Justin Townes Earle

Friday evening we went to see Justin Townes Earle perform at the famous Horseshoe Tavern. Justin is the son of Steve Earle. He has managed to become successful without trading on his father’s name and has remarkably developed his own style of songwriting and playing. He has no doubt been influenced by his father’s musical tastes without copying Steve’s sound at all.

http://www.justintownesearle.com/

This venue, The Horseshoe Tavern, has been around forever and has hosted a ‘who’s who’ of incredible acts over the years. The building itself is 150 years old and originally housed a blacksmith shop. Since 1947 it has been a bar/honky tonk and artists like Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Loretta Lynn played there early in their careers. More recently The Rolling Stones kicked off their Bridges To Babylon tour there in 1997. This was an ‘invite only’ last minute affair as the place will only hold 300 standing shoulder to shoulder.

http://horseshoetavern.com/glory_days.htm

While waiting for the doors to open, I received a small tap on the shoulder and a tiny female voice saying, “Hi Bill”. Now keep in mind that I know exactly six people in the metro area and I am 1,000 miles from my hometown so to hear my name called out is just impossible. To my complete surprise, I turned around to see my little friend, Amanda Shires. If you were a faithful reader of our New York blog you may recall that we saw her perform on two occasions there last year. Once I was able to recover from the shock of seeing a familiar face in my new city, I found out she was not the opening act, but would be the fiddle player and backing vocalist for Justin. What a great bonus! A little later before the show, Toni and I were able to separately have brief conversations with her and she told us how she and Justin go way back to the beginning of his recording career in Nashville and that she played on his first CD. Justin had to cancel some dates last year and when he rescheduled them he contacted her to see if she was available. She had a few days off from her own shows with Rod Picott and booked them with Justin. She was a fantastic addition to the lineup. Bryn Davies was recruited likewise to play standup bass.

http://www.amandashires.net/Amanda_Shires/HOME.html

We arrived early so we could snag one of the few seats to be had on one of the tables. We were able to share a booth with a U of T Professor, his son and his son's friends who were all huge fans of this genre. So we had some interesting conversation before and between acts to ease our impatience of not getting to see JTE until 11:15.

Little did we realize this was a venue without a good seat in the house. Only the people standing in front that arrived later would be able to get the complete experience. Luckily our booth had a ledge above it where we were able to perch ourselves and get fairly good views of the musicians. Being a sold out show, there were hundreds of people packed into this small venue so Toni's usual attempt at wriggling up front failed after a couple of minutes.

In addition to the less than comfortable seating, we endured a lot of drunk attendees. Upon our perches we were getting a decent amount of A/C cutting through the growing humidity and feel pretty relaxed and relieved the sound system was a great one. At that point about half way through the opening act, a very intoxicated woman standing behind us who was yucking it up with a couple of hippie bikers suddenly did a Danny Thomas spit take. Luckily, Toni only was hit with enough drops to get her attention, but one of the bikers good naturally took the brunt of it resulting in a soaked t-shirt.

About 20 minutes into JTE, the A/C could not keep up with the humidity rising from the damp basement cave below and the heat of the crowd. This was the perfect environment for Justin performing "Working For The MTA" because it was just like being in the worse NYC subway station on a muggy day.

The show was great though. Justin was entertaining not just with his music but with his between songs banter and self deprecating humour (much of it directed at his demons that led to the rescheduling to begin with). The highlight of the evening was the title track, “Harlem River Blues”, which the entire crowd sang along with from beginning to end unprompted. Usually I don’t care for the singalong bit but in this case the original song incorporates a gospel style backing so it was enhanced by this participation.

We really wanted to stick around and say goodbye to Amanda after the show but we were exhausted and anxious to get out of the sauna. It was nearly one in the morning but it is a snap to grab a cab at Spadina and Queen and in five minutes we were delivered to our door.

Another Canadian Cousin

Gordon Nosworthy, me, Dawna Wightman

Gord and Charlene with one of Gord's paintings.

As soon as we were settled in Toronto I looked up another one of my cousins here, Gord Nosworthy and his wife Charlene. They invited us along with Cousin Dawna and Jay over for dinner. It took a few weeks of emails but we got a date set and Dawna and Jay gave us a ride out to Markham, a suburb just north of Toronto. We had never really been outside the core of Toronto, let alone 30 miles from the city centre and five miles beyond the last subway stop. The ride was a real eye opener as we got a taste of how sprawling the metropolis is. The funny thing is that once you get out that far it looks like every other suburb I have ever seen anywhere in North America.

We had a wonderful get together; cooking out on their deck. I can’t say that we were catching up because it was a first meeting for Gord and Dawna, and Gord and I only met once nearly fifty years earlier. It is funny how this works, virtual strangers meeting face to face for the first time but the barriers evaporate simply knowing there is a common ancestor binding us in some invisible way. If you were to see us you would think we had all grown up together.

A little backstory:

Gord is my first cousin once removed. Neither of us can remember it but we first met on our big family vacation in July, 1963. Gord’s father Roy and my grandfather Donald were brothers. Roy and his family were the first of the family to move away from Montreal in 1947, the year before my grandfather moved his family to Kansas City. When we came to Canada in 1963 our first stop was to see Roy and his wife Margaret (still living nearby, age 97 and sharp I am told) in Toronto. We spent a couple of nights there before continuing on to Montreal. Their home was a semi-detached house in the Beaches area east of downtown on Silver Birch Avenue.

Gord grew up in this house in the Beaches, theirs was the unit on the right. I once spent the night in the third floor dormer.

Twenty years later Toni and I came to Toronto to visit her sister and brother-in-law. They had just moved into their 1940s era semi-detached…on Silver Birch Avenue. It is only four houses up from the house Uncle Roy once lived in! That is a huge coincidence for a city this size. Now, to add to this story Dawna moved to the Beaches three years ago and is just three blocks east of Silver Birch Avenue. That is a lot of connections to one very small part of a neighbourhood.

Summer 1953. Gord, my Uncle Donald, my Mom, all at Lake Ontario.

Gordon in high school.

Health Care Part Two

I had my first real encounter with the Provincial Health Care system on Thursday. This initial visit was simply to set up my account and meet my doctor fact to face. The appointment was for 3:00 but I arrived a half hour early anticipating there would be forms to fill out. I presented my health card to the receptionist and she proceeded to check the computer for my appointment. She did not have me down for 8/11 at all. After a little further searching she saw that my appointment was for Monday the 8^th and that I had missed it. Toni had made the appointment a couple of months earlier in person. It is not like her to get something like this wrong. Later at home we pulled out the appointment card and saw that receptionist had indeed been correct. She had handwritten the date: Aug 8/11. Exactly like that and Toni noticed just the numerical part and eventually entered it in the calendar for the 11^th instead of the 8^th.

At the doctor’s office I was prepared to reschedule but the receptionist assured me that it was no problem at all and the doctor would still be able to see me that day. She gave me my forms and clipboard and I went over to the waiting area to dig in. Despite what you hear about the long waits and so on there were only a couple of other people sitting there. As I worked on my medical history and personal information I found that it was a little odd to not be pulling out credit cards and insurance cards and copying down all those numbers. I was about ten minutes into the forms and about half finished when the doctor popped out and waved for me to come back. I explained that I hadn’t quite finished yet and she told me not to worry and come on back.

In the course of our interview we scheduled a physical. Part of this was an order for blood work. She gave me the form and two addresses of labs that could do the job. I asked about setting up the appointment for that. She told me there was no need for that. You just pick a day to fast for 12 hours and then just show up with the form. No prearranged time at all. She noticed my puzzled look and said, “Welcome to the Canadian Health Care System”.

To recap, I show up three days late for my appointment and still get in without waiting at all (in fact was seen earlier than planned) and then I can walk in anytime I like for blood work. It is not exactly the way it is portrayed in the States. More later.

Tuesday Tutoring

Again, from Toni:

Every Tuesday afternoon since mid-June I can be found at the Fred Victor Employment and Training Services Centre. It is only a ten minute walk from home. No, I am not getting training to find employment for myself.

After I enter the building I walk past the employment area (bustling with people preparing to be sent out on job interviews) to the computer lab in back. For three hours two afternoons a week the lab is open to individuals participating in the Back-to-Basics educational program. This program provides people one-on-one assistance with: computers, preparing for the GED or college entrance exams, English as a Second Language (ESL), and job hunting skills. At any given time a dozen students are being triaged by the program coordinator to be helped by two tutors. I was lucky enough to be chosen to be one of those volunteer tutors. In a typical session people need my help when they get stuck using one of the online tutorials or from hardcopy exercises for grammar or algebra. In between questions, I correct the hardcopy exercises that have been completed. At every session, there are some people that need special help which is the most challenging and interesting part of the job.

In this week’s session I taught a woman, a recent émigré, how to use a computer for the very first time. She had never operated a mouse, keyboard, or even been on the internet. She lives in a women’s shelter. She is over forty years old and English is her second language. I spent less than an hour with her, starting with getting her oriented with the hardware, explaining some basic terminology like the word, “cursor”, making her comfortable with a mouse, moving on to what software does, then on to internet searches with Google. I got her to the point where she was able work without assistance for the next two hours. She practiced reading English by finding websites that would get her more familiar with Toronto. She left at the end of the session eager to return on Thursday for more.

My next student has been coming to the centre regularly for several months. I taught him a few tricks to perform quick and successful internet searches related to his career goals. He is in his mid-50's and an ex-con. He never held down a legal job because before serving a lengthy stay in a penitentiary his occupation was a longtime gang member dealing drugs at a high level while travelling and living in various countries. After serving his time, he committed himself to putting crime behind and doing whatever it takes to start over. To achieve his goals, mostly we assist him each week with composing correspondence to potential financial sponsors, schools, and employers to enable him to start a career in addiction counseling. His job counselor and I have helped him to perfect his resume so he can get some part-time work while in school. We taught him how highlight his talents and skills resulting from his past experiences: speaking three languages fluently, diverse cultural understanding, and determination to help at-risk people. Our resume content discussions have helped him to value what he has: the retention of his good basic academic skills from his attendance at a Jesuit grade school, his caring about his health and appearance, his growing ease with using office equipment and his naturally extraverted people-oriented personality. It has been very rewarding to witness his growing self esteem when he sees these things in writing. He is gradually losing his pessimism and knows he will eventually become what he calls “a real person”.

Towards the end of the three hour session I helped a Chinese woman with her English pronunciation. She has been in Canada for several years and is doing very well with her written English grammar and spelling but people cannot understand her speaking and she has trouble understanding them. She has no family, lives alone in her own apartment near the Centre, and works three days a week as a housekeeper. She wants to work full-time at a unionized hotel where she can move up from a meager existence. She keeps her resume updated and is able to obtain job interviews but she is rejected because the supervisors interviewing her tell her they cannot understand her English. So that is why the job counselor recommended she attend the Back-to-Basics Program.

It broke my heart to hear her story because she described to me how skilled she was as a housekeeper in making beds, cleaning, and making a room look good. She can read a schedule and instructions without problems. Not only can she do the job that few people want but she takes pride in it and likes what she does. She described the discrimination she faces from both her culture and those of others. Fellow Chinese will not assist her because she is not of their family or has no connection to their families. Toronto has a large Chinatown but it is a closed society. The other problem is that the interviewers in the big hotels are usually Latin or Eastern European and English is their second language as well. This situation makes it all the more difficult for them to communicate. The hotel managers feel they have already paid their own dues by improving their English and there is little sympathy for newer immigrants. She cannot join the hotel workers union without getting a job first at a union hotel. She is in a real life Catch 22 and her only option now is to improve her English language skills.

To start her first lesson I went through the English alphabet with her, distinctly pronouncing each letter while she watched the movements of my mouth and imitated them as she repeated the letters. We discussed how she must memorize these sounds and how to make them while visualizing the spelling of the words so she can remember when she needs to make these sounds. On her second time through the exercise she was pronouncing each letter perfectly. The next time we will try a list of whole words. Through our conversation we also discovered she needs to expand her vocabulary so more reading and writing is needed along with conversational lessons. I will help her to overcome performance anxiety as well so she can have the skill to refrain from reverting back to old habits when under the pressure of an interview. I am excited to work with her again and to witness each step of improvement. We will eventually see her career goal met.

I am humbled by the students’ motivation. Despite any challenges I have had in my life I have been privileged with health, safety, friendship and abundant resources simply from being born into and working within an enlightened western culture. At my age I know myself pretty well and firmly believe if I had to face harsher conditions and more prejudices I would have failed. These students are very friendly, respectful, and grateful, always thanking me for helping them. I try to return the appreciation as I feel that they teach me more things than I have ever experienced before in such short periods of time. I am so glad they have placed themselves in a situation that will lead them out of their hardships. As their tough journey continues I hope it will get easier and they will experience more and more of the privileges they deserve as human beings.

Brian Wilson

I recently had a rare Saturday at home with no plans for the day. I was catching up on some correspondence and for a change I was reading the newspaper the same day it was delivered. There was nowhere I had to be and no one I had to see. Suddenly that late afternoon it all changed when I was offered a free ticket to see one of Rock ‘n’ Roll’s largest icons, Brian Wilson, at the legendary Massey Hall. The show was only hours away but I didn’t hesitate to accept. It also helped that the hall is only three or four blocks away. I had noticed the concert listing a month or so ago but dismissed the idea of going when I saw the $100 plus prices for the floor tickets. Many famous jazz albums have been recorded at Massey as well as the recently released Neil Young album. Dylan played here in the early years with the musicians who would later be known as The Band.

At precisely 8:00 I met Nick Krewen at the will call window. Nick is a free lance music critic in Toronto and the generous ticket holder. We had only recently become acquainted on Facebook through one of my cousins. My cousin knew of our common interest in music and suggested that we be ‘friends’. Nick had actually interviewed Brian Wilson earlier in the day and I think that led to his last minute ticket windfall.

We settled into our tenth row floor seats and Nick and I started sharing our music backgrounds. It was odd to be hearing bits from his recent interview with the man who was about to perform for us. I have seen the Beach Boys several times over the years but never with Brian Wilson. Considering his history it was remarkable that he was even touring and it was a thrill to finally see him. His band was top notch and he also had a string quintet for half a set. They played nearly every Beach Boys hit you could think of and then after a short break the band returned to play all of Brian’s recent Gershwin album for the second set. I thought the audience would cool off for this round but they were along for the full ride and the enthusiasm never wavered. We were rewarded with six more Beach Boys tracks to go out humming to.

Nick and I hit the diner across the street for a quick coffee and exchanged a few more stories before heading back home still marvelling at how my day turned out.

NICK'S INTERVIEW WITH BRIAN WILSON

REVIEW OF THE SHOW WITH PLAY LIST

HISTORY OF MASSEY HALL