Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Morning Glory / Alewives




Andy was almost falling on the floor he was laughing so hard as he relayed the story of how his latest song title, "The Greatest Show on Earth" had come to him. He was thinking about the ridiculous claim our employer, Sam the Record Man was making in their use of "The Greatest Store on Earth" as their motto. The. Greatest. Store. On. Earth. It is pretty funny. It's fucking ridiculously, screamingly, fall on the floor funny if you are in the right mood for and are the right kind of person for that kind of funny.

It reminded me of the night Tim and I wandered around Richard's neighbourhood, in the midst of an evening spent drinking Jack Daniel's in the shed behind Kevin and Richard's house - the shed the two of them had built and decorated with empty pop cans, empty cartons of Marlboro's, and an enormous confederate flag poised above a sign in support of the local Reform party candidate, both intended as a joking affront to their liberal-minded friends. By the time I caught up to Tim, he was keeled over on the curb trying to intake oxygen amidst his laughter as he pointed at - unable to speak - the street sign declaring "Gaylord Avenue." It's just fucking stupid how funny that was.

The first time I heard Alewives, I thought: I bet this is what Morning Glory would sound like now if they were still a band. The first time I saw Andy on stage, his guitar hanging loosely over his shoulder, leaning into the amplifier, his back - probably intentionally - to the audience, I was reminded of Tim. They both carry themselves in this casual way that I suppose the term "indie rock" has kind of become synonymous with. They both look so free-spirited and authentic and like they don't care about anything except the rock and roll they're playing. But before there is the practicing, then the nervousness, the serious consideration of song order, and afterwards, "Did everyone notice where I messed up?" "Do you think that new song went over well?" "Do they like me?"

It was super fun being an Alewives fan with my friend and roommate Sydney. We're both music nerds, but our tastes often differ. Not entirely unreasonably, Sydney once said to me, "Not all pop songs have to sound like Brian Wilson could have written them, you know." She's way into Blondie and Tori Amos, and I guess I don't really get those guys. And yeah, she thinks my tastes are a bit too precious and predictable, I think. But we both really, really love The Replacements. And I knew that she would love The Alewives. Not that they're all derivative or anything, but they come from the same place. They have the same sound. And nothing says high school like that sound.

It was, oh so appropriately, Tim who first introduced me to The Replacements, when he put "Bastards of Young" on a mix tape he made for me when we were in grade twelve. He gets credit, too, for Pixies, The Lemonheads, NOFX, and for a bunch of local bands reserved for a future blog entry.

My friends Tim and John were the core of Morning Glory. They wrote the songs, and played guitar and bass. They had a couple of drummers - first Steve and then Dave. They had a band room in Tim's basement, where the drum kit was permanently set up, and I sat against the wall and listened to them rehearse for hours. I knew all the words to "Sadfish" and "Where Am I?" and "Here I'm" and "Spaceship of Life." Once they played a show there. They named the practice room "Potatoland" for the evening and bought a flat of beer that we all guzzled down, across the street at the vacant "White House" (a house used as a real estate office, where we would often go to smoke cigarettes) during intermission, and presumably unnoticed by his parents. Man, Tim's parents must have been pretty cool.

Morning Glory got to play some shows down-town, in all-ages venues like The Silver Shack and Classic Studios. Abby, Jackie, Paul, Brandon, Sean and I were the most hardcore Morning Glory groupies, and we'd take the subway down-town to cheer them on, to be in the midst of this scene that felt incredibly cool. We'd sing along and hoot and jump up and down and then help carry their amps and instruments.

Classic Studios was the venue they played most often, it seems to me. It was a dim, open room with low ceilings, below Ossington Avenue, a stone's throw from the Queen street Mental Institution, and it shared its address (it was something-and-a-half Ossington Ave.) with the fish and chips restaurant upstairs. The place was owned or managed by a conscientious, well-intentioned man who seemed genuinely concerned about the kids - such as myself - who over did it. He knew he wasn't serving us alcohol, but he didn't seem to be aware of the convenience store down the street where under-aged kids could buy bootlegged liquor.

Going into the city, to these shows, taking the subway home in the wee hours of the morning, drunk and exhausted, I always felt so grown up. I felt like I was looking at my future. My cool, hip, rock and roll future.

For my 29th birthday Sydney made me an Alewives t-shirt, and a matching one for herself. We talked about making an Alewives zine, but we got too busy with other stuff, or we got too lazy, and then she moved away to BC. I loved going to those shows with her, like I loved waiting at the bus stop and standing right up at the front of the stage with Abby.

The kind of authentic, energetic rock and roll that Alewives play makes me feel nostalgic, and not in some bullshit I'm-too-old-to-rock way, just as a reminder of how and why music matters. It reminds me of discovery. It reminds me of the way something so simple can be so awesome, so intoxicating, so fun. It's about the moments when I'm not asking, "Do they like me?" "Why does that work?" "What happened?" We pick ourselves up off the floor or the curb and we go back to work or back to our friends, and that old, sinking, other kind of reality sets in again.

Thank God for three-minute rock songs and sloppy boys with electric guitars.

Saturday, October 11, 2008

Lik My Vacuum


Perhaps the best present I've ever been given was the one I received for my eighteenth birthday, from my friend Aidyl. A year ahead of me, I missed her presence at Martingrove during my final year of high school while she was enjoying her first year at Ryerson, where she was studying Radio & Television Arts. Having access to a super cool studio and the equipment it housed, she made me a cassette tape that played like a radio program for my birthday.

Aidyl and I were friends for the duration of my time at Martingrove, first becoming acquainted when I was in the ninth grade, in a tiny room where members of the Auditorium Facilities Crew hung out during lunch hour. Our friendship varied in degrees of intensity. Both of us were social creatures who were comfortable and friendly with a number of diverse groups of people, but where her friendships often included the sportier set, mine eventually leaned towards the smokers who congregated outside of the cafeteria in an area commonly referred to as "the outback"; and particularly those smokers who were especially eccentric and determinedly unaligned with the extra-curricular activities that I (and Aidyl) also enjoyed, such as the Martingrove Stage Company and the aforementioned Auditorium Facilities Crew. Aidyl and I would go for long periods of time, immersed in our own, separate things, and then reconnect for a week or two of near constant companionship.

Aidyl and I both loved to sing, and this was one thing that definitely bound us. It was with her that I started my first "band." In actuality, we were a duo who performed once, on the stage in the auditorium at Martingrove Collegiate, during the annual "Martingrove Jam," a glorified open mic.

We called ourselves 12 Eagle Road, taking the name from the address of the "crazy lady" who lived on a side street near Bloor and Islington. Our friends and ourselves used to delight in driving slowly and repeatedly past the paranoid woman's house, and in watching her increasingly insane reactions to our presence there. She would yell, "Get off the road, you sons and bitches!" which would always put us into hysterics. She was always threatening to call - and actually did call - the police. She took our photographs and even brought out a video camera, for which my friends and I performed Monty Python sketches on one occasion.

For our debut - and final - performance as 12 Eagle Road, Aidyl and I had each written original songs. Here, I will boldly include the chorus from the first song I ever wrote with my guitar. Much of my high school existence having been defined by being painfully and unrequitedly in love with one of my best friends, Tim, it is of course appropriate that my first song would have been about him. The stupid, embarrassing chorus went, "Well it's hard to be your friend / When my feelings aren't correct." Aidyl's song was better, but I'll let her decide for herself whether or not she wants it exposed.

We listened to and sang along to so much music together. Particularly fond are my memories of singing along to the Les Miserables soundtrack. We collectively, particularly, dug then-popular CanCon fare like Blue Rodeo, The Waltons, Barenaked Ladies, and - yeah, really, ugh - Moxy Fruvous.

Lik My Vacuum is the name that Aidyl gave to the cassette she made me - a take-off on The Waltons' Lik My Traktor. It was a record of our high school experience together and a testament to the endurance of memories, if not location or musical taste or even enduring friendship. I don't even have Lik My Vacuum anymore. Along with all of the other cassettes I used to own - and many other valuable possessions of mine - they disappeared from the basement of a house I used to live in, which is another story altogether. I am almost over these things that I lost, but I still don't like to talk about it.

It was Aidyl's birthday yesterday, and I was reminded of all the birthdays that we shared together during high school. I thought about the surprise party Tamie and I hosted in my basement - the one that Charlie showed up to drunk, a short while before I really had friends who drank, or drank myself. I remember one year Aidyl gave me a diary for my birthday, and the good use I made of that over the following year. And most of all, I remembered how impressed and delighted I was to receive Lik My Vacuum. I listened to it all the time. I couldn't believe someone had gone to so much work to show me that I meant something to them. It sucks that it's gone, but I can't imagine I'll ever forget the majority of the songs on Lik My Vacuum. In fact, I bet I could still sing along to every one of them.
*Aidyl and I did not look that old when we were in high school. That picture was taken last December.

Monday, October 6, 2008

Kids' Prayer




Sean and I had only been dating for about four months when we decided to take the bus all the way from Toronto and across the provincial border to Manitoba for the Winnipeg Folk Festival. By the time we were out of Thunder Bay, I don't think either of us could have fathomed that we were to stick it out together for another three and a half years. It is trying to be on a bus for twenty-four hours, especially when all there is to look at is the endless expanse of trees. Northern Ontario is the most boring place on earth. I much prefer the hopeful, straight-forward horizon of the prairies, or the unexpected turns on slim mountain roads, to the succession of evergreens - the imposing forest through which you can never see the trees or the wildlife or any further evidence of the people who presumably utilise the ever-present power lines. Plus we were exhausted, and trying to combat this with the worst bus station coffee. I still maintain that the best cup of coffee I ever had was at the Winnipeg Folk Festival. I may have just uncovered a reason for this.

Whenever we got upset with one another, Sean would refuse to communicate. I think he reasons that he doesn't want to say anything regrettable when he's angry, but THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT I WANT TO DO! I don't mean that I want to say all kinds of horrible things, but that I want to address things immediately, and immediately also means emotionally, and of course I am either crying or yelling. The wall he would put up would just make me more incensed. And then we'd both get all defensive in the very same way and it would be just horrible. It was like that in Thunder Bay. I can't for the life of me remember what we said we were fighting about; I only remember how I felt, and that sensation of being so far from home with all of that time stretched out ahead of us.

But such were the recuperating powers of a grassy field, a lightning storm, and a beer tent, that we were making jokes about how we almost broke up there when our bus pulled into the Thunder Bay bus terminal on our trip home.

There wasn't anyone either of us were dying to see at the Winnipeg Folk Festival, though I was pretty excited about seeing Dan Bern and Dar Williams. Mostly, I wanted to go because I'd heard great things about the event, and because I wanted to sleep outside in a tent and stay up all night listening to or be woken up by music from within my temporary canvas home. I also wanted to hang out in Winnipeg and have a beer at the Royal Albert, because Rheostatics - my very favourite band - have such a connection to the city and that venue in particular. It was a bit of Canada I hadn't explored as a willing and alert participant and I wanted to see what is was like there. (When I was two, I stopped there with my parents on a cross-country train trip, and I used to maintain that my earliest memory was of zooming my batman hotwheels car across the floor at the train station in Winnipeg, but that seems way too specific to be an actual memory of an experience belonging to a two-year-old.)

A series of frustrations ensued after exiting the Greyhound bus. It took us ages to locate the spot where the shuttle bus would meet us to take us to the field the festival was being held at. Then it took us ages to assemble our borrowed tent. And finally, once we were inside our tent, a downpour that would wreak havoc on the grounds began. A lightning storm on the prairies is a terrifying and mesmerising thing. Watching lightning hit the earth like that - and so close by! - is truly one of the most awesome things I have ever seen. I don't know what Sean was thinking, telling me that story about the time he was camping with his family, as a kid, and lightning hit the metal pole supporting their tent. It was another sleepless night.

The sun was out in the morning. The best cups of coffee EVER in hands, Sean and I went to see some workshops. All of our clothes were soaked, and every step we took was into the slimy, unavoidable mud that the ground had become overnight. But we really didn't seem bothered by that.

Knowing we'd have other opportunities to see Dan Bern, we seriously debated checking out Hawksley Workman instead. We didn't know his music, but had been hearing good things. The eventual deterrent was the press photograph that we thought made him look like an asshole, and thank goodness for that photograph.

In a small tent along with maybe fifty other audience members, Sean and I got to be a part of what remains one of the most moving live music experiences of my life. Expecting "Tiger Woods" or even "Wasteland," Dan Bern blew my mind with his take on the Columbine shootings. There's nothing I can say about what he says in this song. It's explicit. It's perfect. Read the lyrics provided here, if you will. After the storm and the bus ride from hell and the sunny reprieve, the song just stunned me with its immediacy and honesty.

The rest of the week-end was great. We ran into an old friend of mine from Halifax. We got to hear Dar Williams. We were impressed by Martin Sexton. We got drunk but not too drunk. We took pictures of our mud-caked feet and legs. We laughed at our discomfort. We slept in a tent.

But the best part of the whole week-end was hearing Kids' Prayer - this thoughtful and extraordinarily moving song inspired by this very big and terrible thing that happened to a bunch of ordinary kids at an ordinary high school. It made everyone think and feel be glad they got to be there for that performance. It's kind of what I was hoping a folk festival would be like.


Kids' Prayer - Dan Bern
So sad, so sad, the news come our way this morning
Like a bad dream, a dream you never even talk about
In a school, a school, where they send our precious children
The one place of innocence the world might ever let them know
And barely aware of the odds against existence in the first place
Of love and fertility, of risk of a baby being born
And of food and clothes and fear and maybe relocation
Of sickness, recovery, of music lessons, painting the garage
And lingering over eggs and thoughts and sleepy conversations
And plans for the weekend, and one last pause to pet the dog
And a glance at the clock and the grabbing of the sandwich and the notebook
Confident of nothing but the unbroken days that they've been granted
But comes a child, a child so full of anger and hatred
Barely aware of the genesis coursing through his veins
With a gun, a gun, deaf and blind deliverer of madness
Skilled in its efficiency beyond his own unformulated brain
And with his hand in a fist, and his soul in a knot and his heart racing
And his mind sick with images, his slim shoulders finally feeling tall
And his fellow creatures, school kids in their crushes and their daydreams
Struggling to unwrap the ancient secrets of geometry
And he pulls from his coat the instrument to shatter all forevers
In a random blaze of insides and blood and endless now
And boom and flash and more and not even when it's over
Can any of them so much as summon up the sanity to scream
And on the floor his classmates blown down, and choking
As he lays his weapon on his desk, partly sure he isn't dreaming
And all the world descends, and offers up their condolence
And offers up their theories what went wrong and who and why and when and how
It's all the killing day and night on television
It's all the movies where violence is as natural as breathing
It's guns and bullets as easily obtainable as candy
It's video games where you kill and begin to think it's real
It's people not having God in their lives anymore
Or it's all of it, or none of it, or some of it, in various combinations
Now all these theories, sound pretty logical I guess
Though I ain't no scientist, I ain't no dissector of statistics
I ain't no theologist, I ain’t no psychologist or biologist
All I can do is offer up a prayer of my own
Talk to your kids, play with your kids
Tell them your dreams, and your disappointments
Listen with your kids, and listen to your kids
Watch your kids, let your kids watch you
Tell your kids the truth, best as you can tell it
No use telling lies, your kids can always smell it
Cook for your kids, let your kids cook for you
Sing with your kids, teach your kids the blues
Learn their games, teach them yours
Touch your kids, find out what they know
Be sad with your kids, be stupid with your kids
Embarrass your kids, let them embarrass you
Be strong with your kids, be tough with your kids
Be firm with your kids, say no to your kids,
Say yes to your kids, take it easy on your kids
You were a kid not so long ago
There’s things you know, your kids will never know
There’s places they live where you will never go
So dance with your kids, paint with your kids
Walk with your kids, tell stories to your kids
One day your kids, won’t be kids
And maybe they'll have kids of their own
Let's hope they talk to their kids,
play with their kids
Tell them their dreams, and their disappointments….

Sunday, October 5, 2008

Moondance (the album)




I discovered Van Morrison's "Moondance" while working at Sam the Record Man on Barrington street. So I was pretty late arriving there. My co-workers/bosses/friends Sean and Andy in particular made fun of my enthusiasm with responses like, "Yeah, we know, good record. It came out in 1970." Across from the front desk at Sam's there was always a collection of budget cd's. We referred to this area as the "Wow Wall" for the enormous letters spelling "WOW" that were attached to the flat board above the cd's to indicate the wow-worthy bargains to be had. A perennial Wow wall title was "Moondance" and it was Jonathan Andrews who properly introduced me to this album. The two of us certainly played it to death for those co-workers with less approving ears.

Jonathan's picks were all over the place, and he turned me onto and off of all kinds of artists. Working cash by his side was always a bit of a crap shoot. While his temperament was not as eclectic as his musical taste there were certainly days that I loved working with him and days that I hated it. Of all of the friends I made and relationships that developed while working at Sam's, none feels more honest or more familiar than my relationship with Jonathan (I am excluding Sean from this assessment altogether, for the long and intense and complicated relationship we had before he ever hired me). And when I say "familiar," I really do mean that quite literally. He felt like family, like a brother, and that's the only reason I didn't let his indifference and dark moods get the better of my over-sensitive nature.

When Jonathan was in a good mood, and seemed glad for my company, he was so much fun to work with. He can be remarkably easy-going, and I can see how he might make a pretty crappy tenant or nerve-wracking roommate because of this, but not being in either of those positions, it's something that always amazed and impressed me about his character. He has given me his very last cigarette without having funds for more, when asked for one, on more occasions than I can count, despite my astonishment and attempts at refusing his gesture. He has quit jobs that made him unhappy without having back-up plans. He has a lot of faith in the people in this world; in things always working out.

But back to music.
Jonathan would listen to everything. Artists whose cd's he loved to play included Guided by Voices, Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Stephen Malkmus, LCD Soundsystem, and Huey Lewis & the News. Myself and Scotty kept conspiring to hide the Back to the Future soundtrack on Jonathan (he always found it, don't ask me how), which of course he eventually only played to piss us off, but I really believe he actually did like Huey Lewis a lot.

He would play Stan Rogers' Fogarty's Cove all the time. That's a great album, but it's a bold move for anyone working in the coolest record store in town, just minutes away from pubs who make their bread and butter by being host to Celtic rock bands playing endless covers of "Barrett's Privateers" to university students who don't give a shit about music but know all the words to that famous song about the Halifax pier.

While Jonathan's friends and peers played in weird indie rock bands, he was championing and eventually playing music with Halifax legends like Al Tuck and the all-but-forgotten Matthew Grimson. While always staying in touch and engaged with new releases, he was also investigating everything that came before, without any agenda except for hearing something great that he had never heard before and finding some musical mentors. He was always learning. And he was always so enthusiastic about sharing what he had learned. Jonathan's first solo album "Halifax Indie Rock" is a self-conscious and earnest homage to just that mentality. I love the name. And I loved how he stood behind the display of his cd's - the face on the cover clearly identifiable as his own - that stood in front of the counter at which he rang in customers' purchases. There's not a hipster bone in Jonathan's body. I'd say he was wise beyond his years in some respects, but he doesn't carry it like wisdom. He's too playful. Maybe it's just so rare to come across a really genuine person who is so difficult to pigeon-hole.
Every now and then I run into someone who knows about and likes to talk about music in that geeky way we had at Sam's. I never realise how much I miss these conversations until I leave one feeling so refreshed and excited. I miss working at Sam's. I miss poring over release sheets and being excited about new release Tuesday, and I miss hearing classic albums like "Moondance" for the very the very first time, courtesy of people who just have to show me why they're such classics. I miss my friends.






Moondance - Van Morrison


(the album)