On this day forty years ago, December 31, 1981, I went downtown to a New Year’s Eve concert featuring Maja Bannerman, Handsome Ned and the Sidewinders and The Government. The show was at Mercer Union, an artists’ run centre that was located on Adelaide St. at the time. I didn’t know what Mercer Union was, and I didn’t know what artists’ run centres were, and I had no idea that I would have some kind of affiliation with one or more of them for most of my adult life (so far). I went with my sister, Lisa, and my friend David Keyes, and I’m sure we bought our tickets at the Record Peddler. I know the draw for me was The Government (https://open.spotify.com/track/125aikDb420xmgkNGr9fYH...), a band that defined cool downtown for me, everything I longed for in my fantasy escape from the suburbs. Handsome Ned and Maja Bannerman would become part of that fantasy in due course.
The evening was what I had hoped, though I like many great moments in my life, I have a lonely memory of it, perhaps because I had no way of actually connecting to any of the people in attendance (Lisa and David notwithstanding), without getting blotto and then doing so in a blackout. Perhaps it’s because I took enough of an opiate that night, and for my first time, that I thought maybe I was going to die. I’m sure I had a case of paranoia as I went home and got up the next day, visited my girlfriend and then went to work.
New Year’s Eve, and especially New Year’s Day, have always filled me with anxiety and loneliness, along the same lines as Labour Day, each of them being the mother of all Sundays.
I suppose I’ve had some good New Year’s Eves, but they always come double-edged. For a number of years, and a number of times in my life, I’ve held parties because it beats the alternative - going out. Hilariously, a party we held for many years where we’d invite both sober alcoholic/addicts and “normal” imbibers was intriguing to the CBC, which led to an interview on “Out in the Open” that they ran 2016, 2017 and 2018, but is still available the way things are in this era: https://www.cbc.ca/.../eat-don-t-drink-and-be-merry-an....
I don’t remember much about other high school New Years. Mostly I worked my restaurant/banquet job, and in earlier years stayed home to listen to top-whatever countdowns on the radio while my mother ate lobster.
I made a Spotify playlist (https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3daskNNDhqT6IZlpwfJueH...) recently called High School. Like most of my Spotify playlists, it’s kind of random, probably a bit too sprawling, and impenetrable to anyone but me. In this case, it’s a playlist about what I listened to in high school (1977-1982), what I fantasize I listened to in high school, songs that hadn’t been recorded yet when I was in high school, songs I fantasize about singing in the band I fantasize about being in when I was in high school, and songs that I should have listened to in high school had I been as cool as I thought I was.
It’s not complete. It’s just a momentary fantasy. 71 songs, 4 hours and 27 minutes, the length of a basement party.
Some of the choices are obvious. “Top Down” and “Picture My Face” (https://open.spotify.com/track/0zYGqo3pLiVJUYCcwrn21h...) from the first Teenage Head album: a huge amount of fun and more exciting than many of the other punk bands I was into, a band that my sister Lisa and a few of my newfound friends at Mother’s Pizza (who taught me a lot about music) could agree on. We played the hell out of the record, and compared the production quality of the singles (“better” in both cases, but less pleasing to my already DIY sensibility). We saw them at every high school performance we could get to, every Knob Hill Tavern gig they’d let us into, at Danforth Music Hall, somewhere in Stoney Creek, everywhere and anywhere.
“Days of Wine and Roses” (https://open.spotify.com/track/2inEzpdn0vqBap0YJ2eD2o...) by The Dream Syndicate came out once I was in university. That album, and handful of EPs and singles by the band, along with music by The Gun Club, The Cramps, The Blasters, Rank ‘n’ File, and the Violent Femmes, were the bands that gave me hope after, to my mind, punk, new wave (as we originally understood it) and postpunk were finished, giving way to synthpop, New Romanticism, etc., etc. These bands, and hardcore bands like the Dead Kennedys and Black Flag, were the saving grace apparently. The truth is, those bands were great, but I eventually grew to hear good things in Tears for Fears, A-Ha, Depeche Mode. I’ve come to realize that there are periods of our lives that we lock into, periods that we decide define our identity to the exclusion of everything else, and then we turn off. At least, I do or, I hope, did. Nothing beats adolescence for carving out one’s identity, but I am trying hard to call me on my own bullshit, even while I sentimentalize it!
When I have the fantasy that I had a band in high school, one possible version of it involves showing up to the Battle of the Bands and we’re The Dream Syndicate, a band that is not punk but is so punk, a band that has to appeal to anyone into 1970s hard rock, from Neil Young and Crazy Horse to the alt protopunk variants like the Velvet Underground and The Stooges. That’s my band. One of them.
The Stooges’s “Not Right” (https://open.spotify.com/track/6ghf1333jb7cJ9sQCgMRWl...) is one of a dozen or so songs by the band that were always heavier and more exciting than most punk bands. That was part of the musical experience of the time for me. I loved everything New that was happening during that great period in music (and film, art, literature, DIY-ness), but it was impossible to disregard the greatness of what had gone before, what wouldn’t have been on our 1050 CHUM radar screens growing up, but was happening parallel to all that other greatness.
I was too cool to be into Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, but had a song like “Beggin’” appeared by some new band out of the blue, I’m pretty sure my ears and my brain could not have resisted: https://open.spotify.com/track/7wVQgvVVX4penHEGrF5eCL...
Like almost all of my high school “discoveries” I found that my friend Kim was already into them. Actually I took my cue first from Jim Morrison, because I discovered that The Doors opened for them at the Whiskey a Go Go or some such LA place. The Doors were still cool to me, even though they were profoundly uncool by my New Wave standards. I still like The Doors, but I still love Love. I am almost shocked every time I play their music, from their garage rock classic 7 & 7 Is (https://open.spotify.com/track/0OJnkHGtb0kbUiKrboCuJg...) to Alone Again Or (https://open.spotify.com/track/1XuccRABkfUVB4FjSVhjL1...), a song so astonishingly beautiful to my 17 year old self (and my 58 year old self). I am convinced the first few songs I heard were all from the Johnny Cash greatest albums that came out in 1965 and included the mariachi-infused “Ring of Fire” and “It Ain’t Me Babe”; years later an (arguably) mariachi-infused “Alone Again Or” would become a huge favourite, played over and over again on vinyl, on tape and now online. I think I bought most of my Love records at Peter Dunn’s Vinyl Museum, but at A & A’s Yonge St. as well I’m sure (hello Kim, hello Lisa). I am tempted to go on and on about Love and I did, back in 2007 near the beginning of my Facebook Group, 1000 Songs, followed by a conversation with some of my favourite people: Alan Zweig, Rick Campbell, Gary Westwood, and Steve Winwood. https://www.facebook.com/notes/1000-songs/song-57-alone-again-or/10150206403561451/ PS: Scott Walker's "Seventh Seal", an inarguably mariachi-infused psych/crooner gem, hit me as strong as Cash and Love. Too much to say here.
A big part of my high school experience consisted of going downtown to bars like The Beverley (my favourite), the Spadina Hotel (Cabana Room mainly), and Start Dancin' (not a bar) and others to hear bands like the Rent Boys (https://open.spotify.com/track/2RYbxnAVvKEaUak6i1rVMn...), the Sturm Group, the Rheostatics, the Dave Howard Singers, Fifth Column, and so forth. The music I heard then, and the connections I made still live with me, even if sometimes very tenuously.
I’m not sure if I listened to the Spencer Davis Group when I was in high school, but I should have. This song, I’m a Man, is pure pleasure whether it’s this original (https://open.spotify.com/track/3FBQJqRo62hW0RvGoJXWdB...), or Bob Seger or Chicago. Steve Winwood is a reminder that it was possible to be musically accomplished as a young teenager. Apparently you have to work at it harder than I did.
“Nice ‘n’ Sleazy” (https://open.spotify.com/track/2CeBK22RiNWepnaCs0yHPb...) was one of the first punk songs that my sister owned, and maybe the first either of us had on a picture sleeve. The Stranglers are a band that still sound fresh and exciting to me. My fantasy band would play “Golden Brown” and “Hangin’ Around” (https://open.spotify.com/track/4OvQsAObGMF3dpkCV6DZzb...), as well as their version of “Walk on By” (https://open.spotify.com/track/468OjJdSYyN77e1tYj4O6Y...).
Richard Hell and the Voidoids were like the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, and Patti Smith to me: “HOLY SHIT!” That anarchic energy cut through everything for me, and still does, though today its part nostalgia, and part genuinely reminding to cut the shit and focus. I love “Blank Generation” (https://open.spotify.com/track/5OGfBbWmRRkDiZiJbu5WIr...) and their version of John Fogery’s “Walking on the Water” (https://open.spotify.com/track/4qbhCFHUmMMXnP09MKMcZP...).
Which reminds me: CCR have never grown tired for me.
And did I mention Neil Young and Crazy Horse? It was so exciting that Rust Never Sleeps came out while we were in high school. It seemed impossible that my generation could have an album as earth-shattering as Everybody Knows this is Nowhere or After the Goldrush, but time has proven that, to me at least, Rust and Live Rust are two supremely high points in their career.
Sometimes I know it’s just nostalgia. So Some Girls is my “favourite Rolling Stones” album, but I can’t sustain that position. Exile, Sticky Fingers, and Let it Bleed are obviously “better” and each is also “my favourite".
I really must be going. Happy new year!
Rent Boys Inc · Song · 1982
33Alan Zweig, James Anderson and 31 others
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Lisa SheddenHappy New Year, Jim. I miss spending New Year’s Eve with you.
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· 19h
Aldona SatterthwaiteHappy New Year, Jim. As I'm mostly an introvert, I love spending New Year's Eve by myself. I've never liked New Year's Eve parties--everyone so desperate to have a good time and all that false bonhomie. Nuh-uh. Instead, I make myself a really fabulous dinner, drink a little Prosecco (or champagne, if I'm feeling fancy), and usually watch all five hours of the BBCs production of Pride and Prejudice (the one with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle). This year, I might check out Get Back, the Beatles' documentary on Disney+, instead. Cheers!
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· 19h
Kerry DooleFine choices!
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· 18h
Rick CampbellHey, Jim that’s quite a piece! Are you sure it wasn’t NYE 1980? Andrew told me that their opening gig for XTC at the Concert Hall was The Government’s last gig and that was October, 1980. I know because I moved to the UK the next day.
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· 15h
Jim SheddenRick Campbell I hate to disagree with Andrew JP about his own band, but I was at several shows when I was in grade 13, which was 1981-82. I have street posters to do it, not to mention an interview with Robert Stewart in one of my zines that took place in 1982 and the band was still together, but I guess that must have been the end.
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· 13h
Rick CampbellJim Shedden Okay. Maybe they broke up more than once! Billy Bryans wasn’t their first drummer so…
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· 12h
Jim SheddenRick Campbell Its possible that a show I saw of theirs at the Palais Royale, on September 18, 1981 (my birthday) was the first show with Billy Bryans. I believe he also played with every band that night.
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· 3h
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Nick Smashthanks jim. this very much echoes my own experiences.
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