Rheostatics reintroducing happiness

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 19/08/2017 (2966 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Ten years ago, in March 2007, the Rheostatics played a triumphant, poignant farewell show at Massey Hall.

It was filled with all the things that made the band — whose 1990s Melville and Whale Music records have been often cited as among the best Canadian albums of all time — a cultishly loved success, from luminous art-pop to blistering rock, with silly shenanigans and moving moments along the way. There was a cavalcade of musical guests, acoustic sing-alongs and no shortage of tears and hugging.

Nobody in the room, least of all the band members themselves, would have imagined that a decade later, the group — singer/lead guitarist Martin Tielli, singer-rhythm guitarist Dave Bidini, singer-bassist Tim Vesely and drummer Dave Clark — would be heading out to play festival dates at Interstellar Rodeo and planning an album for 2018.

However, a couple of recent one-off concerts in Toronto (including another Massey Hall show) sparked an unexpected creative resurgence.

“Momentum is kind of a rare thing, especially in the life of a band,” Bidini says. “And we did seem to have momentum, especially when we got together and tried to work on new material; it seemed immediately we had half an album’s worth of stuff, so that kind of all locked into place.

“And then Dave Clark, he had a health scare and so we just realized that our time together as people and as musicians is precious.”

With Clark, who had left the band after the Introducing Happiness album in 1994, back in the fold, the group was joined by Kevin Hearn of Barenaked Ladies on keyboards and Toronto jazz violinist Hugh Marsh, who has played with everyone from Bruce Cockburn to Raffi.

Bidini says the experience of playing together now after their long hiatus is subtly but palpably different.

“We’re just better musicians; you become better the more you play,” he says. “Our show is quite different — it’s less frenetic, it’s less fly-off-in-a-million directions. It’s a little more poised, I suppose.

“Physically, too, we can’t do the sort of shows we would have done 20 years ago, but we can play much better than we did… we’re able to go off on crazy journeys into the music. Emotionally, it feels great, to be celebrating music together.”

Rheostatics have always been champions of Canada — not blind patriots, but celebrants of the beautiful and unexpected, and exposers of the ugly and inhumane. With his latest literary project Bidini — a former National Post columnist and author of several non-fiction books about sports and music — is shining that light closer to home, focusing it on his neighbourhood in west Toronto, where he lives with his family in the house he bought from his grandmother.

His new outing is the very definition of quixotic in a time when it seems media outlets are being shuttered weekly: he’s starting a newspaper. Not an online journal, not a blog — an honest-to-goodness broadsheet newspaper, the West End Phoenix, ad-free, supported in part by donors and delivered to subscribers’ doorsteps.

“With community newspapers in Toronto, it’s a medium that’s been bereft for along time,” Bidini says. “Metroland bought all the community newpapers here and basically squashed them and made them into glorified flyers. I just wondered what it would be like if something tumbled up on our steps once a month that we were super exited to read, as opposed to cynical about…

“Also, it really comes back down to storytelling and our modern age, where we really like to think we’re engaged with our neighbours and our commnity, but in a way we’re not… We share more but what we share in thinner.”

The content is focused on a neighbourhood Bidini says is “exploding.”

“This catchment has all kinds of realities from all different kinds of people — it’s very rich that way. It’s also at a point where it could go very badly, moving foward, or it could maintain what’s great about it. There are over 40 planned developments in the area and the condo builders have come in, so it’s an interesting time to document where we’re at.”

Though the focus may be hyper-local, Bidini hopes the topics and the lure of quality long-form stories will appeal to a broad base of readers (the paper will deliver to out-of-province subscribers; details are at the website, westendphoenix.com). The first issue will feature, among others, contributions from novelists Michael Winter and Katrina Onstad, journalist Alicia Elliott, graphic artist Jeff Lemire and Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson, who will contribute a recurring comic.

“I think the concerns, whether housing, development, social justice issues, are universal concerns of any city,” Bidini says. “I also think that the writing will be good enough that people, wherever they live, can enjoy it. It’s the way you would read the New York Times or the Village Voice, or Rolling Stone back in the day. You’d read Rolling Stone because Hunter S. Thompson was writing for it; you’d head to the Village Voice because Nat Hentoff was in the pages.”

jill.wilson@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @dedaumier