Although I don’t know how much more. The wind was taken out of my sails last week when I found out that Steve Young had died. The musician and not the football player— jeez, I have said that so many times over the years but always with a chuckle. Not this time. Steve is really gone and things just don’t feel right.
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One hell of a year for music. Not so much for musicians— at least the musicians no longer with us. Hard to balance a year like that, pluses and minuses popping up like ads from a virus, canceling one another out or piling one on top of the other ad infinitum until the system collapses from the weight. We all felt the weight whether we all know it or not. So many musicians now on the other side but, lucky for us, so many new musicians taking their places. Jesus. My head spins.
Judging by the positive reactions to the various music documentaries being filmed these days, I am assuming that music history is not a bad thing. I mean, we have always had the tomes and films of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones and their like to while away our time and before that there had been real movies documenting the different eras, but a large portion of the music public seems to be open to more today, some enough to follow film festivals for early screenings of films about The Wrecking Crew and Big Star, to name two of the most popular.
I watched/listened to a short clip of a Jim Dawson concert this past week. Most of you don’t know the name, I am sure, but Dawson was at the forefront of my obsession with records back in 1971 and his Songman album is a treasure I would not part with except to Dawson himself. He was part folkie as were so many back then— the beginning of the real singer/songwriter movement— and experimenting with layers of sounds.
Indiana Jones has nothing on me. That big rolling ball chasing him? That’s nothing compared to the mountain of carnivorous beasts chasing me in my dreams every night, each vying for that elusive review I promised what seems months ago. It is the music reviewers equivalent to no pants in the schoolroom, the albums fighting one another to get to me, to rip flesh from bone, to make me pay for what they see as vinyl manslaughter— vinylslaughter, if you will— an offense so terrible as to consign innocent artists and albums to a certain death, so vile as to blast dreams to smithereens, so ghastly as to be— well— ghastly.
I am a lost Son of Canada. I must be. I love Canadian bacon, though bacon it not really be (except maybe technically). I love Jennifer Dale, an actor who deserved much more than she has been afforded, respect-wise (I reveled in her work on Canadian TV and film during Comcast’s all-too-short span of including CTV and CBC on their cable lineups in the ’80s). I love Due South, one of the most creative and funny-on-so-many-levels series TV has ever created (the transition of Ray to Ray— David Marciano to Callum Keith Rennie— a work of pure writing craftmanship).
Barry Diament. Odds are, you’ve never heard of him— or think you haven’t. The truth is, though, that if you have albums or CDs by Bad Company or Hoodoo Gurus or Led Zeppelin or Linda Ronstadt, you could have some of his work in your collection. Diament, you see, has mastered or remastered albums by those and many other musical artists. What is mastering? According to Hoyle (erm, Wikipedia):
1. Usufructed, and it ain’t fun. Before you ever wrote or even heard that first note of that first song, the cards were already stacked against you. Record labels, publishing companies and every other segment of what would build into the corporate structure which is the music industry have plotted against you from the start. Of course, it was done legally. God forbid that Universal or BMI take anything from you as regards what finally was termed your “intellectual property”. God forbid that they treat the worker bees creating that which they would build into a multi-billion dollar industry like so much chattel. I mean, after all, corporations are people, right? And we know what people do to each other on a constant basis.If this was a real job, I would have been fired long ago. I spent a whole day and night piecing together the research for this weeks column which was intended to be fun and games with radio charts because, man, when you get into them (especially the ones from the fifties and sixties), they are fun as hell and, boy, the tricks you have to know to understand them, but once again things came along to kick the idea to the curb. It happens every week, swear to God, so I took a little trip down computer lane and counted the columns and column ideas I have started and not finished and it came to 27. The good thing is that I still have 27 ideas set aside for future columns. The bad news is that I haven’t worked on any one of them since. Sigh.
In fact, this may damn well be the year I kick the bucket. My life has pretty much been music, or music at its core, and it has never been better and I have to say that this next year promises to be the best yet. Ever have that feeling that you can’t lose? I not only have that feeling but am overwhelmed by it, politics be damned! So pardon me while I crawl into my hole and surround myself with a future major labels only dream about. Pay attention. There will be a quiz.
Bullseye Records of Canada
Segarini: Don't Believe a Word I Say 