: He loves it. He's great. He has strange hobbies. He's built an aviary in the backyard, and mates Australian finches. And he's a shortwave radio guy, talks to people all over the world on his radio in the basement. He's so supportive of this music stuff. If you have a passion, he says, you'd be a fool not to follow it. Bmx: Tell me about being a multi-instrumentalist. You sound like a good band on Rock and Roll Album, and it's all you. What do you start with? Jack: I trained classically on piano. I guess it depends, though. If it's a piano song, I play the piano first. If it's a guitar song, I start with guitar. And I always play drums second, to give it some sort of rhythm. Then I just overdub everything. Bmx: Is it better to play all the instruments, or would you like to record with a band? Jack: Oh, no, I'd prefer to do it on my own. I like to do it on my own because it's quicker. And even though I don't have the technical ability to play exactly what I hear in my head on drums or bass, I can, I think, come pretty close. And I like the fact that it sounds a bit sloppy at times. I think as long as I make albums, I'll do it on my own. Bmx: Do you record at home? Jack: No, it's all in the studio. Outside, I walk around singing parts in my head, or in the shower. I think about the songs one at a time and come up with stuff. But a lot of it's just improvised in the studio. Most of the parts: the electric guitar, the bass parts, those are. For some reason I think it's really important to come up with it on the fly. You know, I record the vocals and the guitar or piano and then just do whatever feels most comfortable at that moment. And then it's done, it's captured, don't fuck with it, that's it. I don't think there were too many things on the CD that were more than one take. I guess I want it to sound quick and raw. Bmx: It works. Jack: I guess so. On some level I'd like to say, maybe you should just take a song and try to perfect it. Make it into a very well-crafted pop song. But I lose interest, and I think that it won't be as honest if I do that. Bmx: That's the approach you took with Helms Alee also, right? Jack: Yeah, those are thrown out too. And what a lot of people will tell me - and they're probably right - they'll say,"That's a really good idea. If only you had really crafted it and perfected it, it could have been great." But I kind of disagree. There's something to be said about something that's… you get this idea and boom, it's done. You move on to the next thing. Especially music, which is supposed to be this honest, pure thing. Just let it tumble out and whatever happens, happens. It won't be perfect, but it'll be honest.
Interested folks: Jack's web house is full of fun: sample mp3s, order the CDs and book, and find out when he's playing. Check it out. ut when he's playing. Check it out.