Vintage Canadian

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 24/12/2016 (3538 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In 1971 Pierre Juneau, head of the Canadian Radio-Television Commission (CRTC), stated, “Canadian broadcasting should be Canadian.” The government then legislated that 30 per cent of all music selections played on the radio in this country would be Canadian.

Musician Myles Goodwyn briefly notes the CRTC ruling in his autobiographical memoir Just Between You and Me, but he neglects or misses the significance this ground-breaking legislation had for the musical destiny of his band, April Wine, and an entire generation of Canada’s aspiring rockers.

The regulation literally breathed life into the careers of bands like April Wine, which had its first major Canadian radio hit with You Could Have Been A Lady in 1972 and went on to a 10-year run during which Goodwyn was the leader, singer, songwriter and sometimes producer of April Wine — and, by the end of the decade, its only surviving original member.

The “Cancon Regs” allowed Canadian bands a guaranteed foothold in the national rock consciousness. The repeated airplay of, at that time, a small number of competent Canadian rock groups allowed them to break out of their own regions and become national stars.

In the 1970s Canada was known as “the bread-and-butter circuit”; groups like April Wine toured Canada continuously on an upward continuum of clubs, small concert venues and eventually hockey arenas, earning a living while honing their craft waiting for a big break into the lucrative U.S. market.

For April Wine, that big break came in 1981 after 10 years of grinding, with the release of the album Nature of the Beast.

Rock-music autobiographies generally follow a well-defined form, one that’s used by Goodwyn to sketch out his life and career. He grew up a hard-scrabble kid in Nova Scotia, moved to Montreal to find fame and rock fortune with his original Maritime bandmates, and from there has played out the pretty typical life cycle of the one per cent of rock musicians who achieve a track record like April Wine’s — including 20 million albums sold.

These stories almost always include hard times and hard slogging, followed by the positive trappings of success (good fortune, material wealth and a certain fleeting fame) as well as the cautionary negatives (lots of broken friendships and relationships, myriad changes in personnel as the band ages, failed marriages and regrets).

In the case of Goodwyn, the dark side of his rock story has also included recurring alcoholism, heavy drug use, stints in rehab and poor health (diabetes), but also a lifestyle that allowed him to relocate to the Caribbean at the age of 36.

For the record, Goodwyn is back on the road touring with a reconstituted April Wine, even though that type of formulaic, guitar-heavy journeyman’s pop rock is as long out of fashion as the ‘70s themselves.

This late stage of the story in biographies like this one is called the “victory lap,” although the sight often reveals a lot of bald (or greying), fat musicians not exactly performing like Greek gods. And April Wine hasn’t abandoned the idea of recording again, although it’s doubtful most people have heard any of the music the band created in this century.

The allure of the rock lifestyle epitomized by the 1960s slogan “sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll” has turned out to be a mixed blessing, if not a dead end for all but a very small pantheon of its practitioners. And the lyric from the Who’s My Generation — “hope I die before I get old” — could these days be modified and extended to include the words “at least before I get old enough to write my memoirs.”

If rock has gotten old, which it most certainly has, then the rock memoir, with the exception of certain iconic artists and situations, has become just as tired.

Goodwyn explains his rationale for writing the book on page 299, as the story winds down. “I’m writing this for my family; first of all I want them to know what really happened in my lifetime. Putting it on paper has not been easy at times but I feel it needs to be said. I want them to know the truth.”

Here’s an additional thought: A recent article in the Globe and Mail by Adriana Barton was titled Reminiscing fights loneliness and depression, research says. Barton, in her explanation of reminiscence therapy, says that “For older adults, talking about the good old days may be one of the best defences against loneliness and depression… And it’s drug free.”

Jim Millican was the tour manager for the Guess Who and manager of Mood JgaJga when April Wine was a fixture on the Canadian charts in the ‘70s.