ra mcguire dot com
The Vancouver launch of my book will take place at the Roxy Nightclub (where the Canadian Idol auditions were held) on Monday May 8th at 6:00 PM. The event is open to the public and free. The invited guest list is a who’s who of Vancouver music and entertainment. I will read from the book and copies will be on sale. The Roxy is located at 932 Granville Street, Vancouver. You are all (every one of you) invited to attend.
I was surprised, two days later, to read an email from Gillian Rodgerson in Toronto saying that she’d just heard the interview. We were told it would run a week later. Heather then wrote from Calgary with another heads up. Connor and I dialed in the CBC Calgary online feed and listened to it in the den. When it was done, Debbie joined us and we listened, again, to the Vancouver feed as it played in real-time.
It really was one of the most delightful interviews I’ve ever done. Shelagh Rogers is beyond professional and has the creative courage of a lion. We wandered fearlessly from topic to topic. She is THE best audience - and it was a total treat to meet and talk to her. And Connor, of course, loved it.
Shelagh said the book should be re-named; “Canada”. God I loved that.
We’ve received permission to post the interview here (and on the Trooper site) so that you can hear it if you missed it. We’re just waiting on the CD from CBC.
We had completed a dozen sold out shows in sixteen days, logged eight thousand kilometers on our rented gold Suburban, and crisscrossed the thawing prairies between Vancouver and Winnipeg. We were all tired, but energized by the incomparable buzz of being part of the Trooper touring machine.
Two weeks earlier, at the first band party of the tour - an acoustic jam in a Camrose Alberta hotel room - we realized that with Richard playing bass, Randy playing guitar, and Dave drumming, we could, potentially, have TWO bands on the tour. Part way through our Banff, Alberta show, “Funbucket” took to the stage, busting out a blazing version of Doucette’s “Mama Let Him Play”. They happily returned to the stage many times throughout the tour. The Nelson ‘end-of-tour party’ version of the song, with additional harmonies and percussion from Frankie, Scott, Gogo and I, was the tightest of the tour.
Gogo brought his violin - which he played frequently in small town Tim Hortons parking lots and hotel lobbies - and a ukulele - which eventually lead to a traveling Tiny Tim party. Scott and I worked our way through a collection of songs by “The Big Four” - Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Tony Bennett and Dean Martin. We refined the playlist to a fifteen-song set of classics that Scott rehearsed daily. We downloaded videos of the Dean Martin show and Frank Sinatra concert clips that we watched as we rolled down the highway. Nothing brain-bombs more effectively than songs like “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love” and “Ain’t That a Kick In the Head” and I spent most of the tour singing like Frank, Dean or Tony. Scott plans to become a crooner, a perfect fit for his rich baritone voice - and by the end of the tour he was confidently singing those brilliantly constructed songs, performed originally by true vocal masters.
After the final show, the band and crew relaxed in the candle-lit dressing room with some new Nelson friends. An Irish tenor, sitting across the table from me, got everyone singing “Lean on Me”. A surprising number of our guests sang well, dropping in harmonies and soulful licks. Another song followed and voices grew stronger. I smiled around the room at my traveling companions and savoured the moment.
Monday’s pre-interviewer was intelligent, charming and funny, and we talked comfortably until she asked me to tell her a couple of stories.
“… like you would tell when you’re all sitting around having a beer.” she hinted. “I just need one from this tour, and maybe one from the early days.”
Despite the fact that I am a seasoned interviewee with not inconsiderable experience in the field, I could not, for the life of me, deliver a story. She needed two. I had zero. I apologized, explaining that stories have always just come up in conversation so I’ve never felt the need to choose some “good” ones for this kind of context-free interview emergency. Being a complete professional, she picked up our conversation as though the request had not been made and we successfully completed the otherwise smooth-sailing simulated interview.
The next day I asked my band-mates to help me develop some party-pieces - at least two good road stories that I could count on. For the next hour, we riffed through a small collection of oft-repeated and familiar tales that still reduce us all to hysterical laughter.
Someone once took three of us out on an expensive and powerful cigarette boat. As they pulled away from the dock, the high-strung skipper admitted it was only his third time at the helm of this souped-up macho racer - and it quickly became terrifyingly obvious that he had never been trained to drive it. After a white knuckled beeline to the middle of the lake, and with no land in sight, he turned off the roaring engines. The shaken passengers were then offered drinks … and cocaine. After nervously declining the fat white lines he had produced, they watched in horror as their host finished all the drugs himself.
This is the kind of story that we tell when we’re having a few beers. I had lied. I have hundreds, probably thousands, of them but I can’t trust myself to know with a certainty that the one I have chosen to tell will turn out to be appropriate for all audiences. This one probably isn’t.
Undeterred, we continued. There was the one about a former Trooper crew member who, at a large outdoor concert, had pissed off so many on-site crew and staff that, when he fell to the stage floor with a painful hernia attack, everyone just stepped over top of him - carrying on with their work.
There was the time when one of the band members, sick with the flu, had us stop the van quickly so he could leap out the side door and vomit impressively in front of a packed restaurant’s dinner patrons.
There was the time when, a former light man driving the gear truck in dense fog in Newfoundland nearly hit a deer and screamed - waking our sleeping merch guy who, disoriented and seeing only a white void beyond the windshield, and deducing that the truck was flying off a cliff, braced his hands and feet against the dashboard screaming “NO! NO! NO!” - waking our tour manager, Mike Pacholuk who calmly surveyed the situation and made a mental note to remember to tell us all about it later.
The search for appropriate stories continues. My real interview is a week away.
The new gold Suburban I was leaning up against was overflowing with luggage, jackets, blankets, a pillow, a ukulele, a violin, two computers, empty Starbucks and Tim Hortons cups and cookies from the Alberta Cookie Lady. There was no room in there for personal calls.
Scott, Gogo and Frankie, in the back half of the Suburban, had just watched “Still Crazy” on the onboard DVD player while I watched “Hostage” on my Powerbook in the passenger seat. Smitty, behind the wheel as usual, watched the long, straight and virtually unchanging highway. I was glad for the rest. Our first tour of the season had started with a bigger bang than usual.
My week of CBC National Playlist sessions was followed by interviews with the two local papers. This would be the first time that I would face questions about the book, and I was disturbingly unsure about how I was going to respond. My concern was compounded by the fact that my friends and family would most likely see the results of my potentially amateur inaugural book-promotion efforts. To my great relief both interviews came off without a hitch.
My friend Myles Goodwyn once wrote that “Rock and Roll is a Vicious Game”, which is arguably true, but one of my five interviews on Tuesday made it clear to me that rock and roll’s got nothing on the publishing world. My first interview of the morning was a spirited radio spot with a funny and bright Saskatoon DJ. I was pumped and ready to go when my next call, from an Alberta newspaper entertainment writer, came in. After minimal preliminaries, the writer began to discuss the phenomenon of “books like this”. He made jokes about rocker Brian Volmer’s new Helix book. He told me he was planning a sidebar for my story that would list titles for imaginary books by other rock stars who, he was convinced, were going to write even more “books like this”. He lamented that he was doomed to host a weekly series called “Book Talk with Rockers”. He was reveling in rudeness.
At the point where I was convinced that input from me wouldn’t be necessary for his story - he clearly had all the material he needed - he finally asked me: “So why do we need another book like this?”
“Well, uh, Dickface,” (Dickface is not his real name - I’ve changed it here to avoid potential legal action) “I, uh … you know Brian’s had a pretty intense journey of his own, but I have to say that it’s entirely different than mine in many ways.” I wondered if he could sense the forced smile and the cold, controlled civility.
I continued to speak, as humbly as possible, about writing the book as I carefully considered the idea of hanging up on the guy before I told him to go fuck himself. My wife and son were listening at the kitchen table only a few feet away. I chose to stay the course.
“And what is it …” he asked, warming to his theme “about blogs, that makes you think that we want to read your innermost thoughts from your personal diary?”
“Well, Asshat,” (not his real name), I responded, “it’s not actually my diary …”
And then, like the boxer in “Against the Ropes” the mediocre Meg Ryan movie that Debbie and I watched the other night, I reached my limit, changed up my stance and bit down hard on whatever it is boxers bite down on, and said something like:
“You know, it’s not a diary and it’s not “another book like this”. It’s MY book, and it took me three years to write - and it means a lot to me.”
He paused for a moment - seemingly shaken out of his righteous groove - and then he told me, authoritatively, that I should not be so sensitive.
“I’m just challenging you.” he said, sounding pleased with himself.
“I’m with you” I grinned, “I’m with you.”
Most of the good stuff that appeared in the finished story followed. I went off, and said what I needed to say, convinced that doing otherwise would be a waste of valuable interview time. My favourite part of the interview came when he tried to re-visit the topic of blogs.
“Do you write on your blog about everything that happens to you?”
“No, just things I think people would find interesting.”
“So are you going to write about this on your blog?”
“Oh fuck, yeah” I said.
I’m both Christmas morning excited and sky-diving terrified. When I was writing the blog entries that eventually became the book, I imagined my audience as a group of uncritical friends who knew me well enough to suspend judgment and cut me some literary slack. Now, in book form, those same words are exposed to anyone who cares to have a look. Critics will be reading it – and, probably, voicing their opinions about it. People I know and love, alerted to the book’s release, will now be obliged to read it to see what I’ve written about them. My 90-year old Aunt Lena in Quesnel will see all the F-words.
Erik Hodgson, the publicist for the book, says it looks “great” and my good friend and front line administrator Heather Uhl says it looks “fantastic”. She got her boxes this morning. So where are mine?
“They’ll come on soon.” He promised.
Five minutes before show time, my headphones were still eerily silent. As casually as I could manage, I made a quick second visit to master control.
“They were calling the wrong number,” he said smiling “I gave them the right one”.
I returned to my room and was shuffling through my notes when the Toronto producer said “hello”. He promised that the voice of Jian Gomeshi would soon join us and we went over some technical issues while we waited.
My friend Howard Mandshein, the outrageous and charismatic Winnipeg showbiz icon, had warned me that his week on the National Playlist had been challenging. Sitting alone in my tiny triangular studio I was about to enter into a debate, on national radio, with three people I could not see and did not know, all of whom were gathered in another downtown studio 4000 kilometers away. I reached for my volume knob and cranked it up loud.
What ensued was fun from the start. Jian Gomeshi, Tara Thorne and Dalton Higgins were enthusiastic and entertaining debate-mates and the show, guided by Jian’s innate professionalism, rolled out smoothly and confidently.
My headphones became my lifeline – the focus of my complete attention. My temporal Vancouver reality shrank to the space between my face and the black mic in front of me.
During a break the headphones went quiet again.
Moments later, they crackled, and a new voice broke the silence.
“Hello, Ra?”
“Hey” I answered, confused.
“This is Joe, I’m your engineer here in Toronto. I just wanted to say … thanks for the music”.
I’m smiling as I recall this. I enjoyed meeting and talking to Joe - across the country, through the CBC’s phone lines. He told me he was going to blog about it. And he did.
There’s no business like show business.
Click here to visit Joe Mahoney’s Blog and read about our conversation.
“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture”
Each guest brings in two songs (one new, one old) that they think should make it to the playlist. 8 songs are debated but only 4 make it to the weekly top ten - like ‘Survivor’.
I’ve written two “pitches” for the songs I’m proposing and I’ve massaged them into fifty-second sound bites for the show. This has necessitated multiple re-writes followed by a crash course in reading them very quickly. Tomorrow I will sit in a downtown CBC studio by myself and pretend I’m hanging with the other panelists in Toronto. At some point in the week I’ll be asked to present my pitches. I don’t think anyone at CBC will mind if I share them with you now. I enjoyed writing them and it seems like such a waste to have them go by so quickly on the air.
So here they are:
The Motown Records building in Detroit may have been demolished in January but the power and glory of the Motown Sound lives on, forty years after The Temptations recorded their first number one hit: My Girl. The song opens with one of the most famous bass lines in pop music history, followed by the most recognizable guitar hook of all time. When David Ruffin sings the opening line – the musical sun comes out and stays out. Written by Smokey Robinson and Ronald White from the Miracles, sung by one of the most successful groups in black music history - backed up by the world’s greatest house band - My Girl was destined for Hitzville - but the track has an additional magic that transcends the sum of its parts. Structurally, the song is pure genius and the seamless and brilliantly detailed arrangement contains one of my favourite bridges. Where else could the words “hey hey hey” convey so much meaning while simultaneously uniting the world in a blissful singalong moment.
I was preparing to write my pitch for The Arcade Fire’s “Crown of Love” when it occurred to me to check and see if it was, in fact, released in the last 12 months as the criteria for the show requires. Sadly, neither the AF album nor the most recent Weakerthans album made the cut. I defaulted to a great song from the new Bright Eyes record. This is what I will (quickly) say:
I was not a convinced fan of Connor Oberst and his band Bright Eyes, until I heard the quirky, jerky and totally engaging track – ‘The Arc of Time’. Mr. Oberst must be tiring of his “boy wonder” status. It’s hard enough to create a recording that is both innovative and listenable, lyrically meaningful and musically engaging without having to deal with the complication of a critical press with high and often specific expectations. It takes courage to confound your fans, and I admire this well crafted entry into the critically dangerous pop-song arena that confidently avoids any pop formula that I know about. Built on the dated bones of a Bo Diddley beat, this track knows instinctively when to change up – when to add and when to take away. The performances are infectious, the lyric cuts “to the deepest part of the human heart” … but most of all - I like the way it moves.
It's going to be really hard to keep writing this blog, now that I know that what I write could eventually be published. My first attempt at writing a quick 'welcome back' post for the new site focused on what I had wanted to be when I grew up - and how, by imagining careers as a DJ or a newspaper writer, my adolescent dreams had undershot my eventual reality. That thread collapsed in navel-gazing confusion. The next two posts self-destructed as well. The writing wasn't good enough. This is my fourth try.
Since this is my first post since the completion of the long and painfully introspective process of editing a three-years collection of wildly uneven blog-writing for my first book, I'm sure I'll get over this self-conscious hump. If I write something stupid I can fix it in the mix.
The book will be released in April - not, like a new CD, on a specific day, but over the course of the month. There are, it turns out, many differences between releasing a book and putting out a new CD, not the least of which is the fact that the book - my book - is all about me and my thoughts and experiences. I have never felt so vulnerable.
Preparation for the book's release has helped to keep my mind off the terror of literary nakedness, and the resuscitation of this website has been a part of that. Mad props to Debbie and Connor who have been my daily (and sometimes, hourly) beta testers and aesthetic gurus, and my good friend and web co-conspirator Heather Uhl, who has once again wrestled PHP, CSS and HTML into submission, helping to create Rev. 2 of ramcguire.com.
(This is the introduction to my book, written on a plane on the way to our New Years gig at Reds in Edmonton.)
Jully Black closed her eyes and inched her lips toward the microphone. The first two words - the title of the song - seemed torn from a personal reverie ... surrendered unwillingly - as though her thoughts and emotions had boiled over and out of her mouth by accident, by mistake.
"Pretty Lady" she sang, and I let out an involuntary whoop.
"Here I am" she admitted, and other audience members gave it up. Spontaneous.
My nervousness turned to pride. Jully was singing the shit out of a song I wrote 40 years ago with my writing partner Brian Smith - and my wife and son and many of my peers in the music industry were there bearing witness. I grinned across the large round table - first at my family and then at Smitty. Debbie squeezed my leg.
After singing, Jully told the audience that her manager was a huge Trooper fan and had pulled strings to sit at the same table as us ...
"With God" she said.
She went on to describe our band as "honest-to-God Canadian legends". The crowd cheered as she called Smitty and I to the stage to accept our 2005 SOCAN Classic Awards.
Ann Lorie, who wrote "Insensitive" for Jann Arden, was also sitting at our table and had shed a few tears when accepting her award, but Smitty and I were too buzzed for sentimentality. We could feel a palpable connection with the music-biz crowd arrayed before us - many of whom had become friends and compatriots over the years. The evening's awards ceremony played out like a personal celebration of a long and successful career that continues to offer up the elusive rewards of adventure, challenge and straight-up fun.
I was proud to announce from the stage that night that my son Connor and I had just written our first song together. After the show, in Jully Black's dressing room, representatives of an independent record company approached Connor to talk about his music. He smiled and accepted their card appreciatively. Here he was, functioning comfortably in an environment that would have absolutely terrified me at eighteen.
I started singing in a band when I was twelve years old - five years younger than he is now. I recorded my first album 13 years later at the age of 25. I'm 55 years old now and have never had a real job. I've written hundreds of songs, performed thousands of shows and have traveled tens of thousands of miles - most of those back and forth across Canada. Trooper is as viable today as it was in the seventies when songs like "We're Here for a Good Time" and "Raise a Little Hell" were knocking down doors and serving as our invitations to the best party in town. In many ways our status has elevated recently to a place just south of legendary - where, for instance, total strangers embrace us as they would a favourite relative visiting from out of town. The party continues.
Trooper's first web site went online in 1996. Little Timmy Hewitt and I hacked together the html for 'Rev. 1' long before Google, eBay or Amazon.com had registered their now iconic domain names. I started my own personal site - they weren't called blogs then - not long after. I wrote about my life on the road and those things that someone unfamiliar with this kind of life might find interesting. I was surprised and encouraged by the enthusiastic response to that tentative and sporadically updated site, so, by the time Blogger launched their online interface, I had decided to maintain a semi-regular online account of a 53 year-old's rock and roll adventures.
This book represents the first three years of ramcguire.com. It was written in real time as journal entries. It has no beginning and no ending, but surprised me by telling more than a few seemingly complete stories.
It was written in airports and rented vans, on ferries and planes - in billet-rooms in remote high-north villages and luxury hotel suites in the heart of the Big Smoke. Some of it was dashed off quickly at four in the morning. Some of it might be more carefully considered than it needs to be. Often it reveals much more than I'd intended at the time. And sometimes, the story is fleshed-out by that which wasn't written down at all. Each entry came as a complete surprise to me - as did, of course, the unfolding events I was chronicling.
The SOCAN Awards were held in Toronto at the end of November. I'm writing this on a plane on the way to Edmonton Alberta on the last day of 2005. Our New Years Eve show tonight will be at Reds - a very large club in the West Edmonton Mall. It's going to be a total sold-out zoo!
(This is the post that followed the final post in the book - and the last entry before I shut the site down for the winter)
"You should know that there may be some weight issues on the way back."
The young pilot leaned close to me and spoke quietly.
"Sorry?" I said.
"Well, with the gravel and all ..."
"The gravel?"
"Well, ya ... and the short runway. And the fact that the take off is over water. There may be some weight issues. You may have to leave some things behind tonight."
"We already left a bunch of stuff behind in Winnipeg." I said, thinking out loud. "And we play tomorrow night ..."
I paused, weighing safety against a potentially missed gig, "How much stuff?"
"No more than a hundred pounds ... but it's really up to the pilot ..." He thought for a moment, "and the wind".
Our tiny ten passenger Pilatus single engine turbo prop sat alone on the Big Trout Lake air strip - a ragged gravel swatch cut out of the lakeside forest - surrounded by the band, the crew, a small collection of gear and the community's welcoming committee.
We moved quietly through the gathering entourage, shaking hands and making introductions. Accompanied by Eno, the show's coordinator, Luke, our constant companion for the evening, and three teenage boys, we boarded a battered yellow school bus for the ride to the "resting place". We crashed and bounced through the trees on dusty dirt roads - I raised my left hand, like a rodeo bull rider, bouncing on my seat. We hooted and hollered. Glen the school teacher - obviously British, wearing a Tilley hat, steel-rimmed glasses, shorts and boots grinned from behind the wheel.
"Kish'n'mayg'sib" Luke delivers the community's name as though it contains no more than two syllables.
"A little slower, Luke. Who's got a pen?"
"Kitchen - aw - maygo - sip" I repeated the word over and over in the arena's basement dressing room.
"Kitchenawmagosip, Kitchenawmagosip, Kitchenawmagosip"
"You've got it now" said Luke, smiling.
"Kitchenawmagosip" I repeated, unconvinced.
Kitchenawmagosip, or Big Trout Lake as it's called on the map, is an hour and a half flight northeast of Winnipeg. It's not accessible by road in the summer, when the ice-roads have melted. They have two stores, a school, a police station with three policemen, a woman's shelter, and a small hotel with a restaurant. They are planning a youth centre and a laundromat. We were there as part of a celebration that also included square dancing, fiddle music and a $50,000 Bingo game.
"Take us there!" we said when we heard.
"Two Fifty a card" replied one of the buzz-cut teenagers.
"Two hundred and fifty dollars?"
"That's how we do things." Eno said proudly.
About a hundred people, in two rows of chairs, sat at the halfway point in the large dark arena. The six o'clock show-time had drifted to seven. Our high-intensity intro music exploded in the silent, near empty arena and the first show began. It is fair to say that first nations people have a general tendency to shyness. As an audience, they applaud appreciatively between songs but lack the animated interaction of a typical rock crowd. After I insisted that they move their chairs closer to the stage, the small audience began to warm up. They smile. Shyly.
We have flown from Vancouver to Winnipeg, from Winnipeg to Big Trout Lake and performed a ninety minute set. Our second show begins after a short thirty minute break - most of which is squandered signing autographs at the t-shirt table. We are already exhausted as we take the stage for the second time that day.
"That second show was on fire!" says Luke quietly as we make our way down the basement hallway to our bright yellow dressing room.
"Hey thanks." I say, shaking his outstretched hand.
By 11:00 PM we are assembled again at the airstrip. The warm, clear northern night is pin-drop quiet - headlights from a few randomly parked pickups provide enough light to load the gear. We talk quietly as we say our farewells. Luke promises to email photos. Eno's handshake turns into a hug. I step away from the group for a moment to discuss the weight issue with the pilot.
Ten minutes later, as we fly back to the tree-line, the copilot shuts off all the lights in the plane. We are high above the clouds and sharing the sky with a massive display of northern lights. Our tiny plane is surrounded by enormous curtains of shimmering and dancing light. Like children, we press our faces to the small windows - maneuvering our elbows to the seats in an effort to see higher into the night sky.
An hour passes before Winnipeg floats into view in front of us. We take turns craning over the pilots' shoulders as the city lights grow brighter. Soon, two clearly defined parallel rows of lights position themselves below and ahead of us. It still seems like a very long way down. Tilted at a slight angle to break our speed, but moving straight towards the runway, we descend smoothly to the Winnipeg tarmac.