This is a test
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations
About This Book
Jim Guthrie: Who Needs What tells the story of a musician whose twenty-year career has been spent either at the forefront of Canada's indie rock renaissance or in the background of some of the most popular indie games, films, and ad campaigns of the past decade. Through interviews with Jim, his collaborators, and fans, this book explores how a self-described "Seabiscuit" earned a cult following and became a major influence to musicians at home and abroadāall without really having to leave his basement.
Frequently asked questions
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlegoās features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan youāll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, weāve got you covered! Learn more here.
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Yes, you can access Jim Guthrie by Andrew Hood in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Media & Performing Arts & Music Biographies. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Subtopic
Music BiographiesCHAPTER 1
How We Get Old
āWhereās Jim?ā
āOutside being useless.ā
ā from Riverās Edge
(as quoted in āRiverās Edgeā from Victim of Lo-Fi)
When I bug Aaron Riches for his memories of the young James Edward Guthrie he met at Waverley Drive PS, he laughs: āJim had the exact same haircut as he does now. He really looked the same. Jim hasnāt changed. I think he was born how he is.
āOf courseā¦ā Aaron tempers his amusement some. āEveryone grows.ā
Three quarters of what would become Royal City met at this time, at Waverley. Both Aaron and Jim are Guelph-born. Simon Osborne, bassist for that band and player on most of Jimās albums, moved from Ottawa in Grade 7.
Simon was into skateboarding and made friends that way after relocating. Through a skating friend he heard about this ācool guy from across the streetā who had a Vision Psycho Stick5 and could do kickflips. āSo I met Jim,ā he remembers, āand he could do the kickflips that were described. And I thought Jim seemed pretty awesome, too.ā
The earliest first Jimpression comes from Steve McCuen, childhood chum and collaborator on a hard-to-place project, Mandrills.6 In āRap Song 2000,ā Steve rhymes his memories of first meeting Jim: āI can remember being back in grade 3 / Itās in Septemberāā82āitās where I first met Guthrieā¦ He sold his Mite-Y-Mite bike to my younger brother Mike / and told us how to ghost ride the damn bike.ā
āI just remember getting huge laughs,ā Jim recalls when I ask him about ghost riding, a trick where you leave a moving bike and it continues independent of you. āYou did that and everyoneād be on the grass. If you could make a bunch of kids laugh by having skill enough to jump off your bike in such a way that it coasts silentlyā¦ I was one of those kids who had, like, no confidence, but who had hand-eye coordination.
āAnd I could throw a rock,ā he goes on, āLike, really far. Or straight up in the air and everyone would be like, āHoly shit!ā You couldnāt even see it anymore. And it would take 30 seconds to hit the ground. I remember moments like that. Just doing little things that gained immediate [attention].
āEven stillā¦ I went to the cottage with a few people [recently] and I pulled out the olā rock throwinā arm, and I still had it. I always attributed it to a good, stout frame. And I have these whippy, elasticy arms. I think thereās a real kind of physics there. I think if you got somebody to measure my body, theyād be like, āThis is optimal. These are the dimensions youād use to build one of those David and Goliath slingshots.ā
āI made one of those [slingshots], too. When I was younger I used to be really crafty and self-reliant. But the whole while I was trying to choke down a stutter.ā
Two years older than Jim, Stephen Evans met Jim on the block. āHe was about 12 or 13,ā he says. āI think I remember him stammering a lot and being quite shy, but he was also very athletic. He was built like a little gymnast. He was an amazing skateboarder and he was an amazing breakdancer. Well, not an amazing breakdancer, but he spent time learning that stuff. He could moonwalk. I didnāt know anybody who could moonwalk.
āHe moves so beautifully, this little man.ā
But Stephen stresses that Jim was never a show-off. āI think he just liked devoting himself to learning something and seeing if he could pull it off.ā
Jimās character, like his music, is a unique balance of reservation and razzmatazz. Heās never been someone to trumpet a project, but the work itself, and his dedication to it, has always had such a visible aplomb that drawing attention is inevitable.
To hear it from Jimās friends, the guy stood out in adolescence; to hear it from Jim, it was the opposite. āWhen I was younger,ā he says, āI didnāt like being the centre of attention because normally, when I was the centre of attention, I was stuttering in front of a class. So I sort of learned being the centre of attention doesnāt always feel good.
āI used to think of myself as a bit of a Seabiscuit,ā7 he says. āIn as much as Seabiscuit is sort of a lame horse that nobody wanted. I wasnāt super book smart when I was younger, and I had that stutter, and when I was born my legs were all kinda twisted and turned in. I had to wear casts on my legs for the first little bit of my life. I was always just sorta short and runty. Now thatās all in the past, and I guess it was a big deal at the time. Now, when I put [those issues] under a microscope, they all seem like big little things, a great deal of who I was when I was younger.
āBut I learned a lot from those early struggles and it sort of showed me how to adapt and reinvent myself over the years.ā
Split grades separated Jim and Steve McCuen for most of elementary school, but they met up again in junior high. They were still into MAD magazine, but by the eighth grade were also getting into The Watchmen and Frank Millerās revamping of the DC Comics mainstays. The tone of MAD and the grittiness of this new wave in the mainstream made for an easy transition to underground comics. If they could find him, they were reading Crumb.
It was a confluence of the comics and hip hop that helped them shake their early musical interestsāfor Jim, Howard Jones; for Steve, Phil Collins. āBy ā89, De La Soul had dropped Three Feet High and Rising,ā Steve says. āWe were hip hop. We loved it. But then by ā91, Sonic Youth was singing with Public Enemy,8 and we were like, āSonic Youth might be cool.ā When [hip hop] started getting all dolla dolla bills and bitches and hos, we sort of said, āOkay, letās differentiate ourselves from this misogyny and become alternative.āā
While the coming āalternativeā influences of bands like Sebadoh, Pavement, Ween, They Might Be Giants, and, later, The Sea and Cake, and Tortoise, would shape much of Jimās work throughout the 90s, Jimās post-millennium love of licks and movement towards a more polished production is anchored by a parallel influence of classic rock. āJim was into Queen before it...
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Epigraph
- Introduction
- Chapter 1: How We Get Old
- Chapter 2: The Royal City Home Rock Eruption
- Chapter 3: The Royal City All-Stars
- Chapter 4: An Obvious Sense
- Chapter 5: I Don't Wanna Be A Rock Star
- Chapter 6: An Experimental Cure for Acute Soul-Sickness
- About the Author