Remembering the Rock

The thing I'm going to remember best about Live From the Rock will be that the sun appeared to to hang in the same place, mid-sky, for each long northern day. Time wasn't exactly suspended, but it certainly ignored the usual rules for a while.

This was an ancestral dwelling place once. It felt like that again. The tribe camped beneath the cliffs along Superior's shore wasn't made up of hunter-gatherers, but of wandering people just the same. They were seekers after spirit, shapers of story and song. Their faces were bright by the warm fire. Their skin shone in shifting shades, a rainbow reflected in the wave of a moving crowd.

Red Rock is a northern town. The pulp mill moans all night and day, occasionally belching a god-awful sulfurous reek. Freight trains rumble and screech like loutish animals on the move. The beer tent was a shooting range, complete with mounted fish and trophy heads. The locals drink OV. There are a lot of pickup trucks around, and the campfire party goes all night long.

But there's something in Red Rock a lot of northern towns have lost: the peace and prosperity that a solid local employer can foster. That raunchy pulp mill has kept this pretty little place in business for a long while. You could see that comfort reflected in the warm, welcoming smiles of the townspeople. They love where they live. They're proud to show their guests around.

Music made the days more bright and the nights more deep. There was joy on the breeze, laughter in the darkness, kinship among strangers underneath the northern lights. This is what folk music can foster. This is why people work so hard to make playing the heart of the matter. This is how we humans love to love our creativity, our creations, our Creator.

This is what happens when Time itself take time off for Truth and Beauty. Live from the Rock, long may you run!

The North is a Spirit

Last Thursday night I headed out into the darkness to hear Ian Tamblyn up in Orangeville. Of all the songwriters I know, he seems to work most directly with the ideas that move me both as an artist and as a spiritual seeker. Ian's songs, stories, photos and compositions are expressions of solitude, sublimity, awe, and grace. In a time and a place where these notions are frequently pressed into service as buzzwords, it's a refreshing and at times a deeply moving experience to get back to the heart of the matter.

And what is the heart of the matter, precisely? Ian phrased it as a query that went something like this: is the North in Canadian art and music an idea, which we're applying onto the landscape, or is it a spirit that we're discovering there and then expressing?

Ian's not the first guy to take ask this question, implicitly or explicitly. Artists from the Group of Seven to Glenn Gould have tackled the North, or been tackled by it, and it's never been officially settled. I can't place myself in such noble company, but I can tell you I've been obsessed by the same thing. As a kid from the Canadian Shield near Parry Sound who spent 6 seasons in the bush as a treeplanter, I've been chasing the North in story and song all my life. The more I think I get it, the more it gets me.

Then again, I'm convinced the answer to the question is less important than the effort that goes into trying to work it out. But on the way to Montreal last Friday night, in the dark space between Brockville and Cornwall where many of my songs have been conceived, these words came to me in a dark, ancient-sounding melody. They're only words, and you can make of them what you will. But when I sing them I know what they mean, and I believe these words to be true.

The North is a Spirit
You'll know it when you hear it
In the cry of the loon
Beneath a waning moon
You'd better try to understand it
And when you finally begin to
You'll see the North is a Spirit
And the Spirit gets in you....