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In which the author pretends feebly to reminisce about a time that wasn't really all that long ago, but about which he's been dreaming for the last month or so straight. We have a collection of glass smoking pipes for all. . checkpoint Come on up here, kids, lemme tell you a story. It would have been the Summer of ninety-and-eight, and yer Grampa Tony was jes' getting started on this whole music thing, having finally figured out that to actually make a name for yourself you had to get out of your own house and play in front of strangers, and if'n they didn't throw rocks at you or some such then you mightn't be half bad, maybe a third bad or even less, which was good, don't make me draw a diagram or I'll whup ya and blame it on senility. Useta be the best cure for mouthy little hamsters like you kids was a quick hosepipe or bit of belt upside yer heads, just to get youse thinking. (Course, that was back around the turn of the century, before all non-procreative human touch was outlawed and they perfected the B-Quiet Pill(tm) for kids. But anyway.) So I was off doing my second tour across Canada (the first one, in ninety-and-seven, consisted of exactly two dates, Regina and Moose Jaw, and the Moose Jaw gig was at a house party and the Regina gig was attended by, if you take out the club owner, the bartender, the opening act and their girlfriends, exactly zero people), the main reason of which was not to actually go play a ton of cities (which we succeeded quite admirably in not doing) but rather to get the hell out of Toronto for a couple of weeks in August and visit the Songwriting Centre of Canada. The Centre was the brainchild of an old friend of mine, Scott Wilson, a 40ish music hustler who I knew when he worked in promotion for this event coordinator. He was always thinking a step ahead of where he was, which I liked, although he did have the usual side effect of talking shit sometimes. Anyway, he had this idea (maybe others had it too and they worked it out among themselves, but he was the one I knew first, so I'm giving him credit) to open up a center somewhere in the middle of the continent specifically as a mid-tour retreat for songwriters to recharge their creative juices. Saskatchewan seemed like the perfect place - they had lots of cheap land and a government that was as sympathetic to artistic and cultural concerns as anywhere else. Scott Wilson and Joel Scott (and the whole group of people that actually put this together) found this abandoned youth prison on the shore of Buffalo Pound Lake outside of Moose Jaw, and they took the bars off the windows and put in carpets and a coat or two of paint, hired a decent cook, and the Songwriting Centre of Canada was born. Scott contacted me fairly early on in the life of the place, figuring I could go and talk the place up to the touring acts in Toronto, and so I (with one of the guys in my then-band) got to go there and enjoy a glorious W.O. Mitchell-esque summer break in the middle of flat, beautiful nowhere. I loved it so much that I went back the next year, by which point the place had started to develop a bit of a reputation. This touring band from Africa was staying there when I first landed there (I had managed through sheer boorishness to finagle another two weeks there gratis, even though they were charging a nominal fee for lodging at that point), and the Headstones and the New Meanies and a couple of other acts came, crashed for a couple of days, and left. Anyway, one of the bands that came for a couple of days was Scruj MacDuhk. Between myself, Scott and Joel (the three constant members at the Centre), the place became quite the crusty guys' hangout when no one else was there. We'd sit there with a pretty much endless supply of beer, out on the deck, watching the waterskiers by day and the Northern Lights at night. (If you've never seen the Northern Lights in person, they put the supposedly realistic Hollywood special effects to absolute freaking shame.) Scruj were these seven apple-cheeked kids from Winnipeg who were all gee-whiz about being on their first tour. Lenny Podolak was their leader, a precocious kid of about 20 who could play a mean fiddle and apparently came from a Canadian music business family (I learned this while they were there). He joined in the guys' fun, but even I felt like some kind of grizzled road pig compared to him. He knew an endless supply of maritime folk songs, and played them constantly. You'd think that would be annoying after, like, 12 hours. Nope. He was enjoying himself, and his exuberance was enough to win us all over. Most of the other guys in the band were just happy to get a break from the schedule in a complete retreat. Sure, they joined in playing, and the drinking, and the barbeques, and the drinking, and we went out on the lake in the houseboat for a while, but they were mostly content to crash in their now-carpeted cells-cum-suites and surface for meals. It was a lot like camp, or maybe some Fitzgeraldian resort. We'd pass the instruments around and lie out under the glorious 270-degree prairie sky. Every once in a while we'd pack up the truck and go into town to play a show or see a Saskatchewan Roughriders game or go grab some Molson Canadians at the Park Hotel in Moose Jaw or something, but by and large we just did nothing, beautiful sweet easy nothing, except write songs and play them for each other. Life rarely stays that easy. Scruj MacDuhk is now a nationally known touring act, Scott Wilson disappeared last I heard and is probably in Central America somewheres, the Center is probably still in existence (I haven't been out that way in three years now), and most of the bands I knew from there have disappeared, as maybe I have for many of them who only pay attention to the Canadian music beat. Still, when I realized I wanted to move out of Toronto in ninety-and-nine, I gave a lot of thought to going out there and getting some cheap land and writing books in complete solitude. That I wound up going the exact diametrical opposite way only serves maybe to show how little I really knew about how I wanted to do what it was I wanted to do, that is, write and write and write. Besides, I thought, I could always retire there. This, this is the time for the fast life. Saskatchewan is the kind of place that is best enjoyed at a seasonal pace, not by the frantic second-to-second of Manhattan. That's why I look so old to you now, kids. I'm almost forty years old, and this decrepit body is all I have to show for living the life I chose. Well okay, this decrepit body and that wall of Nobel Prizes and Oscars over there. But never mind. I may just live out the rest of my days on the prairie yet. You'd like that, wouldn't you. Get the geezer out of yer pink preteen ungrateful hair. Why, I'll show you the back of my hand! - Tony Hightower |
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