IRWIN CHUSID (author, Songs In The Key Of Z):
Outsider music is a slippery genre. It’s musicians who tend to be self-taught, untrained, working certainly way outside the channels of mainstream music. There are very important qualifications; they are sincere about it. They mean it. They’re not doing it to be funny. They’re not doing it to be outrageous. This is a sincere musical expression. Wild Man Fischer in many ways is a poster child for outsider music.
I look back on my life and understand why music has taken up most of my life, though few others do. I am an anomaly to them– an outcast in a world of careers and families and politics and so many other things so more important and I can see that like Red Green and all of the excellent male role models on The Red Green Show, they accept me like I am, even if it’s not what they usually accept, and only if they have to. They have had to, I suppose, for I am who I am and that is not said as pure statement but with the realization that over the years I have tried to change.
Boy, did Bob Segarini get the gears moving in my head with his recent column about The Doors and Jim Morrison. Very few people who spent a couple of decades in the music business didn’t have their brushes with greatness, as some scribes tend to call them. I guess greatness is one thing to one person and another thing to another. Wait a minute… guess? Of course, it is. I am learning that as I interview various rock musicians for history pieces I am writing. Ask five members of a band about something thirty or forty years ago and you are as likely to get five different answers or pictures as you are to get a perception of what really happened.
Bullseye Records of Canada
Segarini: Don't Believe a Word I Say 