Sitting in the back of a dimly lit venue in Southwestern Ontario, you can almost smell the history on a band like 54•40. It is a scent of stale beer, tour bus diesel and the kind of stubborn resilience that only comes from four decades in the trenches. They are the ultimate survivors of the Vancouver post-punk explosion, a group that managed to buff the jagged edges of the rainy west coast into something that could actually live on the radio.
Most bands from the 1981 vintage have long since dissolved into acrimonious lawsuits or depressing casino tours. But 54•40 is still here, grinding through a schedule that would break a group half their age. They are hitting the 519 area hard this month with stops in St. Catharines on Jan. 10, Paris on Jan. 14 and 15, Meaford on Jan. 16 and Guelph on Jan. 19.
I caught up with original bassist and founding member Brad Merritt. He is the anchor of the operation, a guy who has seen the industry shift from vinyl to digital and back again without losing his footing. We talked about the evolution of their craft and why they still bother getting in the van.
When you look at the band today, it is easy to forget they started out opening for hardcore legends DOA. That is a hell of a jump—from the spit-flecked anarchy of the punk scene to the polished pop-rock of "Ocean Pearl" and "Nice to Luv You." I asked Merritt how the band has actually changed since those 1981 basement shows.
"Well, we know how to write songs and keep each part in the key of the song without changing keys," Merritt says. "We learned how to do what we do. We started in akind of scene, and we were very enthusiastic and worked very hard, but didn’t know what we were doing, and then we figured it out as we went. That doesn’t make it any better, what we’re doing now. It makes it different, maybe more conventional. So there’s growth, and I think that was the object of the game all along. We’re more concerned with the process than getting a result."
It is a refreshingly honest take. Most veterans would claim they were geniuses from day one, but Merritt admits they were just kids with loud guitars and no map. That "conventional" growth he mentions is exactly what allowed them to pen "I Go Blind," a track so fundamentally solid that Hootie and the Blowfish rode it to the top of the charts years later.
But the road to that kind of success was littered with the wreckage of bad industry timing. In the mid-80s, 54•40 was on the cusp of breaking the American market, but the gears of the machine ground to a halt. I asked him if he looks back on the career with a sense of satisfaction or a "what if" regarding the US charts.
"Yes, I am," Merritt says. "The way I look at it is, if we had achieved much more success off the get-go, if we released the Green Record in 1986, and not just had MTV play on 'Baby Ran', but radio embraced it, and then we got to 'I Go Blind' as a single, which we never did in the United States, and they didn’t have the independent promoter scandal and the payola scandal, and we could’ve actually marketed the record and got our songs on the radio, I think we would’ve been a much bigger act in the United States, obviously. We feel vindicated that 'I Go Blind' came around years later as a hit for Hootie and the Blowfish, so it could’ve happened."
The payola scandal he mentions is a gritty bit of music history that cost a lot of Canadian bands their shot at the big time. It is a technical, dirty reality of the business that most fans ignore. But Merritt does not sound bitter. He sounds like a guy who won the long game by simply outlasting the scandals.
The band never officially stopped, but there was a significant six-year silence between studio albums before *Keep On Walking* dropped. In an era where the algorithm demands constant "content," a six-year gap is an eternity. I pushed him on why it took so long to get back into the studio.
"That’s a good question," Merritt says. "Well, I think there were existential questions being raised from within the band. I know Neil wasn’t really motivated to create within the band, because we actually started in 2013, and we had 22 or 24 jams that we had actually recorded that we felt had lots of potential. So it took a little while for us to sort of, as a group, decide that this was what we wanted to do."
And then there is the unglamorous reality of the modern music economy. You do not just walk into a studio on a label's dime anymore. You have to hustle.
"Then of course, the way you finance these things too," Merritt says. "We didn’t have a record company, and so we knew we had to do it ourselves, so we did an Indiegogo campaign, a crowdfunding exercise. That allowed us to get some money together to complete it."
But even with the money in hand, the band got distracted by their own legacy. It is a common pitfall for heritage acts—the desire to look backward while trying to move forward.
"Then at the same time we realized that it would be a good idea to maybe look at some of our bona fide hits, and try to interpret them in a different way," Merritt says. "So we actually did another crowdfunding exercise, and actually stopped working on *Keep On Walking*, and did this acoustic record called *La Difference: A History Unplugged*. Then we toured on that for about a year."
I think now, we feel very comfortable with who we are, and we don’t feel this need to vacillate, swing wildly back and forth. ...I think that comes with age, experience, and confidence.
When *Keep On Walking* finally arrived, tracks like "Sucker For Your Love" proved the band had not lost their knack for the "chug." It is a specific kind of Canadian rock rhythm—reliable, driving and unpretentious. I mentioned to Merritt that the track feels like a future staple of their live set.
"There are songs that are like that in our catalogue, where it’s kind of pedalling eighth notes and you’re chugging along, an," Merritt says. "A very direct kind of song, we’ll say, rather. And we were in a studio, this is actually after the song has been written, and we were talking about the feel and the tempo, and taking a close look at this before we started to get in there and start laying down tracks. The band was going through a bit of an ELO phase, you know, Electric Light Orchestra, Jeff Lynne. 'Don’t Bring Me Down' was the song, we looked at the video and went, what a clever, simple song, but it had this nice little pulse to it."
As a bassist, Merritt is the guy responsible for that pulse. He has to lock in with the drummer and hold the floor while the guitars swirl around. It is a blue-collar job in a white-collar industry. I asked him if he still gets a kick out of those driving,tracks.
"Yeah, I do. But I like them all," Merritt says. "They’re fun. That’s part of the reason why we got into this. And I think people enjoy that. It’s a, pulsing kind of rock and roll thing, full of little guitar riffs which are kind of catchy. It’s a big part of the music that I grew up with, whether it be the Kinks or the Troggs or the Rolling Stones or whatever. There’s a timeless appeal, from 1964 to 2024. I don’t think that’ll ever go out of style, at least for us anyway. But I don’t want to do that all the time."
He then pivots back to his punk roots, offering a sharp critique of the genre that birthed them. It is a moment of clarity about why 54•40 evolved while their peers stayed stagnant.
"In fact, I remember going to see bands, the bands that I know and love," Merritt says. "You mentioned DOA. Love DOA, but after they’ve played five songs you go okay, it’s kind of what it is. This is why punk rock, which I love punk rock, is, you’re right, you’ve got to keep those sets short. It’s got to be half hour, and then you’ve got to get them off, get the next band on. We were never going to be that band. Our interests were more varied than that."
That variety is what keeps a band from becoming a caricature of itself. Yet, there is a pressure on legacy acts to stay within the lines. Fans want the "54•40 sound," but the band wants to breathe. I asked how they balance that familiarity with the need to experiment.
"Being the pop rock combo that we are, or stylists in other words, where no one went to university and has got a fine arts degree in music, there’s certain limitations that we have, but that’s what creates the style," Merritt says. "Because you’re not chameleons. But at the same time, we always have this intense desire to not repeat what we just did. And what we found early in our career is that each record, within what we were capable of doing, was diametrically opposed to the record that we just did. So we just did these huge oscillations back and forth. But it allowed us to grow and experiment and try different things, and some were successful and others less so."
Now that they are in their fourth decade, those wild swings have settled into a more confident stride. The technical critique here is that their later work feels more integrated, less like a band trying on costumes and more like a group that finally fits into their own skin.
"I think now, we feel very comfortable with who we are, and we don’t feel this need to vacillate, swing wildly back and forth," Merritt says. "So we actually do that within the record itself. That’s what we did with *Keep On Walking*. It’s a very eclectic set of songs, and produced by four different producers, but it still holds together. I think that comes with age, experience, and confidence."
The conversation turned to the ghosts of the Canadian music scene. There is a legendary video floating around of 54•40 performing "Book" with Spirit of the West back in 1992. It is a time capsule of a golden era for domestic rock.
"That was from a MuchMusic kind of documentary, where they just followed us around as we were all over the place, Toronto, Vancouver and Los Angeles, and we hung out with other bands, and chatted and played songs together," Merritt says. "There’s also a neat thing early in the broadcast, where The Hip were down in Australia touring, and they pulled into a studio and did their own version of 'Baby Ran' too, which is on that same broadcast. It’s all over YouTube, so you can find it. But it’s hilarious."
The mention of Spirit of the West inevitably brings up the late John Mann. In the tight-knit world of Canadian touring, these bands were more than just colleagues; they were a travelling circus.
"Anyway, we’ve all sort of gone back and shared that with each other," Merritt says. "With John Mann’s passing, we did that. It’s a clever song. It was on *Dear Dear*, which was released in ’92. John played guitar and sang background vocals, Jeff played flute, Linda McRae played accordion, and Hugh played mandolin. It was a great experience, we really enjoyed it."
I asked him for a specific memory of Mann, and he gave me a story that perfectly encapsulates the grit of the prairie circuit. It involves a storm, a stage and the late Gord Downie.
"So many," Merritt says. "You just couldn’t imagine a kinder, nicer, more pleasant person, and you couldn’t imagine a person with more energy than him. We both lived in Vancouver, and we’d run into each other from time to time. We played together, we visited them in the studio when they were doing *Save This House*, Mushroom Studios, and did the 'Book' song together. We played together with them, us, and Tragically Hip in Saskatoon once."
The imagery of the Saskatoon show is vivid—the kind of lived experience that defines the Canadian rock identity.
"It was outdoors, and they opened the show, and you could see it starting to get kind of windy, something was coming in," Merritt says. "And we get onstage, and it’s being summer in northern Saskatchewan, it’s still light at 9:30 at night. And it’s just starting to get dark, and the wind is getting more intense, and we finish our set, and then Tragically Hip gets out there, and the heavens just open up. This is a prairie rainstorm. They move the whole back line back, the band backs up under the cover, and Gord Downie just gets right out to the edge of the stage and just does the whole show in the pouring rain. And there’s us and Spirit of the West watching the show from the side of the stage going, 'What a great night, and what a great thing for us to play together, and that Gord Downie guy, he’s pretty amazing.'"
As the band prepares to roll through the 519 area, Merritt is reminded of his own history with Southwestern Ontario. One specific memory from the Peace Festival stands out—a chaotic night involving legendary country icons and a very late set time.
"Yes, lots," Merritt says. "We played the Peace Festival, near the Peace Bridge, down there. What a great show. That was great fun. And we were actually on the night after we were going to play with a bunch of other bands, but it was that band with Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash—The Highwaymen."
But it was not all country legends and sunshine. There was the inevitable friction of festival logistics, specifically with Windsor's own The Tea Party.
"Yeah. So it was a big thing that they had going on there, so when we played there was probably 30,000 people there," Merritt says. "But anyway, they put us on last. Which is fine, we can be last. We don’t like being last in these big festivals, we’d rather be second or third to last. And they wanted a band that had some catalogue so the people would stick around and hear some of the songs. And then The Tea Party."
He pauses, the memory of a 1 AM set time clearly still fresh.
"I’ve got nothing against them, and actually we’re on very friendly terms with them now, but they had this new record out called *Twilight*, and they were scheduled to come on at 6 pm and they didn’t want to go on so early because they wanted to play during twilight," Merritt says. "So they dragged out the changeover so everything was late, which I held against them for at least two or three days, but I got over it pretty quickly."
The image of a veteran rock star standing on a stage at 2 AM with a pocket full of cash is the most honest depiction of the industry you will ever find. It is not about the glamour; it is about the transaction between the band and the people who refused to go home.
"So we go on at 1 am in the morning, trying to play and I remember getting paid, got paid in cash, and I had just a wad of cash in my front pocket as we’re playing the show," Merritt says. "And we’re still out there at 2-3 in the morning, and to my surprise, everybody stayed, enjoyed the show, sang along with us. It was the first show where I realized that we had something that was unique and appreciated and valuable, and something that people really wanted to be a part of. It wasn’t us trying to impose ourselves on people. I was quite grateful to the people of your region that stuck around and saw our show, as late as we came on."
When 54•40 hits the stage in Paris or Guelph this month, do not expect a choreographed spectacle. Expect a band that knows exactly how to work a room because they have been doing it since the days of payola and 1 AM cash payments. They are not chasing the charts anymore; they are just keeping the pulse alive. And honestly, that is more than enough.
