Shakespeare My Butt... is an album by Canadian band The Lowest of the Low, released in 1991.
Lead singer Ron Hawkins, guitarist Stephen Stanley and drummer David Alexander were previously in the band Popular Front, but when they formed The Lowest of the Low, Hawkins, who wrote all but one of the songs on the record, made a change in his songwriting for the material that would ultimately become "Shakespeare My Butt." While he had previously written material that was "about big global issues" and "places sort of far from ourselves and people that were not in our immediate circle," Hawkins began writing songs that were "much more personal, much more close to me... much more about my surroundings." He quickly saw that this material was connecting with audiences. Hawkins explained "The whole thing with Shakespeare My Butt was... a whole bunch of songs that dealt with my neighbourhood and my local bars and characters I would run into." "The Taming of Carolyn" was a Popular Front song that the Low began to perform, but the other fifteen songs that Hawkins wrote for the record were all written in a very productive six-month period.
The band had built a large catalog of material they were performing live but ran into a problem when it came time to record the material. "With Shakespeare, we went in without any money, to do demos really. A friend of ours worked at Sound By Deluxe, a film post-production house. We recorded a lot of it in Foley booths. It was by no means a professional undertaking. We'd meant to just shop it and see if we could get a record deal," Hawkins recalled.
With no label interest, the band decided to make some copies of the demos for friends, then began selling copies at their gigs. When they had moved 4000 copies of the self-released album they struck a distribution deal with Page Publications (run by former Barenaked Ladies vocalist Steven Page's father Victor) and were soon moving a lot of copies at Toronto's HMV Superstore thanks, in part, to heavy radio play when CFNY began to champion the band. With thousands of copies sold and the songs on the radio, these "demos" had become "the songs." Hawkins explained: "Once the Edge [Toronto modern rock station CFNY] picked it up, it was like "well we can't go back and make the record we wanted to make. The demos are out there." Years after its release, Hawkins said "I listen to it and go, wow, the most popular record in my entire canon is the shittiest-sounding record I've made."
At the time of its release, the album briefly became the best-selling independent release in Canadian history, although it was soon eclipsed by Barenaked Ladies' The Yellow Tape. However, its melodic, jangly folk-punk has made it an enduring classic of Canadian music.
The album was remastered and re-released in 2010 on Pheromone Recordings, with an accompanying short film DVD, LowRoads, produced by the band's drummer, David Alexander.
Shakespeare My Butt... is a solid album of Lowest of the Low. It's a sort of (happy, but not too) happy folky rock with a lot of good vocals. Listening to the album I heard some small error, but nothing to disturbing. I thought that leaving these imperfections in was a brave decision, but reading the Wikipedia page, I understand this is rather a bunch of demos and not a produced album. Maybe that's the reason it all sounds spontaneous and fresh. Also minor compositional weakness in a guitar solo is not a problem. The lyrics are no literature, but even Shakespeare wrote The Taming of the Shrew. We all have moments that we do not excel. And probably that is the main issue with this album. A bit more song selection ("kill your babies") would have greatly improved the album. It could have been an easy four star experience if only the ten best songs were used.
A decent early 90s' folk-punk LP that's underserved by its dumb title and lack of editing. I enjoyed some of the guitar parts and more down-to-earth songwriting here and there, but a 70-minute slab of straightforward 90s' rock is just too much of a mediocre thing. The highs are quickly subsumed by the just meh tracks, and the LP becomes an exhausting listen overall. Wish this had enjoyed just a tad more studio attention, the independent release method is a cool part of the history but some editorial polish would've really tightened this up into a solid classic.
I came into this irritated by the dumb title, but couldn't really stay mad at this amiable country and rockabilly inflected alternative rock. Pretty clever lyrically, and while it doesn't stretch much past a straightforward and not terribly inventive sound, it's all executed with solid talent and consistent energy.
Another quirky Canadian musical export that I never managed to run across. They sound like the love child of The Barenaked Ladies and Hootie and the Blowfish. Not a bad thing at all. They don’t make my must-listen-to list, but I don’t mind listening to it at all.
Their singer sounds a lot like a particular 90s alternative band’s singer, making their entire sound seem derivative. But I would have liked them when this album debuted.
Essential album, my ass. Seriously, I didn't have to listen to this before my final demise.
"They sound like the love child of The Barenaked Ladies and Hootie and the Blowfish", as one of the more perceptive reviewers pointed out in their three-star review. Exactly. Ugh. Which is why I'm giving a 1/5 grade to that sort of offspring myself.
Spin Doctors could be a genitor as well, by the way. "Two Princes" only predates "Salesmen, Cheats and Liars" by a month or so, but there's certainly common DNA between the two songs, even if the second is less memorable. In the less grating parts of this LP, Lowest of the Low could pass off as a very bland version of REM or The Gun Club. Like early The Tragically Hip, only even less convincing.
To put it in a nutshell, Lowest of the Low's *Shakespeare My Butt...* is an affair that's less well-performed for the vocals, and less well-produced for the music, than the one of its forebears and cousins. And for the most part, the songwriting in it comes off as formulaic, unchallenging and utterly predictable.
So MANY better things were happening during the early nineties, for Pete's sake. Oh, and the bad taste graphics for the artwork speak volumes here as well, by the way. And it's only one example of bad art among many in the band's discography, mind you...
1/5 for the purposes of this list dedicated to essential albums.
6/10 for more general purposes (5 + 1/5)
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Number of albums from the original list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 465
Albums from the original list I *might* include in mine later on: 288
Albums from the original list I won't include in mine: 336
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Number of albums from the users list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 91
Albums from the users list I *might* select for mine later on: 112
Albums from the users list I won't select for mine: 229 (including this one)
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Hey Émile, j'ai répondu sous Demon Days ET ta sélection pour la users list ! 🙂
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