To refer to Don Pyle as the drummer of the Toronto instrumental band Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet would be a vast understatement, even though that gig granted him access to the Ramones, famed engineer Steve Albini and even the Kids in the Hall, for whom Shadowy Men served as house band.
Don Pyle's new memoir is out May 26.Andrew Blair/Supplied
He’s been a constant presence in Toronto’s creative scenes, performing, recording, photographing and generally making art for five decades. (Among his other bands? Crash Kills Five, King Cobb Steelie, Phono-Comb and Fifth Column.) His photography book Trouble in the Camera Club (ECW Press, 2011) is a crucial document of early punk history in the city, authoritative and entertaining enough that it sometimes pops up in record stores across the world.
His new memoir, Rough Description: Love Letters and Ghost Stories from a Life in Music – also with ECW and out May 26 – turns the lens on himself and his relationships with loved ones. Many of those people are now dead – including Albini and Sadies co-founder Dallas Good, the latter of whom Pyle played with in several bands.
Pyle is a careful and caring writer, seeing the best in people and finding joy in their stories. But for a book by a man who professionally keeps time, Rough Description pays little heed to linearity. Tour tales toggle across bands and decades. An appreciation of vistas viewed from touring vans bleeds into tales of the humanity that drummers wring from their kits. Yet the book is less a stream of consciousness than a flood of memories tied together by a love of music.
Pyle spoke with The Globe and Mail by phone shortly before Rough Description‘s release. This interview has been edited and condensed.
You’ve been on the scene in Toronto for five decades. Why was now the right time for a memoir?
My second book, Shot in a Mirror, was just photographs. I didn’t want to summarize the people who were in the photos, but there was so much more behind the pictures. When I did talks about them, I spoke more at length about the context of the photographs. This was mostly instigated by one in particular. I transcribed as much as I could of what I said about [artist] Wendy Coburn, which turned into one chapter. That made me think, I can do this. I love giving the cultural context of things.
The other person that set this off was the chapter about Dallas Good, which I began immediately after he died [in 2022]. I just started writing all this stuff down to capture my heightened emotional state at the time. That was a big kick in the ass. There’s something about the end nipping at your heels that cracks the whip and makes you want to do more.
You also write about the complexity of grief – that you mourned not just Dallas, for instance, but eventually the end of Shadowy Men. Why was it important to highlight this complexity?
Don Pyle's memoir turns the lens on himself and his relationships with loved ones.Supplied
Grief is a huge part of my relationship to Dallas now. I’m very close with his wife [Amanda Schenk], and our friendship has developed so much more because of Dallas’s death – so there’s this weird kind of paradox of grief generating love. It’s love for her, love for being alive, love for the beautiful everyday things about life.
Grief is something that is so different with every person close to you who dies, whether it’s because of the age you’re at, or how close you were to that person, or how close you are to death.
The focus on “ghost stories” is right there in the book’s subtitle. Why did you decide to pay so much tribute to loved ones who’ve passed?
I did not want to write an autobiography. I was pretty conscious about that. I am just another person in another band, like a million other people, but I have had some very interesting and crazy experiences. A lot of the book, I was writing about gratitude. I think perhaps people overlook gratitude to others, and I wanted to record some of mine.
You write that at one point in your life, the music scene and queer scene in Toronto rarely intersected. In your experience, has that gotten better?
Oh my god, so much. It’s massively different. And there were golden moments with everything shifting, whether people recognized it or not. There was a period around when the Hidden Cameras were starting, and there were a ton of related bands – and when [the late promoter and artist] Will Munro was starting to do his Vaseline parties. Those parties were a huge catalyst in bringing all these little pockets of scenes.
Sometimes you need somebody else to set the example for you to go, I can do that. I experienced that myself with the birth of punk rock: You see someone who can’t play on stage, and that’s what inspires you to do it. Now I feel it’s quite normal. There’s tons of queer people I know in bands, tons of trans people, which is so amazing.
You describe Shadowy Men as a “mid-time band” – not quite big time, not quite small time. The economics of music have changed so much since the band’s first run. Do you think it’s even possible to be a mid-time band today?
Broken Social Scene is maybe a contemporary equivalent, but I think of them as being a big band. Shadowy Men, at the time, was middle class. I think band structures can reflect economic structures, and with the hollowing out of the middle class, now everybody’s poorer or everybody’s richer, and it’s tough in the middle.