Another White Male

Another White Male went through the whole arc in about three years. They made their first record before they had ever played a show, toured the United States while still putting records out themselves, got signed by a major label as a development act, landed a song in one of the defining Canadian rock films of the decade, and were being written about in the past tense in their own city within weeks of their album reaching stores. Cattle, released by A&M in 1996, is the only full-length they left behind.

The band was built around Nathan Dillon on lead vocals and bass, Sean Webster on guitar, Daniel Wiener on drums, and James Cowan on stand-up bass and saxophone. That instrumentation gave them more room than most Vancouver bands of the period had, and they used it. The first release was Yesterday Rolled By..., a five-song EP put out in 1994 on their own Greed Clown imprint. Dillon later admitted what the band actually was when they made it. They had never played a live show, they had almost no studio experience, and two of them were still in high school.

The live band came second, and it came quickly. They were at Vancouver's Graceland on June 17, 1994, and back there on September 9 with The Fourth Man. By the following spring they had reached Slam City Jam at the Plaza of Nations on May 14, 1995. That summer they went out with Pansy Division for a run of American dates, turning up with them in Detroit, Grand Rapids, Toledo, Pittsburgh, Albany, Providence, North Windham and Portland through July. All of that happened while Another White Male was still an independent band with one self-released EP to its name.

By January 1996 they were on the list of Vancouver acts heading to South by Southwest in Austin, and the Canadian touring trail from that year is easy to follow. They opened for 7 Year Bitch at Foufounes Électriques in Montreal on April 7, played Music West at home on a bill that also carried Bif Naked, Big Sugar, the Paperboys and Tom Wilson, went in with Prong at Lee's Palace in Toronto on June 30, returned to Lee's on August 23 with Sponge and Bluebeard, and caught up with Fishbone in Ottawa on September 3 and Montreal on September 4.

The A&M signing came out of a specific moment at the label. John Reid, then president of A&M/Island/Motown Canada, told Billboard in May 1996 that Another White Male was one of the acts he had signed since taking the job. Reid wanted a small and eclectic Canadian roster of artists he thought could work outside the country, and he talked about funding developmental bands, keeping them on the road and giving them time to grow into something. Another White Male fit that description, and they had already done a good deal of the developing on their own. Library and Archives Canada holds a 1996 file titled Another White Male - Contracts in the Bruce Allen Talent series of the A F Music Ltd fonds, which puts the band's business affairs of that year inside one of the country's major music industry collections.

Cattle arrived in 1996 as a twelve-track CD, catalogue 314540581-2. Dillon described the two years since the EP as the period that made the band. The songs had been played, pulled apart and rebuilt onstage, and the writing had turned collaborative in a way the first record never was. What he wanted from the studio was the physical charge of the live group inside a record that held together for its full forty-three minutes, from the first track to the last. He was equally clear about variety. The band had to be free to follow something melodic with something abrasive and still sound like one group doing it.

Angst, Home, Monday, Tis, Timepiece, Lovesong, Do, Attempt, Acid Coloured Eyes, Exit, Deadweight and Common BudDha do exactly that, moving between hard guitar, heavy low end, melody and stretches of quiet. Kevin Templeton, reviewing the album in September 1996, heard industrial rock, Vancouver punk and something of Tool in it, and noticed that the guitars sat lower in the mix than a straight metal record would put them. He picked out Angst and Home, found Deadweight and Common BudDha the most urgent things on the record, and thought the band had something to build on. Drop-D Magazine, working at the same problem from another angle, had already settled on calling them hip hop punksters.

The sound of the record traces back to who made it. Brian "Who" Else produced, engineered and mixed Cattle, with Dave Ashton assisting and George Graves mastering. Else had engineered NoMeansNo's 0 + 2 = 1 and Why Do They Call Me Mr. Happy?, worked on records with Victim's Family and on the Dead Kennedys tribute Virus 100, and spent 1996 engineering the Hanson Brothers and Maow. Cattle came out of that West Coast punk and underground lineage rather than out of a major label's house sound.

The guest list keeps the record tied to the same community. Andrea Polz sang on Tis, Do and Deadweight. Lorna Brampton played cello on Deadweight. Blair Dobson, Danny Sather and Jody "Reg" Bronson sang behind Lovesong and Exit. And Joe Keithley of D.O.A., credited as the Right Reverend Joseph Shithead, delivers the rants on Common BudDha, which puts a founding figure of Vancouver punk directly onto a 1996 major-label debut.

A&M worked the record the way a label works a development act. Exit went onto the 1996 Canadian promotional compilation Burnt, Blistered & Peeled, where Another White Male sat between White Zombie and Scarce on a disc that also carried Doughboys, Local H, Dishwalla, Salt, Tracy Bonham and Therapy?. Cattle was also issued on CD in Brazil, which says the label's ambitions for the band ran past the Canadian border.

Then there is Hard Core Logo. Bruce McDonald's 1996 film credits a song called Love Song with lyrics by Nathan Dillon and music by Another White Male, published through Greed Clown Music and performed by the band. Cattle carries Lovesong. The two are almost certainly the same composition, though the film recording has not been compared against the album master.

Greed Clown stayed alive alongside the A&M record. A 1996 seven-inch paired Acid Coloured Eyes with the non-album Numb (Live) as Greed Clown AWN-2, and that live B-side is one of the only officially released recordings of the band outside the two studio releases.

The ending came fast enough that it overlapped the release. In an interview submitted on November 10, 1996, Dillon was still talking about where the band could go next, and he also laid out the one rule Another White Male had run on from the start. When making the music stopped being fun, the band was over. Within days, Drop-D was reviewing the Girl Feast benefit of November 7 to 9 and describing Puncture's bassist Nathan as the singer guy from Another White Male, R.I.P. On November 15 Dillon turned up alone with a dobro at Vancouver's Rock for Choice benefit, introduced by way of both Puncture and Another White Male.

Dillon kept moving through Vancouver bands after the breakup. Canadian Musician was already identifying him in 1997 as the new singer in Meeker, the group that emerged from DSK, and in 2017 he joined composers James Maxwell, Edward Top and Alfredo Santa Ana in Square. In a 2023 interview about Square, Dillon said he had released his first independent cassette in 1990, which places his own recording history four years before Another White Male's debut EP.

-Robert Williston