Chances are if you’ve hung out in the Vancouver Island music scene in the last 10-plus years, you’ve probably seen a gig that featured the powerhouse drumming of Tremblers of Sevens’ Juli Steemson, aka Rad Juli.
Playing since the mid-’90s, she’s a fixture of bands like Black Valley Gospel, Himalayan Bear, Black Rice and most recently a Victoria-based band called Archivists.
However these days she’s most busy with her band Tremblers of Sevens, who play a show at The Queen’s on Friday, March 1.
A loud, genre-defying duo with guitarist Dan Weisenberger (Wise), Tremblers of Sevens reinterpret a vast repertoire of styles and songs they describe as “traditional blues, devotional gospel, meditative Turkish delights, and klezmer nuptial nights,” among others.
Here’s my Q&A with Rad Juli, which has been edited and condensed for clarity:
Julie Chadwick, The Discourse: I saw you were playing this weekend with Caveman and The Banshee, you play with them quite a lot, right?
Rad Juli: Yeah, in whatever incarnation they’re up to. They’re great people and a great band. And it’s fun to have two duos on that night, you know?
JC: I love that format, when I think of famous powerhouse duo bands, like The Pack AD or White Stripes. Was that something that you originally wanted, specifically? To just have two band members?
RJ: Yeah, we were playing together in a different band, with a singer and a guitar player and it’s so many people to wrangle and organize. Because a lot of what we do on stage is quite improvised, we can actually pivot pretty fast if somebody has a moment or a mood, we can just go ‘Oh, let’s go there.’
[More band members] is reflected sonically but at the same time I think we’re doing pretty good. It’s pretty loud.
JC: Yeah, I saw you play at the Dead Bob show.
RJ: [Dead Bob] were amazing. That is that many, many years of experience on a stage right there, just feeling it and embodying it. [Former NoMeansNo drummer John Wright] is actually my favourite drummer. When I learned how to play drums I got into NoMeansNo really quickly, and was like, ‘What? You can do that? It doesn’t have to be four on the floor, it doesn’t have to be Ringo Starr? Okay, great.’
JC: Was that the first time you guys have played a show together?
RJ: That is the first time we played together but he’s been in the audience when we performed before. At one point I did a really short-lived NoMeansNo tribute with my friend and we played in an old pub in Powell River. And John was there and sat behind me. I’ve never been so nervous in my whole life. Like not only is my drum hero here, but I played his songs. No pressure!
JC: Was drumming something you started doing in high school?
RJ: Yeah, I was probably 12 or 13 and got into percussion and then jazz band, and from there I didn’t stick with the band format. I’m not really a follower, shall we say? Right away I started playing with bands and I think I played my first professional bar show when I was about 14 or 15.
JC: Where was that?
RJ: It was at the Starfish Room in Vancouver, in 1994.
JC: You must have been pretty stoked.
RJ: It was so nerdy. All our high school friends tried to sneak in, as you can imagine. And then I just never looked back. Music is not something that comes naturally but is something that absolutely makes sense to me. The way you communicate with people through music is the easiest way to communicate.
JC: Did you always know that drums were the instrument you wanted to play?
RJ: As soon as I tried it and it felt good. I was like, ‘This is for me.’ You’d be shocked if you saw my record collection. It’s everything from Turkish folk music to vocal jazz, piano, Honky Tonk, hardcore metal and electronic ambience. I just listen to everything. Genre doesn’t really matter — it’s what’s good, what feels good, what sounds good.
JC: And that feeds into the Trembler sound right?
RJ: Big time. Dan and I are very similar that way. It was one of the things that we jammed out on when we were becoming friends. We’re very much on the same page and we influence each other, just as much as everything else influences us. It’s fun.
JC: Where does the band name come from?
RJ: So the backstory for us was that we had been jamming an improv thing on the side from this other band, and someone got wind of it and asked us to do a fundraiser with them. But he insisted that we needed a name, we couldn’t just call ourselves Dan and Julie.
He’s a magician, first of all, so he gave us an Encyclopedia of the Occult and said, ‘Go find a name and report back to me,’ kind of thing. We went to the pub, and did that random, open, flip, point your finger down thing. What we found was the Tremblers of les Cevennes.
In France, in the 1500s, there used to be a group of convulsionists, like snake handlers and people who experience spiritual connection to God through weird things with your body. So the Tremblers would get crushed under weights or be beaten with iron bars and show no marks on their body because of their faith. It’s a faith thing, where if you believe in God, there will not be any marks on your body. Dan’s girlfriend pointed out that Cevennes is harder to spell than Sevens so we just changed it.
JC: That is cool.
RJ: It’s super epic! We go for epic everything.
JC: You were talking about how improvisation plays a huge part in your performances, and I saw you play on Lasqueti Island for Rock Show where Matt Chesterfield [from Velvet Stardust] was singing and drumming at the same time because their drummer couldn’t come, and I was so blown away at how you jumped in on the drums and just nailed those songs. I think it was the first time you’d ever played them? Can you explain how you did that? It was incredible.
RJ: I’ve been playing music for 34 years and you get to a point where you’re like, okay, that’s how rock songs start. There’s a pattern and you just kind of get good at the pattern. Some of those songs I knew but had never played, like Pink Floyd.
And it does come back to improvising. A big part of improvising as a drummer is that you have to watch what everyone else is doing. You start to read and then there’s some language that goes on a stage where if the song is going to end someone’s gonna give me a heads up. But sometimes you just have to guess.
JC: In your 30-something years of playing are there some memorable shows that stand out for you?
RJ: I really love playing in Tremblers. Having played in so many different bands, there’s just an ease to what we do. That makes it really satisfying. We really like each other, and play off each other. We’re like a sports team [laughs]. We’re always working towards the next thing.
But I think my favourite show that we played with Tremblers was when we opened for [rock band] The Sadies at Upstairs in Victoria, above Darcy’s. That was really amazing. Dan has played with them and does sound for them many years in a row. It was a great audience, a great show, a great room… like you know, when everything is just perfect? It sounded good, and people loved what we were doing.
There were tons of people there who had no idea who we were, because they were there to see the other band, and we sound nothing like The Sadies. That was probably my favourite one.
