Moe Berg

A Spotify Playlist

On the surface, this might seem like an immodest, self-indulgent thing. However, I’m doing this more as a way for me to talk about the music that has inspired me to become a musician, a songwriter, a producer and also describes me as a music fan.

Most of my Spotify playlists are a dog’s breakfast. They don’t have a lot of conceptual integrity. I hear a song and then add it to one of the random playlists I have going and none of it makes a lot of sense. This playlist is my attempt to make something coherent, though it is also eclectic. I’ve also tried to be honest in my selections. There is a lot of old music that I discovered more recently that I won’t include, like Waiting For Someone by The Tokens, which is one of my all time favorite songs. Some of the stuff on the list is a bit corny but no one should be embarrassed by their musical choices and no one should make musical choices based on how cool it makes them look to others. You may be disappointed that there aren’t more deep cuts or obscure tracks. Often, the song that got me interested in a band or caught my ear, was the one I heard on the radio. I’m not trying to be hip with my choices, I’m trying to be honest. A lot of these songs were the big hits for the band and I’m not the kind of person who feels that disqualifies a song.

This playlist is loosely chronological. One thing though is, this list ends at 1985, which is when I moved to Toronto. Even though music continues to inspire me, I look at that date as the end of my musical upbringing.

There are some significant omissions here. Both Neil Young and especially Joni Mitchell were huge influences and major parts of my musical upbringing. I could tell long tales about my experiences buying their records, listening to their records and learning their songs. But since, (at least at the time of this writing) they have pulled their records from Spotify, and the whole idea of this is based on a Spotify playlist, those tracks are, regrettably, not included in this piece.

From a very young age, music was everything. My older brother, John and sister, Ann would occasionally bring home records and I listened to them over and over. Mostly, I was glued to the radio, listening to 630 CHED AM and later, K 97 FM. I listened to music all the time, learned to play songs on the guitar, picked out harmonies with John and dreamed of being a rock star.

I miss my youth. No matter what people say, you can’t relive it. When you do things like listen to an old record or go see a band you loved 20 years ago, you are seeing it through the lens of all that you’ve gone through since you first heard it/them. It reminds you of everything you’ve lost and everything that is gone. Doing things you used to do when you were young can never have the same rush as it did the first time. A song that captures this a little bit is Merle Haggard’s Wishing All Them Old Things Were New. A visual image of how I see my life is the scene in Fargo where the police are dragging William H Macy as he tries to escape through a window, whining like a child. That’s me trying to escape the inevitable end of my time on earth.

This is written sort of stream of consciousness. So don’t expect a literary masterpiece. You may or may not want to follow along with the actual playlist. Also, not to really get into it but I have some misgivings with Spotify and streaming services in general and I’m anticipating some comments about using Spotify. I see Spotify as a good thing for some (fans) and a bad thing for others, (musicians/songwriters). I’ve heard it said that better always means better for some and worse for others.

House Of The Rising Sun was the first record I ever bought by myself, which is the main reason it appears on the list. I bought it at a store called Ollies Pipe Shop, (later named Emery’s Pipe Shop) which was a tobacconist/convenience store about a half hour walk from my childhood home. On the counter was a cardboard box of current and old 45’s, positioned in the same way you might have a display of gum or lighters. I think they did quite well with this as, for a while, it was the only place you could buy records in St Albert, AB. If you wanted an album or a bigger selection of singles, you’d have to take the bus into Edmonton. (Eventually, Safeway, for years the only grocer in St Albert, put up a rack of albums that they sold at a wildly inflated price). Buying a record was a big deal. We were poor, the poorest people I knew in our slightly affluent suburb. It meant I listened to this record over and over again. When I first moved to Toronto, there was a club called the Copa. The place would often have bands play early shows before it converted to a dance club later in the evening. I saw Eric Burdon there and he sang a bunch of Animals songs and his voice still sounded amazing even though he must have been into his 60’s. One of the greatest rock singers of all time.

Roll Over Beethoven. Where I lived, no one had tons of records and most of the records people had were singles. But some people had Beatles and Beach Boys LP’s maybe some Sinatra and easy listening stuff. So that was my starting point. You’d go over to a friend or a relative’s house and you’d almost always find Long Tall Sally, which was a Canadian only release from the Beatles that resembled The Beatles Second Album. I remember listening to the intro to Roll Over Beethoven over and over again, stopping at the vocal and bringing the needle back to start again. There was something magical about George’s intro guitar that I couldn’t get enough of. At the time, I didn’t know this was a Chuck Berry song-I thought the Beatles wrote all of their songs. This is a great track that really has the Beatles sound. Each individual instrument is undoubtably John, Paul, George and Ringo playing it and there is an ensemble sound of the Beatles that is very distinctive.

Don’t Worry Baby. My brother John, was a big Beach Boys fan and that’s where I got my love for vocal harmonies. I Get Around was an early favorite of ours with its complex vocal intro and re intro that I still think is genius. But it was the more melancholy side of Brian Wilson that stuck with me over the years, which is why you see Don’t Worry Baby on the playlist. As a kid, I always imagined the teens of that era around a campfire snuggling with their girlfriends while that song played. My sister used to run with a bunch of guys who rode crappy motorcycles. They’d hang out in our basement and eat Kraft pizzas, (can you still get them?). They came in a kit that had a can of pizza dough, sauce and shredded cheese and you’d assemble and bake the pizza yourself. They must have been awful though I know little about pizza. But Ann would drag the portable record player down there and Don’t Worry Baby would be a song that would leak upstairs to where I was sitting with my mom, distracting me from whatever terrible TV show we were watching. When I was young, I used to think the Beach Boys were a band that people would listen to after a break up. I didn’t know much about romance but their songs had a subversive paradox inside them that could make them as relevant at a funeral as at a wedding.

I Don’t Want To Spoil The Party. This whole list could be Beach Boys and Beatles songs. Their catalogs are my earliest memories of music and their music is almost part of my DNA. This has a very relatable lyric. About a breakup where you might have mutual friends and how do you manage that? And about the singer taking the high road even though he is broken hearted. The last band I had in Edmonton was called facecrime, (I was on a huge 1984 kick at the time but yeah, cringy name). As I’ve noted in previous blogs, Edmonton was a hard place to get a gig if you weren’t a cover band. A lot of gigs would be week long residencies at a hotel bar. One of the more ‘prestigious’ gigs in town was a place called the Sidetrack Cafe that wasn’t attached to a hotel but was able to have live music and a liquor license because they served dinner. I remember seeing BB Gabor there a few times. Anyway, facecrime ended up with a booking as I had been grinding it out in other gigs in the city for years and this was considered, (comically) an “A” room. We had to play three sets and so we needed to pad our set with covers and also, do extended versions of our own songs, which no doubt made them crappy. We were getting some sort of decent fee to play the whole week. We didn’t have a sound man, in the sort of punk/new wave world, we would typically use the house guy, unless we were opening for Teenage Head or the Diodes or some touring act. (Though for a period of time, we had a young kid named Brook Pimm do our sound until he got too good at it and went to work for people who actually paid him). The manager of the club set up our sound-set it and forget it-so for the whole week no one was manning the sound board. Apparently he did an awful job as everyone said we sounded like crap. We played the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday then the manager fired us. I feel like he only hired us because he had a touring band that only wanted to play the Friday and Saturday and he needed someone as a placeholder for the early part of the week. When I went to collect our money, he gave us less than half of what we’d been promised for the week. His rational was that they made most of their money on the weekend and since we didn’t play the weekend we didn’t make half of the money. We had a back up singer named Dianne, a very nice and sensitive woman. She cried and I felt bad for her but I was like, whatever, we shouldn’t have been playing at a club like that in the first place. It was just one more reason I needed to get out of that crap town that was so aggressively horrible to its musicians. I hate bashing Edmonton. It’s much better now and when I am bashing it, I’m bashing what it was when I lived there and feel extremely justified in doing so. Anyway, I Don’t Want To Spoil The Party was one of the covers we did and I believe Dianne sang it. My 14-year old son, who is a Beatles fanatic recently got me to do this Beatles Bracket thing to discover what your favourite Beatles song is. This was mine.

She’s Not There. This was a single. I really didn’t know more of the Zombies stuff until later. I knew this song and Tell Her No and eventually, Time Of The Season. The tiny bass solo that acts as a transition between the first chorus and the second verse floored me. I first heard this on the radio and then I think Ann bought the single. We had a suitcase record player and, like I did with Roll Over Beethoven, I would drag the needle back to play the bass signature over and over again. At this point in my life, I didn’t really pay much attention to lyrics. I was more fascinated by anything unusual about the track, which the bass was in this one. This is still so great, holds up amazingly well after all these years.

Mr Dyingly Sad was a song I would hear on the radio but never owned a copy of and didn’t know anyone who did. This was one of the big issues with retail controlling music. If record stores didn’t think a record was selling, they’d send back their unsold copies and the record company would stop producing the record. They would typically destroy the unsold copies unless they could find a way to sell them at a huge discount. I assume that this song was quickly deleted and was not able to be purchased for decades. Several years ago, my friend, documentary filmmaker Alan Zweig, put it on a cassette for me and that was my only physical copy of the song. This track is all about the hauntingly beautiful vocal arrangement and exquisite chords. People at the time might have called it ‘jazzy’, though I personally wouldn’t. There are certain favorite songs of mine that I have listened to so many times that I never have to hear them again. And there are others that I never seem to get tired of. This is one of those, I could put it on anytime and still love every second.

Sit Down I Think I Love You. Again, it was the chords. Also, the little signature that the accordion plays around the hook made me fall in love with this unpopular instrument. I’ve tried to replicate that accordion style in songs that I have produced over the past decade and I’m thinking I should just send the player this track as a reference. All through the song there are interesting textures, like the sound of the guitar that does a call and answer with the vocal at the end of the B section. And the mandolin. The outro of the song features a great vocal counter melody that I often think of when I am getting lazy with an arrangement. I try to encourage myself to continue producing the song until the final note. I believe the original version of this song was by Buffalo Springfield and this is a Stephen Stills composition.

Tattoo I think my friend Rod bought The Who Sells Out as a ‘twofer’, which was one of the ways record companies repackaged records after their release. You’d stick two records together and sell them at a reduced price. Which meant I first heard this record a fair time after its initial release. The other record it was packaged with was A Quick One. The Who Sells Out forshadowed their later work as, although it wasn’t technically a concept record, it had these interstitical radio bumpers that tied the whole thing together. This song sounded so sad to me and it sounds sad in my head as it is running through it right now. The track is stripped down with it’s melancholy vocal and chords that make the uncharacteristically dopey lyrics sound more meaningful. I remember singing this song and others off of this record randomly when my friends and I were walking to school and it turns out, irritating the shit out of them. My friend Jackson would chastise me and ask me what I thought I was accomplishing by doing this? Was I showing off? I wasn’t showing off, I just couldn’t help myself. I also used to watch TV with a guitar in my hands, often ruining shows for my family members. Music was just inside me, screaming to get out and I didn’t even realize I was being such a frigging nuisance. I played my guitar until all hours of the night, driving my poor mom crazy and hogged the stereo, listening to records. A real pest. I was probably more driven as a kid than I ever was as an adult.

Let’s Spend the Night Together. Honestly, I didn’t know that much about the Stones for a long time. My sister Ann bought Let It Bleed but I’m not sure I liked it back then. Rod, who always had more disposable income than me, bought Through The Glass Darkly, with the original hexagon cover, (I wonder if he still has it). It was a greatest hits collection that we listened to it a lot and it was really loaded with awesome stuff. Let’s Spend The Night Together was my favorite song. I could never figure out the second chord until much later in life. It wasn’t clear to me that you could change the bass note on a chord and turn it into something else. I eventually figured that out and it dominated my philosophy of composition. And the harmonies were amazing. The Stones have been good for that, from Sympathy For The Devil to Love Is Strong, their harmony parts were very specifically them and brought an idea of catchiness that I think elevated a lot of their songs. The Stones were always a bit scary for me. They looked stoned and amoral. For a kid who grew up in the church, they seemed like what the parents in our congregation thought all rock musicians were. Releasing a record called, Their Satanic Majesties Request didn’t help. For me, the most interesting thing about The Stones is how much better a band they became when they stopped trying to be a blues band. When they figured out how to write great rock songs, that’s when they grew a personality. I’m always amazed by that. The moment when somebody finally gets good at something. I watched the Oasis documentary and there’s that great scene when Noel shows the band a song he wrote and the rest of the guys go, “you wrote that? No way, you didn’t write that!” I wonder if that was how the Stones felt when they recorded Aftermath and Between The Buttons?

I’m Goin’ Home. Alvin Lee was my first guitar hero. One of my older siblings either bought or borrowed the Woodstock soundtrack record. For me, the best track on it was Ten Years After’s I’m Goin’ Home. Alvin Lee was the first fast guitar player I’d ever heard and it blew my mind and that lick that’s in the solo of this song, the one that I’d hear on Montrose’s Good Rockin’ Tonight years later, still slays me. These days, fast guitar playing holds no interest for me other than respect for the gymnastic ability someone might have. Though sometimes I’ll hear someone play something fast but it will be a really interesting scale that I’ve never heard before and isn’t being played so fast or with so much distortion that you really can’t make out the notes. A good example of this would be the solo in Hip Today by Extreme or the outro solo in You Went Away by Earth Wind and Fire. My first rock concert was an all day festival at Clark Stadium in Edmonton, which may not even be there anymore. I was really young. There was a huge lineup of bands, some of which, like the Flying Burrito Brothers, never showed up. Growing up in a fundamentalist Christian household, this was my first experience with seeing people openly drinking, smoking pot and making out. John, my cousin Rob and I got a hot dog at the Bay, (a Canadian department store) bought 10 cans of pop and headed to the park. That was all the sustenance I had for the day. I only remember a few of the bands’ names, The Wackers, Flash Cadillac and the Continental Kids, who were like a B version of Sha Na Na, and Country Joe MacDonald doing a solo set, capped off with the obligatory Feel Like I’m Fixin’ To Die Rag. When Ten Years After finally hit the stage after nine or so hours, everyone stood up, blocking me, the tiny child, from seeing them. So I basically heard their set. For the last song, they punched into I’m Goin’ Home and John put me on his shoulders to be able to see them play. By then, I was so tired and worn out from the day, I’m not sure how much I appreciated the song but, thinking back, it was a cool first concert.

Suite Judy Blue Eyes. This is a title that I thought was clever as a kid but now find painfully corny as an adult. As band’s became heavier and vocals became less important, Crosby Stills and Nash were a breath of fresh air for me. They were one of a growing number of supergroups that would be a thing during the ’70’s. This track was on their eponymous debut and was in heavy rotation on my suburban crescent. I’d be in one of the neighborhood girls’ basement and everyone there would sing along to Marrakesh Express and this song and, because I was good at singing harmonies, it made me look awesome to the girls. Picking a harmony part in a song and singing along was pretty much my favorite thing to do at the time and this record was like a buffet of that. I spent a lot of time hanging out with girls when I was a kid and had a few girlfriends though I never really did anything with them. A bit of hand holding and an even smaller amount of kissing. I was pretty naive and, even though I was very girl crazy, I was unschooled in carnal matters. A lot of that was on account of my fundamentalist Christian upbringing where sex wasn’t really a subject or even a word. But I learned early on the power women had and how men’s desire for them made guys act and feel stupid. And also the rush you get when a girl likes you back.

Heaven On Their Minds. Jesus Christ Superstar was a gigantic deal when I heard it. My life up to that point had been singles and collections of singles. The idea that a story could run through an entire record seemed pretty cool to me at the time but in hindsight, the idea of a rock opera is really dopey. When I used to listen to albums before this, I would typically skip the songs I didn’t like or couldn’t understand. But I listened to JCS from beginning to end, with my headphones on, over and over again. My brother John brought this home but I don’t think anyone in my family listened to it more than I did. I can still remember almost every word, every riff clearly and I may have listened to it more than any other record I can name. The singing on the original cast recording is absolutely stunning. In my opinion, it was Deep Purple’s, Ian Gillan’s finest hour. All the vocal performances by the cast were flashy and passionate, which, I discovered later, is the nature of the theatre. Heaven’s On Their Mind has a guitar hook that foreshadowed the drama and impending doom of the story that was about to unfold. What always struck me about JCS was how dark it was and when I listen to it now, it feels sinister, full of foreboding. We are leading up to the tortuous death of Christ and there is an ugliness to the plot of this opera. The death of Jesus may have been preordained but it doesn’t make the events leading up to it any less creepy and I feel that Rice and Lloyd Webber expertly captured that.

Pearl. I remember hearing this on a bus trip home from my Grandma’s in Camrose, Alberta. I don’t know if the bus had a radio of if someone was playing it on their transister. My cousin Dan and I used to go to Camrose every summer for a week to visit Grandma and mainly, just hang out with each other. One of our main activities during these visits was to come up with song titles based on descriptions of farts noises and poo. It was about a one and a half hour bus ride home but to a kid, it felt like it took the entire day. On one trip home, Grandma had sent us off with a couple of root beers to drink on the ride. For some reason, we were having trouble opening them. A man stepped up and helped us and then scooped a middle finger full of Copenhagen into his cheek proclaiming, “This is my root beer.” Weird thing to say. We were probably 11 or 12 years old, maybe a bit young to be on a Greyhound alone but those were the times. Pearl was clearly a love song but something about the way it was portrayed, maybe it was the organ tone, gave it a sad feeling. As I write this blog, I can’t help noticing how often melancholy and sadness comes up when I describe songs I like. I think of my youth being carefree especially compared to the lives of today’s youth, but in reality I think it was pretty sad. I think there was a perpetual feeling of longing that dragged me down and prevented me from really enjoying things, something that remains part of me to this day. My father abandoning our family when I was seven years old obviously had a profound effect on me and I, perhaps foolishly, blame everything that’s wrong with me on that. It was clearly a constant source of sadness and shame and was only perpetuated by a myth that he would someday return. The old man would come around from time to time, often to beg my mother for a divorce. He’d occasionally bring birthday gifts though that dried up after a couple of years. One day, I made a bet with a guy at school named Dave, (not Dave Gilby). He said, if I could refrain from speaking for a whole day, that he’d buy me any album of my choice. As someone who didn’t have a lot of money for albums, this was a bet I had every intention of winning. I was out with him and my other friends for most of this ‘day’. However, at one point I was home and my dad was there, again, trying to get something out of my mom. He asked me something and I wrote down on a sheet of paper that I held up, saying that I couldn’t talk to him. I didn’t explain why. I didn’t see him again for ten years, and that night tortured me every day of those ten years. I managed to win the bet and got Dave to buy me Journey Through The Past by Neil Young, an odd record but I was at the height of my Neil Young phase. I don’t know what happened to it, I can’t find it in any of my stuff and considering how monumental that weekend was for me, a bit curious that I would lose track of it. My cousin Dan has had a troubled life. I had lost track of him for decades and recently was able to connect with him via Facebook. Talk about a guy who was dealt a shit hand. There’s more to say about this but I think discretion prohibits me going any further.

Every Night. Paul’s debut solo album was something of a curiosity to me. I don’t think I was musically sophisticated enough to understand it until much later. But there were some Paulish songs on it that I loved. Maybe I’m Amazed, obviously. Junk as well. In high school, my friends and I did a pantomime in Drama class with Singalong Junk as the soundtrack. Every Night had the Cole Porter major to minor or in this case, minor to major in it. It’s such a great trick that I’ve, oddly, hardly ever used myself. I’m constantly amazed at the brilliance of this song. Knowing how sappy Paul can get, this is decidedly not that. It’s a very interestingly crafted lyric. It really only gets to the mushy stuff on the hook. I had an opportunity to talk about this album on a podcast called The Walrus Was Paul, by Paul Romanuk which offered me the chance to really examine it in detail. This record becomes more impressive to me as the years go by and I’ve probably never loved it as much as I do now.

Make Me Smile. Sometime in the late ’60’s into the ’70’s, jazz rock became a big thing. Someone told me that Bitches Brew by Miles Davis was sort of the unofficial start of that. However, both Blood, Sweat and Tears and Chicago, the two biggest bands of the genre had formed before Bitches Brew’s release. So I don’t know. (Maybe they meant that Bitches Brew was the start of jazz rock fusion?) There were other bands that cashed in on the trend, Ides of March had a killer track called Vehicle and I also had a single by a band called Spiral Staircase, called More Today Than Yesterday that featured an incredible tenor vocal. Then there was the Canadian band, Lighthouse who had a decent run in this style and, more on them in a bit. Again, it was John who brought home the Chicago and BS&T records. Make Me Smile was my favorite Chicago track, it was part of a long piece on Chicago III called Ballet For A Girl From Buchanan. It had a drum solo and cool harmonies and great chord changes. It was a Terry Kath song, Terry being the band’s guitarist. He accidentally shot himself to death cleaning his gun, a uniquely American death. The band also died with him. They would go on to greater commercial success later on but musically, they never achieved the artistic heights they did while he was with them. Sometimes a band has someone who is like their creative conscience. Someone who gets what’s good about the band and is able to deflect the more puerile tendencies of the other members. The sort of twee Peter Cetera ballads that were the focus of their sound on their later records created a bit of a sad legacy for a band that was pretty radical in its early days, very political and musically adventurous.

No Matter What. This feels like a song that everybody likes, like Blister In The Sun by the Violent Femmes. It’s pretty much the definition of power pop and I believe it has influenced thousands of songs. I often cite Badfinger as an influence but I had little interest in any of their songs that weren’t written by Pete Ham, (or Paul McCartney). The Beatles introduced an idea that everyone in a band can and should write songs. I haven’t really examined how common this idea was in general but it seemed to be a big thing in the power pop world, I guess since power pop bands were so influenced by the Beatles. Arguably the two biggest power pop bands of the original wave, The Raspberries and Badfinger, had this egalitarian approach. It meant that every record had a few amazing Pete Ham/Eric Carmen songs, then a few by the second best writer and then a bunch of barely listenable songs by the other guys in the band. This sounds uncharitable and many would disagree. I guess I don’t believe that, just because you can play an instrument, you are a world class songwriter. The story of Badfinger is one of the most depressing in the history of rock. If you are interested in a tale of the music business screwing over a band so badly that two of the members commit suicide, then dig into Badfinger’s story

Surf’s Up. I have never seen a record jacket that so accurately described the music that was inside it. The photo of the lonely horse rider, his head down and the dull green hue to the painting really illuminated the essential contradiction in The Beach Boys music, the idea of melancholy presented in a beautiful and upbeat way. The final act of the song Surf’s Up, as I stated in a previous blog entry, is the single most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard. I remember listening to this at my grandma’s house, in a sitting room with my cousins Jackie and Greg. I’m not sure who actually owned the record, probably one of their brothers, and being devastated by Feel Flows, ‘Til I Die and especially Surf’s Up. They kept playing Student Demonstration Time and Take A Load Off Your Feet, both of which are kind of gross, but that’s not a knock on my cousins. We were kids and those songs had a catchy simplicity to them. It never clicked with me as a youngster what an absolute genius Brian Wilson was. Even back then and even after hearing this record, I still associated the Beach Boys with surfer and car music, summer and good times. As cool as I thought it was at the time, I was still too young to really grasp how musically sophisticated it was. As I got older, I began to appreciate Wilson and the Beach Boys in a new way. This song reveals a genius in full bloom. I feel like it took a long time but the world has caught up to Brian Wilson and more and more people are seeing him for the brilliant producer and artist he was.

Lord Of This World. John brought home Masters Of Reality by Black Sabbath one day. I (and really, no one else on earth) had ever heard music this heavy. We put it on and the coughing with the delay into the opening riff of Sweet Leaf was like a completely new experience of music. The distortion and low end were other worldly. There was an evil vibe to this, which was a bit weird as my brother was embracing Evangelical Christianity right about then. Another song on the album, After Forever, seemed to be a pro-Christian tune but there was enough of the Diabolus in Musica to make it clear that this was from the dark side. I absolutely loved this record and played the crap out of it. I found out that they had earlier records and it was on my record buying radar to get Paranoid, their second album. I took the bus into Edmonton to a store called Kelly’s with enough dough to buy a new record one weekend as I must have come into some birthday money or something. I narrowed it down to a choice between two that were on sale. One was the original cast recording of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. I was high off of my adoration of Jesus Christ Superstar and thought this might be similar in its greatness. My other option was Black Sabbath’s Paranoid. I did a mental coin flip and chose Joseph. (This was years before Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat became a Broadway sensation). As anyone knows, it kind of blows. I tried playing it a bunch of times but never really got it. I thought, I’ll go back downtown and ask if I can switch it for Paranoid. Both records had been in some kind of budget bin. I sheepishly went up to the cashier and asked, “Are there refunds for these records?” to which he replied, “nope”. What I meant to ask was, could I exchange Joseph for Paranoid but I was too nervous. It was the only time in my life that I contemplated stealing something. I never ended up buying Paranoid until I got the CD on sale at Walmart in about 2001. But Lord Of This World has remained my favorite Sabbath song.

I’ve Got Confidence I would be remiss if I didn’t include at least one Gospel song. I grew up in the Pentecostal church. My Dad’s family were a part of it and my mom converted after the old man bolted from the family. I guess it was a way of coping with her crap circumstances, 5 kids and no job, fucking hell. John was the only one of us kids who bought into the church and he did so in a big way. He started bringing home Christian records, lots of quartets like the Blackwood Brothers and the Imperials, who were a bit “hipper” what with their guitar solos and sideburns, and seemed to be pandering to a younger audience. They had one killer track called Jesus Made Me Higher (see?) from a live record they released, that had some insane harmonies. There was also a sort of hippy group called Love Song that had some stuff with really nice tight harmonies, They probably would have been a relatively successful secular group along the lines of America or Crosby Stills and Nash. They had one track called, Feel The Love that had a really beautiful chorus and another song called And The Wind Was Low that was/is painfully lovely. The best record John brought home was called Keep On Singin’ by Andre Crouch and the Disciples. The song I have chosen to showcase here is I’ve Got Confidence, though it isn’t the version from that record as that version is not available on Spotify. This version seems to be the same backing track but with a different, not as good, vocal on it. The bass playing on this is amazing-his band was hot. Many of the songs I listened to growing up, including the aforementioned Jesus Made Me Higher aren’t available on Spotify. Maybe there is some kind of Christian streaming service that I am unaware of? Later on, after the time period of this list, I started listening to a lot of traditional Gospel music like the Staple Singers, Five Blind Boys of Alabama and a lot of mass choirs. We used a snippet of The Downward Road by the Staple Singers to lead off our record of the same name.

Stop. Several years ago, I recall seeing a band of really young kids who were doing sort of a classic rock thing, a before its time Greta Van Fleet. They were pretty good except for the bass player. The band would kick into a song and he would just solo over it. The groove would never be established because he would rarely hit the root note and never played with the drummer, ever. They were managed by a guy I knew and this was at a time when I was really aggressively looking for production gigs. I remember telling him how much I would like the band if they had a different bass player. I feel like he agreed with me and also, that the rest of the band would agree with me but the bass player was a very strong willed person and they all went along with him wanting it to all be about him. I imagine they had grown up together. He was probably influenced by flashy players like John Entwistle. But John, and other bassists like him, still managed to play the root notes to the chords of the song. James Gang had a record called James Gang Live In Concert. Still my favorite live album. On one of their early records, they had a long song called Stop, which was a pretty white sounding jam track with about 6 minutes of Joe Walsh guitar soloing. However, the version on Live In Concert was shorter and tighter and had all three members playing virtuoso parts. The drums and the bass are all over the place. But Dale Peters always hit the root note before doing some kind of super fancy lick. It’s one of my favorite bass parts and this is coming from a guy who thinks punk rock bass is the best bass. Just play eighth note roots and you’re good in my book. But the bass playing in Stop really highlights what was wrong with the arrogant young bassist at the start of this story. No matter what you use to embellish the part, you always need to play the chords of the song. Joe Walsh’s guitar playing on this record is his high note. I never heard him play better than he did on this album and this is the best power trio recording I’ve ever heard.

Country Road. Speaking of power trios, I grew up thinking Grand Funk was a cool band. Cool people in my high school listened to them and girls used to spin Footstompin’ Music at parties. It wasn’t until I got older that I found out they were regarded by the gate keepers of the time as trash. My first band was with a bunch of older kids and we were called 556, the meaning of which remains unknown to me. We used to get together to ‘practice’ and barely ever played a song from beginning to end. We’d jam to Aimless Lady by Grand Funk because our bass player loved the bass part. One weekend, the bass player’s parents went away and he invited the band to come over and have it be more like a party where we played. He told me to bring something to eat for dinner. I brought a can of Mini Ravioli, which was like a bar of gold in our family. We jammed for a while until the other guitar player started to make out with his girlfriend. Even though the guys were only a year or two older than me, I must have seemed like a little kid to them. The bass player suggested he drive me home before they all got drunk and disorderly. The guitar player ended up knocking up that girl, (maybe it happened that night?), which probably turned their life to crap. We performed one gig, which was my school’s variety night, where we played Neil Young’s Cowgirl In The Sand. Speaking of bass, the bass is so frigging loud on this track and pretty much every song Grand Funk recorded up to the Todd Rundgren produced albums. It’s the loudest thing in the mix other than the vocal. I loved it and any listen to a TPOH record reveals that any mix note I ever gave to an engineer included, ‘turn up the bass’. I still don’t get why people thought Grand Funk were like a boy band. Their lyrics were very political, which was the style at the time and they played long, jammy songs which was also the style at the time. Maybe it was because they were always shirtless? I don’t think they were the only band who did that though, what a weird thing to do. Could you imagine a shirtless band now? (hint: their initials are RHCP)

Baba O’Riley. There was a girl who lived down the street from me, we’ll call her, Susie. We’d known each other since we were young and had gone to all the same schools as kids. At puberty, she developed some very womanly features. She had met some older guys and she would routinely steal money from her parents to buy beer to meet up with them. Stealing money from one’s parents was a thing that a few people in my grade did. Maybe it’s a common thing even now? One day she asked me over and bought me some food from the only fast food place in St. Albert, a place called the Klondike Inn, with some of her stolen money. The Klondike Inn had a burger called the Mushroom Burger that was soaking in something like Cream Of Mushroom soup. Susie had just bought a Who record called Who’s Next with some of her parents cash. I had been a Who fan for a long time and especially liked Tommy. I remember sleeping in my friend Jackson’s backyard and he sang Christmas from that record. I thought it sounded great and later he played me the album and I thought it was magical. Tommy was another rock opera, like Jesus Christ Superstar. When Susie put on Who’s Next, the first song was Baba O’Riley and I was struck by how great it sounded. Like the fidelity of it. There is talk that it was one of the first records where a lot of energy was put into making it sound better than rock records typically sounded. We listened to the whole album while we ate our mushroom burgers and drank orange soda and then she went out to meet the older guys. It was a hard rock masterpiece that seemed to be written by a genius. The songs had enough of the meat and potatoes rock that would make it accessible to a North American audience but still had a sophistication that made it better than any American hard rock album to that point. Hard Rock was still a British thing until Montrose came along. Who’s Next was produced by Glyn Johns, who had engineered the Let It Be album by The Beatles and the Beatles were the only band other than the Beach Boys whose records had any meaningful fidelity to them. One of the most influential parts of Baba O’Riley was the Lowery organ that ran through the entire piece. What struck me most was how different the organ sounded depending on what bass note was being played. I started playing chords but changing the bass notes to see how the chords reacted to them. As I mentioned earlier, this defined my personal sense of harmony.

Go All The Way. I saw the Raspberries on Don Kircheners Rock Concert. It was pretty much power pop heaven. Great harmonies and Left Banke chord changes. I loved Go All The Way. Along with No Matter What, it may be the most pure example of power pop ever recorded. A while later, I was in a record store, probably Kelly’s, with Rod. They were playing Raspberries Best in the store and I basically stood around and listened to every magical track. I didn’t have any money but vowed not to leave the store without this record. If I had asked my mom for the money, she might not have given it to me but I asked Rod to loan me the cash for it. That way, I could tell Mom that I had to pay him back. Pretty crappy trick to play on my mother but it worked. It was a great collection that had pretty much every really good Raspberries track on it. Later, I bought all the four original albums but you could easily get by with the anthology I bought that day. Eric Carmen, the main singer and songwriter, eventually went solo and while his first album had a couple of nice moments on it, he sort of descended into a schlocky crooner. On his third album, he unexpectedly released a song called Hey Deanie that Shawn Cassidy covered and it was the best piece of power pop he’d written since he left the band. The band that was to become The Modern Minds learned it and played it at our first gig, an outdoor event that showcased the original Edmonton punk bands. Weird song for us to play at an event like that but our concept was still forming in our heads. Last I heard, Carmen was devoting his life to being in a cult. But the Raspberries have to be one of the most influential bands ever. One of the coolest moments of my life was getting cold-called by Wally Bryson, the lead guitarist in the band. I had made no bones about how much I loved the Raspberries and had probably said as much in Rolling Stone. He found out about it and managed to contact someone who gave him my phone number. They hadn’t done anything in a long while so I imagine he felt it was nice that someone was out championing them. Wally ended up in a band called Fotomaker whose debut was a pretty good album. In a world of WAP, the lyrics to Go All The Way are sort of charming. A guy begging a girl to have sex with him without using any explicit language. The expression, Go All The Way feels innocent though of course it isn’t.

Lady Day St Albert, the town I grew up in, had two middle schools. but those schools merged into one High School, Paul Kane. So when when my friends and I got there, we ended up meeting a whole new group of people. The girls from the other middle school seemed more exotic than the one’s we had gone through our previous school career with. My friends and I started hanging out with some of them. They had different records, like Traffic and Slade and Lou Reed. Hanging out with these girls and listening to Transformer and Berlin felt sophisticated, like life was more than baloney sandwiches on white bread. I really loved Transformer but there was something about Berlin that spoke to me in the way that a bunch of records of the time were speaking to me. It let me know that there was a dark and decadent world outside of St Albert. Berlin painted a bleak picture of life in a big city-of people who had lost their way. Lady Day was such a beautiful song, produced by Bob Ezrin who had produced all of my favorite Alice Cooper records. Lou Reed became one of my favorite artists and a big influence on me as a lyricist and also as a performer. His record, Take No Prisoners had some of the funniest stage patter I’d ever heard though much of it would probably be considered very offensive now. That record and Metallic KO by Iggy and the Stooges, (which also contained some very politically incorrect stage patter), introduced me to an onstage swagger that was not part of my personality but I adopted and probably, for better or worse, was part of what got TPOH noticed. Sometimes it would backfire. I remember playing a charity gig at the Rivoli in Toronto. We had really broken big by then and the Rivoli was a far too small venue for us. I forget what the charity was but I remember that National Velvet was also on the gig. That day there was a catastrophic snow storm and the show didn’t sell out. I felt hurt by that, my ego fucking up on me, and it put me in a terrible mood. I went off on some rant about Barry White for some reason, I have nothing against him, I may have read that he said some benign sexist thing. Anyway, a woman in the audience heckled me about it and I called her a bitch. It was one of those times when, as the words are leaving your mouth, you are already regretting it. It wasn’t a thing I think I’ve ever said to anyone before or since. She wrote a letter to NOW Magazine, basically calling me out as a dick. And, yeah, I was and I deserved that public shaming.

Gudbye To Jane. Slade was another band the new girls turned me on to. Sladest was the soundtrack to most of the makeout parties I attended. Because it’s like a singles collection, there wasn’t really a bad track on it. Noddy Holder is one of the greatest singers in rock history, what a voice! It’s weird that they weren’t really a thing over here as they had all of the standard rock elements that most American and Canadian bands had. Maybe it was exposure. If you hear something enough times, you’ll start liking it. I feel cheated that I didn’t get enough exposure to British glam in St Albert. I came to love Mott the Hoople, early period David Bowie and T Rex more after the fact then when they were current. But I did get lots of exposure to Slade. Later in life, when I started DJing, I would play Gudbye To Jane pretty much every set. Slade were the masters of the singalong chorus and I have adopted their gang vocals as one of my most used production tricks.

Messing With The Kid. Living in Edmonton meant that you weren’t on the usual route for bands touring North America. Bands would usually play Toronto and Vancouver and sometimes Montreal but a band would want to be making a detailed tour before they would come to our town. There were certain bands, though, that seemed to be road monsters, playing anywhere they could. Supertramp used to come to town all the time though I heard it was because they were oddly more popular in Edmonton that they were in any other North American market. Another artist who made yearly visits was Rory Gallagher. Rory was an Irish guitarist who could make his guitar sing. People say this about guitarists all the time, but Rory was the only guy who I actually heard do it. He had a way of bending notes that I haven’t really heard other guitarists do. That combined with the sound he got out of his Strat created a wail that was the signature of his style. There is something about being on the road that affects a band’s sound. I’m not talking about the big tours we see now where everything is choreographed and there is little deviation from show to show. I mean, when bands’ used to tour and play songs and improvise and those improvisations turned into recurring themes that the band would build on. Surely playing every town in North America year after year was what made Rory such an awesome guitarist. That, and the ability to improvise and push himself without worrying that he wasn’t conforming to some pre staged idea of what his set was supposed to be. I have a fantasy of Taylor Swift going on tour with a four piece band with no staging and just playing whatever songs she felt like on a nightly basis and maybe even taking a few requests. I feel like this would be the ultimate Taylor Swift rebellion against those who don’t see her as a legit artist. (I know this can’t happen).

Superwoman. I remember getting really sick with a flu or something. At the time, I shared a bedroom with John. He let me keep the radio on all night because I couldn’t sleep with my fever. It was probably the middle of the night and this song came on. In my delirium, I was transfixed by the beauty of this track. I believe that Stevie Wonder is the most talented person of the recording age. When you look at songwriting, singing, musicianship, production and arranging, I think he’s the greatest of all time. There are people who may be better at one of those individual things but no one is as good at all of them. From Music Of My Mind to Hotter Than July, who was better? The Edmonton Public Library downtown had an enormous collection of vinyl. I used to take out records and tape them onto cassettes and that’s how I listened to all the early Stevie Wonder records. Stevie wasn’t just funky. His songwriting was deep in the traditions of song craft, great melodies and choruses and thoughtful lyrics. And incredible sounds. He was like a more progressive version of Holland Dozier Holland.

School’s Out. The relationship between an artist and a fan is one-sided but still beautiful. I was in love with Alice Cooper, not in any sexual way, but there are parallels to a romantic relationship. I loved seeing pictures of them, I’d even like seeing their name in print. I wrote their name on my school binder. I bought any magazine that had an article about them. They were real rock stars and Alice Cooper, the singer, was almost like a superhero with an alterego. I heard School’s Out on the radio and it instantly became my favorite song. I really wanted the album and I had saved up enough money to buy it. My brother, who was driving by this point, drove me to Edmonton in one of the rotating Volkswagen Bugs that he and Ann’s boyfriend, Derek had parked in our driveway, so I could buy it. The album jacket opened like a school desk and the vinyl inside was wrapped in a pair of paper underwear. The photo inside showed the band around a bunch of garbage cans guzzling beer. These guys were definitely not like me and that was part of what was so great about them. I’ve written in this space about rock stars and how important they are to kids. School’s Out came out during the time that I was becoming aware of production on a record and Bob Ezrin was my first favorite producer. As I went backwards and heard Killer and Love It To Death and then forward to Billion Dollar Babies, I was struck by the sound of the records but also, by the production devices that helped tell the story of the song or the use of strings and choirs in a hard rock setting. I met Alice briefly at a radio conference in San Francisco and had my picture taken with him and he called me by name. Earlier in the day, he had recognized the other guys in the band. Thinking that he knew who I was or had heard our music made my 13-year old heart burst. I never got a copy of that photo, would love to have it.

Rock Me Baby. My introduction to Johnny Winter was his self titled record, the black one with just his face. I’m not exactly sure how it came into our house but I heard the intro to Be Careful With A Fool and it had this incredible energy. His guitar playing was the best blues guitar I’d heard up to that point. Later, I heard Johnny Winter and Live but didn’t really care for it, mostly because of the terrible mix that has no bass. But I bought Still Alive And Well and it was just as good as the eponymous record. It was definitely more of a rock album. Whenever I listen to this song, I am ashamed of how many of his licks I copped. Johnny Winter was another artist I saw at the Copa in my early Toronto days. It was me, one woman and about 700 bikers. I was wearing a suit coat and a black fedora and couldn’t have looked more like someone to beat up. Everyone was cool though, and I’m glad I got a chance to see him. He finished his last song and a girl came out, he put his arm around her and they walked straight to his bus. No encore. My understanding of the Johnny Winter story is that he had been ripped off constantly and taken advantage of by a manager. Apparently, he finally freed himself from that guy but, even though he was ill in the last days of his life, he still had to play. Kind of sad for someone so innovative and influential. He should have been able to retire with a big sack of money.

Glamour Boy Growing up in Canada, The Guess Who were sort of ubiquitous. Always on the radio and in the media. I would hear their stuff on CHED AM and loved No Sugar Tonight especially. But Guess Who 10 was the first album of theirs that I bought. I was on some sort of trip with a friend of mine, Doug, and his dad had the radio on, which is when I first heard Glamour Boy. What a beautiful melody and what beautiful chords. I started buying all the old Guess Who records with the money I made working at Safeway. Safeway was the only grocery store in St Albert and was the best job for a high school kid. It was the first time in my life when I could buy records without saving for a long time. I bought everything from Share The Land to Flavours and loved every one of them. Obviously, Burton has a one in a million voice and his voice often saved songs that weren’t great. I got a chance to meet him at an industry function and although our interaction was brief, he was very nice and complimentary. Someone snapped a photo and it is one of the two photos that I covet the most, (the other being that shot with Alice Cooper). Not too long ago, I got a message from him via facebook about how much he liked our Where’s The Bone record. Struck me as odd as it’s not exactly one of our most famous recordings. But I suppose that makes it even more special that Burton liked it.

Good Rockin’ Tonight. When I was a kid, Creem Magazine was my bible. I read it cover to cover every month. During a press junket in Los Angeles, I got to meet one of the writers, Dave DiMartino and I have never been more star struck. I hope I have this right. There was a Warner Brothers Records ad for a compilation of their artists’ most recent releases. It ended up being part of a series called Loss Leaders. You had to send something ridiculous like $2 to get it. I sent my two bucks and, a few weeks later, a double album called Hard Goods arrived in the mail. It was amazing, filled with killer tracks. Vegetables by The Beach Boys, Strutter by Kiss, songs by Neil Young, Todd Rundgren, Frank Zappa, almost 30 songs in total. It also had a song by Montrose called Good Rockin’ Tonight. Montrose was a band I had vaguely heard about from someone in high school. I can’t remember the kid’s name but I remember an incident. It was during a track meet and someone had given me a stop watch. I went up to him and said, okay let’s time how long it takes you to have an orgasm, thinking it was the funniest thing ever. Unfortunately people had been taking about this kid being gay, which I was completely unaware of. He, and the dudes he was with, took great offense to my joke. I still think about this often. I abruptly left when they got mad at me, thinking I was probably in for a beating. My joke had absolutely nothing to do with any perception people had of him being gay, which I certainly wasn’t aware of. I wish I had spoken up as he probably despises me to this day. Good Rockin’ Tonight-wow, what a track. The guitar sounds were so meaty and the track was supercharged with energy. There was a lick in the solo that was an Alvin Lee lick that I’ve never been able to play. A few years back, I was producing a band called National Anthem and they had a really good guitar player named Bernard. One day I heard him playing the lick and I felt like punching him in the face. Something that had eluded me my whole life and he was just playing it like it was no big deal. What’s also so great about this arrangement is that it’s a 12 bar but it sounds like it has a verse and a chorus. After hearing the sampler, I bought the first Montrose record and it remains in my top ten of all time to this day. In my view, it is the greatest American hard rock record and Sammy Hagar’s finest moment. It was produced by Ted Templeman, who produced basically the same record for Van Halen a few years later, and there isn’t a bad track on it. The whole thing sounds like it was recorded live off the floor in one take and the stories I’ve heard about Templeman’s production style lead me to believe that it might have been. Ronnie never recorded anything as powerful again. There was a second Montrose record with the same lineup called Paper Money. But it was like Ronnie already felt like he had to move in another direction. The only song on it that had the same punch as the stuff on the first record is a track called I Got The Fire. He drifted around with different line ups, each one a bit less successful than the previous, until he died. I should say that him following his arrow isn’t a bad thing. It’s more that, I feel like he had found something unique and uniquely his and also, incredible and I would have liked to see him milk it and also, expand on it for a few years before he went into his Jazz Odyssey period. I’ve heard countless bands and guitarists cite this record as an influence. I even wonder if Van Halen would have existed in the way they did without it?

Dancing Days I remember the autumn that I first heard the Houses Of The Holy record by Led Zeppelin. My buddy Kevin had the best stereo and record collection and also, the most hospitable basement of my high school friend group. He bought the album and, even though I had liked the previous LZ offerings and owned the fourth album, there seemed to be something different about this record. It was the least ‘traditional music’ record they had made and it seemed like they had found their own unique sound that wasn’t largely based on plundering (or outright stealing) music from the past. We’d listen to records for a while and then we’d walk to Lion’s Park and hang out on the swings in the chilly fall air and talk about girls or music. As I was talking, there was always a song was playing in my head. We sat on the swings and shot the crap with Dancing Days as my own internal soundtrack. I love that about music. You hear a song and then you keep hearing it hours later as it swirls around in your auditory cortex. This song still touches something inside me that fills me with dread and loneliness. What happened to me? How did I go from listening to this song at Kevin’s to years of searching for meaning in my life. Everything was in front of me then, and I knew it. I was planning my escape from St Albert, even if I thought my chances of making in the music business were slim. I wish I still had that kind of nerve. This remains my all time favorite Zeppelin track with its angular chords and subdued vocal from Robert Plant.

Livin’ Alone In high school, I started my first band. It was called Hot Toddy, (terrible name) and it featured me on guitar and vocals, Kim Upright on drums and vocals and Bob Drysdale on bass. Years later, we would reunite to become The Modern Minds, my first ‘real’ band. More on that later. Our high school had a yearly Variety Night where kids would perform dances or songs or whatever. That year, we played Livin’ Alone, by Beck, Bogart and Appice and Thunderbird by ZZ Top. Both songs had dual vocals, which was perfect for Kim and I. Our drama teacher, Ms Laurence introduced me to the idea of performance, that you didn’t just stand on stage and play your guitar, you had to try and engage the audience. it was probably the most important thing I learned in school and I owe her a debt of gratitude. I include Living’ Alone for this reason. Hot Toddy split up and I joined a band with some older guys. That band was called Lover, which was a cover band that mainly played high schools. Not sure why anyone booked the band because we played almost no top 40 material. The leader of the band, Walt, figured that the greatest achievement by a band would be to have your single in jukeboxes in small town Alberta. He used to manage a band called Money, (great name) who released an indie single called Whirlpool Woman, which I can, to this day, remember by heart. I spent a season or two in Lover until I realized I had higher aspirations and during Christmas vacation, teamed back up with Bob and Kim.

Cut My Hair. I saw the Who recently as my friend Steven Page was opening the show and graciously invited me. As I watched the Who perform, even though it was clear their best days were behind them, I was struck by Pete Townsend’s genius. The body of work he ran through that night really made me understand that I am not him. There is a level that almost no one in music has ever reached but he has. I’ve always thought that there were people who were good and people who were great but I realized that there was a small group of people who were had achieved something that can’t really be quantified. All of the Who’s records, from The Who Sings My Generation up to The Who By Numbers are stunning. But to me, Quadraphenia, is Pete Townsend’s high water mark. It landed in my life when I needed it most. I was just entering my disaffected youth period and when he sang, why do I have to move with a crowd/ of kids who hardly notice I’m around, I melted. It was amazing how well Pete, at whatever adult age he was at, was able to plug in to the neurosis of youth. Even though I didn’t relate to the character in Quadraphenia, I certainly related to the painful chrysalis of becoming an adult.

Personality Crisis. The New York Dolls were another band I came to via Creem Magazine. Creem loved them and since I trusted every thing they said, I quickly came on board. The opening song on their debut, produced by Todd Rundgren, seem to leap out of the speakers. You just know that piano off the top was Todd’s idea. It was punk rock Chuck Berry before there was punk rock. It had that wild abandon that would be very important to me over the next ten or so years. Listening to that record felt like things were going to go off the rails at any moment, the way you feel when you’re too drunk. The entire record is so blisteringly savage that it may have no equal. The only records of its approximate genre that compare are Never Mind The Bollocks by the Sex Pistols, Raw Power by Iggy and The Stooges and And No One Else Wanted To Play by SNFU. It had things that you would hear in a Stones record and later in an Aerosmith record, the sloppy rock guitars, the wailing harmonica, the glammy singer but it had an unstable energy that created, (and I hate this expression) a sense of danger that was wildly appealing to a teenager.

Search And Destroy Iggy was yet another fixture in Creem and part of my pre school for punk rock. I think Jackson was the one that purchased Raw Power and we all became obsessed with it. There isn’t much to say about this masterpiece that hasn’t already been said. The odd thing for me was how bad it sounded. It sounded like it had been mixed by a couple of drunk interns who’d never actually been on the console before. I always wished it could be remixed so that it didn’t sound so horrible. But, years later, it was and it wasn’t as good. Part of the charm, bad word to use, was how the terrible mix aided in the chaos of the album. Also, I think we get used to something and then hearing it a different way interferes with our nostalgia for it. I feel the same way about a track on the Foo Fighters debut. The track is called Exhausted and when I first heard it, I was charmed by the beautiful chords and melody. But there was this scratchy, white noise guitar that was messing things up. I remember thinking, this would be so great if it just had a less offensive guitar sound. Years later, I watched a You Tube video of the band playing it on acoustic guitars. This should be good, I figured. I only got about half way through it. I realized the scratchy guitar was part of the song, part of what made it unique and contributed to the idea of the song. I suppose that’s how I feel about the original mix of Raw Power. The new mixes sound like cover versions of the songs.

Pretty Lady I mentioned Lighthouse earlier. They were a band whose singles you would hear all the time on Canadian radio. I am thinking they were the beneficiaries of Canadian Content rules. Their big hit was a song called Sunny Days, which is kind of dumb. But they had a few better songs. One was called Little Kind Words that was more sort of psychedelic and baroque. And then they had Pretty Lady. The chorus had the most beautiful harmonies over amazing chords. There is a thing that happens to songwriters where they write a song and then they think, did I hear this somewhere? It used to happen to me a lot when I was a kid first learning to compose. I once wrote a dead ringer for Rock Show by Paul McCartney without realizing it. The Modern Minds and all the bands I had with Bob and Kim before that, used to practice in Bob’s basement. We made an unholy racket and kudos to his parents for letting us torture them. The basement was kind of open and one day Bob’s dad approached us about building a makeshift wall to keep the sound somewhat enclosed. But we were too lazy and inconsiderate to do something like that. Bob’s dad would often try to get us to do some manual labor as I don’t believe he thought music was something that held much of a future for us and we should learn the value of hard work. One day, I brought in a song that was a rip off of Pretty Lady. It was probably the song I was the most excited about in my early songwriting career. When I think of it, I see the roots of where I was headed musically, so it may be one of the most significant songs I’ve ever written even though it wasn’t that great. Bob’s dad took us to a WHA game, the short lived alternative to the NHL where I first saw a young Wayne Gretzky. I think he was 18 and he just dominated the game. Bob had some mental health issues and many years after this though at far too young an age, he passed away in his sleep. He was one of the best musicians I have ever played with-technically amazing but full of rock and roll spit. The real band we had, The Modern Minds were sort of the grandfathers of the Edmonton punk/New Wave scene. We released a 3 song single called Theresa’s World. It didn’t do much outside of Edmonton. But it was included in a catalog of Canadian punk called Smash the State. I think, because of that, I would occasionally get requests for it. Mostly from Japan. Eventually a Japanese record company contacted me about releasing a long form CD of the band. I was able to cobble together the single, some demos and some radio show recordings. It was kind of thrilling to see this band get a new life. Then, years later, a guy named Simon Harvey asked if he could release a vinyl version on his label, Ugly Pop. It didn’t set the world on fire but again, so cool to see it live on all these years later. Rest In Peace, Bob.

Days Gone By. After Joe Walsh left The James Gang he released his solo record The Smoker You Drink, The Player You Get. It is an incredible document. It became a very popular record because it contained one of his biggest hits, Rocky Mountain Way. For those of you who are not familiar with the record, Rocky Mountain Way is the worst song on it. Rocky Mountain Way was a song that every Edmonton cover band played because it was so friggin’ easy to play. But it’s horrible. However, the rest of the record is breathtaking. The Smoker You Drink was ostensibly a record by Barnstorm, which is the band Walsh put together after The James Gang. Many of the songs were written by or collaborations with the drummer, Joe Vitale and, whatever happened to him? Not only did he drum on the record and sing some but he also played completely appropriate flute. This record falls into the category of records I could never get sick of listening to. It reminds me of a time when I could be completely blissed out by a record, it would be on my mind all day long and the songs would buzz around in my head, no matter what I was doing, drowning out the noise of the world and my life. Some of the records on this list (and some that I really like that are not), are records that I love and are influential. And some are records that are so beautiful to me that they are like a wildly sensual experience for which there is no equal.

Strutter. When I was a kid, music wasn’t as ubiquitous as it is now. There actually wasn’t much music on TV. I think the reason The Beatles made such a huge impact when they played the Ed Sullivan show is that everyone watched it because there wasn’t a lot of opportunities to see music. Most music I saw on TV during my childhood was lip synched performances of a band’s latest recordings. The exceptions were shows like Midnight Special and Don Kirchener’s Rock Concert, which would have limited runs of six or eight weeks during the summer on Edmonton TV stations. These were the best days of the year. Watching live music on television was just amazing. There is a fair in Edmonton, my hometown, called Klondyke Days. I went with my brother and cousins one year and they had a concert with a bunch of local bands. I was probably about 7 or 8 years old. I was absolutely gobsmaked at what I saw. I’d never really seen live music before. The performers were just a bunch of half assed cover bands but I sure didn’t care. My cousin Rob called the house a few days later, looking for John but he wasn’t home. So, we ended up talking about how awesome the concert was. He stayed on the phone with me for about an hour talking music and playing records over the phone and I’m not sure if I’ve ever had a more enjoyable conversation about music in my life. Years later, I recall a show that I believe was filmed in Edmonton, probably some kind of CanCon requirement, that featured young musical artists. It ran after school and I think there was only a handful of episodes. But one episode had a band, all dressed in black, who played Strutter and Firehouse by KISS. Holy crap, how cool were these guys, they looked like they were still in their teens. I wasn’t really that aware of KISS up to that point except that Strutter had been on Hard Goods. I remember getting a letter from a fan years ago saying she’d heard our record and it sounded like it was recorded by a band who lived in a big city. That’s exactly how I felt when I heard Strutter. It’s also how I felt when I first heard The Strokes. My little brother Kelly bought Dressed To Kill, which remains my favorite KISS album but I include Strutter in this playlist as it was the song that first drew me to KISS. Whenever I hear the song, I think about the band playing it on that crappy show and how much it made me want to leave St Albert and become a rock star.

Ogre Battle I think it was Kim Upright who turned me onto Queen. I’m not sure if they had played Edmonton and he’d seen them? They were so original, they played hard rock but their lyrics were intelligent and weird. Everything about them was unique, Freddy’s voice, the guitar orchestrations-there really wasn’t anything like them, at least that I had heard. At this point, we had only heard their debut record. I went out and bought their second album, Queen II. The whole thing just killed me. but the song that has stayed with me over the years is Ogre Battle. It was so heavy but still kind of cerebral, something that was becoming more and more important to me. The track is sophisticated in a way that makes me feel like the people creating it weren’t pretending to be smart, that they actually were smart. This is a huge point to be made as a lot of rock bands seem smart to people who aren’t smart. All of my friends loved Queen. I remember Jackson saying that Queen were like a hobby for him. The next album, Sheer Heart Attack was a real tour de force. Killer Queen seemed like the perfect Queen song, a catchy song with a complex structure and crazy, poetic lyrics. But the record was the beginning of the end for me. The vaudeville tendencies that were introduced here would overwhelm the band in subsequent releases. For most of the rest of their career, they would intersperse the dance hall stuff with the sort of generic rock that I think was beneath them. And then a bunch of half assed R&B approximations. While I must confess to liking Bohemian Rhapsody when I first heard it, it kind of makes me cringe now, especially knowing what the band was capable of. Even though I had written them off long before this, Freddy Mercury’s death was the first celebrity death that hit me hard. I remember being at a Pursuit of Happiness rehearsal when someone came in and told us the news. He and Queen had meant so much to me in the period that those first three albums lived in that I felt a genuine sense of loss.

Doctor Wu. Steely Dan has had one of the oddest trajectories of any band in history. They started out as a radio friendly ‘session’ band, sort of like Toto but good. Then they became a super hip New York band. Then they became associated with Yacht Rock and became really uncool for a while. Recently, they’ve had a resurgence and maybe it’s because people finally figured out how great they were. They were famous for the incredible fidelity and extraordinary musicianship on their recordings. They stopped touring very early in their career and were able to make a go of it as a studio band, something that would be impossible today. I envy that, being able to fiddle around in the studio for as long as you want until you found something magical. My understanding is that they would get multiple instrumentalists to play solos and then pick the best one. Wow. For me, the first Steely Dan record, Can’t Buy A Thrill, which I did buy with my own money, is their least satisfying. It doesn’t really sound much like them and lyrically, it’s pretty dopey. They caught fire a bit on their next record, Countdown To Ecstasy, and you could tell something was shifting. They canned the vocalist who sometimes took a lead and the lyrics seemed slightly better. The third record, Pretzel Logic, (what an amazing title) was the moment where they became who they would eventually be. The songs had the amazing chords and song structures that would define them. The fourth record was called Katy Lied and is, in my opinion, their best. It has an edge to it that none of their previous records had. There is also a sadness to it that lies beneath the surface. Doctor Wu is a good example of what I’m talking about. I’ve never been able to figure out what it means but it feels dark and hopeless. The track is full of angular chords and unexpected changes. This would be a good example of a song that needs to be listened to a few times before you get it.

Diamond Dust. My introduction to Jeff Beck was Truth, a record I believe my sister’s boyfriend, Derek brought to the house and left there. It was a bit over my head but I loved Blues Deluxe, with its completely off the hook guitar solo. I heard Beck Ola and the aforementioned Beck Bogart and Appice but it was Blow By Blow that was the big Beck record for me. The Modern Minds’ bass player, Bob had been getting into jazz and instrumental music and was trying to turn Kim and I onto Stanley Clarke, Return To Forever and Weather Report. So the instrumental ideas of Blow By Blow weren’t completely foreign to me. Beck’s playing on this is truly spectacular and understated. Diamond Dust is a beautiful and sad piece. This is amplified by the final pass through the structure being performed by the strings to give it more drama and darkness. Weird way to end the album-really leaves you emotionally spent. Great job, George Martin.

The Boys Are Back In Town. I heard this on K 97 and wow, there was a chord change almost every bar of the song. This whole album, Jailbreak, is amazing. I feel like Thin Lizzy would be a hard band for people to hate. It’s all cool guitar riffs and fancy chords and a sexy vocalist. There’s nothing ornamental or corny and when it is a bit corny it’s corny in the sweetest way. Like the guitarmonies. They weren’t new but I think the fact that they had nothing to do with southern rock made them seem hipper to me. The music on Jailbreak sounds like the music your supercool uncle’s band would play. There is a timeless quality to this that a lot of songs from the ’70’s have. There isn’t a bunch of period specific ambient effects on the mixes or anything in the recording process that’s distracting. But the fidelity is good enough that it doesn’t sound too retro like a song from the ’50’s or early ’60’s would sound. Phil Lynott was a terrific singer. On this track, the flow of the lyrics is ever changing but always sounds musical. The melody in the verses dances around to accommodate the story but never sounds out of control or like he’s trying to jam too many words into too tight of a space. I feel like he would have been an amazing MC had he been born 20 years later.

Just before I got back together again with Bob and Kim to form The Modern Minds, Jackson bought a copy of the Sex Pistols single Pretty Vacant. He brought it to Kevin place and we put it on the turntable. The slow burn of the intro had us looking at each other with anticipation. Once Steve Jones’ guitar started hammering out the power chords of the meat of the song, we were high school boy dancing. And when the music stopped and Johnny Rotten yelled, ”and we don’t care.” you could have scraped us off the ceiling. It was the most exciting moment of my life to that point and may be the most exciting moment of my life EVER. Better than losing my virginity. What was so transformative about that moment was that it was the first time we had heard music that was ours. Most of the music we had listened to before that was music that our brothers or sisters liked or music that had roots in a time before we came of age. Every generation has music that is specific to them and I think punk rock was the music that timed to my generation. It was unavoidable, you would have had to be a complete cowboy to not be moved by what the Ramones and Sex Pistols and Clash were doing. So much of how I play and how I write is still tied to learning songs from that era.

Trapped. Anyone reading this knows that Todd Rundgren is my biggest influence and the artist that I am the biggest fan of. Getting a chance to work with him, was/is one of the greatest accomplishments/thrills of my life. I came to his music a bit late. I feel like I had heard, Hello It’s Me but I can’t be sure. He wasn’t much of a sensation in Edmonton. I had tickets to see Blue Oyster Cult at the Edmonton Coliseum. Utopia, Todd’s band, was the opener and I didn’t think much of it at the time I bought my ticket. Then something happened. K 97, our FM station, used to have a show on Sunday nights hosted by Ted Kennedy. It was like a new release show where they would play a new record in its entirety, with a pause for a commercial when they had to flip to side 2. A couple of weeks before the concert, they played Oops, Wrong Planet, by Utopia. It feels a bit redundant now that I’ve gushed about so many songs completely blowing my mind, but this was probably the ultimate mind blow. Then I went to the concert, which was amazing. I feel like I was in a trance for about a month after hearing the record and seeing the show and it reminds me of when you are young and you first kiss a girl and you bask in the afterglow for weeks afterwards. I spent the next couple of years catching up, buying all of the Todd solo and Utopia records, each one its own revelation. There were songs I heard that I couldn’t believe could exist, like Don’t You Ever Learn, Real Man and Breathless. They were so unique and there was nothing I could compare them to. I was listening to a true genius and it was the most inspiring time of my life. Alan Zweig, the filmmaker that I referenced earlier, once said to me that he would never write a book because it could never be as good as one by Cormac McCarthy. I think I said to him, well no one can write as good as he can but that doesn’t mean you don’t have anything meaningful to say. I guess that’s how I felt when listening to Todd. I felt inspired to be great and, even if I wasn’t ever going to be as great as he was, I could still do something worth sharing.

Don’t You Ever Learn. As revelatory as Oops Wrong Planet was, Todd’s solo stuff was even more so.
From Something/Anything to Acapella, Todd’s music was completely original. Nothing else sounded like it except if someone was trying to copy him. Todd’s story is well know to his fans and people in show business. He released Something/Anything, his breakthrough record complete with multiple singles and critical praise. On his next record, he did pretty much the opposite and released a weird, noisy, psychedelic masterpiece called A Wizard, A True Star, that was like a huge middle finger to the music business. This defiance defined the rest of his career. He spent the next few decades as a musical explorer and each new recording seemed to have some sort of conceptual narrative that gave it purpose in a continuing story line. Each record was slightly or sometimes completely different from the previous effort. Don’t You Ever Learn is from the follow up to Wizard, simply called Todd. It lived in a middle ground between AWATS and S/A, weird but tuneful and less overtly obtuse than its predecessor. Two of Todd’s greatest songs are on this record, this song and The Last Ride. Don’t You Ever Listen starts with a spooky, odd piano melody that moves through several chords. It eventually reaches a climax into the main chords of the A section. There are basically two A sections that are the vocal sections of the song. They are sung over a difficult string of chords yet the melody is incredibly musical. We go into a reintro that is more playful than what we got the first time. The second vocal section is also looser and ends with some lovely three part harmonies. The song resolves into an extended coda with harmonies singing the hook over some carousel like synths. Like I said, I’ve never heard anything remotely like it. God, to be that original, to be that groundbreaking. It makes me feel small and insignificant. The sad thing is he, to this day, hasn’t received his due commercially. He has spent the largest part of his career as a cult artist with an adoring legion of fans. However, recently a new group of young musicians have discovered his music, his experiments with synthesizers and his psychedelic wizardry and his esteem in the music community has risen dramatically. Like The Ramones, the artists he influenced did better than he did, which is the curse of the innovator. However, it should be noted that he is in his ’70’s and still out playing to his rabid fans, still making records on his own terms and that all sounds pretty great to me.

I Just Wanna Have Something To Do Even though the Ramones pre dated the Sex Pistols, I came to them afterwards. The trajectory of the New York Dolls and Iggy and the Stooges led me to the Pistols and the Clash first. I think my primary interest in the Ramones came from reading Creem Magazine. I can still remember the review of their debut, never had I read a more passionate recommendation of a record. I remember when Roger Corman’s Rock And Roll High School came out. I went to see it with Kevin and loved it. I think we went to see it again a few days later. After the movie, Kevin had managed to get some Black Tower wine and we downed the whole thing. I was not a drinker at this point and got teenage wasted. I came home and tried to unlock the back door. Unbeknownst to me, I must have been making an unholy racket because, as I fumbled with the key to open the door, my brother John opened it for me as he’d been awakened by the noise. As the door opened, I dropped the key and it fell into a crack between the steps and the house, never to be retrieved. Thinking about it now, a scene similar to this probably played out a thousand times after viewings of early rock and roll movies. I think back, sadly, about how fun it was to get that excited about music.

What Do I Get. The Buzzcocks were the band that The Modern Minds were most compared to largely because of their pop sensibility. The Modern Minds used to play really fast but there was always a melody. In a style of music where darkness and aggression were becoming two of the defining qualities, the Buzzcocks gave us a place to fit in. Their collection, Singles, Going Steady is one of the best top to bottom records of all time. Every track is pretty great. What Do I Get is particularly good because of the anti-rock star lyrics. I just want a lover like any other, what do I get. Every unpopular guy’s lament.

Also part of this new personalized music was Is She Really Going Out With Him by Joe Jackson. He was talking about girls in a way that rock stars hadn’t before. About being a nerd, a loser who lost his girl to a jock or a guy we didn’t think was deserving of her. It was sublime. It completely changed the vernacular of the pop/rock song. I mean, how absurd, a rock star could get anyone he wanted, couldn’t he? But Joe was more like us. This was such a great track, with Todd Rundgren chords and harmonies but with a low fi sound that was a precursor to the sort of indie rock style that would follow. Joe was an anti rock star in a way that most of the punk rockers weren’t. Johnny Rotten and the guys in the Clash and the Jam still seemed bigger than life to me. But Joe seemed like someone in the neighborhood, one of the outcasts in your school, a puffy, unattractive dude that was smart and funny but didn’t have the thing that girls were looking for from a teenage boy. A lot of the more hardcore punks in Edmonton didn’t care for this but I saw a thread that ran through punk in Joe’s music. Joe also outlasted most of his peers. He continued to make interesting music for decades, always catchy but always just outside of the mainstream enough that he remained a cult artist for his entire career.

Ice Cream Man. I’m going to make a bold statement here and say Van Halen’s Ice Cream Man is the most exciting three and a half minutes in rock history. It is a studio recording that reads like a live performance. Eddie’s solo is so magnificent, without any of the finger tapping that would dominate most of his early solos. Please don’t interpreted that as me saying, I didn’t fully love the finger tapping. But it showed the world that he wasn’t a one trick pony, that he could really play. I don’t have a lot of time for most flashy guitarists. But there was something so incredibly musical about everything Eddie did. He was the Wayne Gretzky of guitar players, with an effortless majesty to his playing. David Lee Roth’s sleazy vocal on this track is so rock and roll that everyone else should just stop trying.

Confidential. I’ve told the story of seeing The Modernettes for the first time in a previous piece on this site. When The Modern Minds played Vancouver for the first time, opening for The Modernettes and No Fun, The Modernettes opened with Confidential and it was love at first listen. The opening guitar melody is one of the great intros of all time and bursts out of your turntable, instantly hooking you into the song.
And then there’s the lyrics. Everybody saw the way that I acted/last night at your party/they all saw the way I looked at you/when you left without me. What a zinger! Not only being rejected but being rejected in front of everyone. It was the perfect sentiment for a loser boy at the time and I can only imagine how many guys this song resonated with. Buck Cherry’s vocal is delivered with a perfect mix of defiance and vulnerability. It’s absolutely thrilling.

Let’s Groove Many people malign the Sony Walkman. That it changed the way you experienced music in a negative way. Instead of sitting down in front of your stereo and really listening to music, now music came with you and become more like a soundtrack to your everyday life. I understand this criticism. But for a music junkie like me, the Walkman allowed me to listen to music all the time, even when I wasn’t at home with my record collection. The year that I got one for Christmas happened at the same time that I was really immersing myself in Black Music. The U of A campus radio station had a program called The Black Experience in Sound that I believe was hosted by Cadence Weapon’s father Teddy Pemberton. I didn’t buy tapes, I taped records. Two records I taped were Raise and I Am, both by Earth Wind and Fire. I had a job working at a convenience store called Tops Convenience on Whyte Avenue. It was run by a guy named Richard Kim, who was one of the smartest people I’d ever met. He was one of those guys who instinctively knew the best way to do anything. The walk to the store would take a little over 20 minutes, long enough to listen to one side of a record. So, over the course of two days, I would listen to both records once. Earth Wind and Fire was a band I came upon late. But it was at a time when I really wanted to hear something funky. The interplay between the bass and drums just destroyed me and their records sounded great. This was something that had now become important to me since I was hearing records largely on headphones and becoming more interested in fidelity. Some of EWF’s stuff was a bit corny but, at the time, I didn’t notice and now I don’t really care.

Let’s Pretend We’re Married I believe I had heard, Wanna Be Your Lover but it hadn’t really hit me right. I’m honestly not entirely sure how I heard about 1999. Maybe it was through the Black Experience In Sound? At any rate, I bought it and listened to pretty much nothing else for quite a while. Prince was so unique. He was completely sexual but not in a macho kind of way that most rock stars were. I heard a joke recently that said, Prince was the only guy who wore make up, high heels and big earrings who could steal your girlfriend. And he talked about sex in a real way without all the cliched euphemisms. The music was funky but there was pop and rock elements to it. This record ran from straight up dance tracks to moody mid tempo stuff but everything felt very ‘written’ and complete. These weren’t the jams that you’d hear later on in the NPG era. And I loved the sound of it, the ambient drum machines, the synths and the distorted rock guitars, (that distorted wah guitar was really what gave the stuff three dimensions and made Prince stand out as something other than a funky dude) combined to make something that ended up inspiring an entire musical movement. Like Todd Rundgren, he did everything himself. But just because he wasn’t like other rock stars, that didn’t mean he wasn’t a rock star. He was bigger than life in the way he looked and dressed and acted and that was very inspiring. In the months before Prince’s death, my friend Nick Schiratta contacted me and told me he had tickets to see Prince on his solo with a piano tour. He was supposed to go with his daughter but she was unable to make it. I went with him and it was amazing. I had never actually seen Prince perform live. A couple of weeks later, he was gone.

Mary Anne I went to Rod’s cottage (he called it a cabin, that may have been an Alberta term) in Northern Alberta late one summer. Before I left, a friend of mine, Rob Lennon, gave me a cassette with the first two Marshall Crenshaw records taped on it. (I was still using my cassette Walkman.) I didn’t get a chance to play it until just before the trip ended. I was taking one last walk along the lake and put it in. Wow, from the first song on the debut, There She Goes Again to the final song on Field Day, Hold It, this was an absolute feast. The songwriting was exquisite and he was an amazing singer and guitarist. This music was melodic and catchy but was bursting with energy-music like this wasn’t supposed to be so danceable. I think that’s what differentiated Marshall from the other singer songwriters of the time and to any of the power pop artists of the ’70’s and ’80’s. The infectious rhythms gave this music an added, irresistible appeal. When we signed with Mercury Records for our third album, it was suggested that I try some co-writing, something I hadn’t done before. I took two trips, one to Chicago to write with Pat DiNizio of the Smithereens and one to New York to write with Jules Shear and Marshall Crenshaw. A few years earlier, someone at Chrysalis or maybe it was EMI Publishing, sent Marshall some of my demos to see if he’d be interested in recording any of them. I had a brief phone conversation with him and mostly what he talked about was how odd it was that I’d written a song about smelling a girl, (Wake Up And Smell Cathy), and also, when I told him I was originally from Edmonton, he talked about going to West Edmonton Mall, which for those of you unaware, is a massive, multipurpose shopping complex. He told me he’d bought a watch there and it “worked great and I’m still using it.” So when we met up in Woodstock, NY, we had that tiny bit of history. We worked on the song in a Comfort Inn the publishing company had put me in. He sat down and immediately said, “I have something we can work on,” which I was grateful to hear. It meant we didn’t have to stare across from each other, fumbling on our guitars hoping something would spontaneously occur. He played through the verse and chorus, and hummed a melody over it. It was pretty great. I contributed the bridge and we were done the music part of it in pretty short order. Then came the lyric writing. We talked a lot about politics and other music, one hilarious thing he said was, when talking about Wilson Phillips, who had just had a massive hit with a song called Hold On, “I can’t decide which one of them I want to kill myself over.” When working on the hook, he said, I hear ‘baby food,’ and I exclaimed that I loved it. He looked at me like I was a moron and said rather firmly, ”we’re not calling this Baby Food.” Marshall didn’t go for the weird stuff that I might have been more inclined to explore. We spent a few hours chasing our tails and broke for the day. I promised to work on it that evening and try to come up with something. I worked all night and came up with the lyrics and showed them to him the next day. I held my breath hoping he’d be okay with them. He seemed to be and liked that, even though it was a made up story, I’d based it on a real person. I think we sang it through a few times and he moved or changed a word or two and we had it. The song was called, The One That Got Away. When I got back to Toronto, I demoed it and a few weeks later, he sent a cassette of his demo to EMI Publishing, who passed it along to me. My demo didn’t capture the song at all. His demo has all the Marshall good stuff, a great beat and great energy, both of which were sorely lacking in my arrangement. When you’re in the music business and you have some success, cool things happen all the time. I think I appreciated how cool it was that I got to work with Marshall but when I think about it now, I’m a bit more blown away. Nothing ever happened with the song, I wish Marshall had recorded it for one of his albums as I think he would have done a fantastic job with it.

Public Image The album containing this track, First Issue, wasn’t availble domesrtically where I lived. I bought it thinking it would be an extension of what Johnny Rotten had been doing with the Sex Pistols. It wasn’t really. I’m not sure how you’d descrbe the music on this record. The title track was the most accessable and the closest thing to a Pistols song though not even. It’s absolutly blistering, it fairly knocks you down with it’s relentless energy. The guitar parts are so melodic and fluid against a rhythm section playing at a ’70’ tempo. (The 70’s were great for fast songs. Even band’s like Loverboy played superfast). Rotten’s vocal is problably the finest one he ever performed, full of the tuneless rage he had perfected. My bands in Edmonton would cover this even though I couldn’t make out almost any of the lyrics. I basically just bellowed over the music until we got to the hook. Hilarious. This has to be one of my favorite songs of all time, 

New York New York Hip hop was something that I became aware of when I went to see a movie called Wild Style at the Varscona Theatre in Edmonton. It was a documentary about the birth of the hip hop scene in New York. It encompassed graffiti, breakdancing and rapping. Like many things I’ve discussed, Hip Hop seemed wildly exotic to a kid in Edmonton. Since black music was one of my obsessions at the time, this appeared to be a logical next step. Dave Gilby worked at a record store and told me that there was some 12 inch records by a group called Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. One was called The Message and another was called New York New York. They were both amazing. The power of the words and the vocal delivery was incredible. The lyrics about the inner city of New York depicted a world that was completely unfamiliar to me. Wild Style had also introduced me to The Sugarhill Gang. whose track Rappers Delight was getting a little buzz even in Edmonton. I started trying to write like that. I had a few songs where I did a version of rapping on them. Nothing was that great, obviously. But it informed my writing of I’m An Adult Now. It suggested that you could just tell a story in a song without singing it.

Yo Mamma. This was a one hit wonder by a group called Wuf Ticket. I got the 12 inch of this from the store Dave worked at after he, sort of comically, attempted to describe it to me. It is a quintessential old school rap song with the two MC’s putting down the other guys moms. The song sounded new and fresh at the time, like it was part of something breaking through, which it definitely was. Looking back at it now, I find the innocence of it charming. I don’t really get current hip hop. I’m not sure what it is trying to accomplish. OLD FOGEY ALERT. This track is introducing a style or at least continuing a discussion that the Sugarhill Gang had started. Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five brought a dose of reality to the world, describing the inner city in a way that gave rap music a purpose in terms of its ability to be a force of social change, like the music of the ’60’s. The musical innovations of sampling and scratching made hip hop a unique creative environment for artists and producers. Then groups like NWA poured gasoline on hip hop, glorifying the gangster and the underworld, which became a new, defiant take on the political ideas of their predecessors. So much of hip hop now is trap beats, spooky keyboard melodies and choppy, whiny vocal melodies that seem indistinguishable from any other track on a hip hop playlist. The lyrics typically say nothing, which is so weird in a form of music where the lyrics were once everything. There is still good hip hop and, every once in a while, I’ll hear something that just floors me but I don’t get the value in it the same way I used to. I sometimes feel like hip hop is reaching some sort of end in the same way that rock seems to have. For every Kendrick Lamar and Chance the Rapper, there is a hundred guys who are just making noise. I feel like soon, AI is going to be able to make a beat good enough to put most of these guys out of business. But you can trivialize anything and often it’s because you don’t understand something and that’s probably where I am at with this. But Yo Mamma definitely had an effect on me and the originality of hop hop. like punk rock, gave me a jolt of inspiration that made me who I am.

I Can’t Take It I remember seeing Cheap Trick open for Kiss at the Edmonton Coliseum. At the time. I loved anything theatrical or where the band assumed characters. Cheap Trick fit that perfectly and also, they were a killer power pop band. I got In Color and In Black And White and loved every single track. It began my life long love affair with the band. Years later, they went into the studio with Todd Rundgren to record Next Position Please. This is a record they did without bassist, Tom Peterson. I have a bit of history with Tom. I ran into him one day at the Rivoli in Toronto. Not entirely sure why he was in Toronto but he introduced himself to me, (like he needed to) and said he’d love to write with me sometime. This was wildly flattering to me but it never happened. I hope one day to connect with him again. One of my greatest memories of being in The Pursuit Of Happiness was playing a show at the Commonwealth Stadium in my hometown of Edmonton. We were third on the bill to Meatloaf and Cheap Trick. All three bands had been produced by Todd Rundgren. The guys from Cheap Trick immediately crashed our dressing room and hung out with us. Later, Rick acknowledged me from the stage. And then, after their set, he walked off towards me, where I had been watching them from the audience, and shook my hand. I couldn’t believe how cool it was that he validated me in front of my home town and I am forever in his debt for that. The record with Todd was a bit uneven but it contained my favorite Cheap Trick song. I Can’t Take It sounds a bit like a TR song, which is maybe why I like it so much. Later, Tom rejoined the band and all was well again. Cheap Trick are, to me, the ultimate power pop band. And I love that they haven’t changed, they keep being awesome and haven’t felt the pressure to reinvent themselves. This is a good lesson for young musicians. If you make timeless music you’ll never go out of fashion.

Reel Around the Fountain This is my final entry and would be a song that I started listening to just before I moved to Toronto. Again, I got this record out of the Edmonton Public Library. In many ways, this song is a fitting end to this piece as it has so many of the elements that the other songs I’ve listed have. An acute sense of melancholy, beautiful chords and amazing lyrics that describe a complicated relationship. I listened to the Smiths’ debut on my Walkman in my final days wandering the streets of Edmonton just before I left to hopefully, change my life. To me, the ultimate version of this is on Hatful of Hollow, the live in the studio version that captures the full bleakness of the song. Interestingly, the version on HFH is in a much higher key, which makes Morrissey’s vocal all the more mournful. One of the things I love most about this song, the Hatful Of Hollow version, is how much it sounds like a band. It was recorded for John Peel’s radio show and it is clearly live off the floor. It’s so rare these days to hear something so raw and organic. Whenever I hear this song now, I think of my early days in Toronto, where I was putting together the band and the possibilities of life seemed all out in front of me. Every day seemed to hold some new, exotic experience and I felt like destiny was pulling me towards something wonderful. But that was a long time ago. Many things went really well and many things didn’t. I had a lot of victories and just as many disappointments. Still, I am grateful for the life I have. I have an amazing wife and kids and have been able to make a living in music for the majority of my life. I’m reasonably healthy and still have my hair! But the sun is going down in my life and doing something like this reveals how much is behind me. The good news is, music can get you through the rough parts of life and bring extra happiness to the good parts. When I listen to an old song, I try to remember where I was and who I was when I first listened to it. I know you can’t go back but there is value in nostalgia. That fact that writing about these songs has evoked such strong emotions in me really speaks to how important music can be in a person’s life. Now that I’ve come to the end, I am thinking of so many more songs I’d like to include. But nothing lasts for ever and sometimes you just have to let things go.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1tNUVLvIUL2qSDWbTTqEzn?si=07f3cb5c401046f2&pt=613cb52fd656f4cec0bb99154b05f6ff

I recently listened to a podcast which featured an old friend of mine from the music business. In the course of the interview he proclaimed that, “music right now is basically trap, you know 808’s with fast hi hats. That’s all that’s happening, really.”

This gave me pause. There has always been this idea especially in the straight music business, that music is dominated by one thing, I feel like this is part of the hangover of the blockbuster. I once heard Todd Rundgren talk about the beginning of the blockbuster. The origins are typically Frampton Comes Alive and the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. Before Frampton Comes Alive, no record had sold 10 million copies, not The Beatles, not Elvis not The Stones. So, to memory quote Todd, “the record companies figured, well if one record can sell 10 million copies, why can’t all of them?” I think that was the moment when sales became the only meaningful way to for the industry to judge music. Not that sales weren’t very important before. Just other things were also important.

The ‘thing’ has been many things, which is why the ‘thing’ is such a meaningless thing. In the late 80’s it was hair metal, then it was grunge, then it was post grunge, then it was pop punk, then it was EDM, then it was new folk, then it was a mix of EDM and new folk, “folktronica” like Wake Me Up by Avicci.

Several years ago, I took a meeting with an A&R guy to play him some stuff I had produced. He said to me, “the records we are doing are this. We are recording, (what he called) Warped Tour Bands, (meaning pop punk) but in every song there has to be 12 lines of ‘rap’. So that was the current ‘thing’, pretty specific if you ask me but it was that month’s get rich quick scheme for record companies and bands that wanted to play along. He said it in a way that made it seem like this was mandatory. So a, ‘punk band’ needed to pause to become a hip hop band momentarily and this was the key to success.

I remember thinking how this played into the belief that many have that music is largely manipulated by the record companies. That record companies come up with a sell-a-ble formula and feed it to the masses, and as Todd Rundgren once said to me, “the masses will eat whatever you put in front of them.” That the top 40 is whatever the people in charge decide it is and in some way, what they decide it is, is largely random. At the same meeting, I played him a track by a young blues man I had produced. He really liked it. But he didn’t have any interest in it. “I like this music but the fact that I like it is irrelevant,” is what I inferred. There was never a thought that, ‘well I responded positively to this, I wonder if other people would?’

It has always been my belief that The Pursuit of Happiness sprung to success largely because there wasn’t a ‘thing’ at the time. There was no prevailing music trend that anyone was forcing down your throat. Hair metal was sort of a thing but there was enough resistance to it from taste makers that you could still create music outside of it and ‘make it’. I think the fact that there wasn’t anyone else doing a power pop/hard rock/punk curry with female vocals was what got people’s attention.

The problem with ‘the thing’ is there are usually a few artists who do the thing well and everyone else is sort of average at it. If you pull up the weekly releases on Spotify, it will be mostly trap and hip hop oriented stuff and out of 40 songs, about 4 or 5 will be good. But all 40 get this coveted support from Spotify or record companies or Apple or whoever is controlling music that day, mostly because it conforms to the style happening that week. And it’s shocking how difficult it is to escape the ‘thing’ in 2021. With radio playing so few songs and streaming services creating algorithms that basically force current trends on you no matter what you are looking for, you really have to try to find music outside of what they want you to hear. The irony being, with the internet opening up a universe of music to anyone who can afford a computer and a modem, it still feels like we are walking into a virtual record store that is only stocking the top 40 albums.

The reason most ‘thing’ music is crap is because it’s written and performed by people who aren’t original, copying people who are authentic. The people copying would have copied any kind of music that was popular so there isn’t anything real about their music.

Sometimes, something comes along and blows the ‘thing’ out of the water and ruins the music business’s plans. Like Nevermind did. But then that started another thing. Everything needed to be that ‘thing’ and some of it was good and most of it was terrible.

Going back to the opening of this, the part that bothers me the most is that the ‘thing’ being the only thing isn’t true. There is so much music that isn’t trap or trap influenced pop, that millions of people like. My 15 year old daughter’s favorite band is called Peach Pit. Describing them simplistically, they are a guitar based alt rock group. They have over 2 and a half million monthly listeners on their Spotify page and one of their songs has almost 55 million streams. Those numbers seem good to me and I’m guessing no one in Peach Pit has a day job. I went ahead and clicked on the first artist in the Fans Also Like sidebar to Peach Pit’s Spotify page. The band is called Dayglow and they have over 6 million monthly listeners and the first song in their Popular column has 187,496,407 streams. And I’m guessing these are artists most of you have never heard of. Rise Against, a band that plays music that many people believe is dead, most popular song Savior has 382,208,626 streams. I randomly came across a band called Glass Animals when I searched Indie Music. They have over 16 million monthly listeners and their top track has over 221 million streams. They have 37 and a half million views of their video, Youth, on youtube. I had never heard of them. I had also never heard of Clairo until a student of mine mentioned her to me. I’m now listening to one of her tracks that has 238 million streams. No one is pushing people towards these artists, people are discovering them on their own. Do those people not count?

Now of course, these aren’t Drake or The Weeknd or Bad Bunny numbers. But for every Drake there is 10 Pooh Shiesty’s, who are essentially along for the ride.

And please don’t think, “Moe doesn’t like trap or hip hop,” or that I’m trying to imply that this particular form of hip hop isn’t the most popular form of music right now. I’m saying a lot of people want you to think that it’s the ONLY type of music right now. and that there aren’t hundreds of millions of people listening to music that isn’t that.

How has chasing the new thing over the past 40 or so years helped? Music has the tiniest place in our culture right now. Most people barely give a crap about it. The people who really care about music are old and listen to their old records because they remember a time when music was everything. They are the people who pay a $250 premium for a meet and greet with Aerosmith or Bruce Springsteen, who buy $300 Motley Crue leather jackets. The people who listen to trap stream it on Spotify along with 1000 other tracks. I’m not saying that the top pop/trap artists don’t generate the most income or most streams but, I wonder, how big is the pie and how much do people really care about them outside of their celebrity? One more time with the Todd Rundgren, he recently said most artist’s music is like their theme music. Just music to accompany their celebrity.

Why does dismissing the tastes of the vast majority of people make business sense? (It probably does but I just can’t see it). What I also can’t see is, why offer your consumers only one ‘thing’? Wouldn’t a variety of ‘things’ be a more successful business? (Probably not).

I listen to a lot of old music. And when I say old music I mean music from my youth. Studies have shown that we find our favorite song or songs between the ages of 11 and 16, with women being on the younger side of that and men slightly towards the older side. But there is something else about music that has me thinking lately.

Over the past couple of weeks, I heard two songs in a way I hadn’t heard them before. One was, Rhythm Of The Night by Debarge. The other was Under The Boardwalk by The Drifters .

Rhythm Of The Night wouldn’t be a song I remember liking or caring about before this past listen. Up to now, I wrote it off as a piece of ‘80’s fluff. But when I heard it last week, it filled me with a bit of longing or sadness and that sadness could be interpreted as nostalgia. Nostalgia being a desire to return to a time in the past, usually one you associate with a good feeling.

The song gives off a sense of life. The feeling I get is that the singer is planning to head out somewhere fun where good things are happening. Forget about the worries on your mind/you can leave them all behind. What a great message. There is nothing negative or cynical in the lyrics or the vocal performance, just an appreciation of how magical this particular night will be. It made me wish I was having that much fun.

However, the song is symbolic of something else. I think I am hearing it this way because it probably reminds me of the ‘80’s and maybe I was having fun then and I didn’t have any cares or at least fewer than I presently have. There is an idea of the ‘80’s that my mind conjures up. It’s a glamorous time when people dressed up and did their hair and everyone looked a bit stupid though not to each other at the time. People paid attention to how they looked and that kind of made things more fun for them. Dressing up before going out made the going out more of a celebration.

Under The Boardwalk is about summer. I love summer. I really hate cold weather. In the song, the singer is singing about a boardwalk near a beach, a summer scene. When summer arrives, he will head there with his girlfriend and sit on a blanket. But not in the direct sun, under the boardwalk where there is shade and possibly, some privacy. In the song, he is not there, he is dreaming of it. He can almost taste the hot dogs and French fries they sell, he sings.

If you live in Canada or north of the Mason Dixon line in the US, summer is an event. In most places up north, summer runs from about June to the end of August. So, unlike Florida or California or Texas or the Caribbean or any other hot climate on earth, summer is short lived and special, almost like Christmas or Thanksgiving. We experience it knowing that soon it will be gone and cooler weather will take over and then much colder weather will follow that. It makes the entire season feel a bit bittersweet as though you are visiting with a good friend knowing they will soon be gone and you won’t see them again for some time. In the summer there is the beach and people have stripped off the functional clothing of winter and we see who they are. For kids, it means no school and for many adults, it’s the time when they take their vacation from work. Beer tastes better and so do burgers.

For me, the end of summer is the end of the year, much more so than New Years Day. Summer ending almost has a sense of foreboding, colder temperatures, dressing to stay warm, rough lakes that will turn to ice. As a kid, it meant school starting-a new school year seemed much more significant to a kid than an arbitrary date on a calendar like January 1st.

Under The Boardwalk celebrates summer. It was probably written about a boardwalk in a place like New Jersey. So it struck me the same way Rhythm of The Night did, celebrating something finite and in doing so, almost implying that this good feeling is only temporary and that something less than good would follow. That is so depressing I can barely stand it.

This is the value of nostalgia. It can bring us to a place where life didn’t feel so shitty or complicated or worrisome. I think an idea exists that one should always be seeking out new music or new adventures. That’s certainly true to an extent but I am coming to terms with the fact that I may never hear a song that resonates with me the way the songs I remember from my 20’s or 30’s, when music was everything and it accompanied every thing that I did.

When bands like mine play shows now, what we offer people is that. We are giving them a night like they used to have, when they were in college and first heard our records and our music touched them on some level. It’s possible that the experience is even better now because the extra spice of nostalgia has been added. I remember seeing The Psychedelic Furs and Echo and The Bunnymen and being sure I was enjoying it more at that time than I would have when they were both current. Nostalgia has to be part of that. Other things like, they can play better now or they are not as drunk or stoned or jaded as they used to be might also come into play.

Many of you probably don’t know that I released a solo record some years ago. It was called Summer’s Over and it was a metaphor for the best part of your life being over and moving into the colder and darker end of life. The idea of using seasons to chronicle a life is not original. But it was one that made sense to me at the time. My friend Ronald Ramage once sang me a very short song he had written and the gist of it was that when you stop growing up, you start growing old. Pretty depressing stuff. The theme of coming to terms with getting older has been recurring in my music, starting, obviously, with our hit.

Summer imagery is something that resonates very strongly with me. Summer Wind, by Frank Sinatra, Summer Rain by Johnny Rivers, Boys of Summer by Don Henley and pretty much (and especially) anything by The Beach Boys.

There may be no recording group in history that so completely captured the idea of a season than the Beach Boys. Their music evokes the fun of summer and the desire for it to be endless. At this point, even the sound of their voices and harmonies paint of picture of summer in my mind. Which is why I can’t hear even the cheeriest of their songs and not feel melancholy.

I read a New York Times article that stated that nostalgia can, “counteract loneliness, boredom and anxiety”. I certainly get the loneliness and anxiety part, remembering something positive seems like at least a partial solution to those things. The article also mentioned that in the 19th and early 20th centuries, nostalgia was considered “melancholia and a mentally depressive-compulsive disorder.” So the idea that nostalgia and melancholy can be related has some basis though I’m sure this has been, at least scientifically, discounted. Many people use the term ‘longing’ when describing nostalgia. Longing is a very appropriate word. The article also states that “couples feel closer and look happier when sharing nostalgic stories.” That’s certainly true. So many of the conversations I have with my wife are about wonderful trips we’ve taken or times when the kids were younger and these conversations always put a smile on our faces.

My mom just died. My childhood home was sold off years ago. I’ve lived the majority of my life already. I’m unclear as to how many summer’s I have left. We are in the throws of a global pandemic that feels like it has no end in sight. The past feels quite a bit more appealing to me than the future does. So I guess that’s why these two songs are pulling at me. The idea of life being carefree seems so foreign to me right now. The weird part is, why Rhythm of The Night? It has no place in my musical vocabulary. I suppose it has less to do with the actual song than the feeling it evokes.

Like everything I try to convey in this space, I would like to declare, this is the power of music. To bring us back, to unlock a memory, to comfort us in a time of loneliness or disconnectedness. To give us strength in a time of weakness or hopelessness. If you’re ever questioning the value of music, put on a record you listened to in high school or college and notice how it makes you feel.

My favorite time of day is my morning coffee. I am typically the first one up in my household. In the early days of the pandemic, when most everything was shut down, that meant brewing a coffee and retreating to my studio. Since things opened up a bit, it has meant taking a walk to my local Starbucks where I can order ahead, pick up my coffee, say a huge thank you to my baristas and walk out with a minimum of contact with other humans. During this walk, I have taken to listening to podcasts. This is something I never felt I had time to do up until now.

Podcasts, like everything else, are uneven in quality. Since pretty much anyone can make one, they can be awful, promise more than they deliver or suffer because often they are only as good as the guest they are interviewing.

I’ve been listening to three types of podcasts. Political ones, which I shouldn’t because they make me angry and afraid, something I don’t need any more of in my life, music productions podcasts, which are almost always bad because nerds don’t give good interviews, and general music podcasts which are usually the most enjoyable of the three. My current favorite is one called Heat Rocks.

It’s hosted by musicologist Oliver Wang and music supervisor Morgan Rhodes. Unlike many music podcasts, I feel like Oliver and Morgan actually know what they are talking about most of the time. They both seem to have pretty good taste and are typically informed about the music featured on the show. Every episode, they invite a guest to discuss a favorite album or one they feel is important in some way. Generally, the series skews urban music. Lots of hip hop and old R&B. Not a lot of rock and certainly no commercial pop. Which is not to say they don’t feature so-called, white music. They have had guests talk about Court and Spark by Joni Mitchell and Tapestry by Carole King. But it’s not the usual thing.

Which is why I was so surprised to see the most recent episode was going to feature Surf’s Up by The Beach Boys. The guest who chose the album was African American poet and critic Hanif Abdurrabqib. He appeared very sincere about his appreciation for the record and for the Beach Boys generally. Perhaps because Hanif resides in Columbus, Ohio, which seems like the type of place where the Beach Boys would draw a big crowd at a summer fair.

I imagine that our hosts don’t always love the records their guests pick, though they may only do shows if they can stomach the record. I get the impression they ask guests to pick more than one record in case the guest picks a stinker that Oliver and Morgan couldn’t support on their podcast. As respectful as the hosts tried to be with Surf’s Up, it was pretty clear that they thought they were slumming it. There was a thin veil of, this is goofy, throughout the podcast. They also dominated the conversation in a way that I hadn’t heard before, at least in the episodes I’ve listened to. One reason for that may have been Hanif’s audio wasn’t very good. This episode was recorded during the Covid pandemic so I am assuming, remotely. I’m wondering if the hosts maybe wanted to spare us, the listener, the crappy digitized sound that got worse as the episode progressed. So Hanif may have had something meaningful to say that ended up on the cutting room floor? Would love to know.

So, a long winded way to get to where I want to be which is, Surf’s Up is a great album and the title track, which was hardly addressed in the episode is one of my 2 or 3 favorite songs of all time. And I want to arrogantly insert myself into the conversation with Morgan and Oliver about the album as though I am a special guest on the episode. Because the point here isn’t to criticize Oliver and Morgan, who I think are amazing. Their enthusiasm for almost every record they talk about on the show is frankly enviable. So many people in the music industry eventually start to view music and the artist’s who create it with contempt. That’s what happens when you commodify art for too long.

I was around 4 years old when I started loving The Beach Boys. It was the harmonies that drew me to them more than their actual songs. My older brother, John was the one who introduced me to them and the big song for us was I Get Around and it’s vocally complex intro/reintro. Later on, I became enraptured by The Warmth of The Sun, Please Let Me Wonder and Don’t Worry Baby because they had beautiful harmonies and extraordinary melodies but also a sense of melancholy. That melancholy would become more and more, a big part of the Beach Boys music.

Many people are aware of The Beach Boys artistic breakthrough, which is Pet Sounds. Pet Sounds would have made an infinitely better Heat Rocks episode because of its impact on the culture and its defining of Brian Wilson as a recording genius. Most musical historians know that the next project Brian took on was the most ambitious of his career, the up to recently unreleased, Smile. Not talking about Smile in any discussion of The Beach Boys from 1967 to the mid-seventies means the story isn’t complete. The aborted Smile project hung over the Beach Boys for that whole period and is often cited as the reason for Brian’s breakdown.

Many of the songs that were part of the Smile project ended up on a record called Smiley Smile, which was released in 1967. However, the best song on Smile is the title track of the record that is our subject. The esoteric lyrics by lyricist Van Dyke Parks paint a picture that is both abstract and haunting. Musically, it is the sort of complex chord arrangement that Brian started in Pet Sounds and would inform his songwriting thereafter. There is a moment in the song that is the most transcendent thing I’ve ever heard in music. Brian sings, “I heard the word/wonderful thing/a children’s song. As he sings children song, the reverb is pushed up and gives the last word a sorrowful cry. Then comes an intricate vocal coda with sort of a round against repeats of that wonderful last line. It’s the best thing I’ve ever heard. It’s the kind of thing that makes the Beach Boys matter even though most people think they are a novelty act. By the time Surf’s Up was released, Brian Wilson wasn’t very involved with the group. However, two of the three best songs were his, the beautiful ’Til I Die and of course, the title track, (the other great track being Feel Flows). But ’Til I Die was never mentioned in the podcast and Surf’s Up barely.

The hosts keyed in on the so-called more socially aware tracks like Don’t Go Near The Water and Student Demonstration Time, which they both gave a full diss to. Because it is corny. In fact, much of this record is corny and much of the Beach Boys music is corny. And for some reason, Oliver decided to celebrate, Take A Load off Your Feet, I feel to send a signal his fans how dumb this record is. Because it’s also corny or the humor of it isn’t particularly sophisticated. One track that got a bit of love was Disney Girls, a Bruce Johnson track. This track embodies the kind of existential melancholy that fuels this record. The fading idea of traditional happiness, “a peaceful life with a forever wife and a kid someday.” It’s the kind of dream world that the Beach Boys surfer music lived in. The song is nostalgic for a more innocent time, a time that passed with the escalating war in Vietnam and the civil rights movement and popular arts’ obsession with those things and not with surfing and girls and cars.


One thing that reassured me of how smart the Heat Rocks hosts are is when Morgan commented on how great the album jacket was. It’s a painting based on a sculpture by James Earle Fraser called End Of The Trail. Morgan thought it symbolized getting to the end of the coast, to the water. It’s a very sad image and extremely appropriate for the music inside. I think listening to the album while holding the cover, something I used to do all the time with all the records I listened to, would make the experience of Surf’s Up better.

I’m surprised how much this record and its cover informed my own musical journey. I’ve had a life long preoccupation with the idea of Summer’s Over, (see my next blog) which would have also been a great title for Surf’s Up. Writing about this now, on a cold and rainy October day during Covid-19, gives me a feeling of dread and sadness.

I am encouraging you to check out Surf’s Up knowing that half of it is crap. But the other half is brilliant. A few times in my life, I’ve played people stuff off of this or Smiley Smile and watched their mouth drop open. These are typically people whose experience of the Beach Boys is Fun, Fun, Fun and Surfer Girl. I usually hear comments like, “I had no idea how influential they were.” Yes, there was a time when the Brian Wilson led Beach Boys were hand in hand with The Beatles, pushing the boundaries of the recording studio and pop song composition and it’s a shame more people don’t know about that. Also check out the eventually released Smile. I often wonder what the trajectory of the Beach Boys’ career would have been had they released Smile after Pet Sounds.

What eventually happened is they turned into a nostalgia act-a musical representation of White America. Singer Mike Love has dragged them into the gutter and that’s a shame. Because they should have been so much more.

It usually takes a death to get me talking on this space. Ken Chinn, of the legendary punk band, SNFU, has passed. He had been in ill health for some time and I have no interest in going into the details as, I don’t have first hand knowledge of them and it’s nobody’s business.

We know far too much about the personal lives of our musical heroes or musical enemies and it serves no purpose that I can see. Someone’s public persona almost never informs their art. Inspiration is illusive and both swell and crappy people are able to make either good or bad music.

What’s important is Ken was an incredible front man and SNFU were the best band to ever come out of my hometown of Edmonton AB and one of the greatest punk bands of all time.

I met Ken when he was 14. The Edmonton punk scene was pretty small and you got to know everyone, if not by name, at least by sight. My first memory of Ken was him wearing what looked like his junior prom suit, (suits were kind of a thing in the early days of punk) digging on the bands, including my band, The Modern Minds. We were a power pop band that played really fast, like The Dickies or The Ramones with the melodic sensibilities of a band like The Buzzcocks. There weren’t a ton of gigs for bands like ours. Often the gig would be a bar that would slum it midweek and have a ‘punk’ or ‘new wave’ night, knowing that everyone in the scene would probably show up. Back then, there was no such thing as a stand alone nightclub that sold alcohol in Edmonton. Bars were attached to hotels and the only other place to get booze was at a restaurant, (if you ordered food) and restaurants didn’t have live music.

Once in a while, some enterprising kid would rent a hall for a punk show. I remember seeing DOA at one of those shows. There was a guy named Randy Boyd who opened a record store downtown called Obscure Alternatives. It mainly stocked the flood of releases that were coming out post Sex Pistols and Ramones that fit into the category of Punk or New Wave. It became the epicenter of the scene and I remember the night DOA played Edmonton, the band showed up at the store. They scared the crap out of me-they looked like they were in a bike gang. Most of the people in the Edmonton scene were college students or disenfranchised youths who would have been Smiths fans had they been born 7 years later. Which is to say, looking less like bikers and more like pasty white boys.

DOA just tore the roof off of the hired hall that night. The crowd went absolutely nuts for them and I think they got about eight encore calls. I honestly thought they were going to get pissed off at people begging them to keep playing.

Sometime around then, Randy, (I think) rented a place and built a stage in it and opened the doors. Edmonton had its first (non alcohol) punk club. It didn’t have a name but people called it the Suicide Club even though that had been a name for the Smilin’ Buddha in Vancouver. I think it only lasted a month, The Modern Minds played twice, one night had The Modernettes and The Subhumans and I forget what happened the other night. The Modernettes were kind of my favorite band at the time. Randy had organized a trip to Vancouver, which to us, was like a punk rock Mecca. We opened for the Modernettes and a band called No Fun at the aforementioned Smilin’ Buddha. I remember walking to the club, which was in a terrible neighborhood and the first person I encountered asked me, “how much would it cost to get you to kill my wife.” My suburban self walked away terrified. We played our show and then The Modernettes hit the stage. They opened with a song called Confidential and it was love at first listen. It remains one of my all time favorite records.

We released a three-song single as everyone released singles back then. The A-side was Theresa’s World and the B-side had Bungalow Rock, (my ode to my actual hometown of St Albert, a suburb of Edmonton) and She’s Gone. We recorded it at an 8-track studio called Homestead that was run by Larry Wanagas who would go on to manage KD Lang and The Trews among others. The single didn’t sell a lot but aged well and became something of a collector’s item. I would get requests for copies of it from various places, mostly Japan and a company there called Record Shop Base eventually asked if they could press a Modern Minds CD. All we had was the single, so we fleshed out the CD with a bunch of demos. Most of it was recorded live to 8-track, even the vocals. Years later, I was approached by a guy named Simon Harvey who had a reissue label called Ugly Pop who released a vinyl version of the Japanese CD. So it’s been fun, over the years, to see this single fight to stay alive.

I remember the night I left the punk scene. We were playing a show at the U of A, which was another place that would hire punk/new wave bands. We weren’t playing in one of the regular rooms where they ran gigs. This place had a makeshift stage that was only about six inches high. As I said earlier, you kind of got to know all of the people in the scene. There was this guy who was at every show, a big dumb guy. He was also a rich kid, which made him even more unlikable. He always had a nice leather jacket and that sullen, my rich dad knows I’m a fuck up, expression on his face. What some of you may or may not know is that back in the early days, there was an idea that spitting on the band was a thing. I don’t know where this originated but occasionally someone would want to try to be “authentic”-even in Edmonton. Well, on this night, the big dumb guy, who probably didn’t think I was punk enough, stood in front of me, like literally right in front of me, and spit at me through our entire set. His disgusting, pungent gob ran down my face, covered my glasses and gooed up my brother-in-law’s beautiful ‘60’s Rickenbacker. After enduring this abuse for several songs I began to have an existential crisis. This really wasn’t how I wanted my life to go, not how I envisioned being a musician. It never occurred to me that we could just stop the show, I didn’t want to quit and I resigned myself that it was my duty to ‘take it’. As this was all swirling around in my head, a fist flew across my field of vision and knocked Spitty out cold. Some guy had been watching this performance and had clearly had enough. The place went crazy and it felt like the cops were there in 10 seconds. The other thing was, punk shortly thereafter became hardcore and most of the fans were shirtless bald dudes assaulting each other. I wanted to be in a band where girls came to the shows. I would still be a fan but started to lean more towards my melodic side, creating more complex compositions while still playing the odd 180 BPM ditty.

Anyway, Ken formed a band called SNFU, adopting the stage name, Chi Pig. One memory I have is travelling from the suburbs on a St Albert Transit bus that ran once an hour, walking a half an hour to transfer to an Edmonton Transit bus that only ran every half an hour to get to a where they were playing. It was at a bar called Scandals, which was attached to the Sheraton Hotel in downtown Edmonton. I think I was on my third Edmonton band by this point and I had never been in one as good as SNFU. Their set was just blistering. A lot of the punk bands in Edmonton were unmusical, mostly attitude and hadn’t figured out how to use a tuner. But SNFU were incredible musicians, super tight and then there was Ken. Just a dervish on stage with charisma to spare. They signed a deal with BYO and put out their classic debut, And No One Else Wanted To Play. The band went on to become a world famous, highly influential band and one of Edmonton’s most significant exports.

A few years ago, SNFU went back on the road after a long break. They had a show booked in a club called the Velvet Underground in Toronto and this was going to be my first time seeing the band in many years. My status as one of the grand daddies of the Edmonton scene meant that I was always one of the people interviewed when a movie or book was going to feature Ken. It was great to see the band again, even though only Ken remained from that original Edmonton line up. I got a chance to talk to him briefly before the show and he honestly didn’t seem much different than the last time I had seen him decades ago. His voice still had a tiny bit of the timbre of youth and he joked and laughed at his jokes and seemed in a good place. His bass player was Dave Bacon, a guy I had become friendly with, largely over social media and it was great to hear all of those old songs again, played really well by the current line up.

So his death, as death often does, has caused me to reflect and wax nostalgic. Being in a band in Edmonton was so hard that it toughened you up, made you a good musician and tempered your expectations. There was no industry out there, almost no gigs and no real future. When The Pursuit of Happiness broke, even though it was what I had always dreamed of and worked so hard for, it still seemed unreal that it could happen to someone like me. It never would have happened if I hadn’t moved to Toronto and I thank my lucky stars that I was dumb and ambitious enough to move across the country with basically only the money in my pocket.

But there was one weekend in Edmonton where I almost felt that I had made it there. The Modern Minds were hired to do a three-night stand at a place called the Riviera Rock Room in the Riviera hotel. It was at the height of our popularity and I think we sold it out all three nights. That was the only time I remember a Western Canadian club promoter ever being happy with me after a show. It was recorded by a radio station that had to because it was part of their CRTC licensing agreement. I’m told the tape of that show still makes the rounds in Edmonton. That weekend ended up being the swan song for the band. Our bass player, the late, great Bob Drysdale had let us know before the shows that he was leaving the band. But that was as good as things ever got for me in my hometown and I flailed around there for a few more years until I figured out I was going to sink in suburban quicksand if I didn’t get out of there. But lets stop here. This isn’t my autobiography. Rest in peace, Ken.

I just read a Facebook post that had a childless woman berating parents for allowing their children to misbehave on planes and in restaurants. She was aided by another mean girl in this and, from what I read, had alienated and hurt a bunch of moms who probably didn’t need to feel any worse about themselves. In subsequent comments, the childless woman reinforced her opinion that there was a way to raise children so that they would act like short adults and not ruin her good time. Which is to say, she believed she knew what she was talking about when she clearly didn’t. Anyone who isn’t a parent who has advice for people who are parents about parenting just shouldn’t.

These days, this, (not knowing what you are talking about) stops no one. In fact, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find someone who has a clue. But it doesn’t stop there. In 2018, people are creating, making things and starting companies doing things they may not know how to do. Or do very well. But they think they know how or more accurately want to think they know. That is enough for almost everyone.

The craft beer fad is a good example of this arrogance. 20 years ago, much of this beer would be called ‘hooch’. Something a guy brewed in his garage. His buddies would come over and drink some with him and tell him that it was good even though it assaulted their palate. It got them drunk which, for many beer drinkers, is 100% the point of beer. These days, this glorified moonshine is on the shelves of your liquor store, there to make you feel like a rube if you buy a beer made by a brewery that has been making beverages for generations instead of one by a couple of guys in beards with access to yeast and a clean bathtub.

Mrs. Berg and I have travelled to the southern US pretty much yearly for the past decade and a half. I had acquired a taste for southern barbecue while touring and recording in the US with TPOH. My wife and I regularly eat at BBQ places in Georgia, Alabama and Louisiana. I remember wishing, ‘I would love for a place like this to open in Toronto.’ A few years ago, a bunch of places did open up. People, probably like me, fell in love with wood smoked meat and figured they’d try their hand at it and open up a restaurant that serves it. After checking out many of these places, I revised my wish to, ‘I wish someone whose family had been smoking meat for generations would open up a BBQ restaurant in Toronto.’ Because it was clear that merely buying a smoker and some wood chips doesn’t make you a BBQ chef. But in 2018, buying a smoker and some wood chips IS all you have to do to be a BBQ chef.

It’s like when you talk to a kid who tells you, ‘I’ve been a music producer since I was 13.’ Which roughly translates into, ‘I’ve been dragging samples into a timeline in a program I downloaded for free from the internet since I was 13.’ 20 years ago, none of these guys would ever be producers at anytime in their life, let alone when they were 13. But their access to technology has given them an unearned title and they feel completely justified using it.

Can I state here, unequivocally, that this is not a shot at people who create electronic music. EDM, in all it’s subgenres, and hip hop are the present and future of music and anyone who thinks otherwise is thinking wishfully.

At this point, it’s a cliche to state that social media and 24 hour news stations are largely to blame for this. At a time when democracy is in peril in so many other ways, the media is completely democratic, socialist even, where everyone’s opinion carries pretty much the exact same weight. I never get tired of watching that scene from The Newsroom where the actor from Dumb and Dumber who isn’t Jim Carrey talks about ‘giants who were revered.’ when talking about newsmen. Yes, people who spent their life in pursuit of the truth without regard for political gain.

My fear is that people are ignoring how hard it is and how much work it takes to be good at something. About musicians working at their instrument their entire childhood, teenage years and well into their adulthood to finally have some success. And that many who pursued this path still didn’t achieve anything because there was someone else who tried and practiced and sacrificed a bit more than they did. Also, people who took recipes handed down from their parents who got them from their grandparents and great grandparents and still worked for years to perfect them before attempting to serve them to the public.

(This is maybe a right turn or maybe on course, I don’t know). A few months back, my Italian food loving sister was in town. Mrs. Berg, myself and my sister went to a restaurant in one of Toronto’s Little Italy’s. We arrived and noticed that the entire staff was Asian. So much for authentic Italian food, we chortled. Then the chef, an older Japanese fellow, came to take our order. As we got to talking, he told us about the years he had spent in Italy learning to cook. Then taking his skills to Japan and opening an Italian restaurant there and perfecting his recipes for a decade. Then bringing all of this knowledge and experience to Toronto to cook in a tiny little place that, I’m assuming, barely makes enough money to keep the lights on. He complained to us about culinary programs in Canada that had people who didn’t know the first thing about Italian cooking teaching students in our colleges. I thought, joke’s on us, here is a guy who has devoted his life to learning to do something he loves. He didn’t appear to have become rich doing it. I thought the meal was great but honestly, I know crap about authentic Italian cooking.

It seems like the only true meritocracy left is sports and Thank God for sports because it’s one of the only things left on earth that you can only do if you are frigging great at it. That last pursuit where you have to work your ass off for your entire life to maybe have a slim chance of making it at. I don’t see that changing with the rest of the world, although with NFL boycotts based on political beliefs, maybe there will be a RFL starting up that will have players with the right politics playing a substandard version of the game for fans of the right politics. Nothing would surprise me at this point.

As I read this back, I feel a bit old. Am I just cranky? There is another way of looking at this. These nouveau pit masters and brew masters are starting companies and employing people and injecting life into the economy. So that’s great, right? And bedroom producers, if they stick with it, could end up making interesting music. And that’s also good? Is the learning curve getting easier to manage, is world knowledge making it easier to perfect things that used to take much longer? I guess the proof will be in the results. Hopefully, there will always be people who care. Who will want to be great at something and not just good enough to satisfy people with diminished expectations. You have to start somewhere? Maybe my kids will be able to enjoy the beer and bbq made by the children of todays brewmasters/pit masters and it will be awesome. Maybe those children will have the humility to understand how hard it is to be really good at something. Or else people will have moved onto a new fad. In the meantime, I’ll pop the top on a Heineken and start saving for my next trip to the Deep South.

Before we start, Objectivists will find this blog irrelevant.

At this years Canadian Music Week, I attended a panel that featured a speech by my friend Graham Henderson, a well respected member of the music community. He started out as a entertainment attorney, spent some time at Universal Music and has been the head of Music Canada for several years. Graham was my lawyer for many years and is a kind and generous man and also extremely intelligent.

The panel began with Graham giving a passionate talk about the present inequity of the music business with the technology companies in the hot seat as the new villains. Graham used Ayn Rand’s classic novel The Fountainhead as the example of the sort of unregulated capitalism that You Tube et al demonstrate with their business practices. The artist is in the familiar position of being the cattle lead to slaughter by the boss man. At a time when artists are fighting over pennies while You Tube and Spotify and other social media/streaming sites are raking in billions, I suppose one could invoke the kind of Darwinian capitalism Ayn Rand espoused.

What I believe the panel, which also included Songwriters Association of Canada President, Eddie Schwartz,  was telling me was that the industry cut a bunch of bad deals with technology companies, post-Napster, to keep them semi-afloat that, as usual, kept the musicians and songwriters at the bottom of the heap. Now, people like Graham are lobbying to sweeten these deals so that artists will get two crumbs instead of one. A solution to a crisis.

Except that the story is much older than that. The misunderstanding of who creates the wealth in the music business is as old as popular music and the recording industry. The music business has long been in denial as to which side their bread has been buttered. Think of the music business as a fridge. While no one doubts the value of the refrigerator, it’s utility depends on whether you have any food you need to keep cold. Otherwise, its a big clunky thing taking up space in your kitchen. I’ve often described someone in the music business with no music to sell as a food-less fridge. If there wasn’t any music to sell, what would they do? Stare at a phone, sharpen their pencils, go for lunch with people who aren’t musicians? Without musicians and songwriters, there is no business-none. Artists have never figured this out and since the supply of artists has always been plentiful, most have felt grateful to have their 15 minutes of fame, which for most of them, is all they get. The music industry happily cashed in on this renewable resource for 3/4 of a century until Napster changed the game.

The goal, expressed or unexpressed, of almost every artist I’ve ever met is to get signed. Get a record deal, a publishing deal, a manager, an agent, a number one record etc. When your goals are business goals, it puts the business people in the drivers seat. So no wonder they believe they are running things. And they are. The point remains, the artist can survive without the business but the business cannot survive without the artist. So how can artists use this to their advantage?

Today’s world, the world that Graham was railing against, works on the concept of exposure. That if someone can bring what you do to some kind of major attention, then and only then are you able to make money. Which is to say, your content has no intrinsic value, your song, your video, your article for Huff Post or your speech at any number of conferences being held daily across North America. This is something different than the old model which was, we can take your raw (quantifiable) potential, invest in it, market it, then when we find an audience for it, we can take most of the money. The good thing about that was, the artist almost always got something good in that deal. And while the artist has also largely been judged by the marketplace, there has always been an idea of something being of the highest quality even if it wasn’t the most popular thing. But in the world of social media your status is completely measured by clicks, likes, subscribers, views.  In fact, many of the people making it on You Tube are largely the mutant offspring of Seinfeld’s fictional show about nothing.

I should say that I think You Tube is awesome. Not just awesome, incredibly awesome. It has given many people a voice who wouldn’t have one. It contains a staggering amount of useful information.  I can now fix my fridge. Mrs. Berg has a very successful You Tube channel that has allowed her to get her message to the world and pursue a lifestyle of her choice. The democratization of culture that You Tube allows has been liberating. This is in addition to all the great music on it. But the new exposure culture has also done a slight of hand with things of value. Its idea of free and freedom doesn’t apply to itself. While the exposure culture leaders are trying to convince creators their content has little monetary value, they are getting fabulously wealthy.

The Fountainhead reference made me think of the next Ayn Rand novel, which is Atlas Shrugged. For those who may have waded through it’s 1000+ pages, it involves the ‘great minds’ of the world going on strike. Based on what I was hearing at this panel, I started thinking, this was a great idea. What if all the musical artists stopped supplying content to the technology companies. What if they told their audience, the only way you can hear our music is to come and see us perform it live? They would not be releasing any new music to any technology or streaming sites. Of course, the only way this works is if everybody does it. So Radiohead and Chance The Rapper and Beyonce and every other band that could make these companies hurt would have to join the revolution. Then anyone who is able to would take down any of their pre existing content.

The best thing is that I believe the fans would buy in. They would see this as their heroes’ struggle and they would want to join the cause. And, most artists have already discovered that playing live is the only real way to make money anyhow.

Both Graham and Eddie Schwartz assured me that it couldn’t happen because of the binding agreements artists and record companies have signed with streaming and other social media sites. I didn’t really know what they were talking about but I couldn’t help but wonder what artists/record companies got from these agreements. Deals in the main make sense when everyone gets something. Even in the old days of the record company Camelot, often an artist would get a bit rich along side their bosses. But a deal where the artist gets nothing sounds like indentured servitude.

So based on what I heard that day artists, or their rights holders, the labels/publishers, have forsaken all the of the gains artists made in the ’70’s and we are back in the ’50’s again. This is why the strike makes sense. Maybe some of the rights and money can be clawed back through political means but most people who are making music today might be past their prime by then. Would the artists have to break the law or risk being sued for this to work? Maybe. Revolutions often involve a bit of blood. But I have a feeling a strike wouldn’t take long to change things. Faced with an empty fridge, the technology companies might throw a few pennies at the content providers to keep the food supply plentiful.

Nice to think about but I know this idea is bizarre, fantasy. Just like an Ayn Rand novel.

Word is HMV is closing shop. This follows a trend that started over a decade ago and appears to be coming to a final curtain. Which is, the end of the chain record store.

For my entire life, record stores have been like church to me. They were where I went be around my favorite thing. Music. Which records, more than anything else, represented.

When I was a kid, we didn’t have a lot of money. Buying a new record was a pretty big deal. That didn’t stop me from hanging out at record stores. I’d spend hours just looking through the racks, reading the credits, making a mental wish list and just enjoying being around records. I remember gong to what many would call the fair, which in our case was a carnival, midway and exhibition called Klondike Days. There were rides and games and carnival food. There was also a marketplace and in it was a pop up record shop. Instead of going on rides or playing the games of chance, I would spend a big chunk of my time at Klondike Days just perusing the records, even though I didn’t have enough money to buy one.

The only time I almost stole something. There was a $2.99 sale at Kelly’s in Edmonton. Previous to this, my older brother John had bought both Masters Of Reality by Black Sabbath and the original Rock Opera version of Jesus Christ Superstar, the real one with Ian Gillan. I loved both of these records and played the crap out of them. In the sale bin there was Black Sabbath’s Paranoid and the original cast recording of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, which I’d never heard of but was by the same guys who wrote and produced Superstar. I could only pick one so I went for Joseph. As it turned out, the Joseph record was a London cast recording of the stage play and kind of sucked. Or didn’t suck but wasn’t what I was expecting, which was a rock opera like JCS. Disappointed, I took the bus back into Edmonton the next week hoping I might be able to exchange it for Paranoid. I was a very nervous kid and edged my way up to the counter and said, “do you give refunds on the sale records?” to which the clerk of course said, “no”. I meant exchange. Feeling angry about it, I thought about tucking the Joseph record back into the bin and slipping the Sabbath record into my Kelly’s bag. But I didn’t. I went home and listened to the Joseph record 40 times to try and like it. Because that’s what you did when you could only buy a small amount of music, you gave it a chance.

Diversions were few when I was a kid. Television was terrible. So finding time to listen to music was easy. On those days that I actually had enough money to buy a record, I would take it home and listen to it. Not listen while I was doing something else. Just listen to the music. I would listen to any record I bought hundreds of times. This experience was not unique to me and I’m sure many reading who are of a ‘certain age’ can relate to what I’m saying. I remember an interview I once read with Pete Townsend where he talked about loving books. Just touching them and having them in your hands. I have also felt that way about books and book stores.

My obsession with records and record stores lasted well into my adult life, actually until very recently. When we were on the road, I’d go to the local Towers or whatever record store was handy and check out what they had that I couldn’t get back home. Sometime’s our record company would let us pick out a few CD’s after an in store and I would drive the band batty while I meticulously combed the bins to find exactly what I wanted. One of my big regrets is leaving a sealed, vinyl copy of Music From The Magic Christian by Badfinger under the mattress of my bunk on a tour bus.

When Sonic Boom opened in the Annex, I was there pretty much every day. At that point I was flipping through CD’s instead of vinyl but I was still spending an hour or so, checking out what they had and what I might be able to buy. This was post Napster. Some habits are hard to break.

I imagine people look at the generation that follows them and wonders if their experience of the world is as idyllic as their own. So I ask myself, are kids missing out on something because most of them never set foot in a record store? Most of them don’t buy music in the way we used to. (This doesn’t even address radio, which was another bounty of musical experience that shaped me as a kid).

Let’s examine how a young person might access music today. They can purchase music online without ever leaving their house. The catalog of recordings that is available through iTunes outstrips any record store from my youth. Then there are sites like Bandcamp, Reverbnation and Soundcloud where they can discover indy music. Finally there is YouTube where almost every recording known to man, not to mention live performances and more amateur music than you could listen to in a lifetime, exists. There is also Spotify, where kids can listen to music without having to empty their bank accounts to buy it. Just pay a few bucks a month to have access to a wide catalog of music.

If I think of a song, or am wondering about a song, or am trying to tell someone about a song, I can access any of these sites and be able to hear the song pretty much instantaneously. If I could have done this as a kid, you would have had to pry me away from my computer.

The downside, of course, is that the internet has devalued music. Because music was so ‘rare’ in terms of my ability to access it, I was happy to pay for it when I was able to. A kid once said to me, “if I had to pay for music, I wouldn’t have half the music that I do.” Yes, you would be me as a kid. I didn’t even have 1/50th of the music that I wanted.

So are things better now? I guess it’s all about context. Was my experience as a kid better than the experiences of a young music listener today? I’m going to say no. Here is what was bad about my experience. Early on, the supply of music wasn’t so vast and most music could be found in your local record store. As popular music grew and certain recordings became hyper successful, I’m talking about you Frampton Comes Alive and Saturday Night Fever, both record companies and retailers became fixated on making and selling recordings that would sell in huge quantities. So records that didn’t or stopped selling as many copies as labels and stores wanted them to, were deleted, banished to history and obscurity. This got worse and worse over the years. So finding a song like, Mr. Dyingly Sad by The Critters or Crazy Jane by Tom Northcott was virtually impossible unless you could find it in a used record store.

The internet has given people access to songs that have been abandoned by the powers that controlled music. This is the best part and is the part that trumps any nostalgia that I can conjure up about record stores. And while I may lament the closing of HMV and before them, Tower, A&A, Kelly’s and Cheapies, for my own personal reasons, it’s been replaced by something so magical, my younger self wouldn’t have been able to imagine it.

And the fall of the chain record store doesn’t mean the end of the record store. The resurgence of vinyl has created a boom for the independent record shop. So as much as I remember my youth with fondness, life for the music fan has never been better. Now for the musician….

Post Script. It is now looking like Sunrise Records might be buying some of the HMV locations. Not sure how they are planning to make that work but stay tuned, maybe this isn’t over?

(In which Moe uses lots of italics to convey his irritation).

This blog will seem like its about something else for a few paragraphs but I assure you, this is not about the upcoming US election.

Not long ago, I was in a restaurant, sitting at the bar having dinner alone. To my left were two gentlemen, talking politics over beers. Their conversation was one you are hearing all the time right now, (Fall 2016). The gist was, the two candidates for president of the United States, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are, equally bad.

It doesn’t take much to find flaws in Mr. Trump, whether you are for or against him. And Secretary Clinton has some issues that have dogged her campaign. But I was curious as to why they thought Mrs. Clinton was equally bad. Notice, not an undesirable candidate or, has her own problems or flaws but, equally bad. From what I was able to infer from the tone and substance of the conversation, they thought she was equally bad because…. someone else had said that. They didn’t bring up anything in particular about her but just said she was bad. I also got a sense from their tone that, part of it was that she was a woman and there were things about the way she looked and acted in terms of how women look and act that made her equally bad.

I should say now that it was cheap wine night at the restaurant and I was fully engaged in that. And, possibly because of that, became more and more irritated by how moronic the conversation was. So I drunk Facebooked something about it. My post was admittedly a bit harsh. I got a fair amount of response to it. The majority of it was very supportive and a bit of it was not. That is to be expected when you say anything remotely political on Facebook. And it might have seemed out of character as I rarely post anything political on my page.

Some people took great offense, which I felt a bit bad about. I’m fairly moderate, politically speaking. I get that some people see the world differently than I do. And in hindsight, I regret the post and have deleted it. I don’t necessarily regret the sentiment but it was directed at the guys at the bar and not necessarily at anyone who might be reading. Which wasn’t obvious.

But there was a particular type of asshole who responded that I want to mention and this will get us to the heart of this piece.

Moe, you’re good at music but not very good at this. Stick to music.
Moe, you’re just not informed. If you were more informed, you wouldn’t post this.
Which always means, if I was informed, I’d agree with their opinion.

I checked these guys out to see if maybe they were journalists who worked the US political beat or maybe professors of American Politics. No, they were just Joe Average fuckwits. Which is to say, no more informed than I and possibly a good deal less so. I’ve had an amateur interest in politics for most of my adult life. I went through a phase where I read ferociously about politics, especially US politics. I must admit, it was a bit of a journey, I held some strange and immature views and it took decades to get to the point where I felt reasonably comfortable in my political skin. In my old age, I’ve become quite a bit less interested in the whole thing.

This is neither here nor there. What was so offensive was the implication that my obvious ignorance stemmed from the fact that I was a musician and that being good at music somehow meant that I wasn’t able to acquire knowledge about anything else, especially politics. This is an idea that has some legs. Regularly, I hear people call out any rock star or famous person who dares to express their political opinion as though the only people who are allowed to speak about politics are, the not famous people. (I guess the only famous people who can speak about politics are radio and television commentators.)

If I’m being honest, in the past, I may have thought this myself. But I have realized that little is gained for any famous person who speaks out about pretty much anything. And often, there is much to lose. And certainly, some famous people probably don’t know what they are taking about. Which would make them, as a group, about the same as any other group in society. Except that the risk involved in speaking out might make them more careful about what they say, so it’s possible that the percentage of idiotic and irresponsible opinions and statements by famous people might actually be lower than in the general population.

Some people think artists shouldn’t use their fame to expose political beliefs. What is it about being an artist that means they can’t participate in democracy? And one should know that, historically, artists have loudly spoken out and written about the state of the world.

In the sixties and into the seventies, every artist was saying something about the world around them. The term folk music was almost interchangeable with protest music. Even a group like Grand Funk, who many thought of as the One Direction of the time, promoted activism and wrote almost exclusively about environmental concerns and their opposition to war. This was pretty much standard with big artists as like the Jefferson Airplane, Stevie Wonder, even Chicago!! In the R&B community there were plenty of voices of activism and protest, The Isley Brothers, Marvin Gaye and, wait-it’s ridiculous to name artists as almost everyone had at least one political song in their repertoire. Then punk rock and hip hop came along, fueled by protest.

However, in the ’80’s, the so-called Me Decade, we started to see a lot less of this. Sure there was U2 and Midnight Oil, Sting and, occasionally Bruce Springsteen but largely we were being asked to pour some sugar on our artists and, into the ’90’s, to hit them one more time. Hip hop all but abandoned politics for consumerism and fantasy. And that’s okay, really. I don’t need to hear a steady diet of serious issues lyrics. But how about an occasionally protest ditty, especially when the times call for it?

Recently, when the anti-LGBTQ laws were being passed, the silence from the artistic community was, as they say, deafening. You heard plenty of noise from corporations who weren’t going to do business with States that enacted these laws but not a peep from our artists. This was one of the most confounding situations I have ever witnessed. The game had been dumped on its head. The traditional bad guys, the corporations, were now the good guys and the traditional agents of social change, artists, were cowering. The exceptions were Bruce Springsteen and someone else who I now forget. Two people.

No one helped Pearl Jam in their fight against Ticketmaster, admittedly not a political protest but certainly a populist one.

Having said all of that and based on the reaction to my post, it may be that the fault for this lies with the popular culture audience. We don’t want to hear it. And because of that, there is great risk involved with artists who speak out. Certainly the Dixie Chicks had excrement raining down on them for an off hand comment about George Bush. And I read a horrific story about the abuse singer Tim Mcgraw got for playing a Sandy Hook benefit to raise money for the protection of children from gun violence. He never even said he was against the Second Amendment, just wanted to help out people who had been through the most unspeakable terror. (a member of his band had a friend who lost a child in the Sandy Hook massacre). Even his own musical community publicly called him out. Coward and B list singer, Billy Currington who was touring with Mcgraw, dropped out of the concert. Mcgraw’s Twitter account was in flames with outraged NRA-inspired vitriol. In other news, supermodel, Chrissy Tegan’s Twitter account had to be closed down after she was attacked by these same people when she expressed her thoughts about the epidemic of mass shootings in the US.

So why would you want to bring that on yourself? And why would I want to set myself up for insult by a bunch of shit for brains know-it-alls whose mom bought them a PC?

Sad, really.

I just got home from watching the final Tragically Hip show. When the tour was announced, I had posted on Facebook that I thought it would be a great idea for the CBC or someone to televise the final gig. I felt that the coming together and celebrations that occurred across Canada would happen. Not that I had anything to do with it being televised but I am glad that the people who could make this happen did and that the people who could have prevented it, didn’t.

I watched it at The Bloor Cinema in Toronto, a place where I occasionally DJ before music movies. Its a wonderful theatre with a big screen, good sound and an intelligent, respectful crowd. So I figured there would be a minimum of yahoos wrecking my experience. It was a bit emotional, as I thought it would be. It certainly wasn’t a normal concert experience. Canadians from coast to coast were at a place like the Bloor Cinema or their local bar or at a friend with an amazing TV’s house or at a community centre, having a shared experience of watching Canada’s band play their last show. So there was a dark spectacle surrounding this-the idea that this amazing man was going to die and we were watching him do the thing we love to see him do for the last time. What does tomorrow look like for him and for us? The memory will likely haunt some people, it will haunt me.

IMPORTANT NOTE. The chronology of the following will be completely off.

The Hip and The Pursuit of Happiness, (and the Cowboy Junkies, Grapes of Wrath, some other bands) came of age around the same time. It was a great time for Canadian music and Canadian bands. We weren’t chasing anything, we were all being ourselves and that’s what led to all of our successes.

I’ve seen the Hip many times often because my band was sharing the stage with them and sometimes just as a fan. The first time was at the Copa, which was a dance club in Yorkdale that also featured concerts. When I moved to Toronto, I was amazed that there were concert tickets at record stores or clubs-free concert tickets. The Copa was one of the places that you could always find a free concert ticket-I saw Eric Burdon and Johnny Winter and lots of local bands. I recall, just after we recorded Love Junk, that we came home and played a Toronto Film Festival gig at the Copa, where our publicity person introduced me to Tiny Tim and Roger Ebert. But I think I saw the Hip before that.(?)

As I recall the show now, with the exception of Gord Downie, the band looked exactly the same as they did tonight. It’s as though it’s the next day and the band were wearing prosthetics that aged them. They all have the same hair and clothes that I remember from then. As it was for many, it was Gord Downie who caught my attention. I remember thinking there was a vague Stones-Doors idea here but the singer had some jump to him and I have always been a sucker for an engaging front man.

Not too long after that, we sort of blew open and went on a year long tour having pretty much the best time ever. One night in New York, Gord showed up at either a record company dinner or in a record company suite we were hanging out in. He’d come straight from the airport. He was was also in New York for a record company meeting. Where’s your luggage? He held up a Crown Royal bag then began pulliing out the contents, naming each item.

“A comb, a toothbrush and a fancy eating shirt, (a long sleeved button up shirt that he’d rolled up into the size of a large cigar). I’m not taking my boots off so I don’t need socks and the hotel with have shampoo.”

We all found this outrageously funny and, for years thereafter fancy eating shirts became part of the TPOH venacular.

The band’s full length, Up To Here came out somewhere around this time and was very successful. We did a New Years Eve show with them in Kingston and it was pretty fun and you could see they had something major going on. We got too drunk. My memory was taking a sip off of a Corona and involuntarily spitting it on Gord’s sister-in-law’s leg. She looked at me with pity and graciously decided not to make much of it. Unfortunately, TPOH’s early history is riddled with this kind of sorry behavior and disapproving looks from women. But that’s another story. At this point, I still thought we were kicking the Hip’s ass.

Every year Molson Park, just outside of Toronto was the scene of something called Edge Fest. Our slot was near the top of the bill but the Tragically Hip closed the show. Our tour bus was leaving and as I walked through the crowd to get to it, the Hip were launching into Blow At High Dough. Coming out of the intro as the band kicks into the song, “I can get behind everything’, the place just went crazy and it was just a sea of bobbing heads and I was thinking to myself, people fucking love the Hip. But whatever, we’re in Rolling Stone and People and Musician and every other magazine and I never hear about them down south. (years later, the band actually said this to us-hey you guys are always in the big magazines and they never have us. I thought, well a few critics, who don’t pay for records, like us and EVERY PERSON IN CANADA LOVES YOU. Not much of a trade.)

The band called me up one day and asked if I wanted to come over and listen to the mixes of their new album, which was going to be Road Apples. So I went and they put it on and we had some beers. I remember thinking it was a bit jammy, maybe it was going to be their sophomore jinx record. I liked it but I didn’t hear any songs that I thought were going to be, for lack of a better word, hits. Anyway, had a great time that night, one of their girlfriends started DJing playing cool stuff and I thought it was nice that they had me over. As it turned out, the sophomore jinx was going to be ours and Road Apples became a gigantic hit and any illusions I had that we were more popular or even AS popular as them vanished for good.

A radio station in Washington DC was doing a July 4th concert and thought it would be funny or something, to have a couple of Canadian bands play at it. Concrete Blonde was the headliner and The Hip and TPOH played in the afternoon. Someone had the idea to hire a tour bus for the gig and both bands would ride down together. Much Music came by just as we were leaving Toronto and asked if Gord and I would say a couple of words. Gord was not into this at all and gave a very cranky interview. I felt like I had to fit in with this vibe though I likely came off pretty inauthentic. We had a very fun trip to DC with lots of drinks and road stories. I think the Hip played before us and just slayed the crowd. We played next,  but it was obvious that they blew us off the stage. At the risk of sounding immodest, getting blown off the stage rarely happened to us. But it definitely happened that day.

Time went on and the Hip rose to legendary status. The biggest band in Canada by miles. We had moved to a new record label, Mercury Records after the president of Chrysalis, our old label had taken the helm there. The Hip were playing Ontario Place, which was a concert in the round with a revolving stage. It’s now the Molson Amphitheater. They asked us to open. This was just before we were about to head into the studio to do our third album, The Downward Road. Our record company decided to come and see us play so we opened with Hard To Laugh, played eight or so of the new songs and closed with Adult. That set list was one of the biggest regrets of my professional life. Who tries out their new material in front of 10,000 people in an OPENING SET? Gord came out to introduce us and it was a typical, poetic, angular Gord reading which apparently Kevin Drew from Broken Social Scene memorized and can still recite. The Hip should have told us to piss off after that stupidity but they continued to be nice to us then and in the years that followed.

Somewhere in all of this, we did a couple of benefit shows with them, one at the Phoenix and another at Fort Henry. At that show, I asked them if they would play Highway Girl, a song off their EP that I loved. The EP version is good but I had heard them play it live once and it rocked so hard it may have been my favorite thing they had done.  They said they’d play it for me at sound check but didn’t want to play it at the show as they were sick of it or something. It has one of those killer, hypnotic riffs that the band can mesmerize their audience with. I found out later there was a legendary performance of it where Gord tells a long story of a double suicide. Anyway, as I imagine it now, it was like I got a private performance of the song. That’s some good guys right there.

In later years, the Hip had us on a couple of their Another Roadside Attraction festival concerts and were always extremely gracious to us. At one of these shows, we received an ARA laundry bag that I used from that moment until if finally gave out about a year ago. We also opened a show for them in a field somewhere in Minnesota where Gord was just completely and utterly hallucinogenic, putting on the most bizarre and compelling show I think I ever saw him give. People talk a lot about how the Hip never ‘broke’ in the States but there was a large crowd that night loving every minute. My understanding is that they were pretty successful on a club level, probably more successful than a lot of Canadian bands who brag about how big they are in the States.

Back home, the band continued to be in a league of their own, (a cliche but in terms of popularity, during the peak of their career, they had no peers) and I slowly disengaged myself from show business, writing fiction and producing records. My writing led to me getting gigs doing book reviews and one day I was asked to review Gord’s book of poetry. Relieved that it didn’t suck I gave it a good review and it ended up on the front cover of the Globe and Mail Book Review section. So I have Gord to thank for that as it was clearly the subject matter and not my writing prowess that led to this honor.

So these are my Gord Downie/Tragically Hip stories. There are a few more, a favor or two that I asked for, which Gord fulfilled with grace. Some that I’ll likely remember after this is published.

No one could ever accuse the Hip of pandering or selling out. They played the music they wanted to and everyone loved it. Their success was a pure as it comes. Even the show tonight wasn’t a greatest hits show, they represented all of their albums. So if you’re looking for heroes, they are a good place to look. For people outside of Canada it would be hard to describe how connected they are to the fabric or psyche or some important word, of Canada. No other band could be broadcast on national TV and have the entire nation watch. No one. There is no bigger Canadian band and there is no band that more represents the Canadian music fan than the Hip. Neil Young and Joni Mitchell moved to California. Bryan Adams has never shown much of a connection to his homeland. The closest thing would be Rush but Rush are not popular with everyone like The Hip are.

The way they brought the country together tonight is like the Super Bowl or the Canada Russia Summit Series. It’s staggering. Each guy in the band can carry this night with them for the rest of their life. Tonight, they were the most important thing in Canada.

As a live band, they have no equal. They lull their audience into a state of hypnosis with their groove and then Gord takes the crowd on whatever journey he imagines that particular evening. I’m sure many fans have the equivalent of a religious experience at a Hip show. It’s a dying art, the live show. Live music is all show biz, vocals on tape, dancers, lights. That a band could take its recorded material to the next level in front of an audience and give them a unique experience of it-that doesn’t really happen much anymore.

Musically, the band seemed to grow with each new release. In my view, they made a gigantic leap on Trouble In The Henhouse, which is pretty cool considering it came halfway through their career. Which is to say, as popular as they were, they still pushed themselves to be better. The opening track, Gift Shop is in many ways classic Hip, a jammed out riff over which, Gord waxes poetic. But it was like they had finally perfected their ‘thing’. The opening is beautiful and spacey. Melodically, the song was more sophisticated than usual. Then, when the band kicks in, it rips into you as though you were watching them play it live. And Ahead By A Century may be their finest moment. Certainly my favorite Gord lyric and just an exquisite musical track.

Rumors are swirling that perhaps this wasn’t the last show. I’m not going to speculate on whether this may not be the end for the band. That’s not important now. Quite honestly, I’d be thrilled if Gord felt well enough at some point to play another show or two only because that would mean he felt healthy enough to do the thing he loves. I’d be thrilled if Gord was able to comfortably live longer than medical science might predict. I hope somehow he defies the odds. I hope he gets to spend more time with his children and his friends.

But if this is the end, how amazing was tonight? What those five guys accomplished tonight is historical. Like, where were you when, historical. Yes, tonight will haunt me.