The Rise and Fall of Dance Electric, Pt. 2 ⋆ Mississauga Life ✫ Spirit of the City

Words by Chris Carriere

Alright, here goes nothing. When last we left you, Dance Electric were riding high. We had a bit of a monster metaphor running, so let’s give it once last gasp before we drop it in favour of cold, hard reality—as in that moment of a dream when you realize you are dreaming, and consequently wake up.

Dance Electric, the chimera brewed from pop structure and schizoid hardcore aggression, seemed to be, as Jamie puts it, a “world beater”. Its four caretakers, Theo (vocals), Jamie (bass), NJ (guitar) and Tori (drums) had been welded together by the shared responsibility of carting their frequency freak show around Ontario.

“I think that hardcore has always represented a marginalized genre of music,” Theo says, “so it sort of made sense to us to play all of these weird shows. We’d take anything that was offered, basically. Oh, that seems weird, let’s play there.”

They played a wrestling match. (“Presenting Dance Electric, signature move: eardrum obliterator.”) They played an event for abused teens, watching one of the teens berate an officer for police inaction and then commencing the auditory antics. (Theo: “It was awkward.”) The weirdness brought the four ringmasters closer together.

“To me, what made the band special wasn’t just the art, but the interaction between the four of us,” Theo says. “It was just great watching Jamie and Tori rise to the occasion when they didn’t have our history [in the music scene].”

For Jamie, the self-proclaimed underachiever throughout high school (who is nonetheless very bright, and will engage you verbosely on subjects ranging from Beckett to permaculture), the band remains a high point in his personal chronology. “For my family, for my father, even,” he adds. Even more: his work taming the Dance Electric beast earned him a spot with infamous musicians-about-town, the Vulcan Dub Squad.

“That was huge for me,” Jamie says. “I idolized those guys. I remember staring out the window in grade 11 English, just dreaming of being the bassist for the Vulcan Dub Squad.”

“Looking back, Dance Electric definitely seems special. But after awhile, it didn’t feel as special anymore.”

Cue the dramatic strings and the ground dissolving beneath you. No more metaphor, no more rock and roll dreamworld.

What makes a band break up? What makes the feeling of special dissipate? In a way, it’s like asking what makes two people break up after a long-term relationship. The ex-lovers can typically list off “issues” for hours without offering more than a passing insight. Similarly, Jamie and Theo list off a variety of reasons—but it seems like, after each one has been brought into the light and examined, one of them cautions me that it wasn’t specifically that that caused the band’s dissolution.

The first thing that happened was the loss of Tori on drums. She got busy with school (“a departure from her personality”) and couldn’t commit to constant gigging.

“A band needs to be a sustained effort,” Jamie says, “otherwise people will forget about you and move on to something else. We lost a drummer, we went through a period of rethinking it: maybe we weren’t quite special enough.”

Tori was replaced by Rob, who was definitely very “into” the band. But they didn’t share with him the same hard-won chemistry that’d underscored their relationship with Tori.

Then came the Infamous Incident of the Halifax Pop Explosion Music Festival, which in this case might be better termed the Halifax Van Implosion. The intrepid four trekked down to Halifax in the band’s trusty (famous last words), green, standard issue rock and roll van, looking to “spread the gospel of auditory destruction” (direct quote from the band’s bio) to the Atlantic seaboard. The show went well; the boys played with Japanther, always a favourite. It was on the way back that the world began coming unglued at the seams.

First, they lost a tire in Fredericton. No big deal: just get a new tire. Then, a day later, the engine went kaput outside of Montreal. Jamie narrates the scene.

“So, we called a pickup driver, who of course decided to extort us. ‘It’s $100 to put you in the back seat,’ he says. This look came over NJ—I’d never seen him look like this before—and he just says, ‘Are you f—ing kidding me, dude?’ ‘You need to owe me $100, in my hand,’ he says.”

“We go to a Canadian Tire and buy a new engine, which together with the tire came out to $2000. We spent $3000 altogether on the trip.”

Three grand, just to play your music out east. Until now the band had been a largely self-sustaining business entity—not lining the stakeholders’ pockets with gold, but not costing them money, either.

While the band rented a car and drove back to Toronto to attend to their jobs and the other trappings of what most people refer to as “real life”, Theo sat in a Montreal hotel room all night, bouncing off the walls. Given the circumstances, you likely would’ve found the writer in a bar somewhere—vice-free Theo instead “walked down to the Canadian Tire every twenty minutes to see if the work was done”.

Which brings us to a year and a half ago. At this point, everyone was exhausted. Rob quit the band. But the long-term relationship metaphor continues to hold here: how do you give up something that has come to define you?

“It was tough,” Theo says. “Playing music became my identity; I was a film geek when I was younger, and that’s an introvert behavior. I didn’t smoke, I didn’t drink or do drugs—music was how I made friends. Who am I if I quit this band? But I was just so tired that I didn’t care.”

And so comes the end of the Dance Electric saga. What did they leave behind? To my mind, it’s best summarized as a small but durable nostalgia, emanating as a warm glow from the central point of the Masonic Lodge and decreasing in strength as you move away from Streetsville. It’s the same you might feel towards a modest television show that ran for only two seasons, leaving most of the big questions unanswered. The Facebook event for tonight’s show lists 243 attendees and 79 maybes, which is fairly unprecedented for a Mississauga indie gig.

Jamie and Theo remain humble. Jamie refuses the label of “art”, calling it a loaded term. “I can’t believe that people would be so interested in anything that I did,” says Theo. At the end of our interview, the two argue over who was the more hopeless case in high school.

“Being in a band isn’t this incredible thing. It’s juvenile, it’s stupid, it’s not like writing a great novel or doing something important.”

This before our conversation turns to Samuel Beckett—who, I’m very certain, would say much the same thing about the total inconsequence of “writing a great novel”. It’s possible to look at local music as the fleeting runoff of the suburbanite’s adolescent tantrum. Instead, though, I’d like to leave you with this sound, spherical little thought, dropped by Theo (master of self-effacing contradiction) into the middle of our two-hour conversation.

“When I started looking into the local music scene, I found all of these amazing bands that people never really knew. I started going to shows, and all the music I liked before became very obsolete. A lot of those local bands were my favourite bands. Why would I need Limp Bizkit, when I can just walk up and talk to my favourite band after the gig?”

The Rise and Fall of Dance Electric, Pt. 2

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