A TZEEEAC Interview: You Handsome Devil

It's never been a secret that there's a lot of love for Toronto's You Handsome Devil here at TZEEEAC headquarters. Their addictive brand of molten hot satanic rock'n'roll infused with a touch of blues sensibility is enough to turn me into a mindless headbanging animal and has propelled their 2011 debut album called The Hell, You Say right into our 2011 best-of list. Not much info on the band has surfaced ever since and the masses were getting restless. Luckily, though, the guys have foolishly written the email address where they can be reached on their Facebook page and I quickly seized the opportunity to get in touch with them and set up an interview. So, even though the city of Toronto does not accept add-requests from bands, You Handsome Devil have been gracious enough to answer a few questions for us. So kick back, relax and enjoy the very first interview we conducted (and what an interview it turned out to be!), as Jeremy, Steve and Alex talk about the band, their favorite movies, fluffy pets, future plans and the godly delights of Poutine. 

1. Hello you handsome devils, how are you? We're just sitting around, smoking and writing down the questions we're about to ask you. What are you up to these days?

Hello you handsome Tzeeeac. We’re just hanging out in Toronto, living it up like rockstars, doing mountains of blow off the backs of strippers and destroying hotel rooms. Actually, we’re not doing that at all.  Currently, we are drinking wine out of tetra-packs and eating substandard pizza. So, life is pretty good.

2. You know, every time I search for live videos of You Handsome Devil, I have to sift through a ton of The Smiths videos, who apparently have a song called Handsome Devil. How did you land on this name and who the hell is Morrisey anyway?

The name, and the band itself, is an homage to the Devil. None of us are religious, so we don’t believe in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic concept of the Devil. We’re saluting the Devil as a literary character. Satan, or Be’elzebub, or whatever you want to call him has always been our favourite fictional character besides God.  Once upon a time, Rock n’ Roll was called “The Devil’s Music” and we feel that the moniker is still appropriate today. Rock n’ Roll isn’t safe and predictable; Rock n’ Roll is erratic and dangerous. Rock n’ Roll is not about making love; Rock n’ Roll is about fucking. Rock n’ Roll doesn’t watch its language, or apologize for its actions. Rock n’ Roll is playful and hedonistic, and that’s what the Devil means to us.

We’re not familiar with these “Smiths” that you speak of, but they continue to inconvenience us when we’re Googling ourselves.

3. Let's keep the history ball rolling. Tell us a bit about how You Handsome Devil came to be. How'd you guys meet, how did you convince Satan to grant you the power to rock like beasts, these sort of things.

We have a long history together. We all met in high-school, but didn’t play in the same band together until we were in our twenties. We started jamming, smoked an epic amount of dope, sacrificed a virgin on an altar of living flesh and became the monsters of rock that we are today.  

Okay, so the virgin sacrifice thing didn’t really happen.  

Well, it happened, it just didn’t work.

4. So, hypothetical question: you've just finished playing a gig, it's late at night and you're as hungry as wolves. Where and what do you eat? Is there any amazing fast food in Toronto? If so, describe it in painful detail. I'm really hungry right now.

Toronto has an awesome chain of burrito shops called Burrito Bandidos (www.burritobandidos.com).  They’re always fresh and tasty with the benefit of being open till the sun comes up. Otherwise, shawarma and kebabs are other popular options, but nothing really says “I’m a Canadian, motherfucker” like a large order of Poutine. If you haven’t heard of it before, please allow us to illustrate: a pile of fresh-cut, heavily salted, deep-fried potatoes drowning in gravy and topped with cheese curds. It was invented in Quebec, but it has been the cause of many heart attacks all over Canada.
[Oh, we've heard of Poutine. It sounds and looks amazing. Shawarma and kebabs are popular over here, as well.]

5. Speaking of gigs, your live shows at The Hideout look like a total blast and everyone seems to be having fun, on stage and off. Also, Alex sort of looks like Nate Fisher from Six Feet Under (the HBO show, not the death metal band) and busts out some pretty sweet moves behind the drum kit. How do you comment on these allegations?

Since Alex doesn’t need his ego stroked any more than usual, we’ll just say that all of the allegations are true. The shows at The Hideout are particularly intense and always fun to play. Historically, Toronto has gained a reputation for being a pretty reserved audience when it comes to indie shows. The rep isn’t entirely true, but it’s not completely unfounded either. There’s usually not a lot of dancing, and those who are REALLY liking it will show their enthusiasm with little more than relaxed head-banging so as not to muss the hair-style that they spent hundreds of dollars and a million hours on. That being said, Toronto has quite a few members of the other type of crowd: the type of crowd that dances, and moves and encourages others to do it too, and we’ve always been fortunate to have a lot of those kinds of people in our audiences. Still, we don’t think that there is a single Toronto-based rock band that has not encountered the “Toronto type” of crowd at least once. But if they have, we can guarantee that it was not at The Hideout (http://thehideouttoronto.com/). The audience is always lively, and as the alcohol steadily flows over the course of our 3 hour marathon pretty much anything can happen. From that stage we’ve watched our audience get naked, go-go dance on the bar and get completely trampled on various occasions. Hell, we’ve even had the security guards join us on stage to do background vocals. It’s always a party, and we’re always excited to play there.

6. Can you walk us through the brilliant cover artwork on The Hell You Say? Sadly, we could only recognize Robert Johnson and Henry Rollins among the artists burning in hell. Who are the others? Is it safe to assume that they are among your musical influences?

Really? You didn’t recognize Elvis in the front row? I guess he’s not so big in Romania. Over here, we call him “The King”. [Michael Jackson is big in Romania. Elvis... not so much.] 

The art was the contribution of the lovely and talented Malcolm Cameron Jamison (www.facebook.com/MalcolmJamisonIllustration). He’s sort of the Terry Gilliam to our Monty Python. No matter how funny Monty Python was, you can’t really picture it without thinking of Gilliam’s animation and illustrations. When we started up as a band, we wanted a very specific kind of visual representation, but none of us could draw much more than stick figures with circles for boobs and an inverted triangle for the vagina. Malcolm was able to take our crude stick figures and draw more realistic boobs on them, and he has been drawing absurd things at our command ever since.

Malcolm helped us develop the cover art theme which later became the theme of the record itself: an homage to the Devil and the music he created. We’re not saying that the artists featured on the cover of The Hell, You Say are burning in Hell; we’re saying that they came from Hell, and that the world has been lucky to have them. We’re not necessarily fans of the music of all the artists featured, but we have serious respect and admiration for them.

7. Rock'n'roll is glamorous and all that, but let's tap into the gritty side of things. When you're not moonlighting as You Handsome Devil, what boring, mundane day jobs do you guys hold? I was an intern at a bank last year and every day was more boring than the last. It was awful.

Well, it is funny that you should bring up working in a bank, because Jeremy works by day as a mild-mannered bank teller. Alex manages a Starbucks coffee shop in the west-end of Toronto, and he is completing a bachelors degree at the University of Toronto. Steve is the only one of us who actually likes his day job. Steve is an arborist which means that he climbs humungous fucking trees armed with a chainsaw and cuts off hazardous branches. That’s right, he laughs in the face of danger for a living. Steve got accepted out of high-school to a very prestigious university program for jazz bass-guitar, and instead he decided to go to the same school, but for landscaping. 

Thus, making Steve the most sensible member of YOU HANDSOME DEVIL.

He also likes Nascar. We don’t know what that’s about.

8. After we're done writing these questions, we're going to hit the pubs and party all night. Do you guys regularly hang out? What do you enjoy doing on weekends?

All three of us started out as friends before we started playing music together, so we still like to hang out and have beers and talk shit about movies, but all of us spend so much of our week at our day jobs, that we tend to reserve our weekends for practicing and recording. We have an awesome rehearsal space that we lovingly refer to as “The Club House”, “The Man Cave”, and “The Masturbatorium” at various times. We have a beer fridge for our alcohol, and a coffee grinder for our dope. We can play as loud as we want, and we can listen to what we want to listen to. It's a pretty awesome place, and it's cheaper than a pub, so we tend to spend most of our time there.

9. While we're at it, any craaaaaazy concert stories you feel like sharing with us?

We’ve definitely had our share of oddball shows and strange audience encounters in various cities. Like the time that a stumble-drunk redneck gave Alex the evil eye and said, “I’ll bet you’d suck my dick if I asked you.” We’re still not sure if he was being insulting or soliciting.

All of those stories suck in comparison to an outdoor gig that we did in Niagara Falls. Out of respect for some of those involved, the names will be omitted, the rest is being told exactly as it occurred.

Niagara Falls is kind of like a mini Las Vegas. It sits on a border between Canada and the United States and is host to a huge waterfall that attracts tourists of all ages. It also has two casinos, an outdoor theme park, tons of wax museums, cheap motels with heart-shaped jacuzzis, and a multitude of top notch strip clubs.  More on that later.

The gig was in an outdoor venue overlooking the waterfall. It was free of charge, but donations were accepted. For some reason, we were scheduled to play in the late afternoon, and we were by far the heaviest and most aggressive band on the bill. Also, it was Steve’s birthday, so we had been drinking since we got out of the car, as well as partaking in some other “extracurriculars”. All of a sudden, there we were on a stage in front of a waterfall playing one of the worst performed sets of our lives to an audience of middle-aged tourists and their kids. I shit you not. Four seven-year-olds came up to Jeremy after the show and told him that YOU HANDSOME DEVIL was the best band that played that day. You can’t buy that kind of criticism. Kids are pretty quick to tell you when they think that something sucks. Jeremy was so touched that he offered to buy them alcohol. Their parents, were not amused. Despite that, the tourists donated a lot of money to the bands that night, and we walked away with more money than we would ever had made playing a packed show at any club in Toronto.

And that’s where the strip club comes in.

We selected Sundowners (www.sundownerclub.ca) to be our skin palace for the evening, and it was the greatest decision that anyone has ever made about anything in the history of mankind. This is not an exaggeration. The three of us have all been to our fair share of strip clubs, so believe us when we say that this is, quite possibly, the single best strip club in the known universe. There was never less than four dancers on stage at any given time, plus roving lesbian shows that visited you at your table. Since it was Steve’s birthday he was treated to all sorts of debauchery on donated tourism dollars. He got three private dances, he was pulled up on stage to dance with the girls, he puked violently in the bathroom and bounced right back into a VIP room afterward.

From there we gathered a group of friends and brought the party back to the heart-shaped jacuzzi in our cheap motel room. We also remember someone sneezing a pile of cocaine off of a side-table and spending the remainder of the night trying to snort it out of the carpet, but that’s another story.

10. Let's talk about pets! Do you have any? I have a bunch of cats and Marco has a small dog that barks non-stop. It's a really annoying bark, too, like really squeaky and loud. I hate it. 

Jeremy has a small black dog who is named after a Japanese stoner band and resembles Winston Churchill.  Alex has an ill-tempered cat named after a Star Trek character, and Jeremy is allergic to him. Steve’s dogs compete in agility shows and have won more awards and have garnered more popular recognition than we as a band could ever hope for ourselves.
[The only Japanese stoner band names I can think of are Boris and Church of Misery, and the latter would be a pretty weird name for a dog. Marco would probably add that all cats are ill-tempered and that he wants nothing to do with Lieutenant Worf or whatever his name is. He's not a cat person.]

11. You're offering your album on bandcamp on a pay-what-you-want basis, which I think is really cool of you guys. This whole bandcamp thing has really taken off, hasn't it?

We wholeheartedly support Bandcamp. It’s a fair financial arrangement that works in favour of independant artists, the interface is easy to use and highly informative, and it’s a sound purchase for the consumer since they can rest assured that their money is going directly to the artist. Bandcamp, YouTube, and the emergence of social media have done nothing but empower the independent artist. The degree to which an artist can market themselves is far greater than anything that a record label can do. The internet age is a pretty exciting time to be an independent.

12. Oh, you know what's fun? Desert Island question! You each get to pick five albums and five movies to take with you on a desert island in the middle of the ocean. What are your picks?

Okay, just so you know, any delay in us responding to you with our answers to this interview are due chiefly to this question. We can’t stress how many times we completed these lists before one of us would exclaim, “No! Wait! I want to change mine because I forgot about...etc.” This is what happens when you ask desert island questions to three guys who have spent the majority of their lives watching movies and listening to records.

Eventually, we decided to lay some ground rules in order to narrow the criteria:

Rule #1:  We assume that all three of us will be going to the SAME desert island.

Rule #2:  We assume that the island is made of marijuana and comes complete with a waterfall of beer, beaches made of cocaine, and an endless supply of slutty, large-breasted native women who get the jokes in Caddyshack. (Note: Caddyshack is not one of our choices for the island. It’s just very important that the natives are aware of why it is funny.)

Bearing all of this in mind...

Steve’s Records:

Queen’s Greatest Hits Vol. 1

Ready to Die - The Notorious B.I.G.

Enter the 36 Chambers - The Wu Tang Clan

Exodus - Bob Marley

Rage Against The Machine - Rage Against The Machine

Steve’s Movies:

Talladega Nights

The 40 Year Old Virgin

Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back

Trading Places

Bonnie & Clyde

Jeremy’s Records:

A Deleted Symphony for the Beaten Down - Soilent Green

Two Dogs Fucking/Deux Chiens Fourrent - Dayglo Abortions

Sounds of the Animal Kingdom - Brutal Truth

The Collected Recordings of Robert Johnson

Rock for Light - Bad Brains

Jeremy’s Movies:

Pulp Fiction

The Godfather

Stalag 17

Ghostbusters

Back to the Future

Alex’s Records:

Der Ring - Wagner

Made Me Do It - The Haunted

Disco Volante - Mr. Bungle

Slaughter of the Soul - At The Gates

Prowler in the Yard - Pig Destroyer

Alex’s Movies:

Blade Runner

Rosemary’s Baby

Kill Bill

Reservoir Dogs

Raiders of the Lost Ark

13. What's coming down the pipe in the future? Any concerts or tours? A new album? Please say a new album. A new EP, at least? Maybe an official music video? Come on, guys, work with me here.

Well, the next thing to come down the pipe will probably be the substandard pizza that we are currently eating. Musically, however, we have all sorts of crazy shit coming out of us.  

We are getting ready to release a 3-song cover EP called A Band Apart made up of songs that were also featured in the films of Quentin Tarantino. As you can see from our respective movie lists, we are all pretty big fans of his work. In fact, it is safe to say that Quentin Tarantino is our biggest musical influence. For all three of us, the Pulp Fiction motion picture soundtrack had been a treasured record in our respective collections since our pre-teens. If the Devil created Rock & Roll, then Pulp Fiction created YOU HANDSOME DEVIL.  

The other thing is, yes, a new full-length album out before the end of 2012. We’re currently in mixing stages with the fifth member of YOU HANDSOME DEVIL: Metal “Jason” Donkersgoed. Metal was the principle engineer and producer on The Hell, You Say, and he’s been making us sound good on record as far back as any of us can possibly remember.  We’re also working on a video for one of the songs, and Malcolm is already hard to work on a cover. Jeremy still hasn’t written any lyrics. He promised us that he’s getting around to it, but all we’ve seen him do is smoke dope and watch Animal House repeatedly. It’s getting kind of creepy.  He’s been walking around in a toga, and he keeps referring to Alex and Steve as “Pinto” and “Flounder”, respectively.

The new album is going to be called Ragnarok n’ Roll.
[We would just like to add a savagely enthusiastic FUCK YEAH!!!]

14. This one comes from Marco, and you’d better have a positive answer: Do you like The Beatles? If so, have they influenced you in some way? 

Well, we don’t think that there is any band that can say that they aren’t influenced by The Beatles in at least some small way. Even if you can argue that you’re not influenced by The Beatles, chances are that you have been influenced indirectly.  hey were one of the first bands to appear as a collective unit, rather than as a singer with a back-up band. They were one of the first bands to see albums as having personalities unto themselves. Rubber Soul doesn’t sound like Revolver, and Revolver doesn’t sound like The White Album.  Each album sounded widely different. Also, the sheer degree to which they and their engineers helped accelerate the development of audio recording technology is astounding. It’s hard not to be influenced by The Beatles. They were pretty influential.

But the question was, “Do you like The Beatles?”, and our answer is sadly “No.” Sorry Marco.

15. We’ve asked you earlier about some crazy concert stories. What about some extra-curricular shenanigans? We like to kick trash cans at night, so we’re pretty bad ass ourselves.

What a coincidence! We like to walk around the streets in the early morning and pick up trash cans that other guys have kicked over. Sometimes we like to show up at random pubs dressed as Ghostbusters and sit at the bar while we complain about how our wives nag us about how they can never get the ectoplasm stains out of our shirts.

We lead sad and pointless lives.

16. Getting back to the serious stuff, have you ever considered taking your work to the next level? By this we mean signing to a big record company, working with Marylin Manson, stuff like that; things that would make you more hardcore than you already are.

We are always open to the possibility of signing with a label. That being said, the label that we sign to would have to be very progressive and forward-thinking. The old model of the music business is dead, and we as a band would love nothing more than to dance on its grave. There are many labels out there that are making the most of this, and those are the type of labels that we want to be a part of.

We all agree that we are in no rush to work with Marilyn Manson.

17. This one also comes from Marco, because, apparently, he’s obsessed with minor details: Do you put ketchup on pizza? If so, can you tell us how much and how do you live with yourselves?

Who on Earth hates pizza so much that they would even think of such a thing? Marco is a sick man. A sick man, indeed.

18. I know this is a long-shot, but have you listened to any Romanian music? I’m talking about death, black, indie, alternative, whatever, not about the commercial pop/house thingies.

After we read this question, we each turned to our record collections to see if we had anything that was Romanian. Jeremy discovered that he had a metal compilation CD that had a band called Trooper on it, and apparently they’re Romanian. They were a pretty good thrash band. Outside of that, we’ve never heard a thing. Send us stuff that is good.
[Hahaha, that's great. Trooper are still pretty big around these parts. Anyway, check out Phoenix and Negură Bunget, they're probably the best known Romanian bands. Mediocracy are also pretty cool, if you're into furious screaming.]

19. That's it, we're done! Thanks for taking part in this interview and we hope you've had fun answering our dumb questions. The last one is all on you. Say whatever you want. Work it!

Well, if this last section is up to us, then we have some dumb questions of our own.

Question #1: As Romanians, are you sick of people asking you about Dracula?

Question #2: We have to work pretty fucking hard to get a fun show together with a decent crowd in Toronto, what is the scene like on your side of the globe?

Question #3: Should we press vinyl for our next release, and do you want it? 

Looking forward to your answers, guys! Take your time. 

And here are our answers: 

Question #1: It does get a bit irritating when foreigners mostly associate Romania with Transylvanian vampires, attractive women and mămăligă, but as far as national stereotypes go, you could do a lot worse, so it's not that bad. We're more worried about Romanians being perceived abroad as thieving gypsies and uneducated peasants wielding torches and pitchforks. It's worse for Marco, as he's half-Italian and half-Romanian, so he's basically a monster to the outside world. We'd love to expand on the subject, but we're expected at a witch burning soon.   

Question #2: The Romanian metal scene is still relatively small and unimpressive, but things are moving along. Recent years have seen a significant raise in the frequency and quality of major shows - 10 years ago, attending a music festival that featured well-known bands from across the world was just a dream. But Romania is slowly making its mark on the map, thanks to some passionate and able promoters who work tirelessly to bring awesome bands on Romanian stages. We've had some amazing shows by mainstream bands such as Placebo, Alice in Chains, Stone Sour or Rammstein, with first-time performances by Lady Gaga, Linkin Park or Red Hot Chili Peppers being scheduled for this summer, while Romanian metalheads were treated to performances by a slew of great bands - Nile, Melechesh, Sodom, Venom, Iron Maiden, Ozzy Osbourne, Asphyx, Suffocation, Gorgoroth, Vader, Napalm Death are just a few of the names that come to mind. Shows of these magnitude were unthinkable some years ago, so on this front, we're pleased to say that things are steadily improving. 

As far as Romanian bands go, they are also struggling to put together shows with decent turn-outs. Indie-rock bands and electronica artists seem to be more successful, gathering pretty decent crowds at their shows, but metal bands are having a harder time getting good turn-outs. Truth be told, most of the bands who don't garner much interest aren't really that interesting to begin with. It's not easy lurking in the Romanian underground, but hopefully things will improve in time. 

Question #3: I think it's assume that we need and want anything that has to do with You Handsome Devil. Vinyl? Sure. Coasters? I'll have some. Shirts? Yes please. Bedspreads? Hell yeah!