REBEL WITHOUT A LAWNMOWER

I am not a rebel. I've never thought of myself that way, but that sobriquet has often been thrust upon me, sometimes from some surprising sources.

I have almost always had long hair. At this stage of my life, I get the "quaint old hippie" tag and it doesn't bother me, there is some truth in that. I started growing my hair out pretty young. I had long hair in Grade 6. This was the late sixties but in the schools I attended in a small eastern Ontario city, I was usually the only guy at that grade level with long hair. I've always been a doodler, I like cartoons and I did a lot of that in school; one day in Grade 6 a teacher nabbed one of my doodles and confiscated it. It was a hippie cartoon, a guy that was just a hat, a big nose (Ringo Starr like in its enormity), a Zapatta mustache and long hair. Years later, in high school, when were preparing our university applications, the guidance counsellor gave us our school files and told us to go thru them and discard anything we found detrimental. Collette, my school teacher wife (there's irony for ya) informs me how wrong this was but the guy did it. And there it was. My hippie cartoon, attached to my file after all those years. A teacher or principle had written a comment on the file "Over identification with counter culture characters"

I found that funny. Counter culture. That term had .. and still has .. little relevance to me. Counter to what? When I was young I didn't see my long hair and bell bottom jeans as rebellious, I was just emulating what was around me. My oldest brother Edward was a hippie, he lived at home when I was young, he gave me Beatles records and took me to see biker movies and that is what I knew. I don't know if my mother liked long hair and beads and sandals but her house was filled with them and she never openly objected. So that is what I knew. That was my culture.

I grew up in a very free flowing kind of environment. We weren't religious. We sure as hell were not the middle class. I had no father. In our house I didn't think much about these factors but when I was out in the world, it was often shoved up against my face. It always surprised me. But what really surprised me, what often took me aback and put a frown on my face, was the concept that there was some overriding culture that you could be counter to. I always knew that people were different from me. Other kids had dads, other families had money, other mothers did not swear, other brothers did not pay attention to you and give you guidance. I knew that. Why couldn't those people get that?

On some level I knew that I was, that my family was, different but I didn't spend a lot of time brooding on it. Yet others apparently did. When I was a kid some people hated my long hair; they hated it. There would be a snarl on their face and invective on their lips. I never got that. You hate me because of my hair? Not because of who I am, or what I do, but because of how I look? It took me a long time to realize that people are afraid of what is different, they have an existence that they often did not themselves choose, and they do not want to think about any alternative. Fear of change, I guess. Like, I only ever ate red apples, that yellow one over there scares me. Weird.

So, people applied this "rebel" tag to me and although I never really agreed with it, there it was. I knew that in the eyes of some people, I was a rebel. Generally, these people were older, from another generation. I knew that many of these people must have gone thru some period in their lives where they had experimented with change, that they had tried new things but at this point, they only liked what they liked. Fair enough. What catches me by surprise, is when people younger than myself, find me oh so rebellious.

In my early twenties, in the late seventies, early eighties, I did some hitchhiking. Went across the country twice, once with a girl I was seeing at the time and once by myself. On one of these solo excursions I was camping at a commercial site in New Brunswick. The place had a laundry room and I was catching up on the essentials. I met this couple from New England, I think Maine maybe. They were about as crew cutted and and freshly washed as Ken and Barbie. I was a little grubby, I was living on the road, but this was one of the points in my life where was my hair was short. These two looked at me like I was the wild man of Borneo. They were telling me about some campsite in Maine and how all the young people loved it and that it was "groovy" (trust me, that particular expression was pretty dead at this point in time) and chuckling at all this youthful craziness. The kicker .. were were probably the my age. These two came across like the Cleavers in the early 1980's and they were certainly no more than a couple years older than me. That sticks with me to this day: What the hell happened to them.

This phenomena has kept repeating itself. It became quite self evident when I went back to college. I first returned to college in Kingston in my mid twenties. I was pretty much the oldest person in my class. We had some punks, a semi goth girl, some biker rocker guys ... but once again, I was a rebel. In one of our media classes we had a lecture from some people in radio. I was raised on radio, and I always knew that it was a business, I loved it for the music. I saw the commercial aspect as a necessary evil, that the real purpose of radio was the music. Ok, so I was naive, fucking sue me. The good folks giving the lecture saw the music as some kind of unpleasant necessity, like a pimple on a perfect commercial complexion that cannot be removed cuz it would only result in puss and blood. Fine, this was their business, I get it, and I was in a marketing program. What really got me was that my younger classmates, many of whom lived and died by their music, ate this up like hash laced Pablum. Well, of course, it was all about the money, and although I spend every night listening to the same record, we all know that the only purpose of music was to make someone rich ... I could not remain silent (yeh, like that surprises those who know me) and I got into a little discussion with our hosts. At the end of the lecture, one of the women turned to me as I went out the door and she smiled and said "Keep on fighting, rebel" Turns out we were the same age.

This happened again when I came to Toronto to do television studies at Seneca college. Yet another media lecture. This is around 1986/7 now. Female professor. Discussing TV commercials. And her stating how much the media portrayal of women has changed over the years and that the old image of the "house wife" was dead and gone forever. I choked on my coffee. I pointed out the endless array of current TV ads featuring the young woman, all alone in her home, surrounded by her laundry and her dirty dishes and smiling like a happy, freshly Tasered Stepford wife. The lady professor disagreed. And so did my classmates. In that lecture hall I was the oldest student by at least three years. And every single one of them thought that the portrayal of women in the commercial media was lightyears advanced from the previous decade. Of course, I gently tried to dissuaded them from their point of view, all 56 of em. At once.

So I became the class rebel. Again. I really hadn't meant to. I was just pointing out the obvious: What we see, we should think about. And what we see we should not always accept. One of the quotes that defines my life is from Juan Ramon Jiminez: When they give you ruled paper, write the other way. Ray Bradbury used it to open Fahrenheit 451. That always seemed just so simple to me; there is more than one way to write the same sentence on the page, you have your way to do it and it works for you, so don't be shocked when someone else does it differently.

So, let's get to the point of inspiration for this post. What inspired my thoughts of rebellion and rebels? It was my lawnmower. Yup, my lawnmower. My old lawnmower finally bit the dust. And my lawn is getting high and I live in a lovely, middle class neighbourhood in central Toronto. I have a leather clad biker dude living next to me and his yard is filled with weeds and I do not want to present that image to my neighbours or even myself.

So I went out and bought a new lawnmower. Cuz my grass is too long. I still have my ponytail, but I can't let my gas grow. Fuck. I am such a rebel.

WHY YOU SHOULD NEVER WATCH WE WILL ROCK YOU ON YOUR iPOD

This past weekend Collette and I attended a performance of We Will Rock You here in Toronto. This is the musical based on the music of Queen. You remember Queen; big hair, big guitars, big hits, big music, big ambiguous lyrics filled with big words that had some of my high school buddies scrambling for a dictionary. "Hey, look up Bohemian ..." Well, at least they had finally opened a dictionary. Hell, they had finally opened a book ...


I digress. Not surprising, really, because I think digressing is the whole point of this blog. So when I don't digress and stay focused and on point, I am defeating the whole point of this exercise. Except defeating pointless points is also the point of this blog. Again. With the digressing.


Back to We Will Rock You. This won't be a review of the show but it was great. Collette and I are Queen fans of varying degree and we like the music, the performances and singing were solid and the "book" (see, I took theatre in school) was quite funny.



The story concerns itself with the homogenization of music. One of the characters states "The music began to die with the creation of something called American Idol that produced singers whose careers were shorter than the songs they sang" (Paraphrasing, imagine a more humorous and melodious syntax) Real music made by real guys with real big hair wearing their sisters make up in their daddy's garage had been replaced by corporate created muzac distributed over the Internet.

The instruments were taken, the leather jackets where shredded and people's ability to create had been compromised by commercial pablum. Well, hard to argue that. But, when did this happen? A recent phenomenon? Was there actually some long grace period where free spirited artists made their music as they wanted and everyone was able to hear it?

Maybe in the Delta, in the juke joints and the booze parties, where Leadbelly and Robert Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson played for pennies and still liquor, often making it up as they went along cause nobody read music or knew the words. (OK, my blues name will now be Sighted Tangerine Kellar, just cause I can)

I grew up at the tail end of rock and roll, pre Brit invasion rock and roll, the era that We Will Rock You casts as some kind of musical utopia. Cept it was during this era that Fabian was signed to a recording contract before anyone ever heard him sing cause he had wet eyes and a taut butt. And Pat Boone was doing Little Richard covers and selling them. I often bemoan aloud that in this day of the music video, people get record contracts based on their looks; but Fabian was there already there and the Beatles really didn't get huge until they were on Ed Sullivan

Image has always been a part of rock and roll. Maybe rock and roll was so hugely successful because of its image. The leather jacket and blue jeans are visual icons really, associated with an aural art form, can you have one without the other? Rock and rollers enjoyed mass market success long before the bluesmen even though rock began as an expression of blues. Why is that so?

Cause more rockers were white, more rockers were young, and more rock and roll happened in the age of TV than did the blues. Sullivan, American Bandstand ... I am not forgetting or ignoring racism. Blues records weren't sold to white kids and blues music wasn't played on white radio. Though, even this art form was chained to commercialism; many blues greats, including Sonny Boy Williamson got their start on the King Biscuit Boy radio show. King Biscuit Boy was a flour label.

Lets face it, if music didn't have ties to commercialism we would never hear it. Guerrilla radio stations aside, most of the music we hear is because some one is making money from it. And if someone is making money from it, that someone damn well has their hand in the creative stew.

Early blues music was organic, shows sometimes just happened spontaneously and bluesmen often "duelled" with other (and duelled with each other, like with guns and razors "You bring the knife, I'll bring the gun, we'll go down to the alley and have us some fun" Hoyt Axton sang) Early rap music was similar. Totally uncommercial, a form of expression devoid of instrumentation cause no one could afford it. Now look at it. Queen Latifa (who once declared on black person could be racist so don't jail them) hawks lip stick and Run of Run DMC has a reality show that looks like the Cosby show.

In the mid sixties a lot of old bluesmen were "discovered" by a white audience and were applauded as real, organic, "folk" music. You could actually "find" a Bukka White album and pass it around and be pretty sure no one else in your circle had ever hear of him. I heard KT Tunsall on a little underground internet site and it seemed before I could write her name down, she had her own Bravo special. Technology has made that different, as We Will Rock You declares. But is it bad? Bukka White never got to sell a million records or play to thousands of peoples and sign and endorsement deal and make a sex tape that gets onto the net and go to detox and national TV and clean up and become a Christian for four seconds before going back on tour and producing some tiny little white chick with big tits who makes him even more money ...

But I bet he would have liked too.

Oh yeh, one final irony about the whole thing. We Will Rock You, the musical that denounces the commercialisation and branding of everything was staged in the beautiful old Pantages theatre ... except now it is called the Canon.

And life goes on.