Cochlear Implant

Mike Soret is warming to the idea of celebrating the holidays with friends instead of drinking alone

THE MOLESTICS
Featuring Ben Sures. New City Likwid Lounge (10081 Jasper Ave). Wed, Dec 9 (doors @ 8pm).

The holiday season can be many things: a time of merriment and a time of celebration, a time of family and friends, a time to show our appreciation for all the pleasures life has given us. Or it can mean a miserable week spent in the company of our malfunctioning families, an obnoxiously cheerful reminder of why Christmas is not the most wonderful time of the year.

Mike Soret, former frontman of the veteran Canadian punk/swing band The Molestics, is definitely one of those people who finds Yuletide ... well ... interesting. “I can relate a lot to Festivus,” he says, referring to the misanthropic anti-holiday invented by Seinfeld’s Frank Costanza. “I spent every Christmas in the cubbyhole under the stairs while my Ukrainian family got drunk and fought the whole night long. I think a lot of people from Edmonton can relate to that.

“Before the band,” he continues, “I put on a medieval Christmas pageant called The Second Shepherd’s Play for seven consecutive years as a way to forget to my Festivus-like Christmas. I had to go back 600 years to find a time where I liked Christmas! When I was in The Molestics, I had a traditional Christmas — turned off the lights and tried to drink myself to death. That was a ritual I picked up from a friend who had it as a New Year’s tradition. I’ve never gone out for New Year’s before or since the band. Christmas is a time for friends and family, and if your memories of friends and family are like mine, your ritual will be the result.”

Luckily Soret’s Scroogelike personality is tempered by his flair for showmanship and his ability to engage an audience — both onstage and in print. His memoir Confessions of a Local Celebrity (recently published in a beautifully designed paperback edition, the precise dimensions of a 45 single, by Edmonton’s Belgravian Press) is a highly readable, self-deprecating, laugh-out-loud funny tale of life as a musician in Vancouver. Most of the book covers The Molestics’ Vancouver glory days in the late ’90s, when the band was popular enough for Soret to achieve a limited amount of local fame. The Molestics were heavily influenced by “hokum jazz,” a style of music built on farce and slapstick humour that laughs in the face of “real” music, and he brings the same healthy disrespect for literary writing to Confessions of a Local Celebrity. But who cares about critical prestige so long as you’re entertaining your audience?
“It’s the job of the entertainer to be interesting ... to be entertaining,” he says. “It doesn’t matter if the audience likes you or dislikes you, whether you lose them or the music guts them — those are just subgenres. The main qualifier is that it entertains them. Somehow, probably because it’s really important to me, I can entertain people. I entertain even if it is not entertaining at all!

“I’ll even tell you a secret. I shouldn’t even tell you the trick, but I will. Here it is: you got the microphone, so you’ve got this advantage. Everyone came to see you and you’ve got the microphone. If someone isn’t having a good time, you can break them down. And then I encourage people to drink. It works for me. Why the hell not have a good time? Isn’t that what you came for?”

Perhaps Soret learned a few things about entertainment in that childhood cubbyhole, listening to the muted sounds of inebriated relatives and witnessed tortured holiday rituals. There’s no question that he looks at the holidays differently now than he did years ago; this year, Soret says, he no longer wants to be alone over the holidays.

“I’ll make Christmas better for everyone by absolving the crowd of their dysfunction,” he says. “The role I play onstage says that it’s okay to be screwed up after what we all went through. Might as well make the best of it.”