Bruce PM

Bruce PM was the stage name of Bruce Meikle, a keyboardist, bassist, trumpeter and drummer who moved through Toronto's early-1980s post-punk and cassette underground. His 1981 tape Makeshift was the first release on Nervous Recordings (NRV-1), a loose, handmade set built with Mike Phillip, Paul Myers and Bruce Wrighte from voice, bass, synthesizer, percussion, drums, guitar and wind instruments.

Most of it was recorded in late 1981 at the Happy Place, which was less a studio than the basement of the North York hair salon run by Mike Phillip's mother, Sophia. Mike Phillip was Michael Phillip Wojewoda, who had been recording bands since 1977 and would go on to become one of the most important producers in Canadian alternative music. He engineered Makeshift and took the lion's share of the production. Rather than a fixed lineup, the insert breaks the music down track by track, with Bruce PM and Wojewoda trading vocals, bass, synthesizer, percussion and drums between them. Paul Myers adds guitar and vocals to 'Radios and Cameras', and Bruce Wrighte, who also designed the sleeve, plays guitar on 'Well, Yes'. Everything was composed on the spot by whoever was playing, except 'Radios and Cameras', written by Jeff Nelson, John Deslauriers and Dave Dysart. Bruce PM and Dysart remixed the tape.

Musically, Makeshift is hard to pin down. It runs through rock, new wave, punk, experimental electronics and ad hoc avant-garde cassette work without settling on any of them. Much of it has a loose, live-off-the-floor feel, with rough vocals, bass, synthesizer, percussion and wind moving through short, loosely structured pieces with titles like 'More Joyful Noise', 'Even More Joyful Noise', 'Senility' and 'Electronic Security'. The tape is broken up by social commentary, political fragments, mock radio and television spots and meandering spoken passages that are often hard to make out in the mix. At times its clatter and free-form construction recall the Nihilist Spasm Band, filtered through a Toronto post-punk sensibility.

Makeshift also catches a circle of musicians whose paths kept crossing. Earlier in 1981 Myers and Wojewoda had made a four-song 7-inch EP as Space Invaders with Sharon Cook and Andrew Snell, recorded after hours at the Music Gallery with John Oswald engineering. The basement of the Happy Place was where that band had taken shape too. By late 1982 Bruce PM, Myers, Wojewoda, Snell and 'Radios and Cameras' co-writer John Deslauriers were playing together as Dis Band, a group formed with a built-in expiry date that played its last show on New Year's Eve 1982. Their cassette Gone Dead Out, made partly at the Happy Place, came out on Nervous Recordings in 1983 as NRV-4.

Bruce PM also played keyboards live with Kinetic Ideals, one of Toronto's darker, more atmospheric post-punk bands, and spent time in L'Etranger, the politically charged band of Andrew Cash and Charlie Angus. Their 1984 EP Running Out of Funtown, with preproduction by Wojewoda, credits him only as 'late for practice'. Cash and Angus both later became New Democrat MPs.

-Robert Williston