Constant for 10 Years: Looking Back at a Decade with the Constantines’ Steve Lambke
“When you talk about a rock band and say ten years, that’s a long time,” says lead vocalist Steve Lambke. He plucks on his guitar as we talk on the phone. In talking about the band’s journey, he finds himself of different mindsets as to whether or not the last 10 years have truly felt like 10 years.
“A bit of both,” he says inconclusively. “It’s felt like a hundred years in some ways, but at the same time ten years can go by really fast, I still haven’t really wrapped my head around that, it’s become such a part of my life. It’s sort of hard to put it in any kind of context.”
The historical context is that the band got together in ’99 rather simply. Lambke and Dallas Wehrle grew up together playing in different bands in Cambridge. Meanwhile, Doug MacGregor and Bryan Webb played for a London-based band called Shoulder. Wehrle migrated to London to play bass for Shoulder, but the band broke up soon after. But Wehrle, MacGregor and Webb stayed together and, with the addition of Lambke, formed a new band: The Constantines.
Gathering together in the tri-city area generally – and Guelph specifically – the new Constantines began to play tonnes of venues up and down the 401 between Toronto and London. In Guelph, they all lived in one house where they also set up studio space in the basement. It’s also where some of the band’s most popular local shows took place.
“When I think about that it’s not really our sets that I remember, but the whole experience of putting on those shows, and the other bands that were coming to play,” remembers Lambke. “Playing wasn’t what made those nights memorable for me, but I’m glad that we were there and that we were a part of that. It was a cool time.”
The reaction to these basement sessions paled in comparison to the reception of the band’s first album, which dropped in June 2001. “It was a really cool surprise,” says Lambke about the critical and commercial success of their self-titled debut. The alternative press and music publications like Exclaim! And Eye Weekly drove a lot of the buzz, as well as repeated airplay on campus radio. Suddenly there were a lot more people at their live shows as they started selling out venues like Lee’s Palace and the Horseshoe Tavern.
“Those were pretty exciting times and I feel very, very grateful for the response that we got on the first couple of records, right off the bat,” he adds.
Flash-forward eight years and Lambke says that some of the daily struggles for the band are still kind of same. It’s still a struggle to balance band and life and keep everybody enthusiastic and happy.
“I still question the viability of a career every, single day,” explains Lambke. “I think that’s a process rather than a point. I definitely doubted it daily, but we were pretty lucky on the first record in getting amazing attention from the press and from the record buying public. It was beyond what we expected as a possibility, at least for me.”
And the definitions for what’s possible for a band have changed a lot in the last decade. Digital downloading, MySpace, iTunes have all changed the face of the music industry irrevocably. “Now you have a band, and pretty much right away you have some songs up on My Space and everyone can hear your band, and that’s really great in a way,” observes Lambke.
Still the primary challenge for a band, be they emerging or established, is promotion. The Constantines now have people at a major record company, Arts & Crafts, to do their marketing for them, but Lambke says he admires those that shoulder that responsibility to do what it takes – like extra shows or daily blogs – to get themselves out there. “Whenever we say that we’re going to do something daily, it’s always forgotten pretty quick,” he says laughing. “[But] there’s an element of that that is really cool, because I think it’s good to destroy the myth of rock and roll.”
And even though the place the Constantines is currently at could be considered a success by most definitions, Lambke’s still not sure, but the good definitely outweighs the bad. “There’s always something exciting just around the corner,” he explains, “like making another record or this tour with the Weakerthans coming up. It kind of keeps you going through the question mark kind of times.”
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