T.O. Talks To Musicians #1: Rich Paxton
Fixing myself one musician at a time
I have constructed rules in my head to justify never talking to musicians at the shows I go to. Lately, I have begun to wonder if that may be really dumb. So, to learn how to talk to musicians, I am spending time talking to musicians. This is my first attempt.
Rich Paxton, lead singer of Calgary band Free The Cynics, was a few minutes late for our meeting at a brewery on Sunday afternoon. It was mostly my fault - he had emailed earlier in the day asking if we could move the setting closer to where he was going for brunch, but I had ignored my phone all morning. Smooth start.
The extra time let me think about the absolutely insane fact that I was about to have the first real conversation of my life with a lead singer. First with an active musician of any kind, really. That should be impossible for a guy who is almost 49 years old, and has spent as much brain power over the years thinking about music as I have. But I have exactly the right combination of mental hang-ups and personality deficiencies to make it happen.
I might have guessed I’d have been nervous waiting for him, but there wasn’t any hint of it. This idea to talk to musicians, and to make him the first one, came to me fully formed the other day. Like a slap to the head. So there was nothing to be worried about - it was already in place in my mind, so reality just had to catch up.
Besides, something I had seen in Rich when I saw him on stage a few weeks back made me know I didn’t need to be worried. I think maybe it was the way he gave a good friend a hard time for arriving with just two songs left. He later said that had made him feel like a dick after the fact, but he said it in a way that was clear he also found it funny. So did I. And I’d have done it, too.
He was dressed all in black, including a leather jacket. He had these pointy faded purple leather shoes that made perfect sense for him, but which I could never pull off - and not just because I’d trip by the second step. His head is shaved, and his red beard clearly rarely gets touched by a razor. He has enough ink visible that there is no doubt that there is much more that you can’t see. If a movie filming in Calgary was looking for ‘guy who obviously plays in a band’ for a background shot, they would grab him off the street and be done with it. But it doesn’t look at all like a costume. He is what he is.
To get to the point of having this beer, I had sent Rich a long and perhaps slightly rambling email. A tad unhinged, even - at least until you get to know me, and learn that that energy is just part of my base level. As I sat waiting for him, I couldn’t help but think about one thing I knew about him. For several years, he had been a trained crisis volunteer for the Calgary Distress Centre, answering calls from people who really needed help. Part of me wondered, mostly jokingly, if he had agreed to meet with me because that instinct to help the helpless was still strong, even if he no longer did that work. I was comforted a short while later, though, when Rich talked about someone else who he’d had contact with at that same show who, after I emailed him, he assumed was me. I thought that guy sounded a little crazy, so at least I’m not the only one.
I don’t like half-measures when a full measure is possible. And if an extra-full measure is on the table, I’ll often choose that. So, it can’t be surprising on some level, then, that my first ever conversation with a lead singer lasted for four hours, and well over one pint of beer. No easing into things here. To be fair, though, I had stacked the deck - I’d picked a brewery as the setting to talk to a music geek about music, and a lead singer about themselves. Nothing about that was a recipe for brevity from where I sit. And it was immediately evident that the same was true for Rich. I think you can tell a lot about someone by how they deal with being asked if they want another round when you are having a beer together. Without even a glance my way, Rich nodded to the server like it was a given. We weren’t so different, after all.
She's teeth-grindingly easy on these hazy eyes
She's just that kind of being
She'll fuckin' steal your bike
I was in love with this lyric, from the song Dollarama Prima Donna from Free The Cynics’ latest album, the second I saw it. That last line is such a whipsaw of a twist. Perfect.
We were deep into a conversation about the songwriting process. It was time.
‘Who stole your bike?’
I wish I had buckled my seatbelt before posing the question.
Rich is a very free laugher, so it’s no surprise that he laughed when I asked. But not a normal laugh. He threw his head back and to the side, looking up as if the film of the bizarre episode spawning the lyric was projected on the ceiling. Then he looked back, and with a mischievous giggle that I would hear several more times over the next few crazy minutes, he got started.
I won’t tell the whole story. I’m sure I couldn’t do it justice. It started with a plan for him and a bandmate to get fit. The methodology was arguably imperfect - play a bit of tennis once a week, and then head to the pub for several pints to celebrate the progress. And it wound up with the bandmate having a tiny woman in a ballgown who he’d never seen before hanging onto his back and punching his head over and over again, while a nearly 7 foot stranger and a cop in an unmarked car looked on, and Rich stood there screaming at his wife to leave them behind and drive away while she still could. It probably goes without saying, but the path between those two points was not a straight line.
I understand the lyric even less now than I did before I asked. But I like it even more.
Like a man who is fully aware he won the jackpot in a lottery, Rich brought up his wife Lauren countless times. She attends most of his shows, and he says he sings 10 percent better when she’s there. Fairly early in the afternoon, though, I heard about one show she had chosen not to be at.
Rich was 23 at this point, and at the tail end of an impossibly rough year. He was living in Edinburgh, and was on tour with his band in London. The logistics weren’t quite dialed in, and the five person band had wound up with just four beds booked in a room in a hostel for a couple of nights. Rich pouted about pulling the short straw, but he took a bed in another room.
Straight out of a rom-com script, one of the others in that new room was a 21 year old Canadian girl backpacking through Europe. With the bravado of a lead singer, Rich invited the stranger to his show that night. That was more than 15 years ago now, but he still almost flinches from the sting of her decisive rejection of the idea. But after they both slept in the next morning, he convinced her to join him for breakfast, she happened to be heading to Edinburgh after London, she agreed to go to his show the second time around, her stay in the Scottish capital wound up being longer than planned, and here we are.
At what point did he know that she would be a character in his life’s movie forever? Almost instantly. He has lyrics by British rock band The Libertines tattooed on his forearm. He says that she identified the band quickly, and completely unprompted. In the movies, there is sometimes a phrase someone reads and a genie appears. She read his arm, and a husband appeared - whether she knew it at the time or not.
I was so touched by his telling of that story, and by other things he said about Lauren, that I was feeling guilty towards the end of the afternoon when she was texting him to remind him to be home for dinner, and he was promising a timeline that just wasn’t going to happen without the aid of time travel. He said more than once that he was going to be in so much trouble. But the way he said it, and the look in his eye, made it clear both that that was really not something new to him, and that it was a strangely comforting place for him to be.
Rich and Lauren have a son, Lochlan, who is 20 months old. Like any good man, Rich brought his son up often. My favorite was when we talked of songwriting, and his process. Rich says he can’t write happy songs, so he relies upon the band to disguise his dismal lyrics with their music. Since he’s had a kid he’s felt pressure from others to write a song about him, or for him. He’s tried more than once, but just can’t get it right. Respecting his writing as I do, I struggled to believe that he couldn’t manage it. But when he shared that the title of his best version of a toddler tune to date was ‘I don’t want to fuck you up’, I realized that maybe his instincts were right here.
On one of his first visits to Calgary with Lauren, they attended a Flames game. The Kings were in town, and Rich was stunned to see a guy sitting in the crowd wearing an L.A. jersey. The guy had no protection, didn’t seem to be in any fear, and didn’t get physically assaulted at any point in the game. To his Scottish brain, that just didn’t compute.
Rich is a fan of Celtic F.C. - one of two soccer teams in Glasgow, along with the hated Rangers. And I mean that he’s a fan of them in the same way that I am a fan of oxygen - it’s pretty central to my entire existence. Before meeting Rich, I knew that Celtic and Rangers were an all-time rivalry, but the specifics were beyond me.
In simple terms, Celtic is a team for catholic, left wing supporters, and Rangers is for protestant, right wing supporters. And both sides would prefer if the other side were dead. Not ha ha dead, like I feel about the Oilers or Buckeyes. Dead dead.
Rich spent a lot of time, and more passion, educating me on this rivalry. He explained that he is both an atheist and a pacifist, but he becomes a violent catholic on game days. I’m a big sports guy, with more than my share of hated foes, so I ate this right up. One story, though, seemed just insane even to me. As a North American, I charge you with counting the number of things in this next paragraph that kind of make your head explode.
Rangers fans sing many songs that sum up their bitter contempt for their catholic, socialist foes succinctly. One, called Billy Boys, contains the line ‘We’re up to our knees in Fenian blood’. Leading into one rivalry meeting, Rangers supporters had MAILED A BOMB to the Celtic coach. This was not the first time that that had happened. And, luckily, the package was intercepted before it arrived. At the game, Rangers supporters had amended the lyrics of the song to ‘We’re up to our knees in postal fees’. He hated to admit it, but the songwriter in Rich had to tip his cap to the enemy for that one.
His passion for that rivalry is far from the only way in which Rich is Scottish. Exceptionally Scottish. Far more Scottish than I feel like I present as a Canadian, and I have been one my entire life, and for several generations before that. There were tells along the way, for sure. His accent is likely not nearly as thick as it once was, but still very present. He has a very red beard. He knows the challenges of wearing a kilt on a beach in Thailand. He called his son Lochlan, which is the name of most Scottish people I know. He handles a pint glass like he was genetically predisposed to hold one.
It was when I asked about Scottish independence, though, that his roots were put on full display. To be clear, I mostly knew what I was doing when I asked. I’d had a couple of pints by this point, and I saw a pot I could stir. What made it fun, though, was that I didn’t really understand what his stance would be. I just knew by that point that he would definitely have one.
Remember in Braveheart when the Scottish forces are preparing for battle against the English, and Mel Gibson rides back and forth on his horse firing up his troops? ‘They may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom!’ Those soldiers were less ready to embrace Scottish independence than I was by the time Rich was done with me.
I heard about the Queen. And some monarchs before her. Several prime minister’s and their immense faults. Geography. Population distribution and vote splits. TV network’s malice. European indifference. Ireland. How all of northern England wishes they were Scottish. How you can love English bands, cities and people and still want to leave them in the dust. And more. And by the end, I was desperate for those English cowards to allow a vote and let my people be free!
I knew going in that Rich was into Idles, a British rock band. They are named as a major influence for Free The Cynics several times. So it was inevitable that they were going to come up. He was wearing an Idles t-shirt under his leather jacket, so he certainly wasn’t hiding his affiliation.
The truth is, it turns out, that Rich is really, really, really into Idles. We came back to the band several times. He’d talk about what I should look up on Youtube, what lyrics made him happy, and which made him jealous, the lengths he had gone to see them play, and the times that they were close and he was unable to see them play and how it gutted him. He went deep - and he raised the hairs on the back of his own neck more than once as he did so, he told me
Idles is a band I know, but not that well. But I loved hearing him talking about them. And there was a particular moment when I really realized that my whole mindset about musicians might not have been true. That it was actually probably dumb as hell.
I have spent my life assuming that there is a massive, uncrossable chasm between me and musicians. They are, I have believed, impossibly different, and I could never relate to them. So I haven’t tried. But the way he was talking about Idles, I suddenly realized, was exactly the way I would talk about The Watchmen. He was explaining every detail of everything about the band, to a level far, far beyond what most people could ever even conceive of caring about. And he wasn’t even scratching the surface of what he could have said. But I sensed and knew, like few do, the simultaneous, unspoken frustration of being completely incapable of explaining anything about why you love them like you do.
He was, I realized, just a hopelessly obsessed music fan. Like me. He just expresses that obsession in part through singing. No one wants that from me. So I go to shows, talk to people about music way beyond their precipice of boredom, and, now, write about it - in greater volume than anyone suspected when they signed up.
It’s different, except it’s really not that much so. So, building big walls around musicians, as I have, is just dumb. It would be like a red cow deciding they can’t eat grass beside a white cow because it’s white. It’s still just a cow beyond the pigment, and ultimately they’d almost surely like eating grass together for a while. They are, after all, both just four legged hamburger in the end.
The gap between his love of music and mine further narrowed to almost nothing when I asked him which high profile bands he doesn’t have time for. His list was different from mine, but his lack of understanding of their success, and his venom towards them, were so familiar I felt like he had robbed my brain. For the record, if you are looking for a gift for Rich, don’t buy him anything by Drake or City and Colour. And I don't think his next project will be a Coldplay cover band, either. He said that they write music ‘purposefully to be in the middle of the road’. I’m not fluent in Scottish, but that doesn’t sound like a compliment to me. Personally, I would call the illness of writing songs like that Mumford-&-Sons-itis. I fear it may be fatal to society.
“So why do you find it so hard to talk to musicians? We're just scumbags. And we love when people tell us we're good.”
For all of my fascination with talking about being a musician with Rich, it seemed like he also had a fascination with understanding what was motivating me. We have that in common right now, I guess. On his part, it didn’t feel like it came from a place of disdain, either. He was, I would say, curious in his understanding. He turned the conversation to the topic at least twice - which is as often as he said some version of “But honestly, I see where you're coming from”. I believe he does - even if, increasingly, I don’t.
Really, it would be disingenuous for him to be totally without understanding. After all, when he was about 18 he was at an art gallery standing by the bar. Liam Gallagher, one of the two brothers at the head of Oasis, and one of Rich’s true musical heroes, came to the bar for a drink, then sat at the next table drinking it. Rich, in a move I can absolutely understand because I have rehearsed it many times over, said nothing. And he has since spent more than 20 years dwelling on his silence. Musicians are just like me, it turns out. It’s weird how this is quickly becoming something of a recurring theme.
Rich offered another interesting peek into a musician’s mind when he described the challenge of stepping off the stage after a set.
“Another thing that happens when you get off stage, you don't want to look at people. Yeah, when I come off stage if I don't want to look at people because I don't want them to think I’m like, ‘Hey, tell me what you like about me. Talk to me. Tell me.’ A lot of musicians probably don’t look at people then because they're like, I don't want to be that guy.”
I believe that the lesson there was that I should immediately begin hugging each artist I like the second they step off the stage. I’ll tell them Rich told me to do it.
I don’t know what I was expecting from this exercise. So I don’t know exactly what I accomplished. But it feels like it was a lot. And I sure am glad it happened. Rich is a truly good guy. But he’s also just a guy, and the reinforcement that you can be both that AND a musician I enjoy and respect should have been much more obvious to me than it had been before now.
At one point, I asked him to describe being in a band in three sentences to someone who had never been in one. I was expecting it to be a throwaway question, frankly. But he really thought about it. He grabs his beard and smooths it into a point when he is thinking, and it got a real workout here. And there was a long pause after each answer, too.
His eventual answers:
80% the best fun you could ever have, 20% really fucking frustrating.
A huge trigger for self doubt
You see what others are doing, and wish you could figure out how to do that
It’s life. He described life. Being in a band is just being alive.
Ya, I’ve been an idiot all these years.
They haven’t asked me do this, but I wanted to tell you about an event Rich and Lauren have run for 10 years now. Rich has a heartbreaking personal connection to the work the Distress Centre does. Each year, they organize a concert event at Dickens Pub in Calgary to support the organization. They have raised a silly amount of money over the years. This year’s edition is Saturday, June 1. Four bands donate their services - including, obviously, Free The Cynics - and there’s a silent auction and raffle. You can get tickets - which are way too cheap, by the way - here. Or, if you’d rather stay on your couch and be boring on a Saturday night, you can support them in absentia here. Tricia and I will be there, and I know it will be a fun night.
I don’t as yet have my next musician lined up to talk to - though I have a target in mind, and am just one ‘Yes!’ away from making it happen. The afternoon was way too good for it to be a unicorn event.
The details: T.O. and Rich Paxton, Sunday, May 5, 1 pm, Two House Brewing, Calgary.
Up next: Exploring a one hit wonder that would never admit that that’s what they are - and maybe they aren’t - on Friday night.
Sounds like you had an interesting time, glad you made it happen..