Music

Q & A: Hollerado talk about meeting Canadian mayors, getting Rob Ford's photograph

by Sam Sutherland

If it weren’t for the fact that Hollerado are indisputably a very good rock and roll band, their endlessly creative tangents might seem like gimmicks. But with the tunes and work ethic to back it up, their diversions and eccentricities have become just another reason that that these Manotick, Ontario, natives deserve every bit of good press and Juno nominations that can be thrown at them. From releasing their debut album, Record in a Bag, actually in a bag, to their inventive (and very viral) “Americanarama” video, through to their month-long residency tour (seven residencies in seven cities throughout Ontario, Quebec, New York, and Massachusetts) and a travel video series called “Holleradaland,” the band are nothing if not dedicated. And weird.

Their latest adventure saw them trying to meet the mayor of every Canadian city they passed through on a recent cross-country tour. It kind of worked.

AUX: How did this all start?

Dean Baxter: There were a few issues that Rob Ford was making headlines around. We got to talking that there were some uncool moves on his part, and we wanted to get a hold of him about it. We were hoping to talk to him about some of these issues, and it just wasn’t happening. We got to thinking if it was possible for any citizen in any city to get ahold of their mayor if they have things they feel like they need to talk about. And we took that idea on the road. We started tweeting about it, wondering if anyone would meet with us. And it snowballed from there.

I read that the mayor of Calgary was the first one to get back to you.

Yeah. From the initial tweets, it was a couple of hours until he got back to us, saying “Bring a bottle of hot sauce and we’ll have a pow wow.”

Over the course of meeting these people, what’s been the biggest thing that surprised you?

Mainly just how down to earth a lot of them are. We were having beers with some of them, and having a good time. A lot of them were really accessible. That was the most surprising part, that we could just sit down with these people.

Your meeting with the mayor of Thunder Bay managed to create a news story on its own. Did you realize it might land him in some hot water?

We didn’t realize it at the time. It was just a candid conversation, and he wasn’t speaking on behalf of his office or the city, it was just his personal opinion based on 35 years of police work. I hope it didn’t land him in too much hot water, but I think it piqued some people’s interest about this whole thing. It was good things that he said, and I’m glad he did it, and I’m glad we could help him get it out there.

Did ever think this would go beyond being this kind of quirky thing? That’s a good example of how you’ve actually been able to provoke some interesting civic discussion.

That was the whole point. We wanted to focus in on each city and really talk about the issues that each mayor was facing. We really tried to make our interviews personal to that city, and get people from that city to bring up what they wanted, like bike lanes on this particular street in Sudbury or whatever. We really tried to make it so that residents of each city would appreciate how accessible their mayors were, and could follow up and bring these issues up later on, after we had broken the ice, so to speak.

Who’s been your favourite mayor?

Meeting Naheed Nenshi in Calgary was really fun. He has a reputation as being the rock star of mayors in Canada, and it definitely seems that way. He commands attention when he walks in the room. He’s a powerful presence, but he’s still a joker. He gave us sweet cowboy hats.

Do you ever think the office of Rob Ford will get back to you?

The office got back to us just recently. I think there’s a “left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing” thing happening, because someone said that he would meet with us, and then someone else got back to us with a full colour photograph, asking us to fill out another form. It was really weird. I don’t think we’re going to meet with him, but we do have this photograph that we can do whatever we want with.

Well, congratulations on that photo.

It’s a beautiful consolation.