July Fourth Toilet Show at Vancouver Art Gallery Ends Early Due to June Twenty Seventh Heroin Use in Toilet

Robert Dayton has a bone to pick with me. About four years ago I wrote an article about a film he starred in, Male Fantasy, and said he resembled Terry Richardson. Dayton wants everyone to know that he’s had his look since 1993 and it’s inspired by Richard Harris or Lee Hazelwood and not Richardson who he thinks is a no-talent, Johnny-Come-Lately from New York City. I have a bone to pick with Robert Dayton. There are people doing heroin at his shows.

His band July Fourth Toilet was playing at one the Vancouver Art Galley’s popular FUSE parties to promote their new album “Balls Boogie.” The event, called Go KRAZY! All Night, was meant to be an all night musical celebration of VAG’s current exhibit. The turn out was excellent and even someone from The Georgia Straight was there to pen this half-assed review “My friends went into the room where July Fourth Toilet was performing its eight-hour show, but they quickly came out as they said it was boring, crowded, and sweltering in the room.” One can’t help but wonder if the writer was even there though as his review has no mention of the show getting shut down.

Around 1:30 AM Go KRAZY! All Night got crazy with a capital H. In the middle of an epic July Fourth Toilet set spread out over three rooms, the plug got pulled and the show was over. The reason the all night show was shut down early was because, oh and this is just incredible, a couple was busted shooting heroin in the Vancouver Fucking Art Gallery. This is the first time I’ve ever heard of a show be cancelled due to heroin abuse. However it’s almost poetically fitting that this happened at a July Fourth Toilet album release show, a band that’s both dark and funny.

I watched Dayton knock back a bubble tea and he told me all about the difficulties of making it as an artist in our fair city, the new July Fourth Toilet album, and the mess that went down at the art gallery .

Dayton: I’ve been doing stuff in this city since the early Nineties and most people don’t know or care because there’s no infrastructure here. Lots of culture but no infrastructure. I’ve been doing my thing forever. I’m sort of semi-tooting my own horn here but I’m trying to make a point. Near 99-00 I did a newspaper. I co-edited it and co-created it. It eventually became a comic book funded by Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle money; it was called The Drippy Gazette. I was a cultural voice with the free column in Terminal City and I didn’t get paid one red cent for any of that shit. Well, I got paid for a brief period of time but then they reneged on that.

That was the beginning of the end for Terminal City as soon as they started paying people.
Getting to my point. Do I have any paying writing gigs right now? No. Is there anything I wanna write for in this city? No, not really. I’ve got a Bachelor of Fine Arts. I make art and have it on display quite regularly. Granted, I did the thing at the VAG the other night with July Fourth Toilet. I was part of the whole Nog A Dod scene so I have some stuff in the Nog A Dod book. All that west coast psychedelia from the Nineties. It took a publisher from Chicago to put that book out probably because no one in Canada would put it out. It’s making waves all over Europe. So I got that. But do I have any art shows coming up or any interest? No. I’ve put out six albums and I’ve got two more in the can. Do I have any label interest or support? No. I did a movie Male Fantasy and it’s finally out on DVD. I didn’t get paid for it and the director Blaine Thurier didn’t get paid because it was a no-budget film. I did all the festivals and I got an agent out of the deal so that was a plus. I actually got an agent out of the deal who says he’ll rep me when I move to Toronto. So that’s why I’m leaving Vancouver. Maybe nothing will happen in Toronto but I’m living in a city that’s for the rich and cultureless. I think I’d be more successful doing shit somewhere.

A lot of people say that.
I’m not the only one!

My theory on why there are so many talented people in this city struggling to get by is because people have better things to do than cultural events in this city. Maybe not for you and me but…
…In their minds.

Right. We have mountains, and beaches and forests. Look at a city like Toronto. What else is there to do there except cultural events?
Jason McLean’s out there. Jason McLean called me and he said “My God, it’s insane. People go out over here.” It was his wife’s birthday and within 24 hours they planned a party and 40 people showed up. And they just moved to Toronto. He says there’s no limit of cultural stuff to do there. People go out, they do it, they partake, it happens. Here, I’m struggling and no one could give a rat’s ass who I am and yet I do all those things I mentioned. No one cares.

Why don’t you tell me about the new July Fourth Toilet album. It’s out now and you’re releasing it independently?
Yeah, no label would touch it because it’s not easily classifiable by genre. People want stuff that they can market easily. Not stuff that’s good. I might sound full of myself here but I’m very critical. I’ve written for years, listened to music for years and had to review albums for years. I myself also have to be very critical with myself and make sure what’s coming out better be worth coming out as opposed to something that’s just adding to the cultural dung heap. Every album I make has gotta be good. Sure there might be flaws I notice later but generally I think I’m pretty successful. So it doesn’t easily fit into a genre and it’s a little bit funny. It’s dark too. Comedy people would put it out if it was straight comedy. But it’s also got weird instrumentals that definitely aren’t funny. Then it’s too funny for other labels to put out. Also, labels are folding everywhere.

Are you just going to give it away or are you going to try and sell it?
No, it’s on vinyl. It’s gotta be a vinyl record. It’s designed to have two sides. Everything about it had to be on vinyl but it comes with a free MP3 download.

So tell me about how the FUSE show at the Vancouver Art Gallery came about cuz it sounded like an interesting event.
If you go to the site there’s a whole history of the band that’s done in the first person. We broke it down year-by-year and show by show for 14 years. Every show has a different context and a different theme. I think people who run galleries might really like that. It wasn’t too hard to pitch when they found out that, as a band, we’re malleable. That malleability showed that we’re not just a regular four-piece rock band. That made it easy for them to book us for this all night party. They seemed like they were into it from the start. When we saw the space we began to shape our performance.

What was the theme you went with for this performance?
Here’s the thing, we wanted to make the most amazing disappointing second album ever. The first album was warm psychedelic pop. This is the most amazing disappointing second album ever. A mind-blowing, disappointing second album. We want you to keep coming back to it again and again and go “what the hell is going on here.” As a bit of loose template there was this budget department store record called “Up Up and Away.” You’d see it and you’d think “Oh good, I love that song [by Jimmy Webb].” Turns out it’s just a bunch of session hacks plugging away at that song and then it’s all their own songs after that. No covers after that. So they’re doing a cover of “Up Up and Away” then it’s all their own songs. Then you flip the record over and you listen to the second side and all the sudden there’s these four psychedelic rock instrumentals. It’s compelling. So we used that as a loose template. We wanted to open with a very innocuous song “Me and Bobby McGee” [by Kris Kristofferson], which is kind of like “Up Up and Away.” We had to open with a song that is just so common, then move on with our own hard driving rock. The other caveat was it needed G-Funk keyboards so we also added some G-Funk keyboards. Then when you flip the record over—that’s why it’s a record—and it opens with the song “Thanks Drugs.” You’ll notice it’s almost the same backing track of “Stoned on You” which is on the first side with completely different lyrics, harmonies and melodies going on. That’s because with these department store albums sometime you’d buy “MacArthur Park” by the Stone Jammy Rock Band. Then you’d go, why is there this song called “Most of All it’s You” the same as this song called “Lisa” that’s on the Generation Gap album. I always found that kind of funny; renaming songs and putting them on different albums by different bands. So we wanted to do that our own way…. So we did that and then we put in our five instrumentals. It couldn’t rock though. So we took the rock away and had very exploratory visions in sound. It’s a bit of a trip and then ends with a nice warm ballad. We wanted a nice soft song to end it as you’re going on this intense journey of substance abuse and stereotypical visions of masculinity.

Substance abuse and stereotypical visions of masculinity? That’s a very nice segue into me asking you more about what went on at the FUSE show.
Clancy Dennehy has a 30-second on the record called “Enter the Princess.” He re-envisioned it live as a 40 minute piece. It’s an intense little piece but he stretched it to 40 minutes and did it in the Rotunda, which is that big circular stairway. So there are all these people in robes—male and female chanters—he’s got his gongs and this weird projected light in the centre and some Kokoro dancers. We were doing some cosmic synthy stuff in Courtroom B, on the third floor, a lot like what is on side B of the album. The Rotunda thing wrapped up around 10. Then we played Courtroom A, which was like side A of the album. Hard driving rock in a cold classic courtroom… it kind of worked. So at 10 and midnight we just did a really good hard-driving rock set. It was awesome in this nice wooden courtroom with all these beautiful rugs. Meanwhile, there was a lot of other stuff going on in the gallery but I didn’t really know about so much as I was too busy running around.

Was it well attended?
It was but people seemed unsure how to find us. So the rock sets were awesome. Then we moved into courtroom B and we started adding to what was going on in there. Because there were musicians in there the whole time doing their thing. So we started adding to it. July Fourth Toilet was playing across the hall from each other. We weren’t listening to what we were doing but we were playing simultaneously. We’re really starting to get rolling—just building and building and building—then all the sudden the lights go out.

What time was this?
Oh god, this would be after midnight. Around 1:30. So the lights go out and Jay Mirus from Much Music goes to find another lighting source and we’re noticing there’s less people. Where did all the people go? This guy tells us that the security guard was not letting people up. I went “why not?” and he said “I don’t know, I almost had trouble coming back in and I went to use the washroom.” This is crazy because the show was supposed to go till 5am. Well, I find out that they made a big decision to shut the FUSE down.

And why was that?
Well, I heard from a few authorities that basically in the gallery there were a few people who turned the art gallery into a shooting gallery. Mixing some heroin with some original George Herriman in the comic section of the gallery. I was kind of suggesting, well why don’t you just take them out to the alley? Why let one bad apple spoil the party? They also said there was a lot of post-bar crowd coming and it was just too much to handle.

Would you be able to speculate if it one was one of the rowdy bar people who was shooting heroin?
I don’t know who was shooting heroin. Maybe it was an art piece?

What do you think it is about this show that brought out opiate users?
I have some theories. But it wasn’t so much that. It was these rowdies wanting to fight that I heard about. Granted, I do think that the security guards there didn’t seem like they could handle too much. They seemed challenged. They didn’t have the proper answers to questions. I asked one of these guys a million questions and his only answer was “I don’t know.” The security could not handle this. Then again, you look at our history of our city in the last 30 years and there is a history in this city of people rioting, showing up at fireworks with knives…

And now people showing up at the art gallery with heroin?
Yeah, but I’m not even thinking about that but the rowdies that showed up along with that. The post-bar rowdies. This city’s got that history. Then to counteract that, we have this over aggressive authority figures that act on way too much power. “Oh well, since we’re here at the GnR riot, we might as well pummel these people who just want to get home that have nothing to do with the concert as well.” That’s what this city is like. Its too extreme. It’s absurd. One person I know’s theory is that it dates back to Mayor Tom Campbell who had the whole Gastown riots and that abuse of authority. We have poor city planning. City planning is run by developers and people with money. It’s like “Hey, having a bunch of bars all on the same street brought nothing but problems to other cities, but hey, let’s see if our city can do this.”

Have you been on Granville on the weekend? It’s terrifying.
It’s disturbing. At my work people come in asking what to do. I tell them to avoid Hastings because it’s unpleasant but it’s not really dangerous. It’s got preservation through neglect. It’s a neglected street, not for long though. But where you’re gonna find trouble is Granville. Walk along Granville and that’s where the problem is. Don’t go along Granville. It’s scary. It’s true, you could get seriously hurt. It’s blocked off, there’s paddy wagons, it’s a nightmare. It’s like “Hey, we need to find a solution to this problem that we ourselves caused. We need to find a solution that we, the people in authority, caused.” That’s the city’s mentality and this is just an extension. Can you have a nice safe all-night gallery event? It worked last year but I guess not this year. We had a great time, I gotta say that. It was awesome. The show was awesome but it’s a shame we had to quit the show early. One gal thought the show was still going and was wondering what was going on next. I went “No, didn’t you hear?” She was so depressed. People paid $20 so they could get violent or shoot heroin? Like what the? In an art gallery?

Why would you do this?
Would this happen in any other city?

No.
No, this would not happen in another city. City’s can do these big events with ten times as many people and there’s never a situation like this. Why do these kind of things repeatedly happen in our city?

I wish I had an answer.

July Fourth Toilet’s Album “Balls Boogie” is available at better record stores that actually sell records.
July Fourth Toilet’s Website
July Fourth Toilet on MySpace