Connor decided a week ago that he would try to write a song a week. Then, in a moment of what I would characterize as foolhardy overconfidence, he added a video camera into the mix – recording the emotional peaks and valleys of his pressurized songwriting process.

As most parents probably would, I gritted my teeth, far more concerned about the outcome than he seemed to be. And, although he started out strong he had ground to a halt by the middle of the week.

In the hopes that I’ve built both your interest and suspense, I ask you all to click on this link to his YouTube page, watch the two short videos and, if you feel it appropriate, leave a high rating and a positive comment. (SPOILER: The resulting song is amazing and more-so after you’ve watched him piece it together)

It’s been a very long time since I’ve played a song over and over again.

I played this video, by Wax Mennequin from Hamilton Ontario, five or six times in a row when I first heard it. I tried to link to it yesterday, because Connor and I were going to see his show at the Railway Club, but it had disappeared from the internets. It’s back now, and you should all watch it/listen to it now before it disappears again. Wax and the Burning Hell killed it last night. There is still plenty of their Hear Some Evil tour left for you to check out. Here’s a web page devoted to the tour. Also, buy the Wax Mannequin CD, Saxon.

Connor performed his first Indie/Dance/Mash-Up set last night at a downtown hole-in-the-wall called the Soundlab. It was a guest-list only event featuring three DJs. Unlike the two turntablists, Connor did an Ableton Live set – a seat-of-the-pants high-wire act where all the musical pieces are prepped on the computer and then selected, beat-matched and spat out in real time – the all important groove totally dependant on split second jabs at a bewildering collection of knobs, buttons and faders.

He’s been creating mash-ups (digital re-mixes wherein one or more popular songs are mashed together) for fun for months, but started working on his set in earnest when he learned there might be an opportunity to try it out live on a room full of drunk and dancing twenty-somethings.

He’s posted three early mash-ups and an original electro/club/pop track on his “Pack Mentality” MySpace page – where he has quietly but steadily been building his Nu Disco persona.

This is another musical left turn for Connor – but probably a welcome and rewarding antidote to the frustration of trying to assemble a band of great players and then keep them together for more than one or two cash-challenged shows. His MacBook Pro, Reason, ProTools and Ableton Live allow him to create and perform solo – not with an acoustic guitar like Rev. 1, but with the power and the glory (and the block-rockin’ beats) that only an infinite collection of digital samples can deliver. Add to that the undeniable ear-candy of layered iconic pop slices and you can begin to see the appeal – both for him and the dance floor.

And all his gear fits in a backpack.

Stay tuned.

The yellow post-it notes were never the best idea. I can’t remember if they were intended to be permanent at the time, or just a quick way of demarcating the division between “Chorale”, “Instrumental & Solo” and “Organ and Chimes” as well as the sixteen other arbitrary categories I created for my recently sorted collection.

I had covered the floor of the den with LPs – each pile representing a vain attempt at organization. The room, and the rest of the house, smelled of thrift-shop dust, old cardboard and vinyl. This was when I first learned that I had accumulated over three hundred Christmas albums.

It’s unlike me not to finish a job properly, but trying to bring order to the chaos of the collection must have left me just enough energy to quickly print, in red pen, the sometimes inscrutable descriptions (”Cool Comp”, “Program” and “?”) that remain today – poking out at random intervals along the eight foot shelf they fill.
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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.
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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 might never have known about Jonah Smith if we hadn’t walked into that square behind the church in Barcelona in September 2007. We assumed, not unreasonably, that the band sound-checking on the large outdoor stage was from Spain, and it took some time to realize that the words being sung were in English. The band was tight and the singer, playing a groovin’ Rhodes piano, was great. Before we left I asked the sound guy who it was.

“Jonah Smith from Brooklyn New York” he said.

Jonah hits on pretty much all of the qualities that I think a great songwriter and singer needs. And his band is one of the most empathetic I’ve seen – leaving lots of space for the best parts.

Here’s a live vid of Jonah playing my current favourite song, “Little Black Angels”. This is not the original arrangement, which I also recommend. I couldn’t find a vid of “Stay a While”, which is another favourite, but your instructions for today are to go and buy both of these tracks, now, on iTunes.

Here’s a clip of the song they were playing at soundcheck:

The Roxy is on Granville street in the heart of Vancouver. Jordan is also the singer for Cozy Bones, one of my (and Connor’s) favourite Canadian bands.

When I started posting on Twitter a couple of weeks ago, I blatantly stole Bob Cesca’s routine of posting an interesting video as the first post of the day. He calls it “Morning Awesome” and I chose to call it that too. Hopefully, the fact that I’m hipping you to Bob’s excellent political commentary site; “Bob Cesca’s Goddamn Awesome Blog” will go some way towards earning his forgiveness – and help to avoid an ugly internets lawsuit. As if Bob knows I exist.

Bob posts the vids right there on his site but, because of Twitter’s 140 character limit, I can only supply a link and hope that my fellow twitterers will click through to what I want them to see. In my case, these are songs by favourite artists whose careers, for one reason or another, have played out somewhere slightly below the popular music radar. I’ve kept a list of all the links with the intention of sharing them here on my site, where an unlimited spew of characters is possible (and often, in my case, probable).

I’ve been experiencing an overabundance of mental disarray this week – with both taxes and an out-of-date contract rider calling for my undivided attention – so it took until last night to realize that I could probably embed the youtube videos the same way my good friend Bob does.

Once I learned how, I couldn’t decide what song to post first, so I experimented with a random (but very sweet) video of two teenagers singing the first verse of a song I wrote forty years ago. Sarah and Kayla are the least well-exposed artists on my list, so they’ve turned out to be a very good place to start.

Today I’d like to present John Gorka, singing “Love is Our Cross to Bear” in what looks like someone’s basement, but is probably a small club. Please notice his amazing songwriting and captivating voice.

If you like this one, check “Armed With a Broken Heart” and “Gypsy Life” – which contains one of my favourite observations on life as a gypsy: “People love you when they know you’re leaving soon”.