This article is about loss of process in the digital age.

In 1992 a book was written by Bill McKibben entitled, “The Age of Missing Information”. I mistakenly thought the book would contribute to my understanding of the emerging digital recording age. At the time the digital versus analogue debate was hot in recording studios as engineers and musicians pondered the new technology, struggled with machines that broke down more often than they worked, discovered words like dither, latency and buffer, and burned CDs that often failed and cost $15 per coaster. At the same time there was the greater question – was any of this new stuff better than the analogue world we knew quite well? The debate about sampling rates and the inability of digital technology to record “all” the sound was heated at the beginning of the age of missing information.
As it turned out the book was not about this debate at all but informed it greatly.  McKibben’s book was generally about how process has been removed from our viewing and understanding of the natural world. For example, we may view a clip showing a giant Anaconda eating a pig in the Amazon. Wow – great footage. However, what we didn’t see was that the cameraman waited beside that river for six months hoping the snake would get the pig. Nor did we see that the Anaconda digested that lovely meal for the next eight months. By editing and eliminating process our understanding of the Anaconda’s life is confused and distorted in the age of missing information.
Many years later I realize that this notion of loss of process in the digital age has more to do with contemporary recording and art form than I had originally thought. I believe that the ongoing and dizzying pace of changing technology in the contemporary recording world confuses and distorts process in a similar way and by doing so compromises the art form itself.
Every time a new piece of technology enters the field it takes time to get a handle on what it does and how it performs in the chain of recording tools. This process of learning takes time. Let me go back in time to explain what I mean.

At the end of the Second World War, a burst war time technology arrived at the steps of the recording studio; all equipment used in the war effort – names like Studer , Neumann, Tannoy  or Neve to name a few.  The combination of British and German technology was a treasure trove for the post war recording engineer but it took ten years before the technology could be understood well enough to record the golden age of jazz . This process could be termed getting to the “art” of the technology.  Some of the recordings during this period are considered to the best ever heard because the understanding of the technology and the art peaked at the same time. A similar process followed in multi track recording culminating in post Beatle recordings like Supertramp’s Crime of the Century or the luxurious Avalon by Roxy Music. I am not sure these two recordings match Oscar Peterson at Massey Hall for art form but they were fantastic sounding recordings. From the time les Paul invented multi- track recording to the forty eight track console was a long process but the process had continuity so that engineers could follow the path – not just the signal path.

I would put forward that the digital age has not had such continuity and that very process of mastering this technology has been confusing and distracting and thus has prevented engineers and recording from getting to the “art” of the technology. In some ways the problem began with the nature of the process itself. As the digital age dawned many thought the process would be the same as analogue, just different machines. As it turned out digital was a much different beast. This  change of process was then compounded  by the introduction of a myriad  of digital recorders – ADATs, Tascams, DAT  MiniDisc , DigCart , some of them brought to the market place so fast they frequently broke down, compromised recording , and are now used primarily as boat anchors ! The argument continues as engineers are stymied by new computers and programmes which leave their previous hard drives unusable and obsolete. I know two very competent engineers who are presently hanging on to their “old” computers because the last several years of recordings are delicately formatted on that system which has been replaced in the last six months. This confused process has left recording artists recording not in one age but several ages. My question is how can you get to the “art” of the technology if the process is so fragmented and disjointed it changes and continues to change every six months?
As a result of this process truncation and confusion many engineers and artists have gotten off the technological bus and have returned to analogue recording – not necessarily because it might sound better but equally because it is understandable, reliable and provides a structure of limitations that then both artist and engineer can understand and then, transcend.    
 I have long given up arguments about digital versus analogue , CDs versus MP3s etc. remembering that I used to play my records with a penny on the needle , the point being that I was listening for cultural information , not audio quality. However, loss of process I do worry about. I admit I am an old fart and a Ludite but I wish contemporary technology could better define a process centre, so we can better understand the process.         

“Too big, too white, too much my eyes
I can’t take in it all
Brilliant light – breathe in and dive
Glide, glance, fall …”

It was a perfect day in the heart of the Antarctic Peninsula. Our ship, dwarfed by the enormous spectacle of ice, snow and mountains set against a deep blue sky, anchored in Paradise Bay, clogged with bergy bits. Conditions were still great for a zodiac cruise. There had been reports of Minke whales in the area and we were anxious to see if those reports were true. Before heading out we had a quick lecture on Minkes and we were cautioned not expect too much – these smallest of Rocqual whales were known to be reclusive- we might see a dorsal fin if we were lucky.
Once in the zodiacs, we clunked our way through the ice, heading deeper into Paradise Bay.

“The sounding whale, the albatross
That carves an endless blue
Or something in the distance
That is calling – calling you “

 The radio crackled - Minkes had been seen about 2km. at twelve o’clock. I looked across the expanse and there, straight ahead, I saw a lone Minke “spyhopping “through the ice!  In a few seconds someone in the zodiac yelled “there’s more!” I looked to see ten, no, twenty-five or more whales heading straight towards our zodiacs!  Within moments the numbers doubled again and still they were approaching. I had enough time to think that these whales didn’t seem that shy, when a whale breached 15 metres in front of the zodiac. As the Minke rocketed out of the water I absorbed an unusual combination of inputs – excitement, fear and religious experience all in a nanosecond. I heard one of the passengers yell “oh Ian- this is well worth the money!” but a second later the zodiac was bumped by something and I found myself grabbing for the tiller of the motor! When I regained control I discovered a Minke whale beside the zodiac!  I moved back from the whale but in moments we were surrounded by a pod of 20- 30 very curious whales sporting around us; it seemed they had come to visit.   
Our day with the Minkes lasted five hours and a lifetime. When we arrived back at the ship everyone who had witnessed the parade of whales was changed for the experience, including myself.
If songs are gifts, and I believe they are, this one was waiting in my cabin. The song wrote itself in about twenty minutes and I sang it that evening as whales gathered round the ship. 

“I see it in the light- your eyes
The smile upon your face  
Heaven now resides in you
As it turns beneath the waves  ...” 

I was listening recently to a Neil Young Archive release called; Sugar Mountain –Live at Canterbury House - 1968. I have followed Neil‘s career since the days when I used to listen and dance to his music at the Fourth Dimension in Fort William, Ontario, both names now lost to time. This album was recorded shortly after his success with Buffalo Springfield but I can still recognize in his strained and plaintive voice, the destined young man who made my Saturday nights and my home town a less lonely place.
During the set Neil talks about the writing of Mr. Soul, one of Buffalo Springfield’s hits following “For what it’s Worth”. To paraphrase him, he said, “the song takes longer to sing than the time it took to write – it happened that fast”. And he is exactly right! Some songs seem heaven sent, gifts from the Muse as were and they come fully formed, no effort, it is as if they pre- existed, waiting for the songwriter to be simply the conduit of the gift. These Muse driven songs are wonderful gifts that can come to the recipient at any time, driving a car, a dream at night, as one wakes up. I think it is really important to heed the Muse when she taps on your shoulder. If the gift comes, be it a fully formed song, a distillation of phrase, a precognitive notion, it is incumbent on the songwriter to recognize the gift passing through. Stop the car, write the thing down, get out of bed, have a pad and pencil at bedside. In the morning you might not remember, but there it will be, oh yeah – that’s what I was dreaming. If you have just the nugget you can get it back but my experience has been that if you ignore the Muse, she, it, the gift, will disappear. If you don’t acknowledge the gift – poof – it is gone, like in Chris van Allenburg’s Polar Express, you will cease to hear the bell. When it is gone, it takes a lot effort to get “her” back.
   
At the same time I do not think that you can or should expect the Muse and the gift to arrive every time you need a song.  Just as I believe that one should never turn away or ignore the creative tap on the shoulder, I firmly believe that the Muse is encouraged by simple hard work on the craft of songwriting. I really think you have to put in the hours, writing in the face of nothing, craft songs, songs outside your métier, listening to the masters of songs, as Leonard Cohen so aptly put, “working in the tower of song”. During the hours, days and years when the Muse is elsewhere, keep writing, keep playing- keep on keeping on. I might suggest that you do not confuse the gift with personal autobiography. There are only a handful of songwriters who have the ability to turn their lives into a canvas for their writing- Joni Mitchell and Laura Nyro may be the great exceptions, perhaps Sara McLaughlin but her work has spawned a generation of diary writers whose pencils are not as sharp. I remember Bruce Springsteen saying something like “if you count on your own story to write songs you will find that may run out of songs early in your career’.

Richard Pacquin had been a childhood prodigy when he grew up in downtown Toronto in the early sixties. He was a poet at an early age and a very good photographer and was on the cultural scene of that city by the time he was fourteen. Though I didn’t believe him, he photographed the Beatles, Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix .He photographed the Beatles in England in 1964. At some point in his late teens Richard developed Wilson disease, a build up of cooper in the brain which manifests itself in liver damage and many psychotic behaviors. I met Richard when he was in his mid- thirties. He began his friendship with me while attending various concerts I gave around town. He was decidedly different but the coffeehouse scene encouraged eccentrics, he was bright and very knowledgeable about music and the arts. He gave me some of his poems which were very good. But Richard was not well. He often spoke of conversations he had with George Harrison or Bob Dylan on a bus, a meeting with Joni Mitchell; he spoke of them as if they were his friends. He was convinced that some of Leonard Cohen’s songs were written by himself, Bob Dylan and Joni as well. In time and during a period when he went off his meds, Richard became convinced that some of my songs were also his. While I was flattered to be in good company it became quite nuisance because, tied to his belief that he had written some of my songs, he also believed that I owed him $35000 in unpaid royalties. Here he had an inflated scene of my worth but that did not deter him. One day I confronted him about these songs and made the mistake of asking him where he wrote these various songs that others seemed to be singing. He said he received them when standing in the shower. He said they came through the shower spigot. With such an answer I thought it best not to ask how Leonard, Bob and Joni received the songs after the shower and claimed them as theirs.
Richard phoned me sometimes twenty-five times a day demanding his royalties. Occasionally he was lucid; often he was completely out of his mind. I tried everything short of disconnecting my phone to lose him but he was very smart and could find a way through every call block system invented. When we gathered at his memorial, all who attended found out it he worked the phone with everyone he knew, a network of about fifty people.  Sometimes his calls were appeals for help, a visit, money; repairs to a guitar or turntable he had smashed in a fit. I became part of a group of people and healthcare workers who knew Richard very well. Through all of this madness Richard continued to write poetry and it was the most lucid and visionary prayer to sanity I have ever read.  Ultimately I think this why I stuck with him. He was a hand reaching out of the fire engulfing him. Music was a constant for him and it was his solace as well. He listened to everything through it all.
It was not easy. At times he threatened to kill me if I did not pay up his imagined royalties.  I did not take it seriously but there were a few times I had friends watch for him a concerts as he once came armed with a baseball bat. One day he phoned and   threatened suicide. I raced to his house with a friend to find blood spattered all over the living room walls. I called and there was no answer. I went upstairs expecting the worst and after a few moments I heard a sound coming from the bathroom. It was Richard. He was singing- in the shower.  
Richard’s cycle of psychotic bouts became shorter and shorter. He would go off his meds, experience a tremendous rush of energy, start to lose it; there would be an incident with the police, incarceration in the psych ward and then reintroduction to meds at the hospital. The round trip took about nine months. Sadly it often it also included mending a broken arm or face that occurred during his darkest moments.
But all this was not without some humour. One night I was enjoying my own company at a local pub when someone saddled up to me and said, “You’re Ian Tamblyn, aren’t you?”
Yes- I replied.
This guy went on to say in so many words that while others might think me a decent songwriter, he felt that my songs were mediocre and that my writing would profit if I took more chances in  life. Having just returned from diving under the ice in Antarctica I felt I was taking enough chances but in the end said nothing other than taking another critics word under advisement. I also thought about drinking at another bar but …
The next morning Richard phoned once again demanding his royalty money. This time I had an answer. I said, Richard, you know these songs that you get in the shower and beam out to me and Bob and Joni?
Yes? – What about them?
Well – last night I was at bar and someone came up to me and told me that the songs you are sending me are mediocre! So – until you start sending me better songs from the shower I don’t owe you a god dam cent!
Richard replied – Tamblyn – you know what I think- I think you’re as nuts as me!
He never asked for his money again. Perhaps some CLR in his shower spigot was all he, and I, needed.

For the last few years I have played a kayak symposium on the shores of Lake Superior at the mouth of the Michipocten River, east of Wawa, Ontario. It is an incredible place to play a gig. Dave Wells has a camp there, Naturally Superior Adventures that used to be owned by the directors of the Great Lakes Power. At one time it was used as a retreat and party centre. The camp has a front room with large windows that afford a spectacular view of Lake Superior. The sunsets there cannot be beat. As a performer I could never outshine any sunset so I always suggest to the audience that they turn there chairs to the window while I pay musical homage to all that is before us. As I play out the window I am soon lost in memories of Superior.
 I grew up on the lake, Fort William, but you could never really get to it for the elevators, train tracks and the industrial zone that bordered its shore. It was a typical fortress town – fortified and negating the lake and land around Superior. Summers were spent at Amethyst Harbour, down the north shore of Thunder Bay. You could get to the lake there but during my childhood the lamprey had decimated the lake trout population and stories of the lake were often filled with danger of freezing in the icy waters. No one canoed or kayaked the lake at that time.
 I remember once finding a beautiful small birch bark canoe down at Land’s End near Sibley Peninsula. It was perhaps a metre long - dyed grass woven through the birch bark. It was a beautiful thing. I took it back to Amethyst, tied a string to it and ran it up and down the government dock throughout that summer. For years it had a special place on the mantle. Then it disappeared. I found when started looking into such things it was likely a funeral canoe for a young child or baby- a canoe that was set forth into the waters of Superior.
At Trent University I met Lindsay Staples, an avid canoeist and woodsman. He introduced me to canoeing and to the work of author Wayland Drew. Lindsay had been a counciller at Camp Pinecrest, near Torrance, Ontario.  Our first trip was on the Magnetewan River, south of Killarney and into Georgian Bay. I will remember forever, my partner Amanda Shaughnessy and I desperately trying to get the canoe to go in a straight line as we weaved a path behind Lindsay. They J-stroke would come eventually.. It was during this period I read Wayland Drew’s wonderful novel Wabeno Feast. It is a story set on Lake Superior and Lindsay began talking about canoeing the north shore of Superior, particularly the Pukasqua and Gargantua Peninsulas, also known as the ‘haunted shore’. Few canoed this shore, a handful really, Bill Mason, Micheal O’Connor, Drew  and Bruce Littlejohn. This was 1972.
It was decided that our first trip should begin at the mouth of the Michipocoten River, just out the window from the very place I was playing, so many years later. I remember coming down the river and hitting the lake. There was an undertow from the river’s strong current and the surf from Superior was running about a metre and a half. This made for a very tricky introduction to Superior and I will admit now it seemed we were heading into something way over our heads.  We pulled the canoes in down the beach and had a little ceremony – a tobacco gift to the gods of the lake, Mishipishu, the Thunderbird, and Nanabjou. Lindsay had just come from a retreat on Cobinosh Island and he was convinced spirits were alive on the north shore. He said he had been chased off a beach one night. I thought it was prudent to acknowledge the lake and that forces around it were much bigger than we were. I wasn’t up for a vision quest but I thought it best to be both humble and observant. I thought the gift to the lake was a good idea.

Each day we were up at six and on the water by eight.  It was the beginning of September, there was a high pressure system over our heads- beautiful days, blue skies. But still- we knew it could be tricky finding camp sites along this rocky shore line so we never lingered long over breakfast. Each day we would paddle across the crescent beaches that arc the Guargantua Peninsula-past Old Woman Bay, Katherine Cove, the beautiful Baldhead River. Some days we would paddle forty- five kilometers, looking for a place to camp the night. Some days the canoes would disappear in the three metre swells  but it was fine as long as we stayed out of the back swell zone.  Coming a shore however, was often –exciting.. We called these landings - one wave approaches. We would surf onto a cobble beach and have one wave to get the canoe out of the surf zone. More often  the beaches had a steep rake and I would jump out of the canoe to find myself  floundering in deep water , completely useless to my partner.

One day we saw a water spout on the lake. It was quite odd because it was a clear blue sky with moderate prevailing winds from the north- west.  We watched in amazement as this thing traveled across the lake vanishing over the horizon. When we set up camp that evening Lindsay was anxious. He was convinced that we should have responded with some tobacco on the water as this water spout may have been a visualization of Misshipishu – the Sea Lynx god of Superior. It is the same horned creature that is depicted in ochre on Agawa Rock.  You don’t mess with the Sea Lynx. I responded that it was well and good that Lindsay should continue his spirit quest but for me , it was enough just to survive another day on the lake.

That night we drew up our canoes just west of the old village of Gargantua . The tip of the peninsula is a long way from the highway and there was no road cut to the point at this time. We had been on the lake for twelve days and not seen a soul. It seemed we had the lake to ourselves. I am less sure about that now.

The next morning I awoke to see Lindsay running down the beach in the direction my canoe. But my canoe was not in the place it had been the night before – it was 100 metres down the beach. There was also something very wrong with it. When I caught up to Lindsay I saw that the whole bow of the canoe had been ripped apart. It was in bad shape. . And yet, the strange thing was there was no evidence that the canoe had been in the water   As well, small rocks had been carefully jammed between the inwhale and outwhale of the canoe. As we stared in disbelief we became very concerned and very frightened.

We had some duck tape but not enough repair all the ripped canvas. We began scouring the beach for nails to bang the canoe back together. We got some pitch from some balsam trees gathered in a can and made our way back to the campfire to heat up the resin. When we reached the campfire we were in for our second shock of the day. In the ashes of last night’s fire, a rock had been placed . On it there was a figure sketched in charcoal. It was a stick man with radiating lines from his head  like a halo or sun figure*. It sent a chill through all of us. At this point I did not know what to think or do. To this day I don’t know who put it there .  I am certain no one in our party could have known what the image represented.  As we stared at this image everyone “went to the lake”. We were completely spooked, scared and, in that moment, helpless.  From this point on every living thing became a symbol, every loon, duck and whisper of wind. In many ways I think we got religion. We surrendered to the power of Lake Superior.

As I play my songs, the sun sets low, is gone and into afterglow. There is not a time I visit Lake Superior when my thoughts turn to the events of this trip. This place was and is the source water of my journey of discovery of Canada. It always will be.

*When I returned to Trent University to work on a conference for the Native Studies Programme , Harvey McCue showed me a book of illustrations similar to what we had seen on the rock.  All were representations of shamanistic figures.

Behind the Hood - A Meeting in Rankin Inlet

 I think there is a truism in music  that goes like this : where ever you go, in every small town, you will always meet someone who will humble you  with their abilities. I never thought that person would be a fourteen- year old Inuit kid from Arviat , Nunavut, named Abraham Eetak.  
  I was involved in a music camp in Rankin Inlet this winter along with Rebecca Campbell, Anne Lindsay, Fred Guignion, and Mike Stevens. We got to Rankin with great effort- lost luggage, three blizzards , deflections to Iqaluit and Yellowknife, and finally arrived in Rankin accompanied by -35C temperatures and 40 knot winds . We were met by our amazing host Bernadette Dean and immediately transported our equipment to the music camp which was at the hockey arena , the home of Jordan Tootoo. As the hockey pucks cannonated off the boards we met our thirty  students. At least I think there were thirty . Over the next four days kids drifted in and out; some days kids showed up I had never seen before. About twelve were from Rankin but others came in from Coral Harbour , Repulse Bay , Baker Lake , Whale Cove and Arviat.  Mike Stevens- the pied piper of the north- started things off by passing out thirty harmonicas and within an hour there were thirty kids ready to join a blues band. ( This could be considered the good news or bad news part of the story.) Anne then broke off four kids who wanted to play fiddle - all from Repulse. Rebecca took seven singers, Fred started work with the better guitar players in a room next to the curling rink . Mike went to a high school to play more harp and I got seven students who were beginning to play guitar.  There I met Nelson Kablaalik  who  had never played  before . He had a spanish guitar with steel strings that were ass- backwards on it and the neck was so bowed that it was impossible to play beyond the first position but - never mind - away we went. I loaned Nelson my guitar, switched his strings and from that first lesson, Nelson played about fourteen hours a day for the rest of the camp
- “ Ian ? - my fingers hurt a bit - will that stop ? “
 By the end of the weekend Nelson was playing right along with all the strummers.
  Anne continued in a similar way . She got some fiddles from Andrea Hansen and her Strings Across the Arctic programme and headed into “  Swallowtail “ and of course , “Amazing Grace “ (We were to find the influence of the Pentacostal Church  to be profound in the Arctic at this time.) Rebecca got the singers right into some three part harmony . Fred was working away with the boys - a workshop called , “pedals I have known” .
   After a break - we played a few tunes for the students , annotating each song or instrumental with something that might be useful for the assembled group.  Mike returned for his second lesson of the day , and so it went. Not bad for a first day I was thinking when Fred lumbered over and said , “ Ian- I think we got a  problem . “
“What’s the problem Fred? “ - thinking that they had probably blown an electrical circuit or something.
“ There’s this kid from Arviat - he’s playing “ The Maple Leaf Rag “ - there’s nothing I can teach him. I can’t even begin to play the f-king piece and he’s playing two parts at once !
 Hmmm- this is a problem - all the expense to bring us up here and  now we got some young genius  from Arviat....
“ Got to hear this ! “ , I said , buying some time.
 
  So off we went to listen to Abraham Eetak play the complete “ Maple Leaf Rag “ . Abraham
and his two buddies , Kendall and Paul Jr. had come up from Arviat on the plane - the latter two with guitars, but no cases !  The three boys wore an Arctic version of a “hoodie” and during the entire time of the camp the hood of the hoodie was never off or down-  whatever. Abraham’s hoodie was made by his mother - it had a wolf fur rim around the hood through which Abraham peered out at the world . He had ‘markered’ out the ubiquitous “Chopper” logo and cross on the back and front and his mother sewed on the design.
  At first I thought Abraham did his thinking through fingers cause he sure didn’t talk much. But when he played  the “Maple Leaf Rag” , Fred and I listened  slack-jawed .  He then showed us how he had figured out the left and right hand of the tune, then how he was able to play both parts at once. He said it took him six months to get it down. He is fourteen years old.   Incredible . He went on to play other tunes he didn’t know the names of - several pieces  by Mississippi John Hurt and Robert Johnson - some gospel tunes , Eric Clapton- some I didn’t recognize. Fred then asked him how he got the reach in his hands- at times he was barring and  spanning seven, eight frets. He put his index finger and baby finger on the floor and pressed down as hard he could. “ I did this every day for a couple of months “, he said.
  As it turned out Fred was able to help Abraham with some of the fundamentals of soloing and I was able to show him a few alternate tuning and finger picking styles but the question lingered -how  could we get into Abraham Eetak’s music camp . On Sunday afternoon Fred and I were collapsed on the couch watching “The Mask”. The music camp was over , the others had left and we were brain dead. Jim Carey was about to put some dynamite in his mouth when there was a knock at the door. It was the Arviat trio  - Paul Jr. , Kendall , and Abraham.
“ Wanna play ? “ And so we did . Fred learned the first sixteen bars of the “Maple Leaf Rag” - and has vowed he will have it down before next camp. I played Mississippi John Hurt’s , “Candy Man” , “Richland Woman Blues, “Payday” . Abraham started talking- wanting to know the names of all kinds of tunes he had learned off a tape but didn’t know the names . We played into the evening and then the trio followed Fred and I  off to dinner.
“You guys coming back?”
“Yeah - we’ll be back”.

 This morning, back in Chelsea, I have sent Abraham a few new challenges - Richard Thompson’s Strict Tempo    , The Best of Django Reinhart   and Don Ross’ Loaded. Leather. Moonroof . That ought to hold him for a few weeks.

Access to Tools-Democratization of the Recording Process

In 1969 the Whole Earth Catalogue arrived on the scene with an interesting subtitle- Access to Tools. In it, there was an article which spoke of a new home multi-track recording device made by Tascam . It suggested that this new  technology might provide  musicians with an affordable means to record their work and thus circumvent the costly recording studio which were in some cases owned or controlled by parent record companies. With this new technology you could also avoid the perceived traps, greed and excesses of the music business world. . You could release your own album. Access to tools. That winter, Ken Hamm and myself searched out this new technology in the hope of pursuing this new path - the woodshed album. After several tours of Toronto industrial parks we discovered that the Tascam was not available in Canada as yet and so  we found ourselves working on an old Scully half- track in a language lab at OISE (Ontario Institute for studies in Education).  Nevertheless, for us, the new age had begun.

  In the subsequent years  more and more artists responded to the democratization of the recording process and in turn technology  provided more affordable gear for home recording.  Now , in 2003, of one hundred CDs on my shelf , 80 are essentially woodshed or woodshed hybrid albums. If I was to check my record collection now  molding in the basement  the relationship would be 3-4 percent. This opening up of the recording process has been a wonderful thing for artists who have dreamed of having their own CD and for works that would have never found a home in the musical  mainstream. And yet , for artist and listener there appears to be some trouble in paradise .

  When I look at my CD collection I also know that a disproportionate number of those independent CDs are pretty dodgy- might I even suggest unlistenable, played once , that’s it. It might be that they sound bad at the recording level but more importantly, they fall short on the artistic level- the songs are not well conceived or executed. Now I will be the first to admit that my first effort was an effort as well but at least I have the excuse of being a pioneer in the form. But now that the CD is so ubiquitous there has been dramatic fallout. Because of the democratization of the process it has effectively turned all consumers into and Artist and Repetoire personnel. In the bad old days record companies had a series of checks and balances in place. The AnR guy sought out and listened to artists who they wanted or who auditioned  to get on the label. One of the most famous was John Hammond Sr. who brought us Billie Holiday and Bob Dylan. He was noted for his taste , musical vision and yes, money making ability for Columbia Records.  Nowadays there is no John Hammond -we are now asked to be the first arbitors of what we hear at $20 per CD. What this has done in recent years can be summed up in the expression- buyer beware. With so many contemporary  CD’s unlistenable, consumers are becoming more and more cautious about wanting to buy a CD period. A recent listener said to me , “I don’t buy CDs off stage anymore - most of them are shit.”  Under the previous paradigm , artists usually submitted demos of their work or recorded a series of demos for the record company before embarking on an album. This check in the system allowed the record company to hear who they were supporting without taking on the cost of full production , and allowed artists to become more familiar with the recording process. Today , an artist can do a CD in his or

her basement and release it unheard by anyone between the artist and the listener. There are no checks and balances in this new world.

  Now maybe there shouldn’t be these checks and balances - certainly the new democracy is preferable to the tyranny of the old system , where record companies and publishers prayed upon the naivety and hunger of the artist. But if this new world has turned us into unwilling editors it as also cheapened the value of the product itself. At one point , doing a demo was like posting a bond of seriousness within the trade. Record companies , club owners, festival directors all required them . It was the thought then that if the artist had gone to the trouble , effort and commitment of putting out a demo , their work should be considered seriously . All that has fallen away, and in the particular and thorny case of the festival director , they are now asked to sort through thousands of CD submissions each year. When you combine the first issue of quality with the second , of shear numbers, it is understandable why the posted bond of a CD now has a reduced value and why, in part you don’t hear back from that  festival director. They are buried under a pile of CDs being asked to do several tasks that used to be done by several others. I was told recently that Rick Fenton , a.d. of the Winnipeg Folk Festival received 1200 unsolicited C.Ds this year. That’s trouble in paradise.

  As an artist who has supported this artist friendly recording process for most of my career all this puts me in a bit of a quandary. If this new order has become a source of frustration for the artist and listener , who has the major beneficiary been.  I submit that at this point the winner is Alesis, Mackie , Fostex , Cubase, Logic, all those formats and tools that have made woodshed recording possible. At some point, companies , who had sold  one unit at $100,000, realized that they could increase their earnings if , through cheaper and available technology they could sell 100,000 units at $6000. Ah capitalism- hard to avoid.   (Alesis’ ADAT sold over140,000 units before it was determined they were better used as boat anchors.) Meet the new boss - same as the old boss.

The Road Ahead - Enjoying the Ride

 In a previous article  I spoke of the ongoing democratization of the recording world and how that was affecting both the practice and process of the art form. Simply put -with  everybody having a CD now and  vying for the same gig - it all seems so overwhelming, how can we  enjoy the ride?!
     Faced with everyone hitting the same club owner or artist director for the same gig, my first series of suggestions falls under the category of lateral thinking . We are all inclined to see the thing in the way it is presented and play the rules of the game . With so many playing there is not enough  room on the playing field the way it currently configured.. And so , I would suggest that you expand the field and adapt the rules to your game. Rather than wait for Joe Cub Owner or Artist Director  to call, create your own venue . Start off small with a house concert , something you and/or your friends can handle . Use a small sound system . Sell CDs . If this works and there is enthusiasm for the house concert format, set up a series. Don’t over tax yourself or your friends as you want enthusiasm, not burn out. A house concert series will, however, give other players a chance to perform and introduce you to a wider circle of place to play.  
  Play in your community . Offer to play at the school , after four programmes , the Christmas bazaar , the hospital , the detention centre, I ‘m not joking . Be part of your community because it is rewarding for both you and your neighbourhood .  You will improve , you may find that you are really good at playing for kids or seniors who knows what could happen. In most cases there will be little pay for this activity , perhaps an honorarium , or tax deduction but what it will do is improve your craft and expand your audience .  After a few years in your community it may be time to move the venue up from the house concert to community hall . Once a year . Lots of advance notice . Strategically timed - perhaps even associated with some cause . Good sound system. High fun factor. An event.  Play well, sell some CDs . See you next year.
  No - this event is not going pay the bills but it will illustrate that you can fill and play this type of hall .Expand your audience , play out of town , repeat. Get enough and you will pay the bills. No Previa but so it goes. Across Canada these days , house concerts and self- promoted venues are joining the more standard types of presentation. To a great extent you have to be your own “little red hen”. I think this is the road ahead.

  Find a place where your CDs will sell away from the competition. Find a small shop, grocery store , bookshop , boutique and ask to place your CDs there , close to the cash register. Ask them to play the CD in the store. Visit the shop frequently to replenish stock. If they move your CDs away from the cash register - get those CDs back there. They will not sell off in the corner gathering dust . Agree to consignment sales if you must but  cash on the barrel head is far better. Suggest a concert in the bookshop , small restaurant . Do something for the shop. You can’t possibly compete with the Stings of this world but with your CD at the cash of local grocery store 500 CDs can turn into a  thousand. At a thousand CDs you will have reached your village and it will be time to expand your village.  Stick with the impulse sales. Expand and consolidate.  

  When I started in this world of music - I wanted to be folksinger., right down to boot cut jeans and cowboy boots . Sad thing was I had glasses, looked like a geek, and was still using my family’s name. Hard to convince people I had just rode in on a boxcar with my piano on my knee.  I made demos , played the local hoots , played the ever closing coffeehouses of the 1970's . I even got a record contract. But I could not make a living from this and maybe I shouldn’t have expect to. But there was a model out there and I was playing by the rules of the game. But then someone arrived with the idea that I could write a musical . Sure I said - I grew up on them but maybe I could do a musical incorporating a story around songs that me and my compatriots were writing. I did . The play, written in 1976 , has seen many incarnations and suddenly  I could include playwright beside my name along with folksinger.. I was now multi-tasking. And I was no longer exactly playing by the rules of the game . I started moving in more than one tribe- there was the music tribe, sub-divided into acoustic and electric  and there was another tribe in theatre . Although these tribes didn’t really mingle I was able to take a little from both and was able to bring a different take on things to each table. When the club scene really collapsed in 1982 - I was able to survive doing soundtracks for a local theatre company as well as setting up an acoustic concert series at the theatre venue.
   The point of this parable is - don’t let yourself get stuck in one box, and don’t let yourself be described as only one thing. There is relatively little room in Canada to just be a folksinger - there are many very good ones . But one’s passion for music can lead you down interesting alleyways and paths that are equally  rewarding both spiritually and financially. Writing music for theatre soundtracks has lead to work in documentary films , television soundtracks , even a cartoon show. It is not the centre of my work but it has expanded my craft , each new challenge informs another discipline of my work and , it all allows me to continue what I love doing- music and writing. I know some might say that you can creatively spread yourself too thin. I have never found this to be the case. There are hundreds of cross - relationships that really make you better in all aspects of your work and can make the road ahead tremendous fun.

Three Days In Ireland

This spring I spent a month working on two expedition ships traveling around Ireland and Scotland . I drive zodiacs for a company called Adventure Canada, point out the flora and fauna , give a few talks on Irish -Scots music, play some tunes. I have done this for the past 12 years to offset the higher tax bracket I would be in if I worked as a musician in Canada year round. It is also an inspirational place for songwriting .The expedition is basically a look at the interesting dovetail between the expansion of two conflicting worlds around the outer islands of Scotland and Ireland ; the world of the Viking from their base in the Orkneys, and the world of the monks and their church as it reached back into Europe from retreats  off the south- west corner of Ireland to the pilgrimage of St. Columba to Iona , Scotland..
    I would like to focus on three wonderful days and nights of music on the west and north coast of Ireland. It could be said that Michael Flatley’s Riverdance and more recently Celtic Tiger has brought Irish music too much into the centre and into the “over the top” category . It could be said Irish culture , fake Irish pubs et al has suffered its own great success   and that the Irish music wave is now in decline in the popular culture. But if this is true the Irish musicians I heard either are unaware of this or don’t give a damn if they are yesterdays hulahoop. From what I heard they are playing with the same passion , precision and joy as the Bothy Band , Planxty , Ossian did at the beginning of the wave.  In some cases they are playing even better.  
   The first day began off the Skelligs- two rock outcrops seven miles off the south- west coast of Ireland . In the 7thC hermetic monks found themselves here- getting away from it all . On one island there is a colony of about 20,000 gannets , on Stack Micheal , there nothing but a shear face of black rock . It defines the word inhospitable. But the monks cut stairs in the rocks , built beehive shaped cletts (stone shelters) to live in at the top , a small stone Abbey about the size of a key on a basketball court . They lived and prayed there . My guess is that they prayed for food.. Occasionally they were raided by passing Viking ships but they persisted and some say the re- introduction of the church into Europe began on rock outcrops like the Skelligs and Aran Isles. How they survived there at all remains a mystery to me.
    We arrived at John Benny’s Bar in Dingle by the circuitous route of Ventry Bay. When I  tried  to get into Dingle Harbour the waves were about 3 metres high, impossible for passengers to get in the boats. I had a brief encounter with Finghy the dolphin then back on the ship. The musicians were just setting up as the pints were poured and I noticed we were in for a treat. The leader of group was an uilleann piper and from the warm up I could tell he was good . Micheal O’Hanalan was a pennywhistler from Aran and a resource person on the ship. He sat in and within moments they were into the craic and a few tunes. Micheal was on the level with Matt Molloy of the Chieftains on Irish flute , had auditioned for Paddy Maloney but it was Matt Molloy he chose.
The squeeze box joined in , then the fiddle and they were off. After  a few sets a guitar player in DADGAD tuning joined in and sang a few tunes . I asked for Arthur McBride or Plains of Kildare, being a fan of Andy Irvine and Paul Brady. He went for Arthur McBride and had all of Brady’s guitar ornamentations down pat. 
  Most of the passengers had never seen a piece plumbing like the Uilleann pipes with its series of regulators, brass and leather. It was only three in the afternoon and the piper barely had his eyes open but he answered their questions  with great patience. It was clear he was the leader of the group , it was his playing that drove the pieces. I mentioned to him that I had heard a musical duel of sorts between Paddy Keenan and Liam O’Flynn at the Celtic Colours Festival, Cape Breton a few years before. He scoffed and said , “aye, the new players, they like to have a go at each other.” With Michael in tow , they organized their sets, reels , slides, a mazurka- often five minutes between sets , sippin’ and tossing it back at each other. I guess it was a session with an audience. It became obvious that Michael was damn good on the whistle so the uilleann piper and Michael did a wonderful slow air with Michael playing discant to the melody. The bar shut up and the music and moment  transcended and transported itself out into the dark green hills of the Dingle Peninsula. An introduction to Irish music.
   Two days later we found ourselves at Matt Molloy’s pub in Westport , County Mayo, listening to the incredible music of the Munnelly brothers. The Munnelly’s are two toe- head boys weighing in at about 250lbs. each and they look like they have lived exclusively on a diet of Guinness and potatoes. But play.  David plays the box with the lilt of Sharon Shannon but the push of no one I know . His brother Kieran plays Irish flute taught to him by Matt Molloy and yet his forte is bodhran. . There is a great fiddler as well whose name I can’t recall but plays in the style of Kevin Burke - dry and fast. When these three guys started up - the acceleration was incredible, Patrick pushing and pulling rhythms adding rhythmic ornamentations , so much so that Michael hit him on the head a few times with the whistle , he could not keep up. The local boys, now more interested in swilling American Bud and listening to Bon Jovi than this shite , stood slack jawed at the power and drive of this music. At one point dancing broke out and a lad on the banker’s holiday, well oiled, jumped up on a chair a did a step dance from his childhood. His buddies were on the floor laughing.
    After forty minutes of pushing Irish music , the Munnellys , soaking wet, took a well deserved break for a refreshment. A few minutes later the accapella singer, Nick Lavelle took to the floor. Nick has been a fixture for years at Matt Molloy’s - a bit of the blarney in horn- rimmed glasses. Nick can sing anything but specializes in those Irish songs that were written in America and brought back to the homeland during a time when traditional Irish music seemed in receivership.  Some are pretty smalztsy but the older folk recognize them and love them . Everybody was singing along to Danny Boy , what can I say. He also sang a couple of very funny originals - My Girl Friend has a new Cell Phone- in a voice that could take out the back wall off Matt Molloy’s pub. Booming.
     The Munnellys came back , Guinness in hand and after a few tunes ,Kieran broke out the bodhran and launched into a solo that would have Ginger Baker smiling .It was unbelievable. The bodhran remained part of the ensemble and David and Kieran played off each other into the night. They tore the roof off the place. I wondered if the 100 passengers we had brought to the house lifted them up to another level or if this what they did every time out. Another mystery to add to the collection . The music  played on as we headed back to the ship , anchored in Clew Bay.     
     The next day found us off the north coast of Donegal on the remote island of Tory. Tory has an elected King - Patsy Dan Rodgers who can pile the Irish lepricon higher and deeper than anyone I know. He greeted everyone with “a tousand tank-yous for comin’ to our wee island ! ”in his long coat and sailors hat. He is also a credible box player and , with his cousin Pol Rodgers , have won a number of ceidlth band contests in Belfast and Dublin . They had had a feud for seventeen years that recalls the recent film set in County Clare but word is they have patched things up. The ceidlth was held in the community hall and it being still the banker’s holiday the boys of the island were well into it. They were also celebrating their recent victory over the ship on the soccer field.
   Tory is one three Gaelic protected areas in the Republic where Irish is the first language. There is also the preservation of traditional dancing and it was wonderful when the younger members of the island took to the floor and did some dances unique to the island. . The enthusiasm of the evening caused an old guy  to get up and do a broom dance . I wondered if it was a traditional dance or something he had learned abroad. He put sand down on the floor and then did a sort of Irish soft shoe on it , while sweeping the sand in different patterns . In the end he swept himself and sand off the floor, an interesting variation on sweeping the spot light away. A few passengers joined in on the fun and when the captain of the ship was asked to dance , everyone hit the floor. Micheal and I played off stage while on stage. three boxes , three fiddles and bodhran provided the groovage. It wasn’t great music but it served the dancing and the fun . People danced till they could dance no more , then the youth of Tory taught them another dance and they danced some more. About eleven that night we limped back to the ship . The band played us out from the pier.
    Tomorrow, Michael and I would play pennywhistle in Fingal’s Cave on the island of Staffa, Scotland. But that’s another story.

The Lake Superior shore at the mouth of the Michipocoten River is an incredible place to play a concert. I have performed at a lodge there that has large front windows and a spectacular view of the lake. The sunsets are incredible. The audience enjoy the view while I pay musical homage to Superior. As I play I am soon lost to memories of this shoreline.

 I grew up by the lake, Fort William,Ont., but an industrial zone  discouraged easy access.  Summers were spent at Amethyst Harbour, on the north-west shore of Thunder Bay and yet, during my childhood, stories of the lake were often filled with danger of drowning in her icy waters. There were no canoes or kayaks on Superior at this time.
 
At Trent University I met Lindsay Staples, an avid canoeist, who introduced me to the “path of the paddle.” It was during this period I read Wayland Drew’s wonderful novel Wabeno Feast, a story set on Superior.  Lindsay and I began talking about canoeing the big lake, particularly the Pukasqua and Gargantua Peninsulas, known as Superior’s ‘haunted shore’.

Our trip began at the mouth of the Michipicoten River, - the very place I was playing, so many years later. Paddling onto Superior, we hit an undertow from the river’s strong current and surf from the lake.  Surviving this challenge, we pulled the canoes in down the beach and quickly acknowledged the lake’s power- a gift of tobacco to the gods , Mishipishu, the Thunderbird, and Nanabijou. Lindsay had just come from a vision quest on Cobinosh Island and believed spirits were alive on the north shore. Canoeing this lake was a big enough quest for me but I thought a gift to the lake made good sense.

Each day we were up at six and on the water by eight,  paddling across the crescent bays that arc the Guargantua Peninsula- Old Woman Bay, Katherine Cove, the beautiful Baldhead River, Devil’s Chair.  On the water, the canoes disappeared in two metre swells but it was fine as long as we stayed out of the back swell zone. Landing, however, was tricky, surfing onto a rocky beach with one wave to get the canoe ashore.   We often camped by raised cobble beaches and found evidence of pukasqua pits, vision pits, where others, long before us, had pondered the lake. 
 
One day we saw a water spout. It seemed quite odd because the sky was clear with only light winds.  We stared in amazement as this thing traveled across the lake, vanishing over the horizon. When we set up camp that evening Lindsay was anxious, convinced that we should have responded with some tobacco on the water. He thought this water spout may have been a visualization of Mishipishu – the same horned creature that is depicted in ochre on Agawa Rock. Our campsite was just west of the abandoned village of Gargantua. The tip of the peninsula is a long way from the highway. We had not seen a soul for twelve days. It seemed we had the lake to ourselves.

 Next morning I woke to see Lindsay running down the beach towards my canoe.  – 100 metres from where it had been hauled out the night before.   When I reached him I saw that the whole bow of the canoe had been ripped open.  Small rocks had been carefully jammed between the in-wale and out-wale. There was no evidence that the canoe had been in the water overnight. The lake was calm. No footprints.
 
 We were unnerved. Could we fix the canoe? We scoured the beach for nails, collected pitch from some balsam trees, and returned to the campfire to heat up the resin. There we made a second discovery: a rock ,placed in the ashes of the fire, and on it, sketched in charcoal, a stick man, arms outstretched, radiating lines from his head.   

As we stared at this image I know I surrendered to the power and mystery of Lake Superior. From this moment on every loon, every tree, every whisper of wind, was alive with spiritual energy. I woke up. Every time I visit Lake Superior I am there again.   

Fear of Flying - Squirrels

A week after we moved into our new house, the animals moved in as well. Our new house was built on the same location in the Gatineau hills as our old cottage which had been the home to squirrels, mice, voles, even a pair of mating skunks .The red squirrels were in first, chewing a hole in the soffet and through the R-2000 wall in the exact same place as in the old cottage. Fall brought in the moles and mice and soon our nights were again filled with the scurrying of little feet as they ripped their way through the vapour barrier.  

In the spring we hired a wildlife agency to come expatriate the red squirrels. They set up traps outside the hole, caught the pests and put wire mesh over every soffit around the house. It seemed to work. The moles, voles and mice were a trickier problem. I will admit to using mouse traps, new mouse traps and Have a Heart traps but you can only set up so many mouse traps and kill so many mice before you suffer a decline wondering just how many rodents are wandering around in your walls.

Then came the flying squirrels. At first we didn’t know what they were. Then one night I woke to a crash , ran down stairs to find a lampshade still swinging and a form flying across the living room . It was party time for flying squirrels, systematically destroying the house from the inside out. We could not sleep for the sound and the fury and worry that they might take on the electrical wiring next.

I called the wildlife agency again. I didn’t think there were flying squirrels in the Gatineau Hills. There are – Northern flying squirrels .I thought they were at risk. No- sir, that’s Southern flying squirrels. Well sir, if its flying squirrels – then  you have  a serious problem. Once they’re in your house…. The boys from the agency returned and assessed that the flying squirrels were likely coming in under the tin roof using the inverted V ribbing as their doorway. “They can lift the tin up, you know. “ I didn’t know but I knew it would be expensive. The cost- $3000., with no guarantee  it would work ! I mumbled something to the effect that this didn’t seem like a great deal. They agreed and, one of the lads came up to me and whispered, “we’re not supposed to say this but what you need is a gun!” The idea of  hunting a nocturnal animal inside my house seemed to have a number of inherent flaws and as the wildlife boys headed up my laneway I felt utterly alone .

About a month later, after dinner, I heard a commotion (mating) in the wall upstairs. I remembered that there was a hole in the drywall behind the baseboard just below their love nest. With a brilliance that shocks me to this day I launched my campaign on the flying squirrels. I ran to the basement ,got the have a heart trap, and put on my squirrel catching gloves.  Carefully I pulled back the base board. Yes- there was the hole. I then I banged on the wall where the lovemaking was going on and to my surprise – two flying squirrels crashed into view.  With a hunters instinct, I reached in and grabbed one and brought it out ,squirming in my hand.  I ordered Amanda to open up the have heart trap and after some difficulty I shoved the squirrel into its new home. Caught! Now! –where was the second squirrel? I shone a flashlight in the hole and – there it was, about to escape! I jammed my hand in a second time and managed to get the creature by its tail. I got it out of the hole but this where the plan began to unravel. Somehow the squirrel got away from me and sought refuge up Amanda’s leg. Amanda screamed, the squirrel flew, Amanda locked herself in the bathroom, and the squirrel disappeared. I felt Amanda needed to calm down a bit and I found the squirrel attempting to fly up a wall in the bedroom. I tried to catch the damn thing but it flew back into the hall. I needed Amanda’s help. There was a short discussion but I assured her that everything was in hand. That was not exactly true.  As she opened the bathroom door, the squirrel leapt , Amanda screamed , the bathroom door slammed shut and I was left chasing the squirrel again . Fortunately, I caught the beast and got it in the have a heart trap without the other squirrel escaping.

 In the next few nights I caught three more squirrels using the same technique. With five squirrels now in the have a heart trap, things were getting crowded so I called the Wildlife Retreat Centre . “No I am sorry  we can’t them because a new law in Ontario and yes, it is too bad . Yes – I hear they come in gangs of twenty. Sorry.” Click.

I can’t say how I found St Karen of Gatineau but she gives homes to injured and undesired wildlife until they are mended or repatriated to the wild. A wildlife underground.  She agreed to take my five flying squirrels.  As I drove over the Alonzo Wright Bridge ,I noted that one river and 40km. might just be enough distance to impede their return. With the last of the squirrels in Karen’s loving care she mentioned  the number twenty again. I returned home with a dark resolve.

Over the next few nights Amanda woke me around four a.m. with a whisper – Ian – I hear them ! They’re in the wall! The ‘have a heart ‘trap was ready and I had my squirrel catching gloves on top the cage. Instantly alert – I crept into the hall , donned the gloves , pounded the wall-two nights- two more squirrels . Piece of cake. It was on the third night things went slightly awry. Amanda woke me up with her usual report  and I leapt out of bed   but this time I was not quite awake- I forgot to don my squirrel catching gloves – I just banged on the wall like a vending machine and down dropped squirrel number eight. I reached in to grab the creature and found out very quickly that I didn’t have my gloves on and incidentally, didn’t have anything else on either! I quickly extracted my hand from the hole hanging on the squirrel who was working on my finger, I let go and the squirrel leapt – onto my bare leg!  Alright – I screamed – the squirrel flew and the next thing I knew I was chasing the squirrel around the house in the buff. It was then I realized I didn’t have my glasses on either.   
After the ninth squirrel a strange silence fell upon the house. I took the gang of four over to Karen’s to squeals of delight as brother and sister, mother and father were reunited. I returned home expecting to resume to my nightly prowlings, but now the walls were silent. No whispers in the night. Could it be I got them all?  Occasionally I would phone Karen to make sure the squirrels were still at her house. They were. Could I dare to dream?

The Giant Maw and the Fragile Tangent

For the past number of years I have mused the giant maw and the fragile tangent as I travel the fragile tangent from gig to gig across Canada.  The fragile tangent is the thin lattice work of community- based concert venues connected by highway and byway that grow and collapse and then are reborn again across this country. The giant maw on the other hand is the heart of the society, the masses, it is the never ending Subway ad, it is Wal-Mart , it is Canadian Idol , it is Tim Horton’s and, it remains the main target area for the North American music industry, even in the nervous age of downloads. It seems to me that a musician has a choice or is chosen to enter either the giant maw or walk the fragile tangent. Take a closer look.

The Giant Maw offers many attractions but the greatest by far is its ability to introduce new artists to a large swath of the listening public .It is as Joni Mitchell put it so well- “the star maker machinery behind the popular song”. If the campaign is successful by any means, including a hit song, your name will be known for the rest of your life by the Giant Maw. Your name will have been entered into the general collective consciousness of the society very much like a Big Mac ad and, with continued effort and frequent campaigns of re-introduction, your place in the firmament of stars may be assured. The introduction into the centre of society, if successful, will almost guarantee you a lifelong career in the music industry. Ask Bobby Curtola.  In many ways CTVs Canadian Idol is an almost perfect example of carpet bombing the giant maw. It does not matter that the format, presentation or even content might be dodgy – what is important is  that money accrues to Canadian Idol  and CTV, while someone is introduced to the mass Canadian public. And yet the downside for the artist in the giant maw is found in the last sentence – that money first and foremost accrues to the star maker machinery behind the popular song .This downside is the heartland of bad contracts, unfair publishing deals , agents, publicists , lawyers  each taking their share of the loot as you- Big Mac – are becoming the latest thing. Oh I forgot to mention, you do have to have some talent but that talent may not necessatily be musical . The biggest talent may be your ability to be sold to the Giant Maw. Ask Johnny Rotten. Your talent may also be one of style over content. Ask Feist.  The Giant Maw has a voracious appetite, one can get chewed up very badly but it is still the most effective way of getting yourself known to the great centre of the society.
 
If you do not turn down the Don Valley , the DeCarre or come down the Kokahalla into Vancouver  you may find yourself gigging the fragile tangent.

More to come…

After the release of one’s first  CD , there often follows a “blue” period about the  project and  even self-doubt about  one’s career as a musician.   I ain’t no shrink but I have witnessed this phenomena too many times and so,   thought I might surround the topic as it were.   I think the disjunction between dreams and reality is certainly at the heart of this blue period but I think it begins with the conception of the work itself.
This is not my Child
   The  creative act of doing a CD is in some ways an act of negation. Imagining , creating and executing  the CD and then, seeing its reflection can place you  beyond the work you have just completed.  Hopefully reflects the distillation of one work “so far”, and yet, in doing so it illuminates what is but one  facet of what one can do. A CD not living up to your expectations is of course another nagging worry .That is a real source of depression - I am not going deal with that. In the end one might be happy with what is done but to paraphrase T.S. Eliot’s Love Song- “when all was said done.. that was not what I meant to say at all”. In other words, by looking at what you have just done , you realize there are so many more things to be said and sung - new vistas of expression ahead of you revealed only by the reflection of what you have just done.   The action of doing the CD is to be  seeing it now in the rear view mirror. If you are a particularly creative musician the act of representing this material that is in essence behind you and the incumbent repetition of same may prove to be less than exciting. And you may be seeing the first shade of blue.
My Special Child ?
  When I started out , the independent release was just possible, there was only a handful of independent releases each year.  It was unique and special. Now there are several releases each week. Is that special?.  I would maintain that for each person releasing a CD it remains so. All the effort, rehearsing, editing, recording , fund raising, graphic design, out- of- pocket coin is like an emotional bow wave going before the release of each CD .There is a great expectation that builds up with each release. Is it special? - you’re damn right is . And yet, the struggle ain’t over. The club owner has Ms. Attitude’s  release this weekend , the record reviewer for the local rag seems to only review Eric Claptons’ CDs ,  the record store offers only consignment sales payable every two years and you have just read an article stating that CDs are obsolete. After all the work of getting the “child” on it’s feet , the effort to get the child moving can seem overwhelming.
Expectations
  The expectation is also found in what you hope for in the terms of the CDs success. I think the dreams of “rich and famous” are well over in this age and yet I have been surprised by some expectations clearly outstripping reality. A few ago an artist I knew suggested to me that he would manufacture 10,000 units of his new CD. He had not toured in years and was well below the horizon in terms of the firmament of stars. I gulped and suggested that a modest run of 500 might be  more realistic  rather than insulating his basement with the remaining 9,500. He , in turn , suggested I lacked marketing skills. I will leave it up to you as to what happened with his CD. In some ways releasing a CD is like a free radical lottery ticket ,  who knows , you might be the next Michelle Schocked or even settle for a post-humus Nick Drake. The point is that we all have dreams of getting lucky or cream rising to the top that we bring to each release. At the same we know equally well that cream doesn’t just rise - it is often whipped. Those of us that are releasing independent CDs we have usually spent our last dinero on the hommus and carrots at the CD release party that was finally held in  Mom’s basement. There is nothing left over to attend to the whipping agents .And so you have made your CD , the CD party was kind of a success , except the words you forgot because you were so tired after putting the balloons up , and nervous , if you could do that over again geez louise! And there were some reviews , some quite good , one reviewer actually got it, there were two hundred promos , and so let me see how many have I sold ....

 Don’t go there !- I’m getting depressed !   It is really important not to count how many CDs you have sold . I think it is simply important to get out there and represent yourself and the work you have presented on the album. Don’t give up on your CD and yourself.   The CD will open a few doors , it is still a passport , and through CBC and community radio stations your name will get out into the hinterland of Canada. The CD project begins with its  conception, but , like a child will need  support  well beyond your next creative act.. One antidote to your post- partum blues will be  your ability to see that the end of your time with your CD goes  beyond the release of the project.   The other antidote will be the letter from a new fan in Willowbunch , Saskatchewan , who will reveal things about your CD you never imagined and how much it has meant to her . This what it is about.

Forgiveness

 In the summer of 2004,  I was working as a guide , zodiac driver and musician for the expedition company Adventure Canada on board the Russian research vessel Akademic Ioffe, en route to Grise Fiord , Ellesmere Island.  I had heard of Grise Fiord before - a community of people  uprooted from Inukjuak (formerly Port Harrison)in Northern Quebec and moved to Ellesmere Island in 1953 . The government claimed the move was about better hunting- the real reason was about Canadian sovereignty and Cold War fears. I had  heard the all too common stories of social upheaval caused by a complete dislocation of a people who had never considered living on the southern tip of Ellesmere. I also knew the people of Grise Fiord wanted to leave talk of that past behind.

  As we approached Grise Fiord , I took in  a narrow spit of land , a line of houses and shacks (pop. 148) dwarfed by a 800 meter vertical face of rock directly behind the village- a truly astonishing sight. At 76 degrees north , and Canada’s most northerly community , my thoughts could not help but turn back to the people as they were presented with this sight back in 1953. How do we live here ?
   I drove the scout zodiac as we headed into the community to check the landing site and see if things were ready a community centre for the one hundred passengers we were bringing ashore- almost as many as Grise Fiord itself ! As I approached the cobble beach I saw an elderly man waiting to greet us along with a rabble of kids ready to grab the boat. As the resource team unloaded I noticed he shook everyone’s hand as they came up the beach , welcoming them to the community. Nice gesture , I thought to myself , it will be a good visit. What I did not expect was that he stayed on the beach.  As each boatload of passengers came ashore ,he greeted every single person  with a handshake ,a smile and bright eyes .  I was deeply touched by this man’s simple act of welcoming. As I watched him engage each person I could not help but think about the circumstances of his life and how he came to be here. Another person might be angry , bitter or lost but he was not. He wanted each person to know that they were welcome in his community - and know  it as a community. Against all odds. To me this mans’ actions on the beach of Grise Fiord was a profound act of forgiveness. His name is Lemeche Kakkee.
  Since I began my travels in the Arctic in 1984 I had never seen a bowhead whale. I had heard from Inuit hunters that their numbers were returning , numbers greater than estimated by environmental groups and Fisheries and Oceans. A marine biologist Pierre Richard on board the Ioffe suggested that perhaps the Inuit were right  - there might be a few thousand Bowheads in the Eastern Arctic , many more than the 500 researchers had estimated ten years ago. All this was wonderful news after the whaling industry  had decimated the Bowhead whale population in the Eastern Arctic in the early part of the 20th century. I remembered a conversation with Etuangat - an Unuit elder when I visited Keckerton in the mid 1990's. It turned me on my head. Etuangat was 103 years old when I spoke with him , he had been a fleencer at the whaling station of Keckerton around 1906. I asked him if he was ever alarmed at the number of whales the Scots of Dundee were bringing ashore . He laughed and said no - the whaling age was a great time for the people of Cumberland Sound, the Scots knew how to catch whales better than we did , they brought fiddles and accordions , we worked hard , we had great parties. A hunter admiring hunters.

    Pierre Richard had told us there was a resident group of Bowheads we might see in Isabella Bay, south of Clyde River on the north east coast of Baffin Island. They gathered there each summer to feed on huge swarms of copepods found along this coast. Just after lunch we spotted our first whale - a plume of breath, a flash of black back on a sun diamond sea. Passengers rushed to the upper decks as more and more Bowheads were spotted , ten , no , twenty whales ! All wallowing about on this lazy summer afternoon. Pierre announced that we would continue south to Isabella Bay where he thought there might be even more Bowheads. ! How could there be ?- this was the most Bowhead I had seen in 23 years in the Arctic.

  But Pierre was right. As we came into Isabella Bay we were met by the vision of over forty whales within sight of the ship . Everywhere one could see breath- clouds hanging above a still sparkling ocean , fins and flukes sounding , mouths gaping open , huge shimmering black backs rising through the water. The Russian captain was so impressed  he  shut down the ships’ engines. Not often done. The captain  wanted to listen as well as see the whales.
   And then with the new silence it was as if the world was breathing.  All around the ship , the expulsion , the gasp of air, then slip beneath the waves. Everyone on board was silent as they bore witness to this spectacle of life.

    Towards the end of our visit - a giant Bowhead turned towards the ship from a mile off. There was clearly an intention to approach . ( I interrupt this story to say something about Bowhead whales . They are huge- forty-five feet in length , can weigh as much as a Blue whale which is twice the length , they are fat and slow , impossible looking really. And it has been discovered that Bowhead whales can live up to 200 hundred years. ) As I watched this gigantic beast head directly towards our ship I realized that this whale, at over forty feet, had likely survived the great whaling age that had taken so many of its kin. Now I don’t want to get into sentience of whales but I asked myself this - why would this whale be approaching the ship if all instinct and life experience had taught it to head the other way ? Before I could answer this question the whale was within twenty feet  . It was a preposterous sight  - an absolutely gigantic back ,maybe nine feet across,  a breathing hole above the water two, three feet, black , white markings and then, when it could come no closer , arched back , enormous flukes, sounding,  before our eyes, we watched it head down   and under the ship. We did not see the whale again. But as I stood there flashing back on the last fifteen seconds of complete wonder, the man on the beach at Grise Fiord returned to me:  forgiveness. Why would that whale would seek our company? Its intent was much more than curiosity. The whale chose its moment.  
And what did that whale leave in its wake? A state of grace. A state of wonder that effected every passenger and crew member on board the Akademic Ioffe that  sun- drenched afternoon in Isabella Bay , Nunavut.      

“Science needs you in the Chukchi Sea” was the first line of a letter I received from John Oliver during the winter of 1984. It altered the course of my life.  Mail was something very special to me back then, before computers, e-mails and even answering messages.  All things came to me by the mail- chances for work, letters from distant friends, infrequent and paltry royalty cheques   - all were eagerly anticipated. The mail was a lifeline. I believed with some conviction that all answers- and by that I mean all lifes’ answers, would come to me by the mail. I would be proven right on this particular winter day.
But the  thing was I didn’t really get much mail. There weren’t a lot of people writing, there weren’t a lot of jobs, the royalty cheques were paltry and infrequent but still one could hope. And this is where St. Luella Laporte of the Old Chelsea post office came in.
Every few days I would cross country ski down to Old Chelsea to pick up my mail. It was an easy trail through the woods of maple and pine and then across Crawley fields. Some days I would stop in at Judy Crawley’s place for a cup of tea .Conversations with Judy were always valuable. Judy was the partner and better half of the filmmaker Budge Crawley. The log cabin she lived in was once part of the set of the fifties television series “R.C.M.P.” which had been filmed in Crawley fields along with another series called “Radisson and Grosselier”. Her cabin held the memorabilia of an illustrious career pioneering the documentary film industry in Canada.  One day I noticed a tin on a shelf in her cabin. It was an old hard tack biscuit tin and on the side was stamped – Franklin Expedition -1845. I asked her if it was real. Yes it was. She and Budge were in the Arctic filming in 1947 and found this cairn on the tundra broken open by a polar bear they guessed. She told me there were cans and other supplies strewn across the landscape, untouched for over 100 years. I was very moved by this story .In many ways I have been chasing my own tin cans across the country since I first saw that tin on Judy’s shelf. “Ian “, she said , “there are lots of stories like this out there , you just have to go and get them” .After tea with Judy I would continue my trek to the post office , my head filled with her film making stories , as I glided across the back lot of  Canadian film history.
Luella Laporte was the post office lady at Fiset’s Depaneur in Old Chelsea. The depaneur was filled with over the counter medicines more than anything else, reflecting the state of elderly M.Fiset’s chronic poor health. You could get any number of ancient cough remedies at Fiset’s but you would be hard pressed to get a litre of fresh milk or loaf of bread. The post office had been there for one hundred years and Luella Laporte was to be the last of a vanishing breed. She and her husband Floyd lived next door to Fiset’s on the corner of Scott and Old Chelsea Road.   They were happily squatting in a house that didn’t belong to them. It belonged to someone who lived in Michigan and hadn’t visited Old Chelsea in several decades. Floyd felt it was a shame that no one was living in a “free” house and so he and Luella moved in.  I worked for Floyd for a while. I had a ’66 Mercury half ton and so did Floyd but his had been banned in Ontario because excessive rust  and so I drove split wood over to the Ontario side for him. His method of cutting wood was unique in the history of logging in Canada I think. Floyd owned a tank. I don’t know where he got it – there many things about Floyd I didn’t ask about – but he logged trees with this tank. I should say that the tank no longer had a cannon -or turret for that matter but it was a tank none the less. Under cover of night, Floyd would take his tank into the Gatineau Park, use the come along and pull perfectly good maple, beech and oak out by the roots. He didn’t bother to cut them down, said it was safer to just yank ‘em out. I don’t know how he did this, I only saw the results, but he hauled them down and then drove back down Scott Rd.  dragging the tree behind him. By morning he had the tree all cut up and it was ready for me to take “dry” split wood to unwitting clients in Ottawa. What he was doing was highly illegal and irregular at best but he never seemed to get caught. I don’t know how because the tanks tracks were evident down the Scott Road right into the pavement and there were always branches and roots on the road near his house like those surrounding a beaver lodge. When Floyd and Luella had their son Dwayne, Floyd painted “Floyd Laporte and Son” on the side of his truck even though the truck was condemned to sit in his driveway by this time. He coveted my ’66 Mercury. It had been a prairie truck, no rust, a great year for Ford, but when it reached 300,000 miles I sold it to Floyd for 400 bucks. The engine was finished.  Or so I thought. The next day he put Floyd Laporte and Son on it and drove it for ten more years never changing the engine. He just put a forty gallon drum in the bed that he filled it with used oil from the local garage. He had a pump and hose over the cab and poured the old oil into the poor dear. I used to see the thing belching around Chelsea and shudder.

Luella and I had this unspoken arrangement about mail. She knew I had skiied a couple of clicks to get it and knew how important it was to me and never wanted to disappoint me with no mail in my slot. So, bless her heart, she would gather other people’s junk mail and put it in my box. I knew that she did this but we both agreed to an unspoken rule that I would accept whatever mail she handed me but not look at it until I was back outside on the porch.  By this convention it saved both of us undue embarrassment. But the day the letter came from John Oliver was a very different day.

Installment 2    

I was standing on the porch at Fiset’s Depanneur when I opened the letter from John Oliver. On the envelope the return address read; Moss Landing Marine Labs, Moss Landing California. Interesting, never heard of Moss Landing before, never heard of John Oliver either. I opened this curious letter and read;
“Dear Ian, science needs you in the Chukchi Sea. Last summer a group of benthic bubs were doing some work in Barclay Sound near Bamfield Marine Station and we came to a concert you gave there. We talked about it after and came to the conclusion that you should probably join us for a month this summer on the Research Vessel Alpha Helix. We will be studying the feeding habits of Gray Whales and walrus and so we invite to come along as a writer in residence. You should get your divers license so you can see how outstanding it is on the bottom of the Bering and Chukchi Seas. If you choose to accept this offer we will meet you on the pier in Nome, Alaska, July 14, (1984) Looking forward to hearing from you . Signed, Professor John Oliver, Adjunct Professor, State University of California, Moss Landing, CA.”
“Science needs you in the Chukchi Sea” – I will never forget that line. It had never really occurred to me that science needed me in the Chukchi Sea, it never really occurred to me that science needed me anywhere, and I didn’t know where the Chukchi Sea.  I burst out laughing. It was more a giggle. I was right- all answers did come through the mail. The letter was outrageous on several levels. Surely it must be a joke. I kicked on my skiis and headed home, laughing to myself all the way. I remembered the concert in Bamfield the previous summer- it was a warm night, it was at the marine station  and there were a bunch of people there from an expedition company called Eco Summer taking a look at the incredible ecosystem that is Barclay Sound. I guess this guy Oliver was there but I never met him or any of his benthic bubs – whatever that meant. As for science needing me, this certainly was not true. Though I loved the natural world and spent a good deal of time exploring it, I was a terrible science student. Failed experiments, unmemorized Periodic Tables and a science teacher so frustrated with my incompetence that he smacked me over head with his safety hat – that was science to me. Oh well- I would phone this Oliver guy up and explain things and that would be that. And then there was this idea of me getting my diving license. That was really funny. Quite clearly these folks did not know me. I am without a doubt the worst swimmer in the world. I swim like a rock. I do not float. Swimming instructors lamented the years I spent in Red Cross Intermediate Class as I flailed around in the frigid waters of Lake Superior. I developed migraines to avoid classes. The culmination of my failure came the day I saw a sea monster coming after me in the annual mile swim and was pathetically pulled from the water by my embarassed mother. Sadly no one else saw the sea monster that day. Oh well I thought. But then I started thinking as I skied across Crawley fields – maybe if I sunk so well, diving might be o.k., perhaps I was meant to be under the water rather than on top of it. By the time I got home I definitely needed to find out more about John Oliver.     
 When I got home I decided  to call Anne Stewart at the Bamfield Marine Station  before I called this John Oliver . She was a marine biologist at the station and had organized a number of concerts for me out there. I figure if anyone had the scoop on John Oliver it would be Anne. She did. “John Oliver! –you mean the nut case from Moss Landing! Sure he was here last summer, I guess that’s when he saw you. He’s crazy Ian! He is also about the best marine biologist around these days- in fact his whole crew from Moss Landing is doing about the best science stuff going. I have never seen a bunch of people push so hard – they dive non stop and everyone’s doing a paper on something. But John Oliver certainly doesn’t act or look like any scientist I have seen. He and his pal Ed O’Connor are more like surfers – Oliver went around Bamfield last summer  a moo moo and flip flops , he was something else. But John and his team they’re good  , they’re very good . If they want you to do something with them you should definitely go . “
“Thanks Anne.”
“Where do they want you to go?’’
“The Chukchi Sea ….”
“Cool- where’s that?”

The Chukchi Sea hmmm. There it is.  North of the Bering Strait that’s where you find it. It ‘s kind of like an hour glass at the top of the Pacific Ocean  narrowing into the Bering Strait between Alaska and Russia , Big and Little Diomede Islands , the International Date Line and widening out again into the Chukchi Sea . It is where the land bridge was towards the end of the last Ice Age – a place they now call Berringa. On the American side the Chukchi extends into Kotzebue Sound, Point Hope and north to Wainwright and Barrow heading east towards the Beaufort  Sea.
OK. So now I know where I am going and bit about the guy I am going with – time to call John Oliver. 

Installment Three
My phone call to John Oliver confirmed what he had said in the letter – an offer to be a “writer in residence “ , a month in the Chukchi Sea  , studying the feeding habits of gray whales and walrus. The conversation also confirmed Anne’s description – John was not your ordinary scientist. Within in two minutes of our conversation my name was not Ian but Tam.
 “Tam – you see what we’re doing out there is no more than collecting stories for science, the same way you collect stories for songs. So – we are doing the same thing. But why I want you there is to take on the big view. Us benthic bubs spend most our time in the mud at the bottom of the ocean collecting shit or we’re looking down a microscope at the stuff  we got at the bottom  you see , so what I want you to take on, if you’re welling , is the big view , I want you to take on the horizon cuz we, the bubs lose track of that , you can write a few love songs too if you want cuz you’re good at that and we can always use a good love songs , but I am looking to fill out the team and Tam , I think you’d be good on the team. Of course it would be good if you got your diving license cuz the diving’s incredible and then you can be part of what we’re seeing. And we’ve got this great hotel called the Alpha Helix, the research ship  from the University of Alaska that has put on extra ice cream for us.
Ice cream ?
Oh yes Tam , ice cream , there will be ice cream in abundance.
I like ice cream.
Good. Then Tam- this is the scam. You get your ticket and meet us at the pier in Nome, July 10 . The Alpha Helix will be off shore if its not too rough , you can help us get some the gear on board. Just for the books you’re now a marine biologist , if that’s fine by you?
A marine biologist …
Just for the grants, remember Tam , it’s all just about collecting stories…

I spent the winter each week at a suburban Ottawa swimming pool taking the basic open water PADI  diving course. I did not tell the instructor that my first dive would be in the Arctic or that I would be wearing a dry suit. I didn’t want to complicate things because apparently you don’t begin your diving career in the Arctic.. In the spring we started diving abandoned quarries where the instructors had placed old planes and boats for the sake of interest. I loved being under the water and found the sport to my liking as long as things were done slow and careful. I forget my buddies name at this point but we seemed to work well together going through the exercises like “buddy breathing” , where, in the case of emergency , like a free flowing regulator or malfunction you would have share your breathing apparatus with the person in trouble. I found some of the decompression tables confusing at first but got onto in time for the written exam . On July 8 we took our final exam in the murky waters of the St Lawrence near Prescott , Ontario. On the way down to Prescott I rescued a turtle who was attempting to cross a freeway and decided he might prefer a swim to sure death on the road. When we got to the dock I let the turtle released the turtle to the St Lawrence  . My  buddy and I  got in the water and with our examiner headed down. This was in 1984 and before the zebra mussels had filtered the murk (and everything else) out of the St Lawrence. The visibility  was less than six feet  but we made our way down to 35 feet  and the murky bottom of the St Lawrence . There I spotted a shopping cart and in the shopping cart was none other than my turtle. The absurdity of the vision suited me just fine and prepared me for what was to come. In three days I would take my first dive with  in the middle of the Bering Strait.
Seven time zones later I arrive in Nome , July12. Nome is a town you could blow away- dusty streets , dusty mud spattered  buildings , a worn- out gold rush town seemed to have seen better days. Except that everytime there is a big storm more gold comes ashore on Nomes beaches. I head to the pier and find crew of the Alpha Helix loading supplies onto a tug , the Alpha Helix is offshore. The crew tell me that Oliver and co. are at the Board of Trade and so I leave my gear with them and head back down town past  line of bars, the Nugget, the Polaris. I didn’t realize the Board of Trade was a bar until I was standing in front of it. Without a doubt the Board of Trade was the grottiest bar I have ever seen in my life . Part of the roof was collapsing , the walls, water stained - dust covered everything. In the far corner , band equipment that was all circa 1965 – all battered and bashed up. Washed up on Nomes beaches back then and never left I guess.  On the walls were stapled bills from every country imaginable and all along the walls scrimsawed ossiks – walrus penis. Apparently , Eskimos desparate for a drink traded ossiks  at the Board of Trade . The bars claim to fame is that is marks the finish of the Iditaroid dogsled race. It seems to me the place might blow away come winter.  All the benthic bubs were there, John Oliver, Ed OConnor, Rik Kivitek, Peter Slattery, Mark Silberstein – several more.  All gregarious Americans – all having a last drink before a month on the “dry” Alpha Helix. I joined in and we poured out of the Board of trade at 11:30 to the strains of the band playing Crimson and Clover. A skiff took us to the Alpha Helix and we head to bed . The sun is still shining on the horizon, it does not get dark . It will not get dark for the next month.
Two days later heading north towards the Bering Strait we arrived at a mysterious place called King Island. It was around midnight . The sun was low on the horizon but it was complete daylight and perfectly clear. The island was seemingly a shear cliff with a stonehednge like structure on the summit.
Rik Kvitik approached me on the deck, “can you see the houses?”.
“How can there be houses Rik, it’s a cliff !
“ Look close , see that indent there and the big rock ? “
And then I saw the houses against the cliff face.
The houses and a church were all faded grey wood against the grey scree of the cliff outfall but with binoculars you could then see houses built on stilts on the steep slope of the island. The white church was closest to the big rock and the bay but there were about twenty houses up the slope. It was the most impossible, inhospitable and improbable   place   people could live I had ever seen in my life.  We stared in disbelief as the ship approached the bay . At first there was no sign of life, I was told people had moved off the island in the late seventies- but then we saw some clothing waving on a line and then two guys waving from a house.  Incredible. I waved back.
As the  ship dropped anchor Oliver passed by in a rush , “  Tamblyn , get your gear, we’re going diving !”

Diving. Of course we were going diving- at midnight, off King Island in the middle of the Bering Sea. I had kind of thought I would sort of ease into the diving thing – say in the middle of the day , sort of a training run close to shore but no, apparently the diving here was the best so my first dive would be to ninety feet .
Pete Slattery helped me put on my dry suit and about forty pounds of weights, a brief explanation of how it worked and we all got into the Boston Whaler (boat) at the side of the ship . It was a beautiful evening, the sun , glistening off the waves but  all I could think of was , how am I going to do this. I had never dived below sixty feet,  I had never dived in a dry suit before , always a wet suit with external buoyancy control jacket on the outside. Now I had a hose from the tank fastened to the suit and the suit was my bouyancy control.  I was sweating like crazy in the suit as John, who was to be my buddy, ran through a few things with me. Yep, ok, I see, alright I will follow you…. and he was over the side!
I noticed John and the other divers had kind of rolled over the side into the water but this was not the proper way I had been taught at the PADI course. You were supposed to roll in backwards holding your goggles so they stayed in place. And so – trying to keep up with my buddy John , which proved hopeless , I  dropped into the Bering Sea backwards. But of course the PADI course was a beginners course intended for vacations in the Caribbean, not a course for dry suit diving in the Arctic. What I found out quite quickly was that all the air in the dry suit rushed to my feet which were attached to my flippers , which were now  out of the water. It is difficult to move in the water without your flippers in the medium and, after what seemed several minutes, I was still bobbing upside down in the Bering Sea . Oh well I said to myself, this is not an auspicious start to my Arctic diving career but I am still breathing underwater, it is a start. I tried to purge some air from the suit but the air you see was down in the legs of the suit which was above the surface of the water…. Finally, I was able to somersault my way around with my feet and flippers finally where they were supposed be- below me! I looked around. There was the Boston whaler with three of the scientists rolling over with laughter, having watched my flippers flailing around  for several minutes . Clearly my writer in residence status would need some adjustment. Pete Slattery called out, “Ian !- sorry man , we forgot to tell you never go in like that in a dry suit ! We forgot you took that PADI course! “Yeah, sure they forgot.  Once settled in an upright position, I found it easier to purge some air from my suit and then,   sink beneath the waves, away from the yuk- yuk session. Where was my buddy John? No where to be seen. I tested out the suit’s purge valve, moving up and down in the water column. It actually seemed easier to control my buoyancy in the dry suit than with an external BC. I cleared my goggles and looked for John again. The water column was clear .The visibility-amazing.  There he was – far below with Ed O’Connor and Mark Silberstein. Some buddy. Oh well- alone in the Bering Sea, my first dive, I guess I better head down.
As I headed down to ninety feet  I looked up to see the light sparkling on the water above and below , the divers below amidst a very colourful bottom of reds, yellows , greens and purples. Suddenly I passed through a zone of a million tiny lights! At first I thought I was hallucinating but as I looked closer the lights- all blinking, were coming from thousands, millions of tiny jellyfish called ctenophores. I slowed my descent to look at them closer. Each jellyfish had a band of running lights around the tiny zeppelin that was their body. Taking my focus away from one lead to a vision of the millions! It was incredible. I continued down , leaving this galaxy of lights behind me. As I got to the bottom I saw John waving me over. As I approached him I looked down to see hundreds of Alaskan King crab groping over each other on the bottom, arms and pincers reaching up to take on John or anyone else. The crab were about two feet thick on the bottom and could see they were scuttling over the carcass of something. I looked around at the swirl of colours around me . I never thought the Bering Sea would have such a profusion of life , bursting with colour . Everywhere I looked were more crab, big sea sponges, sea cucumbers, sea peach, it was amazing . Knowing I had only a few minutes of bottom time at ninety feet I checked my gauges to find I was down to 500 psi. I knew in my excitement and adventures on top I had used my air so I told John it was time to go up. I began to ascend at the same rate as my bubbles, purging the expanding air in my suit as I ascended. But at about forty feet from the surface the purge valve on my suit would not depress and I started to rise much faster than I should. I pressed the valve again but it would not release. I could not get the expanding air to release from the suit and I was rocketing to the surface. I remembered quickly that I should continue to breath out because the air in my lungs was expanding too ! With the acceleration came a dizziness and felt I was spinning in the water column. Oh shit , I said to myself. I knew I was going up way faster than I should and would have to go back down to avoid the bends but my immediate concern was not hitting the bottom of the boat as I rocketed to the surface! I put my hand above my head in a fist in case I hit the boat but instead I hit the surface like a cross between a Polaris missile and a defiant revolutionary! But what was now bobbing off King Island in fact look more like a floating Michelin man – my suit all swollen up with air ! My head spinning dizzy, I looked around to find the boat about twenty feet away and for the second time that evening the crew were upside down with laughter ! A few moments later John was beside me. “Tam- you came up bit quick towards the end there !, what’s the hurry?!”
“My purge valve I sputtered, I couldn’t push it in ! It’s stuck!”
“Right. Sometimes they get a bit stiff – you got to hit ‘em with your fist sometimes.
And with that he hit my purge valve and the Michelin man sank into the waves.
“Never mind, Tam – you had a good dive! We’ll get you another tank , you go down to fifteen feet or so for half an hour , you’ll be fine . Get the boys to give you a tank. I ‘m going back down , I ‘ll meet in the cave over there. “
With that he was gone.
The boys still had smiles on their faces and  there was some good natured teasing as I passed my tank into the boat and managed to strap on a second tank. I need to get back down before the nitrogen got trapped and so I headed beneath the waves for the second time, this time on my own.
Oddly enough, I was quite calm this time , considering the excitement of a few minutes before but I thought well , what else can go wrong. I  tested my purge valve and it worked fine but I realized at fifteen to thirty feet their was not the pressure against it as there was ascending from ninety feet. As I made my way to the cave, I realized too that I would have to ask more questions about the working of dry suits because these clowns were so far down the road with their diving experience my novice experiences were far behind them.  As I approached the cave I noticed squadron of birds , murres , darting underwater around me, like mini torpedoes . They were every where ! I looked around to find John just ahead , how he got there I don’t know . We came to the surface in the cave near the community on King Island and looked up to find a cathedral of rock snow and ice. Everywhere above murres were perched chittering at the strangers below. Over on the snow ledge ,a cache of meat, seals and walrus – a summer refrigerator for the hunters. Murres flew in like a busy airport and took off- some plunging into the water around me and John. It was a very moving and holy site. We lay on our backs for awhile watching the coming and going above us. After several minutes we slipped beneath the water again heading back to the boat, John showing me new creatures on the bottom as we go. We came up at the boat this time without incident and once aboard congratulations are given for my first dive in the north and my cool under stress. I said nothing but I was anything but cool. I was just happy to be alive in the wonder of the arctic. I think I was exhausted and close to rapture. It was now 3 a.m. but the day was not over.
After we got back to the Alpha Helix and put our diving gear away, it was decided we should go and visit King Island and the folks who had been waving to us. Hell- why not climb to the top of the 300 metre high island. And so we did.
Up to 1964 King was a vibrant year round community of about 400 people. I learned later that King Island was also the spiritual centre of north western Inuit who still call themselves Eskimos. “Inuit !- we kicked them to the east- don’t call me no Inuit ! “ Like many other island communities isolated from the world, the coming of the modern world brought with it familiar diseases- influenza, measles, chickenpox. The people had no resistance to them. The results were devastating. The modern world started coming to King Island after the second world war. Shamanistic faith was replaced by Christianity, earthen houses, replaced by wood houses on stilts, and between 1945 and 1964 – 200 people died of disease in the community. It is a familiar story similar to Haidi Gwaii or even St. Kilda, off the west coast of Scotland.  The similarities between St. Kilda and King Island are striking in many ways.  By 1964 the community was socially and physically ill, depressed and unable to support itself. They asked the Alaskan government to evacuate the island and the inhabitants were taken to the mainland and distributed amongst different communities. At the end of the trip I talked to Dolly Kalerak in an Anchorage native bar until 3am about King Island. She was related to a King Island family. She told me the evacuation of King Island was akin to taking the heart out of western Arctic Eskimos. She was amazed that I had even been there and yet she knew all about it. It remained at the heart of her arctic world.
When we reached the shore we were met by Gilbert and Isak, two completely affable walrus hunters and part of the King Island community that came back every summer to hunt.
“You want to go to the top to see Stonehenge? Sure! We’ll take you! Let’s go!”
Stonehenge…..
We climbed up the scree slope towards the community and sure enough there were the houses, a community hall and a church , all built on stilts against the incredible slope of the cliff . I had seen nothing like this in my life. I played a few tunes on the church pump organ, Gilbert said it was the first time it had been played since 1964. Isak and Gilbert said a prayer and we continued our climb. I noticed under several houses there were sod mounds with entrances. I asked if these were food caches. No – the food cache was in the snow cave where we had seen the walrus and seals, these mounds were the original sod houses where the King Island community lived! I looked around and there were sod houses every where, surrounded by midden mounds. This was the first time I had see a kind of living archeological site and in the instant Gilbert “showed” me the old community literally under the knew one a whole other world opened up before me. I saw now why we were surrounded by relatively lush vegetation right next a glacial remnant and rock. The vegetation was growing on a massive midden slope that had built up over hundreds of years. As I looked closer there were bones sticking out of the ground all round me.
We continued our climb up the steep scree slope guided by Isak and Gilbert . They were incredible. Several times they would stop to pick some plant and have us try it – part of the diet of former King Islanders. As we reached the top of the island we began walking on   flat slate-like rubble, I could hear squeaking beneath my feet. It was the sound of hundreds of  nesting parakeet and common auklets. Gilbert reached under the rocks and pulls out several eggs- breakfast he said. With a ruckus beneath our feet we reached the top of King Island . What I saw there was breathtaking. As I looked south towards the Bering Sea the full moon was rising , to the northwest , Siberia- the sun , just at the horizon , the sky a continuum of burgundy to violet and before me a  series of  druidic stone columns the shamans used to call god’s chair.  
I asked Gilbert about the shamans and we fell into a long conversation about the former power of the shamans . We did this as we walked through what he called the pagan grave site. He respected the shamans understanding of the ways of animal migrations but he said they also could have terrifying powers that could be quite harmful . He was glad the shamans were now a memory and that he was a Christian . As he spoke , we walked through a graveyard of skulls and bones . At one point he picked up a femur and put it with the rest of the skeleton. “Foxes, -always moving the bones around. It is bad for the bones to be separated. Every time I come up I have sort them out again” . As he spoke I didn’t realize we were walking in a way from the pagan past of King Island to the Christian present. I was concentrating on the ground  before me, not wanting to step on anyone.
 “We put this up here on the last days of King Island.”
  I looked up. There- looking out over the Bering Sea was a twenty foot statue of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ! I muttered to myself.
“It took them three days to get it up here. I was pretty young but I remember.”
 He bowed his head and said a prayer.
We wandered back towards the old site , occasionally picking up a bone to be reunited with a skeleton . It was not an exact science I noticed one skeleton had three thogh bones. It was the thought that counts. I was lost between worlds when Gilbert started talking about the shaman again. It was if he was between the two worlds – as we got closer to the pagan god’s chair, it was like he shifted over to their world. It was either an argument in himself or merely a respect for both powers.
“The shaman used to come up here to sight walrus or whales. Sometimes they were looking out there cuz you can see a long way but sometimes they were looking inside and other times they flew from here”
“Flew?”
“Oh yeah- they flew all the time.”
With that , Gilbert began to dance . “This is a dance they used to do to bring in the walrus !”

He continued the dance for a few minutes, chanting away on top of an island in the middle of Bering Sea. I looked out over the ocean and thought about flying I closed my eyes and sent myself out . I dove down and continued beneath the waves where I had been a few hours before . I came back up and opened my eyes. Gilbert was still chanting . Far below me I saw several brownish white objects in the water coming around the corner of King Island. They looked like belugas but I knew there weren’t. I called to Gilbert pulling him from his trance.
“Holy fuck ! Walrus ! Let’s go ! We haven’t seen walrus for a week ! I guess that dance still works !”He was laughing.
As we headed down the cliff face I  asked Gilbert why the walrus appeared to be almost white.
“They been in the water a long time. There hair is hollow and the blood in the hair goes back into the body to keep them warm after they been in the water for awhile . When they haul out onto the ice or rocks, the sun warms them up and the blood goes into the hair again , maybe to keep them cool. They’ve got really thick skin.”
We walked down towards the village scrambling over rocks and old bust cairns – bones , skulls everywhere. The people of King Island lived with their ancestors all around them.
“They pulled us off in ’64- said it was inbreeding but it weren’t . Everyone was careful about that, it was the shaman’s job, we lived here for thousands of years without them.  It was us that couldn’t do it no more – everyone was sick. We lost too many hunters – we didn’t want to go. Why would want to leave here. Look at the walrus, you been down below , the fish ,the crab-whales- we had everything here .”
We caught up with the rest of the crew in the village as Gilbert and Isak prepared to hunt for the walrus. We bid farewell. The sun circling was in the sky, we headed back to the Alpha Helix . It was five a.m.

I woke up around noon the next day to find the Alpha Helix heading toward Fareway Island , a craggy outcrop midway between King Island and the Diomedes which are between Alaska and Russia  in the middle of the Bering Strait . Oliver had heard that the diving on Fareway was even better than at King and so he had requested the captain to check it out. Apparently the captain was reluctant saying it was in a military zone. Oliver wanted to see it. We came within view of Fareway when out of no where came a US destroyer telling the Helix to clear the area. Oliver got on the radio and told the Navy  he  wanted to dive off the island. There was some back and forth.  Finally Oliver and the Alpha Helix were told in no uncertain terms to clear the area if the Helix wanted to continue floating! It was their last transmission. The captain blew up at John telling Oliver to stay off the radio, that the Navy ship was serious and you don’t fool around with them up here on the border of Russia and Alaska in the middle of the fuckin’ cold war. The Alpha Helix could be sent back to port if John pushed their buttons again. 
John left the bridge hoping the captain would cool down and the ship resumed course towards Little Diomede Island.
In 1984 the cold war was at its height between Russia and the US and as we approached the Diomedes , navy ships of both nations began appearing . As well we passed several military bases on the Morroccan –like shore line of Alaska. You could feel the tension rising as we approached the Bering Strait. The odd thing was that the scientists on board, especially John Oliver and Ed O’Connor, seemed oblivious to the geo political situation they were entering. They joked about diving at the international dateline – diving tomorrow and coming up yesterday. It was a joke, but there were serious about the dive. The international date line however is also the border between Alaska and Russia and as we rounded the southern corner of Little Diomede Island , a Russian ship ,bristling with antennae , came parallel to the Alpha Helix about two miles to port . It stayed with us for the time we were at Diomede. Perhaps John and Ed were surfing too much in their teenage years and as California boys were blissfully unaware of the Cuban missile crisis etc. or perhaps it was simple surfer bravado. I suspect however it was more about the inborn conceit that most Americans have as they walk the planet- simply said they feel its their oyster. However, at a flare point, like the Bering Strait, such conceit, bravado or bliss ignorance seemed very misplaced. All scientists were told to stay off the bridge until we arrived off the village of Diomede. John laughed and said, “He’s still pissed at me!”
Little Diomede Island is in the middle of the Bering Strait . In the middle of the strait is the international date line and the border between Russian and the US . To the west is the east as it were , is Big Diomede Island whish is home to a very large Russian Naval base. The Bering Strait is also the bottleneck through which many Gray whales pass on their way north to the feeding grounds of the Chukchi Sea . It is also a major tanker and barge lane for the north slope oilfields. A busy place. As we approached the village of Little Diomede , all these things were going on before us- we saw several whales spouting , several herds of walrus , tanker traffic , massive tugs towing barges far behind , and our shadow, the Russian Navy, listening to every conversation.
By the time we anchored the captain had cooled down and he and John were talking again. It was agreed there would be no diving off Diomede , after all it was not in the scientific description of the voyage anyway. However, the captain agreed that all could go ashore as he had some supplies to drop off at the village.

To be continued.   
 
  
  

The Two Week Gig

In an age when three bands might share one night at bar or club the idea of the two week engagement for one band might seem now as foreign or unbelievable. And yet this was the music scene in my home town from 1976 -84 when I lead a band that played almost every week throughout this period. This was the scene till the early eighties when the Punkers and New Wave bands took it over.
The two week gig was a great gigging and learning experience but it could be exhausting especially if you played the Quebec side – five sets from 9:30am – to 3:00am.  Monday was a good night - the hard core clubbers were there and some nerves pulled it together. Tuesday was infamously the let down night, the band was often jagged and the house seldom good. However, from Wednesday on things built to the weekend. Friday night was singles night, Saturday - date night. It was good to acknowledge the difference- a few more slow numbers toward the end of date night Saturday. My band was doing mostly originals but would pepper the set list with lateral hits of the day Talking Heads, Ry Cooder , Richard Thompson, Taj Mahal , Tom Petty , Peter Gabriel just to give you a sense of what we were playing at the time.   I didn’t have to do too many Saturday matinees – they were brutal. By the second week the club was our home. Days would be patterned around the work hours of 8pm to 2am – and the stage at the club became the most familiar thing. As the two weeks progressed we pushed material around, solos stretched, timings and shots increased, more chances were taken. We became totally comfortable on stage and playing every night took our practice ability to the stage level.  Some nights we really did get outside into another zone. One night we were closing a club on New Year’s Eve and the audience was so charged it felt like I was floating above the music- raised by the audience. I am not talking altered states of consciousness although for some members of my band that was a constant state. You could also run a tab for two weeks at the bar and that often was tough love when it was deducted from pay – musicians playing for the bar. Not good.
Some of clubs we played attempted a level of class but for the most part they were holes.  Occasionally band rooms were shared with table dancers and strippers who worked the early shift, but it was all part of the colour. The seamier side was the drug scene associated with the clubs and some of their owners. By the early eighties cocaine replaced weed as the drug of choice and the scene got ugly. As well, some clubs were forced to pay fees directly to the Musician’s union because of previous violations, but the club owner often expected a kick back from what had been paid to the union. Sometimes this could get pretty heavy and dangerous. During the recession of 1982, clubs went up in flames around town and others were padlocked by bailiffs. There was one night of serious busts- a music promoter turned out to be a drug informer. A bad combination.  I got a mysterious call in the afternoon, was forewarned and a member of my band was spared.  That club later burned to the ground under suspicious circumstances.
But the pay was good for the times – a five piece could get two grand for the week, two hundred above union scale so for two weeks the coin was good -  better than today. The fun factor was also great. After a gig there was usually a continuation of the evening on the other side of river, after all who was ready for bed after playing all night? Clubs stayed open till three and all the musicians and fans gathered there. The downside was that the drug scene, attendant to the clubs, also spilt across the river and there were some nights of drawn guns and long knives.  I don’t know who I feared most- the dealers or the police. Late nights and early mornings could lead to some excesses and some of my musical friends from that period fell victim to those late nights.  
But I will remember the nights of  the two week gig- the dancers on the floor , the music transcending itself,   and the memory of fellow musicians laughing their way  home in the pre – dawn light- another week to play.     

There are those who believe that the Drake Passage between the tip of South America and Antarctica is the world’s worst body of water. If that is so the Davis Strait must be the nastiest.
Our ship, the icebreaker, Polar Star, staggers against fist like waves, waves knocking her sideways, shuddering through her hull, waves overwhelming the bow, great sheets of water hurling up and over the bridge, driven by force ten winds. Then- a series of deep troughs pitches the ship only to be driven sideways by a contrary wave smashing the portside mid ships. Looking out at the Davis Strait, it is a grey canvas; grey black mountains of frightening water, streaked with foam and spray. There almost seems some order in the wild chaos, windrows of flotsam streaking in patterns as far as the eye can see. The ship struggles on – hour after hour, six knots headway- it will be two days crossing against this storm.
The Polar Star pitches, wallows and pounds through the wild grayness, crewmen move around the ship securing windows with bolted steel covers. Access to outside decks is out of the question, wind whining through the cracks of the thick steel doors. Sheets of water wash all decks. Amongst seasoned hands this sea is known as the corkscrew as the ship seems to twist as it makes its way through the waves. This corkscrew  turns  even seasoned  stomachs to the  rail  and making one’s way around the ship is at times a dangerous activity , occasionally  balancing a foot off a wall or careening into another as one leans against an impossible force.
The Davis Strait wears on nerves and wearies the body even if you are not physically ill. Even experienced sailors grit their teeth to it – will you not let up, will you not give us passage through these dark waters?
Staring out into forever moving ranges of black ocean I see grey conveys moving , ghost conveys , grey black ships  shivering across the Davis Strait,  waves of ship and steel facing waves of  water and- down below – the sea wolf stalking. To be lost at sea in the Davis Strait, the terror – oh God please take me quickly. As I look out imagining these conveys I remember a man who recently died in my village. In his obit it stated that he had been blown into the dark waters of the Davis Strait by a German U boat, plucked from burning black sea, and piled on deck of the rescue ship with other victims, presumed dead. However, a passing medic noticed there were signs of life in this man. The North Atlantic would not claim Jake Warren.
And through the crests and valleys streaked with foam we labour as the fulmars, kittiwakes and jaegers glide, arc, carve, cut, curve the wild wind. They do not make mistakes in this madness, each move is perfect  arching over the peaks , slight turn, down into the valley , adjustment, acceleration, ground lift affect, angle, fast carve, lift up , pull away , minimum energy , maximum efficiency. The Davis Strait is their home and this is just another in their endless search for food.

The Giant Maw and the Fragile Tangent

For the past number of years I have mused the giant maw and the fragile tangent as I travel the fragile tangent from gig to gig across Canada.  The fragile tangent is the thin lattice work of community- based concert venues connected by highway and byway that grow and collapse and then are reborn again across this country. The giant maw on the other hand is the heart of the society, the masses, it is the never ending Subway ad, it is Wal-Mart , it is Canadian Idol , it is Tim Horton’s and, it remains the main target area for the North American music industry, even in the nervous age of downloads. It seems to me that a musician has a choice or is chosen to enter either the giant maw or walk the fragile tangent. Take a closer look.
The Giant Maw offers many attractions but the greatest by far is its ability to introduce new artists to a large swath of the listening public .It is as Joni Mitchell put it so well- “the star maker machinery behind the popular song”. If the campaign is successful by any means, including a hit song, your name will be known for the rest of your life by the Giant Maw. Your name will have been entered into the general collective consciousness of the society very much like a Big Mac ad and, with continued effort and frequent campaigns of re-introduction, your place in the firmament of stars may be assured. The introduction into the centre of society, if successful, will almost guarantee you a lifelong career in the music industry. Ask Bobby Curtola.  In many ways CTVs Canadian Idol is an almost perfect example of carpet bombing the giant maw. It does not matter that the format, presentation or even content might be dodgy – what is important is  that money accrues to Canadian Idol  and CTV, while someone is introduced to the mass Canadian public. And yet the downside for the artist in the giant maw is found in the last sentence – that money first and foremost accrues to the star maker machinery behind the popular song .This downside is the heartland of bad contracts, unfair publishing deals , agents, publicists , lawyers  each taking their share of the loot as you- Big Mac – are becoming the latest thing. Oh I forgot to mention, you do have to have some talent but that talent may not necessatily be musical . The biggest talent may be your ability to be sold to the Giant Maw. Ask Johnny Rotten. Your talent may also be one of style over content. Ask Feist.  The Giant Maw has a voracious appetite, one can get chewed up very badly but it is still the most effective way of getting yourself known to the great centre of the society.
 
If you do not turn down the Don Valley , the DeCarre or come down the Kokahalla into Vancouver  you may find yourself gigging the fragile tangent.

More to come…

The Great Search

This past weekend my addiction to old acoustic guitars was rekindled with the purchase of a beat up Gibson B-25 - 12 string circa 1964. I got it at an interesting guitar store near Pefferlaw, Ontario.  Now I know it is not a Gibson Roy Smeck Stage Deluxe or a Nick Lucas Special like one I used to own but still- Still- - it sounds great, like a small stringed orchestra and I know just where it will fit into the next CD production I undertake.  It was a rare find made even rarer by the intrusion of E- Bay on the scene.

My addiction to old guitars or perhaps, the search for old guitars began with a story, probably apocryphal, which then became a full blown fantasy. I was living up in Thunder Bay when I asked this guy, Bob Leggett, about his old Martin –a New Yorker, parlour style.  It was about seventy years old.   He said he had been working for a reno team in Cabbagetown,Toronto, gutting a house, when he and a fellow worker tossed an old cupboard out the window into a dumpster down below. When the cupboard landed in the bin it literally struck a chord.  He ran downstairs, open the cupboard and there was his guitar only slightly worse for wear.
From that point on I was on the look out for the lost guitar!

The search took me to old barns and abandon farmhouses along Highway 7 , to pawnshops in North Bay , Sudbury, Edmonton, to Sally Anns and Goodwill stores across the country. I was never rewarded with a guitar in a cupboard but I sure did find a lot of neat old instruments. I found a number of great resophonic guitars, Canadian versions of Dobro guitars, some made in a very homestyle way by a guy named Carl Brasher . One of them sounded great and I played slide on it for several years. I found lots of old mail order guitars in the stores as well, ones that sounded just like the old blues and country records I loved at the time. It was also during this time that the Ottawa valley was being cleaned out of old Martin D-28s to be sold to a burgeoning bluegrass graze in Japan but as a by- product , there were many old Gibsons found that nobody wanted. This where I picked up two very inexpensive guitars – an early fifties J-200 and a 1928 Nick Lucas Special .

Although I loved the old Gibson sound, I did not stop there .It was the searching that was as much fun as the find. I loved browsing old pawn shops to see if I could pull a jewel out of the back room. They were often there. There was also a cult old guitar collectors whose company I enjoyed – each one with their own area of addiction.  Thom Roberts used to love the parlour guitars, perhaps a Regal or Martin but there were dozens of other mail order guitars and amongst them Mausers, Stewarts – occasionally a gem. Chris Cuddy became a collector of Guild guitars especially the F-30, the one played by Nick Drake during his tragically short creative life.  Dennis O’Toole loved cowboy guitars- Gene Autrey  astride a rearing horse , lasso twirling.   None of us were particularly interested in Martin D-28 or D-45 herringbones, they were out of reach and in the hands of a more moneyed class.  I became fascinated with Harmony guitars, it seemed no two alike and yet, the best sounding, affordable guitar you could buy. I still have three – the most recent old one I found had “Mario and Denise” written on the top in red nail polish. I took the names off the guitar concerned that it had been given up in some domestic fracture. It is a great guitar and I play it all the time.

It is harder now to find old unsung and affordable gems these days and that is why the find off Hwy. 12 was such a beautiful thing.  E- Bay has turned the great search into the global village and you can now Google a Roy Smeck Stage Deluxe right out of the hills of Kentucky if you want. Of course the global village has brought with it the astronomical price tag. It has also turned the remaining pawnshop owners into price experts who know they can get two grand for a dubious Gibson J-45 with a plastic adjustable bridge! Bah Humbug!  Where’s the fun factor!

Wings over the Rockies

Introduction and Acknowledgments - Brenda Danyluk
           
 A month ago I received a surprising phone call from an acquaintance which focused some of my thinking on this evening’s conversation with you. Her name is Sheila Petzold and she has been a t.v. producer for much of her life. She is a very a very urbane woman and more familiar with inner city life than field and stream and so I was somewhat taken aback when I answered the phone
“Ian -its Sheila- I want to know about frogs! Are the frogs out yet?”
 Now I have recorded the frogs in the pond near my house each year for the past twenty- five years but the last person I expected to be asking about frogs was Sheila Petzold.
 “Sheila? Frogs? “- well, yes” I began....
 “Can I bring a group of friends out and you show us the frogs?”.
 Now there was urgency in her voice and keenness too I had never noticed before and I hadn’t seen her in many years. I thought to myself - oh oh, the C.B.C. has finally broken her. I had seen it before in people and I was hesitant to get involved.
“Friends. Frogs? , Sheila ...?”
“Yes, It’s Sheila, and about fifteen of us want to come out to the pond to see the frogs! Can you do this? ”
“O.K. Sheila - what’s going on? Why do you and fifteen of your friends suddenly want to come out to the pond to see some frogs?”
What she replied set me back on my heels.
“Because we know nothing of the world .We are disconnected.”
What followed was an interesting conversation. It seems that Sheila and her friends had hit a wall of some description - a wall of recognition that huge changes were taking place on the planet , socially , environmentally , climatically and that they had no idea what was going on out there in the world . They were highly sophisticated people at ease with the workings of market, computers, home entertainment systems and the Byzantine world of sizing lattes at Starbucks but completely disconnected from the workings of the planet. They were living in the age of missing information- completely out of touch. She and her friends had come to the conclusion that the planet was leaving them behind.

Of course I celebrated Sheila’s C- change and invited them out to the pond but the there was scheduling and time has passed , the salamanders and newts have already come and gone, the spring peepers are now there and in a week the turtles will begin their shuffles through the woods , the Dutchman’s breeches did well this year , the trillium, red, white and painted seem smaller , not so many bloodroot - the cardinal that was here last year not back yet, the hairy woodpecker thrumming on my tin roof, the songbirds rarely heard the decline continues replaced by morning doves and more and more turkey vultures , and a few bald eagles. Evermore geese - notes for this spring . And Sheila and her friends have called but you know...  And time passes, chapters open and close .
                                                                                               
And here you are in your seats wondering what is this guy yammering on about people who spend much of their lives in front of computer screens - we’re not them - we’re birders , we are out in the world every weekend , we’re observers of the world, looking for the rare pileated duck ! We’re connected!
And I would agree - you are great observers of the world’s pageant and should be congratulated. I recently reunited with my neighbors’ son who introduced me to the world of birds. When he was young 8-9 I met him with his bird book in hand calling in a flock of chickadees, mixed with pine siskin and the occasional nuthatch. We traveled all over the Gatineaus in search of Sawhet owls, Boreal Owls and a Great Grey all in one day! I got my car stuck in the snow three times. One day we spotted Say’s Phoebe far east of its range. This kid now forty plus introduced me to my backyard, Tory Peterson in hand. When we met again this past week, the first thing we did was go for a walk to see who was there and who was not. I need not tell you we saw only one warbler on our walk. And even in that note we were observing, not just the coming and going of birds, but the significant change in the coming and going of birds. And yet four events in my life in the last several months have cause me to wonder about the way we as humans observe the world. In short - I think we may have to put the Tory Peterson down and think again.

This winter I was working on a ship in Antarctica - the Antarctic Peninsula. I had been in Antarctica in 1994 - diving under the ice near McMurdo Station. As we crossed the Drake Passage I expected a similar experience. But the Antarctic Penisula was very different than the Ross Sea , long fiords , spectacular mountain ranges , dark volcanic islands and more wildlife than I had ever expected. We recorded sightings of humpbacks, Killer whales , crabeater seals , weedells , and leopards - albatross.

 One day we were given a lecture by a marine biologist about whales and what we might see on our trip. She told us we might see Minke whales , indeed we had already seen a few but , just a dorsel fin and gone. She said Minkes were still hunted in Antarctic waters by the Norwegians and Japanese and were by nature less likely to be seen than some other species in Antarctic waters. The were described as shy and furtive. The next day we put the Zodiacs down for what was supposed to be a one hour cruise and encountered close to one hundred Minke whales who had not attended the lecture. These whales were ready to play. Everywhere in this bay that happened to be called Paradise Bay, Minkes breached, spy hopped , jumped in front of the zodiacs , sprayed the passengers with their blow holes passed under the zodiacs , gazing up at a group of stunned tourists who were in the midst of a religious experience . Everywhere we turned other zodiacs were literally being intercepted by Minkes . As one group turned back , a group of Minkes from across the  bay cut them off at the pass , flying out of the water as the caught up with the zodiac. The one hour cruise turned out to be five, and when we arrived back the ship the Minkes had us circled - don’t you want to play anymore! As people came on board everyone had a particular look in their eye - which I can only describe as religious rapture. We had just witnessed something very profound and very unusual. At recap that day a blushing marine biologist concluded that clearly the Minkes had not attended her lecture nor had they read any existing book on Minke behavior. All of the resource staff agreed they had never seen any of many different behaviors displayed by the Minkes that afternoon. That experience stuck with me - it seemed the whales were acting outside the defined behavior  we had gven them in.             

 When I came back to Ushuaia I spent some time gazing out at the Beagle Channel thinking about Darwin, Fitzroy the voyage of the Beagle one hundred and forty five years ago. Darwin gave us a different way to look at the world - a survival of the fittest theory that ran contrary to Fitzroy’s creationist view of the world. But hold on here. Wasn’t Darwin equally influenced by a newer Bible, a bible that underpinned the industrial revolution he was in the midst of- John Stewart Mills, Wealth of Nations . Wasn’t Darwin’s theory in complete sympatico with the competitive, linear, growth model that was part of his times? I guess the Minkes hadn’t read that book either because their pod behavior indicated as much co-operation as competition. Socialist whales.

- The next trip I took was to the west coast of Vancouver Island to help celebrate the yearly return of the Gray Whales. Ever since Captian Scammon help decimate the gray whale population in the last century , he dedicated himself to figuring out the migration path of the whales and to saving the remaining whale population. Today the coming and goings of the Grays are celebrated from Baja to the Chukchi Sea and mercifully their numbers have returned to their original numbers - as far as the records go. People have been observing whales off Tofino and Ucluelet for years. But hold on. As I flew with a doctor to visit a community north of Tofino , we looked down to see a pair of Humpback Whales . The pilot had seen them before indeed three other had been sighted. When we landed in Hots Springs Cove, I mentioned this to a native elder in the community. He looked at me as if I had lost my mind. You saw Gray Whales son- the Humpbacks never show up here before June. I described to him what I saw. You saw gray Whales he reinterated and went on to say First Nation people had observed the coastline for hundreds of years and he knew that humpback returned in the season we now called June. I have great respect for the observations of First Nation indeed I believe they observe on more than one level and so I doubted what we had just seen. But when we flew back to Tofino the humpbacks were still there. Perhaps the humpbacks were not paying enough attention to First Nation tradition or were working on a different aural tradition. I wonder if that elder will ever see the Humpback or will hold to his traditional view even though something might be changing.

- A few days later I spoke to my mentor - a Professor John Oliver in Moss Landing, Monterey Bay. I laughed when I told him the whale stories. We’ve got something like that going on here, he said. As you probably know from John Stienbeck’s Cannery Row , in the early forties, the sardine industry that had created towns like Monterey , California was in dire straits. The sardines had disappeared . Perhaps it was overfishing , something else perhaps no one knew. They were gone. The year before there had been plenty. Fishing towns became ghost towns. Ghost towns became aquarium towns celebrating past glories with a still lingering question- what happened. Well a few years ago the sardines returned. It would appear that they are some fifty year cycle of return -they have just been elsewhere. When I asked John about aural tradition, if natives had any knowledge of this cycle - he confessed that wasn’t an option. The native population had also been wiped out. He did not expect them back. . What was happening with the return of the sardines was a complete shift in the coastal and marine ecosystem that no one on the Monterey Bay had witnessed in two generations. What if the cycle had been even longer? It would seem that the species we are describing are not reading our books on their behavioral or because of the temporal nature of our existence we will never get a full accounting of their behavioral - or maybe they cannot be neatly squeezed into the boxes of our making.           
                                   
  On the plane home, I picked up Yann Martel’s wonderful book, The World of Pi. I couldn’t put it down - the story was fabulous, the spiritual search of Pi both wondrous and funny and of course his journey across the ocean with the tiger Richard Parker so rich to make you believe in a God. But the story was set on a premise that I struggled with throughout the reading. Martel set up a convention about animal behavior based on observations of animals in a zoo. He maintained that given all the proper conditions and all needs were satisfied animals would act in predictable ways . But of course that premise hinges on what the animals allow us to see and what animals will do in a captive situation. It is not rocket science to note that a beluga will not act out its box when it stuck a box at sea world. But Martel gave a fairly convincing argument that if he followed his rubric his tiger would behave in a somewhat predictable way given the confines of a lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific. But again Martel created two boxes. Both in his convention and in its execution in the lifeboat.   But animals don’t live in boxes , their behavior cannot be predicted , or fully known because , like the Minkes of Antarctica , the Humpbacks off Tofino , or the sardines of Monterey Bay they will surprise you every time. And I would maintain that we create boxes, we have set up ways of viewing the world that can prevent us from seeing it.  And when the boat hit the shore the tiger hit the bush and may have conducted itself in ways unknown even to Martel’s wonderful imagination.
In 1984 I had a change in my life that has affected the way I see things ever since. I was playing at a Marine Lab in Bamfield, BC; on the west coast of Vancouver Island .A group of scientists that included a professor John Oliver heard my concert. The following winter I received a letter that stated – science needs you in the Chukchi sea- get your diver’s license and join us for a month studying grey whales and walrus. Your role will be writer in residence. . I laughed as headed home from the post office; certain this was some sort of prank. I phoned John Oliver and he said no prank – we want you to help us. And so I spent the winter in a suburban pool, getting my certificate July 9th, 1984. Two days later I was diving off King Island, near the Bering Strait That month changed the way I looked at the world. Professor Oliver had come to the thinking that as a benthic biologist he was looking at the bottom of the ocean, and down a microscope so much felt a need for someone else outside the scientific community to provide a bigger picture. He had come to the conclusion that the boxes of his scientific imperative were preventing him from the seeing the ecosystem as a whole. Every time we dived we came up with new and wonderful species, on our expedition we found enough new species to keep a post grad taxonomist working for five years. But in the way the individualization and categorization of each new species though valuable and in accordance with scientific procedure, it was like Alice in Wonderland’s rabbit hole, each one leading away from the interconnectedness and the workings of the whole because of the way we have separated everything.  Remember Sheila and her disconnect from the frog world. Is it not possible that by the very way we observe the world , we are contributing to our disconnectedness. John Oliver wanted an artist’s eye – in my case a musician and playwright who could take in the bigger picture and, in doing so, illustrate another way of looking at the world. What John was looking for was a way to integrate an artist’s intuitive and emotional response to the whole picture into his scientific and empirical way of viewing the same world. This interdisciplinary approach as been suggested and celebrated in books by scientist Richard Feydman, Barry Lopez and Bruce Chatwin but in my experience John Oliver’s commitment to this vision has been singular. I traveled with John on nine scientific expeditions since that first incredible summer in the Arctic. Since that time, no graduate student of his or any other professor he engaged has ever followed his vision. When I confronted one of his peers as to why no one had taken up John’s example they simply said, it takes too much time, and, we’re too busy to take the time.  But it gives me cause to wonder, a scientists appeal to artists these day s – help us get our message across, and we need greater integration with the artistic community, is their process part of the disconnect as well.
I believe it is time, and that we take the time to integrate the intuitive, emotional and spiritual aspects of being into our empirical way of viewing the world. It is time or indeed, past time to stretch beyond the age of reason, beyond the industrial competitive Bible, beyond Darwin.

I have one more story to tell. I was off the west coast of Ireland, the Aran Isles, driving my zodiac back to the ship that anchored several miles off the coast. As I traveled I felt something pull my attention, my eye was drawn to the south. About 3km away I saw a dolphin leap from the water and I knew.  I knew it was coming to see me. I fixed on it but another part of me did not believe what I had just felt to be true. I continued to towards the ship. I glanced again and the dolphin was closer yet -still on track towards me. . Before I could think again I looked up to see the dolphin leap over my zodiac. Enter the water on the other side, spin around and, swimming beside me, engage my eye! I didn’t know what to do I had heard from other drivers that dolphins seem attracted to the pitch of the prop . I was afraid to change anything. The dolphin raced forward and jumped in front of the zodiac, then veered left, spinning under the boat  and  then erupted out of the water right beside me , looking at me , yes, looking at me ! I stopped the zodiac. The dolphin disappeared. I said to myself after a few moments, I guess it was the sound of the prop. I lingered a few moments more smiling at this minor miracle. Just as I was about turn on the engine, I heard a gasp of air and turned to see the dolphin at eye level, sailing over the zodiac again. I burst out laughing! We headed towards the ship, I got what I needed there and we headed back over the Irish sea, the dolphin and I playing and- talking a language I did not know.

Richard Pacquin had been a childhood prodigy when he grew up in downtown Toronto in the early sixties. He was a poet at an early age and a very good photographer and was on the cultural scene of that city by the time he was fourteen. Though I didn’t believe him, he photographed the Beatles, Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix .He photographed the Beatles in England in 1964. At some point in his late teens Richard developed Wilson disease, a build up of cooper in the brain which manifests itself in liver damage and many psychotic behaviors. I met Richard when he was in his mid- thirties. He began his friendship with me while attending various concerts I gave around town. He was decidedly different but the coffeehouse scene encouraged eccentrics, he was bright and very knowledgeable about music and the arts. He gave me some of his poems which were very good. But Richard was not well. He often spoke of conversations he had with George Harrison or Bob Dylan on a bus, a meeting with Joni Mitchell; he spoke of them as if they were his friends. He was convinced that some of Leonard Cohen’s songs were written by himself, Bob Dylan and Joni as well. In time and during a period when he went off his meds, Richard became convinced that some of my songs were also his. While I was flattered to be in good company it became quite nuisance because, tied to his belief that he had written some of my songs, he also believed that I owed him $35000 in unpaid royalties. Here he had an inflated scene of my worth but that did not deter him. One day I confronted him about these songs and made the mistake of asking him where he wrote these various songs that others seemed to be singing. He said he received them when standing in the shower. He said they came through the shower spigot. With such an answer I thought it best not to ask how Leonard, Bob and Joni received the songs after the shower and claimed them as theirs.

Richard phoned me sometimes twenty-five times a day demanding his royalties. Occasionally he was lucid; often he was completely out of his mind. I tried everything short of disconnecting my phone to get rid of him but he was very smart and would find a way through every call block system invented. As we gathered at his memorial, all who attended found out it he did this with everyone he knew, a network of about fifty people. He worked the phone throughout the day. He was a very smart, very crazy man. Sometimes his calls were appeals for help, a visit, money; repairs to a guitar or turntable he had smashed in a fit. I became part of a group of people and healthcare workers who knew Richard very well. Through all of this madness Richard continued to write poetry and it was the most lucid and visionary prayer to sanity I have ever read.  Ultimately I think this why I stuck with him. He was a hand reaching out of the fire engulfing him. Music was a constant for him and it was his constant solace as well. He listened to everything through it all.

It was not easy. At times he threatened  to kill me if I did not pay up his imagined royalties and though I did not take it seriously there were a few times I had friends watch for him a concerts I was giving as he came armed with a baseball bat one time . Another time he threatened suicide and I raced to his house with a friend to find blood spattered all over the living room walls. I called and there was no answer. I went upstairs expecting the worst and after a few moments I heard a sound coming from the bathroom. It was Richard. He was singing- in the shower.  
Richard’s cycle of psychotic bouts became shorter and shorter. He would go off his meds, experience a tremendous rush of energy, start to lose it; there would be an incident with the police, incarceration in the psych ward and then reintroduction to meds at the hospital. The round trip took about nine months. Sadly it often it also included mending a broken arm or face that occurred during his darkest moments.

But all this was not without some humour. One night I was enjoying my own company at a local pub when someone saddled up to me and said, “You’re Ian Tamblyn, aren’t you?”
Yes- I replied.
This guy went on to say in so many words that while others might think me a decent songwriter, he felt that my songs were mediocre and that my writing would profit if I took more chances in  life. Having just returned from diving under the ice in Antarctica I felt I was taking enough chances but in the end said nothing other than taking another critics word under advisement. I also thought about drinking at another bar but …
The next morning Richard phoned once again demanding his royalty money. This time I had an answer. I said, Richard, you know these songs that you get in the shower and beam out to me and Bob and Joni?
Yes? – What about them?
Well – last night I was at bar and someone came up to me and told me that the songs you are sending me are mediocre! So – until you start sending me better songs from the shower I don’t owe you a god dam cent!
Richard replied – Tamblyn – you know what I think- I think you’re as nuts as me!
He never asked for his money again. Perhaps some CLR in his shower spigot was all he, and I, needed.

Richard Pacquin died of Wilson disease at the age of forty – three. At the time of his death there was hope to control his disease but he had had so many medical interventions he refused the option. He left me his poems and a photograph of a bird in flight.