puppet wipes on alberta’s punk scene and the pressure of people actually listening

“We’re Puppet Wipes. Fuck you.”

Over Memorial Day Weekend, I saw Puppet Wipes perform three times in the span of four days. The first time I saw the Calgary trio, no one I spoke to after at Total Punk Corporate Retreat could stop raving about them. The second time, Gerard Cosloy and Tom Lax were among those in attendance. The third time, I was minutes removed from a sort of awkward, ever-so-slightly starstruck chat with Calvin Johnson. 

That’s not to paint them as a “next big thing” or any sort of music biz hype fuckery; just an observation that real heads know Puppet Wipes.

There are two versions of Puppet Wipes that exist in a continuum with each other. One is the recorded version, the basement dwelling art kids who created It’s Called Punk, Are You Stupid? and The Stones Are Watching and They Can Be a Handful; the latter released courtesy of Lax’s all-time great label Siltbreeze. (Think XV on cheap psilocybin mushrooms, running amok in the stockroom of a pawn shop.) The other barnstorms stages as a punk trio, teeming with smart lyrics, hysterical banter, clanging chords, and—unlike on their “studio albums” thus far—honest-to-g-d grooves. 

In May, NO Label NZ released Live at Pompeii II—yes, a cheeky nod to the Pink Floyd concert film—as the first recorded evidence of the greatness of Puppet Wipes live. The 8” lathe cut vinyl has long been sold out, so you’re just going to have to buy the digital album on Bandcamp like I did. Same for the band’s forthcoming inclusion on Total Punk’s Order of the Dirty Plates singles series—only you’re shit out of luck if you didn’t subscribe, because none of those singles are available digitally—which features a killer live band version of “Puppet Wipes Theme.” (“It has a lot of swearing,” says vocalist/guitarist Arielle McCuaig. “That’s what the people want, so we’ll give it to them.”)

About a month after their show-stealing weekend—coincidentally enough, on Canada Day—I spoke to McCuaig, Kayla MacNeill (bass/vocals), and Jay Wong (drums) through the modern marvel of video chat software. We spoke at length about the punk scene in their home province of Alberta and later they playfully swiped at the purported “exoticism” of Canada. “It’s sickening,” McCuaig jokes regarding the audience’s reception to their off-kilter and quintessentially Canadian banter. “They just wanted us to dance for them, like, ‘Say toonie!’ And then I said ‘meter’ and everyone lost their minds. They were like, ‘Ohhhhhhhhhhhh!,’ like they had never heard of a frickin’ meter before!” 

Elsewhere in our interview, the band chatted about the live iteration of Puppet Wipes being borne out of necessity, and going from being a group who couldn’t even get their friends to muster any enthusiasm for their first tape to putting out music on some of the most beloved punk labels in North America. We were frequently interrupted by fighting cats.

Tell me about Calgary. I feel like the only things that I know about Calgary, I learned from Bret “the Hitman” Hart.

Jay Wong: That's the most important thing. The Dungeon, the Hart Dungeon.

Kayla MacNeill: Yeah, the Hart family means a lot to Calgarians, for sure.

Jay Wong: His brother was a substitute teacher, and I think we've all had him. He taught gym class, and wore weird cowboy boot sneakers. Like wrestling cowboy sneakers, but strapped up.

Arielle McCuaig: Stampede Wrestling’s cool. What else is good from Calgary?

Kayla MacNeill: Calgary's kind of funny because it's a bit—[the screeching of cats floods the call]—Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Sorry, the cats are fighting. Calgary's funny because it's a bit yuppie. And it's becoming more expensive to live here. So it's a fun little dynamic.

Arielle McCuaig: It's like a big oil and gas town. So there's lots of money from oil and gas, but there's kind of a recession going on in regards to that.

Kayla MacNeill: So it's just a bit shit too. They got money, but yeah, it's a bit of a funny city. We like to think it's like Cleveland, maybe a little bit.

Arielle McCuaig: Yeah. We like to think we're like Cleveland where it's kind of shitty, but the people are really good and really funny.

Tell me about the punk scene in Calgary.

Kayla MacNeill: We're like grown up punks now. Yeah, we're kind of old and out of touch. There's cool stuff happening. Lots of kids doing lots of like grind bands right now.

Arielle McCuaig: There's lots of kids doing stuff. We're a bit older because we're all in our thirties. It seems like it's in a good state right now. Like lots of young kids really wanting to do good, put on shows, bring [in] out-of-town bands, and start bands and stuff. It's like, some of the music is not necessarily my thing, but there's some cool stuff.

Jay Wong: We’re a very grindy town.

Arielle McCuaig: I’m not a grinder. [laughter]

You mentioned that y'all are old punks. What was the scene like when you were actively in the scene and going to shows all the time? I'm just being presumptuous there. Maybe you didn't go to shows all the time. I don't know.

Jay Wong: We kind of came up in a bit of a heyday. I think we were very lucky. We had a lot of friends that were actively trying to book bands from other cities; outside of Edmonton, the closest city is Vancouver, and that's 12 hours away. So to get a band to tour, to drive out and tour, is a really tall order. I think nowadays, a lot of bands are just doing fly-out gigs, like a weekend in Calgary and Edmonton and flying out, you know? So we kind of had to make our own scene.

Arielle McCuaig: No one was coming here.

Kayla MacNeill: No one wanted to come here. It's too far away.

Arielle McCuaig: There was a festival called Garbage Daze. There was a scene of hardcore bands in Calgary. Jay and I used to be in a band called Glitter. That was part of that. And that was kind of like our heyday [in] our early 20s [as far as] stuff that was going on.

Tell me about some more of the bands that y'all have been in. Cause I know, Arielle and Kayla, y'all were in Vacuum Rebuilders together.

Arielle McCuaig: Vacuum Builders was like the first band we played in together before Puppet Wipes.

Kayla MacNeill: I also played bass.

Arielle McCuaig: I played guitar. Our friend Ashley played guitar. She's now in a band called Brass Lip, that's really good with the drummer who was our drummer, Warren, who's also in the band HOME FRONT.

Kayla MacNeill: So a lot of good friends around. Jay and I play in a band called Yankee Cowboy,  which is another band that plays very rarely, but a great band.

Arielle McCuaig: Top notch. A fave of mine, they're the Alpaca Brothers of Calgary. I'll say it again and again and again. The best quote we ever got. I was in a band called Janitor Scum that Jay played in the live band of, Janitor Scum and the Scums. We did like a couple of tours of the States before. My first band was a band called the Throwaways when I was a teenager. Right out of high school I played in that. I'm in a solo thing called Anonymous Carpetting, which I just put out a tape for.

What led to Vacuum Rebuilders turning into Puppet Wipes? 

Kayla MacNeill: Different cocoons, I think.

Arielle McCuaig: Different cocoons. Kayla and I have always been really close, but we never really played music together before. And I think that was kind of like the jumping off point. We were like, “Why aren't we doing this together?”

Kayla MacNeill: We just wanted to make some music together.

Arielle McCuaig: We like spending time together. And then we just got the ol’ 4 track or 8 track. Kayla has a 4 track and I have an 8 track and we go between houses. And we would make a couple of songs one day at one house and make a couple of songs another day at another house.

Kayla MacNeill: Not really thinking much. And no one liked it! None of our friends liked it.

Arielle McCuaig: None of our friends. We made the first Puppet Wipes tape but no one liked it!

That was It's Called Punk, Are You Stupid? I liked that tape.

Jay Wong: I never had a chance to get one.

Arielle McCuaig: You were on tour, and I had them on tour the whole time.

Kayla MacNeill: Dynamite Hemorrhage was always very good about that. Shout out to Jay.

Arielle McCuaig: Jay Hinman. He always was supporting the Puppet Wipes, and played the Puppet Wipes tape. We made this tape, and it had a file folder. It was full of documents, documents that all corroborated the songs.

Kayla MacNeill: It was elevated music making, perhaps.

Arielle McCuaig: Elevated music, it was very free, the freest of musics. And we had so much fun, no one liked it, and then Jay Hinman played it a bunch, and then, then Tom Lax from Siltbreeze just emailed us one day, because he was like, “I heard your tape on YouTube and I really liked it, do you want to put out something on Siltbreeze?” And we were like, whaaaaat?

Kayla MacNeill: Mouth drops.

Arielle McCuaig: Flabbergasted.

I would feel the exact same way.

Kayla MacNeill: It was fucked up, man. It was weird. It was crazy.

Arielle McCuaig: And now he's our old pal.

Kayla MacNeill: He saw a little bit of magic in that demented tape. Grateful for him, his ability to do that. And then it took us three years to make the record. He asked us to make the record and then COVID hit. 

Arielle McCuaig: Yeah, we're also we're a bit slow sometimes, you know, and we dawdled along and made the record.

Kayla MacNeill: And when you make a tape that we did—for fun, not really thinking, and then I think he thought we were a band, and wondered if we could re-record the songs on the tape. Which I don't think we ever really did, because they weren't repeatable to a large degree. We play some of them now, but it's a very different… yeah. It was different making a record [knowing] someone's gonna hear it.

Arielle McCuaig: Well, in a lot of the songs we couldn't reproduce because a lot of our songs are like one take, first take, first thought, best thought. Trying to capture lightning in a bottle, you know?

Was the process different with The Stones Are Watching and They Can Be a Handful?

Arielle McCuaig: It was pretty similar, but it was weird because there was pressure. 

Kayla MacNeill: The only thing that was different was we were very strict. Not strict, but we just used tapes because we like to record on tape. But the pressure of accidentally deleting like a lightning-in-the-bottle, one-take-wonder situation on tape became a bit of a stressor for me. It's so easy to do the thing that you think you're gonna accidentally do. So we went into GarageBand, through the four tracks and what have you. So it's a tape computer [hybrid recording].

Arielle McCuaig: We didn't really use, like, effects or anything from the computer, really. It was mostly just as a tool so we could not lose all our tracks. But it was still fed through the tape machine into the computer, so it's a kind of demented way of recording.

Kayla MacNeill: A little lo-fi tippy. [laughter]

On your recordings, y'all have a really cool, kinda loopy, experimental, one-take-wonder style, but live, y'all are a straight-up fuckin’ punk band. Was it important for you to make your live show different from your recordings?

Arielle McCuaig: No, it just kind of happened naturally.

Kayla MacNeill: I think we had to play a show in a week. I think it was a Sled Island show. Yeah, and we were trying to jam to a drum machine.

Kayla MacNeill: And it was not going well. That one time we did perform as Puppet Wipes live it went great; it was so much fun.

Arielle McCuaig: We played a show that was just Kayla and I. This was right before COVID and it was just tape loops and pieces of paper that we read off and threw into the air and a clarinet going and, and the four track playing backing tracks and posters and medieval outfits. We had the synth going.

Kayla MacNeill: We had a lot going on for one gig.

Arielle McCuaig: It went good, but then Sled Island came back [after COVID lockdown] and we applied, and then we were like, “Okay, how are we going to play this show?” And we were like, “I can't figure this out.”

Kayla MacNeill: The drum machines weren't syncing up with us. We ran out of time. So we asked our dear friend, Jay. “Jay, can you play a show in a week? All these songs that you've never heard before.” [laughter] Jay's a drum legend.

Arielle McCuaig: No problem.

Kayla MacNeill: He's got it. Got it raw. We needed him, man.

Arielle McCuaig: We needed him. And he's perfect, he's a perfect fit for Puppet Wipes. It's a perfect, perfect trio, because we're all best friends, and we just really get along, so it's really fun to be in the band with them. I don't know if this is a trope: We're chuckleheads.

Kayla MacNeill: We're chuckleheads.

Arielle McCuaig: Lots of people I think are in bands with other people they aren't really close with, sometimes. And they're just like straight down to brass tacks, let's jam. But we like to get together and then we sit on the porch for about an hour and we shoot the shit and we hang out and then I'm like, “Oh, I guess we should jam.”

Kayla MacNeill: It's not very mechanical.

Jay Wong: A three-hour jam. Two hours on the porch smoking cigs.

Arielle McCuaig: [laughs] He’s never smoked a cigarette in his life. But long story short, I guess like why it's a straight up punk band is like, I guess we've all just been in punk bands and that's just like what we know.

Kayla MacNeill: Some of the songs that we turned into pretty straight ahead punky songs.

Arielle McCuaig: And some people might get bored listening to experimental music live, so then you put in a driving drum beat and some loud guitars and they'll stay!

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