Glaze (EP)

Quahogs rose from the ashes of two of Halifax's best-known 1980s hardcore bands, System Overload and False Security. When System Overload came apart, guitarist Todd Calder spent a year in Montreal as a visiting student at McGill. Back home around 1990, he started playing again with his System Overload bandmates Leonard Woolley on guitar and Johnny MacKenzie on bass, and they brought in False Security drummer Gerard Watters. They rehearsed in an abandoned store in Cole Harbour. At first Calder and Woolley handled the singing, and that lineup played exactly one party. Wanting a proper frontman, Calder asked Scott Tappen, who had briefly been in a band with MacKenzie, and Tappen jumped at it. Once he joined, Quahogs started playing the Club Flamingo and the Double Deuce.

The new band headed for the poppier side of punk, closer to Montreal's The Nils than to the hardcore its members had come from, and both the punk and indie rock crowds took to them. They shared bills with Eric's Trip, Sloan and Hardship Post. The shows were rarely tidy. Nobody owned a backup guitar, so a broken string stopped the song. Calder plays left-handed, and when he broke a string the others carried on without him until he had restrung; he later wrote a song about it happening one night at the Café Olé. MacKenzie once got so angry he threw his bass around and had to borrow another to finish. Quahogs never put a tour together. Their one show outside Halifax was in Moncton, at Rick's Shipyard.

An early version of 'Back To The None' appeared on the Mass Turbulence compilation in 1991. In June 1992 the band recorded Raw, a ten-song cassette made on a four-track and issued through Boneyard Productions, That summer they were one of twenty-one bands at the Halifax Independent Music Festival, held over four nights at the Double Deuce between June 28 and July 2, with every set recorded live to DAT. Each act chose one song for the festival compilation, Cod Can't Hear, issued on CD later that year by DTK Records with CKDU. Quahogs picked Calder's 'Back to the Nun,' and shared the disc with Sloan, Thrush Hermit, Jale, Cool Blue Halo, Leonard Conan and Al Tuck's Bluegrass Lawnmower.

Quahogs saved the money they made playing shows, mostly at the Double Deuce, to pay for a proper recording. Cinnamon Toast Records, a new Halifax label run by Walter Forsyth, Shawn Duggan and friends, made them an offer: if the band paid for the recording, the label would do everything else, including promotion. Tappen was in frequent contact with the label. In January 1993 they went into Soundmarket Studios with Terry Pulliam, in Calder's words a big wacky hippy guy who kept talking about the voodoo on the record and whose board full of effects impressed them no end. Pulliam also fixed the intonation on Calder's cheap Hondo guitar. Studio time was expensive, and the band were never completely happy with how the record sounded. Glaze came out on March 20, 1993 as Cinnamon Toast's third release (CT003), a four-song 7-inch on purple vinyl in a numbered edition of 500, with a cover photograph by Peter Barss.

The release show at the Double Deuce went into local legend. In honour of the label's name, the Cinnamon Toast crew made cinnamon toast at the back of the bar, and every time someone pushed the toaster down, the power went out. For a while nobody could work out why. In 2009 The Coast named Glaze one of the ten best Halifax singles ever made.

Just before the end, the band recorded four more songs as Songs From The Tiki Lounge, which was never officially released. Quahogs stopped playing together in 1994 without ever formally breaking up, and members went on to form Trike. 'Them' from Glaze resurfaced on Trim Crusts If Desired, Cinnamon Toast's first compilation, issued on CD in 1994 and on LP and cassette in 1995.

Scott Tappen was also a graphic artist, and his posters and record covers were part of the look of Halifax music in the 1990s, including the sleeve for Piggy's Calypsos to Please You on Cinnamon Toast in 1999. He died of cancer in early 2000. On October 19, 2013, a retrospective of his art opened in Halifax.

-Robert Williston