Culture Raven writes about ‘Alive & Pickin’

Pleasant enough finger-picked acoustic guitar. Odd home brewed CD. Liner notes go on and on about the magnetic devices he designs for his brother’s company. Sample title: “I like me.” Does that mean I have to? I do remember this song however, so the CD passes the distraction test. Lunch passes by pleasantly. I chuckle at a song about our ex-mayor Mel Lastman . But not one of these songs takes me away to that “land inside of my mind” that Ted Nugent and his Amboy Dukes sung about, so this CD should not have the word “psychedelic in the title.”

 -Alive and Picking: Featuring the Smoking Guitars of Brian Gladstone and Tony Quarrington.

Live representations of the preceding material and both the singing and the picking are enlivened by the presence of the audience. My mind drifts back to the impressions of Canadian culture that I got from CBC radio and television. It sometimes seemed as Canada was colonized by a tribe of sensitive guitar pickers with gentle senses of humor and soft, breathy voices unsure of the keys in which they are singing. In the eastern part of the country they sung in French and in the eastern-most parts of the country you could hear the burr of Scotland or the lilt of Ireland in their voices. I also flash back to pictures of Stompin’ Tom Connors banging away at his old guitar in a smoke-fogged Horseshoe Tavern, circa 1971. I swear that in the audience I saw little Ben Kerr. Kerr is a daffy old guy who you can see on the streets of Toronto singing wacky songs about little green bottles of wine. Did Kerr think that he too could be a people’s troubadour like Stompin’ Tom? Why does Kerr keep running for mayor? Why is there a Persian website about Kerr running for mayor of Toronto? Does folk singing lead to mental degeneration. My mind wanders further, recalling images of an old homeless guy who used to bang guitar on the corner of Young and Dundas. He continued to perform after his guitar was stolen. I saw him strumming on his cane in subsequent years. Now I will never be able to dissociate Gladstone’s CD from the melancholia of folk music. A half-hour has passed.