On this episode of Mixing It Up, we re looking back at the early days of Vice, starting in the late 80s and early 90s, when the magazine was in its heyday. We re talking about the rise and fall of the company, the racism that went with it, and what it s like to be bilingual in Canada.
Transcript
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00:00:07.000A noodle morning after leaning back on my chair in the green sea spoon cafeteria from New York with gentlemen with the table telling jokes, playing with the salt, looking out the window.
00:00:24.000Girl brings chickplates in full English above Carl grabs the phone like oi oi oi oi.
00:01:15.000I had more let Jesse Pearson handle everything at that point.
00:01:19.000So though this says, I didn't make this shirt, by the way.
00:01:22.000Though this says 2007, we're really going to go from the beginning to 2006.
00:01:27.000Let me give you a brief background on the magazine, the media company, if you're not familiar.
00:01:33.000Montreal, Canada is racist towards English people.
00:01:39.000You cannot get a job there, not only if you are English, but even if you're bilingual, but when you speak French, they can detect an accent.
00:01:52.000In the rest of Canada, especially Ontario, if you go to a museum and you say to some, we call them Pepsis or Peppers because Pepsi was about five cents cheaper than Coke in the 80s.
00:02:35.000But if you're like, bon jour, comment sauvage, je me pel gavin, je je faire boucout cho, je jour douis, they'd be like, oh, no, I can smell English in that.
00:03:19.000Joe's shoes can be there, but it has to be smaller.
00:03:21.000Of course, brands like McDonald's have a problem when they go there because they don't have an apostrophe S in French, so it has to be de McDonald.
00:05:01.000So part of this culture of just funneling cash into Ontario, into Quebec, is there's bullshit grants like there's a diversity grant, tons of diversity money.
00:05:12.000So there's not a lot of diversity in Quebec.
00:05:13.000They have a thing called pure lang, pure wool, and you have to be French or you don't exist.
00:07:44.000And again, this guy would OD so many times that the EMTs would beat the shit out of him in the ambulance because they were so mad about having to bring him back again.
00:09:36.000In fact, I had very little to do with music for the majority of my time there because it's like a full-time job finding out the hot new band.
00:10:23.000They're not letting me, like, obviously to get ads, you have to put the, it was a newspaper back then, put the newspaper in an envelope and mail it to someone and go, here's our thing.
00:14:41.000You have to say, no, this is happening.
00:14:44.000If you have to walk from A to B and they drop a million piles of snow on you, you guys got to burrow through the snow.
00:14:50.000You're getting from A to B. So we call all these stores and within 24 hours, we set up a thing where I'm going to ship you a pile of newspapers.
00:15:03.000And then next issue, you're going to distribute them everywhere.
00:15:05.000And next issue, you're going to get a free ad.
00:15:08.000And so maybe not with the first pile they get, but with the second pile, they have an incentive to get it everywhere because their ad is in it.
00:15:26.000Told this story many, many times, as you can imagine.
00:15:30.000And yeah, we became a national magazine by exchanging ads for labor.
00:15:34.000And that concept of going national happened in 24 hours, thanks to an emergency.
00:15:40.000In fact, that adversity, Kevin kind of gifted us because we wouldn't have had the balls to call up all these stores across the country and set that up.
00:19:02.000It wasn't, because we'd always been cheap and we never spent more than we, if we made enough to print 40,000 copies, we printed 40,000 copies.
00:19:11.000Although we had to pay, I think $50,000 to the Haitians for the, I don't know why, because we were kids and he intimidated us and he said, my wife's a lawyer, I'll ruin you.
00:19:21.000We went, okay, here's, let's pay you $50,000 over two years or something like that.
00:19:46.000And yeah, we were flat fucking broke, but it was worse than broke because he'd been spending money.
00:19:54.000He got a global trademark for this logo, which, by the way, is just the NWA font traced again and again and again and fattened up in Adobe Illustrator.
00:20:06.000We had paid for this to be a global trademark.
00:20:42.000So I was writing the magazine, laying it out, basically handling 100% of what you see, you know, around 2002, which is really when it was at its best, right?
00:20:53.0002004 was the peak, I'd say, 10-year anniversary.
00:20:57.000Oh, and another thing, people always say, well, you lost all this money by leaving Vice.
00:21:33.000The director of Animal House, Doug Kenney, said, or no, sorry, the writer, they said, let's get Animal House actors here 10 days early and they can party.
00:21:41.000And then the evil fraternity will invite there, like Kevin Bacon, we'll invite them there day of, and then they'll hate each other's guts.
00:21:50.000I think good content is the opposite of an advertorial.
00:21:54.000Eventually, you bend that enough and it's going to break.
00:21:57.000When you cost like some poor bastard, some sales guy, you cost him $100,000 because you did a photo shoot, a fashion shoot where all the models were fucking.
00:22:15.000And then when I left, Chain and the advertisers took over the content.
00:22:19.000And I believe, my opinion is, or many opinions are, I have to be careful here.
00:22:24.000I've signed a lot of documentation, that it became more of an advertorial thing, more of a appealing to whatever the hot advertising trend of the day was.
00:22:35.000Like, I'm sure right now it's all about woke capitalism and Black Lives Matter and stuff.
00:22:42.000But the interesting thing about Richard Sawinski is he brought in this concept of a multi-channel brand, he called it.
00:22:48.000Now, we had a record label in Montreal, but it's just a joke, and it was on cassette, and it was for our friends.
00:22:53.000We put out like 10 cassettes, and it wasn't real.
00:22:55.000But he was like, now you need retail, you need a record label, you need a movie company, TV company.
00:23:01.000And we kind of stuck with that even after he abandoned us and we had to rebuild from scratch.
00:23:05.000And by the way, anyone who says we don't deserve what we got because the government started, well, what about when we rebuilt when we were a million dollars in debt and we had to move to Williamsburg, which is fucking scary back then?
00:27:18.000This was my first, the first thing I ever wrote in my life is in the first issue.
00:27:22.000And it's a review of our band Furnace Face.
00:27:25.000Fluid Waffle kicked out Steve D'Anunzio because he was a crappy AM radio guy.
00:27:30.000Five years later, they have Honest Engines, Marty Jones, his sampler, sold-out shows in every province except Quebec, and the name Furnace Face.
00:27:39.000They seem to replace their white guy college funk with a much heavier sound that will make you happy.
00:27:44.000Shit, even if you don't like it, there's plenty of little esoteric fillers you can play for your friends or put out on your answering machine.
00:27:51.000And that sort of ended up defining vice after a while was that mode of not writing seriously and writing how you talk.
00:32:01.000I'd rather just, you know, figure it out as you go.
00:32:03.000You could read about snowboarding, or you could just get on the top of the hill, tie a pillow to your ass, and wait until you figured it out through trial and error.
00:32:44.000And he's like, Yeah, it's very important whether it be black or white to own as much of themselves as possible.
00:32:50.000This guy started the whole concept of indie labels.
00:32:56.000The music business has always been one-sided, where the producer and the writer have never had a stake in the publishing rights and production points that make the big money in the long run.
00:33:04.000I'm happy to see young people get wise to that.
00:33:06.000What about all those Curtis Mayfield tribute albums with monsters like Michael Bolton?
00:37:41.000Yeah, but if you're an avid fan, then you go through your issues and you're like, which one is the Curtis Mayfield one or the Black Alicious one?
00:40:43.000And then within about 20 minutes, every dude is asleep.
00:40:48.000So this guy shows up, and there's just these bored naked chicks snorting Coke, talking to each other in like what looks like part of the Holocaust.
00:40:57.000Just like not literally dead bodies, but possibly about to be.
00:43:02.000Like, it wasn't like handsome jocks, Giselle Bunchen, and what's his name, the football guy, as do's, and then an ugly fat chick as a don't.
00:44:34.000You know, I wrote for the American conservative in the early aughts, saying it's hip to be square, talking about conservative culture and how we're pro-stuff.
00:46:04.000One of my favorite parts of that issue is we had a double page spread, and it showed a cop standing there with little arrows showing all of his shit.
00:46:47.000In fact, he left, after he left Vice, he started doing a magazine called Cat Holic, and it's spelled like Catholic, which I'm not a fan of.
00:48:57.000This was a very important issue to me, was the special issue where we got seriously handicapped people to hang out with Terry and they each got to write their own article and direct it.
00:49:10.000This cover folded out to one, two, three, four, five different things.
00:49:15.000They did a show together called How's Your News.
00:49:25.000And one thing that was interesting is, see this guy in the chair?
00:49:28.000He's like, and I, for a photo caption, this issue, I think it was actually this photo, because he looked like a badass, I said, whatever his name was, would have been a total badass if it wasn't for cerebral palsy.
00:49:41.000And that pissed off the guy who sort of facilitated this whole thing.
00:49:45.000And he goes, he is a fucking badass to us.
00:49:48.000And I was like, I think his name was Andrew.
00:51:54.000In fact, I called him and another intern the faggots for, I think, five years.
00:51:58.000He ended up being the head of sales and paying all our rent.
00:52:01.000But we did an issue dedicated to him called the Eric Lavois issue, where he was in the, we just wrote articles about him.
00:52:07.000I took one article about Mona Lisa's smile and I did edit replace Mona Lisa Eric Lavoie and it's all about Eric Lavoie's smile, his mysterious smile, and how it lures people in.
00:52:19.000I think that was the only issue ever that didn't have 100% pickup.
00:52:23.000Oh, that's the photo shoot I was telling you about before that lost his 100 grand.
00:52:28.000Lost his, what was it, Yamaha or something?
00:52:35.000So this is going back over many years.
00:58:44.000And we'd make these horrible mistakes, like with the Tricky interview, it came out, and thanks to Quark Express, the picture was hiding a column.
01:01:32.000I was originally formed at a plant here in Rexdale that makes and distributes various shapes of pasta for an Italian company called Santa Maria, who in turn sells it to Mastro and some other people.
01:01:41.000I'm going to be bagged this week and probably will be in stores before the spring.
01:01:46.000I had a bowl of pasta the other night and I dropped one of the cooked pieces on my way to the table.
01:01:53.000Being eaten and enjoyed is the prime objective and when something stands in the way of that, that being a normal pasta meal that gets eaten by a healthy human enjoys its food, we feel we failed.
01:04:32.000So we broke down his entire uniform and everything about it, the eight-point hat, the hat device, grooming, turtleneck, collarbrass, patches, pockets, shirts.
01:04:44.000See, this is how you make pop culture.
01:04:51.000That's why I was so good advice because I really wanted to know and I wanted to impart wisdom.
01:04:58.000And it wasn't like, I didn't, I wasn't checking in and out of a job.
01:05:01.000I was like part of the culture and helping other people find out about what's going on.
01:05:06.000Like one issue we never got to do was I wanted to take a picture of a building that was like, say, six stories high and then have people in their windows and then go interview everyone in the window.
01:05:18.000So the table of contents would be that picture and it would just be like apartment 2A, apartment 2B, apartment 2C, and break down the whole, the whole, you know, you couldn't do too many buildings, but like, you know, say a 15-apartment building.
01:05:33.000And that's, you'd be surprised how much of these pop culture people in your life are fans, are nerds.
01:05:40.000For example, I've talked about this before, but Chuck D used to be a show promoter, and then he started Public Enemy.
01:05:47.000Ludacris was a radio DJ, and then he went on his own.
01:05:52.000Fugging Morrissey, he wanted to write for Emmy, and then he ended up becoming his own pop star.
01:06:03.000Iggy Pop was obsessed with the Ann Arbor scene and the Detroit scene, and he handpicked all these different guys from his favorite band and said, let's start a supergroup.
01:06:12.000The Stooges is actually a super group created by a fan.
01:07:35.000This is what I said when I'm, just when you thought nobody gets laid less than you, Mr. Nanopenis waddles past reading a comic book about chefs that compete in outer space.
01:07:43.000This kid is growing to grow up with so little sex, his penis is eventually going to become asshole-shaped.
01:09:21.000It's also possible, by the way, that when you leave me, you'll be a pariah because you'll be the guy who worked for that white supremacist.
01:15:54.000Oh, I'm glad I remembered to mention this.
01:15:55.000Remember I told you about the file that was eating itself and I was so stressed out and I was lying on the floor with my shirt off and I managed to save the day.
01:16:54.000The other kind is the guy who goes, okay, we'll open the files and paste them.
01:16:57.000And then after we get this issue printed and sent to the printer, then we can start working on this horrible piece of shit refurbished computer that's cursed.
01:18:38.000So whether this is all about your own megalomania, which I think is sad, but apparently you don't, or you're going to be the Hispanic, you're going to be the Asian, and they're both going to be mixed because it says melting pot.