Headstones have a ‘ridiculous’ cult following

Tough road to navigate, the whole “staying punk” thing.

It can be self-defeating at the best of times, self-destructive at the worst and it’s lucrative only in the rarest of situations, not to mention a little sad when it degrades into half-hearted theatre rather than the committed act of actually staying punk — which is impossible to define precisely, of course, but ultimately boils down, at the individual level, to being able to sleep well at night knowing you’re conducting your life and art in a manner that refuses to compromise whatever personal ideals you consider foundational to “staying punk.” You can fake it all you want, even to yourself. But when you know you’re not doing it for the right reasons, everyone knows.

Hugh Dillon and Headstones, the gang of Kingston ne’er-do-wells he’s fronted since 1989, do it for the right reasons. They parted ways in 2003 after an admirably subversive run at the CanCon mainstream during the post-grunge heyday of 1990s “alternative” rock hatched by 1993’s rather hit-packed-in-hindsight, platinum-selling outlier debut “Picture of Health,” in fact, because they realized they were no longer doing it for the right reasons. And when Dillon and Headstones co-founders Trent Carr and Tim White reunited for the right reasons in 2011 — to play a benefit for their high school friend and “Cemetery” co-writer Randy Kwan, who was dying of cancer with a two-year-old child at home — they realized that they wanted to keep doing it for the rightest of all right reasons: they’re lifelong friends who love playing music together.

“It got us past our egos and our pettiness because we got together for a reason — a profound reason —and that’s what allowed us to appreciate each other and what we do and get back together on a real level because you can be gone like f—in’ that,” said Dillon, still a hearteningly youthful “old punk” at 59, with an illustrative snap of the fingers during a recent meetup in a dark side-street boîte off the Yonge strip.

“You can tell when it’s forced. And also, I think, as you get older and people are passing away — y’know, look at Gord Downie with the Tragically Hip — everybody kinda recalibrates and realizes ‘Look what we have.’ We’ve got a high-functioning, dysfunctional rock-‘n’-roll band that has fun. And when we rehearse or we go on the road, it’s because we f—in’ love it. And then the collateral damage of our craziness is we make records that we like and we make artwork that we like and we design our own T-shirts and hoodies for the tour and we do all of it. You want to make things that you’re excited by and proud of. Life’s too short just to be bitter and bitchy. It really is.”

The new Headstones record, “Flight Risk”, released on Oct. 14 via Cadence Music, is a proper ripper —even more so than the band’s last album, 2019’s “PEOPLESKILLS,” a return to classic Headstones form that picked up the renewed attitude and momentum gained from 2017’s “Little Army” and “Devil’s on Fire,” the band’s first-ever No. 1 hit at rock radio in Canada, only to have all of that immediately derailed by the COVID-19 shutdown.

The band, which now includes Steve Carr on keyboards and Jesse Labovitz on drums, has come back seriously hard on “Flight Risk,” though. It’s one of Headstones’ best records, certainly the best since their initial 1990s volley of “Picture of Health,” “Teeth and Tissue” and “Smile and Wave,” after which drugs and drink started to get the better of all involved and Dillon was running the very real risk of dying an early death akin to the one suffered by his iconic film character Joe Dick in Bruce McDonald’s 1996 film “Hard Core Logo.” And it’s as good as it is because the band is staying punk and doing it for the right reasons, airing its collective “intolerance for nonsense” in mid-sized rooms across the country to a faithful core audience because it wants to, not because it has to.

Dillon has a whole other life as an actor and a TV writer, after all, having spent years – in another decidedly “punk” move – playing lawmen good and bad and somewhere in between on such hit shows as “Flashpoint,” “Durham County,” “Yellowstone” and the grim prison drama “Mayor of Kingstown,” which he cocreated with “Yellowstone” auteur Taylor Sheridan in 2021. He’d just wrapped the second season, set to debut on Paramount Plus on Jan. 15, when we spoke. But he still found the time to convene the band periodically during the chaos of shooting a couple of different series during COVID times because the pandemic made them appreciate what they had even more.

“All of us felt like it wasn’t a given anymore,” he said. “Because the pandemic made it very much ‘We don’t know if there is any more anything,’ y’know, let alone playing or touring or making records. So that’s where the energy came from. We hadn’t seen each other and we had pieces and fragments and I’d worked with (producer) Chris Osti on FaceTime a little bit, but then when we got together face-to-face it all kinda ramped up.

“It was magic and it was exciting and then you appreciate each other. I’ve said this before, but we have such a weird dynamic because we’re friends and, because we’re friends, we don’t have any respect for each other. We don’t see how good we are. I don’t look at Trent like ‘He’s the guitar player for the Headstones.’ I look at him like ‘It’s Trent and I know his flaws.’ And with Tim it’s the same way, and they look at me the same way. And then we did a few gigs in the summer and we were shocked at how good each of us are at what we do … We’re all highly critical. It has to be shockingly good for us.”

Headstones wrap up the current leg of the “Flight Risk” tour with a sold-out Toronto gig at the Phoenix on Thursday, and by all reports thus far the shows have been typically blistering even though most of the principles are pushing 60. That people have stuck with the band over all these years would seem to demonstrate there’s some value in doing things your own way, all the time.

“You’ve got to maintain your integrity. We are the type of people who continued to play, continued to write, continued to do things whether or not we had a record deal, whether or not things were going poorly and we’re lucky that we did what we wanted to do,” said Dillon. “We’re lucky that we toured so much that people know us like the back of their hands because we’d be drinking in bars with them after the shows. And we’d play everywhere in Canada all the time. One year, I think we played 320 gigs. We were just always playing. So that’s benefited us because some bands would make it in America and then they’d play in America and come back home and kinda play, but we’ve got a ridiculous cult following.”