JIFFY MARKER

JUST A BUNCH OF GOOD GUYS IN A BAD GUY WORLD

The No. 5 Orange is about as quiet as you’d expect at 11:30 a.m. on a Saturday morning. Regardless, “Vancouver’s world famous all nude gentlemen’s club” was in fact open and seemed like as good a place as any to sit down for a beer with Jiffy Marker’s Dave Soul and Jiffy Marx, easily two of the finest “gentlemen” this city has to offer.

Rolling in a few minutes late, I find Jiffy and Dave sitting at a table in the back of the bar, illuminated by the charming black lights while polishing off the last bites of their burgers and already on their second round of beers.

“How’s the food here?” I ask, trying to make out who’s who under the less than optimal lighting.

“Better than you’d think, man,” Dave Soul says taking a sip of his seven-dollar Pilsner and passing me a menu.

These aren’t the kind of bros you’d usually find at a strip bar and it’s obvious, but we’re making it work while Bryan Adams blares over the speakers and the first dancer of the day takes the stage. (**insert stripper siren sound here**)

Jiffy Marker might still be an unfamiliar name to most people in Vancouver’s music scene but hopefully not for long. The trio consisting of Marx (guitar/vox), Soul (drums) and Mr. P Experience (bass) is a straight-up punk rock band. But not in a studded belt / crusty punk / fuck-the-man kinda way. Jiffy Marker is a punk band because they have put in their time and the result is a group of guys who know how to play really good rock ‘n’ roll without even trying. Oh, and they don’t give a fuck. The 10 tracks on their debut album, Winston, clock in at less than 20 minutes — a fun-and-fast “fuck you” to everyone who ever wasted their time trying so hard to make their band perfect.

“I don’t put a lot of thought in to the songs. I have a really stupid idea for a song and then I shit it out. And weirdly enough it’s probably better than half of the stuff I’ve written in other bands,” Marx says.

The dudes in Jiffy Marker are getting old but they’re not old and shitty. These guys grew up listening to good shit like Black Flag, The Ramones and Screeching Weasel. They still skate, they still drink and any one of them could probably steal your girlfriend if they really wanted to. And while these guys may be well past their 30s, it’s only now that they’re finally getting to revisit the scrappy unadulterated pop punk they grew up on.

“One thing that I think is funny is that all of us have been in bands that have been on major labels and had pretty lame experiences, so this is the answer to that,” Marx says without even glancing at the spicy little number doing her thing onstage. “Being signed to a major label never did anything for any of us. If anything it was a waste of time and a real bummer.”

No matter how hard they try to not try, their finished product sounds tight as hell. Pop that shit on when you’re skateboarding through East Van and, while you probably couldn’t make it from one end of Hastings to the other before it was over, it’s guaranteed you’ll be playing it again and again.

“Do You Wanna Go Halfers” is a pretty awesome song about splitting up girlfriend duties with someone else because they really are just too much for one person to handle. “I Wanna Be a Good Boy” has one of the most ridiculous choruses, as the band chants “B-A-D-B-Oi! BAD BOY!” Just a bunch of good guys in a bad guy world. Totally. By the time album-closer “Thank God For Abortion” comes around, you almost forget that some people might be offended by the subject matter. But the riffs are furious and the content is so goofy that you just have to laugh along.

“We really are just a bunch of old men taking the piss out of it. But you know, we’re just having fun,” Marx says. “I’m inspired by bands like Pierced Arrows. That dude is as old as my dad and he’s still playing rock ‘n’ roll music. I’m not trying to be anything, I’m just trying to keep it going and do something that I enjoy doing.”

Jiffy Marker is gonna kick-flip it at the Biltmore Cabaret on August 24.

By Glenn Alderson