Is History Important?

This is a question that I frequently ask myself. Is my passion for studying the constructions and cultures of those who came before us a matter of reconciling my being within the larger context of my community, or is it simply a case of an idly atavistic curiosity?  In my particular case, it’s probably a bit of both.

But is that knowledge important?

On a day-to-day level, of course it isn’t. I cannot fill my tank, buy my groceries, pay my bills or clothe myself with historical minutiae. Heck, I can hardly even converse with the neighbours about it. I once assumed that all residents of Fisher Mills Road would be interested to learn that such a famous and powerful man as Seagram was born mere metres from where they sipped their Crown and colas. I was wrong, greeted with yawns and then gently prodded into providing more interesting fare like a discussion on municipal tax increases and the price of Christmas tree lights.

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Why the Northwest Passage Must Remain in Canadian Sovereignty

If you like, a little backgrounder on the Northwest Passage:

From the time that North America was being explored, the idea of discovering an expeditious trade route from Europe to Asia was a top priority. In fact, in 1497, Henry VII sent John Cabot (Giovanni Caboto was his real name) on a mission across the North Atlantic to serve this very purpose, making Cabot the first explorer to come anywhere near the Northwest Passage.

 

Their argument is weak. Canada has islands all around the Passage and the distance from land is well within Canada’s territorial waters. Unfortunately though, however weak the argument against Canada’s ownership of the Northwest Passage may be, Canada’s clout is even weaker. This is an unfortunate thing.

The International Community needs to recognize Canada’s sovereignty in the North. As anyone who’s seen tire tracks from 1950s jeeps trekking around on the tundra during the Cold War will attest, the North takes a tremendously long time to heal itself. An accident of some kind in the Passage could have horrendous consequences for the future of the Arctic and its citizens.

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How Production Killed 80's Music Part 3

Now, just to reiterate, multi-tracking is the art of recording yourself along to a previous recording of you playing. For instance, you could start with a drum track, and then add guitars, bass and vocals so that it sounds like a whole band, but really it’s just multiple versions of you.

Anyway, the next big revelation in recording was the discovery of stereo, that is, a separate signal on the left and right channel, played through two different speakers. Its rise to fame in the late 1950s, made record executives sit up and take notice. Many of those exotica hipster records that exist today were recordings made for the first hi-fi (high-fidelity) aficionados. Suddenly, people would rush out and buy records of ping-pong games just to hear the little plastic ball going “plip” from speaker to speaker. Possibly not as exciting as a real game of ping-pong, but an interesting historical footnote, nonetheless.  

 Suddenly, recording technology demanded at least two tracks: one for recording and one for overdubbing, or one for each stereo channel. Smart studios started to see the value of multiple tracks and by 1964; artists such as the Beach Boys were using state of the art studios in Los Angeles like Gold Star and Sunset Sound.

To see the rapid rise in recording quality in the 1960s, we need only to look at The Beatles’ catalogue. In 1962 and 1963, The Beatles were limited to three tracks which made the recordings sound primitive and clunky. From 1964 through to Revolver in 1966, they were using four. It is for this reason that, until the recent remixes, the Beatles stereo output sounded so odd on headphones. Bearing in mind that two of the four tracks always had to be occupied by the stereo tracks, any time you wanted to overdub anything, it had to go on top of the previous one, at which time that recording was locked in stone. You couldn’t undo an overdub, which is partially why sometimes the vocals would be on one side and the drums the other. By 1967 and Sgt. Pepper’s, their producer George Martin was using two four tracks linked up to an eight track system. In was only with 1969’s Abbey Road that they were using a sixteen track console.

As the music industry grew into a multi-billion dollar behemoth in the seventies, it was in the best interest of the labels to build fancy studios and record on two-inch wide Ampex tape. By the late 1970s, sonic perfection within the range of hearing was pretty much completed. Overanxious audiophiles worried about things like sibilance and low-end rumble, but a well-recorded piece of music produced around that time really sounded amazing. In only 90 or so years, producers and engineers had brought us from the wilderness to a sound that was wholly encompassing.

Then, quite quickly it seems, something strange began to happen.

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How Production Killed Eighties Music Pt. 2

Production.

That is, the art of getting a song out of an artist’s head and onto a record, compact disc or cassette.

If you answered the way I kind of presumed most right-thinking individuals would, I imagine in all three cases you chose the former song over the latter. Now, you may correctly argue that I specifically chose three bands whose peak years were well before the eighties, and that decade’s output from these dinosaurs was nowhere near their best. All true, but this further underlines my point: music producers in the eighties were gilding the lily like never before, trading slick (and quickly dated) production values for honest song-writing efforts.

But don’t hold it against the producers. History had never before offered so much variety in production style, and in a culture where all things celebrated had to be new, it was only a matter of time before production limitation was a memory and an infinite variety of sounds could now be poured into a recording.  

It wasn’t until the end of the Second World War, when the Allies discovered that the Germans had invented a way of recording onto lightweight magnetic tape that the dawn of the modern recording age really came into existence. With this tape, avant-garde composers like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen could create sounds that were other-worldly and new. The BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop must also be remembered as a pioneer in this sense- what would Delia Derbyshire’s theme to Doctor Who be without those crazy tape effects?

As well, the portability and versatility of tape allowed a recording pioneer named Les Paul to come up with a way of recording himself singing and playing guitar overtop of a previous recording of himself singing. By playing along with a tape and recording both parts on a new tape, Les Paul had come up with a way for an artist to create the entirety of a song, thus lessening the need for a musician to have other musicians involved in the creation. In fact, it was Paul’s recording of Rosemary Clooney harmonizing with herself on 1951’s Tennessee Waltz that stands as the first multi-track hit single.

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Why so Much Eighties Music Sounds so Bad These Days

 *author’s note: not all the music of the eighties was bad. Some of it, like Black Flag, Stan Ridgeway, The Pastels and The Feelies, was really quite excellent.  It’s just that even a decent band had to wade through baffling production choices. And there were an awful lot of bands that barely qualified as decent.

 Almost as a deliberate spit in the eye to what had come before; the eighties brought a whole-hearted embracement of the capitalist consumer culture that was represented in Reagan’s America, Thatcher’s England, and to a much lesser extent, Mulroney’s Canada. No one better exemplified the “me-first” attitude of the eighties than Gordon Gekko, Michael Douglas’s greed-driven character in Oliver Stone’s 1987 classic Wall Street.

“I create nothing. I own. We make the rules, pal. The news, war, peace, famine, upheaval, the price per paper clip...” - Gordon Gekko

That to me is the eighties.

Now, as every decade ought, the eighties has its soundtrack. I mean, how can you picture the opening scene of John Hughes’ Breakfast Club without thinking about Jim Kerr and the rest of his Simple Minds? How can you think of the song “Oh Yeah” by Swiss oddities Yello without thinking of Principal Ed Rooney climbing bedraggled onto a school bus at the end of Farris Beuler’s Day Off?

And MTV... whew, it was a whole new way to experience music. Now, instead of having only the radio to guide you, the visual medium would henceforth become equally as dominant. You could replace all those images your brain conjured up with whatever some video auteur had in mind, be it Madonna slutting it up on the front of a gondola, a little girl mutilating a grand piano with a chain-saw, or two bearded rockers from Texas continually supporting the underdog by supplying him with a fine set of wheels.

MTV’s baffling initial refusal to play black artists was only made obvious when Michael Jackson’s 1982 smash “Billie Jean” was climbing the charts. MTV relented on this unstated policy, and the video that introduced the moonwalk to the world was put in high rotation. After the colour barrier was broken (which MTV seemed fond of advertising, instead of being ashamed of having created one in the first place), the floodgates were open and anything was fair game.

Now, instead of only presenting videos made mostly by aging white rockers and British New Wave bands (the Brits had been making promotional videos since the sixties), any song with a catchy video was fair game. This accent on the reliance of image came at exactly the wrong time. It came at a time when recording technology had improved so much in its 100 year existence, that producers were starting to detach themselves from what made music vital in the first place.

Tomorrow, I'll point to where and why the music of the eighties went wrong, and what brought it back on track. Stay tuned.  

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Invitation to connect on LinkedIn

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My Vision For Transportation's Future

Simply put, people never stopped riding the black-fendered bikes because the unity of colour and make meant that no one bike was any more attractive to a thief than any other. It had been this way for so long that many people in Amsterdam didn’t even bother to lock them anymore. This is an idea that has stayed with me.

Basically, what I’m proposing is a series of electric trains into each city, or whatever urban node you want. Outside each train station are a series of poles with identical electric cars parked in a circle around them, kind of like the way airplanes park around a terminal. Each car is plugged into a pole, and with the use of a credit card, or some other identification piece, it can be driven away.  

The use of the cars is meant to traverse the places where rails don’t go: you can take the car home overnight, bring it back to the station in the morning and plug it back in before boarding the train to work.

I believe that the use of individual vehicles is necessary for our transition away from gas-powered transportation. Simply put, I don’t think people are easily going to give up on the ease of mobility that an automobile provides.

Some sticking points are:

1.       Where are we going to get all this electricity from? The electricity for the cars is coming from the same lines that the trains use. The electrical supply can come from hundreds of small suppliers, who might use wind, solar or more efficient hydro power. However, I’m not an engineer. I just believe that’s a hurdle we can overcome. For instance, if we installed geothermal pumps in our buildings, we could vastly cut down on electricity use in the summer.

2.       Are people going to want to give up the pride of ownership of a car in favour of publicly owned identical ones? At first I imagine you’d have some holdouts, especially those who value performance cars. Still, as the price of gas rises, so too will the attraction of not being burdened with a giant, unsellable piece of metal.

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The Elastic Time

It seems like only yesterday we were worrying about Y2K: the fear that as 1999 became 2000, the world would descend into chaos. It was believed that as the clock struck midnight, all of those functions that require computer assistance (like, well, everything) would go bat guano because a computer couldn’t count past 99. It was generally assumed that planes were going to fall out of the sky, banks would collapse (which they eventually did anyway), and Global Thermal Nuclear War would be no longer just a part of Matthew Broderick’s computer fun in War Games.

If I recall rightly, there was even a guy near Barrie Ontario who buried thirty school buses into a hill-side, filled them with a generator and enough provisions to withstand several nuclear winters. I wonder if the buses are still there, and if so, what is our paranoid friend doing with them? Maybe he’s growing mushrooms or something. Beautiful, beautiful irony.

And here we are, almost ten years later. Where did all that time disappear to? Well, here’s the answer:

It didn’t disappear.

Time moves faster as you get older.

No seriously. It’s not a constant at all. Since we humans must necessarily view time from within the constructs of our own experience, as your life gets longer, time speeds up. When you are a small child, time moves slowly. It accelerates as you age because your wealth of knowledge and experience has given you an ever stabilizing platform from which you view the world.

Take a five year old. Since that child has only experienced five summers, and only remembers two or three, each day in the summer is a new experience. As well, each hour of the day is a greater percentage of a child’s life than it is of ours.

Is this making any kind of sense? Let me put it this way. My son, who was born in 2004, has not consciously lived (or at least consciously remembers) even half of this past decade that I think just flew by. To him, the past couple of years are an eternity, because all of his wealth of experience was gleaned in those times.

I’m pretty sure this is why the summers of our childhood seemed so long that returning to school in September always felt like arriving home after a long journey of great distance. When a morning could be happily spent on the front porch just watching the world go by, time has no real meaning. It’s only as we age and get to know what to expect from the days and seasons that time accelerates (“It’s the beginning of November now. I reckon it’ll snow within the next couple of weeks or so.”)

Still, this acceleration of time (especially in the context of now) isn’t always a bad thing. I mean, good riddance to the noughties. They haven’t been very nice to us at all. 9/11, wars in Iraq & Afghanistan, global financial meltdown, my band breaking up, me being laid off from my job, my dad dying.

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How Buddy Spawned Bob

Thought not.

People know what happened next. As Don McLean sang in American Pie it was “The day the music died.”   However, for Robert Thomas Velline of Fargo North Dakota, the exact opposite was true.

When the tour rolled into Minnesota, and everyone cried, the promoters were adamant that the show must go on. Unfortunately, three of its headliners were now dead, so a talent search was quickly organised. This is how Robert Thomas Velline, who billed himself as Bobby Vee, found himself a headliner in Moorhead Minnesota.  Prior to that, the fifteen year old Velline and his band of school pals The Shadows (not to be confused with Hank B. Marvin’s Apache combo) had never played a real engagement, let alone one which would headline on a package tour.

Needless to say, they were a hit with the teenage crowd, and Bobby Vee was catapulted to instant fame. After the show ended, Vee was offered a tour, and he needed a piano player. After auditioning some players, Vee settled on a young unknown musician who called himself Elston Gunn, and the expanded combo played a few shows before Elston Gunn enrolled at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis under his real name Robert Zimmerman.

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Taken for a Ride

This evening I attended a presentation at Waterloo’s famed Princess Cinema hosted by fellow Hespelerite and history enthusiast Paul Langan. Called “How the Streetcar Died and Came Back to Life”, it discussed the death of light rail transit (or streetcars as they used to be known) across North America, and about how various cities are now trying to fix the problem of too many cars on the roads.

The core of the presentation was a film called Taken For a Ride (see below for link). A 1996 documentary, it explores how General Motors, under the steerage of Alfred P. Sloan Jr. colluded with other companies, such as Standard Oil, Mack Truck and Firestone Tires to eliminate streetcars in order to open up the streets for automobiles, and also to force people to buy cars.

The toll over the past fifty years on some American cities has been horrendous. Los Angeles’ famed Red Cars were loved by residents. They loved zipping from the suburbs to downtown quickly, cleanly and quietly. Under the aegis of progress, L.A. was turned into the smog-ridden, traffic-clogged nightmare we all know and despise soon after the tracks were torn up.

And it wasn’t democratic, either. The people didn’t want to lose their streetcars, and the public waged a huge battle for over two years, until the chief planner, who was actually employed by the company that ran the bus line (which itself was secretly owned by GM), quashed all dissent and decreed that Los Angeles would henceforth be a bus and freeway city.

In one segment, he went so far as to say that the buses (the old 1950s buses), did not pollute in any way, and did not affect the quality of Los Angeles’ air at all. How a person could self-delude themselves so completely in the pursuit of dough is beyond me. Actually, that goes for a lot of what people do: if you actually thought about the consequences of your stupid action, you probably wouldn’t do it. At least, I hope you wouldn’t do it.

To quote Kurt Vonnegut, “And so it goes”. 

But Waterloo is looking towards a brighter tomorrow with the implementation of a new Light Rail Line connecting Kitchener-Waterloo to Cambridge. Many people say it’s too expensive, and that not enough people ride transit for it to make sense. You know, the usual "the chicken or the egg" scenario. When gas hits three bucks a litre, as it inevitably will, an improved transit plan will make sense.

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