Ongoing Ballad of Handsome Ned
Have Not Been the Same excerpt on Toronto alt-country pioneer
This Saturday marks the 39th anniversary of Handsome Ned’s death. It’s not a big round number, but it’s as good a time as any to screen a rarely-seen 2010 documentary about the Ukrainian cowboy who ruled Queen Street West in the mid-’80s.
You Left Me Blue plays the Paradise on Bloor this Saturday at 3 p.m. Very limited tickets left! The film debuted at NXNE in 2010, where it got at least one review, and then promptly disappeared. This is a rare opportunity to see it.
This week’s live music listings are here.
I wrote about Handsome Ned in Have Not Been the Same, in a chapter about the punks who started playing and listening to country music in the mid-’80s, including the noise-rock origins of Cowboy Junkies, the SoCal punk connections of Edmonton’s Jr. Gone Wild, and how k.d. lang was initially marketed as cowpunk.
Like lang, Ned was a straight-up throwback to rockabilly and country music of the ’50s and early ’60s, and, in Ned’s case, outlaw country of the ’70s. All of which, in the ’80s, was a counterweight to what mainstream country had become, but also to the dead end of punk’s first wave. Ned’s band came from the Toronto punk scene, and his audience comprised Queen West’s new wave, goth, punk and reggae crowds.
He’s also directly credited with the development of Blue Rodeo. Jim Cuddy and Greg Keelor came back from NYC with their tails between their legs after their power-pop band floundered. They saw what Ned was doing, not just at his weekly Cameron matinee — a gig he held for five years — but in various configurations, including a reggae collaboration with Mojah, and as a huge champion of the local scene in general. Ned gave Blue Rodeo not only encouragement but some of their first gigs.
Ned barely released any music while he was alive. A couple of years after his 1987 death from a heroin overdose in the backroom of the Cameron House, a posthumous album was released on Virgin Canada. In 2000, a more comprehensive collection came out on EMI, which leads off with one of my favourite songs of all time, by anyone, a song I first fell in love with during the opening credits of Roadkill:
What follows, for paid subscribers, is the Ned section of Have Not Been the Same. But first, the intro to the chapter in which he appears:
Folk You: Roots Revisited
The story of the punk rocker turning on to country music is old hat.
Indeed, the older punk rock gets, the more ossified a genre it becomes, part of a natural lineage of American music — and as conservative a musical choice as country music itself.
The crossover between the two genres began in the early ’80s, with bands like X and the Mekons and Rank and File, but it was still raising eyebrows right up until the late ’90s.
That novelty has long since worn off, yet the incongruity of the fusion in its early days cannot be underestimated. When musicians who came from playing the most threatening music of the day decided to appropriate the most conservative North American music possible, diehards from both sides were going to get their feathers ruffled.
Rockabilly was a bridge. In the early ’80s, volatile Toronto punk icon Steve Leckie of the Viletones decided to shuffle his band’s lineup and go rockabilly. It didn’t go over so well: they were pelted with bottles when they opened up for the Buzzcocks and Gang of Four before an audience of thousands in Toronto—in part because Leckie, who used to call himself Nazi Dog, came out on stage in pink pants, a gold smoking jacket and an Elvis haircut.
Steve Koch, the Viletones’ guitarist during this brief period, thinks the most courageous and punk rock thing Steve Leckie ever did was tell that audience: “We’re going to play a Hank Williams song.”
Koch embodies the chronology of Canadian punks getting turned on to roots music. Raised in Calgary, he had a fascination with punk culture before he ever heard the music. His curiosity took him to London, England and then Toronto in the late ’70s. After stints in the Viletones and the Demics, Koch hooked up with pioneering Queen Street neo-traditionalist Handsome Ned, and later played with other ex-punks in the John Borra Band.
For him, the leap from one to the other wasn’t that big. “Everyone who was interested in punk rock was basically a musicologist,” says Koch. “Their whole lives were music, and they were open to a lot of new sounds. There were some hardcore guys who went the other way and got into the thrash scene, which to me was a dead end.”
The appeal of country to punk rockers is obvious: honest delivery, straightforward instrumentation, direct and potent lyrics. Margo Timmins of the Cowboy Junkies says, “To me, what the punk era taught us is to do whatever feels good, as opposed to trying to get on a label and trying to become the next Rolling Stones. As a teenager, you’re into whatever the big sound is at that time. Then punk came along, and that was your rebellious stage if you were 17 or 18. But after that, you can’t really go back to the big mega-bands, and punk was a roots thing — it was an expression of where you live and what you’re feeling. A lot of people found country from that, for some strange reason. Or blues, or jazz, a more down-to-earth kind of thing, then they twisted that around to meet their own needs.”
American media liked to inflate the importance of a punk artist crossing into country as a monumental shift in vision, when in Canada it was a much more natural evolution. Witness how revolutionary The Band sounded to American rock critics in the ’60s, doing what came naturally to Canadian musicologists who didn’t see any grand distinction between country, blues, soul and rock — they were all equally exotic Americana and Canadians were entirely comfortable melting them into a new sound, one that sent American heads spinning. While Gram Parsons was converting the Byrds to country-rock, Canadian folk pioneers Ian and Sylvia Tyson were forging an equally progressive fusion with their short-lived but influential Great Speckled Bird project.
But because the Americans have always had the final say on the history of country-rock, Jr. Gone Wild will never take their historical place alongside Uncle Tupelo, and Blue Rodeo will always be overlooked next to minor players like the Jayhawks. And because the Cowboy Junkies morphed into a fairly conventional pop band, it’s easy to forget how out-of-step and adventurous their first two albums sounded.
Finally, because Canadians had a tendency to gravitate toward their rediscovered influences with enthusiastic levity — which could manifest itself in k.d. lang’s campy performances, Jr. Gone Wild’s wise-ass songwriting, or Handsome Ned’s larger-than-life presence — it was easier to take the artists less seriously, much in the same way Stompin’ Tom has been perceived as a mere novelty act.
But the revisited roots music created during the CanRock Renaissance was rarely imitative, consistently inventive and extremely enduring.
On January 9, 1982, an imposing figure in a large cowboy hat took the stage in the back room of Toronto’s Cameron House on Queen Street, one block west of Spadina. He called himself Handsome Ned, and he was about to start a five-year tradition that galvanized the Toronto music community.
