Joe Naylor

Joe Naylor was part of Vancouver's independent music and media scene from the late 1970s through the 1980s, moving between radio, live performance, recording and video. An early trace of his name appears in the CiTR archives on a 1976–77 station tape containing a "Joe Naylor jazz promo." By 1980 he was performing around Vancouver with Sean McConnell in The Original Sinners.

The Original Sinners were playing publicly by February 1980, when they appeared with Teddy and the Torsion Testers at the Pit at UBC. Later that year Naylor and McConnell made one of the stranger records to emerge from Vancouver's independent scene, I'm Canadian Beer b/w I Hate Fluorescent Lights, released as FR 005 on Friends Records.

Friends Records operated from 319 East Broadway and was part of Vancouver's growing independent record culture. Its small catalogue included releases by D.O.A., Secret V's, Slamm and Warsaw. Naylor played electric bass, sang, and supplied the music, words, effects and treatments, while McConnell contributed acoustic drums, Dr. Rhythm, beer bottles and the wonderfully described "rhythmic gap setting." Dave Miller engineered the sessions at Max's Deli and Sound Studio, and Annette Ducharme of Eli Productions designed the cover.

"I'm Canadian Beer" drew directly from life in British Columbia at the end of the 1970s. Brewery labour disputes and beer shortages were still fresh memories, and Naylor turned the situation into a piece of deadpan Canadian satire. Beer itself becomes the narrator, complaining about strikes, suspended pay, brewing monopolies and prices while McConnell's beer bottles help keep time. The orange sleeve carried the joke further, with a frothing beer mug, a Canadian flag and a grim face staring out from the glass.

"I Hate Fluorescent Lights" shifted the setting to the office. Naylor wrote about headaches, glazed eyes and life beneath the fluorescent glare of the workplace. The homemade combination of bass, drums, electronics and effects gave both sides a dry, eccentric quality that suited Vancouver's early new wave and experimental underground.

The sleeve also preserved an important piece of Naylor's history, identifying Joe Naylor and Sean McConnell as members of the Original Sinners and linking the single directly to the band that had been appearing around Vancouver earlier that year. Naylor was also connected with radio during this period, including CiTR and later CKO-FM-4 and CJAZ.

During the next few years his work moved increasingly into independent video. Vancouver's Video Out catalogue documents a series of productions associated with Naylor beginning in 1983, including Legend of Jimmy Offsales, Do Be Do and Share It With Me. Further projects followed in 1984 and 1985, among them Such A Grind, a title that would surface again several years later.

By 1988 Naylor was at the centre of Mind/Body, a nineteen-track cassette bringing together electronic programming, rock instrumentation, jazz touches and a large group of Vancouver musicians and singers. Naylor handled drum programs, keyboards, fretted and fretless bass, and lead and rhythm guitar throughout the album. He wrote or co-wrote every composition and shared production duties with B.A. Smith, Harold Futrell-Fruhling and Joe Money.

The sessions included vocalists Amanda Hughes, Bill Air, Lee Smith, Garnet Harry and Al Thurgood, along with Tim Hersey, Jack Mathews, Scotty Hall, Bob Smart, Harold Futrell-Fruhling, Mike Skinner and Lorne Ettkin. Saxophones, acoustic and electric guitars, synthesizers, programmed drums and changing vocalists gave the cassette a broad, collaborative sound built around Naylor's writing and playing.

Music and video remained closely connected. The Mind/Body notes identify "The Void," "Pathological," "Eye Candy," "False Desires" and "Such A Grind" as parts of programs distributed on videotape through British Regional International Television, or B.R.I.T., in Vancouver. "Satan's Room" was connected with a film of the same name. B.R.I.T. also handled performance inquiries, with Naylor named directly in the cassette notes.

-Robert Williston