In the last few weeks, friends, fans and a couple of people on the street have brought up the ‘Raise a Little Hell’ Cracker commercial. Some have congratulated me. Others have joked about lifetime supplies of saltines. Others, knowing that I don’t watch TV, simply wanted to be sure that I’d heard about it.
As it turns out, I found out about it the way they did. I heard the familiar ‘A’ chord ring out from the living room as I worked at my computer here in the den. I jumped up, and Debbie and I watched, fascinated, as the slow motion crackers dropped into the waiting bowls of exploding tomato soup. (continue reading this post …)
Just because I’ve never heard of ‘The Dishes’ shouldn’t automatically disqualify them from a place in a documentary about Canadian popular music. An album by a band called ‘Simply Saucer’ beat out Trooper in Bob Mersereau’s ‘Top 100 Canadian Albums’ book (they were #36 we were #60) and I’d never heard of them either. And despite the fact that I remember ‘Martha and the Muffins’ as a one-hit-wonder, their web site currently lists a total of 10 albums. So, really, what do I know?
I have great sympathy for the producers of the two-part CBC documentary ‘This Beat Goes On’. A truly comprehensive history of Canada’s pop music would require several full days to present. The two episodes of TBGO, covering the 1970’s, clocked in at two hours, minus commercials.
And, like Roy MacGregor said about our job as judges for the CBC’s ‘Seven Wonders of Canada’ program – beyond all other considerations, a show of this nature needs to be “geographically correct”. Considering writer Nicholas Jennings also wrote the astonishingly Toronto-centric ‘Before the Goldrush’ about the supposed genesis of the Canadian music scene, I was surprised and happy to see so much western-Canadian content. I was particularly impressed with the time and attention lavished on me, and my band.
Nonetheless, I’m still strangely unsatisfied with what will now stand as trusted documentation of the crazy Canadian music scene.
For one thing, I want you to know that the seventies Canadian music scene was a lot of fun. With only a few exceptions, I didn’t get that sense from the show. It was low-key, scholarly and, forgive me Jian et al, a bit dull.
More important to me though is the fact that Canadian-made music is not the only music we Canadians listen to! Isolating Canadian hits from the mosaic of American and British music of the day is akin to presenting Van Halen’s brown M&Ms as a full pack of candy. The constantly buzzing interaction of Canadian writers and performers with the outstanding music coming at us from the US and England was part of the unfolding thrill of what was happening here. Our music did not take seed and grow in the cultural vacuum that the documentary suggests by it’s omissions. My song, “Two For the Show” only reached number two on the Canadian charts because a Paul McCartney song held on stubbornly at number one. That was the world we Canadian artists came up in.
I also have two petty quibbles:
I understand and applaud the doc’s nod to the Quebec music scene but do not understand the omission of Montreal’s Michel Pagliaro – the first Canadian artist to score top 40 hits on both the anglophone and francophone pop charts in Canada. (Last year Pag received the ‘Governor General’s Performing Arts Award’, Canada’s most prestigious artistic honour). His “What the Hell I Got” was one of my favourite songs in 1975, and still stands up well: (please forgive the total uselessness of this video)
And finally, regarding the story that Randy Bachman tells on the show about the pizza boy playing the piano part on “Takin’ Care of Business”: it’s not true. I was there. The piano part was played by Seattle’s Norman Durkee – a professional musician who deserves the credit for his deftly performed and rollicking track.
I have been trying to explain Twitter to friends – especially regarding its differences with Facebook – and have not been particularly successful. I think this article covers it pretty well (while also predicting that Facebook plans further changes to become more “Twitter-Like”.)
In general, there are two ways to model human relationships in software. An “asymmetric” model is how Twitter currently works. You can “follow” someone else without them following you back. It’s a one-way relationship that may or may not be mutual.
Facebook, on the other hand, has always used a “symmetric” model, where each time you add someone as a friend they have to add you as a friend as well. This is a two-way relationship, and it is required to have any relationship at all. So as a Facebook user there is always a 1-1 relationship among your friends. Everyone who you have claimed as a friend has also claimed you as a friend.
Andrew Chen recently described one advantage of the Twitter model. It allows 4 types of relationships, while Facebook only allows for two. The two relationships of Facebook are “friend and Not Friend”. The four relationships of Twitter are:
After our Juno Awards thank-you speeches we were lead from the stage by a Juno hostess and ushered through a door at the back of the stage. Still buzzed from our victory – laughing and slapping each other on the back – it took us a moment to realize that we were walking noisily through the main kitchen of Toronto’s Royal York Hotel. I still have a vivid memory of an oriental cook in white chef’s hat and uniform, staring at us curiously from behind an aluminum table. Elation turned to confusion as we realized we did not know where to go next. The five of us herded together alongside what we hoped was the back wall of the ballroom and eventually tumbled through the first exit door that presented itself. Flashes flashed and microphones were extended.
“How do you feel about winning the best group Juno?” I was asked.
“It’s fucking wonderful” I responded.
” ‘It’s wonderful’ said Trooper singer Ra McGuire at last night’s Juno Award ceremonies …” reported the Toronto newspaper headline the next day.
It has always annoyed me that I wasn’t quoted correctly. There is, of course, a HUGE difference between “fucking wonderful” and just “wonderful”.
The 2009 Junos took place in Vancouver tonight. I didn’t attend this year. Trooper has received seven Juno nominations – and won the “Best Group” award – but we’ve only attended twice. Once, in 1978, when we were nominated for “Most Promising Group of the Year” and in 1980 when we were up for both “Best Group” and “Album of the Year”.
We flew to Toronto for our first Junos when we were nominated for “Most Promising Group of the Year”. We arrived proudly in the Royal York ballroom which was decorated with large blown-up album covers of all the nominated artists, and saw that ours was the only cover that was, humiliatingly, conspicuous in its absence. The evening deteriorated further when the “Most Promising” award was presented to “The THP Orchestra”.
In 1978, we were one of five bands nominated for “Group of the Year”, but chose not to attend. Rush won that year. In 1979 we were nominated again for “Group of the Year” and we chose, again, to not attend. Rush won it again. In 1980, now simply following a comfortable tradition, we once again turned down the Juno organizer’s invitation to fly to the Toronto ceremonies. At first they tried to shame us into coming, which didn’t work. Finally, they broke down and told us that we were going to win at least one award. So we embarked on what was to become a great Trooper adventure that ended with, among other things, members of the band rolling, drunk and in white suits, in a Toronto hotel driveway with Burton Cummings. My personal most embarrassing Juno moment came that year when a young Vancouver friend shouted across a room filled with Canadian music-biz royalty.
“Ra McGuire!!” he shouted when he spotted me. “You’re BIG!!”
It’s funny that I still remember that. We’ve never returned to the Junos and, because the whole idea of them still makes me uncomfortably squirmy, I’ve only managed to watch them on TV two or three times in the intervening years. There have been a couple of occasions, however, when I would have enjoyed shouting back at Bryan Adams, who’s gone on to do quite well for himself.
I’ve had more to say about this (and other things) on Twitter. You can follow me, if you want, here.
Shauna Mac invited me to join Facebook three years ago. Subway Steve friended me the day I signed up, noting that I had finally succumbed to Facebook’s evils. At the time I didn’t understand what he meant. Shortly thereafter I shut my new Facebook page down.
Newsweek’s Steve Tuttle just did the same because “In the end, Facebook is really the emptiest, loneliest place on the whole World Wide Web”, but my leaving had less to do with it’s inherent evils and more to do with my state of mind at the time.
In 2006 I had painted myself into a very public corner and Facebook just became the digital last straw. The release of my own, non-digital, book – a paper and ink version of my blog musings – had nudged my personal life out into the public world in a way that became surprisingly uncomfortable for me. During one of my first book promotion interviews, an Alberta newspaper writer asked me;
“What is it about blogs, that makes you think that we want to read your innermost thoughts from your personal diary?”
Despite my references to him in a subsequent blog post as “Asshat” and “Dickface”, his question added to my discomfort. What is it, indeed? (continue reading this post …)
Just in case there’s a google-bot sweeping the internets for references to Barack Obama and the presidential debate, I believe that Barack Obama clearly won tonight. I wish I could vote for him.
I am honored to watch two very intelligent and wise people face off against each other in public. It’s the most fun I’ve had in a long time. I am extremely proud of the candidate that I support.
ra mcguire dot com is mostly about music, culture, and minor celebrity in 21st century Canada. For more about me, this site, and my career in music and media, click here.
A powerful and personal book about God by one of Canada’s greatest writers. “I believe that all of us, even those who are atheists, seek God — or at the very least not one of us would be unhappy if God appeared and told us that the universe was actually His creation. Oh, we might put Him on trial for making it so hard, and get angry at Him, too, but we would be very happy that He is here. Well, He is.”
I have failed in my first attempt to read this much-acclaimed magnum opus. The same thing happened with Ulysses. I’ll try again one day, once I have steeled myself to not be so annoyed by it.
An important book about the food we eat and the difficult choices we face in a world suffering from what Pollan describes as a “national eating disorder”.
