|
 Reprinted
from Culture Raven, 2003
Gladstone, Brian. Psychedelic Pholk Psongs.
www.backtothedirt.com
Pleasant enough finger-picked acoustic guitar. Odd home brewed CD. Liner
notes go on and on about the magnetic devices he designs for his brother’s
company. Sample title: “I like me.” Does that mean I have to? I do remember
this song however, so the CD passes the distraction test. Lunch passes by
pleasantly. I chuckle at a song about our ex-mayor Mel Lastman . But not one
of these songs takes me away to that “land inside of my mind” that Ted
Nugent and his Amboy Dukes sung about, so this CD should not have the word
“psychedelic in the title.”
-Alive and Picking: Featuring the Smoking Guitars of Brian Gladstone and
Tony Quarrington.
Live representations of the preceding material and both the singing and the
picking are enlivened by the presence of the audience. My mind drifts back
to the impressions of Canadian culture that I got from CBC radio and
television. It sometimes seemed as Canada was colonized by a tribe of
sensitive guitar pickers with gentle senses of humor and soft, breathy
voices unsure of the keys in which they are singing. In the eastern part of
the country they sung in French and in the eastern-most parts of the country
you could hear the burr of Scotland or the lilt of Ireland in their voices.
I also flash back to pictures of Stompin’ Tom Connors banging away at his
old guitar in a smoke-fogged Horseshoe Tavern, circa 1971. I swear that in
the audience I saw little Ben Kerr. Kerr is a daffy old guy who you can see
on the streets of Toronto singing wacky songs about little green bottles of
wine. Did Kerr think that he too could be a people’s troubadour like
Stompin’ Tom? Why does Kerr keep running for mayor? Why is there a Persian
website about Kerr running for mayor of Toronto? Does folk singing lead to
mental degeneration. My mind wanders further, recalling images of an old
homeless guy who used to bang guitar on the corner of Young and Dundas. He
continued to perform after his guitar was stolen. I saw him strumming on his
cane in subsequent years. Now I will never be able to dissociate Gladstone’s
CD from the melancholia of folk music. A half-hour has passed |
