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here is showmanship galore. Strumming in a Mexican style on his guitar, Petunia broods and glowers. He controls and galvanises with a softly snarling presence, sparking unexpected electricity-bolts of energy, and leftfield tempo shifts, through his toe-tapping lead. But there is less ego in the playing than you might expect. There is clearly a lot of mutual respect amongst the band.
“That’s ’cos we’ve played in a lot of dives! And we’re pretty laid back. Those guys are all really great at what they do so there’s no proving anything. I’ll always rein things in, if things start sound- ing like there’s no reason for someone to be doing something – including myself! If it’s cheesy, boy, I hate that!”
Now an established and popular presence on the Canadian touring scene (also having completed a rip-roaring 2013 tour in the UK), and currently settled in BC, Petunia’s roaming was once of a more romantic nature. Travel in many ways led him to music – only starting to play well into his 20s – living out of a bag and on the road for long stretches as he pinballed and hitchhiked his way across Canada, America, Europe and South America, serendipity and happenstance his guides.
“I think you get more mileage out of your life as a result of the random events that help you become whatever you are going to become; if you do a lot of things before you become that. And you understand that just because you’re a musician now, doesn’t mean you’re not going to be a painter later, or a beggar. And the things that you’ve done before are going to help you. That’s the way life is. And so having gone into music with all these other influences has probably helped me write songs.”
The tumbleweed lyricism in his songwriting reflects this lifestyle – a relentless polysyllabic spilling of ideas about human striving, love, loss, sin, death and redemption – channelled through a voice which shape-shifts between velvet-coated melody and gritty Tom Waits-style dissonance, between Jimmie Rodgers’ backwoods spirit and a skittish jitterbugging menace.
Unlike Jarmusch’s “stealing”, the mercurial sound of Petunia
& The Vipers is less of a conscious process: this is osmosis. “I’ve always believed that as you learn things, you’re ready to forget them. You learn something, then it’s in there and you forget it, you lock it somewhere and eventually it comes out… as a cre- ative person… whether it’s tying your shoes or going for a walk or writing a song. So you learn as many things as you can, that interest you, you just forget about them and relax, then they just come out other places.”
Petunia’s own starting place was Sainte-Dorothée, a semi- rural suburb of Laval in Quebec. A punk rocker as a teenager, his nomadic spirit and sense of curiosity took him travelling – working and hitching around Europe. A brief spell co-busking in Tel Aviv and a short-lived try-out of the guitar hit a dead end. “I could never play and sing at the same time. I couldn’t do both. It was kind of hard. I dropped it after six months and carried on travel- ling.“ Heading back to Canada for more intercontinental road- trips, he eventually alighted in Toronto, where he started to work as an independent filmmaker. “I got a 16mm Bolex wind-up cam- era – and made surrealist films.” No surprise maybe that all those filmic references are so rife in people’s attempts to define Petunia – “David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch, Tarantino, Cohen Brothers – all those weirdos! I acknowledge these references only because I think that if I perpetuate that, then those people will eventually take notice and listen. I know that the music is useful cinematically to someone. I know it!”
“Then I fell into music accidentally after that. I met this woman who named me Petunia.” The woman in question is an iconic Toronto figure, Sheila Gostick, described as the “ultimate outsider artist; a legendary rebel comedian and song tosser.” As well as naming him and teaching him to play, she also had a case of old country music tapes, “so I heard Hank, Jimmie Rodgers, the Carter Family for the first time.”
“She showed me a lot on the guitar and inspired most of my singing and playing early on. She always says I went to her finish- ing school, ‘put the crosses on the ts’. She had a Readers Digest songbook, opened it up to some Hank Williams’ song, she played and I did what she did. She was playing in the Mexican style where you pluck with your thumb and you strum with your fingers. And I did that. And I could play and sing!”
Within a few months, Petunia was making his living – with occasional supplements from work on movie sets to pay the rent – playing on the street. This set the pattern for the next eight years.
“I probably never played better than I did then. If you play guitar four or five times a week, three or four hours a day and you have to play in an environment that is unamplified, it forces you to do certain things. You play your guitar as loudly as you can play it without it sounding rough. So you learn the boundaries of your
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