Lesser (Known) Lights #7

Trans-Canada Highwaymen – Explosive Hits Vol. 1

I’m always a bit surprised when fans of a band don’t follow former band members when they set out on new musical adventures. If someone has given you joy as part of one outfit, it only seems logical to me that they might be able to do it again with another. Barenaked Ladies have 2.7 million monthly listeners on Spotify, and I think we can all agree that a big chunk of those people (myself included) are mostly listening to music made when Steven Page was the band’s co-frontman. (I wonder if there is still some bad blood there, since you would never know from the band’s Spotify bio that he was ever one of them.) Page on his own, however, has just over 5,500 listeners, and Trans-Canada Highwaymen – his supergroup with Moe Berg of The Pursuit of Happiness, Craig Northey of Odds and Chris Murphy of Sloan – has a mere 3,115 at this writing. And in the case of the latter at least, that means a whole lot of people are missing out on a giant heap of fun.

Now, even the idea of a Canadian supergroup seems pretty un-Canadian to me. Considering the gang’s middling commercial success, they’ll have to do until Drake, The Weeknd and Bieber join forces with whoever they pick to play George. (Sorry, Biebs fans – he’s Ringo in this scenario.) Mendes? Avril? Shania? Buble? My pick is Celine, medical concerns permitting – I’m pretty sure the album would be an unlistenable mess, but what a glorious mess it would be.

This album is wall-to-wall joy, starting with the throwback cover art in homage to those messily bright K-tel collections of the band members’ (and every other Canadian of the era) childhoods. After an entertaining opening track setting out a possibly fake story about how the band even exists, we get nothing but cover versions (my kryponite!) of classic Canadian pop songs of the 1960s and (mostly) 1970s. Part of the fun – assuming you share my definition of that word – was learning about the songs that were unfamiliar to me. But there was plenty I already knew here – many of them from those same K-tel collections – and hearing them in these faithful renditions was both nostalgic and revelatory. I never cared for Lighthouse’s “Pretty Lady”, but something about Berg’s clogged sinus delivery opened me up to its charms. Joni Mitchell’s “Raised on Robbery” is a honky tonk roof raiser, the cheese of Paul Anka’s “(I Believe) There’s Nothing Stronger Than Our Love” becomes less of a threat to your cholesterol level, and I apologise to Larry Evoy and the rest of Edward Bear for not recognizing that “You, Me and Mexico” is, indeed, a classic. And if they hadn’t already won me over completely, they sealed the deal with a high energy and not even slightly ironic take on “Heartbeat, It’s a Lovebeat” by, in the words of Mr. Pink in “Reservoir Dogs”, “Little Tony DeFranco and the DeFranco family”.

I haven’t had the chance to see them live yet, but I really hope their calendar and mine will align while they still feel like doing this. In concert, the band liberally mixes in tracks from their past bands, and any show where the setlist might include “Brian Wilson”, “She’s So Young”, “The Rest of My Life” and, especially, “Heterosexual Man” is a night that I’ll happily take a chance on. You should, too.

Classic [Band] of My Youth Revisited: April Wine

As much as I love music, I haven’t been to a whole lot of concerts in my life. There are a lot of reasons for this, which have varied depending on my current circumstances: financial limitations, parental responsibilities, time constraints, divided interests (a night out is six hours not spent reading, writing, watching a movie or television show, or listening to other music). I also am not a fan of crowds, and have had instances where I suffered panic attacks, or practically shut down from social anxiety. Those occurred without any warning (and on one occasion with the latter was not even in a large group) so they haven’t exactly led me into avoidant behaviours, but they are another reason why I lean towards a peaceful night at home with my favourite person over a jaunt to hear some live music.

Growing up in Cape Breton, missing out on live music was not a real concern since very few major acts came our way. I know I saw Dr. Hook in 1980 – I can date this more or less exactly because the opening act was Graham Shaw and the Sincere Serenaders, riding high on their #15 Canadian hit “Can I Come Near” – and since Dr. Hook were still churning out top 10 American hits (“Sexy Eyes” reached #5 that year), I cannot even imagine how they ended up playing the Sydney Forum. What we got in their place were a lot of Canadian bands, and probably none played our local arenas more frequently than April Wine.

With the recent passing of the band’s frontman Myles Goodwyn, lots of friends and acquaintances are posting stories on social media about meeting him and how he came across as a solid, friendly guy. I never had that pleasure, but his band’s music was still a big part of my growing up. April Wine were not just Canadian, they were Maritimers, though I don’t think I knew that back then. They were also prolific, releasing 10 albums between 1971 and 1982, with at least one song in the Canadian top 40 each of those years. Although their biggest success was at home, the band also made an impression south of the border, with 1981’s “The Nature of the Beast” selling over a million copies and reaching #26 on the Billboard albums chart. They also landed three top 40 singles there over the years, with the biggest of those being that record’s “Just Between You and Me”.

Though April Wine released their share of rockers, it was on the ballads that they really excelled. I think you would be hard pressed to find another band of that era with a better collection of power ballads, and junior high school dance floors were filled with boys and girls experiencing their first serious hormonal stirrings to Goodwyn’s words and voice. 1974’s “I Wouldn’t Want to Lose Your Love” was a favourite of the disc jockey at my earliest Friday night dances at the Catholic Church hall in Florence circa 1975/76, and I am confident I felt my chest crack open and watched my heart tumble onto the dirty floor at least once while Myles sang “I couldn’t stand the pain / You know it’d drive me insane”, and it absolutely did just that.

I don’t have a particular favourite of their tunes, but there are a good dozen or more that pull me back to that time. Listening to “The April Wine Collection”, I see titles that make me think, “I should know this”, and then I play something like “The Whole World’s Goin’ Crazy” and I’m 12 or 14 or 17 years old again and listening to CJCB in my bedroom. April Wine never won a competitive Juno Award (Graham Shaw, on the other hand, does have one), they don’t seem to show up on critical appraisals of the top acts of their era, and even lists by Canadians of the best songs that have come out of our country mostly neglect them. This, strangely, seems right, because what made them good can’t really be summed up in one song. What they had instead was a body of work that was consistently catchy and musically diverse. From the ‘50s-esque singalong “You Won’t Dance With Me” (it stuns me that no retro crooner has ever covered this) to the electrifying train-crossing bells of “Oowatanite” (written and sung by Goodwyn’s band mate Jim Clench), the sly percolating funk of “Say Hello” and the jittery ass kicking fuzz of “I Like to Rock”, they were not a band that could be easily boxed in.

There are covers from Canadian artists that probably grew up loving them: fellow east coasters Sloan and Melanie Doane lovingly served up live versions of “I Wouldn’t Want to Lose Your Love” (complete with hand claps) and “Oowatanite”, respectively, Sebastian Bach gives us a fired up “Rock n Roll Is a Vicious Game”, and Treble Charger did a grimy version of “Roller” for the “FUBAR” soundtrack. More fun is to check out the originals of some of the artists they covered, from Elton John to Muddy Waters to King Crimson. They serve all well, but nothing tops their reinvention of Hot Chocolate’s funk jam “Could’ve Been A Lady” (which is maybe better than 1971’s original, but can’t quite match the British band’s much funkier 1976 reimagining of their tune).

In August 2022, I played their greatest hits record. It was probably the first time I had listened to April Wine in close to 40 years, and I wrote my friend Robert Barrie to say I thought it held up better than most of their domestic contemporaries. He told me in response that Goodwyn had once said he always made sure there were hits on the albums so they would get airplay and people would know the band and come out to see them play when they came to town. Goodwyn understood that a band needed to connect with its audience, and the best way to do that is to give them songs to love, and then they’ll love you back. The power of a song that you love – which I relive in this space again and again – is that it never loses that hold over you, connecting you to another time and the person you were then and the people you shared those days with. I don’t have that pull from April Wine to the same degree as I do with many other artists and songs, but I know a lot of people who probably do. For them, and the people they once were and now are, I pour one out for Myles Goodwyn, a CanCon legend, and a man who knew how to make music that touched your soul.

Favourite “New” Music – October 2022

I think it’s important to know what kind of nerd you are. Nerddom can be very arcane, a subculture with shared codes that is impenetrable to those not in the know, or more expansive, a mass culture experience that brings together people whose only commonality is, say, a love of manga or “Lord of the Rings” or old Sub Pop cassettes. (I made that last one up, but I bet it exists.) And while I have my attachments to the broader nerd world – music, of course, but also superhero movies – what I really am is a data nerd.

So, what does that mean? Well, I love numbers. I am in thrall to things with a quantifiable value. That means, of course, that I have a Fitbit, and have at times been obsessive about hitting my targets. I can get lost in sports reference books and websites – basically long lists of numbers detached from context. I have similarly wasted considerable time reviewing movie box office receipts and television ratings.

In music terms, it means I have a serious attachment to where songs rank on the hit charts. I bought RPM regularly in the ‘70s and ‘80s and Billboard in the ‘90s and ‘00s, and it was totally for the weekly charts, not the articles. The pleasure I got from seeing how long a song was on the chart, or what was rising with a bullet, or if a favourite song entered the chart, is inexplicable, and, yes, kind of weird. But I have always loved numbers and their cold objectivity.

The ultimate music data nerd was Joel Whitburn, who passed away in June 2022 at the age of 82. Whitburn started analyzing Billboard’s charts in college, then put his knowledge to work at RCA in the ‘60s before starting his own company, Record Research, in 1970. Since then, Record Research, through a deal with Billboard, has published a seemingly endless series of books for other music data nerds telling us what is in those charts.

When I started this blog, I quickly realized that if I was going to reference chart performance by a song, I needed a better source than Wikipedia, and naturally thought of Whitburn. I had owned one of his books forever ago, a compilation of Top 40 singles through 1984, and it was heavily thumbed until it finally fell apart and was discarded. There are lots of his books available in stores or from places like Amazon, but for a true nerdgasm, you need to order from the company directly, and pay a serious premium to get the 1,200-page monstrosity pictured above shipped to your home. It’s been worth every penny. Browsing its pages, I see the names of bands and songs that I had long forgotten, and it’s been a joy to revisit oddities like the whispy soft-core pop of Christopher Atkins’ “How Can I Live Without Her” from “The Pirate Movie” soundtrack. It is not a good record, but I liked it enough in the summer of 1982 to record it off CJCB for a mixtape, and was so very glad to experience its horribleness again. Only a true music nerd, a Joel Whitburn, would understand.

And with that, here are my favourite “new” albums from last month:

Faces – A Nod Is as Good as a Wink … to a Blind Horse (1971) (I am yet to have a bad experience listening to a Rod Stewart record, and, yes, that includes “Blondes Have More Fun”.)
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers – Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (1976) (Yeah, I know – I should’ve listened to this decades ago.)
Nick Lowe – Labour of Lust (1979) (See Tom Petty, above.)
Steve Miller Band – Abracadabra (1982) (I have always disliked the title song, but the album is a soaring meeting of power pop and new wave that feels like the soundtrack to a John Hughes movie, which is high praise in my book.)
The Three O’Clock – Sixteen Tambourines (1983) (1960s Britpop/psychedelica filtered through an indie pop sensibility.)
Public Image Ltd. – This Is What You Want … This Is what You Get (1984) (I think the widespread dislike of this record is about the audience’s expectations for what John Lydon would give them instead of a comment on the great brooding pop record that he delivered.)
The Screaming Blue Messiahs – Bikini Red (1987)
The Posies – Frosting on the Beater (1993)
Nerf Herder – Nerf Herder (1996) (This is the band that would result if first cousins Bowling for Soup and blink-182 had a baby.)
Sloan – Action Pact (2003)
Ratboys – Happy Birthday, Ratboy (2021) (A strange blend of folk/country-tinged pop and early ‘90s female-fronted indie rock.)
Julia Jacklin – PRE PLEASURE (2022)
Sofie Royer – Harlequin (2022)
Sudan Archives – Natural Brown Prom Queen (2022)
Melt Yourself Down – Pray For Me I Don’t Fit In (2022) (Jazz-funk with elements of Afrobeat, punk and hyperdriven ‘90s indie pop.)
My Idea – CRY MFER (2022) (Lily Konigsberg can do no wrong in my eyes.)
Shygirl – Nymph (2022)
BODEGA – Broken Equipment (2022)
Steve Lacy – Gemini Rights (2022) (Neo soul smashes up against psych pop and comes out the other side as its own distinct thing.)
Sorry – Anywhere But Here (2022)