Rumours of Glory
Page 47
or is it Skopje? I forget
Through the thin hotel wall a man groans in his dreams
And on the other side of the world
the drug squad busts a child’s birthday party
Puts bullets in the family dog and the blood goes all over the baby
And the Mounties are strip-searching schoolgirls
because they can
And a car crashes and burns on an off-ramp from the Gardiner
Two dogs in the backseat die, and in the front
a man and his mother
Forensics reveals the lady has pitchfork wounds in her chest —
Pitchfork!
And that the same or a similar instrument has been screwed to the dash
to make sure the driver goes too
You’ve never seen everything
I see:
A leader of the people with a ring in his nose
And the leaders of business tell him which way to go
With tugs on the golden chain which once led the golden calf
And we’re supposed to be impressed with their success
But my mind goes blank before the unbelievable indifference
shown life
spirit
the future
anything green
anything just
Bad pressure coming down
Tears—what we really traffic in
Ride the ribbon of shadow
Never feel the light falling all around
Years ago when my brother was in India
A small-town baker got a bright idea
He cut his flour with pesticide
and sent a bunch of neighbours on their longest journey
He was just being cheap—trying to make a profit
Didn’t even have shareholders to answer to
But it’s worth remembering, as we sell off the forest
gene-splice the world’s food into an instrument of control
maim and destroy as acts of theatre,
what came next —
That when the survivors looked around
and understood what had been done
they butchered
that baker
Snow swirls in the parking-lot light like flour
like pesticide
There’s a trade war brewing—or at least that’s the face they paint on it
But it’s only more transnational manipulation
It’s all bad magic and gangrene politics
Hormone disruptors and carcinogenetics
Greed twists eternal in the human breast
But the market has no brain
It doesn’t love it’s not God
All it knows is the price of lunch
Here I sit
Staring at my own shadow
Feeling my blood move
Trying not to have a drink
Trying to find somewhere to put the rage I’m carrying
Bad pressure coming down
Tears—what we really traffic in
ride the ribbon of shadow
Never feel the light falling all around
Never feel the light falling all around
You’ve never seen everything
“YOU’VE NEVER SEEN EVERYTHING,” 2001
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/96.
22
One morning in Toronto, I awoke to the realization that I had lived in the city or its environs for twenty years. This was 2000. “Come the millennium” was a good time to move. I could have gone anywhere, but for very good reasons I chose Montreal. I was craving a new landscape to explore, but the move also put me close to Jenny, who, having gone to Montreal for college, had made it her home. It was also five hours closer to Sally, less than an hour from the border of Vermont.
Yet during the four years I lived in Montreal, I found myself mostly alone. I set up the sunniest room as a studio for Sally, but she rarely visited, and never for long enough to paint, so the row house I rented, which was about 150 years old and not very big, became a “man cave,” a receptacle for my pack-rat assemblage of belongings: instruments and amps, books, CDs, a rambling collection of knives and swords, clothes, art, ironic war toys from odd places (a scrap-metal machine gun from Mexico, a wicker tank from Mozambique), and a couple of rifles but no handguns. Unlike in Ontario, possessing handguns in Quebec would have required a police inspection of my house by members of a force that had a reputation for being difficult to deal with. That didn’t sit well with me, so I gave away most of the handguns to shooting friends and sold the rest. The house had almost no furniture. Sally gave me a set of quality pots and pans to replace the camping gear I mostly cooked with.
Montreal is Canada’s second-largest city and the home of a vibrant arts scene. When I got there I anticipated absorbing the arts and plenty of music, improving my French, hanging out with people. The first person I went out to hear play was Howard Levy, a harmonica player of staggering prowess, in a bar not far from my house. The proprietor made a fuss about my being there, bought me a drink, got me a table, and made sure everybody noticed. I didn’t want to sound ungrateful—it’s nice to be appreciated—but I had to tell him, “Thanks, but I just want to sit in the back and get into the music. I don’t want to be part of the show.” It was embarrassing. It’s even uncomfortable to put it in print—oh, the poor celebrity, the rigours of fame, etc. But that wasn’t it at all. I felt the same aversion to attention that I’ve carried all through my life. The result was that the whole four years I lived in Montreal, with the exception of street fairs and the jazz festival, I never again went out alone at night to hear music. I’d go to a movie or occasionally join Jenn and her friends, but just showing up by myself and risking being centred out was too uncomfortable. Eventually I made a friend in photographer Zoi Kilakos. We would get together for dinner now and then and hang out for an evening.
Daytime was different. I rode my bike a lot, even in winter if the pavement was not too icy. I’m a big fan of the bicycle. It provides a semblance of freedom in an urban landscape while moving us along at speeds that make sense to human physiology. The bike also promises adventure, which is easily found when the temperature is hovering around minus twenty degrees Celsius.
Past the derelict mattress
and the overgrown pavement
over the tracks
and through the hole in the fence
Past graffiti-bright buildings
and the junkyard alarm bell
and the screaming police cars
and it’s all present tense
It’s my beat
In my new town
Past the drunk woman reeling
with her bag of provisions
Down through the tunnel
with the stink-fuming bus
Onto the bike path
where it’s something like freedom
and the wind in my earring whispers
Trust what you must
It’s my beat
In my new town
Ancient and always
The wheel’s ever whirling
Today I’m riding
Tomorrow I walk
Step through forever
into this very moment
The heart is pumping
and the heart rocks
It’s my beat
In my new town
“MY BEAT,” 2001
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/97.
The solitude of Montreal was at least productive for writing and practicing the songs that ended up on You’ve Never Seen Everything. The house came with a downstairs neighbour who was almost unnaturally tolerant of my noises. A guitar, especially an electric one, played in a detached house torments few neighbours, but amplify it in an apartment and people end up hating you. The woman who lived in the basement never complained, even when I asked her about it. In fact, when she moved, she told me she would miss the music. I think she was being nice.
Songwriting isn’t pretty; it’s not a concert or CD. You play the same riff over and over for an hour. When I lived with Judy in Toronto, the woman through the wall was refreshingly honest about it. “Before living next door to you,” she said, “I had no idea what a painful process songwriting is.”
The music magazine Paste called You’ve Never Seen Everything “easily one of the highlights” of my career. Gary Craig brought back his riveting drums, augmented by young Toronto jazz drummer Ben Riley and additional drums and percussion by Stephen Hodges, known for, among other things, his work with Tom Waits. (Hodges also played marimba on “Messenger Wind.”) John Dymond, Larry Taylor, Steve Lucas, and Rich Brown played bass. Colin Linden, who once again contributed his strong ear and technical gifts as coproducer, played electric mandolins and a small bass part. As usual, we brought in some ringers to add vocal harmonies, including Jackson Browne, Sarah Harmer, Emmylou Harris, Sam Phillips, Jonell Mosser, and two guys from a young Toronto band called the Supers, Maury Lafoy and Graham Powell. John Whynot beautifully engineered the sound and added some perfectly mysterious whistling on “Messenger Wind.”
The magic of what violinist Hugh Marsh contributed can’t be overstated. Hugh is on all the songs but one, gracing them with his alternately funky and painterly violin. It was my first album collaboration with him since Big Circumstance in 1988, a fifteen-year gap it felt good to bridge. Hubie and I and Gary, who played the role of human beat box on a very unorthodox drum kit made up of odd percussion instruments, performed all the songs as a trio. All the other elements were then added, though Colin and I briefly considered leaving the tracks in their trio form, as the material shone brightly in that spare setting. In the end, we opted for a richer palette.
As mentioned earlier, guests on You’ve Never Seen Everything included pianist Andy Milne, coauthor of two of the songs. With Andy came a fellow Dapp Theory band member, Swiss harmonica prodigy Grégoire Maret, who played on “Everywhere Dance” and “You’ve Never Seen Everything.”
We had recorded the “real” version of “Trickle Down” for Andy’s album with Dapp Theory. Nearly all the pieces on that record had unusual time signatures. The musicians could play in seven-four time, then in five for a couple of bars, then a bar of eleven, whatever, and they could groove through it without even thinking. The effect is very strong, but I couldn’t do it. I was able to mostly fit in when I played with them on their versions, but mine had to be simpler. I had to be able to get the words out over whatever I was playing. Andy agreed to my altering the music of the verses, but I don’t think he was all too happy with how I did it. His enthusiasm on the album, though, came through undiminished.
“Open,” the second song on You’ve Never Seen Everything, wrote itself very quickly. I woke up one morning holding my breath. The little deep-set, arched window in my bedroom was blowing in light spiced with early-morning street sounds. I started cataloguing the sounds and what I was feeling. I felt like I wanted to be open to it all. I’m still working on that. Outside our collective darkness lives something that touches the core of us, perhaps what we call “love.” I embraced and understood this feeling as a holy and benevolent force, perhaps because it contrasted so well, and so often, with the many dark mansions of my own life and those of my brethren. I had a glimpse of humanity poised to experience a spiritual coalescence, open enough to invest ourselves in nurturing relationships with each other and with the beautiful creatures of this planet, with the cosmos, with God. The song was an encouragement to all of us, especially me, to keep trudging in that direction.
“Open” followed “Tried and Tested,” the songs intentionally juxtaposed as a marriage of dark and light elements, which are important on this album. Yet “Tried and Tested” is not necessarily a “dark” song. The tune itself is intentionally upbeat. We are often—some of us perpetually—tried and tested by the times, by history, by bullies and fakes, by our own foibles and weaknesses, by our neighbours and families, by tragedies we encounter or create. I don’t think I’m alone in this. The song carries these challenging elements of my life onto an audio tableau as something to be addressed, assuaged, and set toward light. We have to acknowledge and understand these things in order to get to light, to remember delight, to be open.
Tried and tested
Tried and tested
By the cries of birds
By the lies I’ve heard
By my own loose talk
By the way I walk
By the claws of beasts
By the laws of priests
By the glutton’s feast
By the word police
By the planet’s arc
By the falling dark
By the state of the art
By the beat of my heart
By dark finance
By the marketing dance
By the poverty trance
By the fateful glance
Tried and tested
Tried and tested
By the pressure to rhyme
By the wages of crime
By the drop of a dime
By the ghost of the times
By the spurs of desire
By “What does love require”
By what I waited for
By what showed up at the door
Tried and tested
Tried and tested
By the nation wide
By the tears I’ve cried
By the lure of false pride
By the need to take sides
By the weight of choice
By the still small voice
By things I forget
By what I haven’t met yet
Tried and tested
Tried and tested
Pierced by beauty’s blade and skinned by wind
Begged for more—was given—begged again
I’m still here
I’m still here
“TRIED AND TESTED,” 2002
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/98.
During the same period that Andy and I were writing “Trickle Down,” I was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. The ceremony took place in Hamilton, Ontario, on March 4, 2001, during the thirtieth annual Juno Awards. While deeply honoured, I felt the induction seemed somewhat premature. Wasn’t I supposed to be dead first? Well, no, apparently not—artistic taxidermy not required. As I told a Toronto Star reporter at the time, “If age means shutting down, closing the heart, relying on past habits to get you through, it’ll be a problem for any kind of creative work. So far that hasn’t been the case. I feel as if I’m learning at the same rate as I always have, but I’m more aware of it now, and able to appreciate it more. My models for graceful aging are guys like John Lee Hooker and Mississippi John Hurt, who never stopped working till they dropped. Eventually time is going to get everyone, but . . . you don’t have to stop maturing just because you become mature.”
I was nervous at the Junos, more nervous than I was when threatened with castration in Mozambique. Not only was it the first time in twenty years that I would attend the awards ceremony, but I had to make a speech live on national television. A couple of months later, I would discover that the stress I felt had given me an atrial fibrillation that wouldn’t go away (“the beat of my heart”). All that day, I was aware of feeling more apprehensive than I had ever been, which is saying something. I was in and out of the bathroom every half hour. At the awards show itself, in spite of Sally’s efforts to calm me down, the pattern continued. I threw down quite a bit of questionable bar Scotch, to no avail.
TORONTO GLOBE AND MAIL, ANTHONY JENKINS
The producers of the show had put together a very nice segment honouring me. Bono, Jackson Browne, Margo Timmins of the Cowboy Junkies, and Peter Garrett of Midnight Oil said nice things about me in video testimonials. The Barenaked Ladies (all of whom were men in normal clothing) performed “Lovers in a Dangerous Time” (which had been their first top-forty hit, in 1991), Jann Arden and Terri Cla
rk sang “Wondering Where the Lions Are,” and Sarah Harmer sang “Waiting for a Miracle.” (A year and a half later, Sarah kindly dropped by the Clubhouse recording studio in Toronto and added harmonies to several songs on You’ve Never Seen Everything.) Gordon Lightfoot, the archetypal Canadian singer-songwriter, and scientist and environmental activist David Suzuki “inducted” me. (I had worked with Suzuki the previous year on an effort to pressure the government of Canada to address climate change.)
Then it was my moment. As I walked to the gleaming Lucite lectern, the quaking in my knees ceased. I felt a rush of clear energy flood my system and thought, “Geez, I know how to do this!”
Thank you. It’s a thrill to be included in the incredible company of artists who make up the Hall of Fame. It’s been my privilege to be one voice in the human choir during a period which I think will turn out to have been a formative one for English Canadian culture. Over the years there has been a wonderful flowering of creativity and spunk in our music scene, paralleling, often reflecting other currents flowing around us.
In the sixties, when I was just beginning to play for people and write songs, the world began to recognize its oneness. We had McLuhan, Vatican II, we had Swami Vishnu Devananda dropping chrysanthemums from the air over Belfast and Suez. We had a generation of people, worldwide, who began to appreciate their common burdens and strengths instead of fixating on what separated them. This spirit has developed into a widespread embracing of each other’s music and cultures, at least important aspects of them. Some people are afraid of this, but to me it’s a positive thing. There is a dark side—that is, the promotion of uniformity by those whose interest is power by profit. Their job is easier if we’re all the same—if we all like whatever they tell us to like, so much so that they sometimes act like we are all subscribers to the same shaky pyramid scheme with them at the top. It’s this thinking that has led to the weakening of national sovereignty, of democratic principles—that has, in effect, hijacked the movement to global community and tried to turn it into commerce under the name “globalization.”
To thrive, society needs a sense that we’re looking out for each other, needs to know where it came from and what sacrifices were made to create it. It needs to be literate as well as web-wise. We have to stop the hemorrhaging in health care and education, the shrinking of environmental safeguards. We’ve got to get past the fad of privatization—the mercantile system sucked when they tried it in the 1700s, and it sucks now. It’s our community, it’s our world.