TeledyN

I'll tell you: Girls would swoon at the 3rd Trombonist if he was cute, guys would be transfixed by the cute cellist, instead of obsessions with serial numbers and swag, music was a means to phone numbers and real human connections. The barn dance musicians were respected because they were the vital avenue to community cohesion.

And in our bid to make a buck, we sold it all to those who cared not a speck for anything other than making a buck. An ex-flame of mine worked on one of the first really big Molsons Speedway shows up near Barrie, and all of the organizers thought it was 'cute' that she actually knew what the product, er, I mean what the bands sounded like. The life of the music, the ecology and context were all irrelevant to their purpose.

It didn't start that way. Sam Philips, Chess Records, all the old labels (including the early punk labels) did it because they loved the community and wanted to act as catalyst. Border Radio, jump-ups, Studio-One, they all wanted to make a buck by greasing the wheels of community. It was all about a context, about an event, about an (unpackageable) happening experience of real-life living.

Somewhere it all went horribly wrong. I blame George Martin and Phil Spector et al, not that they set out to destroy music, they were just trying to 'capture' sound and put it into a package that included the essence of what was so electrifying at the in-context event, to share the magic, but they stumbled on to a powerful and terrible secret.

In Food Science, McDonalds stumbled on to the same secret, as did TV commercial advertising and on and on, the story of our lives: human beings are not incorruptable gods, they are animals, with animal brains and sensory perceptors, and they can be fooled, they can be seduced, and they can be distracted by empty content provided the fat-sugar-salt ratios are over the top.

I love field recordings, can't get enough of them. I've heard everything Alan Lomax ever recorded, I get all tingly when I see an obscure disk like "Sea Shanties of the Great Lakes" sung by people they found in the legion halls or fiddle tunes of American First Nations or Georgia Spirituals. For me these are a precious, a gift from our ancestors, a rare signal from outer time-space, and what I notice most of all is how much we have lost, how much of our rich cultural birthright has been pillaged and sold off, like how they tore all the ancient accessories from the houses of post-war Europe, sold them to American restaurateurs, then replaced them with cheap, short-life, aluminum pre-fab.

And today here is me, raised in suburbia, surrounded by the aluminum pre-fab, and I only know this because I traveled, I have seen the worlds beyond the HMV; my neighbours have never known anything other than pre-packaged instant music from Nashville or NYC or LA and the London/Toronto knock offs.

Time was "Bruce County Fiddle Style" meant something, it's all gone now, most of it extinct like Native languages, some of it barely hanging on in the memories of wobbily 90-year-old players who find few under 50 who will give them the time of day. Some sanitized parts are preserved in the best intentions of the Mike & Pete Seegers, paraded out as exotica at Folk F'expos for $60 a pop while the last living remnants play on for free Thursdays and Sundays at the legion. But the real vital and living heart of it? Gone. Bottled up and pickled in 78 re-issues like the cow's eye at the back of the grade-9 science lab room.

Sorry for the ramble. The more I think about this, the more depressed I get, but I'll tell you this much, when I play with the community bands, I try to breath a new meaning into old John Philip's Liberty Bell, reaching for and dreaming of that magical ringing sound that will wake them up and bring them back into the living groove :)