How many newsletters talk about John Zorn and Gowan in the same week? Welcome.
Gowan plays Massey Hall this Thursday.
This is an essay I wrote 3.5 years ago, after seeing his most recent big show in Toronto, a few mere weeks before the first lockdowns of 2020. He’s more than an ’80s Canadian pop icon to me. This one is personal.
Gowan at the Danforth Music Hall, Feb. 26, 2020.
Last night I went to see Gowan, 35 years after one of his shows at the Ontario Place Forum was my first live rock’n’roll experience. Both shows were amazing. And I owe Gowan an apology.
Twenty years ago I co-wrote a book about Canadian music of my youth, the years 1985-95. I’m very proud of it. It turned out to be influential on younger writers and musicians; people still mention it to me all the time. But the opening paragraph contains a sentence I’ve regretted the rest of my life:
“Some would argue that the youth of the early 80s had no opinion of their country’s culture, but they most certainly did. They thought it sucked.”
I wrote that, as a 29-year-old, as a way of setting up the book’s thesis: that a new generation of punk-influenced Canadian music was poised to assert itself, standing apart from the heroes of the baby boom, classic rock, hair metal and vapid pop. A statement like that is necessary to establish a generational divide. But it’s also wildly incorrect.
In 1985, when I was in Grade 9, Rush were still massively popular. Bryan Adams and Corey Hart were bona fide, million-selling superstars. Platinum Blonde’s first album was thrilling. Some of those things were guilty pleasures for me for a while, but all that music has held up remarkably well—although you’ll forgive me if, after years of ubiquity, I never need to hear Adams’s music again.
Then there was Gowan.
In 1985, he released his second album, Strange Animal. Rob Quartly’s video for “A Criminal Mind” was incredibly vivid and captivating (its use of animation similar to, but not as extensive, as A-ha’s “Take On Me,” released the same year). The song was an odd single, to say the least: a first-person character narrative, a seven-minute piano epic in which the Linn drums don’t appear until almost the two-minute mark; when the real drums kick in at 3:23, it’s almost as powerful as Phil Collins’s entry on “In the Air Tonight.” But the lyric, the voice, the arrangement, and that melody all made it a smash hit.
The whole album was recorded at Ringo Starr’s house with Peter Gabriel’s band (bassist Tony Levin, drummer Jerry Marotta, guitarist David Rhodes). While undeniably rooted in a specific era, the album easily holds up due to the songs, the players and the performances.
Or… does it? I bring a lot of bias to this situation…
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