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Thanks to John Wiles and OZ FM’s old ‘Jigs & Reels’ radio show, I heard dozens of great folk bands while I was still in elementary school. The 70s were a bit of dead end for traditional music, at least commercially, but before things fell apart a number of classic bands arose. These acts formed the core of John’s traditional music show, in the days when good Newfoundland albums could still be numbered at less than a dozen. Unfortunately, many of these bands are pretty much forgotten now, at least by the casual North American folk fan.
Silly Wizard were Scots who came out of the 70s revival, when folk music suddenly gained professional legs. They made a series of great albums, but were also known for stirring and unusual live shows. The band was blessed with some unique characters. Lead singer Andy M. Stewart had a slippery voice, all soft edges and emotion, and he was unafraid to sing in his thick dialect. The Cunningham brothers played fiddle and accordion, and were able to do it with a speed and dexterity that still sounds a bit inhuman. All their albums are good, but check out ‘Donald MacGillvary’ from the album So Many Partings, recorded in 1979. Although it sounds a bit thin on your average MP3, the quality of the singing and playing come through. For a band that almost entirely avoided electricity, at least in its hay-day, it’s powerful stuff.
As you go further back into the 70s, and even earlier, folk music tends to separate itself into hippie/non hippie. The hippies certainly embraced the old-fashioned vibe and earthy instruments associated with the genre, but those of a more psychedelic bent often added some serious weirdness to the recipe. The members of Led Zeppelin, among others, often point to the Incredible String Band as a huge inspiration. They were another of the gems John dug up. While the String Band played real traditional music in some of their incarnations, they were more partial to a hippie vision full of fairies, highwaymen and an imagined version of medieval England that any reader of Donaldson, Pratchett et al would readily recognize. Check out ‘Cousin Caterpillar’, and discover what happened when drugs and music studios first came together. I cannot imagine what this sort of thing this sounded like live. Their appearance at the Woodstock concert was apparently so shambolic that their tunes made neither the movie nor the album. On the other hand, in those days the lineup also included a singer named Licorice McKechnie. That alone deserves some bonus points.
I have spoken before about my love of Steeleye Span. They were a staple of John’s shows, though I did not realize it until years later. The Span has gone through so many incarnations that they often sound like a completely different band from record to record. Their most interesting blend of hippie weirdness and genuine traditional chops probably can be found on ‘Below The Salt’. The album has a few sensible moments, but eventually gives in altogether to the patchouli. ‘King Henry’ is a tale of monsters and such that changes tempo a few times, includes a full violin mini-symphony, and generally sets the benchmark for this sort of thing. You just do not hear 8:00 minute songs anymore about kings and witches - or rather, not by bands that are taking the whole thing utterly seriously. Pity.
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I have written before about the rampant Anglophilia that
infected much of my youth. For a large quotient of the music community, it has
continued unabated; note the how often serious musos read heavy British music
journals like ‘Q’ & ‘Mojo’, while they have nothing but contempt for North
American rags like ‘Blender’ and ‘Chart’. Still, you have to hand it to the British; their bands have
a real flair for pop songs. We have lots of good bands in Canada, but anyone
looking for pop froth will find it heavy going amongst the likes of Billy
Talent and Finger 11. The grey streets of England seem to produce a yearning
for escapism that Canadians just don’t seem capable of. Even Canadian ‘pop’
bands like the New Pornographers or Stars are a bit too realistic for those who
love Britpop. I was living in Barrie when Britpop, that early 90’s burst
of English power pop, burst on the scene. I still have a soft spot for Barrie.
Even though I was a massive square peg there, people were nice to me. Friendly,
yes, ‘cool, definitely not. Swinging London it wasn’t. I spent an inordinate
amount of time talking to the owner of the local used record store, drinking
coffee with various artists, and walking around the Victorian streets,
listening to the first portable CD player I ever owned. ‘I Should Coco’,
Supergrass’s debut came out around this time, and I listened to it a thousand
times. Nothing stuck better than ‘Alright’. Never a hit in North America, it has been used for dozens of
advertisements. Go download it, and marvel that anyone could have ever been
that young and happy. Super Furry Animals come from the same era as the Britpop
stars Oasis and Blur, but genre wise they live in their own little world.
Self-consciously psychedelic, (whatever that means), their music is dense,
complex and full of noises and solos. The band is unbelievably prolific,
recording dozens of singles and B-sides, including a number in Welsh, their
native tongue. The only North American equivalent I can think of is the Flaming
Lips. They certainly share a refined sense of the visual, a loyalty to living
in the middle of nowhere, and a certain oddness that verges on disturbing. They
also share a complete indifference to commercialism that has (ironically)
garnered them both huge worldwide cult followings. ‘The Man Don’t Give A ***’
was one of the Furry’s bigger hits, and is reasonably representative of their
unique approach to making music. I am fonder of ‘(Drawing) Rings Around The
World’, which is about as close as they get to a pure pop sound. It takes a bit
of listening - the song is absolutely drenched in feedback and other found
noises, but there is brilliance in there somewhere. The Smiths are not really Britpop, coming from an altogether
darker era, but they are the epitome of the sort of British pop band that are
waaaayyyy to English for North American tastes. Lead singer Morrissey still has
a huge cult following, and co-writer Johnny Marr has recently been reborn as an
American rock star in Modest Mouse. The Smiths’ songs are pretty unique in the
pop canon. Morrissey wrote weird little short stories, which despite bothering
little with rhyme or meter, he was somehow able to turn into very effective
lyrics. A truly shit adolescence gave him grist for a million songs, and in Marr
he found a guitarist capable of translating it all into something listenable. Every
depressed gay teenager has a favourite Smiths song, and despite being neither
of those, I absolutely love ‘This Charming Man’. A rather sordid tale of a
brief liaison, Morrissey’s croons the story like a bathroom opera singer, every
note dripping his faux melancholy. The chorus, or what passes for one, contains
one of the best pop lyrics ever: “I’d go out tonight, but I haven’t got a stitch to wear…” Cracking stuff, I say, old chap and all.
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Over the years, we have tried to walk a bit of a fine line
when it comes to the whole ‘are you Celtic?’ thing. It is a question that has
died down a bit, but it still comes up, particularly in America. Early on in
our career we decided that we were going to focus as much as we could on
Newfoundland songs and instrumentals. It made sense - we were already immersed
in that tradition, and there was a goldmine of unrecorded material out there.
Plus, it made us unique. Most other traditional acts around here (and truth to
be told, everywhere) are drawn to the vast body of well-recorded and
well-arranged Irish music. Researching older songs that do not already have
choruses and hooks is a lot harder, and often a lot riskier - sometimes old
songs are obscure for a reason. Irish songs work just as well, or better, and
are a lot easier. In Newfoundland these days, most younger artists do not even
make the distinction between Irish and Newfoundland material, something that alternately
surprises and depresses me. That said, Irish music is a broad strain in the Newfoundland
tradition. It is particularly prevalent in St. John’s, which has seen a
continual influx of Irish players over the years. Like a lot of things, the
nuances are just part of us. For example, I would consider my accordion playing
about as ‘Newfoundland’ as you could get. I hardly own one Irish accordion
record, nor do I use Irish ornaments in my playing, nor do I play any
identifiable Irish tunes, really. Even so, I once played for Seamus Connolly, a
famous fiddler and professor at Boston College, and an expert on Irish music.
He was intrigued by my playing, which he felt was a blurry version of a rural
Waterford style. And my repertoire includes many tunes originally popularized
in Newfoundland by the McNulty family, Boston Irishmen who were stars here in
the 1950s. (Much of the rest is sped-up English Morris dances, but that is
another essay). Furthermore, the last decade has not been a golden age for
Irish music, which adds to my general ambivalence about our suppressed
Celticness. There are lots of good bands, and great players, but the
well-arranged song has largely been supplanted by lightening fast jigs and
reels. If they sing at all, younger bands often do so unaccompanied: one chap
lilting away with his eyes closed, while everyone else looks at the stage,
trying to be suitably solemn. That is a bit of an anathema to Great Big Sea -
hearty songs and spirited group singing are our meat and drink. Therefore, if I
was to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, (in some fashion other than a gig), than I
would listen to some music from the late 60s and early 70s, when the ballad
singers spawned by the Clancy brothers met the first generation of modern
players. And all sorts of amazing things came forth. Good luck finding any CDs by the Johnstons in a record
store. This is one gem that ITunes rescued from obscurity, and I am grateful
for it. The band peaked in the early 1970s, when folk legends-to-be Paul Brady
and Mick Maloney joined a band fronted by the two Johnston sisters. They all
sang close harmonies, and Brady and Maloney found complex and intriguing hooks,
all while maintaining a very light feel, a bit like the Association meets the
Clancy’s. The records sound old-fashioned now, from an audio point of view, but
there is a freshness and spirit to the singing that is rare in modern Irish
music. Check out their version of ‘The Spanish Lady’. This rather enigmatic song
has become sadder and sadder over the years, but there is nothing but joy in
the Johnstons’ version. After the Johnstons, Brady himself later joined Planxty, the
band every critic agrees was the greatest of the era. The four original
members - piper Liam Og Flynn, bouzouki genius Donal Lunny, mandolinist and
singer Andy Irvine and guitarist and singer Christy Moore - single-handedly
reinvented the way Irish music was arranged, sung and performed. Their blend of
songs and instrumentals was unique, years ahead of its time, and in Moore and
Irvine they had singers who were capable of anything. Lunny was not the first
to play Celtic bouzouki, but he invented the melodic rhythmic style that every
one of us uses today. Irvine mostly played mandolin in the band, and he and
Lunny created a weaving harmonic style, which with Og Flynn’s virtuoso piping
was a killer combination. Later additions like Brady and Johnny Moynihan just
added to the mystique. Every pub band in the world owes a debt to Planxty, and
their hooks and ideas have become fodder for hundreds of albums. ‘The Raggle
Taggle Gypsy’ is the song most critics point to as evidence of their
brilliance, but I prefer ‘The Little Drummer’. Moore’s crisp baritone punches
every note, while the rest of the players create a melodic setting which would
be the envy of any fancy pop band. Case in point - the song itself has no
chorus, and repeats itself a half dozen times. In the hand of a lesser bunch it
would be dull and repetitive. In Planxty’s version, you do not even notice.
Instead you are just sad that the song, and the band, ever has to end. Luke Kelly has been dead for decades now, but as ballad
singer, he has yet to be surpassed. A gnarly looking character, he was one of
the leaders of the Dubliners, a band who wrote the book on gnarly. He might
have looked like an out of work dustman, but his voice was something else -
strong, clear and as rich as a good pint. The Dubliners often played all over
each other, but live Kelly was left alone, to sing his songs with little
accompaniment. He loved songs about the travails of workingmen, and ‘Tramps and
Hawkers’ is one of the best. A superb live version is available everywhere, on
a dozen different Dubliners compilations. Go buy it, and revel in the passion
the man was capable of bringing to a simple lyric. Few singers in any genre would have the courage to deliver
this song as simply as Kelly, and yet you believe every word. The song ends
almost in a whisper, with this poignant traveler lyric: And if the weather treats me right, I’m happy every day. Whether in Ireland, or across the ocean, words we can all
live by.
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I was watching hotel TV the other night, the sort of shit
you never watch at home. In fact, other than the Premier league, I
hardly watch anything at home. Hotels are a different matter. Everyone watches
too much TV on the road. Anyway, I was watching one of those Time infomercials,
where they sell these huge song collections. This one, surprisingly, was for
90’s songs. “90’s songs!” I thought, “*** me, we are supposed to be an
object of nostalgic already?” Maybe I even said it out loud. Hotels are like that. Anyway, I did not succumb to ordering the lot, but it did spur me to download a few songs
from the era that caught my attention for the second time around. Weezer were a weird band then, and by all accounts remain
well left of center, but ‘Buddy Holly’ is a piece of genius. The only reason I
even heard the song when it came out is because the video was included on the
first computer I ever bought. I guess I didn’t listen to the radio that much in
the early 90s. I was too poor for cable, in fact the first time I ever saw
MuchMusic was after our ‘Run Runaway’ video came out, when I felt compelled to
subscribe. Not to digress into my ‘St. John’s was a backwater’ thing again, but
Cable TV round here came with 24 channels then, which was an anaesthetizing 23 more than I got with rabbit ears At any rate, I have been reunited with a dandy. ‘Buddy Holly’s lyrics are
clever in a way few attain. Satire does not usually lend itself to pop music,
but Rivers Cuomo pulls it off. The
guitars are so boneheaded anyone with 4 strings could play them, but it still has the happy bubblegum feel the Ramones
always tried for and never really nailed. Cuomo can really sing - even when he
is comparing his girlfriend to Mary Tyler Moore there is a bit of an edge, an
edge that tells you that this guy quite possibly does not have both oars in the
water. Better still, according to wikipedia, he pissed off at the height of
his fame to do an English degree. I would argue with his timing, but as a
fellow devotee of the obscure and arcane, I can certainly sympathize. Len is the quintessential one-hit wonder act. They have just
one hit to their credit, but it is so good their subsequent fall into obscurity
is almost prosaic. 1999’s ‘If You Steal My Sunshine’ is blessed with a killer
hook, largely sampled from the Andrea True Connection. Lead vocals were shared
by Marc Costanzo and his sister Sharon, and somehow perfectly capture the sort
of hangover that follows a break-up and subsequent nights of self-destruction. Marc recites the vocal in a husky rap,
sounding as if he is already well into his second pack of smokes, while his
sister is as cheery and chirpy as the Easter bunny. Without even trying, they pretty
much captured the pattern for every decent break-up - one side is wallowing in
despair, while the other prances off in a cloud of relief. I vaguely recall a video, which appeared to be shot for
nothing in Daytona Beach, with the band & buddiea cavorting around video arcades, fooling
about with scooters and whatnot. I remember it made me a bit jealous. We were bunging
around the USA for most of that year, stuffed back in the van for weeks on end, with all it’s
dubious comforts. There was not much cavorting of any kind for us. Len
looked like they were having the time of their lives. With the benefit of
hindsight, I hope they did.
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There was very artistic movie making the rounds a couple of
years ago, aptly shot in Winnipeg, about a contest for the saddest music in the
world. The movie itself was heavy going, and no matter now worthy, I did not make
it to the end. Nonetheless, the concept itself was quite intriguing. Of course, everyone has an immediate contender - generally
some song that they associate with a sad time of their life; i.e. the favourite
song of a couple now split, or the hymn played at a friend’s funeral. Fair
enough, we all have these, but what really interests me are those songs that
stand up for themselves, songs that carry their own heavy bag of ennui along
with the verses and chorus. Admittedly, this is a topic I have addressed
before, but one to which I am strangely drawn…particularly during the dreary
winter weather to which we here at the end of the world have been afflicted. I heard the Doors’ Riders of the Storm the other day on the
radio, a song that I find profoundly depressing. There is something really
pathetic about Morrison’s delivery - his booze-ravaged voice barely rises above
a whisper as he recites the aimless lyrics. It’s as if he could hardly be
bothered to interrupt his headlong plunge into a bottle long enough to actually
sing. Even the guitar solo is sad, all drawn out minor chords and dark modes, a
lament just waiting for the wake to start. The Dream Syndicate was another Los Angeles band, albeit
from a decade later, one who had a very minor hit with a song called Tell Me
When It’s Over. A break-up song, it’s given its true sad weight by the singer.
He can barely handle the melody, wobbling all over the place, moaning and
heaving and sighing the words out. It ends up sounding like the sort of painful
and desperate message you hear the recently dumped leaving on someone’s cell
phone, all misplaced rage and cringing self-pity. It is as agonizing as your
own adolescent poems, without so much as a shred of hope. The music consists of
a grinding, descending riff, distorted in a cheap and unpleasant fashion,
played over and over again until you hate it. Genius, really, in a depressing
kind of way. My all-time favourite in the sad & sadder category is a
cut from Sweden’s Cardigans. Although they are known in the USA for a handful
of cheery singles, in Europe their later catalogue is as gloomy as it gets.
Long Gone Before Daylight is the kind of album that you hear once, and then buy
a copy for everyone you know. The stand-out song And Then You Kissed Me… is an agonizing
cry for help. Nina Persson’s voice is beautiful, but with a fierce edge, as if
it could fall apart, (and her with it), any second now. The chords and melody
are perfect, so pretty you don’t even realize right away what Perrson is
singing: “…blue, blue, black and blue red blood sticks like glue true love is cruel, love, sweet love, tasty blood… and then you hit me, right in the heart… love makes you wake up sore, with fists that are ready for more” And you know she means every word. Her weary tone of
resignation about the self-destructing violence, of her relationship, whether
physical or emotional, is about as sad as you can get. Recently, a friend asked me which GBS song is the saddest.
It is an interesting question. All the break-up songs (My Apology, Buying Time,
How Did We Get From Saying I Love You…, Time Brings, etc.) are kind of sad when
you knew the people involved. Fisherman’s Lament is pretty sad too, especially
for those who lived through that era in Newfoundland, when for a while it looked
like we were pretty much done here. If you want to get into context, then the
whole cannon starts to look a bit iffy. Really, when you get right down to it,
nothing is particularly cheery about dead horses, tidal waves, and being a
simpleton with a shitty little green boat. It just all comes done to how you
look at it.
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My years with Sean (and many, many others) in Rankin Street
have been romanticized a bit over the years. I have often regretted describing
those years as ‘our apprenticeship in St. John’s rowdy dockside pubs’ in an
early bio. It makes it all a bit too casual and rough and ready. And like
anything else, the truth is somewhere in between. In a way, though, we had no one to blame but ourselves. It
is a bit embarrassing, but a lot of the craziest stories are true. Pubs were
dodgier here twenty years ago. People drank earlier, drank more, and drank
harder. Rock bands were out of favor, but the traditional scene was thriving,
and we went at it full on. There were so many alcohol-fueled indulgences that
sometimes it seems like an extended five-year dream We really did get into
fist-fights onstage; sometimes with each other - more than once with the
audience. Jeff Scott, Sue from Gander, Jackie, Fiddler, Heidi and another half
dozen characters really did pass through the band. We really did swap
instruments at random points during boring shows, (whether one knew how to play
them or not). We really did lug the gear up and down George Street for
three-show St. Patrick Days, and play seven nights straight for weeks on end,
our voices bloody rags. Going straight from the pub to a final exam was
routine, as was getting your whole night’s sleep ration after sound check, in
the back of a car parked under the bar windows. We really did buy a large and
complicated PA system on a whim one fall afternoon, and then set it up and
played through it that night, despite having no idea how it even turned on, not
too mention how to mix live audio. We really did produce our own series for
local cable, without even having so much as a conversation about what we were
going to do for half an hour a week. We played so well some nights that
everyone there was transfixed, and remembered it like their high school prom -
and we played so badly other nights that the bar emptied before our eyes. We
really did give away some 1000 beers, right off the stage, during our farewell
performance. We really did an entire show where we played ‘Lukey’ every third
song, just to see if anyone would notice. We really did…and on and on it goes. But mostly, we learned how to do this. We learned how to
stand on a stage and be unafraid, no matter who was in front of you. We learned
how to keep going, even if everything broke, we forgot all the words, or we
suddenly acquired a world-class case of hiccups. We learned how to play when we
were exhausted, enraged, loaded, when we could not hear a thing, when there was
no room, when all the strings were gone, when we had no monitors, when someone
was leaning on you, shouting the wrong words in your ear, or when you were trying
not to spew after an unwisely accepted triple shot of Black Sambuca. I spent years fighting with my instruments, trying to make
things sound bigger and louder without also sounding like shitty electric
guitars. Three different mandolins led to a mandola, and then my first bouzouki.
It was a Greek model, better suited to the wall of a taverna, and it sounded so
bad the band threatened to quit if I insisted on playing it. A series of
fiddles all sounded wretched, with pickups that sounded like transistor radios.
Once, I actually ripped an accordion in two, and I pitched dozens of cheap tin
whistles into the crowd, vexed with their shrill tone. It took us til well into
Great Big Sea before we got gear that was fit to actually use night after
night. Half the problem was the lack of decent models. Lots of guys
played accordion around here, but only a handful had grappled with playing in
high-volume situations. Most just used whatever microphone was available, and
got used to the shit sound. Fiddlers, even the good ones, usually sounded
terrible. No one really played the bouzouki much then. Gradually we found decent pick-ups, and learned how to
close-mic the accordion and the bodhran so they would not howl with feedback.
In the early GBS days we acquired the first versions of the vastly superior
Takamine guitars we still lay live. Sean discovered the Sausudo whistles, the
whistle that made it possible to actually play the bloody things live. And in
1995 Alan and I bought our first bouzoukis. We used mediocre mandolin and
guitar pickups for a while, until John Littler at Headway in the UK made us
decent custom jobs. Then we had a bigger problem - what to play. We ended up
evolving into two very different styles. Alan is primarily a guitar player, so
he favours a rhythmic and chordal approach. For me, it was a just a big
mandolin. Also, I knew the flowing melodic style of Donal Lunny and Andy Irvine
- the guys who pretty much invented Celtic bouzouki. Mind you, their style
didn’t really work for us. We needed a different sound anyway; the lyrical soft
picking Lunny approach did not work at all with GBS’s power. Turn was the first album where we really figured out how to
use the bouzoukis. Alan’s style can be heard very clearly on Jack Hinks - his
bouz carries the rhythm, a tight, direct strum pattern that holds the whole
track together. We needed something different from me - I needed to be able to
play pop hooks, but at the same time keep the sound essentially acoustic and folksy.
The answer came from the Birds, half-heard on the radio. It was one of those
‘eureka’ moments. Have a listen to their ‘My Back Pages’, and then ‘Consequence
Free’. The rest should be obvious.
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Taking a macro look at this journal, which I have been
keeping for well over a year now, a couple of broad themes seem to have emerged,
at least if one is judging anything by the number of comments various topics
have generated: for example, the more intellectual and argumentative I am, the
more people are bored and uninterested. Conversely, the more revealing the
anecdote (from a GBS perspective), and the more “in character” I write, the
more popular the entry. This is not really a surprise; attempts at taking
ourselves seriously have never been to our advantage. To quote my friend Ken,
then, “dance with the one who brung ya…”. Therefore, here are some replies, to those entries that
caught my (at best) limited attention: The Moody Blues - It
was interesting that a number of people saw this piece as an attack of hippy
values; on the contrary, I was trying to express something many Gen X’rs like
myself have commented on - the envy we feel for people who grew up in era of
limitless possibility. Seen from the depression that gripped the Newfoundland
of my youth, bands like the Blues seemed to have lived in a world as foreign as
Robin Hood’s. And I rather envied them for it. Fly By Night - Fly By
Night…Fly At Night….yadda yadda yadda. The urge people have to correct a very
minor error never ceases to amaze me. When I ws a TV guide editor, I almost got
fired one Monday, after 11 of our faithful readers called, one after another,
to hurl abuse at me. Their complaint? Our listings had the People’s Choice
Awards ending a half hour earlier then they actually did. All 11 had set their
VCRs for the wrong time, and missed the last half hour. I was professionally
sympathetic to the first few, but after an hour of that foolishness, I told the
last caller to “*** off and get a life”. My boss was sympathetic, and in fact
laughed when the irate customer then called him, but felt obligated to suspend
me on principal. Quite frankly, I
would do the same now. Max Webster/Simani -
My analysis of the odd career of Simani went over fairly poorly; perhaps it was
a bit toooo local? Too bad, I thought about that one a lot. Ah well. The Max
Webster piece was a bit more popular, though one thing is clear - no one else
has a clue what the song is about either. All The Small Things
- I was delighted to see 41 responses to this rather rambling piece linking
Blink 182 to the Voice Squad - until I discovered that my ‘Comments’ had been
co-opted by some sort of Spambot. Not necessarily a bad thing - perhaps those
seeking cheap Viagra and whatnot will instead benefit from some sharp
self-satire and dazzling metaphors? Steve Miller - The
reaction to this one felt a little like the sort of discussion that goes on in
Star Trek boards. I definitely touched a nerve with the vinyl fans. A couple
even went so far as to go into rather elaborate explanations of why digital
music pales in comparison to analog. I found that rather touching, actually. I
mean, I know the difference; I am old enough to have listened, and recorded, in
both worlds. I just thought it was too boring to go into in any detail. Not so
for the defenders of analog. Burn
those CD players, trash your I-Pod! Vinyl rules! Frank Maher & Folk Festivals - See intro. The Verve - OK, I get
it. More crazy road stories which include madcap incidents, clever capers and
harebrained japes involving the band. Well, actually, now that you mention it,
there was this time with Murray, a roadie, three lesbian nuns and a blender…. Jethro Tull - I think
we can all agree now that high school sucked, (or sucks). I have now firmly got
this out of my system, and I promise never to speak of it again. Oh, what’s
that? Facebook you say? *** me. Once more into the breech!
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This one has been delayed for a while - five straight
weeks of serious GBS studio days made it hard to even think about music, not to
mention write about it. I started this a while ago, but only recently got a
chance to finish it. One of the dominant themes of this journal has been how the
songs of my youth have been filtered into my current playing and performing.
Time and time again I have commented on how pleasant it is when these songs
still connect. By way of contrast, here is one that didn’t. Jethro Tull is one of those bands that has never been cool.
Even their hay-day they were a bit of a sideshow, never favoured by critics, and never widely popular in the hit parade, but nonetheless they developed a wide audience, and were very
successful in their understated way - as folk oriented bands often are. I loved the album ‘Aqualung’ when I first heard
it. Ian Anderson’s rambling
poetry, the vaguely traditional guitar and flute based melodies, the unusual
riffs of songs like Cross-Eyed Mary - it was right up my alley in my high
school ‘blue period’. A particular favourite was Mother Goose. The flute hook,
which wraps itself around a complex guitar sequence, was particularly
brilliant. I remembered it fondly, so much so that I have consciously recreated
it a dozen times - compare it to GBS songs like ‘The Mermaid’ or ‘Gideon Brown’
for obvious examples. I was hoping for some pleasant nostalgia when I bought
the album again, almost 20 years after I first heard it. Unfortunately, it was rather disappointing. The sound was as
flat as a board, the clever lyrics now seem absurd, and the band is both loose
and uninspired. The clarity of the re-mastered CD sound does not help any of
this; instead, it just underlines how wobbly their concept album theory was.
The flute hook in ‘Mother Goose’ is still a good idea, but that was as far as
it goes. One listen was enough. Instead of inspiring a happy reverie, I felt
like I had just discovered a poem I'd written after a Grade 10 break-up. It was all
a bit embarrassing. Like everyone
else, I have my closet full of high school obsessions and passing fancies - the
Lemmy-inspired cowboy boots which almost crippled me, an all hot-dog diet,
Tolkein, my Traynor 250 watt amp, a stack of Black Flag t-shirts - all of which
I long ago abandoned. ‘Aqualung’ should have stayed with them.
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Most GBS fans remember when they first heard a particular
song. Often it was connected with a particular point in their life; a song came
along at just the right time, and caught the extreme emotion of the moment. It
is understandable, really. A lot of GBS songs are about the moment, as it were. I have a similar story, although it is not about one of our
songs. A recent afternoon spent waiting around in Hamburg airport reminded us
all of our first German tour, a fiasco of major proportions, (even by our
European standards). In the middle of a very busy autumn of 1997, we were
offered four shows supporting Del Amitri, a Scottish pop band who were
attempting a mild comeback. One more show was added at the last minute, a club
gig in Hamburg. At the time, our German label was headquartered there, and it
was felt that we should make an appearance in their backyard - in theory they
would be so excited that it would spur them into actually doing something. Right off the bat, things did not go well. In those days you
still had to fly into and out of the same European gateway (or spend a
fortune), so after an all-night trans-Atlantic flight we were forced to fly
into Hamburg and then drive like maniacs to our first gig, which was
inconveniently located in Berlin. The Del Amitri crew were complete assholes,
refusing to move so much as a mic-stand for us. We had to play in the middle of
their gear, tripping over and bumping into their numerous mics, amps, etc. With
the exception of a handful of fans (some of whom are, to our mutual surprise,
still with us), we were greeted with bemused indifference. Three more demoralizing gigs followed. Our trip to Koln was
punctuated by us getting thoroughly lost in the backstreets on the way to
soundcheck. At one point we were so tangled up in the medieval section that we
had to unload the trailer and walk it back to the main road. Even Alan, ever
the optimist, was finding it heavy going. The Del Amitri crew never got any
better, and the band completely ignored us. Saturday morning saw us making a
long drive from Koln to Frankfurt in a depressing grey mist. About halfway
there we were racing down the Autobahn when we heard a suspicious sound from
the engine. Within seconds, smoke was pouring out. Our tour manager Tony was
driving, and he managed to steer the dying van to an exit. Then it was all hands
out the door, and we pushed the very heavy rig the kilometer or so required to
get it off the extremely dangerous highway. Tony set off to a distant farm in
hopes of help, while we stood there smoking in the rain. Morale was low. Eventually he returned, and joined us on the side of the
road. Tony was not sure if his sign language had actually worked, and we were
almost surprised when a guy in a yellow jumpsuit showed up in an 18-wheel
flat-bed truck about a half-hour later. He took a 10 second look at the engine
and then turned to us. He shrugged. “Das van ist kaput.” Everyone understood that. Quickly, he attached his winch,
tipped up his bed, and hauled our van & trailer onto his truck. We all looked at each other, and Tony,
who by now was plainly in charge. “Where are we going to ride?” was the foremost thought. The repairman was not concerned. “Gehen zie…” he commanded, waving us back into the van. With
few other options, we all obediently climbed up onto the truck bed, and back
into our van. He threw a few canvas straps over us, hopped into his own cab,
and then off we went. The ride that followed is not one that anyone will ever
forget. Almost two stories above the road bed, we careened through the
countryside at high speed, tearing through tiny villages, close enough to the
second floor balconies that we could snatch flowers from the window boxes. The
van lurched and swayed like a carnival ride. At any moment we figured we would
be rolling to our deaths, but it never happened. Instead, after a scenic and
adventurous ride, we were dropped off at a sparkling new Honda dealership,
literally in the middle of nowhere. The owner and his family were celebrating a
poorly attended grand opening, or otherwise they would have been closed. In
those days, as is the case still in much of Germany, Saturday afternoon is a
serious holiday. The dealer and his family watched in amazement as we lounged
around his new showroom, eating a cake laid on for the customers, and drinking
their punch. We were starving, and it was the only food for miles. We were
plainly a nuisance, but we were beyond caring. Morale had sunk to a new low. After a lengthy conference, again in sign language, my
rudimentary German being useless in this situation, someone found us two rental
cars located in a village some distance away. Tony and Darrell went off to
fetch them, while we waited around with the thoroughly mauled cake. Eventually
they returned, and we now had to squeeze a van and trailer’s worth of gear into
two hatchbacks, Euro hatchbacks at that. We abandoned the van, thanked the
dealer and his family while pressing copies of Up into their hands, and raced
back down the Autobahn. Amazingly, we made it to the gig with seconds to spare.
The Amitri crew looked at us with distaste. We had not been missed. Again we
had to play in the midst of a forest of gear. When we emerged backstage from
our indifferently received show, we discovered that the band and crew had taken
every single dressing-room available. We had to change and eat standing in the
hallway, shoved and pushed around like high school frosh in their first day in
the locker room. Morale disappeared altogether. When we finally got to the hotel, inconveniently placed in
the suburbs a confusing half hour drive from the gig, by mutual and unspoken
consent, we booked six rooms. In those days a room to yourself was a huge
luxury, a major extravagance. After that day we never shared rooms again. We
couldn’t - spirits were so low, someone would have been killed over a reading
light. The next day it was back to Hamburg, three abreast in the
front seat of for hours in the little hatchback, not even room to cross your
arms. The Hamburg show was another debacle, with just 14 punters, a suicidal
promoter and the scariest hotel I have ever stayed in. Our record company head
turned out to be a strange hippie, who arrived on the sort of bicycle Lucy
Pevensie might have ridden, wearing enormous corduroys and pant clips (a detail
so absurd everyone later remembered it). He had never heard of us, and his
label turned out to be a pamphlet and not much else. In fact, he was just our
UK label’s local salesman. He had no budget, office, or even a car, and was
thoroughly amused at our obvious disappointment. That night I left Hotel Bizarre, and found a local beer hall
down the street, on the dodgiest fringe of the Reeperbahn. I ordered a gaseous
pint, and sat there by myself, trying to figure out what terrible miss-step had
led me to this ridiculous point. Now it is all rather funny, but at the time I was
ready to chuck the works. Out of the blue on the club stereo came this song -
Bittersweet Symphony, by the Verve. It had not been released in North America
yet, and it was the first time I had heard it. The hook was instantly killer,
but more relevant were the lyrics, “It’s a bittersweet symphony, in my
head…”. Indeed, I thought. And
then the refrain “I can change, I can change, I can change…”. My sad-eyed and silent drinking companions stared at me
resentfully, flexing their swollen knuckles, my interloper status obvious to
all. Too late, the Verve had already imparted their ounce of magic. For a
moment at least, I did not give a *** what they thought of me, nor did I care
what new nightmare the next day would bring. Germany could not defeat us that
easily. I loved that song then, and I love it now.
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![]() It has been some time since we played any festivals in
Europe. Three in a row in the past couple of weeks was a bit of an eye opener,
particularly after doing a bunch in Canada and the USA. Festivals come in many shapes and
sizes; some of the ones we attended were very well organized, and some were
not. Some we thoroughly enjoyed, and others felt like very hard work. Talking
to fans, it sometimes surprises me how little anyone knows about how and why such
events operate. By way of explanation, and to expand upon a chat Sean and I had
in a recent podcast, here is a highly personal overview of the current festival
situation, at least as it pertains to us. Be warned, these are my opinions.
Feel free to disagree. There are essentially two types of festivals, those who are
set up to make money, and those that are not. In North America, we play many events
that feel like festivals, but fall somewhere in between; for example, they take place outside with multiple band bills, lots of hippies, etc., and
feel very festival like. Generally they are produced either for profit, or by
organizations that have a mandate (and budget) to present a wide spectrum of
live entertainment. Recent shows in Lowell, Massachusetts, Northampton, Ma, and
Maine all fall into this category. The Ottawa Blues Festival is another big one in this category. Festivals like Tonder, Calgary and Winnipeg
are essentially non-profit. Money made goes to pay artists, operating expenses,
and improve facilities. This difference can be crucial. For-profit festivals tend to
be much more corporate, but also better organized, and less given to bizarre
eccentricities. Non-profit festivals tend to operate with a much looser vibe,
with a wider variety of music, and a more family-friendly feel. They also tend
to live and die by the weather, volunteer turn-out, and other ephemeral
influences. Either way, after 15 years of doing these, a few observations are
starting to emerge: - At the big
festivals, almost no one sucks. A slot on a stage - any slot, any stage - is
highly coveted. Bands and artists compete heavily for these slots, and the
result is an almost universally high standard. It might not be your cup of tea,
but it will be quality. Even if you have only heard of half the bill, your time
and money will not be wasted. I will confess that I have little or no interest
in alt-country, particularly bands who are both deliberately disorganized and
dreary. There are a lot of them at festivals these days, so I tend to pay
little attention to them. Many others disagree. So be it. Either way, there is
a plethora of fine performers out there, and only the best make it onstage
these days. - Festival organizers love workshops, particularly those
that feature a disparate group of musicians somehow sharing the same artistic
space. I have seen a lot of these over the years, although we participate in as
few as possible. Not so much because we are snobs, but because we have created
a cohesive package, one that we prefer to utilize in order to display our
material to its best advantage (such as it is). Breaking our show up into bits
and playing in some half-assed format just does not make a lot of sense. In
theory, workshops give the audience more bang for the buck. They seem to work
best when the musicians really do have something in common, i.e. style or
presentation. I saw a group of Irish musicians slay at one such mini-concert,
recently. Of course, they all shared a certain repertoire and sensibility,
which made it easy to mix and match. Workshops organized by theme do not work
quite as well. A couple of weeks ago, I watched one workshop loosely based on
a Balkan theme come completely unglued. The musicians onstage were forced to
politely endure each other’s music, music they were plainly uninterested in. At
one point, after a ten minute meandering jam, the leader plaintively said, on
mic, “Can we just please stop now?” Not ideal. - More organization does not necessarily make for a better
festival. Calgary and Edmonton are probably the most organized festivals in the
world, but it sometimes has the effect of turning the audience into children.
For example, the fuss over tarp spaces seems nuts to me. Effectively at those
festivals, you have to run a race or win a raffle to get space to lay out a
tarp or blanket, giving you 8 square feet of personal space at the main venue.
This results in some weird situations. You can see it in the audience’s eyes -
Who cares if I hate all the acts tonight, and only want to see a band on
Sunday? My tarp is here - I would rather hang out here and be miserable than
let someone else get it. In Calgary, in order to eat, for example, you had to
rent a plate, which you then had to carry around until it was time to line up
and return it to a separate window. I am all for recycling, but it felt rather
too much like a prison movie for my tastes. Many North American festivals are just as
puritanical, banning drinking, meat, sequestering dancers, preaching various
political causes at the crowd, and otherwise ensuring that everyone has the
minimum of fun. Then you go to Europe, where there is no seating to speak of,
everyone drinks and smokes like crazy, dirty kids run around everywhere, and
people camp happily in some bog up to their knees in muck…and yet somehow, no
one gets seriously hurt, and no one needs to fear a lawsuit. A different world
indeed. - Good festivals make sure that the acts are bigger than the
festival; in other words, there has to be people playing who the audience
genuinely wants to see. Festivals, particularly older ones, have a way of
losing site of the fact that they are entertainment events. No one wants to
spend their precious fun time being involuntarily educated, and the more
serious a festival is, the less people seem to turn out. The Newfoundland and
Labrador Folk Festival, in my opinion, has almost fallen victim to this
problem. For a variety of reasons, the festival has largely been abandoned by
the province’s professional musicians. While it is still a very authentic
collection of Newfoundland artists, it is now competing with a host of other
local festivals, shows which feature the cream of the province’s working
performers. Locally, it feels like the equivalent of porridge - not really what
you want to eat, but damn it, it is going to be good for you. A lot of casual
fans have been voting with their feet, and the results are shrinking gates and
wobbly finances. We have seen this phenomena taking place elsewhere, as well.
Festivals need to constantly evolve, and keep abreast of what is happening in
the music, and most important, find acts that the audience actually wants to
pay for. -Volunteers can be both the blessing and the bane of a
festival. We have met some genuinely wonderful people working at festivals, and
anyone giving up their time to perform thankless tasks needs to be
congratulated, not criticized. On the other hand, we have spent hours pulling our
hair out in frustration, stymied by volunteer crews that seem to have been
summoned directly from some particularly bureaucratic branch of the post
office. We are not unduly picky about dressing rooms, riders, and other rock
star hand-holding. We do expect to play, sound-check, show up for interviews, and otherwise do our jobs
when we are scheduled, hopefully with a minimum of fuss and bother for all
concerned. You would be amazed at how hard this sometimes is. - Young bands are struggling to take on the mantle of
headliner. In Europe, we see the same bands who have been headlining for 20
years still at the top of the bill. The situation is somewhat better here in
North America, but only just. While this is good for people like us, it is not
good for the festivals. All festivals need to find and support young acts, acts
who can build audiences and go the distance, acts who one day can draw the
large crowds that will keep these unique events strong and healthy. In light of
the above, check out Danu, Seth Lakeman, Lau, La Vent Du Nord, The Duhks, The
Sadies, Julie Fowlis, and a dozen more. They need you. - No one, not Newfoundlanders, not Germans, not even the
Irish, can drink more than the Danes. Once again, we have been humbled.
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When the button accordion came on the scene here some 150
years ago, dance players quickly adopted it wholesale. It had some huge
advantages over the fiddles and occasional tin whistles which had provided
music for dances in Newfoundland in an earlier era. For one thing, accordions are way easier to learn at a basic
level, and relatively easy to maintain.
Unlike finicky and temperamental violins, accordions were pretty much
immune to the punishments of climate. Accordions also had the advantage of
volume, something very useful at community dances where drums and guitars, not
to mention PA systems, were pretty much unheard of. I spoke before about the differences between Cape Breton and
Newfoundland traditions. If I can digress even further, the Cape Bretoners
solved their volume problem by massing fiddles, two or three together with
accompaniment from the ubiquitous parish hall piano. They also transferred many
tunes from the big pipes, which forced some complex and unusual fingerings and
styles. This has led to their complex fiddle repertoire, held in common by all
decent players, one in which virtuoso playing is held in wide regard. There is
really no equivalent in the Newfoundland tradition. There are lots of fiddle
tunes here, but they rarely make it into the repertoire of the accordionist.
Conversely, the Cape Bretoners never really took to the button accordion - too
many of their Scottish tunes would be unplayable. When I was learning to play
the fiddle, I learned dozens of Irish & Scottish tunes. They were easy to
find on record, and I found them much easier to play than the choppy and
propulsive Newfoundland tunes. Melodies which practically rolled off the
buttons on my accordions turned into complex and ugly finger exercises when
translated onto the fiddle. Diatonic accordions, (which are pretty much the
only ones used in Newfoundland), are very restricted musically. Each row of
buttons is fixed to the notes found in the scale of the chosen key. Therefore,
all the accidentals and sharps and flats that fall outside that key become
unplayable. On the other hand, the
resulting ease of playing up and down the straightforward scale allows one to
play with a forceful precision, ideally suited to step dancing, waltzes and set
dances. Forget playing fiddle tunes, for the most part - the legato sway of
good Irish reels often become clattering and popping bundles of 8th
notes, about as melodic as reciting the ABC’s. That is not too say there are not accordion virtuosos found
in abundance in Newfoundland. Two of my favourites are Vince Collins and Frank
Maher. I recorded Vince myself a few years back, for an album called Lifting
Out The Stove. Vince is an extremely old-fashioned player, with a style that
pre-dates most modern influences. His repertoire is a mix of Irish tunes,
learned from local players and half-heard Irish radio broadcasts from Boston,
and more idiosyncratic local dance numbers. He learned to play first and
foremost to accompany dancers, and you can hear the spaces he leaves for them
in every note. One of the best tunes on the album is the Irish jig The
Blackthorn Stick. This tune is very popular among uillean pipers In Ireland,
and though that weird and wonderful instrument never made the journey to
Newfoundland, you can hear echoes of them in Vince’s playing. The notes bubble
and pop, as fluid as a waterfall. On a fiddle it would be awkward, a much
slower and tortuous expression, but in Vince’s accordion the tune is as light
as a daisy. Frank Maher is the senior hand among Newfoundland
accordionists, and much loved for his ebullient character and powerful playing.
His repertoire is similar to Vince’s, a mix of Irish and Newfoundland tunes.
Unlike Vince, Frank traveled the world with bands like Figgy Duff, and has
compared his own technique to many others. He recently released his debut
album, Mahervelous, and it has some dandy tunes on it. Most instructive may be
his version of the Goat Dance, a Newfoundland set dance that by any standards
is an exercise in force. Over the years, the four tunes have been reduced to
their simplest form, in order to aid the fast and driving half-time rhythm the
set dancers prefer. Frank plays them furiously, as if he was trying to rip the
accordion in two. For a man in his seventies, it is an incredible demonstration
of the possibilities of the instrument. Although his band accompanies him,
their presence is at best superfluous. He squeezes a mighty sound out of his
simple instrument. It is easy to imagine that if he was playing alone somewhere
in an isolated outport parish hall, with dozens of dancers stomping around him,
and nary a drum nor microphone to be seen, you could be sure of one thing:
Frank and his accordion would more
than suffice.
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A while ago, I was talking about the difference between the
way we make records, and the way they used to be made. The difference can be a
little hard for a layman to understand; after all, to most people, a song is a
song. Audio quality, as long as it is decent, is probably neither here nor
there. Thus it may come as a bit of a surprise that so many older
audio critics hate Itunes (and Ipods). An MP3 is a compressed version of the
audio information available on a CD; and, it should be noted that Itunes is
just a sophisticated version of the MP3 format that has been around for a
decade or more. It is a black and white picture of something designed to be
listened to in colour. These days, a lot of musicians and engineers have grown
up familiar with the tight fizzy sound of an MP3. They are comfortable with it, and they take this reality
into account. More often than not, records made prior to the digital age suffer
the most in comparison. Three-inch tape could capture an enormous amount of
real audio information, aided heavily by the warm tube mics and solid state
pre-amps which were the only thing available in those days. That is why albums
cost so much to make thirty years ago. To do anything like a decent job
recording music, you needed a fortune in specialized equipment. I can record
and edit multi-track songs on my laptop, but the reality is, certain aspects of
the audio quality will never even approach the stuff made in the 1970s. While
recording platforms are infinitely cheaper and more sophisticated today, the
digital mics and preamps found in most studios cannot come close to the sound
offered by old solid state equipment. This is not to say that the digital age has not been a boon
to recording. Simple computer programs and dirt cheap digital-audio interfaces
mean I can make very sophisticated recordings without the benefit of an
engineer or stduio. And I can do them for practically nothing. And so can
anyone else. This is a good thing. On the other hand, the infinite editing
possibilities offered by the digital platform can be problematic. When do you
stop? Especially when endless tinkering does not cost anything? While our
studio is a mix of digital and analog, it is not free. The first thing I do
with any new client is to underline the necessity of at some point stopping. We
always remind our clients that artists usually run out of money before they run
out of inspiration. No one ever listens, but we are sympathetic. We have
learned the hard way that endless tinkering does not makes for more interesting
records. In a digital age, it is the spaces between the notes, the burst of
energy, the sudden moment of passion that can make all the difference. 35 years ago, bands had no choice. You could not go back and
overdub your enthusiasm. Tape cost
a fortune, and studio time was rare and valuable. If the band was wobbly, the
record sucked. Interestingly, sometimes the band did indeed suck, and the
result was still brilliant. Recently I downloaded Living In The USA by the
Steve Miller Band. I heard the cut on classic radio, and it stayed with me. If
you listen to it on headphones, it perfectly illustrates the sea change that
has taken place in the past decade. The song is a blues shuffle in that late 60’s San Francisco
style, complete with someconfusing hippie patriotism passing for lyrics. A squeaky
old Hammond organ and a truly crappy bass carry the hook, along with an
inordinate amount of noodly percussion, sloppy handclaps, and some honkin’
harmonica. Still, it has a great feel, all good vibes and happy grooves. Listen
to it again, and you start to hear a few things that really make it stand out
when you put it up against something from the past decade. For example, the
intro takes a full 50 seconds. These days, the radio edit would have you well
into the third chorus by this juncture. 20 seconds later, when you finally hear
the classic hook for the first time, the group half-heartedly bumbles into the
riff only to have the guitar silenced by an ungainly blast of feedback. My favourite moment comes at 1:42; for some reason the
drummer comes fully unglued, falling a full beat behind the rest of the band.
He is forced to speed up to catch everyone else, skipping along like a novice soldier. A minute later, a 60s-style
breakdown is abandoned after a dozen bars when neither the bass, guitar or
drums can agree on who is supposed to be doing what. And for the final bonus: the unrehearsed
ad-lib that covers the wandering fade contains some faux calls for patriotism;
the last audible one? “Somebody get me a cheeseburger!” They don’t make them like that anymore. It just does not
work that way.
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One of my original aims here was to illuminate the band’s
music by exploring my own influences, and trying to draw metaphors and links
between the two. Unfortunately, none of the songs I have been listening to
lately have anything to do with Great Big Sea. Of late we have all been busy
writing away like maniacs, trying to outdo one and another in the race to the
next album. When you have any time for pure listening, it is a good idea to get
as far outside the box as possible. Therefore, as it is raining, and my house
is unbearably hot, and I do not have the patience to go on and on about some
tune no one else even likes, and the last song I finished stunk, I thought I
would stick to basics for a change. Or just ramble on. Be warned. Looking back on all these pieces, it is interesting how many
songs I like because they are a bit sad. Perhaps this will give me a new
sobriquet in the band - ‘the depressed one’, or better yet, ‘the sad one’. For
years fans have accused me of being ‘the quiet one’, because I rarely say
anything onstage. In my defense, I saw the White Stripes the other night, and
that Gillis fellow hardly said anything either. And his wife or sister or
whatever never said a word. No one calls them ‘quiet’. I am also known as the
‘smart one’, mainly because I have an unhealthy ability to recall trivia of
little use to anyone, and I rarely watch TV. And unlike everyone else on the
Newfoundland music scene, I bothered to figure out how HST worked. It does not
take much, sometimes. Anyway, here are a couple of really sad songs: ‘No Rain’ by
Blind Melon, and ‘All The Small Things’ by Blink 182. Neither song is supposed
to be sad, but both are testaments to the vagaries of the rock life style, and
both have gained an unhappy tone. Blink 182 broke up in acrimony a couple of
years after this song came out. The song’s odd tone of resignation, which
always made for an unusual juxtaposition with its Ramones’ groove makes perfect
sense now. I actually feel kind of
bad that the band broke up. Their last single, with the unfortunate title ‘I
Miss You’, was a massive step forward for the band, and should have been their
turning point. Instead, it was their requiem. Blind Melon’s ‘No Rain’ was so
good even they could not surpass it. Try to put the silly video out of your
mind, and just listen to the explosion of sweet hope in Shannon Hoon’s voice.
It could not last, and it didn’t. A heroin o.d. is a particularly pointless way
to die, especially since with that one song Hoon proved he had greatness in
him. In those songs, context puts them into their emotional
place. A lot of folk songs are so unhappy context does not even need to come
into it. Try and find the Voice Squad’s version of ‘The Brown and the Yellow
Ale’. The song is about the discovery of infidelity, and the sort of
incomprehension and despair that comes with it. The melody is melancholy
without ever becoming a dirge, (which is a fine line to walk), and the lyric
pure poetry. My personal favourite from the sad song catalogue is ‘*** of the
North’, an obscure Irish song best recorded by Eddie and Finbar Furey. The
lyric is a woman’s defense of her love for the town simpleton, and the joy he
brings her with his strange, impractical and beauteous vision. Furey sings it as
if he was recalling someone he knew all too well, and his voice cracks with
emotion in the live version. Whether real or feigned, I have never heard
another song like it. In the ‘sad’ department, it is a heads-up winner. Hmmm. The ‘sad one’. I rather like it. Indeed - I shall grow a
drooping moustache, and wear even more black. Instead of trying to think of
witty remarks for podcasts, I shall keep a self-indulgent journal full of my
musings on diverse and dull topics, and I will paint grayish water-colours of cliffs
and dead caplin and abandoned gill nets. I shall write lengthy poems. And drink
unpleasant cheap cognacs. I will submit hectoring editorials blaming Canada for
all Newfoundland’s problems. The key of ‘Dm’ shall be my default setting. I am sure it will make for a refreshing change.
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The first time you go into a studio, it is enough just to
get something out that doesn’t utterly suck. As time goes by, ambition grows.
Now you want to introduce some nuances. And I do not think any seasoned band
would argue that tone is one of the hardest things to put across in music. It
is all too easy to get wrong, and all to hard to get right. One might disagree,
but just today while driving along I heard something which made the point
easier to explain. Like a lot of drivers, I switch constantly between channels,
trying to find something in ‘the great wasteland’ that I can stomach. I stopped on a station playing the
Beatles version of ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’. Ringo Starr’s laconic
delivery perfectly suits the song. In his world-weary tone it is mild tribute
to his friends in the band, the men riding life’s ups and downs with him,
watching with wry bemusement the various follies that surround them. The
station followed it up with Joe
Cocker’s histrionic version, made famous through its appearance in the Woodstock movie. In his hands the song is a completely
different beast, all intense passion, hope and despair, a different beast
entirely. If you listen to the arrangements, it comes as a surprise to realize
they are not really all that different. It’s all in the delivery. Even in my own minimal singing career, I can think of a few
times when I did not really nail what was intended. The demo of ‘Helmethead’ is
full of self-loathing and sarcasm. Somehow, the final version ended up jokey
and comedic, which wasn’t really the point at all. While poking through my Ipod the other day, I came across a
couple of songs I downloaded a while ago, and have hardly listened to since. In
the midst of this current phase of studio productivity, I have been thinking
about this problem, and these songs really stuck out. I guess I am not supposed to like Beyonce, but anyone who
appreciates talent for its own sake has to respect this creature. Genetics have
favoured her more than most; good producers have also made the difference.
‘Irreplaceable’ is as close to perfect as it gets. The music is bare, all
washed out loops and samples. The song’s power comes almost entirely from the
vocal delivery of Beyonce herself, her tone both economic and somehow florid.
The lyrics are more resigned than angry, and Ms. Knowles nails it perfectly as she
lectures her errant boyfriend in an almost conversational tone. She manages to
keep her trademark octave swoops to a minimum, dropping them in here and there
when she wants to make her point - which (not unreasonably) seems to be ‘I am
the one in charge here, take it or piss off’. In contrast to the braggart’s
world which is male R&B & hip-hop, it is actually rather refreshing. Al Stewart’s ‘Year of the Cat’ is the diametric opposite of
Beyonce’s song, but they have greatness in common. Stewart was a 30-something
ex-hippie singer-songwriter in the mid-70s, when this song came out, and to all
reports he has changed very little in the intervening period. The song has that
smooth 70s sound, combined with a great performance from everyone involved.
Lyrically it’s about getting caught up with the wrong woman, in the wrong
place, and then being unable to extricate yourself from either. Really, though,
the song is about ennui. Stewart’s delivery conveys this with every syllable.
His reading is mostly soft and laconic, but every so often he pushes his voice
a little, or clips a vowel, just to let you know what’s really going on. Solos
come and go, but Stewart is always there, aimlessly wandering the streets,
picking up books and laying them down, buying drinks he doesn’t really want.
The song would literally be nothing without him. In the studio, this is the stuff that drives us nuts. How,
exactly, does one create that sort of magic? And a worse thought - if we did,
would we know it? Or would we keep
going, driving right past the house, down the highway, and into the next town? Unfortunatly, it’s never easy.
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House-guests are often surprised at how few CDs I own.
Little do they know – this is fairly typical for musicians. It must have
something to do with the amount of music you end up carrying around in your
head. I know several word class players who do not even own a stereo, and never
listen to the radio beyond the news. While my collection is not large, it is
pretty diverse, and what has ended up on my little Ipod shuffle is fairly
representational. One of my favourite songs is a hymn, the English patriotic
song Jerusalem. It stands out in my collection, the highlight of practically
the only classical album I have ever purchased. The song is from the ‘Last
Night At The Proms’, with the BBC orchestra in London playing the last night of
their annual summer concerts, an evening always devoted to British patriotic
music. This particular version is nothing amazing, the quality is not great,
and with the audience bawling along, not particularly musical. Still, it has
that certain something. I would not say my family were Anglophiles, but older
relatives from Britain visited regularly, and even now, familiarity with
English mores has a lot of social capital in Newfoundland. In many ways
Newfoundland is still a colony, and the sort of outside approval
Newfoundlanders seem to crave is especially valued when it comes with an
English accent. Our imaginary England was not the England of the Clash and ‘Eastenders’;
it was a place full of heather, quaint pubs, chummy boarding schools and heroic
Spitfire pilots. Queen Victoria herself would have been quite at home there. When I went to university here, Oxbridge refugees still
largely staffed the English faculty, accents, gowns and the love of Wordsworth
transferred intact to their hardship post. The Oxford Book of English Poetry
loomed large in any course selection, along with lashings of Shakespeare,
Thackery and Milton. It is no wonder the archaic language of folk music comes
so easily to myself, Sean and Alan, having each of us having spent four years
immersed in the world of 18th century letters. So it is that even though I am all too aware that the real
England bears little resemblance to this bucolic world, I still have a massive
soft spot for it, and I am a sucker for songs like Jerusalem. The lyric comes
from the poetry of William Blake, an 18th century poet and artist
gripped by vivid religious visions.
In his lifetime he was considered to be a madman, but his strange output
is very highly regarded now. To him, God and the angels were personal
acquaintances, and he conversed with the biblical prophets regularly. While
much of his work is heavy going, some of his poems have a child-like
simplicity. Jerusalem is perfect in its brevity and conviction: Bring me my bow of burning gold! Bring me my arrows of desire! Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold! Bring me my chariot of fire! I will not cease from mental fight, Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, Till we have built Jerusalem In England's green and pleasant land. You can see why it has become the unofficial English anthem,
almost as popular as ‘God Save The King’. It is based on the sort of idea that
drives ‘The DaVinci Code’ – that the young Jesus visited southern England with
his cousin Joseph of Amrimathea, and while doing so, particularly blessed that
Island. Flimsy for a historian, but for someone of a spiritual or sentimental
bent, very inspiring. Blake the visionary saw his duty clearly: to try and
create the mythical Jerusalem of the prophets and the Book of Revelations in his
‘green and pleasant land’. C. Hubert H. Parry put this stirring melody to the poem in 1916, in an attempt
to stir patriotism in the dark days of WW I. It does not matter if you are an
anti-anglophile or a raging atheist, only someone with an ear of lead could not
appreciate the perfect marriage of form and function that exists in this song. And even if you are both of the above, it might do well to
remember another of Blake’s pearls, a line succinct enough to be any artist’s
motto: “The imagination is not a State: it is the Human
existence itself."
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More than once here, I have found myself referring obliquely
to the ‘Can-Con’ regulations. For the uninformed, this is a set of laws that
govern what radio and television stations in Canada are allowed to play. More
specifically, they dictate that around 30% of Canadian prime-time broadcasting
must be devoted specifically to Canadian artists. The definition of ‘Canadian’
can be complicated, and the regulations are usually under siege from
multi-national companies and American trade regulators. Still, they persist. The Canadian music industry knows how important these
regulations are – prior to their advent in the mid-1970s, the only way to get
played on radio or TV here was to become famous elsewhere. The industry was so
grateful, they named their annual awards after the technocrat who designed the
regulations – Pierre Juneux – and thus the Juno awards took flight. It took a while to get going, but by the early 1980s, a
small but healthy Canadian music business had formed. Not only were standard
pop bands gaining national recognition, some pretty weird stuff somehow came
out of the woodwork. My personal favourite from that era was Max Webster. They
started in Sarnia, an industrial town in southern Ontario, not far from
Detroit, in 1974. Heavily influenced by art rock bands like Yes and Genesis,
they wrote complex music, filled with odd shifts, lurching rhythms, and unusual
melodies and lyrics. Rush were big fans, and both bands shared the talents of
lyricist Pye Dubois. These days, they are best remembered for their front man,
Kim Mitchell. In any era Mitchell would be remarkable. Tall and and almost skeletal, he
favoured outlandish costumes and bizarre makeup. Although he later became a blue-collar
rocker, a la John Mellencamp, in the 70s he looked like he was from
Mars. Still he had a great ear for melody, and along with fellow singer Terry
Watkinson, the band created some memorable music. The song Let Go The Line comes from their high water mark,
the album Million Vacations. It is rather ironic that the album came out in
1979. It could not be further removed from the punk aesthetic that was
gathering steam at the time. Even the surreal cartoon cover reeks of 70s
artistic pretensions. As out of step as it probably was, the music is timeless,
Let Go The Line particularly so. Wistfulness is something hard to convey in music, even more
so in a rock song. Let Go The Line is all about that kind of semi-sad ennui.
The band put a lot of thought into this arrangement. It takes almost 45 seconds
for the vocals to start, an eternity these days. There is a wonderful melodic
guitar solo, the sort 70s bands like Boston did so well, the kind that have all
but disappeared from modern pop. It is echoed by one of those synthesizer lines
that are very much of the age. Sadly, it has become very unfashionable to use
those sounds – you know what I mean, vaguely spacey airy tones, a cross between
shimmering violins and a female voice. Somehow they have become cheesy. It’s
too bad – there is nothing else that conveys mystery better, and Let Go The
Line is a very enigmatic song. Long before the singing starts you know that this song lives in a different place. Life has been likened to a poker deal Or a poor brief candle or a karmic wheel All I know is that tonight I might let go the line… Watkinson’s lyrics could easily be read as a suicide note,
but there is nothing nihilistic about the melody, or the way he sings these
words I am not sure what he really meant – perhaps he is a drowning swimmer,
letting go of the rescue line. I was a kid when I heard this song the first time,
(albeit a while after it came out), and having spent a lot of time on the
water, I heard it differently. When you pull away from the wharf, ‘let go the
lines’ (or more likely, ‘cast off’) would be a command to release the ropes
keeping you tied to the dock. It would be an exciting act: the nautical
equivalent of ‘start your engines’. It might also be frightening – the ocean
here is fierce, and very dangerous. No one takes a sea voyage lightly. Casting
off might also be an act of regret: on any voyage the crew is divided into two
camps, one being those who are sailing towards, the other being those who are
sailing away. I like to believe that Watkinson found himself in-between
all those states. And he created the perfect metaphor to express that wistful
stage, somewhere perched between sadness and hope, the goal on the horizon, and
the port left behind. If we ever
get around to doing our Canadian cover album (along with our kids album, our
Oysterband tribute, our instrumental album, etc.) I think that I am going to
have a go at this one myself. It’s too good a song to be lost.
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It is funny how Newfoundland music has evolved over the past 20 years. Whether we intended it or not, Great Big Sea has had a vast influence on how the music is presented here. Our evolved pub band format has itself become an archetype. Like young people everywhere, younger musicians see this state of affairs as permanent. They do not realize that the three-and four-piece pub line-up of guitar, bass, bodhran and fiddle/accordion/whistle is a recent phenomena.
When we started doing this 20 years ago, there wasn’t really anyone else taking this approach in our part of the world, apart from our colleagues and competitors, the Irish Descendants. Other bands existed – Stogger Tight, and later the Masterless Men. However, they were casual, part-time outfits, and based themselves largely on the Irish Rovers, a band that for whatever reason we had hardly heard of. Neither of those acts played much, the members were a lot older than us, and had real jobs. Our model was a bit different - the full on approach of shouters like Fergus O’Byrne, married with the in-your-face performance and DIY attitude approach of my punk bands, and later, the well-rehearsed approach of Alan’s rock bands. The only other serious folk act in Newfoundland at the time were Rawlins Cross, and they were for all intents and purposes a rock band with bagpipes, and had little time for our pub heroics.
Now there are a dozen bands here pursuing our model, (such as it is), with God knows how many out there in Ft. McMurray, Cambridge, Ottawa and other centres of the Newfoundland diaspora. Yet, like everything else in Newfoundland culture, it was all a bit of a fluke. We have often talked about how influential bands like Ryan’s Fancy and the Wonderful Grand Band were, but by the time we were teenagers, no one was really listening to them. By far the most popular and influential Newfoundland band was Simani. If their influence had been maintained, or if they had been a little bit younger or more charismatic, then it all might have been very different indeed.
Simani have faded off the radar in Newfoundland, and they never made it onto the radar anywhere else in the country. For a time, however, their music was by far the most popular of any group in the province, and their distinctive sound created a whole musical movement. The band was a duo, actually, made up of Sim Savoury and Bud Davidge. (‘Sim and I’, in other words, the sort of pun much loved by Newfoundlanders). Davidge sang, and played guitar, while Savoury played accordion, mandolin, and also played bass pedals and ran the PA. Simani also embraced the tick-tock sound of the drum machine, and popularized the device among Newfoundland performers. They started playing in 1977, and made their first album, Salt Water Cowboys, shortly after.
It was an instant hit, and the two went onto record a dozen more albums over the next 15 years or so. They had a very distinctive sound. Unlike the groups that GBS has spawned, Simani seemed either oblivious or just uninterested in pop music, Irish acts like the Clancey Brothers, or anything else that came out of the 60s folk revival. Their model was simple – classic country, a la Hank Williams, Johnny Cash and Ray Price, married with Newfoundland-style button accordion. Davidge was a fine singer, with a rich baritone, and Sim was a great arranger and instrumentalist, with a good ear for a hook. They wrote almost all of their own material, and apart from a few instrumental sets, rarely played anything I would call traditional. The sort of country music they loved had (and has) a huge following in Newfoundland, and Simani was one of the first local bands to get airplay alongside the more easily absorbed mainstream North American acts. They did not tour a lot, but their tapes sold in the tens of thousands, so well in fact that the two set up a very successful recording studio and tape manufacturing factory, both in the tiny fishing villages on the isolated south coast where they lived. Dozens of other bands followed their model, many of whom are still going strong today, still packing them into outport lounges, with their blend of high-twang country and soft, sentimental accordion. They played for a largely older audience, but one that absolutely loved them.
Let me say that I was often doubtful about Simani; they embraced a level of Newfoundland cliché that made me very uncomfortable, and their explicit encouragement of the term ‘newfie’ pissed me off. Like a lot of older Newfoundlanders, they were fine with it, and seemed oblivious to the negative connotations the term carries. They did not like St. John’s very much, hardly ever toured here, and made no secret for their dislike of townie folk pretensions. Their heavy use of drum machines was irritating, made worse by the hundreds of imitators who jumped on their band wagon.
That said, they wrote and recorded a couple of some great songs, songs that deserve a place on any Ipod. Their best is the ‘Mummer’s Song’, a Xmas song that dominates radio stations and house parties around here at the Yuletide. It is very, very good, but it is also a novelty song, and well outside their normal repertoire.
More interesting to me was their song ‘The Wreck of the Marion’. Shipwreck songs are common in Newfoundland archival collections, but they have pretty much evaporated from local songwriting. It was left to Simani to write the last of the great ones. The song is about an incident which took place within living memory, when a small Newfoundland banking schooner and it’s skipper, both from the south coast community of St. Jacques, ran into trouble with an aggressive captain from the nearby French island of St. Pierre. The Marion disappeared after a dockside confrontation in St. Pierre, and local people believed that the two captains had settled their accounts with a battle at sea, a battle which left no trace of the Marion.
The song has clever lyrics, an unusual story, and unlike most others of its genre, an anthemic chorus. It is the only song of Simani’s which continues to be sung and recorded by younger bands. It deserves the tribute. It has also stayed with me for another reason. Around the time GBS was getting rolling, I was visiting with an elderly family member, who came from the same area as both Simani and the Marion. She remembered the disappearance of the Marion very well, and had mourned the crew with others from her community. For me, it was a surprise, a sudden shift sideways, into someone else’s reality. Up to then, all the lyrics of the traditional songs I knew pretty much existed in a parallel world – I loved them, but all the talk of ‘ships in sail’ and ‘milk-white steeds’ and what-not really had little to do with my life. For Aunt Essie, however, this song was part of her own story. Traditional music sometimes has that ability – it can open a window you didn’t know existed and draw a connection with the past, in a way which just does not happen elsewhere in life. ‘The Wreck of the Marion’ was original, but Simani wrote their song so well it both embraced and became part of the tradition, and in doing so, made the circle whole. We should all be so lucky.
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The wanderlust that drives many a musician into the world often wanes as careers rise and fall. While I hate the tedium of airports and such as much as anyone, my enthusiasm for going somewhere different has never waned. My favourite time on any tour bus is the early morning, before anyone else is up, when I can just sit by the wide windows and watch the world change in front of me. And even thought their lifestyle is probably pretty grim, there is a part of me that envies the Travelers of the British Isles, and the French Gitane, with their caravans, ponies, and delight in the open road. I am lucky that I found a way to make a living and indulge in a piece of that fantasy, while still avoiding many of its hardships. One day I will write a song that captures this paradox. In the meantime, others have already done so. As Irish songs go, Sullivan’s John is a bit obscure. I heard it somewhere back in my pub days, and liked it enough to learn all the words. Fortunately, I never ruined it by playing the song with a band, so it has remained a personal favourite. Ostensibly, the song’s narrator is warning the eponymous John against running off with a tinker (an Irish Traveler) girl, and and taking up the life of the road. Oh Sullivan's John, to the road you've gone far away from your native home. You've gone with the tinker's daughter, for along the road to roam. Oh Sullivan's John, you won't stick it long, 'til your belly will soon get slack. Up along the old road, with a mighty load. and your toolbox on your back. The only recording of the song I have, by the 60’s ballad band Sweeney’s Men, perfectly captures the song’s irony. While the narrator’s warning is quite dire, the song’s tone is anything but. The rather cheery melody undermines any dour threats. Instead of foreboding, the narrator just ends up sounding envious, as if he too would like to take off down the road with a beautiful tinker (girl or boy). And on a dull, grey day, when the office or the cares of the world are closing in on you, who wouldn’t? Fly By Night, by Can-Con heroes Chiliwack is a very, very different song, but I think it’s creative impulse comes from the same place. Led by the golden voice of Bill Henderson, Chilliwack were a 1970’s Canadian band that managed to take advantage of the new Canadian content regulations of that era. Aimed at getting more Canadian music on the airwaves, the Can-Con laws created a domestic music industry overnight. A wave of bands poured across the country in the wake of that sea change, and Chillwack were one of the best. The song is supposed to be an extended riff about the experience of taking an overnight airplane flight, but it feels a lot more like a driving song. The guitars rumble along in perfect Chuck Berry fashion, creating as evocative a representation of the turn of the wheel as I have ever heard. More than half the song consists of a unique vocal hook, layer after layer of Henderson’s high, perfect voice, keening like a siren in harmony with himself. You cannot hear it but find an echo of the prairie wind, blowing through the telephone wires that parallel the highway in those wide-open places. Finally, the song both begins and ends with a perfect quatrain: Four men in a rock and roll band, Fly at night, in the morning we land Fly at night ‘til we’re satisfied… See the morning from the other side… Words to stir the heart of the vagabond.en in a roll bandFly at night in the morning we land Fly at night 'til we're satisfied
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