What about Bob?

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 26/09/2020 (2209 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Former Winnipegger Bob Wiseman is most prominently known in this part of the world by the friends and family he grew up with here, and as an original member of notable Canadian country-rock band Blue Rodeo, which he left many years ago just as the group established serious commercial traction.

“I didn’t enjoy those guys” is one of the lines he gets off in Music Lessons, his recently published debut as an author. It’s a book that reads something more like a journal than a typical biography, diary or memoir, and it’s perfectly suited for the internet age.

Music Lessons brings to life in print format what is actually a compilation of Wiseman’s personal blog posts dating back to somewhere around 2005. The title is doubtless a reference to his longtime avocation as a music teacher, but also to the frequent commentaries he offers on a dazzling array of music he likes and dislikes, to wide-ranging bar room philosophy and politics, to family life, food commentary, travel diaries and to his constant jousting with the commercial and corporate world of popular music as he wends his way through life eking out a living as a working musician.

He’s also a songwriter, filmmaker, composer, producer, teacher, student and (now) author. His has been a life on the indie outskirts of the music and theatre world, but Wiseman comes across as a guy who would cross the street and walk on the other side if he ever came close to commercial success (as in lots of money). That’s exactly what he did when he left Blue Rodeo in 1992 after four albums and five Juno awards. He bristles in several comments about being pigeonholed by that experience, and ongoing attempts to pin him down on why he left that band.

Here are selected factoids about Wiseman and his amazing accomplishments gleaned from Music Lessons:

• ● Growing up in Winnipeg he attended Joseph Wolinsky Collegiate, Ecole River Heights and Grant Park High School. He moved to Toronto to study improvisational music at York University, and holds a masters of environmental studies degree from York University.
• ● He played accordion on the Barenaked Ladies hit If I Had A Million Dollars.
• ● He discovered a young Ron Sexsmith, who calls Wiseman “the Canadian Tom Waits.”
• ● He’s collaborated with Serena Ryder, Daniel Lanois and Feist, among some of the notable talents listed in his experiences.
• ● His 1988 album In Her Dream: Bob Wiseman Sings Wrench Tuttle was included on a music critics’ list of the top 100 Canadian albums of all time.

If those credentials aren’t enough to pique your interest, Wiseman also shows great fondness for his old hometown as he name-checks Winnipeg music legends such as Mood Jga Jga and toilet rockers MacLean and MacLean, remembers attending the legendary Elvis Costello concert at the Playhouse in 1978 and tells another pure ’Peg anecdote about playing music in friend Danny Row’s basement while “Kurt Winter of the actual Guess Who (was) upstairs playing poker with Danny’s father. Being this close to a famous person is too much to handle at 13. They’re drinkers — I don’t understand drinkers… Don’t know anything yet about addiction… At 13 it is just Johnny B. Goode every time all the time.”

Wiseman comes across by turns as charming, fractious, funny, eccentric, annoying, sometimes unfocused but almost always as super intelligent. None of the hundreds of entries is more than a page in length, so if you get bogged down, simply move on, or put the book down and come back to it later. There is no beginning or end. There is no plot. There is no chronology.

There is also no index/table of contents at the beginning and no glossary of names, song titles or subject matter at the end of the book. You’ll be lost trying to find something profound or really funny if you want to go back to a certain passage that bears rereading.

The whole book is quotable, but no single quote would portray the contents or the writer accurately, except maybe this excerpt from an entry titled “listening to kenny g” where Wiseman offers: “The thing about art is there is no objective measurement of good and bad. Everything is good or bad to someone and neither conclusion is wrong.”

You can imagine that Wiseman would critique Music Lessons using exactly the same kind of thinking.

Jim Millican is a former music columnist for theWinnipeg Free Press and now follows Bob Wiseman’s blog (at bobwiseman.ca).