Tag: 1986

What we used to talk about when we talked about alternative music

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This novel I’m working on is set in a very specific time and place: Vancouver in late 1986, and partly in what we used to call the alternative music scene. My main character, Joni, joins a band, stays in a warehouse-turned art space, and goes to some “alternative” Vancouver clubs of the time.

However the way Joni and her friends think about alternative music is a bit different than the way people did in the age of Nirvana, Jane’s Addiction, and Lollapalooza — and after. 

Is this important? (And is this something some of us spent way too many hours arguing about, decades ago?)

Probably not. (And definitely yes.)

Music chart from RPM Weekly, November 15 1986
From RPM Weekly, a Canadian trade magazine. Can you call any of these records played on commercial radio stations “alternative?” According to the definition I knew at the time, the answer is no. Source: RPM Weekly.

If you look at the best-known North American music industry trade magazines, and charts, you’ll see a certain kind of story about what was happening in music in the mid-1980s — but that was only one version of events.

There were also active and lively independent music scenes happening in different cities, with artists and bands performing live who only very rarely got radio airplay, and selling records (if they had records) in numbers that were too low to show up on sales charts. 

But these independent artists were also attracting a large enough audience that — even in Vancouver — there were at least half a dozen venues where they could play.  

Because radio, music videos (very expensive to make at the time), and most music news was so dominated by the major labels, campus and community radio provided an “alternative” — a way for listeners to hear something they expected to be more authentic and less processed, regardless of genre. 

We…know that a large segment of the city’s population is sick of listening to the same old tried-and-true sounds of commercial radio. You now know that an alternative exists.

Michael Mines, Discorder, February 1983

By February 1983 the phrase “alternative music” was already well-established in the radio environment — at least in Canada — when the University of British Columbia’s campus radio station, CITR, launched their monthly magazine, Discorder.

As Michael Mines (then Discorder’s co-editor) puts it in the editorial that opens the first issue, “CITR has been an alternative music station since the mid-seventies…. We…know that a large segment of the city’s population is sick of listening to the same old tried-and-true sounds of commercial radio. You now know that an alternative exists. As one longtime CITR deejay recently remarked ‘We have no target market, we have nothing to sell.’”

And if there is no specific target market, and no need for a profit, that means the station’s playlist can be wide-ranging.* Looking through Discorder, you can see that “alternative music” (then and now) goes far beyond indie rock: the station has regular slots for folk, jazz, and reggae — and individual deejays play(ed) a much wider range of music than that on their own shows. 

As early as 1983, campus radio people were talking about “alternative music.”

But even if campus radio had nothing they were literally selling, and refused to define what their product actually was (only saying what it wasn’t), they did have a product with a powerful appeal — because for listeners, the word “alternative” sounded subversive and full of possibilities. And a lot of us CITR listeners found out about the station the same way: someone breathlessly telling us about this wild radio station — run by students and (at the time) only available on cable or on-campus — who played what the commercial stations wouldn’t or couldn’t.

Campus radio was only part of it, of course. There were also national late night shows on CBC Radio that anyone could tune into if they didn’t have to get up early the next morning — Night Lines and Brave New Waves — and independent record stores that specialised in independent and imported music.

And of course there were those clubs. Because many of the bands playing live in the alternative scene didn’t have records or even demo tapes, the clubs were the only place to hear them. While the fictional Joni’s band is inspired by the Nuggets compilations and plays a type of psychedelic-tinged garage rock, she and her friends would have gone to the Railway, Savoy, Town Pump, Luv-A-Fair, and Arts Club and seen bands playing art rock, dance music, rockabilly, roots music, soul, even swing, among other genres — and many mixtures of these — as well as indie or alternative rock.

Gangsters of Swing
A feature article on the Jazzmanian Devils, Discorder April 1987.
The JDs played swing and were also part of Vancouver’s alternative music scene.

*The term “alternative” as we now know it may even have originated from radio licences. It would take more time for me to dig into broadcasting licenses for the period, but in October 1984 RPM, a Canadian trade magazine, refers to “250 college and alternative radio stations across the U.S. and Canada.” (Source: RPM Weekly).

Notes and photo credit

As I write this (March 2021), we are still living in a pandemic. Nightclubs and theatres are closed here in Vancouver and in many places around the world, and most of us haven’t seen a live band in a year.

It’s an especially surreal time to be thinking about an age when this city had an active and busy live music scene.

And that image at the top? It’s a diagram of The Enigmas’ Windshield Wiper dance, taken from the Strangely Wild EP. Photo credit: http://musicruinedmylife.blogspot.com/2011/11/enigmas-strangely-wild-1985.html 

Setting the scene: Live and local music in Vancouver in the fall of 1986

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It was a few months after Charles and Diana came for Expo 86, a time when the Skytrain was brand new, and you could probably still count downtown residential towers on your fingers. 

An old photo from the intersection of Quebec and Terminal in Vancouver. That’s the Skytrain on the left.
Follow it a little further and you’d see some old carpet stores, with cheap office spaces upstairs where a few bands used to practice.
Photo: City of Vancouver Archives: CVA 772-1223.

It was also the socially conservative era of Reagan, Thatcher, and Mulroney. (In British Columbia we had our own colourful version for a while — Bill Vander Zalm — but that’s a whole other story.)

In entertainment news, The Beachcombers and Front Page Challenge were still on Canadian TV, but most people were watching The Cosby Show, Cheers, and Dynasty — and the top albums in Canada were glossy offerings from Madonna and Huey Lewis.

But during this post-punk / pre-grunge time, there was also what we used to call an “alternative” music scene. Not every city had campus radio, but Vancouver did — CITR, from the University of British Columbia. The station played local independent music and put on and promoted shows, and their monthly magazine (Discorder) interviewed local bands and reviewed gigs and demo tapes.

CITR Radio’s playlist for November 1986. Some major labels represented here, but no Huey Lewis. Image: Discorder.

A lot of musicians and artists in the mid-1980s were tuning into CITR (when they could pick it up) and the late-night CBC Radio shows that played new and non-mainstream music,* listening to records on indie labels, and placing ads in The Georgia Straight** to find bandmates.

And most evenings in late 1986 if you wanted to hear a local band, you had a choice of places where you could see them play.

Here’s just some of what was happening on the local alternative music scene in the month of November 1986.

The Savoy nightclub’s lineup for November 1986.
Shindig was (and still is!) CITR’s battle of the bands.
Image: Discorder.

Bands practiced in basements or in shared living spaces if they were lucky, and also in old warehouses and cheap office spaces. I remember some practice spaces in beautiful heritage buildings but also a few that were just bare boxlike rooms, upstairs from a carpet store on Terminal Avenue. With three or four bands sharing one of those rooms it was quite cheap. (At least in theory, if they each played one opening gig a month — at $50 a show — they could easily cover the rent.) 

Who was playing at the Town Pump in November 1986.
Some big touring acts too. Image: Discorder.

There were gigs almost every night, in venues like the Savoy, the Town Pump, John Barley’s, and the Railway Club, and, on weekends, the Arts Club on Seymour Street.

And that wasn’t all. CITR’s Discorder magazine for November 1986 also shows listings for live bands at the Luv-A-Fair (best known as a dance club), Club Soda, and Channel One (in the West End).

The Arts Club Lounge — like a basement rec room in a rock & roll alternate universe. Image: Discorder.

At the time it felt like we all knew each other and it was a really small scene, but looking at these listings, I don’t think that was possible, because you can see there was a lot happening. And that’s not even including the big out-of-town acts that came in and often had local bands open up for them. Those shows often happened at the Commodore and Eighty-Six Street, on the former Expo grounds.

Notes:

*Brave New Waves on weeknights, and Nightlines on weekends.

** Vancouver’s free weekly newspaper, started in the late 1960s.