This article was originally published on beingtheremag.com, an independent music and film magazine that ran from 2004 to 2007. It is presented here as part of the Being There Magazine archive.
By Adam Anklewicz | Being There Magazine, April 2005
These are some of the things I have learned from the Inbreds: If you make an android of yourself, it will take over; Prince is a toy dog on wheels; You don’t really need guitar; Raymond Lowey is the one who designed the Canada Dry logo; Amelia Earhart’s safe, because she’s an excellent navigator; And Finally, rap and tap is a genre fusion that should never happen.
The Inbreds story began in Kingston, Ontario, a town known for its university and penitentiaries. The line-up consisted of just Mike “The Owl” O’Neill and Dave Ullrich. Between 1992 and 1998, The Inbreds released four albums, toured consistently, owned and operated their own label and were able to make catchy pop tunes focusing around the simple combination of bass and drums.
Inspiration for this article came with the announcement of a reunion show here in Toronto at Lee’s Palace. I was able to schedule time with both O’Neill and Ullrich and speak to them about their records, the reunion show, the future and their post-Inbreds projects. Though spending more time than was allocated, both Mike and Dave seemed genuinely happy to be working together again.
Originally planning to only be half of a band, Ullrich recalls the story of their origin when “[Mike and I] played and my brother was there, who was a sceptical, hard ass kinda guy. We just did a bunch of riffs and he said, ‘that will work.’ It was because he said it could work, that hard ass would take it. From there, reaction at every level was so good. Whether it was our friends, at the first house party we played at… the reaction was always good at each level.” With melody driven tunes, the Inbreds had something special.
The bass/drum combo debuted with their first album Hilario in 1993, featuring the single “Prince,” which was also the first song they had recorded as The Inbreds. Hilario featured songs previously only available on home released cassettes. The album was the only true indulgence in the strict bass/drum combo. Through heavy distortion and fuzz pedal, you could hear melodies that would soon explode into one of the best musical duos.
The history of their name had never been divulged before, so I had to ask where someone gets the name The Inbreds. When I asked them, Mike and Dave exchanged a thoughtful glance, as if speaking silently. Mike said, “Should I tell the truth?” Dave agreed and the story is as follows: “I have a brother named Joe. He’s very clever and I would always go tell Dave stories about Joe and the things he said. [Joe and my sister, Mary] were driving in the car, and there’s this car that was bothering them, it was filled with punks I guess. It was really starting to bother Joe and he knew it was bothering Mary. So he was turning around and looking between the seats, giving them the evil eye, but at such a distance what would it achieve? So my sister Mary had said ‘They can’t see you, what are you doing?’ He was losing his mind; maybe he thought it was dangerous, I don’t know. So he got a piece of paper and he wrote ‘inbreds’ in pen and he held it up. They couldn’t even see it. I told Dave that story. We needed a name for the band. I think that there’s always something appealing about a two-syllable name with ‘the’ in front of it. It’s just a matter of finding the right word. At the time, I didn’t think the band was going to go on for years. There were times when I was embarrassed by the name. If someone our parents’ age would ask me what the name of my band was, I’d say The Super Friendz. I knew they would never find out the difference, and it’s a nice name; The Inbreds I’ve got to explain.”
Mike O’Neill’s songwriting is the cornerstone of the band, and he is frequently compared to Paul McCartney. When listening to their albums you will always hear little nuances that are easily linked to White Album-era songs, or McCartney’s first solo album, McCartney. Kombinator is perhaps the best example of this, listening to them side by side; there is a feeling that Kombinator is a continuation 25 years later. The simplicity in the melodies and instrumentation are readily apparent during first listening. As you delve in deeper to these two albums you will find complexities not obvious before.
On Kombinator, The Inbreds added some more instrumentation while leaving bass and drums in the forefront. The occasional guitar, cello, piano or brass instrument pop up from time to time, but the soul spirit of the band is intact. A cleaner sound and better harmonies, Kombinator is without a doubt, their best work. Songs like “Amelia Earhart” and “Any Sense of Time” bleed pop sentimentality and O’Neill comes shining through as the gifted songwriter he is. Kombinator is Ullrich’s favourite of their albums. “Kombinator represents a really good time for us. What I really like about it is that the mood of the album is very consistent. It kind of flows as this cohesive unit of itself.”
Dave delved into why The Inbreds were able to make a bass and drum duo work. “[Other bass/drum duos] like NoMeansNo [in the ‘80s] are what you’d expect them to be. They raged, which is what Death From Above 1979 are too. Thoughts of attack… fill the space. Mike had a lot of melodic pop influences; it was taking this filtered through bass and drum. The result was The Inbreds, who had a very different tone, a different sound, different songs, I don’t think there’s a band like The Inbreds and I don’t think there will be a band like The Inbreds.”
The Inbreds returned to Toronto’s Gas Station recording studio in 1996 to make their third full-length album, It’s Sydney or the Bush, featuring some of their best songs, “North Window” and “Drag Us Down.” While not as consistent as the previous record, It’s Sydney or the Bush proves that The Inbreds were more than just a bass/drum duo. Without the need to prove themselves any more, The Inbreds were able to create a greater ambiance around the music using more instrumentation. The album also shows their playful side with short skits between the songs.
Winning Hearts, the final album by The Inbreds charted in 1998 as the highest played Canadian album on campus radio. Winning Hearts saw the bass and drum duo returning to their roots by keeping their songs bare. That album saw The Inbreds gaining more and more fans and winning hearts with shows at the South by Southwest festival, touring with EdgeFest and gaining fans such as Dave Grohl, who annoyed his band mates by playing this album non-stop. When writing songs, Mike O’Neill “has an acoustic guitar and I took the two highest strings off it, so I wouldn’t be tempted. That’s the way I would go about writing it. Especially Winning Hearts; I wanted to make it honest somehow, but there was always this reminder that I was still playing a guitar.”
1998 also saw the band’s break up. “Mike and I both had a band relationship, a friend relationship and a band as a business. All these things wrapped together, music, art, friends, business, all, depending on the day. Some days we’re [getting along perfectly], others we’re [butting heads]. Years of that just tested the relationship we had. As levels of success went up and down it played itself out. The friendship as well had seen better days.”
A surprise came to fans a month back when Ullrich’s zunior.com advertised an upcoming Inbreds reunion show in Toronto. After seven years, Ullrich says an email came in at the right time. “Mike and I hadn’t been in touch a lot, probably five years passed since the band broke up. Mike was in town and he came and visited me at my house. Tyler, who organized the show, sent an email which just happened to come in just after that. So the timing was really good. If she had sent the email two months earlier the answer would have been, ‘I don’t know’.”
Since the band’s break-up, Ullrich has been working in technology and started up a new label, Zunior.com. Zunior is a different kind of label, selling album downloads for $8.88 CDN and individual songs for 88¢. What makes it so different however is the business strategy. 85% of sales go directly to the artist and the remainder covers PayPal fees, bandwidth and server space. “I was really out of music for a while there. I started to work with The Gas Station crew; Don Kerr and Dale [Morningstar]. I’d see Don around all the time and I told him, ‘Don, if you ever need help with a web site, just let me know, I’ll do it for you, I’ll make it, set it up, host it, it won’t cost a cent.’ So I did The Gas Station, out of that I did Pete Elkas. Then I did Scribbled Out Man, and The Kelele Brothers and all these different sites. I was just doing them for fun.
“Out of that I saw that these guys were trying to sell their stuff in CD format. Digital was just starting to go and I saw that they needed a way to sell it digitally. In my day job, I did systems like Zunior and what allowed me to do it was open source [software], being able to do it for free. Such a robust system existed, which I realized could be applied to this application. The technology is the base, but it’s the contacts and the people I know, whether it’s Mike or Elevator or all these guys. They all come in, probably because they know me, and maybe when it establishes itself it will grow to more than just me. We’re probably going to be doing the Super Friendz’ B-Side record and an Elevator record. A bunch of things like that which are all direct connections to [the scene] back in the day.”
Can the intangible compete with the physical? MP3 versus CDs. It’s a debate that started when Napster hit. Some say no, but perhaps those people will be clutching onto their CDs as a handful of the previous generation are clutching their LPs. Dave Ullrich thinks, “Not in today’s marketplace. In five years, CDs will become backup. CDs will still sell to people who want back up.
“Vinyl (analogue), CDs (digital-physical), then digital in the air; One of the things that got lost from vinyl to CD was the fact that there was more of an experience involved. The artwork, the writing the things presented on this larger medium. There was something very physical about watching a record move. One of the exciting things about the future of digital music is that there’s a capacity, because it’s delivered in a method which is only limited by bandwidth and digital restrictions. Whether it’s high quality digital photography, rather than having a little album cover like [a CD], you can have full screen imagery, things that can be printed at high quality resolution. It could be Flash presentation or video. I think it’s going to allow music to go back to that sort of artist experience beyond music. Music bundles that were records and then they were CDs, then they’ll be this new thing we don’t even know what it is, it could be holograms for all I know. Mike O’Neill could be spinning discs on your kitchen tables. That’s what I think the opportunity is for digital music.” Perhaps The Owl.
“He’s seeking artists that he has connections with and a vision of Zunior.” says Mike O’Neill who’s second solo album, The Owl, was the first exclusive release on Zunior.com. Released in October, The Owl is still at the time of this writing the number one seller on Zunior’s chart. O’Neill has a personal perspective on Zunior having known Ullrich so long and helped draw attention to the label.
With over 100 albums and more on the way, Zunior is gaining attention, getting money to the artist where it belongs, and serving as a place where great Canadian talent is easy to find. There’s loads of music from former Local Rabbit Ben Gunning, a new band Bontempi featuring two former Plumtree members, The Kelele Brothers (Ron Sexsmith’s backing band) and David Celia formerly of Invisible Inc.
Mike O’Neill on the other hand has been creating music over the seven years since the Inbreds split. With two full-length albums, 2000’s What Happens Now? and 2004’s The Owl, O’Neill has also joined Sarah Harmer on tour as her guitarist. Recording The Owl at home digitally and making it exclusively available on Zunior.com, O’Neill’s work has stepped into the new age, but with the advantages of home recording come the problems. “You can record a pretty good sounding record at home and it’s something that our generation enjoys. There’s a price to pay.”
Having waited four years between records, fans were not disappointed with the release of The Owl, but with how long they had to wait. What took so long? “I went from recording in studios without even asking any questions to being really interested in recording at home. So I started recording and I thought it was sounding really good. Then I’d get a book and learn a bit more about it and say ‘gotta start again.’ So this kept happening and it became kind of an obsession, not a healthy one. I would learn something and then I’d think I wish I’d done that, go back and do it, but I’d have to do it to everything. And then halfway through it, I thought, ‘Everything sounds good, but I’m going to borrow a decent microphone for the vocals’. I asked this friend and picked up this really expensive microphone to just do the vocals. Of course I got it home and listened to it and thought, ‘Oh it sounds so good. What would it sound like on acoustic guitar?’ And then I rerecorded everything, again. That happened so many times it’s silly. I’m happy with the result. I don’t have the desire to rerecord those songs again. Sometimes you record a song and you think its okay, but if I had the opportunity I’d record it again. I don’t have that feeling.”
The Inbreds brought a fresh spin to both pop-rock and to bass/drum combos during those great six years in the ‘90s. Now into the early 21st century, we’re seeing more innovation from these two collaborators. Dave Ullrich’s Zunior.com, a new concept in record distribution, and Mike O’Neill’s adventures in home recordings.