Bart Testa and I finished writing this in 1998, and then it was finally published in 2002 as part of a book called Slippery Pastimes (http://www.wlupress.wlu.ca/Catalog/nicks_sloniowski.shtml). That book, which had a print run of probably 1000, was a typical academic publication of the day: thorough, earnest and marginal. I'm happy to say, however, that everything eventually circulates online, or gets a wider life if it deserves it. You can read much of the book online at Google Books (http://books.google.ca/books?id=skTVwTzT27cC&pg=PA145&lpg=PA145&dq=slippery+pastimes&source=bl&ots=Wv6PD_2B71&sig=so1fh9rXSUKz3TLc4Lmc5Eggc58&hl=en&ei=YHTjSrm5LZG_lAf5tPCKBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CA0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=&f=false). Recently the book was cited, positively, several times in Ryan Edwardson's excellent book, Canuck Rock.
Here's the edited text, with footnotes at the end.
In the Great Midwestern Hardware Store: The Seventies Triumph in English-Canadian Rock Music
by Bart Testa and Jim Shedden
I. Preface
Since 1995, Canadian rock musicians have shone dramatically from a position of unprecedented prominence in the North American music industry. Leading the way, Alanis Morissette won four Grammy Awards (the high prizes of the US music industry) for her album Jagged Little Pill, whose sales, by the fall of 1996, rivalled those of the top-ranked American pop diva Whitney Houston. The 1995 Grammies were widely recognized as signalling widening success for Canadians. Alongside Morissette, other Canadians, especially Bryan Adams, the most successful Canadian rocker ever, enjoyed unprecedented continental prominence. Céline Dion's impact on the 1996 Grammies and her booming record sales more than confirmed the decade's trend.
The 1990s florescence of Canadian rock contrasts sharply with its sorry status a generation ago. In 1970, Canadian radio stations adamantly refused even to play records made by Canadian musicians until they were compelled to do so, starting the next year, by the Canadian Radio-Television Commission (CRTC) (Yorke, 1-11; Straw, 1993a). At the time, the recording industry was dominated by British and American firms who rarely signed Canadian pop musicians and, when they did, never adequately developed or supported their careers. The same record companies are still in place and, if anything, multinational control of the recording industry has further concentrated through corporate mergers (Straw, 1996). But their attitudes toward Canadian rock musicians have undergone fundamental changes.
This paper examines the commercial rise of rock music in English Canada from the mid-1960s to the present day, concentrating on the breakthrough years of the 1970s. We argue that it is a development best understood in socioeconomic and geographical rather than aesthetic terms. This approach does not preclude interpretations of rock music made by Canadians and, in fact, this essay includes a good deal of that. However, we do eschew the conventional Canadian nationalist-cultural interpretation. That is why we begin by opposing two critics who hypothesize the project of creating a unique and national Canadian rock sound on cultural-nationalist aesthetic grounds. In contrast to that approach, we argue that the success and failure of Canadian rock is best tracked along a base line of market success that Canadian musicians have or have not attained during the thirty years to be discussed.
Instead of detailing a comprehensive narrative account, this paper will focus on certain signalling moments and analyze selected careers to exemplify a socioeconomic history of Canadian rock that has to be written. The chief moments we look at proceed from the installation of the CRTC's Canadian Content regulations and cluster around the middle and late 1970s, a period we regard as the breakout moment for Canadian rock. Our historical sketch is outlined in the fourth section.
II. Against Canadian Cultural Nationalist Interpretation
The first of the two articles arguing for a national-aesthetic interpretation of Canadian rock that we criticize is Barry Grant's "`Across the Great Divide': Imitation and Inflection in Canadian Rock Music" (Grant). Grant paints picture of "Canadian rock and roll" (Grant's emphasis) that has as its main feature an aesthetic strategy: parody. He claims that parody effects a "generic subversion" of American rock forms. Grant discerns in parody of rock music a distinctly Canadian approach to a music genre he claims to be American in its defining conventions. He interprets particular records, like the Toronto group The Diamonds' "Little Darlin'" (1957), arguing that their aesthetic distinction is that certain Canadian rockers subvert American rock-musical-and-lyrical idioms. Grant connects Canadian rock to the spirit of Canadian comedy instanced by the skit-comedy TV show SCTV that spoofed American network television and to ironizing tactics of English-Canadian documentary films such as the NFB production "Lonely Boy" (1961) which depicted Ottawa-born teen idol singer Paul Anka. Manifestations of this parodic bent Grant takes to be exemplify a Canadian subversive posture toward American pop culture forms. Canadian rock, when authentically Canadian, shares this tendency toward parodic subversiveness and, so, for Grant, it serves as both a distinctive national-cultural trait and as an evaluative measure. Consequently, Grant regards most commercially successful Canadian rock bands, notably Bachman-Turner Overdrive and Rush (Grant, 126), to be simply American copycats because he cannot discover parody inflections in their music.
The appeal of this interpretive approach is considerable. It sets out a demonstrable aesthetic difference in Canadian rock and connects that difference to similar aesthetic tactics in other Canadian cultural production. However, Grant would be hard-pressed to discover more than a handful of popular Canadian rock musicians for whom parody is a distinguishing feature of their music. We would add to Grant's examples a few, like Rough Trade's 1980 "High School Confidential" and Kim Mitchell's 1986 "Patio Lanterns," which fit his model well. One could even argue that he misses parodic elements in BTO's music (e.g., the stutter Randy Bachman affects in his vocal on their hit, "Takin' Care of Business," spoofs Roger Daltrey's on The Who's "My Generation"). Nonetheless, most Canadian rock parodists would have to be regarded as cult -- and not popular -- figures, like Stringband, Mendelson Joe, or Nash the Slash. Moreover, this trickle of Canadian parodists does not offer much national-cultural distinction when compared with the stronger parody underwriting American rockers since the classic period of Little Richard and Bo Diddley, or the corrosive American rock genre-benders like Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart, or outlandish British parodists like Arthur Brown and Moot the Hoople. In other words, rock is demonstrably a pop-culture genre inclined to parodic self-subversion everywhere. Parody cannot, then, be a convincing sign of Canadian cultural difference in rock music.
The second article we criticize is a more earnest interpretation than Grant's. Robert A. Wright claims a "golden age" of Canadian rock occurred in the years 1968-1972, and argues that important Canadian musicians reflected the background of rural folk music and actively foregrounded both a "back-to-the-land" sensibility and a protest-song trend (Wright, 283-301). The Canadian musicians Wright discusses include Gordon Lightfoot, Bruce Cockburn, Joni Mitchell, and Neil Young. He claims that preference for folk-music forms was distinctly Canadian. The inconvenient fact that the same forms underwrote the folk revival of the 1950s and early 1960s in U.S. pop music is brushed aside by proclaiming Canadians "co-opted and preserved an earlier American folk-protest tradition" into the next decade, the 1970s (Wright, 284).
Wright's chronology of "cooption and preservation" here is dubious, though his initial observations are suggestive. When he started recording, as a folkie, Lightfoot had his closest contemporary colleagues in Americans like Tom Paxton and Tim Hardin. Mitchell established herself as a notable songwriter through covers of her songs recorded by American folk-diva Judy Collins (and so, by the way, was Leonard Cohen). But Mitchell's star rose through the recording of her "Woodstock" by the rock group Crosby Stills and Nash. The originally Winnipeg-based rocker, Neil Young was only recognized as a singer-songwriter with protest-folk credentials after association with the California rock group Buffalo Springfield and its successor, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. In fact, Wright's cohort of Canadian musicians worked alongside musically similar American colleagues throughout their careers, and their musical development kept apace with their American colleagues. They "co-opted and preserved" nothing American musicians did not continue to develop similarly on their own. This comes clear when we turn to Wright's closer analyses of particular songs: for each Canadian musician one could readily adduce American equivalents working simultaneously in the same musical vein and writing very similar lyrics.1 As for "preserving" a protest-song tradition into the 1970s, it could hardly be said to have been abandoned by Americans to any greater degree than by Canadians. Moreover, Lightfoot's greatest successes were love ballads made in the 1970s (e.g., "If You Could Read My Mind") accompanied by strings and his role as Canada's songwriter laureate (ie, "Canadian Railroad Trilogy," "Alberta Bound," etc.) corresponds to Lightfoot's flagging commitment to protest and to his mutation from folk singer to commercialized "singer-songwriter" on the model of James Taylor and Cat Stevens. Mitchell's career soared similarly when she switched to pop-songwriting and pop arrangements (on her Lps Blue and Court and Spark). As for the Canadian latecomers, like 1970s folkies Murray McLauchlan and Bruce Cockburn, the former's minor success arose from distinctly urban material (i.e., "Down by the Henry Moore") while the latter remained stalled as a cult figure until he belatedly transformed his image under the influence of Punk in the later 1970s, rocked-up his instrumentation and re-created the protest song (i.e., "If I Had a Rocket Launcher").2
Wright's interpretation of the nationalist cultural ethos to which he seeks to link these musicians is itself problematic. It rests on the claim that Canada's national character is far more embedded in ruralism than the American. This was a prominent claim in the later 1960s as a component of a cultural nationalism but it never matched the socio-economic or cultural facts. Canadians were overwhelmingly urban and mostly at work in industrial manufacturing long before the 1960s and many historians date the urbanization-industrialization of Canadian society to as early as the 1920s. The cultural-nationalist construct of a rural Canada as authentic Canada must be regarded as a bourgeois-leftist-cultural nationalist ideological confection of the late-1960s that served to fantasize Canada -- and here Canadian musicians -- as "not-Americans." That such an ideological purpose underlies Wright's imaginary Canadian ruralism as a musical-textual value is, he makes clear, precisely his point, just as Grant's parody/genre-subversion interpretation serves to make a similar aesthetic difference stand in for difference of national character.
Aside from glaring inaccuracies, the most obvious conceptual problems we see with both these interpretations lie with their restriction. Grant provides too little scope for accounting for Canadian rock. Chronologically unconvincing, intrepretively unpersuasive and ideologically suspect, Wright's claims are flimsy attempts to draw distinctions between national cultures. Most telling of all, both critics fundamentally, if discretely, despise rock music. They strive to carve out musicians' differences from rock so that they can evaluate them above it on behalf of Canada's cultural identity.
Our broader disagreements with these critics are two-fold: first, we believe that their attempts to distinguish a Canadian national character on aesthetic grounds and their application to particular musicians are misguided; second, we also disagree with the way these critics assume rock to be an already-decided American genre -- which Grant and Wright both do -- as if the nationalist essence of rock were immediately apparent. We want to turn to this second issue now.
III. On Not Defining Rock: Chronologies and Momentary Authenticities
Astute rock critics prefer to cast their definitions of the music by resorting to some kind of chronology. For example here is a description from critic Dave Marsh of the virtues of Bruce Springsteen as keeper of the rock'n'roll flame because Springtseen invokes a particularly defining moment in the history of the music:
Springsteen has been so often celebrated as the New Dylan or Elvis or something that his role in resuscitating the sound and feel of early sixties New York studio pop -- the sound of Leiber and Stoller, Gene Pitney, Luther Dixon and Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, not to mention Phil Spector -- has been virtually overlooked. Which figures, since according to orthodox rock history, that stuff either didn't happen or didn't matter ... Springsteen is just about the only contemporary performer who does acknowledge the greatness of this songmill stuff as part of rock and roll [not just Tin Pan Alley] and that has a lot to do with why he's more singular than those who work ten times harder at individualism. (Marsh, 272-73)
The type of chronological argument March evokes shows a critical instinct strong among astute rock writers. We'd like to indicate why this reflex carries important truths. Rock arose as hybrid musical form and continued that way. In the 1950s, rock'n'roll appeared as an amalgam of c&w, r&b, jazz, and pop-song forms. In its hybridizing aspect rock resembles other popular culture forms, like movie genres, radio formats, musical theatre, comic books, mass-produced cuisine and so on. Pop-culture hybridizations are events (or, rather, series of events) that do not yield stable essential forms. This peculiarity, in fact, characterizes popular culture in almost every instance. Both assumptions of and critical quests for essences of pop-culture forms inevitably miss the point of their material creation and development over time. They misconstrue pop culture's dynamics and wind up deforming them in a misguided attempt to grasp their supposed essences [Jarrett].
This misconstruing, we want to emphasize, is different than a critic indulging in his or her taste. One can prefer one period over another, as Marsh does the early-1960s period that Springsteen revives in his music, but one many other critics regard as a period of rock's decline. A critic can use any rock period as a taste measure, but one cannot suppose that there is an essence disclosed in this exercise of taste. Marsh does not confuse his enthusiasms for "essence" (much less national essence) and he actually valorizes Springsteen's "singular" tendency toward amalgamizing an early-1960s rock style most critics disregard. Marsh's assumptions contrast sharply with those of Grant and Wright, who believe they have defined "Canadian rock" against "American rock," which they assume to be "essential" rock as such.
There has constantly been plenty of heated debate about what rock "authenticity" is. What rock critics, fans and musicians indicate in such debates is that, among popular-culture forms, rock has made an unusually high investment in its "self-truth" and it serves pervasively as a taste criterion. This is evident in the expected posture of the rock performers themselves. Just compare rock performance styles to the self-consciously artificiality customary in other pop-music forms, such saloon singers (e.g., Al Martino, Dean Martin, Tony Bennett) or musical theatre. In these cases the cultivation of artifices of decorum and stylization predominate over investment in authenticity.3
But, authenticity in relation to what? How can one speak of a musician being authentic when the music's hybrid nature makes its essence or "roots" impossible to define? It proves impossible to answer this question and all claims to "self-truth" in rock are locked in a contradiction. This contradiction accounts for the notorious instability of rock music manifest in short career arcs, serial stylistic diversity, mercurial fan support, and the tendency toward parody we already noted. Or to put it more positively, rock music's recurrent renewals, its grasping at innovations, returns to "roots" and so on arise from the contradiction between investment in authenticity and the fact that there is nothing really to be authentic to. This contradiction cannot be resolved. It can only rehearsed over and over. This is also true of other popular genres, especially those of popular filmmaking. Rock is destined to play itself out repeatedly and this is the destined dynamic of rock chronology. Astute critics like Marsh reflexively grasp this, which is why they frequently argue in the unstable terms of rock's recurrent ups and downs, renewals, recast forms, innovations, etc.
Take as an aspect of rock's instability the musicological aspect, the myth of roots, or the "real origins" that yielded 1950s rock'n' roll and sometimes are invoked as the defining source of the music. Rock's origins really result from a first hybridization, from "race records" of r&b black musicians and from C&W. Rock thereafter is a readily hyphenated term that admits of serial amalgamations with other forms (folk-rock, soul-rock, jazz-rock, etc., etc.). Such critical terms semantically admit rock music to be constantly and serially hybridized. Some critics have recently argued for these as well as other reasons, as does David Shumway (Shumway, 119), that rock represents a "cultural practice" on the other side of an historical rupture in culture, a rupture that defines pop culture generally. Rock is a scandal of that rupture. The first hybrid that yields "rock'n'roll" in the 1950s was a triple scandal: of the musical genre whose are a suspect hybrid; of a musically impoverished, vampiric genre that commercially assimilates every other popular musical form; and, of a chimerical musical type that won't settle upon a generic essence of its own. Rock did not define itself historically -- the enduring cult of Elvis Presley notwithstanding -- but as a cultural practice of serial amalgamations. Fragmentation and successions of styles in rock, and the surfacing of its subordinate subgenres to momentary preeminence were preordained. After the initial and brief "rock'n'roll" scandal, the dynamic was set by the permanent social factor of post-war adolescents becoming independent consumers, plus the fresh intrusions of Afro-American and white musical idioms unmediated by pop-song decorum, and hybridized differently (Frith et al).4
But how does a hybridizing form, a cultural practice of rock's pop-cultural type, gain (or lose) authenticity, which fans and critics insist upon and as a taste criterion? Like most pop-cultural forms do, but more intensely than perhaps any other, rock relies on a participation mystique. By this we mean the engagement of listeners with the energy and perceived expressive self-truth of the music. Rock is what the fans/critics say it is -- or subsequently are told it is and agree -- and nothing is more obvious that what rock is in these terms changes often, and often wildly.5 A powerful tension falls between rock and its "early-user" listeners and its delivery systems (radio, record companies, critical organs, etc. that constitute the music industry). The fans who first hear and enthusiastically champion a band or group of bands at local clubs (Street) engender a participation mystique and then "marketing" takes over in the rationalization required to distribute the music in the form of recordings, radio air play, organized tours of performers, etc. It is the tension, worked out in stages, between participation mystique (the passing moment of felt "authenticity") and the music industry (the distribution of the music), that characterizes the rock cycles which serially concretize the contradiction of rock's authenticity and its material existence as a pop genre. It is this tension that colours the quick-paced, cyclical chronology of rock's many "deaths," revivals, renewals, and renovations. Rock, then, is a cyclical story in which the local (or regional) origination of musicians and their fan-base and wider industrial marketing continuously overlap, intersect, separate, and so on with all kinds of uneven distributions of power, control and energy, and over short spans of time. Such a dynamic militates against generic stability and it precludes coagulation of any "essence." It does ensure that local and participatory claims remain the necessary if ever-receding horizon of authenticity. If we compare rock to other pop forms like movie genres, TV formats, comic book heroes, or mass-produced cuisine in these terms we discover that all of them are subject to similar cycles. However, there are differences: rock's authenticity is more heavily invested and each serial arc more abbreviated.
Take a famous span of time in rock history, between 1958 and 1968, a mere decade. By 1958, rock'n'roll's original scandal, though barely five years old, had failed. The marketing of the music had become highly rationalized. New stars were groomed by management firms, and launched by television's American Bandstand, and its energies channelled by a series of inane dance crazes, like the Twist. This is the era of Frankie Avalon, Fabian, Chubby Checker -- and the Paul Anka of Lonely Boy. Rock fell to a very low level of local origination, suffered a catastrophic deflation of authenticity, and threatened to fold into homogenized popular music. The Beatles and the other groups forming the "British Invasion" (The Animals, Rolling Stones, The Swinging Blue Jeans, etc.) crashed into this situation with great force. Their music involved a renewed crudity that represented a high level of local origination (Liverpool, London, etc., were very local scenes), and high degree of participation. The English musicians were white but they were also working-class kids from industrial northern British cities who strongly favoured American black music. After a first fluorescence, the authenticating, reviving-reworking features of British rock dissipated into another routinizatioin, and the British quickly hit a nadir with Freddy and the Dreamers, Herman's Hermits, etc.. The Americans responded to the British with rock forms possessing local origination on two contradictory fronts, one black (Memphis, Detroit, etc.), the other white (the second, New York, stage of the folk revival exemplified by Bob Dylan, Tim Buckley, etc.). The black "soul sound" generated the first time that urban black musicians predominated on the record charts. The latter swiftly led to folk-rock (The Byrds, The Lovin' Spoonful, The Blues Project, Buffalo Springfield).6 Folk-rock, in turn, excited local city-scenes in San Francisco (The Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service), New York (The Youngbloods, The Velvet Underground), Macon, Georgia (The Allman Brothers), and Los Angeles (The Doors) that engendered American "acid rock." The British replied yet again with another adaptation of black sources, in this instance an instrumentally virtuosic treatment of blues (Jeff Beck Group, Cream, Ten Years After, etc.) rooted, again, in local English club scenes. This time, however, the British did not displace the Americans, but joined them in a loose new, powerful hybrid, "sixties rock," which takes us to 1968. But "sixties rock" was also quickly to become a hugely successful marketing rationalization, and its supposed fluorescence, at Woodstock, the Isle of Wight and other rock festivals, already marked the ending of its authenticity.7 However, its halflife extended through the 1970s, when "sixties rock" became 1970s "arena rock" until the self-conscious and fierce reaction of Punk, in New York, then in London, and other cities -- some of them notably regional, like Akron, Ohio, Washington, D.C., and Toronto.
As this quick sketch suggests, each new redistribution of music energy and appeal, arising always from an initial localized participation mystique, corresponds musically with sub-generic invention, revivification, and innovation. These processes succeed one another usually through contradictions of stylistic preferences, but each is claimed to be recovering rock itself. Then, each seems soon to betray rock. This is how the fundamental contradiction of rock authenticity played itself out for over a decade. Although initially reviving classic fifties black-music styles (Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters), by 1966, British invasion rock soon sounded pre-fabricated and lilly-white. The black soul music of Motown and the more muscular soul styles emanating from Muscle Shoals, Memphis and Chicago exuded erotic energy and authenticity. But, soul music soon seemed suitable only for rutting white frat boys, and the music's mystique shifted to folk-rock's improvisationally expansive offspring, "acid rock," etc. Some musicians have been remarkably mutable -- The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, the best Motown artists like Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder -- and others, even more rarely, endure with "classic" status (Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Elvis Presley). But such performers are deceptively exceptional. For most rockers, the moment of authentic mystique is very brief. Often the moment is not even captured on recordings. This was the case both with most bands of the San Francisco scene of the late 1960s (e.g., The Quicksilver Messenger Service), and the New York 1975-76 phase of Punk rock (e.g., Television, the Voidoids).
When assimilated into the music-business delivery systems -- radio, records, concert tours -- rock's participation mystique crosses a barrier into something different, but its intense engagement enjoys a strong halflife as a more widely enjoyed recorded and/or touring music, until that decays and is displaced by the next, often contradicting outbreak of energy and authenticity.8 The only historical constant between 1958-1968 is that rock keeps growing as a music-industry force despite its cultural and musical instability.
So, authenticity -- the working definition of rock at a given moment used by critics and fans -- is labile, quickly relocated musically, as well as in terms of its "cultural" posture, racial positioning and even usage-consumption (listening, dancing, etc.9). Doubtless, the main social factor is the speed with which rock fans pass through their adolescence, and the next "generation" (or even the next graduating class) requires fresh rock musicians and styles to elicit their commitments, and therefore to inflect the music's authenticity.10 But another, aesthetic, factor in the speed of replacement is that pop-culture hybrids are unstable amalgams and are given to wearing down to self-parody very quickly. This is also true of other pop genres, like horror movies, TV shows and comic books, though the pace is never as swift as in rock. A crucial feature at work is that rock possesses an high degree of stylistic redundancy. A rock musician has very few aesthetic moves he or she can use but will use repeatedly. The rigidity of the moves do not so much restrict as define the rocker's expressive commitment but these moves are very liable to play out swiftly. Anyone widening his or her aesthetic repertoire beyond an initial and redundant style -- viz., a hard rocker making a "concept album," like Led Zeppelin's In Through the Out Door, or a ballad, like Alice Cooper's "Only Women Bleed" and Kiss's "Beth," etc. -- is almost always a late-career gambit and a harbinger of rapid career diminuendo.
We need to add a note on radio for two reasons. First, in general, radio is historically the rock's premier delivery system. Second, radio has played an even more critical role in Canadian rock, often a matter of life and death for very basic economic reasons. The population of Canada is so small and distances between population centres so great that musicians must generate a market base for record sales quickly to support concert tours, which by themselves cannot usually sustain even a low-cost rock outfit. Until very recently, in the absence of secondary supports, like a viable rock press, radio was the only medium available to Canadian bands. This is why the CRTC Canadian Content regulations proved to be such a crucial benchmark in the development of Canadian rock music.
Initially rock radio arose in the 1950s as a format designed to play the Top-40 (or even Top-20) pop hits. These were single
songs and not album tracks. In the 1950s, after the arrival of television, AM radio stations moved to a "vertical format" of "Top-40" radio in which all programs were identical and all delivered a steady dose of hit singles around advertisements. In adapting to a vertical-musical format, AM radio aptly suited rock's economies of scale by targeting relatively specialized audiences (in comparison to movies, much less TV) and delivering doses of rock in 3-4 minute bites, the 45 RPM single. But radio remained initially focused across a range of popular recordings, from ballad singers like Pat Boone to rock'n'rollers like Chuck Berry. Rock did not initially dominate AM radio. By 1970 and the opening up of the FM band to pop music stations, and the achievement of stereo capability, rock-dedicated radio appeared and saw the development of stations that reached past charted hits to album tracks. FM rock stations defined themselves against Top-40 AM rock stations which played only hit singles by expanding their playlists into non-hits and album backtracks. Simultaneously but gradually, the record industry redesigned the unit of rock music consumption from 45 rpm single to the LP. The radio and unit of consumption nexus corresponded to rock music's proliferation in the 1970s and augmented it further. Numbers of recordings and touring bands greatly increased, paced by sales, rock became a large-scale industry phenomenon for the first time. Radio reacted to rock's market growth and this is reflected in competing play-list policies. Many FM stations resumed Top-40 playlisting in the 1970s, but within sub-generic limits (still leaving AM to purely generic pop "singles acts") so that interpreting the brute sales figures of record charts -- themselves multiplying to reflect sub-generic sales patterns -- was finessed to meet the somewhat specialized rock music tastes of target-audiences (Barnes, 16-25). We return to discuss the longer-term consequences of this trend in the 1990s at the end of this paper.
FM rock radio's competing formats correspond to the historical dynamic outlined above. FM at first sought to position itself closer to the source of the music's generation, to the local early user listener. FM rock programmers devised formats, advertising and announcer styles that pretended to approximate rock's authenticity (this was true especially during its "counter-culture" phase). These strategies soon reflected the labile destinies of rock's authenticity, a trend accelerating through the 1970s and 1980s.
In was in the late 1960s and early 1970s that the ideal of a national Canadian rock music was first entertained seriously and led to the Canadian content regulations. It was not a wholly fortuitous moment for this to have happened. Record companies in the 1970s assumed that musicians would have to be systematically supported -- by promotional and touring subsidies -- while they built up a fan base over several L.P.'s and tours. Companies expected limited album-track FM airplay long before record sales produced a profit. In this strategy, the big radio-hit 45 single became the cap of a graduated promotional process, not the basic goal. Now the LP was regarded as the commercial unit of measure. Internationally owned record companies dominating in Canada refused to invest in the development of Canadian bands at anywhere near the levels that had become the industry standard in the 1970s.
III. Canadian Rock and Regionalism: Outlining a History
As our argument above indicates, the chronological premise -- modelled on how rock music's evolution is usually written -- is that rock music consists of serially arrayed North American and British subgeneric forms. We now want to add a geographical premise which will be directed to the discussion of Canadian rock. Rock subgenres arise simultaneously but heterogeneously in numerous North American regions, often regions that cross national boundaries in terms of musical styles and their popularity. Rock subgenres burgeon, however, serially, in terms of market popularity. This is to say that in Louisiana or Texas, for instance, a rock style may simmer locally without having any impact on the wider music industry at the same time very different styles dominate the airwaves. Then, the local style bursts from the local scene and, for a time, achieves popularity through recordings, radio play and touring. This has happened at various times to locally favoured musicians of Detroit, New Orleans, Macon, Austin and Seattle. Hence, for a Canadian example, in the 1950s and 1960s, Toronto can be seen as part of the North-American midwest and was a city receptive to r&b, not unlike other Great-Lakes industrial cities, e.g., Chicago or Detroit. R&b cover groups made up of Canadian white musicians were successfully launched from Toronto into the U.S. market in that era.11
Musical developments in rock will, then, often be a chronology of regional local-listener excitement and innovation, the rise through acceptance into national marketing conduits, decline and so on. This model is different from the model of formation of a stable national "rock style" in the U.S., Britain, or, for that matter, Canada that is often proposed, as it is by Grant or Wright. In our argument, the privileged region for that crucial part of the story of 1970s Canadian rock is the North American industrial midwestern region surrounding the Great Lakes. Above we tended to parallel rock and other pop-cultural forms. However, in one crucial respect, rock differs from movies, print publishing and television: it has never been centralized. Even though major record companies have their headquarters in Los Angeles, New York or London, rock music has no production centre like Hollywood. Rock's material production is decentered. While its marketing is corporately centralized, rock music rarely arrives at the industry centres -- a Los Angeles or London -- without already having been materially produced by its musicians -- the songs written, the band sound evolved, the image established. Passing into half-life, entering the phase of being marketable, involved recording, reproduction and circulation of what the musicians have already made.
If rock's production is geographically decentered, then its history is unique in popular culture in being both an episodic (more a chronology than a history per so) and a geographical story of local eruptions, most of them arising at a remove from the centres of pop culture and only later channelled into centralized commercial delivery systems. This is no less the case of Britain and Canada than of the U.S.. More dramatic contrasts between metropolitan centre and local region may be invoked by contrasting Atlanta and Los Angeles; Austin, Texas or Seattle, Washington and New York than contrasting, say, Winnipeg and Toronto. However, the impression that the centre is everything in Canadian rock is an error arising from a tendency to insist on a "Canadian" culture (for movies and TV and, therefore, for rock music) rather than the right focus on localities' role in rock. In fact, regional cities like Winnipeg and Vancouver, Sarnia, Calgary and Kingston have, at various times, been the sites of cutting-edge Canadian rock no less than a "metropole" city like Toronto. Indeed, we will argue that the triumphs of Canadian rock in the 1970s arose from and travelled through regional scenes and that musicians linked up, again region by region, across the national border with U.S., most significantly with other places in the Great Lakes area -- with, in other words, the greater industrial middle west of the continent.
Nonethless, as we have emphasized, the story of rock is not the same as the story of the music industry despite their constant interaction. We thoroughly agree with writers like Grant that Canadian rock must be seen in relationship to a hegemonic American music industry. Until the 1990s, sustained success in Canada has been predicated on success in the U.S. market. For the reasons we mentioned above -- and these come down to distances and population -- the financial requirement to sustain even a compact Canadian outfit requires a rock group to reach beyond its immediate locality with records and concert tours. That reach has been provided only by internationally owned record companies and radio. The consequence of this is that no local scene within Canada really mattered until the possibility of entering the music industry's marketing conduits, and that meant getting on Canadian radio.
Once we move beyond tales of short-lived local scenes (and their mystiques -- Toronto's or Vancouver's in the 1960s, or Toronto's Queen Street in the Punk era), Canadian rock history is the harsh chronology of rock acts either making it stateside or (more usually) not enduring at all. These tales contribute to issues that involve the "institutional" -- and market -- realities of rock in Canada. For these reasons, the founding of the CRTC (1968) and the implementation of Canadian content regulations for radio (1970/71) are watershed institutional events. They changed the market set-up in which Canadian rock musicians operated. Prior to the CRTC's formation, Canadian rock acts were only commercially successful insofar as they moved their careers to the US (e.g., Neil Young, The Guess Who, David Clayton-Thomas, Joni Mitchell, Steppenwolf). The quintessential, but highly idiosyncratic case in point during this period, and the one that we develop below, is The Band.
In the late 1960s, a cultural-nationalist, somewhat anti-American fervour swept Canada (York, 1971). Between the formation of the CRTC and 1970, there were unsuccessful efforts to get commercial radio stations to showcase a percentage of Canadian talent (this was called the Maple Leaf System). But Canadian rock radio was afraid of Canadian rock talent to the point that, in early 1969, Winnipeg's The Guess Who had a million-seller with "These Eyes" in the U.S. at the same time Canadian radio stations would not play the band (Yorke, 8). In February, 1970, at the prompting of individuals like Walt Grealis (publisher of the Canadian music trade magazine RPM), and to the shocked disbelief of the broadcast industry, the CRTC announced Canadian content ("Cancon") guidelines. Beginning in January, 1971, Canadian broadcasters would have to program a minimum of 30% Canadian content.
In this study we will divide the chronology of Canadian rock into six moments. The first moment consisted of the few r&b groups, like The Diamonds and The Crew Cuts, and pop-singers, like Paul Anka, successfully exporting themselves stateside during the 1950s and early 1960s. The second moment consisted of musicians like Neil Young and The Guess Who repeated this either by moving stateside (Neil Young) or hitting the charts there (The Guess Who) without preliminary success in Canada.12 The third moment arises from directly from the "Cancon" regulations that paved the way for Crowbar, Foot in Cold Water, The Poppy Family, Lighthouse and others. The fourth moment involves rock bands that were able, for the first time in Canadian rock, to sustain careers beyond radio-hit singles. These bands were successfully in touring, album sales and American success, and the signalling groups here were Bachman-Turner Overdrive, April Wine and Rush.
The fifth moment marks a turn away from hard rock, isolated successful bands and the rise in influence of rock managers, especially Bruce Allen, and a developed music-industry infrastructure that worked -- and continues to work today -- behind Corey Hart, Loverboy, Trooper and Bryan Adams. This moment continues to the present. However, by the mid-1990s, a greater diversity in musical directions emerges, exemplified by Sarah McLachlan, Blue Rodeo, Tragically Hip, Barenaked Ladies, The Dream Warriors, and Alanis Morissette, and these constitute a contemporary sixth moment.
IV. Transcending The Second Moment: The Imaginary Pilgrimage of The Band
The Band -- four Canadian rockers held together by an Arkansas drummer -- staked their claim to an American story from the beginning. The story had its veils, but the fact of the story was plain. "This is it," my editor Marvin Garson said in the spring of 1969, as he sent me off to cover the Band's national debut in San Francisco. 'This is when we find out if there are still open spaces out there.' (Marcus, 43).
Was the story that plain? Is the writer, Greil Marcus, alluding to the famous plainness of The Band's musical style, to the undecorated simplicity of their songs, to what that represented in 1969, or to the fact that here was a group of musicians without personality? All of these suggestions are there in Marcus's paragraph. But that plainness, folded within the "veils," is The Band's imagination and, as Marcus will acknowledge in his essay "Pilgrim's Progress," it proves to be surpassingly rich and allusive.
Of all the Canadian rock musicians who departed for the U.S. to achieve success in the late 1960s, The Band would prove to be the most idiosyncratic and also the most suggestive rock ensemble of all. While Neil Young must be recognized today as rock's most durable and mercurial eccentric, at the time he was smoothly inserting himself into the Los Angeles scene. Young blended well into Buffalo Springfield, then into the "supergroup" Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. His stardom remained within the L.A. orbit for nearly a decade.
The Band's gestation was uncommonly long, the important phase of their career was remarkably brief. The players were first assembled as The Hawks, a backing group for Ronnie Hawkins. An Arkansas shouter whose compatriot, drummer Levon Helm, accompanied him to Hamilton, then on to Toronto in 1958, Hawkins settled there to become a permanent godfather figure. He played a southern-style roadhouse version of rock'n'roll. Although he initially had a string of hits that established his stature, Hawkins was, by the early 1960s, already a relic, albeit a rambunctious one. His performance mainstays would always remain his Bo Diddley covers. Initially, the young Hawks were typical Toronto rockers of their era. That is, they were white r'n'b players apprenticing in Yonge Street saloons behind visiting American singers. They were found nowhere near Yorkville. Hawkins, a rocker with a particularized Southern idiom, took them on for long-term employment.
Then, in 1965, they were hired (sans Helm, who refused the job) by Bob Dylan as a nameless touring electric back-up band.13 The Hawks did not record with Dylan on any of his three initial "electric" albums. This placed them in the position of having to approximate Dylan's studio arrangements as an live concert backing unit. Now, though Dylan's influence as a songwriter pervaded 1960s rock, his arrangements were among the most bizarre of the decade, bringing carnivalesque elements, oddly obsolete barrel-house piano, blues guitar, and a mannered sort of grandeur together with song-forms remained, for all their lyrical weirdness, rooted in Dylan's folkie incarnation as Beat song-poet/protest singer.
The collaboration between the Hawks and Dylan was notoriously intense and extremely successful, but never committed to vinyl. It lasted beyond the concert tours when the group's members retired with him to the neighbourhood near Woodstock, New York, after Dylan's motorcycle accident temporarily curtailed his career. To this point in what was a decade-long apprenticeship under very controlling front-men, the group that would become The Band still had no name and the members (Helm now returned to the fold) remained unknown to the public. They secretly worked with Dylan on a set of home-made recordings (a potion much later released as The Basement Tapes); they laboured with him on the material that would become the singer's comeback album, John Wesley Harding (Dylan again recording without them) and their own first LP as The Band, Music from the Big Pink, named for the house where they and Dylan had assembled.14
When The Band released this record under their calculatedly generic name15 and made their concert debut, in 1969 in San Francisco (their second concert was a Woodstock appearance that summer), their music was at odds with the flamboyance and instrumental virtuosity of sixties rock. A virtually acoustic ensemble (they used minimal amplification), the group featured raw-boned group vocals (Helm and bassist Richard Manuel were the main singers). The members looked and dressed in photographs like well-worn homesteaders who had wagoned in from a winter's solitude to kick up their heels a bit at a church social. Most songs were set in dragged medium tempo, a few in a slightly accelerated waltz, usually with a layered keyboard sound recollecting the church and barroom in about equal measure. Aspects of the sound, notably the tempi and vocals, derived from Dylan, whose stamp was also evident in the songwriting as well. But The Band's musical style, and the myriad sources on which it drew, was extraordinary in its allusive range as well in the sense of a hard-to-locate past. These were not ersatz-cowboys, or rural hippie innocents, or good ole boys on a c&w toot. The Band eluded these nostalgic stereotypes -- and eluded them with an ambiguity that made them seem at once foreign and uncannily familiar.
They were instantly a critical success, and by the time the released their second LP, The Band, a mainstay of the then-new FM rock radio stations. However, they had no major hit singles and Music from Big Pink never became a gold record. Their most famous song, "The Night They Drove Ole Dixie Down," was actually a hit single, but for erstwhile folkie diva Joan Baez. Then, within about six years and just one more LP, The Band bowed out.16
What is perhaps most interesting to our discussion of Canadian rock is that The Band cannot readily be called an American band and yet seemed to critics like Marcus an archetypal American band. Aside from the Southerner Helm, the members are Canadians, and Robbie Robertson and Manuel were the principal songwriters. But, in fact, it is Helm's presence as vocalist and drummer that opens the critical question of The Band. Their music is evocative, often pointedly so, of a regional North America, rather than of the nations of Canada and the U.S. The distinction is important. The stories their songs tell -- like Dylan's, the Band's songs often deploy elliptical narratives -- are sometimes deep-Southern, sometimes deep-Northern or Maritimer. But most often they seem to arise from an ambiguous place that has no definite location. It has no official version of itself and is therefore unlocatable. The same ambiguity pertains to the songs' times, which does not belong to a known history, but only to those small and forgotten times that nations do not recall, but localities remember, vividly if elliptically, as happening "down the river," "up the creek" or "over to her house," that happened during that "bad winter" or after "the year the harvest failed." In some songs, these are things are more specifically historical, as in "The Night they Drove Old Dixie Down," and "Arcadian Driftwood," but most of even their epic songs -- "The Weight," "Chest Fever," "King Harvest," "Unfaithful Servant," "Across the Great Divide" -- paint ambiguous and almost wholly imaginative landscapes.
And so, too, the music The Band weaves continuously echoes sounds associated with regional origins and historical periods of popular music, but in mixtures and through revisions that can only be located by vague types and not as historical sources, and references. There is as much early jazz as folk, as much Canadian East-Coast as American Southern, as much of the Baptist church as the Brownsville brothel, etc. All that the listener feels pretty sure of is that The Band sounds somehow antique, that they play music long obsolete and it remains so even after they revisited it, but that, on the other hand, no one ever played or heard it like this before.
Reconstructing The Band's music by its sources -- doubtless possible -- might also have some purpose, even if it would also dissipate the imaginative effect.17 One consequence of such a reconstruction would be to confirm that, until the delicately woven veil of its obsolescence, The Band's music amalgamates an imaginary plurality of regionalism, and especially the sense, finally made explicit on their last LP, North Light-Southern Cross, of a musical-narrative conversation between Canada's East and North, and the U.S. South and middle-west. The rock music of the Band realizes, in its imaginary construct, the history of a popular musical and story-telling migration among the regions of the eastern half of the continent that the "metropole" (i.e., the Now, the group's members did experience something like this in their apprenticeship under Hawkins, who brought them to the Southern sources. It comes out in the sometimes vexed relationship Robertson had with Helm, the Southern voice of the group. However, it was doubtless Dylan, the widest-ranging of rock's imaginary geographers, who pointed The Band in the direction that they would refine and enrich as their own imaginary construct of North America. What The Band accomplished includes the surprising refinement of Dylan himself, manifest on John Wesley Harding and on the best songs on The Basement Tapes, three of which also anchor Music from the Big Pink.
These interpretive claims are summarized by Marcus in the theme and title of his essay, "Pilgrim's Progress." Marcus interprets The Band to be, in an eccentric form for rock music, the great recapitulation of the antique Protestant ethos of the U.S., for which John Bunyan's great (and surpassingly peculiar) allegory Pilgrim's Progress long served as the prototype. The theme Marcus weaves claims is exactly right, though a host of ambiguities rise from it. There is a powerful connector across the great diversity of regional allusions The Band's music encompasses, and it is the mythos of an old American -- but it has to be North American -- experience. It is a mythos of biblical -- at times millennial and tragic -- Christianity, now obsolete in sociological terms, but enduring in the imagination. Such strong and mythically rich connector across national borders also explains in part why The Band's imagined circulation of music and tales actually can make listeners image vividly what we already know: that the scattered regions of the continent have exchanged and communicated pieces of their cultures for two centuries now, in unconscious, parochial disregard for the metropole's culture. This connector, this deep old mythos, made them receive as meaningful and worth preserving a popular-culture of songs, story fragments, musical metres, vocal intonations, and odd moral fantasies that do tie far-flung regions of the continent cultural together and that the metropole (the centre, the city) does not remember or know.18
But it is important to understand the connection passes through underground channels unregulated by the switchboards of metropolitan cultural centres, of official national history, of organized education, or by the other media of the continent's national states. It passes through pre-modern popular songs. A great deal of the American South is such a non-metropolitan region, so indeed is a great deal of Maritime and Prairie Canada, the American middle-west, the Appalachians, coastal New England, etc. Or was, until very recently, until, probably, television.
If we have paused to elaborate an interpretation of The Band it is because their music seems to us to exemplify in its own highly imaginative and idiosyncratic fashion an important practical feature of popular music, and so of rock music, in North America: that connections are potentially drawn often between regions rather than countries. Unique among the Canadians who left to pursue musical careers in the U.S. in the 1960's, The Band somehow used the circumstances of being a Canadian group, one first wrapped around Hawkins obsolete American Southern style, and then around Dylan's magisterially odd musical amalgam, to become the first important Canadian rock band. Yet, The Band was also rightly heard as the archetypal American rock group. And, yet again, The Band was, in everything that mattered, thoroughly eccentric to the rock music surrounding them on both sides of the border. The Band became this utterly implausible double of themselves by discovering, through their music's imaginary progress back through time, a North America different than the metropole, the nation, the center, the immediate "happening" present of the 1960s. Their musical North American consists of ambiguously remembered locales, episodes, rhythms, musics, and intonations. The radical idiosyncrasy of The Band must be understood to include no rock authenticity as the music almost always demands. There was no local "scene" from which they sprang, no musical subgenre that rooted them, no "early users" -- in effect never for them any "fans." The Band was one of the extremely few rock groups that created itself purely from imagination and memory, that made the always decentered character of rock the source of a unsurpassingly evocative music -- evocative, that is, of multiple lost centres and sources, pasts and places.
Now, we are speaking here of The Band's music, not their place in the rock music business. In industry terms, The Band constituted a very minor episode, a footnote, at best, to sixties rock. The Band appeared at the moment, right in the euphoria of Woodstock, when rock music began to be absorbed into a greatly expanding rock music industry in a new way. In a few years, the era of "arena rock," of best-selling "concept albums" (whose prototype is The Who's Tommy), in short, of rock's hypertrophic staging of its own intensity would soon define the next decade. The Band is the oddest possible prelude to the 1970s, that would frenziedly market "heavy metal" and "art rock," "glitter rock" and "glam rock," and "disco." And yet, for us, The Band represents, at this point in our argument about Canadian rock music, nothing odd at all, but something exemplary. The Band represents the imagination of regional connections that would in 1970s, under radically less imaginary and immeasurably more brutal conditions of play, mediate the sudden and unexpected triumph of Canadian rock, rising from the most unpromising and incongruous of quarters -- the suburbs or Toronto, Windsor, Winnipeg and Calgary.
V. The Third Moment: False Starts
Many of the artists of the third moment had achieved minor local success in the late 1960s, often under other band names.19 The new Cancon radio regulations pushed these musicians into new prominence through the vehicle of top-40 singles. It was U.S. success that proved initially how productive the federal regulations were. Ritchie York points out that in "1968, Canada didn't even rank among the first forty international record producers. In 1970. we were third!" (Yorke, 13). Nonethless, there are reservations about this third moment and they begin with the music itself: it was pre-formed and derivative. The bands were past their prime inspiration (which was limited in the first place), and what resulted was predictably a cycle of one-and two-hit singles bands. Stylistically, the rock played by these early-1970s Canadian bands resembled second-tier but popular American rock hit-singles outfits of the period, like Three Dog Night, The Doobie Brothers, Chicago, etc., among which The Guess Who are to be numbered. All these bands served a institutionally opened marketing niche but they lacked both the base and the ambition to occupy or cultivate it for long. Typically, Lighthouse, formed by drummer Skip Prokop and composer-keyboardist Paul Hoffert, initially as a sixteen-member ensemble complete with string section, swiftly pared itself down to the level of an second-string Blood, Sweat and Tears (fronted by Clayton-Thomas20) then hit with "One Fine Morning" in 1971. These Canadian bands would never develop into groups that could sustain Lps and concert performances. This proved critical: by 1970, the major unit of rock consumption, and therefore of reputation and career momentum, was the LP. This third moment is best described, then, as a sort of holding action and a false start. These musicians gained preliminary purchase on the Canadian rock market. However, their momentary successes did not mark out a fruitful line of development for Canadian rock.
VI. The Fourth Moment: Canadian Triumph (Bachman-Turner Overdrive and Rush the 1970s.
By the mid-1970s, a different type of rock arose that was album-oriented and performance-based, and that held wide appeal for young audiences in the industrial heartland, its suburban and ex-urban terrain. Hard rock initially had little music-industry cache and none with the rock press that still looked to the 1960s for its models of rock authenticity. This style of rock would doom the dominance of the Canadian singles-style acts that first arose in response to Cancon regulations.
A band sprung from the most famous of these singles acts, The Guess Who, was Winnipeg's Bachman-Turner Overdrive (BTO) which exemplified the sound and image of this hard rock. Virtually indistinguishable from American bands appealing to the same demographic, BTO was also the most successful made-in-Canada second-tier rock group of the period, the early-1970s. They also mark the transition from short-lived hitmakers, like The Poppy Family and Lighthouse, and the more durable triumphs of album-oriented rock (AOR) that comes later in the decade and that Rush exemplifies. As with their parent group, sustained success for BTO in Canada was predicated on success in the U.S. and, once again, like The Guess Who, BTO were a singles band, but one that became a very successful concert outfit on both sides of the border.
Placing them within wider rock trends, BTO represents a moment in rock's chronology when black influence was all but erased from the music. Culturally, this is notable as just one of the contradictions this moment embodied, the moment that hard rock invented itself. Hard rock defined itself as appealing exclusively to the very young and, while it assumed an oppositional posture like much 1960s rock, it was not really against anything, and certainly not the "Establishment." BTO represented the ethos of a industrial working class but were consummate businessmen and they made no secret about their marketing savvy in their lyrics or statements in the media. Theirs was music that parents and teachers (and older siblings) hated but not because of the meanings it conveyed. On the contrary, it was intentionally meaningless. It was apolitical and yet insisted on being antagonistic. In musical form hard rock was simplistic -- a departure from the often elaborate song-forms of sixties rock -- but it retained the cult of virtuosic guitar-playing. It was utterly unpretentious in its lyrics and delivery, unlike much "heavy metal" to come (see discussion of Rush below), and bereft of serious emotional tenor. Some hard rockers like the Michigan-based Bob Seger and Grand Funk Railroad still drew upon soul music roots and reflected the r&b traditions of the midwest. But the more typical strain consisted of bands like Brownsville Station, Alice Cooper, Deep Purple, Thin Lizzy, REO Speedwagon, and Kiss. This was BTO's cadre.
The title of the single "Gimme Your Money Please" might best exemplify the ethos of BTO. There is nothing cynical about it. In fact, BTO's ground-tone would always be cheerfully openhanded and their attitude was nothing if not transparent. Indeed, they exemplified how easily the demands of the expanding music industry could be reconciled to the postures of rebellious rock authenticity during the 1970s. What this meant was that early in that decade, hard rock lost its pretence to be about anything (politics, erotic liberation, religious or poetic vision, etc.) and expressed nothing but the glamorization of the rock lifestyle itself. BTO was exemplary of these trends in every respect. Consider this final stanza of the band's signature tune, "Takin' Care of Business":
There's work easy as fishin'
You could be a musician
If you can make sounds loud or mellow
Get a second-hand guitar
Chances are you'll go far
If you get in with the right bunch of fellows
People see you havin' fun
Just lyin' in the sun
Tell them that like it this way.
It's the work that we avoid
And we're all self-employed
We like to work at nothin' all day.21
Unlike other hard rock bands, high-living was not part of the BTO scenario. No sex, no drugs, just rock'n'roll. Yet, despite the clean living espoused by Bachman (a practising Mormon) in his interviews and such, the message BTO broadcast is the same as most hard rock of the decade: work hard, play hard. The form this message took was the recurring pean to rock itself. And, despite claims to a basic Canadian character of the group (Pevere and Dymond, pp 70-73), BTO's musical style and message and appeal was identical to that of their mid-western American counterparts. The meaning, while intentionally empty, is not without a utopian aspect, nor is it hard to interpret. BTO obsessively evoked the "good times" to be had by average working-class suburban and ex-urban youth. While the banality of the pleasures BTO's songs enumerate might be regarded as a radical diminishment of the fantasies of sixties-rock songwriters like Jim Morrison or John Lennon -- who dreamed of touching God, or more often the Goddess; or the ecstatic freedom after overthrowing of the American empire, etc. -- the subtext was not, in fact, entirely different. As utopians of a plainer hue, BTO fantasized a collapsing of pleasure and work into the rocker's job, a job without bosses because the worker-musician now owned the business, for "we're all self-employed." This is a fantasy -- BTO were employees of Mercury Records when they sung the song -- with a lingering utopian dimension. But the utopia figured here has a backdrop very different from rock's outlandishly dreamy 1960s pleasure dome. BTO's was a wakeful utopia involving large trucks rumbling down the highway, and beers enjoyed later among the boys leaning on tailgates after the band's show.
Rock in the 1960s was the fantasy of an unprecedentedly affluent middle-class youth culture, with its capitals in San Francisco and Los Angeles. By comparison, 1970s hard rock, which BTO embodied in an especially no-frills fashion, was the fantasy of working-class youth that, for a brief moment, could and did imagine the permanent release into a lifestyle where labour and fun were the same. This was a moment immediately prior to the recessionary cycles begun with the oil crises of the 1970s that would soon severely damage this class cadre, impoverish its industrial base (the steel and automotive industries), and foreclose on the easy glee of this rock subgenre. It was a fantasy that, by its nature, had no capital, no equivalent to Haight Ashbury. There was no centre one ached to travel to and become part of, for its domain was virtually everywhere. This was a fantasy lifestyle of mobility and constant repetition, possessed by an industrial elan always emblematized by vans and trucks -- i.e., by working industrial vehicles -- and accompanied by a music so simple it could serve as the soundtrack of constant motion. It expresses, at root, an late-industrial utopia, and it arose in BTO's own neighbourhood, the regional terrain looped around Winnipeg, then Calgary, Sarnia, Windsor, etc., and that proved readily trsnaporatable when BTO lapped circuits of touring and radio-play around the whole industrial midwest. In the most important demographic and economic respects, BTO showed that Winnipeg was hardly different from Windsor, Flint, Duluth, or Butte.
The ostensible diminishment of rock fantasy between the 1960s and 1970s corresponded to a demographic spread in the consumer lifestyle of the listeners. The spread moved inward from the decidedly coastal counterculture of the middle-class and college/university-destined young to the mass of the young in general. The widening in the 1970s included the working-class and lower middle-class of the lesser-affluent but, for the moment, well-paid and secure population of the industrial belt of the middle of the continent. Hard rock arose to accompany the leisure of this numerous youth-group sector, not to pose as a fantasy-transformer of its "lifestyle" but as its confirmation. BTO's thoroughly white, simplified and lyrically flattened style proved perfectly suited to this purpose and made it typical of its continental hard rock subgenre. BTO's slender distinction is that the band's utopian dimension is bracing in its bell-like clarity.
The broadening of rock's audience is no mystery, given that the music industry had always proffered consumer products (records, concert tickets, T-shirts, etc.) as token of identity. However, as Robert Duncan has argued, in the 1970s, rock became big business for the first time and did so without apology (Duncan). Duncan points out that the "half a million strong" referred to in Joni Mitchell's "Woodstock" was "an accountant's epiphany too." (Duncan, 37) He adds,
And, indeed, for all the noise, the music business of the sixties was a mere infant -- squalling perhaps, but tiny -- by comparison with the brute of the post-Woodstock seventies. In the seventies, in fact, the music business finally grew up --like some kind of thyroid case -- to become the music industry (Duncan, 37).
There was no more need for "peace, love and understanding," "let's live for today," or "all you need is love" in the ideology of 1970s rock. Rock was now a product. Although still a tool of youth identification, the 1970s young, now a much-engorged demographic cohort, were rebels without causes just looking for an occasion to rock out. BTO typified the consequences: "hard rock's" root formalism was a stripped down and shaped up as an easy commodity. BTO clearly made the conditions of rock's consumption their preeminent utopic theme, and they trimmed their musical style to fit a life that would be lived wholly between work and the consumption of tailor-made commodities that celebrated that simple condition, one without imaginative surplus. It was the band's perfectly generic genius to warp that dull, diminished truth into a still-utopian pean to a "lifestyle."
It is commonplace in cultural studies to understand demographics in terms of class (Frith), nation, race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. It is perhaps more instructive in the instance of considering rock on this continent, however, to consider geography as well, as we have begun doing. We take geography to mean region on the one hand ("the South," the mid-West, the East Coast, etc.), and on the other, to indicate patterns of local development (e.g., "rural," "urban," "ex-urban/industrial," "suburban," etc.). The early success of a rock subgenre can happen in a specific region and, then, after local success, the popularity of the band or genre can spread to other locales with similar patterns of development. For example, after its initial localized success in Southern urban centres, soul music in the 1960s took hold in developmentally similar urban centres in Detroit, New York, Chicago. Another example: in the 1970s, the initial and very local-regional success of "Dixie rock" bands like the Ozark Mountain Daredevils, Black Oak Arkansas and Lynyrd Skynyrd in American-Southern suburban/ex-urban regions prepared for the subgenre's broad impact with youth in developmentally similar suburban/ex-urban regions throughout North America. Our account of BTO is such an example of how Canadians could arise from a regional outpost like Winnipeg and achieve success continentally, with its particular base of support in the Great-Lakes midwest.
Rock's sustained market success, like that of any pop culture product, is predicated in its ability to communicate, past the local participatory mystique, to audiences with a shared demographic background. But there has been wholesale neglect of the geographical homologies across the expanse of what seem at first to be restrictedly regional sites of reception. The demographic situation relevant to 1970s rock was that regional and class sensibilities among the young across a widening class range were intensified and let loose within the channels of cultural consumption represented by rock. BTO's success was geographical in both our senses as well as class-based (and racially and gender-based: this was music embraced by white working-class and lower-middle class boys) in our expanded sense. For Canadian rock, BTO's success was a forerunner of things to come, which, in the form of another band, Rush, it did very soon.
Rush has earned one of the most eccentrically successful positions in the global musical market by positioning themselves outside vogue and fashion, touring with the relentless tenacity of a Canadian winter, baldly fetishizing technical virtuosity and pop metaphysics, Rush connected with those kids who'd grown up with bikes, torn jeans, paperbacks and strip malls just like the boys in the band. When you consider the countless thousands of square suburban miles in North America, Europe and the U.K., it becomes quite clear why Rush found itself the band of choice for millions upon millions of kids. (Pevere and Dymond, 184)
The connection Pevere and Dymond draw between Rush and their fans has endured. Rush has been making successful albums for over twenty years. The suburban-born trio, Geddy Lee (bass, vocals), Neil Peart (drums), and Alex Lifeson (guitar), is the most successful Canadian rock band of all time. Given the aspirations for Canadian rock we identified above, they represented its belated triumph. Formed in 1968 by Lee, Lifeson and John Rutsey (replaced by Peart in 1974), they were a popular Toronto/Yonge Street bar band at the Gasworks and the Abbey Road Pub. They released a cover of "Not Fade Away" in 1973 and their self-titled debut album in 1974 and enjoyed minor success touring southern Ontario until a dj at WMMS in Cleveland began to play their music. After tours of large stadiums, opening for hard rock bands like the Texas-based ZZ TOP, they were signed to Chicago's Phonogram Records and released Fly By Night (1975) that reflected their heavy rock/bar-band stage. In the following year, with 2112, Rush established their own hybridized style. That style can be characterized as harder-than-hard rock "power chords," virtuoso guitar solos associated with "Heavy metal"; relentless percussion; epic fantasy-literature-derived lyrics; extended song length; and, for a rock band, complex musical structures. But this description does not yet describe the key differences Rush's stylistic amalgam made, and that made the major difference for Canadian rock.
Hard rock in the early 1970s, as exemplified by BTO is still based predominantly on hit singles, consumed on the radio, and simply confirmed in concert. At best, the hard rock LP was a collection of hits and, at worst, a packaging of filler for the one or two tracks fans actually listened to. BTO expanded upon the first echelon of Cancon acts by becoming a successful concert attraction and by packing their Lps with more hits per platter, but their style remained rooted in the short 45 single. Meanwhile, in the U.K., two other subgenres of rock were emerging, "heavy metal" and "art rock," and both were "album-oriented." Heavy metal evolved across albums Led Zeppelin (by the time of ZOSO, the band had left its early blues roots far behind), and was simultaneously defined by Black Sabbath and Uriah Heap among other British groups.22 Art rock arose from the post-psychedelic albums of Pink Floyd and the Moody Blues and fell into a close alignment with "progressive rock" through bands like Genesis, Yes and King Crimson. Although exclusively British in origin, both heavy metal and art-and-progressive styles held huge appeal to North American listeners soon equal to, then surpassing, hard rock. (For one thing, it played better in large arenas.) The main difference is that this newer 1970s rock did not depend at all on hit singles. The preferred format stretched into extended-song forms and these bands made the LP format their own. This occurred at the same time that the LP was rapidly becoming the standard, rather than exceptional, music industry unit of consumption as the 1970s advanced.23 What scant airplay art rock and heavy metal received came through FM stations which, by choice (most U.S. stations) or regulation (e.g., the CRTC in Canada) did not play hit singles (see our discussion of radio above).
Very young North-American audiences flocked to see this British rock music performed and it took well to large sports stadiums, and listeners likewise bought large quantities of albums by Yes, Led Zeppelin, Queen and Emerson Lake and Palmer. There were, however, no successful American bands played progressive or heavy metal rock. It seemed exclusively a British franchise. In Canada, however, the situation was soon strikingly transformed. Canadian bands absorbed both heavy metal and art/progressive styles and produced their own hybrid that spearheaded Canadians unprecedented success in the North American market.
What we want to argue is that this "art-metal" Canadian hybrid -- and this is what Rush perfected -- is the only instance of a distinctly Canadian form of rock to emerge. When bands like Saga (Toronto), Prism (Vancouver), Max Webster (Sarnia) and Rush fused the hard rock with art rock, they brought together the straight-forward guitar-bass-drums style appealing to young listeners in the Great Lakes industrial middle-west -- the Canadian bands' home ground -- with the expanded LP format/extended virtuoso synthesizer-keyboard-guitar art rock of British bands. The result was the first uniquely Canadian hybridisation, one that never had an equivalent in American or British rock.24 If BTO expanded rock's reach into the youth of the ascending industrial suburban and ex-urban class in the early 1970s, Rush intellectualized rock reaching the same audience. If BTO exemplified a diminution of sixties-rock aspirations to liberation, Rush represented two things: a thematic reinflation and an explicit shifting of the intellectual and political milieu of hard rock.
The relation between the two Canadian bands was suggested by a 1978 Maclean's cover story whose headline read: "The Rush Revolution" and, inside, "To Hell with Bob Dylan. Meet Rush. They're in it for the Money." Rock may have become big business in the 1970s but the big-capitalist ethos of the music industry co-existed with contradictory postures of surviving and still very-popular "hippie era" rock bands, like Crosby, Stills Nash and Young and Jefferson Airplane (later Jefferson Starship, and then just Starship). Heavy metal and progressive rock together would change this, and the music itself would grow thematically grandiose and technologically expansive.
So, if Rush's appeal was partly comparable to BTO's, as Pevere and Dymond argue, it is because it cohered with the mid-1970s "nouveau riche suburban work ethic, according to which 16-year-old kids who didn't have part-time jobs were losers" (Pevere and Dymond, 186). Will Straw's account of the rise of heavy metal provides needed perspective on Rush, although the band was, as we have suggested, soon "artier" than most metal groups. When the LP replaced the single as the crucial consumer format, it transformed the music industry's economics: "the break-even point for album sales went from 20,000 to 100,000 copies" (Straw, 1993b, 370). This meant that (as we noted above), record companies had to think more strategically and long-term to ensure considerably greater longevity of rock groups, who would have to build a following rather than expect the quick (but lower cost-recovering and quickly fading) success of a hit single. These considerations, observes Straw, "made more important an audience segment that had been somewhat disenfranchised by movements within rock of the late 1960s -- suburban youth. In the 1970s, it was they who were the principle heavy metal constituency." (Straw, 1993b, 373)
Straw's analysis is mainly geographical and, though it is not without the familiar race-class-gender dimension of cultural studies, and when he compares the rise of heavy metal to the rise of disco music, its 1970s contemporary, it is the where that counts more heavily than the who. Straw observes: "the demographics of disco showed it to be dominated by blacks, Hispanics, gays, and young professionals, who shared little beyond living in inner urban areas" (Straw, 1993b, 373) He goes on to argue:
Suburban life is incompatible for a number of reasons with regular attendance at clubs where one may hear records or live performers; its main sources of music are radio, retail chain record stores (usually in shopping centres), and occasional large concerts (most frequently in the nearest municipal stadium). These institutions together make up the network by which major-label albums are promoted and sold -- and from which music not available on such labels is for the most part excluded (Straw, 1993b, 373).
The story of Rush's success is the tale of their manipulating the delivery systems to reach the suburban and ex-urban youth audience. The new market framework of the 1970s did not encourage local subcultural rock to arise; it did not look for local origination as rock had so often in the previous decades. On the other hand, in the senses of geography we discussed above, Rush's success is exemplary and the proof is that the "art metal" hybrid was accomplished only in suburban Canada, achieved its first dispersion in the Great Lakes region, and then caught on in similar localities through North America, and then Europe.
The early career of Rush was typical of post-Led Zeppelin local hard-rock outfits, and they were jokingly called "Led Zeppelin Jr." for a awhile. With 2112 in 1976, the band distinguished itself musically and lyrically and from this point reached great commercial success. Thereafter all their albums have achieved gold or platinum status. Comparisons between the Canadian band and British groups like Yes became commonplace. The resemblance was not mysterious: Rush played thundering heavy metal fused with complicated instrumental solos and screeching falsetto vocals; they revealed a strong interest in the technical possibilities afforded by the recording studio; finally, they composed lyrics that had more than a whiff of mythological fantasy that permitted them to piece together thematically unified Lps that seemed closer to suites than single songs. These features were all hallmarks of British progressive rock, though Rush's instrumental attack was much tougher and louder, and that brought them onto terrain previously owned by American midwestern hard rock. Not long after their success in the late 1970s, the comparisons to other groups ceased and Rush gained their peculiar reputation among fans as the "thinking man's" rock band, a position they continue to hold -- along with their very high record sales -- in rock magazines' readers polls until the present. Rush has outlived its genre models and most of its competitors but without losing their fan base. These facts make them the unique, and uniquely Canadian rock group.
Rock critics responded negatively to heavy metal and Rush's "art metal" was no exception. Straw observes that critics disliked such bands because they seemed "unauthentic." Critics "adopted more and more of the terms of journalistic film criticism, valorizing generic economy and performers' links with the archives of American popular music" (375). In other words, by the latter 1970s, rock criticism had become professionalised and one consequence was its practioneers became "historians" (they also became, against rock criticism's best reflexive insights, "rock essentialists"). Heavy metal, art rock, progressive rock and Rush's style of "art metal" were all defiantly "non-historical" subgenres -- that is, divorced from black music sources, familiar song-forms, and such customary rock aesthetic virtues as brevity, leanness and laconic lyrics. This rock was unapologetically white, developed pretentiously pseudo-Weberian extended song-forms, was long-winded, overblown and immensely wordy. Overall, "rock-historical" inauthenticity defined heavy metal and its companion subgenres. However, this is what makes it paradoxically authentic, that is, writes Straw, its "non-invocation of rock history or mythology in any self-conscious or genealogical sense" (Straw, 1993b, 375) declares it to be de nouveau, to arise from appeals to pure masculine energy or urgency itself. We have insisted above that rock authenticity is not an historical category, but just as often requires rockers to break with the past. "Art metal's" place in the chronology of rock music does not require an adjustment in that position any more than then the advent of The Beatles or Motown does.25
But we need to answer another objection rock critics made to 1970s rock before we can account positively for Rush's claim to authenticity. Professionalised rock critics took sixties rock as the benchmark for rock's cultural ambitions, believing the political and pseudo-religious ethos of the later years of the 1960s to be a hallmark of thematic seriousness. In very general terms, rock's appeal, and not just to critics, can be partially explained by its intellectual pretensions. Rock has sometimes provided a simplified but seductive entrance for the young into the world of ideas and culture. Bob Dylan opened the ethos of the Beats to a wider public. Jim Morrison and the Doors introduced figures as diverse as Nietzsche, Antonin Artaud, Norman O. Brown and Bertolt Brecht to the 1960s generation. Patti Smith directly exposed the Punk generation to the names of Rimbaud, Verlaine, Baudelaire and Rilke. William Burroughs has remained a touchstone figure for countless rockers, major and minor, for thirty years. Such authors as these may seem obvious canonical fare when viewed from the perspective of those with an sophisticated literary education. But for the young whose intellectual circumference is a high school English curriculum, such authors can constitute a passionately sought out "underground literature," a reading list of names discovered from allusions on album sleeves or song lyrics. The values of sixties rock extolled by critics who cast unsympathetic eyes on the rock of the 1970s, include literary cultural values as our examples just above suggest. And while heavy rock bands like BTO erased such values from their brand of rock, the general stylistic reinflation of art rock and heavy metal, and the Canadian hybrid "art metal" included a new expansion of lyrical ideas as well into such literary terrain once again.
Rush's references are extraordinarily wide-ranging: from the poets -- Coleridge (the LP Xanadu), Eliot ("Double Agent" on Counterparts) -- to scientists like Carl Sagan ("Cygnus" on A Farewell to Kings), the band has tended to map their albums on literary bases, even though not all their recordings are "concept albums" (i.e., thematically unified suites). However, it is the influence of Ayn Rand that had been definitive and certainly the most controversial during the Rush's key breakthrough period of the 1970s. Rand's right-wing, pro-capitalist libertarianism (which she called "Objectivism") has been cited by drummer Neil Peart, the band's main lyricist, and vocalist-bassist Geddy Lee on numerous occasions. Rand is credited on 2112 because of the similarity between her novel Anthem and the narrative conceits of the LP.
In some ways, she seems a peculiar taste for a rock band since Rand began publishing in the 1930s. However, her popular heyday was the 1970s. It was then that she appeared on the underground reading lists of suburban high school students. Born in Petrograd, Rand emigrated to the U.S. after the Russian Revolution and began a successful career as a playwright, screenwriter and novelist. Her virulent anticommunism and pro-capitalist individualism saturates all her writings, but achieves programmatic force in Anthem, a dystopian fiction set in a totalitarian society resembling a Leninist Soviet Union in which individuality is outlawed. The novel's heroes rediscover their individual nature and break away from the closed city. The same tale is told on 2112. Here is Rush's portrait of the album's communitarian society:
We've taken care of everything
The words you hear the songs you sing
The pictures that give pleasure to your eyes.
It's one for all and all for one
We work together common sons
We are the Priests, of the Temples of the Syrinx
Our great computers fill the hallowed halls.
We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx
All the gifts of life are held within our walls.
Look around at the world we made
Equality our stock in trade
Come and join the Brotherhood of Man
Oh what a nice contented world
Let the banners be unfurled
The Priests are portrayed as ruthless dictators who ensure that everything illogical is eradicated. The world they have made is devoid of art, bliss and imagination. The hero discovers a guitar and, upon playing it, is enchanted. (He sings: "See how it sings like a sad heart/And joyously screams out its pain/Sounds that build high like a mountain/Or notes that fall gently like rain.") Believing that the Priests will be as taken with his discovery as he is, the hero plays the guitar for them, but watches in horror as "Father Brown ground my precious instrument to splinters beneath his feet." Following a dark night of the soul, the hero rebounds with dreams of freedom. The album's final track, "Something for Nothing," makes as explicit as any Rush lyric the band's libertarian themes:
What you own is your own kingdom
What you do is your own glory
What you love is your own power
What you live is your own story
In your head is the answer
Let it guide you along
Let your heart be the anchor
And the beat of your own song
The difference between a 1960s-style anarchistic rock longing for freedom and a virulently anti-communist libertarian source for seventies LP like 2112 was not lost on the critics. Rush was harshly attacked for the political position their songs supposedly expressed. Most rock critics already held heavy metal and progressive rock alike in measured disdain and Rush's monumentalizing amalgamation of both styles seemed even worse. But it was their lyrics that drew particular condemnation. The British magazine New Music Express accused them of fascism, insensitive to the fact that Geddy Lee (stage name for Weintrib) was the son of holocaust survivors. While it was perfectly true that Rush's totalitarian target was fantasized and abstracted to a degree that no specific regime could be secured as its historical referent, it should not have been difficult -- but it was for critics impossible -- to grasp why Rand's radical individualism would hold great appeal to suburban youth, beginning with Canadian youth. They were, for all practical purposes, living in the geographical twilight zone where "we've taken care of everything," namely the white suburbs girdling the middle cities of North America. Given that the 1970s were a decade where the social concerns that directed the young of the 1960s into socially conscious individuation were supplanted by the "Me Decade's" overwhelmingly private preoccupations, an LP like Rush's Rand-derived 2112 provided the perfect rock scenario of a teenaged individualism inflating to solipsistic heroic proportions.
Moreover, when Rush achieved their distinct hybridized musical style with 2112, they no longer sounded like farm-league Led Zeppelin, and the break with the sounds and lyrical accents of the late 1960s also meant a break with the hippy counter-culture. This break proved extremely productive for the band. Suddenly, as Maclean's reported, Rush "found themselves speaking on behalf of a large segment of rock fans without spokesmen, a group who, despite a love for loud, violent music, were highly conservative and certainly self-centered" (Macleans, Jan 23, 1978).
Similar celebrations of individuality were evident throughout Rush's career, and often take on a sub-Nietzschean character of a self-centered yet heroic non-conformism, later expanded (on Hemispheres and Farewell to Kings) into cosmologies, theories of the bi-cameral mind and the dialectic of Apollo and Dionysius. Perverse as it may sound, as they proceeded, Rush was actually revisiting 1960s cultural territory (the Nietzschean themes were a mainstay of Jim Morrison and The Doors, for example). Although the musical style they develop becomes increasingly technological in its aural landscaping, Rush's lyrics are inclined toward imagery derived from a "sword and sorcery" and "fantasy-science fiction" -- the "paperbacks" that Pevere and Dymond allude to above. In this sense, Rush correlates with remarkable ease with other pop cultural phenomena like George Lucas's Star Wars Trilogy (1976 and after) where a similar amalgam of mythopoeic fantasy, technology and individualized heroism are dressed in an operatically overpowering audio-visual cinematic style.
Musically, too, Rush's music mirrored movements in pop cultural phenomena of the late 1970s. If BTO's music can be seen as an affirmation and celebration of the rising industrial working-class, Rush's musical style evinced the turning-inward of the North American lower-middle and working-class of this period. In a certain sense, the ability of the music itself to provide a form of escapist fantasy is more significant than the lyrical content of the band: after all, it is the musical style, usually, that determines the audience appeal of a band. We have already argued that there was a niche market for the amalgam of heavy-metal and art rock: this appeal lies in the synthesis of rock's masculinist show-of-force tendencies, on the one hand, and a fascination with technological wizardry on the other hand. The appeal of Rush's music can be seen in the same context of the appeal of the arguably right-wing fantasies of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind in the movies; Michael Moorcock and Robert Heinlein novels; the renaissance of fantasy-based comic books; and the early rumblings of role-playing video games, and so forth. All of these phenomena represent the increasing role of fantasy, escapism, and solipsism in popular culture during this period. Even drug-taking, for long a companion pursuit of rock'n'roll, became an escapist rather than a liberatory, visionary endeavour. Rush's music, like that of their British heavy metal and art rock companions like Pink Floyd, provided a kind of "soundtrack" for narcotic escapism. With or without the drugs, Rush's music created for its audience a futuristic, technologically determined, post-industrial soundscape, at once utopian and dystopian in its synthesis of classical music (2112 meant to invoke Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, 200 years after the fact), and a nightmarishly, cold, robotic, mechanical sound.
By the time Rush made Permanent Waves, after the 1970s closed, they abandoned the long-track forms and smoothed out both the vocals (Lee dropped his voice several registers) and the elaborate mythic narratives. The shorter tracks gained them strong radio play for the first time, and now Rush was, for all practical purposes -- as the album's title suggested -- a permanent fixture on the rock scene. And with them, so was Canadian rock music, whose likewise permanent international breakthrough the band had spearheaded. When one considers the aspirations of those desiring an indigenous Canadian rock music industry, the moment of Rush's triumph moment is the defining breakthrough. Their success was symptomatic. Canadians not only took control over a significant segment of its own rock music market, Canadian bands had forged a unique form of rock. Like so many Canadian cultural highlights, it was a synthesis of the American form -- hard rock-- and a British variation on it -- art rock. There was no stylistic parallel to Rush, Max Webster or Prism in the U.S. and these bands not only, as usual, depended for their survival on stateside success, they also defined the terms of that success with their own subgenre. What is most interesting is that Rush bypassed the Cancon pathway to success: their success was achieved without significant radio airplay. Their listenership was built instead on concerts and steadily increasing album sales -- precisely on the model of other art rock and heavy-metal bands of the 1970s, which were all underplayed even on FM radio. It was a model that worked mainly in the Great Lakes, industrial midwest region, which served as the base for continental and then international success.
Despite the exceptional longevity of the band itself, the musical synthesis Rush represented was a short-lived phenomenon -- its heyday lasted only between 1975 and 1980. Nevertheless, the market breakthrough the band, and those in its trail (Saga, Prism, etc.) accomplished in music-industry terms proved durable and others were building on it. By 1980, BTO's manager, Bruce Allen, signed Prism, Trooper and Loverboy, and essentially maintained the BTO/Rush momentum by working simplified variations on the hard rock style. Allen later signed Bryan Adams, the most successful Canadian recording star ever. Allen seems to have been the first to realize that success has little to do with seeking a distinct Canadian sound -- Rush's success in this putatively critical stylistic respect earned them no Canadian national-cultural cache whatsoever -- but that it is wrapped up in exerting control over the music industry, and this involved "artist development" of a systematic kind.
VIII. The Fifth Moment: Consolidations in the 1980s
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Toronto imported pieces of the Punk ethos from London and New York. However, the effects on Canadian rock were slight. This aspect of the fifth moment was inconsequential. At first, Canadian Punk seemed to correspond to the late 1960s in terms of cultural rebelliousness and, in Toronto, to a local rock scene defined by a downtown neighbourhood: Queen Street in the late 1970s echoed Yorkville Avenue in the late 1960s. Indeed, it turned out to be rather like Yorkville, a celebrated "scene" that produced no rock that connected with listeners. As fast as Yorkville, moreover, Queen Street was transformed into a trendy shopping district.26
The Punk-forerunner band was Rough Trade, led by Kevan Staples (guitar) and Carol Pope (vocals) and backed by a variable hired rhythm section. The band evolved from "The Bullwhip Brothers" to Rough Trade in 1974 and were a mildly notorious Toronto club band (its initial fan base consisted of gays and lesbians) and went unrecorded until 1980 when they belatedly signed with CBS/True North and enjoyed a short run of slick Lps following the hit single "High School Confidential."27 The other signalling band was Martha and the Muffins, led by Mark Gane and Martha Johnson, and formed in 1977. After a preliminary gig in Toronto -- tellingly at the Ontario College of Art, which served as Toronto Punk's gene pool -- the band recorded their first LP, Metro Music, in Britain, under the paternal sponsorship of Robert Fripp, late of the British art-rock group King Crimson. The album yielded the international 1981 hit "Echo Beach." There was one more LP, Trance and Dance, and then quick dissolution. Martha and the Muffins' musical sound was derivative of keyboard-based British New Wave pop (XTC's "Making Plans for Nigel" is comparable), that greatly blunted and softened Punk, and made it radio playable. Indeed, Martha and the Muffins would become the prototype of the Toronto punk/new wave bands that would make any mark, faint as it was. The Spoons, Payola$, and Parachute Club led the pack, but in each case, they are lightly likeable one-hit outfits, basically also-rans despite considerable press attention. The harder Toronto punk groups -- The Diodes, the Mods/News, the Viletones, Teenage Head, the Battered Wives, etc. -- made no headway whatsoever, though they were successively the momentary banner-bearers of the Queen-Street club scene. Canadian Punk was a case of rock local origination with highly intense participation mystique that achieved no music-industry halflife. It would be an error, however, to imagine a lack of musical ability since musicians in these groups later retooled and achieved success in fresh configurations and under new band names. Nor is it true that there were no successful Punk bands in other cities, for New York, London, and Los Angeles all produced a cadre of bands that rose from an intense local scene to reach a loyal if not always very large audiences.
Punk and New Wave alike characterized themselves as the antithesis of "corporate rock" as heavy-metal, art-rock, etc. came to be regarded by the end of the 1970s. The Punk's no-nonsense, straight-ahead production values, and abrasive poses of artistic integrity were to have been rock`n'roll's counter-revolution against the dictates of rock music as a calculated, overdecorated commodity. However, in Toronto (and in Vancouver) the Punk effort arose from an art-school cadre of self-consciously "avant-garde" musicians and image-makers; what they sought to do, using a borrowed aesthetic, was to put rock back into the bottle of their own bourgeois-art-college-youth tastes in politics and music. The provocations in costume, hair and stage demeanour were calculated to outrage but more than this they announced a hermetic, even elite exclusion. Canadian Punk was, in other words, a late effort to generate an insider urban rock aesthetic to oppose a suburban and ex-urban one. This effort would prove prescient in some respects but its immediate effects on Canadian rock were negligible.
Coincident with the rise and rapid fall of Canadian Punk and New Nave was a consolidation what Punk opposed. The most successful chapter in Canadian rock history continued unopposed under the guidance of Vancouver-based manager Bruce Allen. After coaching BTO, Allen went on to Prism, Powder Blues, Lisa Dalbello, Tom Cochrane's Red Rider, Susan Jacks, and Loverboy in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Allen's most successful act, however, and the most commercially successful Canadian rocker ever, was Bryan Adams. Allen's roster of talent can be characterized as musicians recapitulating the third moment of Canadian rock discussed above and exemplified by BTO itself but stripped of the band's cultural connotations. Allen's roster made radio-friendly, hook-driven, mainstream rock sounds. Allen would eventually expand his scope to include even more MOR acts such as Anne Murray by the 1990s. In a sense, Allen has taken the advantage offered by Cancon regulations to a new heights and Adams is the decade's archetypal performer in this regard. After a tumultuous start in the failed outfit Sweeny Todd, Adams enjoyed a brief career as a co-songwriter with Jim Vallance (a member of the Allen-managed Prism) penning tunes for BTO, Joe Cocker, Juice Newton and others. Eventually Allen retooled Adams as a solo performer and soon he was dominating album and single sales alike with hits that include "Cuts Like a Knife," "Heat of the Night," and "(Everything I Do), I Do It For You." He has had the best-selling Canadian rock album in 1983, 1985, 1987, 1991, and 1992. Critics have caricatured him, correctly, as a pale Springsteen imitation but, as was the case with John (Cougar) Mellencamp in the U.S., the denunciations have not hurt sales. Allen and Adams proved their ability to manipulate Cancon when Adams's album Waking Up the Neighbours was disqualified as a Canadian content (because it was co-written with the U.K.'s Mutt Lange and, therefore, only satisfied one of the four areas of qualification). Adams threatened to boycott the Juno Awards, the CRTC changed the rules and the album was declared Cancon; Adams won the best Entertainer and Producer of the Year awards. The episode revealed both that the protective scaffolding of Cancon had done its job and had become irrelevant. The musicians it had enabled were now stronger than the rules themselves.
Regarded internationally, the Allen-and-Adams success story occupies a corner in the final moment of the trajectory of rock's will to dominate the entire pop-music market. If BTO were part of the expansion of the rock market to include the working-class kids of industrial suburbia and ex-urbia the 1970s, and Rush part of the further expansion of youth markets, Adams exemplifies rock's final occupation not just rock's of demographics of class and geography, but also of age. The 1980s saw an expansion of rock albums so middle-of-the-road that rock ceased to be exclusively youth-oriented, and the whole genre-category dissipated as it swamped pop music all together. Older generations may have continued to listen to rock before but in the form of nostalgia for their own youth music. Now, Adams joined the cohort of Madonna, Prince, Spingsteen, Tina Turner, Sting, Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Dire Straits and many others in creating music for all markets. The telling cap was Adams providing the soundtrack tune for so mainstream a Hollywood film as Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves. Within a few years, Adams would be joined by Celine Dion in the same international middle-of-road cohort.
What matters in our account is that the triumphant aspect of the fifth movement represents a turning-away entirely from the desire to create a distinctly "Canadian rock." They also reveal, with a finality that is undeniable, that this national-culturalist ideal was never more than a hopelessly vague critical aspiration. Canadian musicians had both figured out how to occupy the higher tiers of the international industry both musically and commercially. They had played out an economic destiny, succeeding against considerable odds of the music market. Canada's enduring legacy in rock chronology becomes, in the 1990s, the regular capacity to generate rock records that slot easily into all radio and wide-reaching concert venues. Allen, Adams and like-minded Canadian producers and rockers in the 1980's were deliberately creating a music with no pretence to local, much less national, origination. Adams's ambitions, approach and ultimate success were clearly not even just North American, but international. This is what makes his role in the Neighbours Cancon controversy worth noting. Adams railed against the authorities, denounced Canada as a terrible place to become a rock star and, at the same time, the Cancon regulations made it possible in the first place for him to even imagine that he could have airplay success in his home country.
IX. The Sixth Moment: Conclusion, the Other 1990s
The sixth moment is characterized by an extraordinary dispersion of musical styles, and fragmentation of the rock audience generated by the profusion of media of distribution. That this would occur at the same time as the success of Bryan Adams needs explanation. The sixth moment was foreshadowed in the Punk moment with bands' producing their own Eps and cassette tapes and fanzines and developing rough-and-ready if also very short-lived rock-club scenes. Punk's prescience had greater lasting strategic influence as a development of localized media-savy, and of imitated style that was quickly absorbed into rock television (MuchMusic, broadcasting begun in 1984) and a lower-budget style of concert promotion (the early Police tours, Lolapolooza, etc.). In Canada (as elsewhere), the possibility arose of postponing, or even bypassing, formerly familiar industry conduits. In fact, these were now multiplying because of rock-video television exposure, rock dance clubs, and other new exposure media reflecting the unprecedented fragmentation of the rock audience. These innovations would not bear fruit until the later 1980s (at the earliest), when the major record labels, now unable to rationalize rock's growing pluralism of subgenres into successive "blockbusters" or dominating trends, began to regard all "alternative rock" as a species of research-and-development.28
The sixth moment, however, came as a surprise in Canada and in this conclusion we indicate that, by the 1990s, this moment necessarily changes the ways in which we have been considering Canadian rock and its future prospects. As the rock industry became more of an actual industry in the 1970s and 1980s, it became inevitably more international, especially in terms of the conduits of distribution. This development was manifested in the ever-more consolidated trans-national corporations' control rock's circulation. One would have perhaps expected a greater and greater degree of music homogenization in the rock produced to coincide with this consolidation. The durable success of Bruce Allen and other managers and producers like him throughout the international industry certainly point to this. However, Will Straw persuasively shows that, for a number of reasons -- and the decline in radio airplay as the dominant delivery system is the most obvious -- "audiences for performers have come to be built on what everyone in the industry now calls the grassroots level" (Straw, 1997, 113). And the music industry now more than ever recognizes that its commercial life's blood is there in local and regional scenes, and not in "mainstream" rockers like Bryan Adams. The sixth moment consists of an explosion of many points of "authenticity," experienced as so many simultaneous subgeneric movements and scenes of local origination: e.g. the Seattle, Chapel Hill, Austin, Hamilton, and Halifax scenes; the new rise of Britpop, the revival of krautrock; alternative, grunge, punk, hardcore, thrash; hip-hop, acid jazz, trip-hop, trance, old school, jungle, techno. The list of simultaneous subgenres now assumes a dizzying variety; paradoxically, however, these multiplying subgenres now achieve high degrees of commercial distribution earlier and with an ease unprecedented in the history of rock. The significance for Canadian rock is that, for the first time ever, it is possible to imagine an indigenous Canadian rock music succeeding within its local market and there alone. Straw points out:
Unexpectedly, there is a heightened autonomy of national music markets. Record industry personnel and the general discourse of the music industry are in virtual agreement on this fact: this is a period in which the tastes and buying patterns of national music audiences have diverged considerably from each other. (Straw, 1997, 114-5)
This situation requires analysis and emphasis because, in effect, it changes the long-term conditions and assumptions under which Canadian rock has struggled since the 1960s. Previously, Canadian rockers had to succeed in the U.S. and, to do so, had to hook up with tendencies prevailing there. This is how BTO and Rush succeeded; though they did so on their own terms they also instinctively recognized that their home ground shared the great industrial mid-west of the continent. The new situation is not so simple. Canada continues to follow both European and American trends closely. However, a band like Kingston-based The Tragically Hip, the most successful Canadian performers in the mid-1990s, sold more copies (200,000) of their 1994 CD in Canada in the first four days of its release than they sold of all their previous albums in the United States over the past five years (Straw, 1997, 114-5). In other words, the band is successful in Canada without making significant inroads in the U.S. There is no discernible reason, moreover, why Tragically Hip would be unsuccessful in the U.S., since their sound is congruous with many bands on the so-called "alternative" scene there, such as R.E.M., Blues Traveller, and Soundgarden. The Barenaked Ladies had a similar home-grown success without making any impact stateside. Both these phenomena are occurring, too, at the same time as the huge North American success of Alanis Morissette, and the continued success of Adams and, perhaps most surprisingly, another huge hit album by Rush. What is new in this situation is that The Tragically Hip and Barenaked Ladies do not need to follow Morissett or Adams into the U.S. market to survive, in fact, to be successful.
We began this paper arguing that Canadian rock music is best understood in socioeconomic and geographical rather than aesthetic terms. With the peculiar exception of Rush, it would be erroneous to argue that a distinctly Canadian rock "sound" has ever emerged. Moreover, we argued that even Rush's unique Canadian "art metal" hybrid was more significant for demographic and geographical reasons than for national-cultural "aesthetic" ones. (That is the Canadian national-cultural "meaning" of Rush will always in our view be elusive, though for different reasons than The Band's significance.) In our view, Canadian rock music is best tracked along a base-line of market success that Canadian musicians have or have not attained. The Cancon regulations of 1971 cleared the ground and made it possible, finally by the mid-1980s, for Canadian music acts to prosper and thrive, albeit in a context whereby the distribution networks are largely controlled by multinational corporations. None of this, however, ensured that a uniquely Canadian style or approach to music would develop. Nonethless it did, with Rush, although the current plurality of Adams, Morissette, et al, and the more restricted success of The Tragically Hip, et al, show that such a national-rock sound need not develop.
There are, however, two additional factors that merit brief analysis, and a fuller examination different from the present study -- because the 1990s situation is now different. Straw has isolated these factors and made suggestive assertions about them. The first is a basic transformation of rock's delivery systems. Radio play has, for the first time, diminished in importance as a current-rock promotional tool. Now that broadcasters have elected to pursue an older audience more attractive to advertisers, they have withdrawn from the contemporary audiences. Radio now relies increasingly on rock's backlist of recordings and the blander kind of pop-rock exemplified by Madonna, Adams, Dion, et al. This ensures massive sales for high-tier acts working within a middle-of-the-road style but scant exposure for upcoming or "alternative" acts. Additionally, radio has withdrawn its focus from what Straw terms the "discourses" associated with rock. The music played no longer has the connections with the broadcast formats it once did when at least FM DJ's offered some commentary on records or concert or associated "lifestyle" issues. In place of radio, however, music-dedicated television stations, and especially MuchMusic in Canada, now provide this focus. MuchMusic's impact goes even further than MTV in the U.S.. It provides Canadian rock with something it always lacked, an equivalent to a rock press. Featuring interviews with musicians, rock-related news, regularly centered on local scenes across Canada, and "lifestyle" segments, MuchMusic resembles a rock magazine format, just what Canadian rock fans never had before -- though these were familiar apparatuses in Great Britain and the U.S. thirty years ago. As Straw points out, it is the rock press (and not radio) that is the main vehicle of celebrity. Magazines have pictures and commentary in an abundance even the most "underground" FM radio never offered but that MuchMusic offers extensively. Moreover, because its staple is the look-dominated rock video-clip and it is somewhat less ""vertically formatted" than radio, rock television reflexively favours stylistic pluralism -- with long segments devoted to different subgenres -- and, being directed at a younger audience than radio, it inclines to "alternative rock" in a way just the opposite of radio's gravitation to "mainstream rock." Lastly, MuchMusic spreads this powerful promotional apparatus over the entire country, which radio -- which is always local -- never did.
The second factor pertains to the music industry itself. It is likely that "mainstream rock" may now have become an empty term in the music industry except, oddly enough, as a subgenre. The recording industry recognizes that "alternate" and subgeneric categories sell in a cumulative way more than "mainstream rock" does as a whole. As Straw writes,
[A]s one reads down the best-seller charts, one moves from one purist taste to another, from gangster rap to country music to industrial noise....None of these records sells like the blockbusters of a decade ago, but the spreading of sales across a much wider range of titles seems to indicate a welcome pluralism (Straw, 96).
That is to say, that "niche" sales have become more important to the recording industry than popular "mainstream" acts are. A site where the consequences of this "welcome pluralism" is felt economically is the record store. It now must be physically large enough to contain and display a massive inventory of relatively slow-moving, highly variegated rock. Hence, the record "megastores," such as those built by multinational firms like HMV, Tower and Virgin, displace the previous retail chain stores, a circumstance accounting for the quick demise of two of the major Canadian chains, A & S and Discus, in the 1990s.
This transformed retail situation corresponds to the changed strategies of major record labels. Previously, as we explained above, record companies sought to cultivate select acts for a long period seeking to build a large audience that might eventually enable a band to reach "superstar," which was also break-even, status. This is the route that Rush travelled, for example. Major labels often, in effect, off-loaded the early stages in this process to small independent labels that they would buy up when one or more acts (or a trend they represented) on their roster seemed to be maturing in the market. In the 1990s, this system dissolves, and major labels now sign bands much earlier, after they have built up a "grassroots" -- most often very local -- following through home-made recordings and touring. This is how the legacy of Punk/New Wave rock has been actualized. It is depicted nostalgically in Bruce McDonald's feature film, Hard Core Logo (1996), Canadian independent film's long delayed answer to the mockery of the NFB's Lonely Boy. Overall, this industry change has the rock-cultural effect of transforming what was formerly Canadians' music-industry "marginality" into a new, and capillary replacement for such monumental promotional instruments of the past, the "arena-rock" concert and saturation hit-radio airplay. If "mainstream rock" is meaningless, so now too is "alternative rock." The massive success of Jagged Little Pill, a recording that came from nowhere -- an dismal unknown Ottawa pop singer who transformed herself into "alternative" diva, is best understood as dramatizing this new situation.
Finally, this development, and really it is a fundamental change in the rules of the rock-music process, opens a space where pluralism plays itself out in a new, ambiguous socio-ethnic fashion. Straw is firmly, and quite symmetrically, critical of both those who would attempt to define each subgenre in terms of ethnic identity and those still searching for an aesthetically unified "Canadian rock" entirely in white bands:
One effect of this is that the racial and ethnic boundaries around musical forms seems stronger, more impenetrable, than at any point in recent memory. Those same aesthetic premises and strategic considerations that emphasize grassroots followings and a loyal fan base have worked to strengthen what might be called the ethnicization of Canadian music -- they circumscribe its audiences within relatively insular spaces of racial or ethnic identities. Indeed, the more people have attempted to define a Canadian sound, the more they have been drawn to using descriptive terms -- whimsical, windy, quirky, wide-open, expansive -- which offer almost a caricatural formula for musical whiteness (Straw, 1997: 114).
Works Cited
"To Hell with Bob Dylan: Meet Rush. They're in it for the Money." In Macleans, Jan 23, 1978 (taken off a WWW archive, no page numbers).
Barnes, Ken. "Top 40 Radio: A fragment of the imagination." In Facing the Music. Simon Frith, ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988: 8-50.
Duncan, Robert. The Noise: Notes from a Rock`N'Roll Era. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1984.
Grant, Barry K. "`Across the Great Divide': Imitation and Inflection in Canadian Rock Music." In Journal of Canadian Studies. Vol. 21, No. 1, Spring, 1986: pp. 116-127.
Michael Jarrett. "Concerning the Progress of Rock & Roll." In Present Tense: rock & roll and culture. Anthony DeCurtis, ed. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1992: pp. 167-182.
Marcus, Greil. Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock’N’Roll Music. New York: E.P. Durtton & Co., Inc., 1976.
Marcus, Greil. Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes. New York: Henry Holt, 1997.
Marsh, Dave. The Heart of Rock & Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made. New York: New American Library, 1989.
Pevere, Geoff and Greig Dymon. Mondo Canuck: A Canadian Pop Culture Odyssey. Toronto: Prentice-Hall Canada, Inc., 1996.
Shumway, David. "Rock & Roll as a Cultural Practice." In Present Tense: rock & roll and culture. Anthony DeCurtis, ed. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1992: pp. 117-134.
Straw, Will. "The English Canadian Recording Industry Since 1970." In Rock and Popular Music: Politics, Policies, Institutions. Tony Bennett, Simon Frith, Lawrence Grossberg, John Shepherd and Grame Turner, eds. London and New York: Routledge, 1993: pp. 52-65.
Straw, Will. "Characterizing rock music culture: the case of heavy metal." In The Cultural Studies Reader. Simon During, ed. London: Routledge, 1993b: pp. 368-381.
Straw, Will. "Sound Recording." In The Cultural Industries in Canada: Problems, Policies and Prospects. Michael Dorland, ed. Toronto: James Lorimer & Company, 1996.
Street, John. "Dislocated? Rhetoric, Politics, Meaning and the Locality." In Popular Music - Style and Identity. Will Straw, Stacey Johnson, Rebecca Sullivan and Paul Friedlander, eds. Montreal: The Centre for Research on Canadian Cultural Industries and Institutions, 1995: 255-264.
Wright, Robert. "`Dream, Comfort, Memory, Despair': Canadian Popular Musicians and the Dilemma of Nationalism, 1968-1972." In Canadian Music: Issues of Hegemony and Identity. Beverley Diamon and Robert Witmer, eds. Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press, 1994: pp. 283-302.
Yorke, Ritchie. Axes, Chops & Hot Licks: The Canadian Rock Music Scene. Edmonton: M.G. Hurtig Publishers Ltd., 1971.
1.For example, Wright fails to realize that Lightfoot's "Black Day in July" -- a protest song about urban riots in the U.S. -- belonged to a short-lived genre to which many contemporary American "protest" folkies, such as Phil Ochs, contributed songs.
2.McLauchlan also tried to recreate himself as a rocker in the later 1970s, on the model of Bruce Springsteen with the LP On the Boulevard. Despite some excitement in Toronto, his tour in support of the record -- launched at the New York rock venue The Bottom Line -- failed dismally and McLauchlan had to finish the booked dates without the band, as a folk-style soloist.
3.In one of the oddest books ever published on rock music, The Triumph of Vulgarity: Rock Music in the Mirror of Romanticism (New York: Oxford, 1987), Robert Pattison analyzes the cultural significance of expressive sincerity in rock, contrasting it with the ironic aesthetic postures of other modes of pop, and especially of blues musicians.
4. Jazz too was a hybrid but it stabilized as the dominant pop-musical form in the famous "Big Band Era" before it became an "art music," beginning with bebop in the later 1940s. This introduced to jazz a different kind of instability, different critical disputes, and a distinct type of hybridizing in the post-war era. One of the crueller aspects of rock's social position, from the jazz perspective, is that Afro-American musicians and listeners abandoned jazz and generated, contributed to, and drew from rock forms without reference to jazz. The exceptions, jazz-rock (made by white rockers like Blood, Sweat and Tears) and Fusion music (jazz-rock made by black jazz musicians like Herbie Hancock) were short-lived successful hybrids of the late 1960s and 1970s.
5.In what follows we depend a good deal on Steve Jones, "Recasting Popular Music Studies' Conceptions of the Authentic and the Local in Light of Bell's Theorem" (Straw, Johnson, et al, 1995), especially 171-172.
6.The contradiction fell on one side with the black studio-based, and arranger/composer-dominated Soul music manufactured by well-oiled record companies like Motown that adapted the management strategies of the Frankie Avalon era, and yet produced a cadre of powerful singers with deep roots in the black church and very strong urban neighbourhood identifications. On the other side, the folkie movement put on the most serious airs of authenticity (an intimate "live-music" form, it was rarely recorded to be radio-playable). Yet the folkies were musicians whose biographies (which included college educations, middle-class upbringing, etc.) were often deliberately obscured, and whose highly affected personae was cut to the contours of calculated images. Nonetheless, anti-showbiz folk clubs were highly charged pivots for local scenes and a vital conduit for fresh performers that fed into sixties rock within a few years.
7.The rock of the 1960s had club and concert performance as its principle format, rather than recordings. What linked the major bands of sixties rock, often across subgenres, was instrumental-improvisational virtuosity. It was a powerful vehicle for conveying rock's participation mystique well beyond localized rock scenes, into concert halls (like the two Fillmore, East and West) and then rock festivals. Routinization of virtuosity and its attendant spectacularization was typical of the 1970s and "arena rock." Against this view, see Shumway, 122-123, who argues that rock never valued virtuosity.
8.This article is not the place to analyze the often vital phenomenon of rock music that arises first as recorded music, and only subsequently becomes a concert form. In note 7 we mentioned Motown, and generally "soul music." Disco and reggae are further examples of black music subgenres that arose first from the studio. In such cases, the local participation mystique arises around hearing and dancing to records in clubs or on black community radio before musicians who made the records have performed the music before an audience.
9.Despite the cliche that rock is always, even definitively, "good to dance to," a number of subgenres -- folk rock, British "art rock," etc. -- were opposed to dancing and part of their mystique was their opposition to the frivolity of "dancing to the music."
10.Rock fans are notorious for usually committing to a musical style only once, usually in the later teen years. Thereafter, their popular musical tastes become nostalgic (they play old records, commonly regarded as The Big Chill phenomenon, named for the movie of that name), generalized (soften to general pop music) and simply dissipate (ie, they buy fewer records, attend fewer concerts, pay less attention to musical developments, and so on).
11.Indeed, Toronto remained an important r&b town into the early 1970s, with major clubs like Coq d'or, the Bluenote, the Concord, the Embassy Tavern, Club Trocadero, the Mimocombo, Club Kingsway, and Ronnie Hawkins's Hawk's Nest. Most of them were located around the Yonge Street, the spine of the local music scene.
12.The 1960s in Toronto have sometimes been recalled differently, as they are by Wright, for example. The standard accounts include glowing recollections of Yorkville Avenue, Toronto's hippie axis. For example: "It was not unique but Yorkville Village through the sixties and early seventies had more impact on Canadian music than any other factor...[except the Cancon rules]....It was a scene, like Greenwich Village in New York and Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, that drew many creative people, especially in the music field, within its influence" (Melhuish, 65).
In fact, the best-known musicians associated with this "scene" were those who would move to the U.S. (Young, Clayton-Thomas, Mitchell, etc.) while those left behind (McLauchlan, Cockburn) never became major figures. Many, like Al Cromwell, and Mike McKenna, remained decidedly obscure. The only real lasting claim that could be made for comparison to Greenwich Village was the basement folk club The Riverboat which booked important American folk acts into the 1970s.
13.As can be heard on The Royal Albert Hall Concert, 1966 (bootleg LP) Dylan divided his concerts into a solo acoustic set and an electric set which was often booed by fans who saw the latter as a betrayal of Dylan's "folkie" roots.
14.See Marcus (1997) for a masterful book-length analysis of this period.
15.Their second album, The Band, explains the name with a quotation from a 1917 poem by Shelton Brooks on the back cover.
16.Their departure was as carefully staged as their debut. Although as a concert ensemble the group worked constantly, their repertoire did not expand after the first two albums. The Band made just one more studio recording, North Lights-Southern Cross, in 1976, the year the group dissolved. Even this came after a long detour: they rejoined Dylan in 1974 for an extensive tour resulting in the "live" LP Before the Flood, again playing the role of back-up band. The staging and filming of their final concert was exactingly directed by Martin Scorsese, and it yielded a feature film and performance LP, both entitled The Last Waltz. The concert included a long line-up of guest performers representing both their early career (Hawkins and Dylan), and their Canadian identifications (Neil Young, Joni Mitchell) as well as a survey of their standard repertoire.
17It is one of the great virtues of Marcus (1997) that his analysis has just the opposite effect of expanding the imaginative scope of the group.
18This is the focus of Marcus (1997), chapter four, 87-126.
19. For example, the Chessmen was led by Terry Jacks who later formed the Poppy Family with his wife Susan. Mother Tucker's Yellow Duck became Chilliwack. Calgary's The Stampeders were formed in the 1960s but their major hits, "Carry Me," and "Sweet City Woman" were post-Cancon. The Ottawa-sprung Five Man Electric Band were The Stacattos until 1969, and had their first of their hits with "Signs" in 1971. The ambitious thirteen-member Lighthouse sprang from The Paupers, a Toronto Sixties band, whose drummer Skip Prokop forged the ensemble with composer-keyboardist Paul Hoffert and had a major, cross-border hit in 1971 with "One Fine Morning."
20.Blood, Sweat and Tears was originally formed as a horn-based rock band by New York singer-composer Al Kooper, who had led the seminal New York group, The Blues Project, played keyboards on Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited and innovated the "supersession" concept with guitarist Mike Bloomfield, another Dylan studio alumnus. After Kooper's departure, Clayton-Thomas became lead singer on the band's second album which contained their hit "Spinning Wheel," often counted as a Canadian rock tune.
21.Such songs about the rock lifestyle prevailed in the 1970s: Neil Young's "Tonight's the Night"; Grand Funk's "We're an American Band"; Sugarloaf's "Don't Call Us, We'll Call You." So it was with BTO's "Welcome Home": "I get up early in the morning/And rush to catch a plane/I'm gonna live inside my suitcase/Back on the road again/Big stage and bright lights/Try to relax before the show." Or, consider "Roll on Down the Highway": We gotta keep movin' if we're gonna make a buck./Let it roll down the highway."
22.Led Zeppelin sprang from the early-1960s British blues band, The Yardbirds and initially pursued a "blues-rock" style. However, by their second album, after an instructive tour of the U.S. Led Zeppelin changed directions and developed what soon became their origination of "heavy metal."
23.The LP format was only exceptionally important in sixties rock, as with The Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. It was on in the 1970s that the LP came into its own as rock's crucial unit of consumption.
24The role of English-Canadian youth's anglophilia is estimable here but has never been studied. Anecdotally, however, we note that in Canada, British rock publications like Melody Maker and New Music Express competed with U.S. Magazines like Rolling Stone, among rock fans. This is a situation simply inconceivable in the U.S. By the same token, British bands often enough decided to launch their tours from Toronto, some, like Supertramp, built their initial North American fan base from there. Because of Canadian academic critics' obsession with the dominance of the U.S. on TV and film, they have assumed exactly the same to be true of popular music and the important and distinctive role British rock culture continually plays in Canada has been woefully overlooked. The triumph of Rush and other bands -- not to mention the later developments of Punk and reggae in Canada -- is incomprehensible without taking the anglophile factor into account.
25.Heavy metal, art rock and progressive rock were not the only rock subgenres to refuse historical paternity. This is also notoriously true of Punk, which arose at the end of the 1970s. Punk stripped rock forms once again to a bare minimum that seems to oppose the inflations of "art metal" style, and punk declared its vehement opposition to "corporate music" of which heavy metal, art rock, and progressive rock are all prime examples. Punk also refused North American black-music roots, which they regarded as irrecuperable from disco. Punks, however, led the way to widespread acceptance of reggae, a Jamaican variant. Moreover, within less than a decade, metal and punk merged into Grunge rock, launched from Seattle in the late 1980s (Straw, 376).
26. Toronto is a city with two mythical rock'n'roll streets, Yorkville Avenue and Queen Street, and one real one, Yonge Street.
Yorkville is an avenue that runs one block north and parallel to a main thoroughfare, Bloor Street. Until the late 1960s it was a quiet residential neighbourhood, "Yorkville Village," and then became a mecca for Canadian hippies who commercialized the main avenue and took up residence in the surrounding blocks. The storied Yorkville rock scene actually produced little interesting music, a great many hair salons and sidewalk cafes. In the early 1970s, the funky fashionability of the hippies attracted real estate developers who rapidly cleared the main avenue and turned it into an expensive shopping and bistro district.
Initially an industrial thoroughfare with hardware shops, plumbing supply outlets and a few working-class bars, Queen Street West's proximity to The Ontario College of Art made it a candidate for a Punk music and arts scene. The cache of the neighbourhood gained momentum quickly and its conversion into a commercial strip was accelerated by the move of CITY-TV's expanding cable-television media empire, (soon including MuchMusic, Canada's national rock-video station) to Queen's largest building. The move displaced a number of arts groups, but the erstwhile punks were this time full collaborators in Queen Street's conversion. Then, the construction of the SkyDome stadium, several theatres, a large convention centre, Roy Thomson Hall, etc. flooded the neighbourhood with upscale bars and restaurants, including the city's largest dance clubs.
Yonge Street, in contrast to Yorkville and Queen, is Toronto's spinal main street and has hosted important rock clubs, large record stores and important concert venues (including Massey Hall and Maple Leaf Gardens) that have historically -- but never, ever fashionably -- pivoted successive waves of rock, imported and domestic alike. It is the street onto which kids from downtown, suburbia, exurbia, and even further out pour on week-ends to buy albums, attend concerts and music clubs, cruise and stroll the strip. For the era of the Diamonds, The Hawks, Rush to Rough Trade and onward, Yonge has been the actual historical main street of the Canadian "regional" rock scene, insofar as it has (or needs) one.
27.Rough Trade did record a "direct-to-disc" LP earlier. This short-lived audiophile format, in which the music is recorded directly to the pressing master, required the musicians to record "off the floor" (without remixing) as in a live performance. The consumer cost of direct-to-disc Lps was prohibitive and the number of copies that could be pressed was limited, and this could not be considered Rough Trade's first commercial release.
The band was initially notorious largely because of Pope's self-described "sexual satire" which extended beyond her lyrics to include some byplay between a butch Pope in shoulder-padded jackets twirling her ever-ready riding crop and the very femme, largely decorative, female conga players she hired. Their music was a rather tame r&b and Rough Trade's initial fan base of gays and lesbians regarded the band wryly more as a cabaret act with a steady beat than a rock group. Exemplary of their art-scene/gay connections, Rough Trade served as house band for the Toronto art group General Idea's campy performance piece, Miss 1984 Pagent (staged at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1977). Both Staples and Pope decisively played down their gay-culture position after signing with True North-CBS Records in 1980. Pope refocused her "sexual satires" toward more widely marketable teenage lust and high-school shenanigans while Staples made a point of being photographed holding his newborn child for Toronto newspapers. Pope's later post-Rough Trade style sees a return, however, to her raunchier roots (in acts such as "Quiet Please! There's a Petulant Bitchy Diva On Stage" in 1995).
28In this paragraph and much of what follows we are indebted to Willl Straw's recent research (Straw, 1996).
