Sam Roberts

"There's no road
that ain't a hard road
to travel on."
-- Sam Roberts, "Hard Road"

Don Freed

Apropos of nothing, I thought I'd look up "Talkin' Louis Riel Day Blues" by Don Freed on the internet. Isn't that the home of everything these days?

My my, I couldn't find it.

And yet, there I was in 1992 in Saskatoon (what was the name of that place?) in a little club watching Don Freed record a live album. Colin James guested.

I think "Talkin' Louis Riel Day Blues" is a song every Canadian should know.

I'd first seen Freed when he opened for Jane Siberry at the Ontario Place Forum in 1988-ish. Is none of this on YouTube?

From Wikipedia, I learned that the live album was only ever available on cassette. I have a copy. Upstairs. Somewhere.

But I didn't know this - Freed with Johnny Cash - and more.

Here he is from 2007:



Also on MySpace.

Here he is again.



Rock on, Don!

No Regrets, Coyote

Another Tricky Day

Mary Prankster

So, the kids are in bed.

It was 2002. My girlfriend and I, well, we weren't, anymore, and I was bored of going home alone, and I read something in NOW about this show on College and there wasn't anything to stop me from going and so I went and I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't this; this pixie of a what? Punk rock, beatnik, flapper? With a mouth like Lenny Bruce?

It was a great reminder, that, yes, sometimes it's best to just give life the finger.

I understand that the "Mary Prankster character" has retired. But she is carried around in a million hearts.

And out there in little clubs across "America" the next generation of rock and roll hillbillies is givin' it to the man.



Also - video for Mac & Cheese

*

[First published in The Danforth Review]

Lemonade: Live
by Mary Prankster
Palace Coup Records, 2004

It wasn't supposed to be this way. A website devoted to Canadian small press books reviewing a live album by a USAmerican. What gives? Maybe it's the comment a friend said to me: "Tough chicks are cool." Maybe it's that old desire to keep trying something new. For sure it dates to a night back in December 2002 when I saw Ms. Prankster at Rancho Relaxo on College St. in Toronto. Her band had split from her after recording her then latest CD, Tell Your Friends, and she took to the stage solo with acoustic guitar. I knew nothing about her, but soon learned that she was woman of undeniable charisma, wit and intelligence -- and kickass tattoos.

See more of Mary Prankster at her website.

Lemonade: Live showcases 10 songs and some in-between-song-patter: "welcome to my late-twenties." Like many live albums, it's a kind of greatest hits package. Seven of the songs on the album are from Prankster's previous releases, three are previously unrecorded. For my money, Lemonade: Live is not the best place for a Prankster first encounter, but it is a love-in for committed fans of the albums Blue Skies Forever, Roulette Girl and the already mentioned, Tell Your Friends -- the most recent studio album ... and the one interested consumers should check out first, though those wanting a rawer Prankster experience should probably go for Blue Skies Forever, which includes titles such as "Tits and Whisky" and "Mercyfuck," two songs that have zero chance of getting played on mainstream radio.

Mary Prankster is, of course, not her real name. She's a persona rooted in the Merry Pranksters, the band of proto-Hippies ostensibly led by Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cockoo's Nest, and Neal Cassady, the object of Jack Kerouac's eye in On The Road. The Pranksters were the subject of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by the godfather of New Journalism, Tom Wolfe. What Mary Prankster has to do with this group of 1960s swingers ain't exactly clear ... but the Pranksters did drive a multi-coloured bus named "Further" across the country ... and that's where Mary takes us. Into a space where life can be honestly confronted. And a place where goofiness is a key strategy for resolving life's conundrums.

Baby, you're a poseur
Honey, I should know
You ask me where the show's are
But then you never go

Poseur purgatory
Awaits you in the end
But that's not my story
I'll tell you why my friend

Got my Martens on with steely toes
Spike my hair and pierce my nose
I'm going up to Punk Rock Heaven

"Punk Rock Heaven" (from Roulette Girl)

This song is sung as if Prankster were a swinging 1920s flapper. It's an interesting song because it showcases Prankster's propensity to jump genres, but it also shows she's self-conscious of her lineage. Kesey, Johnny Rotten, our Sweet Mary as Ella Fitzgerald. Most recently, Prankster has been experimenting with country music stylings ... and Lemonade: Live includes her in full imitation twang, among other incarnations. Lemonade: Live is Prankster with new bandmates and a variety of cameo musicians. Like I said earlier, it's a bit like a greatest hits collection, but it also seems like a document of Prankster at a transitional moment. "Welcome to my late-twenties," she says right off the top. How much longer can she go on singing, "The world is full of bastards/ I've dated every one" among other such lines?

As I was thinking about what to write in this review, I kept coming back to the question: Why do I think there is value in the songs? It's not the music, which is fine -- but could be from many other people. It's not her charismatic personality, which comes through in performance and in the recordings -- but there are thousands of charismatic people.

Ultimately, I decided the songs have value because they're fundamentally honest. Some are funny, some are quirky, all shine with a bright intelligence. Honesty may not be a rarer commodity than groovy music, great teeth, and cherry cheeks, but there is a difference between confession and art ... honesty and art are mutually reinforcing; they make each other better; transform each other in an act of alchemy ... and Prankster, remember, is a "Prankster." As she sings in one song, "I know who I ain't." She presents herself as a mask, all the better to get at the truth (Bob Dylan, a man of many masks and much truth telling, started life as a Zimmerman).

And what of the songs? The earlier ones are goofier, rawer. The songs on Tell My Friends are more lyrically complicated. All of the songs shudder at pretense ("poseur purgatory/ awaits you in the end"). Finally, Prankster is capable of being both hopeful and hopeless in love.

I fucked a bunch of stupid men
Went back and fucked them all again
Was never much for romance anyhow

"New Tricks" (from Roulette Girl)

*

Wake up every morning
In the breaking heart of town
On the half of couch
I can't be bothered to fold down

Here's the thought that gets me
Out of bed and to the bong
What if I said
I could do better I was wrong?

"None for me" (from Tell Your Friends)

Not that it's all self-pity with Prankster. Actually, I don't think any of this is self-pity, it's just a scrupulous self-examination, a la John Lennon ("I'm a Loser," "Help!", "Mother"), about the challenges of finding a way through. Like Lennon also, Prankster can write lovely love odes:

You're an answer
In the form of a question
You're a riddle
That's just aching to be solved

If I many be so bold as to venture
A suggestion
Hey - I would love to see the way this gets resolved

Because you're hotter
Than an August in El Paso
And you're colder
Than a January 5th

And you tie my silver tongue up
Like a lasso
And your smile shines like
The ribbon on a gift

"Spill" (from Tell Your Friends)

She also does rage outs:

Heard what you said about me
You're better off without me
Heard I was begging you to stay

"Tell Your Friends" (Part One) (from Tell Your Friends)

It's this mixture of gloom and brightness that is at the centre of the title of the live CD: "I've seen the future/ And it looks like lemonade." Lemons may be sour, but they make a sweet drink. Life ain't so different.

Here's my favorite Prankster lyric:

Shoplift ideology
So at a loss for leaders
When the flame-retardant books came out
They had to burn the readers
And the politicians' patriot pride
Seemed more convincing when they lied

Oh my melancholy baby
Is the whole world going crazy?
'Cause it can't be me who's mad
I got it bad, but it sure is hot in here

"Brave New Baby" (from Tell Your Friends)

As Michelle Shocked said, "Keep on rockin', girl. Yeah, keep on a-rockin'."



http://thenewcanlit.blogspot.com/

Little Red Rooster

Apropos of nothing, the link to the Rolling Stones' cover of Willie Dixon's Little Red Rooster on YouTube (the video won't embed).

Earlier tonight, I was listening to a CD of early Stones. Ah, it reminded me of a line in a Mark Anthony Jarman short story (which one?) about how the Stones lost it after 1965. Or something like that.

Even when I was in high school in the 1980s, there were traces (faint, yes!) of discussion about whether the Stones (a) still mattered (b) the point at which they'd lost it. Was it with the death of Brian Jones?

I remember that Jarman line (faintly, yes!) because I remember thinking that Jarman was trying to capture something in his stories that the Stones were trying to capture in their early songs. And it wasn't fame.

What was it? That thing?

(This post goes out to all of those over the holidays who had little ones say to them something along the lines of, "But that happened in the 19th century!" .... And you held back and didn't say, "20th, actually.")

Now an embedded video alleging to be previously unreleased Brian Jones.

The Who

Forty-one years separate the first video below, from the second.





I was going to conclude with: No comment. But what the heck.

As a teenager in the 1980s, I was primarly a Beatles freak. But it was hard not to take note of the Who's final concert in Toronto in 1982. Long Live Rock (Be it Dead or Alive)!



So when they reunited in 1985 for Live Aid, I had to watch. The video feed cut off halfway through "My Generation."



In 1989, the band reunited, played "Tommy" -- and came to Exhibition Stadium in Toronto, backed by a horn section.



It  was strangely disappointing. Still, there they were. I'd finally seen them in the flesh.

Then in 2006, they put out their first album since the early 1980s and played in Toronto again. I went.



I sat at the far end of the Air Canada Centre and thought: Pete is a guitar god.

I thought, They don't make 'em like that any more.

I thought I was 15 again.

I thought, I will remember this for the rest of my life.

All kidding aside, it was a remarkable concert. For one, the audience had 15-year-olds and 70-year-olds. And the band was LOUD. It was everything the 1989 concert hadn't been. I thought, This is The Who. This is the Who of the 1970s. And isn't Zach Starkey having the time of his life, acting out Keith Moon.

In a book of interviews, Bono recounts seeing The Who at the post-9/11 concert in NYC. He says they walked in, looking like longshoremen, and U2 felt like amateurs.

Okay, I don't really have anything to say. Except, Hope I die (before I get old).

Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen turns 75 on Monday, and I see from today's Globe and Mail that his two novels are being republished in a new, single-volume issue.

Below is a report from 2006, when he sang on Bay Street in Toronto with Anjani Thomas.

*

He came, he spoke, he sang, he joked, he smiled, he laughed, he recited poetry.

It began with Heather Reisman, Founder and CEO of Indigo Books & Music Inc., saying she was known around her corporation as "Chief Book Lover . . . but on this occasion, I'm just 'Chief Lover.'"

Reisman spoke shortly after 3:45 p.m. from a 20'-wide stage set up outside the Bay Street entrance of Indigo's Toronto flagship store. At 3:00 p.m., the police had blocked off the road at either end of the block and the crowd, which had been slow to gather, soon filled the street well over 1,000 strong.

Reisman introduced Ron Sexsmith and the Bare Naked Ladies. Sexsmith sang "Heart With No Companion," noting it was "one of my favorite Leonard Cohen songs." Sexsmith gave the song a strong and heartfelt rendition, a twinge of sadness in his voice, a seeming requirement of every Cohen composition.

Sadness was replaced with a complicated mix of camp and nostalgia when BNL's Steven Page followed Sexsmith with lead vocals on "Sister's Of Mercy." The Bare Naked Ladies and Leonard Cohen? Only in Canada, eh? Somehow it all worked fine. There was a keen "in-joke" quality to the performance, but a deep reverence also.

Reisman then returned to exhort the audience with the news that for the first time ever in Canada: "a poetry book is the number one best-seller!!!" The crowd cheered. The title was, of course, Cohen's Book of Longing (M&S, 2006), his first new title in over a decade.

Then there he was!

The crowd responded with sustained applause. Cohen: "I want to apologize to the pedestrians and the drivers for the inconvenience." He looked relaxed, pleased, slightly hunched. He recited a poem, then introduced Anjani Thomas and her band -- keyboard, bass, guitar -- and left the stage. Thomas, under the name "Anjani," has just released "Blue Alert," a CD of new songs, lyrics by Cohen with whom she has worked off and on since 1984 when she sang backing vocals on the Cohen classic "Hallelujah."

Thomas sang five songs from "Blue Alert." Her vocal styling was Cohenesque, if two voices remarkably different can be said to be remarkably similar. Thomas is heavily jazz-influenced, and she sang at times breathless like Billie Holiday, or Joni Mitchell. Chorus lyrics included: "thanks for the dance" and "saying goodbye at the innermost door." It seemed almost as if Thomas was Cohen's 21st century voice, delivering his goodbye as the poet/songwriter himself knelt at the back of the stage, hands clasped in front of him as if in prayer.

For the fifth and final song of her set, Thomas called Cohen to the microphone, but not before thanking the crowd for its "Canadian aloha." The Hawaiian native said, "In Hawaii, we take off our shoes, so I hope you don't mind."

Lyrics from the final song included:

You're my first loveand my last

there's no love after you

and

I had so much to tell you

but now it's closing time
the heart is always right

and

I never got to tell you

how beautiful you are

and

I don't know how it happened

but I missed the exit sign

it's dark out in Los Angeles

it's dark out along the line

and

I never got to love you

like I heard it can be done
the heart is always right

Is the heart always right? In Cohen's universe, the song and poem is a vehicle of purity in emotion. Back at McGill in the 1950s, Cohen had a country & western band. He must have learned something from Hank Williams early on and stuck with it. Ambiguity of expression is not a Cohen trademark. Recovering lost perfection is. Speaking with gratitude for what's lost is, too.

And so, Ron Sexsmith and the Bare Naked Ladies returned to share the stage with Cohen and deliver spirited versions of two of Cohen's better known "goodbye songs." ("Blue Alert" -- we were reminded sharply -- is only the latest in a long line of song/poetry cycles from Cohen that obsess about endings.)

Sexsmith and Page shared the microphone with Cohen. "I'll follow you guys," Cohen said, but soon the other two had maneuvered their elder into taking over lead vocals. And he smiled like he'd been reunited with "Suzanne." His voice raised on the lines: "you held on to me/ like a crucifix" ("So Long Marianne"). Should we let him go? No, the next -- and final -- song was "Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye."

[First published in The Danforth Review]

http://thenewcanlit.blogspot.com/