15 Smiles to the Gal

Jeffery Sez played well over 300 shows, crossed Canada repeatedly, recorded two full-length studio albums, appeared on MuchMusic, earned commercial and college radio airplay, won a Victoria independent music award for Best Album and eventually signed with Cordova Bay Records. Through most of it the money went straight back into the band.

That tension defined them. They were ambitious enough to keep pushing for the next level and stubborn enough to keep going when it refused to arrive. For a decade they loaded vans, booked studio time before they had the money to pay for it, manufactured their own records, drove from one club to the next and played hard whether the room was packed or almost empty. The songs carried the same split. Fast, melodic and often exhilarating on the surface, with anger, depression, addiction, damaged relationships and self-doubt running underneath. Michael Tension described the idea simply: “I wanted to write fast, fun-sounding music with dark lyrics.”

As a teenager he was immersed in heavy metal, punk, horror films and visual art, and he thought the music around him in the late 1980s had gone flat. Grunge changed that. He liked the aggression of metal and punk, but what he heard coming out of Seattle was a way to sing angry material and still be understood. Music had stopped being a hobby. “I really thought I’d die without it back then,” he said.

The name came from a considerably less serious place. At seventeen, Tension took the ferry from Victoria to Vancouver with a friend to get a fake ID, and came home with a knitted cow puppet he had not paid for. Sitting on the car deck, he invented a character for it: Jeffery, the bastard son of Maybel and Mr. Ed. What “Jeffery says” became the running joke among his friends that summer. About a year later, needing a band name, he remembered the phrase, changed “Says” to the deliberately misspelled “Sez” and cut and pasted a logo out of the Sex Pistols playbook.

There was a first Jeffery Sez in 1990. Tension joined an existing group that needed a singer, talked the musicians into dropping their old material, taught them five of his songs and renamed the band. They played several shows and recorded a five-song demo at Mostyn Sound before falling apart.

Mostyn Sound mattered more than the demo did. Its owner, Larry Ottaway, had spent years playing in Toronto and he taught Tension that songs were only part of being a convincing live band. Musicians walked on and off the stage together. Dead air between songs was avoided. A band should look like a gang. The instruction Tension remembered above all the rest was to play every show like it was your last.

He started again in Victoria in 1994, this time building a group around his own songs and a fixed idea of what a live rock band should be. Jai Joans came in on bass and vocals, followed by lead guitarist and vocalist Christian Down. Dave Shaw played drums through the early period until Chris Hitchcock, who performed as The Negative Bastard, took over in 1996. That put the core of Tension, Joans, Down and Hitchcock in place. Down stayed until 2000, when Joey HiFi took the lead guitar chair and held it until the band ended in 2005.

None of them had known Tension before joining, and away from music their personalities had little in common. The band proved unusually durable anyway. Keeping an independent group essentially intact for a decade was an accomplishment on its own terms, and the band has always counted it as one.

Their earliest surviving releases show a group still learning how to capture itself. Un-Pasturized was recorded in 1996 on a cassette eight-track at the Lynnwood House rehearsal space with Shaw on drums. Slouch followed in 1997, combining recordings from Roan Sound with an earlier session at Trebas. Rough documents, both of them, but the band was moving toward something more substantial.

In 1998 they booked Island Pacific Sound in Nanaimo before they had the money to pay for it. The studio was a serious step up, a fully analog room built around a 16-track Tascam half-inch machine, with Rick Salt engineering. Tension puts the budget at roughly $5,000 for two weeks of recording and mixing. Eight days went to tracking and two to mixing, the last of them running about twenty-four hours straight. Christian Down had been thrown out of the band shortly before the sessions for missing practices, was brought back to play the lead parts, and stayed for the touring that followed. Manufacturing created the next problem. Colour separations cost around $1,000 and the CDs another $2,000, so although the record was finished in the winter of 1998, the band could not afford to release it until the spring of 1999.

Don’t Stand By Dick put Jeffery Sez on record at close to full strength: thick guitars, punk economy, hard rock weight, pop hooks and Tension’s low, forceful vocals carrying lyrics much darker than the music first suggests. Matt Ramsey wrote in the Victoria News in 1999 that the band was reminiscent of early Soundgarden and Bad Religion and had “stomped its first step towards rock and roll superstardom.” David Percival, writing in Positively Sooke the following year, called it “a great combination of rock, alternative & punk music” in which every song had the potential to become a hit. Supreme Echo would quote both when the recordings reached vinyl twenty-six years later.

The band put the album straight to work. Their first Canadian tour ran from May 6 to June 2, 1999, from Victoria as far east as St. Catharines, Ontario, with another western run that October. Touring became the engine of the group. Their own archive records repeated trips across Western Canada, a 22-show run in 2000, another tour in early 2001 and three appearances at New Music West between 2000 and 2002. ‘Someone Worse’, ‘Red Dress’ and ‘Postcard’ picked up local commercial play along with college airplay across the country.

One odd release grew directly out of that first tour. The band met Alberta singer-songwriter Mike Plume, who introduced them to his European booking agent, and the suggestion came back that an acoustic or semi-acoustic Jeffery Sez would be easier to place on a European tour. They recorded a live five-song promotional disc at the Queen’s in Nanaimo, then expanded the idea into Appetite for Dysfunction, a seventeen-song release pressed in fifty copies. It sold out almost immediately and remains one of the obscure corners of the catalogue.

Their profile at home was growing too. Jeffery Sez represented Victoria in the Vancouver Island Showcase of Bands, which brought their first national television exposure through a MuchMusic segment combining an interview with live footage. In 2000 they were chosen from more than 120 submissions for Rocktoria 2000, the long-running 100.3 The Q project promoting Vancouver Island artists, and the compilation still turns up in library catalogues with Jeffery Sez among its featured acts.

Rocktoria coincided with a major personnel change. Christian Down left the lead guitar chair and Joey HiFi came in. Tension later described the change as beneficial well beyond the guitar playing. HiFi’s personality and humour fit the group, and he helped the four of them mature as a unit. That lineup carried Jeffery Sez through its final five years.

By 2001 Don’t Stand By Dick was effectively sold out, and the band knew the second album had to beat it. They went back to Island Pacific Sound in 2002, again with Rick Salt, who by then owned the place, and worked under completely different conditions. The first album had been analog and made under real time and money pressure. This one got seven weeks at a negotiated weekly rate of roughly $7,500 in total, recorded digitally, with far more tracks and far more room to experiment. The first five days went to drums alone. Tension sang in the control room without headphones, reasoning that he had learned the songs by performing them live and wanted to sing them the same way in the studio. He quit smoking partway through the sessions and found the singing came easier.

15 Smiles to the Gal was the clearest statement of what years on the road had made them. The songs were tighter, the arrangements more confident, the production considerably bigger. The band released it themselves in 2002. In early 2003 Jeffery Sez signed with Victoria’s Cordova Bay Records, which remixed and reissued the album, added the newly recorded ‘Plastic & Pills’, secured broader distribution and put radio tracking behind it.

That stretch brought them as close as they ever came to turning a successful independent band into a sustainable career. They were named 91.3 The Zone’s Band of the Month in January 2003, having already won Best Promotion at the first MPower Music Awards, and in May 2003 15 Smiles to the Gal won Best Album at the second MPower Awards in Victoria. The band’s archive records six nominations that year, including Best Artist and Best Live Band.

The live résumé kept growing. Jeffery Sez shared bills with 54-40, Big Sugar, Nickelback, Barney Bentall, Todd Kerns and a long list of independent Canadian groups, and in the fall of 2003 they joined the Western Canadian leg of the Jägermeister Live Rock Shooter Tour opening for the Salads. They appeared in half-hour B.C. Grown radio features on 100.3 The Q and kept working the bars and clubs that had been their real proving ground from the start.

Some of those rooms were considerably less glamorous. At the Alberta Hotel in Oyen, Alberta, the entire stage supply came from a single outlet that also fed the strobe, the Christmas lights, the black light and the PA. Nothing was grounded and the microphones shocked whoever came near them. Jai Joans wrapped a new pair of black socks around them as insulation, but the stage was hot enough that the socks soaked through and the shocks came back. Because of the shape of the room, two people could actually see the band during the first set. Afterward they moved their gear to where the audience was, which turned out to be carnival workers in town with a fair. One of them, drunk, decided to fight Tension over being a pretty boy, and the other carnies dragged him off and dealt with it themselves. The band drank with the bar owner until early morning. Tension still remembers that night better than any showcase: bad wiring, heat, sweat, alcohol, a near fight in the parking lot and another load-out into the van.

Jeffery Sez played well over 300 shows during its main run, and Tension admits most of them are gone from memory. The repetition was the point. They learned by doing it night after night.

He was already writing the third album. Beginning in 2003 the band made weekend trips to Nanaimo and recorded in small batches, usually cutting two songs live and then overdubbing vocals and lead guitar. The plan was to demo at least sixteen songs and pick the strongest eleven. ‘Plastic & Pills’ came out of those sessions and got pulled forward for the Cordova Bay version of 15 Smiles. So did ‘Mona Lisa’, written in early 2003 about a girlfriend whose past had left her hating herself at times. “This song makes me feel sad when I hear it now,” Tension said. “It’s a pretty powerful song, I think.” By late 2004 he had fourteen songs ready.

The problem was no longer whether Jeffery Sez could write, record or draw a crowd. It was whether ten years of doing all three could finally support four adults. Cordova Bay had provided distribution and radio support, but the band’s request for touring assistance was declined. They could get respectable shows and bring people into rooms, and the operation still consumed money instead of generating enough to live on. Earnings went back into recordings, travel and the machinery required to keep moving. Tension still believed label financing for the next album might make the difference. His bandmates had reached a different conclusion.

A few days after the annual Anti-Christmas show in December 2004, Jai Joans told him he was leaving. Tension arranged a meeting with Chris Hitchcock and Joey HiFi in the new year to work out how the rest of them would carry on. In the opening minutes Hitchcock said he was leaving as well. HiFi followed. The last show had already happened in late December 2004, and the band officially ended in early January 2005.

The timing produced one last strange moment. About a week later, Tension was driving with a co-worker when a radio announcer introduced the “late, great” Jeffery Sez and played their version of ‘Don’t You (Forget About Me)’, which Cordova Bay had put out as a single. After ten years, the band belonged to the past before he had finished absorbing that it was over.

Tension moved into advertising and creative work, writing, branding and eventually directing commercial projects. The members stayed on good terms as their lives moved apart. What stayed in storage was enormous: analog reels, demos, posters, newspaper clippings, original lyrics and photographs accumulated across a decade of independent touring, most of it never properly catalogued.

That archive became important again in 2025. Victoria preservation label Supreme Echo assembled Building Rafts Out Of Burnt Bridges, the first Jeffery Sez vinyl release, issued March 21, 2025. The collection draws twelve recordings from the band’s peak years of 1998 to 2004, taken from Don’t Stand By Dick, 15 Smiles to the Gal and the unfinished third-album sessions, including three tracks never released before. Brad Boatright remastered them. The pressing ran to 500 copies, 250 on opaque yellow vinyl and 250 on black, with a large-format eight-page booklet of photographs, lyrics and band history.

The restoration also settled an irritation that had bothered Tension for twenty-seven years. During the 1998 recording of ‘Tincs’, the band missed guitar bends at the end of two riffs. Christian Down recorded replacements, but they were captured with his lead sound rather than the rhythm tone and never sat properly in the track. For the 2025 edition Down, by then working as a producer and engineer, repaired the section using modern audio separation and editing. Tension finally heard the song the way he had wanted it to sound in 1998.

Boatright’s mastering did something broader as well. Recordings made years apart, in different rooms and under very different circumstances, suddenly sounded like one body of work. Supreme Echo describes Jeffery Sez as a distinctly Canadian 1990s mixture of grunge and pop-punk, played hard and loud by a blue-collar touring band. That fits as far as it goes. Their records also carry hard rock weight, punk brevity, metal muscle and a songwriter’s instinct for choruses, with Tension setting dark words against music built to move a room.

Twenty years after the band ended, the songs reached vinyl. Tension has no revisionist ending to attach to them. He does not wish Jeffery Sez had made different choices and he does not want the decade back. “I’m really satisfied with what Jeffery Sez accomplished,” he said. “I don’t have any regrets. I don’t want any redos. We did what we did, and we’re all still alive.”

-Robert Williston