Leisureworld Patrick Worthington – vocals, bass Cade Lakeshore – guitars Patricka Melia - guitars Brent Empress – drums

"We come from the lighter side of the darker side." -- Patrick Worthington

"We lied," admits leisureworld (sic) co-founder, bassist, singer, and songwriter Patrick Worthington. "We didn't really meet in a trailer park ..."

Hold it right there. Is this really the best way to introduce the hardest-rocking Canadian band set to invade the States in many a year? After all, they've got a lot going for them -- their passion, their twisted humor, their intensity at tempos that stalk and saunter or smash past the capacity of normal human drummers.

So does it make sense to introduce them as ... well, let's say, a little irreverent?

Sure ... because the truth is so much weirder than any of the legends they spun about themselves only a few years ago.

Judge for yourself. Crank up Double Wide Double High, their volcanic debut for 41 Records/ARTISTdirect Records. And we do mean up. Piss off your colleagues. Make the neighbors call the cops. Doesn't matter -- you've got to hear leisureworld at its best, which means at full blast. Or just light one up, strap the headphones on and crank the volume knob to ten, it's all the same.

What pictures come to mind? Raucous, sweaty gigs in clubs packed with kids slamming off each other and into the walls as Worthington 'fesses up to every guy's guilt-trip fantasies on their first single, "I'm Dead," or drummer Brent Empress flails through "I Can't Quit You" ("I'm only playing this one once a night," he's been known to growl), or guitarists Cade Lakeshore and Patricia Melia grind out licks that burn, batter, and bruise?

All true ... but this band's story begins somewhere else -- not in a trailer park (we'll get to that in a minute), but somewhere far more bizarre.

Picture this: It's the far side of midnight. In a big, stark basement, a printing press snorts and roars. Two crews mill around this beast, stuffing paper into one end and pulling it out, splattered with tomorrow's TV listings, on the other.

One night, two of these graveyard misfits, bored out of their minds, take a break, pull off their Walkman headphones, and start to talk. They've been working side by side for a while, but only now do they discover they're both musicians. They have the same influences: Howlin' Wolf, Cheap Trick, the (I'm) Dead Boys, Les Paul, Leo Fender and Lester Bangs. And they figure maybe there's more to life than watching a machine chew up and spit out the morning edition in the bowels of the Oakville Beaver.

Emerging from this dim pit into dawn's early light, Patrick and Cade hang out a while, haul out their guitars, and start writing. "We had a little four-track and the worst drum machine in the world," Cade remembers. "But even on our first songs, the ones that are so bad that you'll never, ever hear them on a record, we could hear that there was something worth pursuing."

Pretty soon they decided to put a band together, which they christened Lyposucker. "It was a really nasty band," Patrick says, "but we got a lot of press just from our name. We told everybody that we wanted to live off the fat of a record company -- which made every single record guy in Toronto say, 'Uh, you know, I really hate that name!' So we ended up changing it to Trailer Park."

Already ironic beyond their years, they heralded their rebirth by concocting a faux history as well. "We started this fiction that we had met in a trailer park," Patrick admits. "Okay, it's not true ... but we did party with friends who live in a trailer park in Cooksville, outside of Toronto, so that seemed like a fun place for us to start."

By this time, skin-pounder Brent Empress, who had played with Cade in some forgotten band, had joined them. Equipped with an excess of attitude and the chops that back it up, he proved a perfect fit. "He is his own biggest fan," Patrick laughs. "He was already a legend around town. I remember him calling me and saying, 'There is no other drummer for this band besides me,' even before he played a note with us. Naturally, he was right."

Armed with a set list that was heavy on original material and spiced with bizarre covers that ranged from Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On" to "Hello, Dolly," they lit out to set the world on fire ... only to be extinguished by some upstarts from the States who claimed prior ownership of the name Trailer Park. Rather than trigger an international incident, Patrick, Cade, and Brent decided to become leisureworld and, more or less for the hell of it, hooked up with a friend who ran Backroom Sound, a project studio in Mimico, Ontario. There, in a town best known for its grim prison complex and wasteland vistas, the seeds that would become Double Wide Double High were sown.

"At first we just wanted to make a three-song demo," Patrick says. "But it went so well that we just kept going. In fact, we did half of the album there, with no goal other than seeing how we sounded when we recorded our stuff."

Between visits to Backroom Sound, the guys started looking for gigs around Toronto. With a new name and no CD, it wasn't easy. "The only way we could find work was by inviting everyone we knew to come down to the club," Cade says. "Then, a week later, we'd call them again and say, 'Hey, I know you just heard us, but could you come out again this weekend -- and maybe bring a girlfriend?'"

Even while dragging friends and families through the city's bar circuit, leisureworld kept laying tracks -- and being surprised at the results. Gradually, a picture emerged, of a band whose raw, barbed beats and snarling vocals are already way too hot for Toronto's sleepy music scene. Through their American managers in Buffalo they signed a deal to release their stuff on 41 Records, a feisty little label that pushed them onto playlists in a variety of markets. "I'm Dead" started to spread through stations in Boston, Detroit, Minneapolis, Madison, Kenosha ... and major labels came knocking on the door. When ARTISTdirect Records showed up, the guys jumped, and suddenly the future seems a lot brighter than it did back at the Beaver.

But there was one more milestone to pass before hitting that road. Because they had built their sound through layering guitar parts in the studio, leisureworld realized they'd need to expand to a four-piece in order to deliver that massive sound onstage. Once again, opportunity presented itself in the strangest possible place and time -- an exotic fish store in Mississauga, where locals gathered each Saturday to watch the festivities at shark-feeding time.

"That's where we met Patricia," Patrick says. "She was the manager out there, and when Cade and I showed up just because we had nothing better to do, we both noticed her immediately. She was throwing raw meat into the shark tank, and she had this unbelievable knowledge about exotic fish, but more than that, she was totally rocked out: Her hair was four different colors, and she had piercings all over. I mean, she totally did not look like she belonged there."

Turns out Patricia was a musician too, with an all-girl band called the Divas. "We went out to see them play," Patrick says. "She's all of five-foot-nothing, but she packs a wallop on the guitar, and she makes all these demented faces while she plays. Cade and I looked at each other, and it was like, 'This girl's got to be in our band.'"

With Patricia onboard, the real adventure has begun. "I'm Dead," the first single, is already setting up the impact that Double Wide Double High will make with its April 1, 2003 release. Audiences are primed for lines like "If you ask, you'll find me six feet down" ("I'm Dead"), "You changed my world, time stood still/You made me swallow all your dirty pills" ("Never Gonna Be the Same"), or I'm telling you this for some sentimental reason/You can burn in hell, just there's no hard feelings" ("No Hard Feelings"), or even for the screaming repetition that turns one word into a primal rant ("Apple"). It's creepy and funny, just like the lives of the kids who are already on their way to leisureworld.

"It's simple: four-on-the-floor, flat-out, guitars/bass/drums and gutbucket vocals. My lyrics are intentionally juvenile. I'm not Bono. I'm not carrying any banners. There are no hidden messages here. Bare bones, meat-and-potatoes rock & roll: That's what we do. That's all we need to do." -- Patrick Worthington, leisureworld

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