Week of January 12, 2006, Issue #534
MUSIC
Mercury rising
By DAVID BERRY
If every little kid got to be what they wanted when they grew up, surely the
majority of us who weren’t busy hopping around on the moon or being firetrucks
would be spending our time on the stage, sweat-soaked and rocking for a screaming
audience of off-duty astronauts, ponies with braided hair and fellow rockstars.
It’s that dream of fame and fortune and playing a guitar with your teeth
that drives many a youth to disregard their complete lack of musical training
and play the living shit out of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on a $40
L’il Eddie Van Halen starter guitar in his or her basement. Of course,
childhood dreams being what they are, the only audience the vast majority of
aspiring teenage musicians end up playing for is their dad, and his screaming
is more of the, “If you don’t stop that terrible noise and start
doing better in math, I’m throwing that goddamn thing in the dumpster!”
variety.
Consider Our Mercury guitarist/vocalist Ben Stevenson and his bandmates the
happy anomaly, then. Stevenson, drummer John Watson and bassist Daniel Laxer
were the one group of Edmonton teens who showed dad who was boss, rising to
local stardom at the tender age of 14 under the name Misdemeanor. Becoming renowned
as much for their pubescence as their punk rock—call them The Subatomics
of 1997—the trio played a host of gigs in Edmonton and around the country
with considerably more mature punkers like Good Riddance and Jughead’s
Revenge at a time when most kids their age were trying to hide erections in
French class.
“It was great,” says Stevenson of his young glory days. “It
was kind of like it felt special, but at the same time it was something that
I knew any kid could do, and it was like we were just in on a secret that no
one else was. I walked around school kind of, well, content with myself. Not
with my nose in the air or anything; I never acted like a little—well,
maybe sometimes I acted like a little punkass, but you know, it was something
that we took pride in.”
Stevenson also admits, though, that when success comes with your youthful indiscretion,
it can colour your perceptions of what exactly it’s like to be in a band.
That said, he’s definitely grateful that the group managed to avoid most
of the hardships that come in the early stages of band-dom.
“At first, it was almost like, ‘Oh, we go to shows, and we play
with other people who are just in bands’; we didn’t really think
about the struggles just associated with playing that a lot of people have,”
he says. “But then, you start to have friends who want to start a band,
and you hear about how much difficulty they’re having just finding people
to play with, and you just realize that you are sort of lucky with what you’ve
got.”
One can’t remain a kid forever, of course, and Stevenson and the band
have certainly grown well beyond being the babes of the Edmonton punk scene.
Looking for a bit of adventure and a bit of a break from the “kids who
rock” thing, they changed their name to Our Mercury and moved to Montreal
after graduation, only to return a year later after figuring Montreal didn’t
have a lot more to offer than Edmonton. They recently signed with Winnipeg indie
label Smallman Records, who are releasing their newest full-length, From Below,
and added a fourth member, The Operators 780’s keyboardist Eric Budd,
who hasn’t even been with the band long enough to get in a press photo.
The changes and years have given Stevenson, by now an old hand at this punk-rock
thing, a little more of a relaxed view of the band then he used to have, and
he says that, come what may, he’s generally just happy that he can do
something he has dreamed about—and, you know, actually done—since
he was seven.
“Maybe even a few years ago it was like the band had to keep going, and
if I let go of it, it would have fallen apart,” he explains. “But
in the last little while, I think I’ve found that if it’s worthwhile,
it’ll keep going. Obviously, a lot of who I am, and a lot of who we are
has come about because of the band, but at the same time, we’re a little
less ferocious about it than when we were 15.” V
Our Mercury
With The Pants Situation and The Rocky Fortune • Sidetrack Café
• Sat, Jan 14 (8 pm)