Only one. I was running combine for a small farmer outside of Halsey, Oregon and was hauling grass seed to a warehouse on the outskirts of Harrisburg. The warehouse was a stone’s throw away from what I considered a very nice ranch-style house with a big picture window through which I saw her the first time, a small girl… a waif of a girl, but so beautiful it took my breath away.
The world doesn’t always go my way and sometimes I get so pissed about that that I have to vent. GodDAMN if the world isn’t going the way of idiots and psychopaths as the Trump Generation attempts to destroy everything good, but I will be damned if I will let it happen to my music. That’s right. My music! Sure, you have your music— The Beatles and Floyd and Queen and even Beyonce and Kanye and whoever the hell else. YOU don’t have to worry. YOU can find that music and plenty of people who still love that music just walking down the street. Me, I have to work for it. I have to scrounge and search and listen and question at every turn. You think that’s easy?
Have a safe and happy Canada Day…I love you all. And yes…this IS the Greatest Country in the World…even if some of us don’t know it.
Portions of this column originally appeared in FYIMusic, Cashbox Canada, and DBAWIS.
You can file this one under “and I thought I knew something.” I just watched a documentary which starts “When I was a kid, music was everything,” a statement as acute to me as author Scott Turow‘s line “It suddenly hit me how much I missed music for which I once felt a yearning as keen as hunger.” It struck a note so deep in me that I watched all one-hour-and-thirty-one minutes feeling a kinship with the narrator (and, as it turns out, producer of the film), almost relieved that I was not alone.
This originally ran on October 3rd, 2011
In many ways, the population currently residing on this mudball are from two different worlds when it comes to music. Some components are time-worn and exist in both, and some are at loggerheads with one another, creating a sizeable chasm between the two that is much deeper and wider than even the fabled ‘generation gap’ of the ’60s and ’70s.
One down, two to go… Angharad Drake, as far as I know (I mean, I wasn’t there, Nanaimo being a lo-o-ong walk from Oregon), finished her one gig on Vancouver Island and is set to play two more in Vancouver before leaving for her homeland, Australia. Those will happen (barring God and Act of Congress— and we have seen how Congress has been acting lately) on Friday and Saturday, June 23rd and 24th. On Friday, she will play Trees Organic Coffee and Roasting House and on Saturday, The Heatley. Here is a sample for your listening enjoyment.
As bizarre as even I still consider this lil’ factoid to be, Yours Quite Truly honestly did spend the majority of the Reagan administration touring Canada’s hepper lounges and ski resorts as one-fifth of the one and only (…ah-hemm: but AUTHORIZED, I’ll have you know) Beach Boys “tribute” act known as Endless Summer.
So there!
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Bullseye Records of Canada
