See Spot Run Commemorate 20th Anniversary of Hit Album ‘Weightless’

Veteran Canadian pop/rock band See Spot Run is hitting the road for a series of dates this month as part of what will be a year-long celebration of the band’s second, and breakthrough album, Weightless.

Released in 1999 on Loggerhead Records, Weightless came two years after their debut album, Ten Stories High, and six years after their debit EP Traces. It marked a huge step upwards for the band, which had been slogging it out on the road, criss-crossing Canada on the arduous club circuit of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The title track was a bona fide hit, and both it and the video received regular airplay on radio and MuchMusic. The band was also the first one to launch an album at a show at the then-brand new Air Canada Centre in Toronto, which they did in May of 1999.

Comprised of bassist/lead vocalist/primary songwriter Chris Brodbeck, guitarists Randy Bowen and Aaron Little and drummer Dave Fudge, See Spot Run will start at Signal Brewing Company in Corbyville, Ontario [just outside of Belleville] on June 22, followed by dates in Pointe Claire, Quebec the following night, June 27 at The Social in Peterborough and June 28 at the Rhapsody Barrel Bar in Kitchener. More dates will be announced later this month, as the band expects to be performing regularly throughout the summer and into the fall.

A re-release of the album, featuring some bonus tracks, will happen just before the tour, so fans can pick up some copies on the road.

“The album is being re-released with new album art and the bonus tracks will be some demos that we unearthed from some old cassettes. These are cassettes that we found that had the very first demos of some of the songs from the album. We were on the road all the time, so we packed our studio and took it on the road and got everything down on an old Fostex 4-track. Any time we would go to a new hotel room, we would set up a little studio,” he said.

“We were always coming up with ideas and recording demos on the road. All our demos in those days were recorded on the road and then these cassettes would get passed around between management and this and that, and you would eventually lose track of them over the years. They get buried in boxes or whatever and then the boxes start to reappear from here and there. Sadly, we cannot find the one for Weightless. It still may appear one day, but we have been digging for about a year now, asking people and just going through boxes. The re-release is going to be a limited edition, CD only, mostly for souvenir purposes. Releasing the demos is just a way of making it fun for the fans.”

The plan is to play the entirety of Weightless in the first set on the band’s forthcoming run of shows, with the second set devoted to other hits. Some of the songs have never been played live, others not for many, many years. Yet to be determined, according to Brodbeck is if the band will play the album in the order of the songs on the CD.

“We are playing the entire Weightless album, which we have never done before. Whether we do it in order or not is still up in the air. We’re still trying to figure that out, because when you make an album, the order of tracks on a CD is arranged different than the order of tracks that would have been on vinyl or cassette, where you have two sides. Generally, some bands will do it in a very specific order so that the album has a flow, like a book. Weightless was almost that, except that the marketing people at the label wanted the singles at the front, for marketing purposes. In my view, that’s not the perfect order for a good show, so we’re still trying to figure out if we can make that work, or whether we will have to move the song order around. But it will be all the songs for sure,” he explained.

“Our ultimate responsibility is to put on a good show, a show that has a good rhythm throughout, just the way we always have. We always put together set lists in such a way that the show in a live situation has a flow. I tend to lean towards that. I know there has been some discussion within the band as to whether there is value in playing the tracks in the order that they were on the album. Do people expect to hear this song after that song? It’s an interesting debate.

“When I think about the albums, I listened to in the 1990s and the albums I listened to in the 1970s and 1980s, I found on some of the older albums, like Zeppelin, you would know which song came after the other. But if you were listening to something in the 1990s on CD, they were much longer albums first off, but I don’t know if I would really have the song order sort of memorized, I don’t know if it would bother me to see the Foo Fighters and expect this song after that song if they were playing a whole album. It would be cool to hear an entire album played together because often people don’t play the B side, so that would be the specialness of that.”

Brodbeck gives a lot of credit for the commercial and popular success of Weightless and the stellar sound of the album to producer Gary Moffet, a former long-time member of April Wine.

“He actually did our first two albums and we were on a bit of a ride, because we were learning how to make albums from a guy who make a lot of successful albums. We trusted him and we listened, and we learned a lot and we then were able to make albums ourselves because of his mentorship. When I listen back now, I go, ‘wow, okay, I get it.’ I get what he wanted to do in certain places, and I get how he approached this – things that we didn’t know at the time. But now we have the advantage of listening back after 20 years and realizing what an amazing job he did,” said Brodbeck.

“Gary and I went to New York City to work with [legendary engineer] Howie Weinberg on the mastering, and you walked into Howie Weinberg Mastering and he’s got awards from the Smashing Pumpkins and Prince and all these artists all over his walls, and it’s like, ‘oh my God, this guy has done some albums.’ All of that was part of the experience from 20 years ago, and also working in the studios in Montreal with the people that we worked with. There is a song off Weightless called Loathe, which started off as a very simple song, but Gary was looking for something different to add to it. We didn’t understand what he meant by different, although I understand it now when I listen back. He brought in a guy named Paul Picard who is Celine Dion’s percussionist and he came in and laid down this incredible percussion landscape on the song that give it such a cool feel. We listen back now and realize how pro that was and something we would never have been able to even think of doing at the time.

“Because we just had the nugget of the song. We had the chords, we had the lyrics and melodies and basic arrangement, and it might have been a pretty decent song, but Gary was so helpful in turning it into something special and unique. On other tracks he brought in trumpet players, and other great musicians, real musicians, real characters. Making that album was a good experience and looking back as I go through the songs and sort some of them out, some of them I literally have to relearn, it just brings back all those great memories of the experience, for sure.”

The title track was a top-10 hit on a number of Canadian charts, including reaching number 6 on the Top 40 chart. Like many artists, Brodbeck had an almost otherworldly sense that he was creating magic as he was composing Weightless.

“The songs that I write fast are generally songs that I think are my better ones. Maybe other people feel differently, but when a song flows out fast and I finish it fast and it all comes together pretty simply, I find those are the most successful songs. I remember when I did write Weightless, it was written fast and I demoed it quickly, because it was quite simple, there’s nothing to the song really. The guys in the band were like, ‘yeah, yeah this is the one.’ They knew right away, and management and Gary as well,” he said.

“The record label people were the same, they said it was going to be the single, that it was going to be the song that was going to move us forward. They actually said, ‘it’s not your best song, but it’s the one,’ as is often the case.”

Besides the re-release of Weightless, Brodbeck said he and his bandmates are always working on new songs, in anticipation of following up their previous album, Pretty Holiday, which came out in 2016.

“There is always that desire to do new music. It’s ongoing. I am a songwriter and I don’t see myself stopping songwriting, because that’s just what comes to me every day in my brain. So however the form it takes, there is new music, which could result in another See Spot Run album. As Pete Townsend has said, ‘I am not done,’” he said.

For more information on the anniversary edition of Weightless, tour dates and more, visit https://www.seespotrun.ca.

• 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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