Pack Mentality

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Connor performed his first Indie/Dance/Mash-Up set last night at a downtown hole-in-the-wall called the Soundlab. It was a guest-list only event featuring three DJs. Unlike the two turntablists, Connor did an Ableton Live set - a seat-of-the-pants high-wire act where all the musical pieces are prepped on the computer and then selected, beat-matched and spat out in real time – the all important groove totally dependant on split second jabs at a bewildering collection of knobs, buttons and faders. He's been creating mash-ups (digital re-mixes wherein one or more popular songs are mashed together) for fun for months, but started working on his set in earnest when he learned there might be an opportunity to try it out live on a room full of drunk and dancing twenty-somethings.

He's posted three early mash-ups and an original electro/club/pop track on his "Pack Mentality" MySpace page - where he has quietly but steadily been building his Nu Disco persona.

This is another musical left turn for Connor - but probably a welcome and rewarding antidote to the frustration of trying to assemble a band of great players and then keep them together for more than one or two cash-challenged shows. His MacBook Pro, Reason, ProTools and Ableton Live allow him to create and perform solo - not with an acoustic guitar like Rev. 1, but with the power and the glory (and the block-rockin' beats) that only an infinite collection of digital samples can deliver. Add to that the undeniable ear-candy of layered iconic pop slices and you can begin to see the appeal - both for him and the dance floor.

And all his gear fits in a backpack.

Stay tuned.

My End of the Decade Story

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Just before New Years, I began writing an ‘end of the decade’ piece chronicling my frustration with the general lack of trustworthy sources of legitimate and reliable information in this digital age. I researched carefully, in order to accurately present both sides of conflicting arguments championed by intelligent and convincing spokespersons. I sweated the details so that my dilemma would be clear. Both sides can not be right, and finding the truth of a thing seems to be growing harder and harder as more and more information becomes available.

I wrote the post using a beautiful and innovative new word processor that fills the computer screen with a peaceful white snowscape, eliminating all distractions. It truly seemed to help me focus exclusively on the writing. The essay grew long, but I was happy with the way it was coming along.

On New Years day, I opened the file to finish it up.

The serene white winter scene filled the screen, the program’s pleasantly unobtrusive music began to play quietly and my story appeared before me. In Chinese.

Or Mandarin. Or Chinese (Simplified) or Chinese (Traditional) - other options I learned about from Google Translator where I later vainly attempted to return my writing to my mother tongue.

The software’s website did have a reference to this problem. “If you get gibberish (oops)” they offered glibly, you could “try” their “workaround”. It didn’t work. I’ve contacted tech support but I am not hopeful.

Transition

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For a long time now, I’ve kept my camera, my flash drives and my noise-cancelling headphones in my backpack, which resides under my desk here at home, so it’s at hand for road trips. I use it as an auxilliary desk drawer. I also keep doubles of my computer power cables, adapters, USB, ethernet and audio cables in the backpack so I can ready my laptop for the drive to the airport in the time it takes to unplug it and pack it away. Since the camera, drives and headphones are stored in there already, I’m less likely to leave them behind.

Jumping up and leaving town is such an expected part of my everyday reality, this routine seems eminently logical …

Until this morning, in the early days of Trooper’s traditional winter break, when I paused for a confused moment wondering where to put my camera.

My Christmas Records

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The yellow post-it notes were never the best idea. I can’t remember if they were intended to be permanent at the time, or just a quick way of demarcating the division between “Chorale”, “Instrumental & Solo” and “Organ and Chimes” as well as the sixteen other arbitrary categories I created for my recently sorted collection.

I had covered the floor of the den with LPs – each pile representing a vain attempt at organization. The room, and the rest of the house, smelled of thrift-shop dust, old cardboard and vinyl. This was when I first learned that I had accumulated over three hundred Christmas albums.

It’s unlike me not to finish a job properly, but trying to bring order to the chaos of the collection must have left me just enough energy to quickly print, in red pen, the sometimes inscrutable descriptions (”Cool Comp”, “Program” and “?”) that remain today – poking out at random intervals along the eight foot shelf they fill.

My search for Christmas LPs was necessitated by the ongoing dearth of well-made and sincere Christmas recordings. It began when I found myself unable to finish a once-a-year Christmas mix-tape using only the paltry collection that had assembled in my home as every normal Christmas collection does. Soon I was prowling thrift shops from coast to coast, weighing down my returning suitcase with treasures like the Hank Snow Christmas Album or the original 1957 “Elvis’ Christmas Album” – tucked in with less appealing titles that eventually fell into categories like the aforementioned “Organ & Chimes”.

It was a serendipitous visit to the local Peace Arch Hospital Auxiliary Superfluity Shop, though, that kicked the collection into gear. There, one fall afternoon, searching for a Halloween costume for Connor, I encountered a shopping cart filled with fifty carefully chosen and immaculately cared for Christmas LPs in mint condition. My collection built from there.

There are many factors that recommend a successful holiday recording. All are entirely subjective – the probable appeal of my search for the very best of the breed. One person’s favourites would not necessarily be another's. That’s part of the joy of my collection.

LPs don’t get much use in my home these days, but I do have a carefully filtered and personally reviewed Christmas MP3 collection that currently numbers 715 and growing. I don’t make Christmas mix-tapes any more either, but my “Christmas” playlist will share my holiday favourites, without repeating, for one day, fifteen hours and five minutes.

We’ve listened to a few hundred of those songs already. The tree is up and decorated and the house is nearly ready for Christmas.

My 6-Minute 3-Minute Film

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This was my submission for the 2009 "Cindy & Monty's 3-Minute Film Festival" (discussed earlier, here). We had the best time ever at this year's event – and I showed my film to great critical acclaim – but I withdrew from competition because, despite my best efforts, my 3-Minute film turned out to be 3-Minutes too long! It's a twenty-something travelogue, documenting Connor McGuire's solo month in Europe. Check Connor's website to see *his* 3-Minute film ...

Trooper and the Cracker Company

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In the last few weeks, friends, fans and a couple of people on the street have brought up the ‘Raise a Little Hell’ Cracker commercial. Some have congratulated me. Others have joked about lifetime supplies of saltines. Others, knowing that I don’t watch TV, simply wanted to be sure that I’d heard about it. As it turns out, I found out about it the way they did. I heard the familiar ‘A’ chord ring out from the living room as I worked at my computer here in the den. I jumped up, and Debbie and I watched, fascinated, as the slow motion crackers dropped into the waiting bowls of exploding tomato soup.

I’ve explained Trooper’s relationship with the Premium Plus cracker company to many people, and now would like to explain it to you. We don’t have a relationship with the Premium Plus cracker company. They don’t send crackers for our dressing room rider and we played no part in the choice of soup used in their commercial. The entire deal was done not only without our involvement, but also, without our knowledge.

Here’s how it works.

Universal Music owns the recording of ‘Raise a Little Hell’. Sony Music Publishing administers the use of the song. In both cases we are supposed to see royalties from the deal that’s struck, but we have no involvement in or control over it. No one even asked.

My share of the royalties won't be a lot of money considering the song I co-wrote will be repeatedly played on TV - in a cracker commercial - until next March, but not bad considering it just fell out of the sky onto me.

Thing is though, I’d prefer the song be covered by a kick-ass rock band and become a huge international hit. Hopefully said rock band will not see the cracker commercial.

Creating a Three-Minute Film

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My Dad, a brilliant sculptor, used to tell people that he simply carved away everything that didn't look like what he’d set out to create. Watching him work, you'd swear he did just that - uncovering animals and people that had been waiting in the wood for his chisel to free them. I joked with Monty on Saturday night that I was hoping to use Dad’s approach to finish my submission for this year’s Three-Minute Film Festival. My rough cut had timed in at over an hour. I simply needed to carve away all but three minutes of that.

Monty laughed, but I could see the look of concern in his eyes.

Last year my film “Three Random Minutes” was exactly the correct length. As luck would have it – and it was dumb luck – my script had timed out perfectly. Possibly because of my rigid adherence to the festival’s format, I had wrestled the coveted Delores Award from my 3-minute film-making arch-enemy and two-time Delores winner Scott Milligan.

I had no script this year. My bold plan was to film reality unfolding in real-time, in the hopes that I could glean three entertaining edited minutes. The filming resulted in over two hours of uninterrupted and extremely engaging material.

Once I had logged the collected good bits, depression began to settle in. On Twitter, I wrote: “In any creative endeavour, exhilarating hopefulness begins to diminish near the ceiling of imagination and expertise”. I pretended for a day that I wasn’t making a film.

I hacked and slashed all the next day. I prayed that the heart of the film was not lost somewhere in the digital blood covering the virtual cutting room floor. When I reached the twelve minute mark I stopped to brag about it on Twitter. It took another full day to attain the six minute mark. It took another to admit that the film was as short as it could be.

Cindy and Monty’s Three Minute Film Festival is the best party of the year. We dress up, we organize into ‘magazine’ reviewer groups and post our reviews and votes on a big board on the living room wall. If you don’t bring a film you have to bring an appetizer. Most of the films are surprisingly awesome, but some are less than stellar. Sometimes they’re silly or in questionable taste and sometimes … like my film this year … they’re over three minutes long.

I’m sure Cindy and Monty will forgive me.

Here’s a link to my film from last year: “Three Random Minutes”

Here’s a link to the "Cindy & Monty's Three Minute Film Festival" web site. (Please notice that the actual festival is by invitation, and for friends and family only)

I’ll post my new 6 minute film here after it’s had its debut next week.

More on the Wired Story About the H1N1 Vaccine

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From the Amy Wallace story:

The rejection of hard-won knowledge is by no means a new phenomenon. In 1905, French mathematician and scientist Henri Poincaré said that the willingness to embrace pseudo-science flourished because people “know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether illusion is not more consoling.” Decades later, the astronomer Carl Sagan reached a similar conclusion: Science loses ground to pseudo-science because the latter seems to offer more comfort. “A great many of these belief systems address real human needs that are not being met by our society,” Sagan wrote of certain Americans’ embrace of reincarnation, channeling, and extraterrestrials. “There are unsatisfied medical needs, spiritual needs, and needs for communion with the rest of the human community.”

Looking back over human history, rationality has been the anomaly. Being rational takes work, education, and a sober determination to avoid making hasty inferences, even when they appear to make perfect sense. Much like infectious diseases themselves — beaten back by decades of effort to vaccinate the populace — the irrational lingers just below the surface, waiting for us to let down our guard.

UPDATE: FactCheck.org article: "Inoculation Misinformation - Claims that the "swine flu" vaccine is dangerous range from seriously overblown to flat-out false."

Regarding the H1N1 Vaccine and the Campaign Against It

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I've just received an email warning about the dangers of the H1N1 Vaccine. You may have received it too. That's why I'm writing this. I urge you all to take the time to read this story in the current Wired Magazine called " An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All"

It's a well-reasoned and heavily researched story about vaccines in general and the H1N1 vaccine in particular. Usually I'd say that folks should make their own choices and not care what those choices are  -  but this story has convinced me that in this case it really can't work that way. If enough people refuse to take the H1N1 vaccine - it will put everyone else in their community at risk.

Here's one of many key quotes from the Wired article:

The frightening implications of this kind of anecdote were illustrated by a 2002 study published in The Journal of Infectious Diseases. Looking at 3,292 cases of measles in the Netherlands, the study found that the risk of contracting the disease was lower if you were completely unvaccinated and living in a highly vaccinated community than if you were completely vaccinated and living in a relatively unvaccinated community. Why? Because vaccines don’t always take. What does that mean? You can’t minimize your individual risk unless your herd, your friends and neighbors, also buy in.

By contrast, here's the Wiki page on Russell Blaylock, who wrote the H1N1 email that was forwarded to me. And here's an excerpt from that page:

Blaylock has asserted, among other things, that behind the US drug problem was a "nefarious program created in the former Soviet Union that exceeds even the far-reaching imaginations of Hollywood writers". The drug problem, he writes, would weaken the resistance of Western Society to Soviet invasion, undermine religion (which he calls 'the foundation of Western stability and morality'), target schools, harm the work force and work ethic, make the youth "unable to resist collectivism", and create a "totalitarian mindset within the United States government". He implicates Fidel Castro, Nikita Kruschev, Leonid Brezhnev, organized crime syndicates, and their American "leftist accomplices" in the formation of US drug culture.

Blaylock implies that the Soviet program was linked to crack-cocaine, fentanyl, ecstasy and methamphetamine, and that it was responsible for "an epidemic of hepatitis, AIDS, venereal diseases and highly resistant tuberculosis". He accuses the US media and the US government of knowing about the Soviet plot, but failing to expose it. As part of his evidence, he quotes from the "Communist Manual of Instructions of Psychological Warfare", purportedly by Lavrenti Beria. However, many people have doubted the authenticity and authorship of the work, including the FBI.

The Wired story is not as short and exciting as the anti-vaccine email that I received tonight, but it should be required reading for us all.

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof"

~ Marcello Truzzi

“This Beat Goes On” - My Two-Cents

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Just because I've never heard of 'The Dishes' shouldn't automatically disqualify them from a place in a documentary about Canadian popular music. An album by a band called 'Simply Saucer' beat out Trooper in Bob Mersereau's 'Top 100 Canadian Albums' book (they were #36 we were #60) and I'd never heard of them either. And despite the fact that I remember 'Martha and the Muffins' as a one-hit-wonder, their web site currently lists a total of 10 albums. So, really, what do I know? I have great sympathy for the producers of the two-part CBC documentary 'This Beat Goes On'. A truly comprehensive history of Canada's pop music would require several full days to present. The two episodes of TBGO, covering the 1970's, clocked in at two hours, minus commercials.

And, like Roy MacGregor said about our job as judges for the CBC's 'Seven Wonders of Canada' program - beyond all other considerations, a show of this nature needs to be "geographically correct". Considering writer Nicholas Jennings also wrote the astonishingly Toronto-centric 'Before the Goldrush' about the supposed genesis of the Canadian music scene, I was surprised and happy to see so much western-Canadian content. I was particularly impressed with the time and attention lavished on me, and my band.

Nonetheless, I'm still strangely unsatisfied with what will now stand as trusted documentation of the crazy Canadian music scene.

For one thing, I want you to know that the seventies Canadian music scene was a lot of fun. With only a few exceptions, I didn't get that sense from the show. It was low-key, scholarly and, forgive me Jian et al, a bit dull.

More important to me though is the fact that Canadian-made music is not the only music we Canadians listen to! Isolating Canadian hits from the mosaic of American and British music of the day is akin to presenting Van Halen's brown M&Ms as a full pack of candy. The constantly buzzing interaction of Canadian writers and performers with the outstanding music coming at us from the US and England was part of the unfolding thrill of what was happening here. Our music did not take seed and grow in the cultural vacuum that the documentary suggests by it's omissions. My song, "Two For the Show" only reached number two on the Canadian charts because a Paul McCartney song held on stubbornly at number one. That was the world we Canadian artists came up in.

I also have two petty quibbles:

I understand and applaud the doc's nod to the Quebec music scene but do not understand the omission of Montreal's Michel Pagliaro - the first Canadian artist to score top 40 hits on both the anglophone and francophone pop charts in Canada. (Last year Pag received the 'Governor General's Performing Arts Award', Canada's most prestigious artistic honour). His "What the Hell I Got" was one of my favourite songs in 1975, and still stands up well: (please forgive the total uselessness of this video)

And finally, regarding the story that Randy Bachman tells on the show about the pizza boy playing the piano part on "Takin' Care of Business": it's not true. I was there. The piano part was played by Seattle's Norman Durkee - a professional musician who deserves the credit for his deftly performed and rollicking track.

Artists That I Love - Episode 2 - Jonah Smith

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I might never have known about Jonah Smith if we hadn't walked into that square behind the church in Barcelona in September 2007. We assumed, not unreasonably, that the band sound-checking on the large outdoor stage was from Spain, and it took some time to realize that the words being sung were in English. The band was tight and the singer, playing a groovin' Rhodes piano, was great. Before we left I asked the sound guy who it was. "Jonah Smith from Brooklyn New York" he said.

Jonah hits on pretty much all of the qualities that I think a great songwriter and singer needs. And his band is one of the most empathetic I've seen - leaving lots of space for the best parts.

Here's a live vid of Jonah playing my current favourite song, "Little Black Angels". This is not the original arrangement, which I also recommend. I couldn't find a vid of "Stay a While", which is another favourite, but your instructions for today are to go and buy both of these tracks, now, on iTunes.

 

 

Singers Are Important To Me

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When I was young, I believed there was an agency that monitored TV commercials in order to ensure that all of the claims made were true. As time passed, I began to realize that advertising was simply an unregulated free-for-all battle of competing claims, at least one of which was not true.

In 1962 I went to see Little Stevie Wonder at the Gardens Auditorium in Vancouver. Stevie was 12 years old at the time, and so was I. He stood awkwardly at centre stage and sang along with his records. There was no pretense about it. You could hear the needle drop on each track, and Stevie was the only performer on the stage. Everyone knew that he was just singing along - you could hear both his voice and the recorded original - but the audience understood that he wrote the songs and sang them on the records. He was the heart and soul of the tunes we loved, and we were honored to be in his presence.

Last week we opened for CCR. The week before we did the same for The Sweet. Both bands were paid very large sums of money to headline these shows. Neither of them featured the singer who sang (and in the case of CCR, wrote) their hits.

“The Sweet” was a British “Glam-Rock” band that had hit records in the 1970’s. We played with one of the *two* currently touring versions of the band. One version contains only the original bass player, the other, the original guitar player. The Wikipedia page for The Sweet lists a total of 12 singers over the years - not counting the one who actually sang “Little Willy” and “Ballroom Blitz”.

“CCR” (”Creedence Clearwater Revival”) was an iconic American band fronted by the amazing one-of-a-kind talent; John Fogerty, who wrote, sang and played guitar on the CCR hit records. After going solo, Fogerty tried to stop the drummer and bass player from Creedence Clearwater Revival from advertising themselves as “CCR” (”Creedence Clearwater *Revisited*”) and touring all over North America with a singer who mimicked him - but he was unsuccessful. This was the band that we opened for in Waterloo Ontario last week.

This has happened before. Canada’s “Guess Who” toured successfully in America for years without Randy Bachman and Burton Cummings. “BTO” did the same without either the “B” (Randy Bachman) or the “T” (Fred Turner). To be fair, Randy’s brother, Robbie Bachman, BTO’s original drummer, was in attendance.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with trying to imitate famous front men and women. Singers for cover bands all over the world do it every night and some do it shockingly well. I did it for years. (In fact, back in the day I did a pretty convincing John Fogerty!) “Tribute” bands do note-for-note emulations of the groups they are paying tribute to. Some singers, like Shania *Twin* and *Nearly* Neil, make a living pretending to be their similarly-named heroes.

None of these singers, though, pretend for a moment that they are the *actual* singers featured on the hits they are singing. If, however, one of them were drafted to be the next singer for “CCR” or “The Sweet”, they would, at the expense of what I believe is a sizable portion of their ticket-buying audience, be doing exactly that.

And I don’t think that’s right.

People who buy tickets to see Shania *Twin* do not expect to see, nor do they pay the premium ticket price commanded by, Canada’s best looking country singer. I have to believe that many, if not most, of the people buying tickets to see, say, “CCR” headlining a big-ticket concert are expecting to see … well … CCR! And I don’t think they’re stupid because they didn’t know otherwise. The band should be billed as: “WHOEVER, featuring Stu Cook & Doug Clifford, formerly of CCR” - so there’s no possible confusion for the public.

I saw a poster the other day that stopped me in my tracks. It was promoting an upcoming show for “Doug and the Slugs”. Doug Bennett’s distinctive voice and inimitable stage presence were always the heart and soul of the tunes he wrote and recorded with his band and the shows they performed. Doug died a tragic death only a few short years ago. I’d like to humbly suggest that the band do as they once did when they released a single that Doug played no part in. They called themselves: “The Slugs Without Doug”. I think that would be a much more appropriate name for their current project.

Holiday Thoughts

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I was just reading about Iran again. I realized that, in response to an email from Dik Silver yesterday, I could almost spell Ahmadinejad and Khamenei without checking Huffington Post, where I still spend an inordinate amount of time. I have said the name “Ahmadinejad” out loud several times and think I pronounce it correctly. I am reading “Infinite Jest”, mostly because John Gruber of Daring Fireball said it was his “favorite novel ever”, and I’m trying to not think about the fact that its author, David Foster Wallace, recently hung himself after suffering from severe depression. The book is 1078 pages long and I’m currently on page 71 - so there will be another 1007 pages of slight discomfort with Wallace’s often black humor. It also trips me up a bit that he says “like” all the time. As in: “He uses the word “like”, like, inappropriately”. He also doesn’t use paragraphs which makes for large, intense, blocks of text. I listened to Merlin Mann’s talk on doing creative work this morning. He’s a funny guy but his only real points were that I should get started and not be afraid to suck. Good advice. I didn’t start then though. First I paid a bill. Fedex charged me a $10.50 “Advancement Fee” for paying $3.38 to Canada Customs for taxes on a $25.00 guitar pick order. That’s what the lady told me when I phoned to ask what the $10.50 was for. And I don’t have the time (or inclination) to write about the US audio/video company that wouldn’t take my Canadian VISA and didn’t like my PayPal and eventually cancelled my headphone amplifier order. Also this morning. I wrote to Paul Tobin thanking him for his CD and called the lady that had called Red Robinson who had called me because the lady knew another lady who wanted to give me a portrait that my Dad had done of me in the seventies. She was very nice and particularly understanding. I also called the roofer who put plywood where my skylights were about a month ago. I called last week and his wife told me she picked them up a week before that. This morning I said something about maybe getting the new, opening, skylights sometime before the end of summer. She agreed that would be a good idea. I forwarded off a couple of pieces of email for clarification after discovering there is, apparently, a new person who seems to be representing us in some manner at our booking agency. I made some notes containing what I know will seem like stupid questions and saved them to my desktop, from where I’ll retrieve them at a later date when seeking further enlightenment. I had to re-calk the sink in our upstairs bathroom this morning because the DAP Kitchen and Bathroom sealant didn’t seal when I did it last week. Today I used a new product that jammed-up in the tube two-thirds of the way around the sink and refused to extrude any further caulk. I probed it with a 2″ finishing nail and forced small blobs onto my finger, which I then applied piecemeal to the seam. I also finished, laying on my stomach on the bathroom floor, the tile caulk replacement job in a spot that I had missed down under the cupboards. My Trooper email didn’t work this morning, but before I could ask about it, our Webmeister had already jumped in and taken care of it. Our lighting Director sent an email about flight scheduling and holiday time that made my eyes glaze over and my head start to ache and I was only slightly relieved that his questions were not directed to me, since I will be asked to weigh in with my opinion at some point. Probably after my holiday is over.

Obama’s Cairo Speech

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I watched Obama’s Cairo speech this morning. It was a hope-inspiring way to start my day. As many of them did, this passage moved me deeply:

“Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America’s founding. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia. It’s a story with a simple truth: that violence is a dead end. It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered.”

Artists That I Love - Episode 1 - John Gorka

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When I started posting on Twitter a couple of weeks ago, I blatantly stole Bob Cesca's routine of posting an interesting video as the first post of the day. He calls it "Morning Awesome" and I chose to call it that too. Hopefully, the fact that I'm hipping you to Bob's excellent political commentary site; "Bob Cesca's Goddamn Awesome Blog" will go some way towards earning his forgiveness - and help to avoid an ugly internets lawsuit. As if Bob knows I exist. Bob posts the vids right there on his site but, because of Twitter's 140 character limit, I can only supply a link and hope that my fellow twitterers will click through to what I want them to see. In my case, these are songs by favourite artists whose careers, for one reason or another, have played out somewhere slightly below the popular music radar. I've kept a list of all the links with the intention of sharing them here on my site, where an unlimited spew of characters is possible (and often, in my case, probable).

I've been experiencing an overabundance of mental disarray this week - with both taxes and an out-of-date contract rider calling for my undivided attention - so it took until last night to realize that I could probably embed the youtube videos the same way my good friend Bob does.

Once I learned how, I couldn't decide what song to post first, so I experimented with a random (but very sweet) video of two teenagers singing the first verse of a song I wrote forty years ago. Sarah and Kayla are the least well-exposed artists on my list, so they've turned out to be a very good place to start.

Today I'd like to present John Gorka, singing "Love is Our Cross to Bear" in what looks like someone's basement, but is probably a small club. Please notice his amazing songwriting and captivating voice.


If you like this one, check "Armed With a Broken Heart" and "Gypsy Life" - which contains one of my favourite observations on life as a gypsy: "People love you when they know you're leaving soon".

Why I Like Twitter Better Than Facebook

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I have been trying to explain Twitter to friends - especially regarding its differences with Facebook - and have not been particularly successful. I think this article covers it pretty well (while also predicting that Facebook plans further changes to become more “Twitter-Like”.)

Clipped from Bokardo.com:

In general, there are two ways to model human relationships in software. An “asymmetric” model is how Twitter currently works. You can “follow” someone else without them following you back. It’s a one-way relationship that may or may not be mutual.

Facebook, on the other hand, has always used a “symmetric” model, where each time you add someone as a friend they have to add you as a friend as well. This is a two-way relationship, and it is required to have any relationship at all. So as a Facebook user there is always a 1-1 relationship among your friends. Everyone who you have claimed as a friend has also claimed you as a friend.

Andrew Chen recently described one advantage of the Twitter model. It allows 4 types of relationships, while Facebook only allows for two. The two relationships of Facebook are “friend and Not Friend”. The four relationships of Twitter are:

People who follow you, but you don’t follow back

People who don’t follow you, but you follow them

You both follow each other (Friends!)

Neither of you follow each other

Full article HERE.

(You can follow me on Twitter, if you want, here.)

The Juno Awards

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“How do you feel about winning the best group Juno?” I was asked.

“It’s fucking wonderful” I responded.

” ‘It’s wonderful’ said Trooper singer Ra McGuire at last night’s Juno Award ceremonies …” reported the Toronto newspaper headline the next day.

It has always annoyed me that I wasn’t quoted correctly. There is, of course, a HUGE difference between “fucking wonderful” and just “wonderful”.

The 2009 Junos took place in Vancouver tonight. I didn’t attend this year. Trooper has received seven Juno nominations - and won the “Best Group” award - but we’ve only attended twice. Once, in 1978, when we were nominated for “Most Promising Group of the Year” and in 1980 when we were up for both “Best Group” and “Album of the Year”.

We flew to Toronto for our first Junos when we were nominated for “Most Promising Group of the Year”. We arrived proudly in the Royal York ballroom which was decorated with large blown-up album covers of all the nominated artists, and saw that ours was the only cover that was, humiliatingly, conspicuous in its absence. The evening deteriorated further when the “Most Promising” award was presented to “The THP Orchestra”.

In 1978, we were one of five bands nominated for “Group of the Year”, but chose not to attend. Rush won that year. In 1979 we were nominated again for “Group of the Year” and we chose, again, to not attend. Rush won it again. In 1980, now simply following a comfortable tradition, we once again turned down the Juno organizer’s invitation to fly to the Toronto ceremonies. At first they tried to shame us into coming, which didn’t work. Finally, they broke down and told us that we were going to win at least one award. So we embarked on what was to become a great Trooper adventure that ended with, among other things, members of the band rolling, drunk and in white suits, in a Toronto hotel driveway with Burton Cummings. My personal most embarrassing Juno moment came that year when a young Vancouver friend shouted across a room filled with Canadian music-biz royalty.

“Ra McGuire!!” he shouted when he spotted me. “You’re BIG!!”

It’s funny that I still remember that. We’ve never returned to the Junos and, because the whole idea of them still makes me uncomfortably squirmy, I’ve only managed to watch them on TV two or three times in the intervening years. There have been a couple of occasions, however, when I would have enjoyed shouting back at Bryan Adams, who’s gone on to do quite well for himself.

I’ve had more to say about this (and other things) on Twitter. You can follow me, if you want, here.

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day!

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Happy Saint Patrick’s Day to my fellow Irishmen (and women)! I’m flashing back, this morning, to the month we spent in Ireland in 2000. We found this very funny article in our Craig Castle room in Galway, Northern Ireland. Hopefully Dave Barry won’t mind if I share a short, and very true, excerpt here:

“Geographically, Ireland is a medium-sized rural island that is slowly but steadily being consumed by sheep. It consists mostly of scenic pastures occasionally interrupted by quaint towns with names such as (these are actual Irish town names) Ardfert, Ballybunion, Coole, Culleybackey, Dingle, Dripsey, Emmoo, Feakle, Fishguard, Gweedore, Inch, Knockaderry, Lack, Leap, Lusk, Maam, Meentullynagarn, Muff, Newmarket-on-Fergus, Nutt’s Corner, Oola, Pontoon, Rear Cross, Ringaskiddy, Screeb, Sneem, Spiddle, Spink, Stradbally, Tang and Tempo.

These towns are connected by a modern, state-of-the-art system of medieval roads about the width of a standard bar of hotel soap; the result is that motorists drive as fast as possible in hopes of getting to their destinations before they meet anybody coming the other way. The only thing that prevents everybody from going 120 mph is the nationwide system - probably operated by the Ministry of Traffic Safety - of tractors being driven very slowly by old men wearing caps; you encounter these roughly every two miles, rain or shine, day or night. As an additional safety measure, the roads are also frequented by herds of cows, strolling along and mooing appreciatively at the countryside, reminding you very much of tour groups.

A typical Irish town consists of several buildings, one of which is always a bar, called a “pub.” Next to this there will typically be another pub, which is adjacent to several more pubs. Your larger towns may also have a place that sells food, but this is not critical”