by Daniel Colussi | For the past year The High Drops have been tooling around Vancouver, earning their place as the reverb-drenched heirs to the kind of snappy garage pop that these ears can’t get enough of. Theirs is the school of druggy guitar rock that bridges the gap between those classic blues-loving Englishmen of the late 60’s and the scruffy-dream pop of the VU at their most laconic. They’ve got licks galore, and their bandcamp features five earworms guaranteed to get stuck in your craw. I met with singer/guitarist Alexi Baris, guitarist Mitch Charron, and bassplayer Max Osburn (drummer Jen Smythe was not present) for an off the cuff convo about being a band in Vancouver, what their future plans are, and what specific formative music experiences gave them the rock ‘n roll bug.

STARTING THE BAND

So when did you guys start jamming? When was the first High Drops show?

Lex: The first show was August the 7th, and you were there.

It was the Pat’s Pub show?

Lex: Yeah. Two-thousand and ten.

Mitch: Wow, I couldn’t have told you that!

Lex: At about eleven-twenty five we played. The rest is history. It was us and Dizzy Eyes and Vancouger. C.C. was playing bass for us then. We’ve had a plague of bass players. C.C., Rob, and now Max.

And so, Lex and Mitch, you guys know each other from the old skateboarding days? You were both carving bowls and that’s how you met?

Mitch: At the Art Gallery maybe or Eaton’s. Not actually in the Eaton’s but skateboarding near there. It’s been about ten years.

So it was all about skateboarding and then once you got guitars, the skateboards had to go? It was one or the other? Because you two have a reputation in this town for being semi-legendary skaters.

Lex: No, it wasn’t like that. It was just that we both got bored with skateboarding and got more into jamming.

Was there a pre-High Drops band?

Lex: No. We played as just me and Mitch, just jamming with two guitars. And then I convinced Jen to buy a drumkit. Because I knew that she had history with bands and stuff. And me and Mitch were playing guitars together, just fucking around. And then we asked C.C. to join on bass. But then she decided that she wanted to just play the drums.

Mitch: And then that’s what happened with Rob, he decided he wanted to stick with his first instrument, the guitar.

So what were the albums that you guys bonded over when you first started jamming?

Mitch: In the beginning it was probably The Yardbirds and The Who and all that British Invasion rock. And then a lot of American stuff too.

Lex: We just kinda jammed. For like twenty minutes at a time.

Mitch: So then the progression is that after a while you want to actually write a song. And start making something with a definite beginning and an end.

PLAYING SHOWS

So when’s the next High Drops show?

Mitch: October 6th with Capital 6 at The Cobalt. And then Guys And Dolls – the pool hall on Main St. – on Friday October the 14th.

Max: Is that going to happen?

I didn’t know they did shows there.

Mitch: They don’t. He wants us to do a two hour set.

Who’s “He”?

Lex: They guy that owns it. His name is Kelsey.

And he knows you because you guys are just barflies hanging out in there all the time?

Mitch: No.

Lex: No. Well, we were in there once and he was playing, he was playing something, cuz they have a record player there so you can bring your records in and play whatever.

Oh, I never noticed that before. I thought I always just heard B.T.O. getting played in there.

Lex: Yeah well, it usually is, but he told us “any records that you want to put on, you can play.” So there was this one time he came up to me and he was like, “So what do you want to listen to?” So I was like, I dunno, just put anything on. And he put on this Velvet Underground live album on. And that was pretty cool. And then he was talking to us about The Greenhornes, remember that?

Mitch: Yeah.

Lex: And then that’s how we got talking to him. We kinda liked that band. For a while.

Mitch: He had a twelve piece brass band in there once before.

Lex: Yeah, a jazz band.

Mitch: I don’t know how it’s going to sound in the room. It’s pretty enormous.

Max: There’s a tiny little corner in the front where he wants us to set up.

Mitch: It’s going to sound crazy because it’s going to be so bright, and I told them we can probably only do 45 minutes to an hour, if you’re lucky. So I told him to start it late.

Well maybe you guys should learn a bunch of covers.

Mitch: Yeah. Well, we’re also supposed to to do this – it’s probably not going to happen – but we’re supposed to play on Halloween at Glen 360, doing covers. It’s supposed to be Mode Moderne, Student Teacher and Bummer High.

Lex: So everyone’s supposed to take on another band.

Max: And costumes and personas.

Those are some choice shows you guys have. Guys And Dolls, 360 Glen, the Cobalt. October is a high profile month for you guys.  So what are the best places to play in Vancouver?

Mitch: 360 Glen is fun.

Max: The Astoria was fun a couple of weeks ago.

Lex: We played at the Fortune Sound Club before.

Tell me about that, because it seems like an odd pairing. Who was there, patron-wise?

Lex: It was amazing. The sound was massive. It was mostly just random stragglers.

Mitch: Some of our friends came. But it was the sound that made it so good. The sound was amazing. And that was one of our first shows too. And house parties are always fun.  And we’re also supposed to be playing at Anti-Social. Well, we’ve been talking to Michelle about trying to do it for, like, months now.

Lex: That’s supposed to in October with Bummer High and Jesse Boi’s new band and it’s supposed to be this conjoined tape release.

Mitch: Three tapes, because Green Burrito – our friend Ryan – is starting this tape label.

INSPIRATIONS

Have you guys read any good rock-bios lately? I just read the new Sammy Hagar autobiography, which was great.

Mitch: Just the Keith Richards book.

Max: I’m reading the Patti Smith autobiography. It’s pretty good. I like it. All the stuff about the Chelsea Hotel, they were just being slimeballs. And the way she writes is like quick little sentences – we did this, we did this, we did this.

Mitch: Lex, you read any good one’s lately?

Lex: Um…I’ve read a Bob Dylan one, I’m sure, before. And I read the Neil Young one, Shakey. Which is very good. But lately, I couldn’t say.

Do you guys have any notable early rock show memories? Did you go to any big rock shows when you were a kid?

Lex: The first big show I ever went to was Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young at The Gorge. And this was early, this was my transition into rock. And I had no idea who CSN&Y were at all. I went with my uncle, who’s been going to shows for years and he’s gone to Bowie and everybody. So that was the first big show that I ever went to. Neil was ripping, he broke all the strings on his guitar and he was just wailing on one string. And it was their “Let’s Impeach the President” tour, so they’d have these clips of Bush talking and the crowd was like, Fuck You!, and people were crying. And this one guy had, like, hit a deer or something on the way there. He had this deer wrapped around him like a scarf.

Max: I went and saw the Grateful Dead and The Allman Brothers at The Gorge. This was, like, ’98. I was about twelve years old. It was one of the first big shows that I saw. Going and seeing this Dead show with this kind of festival atmosphere at The Gorge was crazy. There was no Jerry Garcia, but it was not too far after he’d died. I was pretty young. And it was the same deal as Lex: I went down with my uncle. It must have been the first time that I got really wasted. Like, I think I had a bit of mushrooms. It was wild.

Mitch: Um. I’ve never been to a big rock show, really. The Roots, I guess. It was probably eight years ago at Plaza Of Nations. I smoked some bad weed. Everything went green and I couldn’t see anything. I had to be helped to sit down. I dunno what happened. Someone just passed it to me. But other than that, I can’t think of anything else. I went to smaller shows.

Lex: You need that uncle figure to take you out to a big show like that.

Mitch: My first show was probably the Cowichan Folk Fest. My dad is a folk singer and he used to play the folk fests all the time. He’d sing CCR songs, and The Band. He really liked “Looking Out My Back Door” and “The Weight”. He was always singing that one, and “Six Days On The Road”. He’d sing that every weekend.

RECORDING

This is the perfect segue to talk about the recordings you guys have done. So Green Burrito is going to put out a cassette. How many songs?

Mitch: Five songs.

Lex: Our debut.

So you guys recorded this with Tanis [Gibbons] at the Hive? When was this?

Mitch: It was snowing. It was February. In one night we laid down the bed tracks.

Lex: We did everything in one night. Then we did mixing the next night.

Was this like a midnight session thing?

Mitch: Yeah, it was the graveyard shift.

Lex: Eleven to six.

Mitch: And it was Rob Butterfield playing the bass. Before he departed.

Lex: We did all the tracks, and then we mixed and did vocals. It was three nights within a month.

Mitch: Yeah, it was nice. It was nice to hang out with Tanis and meet her.

Lex: Tanis is great.

Mitch: And to be in that room was pretty cool.

Lex: And now we have so many songs to record.

Are you guys still playing songs at shows from what you recorded with Tanis last February? Because sometimes by the time you get something out, it’s taken so long, and you’re not even playing those songs anymore.

Mitch: Probably about half of them.

Lex: It’s only five songs but about half of them we still play. It depends. They’re still in there. The majority of the stuff we play now is all new.  They just write themselves.

October is a big month for you guys…three shows and a tape…

Mitch: Well, the cassette EP is already online. You can download it.

Lex: For free. Or…actually, is it still free? Because Bandcamp only provides two-hundred free downloads…

Mitch: I think we’re only at, like, fifteen.  You can check, there’s a buzzmeter.

Lex: Fifteen?

Mitch: I might be being generous there, it might only be twelve.

Max: Well, no one’s going to download it if they don’t know it’s there. I tried to find it the other day.

Mitch: I just tell random people on the street. I tell people on the bus. I tell the bus drivers.

Max: I tried to find it. Nothing came up. I had to type in the actual URL. Otherwise nothing came up.

Mitch: Oh. That’s weird.

I don’t know that I’ve ever tried to google your band name before, “The High Drops.”

Lex: Not much, a bunch of suicides.

Mitch: Ski jumps.

Well, you guys have got some stuff going on. Are you going to try to get out of town? Have you played outside Vancouver before?

Mitch: No. Just Vancouver. We want to. No plans right now but maybe November. Bellingham or Seattle.  Or Bellevue. On a Friday afternoon. We’ll hit up the Polo outlet.

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Zulu Records veteran and tunage aficionado Daniel Colussi is the Music Editor of Scout Magazine.