This interview of Aaron Chapman was conducted in a secret location after months of negotiations with the wily subject. He’s a hard man to pin down, but an easy interview. He is currently scouting the battlefields of Europe.
RWM: What’s your date of birth, Aaron?
CENSORED. I hesitate to give that away in our information-sensitive, privacy concerned world—but I think it’s already out there. Let me say right now to Vladmir Putin and his computer hacker cronies at work in their dark arts—I’ll guarantee you my computer passwords are stronger than my damn birthdate.
RWM: Where?
Born and raised in Vancouver. People keep telling me that’s rare, I suppose it is.
RWM: Where did you go to school?
I attended Point Grey Secondary High school, though Seth Rogen and Gil Bellows are probably more famous graduates that myself, I like to think they’d at least put me on the brochure… I was accepted to SFU and UVIC out of high school, but ours was a somewhat elitist family where they considered the local post secondary schools with almost an Oxford/Cambridge rivalry. Ours was a UBC family. My father, brother, cousins, had all gone there. And there was no way the family could see a Chapman going off to one of those other places. It’s not as snobby or elitist as it sounds (You can imagine the worst—the gossip around the dinner table amongst the relatives. ‘Did you hear young Chapman is off at UVIC?’, ‘Oh, yes… Dreadful. Do they even have running water out there?’) I ended up going to Langara for a year where I studied Medieval History and Religious studies, which boosted my somewhat respectable but not sufficient class-clown High School grade point average up over the bar to acceptance at UBC, and did my BA there, graduating in 1995.
RWM: Tell me about your musical career.
I took off on tour almost immediately after finishing University. I was in band called the Real McKenzies then—sort of a Scottish version of the Sex Pistols. With kilts and bagpipes, but leather jackets and electric guitars too. A wonderfully exciting and funny band. It was a bit like running away at the circus at a rather early age, but I began to see a fair bit of the world from it, and the adventure of it was mostly what i was looking for I suppose. I left by the late 90s, but the band is still going today. Later played with a Irish folk-rock group called The Town Pants that toured through Europe and North America, especially back east quite a bit, and also another band for awhile called Bocephus King. Plus I used to sit in a fair bit with some other well known local pals from The Hard Rock Miners to the Be Good Tanya’s. I was surprised to learn when I researched the Commodore Ballroom book, I’d played there 25 times with one band over another over the years. I took a bit of a step back from all the madcap touring when some of the writing began to take off I suppose.
RWM: How/why did you get into writing?
I remember thinking around 16 or 17 that I at least considered becoming a writer because I was interested in telling stories. I was very interested in Film as well and I studied that in University. There were a lot of books in the house I grew up in and there was a fairly understood notion that books were important.
My mother was the writer of a novel, an abstract art book and a legal textbook in her time. As a kid, I certainly watched her as she worked. My father was a lover of language and vocabulary, including a few four letter ones when I forgot to take out the garbage. So it was a good home to grow up in. But I also grew up next door to Canadian poet and novelist George Bowering. My bedroom window looked straight over to his writing office. At night, I could see him seated at his desk, typing away. I wish I could tell you I watched him say “Eureka!” or had music blaring while he wrong that somehow helped feed the muse, but there was no such moment. Mostly I remember looking out the window and seeking typing away there. Stopping for a bit, starting again. So watching other writers around me work I think even helped me to understand the mechanics of what it took. What Mark Twain referred to as “the application of the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair”. There were people around me writing all the time. I thought it was perfectly natural there was a writer in every house…
I began writing some cover story pieces for the Vancouver Courier in the early 2000s, and though I didn’t study journalism in school, the articles were well received. I did a story about Howard Hughes’ six month stay at the Bayshore in 1972, the legendary concerts that were staged at the Kerrisdale Arena in the early 1980s, about the closing of an infamous Vancouver watering hole called the Sidebar Lounge, and began to develop a little column called Backstage Past that delved into some previous unpublished stories about the entertainment history of Vancouver. They were all local history pieces in away, and that interest in local history was partly fuelled by seeing the city I’d grown up in change so much so quickly. But writing also seems enjoyable because it didn’t involve soundchecks and travelling around the country with a band—it was something you could do on your own.
Film requires special technology to make it, and show it. Music requires an audience for people to see and hear you play it—but something you’ve written can travel quicker than you can, and if you don’t like it, you can rip it up and start it again. Some of these other arts required the aid of others or money for you to practice it. But with writing, you’re ultimately in charge of every department to tell your story. You’re the Producer, Director, and sometimes even the lead actor in your story. Not to mention the costumer, music scorer, lighting director, and soundman because all those elements in a film you control in the writing, and the descriptions within your story—even to a degree writing non-fiction which must ring true to what originally happened, and your writing evoke the right notes.
But jumping back, some of the articles I had done became jumping off points to books. If an article I had written really seemed to garner some interest or got a lot of feedback, I’d think to myself—there might be an opportunity to tell a longer story, so in a couple of cases the books I’ve written are a direct cause of that, and I suppose I got a little lucky that way. Arsenal Pulp Press took a chance on me when I met them in 2012, and they’ve published all my books so far.
RWM: Current projects?
Currently working on a new & revised edition of my 2012 book “Liquor, Lust, and The Law” (see below). At this moment I’m in Belgium and France on a tour of World War I battlefields with Sir Max Hastings, who is a British military historian of some renown, and he published a great book called “Catastrophe” about the beginning of the war. I’d followed some of his writing when he was a war correspondent, and his book on the Falkland Islands war was very good, so I’m looking forward to meeting and travelling with him on this trip where he does some lectures at the former trenches and cemeteries. I’m also travelling to Austria and back up to the UK where I’m doing some research on a book idea too, as well as hopefully take in a few concerts and a few good single-malts—whichever comes first. There’s an album of music I really want to finish soon too, maybe by the end of the year. I’d love to tell you that my writing keeps all the bills and staff (my two cats) paid at Stately Chapman Manor, but I do some voice over work in film and TV, particularly on some cartoons recently which has been really great fun too. I do a little bit of work on the side as a production manager in the local concert business, all of which helps to keep the lights on. In this town, you better learn how to swim.
RWM: You write for the Courier–how’s that going? Fun, lucrative? (we always hope, eh?)
The Vancouver Courier is great, great local coverage of things. I just met with the editor and we talked about some new articles I’d do for them, that frankly I’m now late in delivering. But the Penthouse book revision has taken up a bit of time. Once I get this done I keep thinking how it might be a good idea if I pitch them on doing at least a monthly column or more, as they seem to like my stuff, and the things I write about seems to be a good fit for the paper. And the newspaper has been a great seedling ground, as some of the stories I’ve written for the paper later grew into a book idea.
RWM: How are Liquor, Lust, and the Law; Live at the Commodore; and Last Gang doing?
Great. Live at the Commodore won the BC Book Prize for 2015. My latest book The Last Gang in Town was shortlisted this year for the same prize, and it’s on it’s second printing, and really seems to have found an audience not just from those who remember what the city, and what East Vancouver was like back then, but also to younger readers, or new residents who’ve just moved there who wants to find out what the neighbourhood was like back then, and what the truth was with those East Van street gangs. So I’m very happy to hear from readers and those who have come out to some of the subsequent talks I’ve given about the book, and they confirm what I had in the book, or tell their own anecdote about some of the police or gangs they knew back then. Right now, I’ve turned some attention to my first book about the Penthouse Nightclub. The book is going its third printing, and because it’s the 70th anniversary of the Penthouse, we’re going to do a new, revised edition, adding more photos and stories, and some additional content. It feels a little strange at time to go back and have the chance to update earlier work you’ve done, as the opportunity isn’t always around to do it—it feels a little like getting a chance to take your class photo when you were a student. But when you write on local history, inevitably people come out of the woodwork no matter how well you’ve researched things, or how great your access was, to tell you a story or a rich little anecdote that would have been wonderful to include had you known it. So the nice thing is I’m getting a chance to add some of that stuff in, or because of the popularity of the original book we have the chance to take some of that stuff that ended up “on the cutting room floor”, to now include in this new & revised edition that’s coming out in the fall of 2017.
RWM: What do you like to read?
I read a very mixed bag of stuff. Anybody that would see my bookshelves would probably think three or four different people owned it, but I suppose everybody is a bit like that, aren’t they? I certainly read a lot of local history, and BC history, I’ve been reading some military history, some Australian history I’ve been meaning to get to. Plus a fair bit of music books of everything from Ian Dury to Tom Waits. There’s some true crime in there—probably as a result of working on The Last Gang in Town, but when I think about it I remember reading that stuff in my teens as well! Gyles Brandreth’s Oscar Wilde Murder mysteries books are great fun, and Brandreth has become a pen pal. Jerzy Kosinski is still interesting to me—though I suppose he’s fallen out of fashion for most. I’ve certainly got all that William S. Burroughs, Hunter Thompson, Philip K. Dick and others that a lot of lads my age would have grown up with. Robert Young Pelton’s travel writing is most enjoyable.
RWM: Hobbies? Sports?
I played soccer quite a bit as a kid. I’ve had a hankering to play Cricket ever since I had an Australian friend explain the game to me that it made sense, and I could watch it knowing what’s going on. It seems like a wonderfully old world game, and I suppose the historian in me likes it.
RWM: What part of Vancouver do you live in?
I grew up in Kerrisdale, but after school I bummed and bounced around nearly in every quadrant of the city renting a room here and there. I currently down between the East End of False Creek and Chinatown. It’s a good central spot and easy to get around. I used to live up on Commercial Drive where I couldn’t walk two blocks without feeling like the King of Kensington—because I knew so many people who lived around there and bumped into them, but this area which used to be all industrial is just being developed. The street I live on didn’t exist until 2006, so it’s been interesting to watch things grow. It feels very much on the border of the upwardly mobile Yaletown area, and the still-troubled downtown east side. There’s nice cars parked out front, but there was a murder across the alleyway the month I moved in. On one end of the street you see pony-tailed young women jogging off to their yoga classes, and at the other end of the street you see a binner pushing a shopping cart full of empties and scrap metal—so it’s just how I like it, right in the middle of it.
RWM: Anything you’d like to add?
Do buy one of my books. If you don’t like it, please return the unused portion and bill of sale to me for a full refund, or at least another one of my books you might like instead.
RWM comment: “unused portion?” That slipped past me. All kidding aside, Aaron’s books are a great read. Just as much fun as interviewing him.
