Ongoing History of New Music

The human body can be both very strong and very fragile…given its complexity, it generally works pretty well…but there are those among us who face challenges because of various disabilities… Some of these are genetic…others come as the result of accidents, trauma or some other kind of misfortune…then there’s the effect of disease… It can be very rough…there can be discrimination…and there can be a lot of misunderstanding… At the same time, though, there are opportunities for learning, compassion, and dialogue about what some of our fellow humans need in this life—and, just importantly, what special things they can offer back… Musicians are just like the rest of us, subject to the whims and frailties of this bag of water and chemicals we inhabit…these are some of their stories…  

There are a lot of things wrong with Facebook—don’t get me started—but there’s no denying that it can be addictive… The best thing for me is finding out where people from my life have ended up…high school, university, my home town, other places I’ve worked…and with over 2 billion active monthly users, there’s an excellent chance that almost everyone you’ve ever known as a Facebook account… But the “where are they now” thing doesn’t have to be restricted to people you know…you can lurk on Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn to track down the current whereabouts of just about anyone…that includes musicians and bands that seem to have dropped off the radar… For example, where are some of these Canadian alt-rock artists of the past?...what are they doing now?...I’ve been doing some lurking—and here’s what I’ve found out…

There have been many times over the last one hundred years where technology has changed the way we make music… Take the microphone, for example…before it came along, singers had to be naturally louder than the orchestra…they needed to have a voice that could reach the back rows of the theatre…but when the microphone came along, certain singers like Bing Crosby, realized that you could use it to create a whole new mood for singing by getting up close and personal… Amplification was another game-changer…at one point, you needed a dozen or more people in a band to fill the room with music…with amps, you needed fewer people to make as much noise… Magnetic tape and multitrack recording made it possible to create entirely new soundscapes, the kind you could never get in the real world…the studio became an instrument for new sonic frontiers… And then we had developments like the electric guitar—and I don’t need to tell you how much that changed everything… This is how things were for the late 50s, all through the 60s, and into the 1970s…amps and mics and electric guitars and multi-track recording gear…those were the tools for making music… But then there was another change in that started to really be felt in the mid-70s…a new era featuring electronic machines that made sounds that had never been imagined anywhere in the universe… So many new possibilities opened up during an era that’s become known as “the golden age of synthesizers”…everything changed—and changed fast… If you’re into any flavour of today’s electronic music, you will find this fascinating…

Here’s a warning right from the outset: this is going to be a weird program…the performs and the music we’re going to talk about are famous because of their weird, shocking behaviour…they set out to get our attention—and they did… Some of us appreciated what they were doing…but the vast majority didn’t get them at all…they were branded as sick, deviant, sociopathic, psychopathic, and even criminal… Yet all found some measure of fame within certain corners of the rock universe…their antics may seem tame now, even quaint…but if we put these images and behaviors in the context of the times, it seemed like that antichrist’s musicians were on earth, ready to lead the young dancing and singing towards the apocalypse… So, if you’re listening to this program, please look around and asked yourself this question: “won’t someone please think about the children?”… This is a look at some of the weirdest and most shocking rockers of all time…

You don’t need me to tell you that being a rock star isn’t a normal kind of job…you live in a bubble that’s as far removed from the regular 9-5, Monday-to-Friday thing… You spend a lot of time living in hotel rooms…there’s a lot of downtime between gigs which can get really, really boring…and your working hours are almost completely opposite to your natural circadian rhythms… A lot of people will end up coping with bad food, drugs, alcohol and self-destructive behavior—anything to alleviate the boredom…or the pain…or the loneliness…or the insecurities… And because you’re a rock star, there aren’t many people who are going to tell you to smarten up and sort out your life…in fact, your bad behavior is more likely to be encouraged than police… And it can be even worse when you get off the road…suddenly, any day-to-day structure you had on tour is gone…and all that’s left you in your house with your bad habits… I bring all this up because this is where we’re going to pick up the story of Deryck Whibley and Sum 41… The band burned very hot and very bright from 1996 through to 2005…and finally, something had to give…and it got real scary… This is the Sum 41 story according to front man Deryck Whibley, part 2…