Iron Age Mystics aka IAM, brings together a quartet of talented, experienced and still hungry veteran Toronto rock and metal musicians and songwriters who have issued a bold and incendiary musical manifesto with the release of their debut album, Pride Before the Fall, which came out in June.
The brainchild of prolific former New Regime frontman Kevin Connelly, the current performing lineup of IAM consists of Connelly on lead vocals, alongside drummer Alexander Tukatsch, and guitarists Sil Simone and Des Leahy. For the recording of Pride Before the Fall, Connelly enlisted guitarists Allan Wohng and Chuck Brown, bassist Clayton Rudy and drummer Greg Mount.
“As the story goes, I met Greg Mount at a mutual friend’s wedding, and he had heard through the grapevine that I was a singer of some repute. He hit me up with the idea of basically starting a really simple writing project with two other guys that he knew, Allan Wohng and Clayton Rudy. I said yeah man, let’s go for it. So, I went into it with no expectations whatsoever. We just got together twice a week, Sundays and Tuesdays were our day and evening together, and we did this for about three or four months, just throwing ideas around out onto the floor, knocking them around and recording them as we went,” Connelly explained.
“Around the third or fourth month we came up with the rudimentary bits for a song that we call on the album, You’ve Got the Power, and all of a sudden there was an excitement in the room and I ran over to the keyboards and I started writing the changes for the second passage. At the end of that rehearsal, I knew that we were onto something. So, we kept rolling until we had about two album’s worth of material in rough form. Then we went it into the studio, and which point I was using connections that I had made in the industry to get it done well and inexpensively. We started to rotate that with playing live, which also added a fresh element which I think we brought back to the rest of the writing of the album.
“And, as things go, you know bands right, the drummer had to drop out about 2/3 of the way through the making of the album, so a drummer I had worked with for years, Alexander Tukatsch finished the album. Allan Wohng the guitar player and co-writer of most of the material had been stricken with essentially a kind of rheumatoid arthritis that flares up, so he couldn’t finish the album, so I had Chuck Brown, a great guitar player for another project I work in, came and finished the album. So, it took a lot of time, a lot more time than any of us expected, a lot of change. But now we have the album, and that’s pretty much the whole story as far as the roll out goes. It’s one of those things where you’ve got to roll with it: some days are like pushing a cloud and other days it’s like four on the floor. But you stick with it.”
The bold and unmitigated political nature of the material on Pride Before the Fall was intentional, as Connelly felt under the circumstances of the current social, economic and political climate in the era of nativism, jingoism, racial nationalism and Trumpism, someone needs to speak for the rational majority.
“My deceased father always had a pile of newspapers beside his bed about as tall as a seven-year-old kid. I inherited the genetic trait of being a news freak, so I get up early and I read the news, and then more news … and more news. I read about world events, current events here at home. And through educating myself on what has been going on and what continues to go on in our global and western society, it started to irritate me that I had no outlet for the things that I was writing,” he said.
“Definitely, from the onset of this project I said I have written enough love songs in my career and in my life. I have written enough songs about rock and roll and partying, I have to do something serious in my adult life and do what I think I do best, which is music, and make a contribution. So that was my quiet incentive, it’s not something I announced to the guys. But it was my quiet incentive from the get-go, so even on the B sides and the album and a half of unrecorded material we still have, there’s not a love song to be seen or heard. It’s pretty much all political. And the other guys were fine with that.
“I shouldn’t neglect to mention that there is also a very spiritual component to the album. When I am talking about revolution in the single Save It For the Revolution, I am not talking at all about violence and Molotov Cocktails. I am talking about a real joining of the humanities, regardless of ethnicity or sexuality or religious beliefs, because that to me is the only kind of philosophy that has evolved beyond an individual’s power that can fight the powers that, in my opinion, shouldn’t be, that are ruining our planet these days.”
Connelly’s views are based on broad, analytical reasoning and empirical data. Nothing he says or writes about is off the cuff or reactionary. At heart he is a humanist and a pragmatist, preferring not to conform to any rigid political doctrine either in his personal life or in the music he composes for Iron Age Mystics.
“I suppose if I were to have to put myself in a box and adopt a label it would certainly be left of centre. The problem is, when you adopt a banner, then you have to live within the rules of adopting that banner. In other words, if you disagree with some things that your Liberal Party is doing, you pretty much have to stay mum about it, because that’s how allegiance under a banner works, right? On some days I agree with some things that Conservatives are saying, on some days I agree with things that Liberals say. Opposition, in two party politics, polarizes people and we have seen that in the U.S. for the past decade,” he explained, adding that it is not people or parties that he is primarily frustrated with, but the system and political constructs that have become distorted from their original purposes and no longer serve the people they were built to serve, but are instead tools of those in power to help them retain that power and propagate their own beliefs, suppressing or silencing opposing voices along the way.
Information Outlaw is Connelly’s take on the various individuals who have stepped forward to pull aside the veil of secrecy over underhanded and immoral dealings by various governments, particularly the U.S. government, and who were made pariahs and even outlaws, persecuted by the state which they are trying to help.
“The idea for that one, funnily enough, came as I was walking into a nofrills grocery store on a Sunday. It’s a good thing that I carry a pen and paper with me. It just kept rolling out of me. I had been following, through alternative media particularly, a lot of what I guess you could call the supressed whistle blowing leaks on a wide variety of important social issues. It was only a year or two after Wikileaks had shown the devastating attack by the Apache helicopter where two Reuters journalists were killed, and it went viral. Around this time, they were vigorously going after Chelsea Manning to, at the very least, hand her punitive measures for daring to put the American military in such a bad light. So this song was a tip of the hat to Chelsea Manning and other whistle-blowers alike who are basically braver than most of us will ever be, to get the terrible truth out to the western public,” he said, adding that Thought Police is along similar veins, looking into corporate and government intrusiveness into our private lives.
“Its about the rise of the surveillance state via technologies that are escalating exponentially every week, month, day, year. It’s about going to the airport trying to get to your plane on time without feeling humiliated or being humiliated. It’s about unwarranted telephone surveillance. People used to laugh it off as a conspiracy theory and nothing more; everybody mocked it. Well then comes Ed Snowden proving that, well no it’s a fact.”
With the problems being outlined so well, with such compelling lyrical force and enmeshed with an insistent, driving, aggressive riff-oriented compositions, Connelly offers at least part of the solution with the aforementioned single, Save If For The Revolution, as well as the anthemic call to arms, You’ve Got the Power.
“Lyrically speaking, it was my disgust with the political climate at the time and how mind washed people seemed to be, again following and toeing the party line even though you aren’t really looking into your party and holding to your stubborn belief that your party or your leader can do no wrong, etc. etc. etc. This is sort of a semi-spiritual solution to this conundrum where once you open your eyes and realize that you’re being led by the nose, that you have a lot more in common with your neighbour than you do with anyone who sits and walks in the halls of the seats of power,” he said.
“It’s a song that has a sense of unification to it, encouraging people to blow off the dogma and let’s go back to being people again and realizing that we have a lot in common and that there is a lot to fight for, right here, right now.”
A couple of very cool and very interesting things happened on the way to the release of Pride Before the Fall for Connelly and his band. The first was the music found its way into the ears of internationally renowned political cartoonist and illustrator Mr. Fish, aka Dwayne Booth, who ended up designing the cover for the IAM debut album.
“A couple of years ago Clayton Rudy bought me a coffee table book and it was a voluminous, wonderful bit of writing with examples of brilliant political art throughout the last century. And it was the work of Mr. Fish, and so it became my night table book, my bedtime reading at mine and my partner Sharon English [a lecturer and director of the Writing and Rhetoric Program at the University of Toronto] home on the east coast of Canada. I was really into it, and I would come downstairs in the morning and I would talk anybody’s ear off about it, man. A few months ago, I am still talking about it, and Clayton suggests we should contact him and see if he would do something for the release of the album,” Connelly said.
“And I am thinking, ‘you go right ahead Clayton.’ This guy is a heavy hitter, he has been in the Village Voice and the L.A. Times. He is a top notch guy in the States. Clayton sends him an email and CCs me on it. About half a day later he gets back to us and says he is really busy but wants to hear the album. Clayton directs him to the website and a few hours later he gets back to us and says, ‘to hell with it, I am putting everything else off my table and I will have this together for you by Monday.’ And true to his word, he killed it man. The piece he did was specifically for the song Pride Before the Fall, and he nailed it. It’s a great piece of work, that’s now on a t-shirt by the way.
“Getting that kind of endorsement and validation is obviously very good. The best kind or endorsement for me, and I don’t mean this in any highbrow way, are the ones that come from the very field of the arts where people have studied art and understand it and especially like Mr. Fish, are out of the park brilliant. So, it solidifies all the time and effort and the money that you put into making a full-length LP, one that, really for me, of all the albums that I have made is the one closest to my heart.”
Secondly, for the fiery and emotionally charged Big, Bad Motherfucker, the band was given permission to use a clip from a speech by U.S. Senator, and darling of the progressive side of the Democratic Party, Bernie Sanders, from his 2016 campaign to be the Democrat’s candidate in that year’s presidential election. Hilary Clinton won the nomination, but subsequently lost the election to Republican Donald Trump.
“I included Bernie because he made a stellar speech about Wall Street greed, corporatism and how during the recession these guys got everything they wanted from the government in terms of bailouts and everyone else got screwed. And I was just riffing at the time and I said, ‘guys, we’ve got this space in the bridge, let’s put that clip here.’’ And lo and behold, it worked, like it really, really works and everybody loves it,” Connelly said.
“I went to our manager Kerry Forbes and said, ‘look we’re not that far away from releasing this and we just can’t release it without at least asking Bernie for permission, so would you please.’ She sourced out the contact and they got back to us with a few words and wanted to hear it. We sent them the website and they literally got back to us within half an hour and said, ‘we love it. Thank you for including Bernie in this song.;’ and that was one of the first really big highs that I had. I was like ‘oh my God!’ I knew this was a good idea, but what are the chances that Bernie Sanders is going to like a song, for crying out loud, if he hears it’s called Big, Bad Motherfucker. And it turned out exactly the opposite that I thought it would most likely go. So that too was a really good affirmation that we must be doing something right.”
IAM is currently working on tour dates not only for Canada, but possibly further afield for the remainder of 2019, heading into 2020. For details on any upcoming shows, for more information on the band or to order Pride Before The Fall, visit https://www.ironagemystics.com.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, ON, who has been writing about music and musicians for a quarter of a century. Besides his journalistic endeavours, he now works as a communications and marketing specialist. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
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