This new documentary digs into the history of Doug and the Slugs — and the filmmaker grew up next door
Growing up, Teresa Alfeld had no idea Doug Bennett was a rock star. She just knew him as her best friend's dad
When documentary filmmaker Teresa Alfeld was growing up in Vancouver, she had no idea that her next door neighbour and best friend, Shea Bennett, had a rock star father.
"I just knew him as Shea's dad," she says of Doug Bennett, known to many as the lead singer of Doug and the Slugs. "Doug was literally just the goofy guy next door. He would play pranks on us as kids. I spent a lot of time at that house and I had no idea that he'd had this incredible career. It was only as an adult, long after he passed, that I started to get into his music."
The group's rise from Vancouver bar band to Canadian chart toppers — and their subsequent fall — is the subject of Alfeld's new documentary Doug and the Slugs and Me, which airs Jan. 15 at 8:00 p.m. on CBC.
Alfeld started thinking about the band while working on her first feature length documentary, The Rankin File: Legacy of a Radical, a film that looked at socialist and labour lawyer Harry Rankin's 1986 campaign for Mayor of Vancouver. Alfeld says she was looking for music that was upbeat, from the 1980s, and uniquely Vancouver to use for the soundtrack
"This sounds made up, but I was literally working out of the home office at my mother's house — she still lives in my childhood home. I looked out the window at [the former Bennett] house, went, 'Oh yeah! Doug and the Slugs,'" she says.
Alfeld felt like she got to know Bennett — who died in 2004 — in two different ways while making the film. The first was through his music and digging into the Doug and the Slugs discography. The second, much deeper way was when Bennett's widow, Nancy, gave her his journals. The journals spanned the period from the band's early days in the late 1970s, through their '80s peak, and into their decline in the early '90s.
"That was when everything completely changed," she says. "It was as if I was able to have a conversation with a version of a man who I thought I'd known. These are his most intimate words, reflecting on his career and his art and his family and everything he wants from life… When I got those journals, I realized we were making a very important film."
A constant point of tension — both within the band and between the band, their management, and their record label — was the ongoing struggle to break the band in the United States. While they were hugely successful in Canada, the band's repeated attempts to cross over into the American market fell flat, and were ultimately one of the things that lead to the group's demise.
Alfeld says that there is a lesson to be learned from the Slugs' story. In the documentary, former record executive and MuchMusic programming director Denise Donlon — who got her start in the industry doing PR for Doug and the Slugs and other West Coast bands — says that music industry success is "alchemy."
"It's a number of things that have to go right at the exact right time for this incredible goal to be achieved," says Alfeld. "So I honestly don't know if they could have done anything [else] to achieve that goal."
If there's one lesson to take away from the Slugs' story, according to Alfeld, it's "to really love and enjoy the success that you've earned." She says that in reading Bennett's journals, it struck her how "it's easy to quickly move on and reframe your goal as the next one," rather than stop and appreciate what you've already achieved.
Alfeld says she hopes the documentary will get people interested in Doug and the Slugs again, both their old fans and younger people like herself who weren't old enough to experience the band's first bout of success. She adds that, while their big singles were known for their goofy, good-time, party vibes, Bennett's lyrics and the band's arrangements had a level of depth that makes them stand the test of time. She says that former Barenaked Ladies singer and guitarist Steven Page — who was a big Doug and the Slugs fan and appears in the doc — best described the band's enduring appeal, when he said there's a "cultness" and an "everyman-ness" to the band.
"On the one hand, I think they really [have] an energy and a sardonic sense of comedy and fun that was really popular and captured in their live shows," she says. "But once you dig a little deeper, once you really start listening to lyrics or exploring the musical arrangements that the Slugs came up with for the songs, there's more than meets the eye. They really give you something to dig into and reward you for repeated listening. So I think that's the kind of music that still holds up today."
Doug and the Slugs and Me airs Jan. 15 at 8:00 p.m. on CBC and will stream on CBC Gem.
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