by
Steve Fruitman
©
2009
by
Steve Fruitman
©
2009
A few years ago I set out to write a book about something about Canadian Music, about Canada and Canadians, and, well, something happened. In the end it came out in six different albums. Each album contained a number of stories like songs. So now, for the very first time, I'll be putting them online - every week another track. This is my journey through life with an ear to Canadian music.
Synopsis 1.1 Timmins, Ontario, Five Cents Short 1.2 Hilltop Rendezvous
Canada is still a very young land,. It’s difficult finding out a lot about us because we don’t tend to worry about who we are. We discount our importance internationally. We’re also a cultural backwater. So therefore I’ve chosen to write a collection of tales chronicling the continuance of Canadian music through the eyes of life, based upon my own experiences. I’ve traveled the whole world over and the country that really fascinates me the most is Canada. Canadian music tells an unchartered story. It transcends generations and weaves luminous lines into the future.I half grew up in Timmins, Northern Ontario and I half grew up in Toronto - a T.O. boy and a northern country boy. After we moved to Toronto Timmins became my summer home. And it was there, in the house of my grandparents, that I first heard the voice of the Canadian people: Stompin’ Tom Connors. It was late June 1965 and he was singing on CKGB radio. And the songs he was singing were about you and me.
In Toronto, my father operated a jewelry store in Mississauga and to get customers into the store he sold tickets to major events: The CNE Grandstand shows, The O’Keefe Centre and Maple Leaf Gardens (except for NHL Hockey games). That’s how I got to see The Beatles in 1964. I was hooked into the world of popular music as a Canadian kid living off radio and TV.
By 1970 I was getting sick of AM radio and without an FM in the car I forced myself to listen to country music. By that time Dave Johnson, the man who introduced the Beatles to Toronto on behalf of 1050 CHUM, was a DJ at CFGM. So I listened and learned to love the dulcet sounds of Nashville. (Sometimes they would even play Stompin’ Tom song!.) From my musical upbringing I realized that when Canadians performed, whether it be country, folk or rock, they did it in quite a unique way, using their own sensibilities, branding their music with a stamp that was Made in Canada.
I traveled through most of the 70s (South America, India and Europe) but when I returned I was dismayed with what I'd found. Disco had filled in the right hand flank and punk sprung up in archaic manner while pop/rock, produced now with that big drum sound, was sinking beneath its bearded weight. FM radio, once the frequencies of the musical intellectuals, were now just as polluted with commercial crap spilled over from the AM band. Thanks to the birth of Campus/Community radio in the early ‘80s, and the still-vibrant CBC, there were still a few places to tune into. These venues gave a host of opportunities to local musicians to get their music played on the radio, something denied them for much too long a time. In fact, Stompin’ Tom lead the charge against the musical establishment by sending his Junos back to CARAS in a taxi cab and rallying against the hiring practices of the Canadian National Exhibition's Grandstand shows. For years he decried the discriminatory practices of the commercial broadcasting licensee who did their utmost to keep Canadian content to a minimum.
In the 80s I got interested in Canadian folk music, becoming a board member at the Mariposa Folk Foundation during its most turbulent years beginning in 1987. I became the founder and editor of the Mariposa Notes newsletter during its brief days of glory. I also thought it would be great if the organization could get a weekly spot on the radio, as a local community group, and negotiated a spot on CIUT, the University of Toronto’s campus/community FM radio station. On June 13, 1988, Mariposa Radio Folkwaves hit the air; the opening song: The Devil’s Dream by Ti-Jean Carignan. By the summer of 1989 I renamed and rebranded the program as The Great North Wind – with a mostly Canadian focus. It was named after a Canadian song from The Porcupine – that gold mining region around Timmins, written by a young Canadian songwriter who'd grown up on punk and Stompin' Tom and performed by his group, The Grievous Angels. They were a local Toronto band with a new Cassette called Toute Le Gang. Fronted by the Right Honorable Charlie Angus, MP for Timmins / James Bay, whose songs were brilliantly interpreted by their vibrant young singer, Michelle Rumball - also from Timmins.
It was around that time that Stompin’ Tom returned to the scene after a 13 year hiatus from the music industry. I got the second radio interview (after Peter Gzowski), when everyone said that it couldn’t be done! Canada was ripe for a taste of its own music and a burgeoning scene developed out of the burned out ashes of the Biz that was shouting that "home-taping was killing the music industry." An entire generation was blooming beneath their feet, rarely taken seriously at the inception of the digital age..
My kids grew up in a home filled with fiddle music, the blues, The Beatles, Radio Head and Stompin’ Tom. We used Willie Nelson’s Stardust album to get them to quiet down in the back of our car on long summer camping trips. When we got up to Sudbury we'd hear Sudbury Saturday Night; in Wawa we'd put on ‘Little Wawa’. Musical moments like these became totally meaningful for us all.
So what I’ve portrayed here, in a series of prosaic essays, are vignettes that I have witnessed as a music lover growing up Canadian.
Steve Fruitman
Toronto 2009
SynopsisI’ve written approxiamately 70 essays structured into six distinct parts. Each part like a distinct record album. Each album is distinctly labeled and threaded out in such a way as to link a series of essays in the same way that a good record album links the sequence of its songs. As The Beatles showed, the trick to survival is to never record an album the way as you did before. Show some growth. Take some risks. Let each album be its own statement in time. Let each essay be like a special song on an album.
Album I
It all goes back to Stompin’ Tom
1.1 Timmins, Ontario, or Five Cents Short
The heart of the Porcupine - This is the where it all began for me. And it all sort of began there as well for a string-bean troubadour who showed up thirsty one day, five cents short of the price of a beer and got a lotta mileage out of it.
Next Week:
The hilltop was at the top of Pine St. in the north end of Timmins, backed into the woods a bit. A cul de sac where Conrad Levigne operated his radio-television station, CFCL. Cars would drive up each summer night for years to be heard live on The Hilltop Rendezvous, dedicating songs to their lovelies from their cars.