When it came time to collect an oral history of hydra-headed band Broken Social Scene and their label Arts & Crafts, EYE WEEKLY’s Stuart Berman was a logical choice, having known and drunk with various key members since time immemorial. (If time immemorial is measured as Ted’s Wrecking Yard in the late ’90s.) The candid history in This Book Is Broken: A Broken Social Scene Story (House of Anansi, 192 pages, $29.95) will surprise the band’s more casual fans with an evocation of a moment when the official Canadian music industry was a charnel house of speed funk and grunge lite. Of course, Toronto was anything but fallow, then or now — it just takes the rest of the world a little longer to notice.

Your author photo sums up the tone of the book.  You’re at this Rodney Bingenheimer–distance behind a few of the players. You’re an insider to this story but at a bit of a remove. Going into this book, what ways did that help or hinder the process?
Having known these people for a decade now, I definitely had a trust and comfort level in the interviews that an independent biographer probably would have had to work harder to attain. At the same time, it was sometimes difficult balancing friendship and reporting — while the overall narrative is essentially that of a small-business success story, having seen it happen first-hand, I knew that it didn’t all come easy, and that some people were more open talking about the tensions than others.

Half the story and half the book take place before Broken Social Scene even plays under that name, because the story does start in the dark ages of Canadian rock, the mid-’90s. Do you think the kids today even know how bad it was? Do they know how evil the word “Bootsauce” really is?
When I first started approaching people for interviews, a common response I got was, “isn’t it too soon for a book?” But the acceleration of pop-cultural consumption is such that 2001 feels like 30 years ago. So in that respect, the mid-90s feels like a thousand years ago — particularly since much of the music from that era predates any formalized online documentation. From the outset, Kevin [Drew] and Brendan [Canning] wanted this book to be about more than the band; they also wanted to pay tribute to the musical community around them. And the seeds of that community were first sown in the ’90s — the various members’ experiences in the major-label system certainly informed the way Broken Social Scene functioned, both creatively and as a business entity. To a young person today, it might seem like starting a successful indie band is a simple matter of add-blog-buzz-and-stir, so I wanted to give a sense of the struggle the band members went through pre-BSS. And yes, that struggle was soundtracked by some inexcusably terrible Canadian rock music.

OK, the term “post-indie,” which you use to describe their business practices, is a little bit rich.  How is that different from “not indie”?
I feel Arts & Crafts possesses the fundamental quality of an independent label, in that, at the end of the day, Jeffrey [Remedios] and Kevin put out the records they want to put out and answer to no one but themselves. However, in a strictly dogmatic sense, one could argue that they’re not a truly independent label, since they’ve had a Canadian distribution deal with EMI since day one. So I applied the term “post-indie” to signify the evolution of traditional ’80s/’90s indie-rock ideology in response to changing economic climate and industry conditions. Whether it’s major-label distribution or TV and film licensing, there seems to be more of a conversation between indie labels and the corporate sectors of the music industry. But in the case of Arts & Crafts, it’s the indie label outsourcing the services of the corporate entity rather than vice versa.

The book’s ending, with Lindsay Lohan encounters, endless festival tours, etc., seems in stark contrast to what comes before it. As an active participant, are you nostalgic for post-millennial Toronto?
I think for anyone who covers music on a regular basis, particularly at a local level, there is nothing more exciting than seeing raw potential turn into something greater. And certainly in Toronto in 2000 to 2002, it felt like I was seeing that happen on a weekly basis, with bands like the Constantines, Hidden Cameras, Royal City and Broken Social Scene. Now, I’m loath to say, “things were better way back then, man.” There’s still so much great music to be had in this city. But when I think of the Toronto records I’ve been most enthused about in recent years — be it Fucked Up, Slim Twig, Born Ruffians, Wyrd Visions or Glissandro 70 — the bands sort of exist independent of one another; they’re not the products of this critical mass of interconnected bands inspiring one another to be better — and that, more than anything, is what made the 2000 to 2002 era special. And I think the legacy of that era is that, with bands like BSS having made the US and European media more receptive to Toronto indie-rock, new bands today don’t really need to put up the same sort of united front to get noticed internationally. The idea of a great band breaking out of Toronto is no longer the novelty it once was — it’s just a matter of course.