‘Rock and Roll Night Club’: The record that started it all for Mac DeMarco
Mac DeMarco has always done what he wants. People say that a lot about a lot of artists, but the Canadian singer-songwriter is a genuine example.
If you’re looking for proof, go back to 2012, a time when a young DeMarco, freshly signed to a record label and attempting to convince them to let him make a proper debut LP, turned in Rock and Roll Night Club.
By this point, he’d already garnered some online attention. This project technically wasn’t actually his first release, as that would be Heat Wave, which sold out its 500 copies and was one of the many things the artist was working on before under different names and in different projects. But in 2012, with the attention firmly on him, he turned to his real name and stepped into a moment that most other artists would take deadly seriously.
You see, the thing is that there was already really no doubting DeMarco’s skill, or at least he wasn’t questioning it. He’d already been self-producing and even self-recording his prior releases, so he clearly knew what he was doing. This talent set in early because he still DIYs everything even as his budget and fame have levelled up. But while other artists would use their first proper commercial release, and their first release being backed by a label, to make a real point, like Prince demanding respect with his own fully self-made debut, For You, DeMarco essentially released a comedy record. What the artist turned in for his label is basically a 32-minute-long bit that feels like an extended inside joke with no one but himself, where the blossoming slacker icon puts on his finest Elvis voice and impersonates a sleazy classic rock and roller.
I’m not just saying that in terms of song structure, although there is some of that as tracks like ‘Baby’s Wearing Blue Jeans’ and ‘European Vegas’ are shaped like classic, foolproof Presley numbers. But the term impersonates fits perfectly, as in the first portion of the album, especially on the opening track, he’s literally putting on a voice, sounding nothing like the singer the world now knows and loves. He gets to that later, clearly getting tired of it by the second side, but at first, he might as well be wearing rhinestones, too.
That, paired with the radio interludes as if the listener is flicking through airwaves in the 1950s, would suggest that DeMarco had a clear plan of what he was doing. But that suggestion, and even Pitchfork’s comment on this album being an inside joke only he was in on, fell flat when the artist himself admitted that his mini-album was actually more just the result of him fucking up, or realising his limitations.
“I was trying to make a Ramones record,” DeMarco said, which is kind of laughable given the result. “I thought, ‘I’m going to do basic power chord riffs, I’m going to do solos, and I’m going to do it really fast’. It turned out I’m awful at it.” Making it fully alone in his home studio set up and producing it himself, it meant that not only could he just throw shit at a wall and see what stuck with no time pressure, but it also gave him free rein to take the failures and mess about with that too. In particular, he started messing about with the tempo, which would become a signature trick of his moving forward.
“When I slowed things down, it was like, ‘Ah, now I’ve got something’,” he said, discovering that if you try to inefficiently play like the Ramones and then slow down that mess, you’ve got an Elvis track. Clearly able to laugh at his limitations, if the record is a running joke, it’s that DeMarco is making the best of his self-deprecation and letting it lead him to something creative and interesting that perfectly encapsulates the whimsical artist he has been ever since.
