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Hello, friends, and thank you for meeting me here. My name is Virgil Brown, and welcome to Episode 4 of my podcast series entitled, Valdy, Canada’s Great Folk Hero.

[music]

changed. I am not a wise man, but neither am I rearranged. I am not a new man, but neither am I old. I am not a rich man, but I cannot be sold. I am one, you are another. I have a family, you have a mother. I am not a good man, no but neither am I cruel. I am not a learned man, but neither am I a fool. I am not an ordinary man, but neither am I strange. I am not your man, but that can all be changed. But that can all be changed.

Today is September 1st and it’s Valdy’s birthday. He turned 81 today. Valdy lives on Salt Spring Island in British Columbia with his wife Kathleen and not too far from his two older sisters. Valdy was born in Ottawa, and he’s the third child of Danish portrait photographer Paul Horsdal and his wife Lillian, who was an English nurse, a writer, and who later worked as a shipping expediter for an outdoorsman’s float camp company in northern British Columbia. Valdy studied guitar and piano at the Lisgar Collegiate Institute, an Ottawa secondary school, located in downtown Ottawa by the Rideau Canal. Many years later, he would be received into the Order of Canada, not far from his old school, at a place called Rideau Hall, home of Canada’s Governor General. During the 1960s, Valdy was a member of a folk group called the London Town Criers, and he later joined the Montreal group called the Prodigal Sons. He then moved to Victoria, where he played lots of music, and worked as a draftsman for the city of Victoria. When he was 25, Valdy bought a small farm in Sooke, BC that he turned into a commune, which at one time had as many as 30 people living on it. In 1972, he recorded his hit song, Rock and Roll Song, which was the beginning of a long and prosperous career in music. In 1972, the great music producer, Quincy Jones, selected one of Valdy’s songs to be featured in Steve McQueen’s great movie, The Getaway. In 1973, Valdy won a Juno Award for Outstanding Folk Music Performance. Fifty years ago, Valdy recorded and toured with The Hometown Band, which featured two Juno Award-winning Canadian musicians, Shari Ulrich and Claire Lawrence. Valdy performed on many of Canada’s variety television shows and was also featured in an episode of the long-running Canadian television series, The Beachcombers, where he played a saxophone-playing environmentalist named Halibut Stew. Valdy continues to perform at folk festivals from one end of Canada to the other. At age 81, he still tours the country, playing over 200 shows per year. It’s been a wonderful honor to be able to talk with Valdy and to get to know him a little bit as I try to chronicle his many adventures. The generosity he has shown me in terms of his willingness to stop everything he’s doing and talk to me for a while has been a very positive and meaningful thing to me. Somewhere along the line, I think I may have become one of the world’s biggest Valdy geeks, although I’m sure there are others who share my level of fandom for this wonderful Canadian artist. I play music too, and I remain so impressed with Valdy’s ability to give himself to an audience of adoring fans and somehow leave everyone feeling like he’s their buddy. It’s a rare gift. Over the years that he’s been in the business, he’s worked with many of Canada’s great songwriters, and it seems that every time I talk to one of them, their relationship began first and foremost with a friendship that later turned into a songwriting expedition shared together. In today’s episode, I’m going to share with you some bits and bobs of conversations that I’ve had with Valdy over the past couple of years. Almost kind of like a 20 questions kind of thing. I’m sorry to say, I did ask Valdy some pretty stupid questions. And, just like you’d expect, he went ahead and answered them. Because that’s just the kind of guy he is. One of his biggest hits was a song called Yes I Can.

Yes I can. Yes I can. Written by a guy named Bob Ruzicka, who comes from a tiny town called Thorsby, Alberta. Bob is known as “The Singing Dentist.” He’s a friendly chap and one of those rare birds who spent his life both as a dentist and a songwriter. We’re going to hear some stories about how his dad got him a job in a rock and roll band when he was only 12 years old. And we’ll go right up until he met Valdy, who recorded his great song, Yes I Can, with The Hometown Band in the late 1970s and which took Canadian radio by storm for many years. It’s still a favorite at Valdy’s concerts, and each of his audiences sings along with it with great gusto. But first, let’s listen to a collage of bits and bobs from my talks with Valdy over the past couple of years.

This might be a painful subject, but it’s something that I’ve noticed as I’ve been trying to get as Valdy-rific as I can. And that is I can’t buy your early A&M releases anywhere. And I know that your early A&M stuff is also not on any of the streaming platforms and stuff like that. And I would reckon that that’s probably got something to do with ownership of the publishing. What can you tell me about that? Because I’d sure like to just get online and buy them all.

It’s the ownership of the masters. A&M Records own the master tapes. And they sold them to Polygram. And Polygram sold them to Rykodisc. As record companies, the big ones ate the small ones. That’s the way it went. And now they’re owned by Universal Music Canada, which is a huge conglomerate. And very difficult to get anything out of them. I’ve ordered CDs for this last tour from them, thinking I might sell a few. And so I ordered 300, because they won’t do less than 150 of each. And so I ordered 300 of them, and it’s going to take seven weeks to get here. Thank goodness they don’t use Canada Post. But I took out a CD with me on the road. I took one of each, and then I said, I have one CD for sale tonight. You can’t buy it because I need it for tomorrow night, but you can give me your money now and your address and I will send it to you. And that’s what I did. And I sold almost 70 CDs for the tour. I mean, the line I used on stage was, I have CDs for sale, which is about as hopeful as a trombone player with a pager. Now that’s hopeful. The stuff might not be online. I could put it up, but I can’t put up someone else’s masters online for sale. No one will buy them. No one will offer them for sale if I don’t have clearance. And I believe that only my “best of” is online via Universal Music.

Right, the master’s collection, yeah.

That one, and also classic collection.

Well, it’s kind of sad that... These roadblocks come up with something that you put your heart and soul into and people would love to get but are having trouble finding.

Yep. Well, that’s my foolishness for giving it all away at the front end. I should have done a “Loreena McKennitt” and kept all my publishing. Yeah. She did real well by doing that and has control.

She seems like a pretty nice gal, too.

She’s straight ahead. She’s a wonderful musician. Great singer, great writer, and understands business, just like any CEO you’ve ever met. She’s really a fine human being.

And when you’re out on the road, what do you listen to in that big sprinter van of yours?

CBC. For those listeners who don’t know that, it’s the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and it is our Government-funded federal radio and television network. And it is impartial politically, and it doesn’t have any advertising on it. There’s a lot of talking heads on one of the stations, and the other one has the choice music. And we also have a French version of it called ICI Musique, which means “music here.” And it’s just constant programming of music all day long. So it’s a really good network to have, and it is national. You can get it anywhere.

You travel through Alberta, of course, and I’ve heard you speak about CKUA. It’s an unusual station, and Holger Petersen’s been there since 1969, Terry David Mulligan. I know you listen to CKUA when you go through Alberta, because most musicians do.

It’s... A landmark. It’s like a beacon. And thanks to the internet, it’s available to everyone now. It’s the only station that consistently plays what it wants to.

I’m super grateful to them because they played the heck out of my record. And that’s what caused me to write my book, which is called Almost Famous in Alberta & Other True Stories. And I had a great run up there in Alberta.

Good, good.

I love CKUA. This year was, just like the Aldergrove Beach rock festival that started things out for your big-time foray into music. 1969 was when Holger’s first blues show came on, and it seems like you guys are kind of tied together. Do you know Holger? Have you ever met him?

Oh, yeah. Gary Fjellgaard and I did a few albums together, and two of them were released on Stony Plain. Holger and I and Kathleen are good friends. He’s a wonderful guy and he’s still at it and he has a depth of knowledge that is unrivaled by anyone.

Yeah, I love Holger. I recorded a tribute song for his show’s 55th anniversary with Canada’s greatest fiddler, Calvin Vollrath, who’s from St. Paul, Alberta. Have you ever met Calvin?

Brilliant player. Just brilliant.

A wonderful guy, too.

And a wonderful guy to boot.

Yeah, we played a gig together in Edmonton about a year ago, and it was just a wonder to be standing next to him and hearing that violin up close.

Yeah. The way he plays all those little grace notes and nothing is out of tune.

I know. It is pretty amazing. It’s shocking. I actually teared up during our rehearsal and had to pull it back together. Good, good, good.

Getting back to the record biz, you know, around 2006, radio airplay and royalties and all of that stuff kind of changed over to streaming. And with it went all of, or most of, the hardworking recording artists’ royalties. Have you noticed that dreadful shift in reality for all successful musicians?

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Yes, I have. I’ve noticed that the royalties coming in, they have moved the decimal place a couple of points to the left. So instead of getting $100, we get $1. Right. It’s a huge hit to people who have hits. It’s not a big hit to me because I was only making a few hundred bucks a year. So now I’m making $10 to $12 a year. But that’s okay. It’s modern times and that’s the way it’s going and people are listening to more music, which is good, and there’s more opportunity for people to go out and do concerts. Live music to me is still what does it because the whole room is filled with something creative at the time.

And you can feel that from your audience.

Yeah, I can. I make up a set list for my shows and I very seldom stick to it because something in the room dictates I do this style or this, the room dictates it to me and I am able to change it because I’m playing by myself. If I was playing with a band, we’d have to stick to a set number of tunes that were already predetermined. Although I do do that and I’m ready in case I draw a blank, I like to wing it with the room.

Who did the horn arrangements on Read Between the Lines? Those are just amazing.

Karel Roessingh and I did. Wow.

That’s just amazing. He did a lot of stuff for CHEK and CBC and stuff, didn’t he? Beachcombers and all that?

That’s right. He still does. Yeah.

Did you have a lot of fun doing Halibut Stew?

Yes, that was a good show to do. That was a good spirit on that set. The late Robert Clothier and then Don Haldane was the producer, who’s a Disney producer. That was a lovely community to be part of for just a minute.

Yeah, no kidding. Were you really playing the sax on that scene?

Yes, but you wouldn’t want to hear what I did. Oh, I see. They hired a sax player to do it..

I used to live on Robson Street about 100 meters from the lagoon at 1950 Robson and Jackson Davies lived in my building and I’d run into him occasionally in the laundry down in the basement and he was sure a nice chap. I could tell when I watched that episode I could tell that Bruno Gerussi and Jackson Davies were really excited that you were there. You can see it in their faces. They were really thrilled. It was kind of almost like they couldn’t even pretend. I thought that was so cool.

Sweet. I didn’t notice that.

Yeah. Tell me about the Live at 5. Is that always on Sundays?

Sunday, 5 o’clock. Every day. Every Sunday, yep. Well, every Sunday I can. Sometimes I’m in the air. And if I can do it, I’ll do it ahead of time. It’ll just be up there when people tune in.

Has that been really great for you and your fan outreach and stuff like that?

It’s been huge for that. I didn’t have any of that before. But because of the pandemic, I went online and started doing that. And now I have a worldwide audience every Sunday. So the fact that we can now go out and play live again, there’s no reason to stop doing it because I would lose connection with all these people. The guy in Ecuador listening every week, a woman and her family in Australia, they’re listening the next day. Yeah.

Can you do that on Facebook Live then?

Just go live on Facebook. Their producer software, which is just, it’s really elementary to use, so I have no trouble with it.

Speaking of hobnobbing with royalty, let’s talk about a little bit of Canadian royalty for a minute. Have you ever gone flying with Murray McLauchlan? No, I’ve never been flying with him. You guys are old friends though, right?

Yeah, I’ve worked with him and I’ve hung out with him here and there. He’s an interesting man.

How about Bruce Cockburn?

Yeah, Bruce and I knew each other when we were kids. And I toured with him. I opened for him actually in 1971, which was a really interesting thing because he’s a brilliant musician. And I still see him every once in a while at festivals. I played with him at the Kingsville Folk Festival down in southwestern Ontario. We did a workshop together along with J.P. Cormier and Don Bird.

What about Gordon Lightfoot? Did he really teach you Bittergreen or did you just?

No, he didn’t. I learned about Drop D from listening to him play that. Oh, I see. I learned from him, but it wasn’t him sitting down saying, now do this, now do that.

Yeah. Did you guys ever hang out?

No. No, he was a shy man and he didn’t do that very often. I did. I actually did hang out with him in 2019 when he came to hear his daughter play. Oh. His daughter has a band, and they were playing in Georgetown, and I was there doing the gig. I had played before, and then he was hanging out with a bunch of people in the green room when I went back in, and we had a little chit-chat then. He had shrunk by that time. He had lost about two or three inches of height. He was a very small man by that time.

What about Jesse Winchester? Did you ever get to hang out with him?

Not to hang out with him, no. I opened for him once in Peterborough, Ontario. I was always a big fan of his music. And then we had him at our folk club here on the island, and I was the sound man, so I got the mix. A total treat. The Salt Spring Folk Club.

Do you still have your sailboat docked out east somewhere?

No, not out east. I have a sailboat out west. Oh. We have one in the ocean in Fulford Harbour on Salt Spring Island. Yeah. It’s a little boat, a little 25-foot cruiser. It’s a one-cylinder Yanmar diesel, roller reef, and the mainsail is new. We had to put a new one on. A little glass boat. She’s called a Bayfield. She was built in Ontario on the shores of Lake Huron. Sailing is not deductible from the time one spends on the planet.

What was your best gig ever?

Oh, come on, Virgil. So many gigs. I’ve got over 10,000 by now.

Over 10,000.

I was doing 200 gigs a year for 50 years. What’s that?

I’ll have to get out my abacus in just a minute.

It’s a lot of gigs. I’ve played a lot. I keep repertoire moving. I keep new songs coming in. I do forget words sometimes because I haven’t sung songs for a long time, but not a lot of that.

Well, of course, the other question that goes with that one is, do you remember your worst gig ever?

I’ve played a lot of gigs. I wouldn’t say any of them were horrible. Some of them I don’t remember, and that’s probably merciful for my brain just to do a bit of sorting there, but no, I’m quite happy with the way things are going for me. And if a gig is going badly, I turn it around so that it’s working by the end.

Could you take me back to a little place outside of Sooke, British Columbia, called Head Acres, and tell me just a thumbnail sketch of what that was?

Yeah, in 1969, I bought five acres of oceanfront for $18,500 with a dilapidated house. And a gorgeous view of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State across the Juan de Fuca Strait. And I lived out there with a couple of buds, and then some people decided they wanted to come out and move in. So we had people come out and build houses, the original tiny houses. And we had up to close to 30 people living there at some point. And wood heat. And I was learning how to use a chainsaw. And of course, you learn by your mistakes. And I felled an alder backwards. Um, I didn’t fall it backwards. It happened to be leaning the wrong way. And I didn’t know enough to look at it properly. And it took out the power lines. Now, our house was not up to code. So they would not re-hook the power lines until we got it up to code. And so we never bothered with that. We just kept going. If we wanted power, we’d have a gas generator. Mostly we just lived with candles and human power.

So basically it was kind of like a commune kind of thing.

It was definitely a commune. We all chipped in. I paid the rent because it was mine. It’s not in rent, but mortgage. It wasn’t crucifying me. And I was working at the city in Victoria, City Hall. I was a draftsman. A good job. Didn’t pay a lot, but it paid enough to cover that. And it was always nice to know that the property was safe, that there were people there.

Back when Valdy had a commune on the shores of Vancouver Island, he probably didn’t think that someday he’d have a hit record. But it wasn’t more than a few years later that he was a significant Canadian recording artist. He recorded his first album at Herb Alpert’s Recording Studios in Los Angeles for A&M Records.

When he got around to recording with The Hometown Band a couple of years after that, one of his biggest hit songs was Yes I Can, written by Bob Ruzicka, “The Singing Dentist” from Thorsby, Alberta. I had a chance to talk with Bob, and here’s some of that conversation.

Hello. This call is being recorded.

Hi, is this Bob Ruzicka?

Yes, it is. Is this Virgil?

Yes, it is, sir. How are you today?

I’m fine. I’m fine. I was thinking about your email yesterday when you said that you wanted to talk about Valdy and a little of that history. And I was thinking, God, that was such a long time ago. And then I realized that given the state of the cultural climate in the world today, probably “Rock and Roll Song” is probably more relevant today than it was the day it was written.

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I think you’re right. It did kind of expose the sort of cultural lines that were being drawn and that sort of the backlash to hippieism and hippies and stuff like that.

Well, it was kind of a hymn to cancel culture before cancel culture was a thing.

That’s an interesting way to put it, for sure. How and when did you meet Valdy?

We did the first Winnipeg Folk Festival at Birds Hill Park together. And so we sort of met up there. And then we were invited up to Faro. Faro was a mining community outside of Whitehorse. And they put together this amazing folk festival that had like, I mean, there was all kinds of really good people there. Roosevelt Sykes and Dan Hill and Bruce Cockburn and these marvelous, marvelous people at Faro. And that was really where Valdy and I, I think, sort of connected for the first time. We both had this kind of shared sensibility about story songs, and we were staying in Faro. There was such great music in the hallways. I mean, everybody enjoyed the shows, but the real fun was in the hallways and rooms before and after and during the performances. Anyway, Show on post

Hello, friends, and thank you for meeting me here. My name is Virgil Brown, and welcome to Episode 4 of my podcast series entitled, Valdy, Canada’s Great Folk Hero.

[music]

changed. I am not a wise man, but neither am I rearranged. I am not a new man, but neither am I old. I am not a rich man, but I cannot be sold. I am one, you are another. I have a family, you have a mother. I am not a good man, no but neither am I cruel. I am not a learned man, but neither am I a fool. I am not an ordinary man, but neither am I strange. I am not your man, but that can all be changed. But that can all be changed.

Today is September 1st and it’s Valdy’s birthday. He turned 81 today. Valdy lives on Salt Spring Island in British Columbia with his wife Kathleen and not too far from his two older sisters. Valdy was born in Ottawa, and he’s the third child of Danish portrait photographer Paul Horsdal and his wife Lillian, who was an English nurse, a writer, and who later worked as a shipping expediter for an outdoorsman’s float camp company in northern British Columbia. Valdy studied guitar and piano at the Lisgar Collegiate Institute, an Ottawa secondary school, located in downtown Ottawa by the Rideau Canal. Many years later, he would be received into the Order of Canada, not far from his old school, at a place called Rideau Hall, home of Canada’s Governor General. During the 1960s, Valdy was a member of a folk group called the London Town Criers, and he later joined the Montreal group called the Prodigal Sons. He then moved to Victoria, where he played lots of music, and worked as a draftsman for the city of Victoria. When he was 25, Valdy bought a small farm in Sooke, BC that he turned into a commune, which at one time had as many as 30 people living on it. In 1972, he recorded his hit song, Rock and Roll Song, which was the beginning of a long and prosperous career in music. In 1972, the great music producer, Quincy Jones, selected one of Valdy’s songs to be featured in Steve McQueen’s great movie, The Getaway. In 1973, Valdy won a Juno Award for Outstanding Folk Music Performance. Fifty years ago, Valdy recorded and toured with The Hometown Band, which featured two Juno Award-winning Canadian musicians, Shari Ulrich and Claire Lawrence. Valdy performed on many of Canada’s variety television shows and was also featured in an episode of the long-running Canadian television series, The Beachcombers, where he played a saxophone-playing environmentalist named Halibut Stew. Valdy continues to perform at folk festivals from one end of Canada to the other. At age 81, he still tours the country, playing over 200 shows per year. It’s been a wonderful honor to be able to talk with Valdy and to get to know him a little bit as I try to chronicle his many adventures. The generosity he has shown me in terms of his willingness to stop everything he’s doing and talk to me for a while has been a very positive and meaningful thing to me. Somewhere along the line, I think I may have become one of the world’s biggest Valdy geeks, although I’m sure there are others who share my level of fandom for this wonderful Canadian artist. I play music too, and I remain so impressed with Valdy’s ability to give himself to an audience of adoring fans and somehow leave everyone feeling like he’s their buddy. It’s a rare gift. Over the years that he’s been in the business, he’s worked with many of Canada’s great songwriters, and it seems that every time I talk to one of them, their relationship began first and foremost with a friendship that later turned into a songwriting expedition shared together. In today’s episode, I’m going to share with you some bits and bobs of conversations that I’ve had with Valdy over the past couple of years. Almost kind of like a 20 questions kind of thing. I’m sorry to say, I did ask Valdy some pretty stupid questions. And, just like you’d expect, he went ahead and answered them. Because that’s just the kind of guy he is. One of his biggest hits was a song called Yes I Can.

Yes I can. Yes I can. Written by a guy named Bob Ruzicka, who comes from a tiny town called Thorsby, Alberta. Bob is known as the Singing Dentist. He’s a friendly chap and one of those rare birds who spent his life both as a dentist and a songwriter. We’re going to hear some stories about how his dad got him a job in a rock and roll band when he was only 12 years old. And we’ll go right up until he met Valdy, who recorded his great song, Yes I Can, with The Hometown Band in the late 1970s and which took Canadian radio by storm for many years. It’s still a favorite at Valdy’s concerts, and each of his audiences sings along with it with great gusto. But first, let’s listen to a collage of bits and bobs from my talks with Valdy over the past couple of years.

This might be a painful subject, but it’s something that I’ve noticed as I’ve been trying to get as Valdy-rific as I can. And that is I can’t buy your early A&M releases anywhere. And I know that your early A&M stuff is also not on any of the streaming platforms and stuff like that. And I would reckon that that’s probably got something to do with ownership of the publishing. What can you tell me about that? Because I’d sure like to just get online and buy them all.

It’s the ownership of the masters. A&M Records own the master tapes. And they sold them to Polygram. And Polygram sold them to Rykodisc. As record companies, the big ones ate the small ones. That’s the way it went. And now they’re owned by Universal Music Canada, which is a huge conglomerate. And very difficult to get anything out of them. I’ve ordered CDs for this last tour from them, thinking I might sell a few. And so I ordered 300, because they won’t do less than 150 of each. And so I ordered 300 of them, and it’s going to take seven weeks to get here. Thank goodness they don’t use Canada Post. But I took out a CD with me on the road. I took one of each, and then I said, I have one CD for sale tonight. You can’t buy it because I need it for tomorrow night, but you can give me your money now and your address and I will send it to you. And that’s what I did. And I sold almost 70 CDs for the tour. I mean, the line I used on stage was, I have CDs for sale, which is about as hopeful as a trombone player with a pager. Now that’s hopeful. The stuff might not be online. I could put it up, but I can’t put up someone else’s masters online for sale. No one will buy them. No one will offer them for sale if I don’t have clearance. And I believe that only my best of is online via Universal Music.

Right, the master’s collection, yeah.

That one, and also classic collection.

Well, it’s kind of sad that... These roadblocks come up with something that you put your heart and soul into and people would love to get but are having trouble finding.

Yep. Well, that’s my foolishness for giving it all away at the front end. I should have done a Loreena McKennitt and kept all my publishing. Yeah. She did real well by doing that and has control.

She seems like a pretty nice gal, too.

She’s straight ahead. She’s a wonderful musician. Great singer, great writer, and understands business, just like any CEO you’ve ever met. She’s really a fine human being.

And when you’re out on the road, what do you listen to in that big sprinter van of yours?

CBC. For those listeners who don’t know that, it’s the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and it is our Government-funded federal radio and television network. And it is impartial politically, and it doesn’t have any advertising on it. There’s a lot of talking heads on one of the stations, and the other one has the choice music. And we also have a French version of it called ICI Musique, which means music here. And it’s just constant programming of music all day long. So it’s a really good network to have, and it is national. You can get it anywhere.

You travel through Alberta, of course, and I’ve heard you speak about CKUA. It’s an unusual station, and Holger Petersen’s been there since 1969, Terry David Mulligan. I know you listen to CKUA when you go through Alberta, because most musicians do.

It’s... A landmark. It’s like a beacon. And thanks to the internet, it’s available to everyone now. It’s the only station that consistently plays what it wants to.

I’m super grateful to them because they played the heck out of my record. And that’s what caused me to write my book, which is called Almost Famous in Alberta & Other True Stories. And I had a great run up there in Alberta.

Good, good.

I love CKUA. This year was, just like the Aldergrove Beach rock festival that started things out for your big-time foray into music. 1969 was when Holger’s first blues show came on, and it seems like you guys are kind of tied together. Do you know Holger? Have you ever met him?

Oh, yeah. Gary Fjellgaard and I did a few albums together, and two of them were released on Stony Plain. Holger and I and Kathleen are good friends. He’s a wonderful guy and he’s still at it and he has a depth of knowledge that is unrivaled by anyone.

Yeah, I love Holger. I recorded a tribute song for his show’s 55th anniversary with Canada’s greatest fiddler, Calvin Vollrath, who’s from St. Paul, Alberta. Have you ever met Calvin?

Brilliant player. Just brilliant.

A wonderful guy, too.

And a wonderful guy to boot.

Yeah, we played a gig together in Edmonton about a year ago, and it was just a wonder to be standing next to him and hearing that violin up close.

Yeah. The way he plays all those little grace notes and nothing is out of tune.

I know. It is pretty amazing. It’s shocking. I actually teared up during our rehearsal and had to pull it back together. Good, good, good. Getting back to the record biz, you know, around 2006, radio airplay and royalties and all of that stuff kind of changed over to streaming. And with it went all of, or most of, the hardworking recording artists’ royalties. Have you noticed that dreadful shift in reality for all successful musicians?

Yes, I have. I’ve noticed that the royalties coming in, they have moved the decimal place a couple of points to the left. So instead of getting $100, we get $1. Right. It’s a huge hit to people who have hits. It’s not a big hit to me because I was only making a few hundred bucks a year. So now I’m making $10 to $12 a year. But that’s okay. It’s modern times and that’s the way it’s going and people are listening to more music, which is good, and there’s more opportunity for people to go out and do concerts. Live music to me is still what does it because the whole room is filled with something creative at the time.

And you can feel that from your audience.

Yeah, I can. I make up a set list for my shows and I very seldom stick to it because something in the room dictates I do this style or this. The room dictates it to me and I am able to change it because I’m playing by myself. If I was playing with a band, we’d have to stick to a set number of tunes that were already predetermined. Although I do do that and I’m ready in case I draw a blank, I like to wing it with the room.

Who did the horn arrangements on Read Between the Lines? Those are just amazing.

Karel Roessingh and I did. Wow.

That’s just amazing. He did a lot of stuff for CHEK and CBC and stuff, didn’t he? Beachcombers and all that.

That’s right. It still does. Yeah.

Did you have a lot of fun doing Halibut Stew?

Yes, that was a good show to do. That was a good spirit on that set. The late Robert Clothier and then Don Haldane was the producer, who’s a Disney producer. That was a lovely community to be part of for just a minute.

Yeah, no kidding. Were you really playing the sax on that scene?

Yes, but you wouldn’t want to hear what I did. Oh, I see. They hired a sax player to do it..

I used to live on Robson Street about 100 meters from the lagoon at 1950 Robson and Jackson Davies lived in my building and I’d run into him occasionally in the laundry down in the basement and he was sure a nice chap. I could tell when I watched that episode I could tell that Bruno Gerussi and Jackson Davies were really excited that you were there. You can see it in their faces. They were really thrilled. It was kind of almost like they couldn’t even pretend. I thought that was so cool.

Sweet. I didn’t notice that.

Yeah. Tell me about the Live at 5. Is that always on Sundays?

Sunday, 5 o’clock. Every day. Every Sunday, yep. Well, every Sunday I can. Sometimes I’m in the air. And if I can do it, I’ll do it ahead of time. It’ll just be up there when people tune in.

Has that been really great for you and your fan outreach and stuff like that?

It’s been huge for that. I didn’t have any of that before. But because of the pandemic, I went online and started doing that. And now I have a worldwide audience every Sunday. So the fact that we can now go out and play live again, there’s no reason to stop doing it because I would lose connection with all these people. The guy in Ecuador listening every week, a woman and her family in Australia, they’re listening the next day. Yeah.

Can you do that on Facebook Live then?

Just go live on Facebook. Their producer software, which is just, it’s really elementary to use, so I have no trouble with it.

Speaking of hobnobbing with royalty, let’s talk about a little bit of Canadian royalty for a minute. Have you ever gone flying with Murray McLauchlan?

No, I’ve never been flying with him.

You guys are old friends though, right?

Yeah, I’ve worked with him and I’ve hung out with him here and there. He’s an interesting man.

How about Bruce Cockburn?

Yeah, Bruce and I knew each other when we were kids. And I toured with him. I opened for him actually in 1971, which was a really interesting thing because he’s a brilliant musician. And I still see him every once in a while at festivals. I played with him at the Kingsville Folk Festival down in southwestern Ontario. We did a workshop together along with J.P. Cormier and Don Freed.

What about Gordon Lightfoot? Did he really teach you Bittergreen or did you just?

No, he didn’t. I learned about Drop D from listening to him play that.

Oh, I see.

I learned from him, but it wasn’t him sitting down saying, now do this, now do that.

Yeah. Did you guys ever hang out?

No. No, he was a shy man and he didn’t do that very often. I did. I actually did hang out with him in 2019 when he came to hear his daughter play.

Oh.

His daughter has a band, and they were playing in Georgetown, and I was there doing the gig. I had played before, and then he was hanging out with a bunch of people in the green room when I went back in, and we had a little chit-chat then. He had shrunk by that time. He had lost about two or three inches of height. He was a very small man by that time.

What about Jesse Winchester? Did you ever get to hang out with him?

Not to hang out with him, no. I opened for him once in Peterborough, Ontario. I was always a big fan of his music. And then we had him at our folk club here on the island, and I was the sound man, so I got the mix. I tried to treat... The Salt Spring Folk Club.

Do you still have your sailboat docked out east somewhere?

No, not out east. I have a sailboat out west. Oh. We have one in the ocean in Fulford Harbour on Salt Spring Island. Yeah. It’s a little boat, a little 25-foot cruiser. It’s a one-cylinder Yanmar diesel, roller furling jib, and the mainsail is new. We had to put a new one on. A little glass boat. She’s called a Bayfield. She was built in Ontario on the shores of Lake Huron. Sailing is not deductible from the time one spends on the planet.

What was your best gig ever?

Oh, come on, Virgil. So many gigs. I’ve got over 10,000 by now.

Over 10,000.

I was doing 200 gigs a year for 50 years. What’s that?

I’ll have to get out my abacus in just a minute.

It’s a lot of gigs. I’ve played a lot. I keep repertoire moving. I keep new songs coming in. I do forget words sometimes because I haven’t sung songs for a long time, but not a lot of that.

Well, of course, the other question that goes with that one is, do you remember your worst gig ever?

I’ve played a lot of gigs. I wouldn’t say any of them were horrible. Some of them I don’t remember, and that’s probably merciful for my brain just to do a bit of sorting there, but no, I’m quite happy with the way things are going for me. And if a gig is going badly, I turn it around so that it’s working by the end.

Could you take me back to a little place outside of Sooke, British Columbia, called Head Acres, and tell me just a thumbnail sketch of what that was?

Yeah, in 1969, I bought five acres of oceanfront for $18,500 with a dilapidated house. And a gorgeous view of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State across the Juan de Fuca Strait. And I lived out there with a couple of bugs, and then some people decided they wanted to come out and move in. So we had people come out and build houses, the original tiny houses. And we had up to close to 30 people living there at some point. And wood heat. And I was learning how to use a chainsaw. And of course, you learn by your mistakes. And I fell an alder backwards. And I didn’t fall it backwards, it happened to be leaning the wrong way. And I didn’t know enough to look at it properly. And it took out the power lines. Now, our house was not up to code. So they would not re-hook the power lines until we got it up to code. And so we never bothered with that. We just kept going. If we wanted power, we’d have a gas generator. Mostly we just lived with candles and human power.

So basically it was kind of like a commune kind of thing.

It was definitely a commune. We all chipped in. I paid the rent because it was mine. I’m not in rent, but mortgage. It wasn’t crucifying me. And I was working at the city in Victoria, City Hall. I was a draftsman. A good job. Didn’t pay a lot, but it paid enough to cover that. And it was always nice to know that the property was safe, that there were people there.

Back when Valdy had a commune on the shores of Vancouver Island, he probably didn’t think that someday he’d have a hit record. But it wasn’t more than a few years later that he was a significant Canadian recording artist. He recorded his first album at Herb Alpert’s Recording Studios in Los Angeles for A&M Records. When he got around to recording with The Hometown Band a couple of years after that, one of his biggest hit songs was “Yes I Can,” written by Bob Ruzicka, “The Singing Dentist” from Thorsby, Alberta. I had a chance to talk with Bob, and here’s some of that conversation.

Hello. This call is being recorded.

Hi, is this Bob Ruzicka?

Yes, it is. Is this Virgil?

Yes, it is, sir. How are you today?

I’m fine. I’m fine. I was thinking about your email yesterday when you said that you wanted to talk about Valdy and a little of that history. And I was thinking, God, that was such a long time ago. And then I realized that given the state of the cultural climate in the world today, probably a rock and roll song is probably more relevant today than it was the day it was written.

I think you’re right. It did kind of expose the sort of cultural lines that were being drawn and that sort of the backlash to hippieism and hippies and stuff like that.

Well, it was kind of a hymn to cancel culture before cancel culture was a thing.

That’s an interesting way to put it, for sure. How and when did you meet Valdy?

We did the first Winnipeg Folk Festival at Birds Hill Park together. And so we sort of met up there. And then we were invited up to Faro. Faro was a mining community outside of Whitehorse. And they put together this amazing folk festival that had like, I mean, there was all kinds of really good people there. Roosevelt Sykes and Dan Hill and Bruce Cockburn and these marvelous, marvelous people at Faro. And that was really where Valdy and I, I think, sort of connected for the first time. We both had this kind of shared sensibility about story songs, and we were staying in Faro. There was such great music in the hallways. I mean, everybody enjoyed the shows, but the real fun was in the hallways and rooms before and after and during the performances. Anyway, Valdy and I sort of realized that we were interested in each other’s music, and we were staying in a place called the Tiltin’ Hilton.

Their hotel was kind of listing to the starboard about 15 degrees. And I can remember going in at breakfast. Valdy told me he was going to write a song about hands. So I wrote the line, “Weathered hands caress the strands, join them to the sea. It’s hanging on for dear life. It’ll help you to stay free.” And I wrote that line down and I handed it to him and I said, see whether or not this works for you. But the next time I saw him, he came back with this song called “Weathered Hands.” At that point, we realized that maybe this was a conversation that should be continued.

Weathered hands that work the sails,

Pull the fish o’er top the rails.

Weathered hands that beat the deck ice off to keep from turning.

Weathered hands that work the traps with fingers that just won’t go slack.

Weathered hands have signified a hard life of learning.

Did you become a folk singer when you were a kid? Did your family play music?

My dad started traveling in a band when he was six, and I started when I was 12. My dad called me into his drugstore one day, and he said, I think I’ve got a job for you. And I was 12 years old. And he said, I got you a job as a guitar player in a rock and roll band. And so I went on the road with Ronnie Cotton and the Satellites. And we played like five nights a week. So that was my start. And when I was in high school, I started the band in Regina. I got involved in that business at a very young age.

Tell me about “Yes I Can.”

Valdy and I participated once in a songwriting workshop at the Faro Festival where you had to do love songs that didn’t have the word love in them. One of the sensibilities is trying to convey a sense of loyalty and love and connection without, you know, rhyming moon with June, I guess. But without doing that, you know. And so the songs that Valdy and I were doing together were sort of... they weren’t like your typical love songs.

Do you remember where you were when you wrote “Yes I Can”? And did you know you’d written a song that would resonate for a lot of folks?

It was strange. The chorus came first, which is kind of odd. Usually it’s the other way around. The chorus is kind of what you bring in the hook later. In this case, I had the chorus. And then it was about saying, you know, whatever it takes, I can do this. And then it became just a laundry list of the things that I could become. But the overall part of it was the fact that I can do this for you.

What was it like for you to see Valdy’s version of the song you wrote take off on the Canadian radio market and become sort of a beloved standard up there?

Well, it was, you know, to hear the songs on the radio was really, I mean, it was exciting. When suddenly it was everywhere on the radio. I’ll tell you a funny story. My mother, who was like about 80 years old, was in Safeway in Edmonton. She was going through the checkout line.

Oh.

Valdy came over the Muzak system in the supermarket singing “Yes I Can.” And my mother said to the girl who was checking out her groceries, she said, “My son wrote that song.” The woman kind of raised one eyebrow and said, “Oh, that’s nice.” And my mother said she just wanted to pop her one!

The girl at the checkout counter thought she was crazy or something.

Yeah, she did. She just said, “Oh, that’s nice. Have a nice day.” But he did a beautiful job on “Yes I Can,” and it was like a huge success for him and for me too.

Yeah, it really was. And he figures he’s probably played that song over 10,000 times. Can you imagine?

No.

You think about how long this has gone on. He’s still doing what he set out to do, which is connect with people through these story songs. I mean, it’s not everybody’s story, but the themes kind of are broad enough that you leave enough space in between that people can kind of connect their own dots. And I think that that’s part of his appeal, is that those people can relate to those stories in a way that’s personal for them. And they love the messenger. And I think that that’s the reason why he’s still able to do what he does.

Okay, thank you very much, Virgil. Okay, bye-bye.

Very, very glad to have met you. Bye-bye.

Well, folks, I’ve really enjoyed working on my four-part podcast series about Valdy, Canada’s great folk hero. Sadly, I think I’ve finally used up all of my recordings of our conversations, and I don’t know if we’ll meet again or have any more of our talks, but I sure hope we do. It’s been great meeting his songwriters and old friends, and at the end of this Substack, I will leave links to two videos of Valdy performing two Bob Ruzicka songs. The first one is “Yes I Can,” in which he explains to a live audience I was lucky enough to be a part of how he came upon the song at a Winnipeg Folk Festival. And following that, there will be a link to a video of a song called “Shadowland” that Bob Ruzicka wrote as a poem and Valdy put music to. It deals with the painful subject of Alzheimer’s disease. This song was inspired by Bob Ruzicka’s own journey with his wife, who suffers from Alzheimer’s. It’s a beautiful song about loving someone who’s going away from you right before your eyes.

I’d like to say thank you to all of Valdy’s fans for accepting me into your Valdyland, and I hope that you enjoyed the things that I’ve put together for you. It’s been a great honor. Happy birthday, Valdy, and thank you for everything.

Valdy Live In Mesa: Yes I can

Valdy Live In Mesa: Shadowlands

Almost Famous In Alberta

Today, my urologist performed a transperineal prostate biopsy on me. This exploration into my body came with an unexpected avalanche of deep, cathartic emotions that I did not foresee. This is what happened.

When I woke up today, I felt the sense of dread that comes with any “minimally invasive” procedure. I knew there would be some pain, and I knew it was being done because there is something seriously wrong with me. I have had this procedure before, though it was transrectal the first time, so I kind of knew what to expect. My partner, Joey, drove me to the facility. Her sweetness is a daily comfort I am ever so grateful for.

In the changing cubicle, before I took off my glasses, I looked at my naked, 68-year-old body—wrinkled face, soft tummy, receding hairline—and realized that, in the words of my much younger sons, man, I’m cooked. I took off my glasses immediately.

Dr. Raj Satkunasivam, my urologist, was very reassuring and made me feel more at ease. He was clearly very compassionate; it showed in his eyes. His team of medical assistants couldn’t have been nicer. They are obviously very adept at making nervous old guys feel safe and cared for.

As I eased myself onto my back on the examination table and raised my calves into the stirrups, it suddenly dawned on me how women must feel on a recurring basis. My mother, my sisters, my girlfriends, and my former partners all came to mind in a flash. My heart filled with regret for not having been more sensitive to the vulnerability they must have felt during their medical procedures. I don’t think I’ve intentionally been callous or uncaring, but now, after the better part of a lifetime, I finally understood.

As the nurse gave me the inhaler containing the pain-reducing drug Penthrox, she asked if I’d seen the World Cup game where the Canadian player suffered a compound leg fracture. I answered yes. She said the reason he was able to smile and wave to the adoring crowd as they carted him and his gruesome injury off the field was the fact that he had the same Penthrox inhaler I was now holding.

I began puffing on it and slowly eased into a state I can’t quite explain. It was pain-reducing for sure, though I still pretty much felt everything—just not as badly. After about half an hour, they said it was over, and I was slowly guided to a room with a TV playing. They asked me how I felt. I was overcome with emotion. I wept and couldn’t speak for quite some time.

My thoughts turned to my boys and how sweet they’d been to travel all the way to Toronto to support me. The love they showed, and the love I felt for them, was so overpowering. You’ve heard of truth serum—like what the secret agents or bad guys on TV and in the movies give people to get them to cough up information? Penthrox felt like love serum to me. The world in my mind opened up like the aperture of a camera, resembling the view you get through a fisheye lens, except it wasn’t visual; it was entirely heart-based. I felt love for ALL of my friends and family in a way that was refreshing and new—somehow colored with grief, joy, and gratitude, along with tears that were sobbed freely.

Men bottle up their emotions, and I’m no better than the rest of us. Suddenly, the floodgates opened and I couldn’t close the dam. I looked up at the TV. They had it tuned to the History Channel, showing a program about logging on Vancouver Island—not far from where I logged as a young man. I remembered my old friends who I worked beside, one of whom is currently battling COPD and failing health. I remembered the great camaraderie I felt being accepted by these guys back when I was only twenty, and the sorrow I felt for the destruction of the natural world we were a part of. I wept for it all.

I wept with feelings of love for my daughters so far away and for their beautiful babies. How could they ever know how much I love them? It’s inexplicable. I thought of all my friends: the bands I played in, the coffee roasting company I ran, my customers, and my pals—like Anthony Ramirez, who lost his partner to cancer and shared recently how much he appreciated our friendship, and the great Seattle musician Gary Minkler, who started his own musical genre, has led the groundbreaking Seattle avant-garde rock band Red Dress for 45 years, and who suffers now from stage four liver cancer. I always looked up to him and his brave creativity.

A vast ocean of feelings came to me half-naked in a waiting room. A wrinkled, crumpled old dude. Cooked.

As Joey drove me back home, I was still in this state of grief, joy, and gratitude. She got me laughing uncontrollably, which is one of her great gifts.

THEN, in a moment of clarity, it came to me that CANCER—yes, the horrible, awful, fucked-up thing some of us go through—is also a chance to love more and better, with words and hugs and calls and tears and gratitude.

Cancer is a chance to love more and better.

My Morning Sanctuary
As a cup of coffee silently steams beside me, it is five in the morning in Toronto, Ontario. I slowly twist the dial and delicately tune in one of the local classical stations. The all-night DJ speaks in a soft, gentle tone, telling me, “Thank you for listening to beautiful music in a crazy world.” I keep the volume down low so as not to wake anyone.

My old Telefunken Allegro 5183 tube radio, like me, is still plugging away after sixty-some-odd years. The technicians who built it by hand, lived in a place called Western Germany.

A Little Music to Start my Day If I’m lucky enough to find a station with a thoughtful disc jockey who spins a good tale before playing a record, I am even happier. That makes the radio come alive. It is comforting to hear someone speak calmly about a piece of music or its composer in a soothing voice first thing in the morning (or any time of day.) When they eventually play the song, it brings me joy—provided it is not too brassy, boisterous or distracting. In the wee hours I prefer something peaceful and calm.

I usually seek out the classical station first, but if that doesn’t work, I search for college radio. The other day, I stumbled across a great vintage dancehall reggae show on the university station. Some mornings, there is nothing on the airwaves that I actually want to listen to, but I do not mind. I have my sweet old radio, and I know I will be satisfied eventually. In fact, it doesn’t even have to be turned on. I am happy just looking at it. It represents a bygone era of style, design, and handmade craftsmanship, along with the timeless promise of more music to come.

Analog Wellness: The Renaissance of Low-Tech Sound
There is a trending shift in how people use devices and listen to music. For many, the move is away from today’s digital reality and back toward low-tech analog devices—a phenomenon some are calling “Analog Wellness.” That’s no problem for me, I’ve always preferred analog sound to digital, but I am also woefully addicted to the endless information fountain that is my cell phone,

Digital Detoxification Trying to avoid digital screens in favor of analog equipment seems to be catching on. There is a sliver of our population returning to flip phones. Common sense may be spreading to social media too. There are growing concerns about privacy. The inescapable relentlessness of it all is leading to user burnout. Who feels good about storing their photos and private matters in “the cloud,” AKA the data gathering servers of mega companies like Apple and Google? Probably no one. Recently there has been news that the 1990’s era “MySpace” social media platform for music creators and fans alike, might be returning as an old school alternative to modern algorithm-driven data-stealing feeds.

Searching for a Simpler Interface
Worried about the residual effects of the amount of screen time I accrue daily, and with an eye to my own “Analog Wellness,” I have been trying to find ways to enjoy music and avoid the internet. This effort led me away from streaming services and back to good old-fashioned broadcast radio. I’ve been on a quest for change, and I have made significant strides since finding a precious radio relic from a bygone era.

Bridging Modern Tech with Vintage Engineering
The Telefunken company has disappeared into history, but many of its fine products endure. Some of their radios have defied obsolescence. The Telefunken engineers had the foresight to include auxiliary ports on the back of their radios for the purpose of connecting reel-to-reel tape machines or phonographs. They probably didn’t imagine a world with Bluetooth technology, but these 65 year-old auxiliary inputs allow me to add that modern capability to my Telefunken radio easily.

For the days when I get skunked and can’t tune into a radio station that pleases me, I have connected a small bluetooth device, (there are many to choose from) with a cost of around $40 CDN. It lets me play anything that I can source from my iPhone, laptop or the internet, into the Telefunken’s auxiliary input.

Streaming Breaks an Age-old Promise to Songwriters
Listening to the radio at home has fallen out of favor over the past twenty years as on-demand streaming culture has taken hold. People are no longer willing to twist knobs or push buttons to find a song. Billions of people pay monthly subscription fees to bring music (and ads) directly into their phones and computers. These monthly fees add up to a multi-billion dollar cash cow for the host companies whose names you know too well by now. The sad truth is that the revenue from these streams flows uphill to the corporate billionaires who siphon off the bulk of the royalty dollars that ought to go to the songwriters and music creators. Prior to 2005, when radio was the primary medium for music, a songwriter could earn a halfway decent living from the royalties of a popular song that became a “hit.”

Unearthing a Uniquely Preserved Treasure
I spent years casually looking for a truly great vintage tube radio, in junk shops and vintage stores. Recently, I found one of the holy grails: a 1961 Telefunken Allegro 5183 Hi-Fi Stereo, complete with its original box. Remarkably close to its original condition and unrestored, the old Allegro works perfectly, and I was able to acquire it at the very fair price of $175 CDN. I’ve seen them priced as high as $850.

A Long-Distance Signal Across the Prairies
I’ve had some remarkable radio listening experiences over the years. Once upon a time, in 1999, I was cutting across the prairies of Saskatchewan on my way back to Alberta. I was on tour, promoting my album “Smoke Rings” and driving a 1962 Chrysler Imperial. I had a song called “Midlife Chrysler” that was getting a fair amount of radio play on Alberta’s glorious publicly funded radio station CKUA. It was exciting to hear my own songs on the radio. The old Chrysler was equipped from the factory with a massive tube radio with a tall external antenna that raised itself up with the push of a button. One afternoon, just outside of Saskatoon, the big radio caught a signal from far-away Cuba. The Cuban station’s powerful broadcast bounced off the ionosphere and landed right in my car, nearly 5000 kilometers away. Suddenly my car was filled with the delicious sounds of a Cuban Rumba. It was an unexpected thrill. There has always been something magical about radios.

A Clarion Call to Harness the Free Airwaves
I wrote this piece to remind people of the simple joys of radio. Remember the crackle of the spaces in between stations? Or the sound of stations too far away and too faint to fully tune in? There’s always the gentle, faint smell of warm dust on the hot glass tubes, with just a hint of ozone.

The radio is not top-of-mind for our younger folks. Don’t blame the kids! The older generations may have forgotten radio entirely as they scroll away many of their remaining hours on their phone’s screen.

All I am saying is give radio a chance… It is a miracle: it sits there waiting for you to switch it on, and once you do, you don’t pay a dime for the music that magically travels through the air from a distant transmitter straight into your car or home. The good news is that radio broadcasters are still monitored by performance rights organizations such as ASCAP, BMI, or here in Canada, SOCAN. They make sure that the broadcasters honour the copyrights of composers and producers, paying them their full royalties.

Now that is a refreshingly old-fashioned idea.

MY ANALOG PAPERBACK

Hello again, thrill-seekers!

This is probably the most un-fun of my Substack subjects, but I am still compelled to share my experience. If we can raise awareness of the dangers of prostate cancer for even one man, it will have been worth doing. If you share this article with your friends, it would go even further toward this cause—especially if you have a large audience, though any size audience is important in this case.

A Historic Hospital with a Very Serious Purpose

In my first article about my creepy prostate cancer, I mentioned that I had an MRI coming up soon. As scheduled, I went to Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in Toronto.

Named for Queen Elizabeth II’s little sister, the Countess of Snowdon, this enormous facility opened the year I was born, in 1958. (Having watched the Netflix series The Crown, I could picture exactly who it was named for.)

It was quite an experience to arrive there at the crack of dawn and find nearly every seat in the multitude of waiting rooms already full of patients and their loved ones. Many of these folks were much worse off than me. Many had clearly been recipients of chemotherapy and were in the throes of losing their hair.

It saddened me to see this. My heart goes out to them all, regardless of their condition. Cancer is a heartless scourge, and this is a very serious place.

Going Through Changes

After a brief wait, I was taken to a changing room and provided a hospital gown and slippers, as well as the key to a locker for my personal belongings. As I stored my stuff, I couldn’t help but notice how much wear and tear there was on every surface. This was a very high-traffic area—clearly a place that has seen millions of people pass through it over the decades.

Being a pretty good judge of wear and tear, the sight of it reminded me that I am but one of billions of people who have to face cancer. It sank in. It was a watershed moment.

Inside the Machine

After changing, I was taken to the nurse’s station and fitted with an intravenous port in my arm so they could inject the magical magnetic solution at the appropriate time. Once ready, they slid me into the very noisy—and some would say claustrophobic—MRI machine. I saw it as a place to lie down and have a nice nap.

They fitted me with noise-reducing headphones for a very good reason. The sounds the machine made were not only deafening; they were a chaotic random collection of whirs, zips, beeps, and horns. As I dozed off, I imagined a garbage truck was about to back over me, its backup warning signal honking in a steady rhythm.

After about forty minutes, they woke me up, pulled me out, removed the port, taped up the exit wound with cotton and gauze, and led me back to the change room where I gathered my belongings and left.

The Results

It can take a week or two to get the results of an MRI. That time passed quickly, and the results arrived a couple of days ago. Deep down inside, I already knew what they’d find.

As it turns out, there is a new tumor on my prostate, and the cancer has spread to the fatty tissue surrounding it. The good news: it has not found its way into my lymph system or into my bones.

Had I not been tested regularly, it would have crept onward unnoticed—like little creepy things do—and that would have been really bad.

I’m not out of the woods yet. There will be a biopsy in about ten days where they will verify the type of cells removed and establish the nature of the cancer: whether it is fast-growing and dangerous, or slower and easier to combat. Once they have more information, my urologic oncologist will determine the appropriate treatment.

Looking Ahead

This is just an update…

I feel fortunate to have the advantages of modern medicine working on my behalf, and I will keep you posted on my progress as it occurs.

In the meantime, please help spread awareness of how vital it is for men to get regular testing for prostate cancer. If you are so inclined, please leave a comment on this article and share it with anyone you know.

Thank you.

Folk Music Therapy

I was raised by folk singers. Growing up, our home was a masterclass in music and community. My parents had an incredible record collection, and the giants of the folk era were often the soundtrack to our lives. It was an eclectic musical education, guided by mom and dad—the first two folk singers I ever knew.

They’ve been gone for quite some time now, so long in fact, that since their departure I’ve become a grandfather. But the lessons they taught me remain the anchor of my life.

My parents were social workers. Their job in this world was to help people get better at managing the psychological troubles that are a part of life. My folks, Virgil and Evelyn, were specialists in something I call “folk music therapy.” They came by it naturally as disciples of The Weavers, Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger—the activists and artists who got an entire nation to sing along to anthems like “This Land Is Your Land.”

Virg and Ev made folk music into medicine. They gathered people together and got them to sing, uniting voices and hearts in a collective act of restoration. I witnessed it with my own eyes many times and it gave me faith.

Recently, I read W. Somerset Maugham’s: The Razor’s Edge. He suggests that the distance that separates us from faith is no greater than the thickness of a cigarette paper. For mom and dad, the distance between a troubled heart and a heart that starts to feel better, was no greater than the length of a good song sung with others.

Reaching Back in Time 500 Miles

Our family sang the folk music standards of the 1950’s and 1960’s. We sang them in the car on trips, around campfires and at the kitchen table. These songs helped form my musical foundation and were the catalog of songs we drew from, in a constant repeating cycle, for years.

By the time I was a teenager I remember thinking that if I have to sing the song “500 Miles” one more time, I just might lose my mind. Written by Hedy West and made famous by Peter, Paul & Mary in 1962, it had become a sort of anthem for “folkies” and was in high rotation in our home. I was aching for change and was already learning to play new material by the singer-songwriters of the 1970’s. I was pulling away from the old family favorites and eventually began writing my own songs. I had outgrown the song 500 Miles.

Forty years later, the Coen brothers made a movie about folk singers called “Inside Lewelyn Davis.” It featured a scene that takes place in a recording studio. A trio of singers featuring Carey Mulligan, Stark Sands and Justin Timberlake perform “500 Miles” beautifully. As Timberlake began singing the first line ever so sweetly, I realized I hadn’t heard it in ages. It caught me off guard. Suddenly my eyes were filled with tears and I felt an ache in my heart as I was transported back in time to Virgil and Evelyn and the comfort of the music they used to nurture us so long ago. I was born lucky because of those two.

120,000 Songs a Day

A musical thread connects those years to the modern world, but the songwriter’s landscape has shifted dramatically. The old folk songs are like dusty antiques buried under an avalanche of new songs daily.

Today, you can’t swing a cat without hitting someone trying to “make it.” Millions of musicians of all ages are putting out videos and tracks, hoping to be clever, quirky, or cool enough to go viral. Every single day, an estimated 100,000 to 120,000 new tracks are uploaded to streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music. That’s three million songs a month. Many of them are created using Artificial Intelligence. It is a digital tsunami. A songwriter could get disillusioned. If you’re not careful, it could sweep you under.

In my twenties and thirties, I played in bands and traveled across Canada, the Far East, Europe, and the United States, making a young man’s living plumbing the depths of popular music while playing other peoples songs as paid rehearsal. That taught me so much that it became my own little songwriting school where I sharpened my pencil for the songs I’d write someday.

After a lifetime of trying I have learned that the only success I can measure is when I can get people to sing along with me. In a way, I guess I was born into it. I always have my eye out for a certain kind of folk.

I like people who sing along.

Folk music clubs or societies are comprised of exactly the kind of people I’m looking for. They’re ready to listen and ready to sing along. I love the sound of a room full of people singing together. It makes me feel like I got my folks back for just a little while.

This year has been unlike any other. My battle with prostate cancer continues and has made me fearful of booking shows. I’m not implying that the phone is ringing off the hook with requests! Just to be safe, I’ve been leaving plenty of time for medical procedures that may arise. I scheduled only two performances this year, both in June of 2026. One was with my old buddy Mike Mallon’s blues band for our 50th high school reunion; the other was a performance for the Folk Music Society of Victoria, British Columbia.

A few hours before I hit the stage in Victoria. I came down with a cold. Wouldn’t ya know? Two shows and sick for one of them! But I made it through ok. The Victoria Folk Society is a very welcoming group of folkies, that were joined by many of my Vancouver Island cousins, a niece, an old school chum or two, and even my father’s old buddy and sometimes doctor, Clayton Ham. I sang my heart out for them, they all joined in and suddenly I felt a lot better. That’s folk music therapy. Here is a 2 minute montage of us all singing:

I don’t know if or when I’ll be out there performing again, but if I’m lucky enough to get there, my job will be to find some folks and get them to sing along. Maybe I’ll see you out there someday. In the meantime, here’s a link to a free download of my most recent album. I hope you share it and enjoy it with your friends — just click on the button:

BANJO MOON ALBUM

Join the Circle

I wrote a book of 35 short stories called Almost Famous in Alberta & Other True Stories, just click on the title if you’re interested in some true tales of my wild Canadian youth and beyond.

www.virgilbrownmusic.ca.

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Am I dying? Not yet, I hope.

But there was a creepy little cancer hiding in my crotch, and I think it’s back.

Three years ago, I didn’t think about my prostate at all. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I had been experiencing classic warning signs—sudden, overwhelming urge to pee, followed by times where I couldn’t pee at all. I just assumed it was a standard part of getting older, but my prostate was messed up.

I was a dope who didn’t get regular checkups. “I wasn’t thinking about it” is a sorry excuse, but it’s the truth.

Fortunately, I had a doctor who insisted on checking my PSA (Prostate-Specific Antigen) levels through a simple blood test. That test probably saved my life.

The Reality of “Getting It All”

My enlarged prostate had nodes. A biopsy confirmed cancerous tumors. Within a year, I underwent two major surgeries:

• HoLEP: A laser reduction of the prostate gland.

• HIFU: High-Intensity Focused Ultrasound to destroy the tumors.

Post-op life wasn’t glamorous. It involved carrying a pee bag attached to a catheter that was connected to my bladder by passing through my stressed-out urethra. It was a constant part of my life wherever I went for a week, shuffling around carefully until the bleeding stopped.

But it worked. My surgeon later told me the procedure was a success and that he’d “gotten it all.” I just had to get a PSA test every six months to monitor things. I hoped I was in the clear.

I may have misplaced those hopes.

The Cliffhanger

Last month—18 months after being declared cancer-free—I got a very bad score on my PSA test. I retook it. The second score was even worse.

The cancer might be back.

In two weeks, I’m getting an MRI to look for new tumors. If I’m lucky, it’s just Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia, AKA acute swelling. If I’m unlucky, I’ll be staring down more surgery or radiation. I won’t know the truth for another month. The waiting is disturbing to my loved ones. I am somehow detached emotionally from it all, except that I want to stay around as long as I can, to share more of my life with them.

The Ostrich at the Bar

Facing your mortality changes how you listen to people. The other night, I met a 69 year old man who proudly told me he would never get his prostate examined. His logic? As long as he didn’t listen to “some doctor,” he’d never get cancer.

He genuinely believed that not knowing, or “the ostrich method,” somehow equaled immunity.

Nothing I said could change his mind. If I had been armed with the actual statistics at the time, maybe I could have cracked his stubborn shell. I can’t change his mind now, but I can share those numbers with you.

The Numbers You Need to Know

Prostate cancer is highly treatable, but only if you catch it before it leaves the staging area.

1. Canada, a country with an effective national health care system, still has around 5,300 men die from the disease annually, averaging about 15 deaths per day. Globally, Prostate Cancer kills one man about every 15 minutes.

2. Last year in the USA, 62% of men between 55 and 69 years of age DID NOT have a prostate screening. About 60% of prostate cancers are found in men older than 65.

3. Roughly 1 in 8 men will be diagnosed in their lifetime, the five-year relative survival rate for localized (early-stage) prostate cancer is over 99%. However, the five-year survival rate drops to about 38% if the cancer has spread to other parts of the body.

4. Prostate cancer is rare in men younger than 40, but the chance of having prostate cancer rises rapidly after age 50.

5. Early detection of cancer saves lives. Screening can help detect prostate cancer at an early stage often before any signs and symptoms which are associated with more advanced disease.

A Favor for the Men You Know

If just one person is helped by reading this it will be our collective victory, so please share this post as far and wide as you can.

Early detection is the best line of defense. Prostate Cancer can happen before you feel symptoms. It happens when you think you are completely fine.

If you are a man over 40, stop making excuses and book a PSA blood test. If you know and care about any men over 40, send them this post and insist they get tested immediately.

No man wants a creepy little cancer living in his crotch. A man shouldn’t wait until he’s carrying a pee bag—or worse—to wish he’d just taken a simple blood test. Forward this to every man in your life today.

This story is an excerpt from: Almost Famous In Alberta & Other True Stories

The town of Cranbrook in the early years of the 1970s could be a rough place for a kid. It was awful for me, and I’m lucky to have survived it. But there were much darker forces lurking nearby that would make my own mistakes seem like child’s play. At this point in his life, my dad was searching. He was trying to find a spirituality he could cling to. He seemed lost. He didn’t know what he was looking for, though it was possibly related to Christianity. He certainly leaned that way. He was never far from his Bible. He also had stacks of books by the American clairvoyant Edgar Cayce. He was devouring books on spirituality, and they were stacked at his bedside in large mountains three or four feet high. I remember as a kid looking at these massive piles and saying to myself, “Jesus!” He needed something from this world of spiritual literature to keep him tethered to the ground. This strange town we had moved to was an oddity he was forced to reckon with. Suddenly, he decided we should try as many different churches and spiritual activities as we could, starting with astrology. Holy cow. I would tell you about it, but I have blocked it out.

As part of his job, Dad would travel to different parts of the region to government facilities where he would do his psychiatric social work with the locals. He served a pretty large territory. I don’t exactly know how it all came about, but not long after we got set up with a house in Cranbrook, my dad bought a small farm in a town about sixty miles away called Creston. I presume he was charmed by the somewhat run-down little hay farm while on one of his traveling therapy junkets to the area. He was a fierce reader of books, newspapers, and even pamphlets and real estate guides; I assume that’s how he found the place. It wasn’t a working farm, but it had a small house, and he invited his sister Arlene and her son Frank to live in it. Frank was about nineteen years old. We would sometimes go to the farm on weekends and have camp-outs down the hill from the house in the fields by the old dairy barn. There were some large sheds we could take refuge in if it started raining.

This little enclave of buildings was not too far from the base of a beautiful cliff with a sheer rock face a thousand feet tall. It had a clean, clear creek running from the base of the cliff straight through the middle of the farm. About fifty acres of alfalfa surrounded the old homestead. In the summer, Dad hired someone to cut the hay and let it dry in the hot sun. After curing it in the usual way, it was raked and baled and put up in the loft of the old barn. My father’s plan was to sell the hay to the farmers in the area for their livestock. I never really knew why my father bought this farm, but I guess he couldn’t fully give up on his utopian dream of a natural life. Whatever his plan was, it was fun to go down and hang out with my Auntie Arlene and cousin Frank. Arlene and I spent a few nights under the stars with fire-heated bricks at the bottom of our sleeping bags to keep us warm. This also attracted the numerous kittens on the farm who happily climbed inside. The sound of crickets, cats purring, the little creek, and the wind in the trees lulled us to sleep. Auntie was very sweet to me and, man, could she cook.

My cousin Frank became my archetype of the cool adult male. I had some very early memories of him and me as small kids at Grandma’s farm in Two Harbors, Minnesota. I got a pretty good talking-to one night from Grandma at bedtime because I wouldn’t stop calling Frank “Frankie-stein” over and over. I thought I was so funny. I must have been about five and already trying to be a comedian. Now, it was eight years later, and I reverently called him Frank. I hadn’t spent much time around guys his age, and he was like a hero to me because he did whatever he wanted and answered to no one. He smoked. He had the winningest smile, a handsome physique, wonderfully tan skin, a thick and masculine beard, and best of all, long brown hair past his shoulders. All the things I could not have. I was skinny and pale, everybody was always telling me what to do, and worst of all, I wasn’t allowed to have long hair. Long hair was still very unacceptable to the average rural Canadian at that time. British Columbia was a pretty square and uptight place in many ways. In Vancouver, the mayor was a jerk named Tom Campbell who had a brute squad of cops that would arrest hippies and forcibly shave off all of their hair, guilty of a crime or not.

Frank drove a red Ford F-150 pickup. He looked like Jesus in Levi’s and a white t-shirt. Frank was kind to me and included me in anything he was doing if he could. He had a wonderful record collection and, being an Ontario kid, he had albums by the current bands from the Toronto scene that I’d never heard of, bands like McKenna Mendelson Mainline and a guy named Bruce Cockburn. We hung out all summer and listened to records. He’d take me in to town to play pool at the billiards hall where he taught me how to play the English game Snooker. If it was a hot day, we’d go to the Tastee Freeze and get some ice cream. As far as I was concerned, he was the coolest cousin of all, and I would be his willing disciple as long as he let me hang out with him.

There was this fella who used to come around our house in Cranbrook. He was a patient of my father’s. He also worked and lived in Creston where Dad’s hay farm was. In a strange coincidence, Frank worked with him on a few jobs here and there. Frank worked in the orchards, and this fella had a large rototiller that he ran for farmers and gardeners in the Creston area. A rototiller busts up the soil like a plow, which makes it easier for crops to grow. Dad paid him some money to plow an area for a big garden up by Arlene’s house on the farm.

I don’t think there was ever a time when inviting your psychiatric patients to your home was considered normal practice, yet a lot of strange people came and went at our house. Somewhere in my father’s raggedy, overworked, genius brain was a hardwired thought system that superseded its safety and shelter functions. When he was in this frame of mind, he’d let total strangers like hitchhiking traveling hippies, hobos, or just passersby on the street into our home or our car or both. The rougher they looked, the warmer the welcome. He was compassionate and fearless to a fault.

As for this particular fella, I wouldn’t say he was a regular visitor, but I had seen him before. One morning he just dropped in to say hi right around breakfast time, possibly to mooch a meal. Dad was already off to work and Liz had left for high school. At my mother’s invitation, he sat down with Mom and I for coffee and a plate of potatoes and eggs. We chatted with this guy for about a half hour, and then it was time for me to walk to school. Mom gave the guy the bum’s rush, and he was gone. Since we’d moved to Canada, it seemed like it was a pretty commonplace event to have unannounced visitors trading conversation for coffee, tea, or a meal, so we thought nothing of it. Mom gave me a big hug, and I was off to the School of Doom.

Eventually the school year ended and summer finally arrived. I was released from the godforsaken scholastic prison and given a temporary reprieve from my horrendous nickname.

Luanne came home from college for the summer. That same weekend Frank came to visit and we all piled into the station wagon on Saturday night to go to the local drive-in theater. When we drove to the ticket booth, they wouldn’t let us in because of Frank’s long hair. Luanne drove us around the corner, and we stuffed Frank under the station wagon’s third-row back seat. We were gonna smuggle him in. The guy at the booth was fine letting us in now because he thought we’d gotten rid of the hippie. We weren’t going to let some mill-town redneck exclude our cousin Frank because he didn’t like his long hair; we were united in that.

Luanne, who luckily spent most of her time away at college, had gotten a government grant to open a teen drop-in center for the teenagers of Creston. The drop-in center was in a huge basement of a large commercial building right in the downtown area. The local teen population, some of whom were one misstep away from juvenile detention, suddenly found themselves tie-dying T-shirts, making macramé baskets, and learning the technique of dying fabrics that originated on the island of Java, called Batik. Best of all for me though, the basement drop-in center had a free jukebox that had a lot of really great 45 RPM records in it. Credence Clearwater Revival’s long version of “Run Through the Jungle” never sounded better than it did through the rumble of that old tube-powered jukebox cranked up loud. My sister instinctively knew that the volume had to be turned up high to attract more teens. God bless her for that. It was a summer of great, loud music.

Luanne’s carefully executed plan included hiring her best friends from college, and Liz to work with her. I got to witness how smoothly things can go when intelligent, thoughtful, caring women are in charge. They also had a great guy named Bruce Chic that worked with them. They worked in a very cooperative manner. It was decided that we’d all live together that summer in tents, barns, and sheds on my father’s little hay farm. It was kind of like a camping commune. We set up a fire circle and a make-shift kitchen by the creek. We had a lot of fun that summer swimming in the deep green pools of the Goat River with Frank and occasionally helping ourselves to the fruit of the local cherry, peach and apple orchards that were teeming with abundance along every road.

I didn’t find out until many years later that my sister was aware of some strange things occurring on that farm. She was convinced we were being watched. At night gathered around the campfire, she was certain she heard and saw someone lurking just outside the circle of light from the fire. She could never be 100% sure, but, like our father, she was gifted with a keen intuition, and she was right to be worried. She always looked out for us. Her suspicions were something that she carried with her for years but didn’t share with me until we were much older.

One morning, I was rudely awakened by Luanne. I was sleeping comfortably in my makeshift mattress of straw in the small, abandoned milk room of the barn. I’d been up late the night before reading from my vast library of comic books and MAD magazines by flashlight. I was very groggy. She told me to get up and get in the car. She was oddly serious and she meant business. I put up a little fight because I was really tired and I didn’t want to go to town. But she was the boss of me, so I got in the car with the rest of the gang, and she started driving.

The town of Creston was about twenty minutes away from the farm. About halfway to town we were chased down from behind by some neighbor guys that we knew in a yellow Jeep. They came up beside us and shouted, “Your barn is on fire!” We turned the car around and raced to the farm. We had only been gone for what seemed like five or ten minutes. By the time we got back there, there was no barn left. There was just a huge pile of burning hay. Thanks to my sister, I wasn’t in it, but I instantly realized my comic books were. And I’m talking about the first ten consecutive issues of Marvel Comics’ The Silver Surfer, as well as my prized collection of Batman and Spiderman comics—all gone forever.

MY BOOK: Almost Famous In Alberta

How could a big barn burn so quickly? Within a very short time, its wood siding and shingle roof were nowhere to be seen. It had literally become consumed by the fire. The large log poles that were its frame were being obliterated by a raging pile of burning hay two stories high. Someone suggested the cause of the fire was bales of hay that may have been put up in the barn too wet. Perhaps it hadn’t been fully dried out or “cured” before baling it. This mistake causes hay to ferment, which in turn causes its temperature to rise rapidly on a hot day and spontaneously catch on fire. This type of thing had been known to happen on farms, and it’s something that people carefully watch out for. We’d been made aware of that danger way back on Deep Creek Road, so we didn’t think that was the cause of it. Something else was going on.

My very first instinct was that a very bad person had been there and burnt down our barn. I can’t explain it other than to say that I had just had this feeling. My guess was that as much as ten gallons of gasoline was used, and whoever did this must have walked around that whole barn and doused it. They probably tossed a match and escaped out the back way. There’s no way the barn could’ve been gone by the time we got back without an accelerant like gasoline. Just no way. It was weird. When we put that together with the eerie suspicions that Luanne had been having that we were being watched, it doesn’t seem far-fetched to think that there was a dangerous arsonist at large. We were all a little bit freaked out. The cause of the fire was never investigated by the volunteer fire department who also never showed up for the fire.

The rest of the events of that summer would fade away from memory were it not for a single momentous event orchestrated by, I assume, my dad. He had a patient named Bill Berg who either owned or worked at the Creston music store. He had a rock-n-roll band, and he invited me to play with his band in a concert. It was actually a sock-hop dance in the big room above the teen drop-in center. I’ll never forget it; there I was, playing an electric guitar through an amp with Bill’s band. He’d lent me some nice new equipment from his store. The place was packed. What a moment of victory it was for me. I knew most of their songs and faked my way through the few I didn’t. I’d been so beat down by the kids at my school in Cranbrook all year, and suddenly I got to be a rocker for a brief, shining moment. In keeping with my luck of those years, though, some local greaser goon from the audience came up beside me while I was playing and mimicked the way I was strumming the guitar in a way that poked fun at me. Then he went back to his gang of greasers, laughing. I was just a kid, much younger than the men in the band. He wanted me to feel like a fool, and I did with that jackass beside me. But later I realized I was the one standing on a stage playing the electric guitar in a rock-n-roll band and he wasn’t. That was good enough for me. I may have been his target because of a secret sense of jealousy. Or, I may have just been a skinny geek worth poking fun at in his small-town, rotten-greaser mind. Either way, the feeling of playing in a loud rock-n-roll band was intoxicating. It was my very first time, and it felt great to be up there.

That summer of amazing experiences slowly came to an end, and it was time to go back and face my crappy school. When I got back to Cranbrook, I got myself a paper route with the local newspaper, and that fall I began delivering them everyday after school. Once a month I’d have to collect a payment from each customer. In the freezing evening air, I’d have to locate the customers, get money from them, and write them a receipt. I remember going into a few apartment buildings to collect, and every apartment had a different smell depending on what they were cooking or what they were smoking that night, cigars or cigarettes. Those apartment hallways smelled horrendous. It gave me plenty of incentive to race home to the perfect aroma of my mom’s kitchen.

Luanne went back to school in Vancouver at the University of British Columbia, and our lives went back to “normal.” Whatever that is. Normal may be just a setting on the washing machine. Luanne left behind two record albums that she’d brought home from college. It was either a slip of the mind for her to forget them, or she purposely left them because she knew I liked them. She could be sweet like that. Those two records were created by the most popular American songwriters of all time. The albums were Carole King’s masterpiece Tapestry and James Taylor’s Mudslide Slim and the Blue Horizon. I have never listened to two albums more than I listened to those. They were the soundtrack of the next two years of my life. They were also the sacred text for my songwriting lessons. They had all the words printed on them and all of the players names too. I studied them relentlessly. I took my father’s cheap cassette recorder and recorded each of the albums on opposite sides of a cassette tape. To do so, I placed the cassette deck in between the speakers of the family stereo. I dropped the phonograph needle onto the surface of the LP record and pressed the red record button on the cassette deck. Because it was also battery operated, we could listen to the albums while we were in the car. I was pretty serious about my love for these two albums; they pointed me in a new direction toward a new acoustic style of pop music and away from the depression-era country music of the Carter Family. Folk rock was a welcome new sound for all of us.

I fell back into the daily routine of school life and paper delivery. One morning Mom and I were having breakfast. I grabbed the newspaper and on the front page was that fella who had been in our house having breakfast with us. He was being escorted to jail by the RCMP and he had his hands cuffed behind his back, and chains on his ankles.

The guy that my mom and I had had breakfast with not six months ago was now in jail because he had gone on a killing spree and murdered six people. In my memory, reaching back so many years ago, he killed them with an ax. But after researching this, I discovered that he had actually used a gun and killed people in three different places around the town of Creston before he was caught. The local psychiatrist that Dad worked with had previously committed this guy to the Riverview Institution in Vancouver. Not long after that, he broke out of the minimum-security joint. Shortly thereafter he showed up in Creston and went on his killing spree.

My gut tells me he’s also the guy who was watching us at night and burned down the barn. After all, he knew my cousin Frank, and maybe the sight of us all together having fun triggered something in him that made him want to burn it down. There was only one person who would’ve died in that barn. Me. I was the only one who chose a barn full of hay to sleep in. It could have been the end of me. On the day of the barn fire, that guy’s car was parked up by the house. It may be that this murderer was also an arsonist. I might have been his first victim were it not for Luanne. Normally she’d have let me sleep in, like the many times before. But something was bugging her. We both feel like she was guided by unseen hands to wake me up and get me out of there. What’s done is done. We’ll never really know, but we trust our intuition.

The second-best thing about Cranbrook was learning how to ski. My mom bought me lessons at a ski hill in a neighboring town called Kimberley. She’d drive me twenty miles to the Northstar Mountain and it’s deep, powdery snow. She would always make me a gigantic lunch to take with me. In those days I was always starving. She’d use a large wide-mouth Thermos, and she’d cook twelve hot dogs and store them in the Thermos in piping-hot water for my lunch. She prepared the dozen corresponding hot dog buns with mustard and relish. On the way to the ski hill and all the way back home, we’d listen to the cassette tape I made of Carol King and James Taylor. She thought they were as cool as I did, and we were both happy to be alone together on these weekly road trips.

The first-best thing about Cranbrook was that in 1972, we left it forever. My dad got a new job on Vancouver Island, which is approximately the same size as England and about forty miles west of the city of Vancouver across a body of water known as the Straits of Georgia. We moved to a small town called Port Alberni, named after a Spaniard named Don Pedro de Alberni. He was commander of an insignificant fort called San Miguel on Vancouver Island’s west coast from 1790 to 1792. The guy was only on the job two years, and he got a town named after him. What are the odds?

This story of an excerpt from:

My Book: Almost Famous In Alberta

Joni Mitchell once said:

“In the beginning, I built the repertoire of the open major tunings that the old blues guys came up with,” she said. “It was only three or four. The simplest one is D modal [D A D G B D]; Neil Young uses that a lot. And then open G [D G D G B D], with the fifth string removed, which is all Keith Richards plays in. And open D [D A D F# A D]. Then going between them I started to get more ‘modern’ chords, for lack of a better word.”

The more modern chords that Joni Mitchell is talking about changed the course of my guitar playing and the nature of my relationship with music and songwriting. I switched to open D tuning, D A D F# A D some thirty years ago.

If you take time to listen to Joni, you’ll realize that she’s a great genius of modern songwriting. Her songs have unique chord structures and melodic musicality. One of the things that contributes to their originality is the fact that she was usually in a non-standard, open tuning of some kind when she was writing her songs and making those recordings. She crashed-into and shattered standard tuning, and passed right through it into a galaxy of different soundscapes. Understanding her approach is a shortcut to the rich organic musical soil that she used to nurture and grow her songs.

Beware though, because the concept of open tunings is like a magic window only some people can see into. The rest are blind to it. You’ll have to open your heart and mind to it, like a daily meditation, or it won’t resonate for you. Also, to succeed with this concept, you’ll have to stay away from the negative notions of those who simply cant believe in it. Ignore them! Most are afraid it won’t be worth the effort to change. If you’re a fearless beginner, the open tuning method can help you zoom past the painful early phases of playing guitar. Only the brave ones will embrace its non-conformity, leaping faithfully into an unknown that sets them free, if you work at it regularly.

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In my case, following Joni’s example, I was enlightened by this different system to work within. The chords I played suddenly sounded more spacious and interesting to the ear, or as Joni said, “more modern.” It was a change that inspired me to more easily grow my repertoire of original songs.

I couldn’t be a songwriter if I didn’t produce original material, which was a problem that had dogged my first twenty years of playing. Once I got a great guitar and switched to open D tuning, ideas for original songs came flowing out of me. Slowly, I developed a wealth of new chords that revealed themselves to me over time and changed the way I was feeling and sounding. The modern guitarist can easily find the fingerings for this tuning with a quick search of the web. Or make up your own.

When my guitar and I became familiar with this ever-growing new set of chords, songs would sometimes fall out of the universe nearly complete, with melody and lyrics already in place. Having a very nice guitar made a huge difference too. I am very lucky to have found my Thompson acoustic, which was the conduit through which these chords and new songs flowed. It blessed them with chiming guitar tones full of harmonic complexity.

Only those courageous enough to try, and willing enough to experiment with open tunings, will learn what I’m telling you is true. I am wishing you the best of luck on your journey!

To hear the the story of my favorite Canadian luthier, the late Ted Thompson from Vernon, B.C., listen to my podcast at this link:

Thompson, My Wooden Friend

To hear the songs I wrote or adapted to open tunings, click “play” when you get to this link for my recent album Banjo Moon.

My Album: Banjo Moon

My journey as a songwriter and writer is told with 35 short stories from my wild Canadian youth in my book: Almost Famous in Alberta & Other True stories, available at this link:

My Book: Almost Famous In Alberta

When I consider the loneliness epidemic, it makes me wonder, don’t we all have at least one old friend somewhere? What about acquaintances? Surely almost everyone has one of those, or how about relatives? Cousins, aunts, uncles and siblings. Most folks have at least one. While society struggles with loneliness, something is stopping us from reaching out to people we already know. What is it? I bet it’s those damn cellphones. Ironically, modern communication methods make it easier than ever to assist in finding old friends, while also distracting the hell out of us with “info-tainment” and the dreaded “doom-scrolling.”

According to the United States Surgeon General, who I rarely cite for any reason, “millions are experiencing profound disconnection, impacting mental health, causing anxiety and depression.” It’s pretty sad.

Do you have an old friend you’ve lost track of or tried looking for?

Somebody once told me if you want to keep friends you have to pursue them. That’s always made sense to me. Although, you’ve moved umpteen times, your phone number has changed, and so has theirs. If there’s no “bad-vibes” between you, there’s no excuse for not trying to find your old friends. Easier said than done.

I’m pretty predictable, if something big and emotional comes up in my life, I’m going to write a song about it. Once, a long time ago, I was telling my youngest son about a crazy thing that happened that day. He was about ten years old at the time, and already gifted with a mildly cynical sense of humor, and knowing his father quite well he said “let me guess…you wrote a song about it?” Like I said, I’m pretty predictable, but even I wouldn’t have guessed that this story would lead to another song.

In the late 1970’s I worked as a logger on northern Vancouver Island. My job was officially referred to as “chokerman.” Me and my fellow crewman, Chris Carlson, slipped heavy duty cables around logs so they could be pulled into a landing and later lifted onto a truck. I worked with a nice group of guys and we became friends. The boss of our crew was a guy named John Shaw and he was what was known in logging jargon as “The Riggin’ Slinger.” He wore a special leather belt with a radio-controlled whistle-activator built into it that sent loud signals to the machine operator, who ran a huge engine and gear box that moved enormous, heavy cables strung high above us in a now-outdated system of logging called “high-line logging.” These cables hauled the logs either down or up the hill depending on the individual setting. The operator used John’s signals to run the equipment safely. It was John’s duty to keep us safe and he was good at that. About a year later I felt the pull of the big city calling and I up and quit, leaving a high-paying job and the north woods behind.

Quite suddenly I lost contact with the guys I’d been hanging out with every day. I moved far away and haven’t seen them since 1980, but I never forgot them because they were such memorable guys. Chris Carlson had a great sense of humor and always showed a good-natured kindness and generosity. He’d let me ride into and out of camp with him on the weekends in his silver 1977 Firebird. We shared similar tastes in music and his car had a great stereo. We had fun hanging out together.

John Shaw was unforgettable for his verbal hijinx and funny phrase collection. His use of Canadian slang was really clever and he often had us in stitches when he’d trick us into one of his long-con wordplay gambits. I wrote a whole chapter about John in a book I wrote a called: Almost Famous in Alberta & Other True Stories. The chapter about him and Chris is called “The Riggin’ Slinger.”

Over the many years since I’d last seen them, I put some time into looking for them. It didn’t help that they both had names that were extremely common. There are literally thousands of men named John Shaw or Chris Carlson. I didn’t have their addresses or phone numbers. Months turned to years, and years to decades.

I’m a singer and a songwriter and recently I was on tour promoting my latest album which is called Banjo Moon. (There’s a free download of that album if you click on the underlined title.) While out trying to promote my work, I passed through the area on Vancouver Island where we’d been loggers long ago. I was thinking about these guys a lot and did a fair bit of internet sleuthing to try and get their contact information. I struck out because I was stumped by the most obvious initial setback: the incredible number of Shaws and Carlsons in the world. You really have no idea, it’s serious. Talk about your epidemics! It’s almost as bad as trying to find someone with the last name Brown.

On my Canadian tour last year, somewhere in the middle of Saskatchewan, I was weary from too much driving. I found a nice campsite and set up for the night. I took a couple of gummies to ease the pain of the road and to get a full nights sleep. Oh, the stars in the prairie sky were amazing. After entering the gummy zone, I got the nutty idea to write a song about my logging buddies so I could possibly get it played on a Vancouver Island radio station, hoping they’d hear it and reach out to me. Ok, I admit I can get some wild ideas under the influence, but it often fuels my creativity. I busted out my trusty Thompson acoustic guitar, and before I knew it the construction of a song had begun. There was no stopping it now. It’s not easy to write a song about logging, but I came up with a catch-phrase for the refrain: “If you see John Shaw say hello,” which is not really a hook. Smoky Robinson wouldn’t write a song with that in it. It wasn’t much to work with at all, but I had a chord progression and melody to go with it. I was certain I could show the world that you can find an old friend just by recording a cleverly written tune. The gummies were strong.

In the weeks that followed there were many distractions that slowed me down. First, there was the completion of my rather grueling tour. Driving from Vancouver Island to Toronto with fifteen or so gigs along the way wore me out. My energy was drained and a bluesy post-tour depression set in. A dear family member passed away. Someone I’d known and loved my whole life. Not long after that, a close friend of mine died. There was a lot of grieving going on. In little cracks of time, here and there, I would grab the guitar and do a quick voice-memo-demo for the logging song, using my cell-phone to store ideas, which is a practice I am very used to. I was trying to build on the foundation of an unfinished song. Bit by bit I got closer.

This past December 8th, 2025 was the forty fifth anniversary John Lennon’s murder in New York City. I suddenly remembered the night John Lennon was killed. I was still in the logging camp, and we all watched the news bulletin together on John’s TV screen. All these years later, I realized it had been roughly forty five years since we’d hung out as pals. I quickly got to work finalizing and recording the song about John Shaw. Before days end I had a new idea for finding John and Chris.

I had put my mind to work on various ways of finding them. I knew the whole radio-station-playing-my-song-gambit was absolutely absurd, no program director or DJ would play a stranger’s song just to help him find an old friend. It was in fact, a truly stupid gummy-fueled idea that like so many of the initial impulses that get me started writing a song. One day I got the idea to launch an inquiry of sorts using a Facebook “town-bulletin-board” page. The last place I knew John lived in was called Cumberland, or as he used to refer to it: Dodge City, like it was a wild gunfighting town in the old west.

I joined the Facebook page for the community of Cumberland, British Columbia. Once I was a member, I posted a link asking the community to help me find John. The responses were almost instantaneous. “John is my uncle,” or “John was my riggin’ slinger too.” My all-time favorite response was: “John is my father and he lives in Woss Lake, British Columbia,” sent by John’s son, Dan Shaw. It wasn’t long before Chris Carlson saw the post and sent me a message. Soon I had reconnected with both John and Chris. It was that easy. I finally got to talk to my old friends, and we’ll meet up this summer.

Finding them made me feel better. If you search, it can be done. It gave me the idea to write this post. If you’re feeling a little isolated and alone, why not reach out to your old friends? It feels so good when you do and whether you find them or not it’s a step in the right direction if you’ve got the blues. I hope this story encourages someone to reach out to an old friend. Finding my friends was very satisfying. I highly recommend it.

However, I still had the logging song I’d been laboring on for months. Now it was just a song that never needed to be played, because I’d found them by other means. The song had good bones and had progressed nicely. I came to like the results of my efforts. You must admit, songs about logging are not common, so at the very least it’s an original idea. I decided to shape the lyrics into a tribute to my friends and how much they meant to me. I also infused it with some logging terms, and the real danger brave loggers face all the time. I went to my computer and dug up some old logging films and photos from the internet and crafted a YouTube video for the song.

I challenge you the reader, to find an old friend. My sister told me that maybe I could start a trend. I said “Yeah! I could call it Find an Old Fart Today!” Remember: there’s no fool like an old fool, so reach out to an old friend. Don’t forget, nobody lives forever. You can’t make “new old friends,” but you can search for the old friends you’ve lost along the way. I’ve included a link to my logging song below.

If you enjoy the song and video, and if this story inspired you to reach out to an old friend, please let me know in the comments section of this article, and don’t forget to subscribe to my Substack, its free. Tag me on Facebook, “like,” comment and SHARE! Thank you very much.

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ALMOST FAMOUS IN ALBERTA & OTHER TRUE STORIES

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WARNING: THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS SOME VULGAR LANGUAGE

This story comes from my book:

ALMOST FAMOUS IN ALBERTA & OTHER TRUE STORIES

About thirty miles west, down the fjord-like inlet from Port Alberni, on Vancouver Island, was a logging camp run by MacMillan Bloedel Ltd. When I was seventeen, I heard that I could make a stack of money being a logger. I hitchhiked out to the camp and applied for a job, which I got. I had one of the most dangerous jobs in the bush. I was a chokerman. The name “choker” comes from the heavy duty slip-knot cables loggers wrapped around the logs so they could drag them out of the bush with heavy machinery. Because of the dangerous nature of this job, I now had a life insurance rating ten times higher than that of an inner-city fireman. There seemed to be more than a little risk in this job, and I was well aware of it. I was pretty quick on my feet; I had a natural thirst for my own survival and the reflexes of a cat because I was scared shitless. On my first day, just before lunch, the logging machine operator decided to try and frighten me. He dropped the two-ton rigging and three-inch steel cable running above our heads from about fifty feet in the air, straight down to the ground about ten feet away from me just to see if I was paying attention. But mostly to see if he could scare the new guy. While he was laughing at his successful effort, I decided to take the rest of the day off after walking up hill to his machine and giving him the proper one-finger salute, along with a few choice new names I had come up with just for him. I didn’t feel safe around a guy like him and rightly so. There have been plenty of guys who died in situations like that, and I didn’t want to join them on Boot Hill. I grabbed my lunch box, wandered down to the gravel road, and stuck my thumb out hoping for a ride. The only problem was there wasn’t anyone on that road. It was literally in the middle of nowhere. There was nobody except a large black bear that was walking in my direction. It saw me and looked interested. It was getting closer and closer, and I began to walk away from it slowly. I opened my lunch box and threw my wax paper-wrapped lunch on the ground as an offering. Maybe my peanut butter sandwiches would distract him for a while. Luckily before too long, a passing logging truck driver summed up the situation and decided to give me a ride. The bear scampered into the woods. I didn’t show up on the job the next day. That was enough of that guy and enough of logging, for a while anyway.

A year or two later when I was done gigging with the Honky Tonk Heroes and after my road gigs as a guitarist for hire, I grew disillusioned with the hard life that came with it. Playing for drunks in crappy bars and rodeos failed to grow on me. It didn’t seem to be leading anywhere, so I quit for the first of many times.

Eventually, on a quest for some good earnings, I thought I’d give logging another shot. I caught a ride up to northern Vancouver Island with my brother-in-law. He was a real logger. Myron, is married to my sister Liz. His folks were from the Ukraine. He’s easy going with a great smile, but you could never out-work him. It would be impossible. He had worked for many years as a faller, the one who cuts down the big timber. It’s the highest rung on the logging ladder and the most dangerous too. The fallers are like royalty in logging circles, where nobody gets treated like royalty. At this particular time, he was unemployed because the company he worked for had laid his crew off. He’d worked for a few “gypo” companies (small renegade private operations) before he landed the falling job with Macmillan Bloedel, or Mac & Blo for short. Even though he’d lost his Mac & Blo job, he and Liz were planning a family, so he had to find a new one quickly. We decided to drive together, a couple hours north to the CANFOR (Canadian Forest Products) logging camp and a place called Woss Lake. Once we got there, we went to the main office and asked for job applications and started filling them out. The guy behind the counter seemed somewhat positive and said they might be hiring, probably because of Myron’s resume. Once we filled out our forms, we wandered down by the river. We were walking around and killing time while they inspected our applications. They told us it would be about an hour. This was an incredibly beautiful place. A raging creek cut the valley in two. This logging camp had its own railroad running right through the middle of it. They owned the logging rights to an enormous tract of land right in the middle of the northern part of Vancouver Island. Their domain was so large that they needed a railroad to move the logs, to be sold and shipped.

After an hour of walking around, it was time to head back up to the office. We started up the hill from the little river, and I walked right into the point of a very long branch hanging down from above, out of my view. I started bleeding profusely from the head. It’s never considered good form to be bleeding during your job interview, but they hired me anyway. Thus began my second stint as a logger. Woss Lake was a pretty good organization. They took good care of their workers and gave us nice clean rooms. Each comfy, private bunkhouse room was maintained by an old guy known as a “flunkie.” Guys with names like Lou and Plug. Plug’s claim to fame was that the only time he’d ever been off of Vancouver Island in his entire life was the time he fell off the Royston dock. These guys were too old to strap on the boots and work on a mountainside so they cleaned the cabins instead. They were good natured men, and we were grateful to have our rooms cleaned every day. They were characters in a place full of characters, like roustabouts from a carnival.

Back in those days, loggers had a strong union that had negotiated a good deal with the logging companies. They had to provide room and board, which consisted of three square meals a day and our own rooms at a cost of only $2.50 a day. It was an eighty-year-old union clause that couldn’t be broken. Such a small amount for lodging was obviously incentive to keep us in camp, without moving to an actual town. This place was in the middle of nowhere, and there was absolutely nowhere to go except the small coffee shop and store by the main office, where I learned quickly that not everyone who chooses logging as a profession is well-versed in the finest manners. In fact, their ranks included a rather loutish bunch of coffee shop trolls. The niceties of modern society were unimportant to them. These guys were kind of like the lifers at the pulp mill. They had one funny gag they did whenever someone came into the cafe wearing a cowboy hat. They’d all whistle the beginning of the theme from The Good, The Bad and the Ugly in unison, but just the first phrase of it. It was usually followed by a round of laughter aimed at the unsuspecting hat wearer. There were a few who were meaner in nature and loved to mock everyone that came into the cafe. Then they’d cackle at their own cruel jokes and a few of the bad eggs had seniority on the job and ran roughshod over everyone else. Guys with oddball nicknames like Ducky or Sharkey. Foremen of their own crews, they fancied themselves the finest loggers in the woods when, in fact, they were kind of old and out of shape. The young, lean crew I was on put them all to shame in terms of daily production numbers, which didn’t improve their attitudes toward us. They were frequently hungover jerks with foul mouths. They loved to be bossy and make the younger guys miserable.

Tolerating their brand of verbal abuse and insults had grown tiresome quickly. I had a chip on my shoulder. I wasn’t a kid anymore, and I wasn’t about to take any crap from anyone. Even so, I was harassed mercilessly by Ducky for the first few weeks of my job. It was bad enough being in the middle of nowhere in a society without women and feeling cut off from the music world I dreamt of being a part of. I felt trapped and isolated. I didn’t want to be bugged by anyone, so I was determined to get even with the notorious Ducky. The next weekend I went to the big city, I bought myself a hunter’s duck call. When I got back to camp, every time Ducky came anywhere near me, I’d let out a good quack or two to just put him in his place. I could make the sound of a duck laughing with the hunter’s helper I’d bought, and I made sure he heard it every day. I was treated to the sight of his sneering, toothless, grimace frothing cuss words from afar. He never bugged me again.

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My direct supervisor was a guy named John Shaw. On our crew, he was the Riggin’ Slinger. A Riggin’ Slinger is an experienced logger with a radio signal device strapped to his belt that activates the air whistle on top of the main logging machine, and with it, all of the actions of its operator. John was a good, solid 180 pounds and about 5’10” tall. He was as tough as anyone I’d ever met. Probably tougher. He was fair and treated me with respect and did the same with our other crewman, a guy he called the Swede Whoore. Whoore is the semi-comical Canadian mispronunciation of the term used to refer to ladies of the night but with no malice intended toward them specifically. It is sometimes spoken that way with humor and affection, if you can believe that. Some Canadians will have an inkling of what I mean but maybe no one else will. It’s all in the translation. There, in the middle of a vast wilderness at our remote work camp, every day started the same. After a huge hot breakfast (as much as you could eat), we’d move over to the lunch bar where they had everything we needed to fill our lunch kit. We’d make sandwiches, wrap them in waxed paper, gather pastries, and fill our thermos full of tea or coffee. Then the different crews would gather in a place known as the marshaling yard. There were men with names like Spar, Slim, or Stump based on the general description of their physique. The funnier you looked, the more likely you were to have a nickname. Each day, just before our crew would climb into a vehicle known as a crummy, John Shaw would say the same short phrase, “It’ll be long and it’ll be hard, but there’ll be no withdrawal.” Only then, had our day truly begun. A crummy was a Chevrolet Suburban 4-wheel drive that could carry six men from the camp to the job site. They were called crummies because of their worn out condition, their rough ride over the logging roads, and their filthy conditions inside and out. They were so dusty on the outside you couldn’t tell what color they were, and the inside was littered with cigarette butts, orange peels, and stinky old lunch bags. I don’t think they ever got cleaned.

After a while we began to feel more like John Shaw’s buddies than his work crew. He was the one who bestowed the nickname of Swede Whoore to Chris Carlson, the Swede. For quite a while, we busted out laughing nearly every time he called him that. Kind-hearted and good-natured Chris laughed along with us, seemingly okay with his semi-affectionate nickname. We’d go over to John’s place every once in a while and drink beer with him and watch TV. To a guy far from home, John’s welcome meant a lot to me. He also played guitar, and we would jam together. I think it made us both feel good to have another guitar player around. I showed him some of my guitar tricks and played him my songs.

John collected funny phrases that he’d store away for special moments when there wasn’t anything else going on. He had a sharp mind and a knack for being wry and witty during work. The work conditions were often bad enough that no one should have been able to find humor at all. When I first arrived, he thought I was too skinny. He said, “You look like a burlap bag full of antlers.” I’d never heard that phrase before, and it completely cracked me up. He said, “Don’t worry about Ducky. He’s a cull.” Cull is the word used for worthless logs that are rotten and, therefore, unusable and discarded. Everyone who annoyed John was a cull. He said as long as you’re not “talking when you should be listening,” you won’t get a “one-way ticket to Fat-lip, Indiana.” Anything small and indescribable, like a small bit of sawdust in your eye, or a bit of food stuck in your teeth was called a Nimberling. He’d spend a lot of effort setting up a gag so you’d be forced to get the punchline out of him, thereby unwittingly acting as his straight man. His favorite little gag always involved “the second worse thing that can happen.” He’d be telling a story and somehow he’d fit the phrase, “that’s the second worst thing that can happen,” into the conversation. To which someone in his audience, usually me, or the Swede Whoore would then ask, “Whats the worst thing that could happen?” Then he’d say, “Shit and fall back in it.” Then he’d start laughing at you for falling into his trap, and you’d end up laughing because it was all so stupid. The fact that we could find anything comedic at all was somehow uplifting at a time we were all working so hard. He had a long list of special words, humorous side-tracks and long-con, laugh-seeking gambits, and I appreciated them all.

Logging-camp goon Ducky wasn’t the only guy who’d gotten under my skin. There was another guy who took it upon himself to try and bum me out whenever he had the chance. This guy got mad because I was seated next to his girlfriend at the Christmas dinner. It wasn’t my fault; she sat next to me. She was friendly and pretty. I hadn’t seen a woman in months. We must have talked a good ten minutes before I even saw the bruiser on the other side of her. After that he hated me. John knew this redneck guy and told me later, “Don’t let him bug you, but don’t fight him. He’s strong. He’s got muscles in his shit.” John dismissed him as “strong like bull, smart like tractor.” He said the guy was lazy too. When John worked with him he had to “line him up with a stick just to see if he was moving.” He called him Johnny Rotten-tooth.

On December 8th, 1980, we were all at John’s watching TV with the sound off, sitting “side-by-each” as he’d say, playing guitars and drinking Lucky Lager beer. That night John Lennon of The Beatles was murdered. I was devastated when the news bulletin flashed on the TV screen. John Shaw’s redneck buddy just had to open his big yap. He was talking when he should have been listening. He said, “Serves him right, the fuckin’ hippy.” I didn’t want to be around people like him any more. There were guys working these hard-scrabble jobs who knew better than to say stupid things, but just couldn’t stop themselves. Some of them were inclined to sudden fits of violence and were too big in size to confront, so I had to pick my battles carefully. I’d grown tired of them. There were too many of them, and they were too willing to be ignorant.

Speaking of ignorant, our logging machine operator was the senior crew member and drove the crummy. He drove way too fast over the pot-hole-riddled, dusty gravel roads for about an hour each way to and from the job site. John thought the guy was a cull too. It may have been because he constantly bragged about how much money he had. He wasn’t a handsome man either. John said he was so ugly, “he’d make a freight train take a dirt road.” The guy also loved to urinate in front of other men because he was big downstairs. In his twisted world, even urinating was a form of bragging. The guy would smoke cigarettes and boast wildly the whole time he was driving. He once told us a tall tale about shooting a deer that was standing up on a cliff and, amazingly, the deer fell right into the bed of his pickup truck. John didn’t like the guy and privately said, “He’s a cull. He’d screw up a church picnic. He oughta be shot and pissed on.” Long rides on bumpy gravel roads in a dirty crummy full of surly, cigarette smoking, hung-over loggers was how each work day started and ended. The only silver lining was I got paid for every minute of it.

Out on the job site, John was a wizard of a logger. He’d use his radio whistle to send commands to the machine operator who was often as many as a hundred and fifty meters away. The logging machine was attached to a tall steel tower that was held steady by four huge cables wrapped around four big tree stumps. The logging tower supported the overhead yarding cables and pulleys. John would use a series of whistles to signal when to stop and lower the rigging to within fifty feet of where we were standing. Once the rigging lay still on the ground, we’d skip over the slippery, wet logs in our steel-toed, spike-bottomed cork boots, which made it almost impossible to slip. We’d connect the choker cables around the logs and then “skip like little deers” as John would say, “quick like a bunny” to get to safe ground. Then John would signal the machine operator with another series of whistles to pull the logs up off the ground so they could be dragged into the landing. Another crew would unhook the chokers and the logs would be put onto trucks with a loader that was like a giant claw.

Even though the machine operator had the most seniority and made more money, John Shaw the Riggin’ Slinger was always the boss of the crew. Our very lives depended on his good judgement. Blow the whistle too soon or too late, and someone could be killed by a swinging log or a large cable. Many young loggers have died doing this job, and the logging companies make no secret about it. They scare the crap out of anyone wanting this job up front so they get it into their head they could die. A bad call from a sub-par Riggin’ Slinger could be the cause of it. We didn’t have to worry about such a fate. I’m convinced there’s never been a better Riggin’ Slinger than John Shaw. I learned a lot about strength and perseverance from him. He was a great example. If he was phased by any of the dangers, he never let on. He was focused and clearly the one we took orders from. He was always calm, cool, and collected. Honestly, sometimes I was sick of the work and the constant rain and acted like a jerk because of it all. I was a smart-ass with a chip on my shoulder. I know I pissed him off every once in a while, but he never said an unkind word. I didn’t mind taking orders from a guy like John. It was always hard work, but he was a natural leader. I went home dog-tired and soaked to the bone from rain and sweat every day. I’d have to put my boots, gloves, and clothes over the heater every night to dry them out only to get them soaked again after the first fifteen minutes of the next shift. John looked out for us in other ways too, like always reminding us to lock our cars and bunkhouse rooms. There were bad folks around camp too, and according to him, “They’d steal Christ off the cross and come back for the nails.”

He never wore his heart on his sleeve, but once he lamented the condition of his marriage. He appeared to be outwitted and befuddled by his ex who had custody of his kids. I could tell he still loved her, but he referred to her as “the Dragon Lady.” He showed me her picture; she was a beauty. He said when things fell apart, “It was tail lights down the road.” In other words, she took the kids and left. I wonder if they ever worked things out. She was his kryptonite, and he was still very much hung up on her. In any case, I later wrote a pretty good song called, “Tail Lights Down the Road.” There was poetry in John’s use of the English language. It’s why he’s in this book, and why I admired him.

At some point every day, John Shaw would pull off his hard hat, wipe his brow, and using his hard hat held upward at arms length, he would shield his eyes from the sun and guess the time of day. Each day he guessed, and I’d check my watch. His guess was always right on the money, within a minute of the exact time. It was a gift, he told us, and it was an impressive skill.

I enjoyed the rugged life out there in the woods. The food was unbelievable. They had five chefs, two of whom were European pastry chefs. Between the food and the beer required to survive there, I think I put on twenty pounds in less than a year, and it was all between my chest and my belt in a lump, like a “food-baby.”

The wild forests of that region of Vancouver Island were supernatural in their beauty. It was a shame to see them getting logged. The company leased this land from the Canadian government, and it was their right to cut down every tree in sight. They didn’t do that, however. They forested the area in a way that appeared to be somewhat responsible, at least as far as I could tell. They had a very sizable tree-planting operation. This was a well-oiled machine that was going to be around for many decades. Nonetheless, it never left my mind that we were on stolen Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka) land, and these forests were sacred. I often felt bad to be there in these supernatural settings exploiting the environment. I recall taking a break one day and wandering to the part of the woods where there had been no logging yet. I found a small impression in the ground that I laid down in. This little bowl-shaped indentation was covered in a layer of hairy, green moss about eight inches thick. I couldn’t resist lying down in it. Spears of sunlight touched the edges of its cool green shag. It called to me. I fell asleep instantly and entered a deep dream state. For a brief flash, I was connected to a spiritual realm I cannot describe with words except to say it was a deep, soulful feeling of love for the natural world of the forest. I can’t remember a time I felt more at peace. Eventually the Swede Whoore came to look for me and found me sleeping. He’d never rat on a guy, so I didn’t get in trouble for napping on the job. I’ll never forget the spiritual and supernatural aura of that forest and my sacred nap. It was the best nap of my life. When I got back to the crew John told me, “Give your head a shake and get in the game.”

I had been keeping my eye on the job listings that were posted on the office bulletin board. One day there came an interesting opportunity. I had a chance to make a move away from John’s crew to be the head of my own crew. I talked to John about it and he said, “Don’t let fear or common sense hold you back.” It was the same thing he’d told any man who thought he was tough enough to take him in a fight. It was like a taunt in a way. I could imagine D’Artagnan from The Three Musketeers using such a line on a lesser swordsman. It was a line we used almost daily on the job too. “Don’t let fear or common sense hold you back,” became sort of a mantra to us all. In this context, though, it wasn’t a threat. He was on my side; he was encouraging me. If I hadn’t made a move that improved my lot, I would have been “strong like bull, smart like tractor.” So, I left the Yarding and Loading Division to become a crew leader in the forestry department of the company. As senior man on the crew, I got to drive the crummy, which increased my hourly wage by a few bucks. I also got paid extra money for being crew chief, so overall it was a big pay raise, and I jumped at the chance. I was now a residual faller. A residual faller is the guy who thins out the new growth with a chainsaw so the remaining trees can grow faster. Right when I started the new job, we were hit with a major rainy season. There was a two-month period when it rained twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Hard, cold mountain rain. Every drop that hit your hardhat became torture after a while.

A few months into this new job, I injured my knee and was taken off the falling crew. I was put in a workshop where I repaired and painted fire fighting equipment until my knee was better. Sure, it was still work, but I got to listen to the radio in a nice cozy workshop with a wood stove in it. I heard on the CBC that President Jimmy Carter had ordered a mission to rescue the American hostages in Iran. In the Iranian desert, one of the rescue helicopters had problems. The mission was compromised. Tragically, yet another of the helicopters crashed into a transport plane. Eight soldiers died. It was April 25, 1980. Carter aborted the mission. It was an election-year public-relations disaster for him. The end result was that the television and movie buffoon Ronald Reagan and his running mate George Bush would be elected to the White House. Even way up in the cold and misty mountains of Vancouver Island, I could tell that wasn’t a good thing. More destructive Republicans like the crook Nixon starting wars and giving tax breaks to the wealthy was a bad idea in my opinion. Republicans have proven themselves to be scoundrels too many times, Abe Lincoln being the rare exception. The Democrats are often nearly as bad, sometimes worse.

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Not too long after that, my time at the logging camp came to an end. The city was calling. It just hit me one day. I up and left camp one afternoon right after work. Before I walked up to the highway I went to John’s bunkhouse to tell him I was leaving. He gave me a firm handshake and a toothy grin as we said our goodbyes. I looked down on the floor and saw the inside of his hard hat. It had a wristwatch strapped to it. That’s how he always knew the exact time. We had a good laugh about that. Suddenly, he got a very serious look on his face, and sadly asked if I’d heard what happened to Jimmy. I asked him “Jimmy who?” He said “Jimmy your finger up my ass!” We both roared with laughter. He’d gotten me again. Then I walked over and said farewell to the Swede Whoore. (continued below…)

With my complimentary Woss Lake Bunkhouse wool blanket, Old Scratchy, tucked under my arm, I hit the road. I was carrying my guitar case and a duffel bag. My cork boots were tied together by the laces and hung over my shoulder. I stuck out a thumb and hitchhiked south to my first stop at Liz’s place in Comox, two hours away. Both of my sisters and their husbands, wherever they’ve lived, have always been happy to help me out with a place to stay and a free pass to the fridge. They’ve always looked out for their baby brother. Before too long, I was back in “the big smoke,” which is what the folks out in the boonies called a town or a city. It’s also North Island logging slang for Vancouver. It was one of many new phrases I was taught by my favorite logging hero John Shaw, the Riggin’ Slinger.

MY BOOK ALMOST FAMOUS IN ALBERTA & OTHER TRUE STORIES

I’m writing to you from the road, on a remarkable journey that seems to be leading me right back to myself. By traveling and meeting with my fellow humans, I’m learning deep lessons about myself. I’m a 67-year-old folk singer and recording artist who, so far, has refused to give up my pursuit of the well-written song and an audience of people with a strong desire to really listen and feel the words and music. The giving-up part is my constant companion, but it hasn’t prevailed yet.

You may ask: How does this elderly gentleman manage to travel across the country of Canada playing showrooms, folk societies, and taverns—with no manager, no sound crew, and no tour bus? I’m writing to you tonight from a campsite at a place called Jimsmith Lake Provincial Park, just outside of Cranbrook, British Columbia. This humble campground holds a very important place in my heart.

When I was a kid, way back in 1971, our family had just lost the family farm. When I say "lost," it wasn’t repossessed or foreclosed upon; it was merely an act of selling it and moving on to a phase of life that my parents could survive financially. It was a great loss to me, though, as that farm colored the rest of my life with precious memories. The farm had put my folks in a very precarious financial situation. My father and I temporarily left my mother and sister and moved to the next town to set up shop while my mom finished the complex job of selling the farm.

My dad would begin his new job working for the province of British Columbia as a social worker in Cranbrook. Given the budget constraints he faced, the only place he and I could afford to stay was in Jimsmith Lake Provincial Park. He would go to work each day at his new job, and I would hang out at our campsite, fighting off mosquitoes and trying to learn how to play the guitar. We stayed in that campsite for about four months.

So, to be here in Jimsmith Lake Provincial Park tonight, thinking these thoughts and sharing them with you, is a special moment for me. Last night, before falling asleep, I walked down to the lake’s edge and saw a gray-haired man talking to a younger man as they sat on a log together, staring out into the lake, where another man was fly fishing and a group of teenagers were trying to talk each other into going into the water—even though it was a chilly evening with dark, foreboding clouds. As I looked at the old man kindly talking to the younger fellow, I imagined it was my father talking to me, reassuring me that everything was going to be OK.

I’ve been on this road trip for over a month now. I’ve played about a dozen venues in that time and visited with high school friends, cousins, siblings, and a special group of ladies who used to pray with my father back in the olden days. They still pray together and have all remained friends who gather and pray for those of us who need their prayers—those facing cancer, other illnesses, or nearing their journey’s end.

Those heavy, galvanized clouds last evening finally burst into a shower of great strength in the middle of the night, and I was glad I wasn’t sleeping in a tent. On this trip, my method of travel is a 25-year-old Honda CR-V. I have taken out the back seats and built a bed that, when fully unfolded, is big enough for six-foot-one-inch me to sleep in comfortably. It requires that I push the front seats fully forward and lean them all the way toward the dashboard so that the bed platform can unfold fully. This platform is elevated, so I can store my guitar and other belongings underneath it.

The CR-V has helped me cross the vast expanses of British Columbia and Alberta—the province whose beloved radio station, CKUA, has propelled my meager career by playing my songs for 26 years so far. The radio in this old car doesn’t work, so I have no idea if they’re playing my new album.

My self-contained rolling motel is how I afford to take this trip to promote my latest album, which is called Banjo Moon. There’s no extra money for motels when you’re traveling from one performance venue to the next. Motel rooms have become far too expensive and can only be used for the occasional respite from confined sleeping. Yes, out of necessity, and with occasional bouts of shame or embarrassment, I must admit to sleeping in my car while traveling across this country playing folk songs for strangers. That’s how it’s been done for years. I can’t change the numbers for traveling musicians, at least for folks who haven’t “made it.” They always add up to sleeping in the car. But tonight, from good old Jimsmith Park, it somehow feels very symbiotic in a full-circle kind of way. I should be proud of myself. I feel my father’s hand on my shoulder and hear him saying, “Well done.”

If you’d spoken to me yesterday afternoon, I’d have told you it’s all been a serious mistake. I fight my own personal demons on a daily basis, like many folks do, I guess. These little gremlins tap you on the shoulder and whisper into the cracks in your confidence. Things like: You’re not good enough, nobody wants to hear you! And look at you—sleeping in your car! Like Gollum, they whisper: You could be back in the Shire, resting comfortably in your hobbit hole. But no—you had to go on an adventure. So far, the only success you’ve had is the invention of a new term for the act of sleeping in your car: claustrophobic exhibitionism. But demons be damned—tonight in Jimsmith Park, my cozy little CR-V feels like home.

On this trip, I’ve had some of the most magical performance experiences anyone could ask for. One in particular comes to mind, and I will set the stage for you here.

Two years ago, I had just finished a tour of Western Canada. It all went pretty well, and I soon booked return engagements to most of the venues for the following year. Then I learned I had prostate cancer, and I had to cancel my return engagements. The places I canceled were kind enough to grant me a return visit if I got better. Among those venues was a very special one in a town outside of Victoria called Sooke, on the southern tip of Vancouver Island. There’s a very kind lady in charge of booking their folk musicians, and her name is Nellie. I was deeply touched when Nellie told me that when I got better, they’d be happy to have me. So imagine my joy when I finally made it to my long-delayed performance for the Sooke Folk Society.

I’ve got a couple of old buddies I’ve known since the 1960s when we were little kids. Their names are Erik and David Poulsen, and they both decided to travel quite some distance to attend this performance and support what I hoped would be my triumphant debut for the Sooke Folk Society—a place where several of my heroes perform, such as Valdy and Shari Ulrich. It was a source of great pride to me that I would be accepted by this society of folk music lovers, and I was deeply touched that my old friends, the Poulsen boys, understood me well enough to know how important this would be for me. They wanted to see it and bear witness. Now it was time.

So I walked to the front of the stage, which was actually the area where the pulpit would normally be—because it was in a church. It did feel like a sacred place to me. I felt my father beside me. I can’t explain it other than to say that, over all the years he tried to convert me to his Christian beliefs, I was unable to fully join him there. I would always sing the old country gospel songs with him whenever we could get together. He’d play his old Gibson long-neck banjo, and me on my old beat-up Suzuki guitar that he bought me in Cranbrook in 1971. But neither banjo nor Suzuki were with me tonight. It was just me and my Thompson guitar, with my old friends sitting in the second row. On the opposite set of pews sat a woman close to my age with a physical condition that confined her to a walker, which she used as an aid to sit in the pew while she gently swayed along with the music.

I stepped up to the microphone and began to greet the audience. I explained how grateful I was to be there to perform for them. I explained how I had been forced to postpone the performance in order to deal with prostate cancer, and I mentioned how grateful I was that Nellie, who sat smiling at the back of the room, had been so gracious and kind in granting me a chance to play there after canceling. So here I was—cancer-free and in Sooke, playing for Nellie and her friends. Until that moment, I had failed to realize just how incredible it all was. My emotions ran high and bubbled right up to the surface. I hadn’t really spoken of my cancer until then for quite some time, and as I looked into the audience and saw the kind faces and my two old buddies, who I’ve known for over 60 years, I began to play a song that I’ve probably played in excess of 1,000 times. I play it daily as a practice, as a ritual, as a meditation. It’s called Did She Mention My Name, and it was written by Canada’s great troubadour, Gordon Lightfoot. It came out in 1968 and was getting heavy radio airplay when we moved to Canada—to the farm—so long ago.

I began to sing the opening stanzas:
"It’s so nice to meet an old friend and pass the time away,
And talk about the hometown a million miles away.
Is the ice still on the river? Are the old folks still the same?
And by the way, did she mention my name?"

Well, that was about as far into the song as I could make it before my emotions took control of my larynx and shut down my operation entirely. There I was, not even halfway through my first song after traveling 3,000 km to perform for these people—and I was caught off guard by a rush of feelings. I was stuck. I froze. I couldn’t sing, and I didn’t remember what the next line was—on my first song of the night. I was so stunned I couldn’t remember the next line in a song I’ve been playing repeatedly for years. My emotions were overwhelming. Tears came to the corners of my eyes, and I was stunned into silence in front of an audience that was hanging on my every word.

Suddenly, the lady in the front row blurted out the next line of Gordon’s song: “Is the home team still on fire? Do they still win all the games?” I heard her words with a jolt—like I was an old 1958 junkyard jalopy whose battery was nearly dead. I had suddenly been zapped by jumper cables from her voice to my heart, and I quickly restarted the song where I’d left off. I safely navigated all the tricky fingerpicking that I had forced myself to learn, remembered the rest of the words, and was able to finish Gordy’s old song with a smile on my face and a great sense of relief.

The rest of my performance went very well. My song Banjo Moon was very well received, as was my finale song, The Good Time Man. When I finished, the entire room erupted in a joyous standing ovation. My good old buddies, the Poulsen boys, right in the second row, cheered too. We shared my victory together, and our old friendship felt even stronger.

I later learned that the lady in the front row calls herself Yukon Mary. I spent some time talking to her. She told me when she lived up in the Yukon, that’s what they called her, and that she liked to pick cranberries when she lived up there. I told her I would try and write a song about Yukon Mary—and the great cranberry. I told her how grateful I was to her. When I was drowning up on that stage, she threw me a lifeline.

I’ve got to be honest. This trip has been grueling—more so from me wrestling with my demons than from the long hours, broken driveshafts, and lack of rest. Yesterday, I was really ready to quit. Exhaustion had me on the ropes. Last night while I slept—unbeknownst to me—I received a text. It had been delayed by the remoteness of the areas I’ve been traveling through. It came from one of Alberta’s greatest sound men, who oversaw my performance in Red Deer two nights ago. His name is Carl Stretton. He’s about as nice a guy as you’d ever meet. This is what he sent me:

It rained all night, and daylight finally decided to arrive. Now I’m gonna drive into the next town and find myself a Tim Hortons. It’s a Canadian coffee and donut shop chain with stores in most small towns. I’m gonna order myself an everything bagel with cream cheese, a large coffee, and a double chocolate donut. Tim Horton used to play hockey for the Toronto Maple Leafs back in the olden days, and he had the good sense to start a coffee and donut company—which eventually became a nationwide chain, proudly displaying the maple leaf on each cup. What could be more Canadian than that?

Thank you, Yukon Mary, Nellie, Carl Stretton, the Poulsen boys,

https://ckua.com

and my daughter Natalie for the inspiration to continue.

(Shout out to Charlie Jacobson too! https://charliejacobson.bandcamp.com)

To anyone who’d like to help, please enjoy this free download of my latest album. If you get inspired, please share this link with your friends and family and also your local radio station request line. The two most popular songs so far are Banjo Moon and The Good Time Man. Every song features Canada’s greatest fiddler Calvin Vollrath. You won’t find it on Spotify but here it is for free:

https://virgilbrownmusic.com/album/3484789/banjo-moon-other-genuine-canadian-songs

Read along with the podcast here:

Hello, friends, thanks for meeting me here my name is Virgil Brown, and this is my Substack post entitled: Valdy, Canada's Great Folk Hero.

Together, we're going to take a deep dive into his first big hit, which was called Play Me a Rock and Roll Song. We'll dissect and examine the recording of that song and tell the true tale of how it came to be. Along the way, I hope to learn what makes this great Canadian artist tick. It will take more than one episode, that's for sure.

Valdy singing: I came into town as a man of renown, a writer songs about freedom and joy. The hall had been rented and I was presented as a kind of a singer that all could enjoy. As I climbed up the stair to the stage that was there, it was obvious something was missing. I could tell by the vibes they wouldn't be bribed. They weren't in the mood to listen. They yelled out, play me a rock and roll song.Don't give me songs about freedom and joy. Play me a rock and roll song or don’t play me no song at all.

Over the past few weeks, I've been talking to Valdy and in a few minutes, you'll be able to listen in on our conversation. For those of you who've never lived in Canada and probably never heard of him, stay with me. Keep listening because I am happy to introduce you to Valdy and share some of the incredible stories that seem to surround his life.

Play Me a Rock and Roll song was a giant radio hit in Canada back in 1972, and it has lingered and remained relevant ever since. It's a rare jewel of the airwaves because it's a folk song, a rock song, and a waltz all at once. Since those days long ago, many of Valdy's songs have become like old friends to me.

In 2022, I wrote a book called Almost Famous in Alberta and Other True Stories. It's a collection of 35 short stories from my wild Canadian youth.In a chapter called Radio Activity, I wrote about being a teenage disc jockey at radio station CJAV in Port Alberni on Vancouver Island. I had an 8-track tape of Valdy in my Datsun pickup, so I'd heard his big hit many times. But it was at the radio station that I finally had access to all of his albums, and as an aspiring young guitar player, he became a real inspiration to me. I'm the guy who thumbtacked his album covers to the studio walls at the radio station.

There's another story in my book about meeting one of the greatest record producers of all time, Arif Mardin of Atlantic Records. I sat next to him on a flight to Egypt once and asked him for his advice on how to make a great record. His answer was short and simple. Find the absolute best musicians and hire them to play on your recording.

I've always wondered how Valdy got his recordings to sound so good and it turns out that Arif Mardin was 100% right. With a great producer of his own and the very best studio musicians, Valdy converted his folk music sensibilities into a folky pop-music ear-candy that is more often than not, quite sophisticated. Like it says on one of his album covers, he's a folk singer deluxe with a side of fries.

If you're a Canadian of the boomer generation, you haven't forgotten hearing Valdy’s songs on your local and national stations. For a while there, he was everywhere all at once. At least up in Canada.

Propelled by his hit records, Valdy has played about 200 shows a year for over five decades. I doubt any other Canadian musician has performed anywhere near as many shows. It's impossible to calculate the great distances he's traveled on his long and winding road trip. He's found a warm welcome in every inhabitable corner of Canada's nearly 10 million square kilometers.

He's met and shook hands with more Canadians than any politician. It's no wonder he's an honorable member of the Order of Canada. Four of his albums went gold, and he's won two of Canada's prestigious Juno Awards.

Yet, after more than 10,000 performances, he remains mostly unknown in the USA, except among Canadian snowbirds who populate the sunny southern states every winter. Valdy has always come off as unpretentious and down-to-earth. He's a counterculture hero of sorts, and way back when, you'd have probably called him a hippie.

For me, he's kind of like the North Star, a guide for how to conduct yourself if being a hard-working musician is your goal. He just keeps on going. He continues to give his all to every performance. He arrives grateful, cheerful, and can't help but dance as he glides through his compelling collection of songs. He wins over every audience with his warm-hearted storytelling and humor.

Though he was raised back east in Ottawa's center-town neighborhood, Valdy eventually made his way to the west coast, where in his early 20s he worked as a draftsman for the city of Victoria. He bought a five-acre oceanfront farm near Sooke, B.C., where he inadvertently started a commune. That's about as counterculture as you can get, but there was an event on the horizon that would shape the rest of his life, and it would come disguised as a failure.

In the summer of ‘69, there was a small rock festival just outside of Vancouver in a border town called Aldergrove. At the Aldergrove Beach Music Festival, cops, bikers, drugs, alcohol and about 25,000 teens and 20-somethings, many of them naked, mixed-together in an intense cultural stew that somehow remained peaceful.

On stage, an American guitar slinger from Texas named Guitar Shorty was playing the blues andliterally doing backflips, when suddenly the electrical power to the amplifiers shorted out. The microphones were still working, but with no sound from his guitar, Guitar Shorty left the stage.

The concert promoter, facing an impatient crowd with no power for the band's equipment, found long-haired, bearded folk singer Valdy nearby and asked him to go on stage with his acoustic guitar. Valdy could tell this was the wrong crowd for his style of music, but he went on stage with his old Martin guitar anyway. His sincere, peaceful folk music was more than the rowdy, fired-up rock crowd could handle. As Valdi later put it, they weren't in the mood to listen.

Valdy singing: I played them some songs about peace and contentment, things that I’d come to believe in. When I was through, to chorus boo some track star yell thank god he's leaving! Now someone play me a rock and roll song I've had it to hear with your flowers and beads, play me a rock and roll song or don't play me no song at all.

They began shouting, “rock and roll,” along with a few insults. Luckily, a small group in the crowd clapped for him at one point, so he took that as a tiny victory, made that his last song, and walked off the stage to a smattering of boos.

Valdy singing: Well, if I played you a rock and roll song, it wouldn’t be faircause my head isn't there. So, I’ll leave you with your rock and roll songs and make my way back to the country. Still, I heard play me a rock and roll song, don't give the music that I don't want to hear.Play me a rock and roll song I should have stayed at home with a big case of beer. Play me a rock and roll song or don’t play me no song at all.

Now, a lesser man would have taken this as a bitter defeat, but Valdy didn't. He rose above it. He was already a journeyman in the craft of songwriting. Like a blacksmith, he took the wreckage of that day and bent it into the shape of a perfect song, creating a neatly trimmed musical documentary of his experience on that day long ago.

Valdy’s hit record became the perfect advertisement for what he was really selling, a warm-hearted style of folky pop music. His hit was the best promo a solo acoustic artist could have. Career-wise, he had the wind at his back from then on. But what was it like for Valdy to go through this musical metamorphosis?

I've always wondered, and I didn't want to wonder anymore, so I reached out to him at his home on Salt Spring Island. We spoke about many things, like the weather and the politics of big-oil subsidies.Then the topic switched to the recording of his songs, and we went deep into the details.

Later, I also spoke to his producer, Claire Lawrence, who gave me additional insights about the recording sessions and how he met Valdy.

The day I called Valdy at first, we had a rough connection, so I had to hang up and dial him again.

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Here's part one of my interview with Valdy:

Valdy: Hey, Valdy here.

Robot Voice: This call is being recorded.

Virgil: good morning, sir.

Valdy: Virgil, I'm sorry, something happened here. You disappeared.

Valdy: I did. I'm sorry about that. I was wondering if it might be related to

the weather cyclone-bomb you guys had up there that caused so much trouble.

Valdy: We lost a few trees, but nothing killed us.

Virgil: Yeah.

Valdy: It was pretty wicked. It was 30 feet high waves.

Virgil: Are you kidding me?

Valdy: Not here. Out on the outside. The outside of Vancouver Island.

Virgil: Yeah.

Valdy: It was a weird wind, eh, because the bomb was off the coast, off the west coast of the island.What it does is it's not blowing at us. It's a low pressure. And all of the air from the surrounding area rushes into it to normalize it. Because that's what the climate does. If there's an anomaly, the rest of the weather situation tries to stop that anomaly. So, all this air was moving from the interior out to...out to the sea. And so, we had an east wind,which is a very rare one for us here, and it affected a bunch of surfaces that generally don't get blown.

Virgil: Right, yeah, the trees were all leaning the other way.

Valdy: That's exactly right. There's still probably still 30,000 people without power here in BC two days later.

Virgil: Yeah.

Valdy: And shut the beaches.

Virgil: Well, you know, that makes me think about something I saw you on YouTube involved with which is Seniors for Climate Change.

Valdy: Yeah.

Virgil: A pretty nifty little song you wrote about, you know, “Stop the Subsidies.”

Valdy singing: Stop the subsidies, fund the people. Stop the subsidies and fund the people. We could wring our hands and cry as so many people.

Virgil: Are those subsidies for oil companies that you're talking about?

Valdy: That's correct. The Canadian government subsidizes the oil companies before they pump a drop of oil by $7 to $8 billion a year. It's like people you don't want renting from you, but renting for free. And then they turn around and charge us up to $2 a liter, which would work out to about $7 a gallon for gas.

Virgil: The Norwegians somehow...outsmarted these guys, and Norwegian citizens get a great personal income from the oil industry there. It would certainly be a model to follow.

Valdy: Yes.

Virgil: So, Valdi, are you 79 years old?

Valdy: Yeah, I just heard 79 in September, and 79 is a prime, I'd like to point out. So it's going to be a good year for me.

Virgil: That's fantastic. but you're still out on the road and still enjoying it.

Valdy: So yeah, the road is still, it still beckons to me. I like it. I like the independence of it. And I still love staying at home too. My wife, we have our pets and the home's a great scene, but the road is, is where I get to sing.And to me, playing music, particularly playing music for people is therapeutic for me. It keeps me healthy mentally and possibly physically too, and psychologically, emotionally, all that. Music is my therapy.

Virgil: A question for you about, you know, you did that first album with Claire Lawrence on Haida.

Valdy: Pretty brilliant man, and he helped my career indispensably by being such a proficient producer. He produced the first album I did, which was Countryman, which was on Haida. He was hired by Haida.

Virgil: And then somehow Jerry Moss and Herb Albert got involved with A&M, right? How did that happen?

Valdy: Haida Records was distributed by A&M in Canada.

Virgil: Ah, I see.

Valdy: And Keith, rather than have me record in a small studio in Vancouver, got us to go down to the A&M lot in Hollywood, and we recorded there.

Virgil: Who's Keith?

Valdy: Keith Lawrence was my manager. He was Claire Lawrence's brother, actually. And he was a hockey coach, and he wouldn't take no for an answer.

When he didn't like something, he'd punch ‘em out. He was a real old-time hockey pugilist.

Virgil: Very Canadian.

Valdy: Mm-hmm. An aggressive man, but a very good businessman with a good sense of timing and what's appropriate and what's not.

Virgil: He somehow arranged to get you guys down to the studio on the A&M lot. How did he do that?

Valdy: Yeah, he got us to record in Studio A, no, Studio B down there. and we used, Claire then took over and became the producer and picked his musicians.

Virgil: You picture me as that teenage kid driving down the island, listening to Valdy in my Datsun pickup. I would hear those harmonics to Rock and Roll Song at the beginning, and I would get my “air drumsticks” ready, just - I had to play that opening drum riff, you know, that's just so great. And then I come to learn that it was Jim Gordon who played that. In my mind, I'd always thought that you guys were recording in Vancouver. Then I learned it was Jim Gordon. Now, I've always wondered, why is the drum sound on that record literally the best drum sound I've ever heard? And then, you know, I mean, that is such a great drum part. And I'm sure Canadians from coast to coast have air-drummed that many a time after a few beers.

Valdy: I still do.

Virgil: Yeah. (laughs) It's so great. At the time, did you know who Jim Gordon was or what was going on in that scene there?

Valdy: Yes, I was aware of his stature and his touring. He had just come off the road with Mad Dogs and Englishmen.

Virgil: Oh, geez.

Valdy: With Joe Cocker and Leon Russell.

Virgil: Right.

Valdy: And when he had gone out, he was a fairly sedate but brilliant studio drummer. And when he came back, he was a bombastic arena drummer.

Virgil: Ah, gee.

Valdy: He had a lot of influences in his life. And ultimately, he ended up being one of the best drummers there was in Los Angeles for his period of time. Jim Keltner then took over from him.

Virgil: Yeah. Do you remember the session well for that song? Does it stick out in your memory?

Valdy: Rock and roll song?

Virgil: Yeah.

Valdy: Yeah, I do. I played in the studio with them, the acoustic guitar, so we did it live as a trio. That's why we got that jump, that feel in it.

Virgil: So, it was you and Jim Gordon.

Valdy: Jim Gordon and Max Bennett.

Virgil: Max Bennett, right. He wrote that song for you.

Valdy: He wrote Simple Life.

Virgil: That's right, yes. What a great tune.

Valdy singing: Will you never let me go I have tried to please you so Common sense should tell us that we're through Time and time again I've pleaded For a love so badly needed, but I guess it really wasn't meant to be Give me the simple life I need the simple life Don't want to worry about tomorrow Live every day completely Love for the joy of loving, then I will be happy

Valdy: During the session, he hauled me across to studio A, which wasn't being used, and played the song for me on tape. And I liked it. I said, good, I'd like to record that. So I went back and I changed it all around and came up with a few lines. And I then went and recorded it, and I think I paved his driveway. Before he died, he called me a few times from his new home down in La Jolla. He was still going up to LA and playing. Still jazzing with local people every week. Even in his mid-80s, he was still one of the most active bass players there was.

Virgil: So, you guys stayed friends?

Valdy: No, no, no. We were professional associations. When I just did this band this summer, I got to use a player here named Peter Douse. And he asked about my recording history. And I said, Max Bennett. And he about fell off his chair. He said, Max Bennett is my role model. He said he was the guy I listened to when I was learning bass. And that's the first person I've met who had dug in like that.Because Max played with the Jazz Crusaders. He was on the road with Joni Mitchell as one of her bass players. He was a real sought-after cat. And rightly so, he deserved it. The fact that he played until his death in his mid-80s, I thought was pretty good.

Virgil: And that would probably explain how you got Joe Sample to play with you, too, then, because of his connection to Max?

Valdy: That was Claire Lawrence. Claire asked, probably asked Jim and Bill who they would suggest for, you know, for keyboards on this particular song.And that's where Buddy came in.

Virgil: It has a blistering guitar solo. What can you tell me about that?

Valdy: A brilliant guitar player. from Chilliwack out in the Fraser Valley to the east of Vancouver. His name was Brett Wade, and he's still playing guitar. And he had this real snaky feel to the way he played and was somewhat ahead of his time. And he tacked that solo along and was just perfect for the record, for the tail, particularly given the bombastic nature of Jim Gordon's drumming.

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Virgil: I was lucky enough to speak with Valdy’s producer, Claire Lawrence,and hear firsthand his memories of recording with Valdi. Claire was a founding member of 60s psychedelic band The Collectors from Vancouver, who eventually became Chilliwack. He'd go on to produce more than 70 albums. Here's an excerpt from our talk. There'll be more from Claire in Episode 2.

Virgil: Good morning, Claire. Virgil Brown here.

Claire: Hi, how are you?

Virgil: Good.

Claire: I'm sorry that I was not available on Saturday.

Virgil: Oh, no problem at all. It had to be when it was right, you know?

Claire: Yeah.

Virgil: Yeah.

Claire: That's how it works.

Virgil: Yeah. I was originally, I wanted to talk to Valdy to figure out how he did it, you know, how he got that record to sound so great. And well, when the first thing out of his mouth was about you and, uh What a great impact you had on his career and what an unbelievably great producer you were for him.

Claire: Boy, that's nice of him to say that. I'm happy to hear that.

Virgil: How did you meet Valdy?

Claire: Well, my older brother was a manager. He managed the collectors for a while, collectors slash Chilliwack for a while.

Virgil: Yeah.

Claire: Until I left them, really, I think.

Virgil: And that was Keith, right?

Claire: And he was managing Valdy after that. And he also had a record company, so he hired me to produce Valdy. So, the first time I met him,I went to a club down in, I forget the name of that square in Victoria.

Virgil: Market Square?

Claire: Yeah. Yeah, it's Market Square, yeah. There was a club there, and I watched. I saw his performance, and I saw how effective he was in live performance. And then I think the collectors played...a gig at U-VIC. And Valdy was there, so we went after and just had a coffee in the cafeteria.And he came and sat at the table. I started talking to him. He was there.And then I went to work with him in L.A.to record. We recorded four or five albums in total, I think. I was going to tell you about the Rock and Roll Song. That was one of the first four songs we did. “A Good Song” was another one.

Valdy singing: I am not a free man but neither am I chained, I am not a wise man but neither am I rearranged.

Claire: We used Studio C in A&M Studios, which was a smaller room, and it didn't have ISO booths in it. It was all just one relatively small room, although they had a couple of baffles that they could put in.Valdy was behind the baffle in a corner. But there he was, playing live with the drummer was Jim Gordon, who is one of the all-time great drummers. He met a tragic end. Do you know about him?

Virgil: Yeah.

Claire: What an amazing drummer he was. So, we were recording this song,And it was Jim Gordon's idea to play that drum fill. And the sound of that drum fill is the way it is because part of the drums leaked into Valdy's mics. Now later, people got into recording drum sets with room sound. But in those days, people didn't do that so much. They would try and have separation between the drums and the rest of the instruments. So that's a part of that fantastic sound in the drum intro of Rock and Roll Song.

Virgil: Wow.

Claire: And the guitar was played by Brett Wade, who was down there playing with the Electric Prunes, I think, at the time. He came in and he played some guitar overdubs for...Valdy and one of them was that guitar playing there, and I remember one idea I had was that he played this we called it rote guitar eventually where (hums a musical description) and then playing the bass notes on a driven guitar amp sound. And thats a big part of that recording too.

Virgil: I figured that it was him playing those lines behind the guitar solo. It was a very, very cool idea.

Claire: Yeah, that's right. That was Brent doing that.

Virgil: It was a great day.

Claire: Yeah, we were really excited to finish that song.

Virgil: As a recording artist myself, I'm always listening to all the playbacks, and you know when you got it, and you know when you didn't. But you guys, did you just sit around and marvel at that for a while?

Claire: No, we just kept going because we had other songs to work on, but it felt really good. I remember just the band track, which was Max Bennett was playing bass, The drummer was Jim Gordon, and Valdy playing acoustic guitar. That's all we had, but Valdy sang it live, too. And the thing that I really noticed, like sometimes other recordings we did where maybe Larry Carlton was the guitar player, and then we did some recordings of Joe Sample. They loved playing with Valdy. Yeah, that interaction between everything being done at the same time, it was terrific.

Virgil: Joe Sample was digging on Valdy, I can imagine that. He played a beautiful part on “Landscapes.”

Claire: Yeah, you're absolutely right, he did.

Virgil: Amazing.

Valdy singing: You still haven’t found what’s really you and I wonder when your running will be through? Your running will be through.

Virgil: This song is called “Allons Mon Canada,” featuring Claire Lawrence on soprano sax and Valdy on his old Martin guitar. When I hear the sound of them playing together, I realize that Valdy and Claire really met in a place called destiny. Together, they struck gold. Their meeting was meant to be.Their fates were entwined, and so forever are their legacies.

My conversation with Valdy continues.

Virgil: Say, tell me, what was it like to receive the Order of Canada? Was there a big ceremony? Were your kids there? I mean, what was that like? How did that feel?

Valdy: Two of my three kids were there, yes. And my wife and a friend from up north. I was allowed one friend, a couple of family members. And it was just a great experience - thing to hobnob with that level of the royalty representation in Canada. And there were three levels to the Order of Canada. There's a member, which is what I was invested into. Then there's a companion. And then there's the officer. Howie Meeker was getting one. It was lovely to be associated with, and even considered a peer of those kind of people. It happened in Ottawa at the Rideau Hall, which is the residence of the Governor General of Canada, David Peterson at the time, I believe. It was a good affair, and there's people who are there because they give a lot of money. Their vibe was entirely different than those of us that got it from the creative community. But we all got along just fine.

Virgil: When you were a kid in Center Town, you probably never dreamed of that.

Valdy: I certainly did not. I still pinch myself today.

Valdy singing: So come on, so come on, my Canada. We are too old now to be so…

Virgil: uh I just can't thank you enough. I'm super grateful to you, man. Thank you so much.

Valdy: Oh, yeah. You're welcome. You're welcome. You're one of the guys in the hood, you know. So, thank you for your music and how your music has affected people. And good luck with it down the road.

Virgil: Thank you so much.

Valdy: Thank you. Enjoy your day in Sedona then. Thanks, Virgil.

Virgil: Okay. Take care Valdy. Bye-bye.

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Well, folks, that's the end of part one of my interview with Valdy, Canada's Great Folk Hero. In the next episode, he shares stories from his youth, the early days of his career, and some more politics.Then I talk to some of the other players in his story, like Canadian singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist, Juno Award winner Shari Ulrich of The Hometown Band.She recorded and toured with Valdy for over two years.

I'll also talk more with Claire Lawrence, whose early years in his father's jazz band shaped his future. I also get to talk to a key player in this story, songwriter Bruce Miller, who unexpectedly found himself to be the catalyst that caused the birth of an excellent band when Valdy recorded a song of his called “Hometown Band.” It's a pretty cool story, and I can't wait to tell it.

Don't forget to visit Valdy.com He's got a great website. You can order some of his music there and find out where he's playing and go see this Canadian legend in person. He will be in a town near you, so check out Valdi.com.

If you're a Facebooker, follow Valdy Fan Page. It's a fun place, and almost every Sunday at 5 p.m.Pacific Time, you can listen to Valdy play live on his weekly show called “Live at Five.”

Also, be like Valdy. Get involved in the cause that is so important to us all by visiting the website seniorsforclimate.org. If you're not a senior, find one and get them to learn more and sign the pledge at seniorsforclimate.org.

My name's Virgil Brown. My website is virgilbrownmusic.com. Go there and download a free album or two or order a copy of my book, which is called Almost Famous in Alberta and Other True Stories.

I hope to be back soon with part two of my conversation with Valdy, but these podcasts take hundreds of hours to make, so don't hold your breath.

Wait, was I supposed to say that? Probably not. Well, if you enjoyed what you heard today, don't be afraid to become a subscriber to virgilbrown.substack.com

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Thank you, everybody, and special thanks to Claire Lawrence and Valdy.

In 2022, I wrote a book called, “Almost Famous in Alberta & Other True Stories.” One chapter was devoted to my beloved Thompson guitar, which was built by the masterful Canadian luthier, Ted Thompson of Vernon, British Columbia. He rarely received the accolades he deserved. His humble approach to life kept his work in the shadows of fame, but Ted's guitar making skills changed my life forever.

Long before my book was nearing its completion, I commissioned a painting for its cover from Seattle artist, Jessica Dodge. She paints on glass, often using old window panes. I hoped that the painting would serve as a metaphor comprised of things important to me. I asked for a painting of a raccoon because of my love for Sterling North's book called Rascal. It’s a true tale about a boy, his pet raccoon, and his elderly father. It takes place during World War One in northern Wisconsin, the state where I was born. I wanted this raccoon to be wearing overalls, like the ones I inherited from my late father. We were farmers in the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia when I was just a kid. I still have my dad’s old blue denim overalls. My dad was born May 4th, 1919. He was a great father. I wear those overalls every now and then. Having them somehow keeps me grounded to the earth. But getting back to my book cover, most importantly, I wanted the raccoon to be playing a Ted Thompson acoustic guitar, so I could honor how much Ted’s work as a guitar maker meant to me. I sent Jessica a photo of the one I play to use as an example.

Jessica did her thing with the paints like only she can, also giving the raccoon some coke bottle eye-glasses like the ones I wear. Once completed, the painting was everything I’d hoped for. From my perspective, its a personally meaningful tribute, an avatar of sorts that represents who I am and where I come from.

Once my book was published, I spent some time trying to find Ted Thompson’s address so I could mail him a copy. I searched online but I couldn’t find it and his address remained a mystery for some time. I figured he still lived in Vernon, though I couldn’t figure out where. I got distracted from my search for awhile and the months flew by, a flurry of calendar pages in the tornado of time. Sometime later, I tried again to find Ted on the web and sadly I stumbled upon his obituary instead. He’d passed away about a year before I found out. I didn’t get to tell him just how much he meant to me. It made me sad that he didn’t get to see the book. I was under no illusion that I’d written a best seller, but its cover, and the chapter I’d written about the guitar he made was a small way for me to say thank you. His obituary contained the email address for his wife, Heidi. I reached out to her and we exchanged a few emails which led to a phone conversation where I learned more about Ted's story and their profound partnership.

They met in Vernon long ago, when Heidi was a budding film maker, photographer, and painter. In this picturesque town nestled in the North Okanagan Valley only thirty miles from the farm of my childhood, Heidi and Ted inspired each other and created a supportive, loving marriage. Around 1985, when they hadn’t been together more than a year, Heidi noticed a lump on Ted’s neck and he was soon diagnosed with Lymphoma. He spent many months commuting from Vernon to Vancouver for many rounds of chemotherapy. The doctor bluntly warned them they might never be able to start a family, and if they did, Ted might not be there to see it. The difficulties they faced early on only brought them closer. In those early days, Ted had been repairing musical instruments in the back room at Vernon’s Silver Star Music Store, and had begun experimenting with building lutes, mandolins and guitars.

When Ted was a younger man, he was a competitive bicycle rider who trained all over the roads and streets of North Vancouver and British Columbia. He rode his bicycle 30 kilometers to work each day at the machine shop he apprenticed at for five years. Though he was physically fit and a lean, powerful rider, as a racer he learned too late that he needed a proper trainer to oversee his nutrition and fitness routine and because of that he never reached his goal of being a championship rider.

This was back when Ted lived in a part of North Van known as Lynn Valley. Just after I graduated from high school, I lived in Lynn Valley too. Before that, we had both lived on Vancouver Island. We probably passed each other hundreds of times. How many ferry rides to or from Vancouver did we share? I’ll never know. When he ended up in Vernon, the paths traced by each of our lives overlapped once again, because Vernon was the first town I lived in when I arrived as an immigrant to Canada way back in 1969. Many years later it really meant something special for me to see the name Vernon on the manufacturer’s label inside the belly of my Thompson guitar. I remember thinking: “Perfect!”

Have you ever wondered why some guitars sound and play much better than others? Guitar builders hone their skills and attention to detail over many years. Where they learn their craft, and who teaches them, combined with their own natural abilities, determines whether their guitars will stand out in a world with billions of guitars. A luthier’s early influences will shape their destiny. Ted’s father was the high school shop teacher, and Ted learned quickly that he was most comfortable in the workshop too. Ted was always very organized. With a mind full of engineering ideas and hands-on skills from unlimited after-school shop time, he knew his future was in there somewhere.

When it came to his guitar building career, he started off with far better odds at success than he did as a bicycle racer. During his rigorous apprenticeship at the machine shop he became an expert at precision metalwork. He lucked out and got a job making steel truss rods for the great Canadian luthier, Jean Larrivée. Over the years, he made thousands of truss rods and his professional relationship with the Larrivée family evolved into a long and meaningful friendship. Even when Ted was undergoing chemotherapy for the lymphoma, he still found time to go down in his basement and make truss rods for them, so he and Heidi could keep up with their mortgage. He also helped Larrivée build some of the jigs used for cutting and shaping the different parts of the guitars. Little by little he absorbed the true nature and depth of fine guitar making from Jean & Wendy Larrivée, just as they benefited from the gift of Ted’s precision engineering mind. He was often a man of few words, but he was steady, organized and methodical.

To achieve excellence, a luthier must learn how to select the finest wood available or their guitars will have an unremarkable or average sound. Some of the woods are picked for the overall strength and physical integrity of the instrument, such as the neck, sides, and back. Some are specifically selected with the guitar’s tone in mind. The most important piece of tone-wood is the top of the guitar, the part with the big hole in it. The skills required to select these tone-woods, and access to the finest ones available, are closely held secrets. Collaborating with trusted colleagues like the Larrivées, Ted’s path to to such knowledge was surely made easier. Understanding the tonal qualities of the different pieces of wood is one thing, but having a sixth sense or precognitive knowledge of how the wood will sound once it takes its place in a fully constructed guitar, well, thats another thing. Those senses don’t develop over night. It takes many years, many guitars, and perhaps a secret or two. Ted developed a special ear for how certain tone-woods captured and projected sound, like the Sitka spruce found on Vancouver Island, or Haida Gwaii, formerly known as the Queen Charlotte Islands. These precious pieces of wood, salvaged from ancient snags or dead trees found deep in the silent rainforest, gave his guitars a rich, warm and resonant voice.

The precision with which he cut, planed, shaved, sanded and fit these tone-woods together resulted in superb instruments with uncommon sonic personality. His meticulous crafting of the fretboards and necks gave each one an extremely high-performance playability.

I’ve enjoyed many years with my Thompson guitar. It has given me great comfort and solace so many times, when I faced the confusing curveballs that life threw at me as I tried to find my way. Something as simple as strumming a chord or two in the morning before work and feeling the sweet, harmonious, vibrational tone emanating from its body, was very reassuring. It’s been a relationship. Holding it in my hands and playing a song or two after work, or playing songs with friends and family at night before putting it to bed in the plush lining of its case always brought deep satisfaction. This guitar and I have been companions for over thirty years. Along the way, I learned that playing an exquisite instrument can give you deep feelings that somehow connect you to the spirit of its creator.

It’s kind of hard to explain, but it makes me think of Pinocchio. His loving father Geppeto, carved Pinocchio from a block of wood into a handsome little puppet who wished upon a star and miraculously transformed into a real boy. He was thrust into a dangerous world that he survived only because he was built with the strength of his father’s love. Like Geppeto and his son Pinocchio, Ted and each of his guitars are spiritually entwined forever. On a metaphysical level, Ted is somewhere inside every song played on any guitar that he built.

Each time he gathered all of the pieces and parts he’d made with his own two hands, in a burst of shaman-like cosmic synergy, he assembled them into a new flawless form. It was then that Ted Thompson’s similarity to Geppeto was truly revealed. What was once a small pile of wood and glue, became a magical creation built for music and song that could provide a lifetime of joy and creativity. His guitars are designed to endure physical hardship, yet they can also provide outbursts of sonic glory. Whosoever plays one of Ted’s guitars will be given a boost, a hand up, an advantage. In his sawdusty workshop, more than 3 decades ago, he built the best, most enchanted friend I’ve ever had. Finding this friend was a stroke of luck.

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On a drizzly day, in 1992, in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood, I arrived at American music and went to the acoustic guitar section. I walked into the soundproof room divided from rest of the store. I’ll always remember the moment I looked up on the wall and saw that guitar hanging on a hook. There were two other people in the room each playing guitars with the same brand name I’d never seen before: Thompson. I pulled the last Thompson down off the wall. Its craftsmanship was flawless. The simplicity of its design drew me in. Instead of a thick black plastic pick guard it had a very thin, almost invisible, transparent one. I could tell it was designed that way to let more of the guitar’s tone pass through it The exquisite mahogany sides and back had the most beautiful grain I’d ever seen. I held it in my hands and strummed a single chord. Just one. Immediately, I took it to the cash register and bought it. When I got it home the most unusual song I’d ever played just jumped right out of it. It became a song of mine called Big Sedan.

Big Sedan

It must have been fate that brought me to American Music that day, when those three Thompson guitars were first put on display. By the end of that day, all three were gone. I never saw another Thompson at that busy Seattle store again, though I learned from Heidi that after American Music sold his guitars so quickly they placed an order for one hundred more. The huge order exceeded Ted’s capacity. Just when he’d mastered his art form, he found he had no desire to create a high-production commercial enterprise.

At his peak he built about ten guitars a month from his shop in Coldstream, a small community near Vernon. As time went by he built fewer and fewer guitars. The day I spoke to Heidi Thompson on the phone, she told me that as he grew older, Ted felt he hadn’t made much of an impact as a guitar maker. He doubted anyone would remember him for his work. She expressed great affection for her husband. She said they were in love the whole time they were together. I cant think of a better way to live a life. What a victory for them, or anyone else so fortunate.

Almost forty years after his original battle with lymphoma, it returned in the late autumn of 2022. After a short, but difficult battle with cancer, Ted slipped away on May 4th 2023. In the words of his beloved Heidi, “Ted said goodbye to the wonderful, magical life that he enjoyed so much.”

I’ve played many guitars in my life, but I’ve never played one with the soulful connection I feel when I play my Thompson acoustic guitar. My inner voice is lifted by it and I don’t feel like I’m just playing a guitar. It feels more like I am in a duet with a spirited creation that deserves as much credit as I do. Secretly layered into this duo is the caring heart and soul of Ted Thompson.

Almost every song I’ve written came out of this guitar. Without Ted Thompson, I wouldn’t have a musical story to tell, and thats the truth, plain and simple. Learning how he felt about his career, and being too late to properly thank him taught me a hard lesson. We’ve all had people in our lives who have changed us and shaped us into who we are. We live too much up inside our heads, within our thoughts, and we often don’t share our feelings about these deep connections until its too late.

We should never forget to express our gratefulness directly to the pivotal people who have changed us for the better. I encourage you to share the gratitude in your heart with the ones who deserve it. Don’t wait! Share this message with your special friends and family.

I thank you Heidi for kindly sharing so much about your life with Ted. It has meant so much to me. This article is dedicated to you, Carmen, Nora, Gabriel, Aria, and Addy.

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Thank you for taking the time to listen to my thoughts today. Please subscribe to my to my substack at virgilbrown.substack.com

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Also, to download several of my albums for free, visit my website www.virgilbrownmusic.com You can find a link to my book there: “Almost Famous in Alberta & Other True Stories.” Its a collection of 35 short stories from my musical life, available in paperback and kindle at amazon.com

If you’re ever in the Vernon or Coldstream area, visit Heidi Thompson’s beautiful art gallery. For more info visit:

https://heidithompson.ca

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(CLICK THE PLAY BUTTON FOR THE AUDIO VERSION AND SONG)

Back when my young life crashed through my middle years, the graceless collision was abrupt. It came with emotional growth but deep losses to grapple with. The death of my parents, changes in my level of interest in my work, followed by divorce, bankruptcy, the whole calamity.

To be human is to lose things little by little and then suddenly at the end, everything all at once. As its all happening, we collect precious moments to be held onto for as long as we can remember them. Standard fare for most folks, though many are unable to see the lifelong arch of it. My hindsight is much better than my foresight. Let’s not even talk about my eyesight - I have been caught off-guard many times. I wish I’d have taken more time to look over the horizon, into the future, to consider what emotional quicksand lies ahead.

That’s why I want to share a hefty helping of harbinger. For those not in the know, harbinger is a noun defined as a person or thing that announces or signals the approach of another person or thing. In this case, to be specific the harbinger of which I speak pertains to a season of life, something like that little equinox between fall and winter. As my middle years slowly slipped away, I entered what I call The Great Bittersweet. It’s a psychological swamp one can stumble into after the middle years. It can pull you under if you’re not careful. It has blurry, mushy, mirage-like entrance that prevents you from realizing you’re in it. Once I discovered I was trudging through it, and had been for some time, I feared I didn’t have the navigational skills to find the exit. Perhaps the only real way out would be the great cosmic exit that we all find eventually. The period between my middle years and the final passage is where I found myself lost.

For those of you who still have youth and your middle years before you, this is a message from the future. Someday, you may stumble upon a strange, mental bog akin to a psychological swamp. You should be aware of its approach and have a plan for: The Great Bittersweet.

What are the properties of The Great Bittersweet? How do you know you’re in it? What can you do to avoid it? Here are some of the things I’ve noticed.

In The Great Bittersweet, you no longer have to wonder who your friends are. There’s no bones about it. Consider your list of friends, using only the criteria of who has called you recently. Your list will be very short indeed. You’ll have to dig deeper to allow for the true friends that simply never call. These rare folks would still be there for you if they could find the will to do something radical like pick up the phone and call you. Sorry, they’re much too busy forgetting to do so. The rest? They are not your friends. They’re only acquaintances who at some point ran the calculations and determined you were not suitable friend material. Upon realizing this, you’ll have to let go of all of the effort you put into being their friend. The things you did with them, for them and because you loved and admired them, these things exist now only as memories, through the frosty window to the past. They are no longer real. How much they impressed as you as people matters no more. You gotta clean out the shed. You’re storing too much crap. In The Great Bittersweet nothing gets sugarcoated, though there is a hint of sugar when you recall the good moments you shared and why you loved them. That’s the sweet. They aren’t your friends now, that’s the bitter, but it’s all stuck together in The Great Bittersweet.

If you are one of the lucky ones who has gotten to live a decent portion of your possible years, and we all know those that didn’t, you’ll be divided into two categories. Those who ended up with a loving life-partner, and those who did not. Those who still have their partners, possess a certain kind of emotional fortitude that allowed them to forgive, forget, renew, and endure the shortcomings of the marriage paradigm. Those of us without partners remember the realization that we did not possess that emotional good fortune. Whatever romantic lot one falls into, we are all susceptible to the whims of The Great Bittersweet. It favors no one.

Frequently pressing the replay button to examine the past is one of its features. It’s got to do with remembering. That great miracle of the unharmed human mind. You remember the good and bad things from the past. Then, you measure it against the present and you are sad-happy. You’ve been branded. Marked by The Great Bittersweet. Can you escape it?

You better think of something. Have some kind of plan. Last year, I chose getting back to my work as a performing musician and recording artist in an effort to outrun the relentless pace of The Great Bittersweet and somehow climb out of its path. I also decided I ought to be an author so I wrote a book. Lately I’ve been finding new ways to release my creativity.

So, one afternoon I found myself playing guitar and singing for a friendly beer garden full of people in the wonderfully warm autumn air of Williams, Arizona, on historic Route 66. The place was packed with all manner of folks. Among them I spotted a hardworking father with his wife and kids. The dad was just off work. He had his work clothes on, he was smudged with oil on his shirt and had a light dusting of sawdust in his hair. His young children punctuated each sentence with the enthusiastic words, “Dad,” or “Mom,” as they tossed bean bags into a plywood hole together. The sound of the laughing voices made by a young family brought memories of joy and an awareness of how short-lived those moments were in the fleeting rush of time.

Later, while I was taking a break, I mentioned to one of the waitstaff, a friendly Floridian named Megan, that I found it touching to see these families together because before you know it those kids will be grown and gone. Dad and Mom will remember this day, but the little kids will most likely forget most of it. Megan mentioned her sister’s kid and how she needed to get back Charlotte, North Carolina to see her soon because time was really flying by. Her eyes showed the early traces of tears forming, which loosened my own ducts. We both changed the subject.

Just then, the Coldplay song “Yellow” began to emanate from the beer garden’s sound system and the mere sound of it tossed me abruptly into a time hole about twenty years deep.

Back to the summer of ‘04. The marriage was in shambles. There was no fixing it. We had four kids. We had to pretend and began taking separate vacations. We each took two of the kids. Summer vacation sent the lady and our teenage daughters on a cross-country drive to New York. Me and our little boys headed for California. Our destination was the Sierra Nevadas where an English friend of mine who looked remarkably like Mr. Bean lived with his kind hearted wife, away out in the country.

Inwardly, my life was stained with a lingering melancholy. My father had passed away not long before, and everything was still blue around the edges. The kids were my only joy. I loved cooking for them, driving to Blockbuster and watching movies with them, goofing around and playing games, the toys, the play-acting with funny voices at bed time. The reading of stories, and all the fun stuff you do with kids. We lost count of how many times we watched the Princess Bride. It created such a good feeling for us all. But personally, and privately, at the foundation of my spirit there was pain. The pain of realizing you’re a member of a marriage in which you’re never going to make your partner happy no matter what you do.

The boys were five and three years old, and inspiring in me, a love as big as anything that could measured. Love with a permanent solidity to it. Eternal as stone. I felt it every time I looked at them or the girls, who were twelve and fourteen. We all had a way of spending a day happily together, like I’d never experienced before or since.

The boys and I had gone on a lot of drives together to different towns for the weekend so we could get away from the grey Seattle gloom and doom and find some sunshine, usually east of the mountains in the town of Wenatchee. But this time we were headed south, and as usual we had been on the road only a half hour when I had to find a rest area to take a nap. The sandman was trying to pull my eyes shut. The boys expected as much by then as this was how we started most of our trips. I couldn’t in good conscience drive if I was sleepy, so the nap was part of every escape. The boys were sweet and good-natured. They always laughed when I told them it was time for me to take a nap, even though we’d just started out. They’d shout “Dad!” Then we’d all crack up. They understood, they were patient with me. They knew we were going to have a bunch of fun and they had their games to keep them busy while I napped and they had a little white Apple iPod to play songs with.

Eventually, we made it to California and the high Sierra‘s were a wonderful place to spend some time. The air was so warm and sweet and the town of Grass Valley was quaint and had nice places to go and eat or get coffee. My friend, Mr. Bean, was humorous and charming as usual, though we didn’t know it, he and his wife were also in the final throes of their marriage. Mr. Bean and I took the boys down to the river to go swimming.

We brought snacks and food to enjoy at the river’s edge. But I was paranoid about the boys and the river, and never really found time to relax, even though they were naturally sensible around water. We built sandcastles, dug trenches and played in the rocks. We skipped stones and sang songs, and Mr. Bean, always a bit tipsy, made some funny faces for them and they laughed at his always-successful attempts at humor. For a time I lost my coke-bottle glasses in the river. Nearly blind, I somehow found them by diving into the river repeatedly. You know, the usual stuff.

Back at Mr. Bean and his wife’s house we listened to LP records from his massive collection of vinyl and we enjoyed the music while drinking wine and cooking for the boys. The boys decided to play a game of hide and seek. I didn’t pay much attention to it, after a while, I realized the youngest one was nowhere to be seen and I was suddenly consumed by panic.

We all looked high and low, but couldn’t find him anywhere. He was completely gone. I was absolutely freaked out. I ran outside and yelled for him all over the yard, into the woods, behind the shed, all around the garage, and in the front of the house, constantly yelling his name. We were all calling for him, but we couldn’t find him, and he wasn’t answering our calls. I began to think about the ramifications of losing my own son, while on vacation, and the thoughts that went through my head were dark and discouraging.

I was filled with the rarest, deepest fear and panic I’d ever experienced. The searching around the outside of the house was proving fruitless so I went back into the house and started checking every room, every cupboard, and every closet. I went into the master bedroom and looked under the bed, and there he was, peacefully asleep. The little rascal had gone under there to hide from his brother and like a chip off the old block, the sandman got him and he’d fallen into a deep sleep. As cute as it was, and it was cute, I was so relieved to see him I was overcome with tears. I was carrying a lot of stress, pain and sadness. Losing him was the worst thing I could think of. It took me some time to get myself together.

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It finally dawned on me that I’d been spending far too much time reacting to unexpectedly difficult and stressful events. We found some time to just relax for awhile.

I’ll never forget that summer and that drive down to the Sierra Nevadas. I’ll never forget how perfect my sons were and how our time together was one of closeness, warmth, and love. Though my life was vexed with a tinge of melancholy, I found a way to have fun because my kids were there, and no matter what happened they were cheery and in good spirits most of the time.

I have a clear image of us three rolling along the freeway in the old Volvo wagon with no AC, on a sunny day with all the windows down just a crack. The wind is blowing their fine blonde baby hair across their foreheads. It’s warm, we’re together, and we have a solid, deep, affectionate love for each other.

The wistful melody and guitar chords of a song hang in the air. Unprompted, my five year old son looks up at me and says “Dad, that’s Yellow by Coldplay.” Then he absentmindedly sings along with it in perfect tune with his beautiful voice and his fingers clicking away on his GameBoy.

I understood, as that curious melody lingered in the space and time we shared, that these two boys would never be so wonderful or close to me again. It is a moment frozen in time. The perfection of a father and his kids getting a break for a while just to be together, like the guy with oil on his shirt and the sawdust in his hair.

It doesn’t matter that we’re all older now and torn apart by the vicious torrent of time and burdened with the hassles of adulthood. We had that moment and it still exists somewhere. That sad-happy song, my theme song for The Great Bittersweet, still clobbers me every now and then.

One of the roles music plays in our lives is to mark the passage of time. Yellow marks the moment I knew for the first time, how preciously fleeting my time as a father of children would be.

All these years later in Williams, Arizona, it was a sunny autumn day. I was playing guitar and singing for the folks at the beer garden, I took a sip of my beer, and began playing the song Yellow. As I watched the dusty old dad and his sweet little family, play together.

In order to keep myself from getting clobbered by the song yellow every time I hear it, I decided to record my own version, just so that maybe it will take me to a different place next time I hear it. You can download this version of “Yellow” for free on my website virgilbrownmusic.com under the tab marked: EPs and Singles. Here’s the song: Yellow.

My Version Of Yellow

Thanks for listening folks. Please consider buying the book I’ve written called: Almost Famous in Alberta & Other True Stories, available in paperback or on kindle at Amazon.com  

My Book

I’ll be out on the road again this year and I hope our paths cross somewhere on my Lost Highway Tour ’24. The number of shows is growing and you can see where I’ll be, on my website if you click the Shows tab

My Shows

It will be a tour of House concerts, Folk Music festival, acoustic music venues and performance halls. I’ll be traveling from one end of this continent to the other and back again. So chances are I’ll be coming somewhere near where you are.

If you, or one of your friends have ever thought about hosting a House concert, check out the house concert guide on my website to see if something like that would suit you. If do you visit my website you wont go away empty handed, because you can download a number of albums for free.

If you wish to support my endeavors, a paid subscription is less than a quarter per week and you’ll get extra content every now and then…

Thank you very much… Goodbye…

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