Trooper Lead Singer Ra McGuire has penned a book about life on the road with Canada's favourite party band. The book is a road diary, which came from three years of blog entries at his web site ra mcguire dot com. Here's the introduction:Look for it in stores April 10th.Jully Black closed her eyes and inched her lips toward the microphone. The first two words - the title of the song - seemed torn from a personal reverie … surrendered unwillingly - as though her thoughts and emotions had boiled over and out of her mouth by accident, by mistake.
“Pretty Lady” she sang, and I let out an involuntary whoop.
“Here I am,” she admitted, and other audience members gave it up. Spontaneous.
My nervousness turned to pride. Jully was singing the shit out of a song I wrote 40 years ago with my writing partner Brian Smith - and my wife and son and many of my peers in the music industry were there bearing witness. I grinned across the large round table - first at my family and then at Smitty. Debbie squeezed my leg.
After singing, Jully told the audience that her manager was a huge Trooper fan and had pulled strings to sit at the same table as us …
“With God” she said.
She went on to describe our band as “honest-to-God Canadian legends”. The crowd cheered as she called Smitty and I to the stage to accept our 2005 SOCAN Classic Awards.
Ann Lorie, who wrote “Insensitive” for Jann Arden, was also sitting at our table and had shed a few tears when accepting her award, but Smitty and I were too buzzed for sentimentality. We could feel a palpable connection with the music-biz crowd arrayed before us - many of whom had become friends and compatriots over the years. The evening’s awards ceremony played out like a personal celebration of a long and successful career that continues to offer up the elusive rewards of adventure, challenge and straight-up fun.
I was proud to announce from the stage that night that my son Connor and I had just written our first song together. After the show, in Jully Black’s dressing room, representatives of an independent record company approached Connor to talk about his music. He smiled and accepted their card appreciatively. Here he was, functioning comfortably in an environment that would have absolutely terrified me at eighteen.
I started singing in a band when I was twelve years old - five years younger than he is now. I recorded my first album 13 years later at the age of 25. I’m 55 years old now and have never had a real job. I’ve written hundreds of songs, performed thousands of shows and have traveled tens of thousands of miles - most of those back and forth across Canada. Trooper is as viable today as it was in the seventies when songs like “We’re Here for a Good Time” and “Raise a Little Hell” were knocking down doors and serving as our invitations to the best party in town. In many ways our status has elevated recently to a place just south of legendary - where, for instance, total strangers embrace us as they would a favourite relative visiting from out of town. The party continues.
Trooper’s first web site went online in 1996. Little Timmy Hewitt and I hacked together the html for ‘Rev. 1′ long before Google, eBay or Amazon.com had registered their now iconic domain names. I started my own personal site - they weren’t called blogs then - not long after. I wrote about my life on the road and those things that someone unfamiliar with this kind of life might find interesting. I was surprised and encouraged by the enthusiastic response to that tentative and sporadically updated site, so, by the time Blogger launched their online interface, I had decided to maintain a semi-regular online account of a 53 year-old’s rock and roll adventures.
This book represents the first three years of ramcguire.com. It was written in real time as journal entries. It has no beginning and no ending, but surprised me by telling more than a few seemingly complete stories.
It was written in airports and rented vans, on ferries and planes - in billet-rooms in remote high-north villages and luxury hotel suites in the heart of the Big Smoke. Some of it was dashed off quickly at four in the morning. Some of it might be more carefully considered than it needs to be. Often it reveals much more than I’d intended at the time. And sometimes, the story is fleshed-out by that which wasn’t written down at all. Each entry came as a complete surprise to me - as did, of course, the unfolding events I was chronicling.
The SOCAN Awards were held in Toronto at the end of November. I’m writing this on a plane on the way to Edmonton Alberta on the last day of 2005. Our New Years Eve show tonight will be at Reds - a very large club in the West Edmonton Mall. It’s going to be a total sold-out zoo!
I'm reading away about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony, in which Blondie's Debbie Harry is fighting with the rest of the band, and I'm thinking "Who the fuck invited Blondie anyway?" Was Diesel busy? Bo Donaldson and the Haywards previously booked?I'm reading away about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony, in which Blondie's Debbie Harry is fighting with the rest of the band, and I'm thinking "Who the fuck invited Blondie anyway?" Was Diesel busy? Bo Donaldson and the Haywards previously booked?Cambridge: Home base. Cambridge is made up of three sections, each once it's own entity, each with it's own areas and downtown's. Combined, Cambridge still amounts to three distinct sections that only just tolerate the political connection they share. I live in Hespeler, as far north as you can live in Cambridge and not be living in Guelph. As compared to the factory outlet mall in Galt, close to as Deep South as you can go and still be in Cambridge. At the same location is a fairly large antique market, called SouthWorks.
SouthWorks is one very large store, with a multitude of small stalls. Different vendors would put out 20 or 30 things, antiques and collectibles all, and the store staff would look after selling the merchandise. A sound plan and a store with lots of interesting stuff. The kids drag behind me, their interest taken up by the many spinning wheels. My daughter leads the interest in these old machines; her only knowledge of them stems from Disney's Sleeping Beauty thus, they frighten her. Or at least she feigns fright; I am never quite sure which. Either way, the many spinning wheels have their attentions while I focus on the prize: Canadian singles.
It is been a few years since I have been here but I know they have records, I can almost smell it; today there will be a find. You simply cannot have so much junk in one place and not have a Poppy Family 45. I find some 78's, not sure whether they are Canadian content or not and consider trying a few. However, I do not have a record player that will play 78's so instead I decide that is something I will have to keep my eyes open for. A little while later I find one, a portable unit made for playing 45's, but which will play 78's and 33's. At $35.00 it's a little rich for my blood. Some other place and some other day maybe I will get one, today I don't have much time and don't even bother examining the player closely.
Then I have a hit. I don't remember what drew my eye to this booth in the first place, something the boy noticed I think. As we came around a table there they were, hidden from view from the main aisle, but there notwithstanding. A small pile of albums and 45s. Three good sized stacks of 45's, maybe a hundred, hundred and fifty in total. And sitting on top? Canada, the Centennial song by Bobby Gimby and the Young Canada Singers; last month's near miss. Then I was willing to pay $5.00 for it. This month it is $3.00 and I'm thinking I go to two stores and find this song in both. Maybe $3.00 is a bit pricey. However, it comes in a good cardboard sleeve and should be considered a bit of a collectable. At least it would be a collectable if the stall owner hadn't put a sticker on it that will never come off without ripping the sleeve, knocking about $2.75 of the real value of the thing. Or am I just feeling cheap today? Either way I ignore the penny-pinching voice running in my head, and pick through the rest of the singles.
Considering there are three piles of records and each pile must be close to 50 records each, I have little luck finding much Canadian. Mostly, these songs are Motown and British invasion stuff, all definitely later 60's, maybe very early 70's. Towards the back of the second pile I find one more record, and that is all for Canadiana. But that record interests me: It's a very early Anne Murray record, A Stranger In My Place, from back when she was a country singer instead of soft pop. Sadly, the doofus who owns this boutique has gone sticker happy with his price stickers. I thought the ruination of the Canada cover was bad, but this sticker is stuck right on the record and doesn't look like it wants to come off. At $1.00, this record is overpriced, even before I find I am going to have to work hard just to make it playable. None the less I pick up my $4.00 worth of Canadiana and head to the cashier.
Getting the records home I decide to play Canada first for two reasons: First, I am dying to know if I remember this song correctly. Did some one actually make money with a song that has the line "One little, two little three Canadians" in it? The second reason is I figure it will take a while to get the sticker off and make Anne Murray playable. I fill the sink with cold, soapy water (remember kids, heat makes vinyl warp) and soak the record for a minute Meanwhile I put on the "Young Canada Singers" and there it is, the very first line:
Ca--Na--Da
One little
Two little
Three Canadians
I can't believe I am hearing this. I wonder what would offend Shill Copps more, the bit about "Little" Canadians, or the sheer triteness of the thing (Actually that's a rhetorical question: Triteness is the one and only thing that has never offended Sheila Copps.) Can you imagine the government subsidizing this in 2001? You can just hear the Organization for People of Lesser Height carping in the Star about the insult of it all. Unbelievably, the song seems to go down hill from there with the rest of the lyrics being unintelligible but clearly far too sappy.
Anne Murray cleans up nicely, with just a bit of scrubbing, a rinse and a towel down she's ready to be heard. I am not as a rule an Anne Murray fan, and this is not some great exception. None the less, it has Anne singing a country and western song (again, not my favorite) which is a style I think she is eminently suited too. I do like this better than what we have come to know Anne Murray for, the pop ballads such as You Needed Me or that stuff she sings on those CBC specials (I actually heard her doing Daydream Believer one day). It's typical Country, her man is gone and now a new, undeserving woman lies beneath him. Typical country but not typical Anne Murray. Written by Kenny Rogers and Kim Vassey, the label lists the song as from 1971's album "Straight, Clean and Simple", which I gather means Anne's singing style and not the status of any Anne Murray drug problem. And that is ultimately the best way to describe the song, straight, clean and simple: Anne Murray sings Loretta Lynne. Canadians sing American music. Which, when you get right down to it is the most Canadian thing you can do. No wonder the CBC loves Anne so much.
Pamela AndersonCTV.ca News
This year's Juno's will definitely get started on the right foot with The Black Eyed Peas announcing they are scheduled to play at next month's awards show in Halifax...
This is not their first major Canadian gig. Last year, the Grammy-winning group rocked the Grey Cup's sell-out crowd at B.C. Place in Vancouver.
The Grey Cup, then the Juno's, pretty good for an LA band. But I have spent all my adult life hearing how wonderful and vibrant the Canadian Music Industry is, thanks I might add, to the CRTC. So if there is any truth in that, why do we need The Black Eyed Peas to front our main events?
Don't we have any lame rap acts to showcase, perhaps an aging hippy geezer-rocker or two. Surely organizers could come up with one viable Canadian option to draw in that key 8-11 age bracket for the show. And if not, why are we having an awards show?
