Favorite Songs By Favorite Artists (Series Three) #7: NoMeansNo

Note: For an index of all articles in all three Favorite Songs series, click here, then scroll down.

Who They Were: Brothers Rob (bass) and John (drums) Wright formed NoMeansNo in their hometown of Victoria, British Columbia, in 1979. The pair performed and made their earliest recordings as a live and studio duo, both singing, John adding occasional keyboards, Rob intermittent guitar, both deploying their formidable technical chops to fill aural space that normally takes at least trio or quartet configurations to pull off. The pair of brothers, though older and arguably technically more talented and musically ambitious than many of their peers, fell into the emergent West Coast Hardcore scene, touring with D.O.A. and others across Canada, the United States, and eventually into Europe. Guitarist-vocalist Andy Kerr joined the band in 1984, around the time that NoMeansNo signed with Jello Biafra’s incredibly influential label, Alternative Tentacles. The trio formed a Ramones-inspired, hockey-themed alter ego band called The Hanson Brothers soon after Kerr joined; John Wright was front-man for that ensemble, with a variety of drummers filling his normal stool over the years. They would occasionally tour Canada in one direction as NoMeansNo, then return home, touring as The Hanson Brothers. Kerr departed NoMeansNo in 1991. Following one album in their duo format, the Wrights added guitarist Tom Holliston and second drummer Ken Kempster in 1993; Kempster lasted for two years and one album, after which the group returned to their drum-bass-guitar format until the band was put to bed around 2016. Rob Wright is now retired from music-making, John Wright has a new band (Dead Bob), and Tom Holliston continues to perform in a variety of solo and group endeavors. I just finished a superb, recently-published, rock bio about the group called NoMeansNo: From Obscurity to Oblivion: An Oral History, by Jason Lamb, which featured in-depth interviews with all of the group’s member and a vast who’s who of artists who were inspired or touched by them over their long and influential career. Recommended reading!

When I First Heard Them: In 1991, via their collaborative album with Jello Biafra, The Sky Is Falling and I Want My Mommy. Following the original dissolution of Biafra’s most-famous band, Dead Kennedys, Jello issued several albums backed by other bands, most of them associated with Alternative Tentacles. While The Sky Is Falling was not my favorite in that series (that would be 1989’s Last Scream of the Missing Neighbors, with D.O.A.), the instrumental approaches and songwriting of NoMeansNo definitely caught my attention, and I nabbed their first Alternative Tentacles album, 1986’s Sex Mad, soon thereafter. It was quite an impressive musical beast, and I stayed abreast of the group’s activities in the years that followed, while also collecting their earlier works. I never got to see them live, alas.

Why I Love Them: Genre labels can certainly be helpful in putting different styles of music into buckets for convenient sorting and release, though they often miss the mark as atypical examples of artists get tagged with labels that don’t really fit. In the UK, you had groups like The Damned (covered in the prior installment of this series) or The Stranglers (who will be covered soon) getting tagged as punk, though they arguably never really were. In the States, “hardcore” was similarly applied to groups releasing music on various labels, or touring with representative artists, though they were not really aligned with musical idioms and lyrical interests typically beating in the heart of that movement. NoMeansNo (along with, say, Minutemen, Alice Donut, and others) were among those groups that got tagged as hardcore, but weren’t, really. Their technical skills were often far beyond the reach of their peers, and their influences and techniques quite different as well; John Wright was a jazz-trained drummer who played with hardcore energy and strength using a traditional grip, Rob Wright turned his bass guitar into a lead instrument, Kerr and Holliston offered impressionist blurs atop the rumbling Wright rhythms. All members of the group sang, though Rob’s basso bellow is the most typical word-based sound in the mix, and he was an exceptional lyricist to boot. NoMeansNo also eschewed the common “fight the power” and “down with the man” and “unity (for those we like)” and “my edge is straight” and “here comes the break” themes that typically defined hardcore lyrics, opting instead for super-smart and often-funny tales anchored more in detailed personal narratives than in vague, sweeping, simple sentiments. Their sense of humor crossed into their marketing approaches, too, with Kerr never actually being credited under his real name (his parts would be attributed to “No one particular” or “Someone, but we’re not sure whom,” among others over his tenure with the group), and their media materials rarely, if ever, actually depicted the band in its entirety. NoMeansNo were also delightful interpretive artist of songs composed by others; I include their a cappella version of a Dead Kennedy’s song and their bonus lyrics version of a Miles Davis song in my top ten list below, to give a sense of the creativity and perversity of their cover songs. Their ferocious energy and technical skills made NoMeansNo about the closest thing possible to an equal merger of punk and prog, which is a deeply appealing combo platter to me, and they’ve long been seen as “musician’s musicians,” with reputations and regard that typically transcended the specific commercial rewards gleaned by touring musicians. I’m also pleased to learn from reading their recent bio that they both seem to be thoughtful and generous guys, too. It’s pleasant, but not always expected, to actually want to like the artists who make the art that moves us.

#10. “Forward to Death,” from Virus 100 (Various Artists compilation, 1992)