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Snake Brothers

Messing with heads

From 1989 to 2000 (roughly), I hosted a hip hop radio show on the Dalhousie University station - CKDU - in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Through the years, many an aspiring rapper came through to drop off a demo tape or to freestyle live on air. One fateful day in 1992 or 1993, a crew from the town of Truro showed up to do their thing. They were called Hip Club Groove. One of the members of the group went by the name C.L. Scar. He left the group before they recorded their first album and changed his name to Sixtoo.

Poster for the old radio show.

I’m friends with all the guys from Hip Club to this day. But Sixtoo and I clicked on a deeper level right away. As I recall, he was the first among the guys to re-locate from Truro to Halifax. We always seemed to live within a few blocks of each other. We hung out a lot and when he went to work on his first album, Superstar Props, I made some beats for him. Not long after Superstar Props came out, we decided to band together as The Sebutones.

Sebutones at play

Quick note on the name… One day I was in the shampoo aisle of my neighborhood pharmacy and saw a bottle of high-powered dandruff formula called Sebutone. I knew a musician-guy named Sebastian and suggested that if he started a band, he should call it Sebastian And The Sebutones. He just laughed. But I was hung up on the idea that The Sebutones would be a good band name, so I used it myself. Running with the theme, Sixtoo and I named our first album Psoriasis. The thinking was: we mess with people’s heads. Ha ha. So dumb. 

Inspiration

In the weeks before Sixtoo and I started recording together, we had many long discussions about what the philosophy and sound of our enterprise should be. Strangely enough, we talked about the 1950s a lot - science fiction from that era and the 50s pinup queen, Bettie Page. We talked (and laughed) about the idea of robots having emotions. We talked about making songs with slower tempos than what was common in hip hop at the time. Jungle and drum and bass music was popular in those days and we both had a kind of resentment toward it. We talked about the idea of flipping the formula of that stuff - instead of slow bass lines with fast drums, we’d do slow drums with fast bass lines. 

Some early Sebutones press coverage

The offending poster, starring Bettie Page

The first song we recorded together was called “Sebutone Def”. Fast bass. Slow drums. Weird science-y lyrics. On a fully DIY basis, we pressed the song on 12” vinyl and gave almost all the copies away to DJs across North America.

Insert included with the “Sebutone Def” 12”

“Sebutone Def” hype stickers

Let’s talk about the b-side to “Sebutone Def” for a second. The song is called “To Mock A Killingbird” and we decided to make a music video for it. Sixtoo was taking classes at a technical trade school at the time and the school had a media room with video equipment. We snuck into the school late one night and filmed. I remember we ran around to other departments looking for stuff we could use as props. The school must have offered courses for nurses or paramedics or something because we found all of these human anatomy models and used that stuff. We also splurged on several rolls of tin foil with which we fashioned an assortment of hats. 

The Sebutones live! Graffiti recently spotted in Toronto

When we were shooting, there was a video monitor positioned high above and to the right side of the camera. I suggested to Sixtoo that while we performed our verses, it would be funny to stare at ourselves in the monitor with our eyes bugged out as wide as possible. I couldn’t get through it without laughing. Sixtoo was a total pro. Nailed it. One thing he couldn’t figure out was properly syncing the video and the sound. None of it mattered. The result was the greatest music video ever made. And for some strange reason, the Canadian music video TV channel (Much Music) used to play the video ALL THE TIME!

Hot on the heels of the “Sebutone Def” 12”, we recorded the Psoriasis album. Sixtoo eventually became an incredible beat-maker, but at this point, he wasn’t making beats yet and so I handled those duties. It was 1995/96 and the SP-1200 sampler was still new to me. It shows on this album. I ran a bunch of the samples into the machine way too hot and they’re distorted. You can hear it in the bass in a handful of the songs. Drives me nuts. But otherwise, I friggin’ LOVE this album. Technical issues aside, I think the beats are really cool. I think my vocal delivery is better on this album than on anything else I ever did and I like how Sixtoo’s voice and mine sound together. Conceptually, we were on some other shit. I went back and listened to this album a few months ago for the first time in many years and my mind was kinda blown by one song in particular: “Flux Capacity”.

First-run Psoriasis artwork - in questionable taste

The idea with “Flux Capacity” is that hip hop is as old as humanity and civilization itself and we lay it all out with references and parallels to important moments in human history. It’s bananas how well it works. How the hell we came up with that, I do not know. 

Official Psoriasis artwork - also in questionable taste

For as much as I love the Psoriasis album and hold it up as perhaps my proudest moment, I think there’s a red flag in the track list - a harbinger of bad things to come; a first step down a bad road: “Security Screws”.

‘Tones in action

Sixtoo and I both have solo songs on Psoriasis. Sixtoo has “Peach Remix”. I have “Security Screws”. “Security Screws” was the first sad-ass/woe-is-me song I ever wrote. Emo shit, some would say. It’s about how I was beginning to feel like I was out-growing my home town and wanting to leave. Boo hoo. Who did I think I was? Friggin’ Sarah McLachlan? I managed to steer clear of the sad road on my next album - Language Arts (which perhaps we’ll explore in the next post) - but I returned to it on the Vertex album and with increasing frequency on every album after that. 

There’s conflict in my feelings about the sad, personal songs I wrote over the years because it’s probably fair to say I made my name with songs like “The Bachelor Of Science” from the Vertex album, the song about my mom (“Ice”) on Man Overboard, the Stella Kuen song on Square, “Tired Out” on Talkin’ Honky Blues and so on and so forth. You might argue that “The Centaur” fits into that category. But I wish I never went down that path. It’s a whole can of worms and I’ll get into it deeper in future posts. From where I stand today, those song represent weakness and a loss of focus. That road took me to places I now wish I never went. Like I said, we’ll get into it. 

Early-days Sebutones gig poster

Despite its flaws, I love Psoriasis. I think it’s a focused record. I think it’s fun. I think it’s interesting. I think it’s something different but with a pure hip hop spirit. It has energy. Unlike most of my albums, it’s not too long. I think of it as part of the peak, for sure. As I said in an earlier post, revisiting the album this past winter fired me up. It was one of the things that inspired me to make the new album, King Of Drums. My hope was to capture some of the same focus, fun and spirit. And here’s some good news: things are in the works now for Psoriasis to be issued on vinyl for the first time. It’s coming. I’ll keep you up to date on that. 

A few years after Psoriasis, the Sebutones recorded another album called 50/50 Where It Counts. I’ll break that one down for you in a future post too. 

And yeah, we’ll take a look at Language Arts next. High art. Until then…

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