Dis Band

Dis Band was built to break up. The name was the plan: a Toronto band with a finite life from the day it formed, first meant to play a single show as something close to a jam band. The players turned out to be too good for that, and they decided to take it seriously for the short time they had. The lineup brought together guitarists Paul Myers and John Deslauriers, drummer Michael Phillip Wojewoda, multi-instrumentalist Bruce P.M. and bassist Andrew Snell, several of whom had not played live in a long while. Wojewoda later described their sound as an early Toronto version of white funk, closer in spirit to The Government than to the punk bands they shared stages with. The group left one cassette, Gone Dead Out (Nervous Recordings, 1983), and its members went on to front the Gravelberrys, play bass in the Doughboys, join L'Etranger and produce some of the most important Canadian alternative records of the 1990s.

Before Dis Band

Myers and Wojewoda were already a team. Myers, born in Toronto in 1960 and the older brother of Mike Myers, played with Wojewoda in Space Invaders from 1979. Their four-song EP on World Records ('Cheer Up', 'But Dot Dot Dot', 'Dead Boats Don't Float' and 'I Wake Up Being') was recorded at the Music Gallery with John Oswald at the controls. Wojewoda had been recording bands since 1977, starting in the basement of his mother's beauty salon with a reel-to-reel liberated from his Catholic grade school's audio-visual department. In 1981 he also ran a studio art project called Potencial Propoganda.

The circle widened through Bruce Meikle, who performed as Bruce P.M. His 1981 cassette Makeshift, the first Nervous Recordings release (NRV-1), was a collection of odd song shapes, spoken pieces, electronics and percussion experiments. Wojewoda, credited as Mike Phillip, played on it and co-produced it. Myers sang and played guitar on 'Radios and Cameras', a song Deslauriers co-wrote with Jeff Nelson and Dave Dysart. Some of Makeshift was made at the Happy Place, the same room where Dis Band would later cut half of its own tape.

Gone Dead Out

On stage Myers and Deslauriers played guitars and sang, Andy Snell played bass, Wojewoda handled drums, keyboards, saxophone and vocals, and Bruce P.M. added keyboards, trumpet and more drums.

On December 19, 1982 Dis Band opened the second night of Sounds From The Streets at 100 Bond Street, a two-night showcase hosted by CKLN's Tim Keele with a compilation tape to follow. The bill that night ran Dis Band, Vital Sines, Rent Boys Inc., the Dave Howard Singers and the Rifles from Winnipeg. John Jones recorded the set for CKLN, which produced 'Wise Guy', 'My Only Hope', 'Ready Go Steady' and the live 'Gone Dead Out' that closes the cassette. The following week the band played the Beverley Tavern from Monday to Thursday, and the last Dis Band show took place there on New Year's Eve.

Gone Dead Out mixes those live tapes with home recordings made on a TEAC 144 four-track at the Happy Place. The insert also lists 'I'm Tired' as taped live at The Spot on November 19, 1982, though it places the same track among the Happy Place recordings. Between the songs are pieces of CKLN broadcasts: Keele introducing the band at 100 Bond, and a farewell interview early in the new year, billed as the last Dis Band interview at the station, with Michael, Bruce, Paul and John in the studio and Andy, as the host put it, wandering around somewhere.

The insert splits the songwriting among Myers, Deslauriers and the band as a whole, and Wojewoda, credited as Michael Phillip-Wojewoda, supplied 'Fall Down Go Boom'. Myers and Wojewoda produced and mixed the tape and designed the insert, with photographs by Cindy Gawel and Scott Dobson. Nervous Recordings issued it in 1983 as NRV-4, on Dolby B cassette.

The 100 Bond shows fed the 1983 compilation Sounds From The Streets: 12 Toronto Bands, where a live 'Hesitation' ran third on side one, alongside L'Etranger, Rent Boys Inc., Youth Youth Youth, the Dave Howard Singers, Kinetic Ideals and Direktive 17. 'One Man Army' turned up on Smash '83, credited to Disband. The same tape carried a 90-second version of 10cc's 'I'm Not In Love' by the Dead Brezhnevs, which was Dis Band under a joke name. On the farewell broadcast the band told the story behind their alter ego: a Russian group who could not get their tapes out of the Soviet Union and formed only for as long as Brezhnev was alive, which turned out to be not long at all. Brezhnev died on November 10, 1982.

After Dis Band

Bruce P.M. joined L'Etranger, the politically charged band of Andrew Cash and Charlie Angus, in time for the 1984 EP Running Out of Funtown. Cash and Angus both later sat in the House of Commons as New Democrat MPs.

Wojewoda kept moving between the drum stool and the console. In 1986 he played in Malcolm Tent, a four-piece led by trumpeter Jerry Berg, who wrote structured passages on an Apple II Plus for the band to learn and then stretch out on. In 1988 he drummed with Plasterscene Replicas for about four months and produced their album Glow. His production work then took off: Chalk Circle's As the Crow Flies, Change of Heart's Soapbox and Smile, the Doughboys' Happy Accidents, Rheostatics' Melville and Whale Music, Barenaked Ladies' Gordon, Spirit of the West's Faith Lift and Ashley MacIsaac's Hi How Are You Today? He won Juno Awards for engineering in 1994 and production in 1996, and another in 2008 for Barenaked Ladies' Snacktime! In 2001 he replaced Don Kerr as Rheostatics' drummer and stayed until the band broke up in 2007.

Myers led the Paul Myers Band, releasing the two-song cassette Around The World in 1989. People kept assuming it was a blues act, so the band renamed itself the Gravelberrys, a nod to The Flintstones. In the Gravelberrys Myers played alongside John Hume on keyboards and Claude Kent on drums. Their 1993 album Bowl of Globes, produced and engineered by Wojewoda, gave them a Canadian alternative radio hit with 'Wonder Where You Are Tonight', and Scott Dobson, who had shot the Gone Dead Out photos, was lined up to direct a video. From 1995 Myers turned to journalism, writing books on Barenaked Ladies, Long John Baldry, Todd Rundgren, the Kids in the Hall and John Candy. He records electronic music as Flam!, made the album Inner Sunset (2014) with John Moremen as The Paul & John, and hosts the Record Store Day Podcast.

Deslauriers switched to bass and joined the Montreal band Doughboys in 1991, playing on the EP When Up Turns to Down. In 1992 he left to rejoin Pig Farm, Adam Faux's band, where Wojewoda was now the drummer. Pig Farm's 1993 album Plug, with Faux on guitar and vocals, Deslauriers on bass and Wojewoda on drums, did well on Canadian campus radio, ten years after the two had stood together on the stage at 100 Bond Street.

-Robert Williston