IN CONCERT
Pink Mountaintops with Ryan Beattie (Himalayan Bear)
When: Friday, 7 p.m.
Where: Upstairs Cabaret
Tickets: $17.50 at rmts.bc.ca, Lyle’s Place and Ditch Records.
Everyone has to start somewhere. For Stephen McBean, who returns Friday to the venue where he cut his teeth as a teenage punk, Victoria was it.
“Victoria — it’s the place,” he says, speaking slowly. “I think anyone who’s lived in Victoria in their teenage years — it has such a gravitational pull on your heart and your psyche and everything. It’s always home.”
McBean is spending a lazy day watching the Fat Albert Christmas Special in Vancouver, another home-away-from-current-official-residence Los Angeles, with a week-long gap between shows. Now in his early 40s, McBean makes a living for himself as the head of psychedelic metal group Black Mountain, as well as the more experimental Pink Mountaintops.
But a music career was far from his mind when he was playing with Victoria punk bands like Jerk Ward, Mission of Christ, Gus and Onionhouse.
“I always wanted to play music from when I was a little kid, but it didn’t cross anyone’s mind, really, back then that you could make a living,” he said. It didn’t seem possible, but it also didn’t matter to McBean or his friends.
“I mean, it happened now for me, which is cool, I can’t complain,” he said.
“I have a bicycle and a hair dryer.”
McBean began learning about punk music as a kid in suburban Kleinburg, Ont., — home of Pierre Berton, the McMichael Art Gallery and the Binder Twine Festival, “where everyone dresses up like Little House on the Prairie.”
But when he moved to Victoria at age 10 in 1980, he saw the do-it-yourself culture in action — there were active fan zines and a plethora of punk groups, from Nomeansno to the Dayglo Abortions carving out niches for themselves in the local music scene.
By 13, he was playing. And by 17 or 18, he and his band Mission of Christ graduated from basements, the OAP Hall and the FOE Hall to opening for the Dayglos at Harpo’s Cabaret, as the Upstairs Cabaret was formerly named.
McBean returns to the space Friday as part of a larger movement to honour the memory of Harpo’s. This is the second concert in the Harpo’s Redux series, which brings musicians with historical links to the venue back to it. The Grapes of Wrath played a show in April to open the semi-annual series.
“That was definitely the first bar I’d ever played,” McBean said. “I played there when I was underage. … There was a DJ room or a band room up above and I had to wait up there when I wasn’t playing.”
Things changed at 19.
“It was the first time that we would get free beer at a show, which seemed like some sort of miracle at the time.”
McBean would become somewhat of a fixture at Harpo’s, playing as frequently as twice a month. And while he has since performed in stadiums, festivals and concert halls around the world (opening for Coldplay in 2006 opened some big doors for Black Mountain), Harpo’s still holds significance for McBean.
“It was special,” he said. Not least of all for the way the intimate space hosted bands on the brink of exploding, from Pearl Jam to Red Hot Chili Peppers.
McBean left Victoria for good around 1995, after a period of moving back and forth to Vancouver. But he says Victoria had an influence on his music, especially through the people he met here.
“It’s a big enough city that it has an influx of outside culture, but it also has a bit of that isolation thing going on,” he said.
“I know a lot of pretty strange people from Victoria. But strange in a good, creative way.”
The Harpo’s concert — a benefit for the Victoria Society for Children with Autism — is McBean’s final stop on a short tour as Pink Mountaintops. He sees the experimental project as fun, because he can do whatever he wants.
“It’s been a big band with six people and it’s been a few people or a couple of people,” he said. “This time it’s just me with a drum machine.”
On the horizon? “Probably just going to continue working on our new record. And watch more episodes of Fat Albert.”
