By Taylor Benjamin Burgess
After his band’s show at the Lo Pub, Mac DeMarco, the pop-sensible singer and guitarist of the duo Makeout Videotape, is listing off what he writes songs about. Once he got tired of writing about girls, he started writing about less meaningful stuff—like eating things, and his job of teaching old Vietnamese women how to use computers. Or at least that’s what he said. He turns to his drummer, Alex Calder. “I write a lot of songs about Alex too. He’s having a rough time in his life right now.”
Calder shakes his head, smiling, like he knows that he wouldn’t be able to stop DeMarco even if he tried. “No, I’m not really, but go on.”
DeMarco continues on, kind of innocently, “I dunno, he moved to Vancouver to go—”
“Jesus Christ,” Calder utters and puts his head in his hands.
I’m pretty lost trying to figure out if DeMarco is being sincere. During the show, he was being the biggest goof. Halfway through their first song, he realized that his amp’s reverb wasn’t working and he whispered “Just one second, folks,” in a raspy voice, and kicked it. Since that didn’t fix it, he got down on his knees and fiddled with some cords, running his tongue over his front teeth exaggeratedly until reverb washed over his surf-tinged riffs.
At the end of his cover to Harry Nilsson’s “I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York,” he told Calder to keep drumming on the tom and snare (which is all Makeout Videotape’s drum kit is), and then he stopped playing his guitar, got down on his knees and basically started yodelling. During their last song, DeMarco instructed me (the closest person to the stage) to pour his beer down his throat while they were still playing. So yeah, it’s hard to take him seriously about anything.
“Maybe you’ve heard of the community on Davie Street out there?” says DeMarco flatly. Calder and their merch guy are constraining laughter.
“Well it’s a predominately homosexual neighbourhood. We’re from Edmonton, and a lot of bad things happen there [for gay people]. A lot of gay bashing. It’s not a very good scene for them, so Alex initially wanted to move out there to be in a more comfortable environment for himself.”
So the two guys moved out to Vancouver, where they made a couple recordings inspired by Jonathan Richman, Arthur Russell, the Beatles and Harry Nilsson. (Recordings that sound like crap only because they don’t know how to record, insists DeMarco.) And in their new locale, they started creating a little bit of a following. Then the guys of Unfamiliar Records set them up with a number of tour dates with Japandroids last fall, after which, Calder moved back to his parents’ place in Edmonton.
“It was just a harsh scene for him once again,” continues DeMarco. “But after doing that, we picked him up for this tour and he finally mustered up the courage to tell them that, uh, that he’s doing his own thing.”
During the show, DeMarco had announced that Calder came out to his parents on the drive to Winnipeg.
“It’s—I just don’t want to talk about it,” says Calder absently. “It’s kinda sensitive.”
DeMarco erupts into a half laugh, half smoker’s cough and leans over to me again.
“Make sure you print all of that.”
You can witness Makeout Videotape’s antics when they open up for You Say Party! We Say Die! on April 7 at the Royal Albert.