SPITS ON THE STREET
Laura Hubert and Pat Langner -- The Spits -- return to their busking roots and hustle up a new record
Two years ago Laura Hubert and Pat Langner had a Juno on the shelf and a recording contract with a Canadian major label. Now they're back on the street, busking for change.
The duo, formerly known as a Treeo, also have a new record in the stores. Now called The Spits (having divested themselves of the "Leslie," the "Treeo" and the third member), Hubert and Langner have proved themselves masters of guerrilla recording, the subversive art of making a record without spending any of your own money. Instead Hell's Kitchen was financed with the goodwill of friends and acquaintances who include respected Toronto musicians, a record retail chain executive and a hotshot Memphis record producer.
When Joe Hardy made a bundle off the Leslie Spit Treeo for producing their prophetically titled second album Book Of Rejection in 1992, he was just about the only one. To put it kindly, its hodge-podge of hard-edged rock, slick balladry and displaced folk tried too hard to please and ended up pleasing almost no one, least of all the band. The unpretentious charm of the former buskers eluded capture. As Hardy sees it, "They were caught in the corporate thing -- and they're as far away from corporate anything as you can get."
What followed that album's release was a career path that had in a sense been preordained when they "won" the accursed Juno award for Most Promising Band in 1991. By 1994, after two records, they had quit Capitol, their major label, lost a member (necessitating an appetizing name change to The Spits) and were about to leave Toronto altogether for Vancouver. Then their luck changed. Apparently Joe Hardy felt guilty. Better still, he wasn't the only one.
Hardy had just finished recording Tom Cochrane's hugely successful Mad, Mad World when his manager negotiated what he now calls "an exorbitant rate" to work on Book Of Rejection. Two years later, after Hubert and Langner sent him some rough demos of new material, he decided he'd like to work with them again. Their new songs, he says, "seemed twisted, cynical, funny and bittersweet all at the same time." Knowing that their financial situation was bleak, to say the least, Hardy not only offered his services and studio for free, but invited the pair to his Memphis home for the two-week recording session. "Being Catholic, there was some residual guilt, you know what I'm saying?" Hardy jokes. "But besides that, I really, really like them. I'm, like, 42 now and have some dough, but when I was their age I had nothing."
"There is an element of enlightened self-interest here -- I don't believe in Karma, but I'm covered for this year just in case it crops up," says Hardy, who has also worked with ZZ Top, Steve Earle and, recently, Kim Mitchell (who donated his leftover tape to The Spits). "The last record," he adds, "must have cost 30 times more than this one."
Hardy wasn't the only one to lend himself to The Spits. Local musical luminaries, from singers David Ramsden and Cindy Matthews to Lori Yates and Blue Rodeo's Basil Donovan, appear on the record as does much-sought-after keyboardist Jason Sniderman. Even the album's title comes from the name of the Kensington Market restaurant that fed Langner and Hubert during their phase of financial impairment.
Six of the album's 14 tracks were completed in Memphis, the remainder at Manta Sound in Toronto with Ron Searles at the helm. "I'm glad they could scam the time at Manta," Hardy says. "I don't know how they did it because they didn't have any dough. Laura conceivably had to blow Ron, but I don't think that happened. Pat might have."
Jason Sniderman might have been feeling a little guilt, too. "If anything," he offers self-critically, "on the last Leslie Spit Treeo album I may have contributed too much." Sniderman, who is also an executive at his father's Sam The Record Man chain, fronted the money to press the first run of Hell's Kitchen CDs. (It's not the first time: he has paid for pressings by Moist and Lowest Of The Low.) Sniderman downplays his generosity, saying, "It would be foolish of me not to help them in the manufacturing process, because I sell the music that I want to sell."
Besides, he adds, he admires the way The Spits have tried out the system, recognized its failings and persevered nonetheless. "That's how it's supposed to be," he says. "You're not supposed to throw up your hands and give up if the record company drops you or if you don't sell 15,000 or 20,000 records. You're doing it because you want to make music and share it with other people."
Hubert and Langner are now back to streetcorner busking to pay rent and finance an eventual tour. Although most of Hell's Kitchen is electric rock, the songs translate well to the limitations of a sidewalk performance. "We do really well acoustic," Hubert claims. "People just get all goofy about it." When asked if a return to busking isn't a frightening step backward, she offers a quick and happy, "No, it was never that far away."