Bidiniband - The Motherland

Bidiniband – The Motherland (Pheromone)

How angry is too angry? When you kick ass, must you also take names?

Writing political music is never easy. Precious few do it well, fewer still do so by employing specifics; those that do risk being relegated to time capsules (hello, Phil Ochs). Even the most virulent songs about Margaret Thatcher—during one of the most fertile periods in British pop music history—didn’t usually mention her by name.

But boy, is Dave Bidini ever pissed—and it’s crystal clear who’s pissing him off. Like the rest of us, he’s been living under Stephen Harper’s Conservatives for the past eight years; unlike most of the rest of us—who give Harper more votes in every election—Bidini can’t bear to withstand what he sees as the rampant destruction of the country he loves dearly. “All hail Canada,” he sings. “We’re number one in all the things the world believes we used to represent.”

The Motherland is a concept album—or maybe it’s just still unusual, even in our post-Stompin’ Tom landscape, for a Canadian artist to write an entire series of songs about the state of our nation and signs of the times. Bidini knows that he’s now an elder statesman in an industry that doesn’t favour veterans: “The world is 18, but I’m a has-been or never, nor ever, nor was.” As a result, there’s a tiny bit of grumpy grandpa at work here—except that for better or worse, Bidini writes with the bite and bile of youth, subtlety be damned. The man is 50 years old; he’s angrier about corporate agendas and environmental devastation than most 20-year-old songwriters are. And he’s probably angry about that, too. (He should be.)

His aim is true. The question is whether the songs are as strong as his intent.

“All Hail Canada” is a prime example: musically, it boasts the strongest melody here, and his band is on fire. Lyrically, it opens with two lines that sum up the entire record: “I hate to think that everything could disappear in four small years / but you and me won’t ever see what lurks behind their dark veneer.” Yet Bidini then almost completely regresses to the amateurism of a pamphleteering protest singer with the chorus: “All hail Canada / we know what’s best / the only country but the States to not sign the Kyoto Accord.” A valid point, yes—but it might well be the clunkiest, arrhythmic line by a great writer ever since Billy Bragg—who usually knows much better—decided to frame a chorus around the phrase “no power without accountability.” Sadly, it’s not the only line like that in that song.

Does this matter? Don’t times like these almost demand a blunt response? Surely I can’t lament the lack of political songwriters and then cringe slightly when someone like Bidini calls it like he sees it. I also can’t worry about whether or not these songs will stand up to scrutiny five or 10 years from now; that’s a classic pitfall of rock dudes who are always quick to dismiss something as a fad or a trifle if they think it’s not something “that’s going to last” (see also: rock dudes’ treatment of ephemeral pop and dance music in general).

There’s zero question about the band behind him: wiz guitarist Paul Linklater, drummer Don Kerr and bassist Doug Friesen can do anything, and Bidini remains a highly underrated rhythm guitarist. He’s also a prolific prose writer; not surprisingly, there are moments of both beauty and effective bile here (“The Grey Wave” and “The Fatherland,” respectively). “Ladies of Montreal” is a wonderfully silly romp exoticizing the Québécoises, with guest vocalist Selina Martin rhapsodizing about “le vin, le pot en p’tites culottes.” “Say the Names” sets an Al Purdy poem to a lilting rhythm, a trio of angelic female voices and a trumpet solo; it’s the loveliest thing Bidini has done since the dissolution of the Rheostatics.

At a time when almost no one is writing political songs—in a hyper-politicized age, no less—I want Dave Bidini to succeed. I’d love Bidiniband to back up Kyp Harness (check his new Armageddon Blues) or collaborate with Bob Wiseman or just start a movement with Geoff Berner and John K. Samson and Tanya Tagaq and Kinnie Starr and Freedom Writers and anyone else who has several dozen bones to pick with the federal government. The Motherland is not the record to do that, but that doesn’t mean Bidini and everyone else should ever stop trying to write songs this country deserves. Dave Bidini, being who he is, is never going to stop. (This review ran in the Waterloo Record, July 3)

Download: “The Fatherland,” “Ladies of Montreal,” “Say the Names”

Bidiniband, John K. Samson

John K. Samson – Provincial (Anti)

Bidiniband – In the Rock Hall (Pheromone)

If Canadian rock had men of letters, Dave Bidini and John K. Samson would be two-thirds of a triumvirate alongside Gord Downie. Bidini, of course, is the author of 10 books about music and hockey (his latest, Writing Gordon Lightfoot, is one of his best), and for over 25 years he was a principal songwriter in the Rheostatics, arguably the most creative Canadian rock band of the ’90s. Samson is the barely prolific songwriter at the core of the Weakerthans, who with only four albums in the past 14 years became one of Canada’s most beloved bands, primarily on the strength of Samson’s prose (which he just collected into his first book, Lyrics and Poems 1997-2012).

Both men have always excelled at setting unlikely characters and situations inside compelling and moving songs. Until recently, they’ve always had help from sympathetic bandmates with whom they grew up, musicians who knew instinctively how to cast every quirky quote. Both men’s solo careers challenge them to think outside the box and make full use of new creative opportunities.

Granted, both had wide leeway before: Samson’s pop-punk bandmates have never stopped him from reciting poetry about retired NHL goalies over a detuned banjo and scraped percussion; the Rheostatics’ best and worst trait was that they were capable of and willing to try anything, making them the Canadian equivalent of equally influential and misunderstood American cult bands like the Minutemen and Camper Van Beethoven.

So what are these two bards up to now?

This is Bidiniband’s second album, so they have the upper hand. The debut, 2009’s The Land is Wild, seemed more like Bidini’s non-fiction writing hurriedly set to music—songs to be played at in-store appearances in between reading passages from his books. Here, his seasoned backing trio have been whipped into shape by regular gigging, to the point where they’re almost as sympathetic as the Rheostatics were to Bidini’s nuances. They obviously share his love of Devo, XTC, The Who and Max Webster, elements that were a small part of the Rheostatics’ avalanche of influences, but are brought to the fore here. And not in an imitative way, either; Bidiniband sounds most like, well Dave Bidini.

In fact, In the Rock Hall sounds far better than any record from the last 10 years of the Rheostatics’ discography, because this band knows how to push Bidini, and he’s more than willing to push back. There’s an explosive, though good-natured, musical tension at work here—largely the work of incredibly elastic guitarist Paul Linklater—watching these men throw endless curveballs at each other before uniting over three simple power chords and four-part harmony in a chorus (Bidini is singing better than he ever has). This is most evident on a recasting of the 1994 Rheos song “Earth,” which Bidiniband rescues from the bloated prog-rock mess of the original and transforms into a driving stadium-rock anthem. Mind you, Bidiniband has its own prog-rock mess in the form of “Eunioa,” a 10-minute adaptation of Christian Bök’s book of poetry that will really only appeal to anyone who understands what a “univocal lipogram” is.

There’s a nautical theme throughout—though there’s no reason for a native English speaker to write a song with the phrase “Big Men Go Fast on the Water” as a chorus (unless this originates as an odd translation of an Aboriginal name). Obvious novelty songs like “Popcorn” and “The Best Thing About the ’80s Was You” sound more like well-produced bar-band set-fillers than anything else—but hey, so do most of the Black Eyed Peas’ greatest hits, and (much to my chagrin) these earworms are just as catchy, if not more so, and not as dumb.

The performances—as well as the production from longtime partner in crime Michael Philip Wojewoda—outshine many of the actual songs, most of which are a baffling series of seemingly non-sequitur images and phrases. (There’s also a queer fondness for the word “tits.”) “I Wanna Go to Yemen,” Bidini sings—but why? “I’ve been waiting all this time to shine a light.” Is this a song about the Arab Spring? Doesn’t sound like it. And: “I want to see your face, eyeliner and burka” doesn’t make any sense when you realize that with a burka you don’t see any part of the face, never mind eyeliner. And why are there Burmese police shooting fishermen in a song also about a “two-bit Neil Young rip-off attack”? No matter: that latter track, “Last of the Dead Wrong Things,” is one of the most fantastic four minutes of visceral rock’n’roll Bidini has ever recorded. (Hear it here.)

And so Bidiniband’s literacy is not so much lyrical as it is musical; the real thrills here are listening to Linklater’s persistent fretboard wizardry, the throbbing, pummelling yet soulful grooves of the rhythm section of ex-Rheo Don Kerr and bassist Doug Friesen, and Bidini’s own underrated rhythm guitar skills. (Here’s your next bar argument: is there any essential rock’n’roll instrument more undervalued than rhythm guitarists? They don’t even get their own set of jokes.)

On John K. Samson’s solo album, his lyrics are the sole focus of attention; the accompanying music is mere background. He’s a prose writer first and foremost; every image and phrase is pondered over until it’s just perfect, yet there is no laboriousness heard in any single lyric. Though the ever-modest Samson will tell you that his vocal range and guitar skills are limited—hey, so is Leonard Cohen’s—he writes tiny perfect melodies and enlists trusted collaborators to fill in all the blanks.

Here, producer Paul Aucoin (Hylozoists, Cuff the Duke) casts Samson solo against just a horn section, in folk-country modes, as a piano balladeer, and—less successfully—in situations not unlike the Weakerthans. Those latter tracks are the only times when the otherwise impeccable Provincial manages to stumble. Even though the hired guns are no slouches (including Bidiniband bassist Doug Friesen and Constantines drummer Doug MacGregor), Samson already fronts an incredible rock band—anything else is going to sound second-rate. His solo work should stand further apart.

On the first single “When I Write My Master’s Thesis,” Samson steps into self-parody: any songwriter beloved by legions of English grad students is probably tempted to write a title like that all the time, but I’m not sure even Colin Meloy (Decemberists) would get away with that. Samson’s most successful narratives here are much better off set to delicately arranged downers like “The Last And,” “Stop Error,” or (a typical Samson title) “Letter in Icelandic from the Ninette San.”

As Samson sounds older (or, more accurately, his age), Bidini sounds more youthful; both promise their fans even bolder moves in the future.

Bidiniband's Toronto release show is this Saturday, January 28, at the Dakota Tavern in Toronto, 7 p.m. More dates are here.

John K. Samson was just in Toronto; Chromewaves wrote about it here. His North American tour begins on March 7 at the Grad Club in Kingston.

Dave Bidini: Out of Africa

Regular readers of Radio Free Canuckistan likely discerned long ago that much of my adult musical life has been shaped by the Rheostatics, who packed it in almost a year ago now. Since then, founding member Dave Bidini published a memoir/travelogue/rock'n'roll book that's much, much better than its clunky title: Around the World in 57 1/2 Gigs.

It's Bidini's second proper rock'n'roll book, the follow-up to On a Cold Road--a must-read history of Canadian rock music that tells the story of not only the Rheostatics through the 80s and 90s, but that of the bands that came before them in the 70s, when slogging it across the prairie spine in pursuit of rock'n'roll glory still involved plenty of uncharted waters.

Part of that book's charm was its ability to tell stories that we thought we knew, but didn't really--and I'm not just talking about Rheostatics fans, but about all rock fans in Canada who don't think about what happens during the long slogs between gigs, about the horrors and hilarities of the working musician's daily existence beyond the usual biz stories about being shafted by record labels.

This time out, Bidini takes us to places we never think about in the first place--such as what it's like to play Canadian folk songs in a Finnish bar with African women and Azerbaijani piano players. Around the World is about the period of time leading up to the final Rheostatics show at Massey Hall, when Bidini is finding his feet as a solo musician--and doing so in places deep in mainland China and in war-torn Sierra Leone.

The best thing about Bidini's writing is that he always calls it as he sees it; he's not trying to create some kind of overly conscious cross-cultural connection to African hip-hop, or to offer a post-modern analysis of cultural imperialism and white colonial guilt. He's an open-minded , wide-eared Canuck, a rocker first and foremost, one who happens to be an astute observer of the absurdities that bind us together, whether it's a collective obsession that men with skates have with placing a small black disc in a net, or the universal truth of a power chord on an electric guitar.

In Around the World, Bidini finds himself more humbled than ever while facing the impending break-up of his band. As one of his close friends once told me, Bidini is a lifer: he married his high school girlfriend, he still wears ratty old hockey sweaters that he first donned in the early 70s (thankfully only on special occasions--he's really quite a dapper man now), and he's only ever really played in one rock band in his life. Having the rug pulled out from one of the certainties of his life--the Rheostatics--leaves him more open than ever to new discovery, to personal re-invention, to challenging conceptions he's held his whole life. Witnessing that unfold in his writing is a beautiful thing.

I had more in-depth thoughts when I first read the book (I've since given my copy to my brother for Christmas), so don't consider this a proper review. I will say, however, that it's one of the few music books I've even bothered to pick up in the last five years or so. (That it came out around the same time as Carl Wilson's mind-blowing musing on Celine Dion is purely coincidental timing--I'm not going back to rock books, really. They bore me as a genre.)

At the book launch in the fall, Canuckistan comrade Shannon Whibbs told me she had a great conversation with Bidini for Chartattack.com that was, as always no matter the medium, whittled down to a couple of hundred words. Because Bidini and I have gabbed at length countless times before, I thought I'd give Ms. Whibbs the spotlight here instead.

As I'm typing this, I realize that Bidini is playing right now at the Paddock to kick off the Exclaim! Hockey tournament this weekend (an annual event he wrote about in his book The Best Game You Can Name). No doubt you'll see him out and about, on ice and off, at that event all weekend. He is playing April 18 at Call the Office in London. Rheos fans should note that there is a new, downloadable "box set" of Rheos rarities being made available. And he's also been in the news lately for matching fellow hockey rock nut John K. Samson by "winning" the CBC's Canada Reads contest; Bidini championed Paul Quarrington's King Leary. All other things Bidini, music and literary, can be found here--including links to musical works in progress. His debut solo album, The Land is Wild, is expected later this year.

Without further ado, over to you, Ms. Whibbs.

---

Dave Bidini
Interview by Shannon Whibbs
July, 2007
Locale: McClelland & Stewart office

SW: After you knew the Rheos were breaking up, you did this solo tour that took you all over the world. What prompted you to write a book about all these experiences?

DB: I thought it would make good fodder for storytelling. When I’m away, I’m writing all the time anyways, in my journal and stuff. I want to see this as a bookend to On a Cold Road; that was about all the time up until a certain achievement, and this is the shadow of that. Having achieved that, it was sort of the top of the mountain and this is the other side of the mountain, and I thought that was worth talking about, through the energy of my trip or travelling.

SW: Did it start and end as you envisioned it, or did it change form?

DB: It changed a lot. I had this wish list. Originally it was gonna be 80 gigs; that was the working title. But we ran out of time. Also, family life [was a factor] too, with two kids. Some part of me envisioned just getting on a train and going right across Europe with my guitar; then I realized, practically and logistically speaking, that that was probably a book that was more suited to somebody with a freer lifestyle. And for the travel in this book, I used up all my coupons, all my domestic coupons, so I had to scale it back a little bit. In the end I wanted to have a full enough view, a perspective of “the world.”

SW: The book is a deeply personal reflection of the break-up of the Rheostatics. Do the other guys know what you’re getting into?

DB: Well, usually with Martin [Tielli], I’ve got carte blanche. When I was doing On a Cold Road, he said to me, “You can write whatever you want about me, it doesn’t matter.” And it really doesn’t—mostly because his memory recall isn’t that great [laughs], and so often he’ll be happy that I remembered half the stuff. Also, because of that book, the guys know that all bets are off; they know me as an honest musician, so why wouldn’t I be an honest writer? Actually, in a way it’s a relief that I was able to write about a breaking-up band that’s never really necessarily going to have to work together—as opposed to On a Cold Road, where I did, to a point, have to be a little bit careful that I didn’t say things that would come back to haunt me. But like any piece of art, the only way it would be a good book, an honest book, was to make it completely honest and real.

SW: I definitely felt that when I was reading it. As a fan, it was really heartbreaking to read. Were you able to achieve your goal in writing about it — were you able to achieve some closure?

DB: Yeah, for sure. For me, the closure came with Dave Bookman’s [on-air] interview [at CFNY] when he surprised us with [The Secret Sessions tribute album.] That was a great moment because we were together and we were all really emotionally moved and there were a lot of tears that night. It was good for that to happen a week before the actual show; you get that all out of the way. If we’d just shown up at Massey Hall, or at the few rehearsals at Massey Hall, and had not been together and experienced that emotional sense of closure, relief and comfort, then it probably would have been a different show and it probably would have been really, really difficult on an emotional level. Because we’d had that time, playing the show was more of a celebration than anything. Personally, and also in the literary sense, this book achieves a certain closure, too.

SW: What are you hoping that fans will take away from the book? Do you think that they will be able to achieve a sense of closure through it as well?

DB: I think so. I can relate that mostly to the response to On a Cold Road. I know a lot of the stories in that book were important to readers—not necessarily Rheostatics fans, but musicians, in the sense that they could see themselves reflected. [For] fans of the band, they got a sense of what we had gone through, personally and musically, as the band was coming together and also [the] Dave Clark break-up [Clark was the first Rheostatics drummer, 1979-1995]. That whole thing was illuminated [in the book] and I think—not that this would be the sole reason for the book—that our fans deserve that because they do pay such attention to the musical detail. And I think there is emotional detail in the literature based on the band. So I think people will get a greater sense of who we are and who we were and that, in a way, informs the experience as a fan and the appreciation of the music.

SW: For me, as a fan, it felt like it helped tie everything up. And when I was reading, I found it to be such an interesting mix of genres, which is great because there are so many travelogues written, and so many memoirs, and so many musical history books, but you’ve kind of mixed them all together in a really amazing way. I was wondering about what sort of readership you were envisioning when you put this book together.

DB: When the first two books came out, On a Cold Road and Tropic of Hockey, there was a lot of back stuff in there about playing music as a kid and rediscovering hockey as a young adult and stuff, but I never really saw it as memoir-ish. There was this whole big memoir wave and people were saying, “Oh, your books are like memoirs.” Growing up, I thought that a memoir was something that an 80-year-old guy would write. I always felt a little bit slighted or cheated when people would call it that. But this book, simply because I’m older and I’ve seen more stuff, is slightly more memoir-ish than the others and that’s just a product of age, I think. Maybe that’s informed a little bit by the maturity of the writing. Because I’m traveling to other places there has to be a travel element to it. Because it’s a reflective look at the band’s history there’s going to be a memoir-ish quality, and it’s also going to be a rock ‘n’ roll book because it’s about rock’n’roll! I would have denied it if I had tried to excise those elements and when you’re writing, you’re not necessarily thinking in those terms, either, that it’s three genres in one. You just write and then it’s over and it’s for other people to call it what it is.

SW: Which leg of your trip had the most impact on you?

DB: They all impacted me in a different way, I’d say Africa because I’d never been there before and I met people with such a completely different perspective, just a different life. And it’s the Africans who have been in contact [with me] the most and are probably the most eager to maintain those connections, too. But of all the places that was where I felt like I was truly far away and it felt like real travel writing, going off the beaten path.

SW: Have you found that your travels have impacted your songwriting since?

DB: It’s hard to say because it really hasn’t been that busy musically, but I wrote some stuff when I was over there and these things tend to produce themselves down the road; it might not necessarily make an instant impact. It’s also not as if the Rheos were a straight rock ‘n’ roll band. There were also African elements [in that band], so it wasn’t as if all of a sudden I started making African music and wearing jazz hats and playing a drum. But I have a song on the solo record that’s almost done, which is a long 14-minute song about a guy I met in Africa.

SW: I was trawling around on your website yesterday and I was able to listen to the MP3 of the performance of “Horses.”

DB: [laughs] It’s insane, eh?

SW: It was so great to have an audio to go with the visuals in the book. It was so powerful. I’m trying to imagine you standing there, taking it all in, going “what the hell?!”

DB: Yeah, it was mindblowing, astonishing. One of the things I did find with this book was no matter where you go and no matter who you’re playing with, you’re able to achieve that centre of just pure, musical exchange and musical communication. And I knew for them, that I was a guy playing a guitar and there were guys playing drums and people singing and it wasn’t really so absurd. I didn’t want to project to them that I thought it was really absurd that a white guy was coming to Africa and playing just for them! For them it seemed natural, so in effect, it seemed kind of natural for me, too. At one point this one woman stood up and closed her eyes and put her hands up in the air and started singing this song this hoser anthem that I wrote at King and Parliament and in my parents’ house. When you’re used to playing it in Canada, it was awesome to see that moment of musical translation and seize on to it. It was really beautiful.

SW: How did that and your other musical experiences in Africa effect your perception of how music is made in North America and how it’s structured?

DB: In Sierra Leone, people there are making music in spite of the fact that they have nothing. It’s a destroyed city with no money and no infrastructure or anything like that, but yet people have to play, against all odds. You do get the sense of the pampered-ness of music [in North America]. On a certain level, there are people here playing who live day-to-day and doing it because they have to do it, but it totally makes you appreciate it more. In the Studio D in Sierra Leone, they couldn’t record unless they had money to buy fuel to run the generator. Here, it’s like you go home, you plug in your computer and you tune up and play and you have a song. It’s much harder over there, so it gave me a new appreciation, for sure.

SW: The section about Africa is one of the most intense ones, and some of the stories were just horrifying. Are you hoping to raise more awareness, through the book, about these issues?

DB: Oh yeah, for sure. And not only that, just to tell stories for people who wouldn’t normally have their stories told. The other thing about Africans is that they’ll tell you the story just as if you and I were sitting around talking about hockey. And for them to have absorbed it for it, to come out the other way—completely calm and a sort of natural sense of oneself—it’s pretty amazing. It would have twice the book if I’d told every story.

SW: Regarding another section, that great stream-of-consciousness thing [wherein Bidini constructs a mammoth sentence of rock’n’roll memories that lasts over two pages; it's on pp182-184 for those following at home] in the China section, which ends with “In my life, rock ‘n’ roll has meant everything to me.” What brought it on and did your editor mention anything about it when you handed in the manuscript?

DB: She didn’t touch it, which was amazing. And of course, that was one of those things that you write in four minutes and it just pours out of your wrist. It was really fun to write and when it was done I was like, “Wow. That’s done.” I fiddled with the last line a little bit, but I really didn’t have to touch it that much. It was a blast. I’ve read other books before like this—I guess Roddy Doyle’s books are like that a little bit, in The Commitments when they’ll be arguing about who’s better, Marvin Gaye or Otis Redding— and it just evokes all kinds of memories of those songs and thoughts of those songs. That was kind of the intention, so that you’re reading it almost the way that you listen to a radio dial sort of spinning up and down, all these melodies and these thoughts. At the end of it, you’re so charged and so excited about being a music fan that you’ve shared in that kind of connection, too.

SW: That’s how it made me feel. You get the sense in reading the book about just how much you love rock ‘n’ roll.

DB: For sure. A lot of music criticism and a lot of music books tend to be a little bit bloodless. There’s always exceptions, but [there’s always] a bit of a distance, y’know? Fuck distance! It’s okay to say you love it if you love it and to prove that you do. I always have to kind of bring myself back a little bit remembering that rock ‘n’ roll is important and exciting and fun and huge in a lot of people’s lives and to portray myself as being one of those persons, it isn’t necessarily not more literary or lacking poise. I’m just going to celebrate it, right?

SW: When you travel to new and foreign places, you often go in to these experiences with preconceived notions of what you’re going to find. Did you have some of these notions of your own and were they kind of shattered when you were over in, say, China, or even Finland?

DB: Yeah, and Russia, too. I was certain—well [traveling companion] Al [Piggins] was certain—that we were going to get killed in Russia. The first time I was there I thought that as well. It was completely demystified. That’s why we travel — to have those stereotypes and misconceptions smashed. It’s the same thing with Africa; I thought it was one of those trips that I might never return from—which is a reason for going. But people talk about the fucking bugs, and they talk about how dirty it is and how you’re going to get really sick. In Sierra Leone I had a really bad three-day cold, and I saw like, four mosquitoes, and I didn’t see any guns. I saw some shady characters, but it was an easy place to be. Even though it was very sad—and a lot of parts of Africa where I was, people’s lives are very tragic— it was just really fun. I hadn’t prepared myself for fun because I was so on edge about what it was going to be like. Then you get there and people just want to have a good time. Finland was probably exactly how I thought it was going to be until our last show, in Eastern Finland and everybody was crazy and fun.

SW: I like your whole section comparing Canadians and the Finns and realizing that we’re not nearly as similar as we’d like to think.

DB: Fuck, Canada’s changed a lot. Canadians have really come out of their shell.

SW: What’s next for you in terms of your solo music?

DB: That’s something that’s going to come out eventually. I’m working on it with Don Kerr and The Scribbled Out Man guys — Paul Linklater, Doug Friesen — and Don is producing it in the studio. But Martin [Tielli] and I are doing a lot of stuff, too. We’re doing the soundtrack for this film and trying to figure out what to do, how we’ll go about it. And we did this Five Hole thing [based on Bidini’s book Five Hole: Tales of Hockey Erotica]: it was me, Selina [Martin], Martin Tielli, Ford Pier, and Barry Mirochnik doing the music for this [theatrical adaptation] that happened in Calgary and that was really fun. We did six songs for that and it’s going to go tour on the road as well. It’s going to go across the country in ’08.

It’s funny, before Massey Hall [closed the chapter on the Rheos], I’d done so much [solo] playing, it was really kind of weird: I’d done the Five Hole thing, I’d done these trips, I worked a little bit on my solo record. It was cool because it wasn’t like it was out of form, y’know, playing a big show like that or even the lead-up shows, which I was proud of. It was like, “Cool. Band breaks up, but…” It convinced me that music doesn’t die; it just exists in different forms.

-end-

Loving Arms

Some supplementary Rheos reading from the past week.

First off, a fine and affecting piece of prose from my dear friend and musical comrade Tristan O'Malley can be found here, illustrating one of the principal reasons I've always loved this band so.

I mentioned Howard Druckman's eulogy in Eye earlier (and the accompanying celebrity tributes), but in some ways I found Ben Rayner's piece in the Star more interesting, mainly because he's not the kind of fan that Druckman and I are, and he's honest about what he did and didn't like about the band--how ultimately part of their charm is that we weren't always supposed to "get it," that it was their ability to baffle and sometimes fail outright that made their highest of heights even possible.

Rayner also commissioned Bidini to offer a Veteran Warhorse tour of old rock'n'roll Toronto here.

And, not surprisingly, Bidini is never short on words when it comes to his own history, including anecdotes that even I hadn't heard before. Those can be found in this Globe and Mail piece.

Finally, cbc.ca/arts has a nice photo gallery from the band's own archives.

The Whaleman has been keeping tabs on most of this, as has the fan message board.

Kings of the Past

Massey Hall pic with snow by Karla Livingston

---

“I have all your records. I’ve even bought some of them twice.”

The last song of the last Rheostatics concert was “Record Body Count,” played acoustically in the middle of the Massey Hall floor. The entire crowd sang every line, empathetically covering up the fact that Martin Tielli’s recovery from laryngitis had been preventing him from hitting the high notes all night.

It was a career pinnacle concert doubling as a loving farewell, and its conclusion proved that as the voices of the Rheostatics fade away, an eager constituency thousands strong are ready to carry on in their place.

“So we’re breaking up,” said Bidini on stage at the Horseshoe the night before, sounding decidedly unsentimental. “And it feels alright.” “The dinosaurs are dying each day,” he sang at Massey Hall, and while that line was originally written in youthful defiance of boomer nostalgia, now it may just as well refer to himself, retiring CBC DJ and Rheos champion David Wisdom, and the removal of Brave New Waves and Radio 3 from the airwaves. Indeed, there’s a record body count this year.

But this show was not a wake, and this was hardly an occasion to mourn. To quote the Trudeau-era idealism that the Rheostatics’ generation grew up on: the land is strong. The seeds have been sown. As the coming months prove, it no longer takes a beloved Canadian artist 27 years to get to Massey Hall. Arcade Fire did it in four, Feist in a little more.

Some of this weighed on the occasion. Bidini thanked “the Masseys for letting us play their hall” and talked about WWI soldiers, Hitler’s anti-fascist crusader of a cousin, Charlie Parker and Bon Scott all filling the hall in decades past.

But with typical Rheostatic self-parody, nothing summed up the affair better than the autobiographical “First Rock Show.” The song includes a verse about how Joe Jackson rescued a young dancing Dave Bidini from being manhandled by Massey Hall security guards, a scenario which was re-enacted in front of the stage, in wonderful period costume, by the comedy troupe the Imponderables.

Even the final electric song of the set was gleefully irreverent. “Dopefiends and Boozehounds,” perhaps their strongest encapsulation of suburban ennui as set to an epic rock backdrop, collapsed into a drum solo that included all three Rheos drummers, augmented by Bidini and keyboardist Ford Pier slapping on a pair of goalie pads.

If that wasn’t ridiculous enough, this somehow segued into the calypso instrumental “Alomar,” a throwaway track from Introducing Happiness celebrating the Toronto Blue Jays’ second baseman Roberto Alomar, before returning for the solemn coda to “Dopefiends.” The collapsing chords of the song’s final moments ended everything on a suspended note—after all, we all know that one can never say never again.

There was no more fitting venue than Massey Hall to hold the final Rheostatics show. As the most storied of Toronto’s very short list of venerable venues, it’s a vital part of Canadian music history. And of course, so are the Rheostatics. This band was Gordon Lightfoot and Bruce Cockburn, Mary Margaret O’Hara and Jane Siberry, BTO and Max Webster, DOA and Stompin’ Tom Connors, Neil Young and The Band. Anyone who ever mistook being “too Canadian” as a criticism needs only to look at that lineage to reconsider.

The Rheostatics have been the one band in the land that not only inherited those traditions, but could successfully absorb them all, modernizing them and mythologizing both the mountains and the urban underbelly, and singing their songs in pubs and art galleries. The Rheostatics are much more than a great Canadian band. They are/were/will always be The Great Canadian Band.

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“Joey stepped up on a block of ice, put a rope around his neck, and fell asleep before he died.”

The week’s proceedings began last Sunday at the Starlight in Waterloo, Ontario, across the street from the site of the Rheostatics’ first ever out-of-town gig at the Kent Hotel. Then, they were opening for L’Etranger, who had just drove in from Toronto themselves after opening for the Dead Kennedys at the Concert Hall. Now they were going to play their last out-of-town gig ever, hastily assembled at the last minute, in front of a curious group of fans who had no idea what would transpire that night. Neither did the band.

Along with the ambiguous feeling one gets watching a self-conscious wake, the set was hampered considerably by the fact that Martin Tielli had contracted laryngitis the night before, rendered unable to speak or sing. This meant that many of the band’s moodiest, most expressive numbers were absent from the set list.

It also didn’t help that the four members had not played together as the Rheostatics in over a year, and there had only been one band practice earlier that week. Sadly, it showed. Much like the opening nights of their annual week-long Fall Nationals at the Horseshoe, this seemed more like a live rehearsal than a gig. The fact that this was the last waltz for many in the audience—on a sedated Sunday night, no less—only added to the weirdness.

The set opened with “Fat” from The Blue Hysteria, perhaps one of my least favourite Rheostatics songs, and one that usually only works when placed later in the set. The chorus features the lyric: “Bye bye Mr. No One/ Bye bye Mr. Woebegone,” a line that, back in 1996, someone tried to convince me was written about then-recently split drummer Dave Clark. I never understood why, as the rest of the lyrics never really added up to me anyway, but it was certainly an odd choice to open your final hat trick, especially when one member was principally responsible for pulling the plug.

There were plenty of unusual choices in the set list, which also included four songs from the latest album 2067. Despite it being the one album featuring my favourite Rheos drummer Michael Phillip Wojewoda, 2067 is also the one Rheos album that I can’t bear to listen to. I should have known that writing songs about WKRP and Ozzy Osbourne presaged an imminent end. In his fourth little song on this night, Bidini sang: “you’re only as good as your last song/ It’s better to burn out than to be proven wrong.” It was a sentiment that hung over the whole night.

Weirdness aside, there was nonetheless plenty to make it a memorable evening. Opener and longtime friend Paul Macleod told us: “Some people have their Beatles. Some people have their Gretzkys. We have our Rheostatics, and it’s one of the great privileges of my life to be on this stage with them tonight.”

He would return to the stage later that night as one of the substitute Tiellis, as one of the few male vocalists in this country who could pull off that formidable feat. Macleod sang “Fishtailin’,” “Jesus Was Once a Teenager Too” and “Record Body Count,” which turned into a long rock jam that found Macleod repeatedly yelling “Best Band Ever! Best Band Ever!” before nudging them into doing “Aliens” as well.



Selina Martin w/ Rheostatics at Starlight, pic by Michael Barclay

Tielli’s special ladyfriend Selina Martin was also up to the task, helming “Rain Rain Rain” and “Dopefiends” with more rock star charisma than the rest of the band seemed willing to conjure for the occasion. Finally, Wojewoda sang a cruise ship duet with his girlfriend Jennifer Foster on “Take Me In Your Hand.”

Keyboardist Ford Pier was—as usual, in any context—the most animated musician on stage that night. When Bidini called on him to lead one of the "Four Little Songs," Pier seized the role that former drummer Dave Clark normally would, coming to the front of the stage and getting different halves of the audience to sing an improv song called “Laryngitis,” one of the more deliciously loony points in the set.

Tim Vesely opened the encore with a solo version of "Row,” which was the only poignant moment of the night that suggested that the end was just beginning: “All the clouds get together and cry. All the trees in the wind wave good-bye. Good-bye.”

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“Music belies one’s actual age.”

More than any other venue in the great dominion, The Horseshoe Tavern has been the Rheostatics' home base for the last six years or so. Around the turn of the decade, they moved their annual weekly residency there, after starting at Ultrasound in the mid-90s and continuing at Ted’s Wrecking Yard (both venues now defunct). One year they played there for a record 14-night stand, matching a standard set by Stompin’ Tom Connors.

Stompin’ Tom didn’t show up on Thursday, though they did cover his “Bridge Came Tumblin’ Down” in the middle of their own “Ballad of Wendel Clark.” In fact, very few guests took the stage, and in typical fashion, just as many audience members were summoned as were musicians. (Three musicians: Ben Gunning and Pete Elkas of the Local Rabbits, Paul Linklater of opening act Scribbled Out Man. Two audience members: Tawny Darbyshire and Mr. Anonymous on “Legal Age Life.”)




photo of Tielli at Starlight by Helen Spitzer

As usual, the set was over three hours long, and much more of a joyous encapsulation of their entire career than the Starlight show. Though they may have been the kings of the past, they were still moving forward: there were three songs that night that I’ve never heard before one of which (“New Science?”) it’s safe to say was written on the spot. [ed note: it's since been pointed out to me that this is a cover of "Radios in Motion," from the first XTC album.] (The other two were pointy political folk songs by Bidini: “Pornography” and a song about Tim Horton’s/ Chad Kroeger and Stephen Harper (“you’re killing us now”).)

For many, the highlight of the show was not a classic Rheostatics song, but one by DOA—the Canadian punk legends who, in 1987, played a benefit for the Rheos when they had all their gear ripped off in Vancouver on their first western tour.

In the middle of “My First Rock Show,” Bidini asked Ford Pier what his pivotal experience had been. Pier said he had snuck in to see DOA when he was a teenager in Edmonton. Which is not only ridiculously cool, but also prophetic: Pier would later serve time in DOA during the late 90s. Bidini refused to believe him until Pier qualified it by saying, “OK, what was the first concert that my mom knew I went to? Big Country.” With scant prompting from Bidini, Pier then led the band in DOA’s “Enemy,” with a wide-grinning Vesely on drums and MPW on lead guitar. Rather than a sloppy half-assed cover, it was spirited, powerful and just as raging as DOA themselves.

This was indicative of the lighter mood overall, which also led to a 10-minute scatological diversion that included stories about Geddy Lee, Colin Hay of Men At Work, and a fan in adult diapers and a short skirt who tried to steal Martin’s wallet from on top of his amp at the Town Pump in Vancouver. The details are too many to recount here, but are best summed up by a quip from Wojewoda: “Live and incontinent.”

The evening ended, as so many others at the Horseshoe have, with the band playing acoustically by the merch table, a move that appeared to have baffled much of the audience, though surely they’ve seen them do this before? They did “Bread Meat Peas and Rice” while everyone figured out what was going on, and then a profoundly moving version of “Northern Wish.” The last time I saw them do this they had a small string section and a clarinet player to help bolster the unamplified band. This time, all we needed was the whole crowd singing both the “Land Ho” back-ups and the barely-audible melody from an ailing Tielli.



Horseshoe pic by Michael Barclay

Until then, Tielli’s voice had been restored to about 70% its usual capacity, which meant that he could pull off electrifying versions of “Christopher” and “Self-Serve Gas Station.” Vesely, Wojewoda and Pier ably covered most his high notes and harmonies. Tielli couldn’t seem to be able to predict what notes would work and what wouldn’t, so by the time he tried to tackle “Saskatchewan,” he simply made it work to his advantage. By surrendering to his laryngitis, Tielli manipulated the melody into atonal realms that made the shipwrecked sailor of the song sound even more desperate and hopeless as the water consumes him. On a night when some naïve fans may have expected faithful renditions of old favourites, this song in particular was revelatory. Right up to their final moments, the Rheostatics were capable of extracting brilliance from seemingly dire circumstance.

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“How can forever not last long enough? Move along. Can’t come back. Move along.”

At 7.55PM in front of Massey Hall, the ushers felt it necessary to remind people that “the show is starting on time in exactly five minutes. Five minutes to showtime, people.” For a band that’s never been particularly punctual or at the right place at the right time, it’s no surprise that most people milling about outside didn’t believe the stated ticket time of 8PM. I was waiting outside for a friend whose ticket I had, so I missed both Dave Bookman’s (undoubtedly eloquent) introduction and the standing ovation that greeted the band as they launched into “Saskatchewan.”

This was one of eight songs from 1991’s ten-song suite Melville that made the final set list, which made perfect sense. The rest of the Rheos discography is tailor made for rock clubs, beer halls, folk festivals and art galleries, but Melville is their one work that has always deserved to be heard in a hallowed hall such as Massey. It’s a near-perfect distillation of their art-rock take on Canadian folk music, with wide open spaces, operatic flourishes, and deceptively simple songs.

Walking into Massey Hall and hearing them play “Saskatchewan” wasn’t as moving or as historic as I imagined it would be: it just seemed natural. This is where they should be; this is where this song should be sung.

That was followed by “Me and Stupid,” a tale of cottage country summers, near-drownings and writing original new wave rock, with a passage from Al Purdy in the middle. Bidini stepped to the front of the stage at that point, as if he was hoping Purdy’s ghost would somehow start calling to him from the gallery. A few fans gladly obliged with the lines in question; Bidini, satisfied, said, “That’s what Al Purdy wrote. This is what we wrote,” before concluding the song.

From there, they sang suburban sonnets, songs “from the dark days of Ontario” in the Mike Harris era, and Western Canadian travelogues that all spoke to the band’s evolution, their lyrical grace and acute sense of place. The performance was proud and majestic, with nary a trace of the unrehearsed awkwardness from the week before.

There were also no guests, except for keyboardist Chris Brown, who hopped up on stage from the audience for two tracks (“Claire,” “Dopefiends”). The rest of the night was primarily Bidini, Vesely, Tielli and Wojewoda, with Ford Pier playing less than half the set.

The first of the three times I got choked up was when drummers Dave Clark (1980-1994) and Don Kerr (1994-2001) joined the core four to perform “Northern Wish.” I’d never seen all six of them on stage together before, and for anyone who has loved the band through all their twists and turns, it was a family portrait we’d waited a long time to see. (They stuck around for “Easy To Be,” and returned later for the final song, “Dopefiends.”)

Tielli’s voice was once again further on the mend, though hearing him crack on the line “once I get good/ once I get better” from “PIN” was heartbreaking to hear, knowing that even a note in the middle of his range was causing his ever-elastic voice to constrict on this night of nights.

But once again, he made that frustration work for him. To avoid wispy croaks, he was remarkably deft at improvising alternate melodies and harmonies on the fly—for that matter, so were Vesely and Wojewoda and Pier backing him up. And he was determined to have fun, acting as animated as I've ever seen him, and utilising as much of the stage as possible.

Nothing was more harrowing than “Shaved Head,” a dramatic centerpiece of their set ever since it appeared on their high water mark, 1992’s Whale Music. With a lyric about a cancer patient, it’s a dramatic song even on the sloppiest nights, but here it was rendered even more emotional while watching Tielli battle with his bug. He normally gets more physically expressive the more he loses himself in song, but such was his consumption that he completely “slipped in the clippings”—he wiped out and fell to the floor in the middle of a line, still clutching the mic stand and not missing a beat.

As at the Horseshoe, there was some things I’d never seen before at a Rheostatics show. Bidini took a bass solo in “Claire,” much to Tim’s chagrin; Martin mocked him by singing Yello’s “Oh Yeah” over top of it, a gleefully absurdist moment as the set was winding down, laughing all the way to the end.

For the first song of the second encore, performed acoustically at the front of the stage (seated on top of an oblivious security guard), they paged Dave Clark to lead the audience in percussive noises for “Legal Age Life.” Anyone who’s ever seen Clark at the Hillside Festival or conducting his Woodchoppers’ Association knows that he can extract magic from a willing audience, and this was no exception.

They then strolled into the middle of the Massey Hall floor to do “Record Body Count.” Before they began, Bidini spoke about how the audience was always the most important thing about the Rheostatics, how what has meant the most to them over the years are the stories of people starting bands and learning Rheostatics songs, or that their music helped people find their way out of the wilderness, sometimes literally.

The devotion always went both ways. Many of my favourite Rheostatics memories were the amateurs who took the stage with them, whether it was an 18-year old girl with a stuffed and mounted chicken singing “Aliens” in Polish, any number of random guitarists invited to take a solo, or as much of the audience that could fit on the stage of the Horseshoe sitting down for a 2AM lullaby. And on the night that my own band finally got a chance to open for the Rheostatics at the Horseshoe, I fulfilled all my rock’n’roll fantasies when they invited me to play keyboards on “Horses.” I could now die in peace.

They were also notoriously benevolent to countless new acts, many of whom return the gratitude on the new tribute album The Secret Sessions: Weeping Tile, Weakerthans, The Inbreds, King Cobb Steelie, Wooden Stars, Cuff the Duke and more. There was also the Peanuts and Corn hip-hop crew from Brandon, Manitoba, Veda Hille and Ida Nilsen in Vancouver, and Toronto’s avant-garde monstrosity Guh, whose Brian Cram would later go on to play with Do Make Say Think. The Rheostatics were—and always will be—a nexus where one can trace much of this country’s musical activity.

My friend and bandmate Tristan O’Malley wondered what would have happened if the Rheos had taken a poll at Massey Hall: How many people here have been in a band that opened for us? Or otherwise appeared on stage with us at some point? I’d guess at least 20 per cent. But even if those who showered several standing o’s on the band that night weren’t musicians, they still felt part of a community that precious few artists manage to cultivate.

In that sense, it wasn’t just the Rheostatics that we were cheering on at Massey Hall, it was all of us. And though they may be fading away for a while, we’re all still here, we still have each other, and there’s still work to be done.

I said earlier that I cried three times at this show, but never once was it out of regret or loss. It was out of pride, of joy, of vicarious accomplishment. This was our band, these are our songs. Everyone there felt the same way: this was our night.

“My days are my lungs, and my love for you is endless.”

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Appendix
Corrections to the following are welcome

Starlight, March 25, 2007: see here

Horseshoe Tavern, March 29 2007: (not in order)
It’s Easy to Be With You (opening number)
Introducing Happiness
In This Town
King of the Past
P.I.N.
Ballad of Wendel Clark/ Bridge Came Tumblin’ Down (Stompin’ Tom cover)
Christopher
Aliens
Saskatchewan
Self-Serve Gas Station
Queer
First Rock Show/The Enemy (DOA cover, sung by Ford Pier)
Find Me Mookie Saunders
Song of the Garden
Radios in Motion (XTC cover)
Green Sprouts
Pornography new song
Tim Horton’s/Stephen Harper/Chad Kroeger new song
We Went West
Fan Letter to Michael Jackson
Loving Arms
Mumbletypeg
Stolen Car
Joey 2
Legal Age Life w/ Elkas, Gunning, Darbyshire and some guy
Record Body Count w/ Elkas and Gunning (final electric number)

2nd encore (acoustic, in front of merch table):
Bread Meat Peas and Rice
Northern Wish


Massey Hall, March 30 2007: (not in order)
Intro by Bookman with guitarist
Saskatchewan
Me and Stupid
Bad Time to Be Poor
It
King of the Past
Christopher
Northern Wish (w/ Kerr, Clark) (Tielli gestures to everyone on stage for the line “and find another band”)
Easy to Be With You (w/ Kerr, Clark)
First Rock Show (w/ Imponderables)
We Went West
PIN
Mumbletypeg (dedicated to the Bidinis)
Tim song from 2067
Aliens (Martin: “I didn’t mean this to sound like Bob and Doug”)
Feed Yourself
Shaved Head (second last song of regular set)
When Winter Comes (last song of regular set w/ snow falling on the coda. Martin: “OK, this is our fake last song, so let’s rock.”)

First encore:
Self-Serve Gas Station (dedicated to the Tiellis. Martin: “not all of this song is true.”)
California Dreamline
Horses (dedicated to Stephen Harper)
Stolen Car
Rock Death America
Claire (w/ Brown)
Dopefiends and Boozehounds/ Alomar/ Dopefiends coda (last song of 1st encore, w/ Brown, Kerr, Clark)

Acoustic encore:
Legal Age Life (w/ Dave Clark)
Record Body Count (acoustic on floor)

Dave Bidini: hockey-rotica troubadour

More today from Dave Bidini, founder of the Rheostatics and author. I updated the last post with links to Rheos material for those unfamiliar with the band.

In addition to his musical pursuits, Bidini has been a journalist since his teenage years writing for the much-lamented late Toronto rock journal Nerve in the 80s. (Not the erotica website, though as we'll see, he might have a place there soon as well.) He was a pop culture columnist for the Toronto Star for most of the mid-90s, and these days contributes to Toro magazine, among others. He published his first book in 1998; On a Cold Road was part Rheos memoir, part oral history of 70s CanRock working class heroes. It's a vital time capsule of Canadian music writing (a painfully short bibliography file, to be sure), and delves into the lost period between the first golden age (Neil Young, Guess Who, Joni Mitchell, et al) and the current explosion (everyone even your non-Canadian friends knows and loves).

Since then Bidini has focused on sports writing, his other love. A true Canadian, he's a hockey nut, which is the focus of 2000's globetrotting Tropic of Hockey and 2005's Best Game You Can Name; the latter is about the Exclaim Hockey League, with oral history interludes from NHL'ers, in a format similar to On a Cold Road. In between was a book about Italian baseball, called, naturally, Baseballissimo. His latest release, The Five Hole Stories, launches the seemingly improbably literary genre of hockey erotica--he'll explain in the interview.

I can't claim to have read his last two books: partially because sports writing really isn't my thing, no matter how well it's done, and partially because I've spent much of the last two years catching up on my canon reading (thanks to the Kill Rock Stars book club Books I Shoulda Read) and avoiding the CanLit and contemporary focus that dominated my fiction reading habits for the last 15 years.

And I've actually yet to dive into Five Hole, despite its brevity and the fact that it's short stories. (This is because I already have too many open books right now: Kafka's The Trial, Paris 1919, Seymour Hersh's The Dark Side of Camelot, Jose Saramago's Seeing, Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, and my long overdue dive into the Lemony Snicket series. Needless to say, my reading habits have serious ADD right now.)

In fact, I wasn't aware that Five Hole Stories was coming out the week I did this interview; it was conducted to promote a gig he had in Guelph, not the book. He arrived at our meeting with a copy, so my questions on that topic are obviously blind.

In addition to talking about the new book, we discuss his upcoming project Around the World in 80 Gigs. Part of this involves his trip to China last year. It was a trip the soon-to-be-defunct Rheostatics were supposed to make; instead, Bidini went over there with his old friend, singer/songwriter/all-around-good-guy Alun Pigguns.

Dave Bidini is reading at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto tomorrow night, December 5, with comedy troupe the Imponderables (who helped make this hilarious commercial for indie store Zunior.com, recommended for anyone who either loves or hates any band from Montreal with "wolf" in their name.)

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Dave Bidini

October 19, 2006

locale: Café Faema, Dupont/Christie, Toronto

I recognize some of these titles from years ago. How many are older stories?

They were all lying around. It’s always daunting with fiction, because you want stuff to stew as long as possible. I also knew that because it’s erotic hockey, it’s not like I would have to worry about it measuring up against the last erotic hockey collection. I felt that on the strength of the idea alone, I could throw this together and not be too self-conscious about it.

What precedent, if any, is there for this?

I did find a website from this woman in Alabama who writes BDSM sex stories about hockey, but there’s no BDSM here (in my book). I was going to send her stuff, but that could be opening a terrible can of worms.

Even sports fiction—I’m not conscious of a large subgenre.

W.P. Kinsella, Quarrington—Canadians, really. Not a lot, though, it’s still fairly small. Quarrington in his last book, Galveston, wanted to write the world’s longest sex scene. I think it’s around three pages long. But part of this was to try to do him one better.

I’m sure Anais Nin wrote longer sex scenes than three pages.

I guess. But he ultimately abandoned the idea.

The obvious sound bite question is, why hockey erotica? What strikes you as erotic about hockey?

The idea is to come at sports writing from a different angle. A lot of the subject matter in here—when you’re sitting around talking hockey with guys, that’s always the most interesting stuff. It’s all off the record, but those are the stories you remember when you come away from the table. I just felt like it was time to bring those stories above the table and acknowledge the fact that there is an enormous subculture of sex in hockey culture, hockey life and the hockey community. We’ve been around hockey for hundreds of years in this country. Surely in the 21^st century, we’re mature enough: the game has matured, the community has matured to the point where we can talk about these things and address them and relate sex to hockey players’ lives, their culture and their community. As opposed to whispering these legendary stories under our breath for fear of people being shocked to no end.

When you talk about sexuality and hockey, are you talking about off-ice puck bunny stories, or on-ice sexual tension?

Everything. It’s all in there. Inner team, out of team. Again, the sexual element looms large in some stories and smaller in others. Some people have asked me how much of it is rooted in truth, which is a weird question for fiction…

But a common question these days [post-James Frey].

Yes. I remember [70s rocker/radio DJ Bob] Segarini telling me about a club called the Moustache across the road from the Montreal Forum. They would do week-long sets there, and whenever the game would end at the Forum, the players would come over to the Moustache to party. He remembers their first set ending around 11.30 and going upstairs and seeing Bobby Hull horseshoed by 20 young French Canadian blondes, rolling a big hash joint. That image always stayed with me, and there’s an unnamed Blackhawks star from the early 70s in one story here. He’s in a scoring slump, and he goes to see his favourite prostitute—concubine, really, to resolve his issues.

If I were to think about eroticisation and sports, hockey would be last on the list. I would think of the slow grace of baseball, the homoeroticism of football, and wrestling is obviously very sexual. With hockey, you have a lot of armor on, it’s cold…

Ah, but those goons disrobe when they fight, don’t they? Grapes [Don Cherry] is always saying, “Two beautiful guys!” He’s always showing a clip of the Probert/McSorley fight, where they knock heads gently at the end and wink at each other. Some of them blow kisses at each other. One of the things that struck me about Russia was seeing players kiss after they score.

Is there something about being bundled up in a cold climate that adds to sexual mystique?

Margaret Atwood would write about lovers underneath the covers in the winter in a cabin. It’s the same thing in hockey, where you’re in this cold place and the players are brought together, and the heat generates sexuality in a northern context. There’s also that brawn vs. grace thing that happens in hockey, too. I don’t know how that relates to sex…

Then there is the ballet element to hockey, the very graceful dance.

Exactly.

Part of the reason I’ve never related to soccer is that it seems very jerky, whereas hockey is very fluid.

Until I started to play soccer when I was in Italy for the baseball book [Baseballisimo], I was never really able to appreciate soccer and the foot ballet. Until you actually try to do it, you don’t realise how light you have to be on your feet. I remember the revelation coming after playing for an hour, and in the last five minutes of that hour players would still be able to deek through the other team and put the ball in the top corner of the net. Meanwhile, I’d be having a heart attack on the sidelines. To be that good while that tired, that was the real insight for me about soccer, how amazing the players are at that level.

They’re running a marathon.

Totally, it’s unreal.

Whereas using skates is practically cheating. Can you explain in a nutshell the concept of the Five Hole?

Do you know what the Five Hole is?

No, I don’t.

Okay, so a goaltender has five holes, five weak spots. Top left (shoulder), top right, bottom left, bottom right, and the five hole is (whistles) between the legs. In hockey terminology, they say, “the five hole takes it away” or “through the five hole.” “That goalie’s weakness is his five hole.” It seemed like an obvious metaphor.

That’s very emasculating, if your weakness is your five hole.

Exactly.

What’s the relation with the One Yellow Rabbit theatre project in Calgary?

It will happen January 4-6 and then tour nationally—unless it sucks.

I thought you did this already, no?

No. The Rheos were out there last January for a week at the High Performance Rodeo. They’ve been around for 25 years doing alternative theatre, and this is the 20^th year they’ve done this theatre festival. It’s a great time and they really wanted to work with us in a larger context. I had sent them a play I had written kind of like [Neil Simon’s] The Sunshine Boys, but it’s two old rock slobs. We were talking about doing that, and then I mentioned I had these erotic hockey stories, and they said, ‘that’s the ticket. We want to do that. Send us the stories and we’ll adapt them.’ So me, [fellow Rheo] Martin [Tielli], Ford [Pier] and Selina [Martin] have been writing the music. It’s going to be a full-on theatrical extravaganza.

Is there a thread through it, or are you adapting each individual story?

We’re figuring out now how that will work. The dramaturgy will kick in when I go out there in November to crack it and put it together. But right now it is five stand-alone vignettes tied together thematically.

There was a snippet of something on your website, what was that?

The spoken word thing? That will be a monologue delivered by one of the actors, I think in a Ziggy Stardust goalie pose. That monologue is the last story in the book. We’ve been in the studio trying to figure out how these literary concepts can be applied theatrically and musically. It’s not unlike Group of Seven in that you get paintings that you have to set to music.

In terms of other projects, I knew about your rock’n’roll trip to China, but I didn’t know you had gone to Finland and Russia recently too. Is this part of a new book?

That’s the Around the World in 80 Gigs book. I’m supposed to deliver that in the spring and it will be out next fall, but I don’t know. I might wait a little longer. It depends on how many other countries I can get to. I’ve done about 50 gigs now. I have to make sure I get to enough countries that it feels pan-global.

Is that to rock’n’roll what the Hockey Nomad was to hockey? [Hockey Nomad is the TV documentary adaptation of Tropic of Hockey]

In a way. Not really, though, because obviously music in these places is not exotic the way hockey would be. It is the same thrust: going to these places to find rock’n’roll stories that are new to us and hopefully will illuminate the context of rock’n’roll in these places and finding local heroes. It is the same spirit, but the conceit is less about finding surprises.

One of them still is a Communist regime, and one of them is the former Soviet state. How subversive is rock’n’roll there?

Suprisingly, there’s a big history of rock’n’roll in Russia—largely suppressed, of course. But it’s been around. China was just… extraordinary. We were in towns where they’d never had a rock band play, never. People were bewildered. We’d try to get them to clap on the 2 and 4—not that I’m a big clapper guy, but you find yourself doing that stuff anyways. But you’d try and get them to clap on the beat, and instead you’d just get (starts clapping) applause, right? Then you get them to do the hands-over-their-heads waving thing, and they’d be watching their hands [instead of you]. And you’d walk out to play and there’d be a kid in the front row eating a turtle. It was awesome.

Then we were in Changsha in Hunan province, which is kind of like the Hamilton of China—mind you, there are a lot of Hamiltons in China. Pretty down and dirty place, especially after coming from Shanghai, which is almost like L.A. The kids in Shanghai all had bad teeth and were all ugly and all loved Motorhead. There’s only one Motorhead album sanctioned in China, but this one kid was boasting that he had seven Motorhead albums that his uncle in Birmingham, Alabama had sent him. Another kid asked us if we wanted to go smoke some pot. It was nice to find rock’n’roll in the poor northern provinces, where it’s a more of an underground phenomenon than in the northern cities.

We played this old amusement park. I asked them the night before if there were any opening bands, and they said, ‘Oh yeah, two local opening bands.’ We were supposed to go on at 2PM. I said, ‘Oh, I’d love to meet them and interview them.’ They said, ‘Great, we’ll pick you up at 8.30.’ ‘8.30?’ ‘Yeah, they’re going on at 9 in the morning. There will be four hours, and then you guys go on. We thought we’d put the Hunanese bands on in the morning so as to not discredit your performance.’ Because rock’n’roll musicians there are considered failures, real societal pariahs. If you’re over 21 and you’re still in a band, you’re a loser.

How does that relate to other artists? Is that purely a rock’n’roll thing?

Literature and poetry have long traditions in China, unless you’re any kind of honest journalist, and then they throw you in jail.

Is this a post-Cultural Revolution thing, about the respectability—or lack of—for musicians?

That’s part of it, for sure. I’d liken it to being a baseball player in America in the 1910’s. It’s not honest work. ‘What are you doing?’ That’s the sense I got. But it’s a regional thing. In Beijing, there was a band there who were like the Donnas, a hard-driving girl rock band. They had five songs that were not banned from radio play necessarily, but the government had come down strongly, saying that they found these five songs to be not appropriate. The band had this big outdoor show a week before we got there, and they started their set with those five songs and the kids went crazy. In Beijing, things are changing and rock’n’roll is becoming empowered. In Russia, you find this rising youth culture, but there are also way more cops and soldiers on the street than ever before. In China it’s the same thing, they’re moving and moving, and at one point they’re going to find out what’s behind door number three, you know?

It’s interesting, because in North America, rock’n’roll is the least rebellious thing you can do. There’s a prescribed package that comes with it, a model you’re supposed to follow. And in the internet age, I’d just assumed that package has been franchised everywhere and it was a given—in the same way that my generation inherited the rulebook from the boomers or even the punks ten years before us.

It’s refreshing that there’s still a frontier for rock’n’roll in parts of the world. I remember being at this Blackalicious show at the Opera House a week before I went to China. There were four bouncers sitting on top of the speakers, and any time a kid in the audience lit a cigarette, they came down on them.

I was there last week for TV on the Radio, same thing.

Right. In China, there’s the Red Guard in Tianamen Square, and it was interesting to compare the two. What’s the microcosmic police state? Is it the fucking Opera House with these goons smashing kids with their flashlights, or is it China, where the security guards are having a smoke? I remember at the end of our show at Sujo, everybody was sitting on these white bucket chairs. It was almost like a convocation rather than a show. Before our last song, Andy, the promoter, gets up and says, ‘Everybody can come to the front of the stage now!’ Everybody got up. I told Andy afterwards, ‘You know, storming the stage when you’ve actually kind solicited it…’

Which happens at the ACC or Massey Hall all the time: “Everybody, you can dance now!”

Right. So they all came to the front and we played our last song. At one point a cop came bursting through the crowd, and I thought, ‘Uh-oh, someone’s going to get in trouble.’ Instead, he was waving ten yuan because he wanted to buy an Al Piggins CD. Now, this is not to say that there aren’t people in prisons getting the shit beaten out of them. But in a rock’n’roll environment, it was interesting to see this difference.

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