Last Wednesday, Connor and I went in to the city to the big CBC building downtown. I thought it would be fun for him to see how a big-time national radio show (Sounds Like Canada) worked – and I wanted him with me in case someone decided it might be good for him to join in. As it turned out, Shelagh Rogers did invite him in to the studio after about ten minutes and he stayed on with us for what turned out to be an hour long interview. We were both gob-smacked when she played “The Audience Takes a Bow”. This was our song’s first airplay ever, so, as it played on radios and computers across Canada, we high-fived over our boom mikes. Shelagh was such a joy to work with that both of us forgot that we were on the radio. We were just having a great conversation with a really cool new acquaintance. We left the building wondering what we had said.

I was surprised, two days later, to read an email from Gillian Rodgerson in Toronto saying that she’d just heard the interview. We were told it would run a week later. Heather then wrote from Calgary with another heads up. Connor and I dialed in the CBC Calgary online feed and listened to it in the den. When it was done, Debbie joined us and we listened, again, to the Vancouver feed as it played in real-time.

It really was one of the most delightful interviews I’ve ever done. Shelagh Rogers is beyond professional and has the creative courage of a lion. We wandered fearlessly from topic to topic. She is THE best audience – and it was a total treat to meet and talk to her. And Connor, of course, loved it.

Shelagh said the book should be re-named; “Canada”. God I loved that.

We’ve received permission to post the interview here (and on the Trooper site) so that you can hear it if you missed it. We’re just waiting on the CD from CBC.

A “pre-interview” is an interview that’s never heard, seen or read by anyone. The pre-interviewer’s job is to confirm that a potential radio or tv show guest will have something interesting to say, so that the REAL interviewer won’t find him or herself floating in what media people like to call “dead air”.

Monday’s pre-interviewer was intelligent, charming and funny, and we talked comfortably until she asked me to tell her a couple of stories.

“… like you would tell when you’re all sitting around having a beer.” she hinted. “I just need one from this tour, and maybe one from the early days.”

Despite the fact that I am a seasoned interviewee with not inconsiderable experience in the field, I could not, for the life of me, deliver a story. She needed two. I had zero. I apologized, explaining that stories have always just come up in conversation so I’ve never felt the need to choose some “good” ones for this kind of context-free interview emergency. Being a complete professional, she picked up our conversation as though the request had not been made and we successfully completed the otherwise smooth-sailing simulated interview.

The next day I asked my band-mates to help me develop some party-pieces – at least two good road stories that I could count on. For the next hour, we riffed through a small collection of oft-repeated and familiar tales that still reduce us all to hysterical laughter.

Someone once took three of us out on an expensive and powerful cigarette boat. As they pulled away from the dock, the high-strung skipper admitted it was only his third time at the helm of this souped-up macho racer – and it quickly became terrifyingly obvious that he had never been trained to drive it. After a white knuckled beeline to the middle of the lake, and with no land in sight, he turned off the roaring engines. The shaken passengers were then offered drinks … and cocaine. After nervously declining the fat white lines he had produced, they watched in horror as their host finished all the drugs himself.

This is the kind of story that we tell when we’re having a few beers. I had lied. I have hundreds, probably thousands, of them but I can’t trust myself to know with a certainty that the one I have chosen to tell will turn out to be appropriate for all audiences. This one probably isn’t.

Undeterred, we continued. There was the one about a former Trooper crew member who, at a large outdoor concert, had pissed off so many on-site crew and staff that, when he fell to the stage floor with a painful hernia attack, everyone just stepped over top of him – carrying on with their work.

There was the time when one of the band members, sick with the flu, had us stop the van quickly so he could leap out the side door and vomit impressively in front of a packed restaurant’s dinner patrons.

There was the time when, a former light man driving the gear truck in dense fog in Newfoundland nearly hit a deer and screamed – waking our sleeping merch guy who, disoriented and seeing only a white void beyond the windshield, and deducing that the truck was flying off a cliff, braced his hands and feet against the dashboard screaming “NO! NO! NO!” – waking our tour manager, Mike Pacholuk who calmly surveyed the situation and made a mental note to remember to tell us all about it later.

The search for appropriate stories continues. My real interview is a week away.

We’d been driving for seven or eight hours and Winnipeg was still too far away to think about. We’d stopped for a piss – and more bottled water. It was dark and see-your-breath chilly. We stood in the spill of convenience store fluorescent light, and talked quietly on our cell phones to our wives and girlfriends.

The new gold Suburban I was leaning up against was overflowing with luggage, jackets, blankets, a pillow, a ukulele, a violin, two computers, empty Starbucks and Tim Hortons cups and cookies from the Alberta Cookie Lady. There was no room in there for personal calls.

Scott, Gogo and Frankie, in the back half of the Suburban, had just watched “Still Crazy” on the onboard DVD player while I watched “Hostage” on my Powerbook in the passenger seat. Smitty, behind the wheel as usual, watched the long, straight and virtually unchanging highway. I was glad for the rest. Our first tour of the season had started with a bigger bang than usual.

My week of CBC National Playlist sessions was followed by interviews with the two local papers. This would be the first time that I would face questions about the book, and I was disturbingly unsure about how I was going to respond. My concern was compounded by the fact that my friends and family would most likely see the results of my potentially amateur inaugural book-promotion efforts. To my great relief both interviews came off without a hitch.

My friend Myles Goodwyn once wrote that “Rock and Roll is a Vicious Game”, which is arguably true, but one of my five interviews on Tuesday made it clear to me that rock and roll’s got nothing on the publishing world. My first interview of the morning was a spirited radio spot with a funny and bright Saskatoon DJ. I was pumped and ready to go when my next call, from an Alberta newspaper entertainment writer, came in. After minimal preliminaries, the writer began to discuss the phenomenon of “books like this”. He made jokes about rocker Brian Volmer’s new Helix book. He told me he was planning a sidebar for my story that would list titles for imaginary books by other rock stars who, he was convinced, were going to write even more “books like this”. He lamented that he was doomed to host a weekly series called “Book Talk with Rockers”. He was reveling in rudeness.

At the point where I was convinced that input from me wouldn’t be necessary for his story – he clearly had all the material he needed – he finally asked me: “So why do we need another book like this?”

“Well, uh, Dickface,” (Dickface is not his real name – I’ve changed it here to avoid potential legal action) “I, uh … you know Brian’s had a pretty intense journey of his own, but I have to say that it’s entirely different than mine in many ways.” I wondered if he could sense the forced smile and the cold, controlled civility.

I continued to speak, as humbly as possible, about writing the book as I carefully considered the idea of hanging up on the guy before I told him to go fuck himself. My wife and son were listening at the kitchen table only a few feet away. I chose to stay the course.

“And what is it …” he asked, warming to his theme “about blogs, that makes you think that we want to read your innermost thoughts from your personal diary?”

“Well, Asshat,” (not his real name), I responded, “it’s not actually my diary …”

And then, like the boxer in “Against the Ropes” the mediocre Meg Ryan movie that Debbie and I watched the other night, I reached my limit, changed up my stance and bit down hard on whatever it is boxers bite down on, and said something like:

“You know, it’s not a diary and it’s not “another book like this”. It’s MY book, and it took me three years to write – and it means a lot to me.”

He paused for a moment – seemingly shaken out of his righteous groove – and then he told me, authoritatively, that I should not be so sensitive.

“I’m just challenging you.” he said, sounding pleased with himself.

“I’m with you” I grinned, “I’m with you.”

Most of the good stuff that appeared in the finished story followed. I went off, and said what I needed to say, convinced that doing otherwise would be a waste of valuable interview time. My favourite part of the interview came when he tried to re-visit the topic of blogs.

“Do you write on your blog about everything that happens to you?”

“No, just things I think people would find interesting.”

“So are you going to write about this on your blog?”

“Oh fuck, yeah” I said.

I arrived at the downtown Vancouver CBC building 40 minutes early – budgeting extra time for a morning rush hour that I’ve obviously had no experience with. The two security guards sent me downstairs to ‘Master Control’, which turned out to be a large room full of gear and one lone technician. He was not expecting me, but directed me to a small, dark room with a chair, a mic, a set of headphones and a beige metal box with only one functional knob – the incoming volume.

“They’ll come on soon.” He promised.

Five minutes before show time, my headphones were still eerily silent. As casually as I could manage, I made a quick second visit to master control.

“They were calling the wrong number,” he said smiling “I gave them the right one”.

I returned to my room and was shuffling through my notes when the Toronto producer said “hello”. He promised that the voice of Jian Gomeshi would soon join us and we went over some technical issues while we waited.

My friend Howard Mandshein, the outrageous and charismatic Winnipeg showbiz icon, had warned me that his week on the National Playlist had been challenging. Sitting alone in my tiny triangular studio I was about to enter into a debate, on national radio, with three people I could not see and did not know, all of whom were gathered in another downtown studio 4000 kilometers away. I reached for my volume knob and cranked it up loud.

What ensued was fun from the start. Jian Gomeshi, Tara Thorne and Dalton Higgins were enthusiastic and entertaining debate-mates and the show, guided by Jian’s innate professionalism, rolled out smoothly and confidently.

My headphones became my lifeline – the focus of my complete attention. My temporal Vancouver reality shrank to the space between my face and the black mic in front of me.

During a break the headphones went quiet again.

Moments later, they crackled, and a new voice broke the silence.

“Hello, Ra?”

“Hey” I answered, confused.

“This is Joe, I’m your engineer here in Toronto. I just wanted to say … thanks for the music”.

I’m smiling as I recall this. I enjoyed meeting and talking to Joe – across the country, through the CBC’s phone lines. He told me he was going to blog about it. And he did.

There’s no business like show business.

Click here to visit Joe Mahoney’s Blog and read about our conversation.

I’ll be on CBC radio’s National Playlist tomorrow morning at 11:30, and every day after that, at the same time, until Friday. I’ll be part of a team of “music makers, music critics and music lovers” – there will be four of us including host Jian Gomeshi – who will engage in a spirited debate about our favourite music.

Each guest brings in two songs (one new, one old) that they think should make it to the playlist. 8 songs are debated but only 4 make it to the weekly top ten – like ‘Survivor’.

I’ve written two “pitches” for the songs I’m proposing and I’ve massaged them into fifty-second sound bites for the show. This has necessitated multiple re-writes followed by a crash course in reading them very quickly. Tomorrow I will sit in a downtown CBC studio by myself and pretend I’m hanging with the other panelists in Toronto. At some point in the week I’ll be asked to present my pitches. I don’t think anyone at CBC will mind if I share them with you now. I enjoyed writing them and it seems like such a waste to have them go by so quickly on the air.

So here they are:

The Motown Records building in Detroit may have been demolished in January but the power and glory of the Motown Sound lives on, forty years after The Temptations recorded their first number one hit: My Girl. The song opens with one of the most famous bass lines in pop music history, followed by the most recognizable guitar hook of all time. When David Ruffin sings the opening line – the musical sun comes out and stays out. Written by Smokey Robinson and Ronald White from the Miracles, sung by one of the most successful groups in black music history – backed up by the world’s greatest house band – My Girl was destined for Hitzville – but the track has an additional magic that transcends the sum of its parts. Structurally, the song is pure genius and the seamless and brilliantly detailed arrangement contains one of my favourite bridges. Where else could the words “hey hey hey” convey so much meaning while simultaneously uniting the world in a blissful singalong moment.

I was preparing to write my pitch for The Arcade Fire’s “Crown of Love” when it occurred to me to check and see if it was, in fact, released in the last 12 months as the criteria for the show requires. Sadly, neither the AF album nor the most recent Weakerthans album made the cut. I defaulted to a great song from the new Bright Eyes record. This is what I will (quickly) say:

I was not a convinced fan of Connor Oberst and his band Bright Eyes, until I heard the quirky, jerky and totally engaging track – ‘The Arc of Time’. Mr. Oberst must be tiring of his “boy wonder” status. It’s hard enough to create a recording that is both innovative and listenable, lyrically meaningful and musically engaging without having to deal with the complication of a critical press with high and often specific expectations. It takes courage to confound your fans, and I admire this well crafted entry into the critically dangerous pop-song arena that confidently avoids any pop formula that I know about. Built on the dated bones of a Bo Diddley beat, this track knows instinctively when to change up – when to add and when to take away. The performances are infectious, the lyric cuts “to the deepest part of the human heart” … but most of all – I like the way it moves.