All That Was

Throttle Body M/C is the long-running rock project of Jerry Hammack, a Seattle-raised, Toronto-based musician, producer, engineer, mixer, and author whose work has always carried a deep understanding of how records are actually made. Founded in the early 1990s, the project has moved between band, solo vehicle, and studio collective, with Hammack at the centre and a revolving cast of musicians appearing along the way.

Over the years, Throttle Body M/C has included or featured players such as Zoro, Osama Afifi, Stephen Dorocke, Rod Moody, and Aaron “Coleslaw” Taylor. That shifting membership has allowed the project to stretch across different sounds without losing its main identity: carefully built rock music with a strong sense of arrangement, melody, and recording craft.

Hammack’s background as a producer and engineer is a major part of the Throttle Body M/C story. The music does not feel casual or thrown together. Even when it rocks hard, there is a clear attention to tone, texture, performance, and period detail. That comes through especially strongly on Super Hits Of The ’70s, released by Green Monkey Records in 2021, where Hammack built an affectionate tribute to early 1970s AM radio without turning it into simple nostalgia. The album draws from the sound world of classic pop, rock, and soul, but the result still feels like a new record rather than a costume piece.

The 2026 album All That Was shows another side of the project. With Hammack writing, performing, producing, engineering, mixing, and mastering the record himself, the album leans into a harder-edged rock sound while keeping the melodic sense and studio precision that have always shaped his work. The Spill Magazine reviewed the album positively, describing it as strong, loud, melodic rock with grunge edges and giving it an 8.0 rating.

The album was also issued on 12" vinyl through ElasticStage, giving All That Was a physical format that suits Hammack’s old-school record-making sensibility. Where Super Hits Of The ’70s appears to have been issued as a digital album, All That Was carries the project back into the world of tangible LPs, a fitting move for music so clearly built around guitars, studio craft, and the album as a complete object. Copies of the vinyl edition are available through ElasticStage.

What makes Throttle Body M/C interesting is not just that the music crosses styles, but that it is clearly made by someone who understands records as complete objects. Hammack is not only writing songs, he is building worlds around them: the instrumentation, the recording approach, the sonic references, the mix, and the final shape of the album all matter. That gives the project a rare combination of musicianly instinct and studio scholarship.

Outside Throttle Body M/C, Hammack is also known as the author of The Beatles Recording Reference Manuals, a major multi-volume study of the Beatles’ studio work. That same fascination with recording history, technique, and sound can be heard in his own music. Throttle Body M/C is, in many ways, the work of a record maker in the fullest sense: part songwriter, part performer, part archivist of studio language, and part rock and roll lifer.

With Super Hits Of The ’70s and All That Was, Throttle Body M/C has found a fitting home with Green Monkey Records and now joins the Museum of Canadian Music / CitizenFreak as another example of how Canadian-connected music history continues to grow in unexpected, independent, and highly personal ways.

-Robert Williston

    Available on LP at: elasticstage.com/throttlebodymc/releases/all-that-was-album   Since 1990, Throttle Body M/C has been pushing sonic boundaries, whether through the straight-up rock-n-roll of AIDS and Language, For The Few and Marley's Chain (the last two compiled in the digital collection, Hits 1992-1994 (The Greatest Band That Never Was (But Still Is) Part I), the pop explosions of Air Canada and A Typical Wednesday, the experimental, downtempo-influenced Nine or the unlikely Lonely Days (The Ukulele Album), and Super Hits of the 70s, great songs and inspired performances have always been foremost.

Green Monkey Records has always had a weak spot for guitars, distortion, and feedback, and you’ll hear a lot of it on All That Was —the ninth release, and sixth studio album from Throttle Body M/C. The long-time Seattle-now-Toronto-based collective, led by multi-instrumentalist, producer/engineer Jerry Hammack takes a somber look at the state of the world through the album’s eight songs, reflecting on love, loss, age and the relationships that bind us.

The sound is a heavy, textural blend of electric guitars, bass, drums and percussion with distortion and feedback playing a central role. Long, hypnotic opening grooves set the stage for this look at the times we live in. When there’s something to say, it’s brief and succinct, as in the opening track, “Goodbye”

If it all ended now

After years and years

Would that make

things right?

Would you shed

a tear?

If it stopped to be

you and me

And the world stopped spinning

Whether in the dream of “Lost to Me” or in the question of “When To Set To Sea,” Hammack pulls no punches as the personal is political and the price we pay is a high one. Songs like the title track, “All That Was,” explore life’s suffering, while “Leaving It All Behind” speaks to the loss of identity through the act of emigration.

These are certainly hard times, and rather than a balm for them, Throttle Body M/C faces the world as it is and invites you to as well. Heavy, melodic, hypnotic and meaningful, this is “Album Oriented Rock” in its natural form. Spend some time with it and ask yourself what these days mean to you.