Some thoughts on this video:

1. Not to sound too much like the American Idol judges, but…song choice: it’s an issue for this vocalist.
2. The dogs are VERY blasé about this.  It’s not the first time these three have made such a video.
3. The sunglasses. ‘Nuff said.
4. The not-quite-but-almost dancing, or at least “rhythmic squirming” that begins in earnest, complete with pantomimed gestures (and if I’m not mistaken, a near jazz hands moment) , at the top of the second verse (about 1:23 in).
5. I’m sure this fellow is a lovely man.  There is a puckish smile on his face that suggests he’s in on the joke of him, so I’m not suggesting that this gentleman is behaving unnaturally with animals.  His decision to shoot a video in which he sings a love song, while lovingly cuddling his two dogs in bed, however?  You can’t deny there’s an aura of creepiness being exuded by that.

As you were.  I felt compelled to share.

Oh, and Go Leafs Go tonight.  Here’s hoping our boys do their share to keep the playoffs Habby free.

Spouse and I were in a bit of a creative mood and we felt that the tune – though entertaining – could use a bit of re-arranging.  After a few minutes’ discussion, we came to the inescapable conclusion that this song should be performed by a marching band at a football half time.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Michigan Marching Band:

My quizzical look was a silent entreaty for more information.  She told me they were “West Coast clappy” guys.

I am unfamiliar with this particular genre of music (part of my brain is wondering whether the said performance involved Captain Highliner, Tupac Shakur and chlamydia).  Can anyone enlighten me?

But I digress.

My point is that we had this job to do and people were depending on us.  Those of you in the working world will understand these concepts and identify them as something known as “responsibility”.  It is something that is entirely foreign to musicians, serious artists and other more highly evolved and important life forms.  Being a musician is not about producing things on time (except for musicians who actually get paid to do what they do because they’re good at it);  when you are a Serious Artist (please read: “unemployed”) working on a Weighty Piece of Art, you cannot be rushed, especially when you haven’t got a fucking clue what you’re doing or why (which is most of the time). The full explanation for this principle is complicated and top-secret (you have to be in the Union to get the complete spiel on this one) but I can tell you that what it boils down to is that as soon as any musician agrees to produce a certain quantity of music, he will immediately cease to produce any music whatsoever and instead spend a lot of time down at the pub.  This is mostly because it’s noisy and they have beer there, both of which are excellent accessories for the gentleman musician who is assiduously avoiding the nagging feeling that he’s falling well behind schedule, productivity-wise, and is thereby “letting the home side down”, also known as “spectacularly failing to achieve even a laughably modest amount of success in an oh-too-public fashion”.

I will spare you the hyperbole about my angst-ridden and lonely excursions through agonizing evening “writing sessions”, alone in my apartment and filled with self-doubt, plunking away on an uncooperative guitar that – for the most part – refused to offer up the masterpiece of musical beauty that would transform a lousy movie into a piece of art.  (Okay, so I lied, I won’t spare you all of the hyperbole about that.  Sue me.)

Eventually, through a confidential commercial transaction that I am not fully at liberty to discuss, certain nefarious underworld forces delivered to me, as consideration for some (somewhat damaged) spiritual merchandise I offered for sale, a tune or two that could be worked into something approaching an interesting musical idea.  My bandmates and I headed into our expansive private studio of the day – of which more will be said in a moment – to work on the idea as a band, to settle on an arrangement, to rehearse the completed composition and ultimately, to record a demo of the song to play for the film’s production braintrust.

At the time that these events came to pass, in late 1998, our “expansive private studio” consisted of the second floor of a very small and extremely run-down house in eastern Toronto.  The house was owned by another friend of ours, a fellow who physically resembled Wavy Gravy of Woodstock fame, and we only ever referred to him as Wavy Gravy.  I have forgotten the man’s real name.   We’d done some work for Wavy Gravy but he had been unable to pay us for that work in any recognized medium of exchange, such as money.  You get used to that sort of thing as a musician, particularly when you are not an especially skilled musician.  There was a tenant on the first floor of the Wavy Gravy house, which was in an exceptionally dodgy neighbourhood.  I cannot imagine the horrors he endured during the few hours that we were not actively and aggressively attempting to destory his typmanic membranes from above.  The entire Wavy Gravy house was overrun with what I am going to continue to tell myself were particularly large mice with unusually long tails and larger than average teeth.  Its many charms included an apparently improperly grounded electrical system that delivered an astonishingly powerful shock to singers and other stupid people who happened to let their lips come into contact with a live microphone, a broken-down refrigerator literally filled with rotten stinking meat of indeterminate origin, and a “ventilation” system that furnished air thoroughly infused with the overpowering stench of urine throughout every square inch of the approximately sixty-four square feet of available floorspace.

The place also had some less positive features.  Chief among these was the community of inveterate thieves that apparently continually surveilled the premises simply waiting for the first available and highly inconvenient opportunity to enter the place and perpetrate assholery.  This they did, no doubt, by simply looking askance at the laughably dubious locking mechanism on the main door, and then making off with the only possessions that truly mattered to us at that time – our instruments.  These rotten soulless bastards also made off with the only possessions that truly mattered to the nice folks at Long & McQuade Musical Instruments, from whom we had rented a not inconsiderable amount of equipment (luxuries like microphones, speakers and tape recorders) in an effort to make a recording that accomplished the very important principal objective of existing.   No problem there, you might assume, it ought to be a simple matter of making a telephone call to the insurance claims agent.   The problem with insurance and musicians, however, is that insurance salesmen – unlike musicians – have not yet learned the skill of receiving payment for things (such as insurance coverage) without resorting to the use of actual money.   As money is only infrequently found in the vicinity of musicians, there is an inherent structural problem that is rather obvious.

Thus did it come to pass that – thanks to the Great Musical Instrument Theft of  Christmas Eve 1998 – our little tribe of Tiny Tims was saddled with an enormous debt to repay, no instruments to play, and no recognizable means of actually accomplishing the writing assignment that we had agreed to complete.  Other than that, things were just peachy.

You might conclude, based on a cursory review of the tale recounted above, that my experience with helping create cinema was a negative one.  You’d be wrong;  before all our gear was stolen, there were some awesome afternoons spent in the Wavy Gravy house of horrors trying to capture our idea on tape.  The principal piece of music I’d come up with for the movie was something called “Sebastien’s Theme”, named after one of the eleventy-six principal characters in the film whose name I could remember.  I quite liked the general melody I’d come up with, but our lead guitarist and principal engineering nerd Rui really outdid himself on this one, adding an absolutely stunningly beautiful lead line that flowed over the entire piece and turned it into the most beautiful and haunting thing we had ever written.  At one point in the recording process, we discovered (quite by accident) that by turning up Rui’s amplifier to a truly Spinal Tap-esque volume level, certain passages of the line Rui had written were actually causing the entire Wavy Gravy house to literally resonate in sympathy with the tone generated, which sympathetic vibrations in turn permitted the strings to themselves vibrate in sympathy, creating an unusual and continuous tone with lots of sustain.  In person, while the passages were being recorded, it was rather like standing next to an aircraft engine that was being manipulated to play passages of Bach;  I am not exaggerating a single bit when I tell you that, at one point that afternoon I was over half a block away from the Wavy Gravy House and walking down the street to get a re-supply of cigarettes but I could CLEARLY hear the passage being played over the sounds of streetcars rumbling by on Queen Street East.  Oh yes, it was loud.  On the tape, though, the sound that we captured from Rui’s guitar/aircraft engine – severely attenuated and processed with a few electronics – sounded a lot like some kind of strange woodwind instrument that had the ability to morph from a peaceful round timbre into a strident and passionate wail.  The effect we achieved in recording that song was an accident born of equal parts experimentation and blind luck; of all the things we did, it’s one of my favourites.

Half a dozen years later, I was permanently retired from the life of an active and creative musician, but I didn’t know it yet.  I was fooling around with some video editing software (taking another gig, it turns out, was the right idea from a “making enough money to feed myself and purchase high tech toys” perspective).  I had been screwing around with some nature clips that I’d taken while on a fishing trip and I got the idea to try and slap together a kind of a music video for the tune.  I never thought anyone else would see it – this was back in ye olden days of 2003 before the YouTubination of the planet – so it’s got some rough spots (I think it’s fairly obvious that, in a couple of sections, I simply didn’t have any other footage that fit the “subject” requirements.  Watching it again for the first time in a couple of years the other day, I would do quite a few things differently if I was putting the piece together again.  Still, I enjoyed it enough to talk myself into broadcasting it to the world via YouTube.

Here then, is Sebastien’s Theme.  I don’t know if the other guys in the band have even ever seen this;  but that’s a story for another day.

It’s important to understand that Bower made the record for charity and never banked a dime of the considerable proceeds generated by its sale.

I have posted a little screed about Bower’s selfless and unselfconscious act of charity over at Pension Plan Puppets.  It’s amazing to me that Bower would have agreed to do this;  it speaks volumes about the man’s good heart and compassion.  I couldn’t help thinking about the contrast between Bower’s decision to use his fame to help others and Sean Avery’s efforts of self-aggrandizement.

Anyway, you can check out the full-on rant by folowing the link above.  Incidentally, take a peek around the site and consider joining up.  Pension Plan Puppets is the epicentre of the Barilkosphere, the community of Leaf bloggers that have plenty of funny and insightful things to say about the Blue and White.   If you join the site as a result of this referral, let me know (by leaving a comment on this post or sending me an email), because – if you then make a paltry 20 comments on the site in the month of December – I, as your guide and PPP mentor, will be eligible to win some awesome swag.

You may recall that I am the Reigning Monarch of Project Commencement;  finding myself with a new piece of equipment and an insufficient number of distractions (this blog, computers, digital photography, doing stunts on yard machinery*), I have resolved to learn how to become more technically proficient at engineering, mixing and producing audio recordings.

The first tentative (and admittedly very decidedly non-technical) step towards that goal was taken last evening;  I waded in to the storage area of our house (a small storage locker sized room behind the garage that permits us to store our accumulated curiosities and whatsits in a non-subterranean manner, unlike those of you with basements) and began searching for my DigiTech Studio Quad 4, a multi-effects processor that offers some cool fully programmable tools and effects like compression, reverb, a rotary speaker simulator and others.  Three hours – and a very large pile of discarded packing material – later, I managed to excavate the storage unit to the point where this particular relic could be recovered (as thrilling as this process sounds, I do not believe I will be anxious to add “storage unit archaeology” to the list of things at which I am a dilettante).

What a surprise I got when I opened up the little box into which I had secreted this most useful little gizmo.  Sitting there on top of it was a piece of equipment that I had forgotten I purchased – a Behringer MDX 1400 Compressor (pictured below with the DigiTech Studio Quad 4).   I had to sit and think for a second about how and when I acquired this thing.  After a few minutes’ careful reflection, I recalled that the very weekend of my first real “date” with Spouse, I had been hanging out at Long & McQuade in Burlington;  I had, the very Saturday of our first date, purchased a companion to the Apex 460 Large Diaphragm Condensor Microphone I already owned.  All the better to record a stereo mix in  a spaced pair configuration.  While heading to the counter to plop the cash down for the second Apex 460, I passed a stack of the MDX 1400′s:  Messrs. Long & McQuade were having a sale.  The MDX 1400 was (and still is, unless its undergone a radical transformation while in storage) a stereo compressor – i.e. it is capable of processing two separate signals at once, typically one from a left channel microphone and one from the right.  As I was imminently about to become the owner of a matched pair of recording microphones, and the device needed to further enhance and beautify the signals they would be sending down the signal chain was sitting right there in front of me at a reduced price, I recall the spatial, economic and technical symmetry of it all being a little too much to resist.     I may have blacked out for a moment;  perhaps it was non-insane automatism, I don’t know.  All I can tell you is that, despite the fact that 460 #2 had very clearly taken my little studio well over its prepared budget for equipment capital expenditures in that fiscal quarter, I ended up standing at the cash checkout with a box containing the device tucked comfortingly beneath one arm, while the other arm extended a hand bearing a credit card groaning under excess strain.

A few minutes later, I was standing outside in the Saturday afternoon sun waiting for a taxi.  I was warm and somewhat euphoric from the spasm of gear acquisition.  The telephone rang and it was Spouse, inviting me to a barbecue at her place, an event which marked the beginning of our courtship.   The 460′s and the MDX 1400 did get unpackaged, set up and taken for a trial run or two – once or twice over the next couple of weeks.  They mostly stood idle, though, while Spouse and I negotiated the beginning of our path together.  When I moved in with her, they were packed into boxes and stored in the basement, as our little house in the City was far too compact to accomodate any home recording projects, as these have a habit of generating a considerable mass of wires, cables and cords, the various ends of which are distributed with entropic inevitability towards walls (and their power receptacles), cabinets and desks (on which effects, recorders and control gizmos stand flashing with input and output ports waiting for precious signal path) and a metallic forest of instruments, microphones and their stands.

Some months and years have passed now, and Spouse and I are happily settled together.  I always knew that I would come back to recording music;  that’s one of the reasons we were determined to end up in a rural area (all the more difficult to annoy neighbours in the course of the creative process).  It is time to set up this gear (in Mission Control at least initially) and see – or perhaps more properly, hear – what can be done with it.

I am going to attempt to incorporate two of my interests in this way:  as I explore the technical issues and experiment with the gear, I am going to attempt to document my results here.  I find that I learn things better when I am forced to sit down and concretize my thoughts about such things;  by summarizing and describing my efforts, I hope to reinforce the technical knowledge I gain.

—-

* attentive readers will note that I did NOT mention either my “lawn mower video” or the account of July’s fishing shenanigans, both of which are still in the mysterious project queue of my mind and both of which would quite obviously qualify as Part of the Kingdom of Inchoate Projects;  each of these undertakings bears some thematic relation to the more generalized list of  “Time Sucking Things I Piffle About At”, so I thought I’d try to keep the list – and the sentence – somewhat shorter.  You know, quibbling about such things might itself qualify as a time-wasting obsession – maybe you attentive readers share a bloodline with the Monarch.

The important point is that I have received a clear and unambiguous signal from my psyche and/or whatever Supernatural Overlord of the Universe you happen to believe in that it is important for me to blog. Specifically, I dreamed that Daryl Hall competed on, and won American Idol. I won’t bore you with all the weird and wacky dream logic details; suffice to say that, in my dream, there was this somewhat (ahem) more “mature-looking” dude with long blond hair and a gawdawful black trenchcoat* entered in American Idol. It was Daryl Hall. I knew it was Daryl Hall. It was obvious it was Daryl Hall. But nobody else seemed to notice that it was Daryl freakin’ Hall.

Now I need to be clear about something at this juncture. The old saw goes something like this: “there’s no accounting for taste.” I respect your right to have your own opinion about the degree to which certain forms of art successfully aspire towards the Platonic ideals of beauty. I accept that there is an element of individuality necessarily inherent in any artistic transaction; the viewer or listener brings his or her own baggage, understanding and preconceptions into the mix, necessarily imbuing the piece under consideration with a unique and highly specific meaning, leading to a potentially wide diversity of opinion concerning what is – and is not – “beautiful.” Thus, while you may, for example, quite firmly believe that Nickelback’s latest composition represents nothing less than the sound of angels exulting on earth, while I may quite reasonably believe that it is more representative, aurally, of a pack of mangy feral cats warring over garbage. Importantly, it is possible – according to the above-described paradigm – for us both to be “right.”

As a theorem, this highly inclusive, tolerant and respectful model is rather like the Newtownian system of physics: it satisfactorily describes and predicts the behaviour of the universe, but only within certain limitations. It breaks down entirely though, so far as I am concerned, with the likes of Daryl freakin’ Hall. Daryl Hall is where everything goes quantum. Limitations of space prevent me from elaborating herein upon the theory of art that is analogous to Einstein’s conception of the universe. Suffice to say that there is another such more comprehensive and complicated model, and suffice to say that this theory is able to much more objectively describe the reality of a given piece of art. Please understand, therefore, that the following statement is not just my opinion, it is an inescapable scientific conclusion: “Daryl Hall is to Philly Soul what Kenny G is to jazz.” You would be correct to conclude that I do not like the music of Daryl Hall; this is so not because my tastes differ – reasonably – from yours, but rather because it is an incontrovertible fact that Mr. Hall’s “music” is horrible shite. If you disagree with me on this point, there is simply no other way to put it: you are wrong.

Keeping these background contextual facts in mind, I am sure you can understand my dream-self’s consternation about the (apparently undetected) presence of Daryl Hall on American Idol. America wasn’t sending him home! Each week, he warbled some pap-crap blue-eyed soul abomination and – far from being pelted with the appropriate amount of vegetable material and broken glass – the American public was eating it up. Hall’s fans could be seen celebrating every such performance with Beatlesque sign-wavery and adulation. Week after week, they encouraged him to continue murdering the very notion of music by voting for him in droves. It was obvious to me that the public was deceived; they obviously didn’t recognize the blond contestant “Daryl” for what he was: a malevolent musical assassin with a proven record of musical crimes, bent on destroying joy and making Santa Claus cry with his execrable caterwauling. In my dream, I tried to warn the public: like any good Canadian, I wrote letters to the editor. I rented a billboard by the highway with a two-storey warning message. I made videos to be posted on YouTube, I went on network television and I even took out an ad in the newspaper trying to spread the word about the villainous Hall and his malevolent musical designs.

But I didn’t blog about it.

In my dream, Daryl Hall won American Idol, and – as a result – he started doing something so frightening and fantastical, I was both certain and highly relieved that I was in the middle of a dream. He started recording and selling his “music”. Thank God that’s not likely to happen for real anytime soon.

I awoke with a start, breathing heavily and sweating profusely from my nightmare. It was obvious to me that something, somewhere was trying to warn me to pay more attention to this blog, lest horribly unthinkable consequences be visited upon the entire earth. So here I am, tippy-tapping away again, telling you about it.

For the love of Pete, if Daryl Hall goes on American Idol – don’t vote for him.

———————

*I have this recollection of a Daryl Hall music video in which the criminal Hall appears in a long, black trench coat, gyrating awkwardly and emoting away with clenched fists as he lip-synched to his latest piece of inveterate garbage. This particular composition, I believe, was one in which the equally egregious Oates was not complicit. I have spent more time this evening than I care to admit (to either you OR myself) pawing through the video evidence of Mr. Hall’s detritus on YouTube, but I haven’t been able to confirm my very vivid horrific recollection. It is a process that is complicated by the fact that I can’t remember the name of the song in question. Is anybody able to help me solve the mystery?

Volume 2 of Static Journey is almost entirely about Melville, the Rheostatics’ second album. Released in 1991, this was the record that truly established the band’s credibility among fans, critics and (perhaps most importantly, in terms of their ultimate influence on Canadian music) musicians. One doesn’t so much listen to that album as come to terms with it. My own experience with the record is probably more or less typical; when I first listened to the disc, I didn’t quite get it – the songs didn’t resonate, and it all just sounded kind of weird and foreign to my ears. I had occasion to listen to the thing repeatedly more or less unintentionally – there was a cassette dub of the record in my car that I listened to frequently while going back and forth between Toronto and Windsor on weekend visits to my then girlfriend. I only listened to the Rheostatics side to get back to the beginning of the recording on the other side. As time went by, I found myself strangely drawn to these songs, and gradually I became addicted to Melville; needless to say, I can no longer even remember what was on the other side of that tape. My point is that the music is somewhat inaccessible, or at least not immediately so, if one is coming from a more-or-less mainstream sensibility – but one thing Melville did was to announce, from the opening chords of Record Body Count that this album would be something different. It took some effort, attention and involvement to understand the record, but once I really sat and listened to it, I didn’t want to hear anything else.

There is a youthful spirit in evidence throughout Melville; many of the characters in the songs are either explicitly or implicitly high-school age kids, and the songs are otherwise largely concerned with aliens, spaceships and memories of childhood bicycle rides. Also in evidence are some more weighty (and by default, I guess) “mature” concerns like politics (Horses) and the struggle for life and death (Saskatchewan). The end result on the album, as I see it, was a certain sense of uneven-ness. Although I have ended up loving this album very dearly and would place it in my top ten albums of all-time, this is so because of the high level of musical accomplishment, the freshness of musical approach and explicitly Canadian content. It cannot be denied that there is, however, a certain lack of unity to the record. It feels in some ways like a collection of songs rather than a cohesive unit. Darin’s retrosective set of tracks, predominantly live performances from the latter years of the band’s career, places the enormity of the young Rheostatics’ musical achievement in context; for that young a band to have developed the chops that they did, as both players and writers, is a remarkable achievement. The series of live performances in Darin’s collection are an enhancement to that legacy, showing the progression of the Rheos as musicians beyond 1991, but all while firmly rooted in the excellence of the material they wrote and recorded a decade and a half ago on a sophomore foray into the studio.

The first track in the set is listed (on Darin’s site) as a Morningside interview with “Jeff Edwards”. I don’t know who Jeff Edwards is, but dammit, that’s the voice of Canada’s most beloved public radio host of all time, Peter Gzowski. Gzowski is interviewing Dave Bidini, Dave Clark and Martin Tielli, and they are discussing the early history of the band. Tim Vesely either wasn’t there at all, or he maintained his usual mysterious and near-complete silence, at least during this portion of the interview. You can find the complete interview here. Clarkie always made me laugh the most, and I love the bit in this interview when he says very matter-of-factly, of the band’s first breakup, “Jah sent us asunder.”

Next is a track called Woodstuck - this one is new to me. A “Dave” song, I would guess, as it’s fairly typical of many of his contributions, referring to popular culture explicitly (I think if I was cooler, I would probably refer to this type of writing as “meta” rock) and being a more-or-less straight ahead composition.

The third cut in the set is Melvillius. I have to admit that I am at a loss on this one – anyone know the full story behind it? I’m not sure what this cut represents.

The fourth track is where the songs from Melville begin. First up is the album version of Record Body Count – a must in a collection of this nature. If Ballad of Wendel Clark got the Rheostatics known, it was nonetheless a bit of a novelty tune, similar to Be My Yoko Ono for the Barenaked Ladies. The song that stuck with people, the song that made people ask “Who are those guys?”, the Rheostatics’ equivalent to If I Had a Million Dollars was Record Body Count. That song was the perfect encapsulation of Hosers in High School, a compelling “story” song that is at the same time humourous, touching, and tragic. It is a unique animal, announcing its entrance jarringly (from a sonic perspective) and exiting abruptly too, with its distinctive narrative twist at the end.

Next up is some recorded stage banter from the final concert. Martin talks about being upset that Dave writes books about how he (Martin) smells. In one of the more humourous moments from that concert, Martin points out the musical similarity between the melody at the beginning of Aliens to the Great White North theme popularized by SCTV’s Bob and Doug McKenzie. This snippet is priceless, in my view, because it gives you, in one quick blast, an example of the band’s always amusing attempts to bust each other’s balls, but it also displays the very real vocal limitations that Martin was struggling with during that last show.

The live version of Aliens included shows the band’s uncanny ability to somehow duplicate on stage the liquid glitter they recorded in studio. If I had one criticism of this version, it would be that it seems to plod just a little bit, especially near the end. This version hints a little bit (as does the preceding excerpt of stage banter) at another crucial feature of the band’s act: their sense of humour and experimentation. Dave carries over the joke during the intro about “B minor” and incorporates it into the song. You could expect that sort of thing pretty much every time you went to see the Rheos to some extent. sometimes, it could be taken to extremes – apparently, on one visit to a club in Winnipeg, the Rheos decided to make up songs – on the spot, mind you – to match the titles inscribed on a set list left behind by a previous band. I once heard Martin make reference to one of his favourites from that evening; I seem to recall they even played a brief snippet of it – it was called “Jesus in a Speedo”, the very song mentioned in this interview recounting the Winnipeg shenanigans.

Next in line is Northern Wish, which also gets the live treatment. I have always welled up with a weird sense of national pride about the band when they come to the portion of the song in which Martin sings:

We don’t need mathematics, and we don’t need submarines

to tell how far the land does go – until it hits the shore!

This is another live recording that shows the near-effortless recreation of complicated arrangements and the interposition of some interesting improvisational elements as well. I always loved it the way they did this song in the latter years of the band, a little quieter and more restrained than the arrangement on the album, which has a type of chest-pounding patriotic anthem quality to it. In my view, the subtlety of the latter approach was preferable.

The live version of Saskatchewan included has Kate Fenner taking the lead vocal. I have to confess I’d never heard of her before listening to this track. Wow, what a voice! In this way, the Rheos continue to introduce me to other excellent Canadian recording artists – they almost always added local acts to their own bill that were quirky, a little less well-known and a bit more eccentric than the supporting acts chosen by other indie rockers. In later years, the band would add a night during their stint in residence at the famous Horseshoe Tavern called “guest night” in which a cavalcade of Can-rock stars would take the stage to do versions of Rheostatics tunes with the boys backing them up. As for this version of this song, I can’t say that I ever heard them perform it poorly. Who knew that perhaps the most beautiful song ever written about a shipwreck would bear the title of a land-locked province?

The live version of Horses from the Hillside Festival in 2003 has excellent keyboard additions by Kevin Hearn, a formerly Barenaked (now clothed?) Lady and mega-talented muli-instrumentalist Lewis Melville, the guy after whom this album was named. An absolute staple at Rheostatics live shows, the song is a potent mix of Alberta labour politics (I’ve always just assumed it refers to the violent Gainers meat-packing strike in 1986), a chorus that includes an apparent reference to Maple Leafs play-by-play man Joe Bowen (“Holy Mackinaw Joe”) and one of the most cinematic lyrics you’ll ever hear in a protest song:

Word came down and it crashed through my door
From the twenty-first floor.
I was thinking about leaving early for lunch
When he told me to shut off my press.
His face turned green and his white shirt was wet
Like he’d just seen an accident.
We threw our masks into a pile.
The trucks pulled away for good.

I have always seen this song as somewhat emblematic of Hoser-rock, because it contains a character named “Gordie”, and there couldn’t possibly be a more Canadian name in my opinion: cf. Messrs Howe, Lightfoot, Downie and Pinsent. In this recording, Dave’s vocals, as a result of his enthusiasm, shade into the shouted/distorted range at times near the end of the recording, but Tim’s insistent bass and Michael Phillip Wojewoda’s pounding drums propel this version past that little technical detail toward greatness. The song concludes with Martin’s trademark Steinberger somehow being coaxed, via the whammy bar, to whinny like a horse under duress – the aural allusion is unmistakable, even first time Rheos listeners will hear it and smile.

The live version of Christopher provides yet another demonstration of a live band at the top of their craft working together to improvise upon the form of the existing song in near-perfect synchronization. It’s familiar, but very much like discovering the song all over again; this too was a big part of the Rheostatics experience and why being a Green Sprout was very much about seeing the band live whenever possible. I once attended seven Rheostatics shows in twelve days – when they were doing one of their extended stints at the legendary Horseshoe Tavern – and never felt like I’d seen the same show or even the same version of a song like Horses, which got played more often than not.

Chansons Les Ruelles would have to be a bit of a rarity. From the Rheostatics live shows I attended, Tim’s experiment of writing a song in French only infrequently made it on to the set list. I have always liked the way this song is delivered, in perfect ninth-grade French class accent. I keep waiting for Marie-Claire, Pictou and Henri to make an appearance in la derniere verse. The quality of the recording on this track is much lower than that of the other tracks, likely because Darin had very few recorded live alternatives from which to choose.

Lyings Wrong is a version taken from CBC’s Brave New Waves in 1987, and a pretty good one except for a somewhat grating snare sound – I’m sure it’s NOT synthetic, but it sounds like it is. I’ve always loved the last little bit of this song, both for the lines themselves and for the very Canadian way Martin says the words “throw” and “out”:

If your right hand makes you fumble cut it off and throw it from you, for it’s better to have lost one. If your right eye makes you blink, pluck it out, throw it in the kitchen sink for it’s better to have lost one.

In this version, Martin changes the last half of the stanza, probably because he couldn’t remember the lines while singing them.

The version of It from Melville is included. Perhaps indicative of the overall quality of some of the live versions included in the set, when I was listening to the collection I believed this version to be from the album but had to check Darin’s blog for confirmation.

The next clip is some stage banter taken from the final concert immediately preceding the band’s performance of When Winter Comes. I found it interesting that reference is made in this segment – again – to the “first time we broke up” (after the early Rheostatics’ disastrous attempts to tour Ireland in the late 80s). It is interesting to consider that the first track in this volume of the compilation, the 1989 Morningside interview, makes reference to that break-up; lo and behold, there is the band almost twenty years later still joking about the “first break up” – though it may be a somewhat stinging indictment on the subject of comedic originality, what better testament could there be to the band’s longevity? The live version of When Winter Comes included is from February 2001 at the Horseshoe Tavern, as are a number of the final clips in this volume. The ‘Shoe was always my favourite place to see the boys, and I am glad to see that a large number of clips from the ‘Shoe have made it into the set. I found it hard, in the context of the retrospective set, not to think about all the water under the bridge in my years of following the band while listening to this track – we’re almost 20 years down the road now from when Dave wrote “I hope I’m never bitter, I hope I never change”. So far, so good! Listen for a playful snippet of Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik at around the 1:35 mark.

The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, again live from the Horseshoe (this time in 2005) is another golden moment. I preferred it when the band gave this type of general feel to the song over the version that they sometimes played (the one they put on Double Live). Strangely, although this is the song that got me into the band (I only had a tape of Melville in the first place because I was interested in this cover of Gordon Lightfoot’s classic ballad) I now find it one of the less compelling songs from Melville. In any event, this live version gives you a sense of how spellbound the audience in the back room at the ‘Shoe could become when the boys were spinning out an intense sonic landscape.

Lastly, there is even a live version of You are Very Star once again from the Horseshoe (March 25th 2000). Hearing this simple little ditty, traditionally a show closer saved for long after last call was over and the patience of the local publican had been exhausted somehow reminds me just as much of the all-ages – please read “little kids’ matinee” that I saw one Sunday afternoon during Green Sprouts Music Week at the Shoe.

• I was a little disappointed initially that the first track in the set – position of primacy, very important – was not in fact a Rheostatics track, but rather the Introduction for the band that was sung by Dave Bookman (accompanied by Steve Stanley) prior to the band taking the stage on the evening of the last concert. It all made sense though, right near the end of the track when you can hear the first thunderous applause as the band takes the stage; it sent chills up my spine again, just the way it did on that night, thinking of all the Sprouts assembled in the grand old concert hall. I remember it occurring to me that this last show was likely the first time ever that all the Sprouts were together like that at one time, just to see the Rheos (most club shows were good for maybe 200 attendees at most, and even the Bathurst Street Theatre shows in ’97 couldn’t have been more than 5 or 6 hundred at most, and at Maple Leaf Gardens or Molson Park Canada Day shows – well, those of us who were there had tickets to see other bands too, so that doesn’t count).
• The chills continued as track #2 kicked in, the familiar strummed opening chords of Saskatchewan (also from the final show). The beginning of this song was usually a thrilling enough moment for me at any Rheos show, but it was all the more poignant at the last show – Martin Tielli was suffering from a wicked case of laryngitis that night, and his struggle to croak out the melody so familiar to all the Sprouts is heart-wrenching and a truly memorable moment for me from that show; from the second I heard Martin’s game efforts to deliver the goods, I was emotionally up there on stage with him, willing him on to as much success as he could find in that cigarette-smoke besotted voicebox of his. I am so glad that there is a decent recording of this part of the show – it’s right up there for me in my all-time list of great Toronto moments, along with Game 7 of the ’93 NHL Western Conference finals (awesome except for the final goal from Gretzky off Davey Ellett’s skate from behind the net [around 0:53 of the linky clip], the most historic hockey game I ever saw in person) and Joe Carter’s walk-off home run in the ’93 World Series.
• I had never heard many of the very early Rheostatic tracks that follow. I knew that, in the beginning, the Rheos had played with a horn section known as the Trans-Canada Soul Patrol, but had never heard any recordings of the material, except perhaps for the excerpt of Satellite Dancing grafted on to Me and Stupid on 1994′s Introducing Happiness. Some of the stuff obviously sounds a bit dated, with some humourously low-budget keyboard bits added in. These tracks are of interest only to completists and to those interested in tracing the musical history of the band. For my part, I thought it was interesting to hear how downright funky some of the stuff sounded, particularly the cover of Curtis Mayfield’s People Get Ready.
• Inclusion of the segments from Brent Bambury’s CBC Series Brave New Waves is genius. Pure genius. Darin Cappe, you are the Ken Burns of the Rheostatics! Or something much better than that! I remember the buzz beginning about The Ballad of Wendel Clark – that’s how I came to know about the band, but I had no idea that the Leafs themselves had listened to the track in their dressing room during their ’87 playoff series against the Red Wings.
• The three tracks from Greatest Hits (the Rheos’ first full album) were well-chosen. Ballad of Wendel Clark and Crescent Moon, in particular, though drenched in too much reverb, provide glimpses of some of the trademark overtone blasts of the incendiary-but-somehow-wet-as-liquid-goo-can-get Tielli guitar work. Public Square provides another harbinger of a major feature of the future of the band’s catalogue, a more or less straight ahead country romp with no apologies, some interesting harmonies and flat-out fun.
• Good on the Uptake makes explicit the notion that the band was already hitting their creative stride in 1987 and exhibiting many of the features of the music that would make Melville and Whale Music classics – without all the reverb from Greatest Hits’ production obscuring the sound the band is making, Tielli’s guitar soars and the band chugs compactly along in a manner that is not at all dissimilar to the end portion of say, Horses from Melville (1991). Much the same can be said of Crystal Soup, parts of which (especially some of the guitar riffs) would be nicely at home alongside 1992′s Dope Fiends and Boozehounds. There has been some (mild) debate, on Fish Mailin’ (the Rheostatics-dedicated Yahoo! news group) about whether any album tracks ought to have been included in the set, but for me this question has already been resolved in this way by the juxtaposition of the the Greatest Hits tracks with the other circa-1987 recordings; for the first time, while listening to these tracks, I’ve heard precursors of the band’s eventual classic style. Kudos to Darin.
• The first volume ends fittingly with an early recording of People’s Republic of Dave, a perennial show-closer quasi-novelty (this old chestnut seemed to be more likely to be tacked on to a show-closing encore when the band had consumed more alcohol than usual).

All in all, an excellent beginning to the project. The sound quality is a lot better than I expected, and I really had fun listening to this set – so much so that I’ll forgive Darin for mis-spelling Wendel Clark’s surname on the blog page describing the songs in the set. Like I say, though, it was fun to listen to; a little like being a fly on the wall while the band practiced in Dave Clark’s mom’s basement. Sorry ’bout the mess, Mrs. Clarkie, I gotta go home – my Mom is making mac and cheese for dinner and the streetlights are on.

Update (Feb 25th): Not to harsh too much on the engineering/producing team for Greatest Hits, but it occurred to me last night while I was lying in bed that – as discussed above – the final few tracks in this collection prove that the Rheos had their chops together and were ready to do something like Melville  or Whale Music as early as 1987.  It took the addition of the platinum producing ears and golden knob-twiddling fingers of Michael-Philip Wojewoda to present the band’s true genius accurately and beautifully to the world.  I don’t want to take the point too far – to be fair to the Greatest Hits production/engineering team, the prevailing indie production ethos in and around 1987  made extensive use of reverb – my recollection is that MPW’s own band, the Plasterscene Replicas, released an album that sounded quite similar in and around that time, so MPW wasn’t always all about the glistening Rheos sound – but maybe the Plasterscene Replicas didn’t have the chops to make that kind of sound work.  The point is that the Rheos did, MPW saw it, and the result was a series of classic recordings.

Anyway, Darin has released the most recent volume of the project he’s calling Static Journey (he’s up to Disc 4 of a 9 CD set) here. Volumes 1, 2 and 3 can be found here, here and here. The price is certainly within the range of affordability – all downloads are free of charge.

If you’re not already a fan of the band, some of the material included in Darin’s retrospective may be a bit inaccessible. That is not intended to be a criticism of Darin’s work. A set like this is by its very nature of primary interest to serious fans of the band – how many casual Beatles fans do you know who own all the Anthology discs? If you’re not a fan and are wondering what the attraction is, you might try watching the Shaved Head video below. Shaved Head is a track from 1992′s Whale Music, the album generally considered to be the band’s finest work. Interestingly, the video for the song – including the audio track – was recorded live off the floor in the sound room at Reaction Studios in 1994. The decision to record the audio for this vid live speaks to the musical ethos of the band: exploratory, honest, and dedicated to improvisation and musicianship. When my band was recording at Reaction Studios later that summer, we were thrilled to be working in the very room where this video was made. We watched it over and over again on the TV in the green room down the hall from the studio. The song is (I believe) about the struggles of a friend suffering from cancer.

* Fans of the Rheostatics self-identify as Green Sprouts, from the “Green Sprouts Music Club” which was (and I suppose still is) the band’s official fan club.