Welcome To Grade 9, Track 3

“Raise A Little Hell,” Trooper


I hate this song.



In my Grade 9 class there were two music options: Band or Guitar Band. If you couldn't muster the chops to play “Mary Had A Little Lamb” on plastic recorder, you were consigned to Guitar Band.

The only way to deal with a room filled with stoners, burnouts and goons of both sexes was to concede to their musical taste. Once he got the class settled enough, Mr. P__ cued up Thick As Thieves at top volume. The first power chord chimed, and 30 pairs of eyes squinted at their music stands in an attempt to discern what to do next. “People, it's 'A' — right? Remember 'A'? Pointer finger across the three center strings? That's your basic 'A' chord. Basic, because it's easy to remember . . . .” etc.

I witnessed this spectacle the first time I tiptoed out of Band class for a washroom break. I snickered and crept on. Little did I know this song was destined to be a year-long project for the band, so that by Spring a group of 30 or so slackers with cheap acoustic guitars could assemble for their begrudging parents and strum along to the record “in concert.”

“Raise A Little Hell,” echoing down a polished school hallway every day of the week for a year? Even a 14-year-old kid gets weary of that.

Welcome to grade 9.

Next!

Welcome To Grade 9, Track 2

“My Mistake,” The Kingbees



I'm an easy mark for rockabilly revivalists — Stray Cats, The Blasters, and most recently Nick Curran have all coaxed a few “hard-earned bucks”* from my wallet over the years. I believe that all began in 1980, with this snappy single penned by Jamie James (born in Toronto, making this the first bit of CanCon on this disc).

*Dave Alvin would close a Blasters' concert by thanking the crowd, “For comin' out and spending your hard-earned bucks.” Classy guy.

Next song...

Grade 9 Summer Soundtrack, Track #1

“Downtown,” Mrs. Miller

Best to kick off with a larf, I always say, and this catastrophic recasting of Petula Clark's cheesy crowd-pleaser always gets me giggling.



Someone from Winnipeg must have requested it from the local pop station, because in 1979 Mrs. Miller was experiencing something of a resurgence, and “Downtown” was all the rage on morning shows. It had been recorded over a decade earlier, and the DJs were now selling the urban myth that had grown like mold around the track: that this was a vanity project gone monstrously awry. It seems, at least from this article, that although Mrs. Miller had dabbled a bit with self-produced records, this was most definitely not that.

In fact, given the illustrious career that followed this release (Ed Sullivan, fer crying out loud!), there is no question that at some point Mrs. Miller was very much in on the joke. Did she know it from the get-go? Listen, and decide for yourself.



Next song...

This Year's Summer Soundtrack: This Is Me In Grade Nine

To my godson —

Well, here you have it: this year's summer soundtrack. I'm really scraping the bottom of the barrel, I know. I can't imagine there are too many tracks here that you're likely to enjoy. Heck, I've included one or two tracks that even I no longer enjoy. But it's been, what, seven or eight years of this? You're 17, dude! Time for you to send me a mixed CD.

But enough of the faux apologies — let's rock 'n' roll. As the Barenaked Ladies once sang, "This is me in grade nine."

First song...

Music Shorts

The very first CD I ever bought was Robbie Robertson's self-titled solo album.



Actually, to tell the truth, I can't remember the first CD I purchased, but this could have been it. When I went shopping for stereo components there were three CDs in constant rotation at every store I visited, and each CD had exactly one song that received the “nudge it to 11” treatment, the better to illustrate the newfangled medium's bootstrap lows and crystalline highs: Sting, Nothing Like The Sun (“Englishman In New York”); Tracy Chapman (“Fast Car”); Robbie Robertson (“Somewhere Down The Crazy River”). I bought all three.

Anyway, I recently pulled out Robertson's old disc and gave it another spin. Although Robertson's swanning-about in “Somewhere Down The Crazy River” retains its off-kilter charm, I don't think the rest of the album has dated very well. More often than not, I found the other songs irksome with strung-together cliches and non-sequiturs.

Showdown at Big Sky
Darkness at high noon
Kiss tomorrow goodbye
That day may be soon

Exactly. Robertson has a catchy way of bending a guitar string and getting the sound he wants for the song he's built, but the album as a whole doesn't achieve much depth of perception.

Last month's How To Become Clairvoyant improves on that, by quite some. It's a confessional, along the lines of James Taylor, bordering on Jackson Browne. Musically, it's as finely crafted and highly polished as his previous solo albums. I'm not placing any bets on how well the album is likely to age, because I don't care: it's plenty good enough for right now. (Burgeoning musicians will definitely want to give the bonus tracks a spin, to confirm the plainest truth known to the pros: even adepts like Robertson and his partner-in-crime Eric Clapton approach the most intricately layered song with a super-simple acoustic lay-down first.)

Bruce Cockburn does what he does on Small Source Of Comfort. The new album continues to feed the sense that things are wrapping themselves up, if not necessarily on a global scale, certainly on a personal one for the aging singer. Nearly half the songs are instrumental, suggesting they may be communicating something more profound than the frustrated pleas of his lyrics.

Finally, ever since my uncle came home one Christmas with a Kurtzweil synthesizer for the kiddies to play around with, I've been a sucker for spacey dance tracks. Cut/Copy expands the tradition of Human League-type digital noodling to pleasing effect; anyone with happy memories of pretty young depressed things dressing up in black and getting a few pallid jollies in clubs that stuck with Depeche Mode, Erasure and Soft Cell should get a big kick out of Zonoscope.

I can't for the life of me recall exactly how I stumbled across Charanjit Singh's Synthesizing: Ten Ragas To A Disco Beat, but it really is quite the remarkable artifact. Recorded in 1982 (much of it in a single take) this album is one of those stunning moments when lightning strikes and leaves a charge that reverberates decades later. More than a curiosity, it is actually something of a game-changer, with its catchy Hindustani worldbeats and synthesizer manipulation. Widely available for pennies a glass at the usual legal download sites, and highly recommended.

Cage Match! Paul Simon vs. David Byrne!!

I've been listening to So Beautiful or So What, Paul Simon's latest CD, and thinking, “This is absolutely brilliant. But do people care?”

The question is a hold-over from a snide discussion I initiated at a party, back when Graceland was all the rage. I was single at the time, and noted that my married friends all had and loved and played the album at soirées like the one I was at. Single hipsters like myself, on the other hand, preferred the stylings of David Byrne, who was just as fond of setting free-association lyrics to “worldbeat” textures. Both men had voices that communicated a forced innocence, but Byrne's was so patently false it was actually menacing — and sexy. “Menacing” and “sexy” were qualities a single young guy aspired to; Simon, on the other hand, was unabashedly sweet.

A quarter-century later, I have to admit that Graceland has probably edged out Stop Making Sense in my rotating playlist. It's also worth noting that I've been married for 17 of those years. So does Simon garner any of the breathless reverence that Byrne still does?

Nope. But it's only a matter of another week or two before So Beautiful or So What catches up to and supersedes Everything That Happens Will Happen Today.

Jim Fusilli ponders Simon's legacy issue, here.

Mr. Hockey

My wheezy old laptop from '98 finally fell apart. That was my "composition" computer. I didn't hook it up to the internet; I just used it for word processing, and that was it. I haven't yet replaced it, so ... you get a picture of Gordie Howe, circa 2001, courtesy of GQ and my scanner. Enlarge and enjoy.


Speaking of hockey, I'm having trouble enjoying the first round of playoffs. The teams I really want to see play each other have another round or two to go, and in some cases they're looking like they might not have it in them to get that far (I'm talking about you, Vancouver).