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Ron Hawkins: reflecting on rock’n’roll politics

Culture

Photo by Maylynn Quann

Adam Davidson-Harden talked with the talented Toronto-based musician and artist Ron Hawkins in Toronto. You can read Ron’s bio and find out about his solo music and that of his earlier bands Lowest of the Low and Ron Hawkins and the Rusty Nails at www.ronhawkins._com. His latest solo album is Straitjacket Love, released in May 2011. Hawkins’s new project, The Do Good Assassins, released their first record, Rome, earlier in 2012. Head to www.victimlesscapitalism.com to explore a unique online shop for Hawkins’ music and art, as well as that of many other Canadian artists.

Adam Davidson Harden: I’m interested to hear your thoughts on connecting music and politics.

Ron Hawkins: I came through politics first. I got pretty politicized when I was in high school, 16, 17 years old, and pretty quickly went fairly far left. You know, like the CPC-ML [Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist)] was a little too centrist for me, so I went farther left. I had a rock band called Social Insecurity. I started that band out of high school with a friend of mine who was also very political, and you know, it was full-on. We were a straight-edge band, we didn’t drink, didn’t do drugs.

And we moved in certain circles in Toronto with other punk bands like Conditioned Response and L’Étranger, Viletones and people like that. Promoters at the time, they were running clubs that were also dealing drugs, they had hookers and stuff like that.

The bottom line was their thing. So oftentimes they put us together with these very right-wing punk rock bands. You know, they think, “well, they draw and you draw,” and they’d put us together and those nights would be mayhem. There were chair fights and stabbings and stuff like that at some of our shows, and I sometimes look at those days and think it’s just so alien to the kind of music scene that I’m a part of now. It’s very peaceful now, and if anything you want to get the kids off the floor, like, “Come on, engage, be passionate!” So that’s where I got into it, through the back door, through politics really.

It’s since gotten a little bit more complicated than that, though. I decided at one point that music as an art form wasn’t really meant to express specific political ideas; that really the job of art and music, for me, was to be a kind of a spiritual sidekick to the politics.

That the politics should be done in my personal life, and that the artist in me should inspire and give people energy to go out and do things in the world. It could have just been my failing as a writer that way. I couldn’t seem to strike that balance where I was true to the politics and true to the art. Somehow it was always one or the other suffering.

I’d like to hear you elaborate on how music can, in your eyes, best relate to social movements, help social movements and connect to them on the left.

Just through the music we’ve been able to do strike support work, and been able to do benefits for OCAP [Ontario Coalition Against Poverty] and things like that. We’ve been able to use whatever notoriety we’ve gotten as a band to bring people out to events, and hopefully that gives people some exposure to them.

I wondered if you had some formative experiences that helped cement or tilt you in a left direction.

It was around Latin America. Nicaragua and El Salvador. I got radicalized pretty quickly because there were things going on that were radicalizing moments. I think a lot of people in high school get into the left through the peace movement, and that’s usually an entry point, and then they either get more radicalized or they don’t. I think for me it was Nicaragua and El Salvador as two major flashpoints, and how international union movements reacted towards it, like the longshoremen’s union in San Francisco in solidarity with workers there. Those things suddenly became like little lines that connected for me.

You’ve carved out an impressive career for yourself as an independent musician in Toronto.

No one wanted to touch us in ‘91. [Lowest of the Low] released Shakespeare My Butt… on our own, nobody wanted to know about us, and suddenly it was going on its own steam as a grassroots situation, and then labels started sniffing around. Some of the meetings we had with people… we were kind of pricks. We put some A&R guys through the wringer. And then we wound up with Universal, and we just kind of beat them up and got this amazing deal for ourselves.

Of course, it was as much of a nightmare as any other major label. They just found other ways to piss us off, and then the band kind of unravelled and fell apart. And that started me on this indie road, of little indie labels.

And it’s not popular to say, but I find a lot of the same problems on little indie labels, with the added headache that they don’t have any money. Sometimes the same habits, but just no pocketbook to back it up. In some cases it can be even worse. And then some people have been fantastic.

I’ve also done it completely independently with no label, and that’s been just a different road with its own difficulties. It’s much more pleasing to know what mistakes are your own. You take responsibility for what’s there and that’s it, and move on. But I find keeping the lights on is not that easy sometimes.

It’s fascinating to hear about the economics of it. Artists and vocation and survival are things that obviously connect to the personal and the political. The way you choose to do your art, the way you choose to try and get it out there.

I remember in the early days of the Low they used to call the band, every article would say “indie freedom fighters,” Lowest of the Low are “local heroes.” It was always about how adamantly indie we were. I would disabuse people of that illusion at every step and say the minute we could find a major label that’s going to drop a million dollars on us and leave us alone to do our thing, we’ll sign with that label. We’re not doing this out of some manifesto or some ethos that we’re adamantly indie. It just turned out that the world taught me that’s what makes sense for me. But I was quite willing to find out and go through that process.

Artists need to survive and work like everyone else. In the song “Bite Down Hard,” you go through some options, some personal options for confronting politics: “You can denigrate the whole wide world/ Or bend your back and try to fix it/Or you can frown and kick it over/Or you can down a twenty-sixer.” It’s interesting to tie that into the future for social movements. What gives you hope these days?

The energy certainly gives me hope. Obviously we’re in a very polarizing time. The energy — the Occupy Wall Street, the G20 — the lessons that people learn there. Just the blinders falling away from people. The energy that people are showing, and that people are so sick of the status quo at this point is really inspiring to me. Unfortunately, the problem that I had with the anti-globalization movement and the Occupy Wall Street movement is that it’s hard to pinpoint where the unrest is being channelled. I’m also a little sensitive to the fact that the structures that I connected with early on and the structures that I thought were the vehicles for moving forward have been historically tarnished, their reputations pretty damaged. There are a lot of questions to be asked about the far left versions of socialism and communism. For lack of a better label, I was a Trotskyist. I’ve struggled with the idea of whether or not that vehicle is inherently authoritarian or sectarian.

Of course, I’m going to have my time on this planet and I’m not going to figure that out, as probably nobody is. And they’re questions that could literally neutralize you.

You talk about aligning with the left and being interested in the politics of the left, and where you find your place in that, and where it’s going.

You hear lots of people talk about how art is therapy for them. If they weren’t a writer, or artist or filmmaker, whatever, that they’d be in therapy. It’s an accessible way to do self-therapy and sort of work things out in your life. I like to think I’m wiser than when I was 27. A lot of my life has been about self-examination. Global examination, self-examination, it’s all tied in. Which is why I think the political still resonates through the personal stuff. It’s all inside the same person. Just a person trying to figure out how to navigate this planet.

This article appeared in the November/December 2012 issue of Canadian Dimension (The Art of Protest).

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