Robert Dayton Purges All (Independently)

“No, no, no,” Robert Dayton corrects me as I misspeak the title of his band July Fourth Toilet’s new album, their second release. “It’s not called Balls Boogie. The full title of the album is July Fourth Toilet presents Balls Boogie featuring Me and Bobby McGee plus Kentucky Whore and Many Others. Yes, it’s a mouthful, but there it is. Perhaps for marketing purposes we should have done what Tiny Tim did,” Dayton ponders, rising up from his bar stool. “Do you know what Tiny Tim called his second album?” he asks.
“Uh...no, Robert,” I reply, startled to find myself stumped on obscure music trivia. “What did Tiny Tim call his second album?”
“Tiny Tim’s Second Album,” Dayton replies, striding off to find the washroom.
We’re seated at the sidewalk patio of the Charlatan, a not-bad watering hole on Commercial Drive where the clientele isn’t chokingly hip and the management are smart enough to staff their establishment with classy cougar waitresses. I prefer the new name of the bar, since it used to be called Bukowski’s – anyone who reads above infantile primers like Dick and Jane or the Republic of East Vancouver knows that Charles Bukowski wouldn’t have been caught dead in a joint hawking $9-martinis, but then again you won’t find slumming WestEnders looking cool in the Grand Union Hotel at Happy Hour on Talent Night.
July Fourth Toilet has been a going concern for Dayton (perhaps better known around town as Canned Hamm’s Little Hamm, and a story unto itself) since the dog days of 1994, when Vancouver’s local scene was flooded with Christ-knows-how-many Seattle-grunge wannabes, all scrabbling for the false promise of international superstardom when the so-called ‘alternative rock revolution’ was proven to be insincere and spineless.
“The 90s were a tough time for me,” Dayton reminisces. “It was hard to find music worth listening to...”
“Thank God Veruca Salt was there to save us!” I smartassedly interject, but it’s nigh impossible to faze Dayton.
“With eight arms to hold us,” he snaps back, missing not one beat. “The great thing about Veruca Salt is that their album went to Number One on the charts before it was even released. They’re a great example of a music-industry engineering. So yeah, that was what it was like, and me and a few of my friends decided to make music worth listening to.”
July Fourth Toilet has seen a bewildering whirlwind of locals do the revolving-door blur through its ranks over the past fifteen years. “We’ve had eighty people in and out of the band,” Dayton remarks, “and once about forty of them found themselves together at the same party!”
Attempting to describe July Fourth Toilet as either musician-performers or as an overall concept is extremely difficult...and annoyingly verbose folk like this writer don’t back away from the challenge. They’re in the same nonchalantly-organized avant-garde performance-art bubble as Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Bonzo Dog Band, but Dayton doesn’t push hard for military discipline in his bandmates: “Some of them are extremely regimented musicians, but some of the July Fourth Toileteers aren’t necessarily musicians per se, and they add their own persona to the spectacle as a whole.” I desperately scramble to find eye-catching superlatives, adjectives, compound pronouns, Carroll/Lear nonsense words, anything to pass the message along. In a move akin to besieged platoon leaders calling in artillery fire on their own enemy-breached perimeters, I scuttle to web link and unapologetically lift their own description, in their own words:

A long-running multi-piece ensemble from Vancouver who brew up a unique stew of musical styles, blending gnomish acid folk, honky tonk stumble, glam tarnish, raw sweat ballistics boogie, synthesized organ matter, cult murder a cappella, crafted cacophony, archaic ritual invocation harnessing of the astral universe and aspartame pop balladry. A lucid 'Something For Everyone' of murk gloss arcana recorded studio matter and a wide variety of viscerally moody candy-coloured bargain basement showbiz extravaganza theme shows that walk the risky razor's edge. All infused with simultaneous childlike wonder and shambolic ritual, melody and sass, wrapped in a burnt husk warm crepe: cream spilling out the side, yearning to be free.

Right. Anyways, by the time you read this, July Fourth Toilet will already have performed their CD Release party for July Fourth Toilet presents Balls Boogie featuring Me and Bobby McGee plus Kentucky Whore and Many Others at the Vancouver Art Gallery, but don’t let that stop you from attending their second CD Release Party, to be held Friday July 4th (when else?) at the mighty Pub 340 (340 Cambie Street, kitty-corner from Victory Square...follow the junkie puke). Posted: Jun 29, 2008