Massey Fucking Hall (Live)

In the hours following Japandroids’ set at Toronto’s Massey Hall in October 2017, drummer David Prowse quietly slipped away from his friends and family at the after-party in the theater’s downstairs bar. “I just wanted to go back on that stage again,” he tells Apple Music. “I sat there by myself and let it sink in. Imagine trying to tell yourself 10 years ago that this band that you\'re in—that’s playing to, like, 50 people at crappy little DIY spaces and punk clubs in Vancouver—is going to play a show at Massey Hall. You know?” Canada’s most iconic theater, Massey Hall is both historic landmark and national treasure—the site of legendary sets by Neil Young, Glenn Gould, Gordon Lightfoot, and Bob Dylan with The Band. That it’s not the sort of place you’d expect to find Japandroids is part of the magic of the Vancouver outfit’s first live LP. Originally recorded by the venue as part of a concert film series, *Massey F\*\*\*\*\*g Hall* finds the duo in mid-tour form—behind that year’s *Near to the Wild Heart of Life*—contending with a room that asks its audience to sit rather than stage-dive. It’s a snapshot of a band whose aspirations have broadened with each release. “Japandroids are a classic rock band in the sense that you feed off the crowds,” guitarist Brian King says. “When the crowd is bonkers, the band is bonkers. That\'s just how it works. But when it\'s a seated theater and the audience can\'t really move and can\'t really do too much, it can be almost fake to do what you would normally do. You almost have to find it from a different place.” Here, Prowse and King take us back to that night, from the start of their set to its raucous end. **Intro: Near to the Wild Heart of Life (Live)** Brian King: “Most shows on this tour, we started the set with ‘Near to the Wild Heart of Life,’ which has this long drawn outro. And the one great thing about that is it gives you a minute or two onstage before things really kick off, to just take it in, digest whatever\'s happening, look around, and really just settle in. That\'s a minute or so of just trying to shed all of this stuff from your mind and just remember that at the end of the day, you\'re playing a rock show. It probably just sounds like a drum roll and a couple of open chords to the listener, but it\'s an essential moment of the set where you just psychologically release everything and try to lose yourself in the moment.” **Near to the Wild Heart of Life (Live)** David Prowse: “I don\'t get particularly nervous before shows anymore, but I was nervous for that one. I think there\'s just a gravity of playing a really legendary venue. There’s a feeling that this might be the only time you play here, and a lot of your heroes have played this stage. You don\'t want to let yourself or let anyone else down. There\'s a bit of ‘Don\'t fuck it up, man.’ And I actually make what, to me, is a pretty glaring mistake, where I just stopped short on the third verse. I kind of like that it\'s there because that\'s where I was at: It was a big deal playing that venue and I was a little distracted.” BK: “I have quite a lot of family that lives in Toronto and then quite a lot of my family from the West Coast flew out for that show. It became a little bit of a mini reunion—even my grandpa, my only living grandparent, who’s never seen Japandroids play, flew out from Vancouver Island to see the show. On top of that, Gord Downie of The Tragically Hip had passed away the week before the show, and in sound check we learned the song we were going to do as a tribute \[1995’s ‘Nautical Disaster’\]. I was extremely nervous—Dave and I typically don\'t just learn something in sound check and then play it that night.” **Fire’s Highway (Live)** DP: “I think we liked the idea of coming out, sort of guns blazing, with some really high-energy songs out of the gate. Before ‘Fire’s Highway,’ when I was on the kick drum, is when I kind of came up for air, just looked around, and was like, ‘This is happening.’ Except I wasn\'t very eloquent. I just said, ‘Wow, Massey fucking Hall, thanks for being part of it.’” **Heart Sweats (Live)** BK: “When I was listening to this recording, I think the first song of the set, maybe you\'re a bit more tepid than you would normally be. When I listen to the second song, ‘Fire\'s Highway,’ I hear us loosening up. By the time we play ‘Heart Sweats,’ we\'ve sort made peace with the show, with the environment and the crowd and the venue. We’ve kind of found a way to be ourselves in a place that otherwise we would feel very out of place. And maybe a handful of people in the audience will get the \[Stooges\' \'1970\'\] reference to start and be like, ‘Yeah!’ There\'s a live record that I really, really loved by The Dream Syndicate, and they do that quite a bit, shucking in little bits and pieces of songs they love during the breakdowns or during the bridges. That’s one of the places where the idea comes from.” **Arc of Bar (Live)** BK: “I feel like when we were working on the record, we probably would have considered that song to be something we created in a studio, but have no idea how to pull it off live.” DP: “We were both very, very excited about that song when it finally came together. I felt like we had pushed ourselves. I think Brian had really pushed himself as a lyricist. And I think we were just much more ambitious about the kind of songs that we could write. I think we really wanted to show people the value of that song by playing it every night. I like the idea of having a live version that\'s quite distinct from the album version, and I think \'Arc of Bar\' is a great example of us doing something like that. Some of the other songs—like ‘Younger Us,’ for example—sound just like the record to a large extent, because \[2012’s\] *Celebration Rock* was live off the floor. We were just kind of letting it rip, and there\'s less choices to be made about how you want to present it live.” **Younger Us (Live)** DP: “When we were making *Near to the Wild Heart of Life*, we went and saw Neil Young play. And before Promise of the Real joined him onstage, he came out solo and he just played a string of hits, right out the gates. But I felt like it was him sort of being like, ‘Okay, I\'m going to give you guys what you want so you feel satisfied, and then I\'m just going to do a bunch of shit that I want to do.’ We really want to play ‘Arc of Bar’ and there\'s a bit of a confrontational nature in the way we approach that song—it’s long and it\'s kind of a weird epic adventure that you go on with the audience. So after that it’s like, ‘Let’s give the crowd something very immediate. You were bearing with us there and you indulged us. Here\'s one that we know you\'re going to like.’” **North East South West (Live)** DP: “There were two guys in the audience and they were wearing these matching hats that said ‘North East South West’ on them. They’d been following us around and were at a whole bunch of shows in that general part of the world: I think they came to Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, and Detroit. And they were near the front pretty much every night, and stoked whenever we’d play this song. Very lovely guys, friendly dudes. We probably should have gotten them to make a bunch of those baseball caps—they were quite fashionable.” **The Nights of Wine and Roses (Live)** BK: “‘Nights of Wine and Roses’ is not a song you can give even 95 percent. It has to be honest—that’s the only way it works. And so for me, this represents the last moment in the set where you can truly give, physically, everything you’ve got to the song. I think it comes off on this recording. You can hear it in our voices: We are fucking going for it with everything we got. And I can only speak for myself, but that\'s probably last time in the set you can just do that. After that, you can try and push your body, but it just won’t go anymore. Your legs become a bit wobbly. You\'re pretty drenched with sweat. Your fingers are sore. Your voice is a bit sore. That\'s actually one of the reasons why, on this version, I kind of improvise on guitar a little bit: to draw out those drumbeats. Because you\'re just trying to give yourself a little room. It\'s like 20 seconds of extra breath.” **No Known Drink or Drug (Live)** BK: “I think sometimes the overall message of the band can be convoluted, in the way that people interpret who we are and what we\'re trying to put out there in the world. And I think that the crux of this song, particularly those lyrics at the end, that\'s just more of the message that I want to leave people with. It\'s like a romantic ideal of what life is or what life could be. I don\'t want people to only remember our band and our records as music for that time in your life where you\'re getting together with friends and drinking, like, ‘Let\'s slam a six-pack and go out and start some shit.’ I\'m not trying to deny that element of it or to say that\'s not us. It would just be a shame if that\'s what we get remembered for. Because I think that there\'s something else there that\'s deeper and wonderful.” **Continuous Thunder (Live)** BK: “It’s very easy for Dave and I to figure out how to perform something live, where it\'s about the energy of the performance, the dynamic between the two of us. But there\'s an emotional element to this song where the way you deliver it, ideally, is just different. And I think that those are harder songs for us to crack. For example: I’m not sure that, if we did another live record, we’d need another version of ‘Heart Sweats,’ because I feel like we\'ve nailed it on this one—it’s definitive. ‘Continuous Thunder’ is the opposite. We\'ve been playing that song for years, hundreds of times, and I still don\'t feel like we figured out how to deliver that song live to the audience in a way that maximizes its emotional impact. We still haven’t discovered the definitive version of that song. I still play it a little bit differently on guitar every night; I never sing it super consistently. It\'s a little bit of a mystery—and that\'s one thing that\'s also cool about it.” **Young Hearts Spark Fire (Live)** DP: “I just like the way we connect with the audience with that song. There\'s a lot of good things happening there. When it first came together—even when we played it live for the first time in Vancouver—I think there was a feeling that we were really onto something. To me, I think it will forever be the definitive Japandroids song. It encapsulates a lot of the strengths of the band: It’s this really cathartic, kind of energetic punk song, with this element of melancholy in some of those chords and vocal lines. And it has all the different things that are fun to do in a Japandroids show: There’s some great call-and-response vocals and some dramatic pauses and some very high-energy moments. It’ll always have a very special place in my heart, and it kind of takes me back to more of an innocent time in the band’s history, in a really nice way.” BK: “When we wrote it and started playing it, it was off the rails. You\'re just going for energy and intensity and enthusiasm—and things like all the technical elements of what makes a recording good don\'t factor into it at all. I don\'t think we\'ve ever looked at that song and thought there\'s a better way to do this, or we should change this. It\'s always remained that same off-the-rails version. I remember the first time we ever played that song at the Biltmore too, and I think if you heard a recording of that version and compared it to the version we play at Massey Hall, there’s probably not that much of a difference. You don\'t improve it by bringing it under control.” **Sovereignty (Live)** BK: “On that tour, our crew were complaining to me about how I have all these guitar pedals on my pedal board and they set them up every night and they clean them and make sure they work every night—and then I don’t use them. And for several shows in a row, I just tried stepping on different pedals at this moment in ‘Sovereignty’ to kick it up and see what happens. And on that particular night, I stepped on a phaser. So every time I listen to this and that moment happens, I just laugh, because that\'s one of the only moments during the set that I was truly just like, ‘Eh, fuck it. Let\'s see what happens.’ I mean, I think it sounds great and it helps the song, but it\'s just a moment of true spontaneity. The next night I didn\'t do that—I did something else. This was my phaser night.” **The House That Heaven Built (Live)** DP: “It holds the throne as the closer—it’s pretty hard to know where to go from there, so that\'s usually how we end most nights. People were a little more tentative at the start of the set, in this beautiful, historic venue. But \'House That Heaven Built’ was the culmination of people just getting a little more rowdy, bit by bit, over the course of the night. Things finally kind of exploded. Everybody was up out of their seats. People were rushing the stage, jumping on the stage and jumping off the stage. You can hear Brian and I laughing at a couple of moments during the performance of this song. Because it\'s just an absurd, surreal, and very joyous moment. There was a stage diver, and as he jumped into the crowd he disappeared in one of those ominous ways. There\'s that initial moment of panic, and then I just saw him pop right back up with a big smile on his face. That\'s when I started laughing.” BK: “It never, ever fails, in all the times we played it, to be a great moment. It\'s the only song we have where it doesn’t matter where the show is, what the circumstance is—it never falls flat, it always goes off. And so that might\'ve been the only moment of that show that I could truly and purely enjoy. Because the hard part\'s over. You can just let go now.”