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Deja Voodoo
Cemetery
Og - 1984
Michael Panontin
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Long before the White Stripes or the Black Keys, there was Deja Voodoo.
The guitar/drum duo of Gerard Van Herk and Tony Dewald formed in Montreal in 1981, a time when the Quebec metropolis had fallen into an economically depressed, anything-goes sort of place. So no surprise then that two dudes playing a distorted gumbo of rockabilly and early r'n'b, with demented songs about mashed potato security guards and Bo Diddley's cat, would feel right at home.
"There was no big established live music scene of any kind," Van Herk would later tell Exclaim!. "You could do whatever you wanted, because no more than 13 people were going to like you anyway. So you might as well play what you want to play!"
And that they did like no one else. If there was any sort of template for Deja Voodoo's sound - quite accurately dubbed 'sludgeabilly' - it was the Cramps and their manic mix of punk and rockabilly. But Deja Voodoo took that and smashed it to pieces, with Van Herk's heavily distorted four-string guitar cranked to eleven and Dewald's minimal drum kit serving as its precarious support plank. Add to that demented lyrics, which Van Herk mangled as if he were running them through a garburator, like "If mashed potatoes were security guards / they wouldn't get much done" and you can see how truly out there they were at the time.
The pair released a seven-inch EP the following year and things just kind of snowballed from there. Before long, Deja Voodoo were running what would become one of the most important Canadian indie labels of the 1980s, which they would call Og Music after a series of children's books by Pierre Berton.
"We were always prolific songwriters, and in 1982 when we put out our first single, we happened to get lucky," Dewald remembered. "A few days later there was a college radio conference in Montreal, and we were doing a show at the Foufounes Electriques and a lot of those people came down and we got a bit of a buzz going." The buzz led to a national tour and eventually to their second release. "We had a lot of songs and didn't feel we were ready for a record, so we decided to put out a cassette." That cassette, the 17-song Gumbo, and a reissue of their first EP were the first records on Og.
Other music followed, including a tape by a group called Condition and a seven-inch EP of various Montreal bands. "We put those out and things started going really well," said Dewald. "After the first tour, we decided it was time to do an album." The album in question would help catapult Deja Voodoo from an obscure Montreal band to a national concern, at least on the college and underground circuit.
Cemetery was recorded in November '83 (cryptically at "Studio Secret" and in the case of the title track "in Bob's basement") and issued in April the following year. The album contained a whopping nineteen tracks, but as Van Herk recalled for CM, it was a pretty swift studio session. "Most of the songs were things we'd already been playing live for a while," he explained. "We recorded the whole thing in one afternoon, four hours if I remember right, because that was the minimum time the studio booked. Then our producer Pete Moss mixed it down in a second 4-hour session a couple of days later."
Cemetery may have come from out of left field, but it was the perfect salve for a new generation of kids chafing in the MTV-hijacked eighties. A song like the opener, 'Things with You', sounds like Jack Scott's 'The Way I Walk' flipped on its head, with Scott's ballsy swagger turned into pangs of pimply puppy love with lines like "I wanna do things with you / in the morning and the nighttime too. / I like your style and the way you dress. / We could go somewhere and make a mess." Even better is the manic assault of 'Big Scary Daddy', which sounds like two minutes of Bo Diddley on acid. Or the whacked-out fun of 'If Mashed Potatoes', which was a pretty huge hit in my circles way back in the day.
Other tracks, 'Voodoo Barbecue' for one, veer down punkier paths and no doubt bridged the gap between the Boulders/Pebbles crowd and the hardcore crew, both of whom could be found at Deja Voodoo shows. Astute garage cognoscenti may even recognize a riff or two. "'Voodoo BBQ', I'd just written the day before," Van Herk admitted. "I told Tony that it was basically the same song as 'The Witch', by the Sonics. But I forgot my song had no bridge! So when we were recording and Tony went into the drum pattern of the bridge, I just sang the bridge from 'The Witch', changing the last line. So what you hear on the record is literally the first time anyone had heard that part of the song, including us!"
Deja Voodoo toured and issued records right through the eighties, including releases in the US, Greece and Finland (of all places). But after their last disc, 1989's rip-roaring Live at the Backstage Club in Helsinki, Finland set, the pair decided to call it a career, with Van Herk completing a PhD in linguistics and Dewald taking up the fine art of brewing beer. Weirdly, none of Deja Voodoo's records have ever been reissued - on CD or on vinyl - so those curious to find out what all the fuss was about will have to seek out those original discs.
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