The Sweetness of Hardly Strictly Bluegrass

It's summer in San Fancisco, their time of year when the sun comes out and stays out, and when all the festivals are in town. For the first time since I discovered with great city seven years ago, I can actually come and experience what it is to be here in the middle of fair and festival season. And what an initiation last night at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in the city's most beautiful urban gem, Golden Gate Park.

I flew in late on Wednesday night, on a fast, pleasant flight where I was apparently a hero for offering up my seat for a baby. The standards are quite low these days if this is any measure of much beyond good manners (thanks Mum and Dad), but I didn't refuse the free wine and dinner out of the same politeness. The air was warm and almost Toronto-in-July muggy when I came out of the terminal, good omen number two. The third good strike was finding that the first festival was starting on Friday, and that one of my favorites, the legendary John Prine, would be playing an afternoon stage just a half hour's walk from where I am staying.

For those of you unfamiliar with John Prine, he was very accurately introduced as a 'songwriter's songwriter'. He is one of America"s greatest living treasures, the only good thing to come out of my first live- in relationship, which was a disaster in every other way except that I got to listen and love his music. I have only seen him live once before, at a small university hall 5 years or so ago when he seemed old, frail, and likely recovering from some kind of illness. In that, he reminded me of seeing Gordon Lightfoot last year, older, thinner in frame and voice, with some health problems and yet the continuing passion of a storytelling balladeer who can paint such a portrait of his country with simple chords and poignant images. Yesterday,Prine looked fitter than when I last saw him, his tone seemed richer, and it was obvious that the audience appreciated his performance. I was thrilled to stand at the top of the hill, with red-tailed hawks hovering overhead above the trees, the sun starting its descent into the Pacific horizon judt behind us, listening to just a fraction of his amazingly large repertoire. It was such a delight to hear "Hello In There", a minor disappointment to not get "Sam Stone" or "Angel of Montgomery", and just a joy to share the moment with thousands of others who came to savour the music of this under-appreciated talent. I really hope I get the chance to her him again, but will always remember that I did get to enjoy him performing in such a gorgeous setting.

And then there was Robert Plant. Another treasure, from a different time and place, who brought to the stage his love of American roots music with folksy versions of Led Zeppelin classics, with country-bluegrass- bluesy hybrid renditions of Black Dog, Misty Mountain Hop, Thank You, Ramble On, and a phenomenal encore with Gallows Pole plucked by banjo strings. He looked and sounded great, his older voice smartly suited to the less thundering but more intensely powerful sounds of American instruments. He was very generous too, often putting the spotlight on his fellow musicians, praising the genius of their craft, encouraging us to come back tomorrow to see some of them playng with their other bands. I have always sensed from him a deep respect and reverence for the talents of those who share the stage with him, and he paid homage to a lot of artists who inspired him as a young man from the Midlands in the way he spoke between songs last night. His Band of Joy is well named, as they play with energy and a genuine love of music that was contagious in the audience as well as on stage. As he came out to do his encores, the sun had begun to set and one could see the fog rolling in over the horizon of the Pacific just behind us.; the day was now ending, and it was pitch-perfect in every way.

Child 44

March is reading comfort month for me. Spring break is just a week away, and I've been compiling my companion books for my week away. For the most part, my favourite reads are in the mystery genre, although I've expanded my interests in recent years. I have a long list of favourite mystery authors, most of whom are British (think P.D. James, Reginald Hill, Ian Rankin). We can now add Tom Rob Smith to this list, for his debut novel Child 44, which was long listed for the Booker prize in 2008. I tend to think of Booker nominees as "literary" genres, and while I totally admire how well this book was written, what made it so enjoyable to read was that it was a thriller about child murders in Stalin's Russia. What made it even more pleasurable to read, in the end, was that it is a brutally accurate portrayal of what life was like in the USSR of the 50s, and what it surely must be like now in many parts of the world. There were echoes of Orwell's 1984 in there, and it was chilling to imagine what it must have been like to try to survive in that society. The detective chase had so many twists and turns, and there was so much to learn about daily life, that the 400 pages flew by during my commutes.

I'm not hoping a request for his follow-up novel, The Secret Speech, will come off the library system in time for my Saturday departure. Although I have two novels already packed, my favourite list has just grown again.

LIFE by Keith Richards

I am not more than halfway through Keith Richards' autobiography, and just need to stop and reflect a bit on what I've read so far. I've heard from others that this was a fantastic, wonderful read; others have shrugged their shoulders or disliked the endless references to drugs.

So, sitting around page 300 and heading into Exile On Main Street and a French château, how am I feeling about this book? For the most part, I am enjoying it. Keith's prose is easy to read, and he is fairly straight-forward about things, places, and people. I am not sure it's fair to speak so badly and bluntly of the dead, who really can't defend themselves, and I'm sure there are a few living who'd like to wring his neck for his less than charitable remarks. That said, I have been fascinated by the discussion about the process of songwriting, and how certain melodies and lyrics came about. I love those musical anecdotes, and they are by and large one of the main reasons I so loved watching Elvis Costello's wonderful tv show Spectacle. I really like how he links particular songs to a place and time, and goes on to explain where the lyrics came from. I was also quite enthralled by the whole 5-stringcopen tuning he described, though as someone who doesn't play guitar, I can't really appreciate the liberation of that last string. Those are the moments in rock and roll memoirs that I love reading about. the gossip about who dated and did who, couldn't care less. I love his reverence for some of the pioneers that came before him, and I do admit to being just a little bit surprised at his admiration for Baden-Powell. I would never have taken him for a boy scout, but I can see the taste for learning survival skills. That is perhaps why he's still here, despite lots of falls from many different types of coconut trees.

My only frustration is that he sometimes doesn't say enough and just glides over events. I suppose it's because he thinks many of his readers have read about them to death, but there were a few instances where I was left wondering what the hell he was on about and didn't think it was up to me as a reader to go look up the incident on Google just to satisfy my need for narrative details and decided to just plough forward.

As for the endless drugs, that didn't strike me as something that got under my skin. It's there, always, but never invading the narrative in a way that annoyed me. I am looking forward to getting to the late 70s, and to the point where he and the Stones showed up at the El Mocambo (where, by the way, my parents met in the late 50s when it was a swing hall) and changed the course of Canadian politics and a Prime Minister's marriage forever. My teenage brain remembers those events one way- I can't wait to hear his side of the story.

Children's Books

I am going through a strange reading phase at the moment, and I am not sure what to make of it except to keep doing it. I am reading children's books, from novels for the 10+ set like the magnificent one whose cover I have displayed above, and YA (young adult) genres like Michael Grant's Gone series. I could pretend that I am doing it as a professional endeavour, but that is not the case. I find myself thumbing through the monthly Scholastic catalogues that the company sends my students, looking for books that interest me, and I find these little gems. The Underneath, shown above, is one such treasure. It is the beautifully written story of a lonely and pregnant calico cat who finds the equally sorrowful hound, Ranger, and the bond they forge before fate sends them down a twisted, dangerous road; the modern story is intertwined with an old magical legend that begins a thousand years before in the same bayou region of the US South. It is a tale of bravery, loneliness, of wanting and loss, and all told with a poetic, elegant prose that just captured me and wouldn't let me go. I wish I could write like this debut novelist, so beautifully descriptive without being long-winded or full of unnecessary words. There is so much feeling and longing on each page, so much ugliness and then, wondrous beauty. I could not put this book down, and yet... I am not 10, and still was enchanted by the unfolding of this story.

I can't quite explain why it is that I am drawn to this younger fiction. Perhaps it is because there are amazing writers now turning to a younger audience, or perhaps because these novels work on different levels. The students in my class who have read this book were just as enraptured by its pages, and seem delighted that I am now reading it out loud to the class. This alone tells me that the author did not set out to write a children's story that ended up appealing to adults only to fail the target market, but the fact that a friend's 10 year old daughter devoured it in one day during my recent trip to California just cements that belief.